It was with some apprehension that I accepted the assignment from the Australian-India Council to interview the Australian poet,Les Murray.My limited familiarity with Australian literature and Murray's copious oeuvre made me hesitate.Since the programme had me 'in conversation ' with the poet in front of an invited audience, I definitely needed to prepare well.I began my search in libraries and on the net,and soon found myself in the fascinating world of a poet who spoke from his heart; a poet who has been ranked alongside Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott in terms of international fame.
Les Murray born in a village, Nabiac in North South Wales in 1983,is the only child of his parents, Cecil, a farmer and Miriam Arnall. He had a lonely childhood on the farm and started school late at the age of nine, "a late age to start socialization." His bulky figure made him the object of ridicule in school. Though he joined the University of Sydney, her left without a degree. His later life was fully devoted to the pursuit of poetry and he soon rose to be the leading poet in his country. He has it his credit 30 volumes of poetry, several prose work and two verse novels, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (published in 1980.Murray claims to be unsatisfied with this 140-sonnet novel now) and Freddy Neptune (1998) which frech him the Queens Gold Medal for property in 1999.Numerous other awards have come seeking him-the Grace Leven Prize (1995) and the prestigious T.S.Eliot Award (1996).His works have been translated in to ten languages, including Hindi. Apart from being a writer, he is also a critic, a reviewer and an editor. He edits the magazine Poetry Australia. Several of his poems have been included in The Penguin Book of Australian Verse. Murray coined the phrase 'the quality of sprawl ' to refer to the land of Australian, its ethos and poetics, which he found extensive, flexible and unconfined. He is said to have thrown off the attitude of 'cultural cringe' whereby Australian poets felt inferior to British poets. I never meant to 'join' high art- I meant to match it. It wouldn’t read the poetry they set us at the university, because I regarded them as collaborators. His poems mirror the multicultural of Australia, its mixture of the aboriginal, the urban and the rural. He respected aboriginal culture and wished to give it its due place. This made him includes aborigines in his anthology of poetry the Buladelah - Taree Holiday Song Cycle. He also uses aboriginal words in his poems. In an easy " cantering the Languages" he talks of the need for "gently but firmly shifting our linguistic perception, so that our entries languages is henceforth centered for us nit thousand of miles away , but here where we live". His works embodies the violent history of white settlement and his desire is for a 'creole'. Australia wheel mixed blood will prevent division and conflict. This led his critics to accuse him of trying to perpetuate the 'bush images' of the Australian that the white Australian is trying to break away from.
Political issue find place in his poems. His anti-war poems resent Australia getting involved in the war against Iraq. Critics trace his contentious attitude towards feminists to his being bullied by girls while in his high school. How ever Murray avers that he is only against radical feminism that attacks a man just because he happens to be one.
His marriage to Valerie Morelli in 1962 led to his conversation to Catholicism. His later work is dedicated to the 'Glory of God’. According to him religion and poetry go hand in hand. As he says in “Poetry and Religion", ' Religions are poems - A poems is a small religion- religion is a large poem.
He has written much on his own experience of writing poetry. As he said in a television interview for the BBC, "You write in a trance - You can go back to the poem, have a trace of the trance, but you can't have it fully again. It’s an integration of the body - mind and the dreaming mind and the daylight- conscious mind' The birth if a poem is described as 'an inwardly dancing' and as 'a painless headache ' .You know there's a poem in there, but you have to wait until the words from "'. At my interview with him, he elaborated this point further by adding that a poem can be written only at the right moment. Write it too soon or write it late and it will never be right. The body - mind contributes the words, the design; the dreaming - mind the aspects of timelessness, the aura of mystery, the supernal; and the daylight - conscious mind the feeling and the rhythm. He calls this ingrated self his ‘poem-self ' he says in " A Defense of Poetry ", " The fusion of my three ordinary states of being height tens each of them, and produce an excitement frequently so intense that I can't bear it for long at a stretch, but must get up and run outside for rest from it, and then come back for some more". He calls the language that arises from poetic integration ' Wholespeak' while he terms the flatter speech of functional prose and rational dominance 'narrowspeak' is not confined to verse alone. Snatches of can be found even in colloquial language.
His poems have been called 'a kind of unspoken video'. Most of them have vivid descriptions. In fact one poem is even titled 'Images Alone'. Another noteworthy factor is their rhythm. As one of Mury's younger admirers, the Australian poet and critic, John Kinchella remarks," Interestingly he is tone- deaf, and his work actually relies on very specific received rhythms - those of the 'bush Ballard' the popular songs, the movements of a car or a tractor or a horse galloping -
One of his best poems' An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow' describes the reaction of a crowd of passers- by to the sight of a man weeping in the street. While some are curious, some are sympathetic. Business stop, traffic slowdown as people stop to stare. Only children and pigeons approach him. Finally the man finishes weeping, gets up and moves on. The poem talk's of ' the gift of weeping'. When asked why he had described it so, he said that it was because Australian society laid such force on keeping a stiff upper lip, on suppressing one's emotions. He wanted to bring out the divide between what that is naturally human and the repression of society.
He has put much of his personal universe into his poems. The poem ' The Wedding at Berrico' describes the wedding of his daughter, Christina on February 8th 1992 and is dedicated to her and her husband James. The poem ends on a note of reconciliation.
But now you join hands, exchanging. The vows that cost joyfully dear, they move you to the centre of life.
And us gently to the rear.
Another intensely touching poems deals with his autistic son, Alexander - it allows a portrait in Line - Scan at Fifteen’. The poem made up of long sentence echoes. With the rhythm of autistic speech. It speaks of the boy's desire to catch up with others-'I gotta get smart!
When asked about his familiarity with Indian Poets writing English, Murray said he hadn’t read many of them. But he felt surprised that it was being done at all. To him it is impossible to think of poetry being written in any language other than the mother tongue.
Les Murray desire to bring poetry to the masses. At school, students are given the idea that poetry is a remote and unreal from writing. No, says Murray, poetry is very much close to ordinary life. A word, a vision, an image from around us can lead to a poem
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