Francis Webb's The Ghost of the Clock and Jordie Albiston's Vertigo: What is good art?

By Dylan Slater

"... I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful."

Poetry is more than just the fulfilling of some preordained poetic criteria (Jarrell !"#$%. &ne can write verse that is in all technicalities poetry that by all rights might be called poetry and yet is still found lacking of some crucial element some vital component that takes it from words on a page to poetry in our hearts. 'he above (uotation is from an interview with singer)songwriter *lliott +mith published in the Boston Herald on ,ay -th of the year .$$$. /hile the writing of song lyrics is often justly or unjustly discredited as a dumbed)down sibling of poetry I feel that this (uote from +mith in many ways encompasses the many mysterious criteria that we re(uire of good art and in turn what we demand of poetry. 'he work of acclaimed 0ustralian poets 1rancis /ebb and Jordie 0lbiston is about as far removed from the folksy song)smithery of *lliott +mith as one could possibly fathom however I believe that his assertion that perfection is not artful and by implication that imperfection in some way is holds a great deal of relevance when considering what it is that makes their poetry so affecting. In this essay I intend to discuss the merits of /ebb's poetry in The Ghost of the Clock, and 0lbiston's in Vertigo with reference to what it is that makes good art good. I will e2amine the academic theory of what it is we value and grant merit in poetry and art and apply it to the poetry of /ebb and 0lbiston.

"3ou can analyse the music of poetry but it's difficult to conduct an argument about its value especially when it's gotten into the blood. It becomes autobiography there." (4ass .$$5% 4ere 4ass puts into words both the fundamental challenge of art criticism 6 that being the attempt to objectively judge a poem once it has already taken it's place within your life 6 and also at the

same time a truth about good poetry. 7ood poetry is that that affects the reader most. It is the poetry that burrows its way into your soul and makes its home there. 1or 4ass once a poem has achieved this it becomes nearly impossible to objectively assess its worth as a work of art because it has become so intimately intertwined with our lives. 0t their finest moments both /ebb and 0lbiston achieve this e2treme intimacy with their audience and whether this makes it 'difficult to conduct an argument' or not I believe that this is a fundamental aspect of what makes their poetry truly leap from the page.

/hen /ebb writes in his poem '8erelict 9hurch': 7hosts of bells chatter as from the sea &ut of memory slides home this gaping wreck +till seaworthy hallowed and functional. or when 0lbiston writes of ;driving sideways through streetsigns< in her poem '0ria =.' from Vertigo one cannot help but feel the words have some deep and strange power within them. 'hey are so visceral so moving that they get 'into the blood'. >ut what is it about these few words that grants them such power over us? If it is enough to call poetry that achieves this good then we must ask what it is that lends it this (uality.

@ant perhaps provides us with a way of discussing the illusive (uestion of what makes good poetry. In his e2amination of judgements of taste and beauty @ant outlines what he believes it is to hold something up as beautiful and what it means to do so. >efore continuing the discussion however I would like to submit that in an effort to make his commentary more relevant and applicable to the poetry of /ebb and 0lbiston we can e2change the words beauty and beautiful with artful or artistic as some art is outwardly ugly yet still holds an appeal.

"'he judgement of taste is aesthetic."

(@ant !""-% 'his short (uote from @ant is perhaps the most important in the entire paper. It dictates that the (uality of beauty or artfulness is one purely based on aesthetics. 'hat is to say its value is grounded in how pleasing it is to the reader not its meaning or message or adherence to a set of ordained poetic criteria but simply its inherent appeal on the page and in its sound when read aloud. 0 judgement of taste a judgement of artistic merit is not a cognitive one for @ant it is not a logical conclusion but a subjective emotional reaction. Perhaps @ant puts it best when he writes the following: "1lowers free designs lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage signify nothing do not depend on any determinate concept and yet please.< (@ant !""-%

