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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures, featuring talks by poets, scholars, and educators, presented by PoetryFoundation.org. In this program, Australian poet Les Murray speaks with American poet Kevin Young.

Les Murray is considered one of Australia's greatest contemporary poets and has won numerous literary awards. He was born in 1938 in New South Wales on a farm he moved back to with his own family in 1985. Murray often writes about Australian history and landscape and life in the rural areas. His work is praised for its inventive use of language and sense of humor. In addition to his poetry, Murray is a prolific author of essays, criticism, and fiction, and is the editor of many anthologies of poetry.

Kevin Young was born in 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska. While a student at Harvard, he became a member of the Darkroom Collective and later earned an MFA from Brown University. He has published many books of poetry, including Ardency, a chronicle of the Amistad rebels, and Dear Darkness, and has edited many anthologies.

Young's book of essays and criticism, The Grey Album, won the 2013 Pen Open Award. Les Murray talks about the tradition of artistic hoaxes in Australia, including a fake modernist poet. He reads some excerpts from his work and tells how he hid his Catholic faith from his father and reveals other family secrets. The conversation took place at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in April 2013.

KEVIN YOUNG:

Well, it's a real pleasure meeting you, having written with you just briefly, but having read your work for years and admired it, we were talking about sort of where we were from. And you're from the same patch of land where you grew up. Tell me a little about it.

LES MURRAY:
It's a valley about eight miles wide by about eight miles long, and it's called Bunya, about 200 miles north of Sydney. It's lovely to talk in miles. We use kilometers these days, but in America, I can talk miles.

KEVIN YOUNG:
And what's the landscape like?

LES MURRAY:
Ah, it's low hills in the middle and quite reasonably high hills around the edges. It's a sort of cupped valley where the land starts to go up off the coastal plain into the mountains. You would probably say it's the geographical equivalent of the Appalachians. Maybe not just the geographical equivalent of the Appalachians.

KEVIN YOUNG:
The emotional and...

LES MURRAY:
Well, certainly in the past, not so much now.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Well, I was wondering about origins. We had written, and I was doing this food anthology, and you had mentioned, you know, you didn't have many food poems, which I found incredible because there's so many great ones. The broad bean sermon and, you know, pure food, that poem about sort of laws and food. And I'm just sort of wondering how your home place and food, the broad bean sermon especially seems about that. Is that what it's about, about your home place?

LES MURRAY:
No, it was a garden I had in Sydney.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Oh, OK.

LES MURRAY:
We had a garden in the backyard, and I think I must have exhausted it because the beans were never as good again.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Well, is that a poem you wouldn't mind reading or do you...

LES MURRAY:
I wouldn't mind reading it, Broad Bean Sermon, sure. Bean stalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade without belief, saying, trespass against us, in unison. Recruits in mint Air Force Dacron with unbuttoned leaves. Upright with water like man square in stem section, they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways, kink down and grow up afresh with proffered new green stuff. Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thinned bean forest, snails hang wrapped in their food. Ants hurry through several dimensions, spiders tense and sag like little black clags in their cordage. Going out to pick beans with the sun-highest fenced tops, you find plenty and fence them. An hour or a cloud later, your fine shirt falls more. At every hour of daylight appear more that you missed. Ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided. Thin straight, thin crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones. Beans knuckled and single bulge, minute green dolphins that suck. Beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers in the incident light.

And more still, oblique to your notice, that the noon glare or cloud light or afternoon slants will uncover. Till you ask yourself, could I have overlooked so many, or do they form in an hour? Unfolding into reality like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique court expressions. Like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string and affixed to its moment. An unceasing colloquial assembly, the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers. Wondering who'll take the spare bag, for which you grin with happiness. It is your health. You vow to pick them all. Even the last few weeks off yet. Miss Shapner's toes.

KEVIN YOUNG:
What a great poem.

LES MURRAY:
Thank you.

KEVIN YOUNG:
How did you put it? There's such a prodigiousness there. Is it an Ars Poetica? A poem about poetry, you think?

LES MURRAY:
You can see it that way. I didn't think of it at the time as Ars Poetica. I thought of it as an Ars… I can't think of the Latin word for bean off the top, maybe.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Well, but it's an unceasing colloquial assembly. Portly, the stiff. I mean, it's kind of a congregation of these beans. How do you think that… Does that describe your poetics, too?

