| Robert Adamson’s new collection is his most experimental. Larry Schwartz reports. DAYS after a failed suicide attempt in which he drank a bottle of mercurochrome, American poet Hart Crane jumped off a ship north of Havana, Cuba on 27 April, 1932. He was just 33. “He was very drunk,” says Robert Adamson. “He went back to his cabin, collected his final manuscript, put it in a neat pile on the desk. Then he walked to the back of the ship, took his coat off, folded it very carefully, turned and waved and then jumped. “By the time they turned the ship around, he was gone.” Adamson, whose 1990 collection, `The Clean Dark’, won both the Victorian and New South Wales Premier’s prizes as well as a National Book Council Banjo award, returns the American poet’s last gesture in the title of a new collection, `Waving to Hart Crane’. The Sydney poet lives beside the Hawkesbury River near a bridge built by the American construction company responsible for the Brooklyn Bridge, New York, an emblem of hope for the future in Crane’s most ambitious poem, `The Bridge’ (1930). Compared to Rimbaud, Whitman and Eliot, Crane has been described as a visionary, American Keats. He saw the chance to transform his world through the imagination. “Can Hart Crane’s redemptive image of poetry as a cultural `wire’ or bridge survive the age of the micro chip?” Imre Salusinszky writes in an appraisal of Adamson’s new book featured on its back cover. “No sonnet will survive/ The fax on fire,” Adamson writes in the title poem. This is not pessimism, he says, but a warning on the elusiveness of cherished values. In returning the wave in the title of a book that is his most experimental, Adamson is ironically directing attention beyond contemporary whimsy, back to solid literary tradition and forebears such as Louis Zukovsky and Robert Duncan and, of course, Crane. “People keep saying that this is a postmodern world. I’m saying that we need to build on the traditional values of poetry. “`The Clean Dark’ was so successful,” he says. “It was the peak of a kind of poetry that I’d been writing for years … I thought, `I have got to keep changing’. I am very comfortable and competent writing books like (that). But I wanted to change and strip back all the rhetoric and ideas. “All the way through the book I was incredibly conscious of not repeating myself, of not doing something that I’ve ever done.” This is not just evident in the series of ways of looking at a pepper mill, described by Salusinszky as the book’s “hilarious finale” or a lengthy piece called `The Sugar Glider’ that Adamson says is his most experimental since his 1971 work, `The Rumour’. Nor in a few “shaped” poems that recall the “concrete poetry” of Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire. He sees an experimentalism in the leanness and lack of unnecessary words that he contrasts with a wordiness in recent works by some contemporaries. Adamson’s poems have been translated in seven languages, including Russian and Chinese. In Melbourne for the Writers’ Festival last week, he is among the most enduring of a group of poets that shook the Australian literary establishment in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including John Forbes, John Tranter, Kris Hemensley, John Jenkins, Vicki Viidikas and the late Charles Buckmaster and Michael Dransfield. Now 50, he dedicates some poems in `Waving’ to contemporaries, some who have have died, including the painter Brett Whiteley and poet Robert Harris. “My generation/ gets older … Our poems become thinner/, sadder, less/ tense.” Adamson, who has recently gained a four-year Literature Board fellowship, is poetry consultant for a new Angus & Robertson journal, `Republica’, and poetry editor of a quarterly, `Ultarra’. With Juno Gemes and the writer Michael Wilding, he directs Paper Bark Books. He talks of his intention in the new collection: “Pushing into a realm that I didn’t know. I was trying to discover a new world or new worlds that haven’t been explored before.” THE SUNDAY AGE, 16-Oct-1994 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 