If we are to take for granted @ant's theory that a judgement of taste is purely aesthetic then we must ask what gives art its aesthetic value. /hat is it that makes good poetry such as that of /ebb and 0lbiston when they are at their most successful have this status as something beautiful or artful? @ant has an answer for this too. @ant (!""-% says that beauty calls not upon our understanding not upon our rational minds but rather our imagination. 'hat is to say that a perception of beauty or in more modern terminology a perception of art is not reasoned towards but rather imagined into e2istence. >eauty is the result of a 'free play' between our imagination and out understanding (@ant !""-%. +omething that is beautiful cannot be fully understood according to @ant (!""-%. &ur imaginations can offer various attempts at understanding but it is never fully fledged or sufficient to satisfy our understanding. 'his void this 'free play' is where art comes from.

'his effect can be seen in the following lines from 0lbiston's opening poem in Vertigo titled '&verture': fear rise like smoke in his tremolo

arms 'he line is striking yet its meaning is unclear. 'remolo a musical term that refers to the rapid reiteration of a single note does not usually belong as an adjective to arms. /hat are tremolo arms? 8oes it refer to a a nervous twitch? &r is it a pun on the device on some electric guitars otherwise known as a whammy bar used for altering the pitch of a note or chord? ,aybe it is all these things and perhaps it is none of them. /hat its meaning is intended or otherwise is not particularly important. /hat is important is that the line resonates somehow with the reader. 'he idea of his tremolo arms satisfies and pleases without conveying an easily understood concept.

'he lines from /ebb's poem 'Aote to a 1reudian' have a similar 'free play' effect: 0ll through the winter the puny virginal rose +at tightly hunched up and the libidinous earth 1aithfully nursed her through long months of repression: ,eanings can be guessed at. Perhaps it is a story of a young girls journey into se2ual maturity. &r maybe virginity and se2 are metaphors for innocence and corruption. 0s with 0lbiston's poem it does not matter. It is not the meaning that lends the poem its beauty and artfulness but rather it is the delicate and precise word choice. If we understood it completely maybe it would not be art or at least it would not be beautiful art. ''hat is beautiful which pleases universally without a concept ' says @ant (!""-%. 'hat is what /ebb's poetry does. It does not answer our (uestions we cannot come at it with a formula or frame to force it into. &ur partial incomprehension of the poem is also in part the pleasure taken from it.

4owever I am willing to venture that there is more to what makes the poetry of 1rancis /ebb and Jordie 0lbiston so good so affecting and powerful. "3oung boys read verses to help themselves e2press or know their feelings as if the dim intuited features of love heroism or sensuality could only be contemplated in a poem." %

(&ctavio PaB in 4ass !"#-%. 'his is in stark contradiction with @ant's theories on beauty and by e2tension the appeal of art. 1or @ant it was simply the aesthetics that leant an object its beauty and perhaps without these aesthetics it cannot be called beautiful or be called artful but maybe it is also possible that there is more to what is good art. It is also possible that we come to poetry wishing it to satisfy us beyond a purely aesthetic level.

"'he premises of their work included a mistrust of abstraction and statement a desire to escape the blatantly conventional aspects of form and an ambition to grasp the fluid absolutely particular life of the physical world by using the static general medium of language." (Pinsky !"CD% 'he above is a (uotation from Pinsky writing on what he feels is the goal of the modernist poet. I feel that in many ways this underpins e2actly what /ebb achieves in The Ghost of the Clock. /ebb's poetry seems to put into words that which is indescribable. 'ake the final lines from '>ack +treet in 9alcutta': 'ormented flesh that is my flesh forgiveE 0nd lap around my deathbed like a pool 'hat starving I may make a true final confession. 4ere in these few lines /ebb encapsulates the guilty conscience of man who has lead a relatively privileged life and makes us feel sympathetic for him rather than the starving beggar in 9alcutta. 0lthough the e2act meaning is unclear I find in my own reading a certain sense of clarity. I am struck with the sense that /ebb has put into words something I could not but that they are no less true for it.