LES MURRAY:
Oh, I hadn't written most of my poetics at the time. Maybe it was a forecast.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like it is now. I mean, certainly I think it has this kind of generative quality. And your work is so prolific, which is a word I hate. People sometimes ask me about… So I thought I'd ask you about prolificness. I mean, do you think of it in that way? Or, you know, your collected poems are so vast.

LES MURRAY:
No, I just do the next poem. I suppose the thing I like best in this poem was Prophet Neo Green's stuff. I was very much after sound effects at the time. And now I don't think about them much because they write themselves. They've learned to look after themselves.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Another early of your poems that I love is the essays on interest. The first and second essay on interest. The ones about the emu.

LES MURRAY:
Ah, yeah. I don't think it's in this book, but you can lend me your book.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Sure. I love that poem. You know, maybe we can talk about it and then you could read it. But you talk about… Well, in the first essay, you talk about this interest that blinks our interests out and alone permits their survival. And then you say, it is a form of love. And in the second essay, you talk about emu. I think it's just a beautiful poem. Similarly, this idea of interest. What did you mean by interest there?

LES MURRAY:
Oh, Lord. Such a long time since I wrote this.

KEVIN YOUNG:
When are these from?

LES MURRAY:
It was an analysis of a mental sort of process. You know, and I went on to do more of that sort of thing. Partly in essays, trying to work out, and I was poetic for myself, what happens when we write poetry. And I finally come to the idea that three things were involved, three minds that we've got. One's called the dreaming mind. It could be called anything, a number of other things, fantasy and so on. One's the rational daylight sort of reasoning mind. And one's the body, which then looks after dancing and gesture and a lot of forms of imagery and so on. And when they're in a kind of concert or fusion with each other, then poetry can exist.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Is the emu all three?

LES MURRAY:
I wasn't thinking of that then. It was before I thought of that thought, that stuff. I know, I was just fond of the emu.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah. Well, it's beautiful how you describe the emu. Then you said, now only life survives if it's made remarkable. We're remarkable and not. We're the ordinary discovered on a strange planet.

LES MURRAY:
Yeah. I love that. I was wrestling with various thoughts and paradoxes at the time. The emu is famous for being a curious bird. It doesn't fly, but it gobbles things down, swallows them. And it never chokes on them. And people think, if you eat a shovel full of concrete, your guts are going to fuse into a stone and you're gonna die. The emu just passes them through.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Would you read that one maybe?

LES MURRAY:
Sure. Second essay on interest, the emu. Weathered blonde as a grass tree, a huge beetle's hair cut, raises an alert periscope and stares out over scrub. Her large olivine eggs click oilily together. Her lips of noble plastic clamped in their expression. Her head fluff a stripe worn Mohawk style. She bubbles a pale blue windpipe. The emu, (UNKNOWN) who stand in on most continents is an antelope. Looks us in both eyes with her one eye and her other eye. Dignified courageous hump, feather swaying condensed camel, swift courser of New Holland. Knees backward in two three-way boots, you stand in a one proud emu, common as the dust in your sleeveless cloak, returning our interest. Your shield of fashions wobbly, your quaint, your native, even somewhat bygone. You may be let live, but beware, the blank zones of serious disdain are often carte blanche to the darkly human. Europe's boats on their first strange shore looked humble, but mass over, men started renaming the creatures. Worship turned to interest and had new features.

Now only life survives if it's made remarkable. Heraldic bird, our protection is a fable made of space and neglect. We're remarkable and not. We're the ordinary discovered on a strange planet. Are you early or late in the history of birds, which doesn't exist and is deeply ancient? My kinships too are immemorial and recent, like my country which abstracts yours in words. This distillate of mountains is finely branched. This plain expanse of dour delicate lives where the rain-shrouded slab on the west horizon is a corrugated revelance, settling its long clay-tipped plumage in a hatching descent. Rubberneck stepsister, I see your eye on our jeeps loads. I think your story is when you were offered the hand of evolution, you gulped it. Forefinger and thumb project from your face, but the weighing palm is inside you. Collecting the bottle tops, nails, wet cement that you famously swallow. Your passing muffled show, your serially private museum. Some truths are now called trivial though, only God approves them.

