“Ulysses Burning”

[Notes written for Jordie Albiston’s poetry class]

From 1974 to 2005 I lived in Hobart, and for much of that time on the eastern shore of the Derwent. Our house at Howrah Beach was only a few metres from the water and looked directly across the river towards the city centre, with Mount Wellington in the background. This stunning view would often have me spellbound at the window for considerable periods of time, and the different aspects it presented as the light varied from dawn to dusk, or under changing weather, seemed infinite. Over the years I wrote quite a few poems which tried to capture that view and its qualities of light, and indeed I think it was responsible for awakening in me a closer attention to detail in the physical world.

The poem pretty much describes what I observed on a summer day, as I sat, or stood, gazing out from the comparative cool of the house at the hot day (there are hot days in Hobart, contrary to popular opinion) and the dazzling light on the water. A few young people did walk from left to right across my field of view, the women in red (as I recall it) sun frocks, which did seem flamelike as the sun poured through them. What gave rise to the poem, I would say, was my sudden thought of the Canto in Dante’s Inferno in which the souls are sleeved in fire — Ulysses being one of them. Had I been reading Dante at the time? I can no longer remember. There is a slight error, by the way. In Dante Ulysses is joined in a single flame with another soul, Diomedes, I think. I had forgotten that when I wrote the poem and represent him as single.

One thing I had been reading, if my memory doesn’t betray me, is Possession by AS Byatt. This accounts for the odd word “odylic”, which I think she uses more than once in that novel. “Od” or “odyl” is a word coined by Reichenbach for a force supposed to manifest itself in light, magnetism etc. It also sounds like “idyllic”, which added to its attraction for me.

I seem to recall Peter Porter saying somewhere — and it must have been at about the time of this poem — that he was not interested in, or was not attracted to, purely descriptive writing, an opinion which baffled me a little, since I felt, and feel, that in a way there is no such thing as pure description, that close observation always reveals or implies something more than what is literally or physically there. And this poem was in part written to embody that view.“Looking is such a marvellous thing,” Rilke said, “of which we know little; as we look, we are directed wholly outside ourselves.” Or as Matisse put it, “To see is itself a creative operation, requiring effort.”The descriptive is never merely descriptive; it can lead to discoveries.

Although the poem is in the first person singular, the “I” is a “purely operatic I”, as Gwen Harwood put it. It is simply the anonymous observer.

It will be immediately noticed that the poem is written with rhyme and metre, and unusually in the current climate I am strongly committed to formal poetry, though there is no space to go into that question here. As is generally the case, I hit on a form for the first stanza and subsequent stanzas follow the pattern. I can only say that I find the requirements of form an incentive, not a barrier, to imagination.

“Ulysses Burning” appears in Corrupted Treasures and can be read here.

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