sunday poetry: hoax!

Petit Testament - Ern Malley

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weep gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.

this is a fun sunday poetry.

the poem you've just read is one part of what is considered to be the twentieth century's greatest literary hoax. the poems were written by a couple of soldiers, writers themselves, who hated the modern poetry being published in australia at the time (the 1940s). so these two sat down one afternoon and made up a poet. they called him ern malley (because "mal" in french means "bad"), gave him a sufficiently tragic back story, found old photos and said they were his. then within a few hours they wrote 16 pages of incoherent poetry with vague hints at meaning and quotes from all over and sent them in to a publication they really hated. the editor loved the writing and published it all. and everyone else loved it too. and even today ern malley is supposed to be one of the faces of modern poetry. ha. ha. ha. art really has nothing to do with its creator, does it.

this is a good story to remember especially these days.

read the whole story here (it's very entertaining) and all of ern malley's mal poems here!