+imilarly when 0lbiston laments:

just don't know if I ever (uite said how I loveFd how you smell when you're happy she describes the grieving of a love in a manner that I could not have imagined. 'he idea that someone smelled differently when they were happy is abstract surreal even and yet it also resonates as some great truth. 0lbiston has put into words the feeling of loss associated with a break)up in a way that is totally original and at the same time universally and undeniable true.

1inally while defining what good poetry is can be illusive and possibly even a futile e2ercise many of us can tell you what it most certainly is not. ,any criti(ues are centred around the idea that it is a failing of the poet if one can sense the hypothetical ticking off of bo2es in composing a poemG if we use these words in these ways it is poetryE ;It is hard to know whether to complain first about the fabricated ingenuity of the imagery or the preciousness of the diction. &r about the fact that it is so sculpted to be memorable anyway.< (4ass !"#-% 4ass had the above to say when discussing the poetry of James /right. It seems that as a common criticism poetry is no good when it becomes to blaringly obvious that the writer wants us to anoint him or her a poet.

Pinsky (!"CD% talks of an instance where poets can ;hold out an inherited mannerism without fully understanding it so that it becomes a kind of gaud or badge establishing that the writer is a poetG the mannerism is like an ancestral tool whose function has been lost.< 'hat is to say that the poet can resort to using an accepted register or an e2pected stylised synta2 and e2pect what they write to be called poetry. 0lbiston uses this to an advantage making use of clichH that in conte2t becomes something more. 'ake the following from the poem '0ria =5':

o! Mother I have lost my faith in good

things and father I fear I will never e fearless again. 0t fist one may be tempted to call these lines contrived and even melodramatic. 0nd perhaps they would be right if they were not conte2tualised within the rest of the poem. +et in amongst the rest of the poem they seem somehow more genuine and less trite. ;+ounds like clichH but it's notE< 0lbiston herself writes in the poem '9horus =C'.

/hat is good art? Perhaps even after limitless and thorough discussion the answer would remain a mystery to us. 4owever 6 even without fully understanding why 6 I hold both /ebb's Ghost of the Clock and 0lbiston's Vertigo up as good art. 0s beautiful art. 'hrough 4ass we might discern that poetry that makes its way into our lives that makes its home within our e2perience of the world that moves us most intimately is good art. @ant suggests that to be beautiful art must rely on its aesthetic merit that beauty and good art is that that is most pleasing and satisfying in an of itself without interest or conte2t. Pinsky would tell us that it is the poets ambition to e2press through the medium of written language the e2act particularities of live and the world. Is poetry that does this therefore good art? Is not this re(uirement of content and meaning in poetry a desire for poetry to say something about the world at odds with @ant's purely aesthetic approach to beauty? Iltimately these inconsistencies and contradictions cannot be reconciled when discussing art. 7ood art is art that we feel to be good and would defend as good art to all others.

References 0lbiston J. (.$$C%. Vertigo, John Jeonard Press: ,elbourne. 4ass K. (.$$5%. Jowell's 7raveyard. In 1. >idart L 8. 7ewanter (*ds.% Kobert Jowell: collected !oems (pp. 5).-%. 1arrar +traus and 7irou2. 4ass K. (!"#-%. 'wentieth 9entury Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (pp. .D)--%. *cco: Aew 3ork. Jarrell K. (!"#$%. 'hese are not Psalms. @ipling 0uden L 9o.: essays and reviews !"5-)!"DM (pp. !..)!.D%. 1arrar +traus and 7irou2. @ant I. (!""-%. 9riti(ue of the Power of Judgment ('he 9ambridge edition of the works of Immanuel @ant in translation (pp. 2vii #C "#)!$M%. 9ambridge Iniversity Press. Pinsky K. (!"CD%. Introduction. 'he situation of poetry: contemporary poetry and its traditions (pp. 5)!.%. Princeton Iniversity Press. /ebb 1. (.$!!%. The Ghost of the Cock in Collected "oems, I/0 Press: Perth.