Letter from Les Murray: on being 'willfully grungy'

I am fortunate to enjoy a long-distance friendship with one of the greatest living poets in our language, Les Murray. Given that Les lives in rural New South Wales, Australia, this is a very-long-distance friendship, both trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific, since when your friend lives on precisely the other side of the world it doesn't matter which way you go to get there.

In fact, I have never been, though I've been invited and do mean to go see him one day on Cecil's Lane, a road named for his father. As it is, I send him letters and things we are working on at Poetry Scores, and he sends back letters, poems, or very large postcards filled with his scrawl.

One just received -- dated, nicely, "10-10-10" -- taught me some things. It responds to a package from me that, typically, included a photograph of my wife and child. When Les first visited us in New York, my wife Karley was pregnant with our daughter Leyla; and he is the thoughtful sort who always has remembered that, so I keep him updated on them.

Your photo of Karley & Laylah [his spelling] is indeed a beauty, or two beauties, & I enclose a reply to Laylah. I hope she'll like. I like it.

His reply comes in the form of a photo of a blue bird sitting in Les' wide palm

 

No legs are visible. Though they could be tucked under its tufts of feathers, I imagine the bird to be legless or in some other way disabled, a natural reclamation project for the poet, an impression encouraged by a note in Les' inscription on the back.

Hi Leyla [getting the spelling right]! I'm happy to see you & your mother looking so well ------- and the blue bird is happy to be looking at all! Love from Les

I know, the tiniest acknowledgement from Justin Bieber would mean much more to Leyla herself, but I am  very proud to have encouraged correspondence between my 7-year-old and a poet whose work will out live us all.

Les also responds to some poems and co-translations of the Turkish poet Orhan Veli I had done with my friend Defne Halman. Les edits the literary section of a conservative Australian magazine named Quadrant and surprised me years ago by printing some work I had sent him; so now, though the friendship is primary to me, there is also a slight strain of literary hopeful in me whenever I send him a package in Australia.

Thanks for your letter too, & the poems. The one that came closest to my grasping Quadrant linkups was, sadly, the co-translated one. What's to stop you developing its impules. The others seem a but wilfully grungy, tho' who am I to judge anything about Injun casinos?

That means I must have sent him this poem:

THE WOUNDED KNEE KIDS BOXING CLUB

Kids are making dream

catchers for tourist pennies

The Wounded Knee Kids

Boxing Club needs money

for gloves    for gas to bruise

and travel

They have been pouring

water on their heads all day

Casino roof

the only shade    The old

massacre creek dry

like any other rut

Oh    the elite set

get seventy new houses    says the Wounded

Knee Kids Boxing Club coach    Casino

money never goes to kids

I used to have a phone    Now

I have forty-five kids    Lucky

I still got a TV

The kids

are all

on fire

This is an old poem, just this side of journalism, a bare factual report of a visit to Wounded Knee, the Sioux massacre site. The next brief bit of Les' letter is the only part of this one that is properly personal.

I'm off to Scotland on Monday next, after turning 72 on the previous day. This has been a traveling year, including into the Icelandic dust back in May.

This relates to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption that made worldwide news in 2010. Les moves from this reflection to another poem I had sent, and another unpronounceable name.

"The exterminating influence of the missions" is a fable of the next wave of missions, largely -- my linguist bro-in-law has restored a language to a district N. of here -- it's called Gumbaynggir & had got down to 2 old speakers when he took it up. He has since worked out & produced a grammar, a dictionary & a collection of traditions, stories, etc. & the folk in question hold that he is a Great Good Bloke. They even use their lang. a bit again. Steve himself was born in Hungary but left there at 1 1/2 years -- he then grew up in Zurich, and he's a Christian Brother. Beware what you believe. Cheers -- Les

Wow! That's a lot to unpack at the end of a note scrawled on the back of a postcard that depicts mating sea turtles.

First, let me share my poem he is responding to.

VOCABULARY LESSON

FOR THE LAST PERSON

OF THE TRIBE TO SPEAK

THE LANGUAGE

OF OUR PEOPLE

 

 

For arrow poison, gall was boiled

down. She soaked his nuts in cum

Sundays, lengthy Elizabethan prose

Sundays, in Kansas City, Kansas.

The hair was at times plastered with clay

for 24 hours, to impart gloss

and keep it from split

ting. The exterminating

influence of the missions

was discouraging, sure,

but courage, for survivors,

was really just a curse.

A is for Absence,

B is for Bayonet in the Back of

C, or Crazy Horse,

D is for Don’t You Dare Speak Your Mother Tongue,

E is for Entrails Emptying Out of Our Soul.

Now that Les Murray mentions it, this is "willfully grungy," what with the nuts soaked in cum and splitting the word "splitting" between two lines. I suppose he and I may disagree about the value of being "wilfully grungy" -- it serves as an apt summary of punk rock, an aesthetic I respect -- but it's good to know where you are coming from, and Les has shown me once again.

If I may quibble with the great poet, however, this poem is not about the next wave of missionaries but rather the first missionary wave in American Indian country, where the languages were willfully annihlated, along with as many of the people as the bad guys could throw a measle blanket on. I'll enjoy discussing this in Bunyah one day with Les Murray and his bro-in-law Steve the linguist Christian Brother.