Some humans who disdain them make a kind of weather which when it grows overt and widespread we call war. There we make death trivial and awesome by rapid turns about. We conscript it to bless us, force-feed it to squeeze the drama out. Indeed we imprison and torture death, this part is called peace. And we offer it murder like mendicants begging for significance. You rustle dreams of pardon, not fleeing in your hovercraft style, not gliding fast with zinc-flaked legs dangling, feet making high tensile seesawing impacts. Wasteland parent, barely edible dignitary, the disinterested spotlight of the lords of interest and gowned nobles of ennui is a torch of vivid arrest and blinding after darkness. But you hint it's a brigand sovereignty after the steady extent of God's common immortality. Whose image is daylight detail, aggregate in process yet plumb to the everywhere focus of one devoid of boredom.

KEVIN YOUNG:
That's great.

LES MURRAY:
I think that's the unnatural enemy after all, boredom.

KEVIN YOUNG:
That's right.

LES MURRAY:
Maybe I was approaching it, I was writing a bit long there.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, but I think there's a full quality to what you're trying to capture with.

LES MURRAY:
Yeah, I was working out a whole nexus of thoughts.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Well, I love this idea of the wasteland parent you call the emu.

LES MURRAY:
Yeah.

KEVIN YOUNG:
And I wonder if we might turn to some of the Australian poets, the Five Fathers that are in your book Five Fathers but also Hell and After. How do you see them as these sort of, are they wasteland parents or are they quite different? You know, obviously they're different from each other. But when did you come to sort of represent them?

LES MURRAY:
I first tried to represent these five fathers in a book for the English market. I thought the 19th century was, 19th and early 20th century was not a barren era in Australia, it was really quite productive. I was trying to show them the riches of a period of Australian literature from the 30s to the 60s I guess. Australian literature as a discipline in universities was only just starting. I think it started in the University of Toulouse and moved to Moscow. The Soviets used to think we were promising people. So I made a fairly tight selection of each of those five. And they all had in common a certain richness of diction. And I thought that they might not be as experimental as American poets but they had a great richness. That was their thing. The experimentalism came in the next generation and it usually was second-rate or secondhand. It was America being imitated. But the second of those books, the one Hell and After, was partly because of a remarkable chap, Frank the Poet McNamara, who was dimly remembered.

The communist, sort of old communist chap, began putting together the surviving bits of Frank the Poet. And I thought this deserves to be widely known. Because Frank the Poet was a total recidivist. Australia as you know started as a British convict colony. And after America got its independence, the convicts had to be sent somewhere. And they began to be sent to New South Wales. And he was sentenced for seven years and served 21 of them. He was repeatedly flogged because he couldn't restrain his witty tongue. And several very funny poems there, including the long one called A Convict's Tour to Hell, in which Frank goes down to hell expecting that that's where convicts go. And the devil said, oh no, we never, we hate the poor, we never accept convicts. But if you like you can come through and see who we do accept. It turned out that hell consisted of the floggers and the jail administrators and the man who discovered Australia and the man who invented jails and all sorts. Wonderful chaps having a very bad time.

And then Trank goes off to heaven and St Peter is a bit doubtful about him, but Jesus said, no, no Peter, we're delighted, Frank's arrived at last. Job, go and kill the fatted calf. And it's going to be a wonderful feast. At that point, Frank wakes up. But it's a sort of folk dantesque, if you like, you know. And there were a number of other fine poets I thought I could put in there, particularly Mary Gilmore. She wasn't all as good, but where she was good, she hit some good notes. And she lived to be 100. No, she lived to be 99 and so had a wonderfully long writing career. And I liked her a lot. So she got in on that basis and a couple of other people as well. There's a lot of good stuff back there in the early parts of Australian settlements. And so I was trying to pick up on it and give a handy condensed views of it.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah. Do you see the poet's role as this kind of reclamation and representing forefathers, foremothers, forebearers?

LES MURRAY:
It can be. It can be, yeah. It would not have been as well expressed without them. There was a tremendous tradition in the past, of course, of Aboriginal poetry. But that's largely a closed book for a couple of reasons. Most of it was never collected in a book form or a written form. And all the best of it is secret. It's religious secrecy. You have to be initiated to know it. And you're not supposed these days to borrow from it either. That's just a very different way of doing art. It's for the community, not that immediate community. It's not for general distribution. What is for general distribution is painting. Of all industry, there's only one Aboriginal industry that's painting. And song, it's gradually creeping up too. The Aboriginal culture being utterly different from ours, it's proceeding in a different kind of development.

