Stephanie Burt

Prodigious and frustrating, welcoming and cantankerous, Les Murray’s body of work has made him both Australia’s best-known poet and its most powerful. Full of Australian history, places and things, his poetry also displays the more abstract qualities Murray likes to think of as Australian. Chief among these is ‘sprawl’, defined as ease, cheerful excess, unbuttonedness and unsnobbish self-confidence: ‘Sprawl is really classless … Sprawl is loose-limbed in its mind.’ Murray’s verse really does sprawl, and there’s a lot of it: some is blustery, sloppy or hard to listen to. His work flaunts its roughness, its male friendliness, its ‘defiance of taste’, its provincial or Boeotian identifications, its ethical doctrines and its Catholic ideals. His attitudes can be difficult to take, but his accomplishments are difficult to ignore. Among them are spectacular feats of description; character-studies with real moral force; sharp storytelling; and, now, the best very long poem in English for some time.‘

Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has:‘

‘The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s own critics: since his death in 1963, attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With Williams, more than the usual number of isms and caricatures need to be...

For a spell during the 1960s, Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American. Written around 1954, the poem got wide notice after For Love (1962), Creeley’s first trade collection, and it is not hard to see why. Sad and funny at once, with a trick ending, it undercuts the pretensions of high culture: what earlier poet would admit ‘I am/always talking,’ or suggest that his own verse exemplified mere ‘talk’? Better yet, ‘I Know a Man’ undercuts hip counterculture too: old and new art, Romantic despair and groovy enthusiasm, seem comically and equally irrelevant to the hurried American who just wants to get safely down the road.

        Yes, another poem about flowers and kids. Our son thinks this one is a ball, or full of balls: like jesters’ caps with bells, one for each stem, or old pawnbrokers’ signs, the lot next door in rainy April weather dangles, and then in sunlight lifts, what he believes he ought to pluck and grasp and throw,

if we would let him. Little...