“All Eyes”

[Written to accompany the poem on the Meanjin website after the poem was declared joint winner of the 2011 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize.]

The first thing you will see from the accompanying drafts of “All Eyes” is that I compose by hand. I get the feeling that not many poets (and presumably no prose writers) still do that. When I began writing in my teens, of course, that was the only way I had, and even when I acquired a typewriter that seemed too difficult to use for composition. But even now when my typing skills are better and computers make it easy, I prefer to write longhand. It may be fanciful but I like the feel of the connection between my mind and my writing hand; it is as if there is a direct charge between the imagination and the page which a keyboard and screen do not produce.

The poem, as you will see, was written between 10 and 12 March 2010. However, on consulting my notebook (I have always jotted down potential poems in notebooks) I discover that the idea for this poem actually dates from about five years earlier and, as far as I can remember, it was prompted by a television report of satellite footage from Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. On the matter of dates, by the way, ever since I began writing poetry in my adolescence I have always scrupulously dated the drafts of my poems and kept a chronological list of them. I’m not sure why; it just seemed the natural thing to do, and it has always been a source of astonishment to me that hardly any other poets do the same — at least as far as I am aware. I would hate not to be able to place my poems in time or in sequence.

What sparked the idea for a poem in this satellite report can be explained by some other words in my note: These things, these things were here… This, of course, is a quotation from Hopkins’s poem “Hurrahing in Harvest”: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder/ Wanting…”

So the poem draws out the implications of that notion: that the phenomena of nature would somehow go to waste or be pointless without a sentient intelligence to observe them. And the last stanza even flirts with the possibility that the very purpose of our existence is to be that observing intelligence and to confer meaning on what might otherwise be meaningless matter, or indeed meaningless life. This smacks very much of the anthropic principle and I don’t know that I really believe it. But it is imaginatively stimulating and a subject area that I seem to have become absorbed by recently because it crops up in other recent poems. Those very words from Hopkins, for example — these things, these things — occur in “Auspices”, written a couple of years earlier, which in part speculates on the question of whether the conscious observer creates meaning, and “Lost World”, also from 2008, wonders whether, in the absence, or loss, of a visual record, we can even know that something happened.

If we turn to the formal and technical aspects of the poem, given that I am a formalist, the question may arise: how do you decide on the particular form, the particular pattern of rhyme and metre? To this I can offer no very clear answer except to say that it is partly a sense of the appropriate form which comes into being with the idea and imagery, and partly heuristic and discovered in the process of writing. And if you consult the drafts you will see that, though the basic form was settled almost immediately, I did, after the first page, change line five from tetrameter (four stress) to pentameter (five stress). One rule which I almost invariably follow, however, is that once the form of the first stanza has been determined, all the other stanzas must follow the same pattern in both metre and rhyme. Another thing which may be observed is that I do not belong to the “first thought best thought” school and believe, from experience, that revision can be as creative a process as the original composition, though of course some poems seem to find their completed form more easily than others.

“All Eyes” appears in Exhibits of the Sun and can be read here.