Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the death of John Forbes at age 47. Ironic, understated, comic and deceptively erudite, Forbes’ poetry represented for many Australian poets, as Ken Bolton writes, “a high-water mark against which to judge their own work.” A keen student of art history, philosophy, military history, and cultural theory, Forbes in his poetry married his intellectual fascinations to suburban Australian landscapes and 20th century ephemera in a conversational tone and colloquial voice that owed much to his early love of the New York School, in particular John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, on who he wrote his honors thesis and a completed (but never submitted) masters thesis respectively.
A precocious talent, Forbes won a major literary prize at the age of 22 with his poem “Four Heads & how to do them.” The poem borrows for its starting point a Renaissance treatise on how to paint a “Classical Head” and proceeds to riff on the form, so that the Symbolist Head “No longer begins with even a mention of anatomy, / the approach in fact leaves one with the whole glittering / universe from which only the head has been removed.” The poem launched Forbes’ career and became an anthology staple. His second collection, Stunned Mullet, was funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority for the purpose of celebrating Australia’s bicentenary in 1988. It presented Forbes with the opportunity to take on the mantle of a "Public" Australian poet. He was, however, far too suspicious of authority for any such pretensions, and in the book’s central poem “On the Beach” the poet goes from answering the call of his vocation to seeing:
“Milled day-glo ephemera
sell you this image of Australia
& where it appears, flogged and true-blue,
your vocation looks
more like a blurred tattoo
or something you did for a bet
& now regret, like a man
walking the length of the bar on his hands
balancing a drink on his shoe”
Yet it is precisely this cynicism and self-effacement which make him a fundamentally "Australian" poet, and validates the argument for his having been a national poet of a kind. Forbes’ persistent skepticism of those things which can at times make great claims for themselves, including those things which interested him most: politics, art, philosophy, poetry, is inherently, if not uniquely, Australian, and gives his poetry an ironic mode which recalls Robert Hughes' diagnosis of Australia's national character in which the country's convict past has made its people at once conformist and cynical of authority. Eschewing academia, Forbes made his living working menial jobs, including a long-ish stint as a furniture removalist, and the meagre art grants offered to poets in the 1970s and 80s. Forbes' view of the role of the poet in late 20th century Australia was perhaps best explained by his speaking grape in "Monkey's Pride", which Forbes viewed as kind of a manifesto: "Because society has elected me / to decorate / its falling / apart with a useless panache." In one of his later poems, "Anzac Day", Forbes opens with a favorable and sentimentalizing comparison of the Australian character against a list of foreign nations' military conscripts (England, France, Turkey, Germany), until the poem takes a muted but sharp turn towards its end to the current state of the nation, resulting not in patriotic pride but rather quiet disappointment:
Not so the Australians, unamused, unimpressed
they went over the top like men clocking on,
in this first full-scale industrial war.
Which is why Anzac Day continues to move us,
& grow, despite attempts to make it
a media event (left to them we’d attend
‘The Foxtel Dawn Service’). But The March is
proof we got at least one thing right, informal,
straggling & more cheerful than not, it’s
like a huge works or 8 Hour Day picnic—
if we still had works, or unions, that is.
“On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra'' was published in Forbes’ posthumous collection Damaged Glamour, which features the poem's namesake painting, a glittering triumph of style over substance, on its cover. Forbes uses this perceived lack of substance as the substance for his poem: the extravagant, superficial display of wealth, the “sulking” royalty, the sycophantic hangers-on, the celebrity gawking—Forbes takes equal aim at both the super-rich and those who would worship such wealth, of whose gestures of contempt fail to mask “raw envy.” "On Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra" exhibits Forbes' concision, his formal ability and superior talent to subtly shift perspectives: From the trashy contemporary glossy magazines the painting comically reminds us of, to the 18th century painting itself, to the protagonists from antiquity the painting represents ("our / contemporaries minus coke and sunglasses"), these shifts produce a sliding movement throughout the poem, with one perspective sliding out from beneath the other to assert itself, a rhetorical effect that creates an irresistible momentum. And if the poem’s social and political critique may itself be in some measure superficial (no matter how accurate), it arrives at a devastating final few lines. Agape, eclipsed by Eros, is absent from the painting. Where shall we place it? How about dragging it down to the basement to be tortured? "You wish, voyeur, you wish." In the culture of spectacle, Forbes suggests, the only way in which charity and kindness can capture either our attention or imagination is if they are being put on the rack. The human reflex to want to be witness to such brutality and callousness makes us, the readers, no better than those idlers gaping on the balconies.
On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra
Any frayed waiting room copy of Who
could catch this scene: flash Eurotrash
surveys a sulky round faced
überBabe who’s got the lot—what else
could this painting mean, except that
superstars can will their luck, or
just how little raw envy’s hidden by
contempt, so words like ‘Wow! Great
Tits!’ or ‘Comic Opera Wop’ sum up
the observer, not Anthony and Cleopatra,
attached to pets & entourages—our
contemporaries minus coke & sunglasses.
What’s that pearl without price she’s
dropping in her glass? A mirror of
their self-regard, replaced by each
others’ glances. Still, it glows, blue
& blank at the centre like their hearts,
flanked by idlers on balconies leering
& placing bets. But if they suggest Eros,
what role does Agape play in this--
downstairs & screaming, being shown The
Instruments? You wish, voyeur, you wish.
