It’s not a simple portrait when painted from this angle: a complex person, a brilliant poet with a genius for language, with some terrible politics. But it’s still a deeply admiring picture of Les Murray, whose poetry looked out to the world at large, a broader world that he was always conscious of but was never going to bend to. The world could come to Bunyah, New South Wales, as he went out and read his poems to an international audience.
A traveller who could bring a “bat’s ultrasound” right into the room (via his poem of that name), Les had one of the most fervent and avid intellects I have encountered. Although university educated, he was a fierce autodidact, whose facility for foreign languages informed the etymological plays and departures of his poetry. Les told me he didn’t trust the avant-garde poets of anywhere or any time, but strangely, he shared more in common with many experimentalists than with the more conservative traditionalists who lionise him. He could show empathy for autism and different ways of perceiving the world with such linguistic intensity that his audience found themselves wandering alongside him around his chosen locales. He had a way of drawing you with him, of making a poem feel like a personal exchange in the paddock.
Les and I stood on opposite sides of the political fence, but usually got on pretty well when we met in person. I arranged his reading at Kenyon College in the US to a packed auditorium. And when he was visiting Western Australia, as he did many times over the decades, he even came out to my uncle and aunt’s farm in Wheatlands, outside the town of York, and was serenaded by my aunt’s Sweet Adelines group.
He loved it, and they loved him. Copies of his book were in many farmhouses, for Les spoke to people on the land. He always took the “battler”-farmer side of things, a position that would sometimes result in disagreements. We once had a healthy disagreement over his brilliant poem The Grassfire Stanzas, in which he wrote, “August, and black centres expand on the afternoon paddock,/ Dilating on a match in widening margins”. I argued that you could say that he was unconsciously commenting on white colonialism’s spread over Indigenous Australian lands and black cultures. He disagreed. He was speaking for the people who were farming the land.
But he wasn’t “just” doing that, this self-styled bard of the people; he was working through the inflections of culture that inform any language, and in this case a language that had pressured and sometimes erased the languages of the peoples whose country it had been and still is. It has long been debated whether his astonishing Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle is an example of appropriation; that might be a point where he and I would disagree. What I will say, regardless of what Les said to anyone else, I saw that he felt he considered Indigenous Australian culture as something to respect and learn from.
Les liked the fact that, at a point in my life when I had reached rock bottom and had managed to hold on to only two books, one was JH Prynne’s poems and the other was his selected poems, The Vernacular Republic. The generative nature of language in preserving rights and preventing, say, the rural being overrun by city decisions, caught my attention. And then we’d disagree. And then, occasionally, swap a letter.
I sent him a postcard from Ireland last December to congratulate him on turning 80 – I am not sure if it found him. Les, I respect your confidence in the glory of God and an afterlife, and I am sure your poems will continue to carry many of us in unforeseeable ways. You were bullied as a kid and you knew what it was like and didn’t like it – and when that sense of things shines through all your learning and language artisanship, it’s like nothing else. Thanks, mate.