John Forbes (Part 2) [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

When John Forbes died of a heart attack in January of 1998 while sitting around his kitchen table talking with friends, he left a relatively small body of work with an extraordinarily high strike rate. Forbes was well known for his critical acuity, and his trained eye did not suffer mediocrity, in his own work or the work of others (his friends included). As Laurie Duggan remembers, “John wouldn’t pretend (or allow you to) that anything could be gotten away with. He was his own harshest critic, and he may well have been the conscience of modern Australian poetry.”

 

Here are three of Forbes’ better known poems. Television features prominently in each of them. Forbes seems drawn to television for its democratic appeal and pervasive influence on the culture in which he was writing, with its ability, both as object and medium, to reflect back insights into our social, political and spiritual condition. The opening injunction of “TV” to dispense with an account of the program being watched in favor of a description of the actual television set itself, suggests that how we watch, the social and economic settings in which we encounter events, provides an architecture for experience which is just as consequential (and revelatory) as what we watch. 

 

TV

dont bother telling me about the programs
describe what your set is like the casing the
curved screen its strip of white stillness like
beach sand at pools where the animals come
down to drink and a native hunter hides his
muscles, poised with a fire sharpened spear
until the sudden whirr of an anthropologist’s
hidden camera sends gazelles leaping off in
their delicate slow motion caught on film
despite the impulsive killing of unlucky Doctor
Mathews whose body was found three months later
the film and the camera intact save for a faint,
green mould on its hand-made leather casing

“Love Poem” is a paradigm of concision. In ten short-lined couplets, Forbes is able to consider themes as hefty and varied as love, war (as entertainment, distraction and consolation), his own poetry (“whose letter / lets me know my poems show / how unhappy I can be”), and the power television wields over both the political and the personal. With its terrifying beauty, the televised bombing of Baghdad, which announced the commencement of the First Gulf War and was the first ever live coverage of war, comforts the speaker in the absence of his beloved. The poem makes the seemingly incongruous action of curling up with images of the war, as if they were a romantic comedy, eerily (and comically) apposite.The poem continues to play with this absurdity, switching between a clear knowledge and appreciation of military hardware and a forlorn romanticism: “Our precision guided weapons / make the horizon flash & glow / but nothing I can do makes you / want me.” The bombing is seen by Forbes as “what the west does best”, an advertisement of technological advancement and awe inspiring power—a detached brutality masked as a moral imperative. The closing couplets, in which Forbes considers that the whole performance has been put on for his benefit, speak to the deceptive force of television itself, which brings the war not just into our homes but our beds, making what was once distant and remote intimate and personal. The live images, however, far from increasing the “realness” of the event for the viewer, only further abstract it; paradoxically, the closer we come to the image, the further away we are from appreciating its reality for those who are truly experiencing it.

 

Love Poem

 

Spent tracer flecks Baghdad’s
bright video game sky

as I curl up with the war
in lieu of you, whose letter

lets me know my poems show
how unhappy I can be. Perhaps.

But what they don’t show, until
now, is how at ease I can be

with military technology: e.g.
matching their feu d’espritI classify

the sounds of the Iraqi AA—the
thump of the 85 mil, the throaty

chatter of the quad ZSU 23.
Our precision guided weapons

make the horizon flash & glow
but nothing I can do makes you

want me. Instead I watch the west
do what the west does best

& know, obscurely, as I go to bed
all this is being staged for me.

“Speed, a Pastoral” is among Forbes’ very best poems. From the opening line there is an irresistible descending propulsion that is mimetic of the poem’s concerns, the inevitable spiral downwards after a night of getting high: “your feelings / follow your career down the drain / & find they like it there”. Forbes himself struggled with addiction to alcohol and a codeine-based cough syrup. The poem opens with a ironic celebration of this intemperance, the strange combination of exquisite insight and unreasonable fallacy that one can experience when a certain level of delirium is reached. Towards its end, however, the poem shifts into a moving elegy for the Sydney born poet Michael Dransfield, a contemporary of Forbes (although the two never met) who died in 1973 at the age of 25, and in whose poetry drugs were a recurring subject. 

 

Speed, a Pastoral

 

it’s fun to take speed
& stay up all night
not writing those reams of poetry
just thinking about is bad for you
                                      —instead your feelings
follow your career down the drain
& find they like it there
among an anthology of fine ideas, bound together
by a chemical in your blood
that lets you stare the TV in its vacant face
& cheer, consuming yourself like a mortgage
& when Keats comes to dine, or Flaubert,
you can answer their purities
with your own less negative ones—for example
you know Dransfield’s line, that once you become a junkie
you’ll never want to be anything else?
                        well, I think he died too soon,
as if he thought drugs were an old-fashioned teacher
& he was the teacher’s pet, who just put up his hand
                                     & said quietly, ‘Sir, sir’
                       & heroin let him leave the room.

 

 

Comments

[David Lehman]

Terrific post, Thomas. Thank you!

[ALAN WEARNE]

Yes indeed a terrific post. One trusts that it will bring new fans [at the least!] to John and his work.