The Meaning of Recognition (4 page)

And in that case it would have been better if he hadn’t. The truth was that he hardly needed to. Most poets lose out when they abandon overt form but Hodgins was one of the lucky few that
gain. His ear was so sound that he could develop a seductively articulated texture of echo over any group of unrhymed lines. His villanelles and other systematically repetitive forms got in the
road of this quality, and suggested that their main value was to help the poem get done. Flatness in Hodgins would not be so obvious if his peaks weren’t so numerous: put in geographical
terms, his main output would look like one of those Chinese landscape paintings in which the multiple upsurge of pointed mountains looks too extravagant to believe, until someone who has been there
tells you it’s all true. Anything in Hodgins that sounds willed, or manufactured to a template, is competing with poems like ‘Rabbit Trap’. But the only poems like ‘Rabbit
Trap’ are his. ‘Rabbit Trap’ comes from heaven. Listen to how the last stanza starts in wit and proceeds through a Montaigne-like detached sadness into a sadness no more detached
than that of St Francis of Assisi.

Almost demanding to go unnoticed in the middle of that sumptuous progression is the linking of the trap’s centre plate to a theatrical stage. Pause for a moment and you will see the
trap’s laid-out surrounding jaws as an auditorium. But he moves you to the next moment. Giving you more than you can dwell on at the time is one of the ways that the master poet declares
himself. But I could quote from
Animal Warmth
and
Up On All Fours
until the cows come home. I could quote until the cows came home about the cows not coming home. In the
Australian countryside according to Hodgins every brutal thing that can happen to an animal happens on the page. Clearly most of this uncooked vividness was remembered from childhood, but in his
mature years, with the needle of nemesis always at the edge of his vision, he reinforced his memories with plenty of hands-on experience. As his football poems remind us, his illness didn’t
stop him being intensely physical: or anyway, that’s the way he makes it sound. In the poems, he stabs pigs, dispatches wounded rabbits, watches the calf being born from an inch away. He
watches afterbirth being eaten and practically gives you a taste. Except for the squeal of the boiling yabbie – there is a PhD to be written about the role of the yabbie in the poetry of
Philip Hodgins, so let’s hope nobody ever writes it – nothing turns his stomach. Brutality is the price of authenticity. The price of country produce that tastes of something is that an
inescapable violence occurs behind it. There is violence even in the milk.

But if the cows eat the wrong stuff they bloat, and they don’t come home.

Those lines are from ‘Second Thoughts on the
Georgics
’, which I just finished saying made slow progress in its narrative drive. So it does, but one of the reasons is that it
is packed with observations as good as that. The reader has to deal with almost a monotony of quality. In Hodgins’ poetry about the land, you must get used to the way he brings everything out
in high relief, a democracy of vividness as if the truth-telling particularity of a painter like, say, Menzel had been carried out with the fantastic allure of the Douanier Rousseau. The narrator is always going where you don’t particularly want to look, and looking hard: into the guts of a rotting sheep, into the penile lustre of a rutting bull. Not even the quality
of the expression can make most of this delightful. But it is made valuable. These are tougher laws than the ones we live by in the denatured urban world. The country is a world with its own rules,
and the rules are severe: even the people can die like the animals. In one poem a little boy disappears into a grain silo.

The question will always remain, now, of whether, when the little boy is sucked to his death amongst the nourishing grain, we are meant to think of the author, arbitrarily expunged in the midst
of life. Was he thinking of himself? How could he not be? And yet surely the mark of his main poetry is that he is not asking for a biographical interpretation: that he is doing everything he can
to avoid it. He is trying to say that real life, country life, is like this anyway; you don’t have to be fatally ill to find it unsentimental and ruthless; it has those characteristics by its
nature, because it is close to nature. This quarrel will go on. If I am afraid of anything in Hodgins’ future, it is that he might be as much debated over as enjoyed. But he won’t be
more
debated over than enjoyed, because there is too much to enjoy, and the enjoyment is too intense. It will be his immediate appeal that will lead to the annotated editions for future
use in colleges across the English-speaking world. There will be footnotes to explain that ‘galvo’ was once Australian short-hand for galvanized iron, and the generation after next
might need to be told that a ‘ute’ was the SUV of the past, when there were dirt roads. But Hodgins’ poetry will say what the dirt roads were, and how they sounded through the
floor of the vehicle.

No, you don’t. On behalf of his country upbringing, Hodgins defied, as Les Murray did, the inexorable expansion of the sealed surface. There is a connection between agrarian conservatism
and peeled-eyed poetic realism that can be traced through Prussia, the American south and Argentina all the way into recent times. A last-ditch stand by literati who know how to dig the ditch
themselves, it has little to do with the traditional opposition of left and right. Agrarian poets, indeed, are likely to find an even bigger enemy on the right than on the left, because it is the
capitalist imperative of industrial efficiency that denatures the country. And it does, after all, make life in the country more bearable for the few who remain to work their land. Most of the
inventions that brought the efficiency about were devised by their forefathers, who, even when not yet dispossessed by the global reach of improvement, were already worn to a frazzle by the rigours
of the life and wanted something better for their children. (One of the reasons I would like to see
Dispossessed
restored to the status of a current book is that it so bravely tells the
sad truth about how a losing battle can breed narrow minds.) Something better came, but it was more bland. When everybody has enough to eat, hardly anybody cares any more about how the food gets to
the table. The salt loseth its savour. Wherewith shall it be salted? From an historic dilemma comes an artistic question. It is an historic force that Hodgins’ sort of poetry braces itself
against.

