Introduction to Alan Wearne (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

Of all the major Australian poets, none have captured the Australian idiom as faithfully and expansively as Alan Wearne. A tacit member of the famed “Generation of ‘68”—the disputed label given to a group of poets who came to prominence at the end of the 1960s and reshaped the nation’s (then predominantly conservative) poetic landscape—Wearne has fashioned a truly original and idiosyncratic oeuvre, renowned for its narrative, character driven poetry. Often epic in their form and scale (his most successful published works are arguably the verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers Part 1 & 2), Wearne's poems take tales of urban Australia and unfurl them simultaneously in two directions: outwards through the country's sprawling and scattered metropolises, and inwards towards their characters’s equally expansive and discordant internal lives. Lovesick suburban drug dealers caught in webs of international power, adulterous politicians, blue-collar workers with philosophical bents—Wearne’s characters, via a cacophony of monologues, sing of an often bizarre, banal, endearing, brutal modern Australia, with irony, wit, compassion and pathos. 

Near Believing (2022), gathers a selection of these monologues and narratives from Wearne’s nearly 60 years of writing, from 1967 up to 2021. The first poem in the selection, “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete,” was written on the 22nd of July, 1967, the day before the poet’s nineteenth birthday—an extraordinarily precocious feat. The poem comically sketches Jesus as a first class runner. His apostle Bartholomew, unimpressed with his master’s teachings (“Brilliant. Yes. Yet never near to God”), finds Christ’s true grace in the splendor of his athletic prowess: “often we came down the mountains / (jogging loosely, never with a cramp) / my running partner, heading for Jerusalem, / appeared as if his feet were next to God.” 

Wearne has said that his poems are “rather like autobiographies in which I don’t appear.” While “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete” is of course a comic poem, it is more complex than the farcical portrait of Jesus the jogger it at first glance appears to be. For me, with my Jesuit upbringing, the opening phrase, “Always in training”, makes me think not only of training in an athletic sense (although I do like the idea of Jesus as an annoying, obsessive fitness junky), but a religious one also: the human incompleteness that requires the constant training of the soul to bring it closer to God in order to be filled with His grace; a process which is never complete (always training), or to paraphrase another poet “created unfit, commanded to be sound.” Meanwhile, the distinction between Bartholomew’s disdain for Christ’s words (“even when I felt he’d gone too far, / think Here we go again out came the logic / smooth as a circle”), and his reverence for Jesus’ actions—or action, perhaps the most rudimentary action of all: running—might inverse the hypocrisy the poet (or reader) found in the Christian orders of his youth, whose actions often fell short of their words.

 

Alan Wearne (photo by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne)

Alan Wearne has published over ten collections of poetry, including The Nightmarkets (1986) which won the ALS Gold Medal, The Lovemakers (2001) which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the NSW Premier's Book of the Year, The Australian Popular Songbook (2008)  and Mixed Business which is to be published by Puncher and Whattman later this year. He is also the founder and editor of Grand Parade poets, which he launched in 2011 and has published fourteen collections of Australian poetry to date.

Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete

 

         Always in training. Yet helping with his work

was partly boring, sometimes even nasty.

Still, even when I felt he’d gone too far,

think Here we go again out came the logic

smooth as a circle, Roman disciplined.

Brilliant. Yes. Yet never near to God.

         Only when he ran.

Only when I saw him striding.

(He’d leap and throw his arms above his head.)

It really was a case of Run with me.

I did. And often we came down the mountains

(jogging loosely, never with a cramp)

my running partner, heading for Jerusalem,

appeared as if his feet were next to God.

        This too was a feat: running for a month

(as rumour had it).

                            Sprinting in the temple

was nothing less than perfect. Tables knocked,

whips raised and money lost.

He charged them twice.

         Of course revenge was needed, and his arms

were raised once more; his feet, however, broken;

sort of enforced retirement. Still,

he made a comeback to end all comebacks.

                                                                       Once

there were ten, and I half-walking, pacing

(my room-mates, seated, limbered-up in thought).

We stopped the noise and movement; standing still,

I heard the footsteps pounding up the stairs. 

Comments

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I appreciate the way his poetry does not shy away from the complexities and contradictions of modern life.