‘The Even More Complete Book of
Australian Verse’
is not a collection of poems. It is a
complete piece of work that mocks a number of famous poets from the past and
their work. Only an Australian would do
this. I think it’s because Australian’s
have something in their psyche that draws them towards being
self-deprecating. We hold it as a
measure of acceptance and balance that a man is able to laugh at him-self and
not get upset when somebody takes ‘the mickey’ out of him. John Clarke is ‘taking the mickey’, and this
is evident in the first paragraph of the introduction to his book, quote:
“For many years it was assumed that
poetry came from England Australia
For this
post I’ve taken one of my favourite pieces from John Clarke’s, Complete Book of Australian Verse. It is titled, ‘Significant Events’, by a fictitious poet whom John has invented
as Paul Dorkan. I’m not totally sure who
the poet is that John Clarke is referring to in Significant Events (most of his other poets I can identify, like,
Bill Blake; Arnold Wordsworth; b. b. hummings; W. H. Auding, etc). I think Paul Dorkan is a cover for Philip
Larkin because Significant Events puts
a mundane twist to life, and Philip Larkin was also known to use the
commonplace and dreary details of life as the basis for his poetry.
Significant Events
(Paul Dorkan)
Twenty years to the day after Edmund Hillary
Conquered Mount Everest ,
Terry Peterson conquered
Heather O’Dwyer
Who was at the time,
The highest woman in the world.
Exactly fifty years after Einstein discovered relativity
Mrs Glenys Simpson discovered that under the house
Without the aid of time or space
And using only friction and an active imagination
Her son Bevan had effected an increase in mass.
In 1925 James Joyce left Dublin
for Zurich
In 1983 Suzie Daley left Brisbane
for Melbourne
A man she’d met on a train, who had something to do with
computers.
‘Don’t forget to write’ her mother had said, but unlike
James
she never really bothered.
Eighteen years after the famous tied test between Australia
and the West Indies ,
Nipper Dixon
Although it has to be said the police covered the distance
slightly faster.
Onlookers said it was all very confused and they weren’t
there
And they didn’t know where they’d got the microwave ovens.
Nearly four hundred years after William Shakespeare wrote
to be or not to be in Hamlet
Owen McKenzie wrote to be in the draw for a luxury unit on
the Gold Coast.
‘You can’t win it if you’re not in it,’ vouchsafed Owen
within
the privacy of his own mind.
Half a century after Wittgenstein had taken issue with
himself and revised his entire position on language,
A plumber in Orbost changed his mind about the nature of
elbow joints and thereafter did them in plastic.
I think Significant Events is brilliant (as are a
lot of other poems in the book). It is
typical of John Clarke’s work. Armed
with that style, dead pan serious and a humorous twist to the end, I set about
trying to come up with my own material. And the material came to me from listening to
news reports. No matter how tragic or
serious a news item appeared to be, there was always a comic twist to it if I
cared to chase down and find the irony – if I was prepared to laugh at
myself. I’ve called my poem, ‘Hudibrastic Bits,’ taken from a type of
mock heroic verse that an English poet called Samuel Butler used way back in
1600 something in a poem he wrote called, ‘Hudibras’.
2010. I hear ridicule, irony and
satire continually reported as news, on the radio, on television. Samuel Butler wrote mock heroic verse in 1663
/ 1676. 400 years later, there’s still
stuff happening.
Hudibrastic Bits
In true tradition of the
Anzac spirit, “Bazza Doyle”,
96 year old veteran of the North Africa campaign,
9th Division, Tobruk, El
Alemain,
gets himself mugged and robbed
of his poker machine winnings
by a young couple,
who tip him out of his mobility
scooter
as he leaves the Campbelltown RSL
in full view of security cameras.
“Bazza” said he wasn’t
scared, and
that he put it down to his military
training
on how to exit from a travelling LAV
that he didn’t suffer more serious
injuries.
Following a code of
sporting conduct
forged in the stadium at Randwick
back to back ARL winners, the
Melbourne Storm,
were found to have deliberately
breached their salary cap,
thus guaranteeing themselves first
pick
at the best players in the game.
“Charlie” Peterson,
one of the Storm’s most loyal fans
and locker room roustabout,
said it was disgusting, and
called it cheating,
but still did OK from a footy-TAB
bet
he managed to place
just before they announced publicly
that his team was being axed
from the competition.
Right place, right time, said
“Charlie”.
Brought up to accept
honesty is the best policy,
“Dolly” and Daryl Edwards find
themselves
abandoning their beliefs
when they discover $100,000
in the lining of the second hand
suit case
they purchased for $15
from their local Vinnie’s shop
for their son Trevor, to take
on his Antioch
weekend retreat to Canberra
When threatened with
prosecution, and
a possible jail term
if they didn’t hand the money back,
“Dolly” said that they never found
any money, and
besides, it probably would have been
spent already
on gambling and anonymous gifts to
charity.
Upholding
an unwritten rule
of honour among thieves,
“Rayelene” Crump, long time devoted
girl friend to the notorious
gangster, Con “Cutty” Cathcart,
comes to terms with his death,
resulting from a beating he
received in the exercise yard
of a maximum security prison
where “Cutty” was serving
a 40 year jail sentence
for murder, execution style
of no less than six
rivals in broad daylight
on the streets of Marrickville.
“Rayelene” said she was
shocked,
Con was such a kind and gentle man,
when you got to know him,
unlike the scum-bag who did him in,
who must be nothing but a maggot.
In a personal
demonstration, of
Prime minister Gillard’s belief
that a good education
holds the key to
the future of our nation,
recent Hamilton High school
“Brendon” McIntyre, sets fire to the
rental property
he was sharing with three mates in
Mayfield
following an attempt to refuel
a Victa two stroke in the lounge
room
and right next to an operating gas
heater.
When combustion did
occur,
“Brendon” had the presence of mind
to scatter the fuel with water, and
spread spot fires down the hall
to get the mower to the front lawn.
In an interview on the
footpath for the local news,
with emergency service vehicles, and
the smouldering Victa still in the
background,
“Brendon” said it may have been an electrical
fault, and
he didn’t feel he was to blame,
because
nobody had told him.
In responding to a challenge
from animal welfare agents
over his freshly thought out concept
of
‘free to roam’ chicken farming
(as opposed to ‘free range’ chicken
farming),
that strongly suggested the only
area
in which one of his chickens could
roam
was the size of an A4 sheet of
paper,
“Bluey” Fenwick, Chooks-4-U,
conceded
that, yes, in the facility
there are other chickens
and of course as they all grow
larger
there naturally occurs a
correspondingly equivalent reduction
in the amount of actual free space
in which any one individual chicken
may move.
The emphasis is on the ‘free’, said
“Bluey”
more than on the ‘roam’.
Experiencing yet another
sucker blow
in a long line of rotten luck acts,
“Dinga” Bell
loses his little doggie on cracker
night
and has no money to pay the $200
fine
for rescue from execution in the
pound.
Dinga’s neighbours said they felt
sorry for him
so organised a whip around
but could only come up with $69.
When told the disappointing news
“Dinga” agreed, maybe it could be
seen
as a bit of a piss weak effort,
but then, said “Dinga”
….. it has been a tough Christmas for everyone.
In an extreme case of denial,
“Cecily” Dawson
beauty consultant and
part time housewife, flees
from a security guard
at her local shopping centre
following an accusation of stealing,
collides with an unlucky pedestrian
and drags him 300 metres
clinging desperately to the
bonnet of her KIA Cerato.
“Cecily” said she didn’t know
what came over her, and
she thought she might be pregnant
and put it all down to hormones.
J. O. White