Hence, perhaps, some of the poetic strength. But in his case the fighting courage goes immeasurably deeper, and it is at this point that I must switch into that comfortable mode of peroration by
which I get the centre of attention away from him and back to me. His courage I can’t measure or even identify. All I can do is comfort myself that it was only one of the factors in the
recognition that came to him before his death. If valour, whether moral or physical – and his, of course, was both – were the sole criterion for recognition, most of us would have to
give up on the idea, and stick with what celebrity we can get. I hasten to add that I haven’t quite given up on celebrity either. It can help. Perhaps I would have had a lot more trouble
getting my poems published if I had not had my face on television. It always seemed to me that it scarcely helped at all, but I might have thought that because, with being published as with being
in love, rejection is more memorable than acceptance.

It isn’t always to the worthless that celebrity draws attention. The world of mass enthusiasm is much more like a pure market than like a public relations campaign. In Britain, a
touchingly vulnerable creature called Posh Spice has defied our expectations by remaining married to the footballer David Beckham for all these months, but she hasn’t defied the law of supply
and demand: she will always sell more newspapers than records, because the public, although it will read anything about a permanently pouting young woman with the voice of a moth, refuses to be
fooled about the music it listens to. Completely to manage the public’s taste is an ambition open only to totalitarian societies, not to free ones, and in fact not even classical communism
could manage it: the Beatles still broke through. There was something I might have said about Madonna earlier on that I must say now, merely to be just: she once really got the youngsters excited,
and might even have done some good. A friend recently sent me a collection of French songs sung by Carla Bruni, who is apparently celebrated for being the sort of well-connected and
well-constructed young supermodel that Mick Jagger spends hours on the treadmill in order to pursue successfully. Well, good luck to him, because he would certainly be right in her case. She sings
beautiful songs beautifully. If she hadn’t first been a celebrity, I might never have recognized that, so the two things are bound together.

Most of the more off-putting aspects of the abundant West arise from its freedoms. The first thing we can be sure of about a free society is that it will be teeming and throbbing with things we
don’t like. We live in Luna Park, not Plato’s Republic, and artists should be grateful that they have been given such variety to be creative about. There have been, and always will be,
plenty of despots ready to give them a lot less. So welcome to the crazy house. But it does become more and more apparent that we will have to reinforce the foundations even as the edifice shakes
with the urgent vigour of its productivity. It might be as difficult as getting new reinforcing rods into concrete that is being squeezed from within by the expansive oxidization of the old ones.
Recognition is just such a reinforcing rod. Unequivocally, recognition is a proper aim in life. But just because it is so obviously worthy, there is no reason to think the young won’t get the
point. Already they find it cool to know the name that everybody else doesn’t know, and there would be no credibility in that unless the unknown names were good for something, even if only
for an even more unintelligible version of gangsta rap. What I did to get this medal with Philip Hodgins’ name on it – this outstanding emblem of recognition in a country which has so
spontaneously developed an outstanding literature – never made me famous while I was doing it. As a poet, I spent two thirds of my career without even a reputation. Receiving this award, I
feel like someone who has run the whole race invisible and popped into sight at the finishing line. Well, that fits. To be recognized means to be reassured that you were right to pursue a course
that had no immediate rewards, and got in the road of activities that had. Poetry is something I gave at least part of my life to: a fact on which I often preened myself, at least in private. Now,
to remind me that I had things easy, I have been honoured in the name of a man who gave his whole life to it, and his death as well. So the honour seems disproportionate; but I suppose an honour
ought to. When a Roman general returning from his conquests abroad was awarded a triumph, a special herald rode in the chariot with him through the cheering city to whisper in his ear and remind
him that he was made of dust and shadows. The occasional general no doubt said: ‘Bugger off, I’ve had this coming for years.’ At least with this triumph, with a name like Philip
Hodgins on the laurel wreath, no recipient is in danger of saying that.

Australian Book Review
, September 2003

Postscript

Australia figures large in this collection, and not just because, as I grow older, the country of my birth becomes steadily more important in my memory. Australia figures large
because Australia is getting larger. Measured by population, it is a far smaller country than it looks on the map, but no country of its size has a comparable cultural influence on the
international scale. Because Australia’s busy expatriates get an unfair amount of journalistic attention, it becomes harder to remember that it’s the creativity within the
nation’s borders that counts most, and provides the basis for everything achieved abroad. Joan Sutherland learned to sing in Sydney, and the post-war expatriate writers have done well because
they were well schooled before they sailed. For decades I harboured the delusion that Sydney Technical High School had never taught me anything technical, until I at last realized that the enforced
inculcation of English grammar and syntax had given me a set of constructional skills fit to annihilate twelve thousand miles of distance, and thus help me to build a career in Britain in the same
way that British engineers once built bridges in Africa. Welcome to Australia’s share of cultural imperialism, the imperialism that really works. In that regard, it was a duty as well as an
honour to pay tribute to Philip Hodgins, whose poetry will probably never be published ‘overseas’ – the word that used to haunt Australian cultural life but which is now,
thankfully, sinking into a long overdue neutrality of use. All serious readers of the  English language, if they can, will come to Australia eventually, and when they do, they can read him
there. Otherwise they can order his wonderful
New Selected Poems
from Amazon, and it will bring his hot landscape to where they live even if their windows look out on nothing but frozen
tundra.