KEVIN YOUNG:
One question I had was sort of about James Mcauley and also sort of Ern Malley, who's someone who I find fascinating. For those who don't know, he was a Hoax poet.

LES MURRAY:
A lot of people, he's the most famous of all Australians.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Well, of course, yes. Not to me, but I think the poem's written under his name by Mcauley. And what was his collaborators?

LES MURRAY:
What was his name? Harold Stewart.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, Harold Stewart.

LES MURRAY:
He went off to Kyoto and became a Zen monk.

KEVIN YOUNG:
That's right, that's right. It's the 40s. Tell me about, I don't know, either Malley or Mcauley or both.

LES MURRAY:
Mcauley was a severe, and you would have seen it straight away from his face, he had a severe expression. He was a wonderful jazz player, apparently, on the piano. Brilliant student at Sydney University. And was rescued from the army by a fellow called Alf Conlon, who was kind of a behind the scenes string puller in military circles. It was a scheme to get the best minds in Australia out of the army and into a place where they'd be safe. And Jim was one of them. And later he became an administrator in New Guinea, which was then an Australian colony. And one day in Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, he and Harold Stewart were sitting around with nothing much to do and decided to invent a modernist poet. They took all afternoon. Then they wrote a wonderful covering letter from his equally mythical sister, who said that she'd discovered these old poems, maybe they would be of interest to somebody. And the letter was so beautifully composed, in just the style of such a woman, that they'd fooled everybody.

And Max Harris was an editor of note in Australia at the time, and it was taken incompletely. And the O'Malley poems became famous briefly until Stewart and Mcauley revealed the nature of the hoax. And then it went before a police court, just in case it was an obscenity. These policemen said they didn't know what the devil had meant, but they thought it might just be obscene. And it's been hanging on ever since. One school of Australian poetry reveres O'Malley, and the other one tends to sniff at him, and I tend to laugh. I think it was a great joke and produced some good imagery.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, that's what I think. I mean, I think it's funny and sometimes hilarious and, you know.

LES MURRAY:
Yeah. Australian artistic history is full of hoaxes. Whenever anything gets to be too fashionable, it tends to get sent up. And oh boy, does it get sent up.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Is that why you think people hoax there, just to send things up? Is it a particular Australian thing, you think?

LES MURRAY:
Australia's a very collective culture, and it doesn't believe in people getting ideas above their station. And if they do, they often find themselves cut down to size and ridiculed. And the method used is very ruthless, actually.

KEVIN YOUNG:
That's a fascinating chapter, I think. Turning back to your work, I was curious in your novel in verse, Freddie Neptune.

LES MURRAY:
Oh, Freddie, yeah.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Could you tell us a little bit about him, it? He seems to me like an important demarcation in your work.

LES MURRAY:
I was suffering badly from depression. Depression gave me a number of things. It gave me a set of poems about, or from the point of view of animals once 'cause I wanted to get out of my own head for a while. It was a bad place, my head. And Freddie was the biggest and best thing that came out of that. He appeared before my mind's eye and said, I'm Fred Bircher, a German Australian. I lost my sense of touch because of something utterly shocking. I saw, write my story. And it was as if it was given all the way through. I thought, start writing this thing. And whenever it slid off and started to look a bit inauthentic, it wasn't Fred, I would rub that bit out and go back. I kept it on the line all the way. And I wrote about four, no five, chunks of about four months each, four or five months each. And then the rest of the year of meditating on it and getting it ready for the next book. And it came out. It was instantly rejected by the critics in Australia. They hated it. And I've never quite understood why.

And the Germans and the Americans seemed to love it. The first place that it was translated was Norway. Yeah, I don't know what their reaction was. I never saw any of the reviews at all.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Is there some of it you would read for us, or is there a part that you can excerpt?

LES MURRAY:
Yeah, I could. You could open the book and start reading anyway.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Was that part of your design?

LES MURRAY:
Well, it was designed not to be written in literary language at all. And it was the language of my father's youth, early 20th century Australian, but spoken by a person who's bilingual and makes German mistakes and German jokes a bit. And, well, this probably would do. He won't serve in the First World War or indeed the Second because he doesn't want to kill Germans or Australians, he being birth. I think more people should take this in mind, you know. Don't shoot your ancestors. In May we reached Berlin. I should mention the we means Fred, and a friend of his called Leland Golightly, who was a Hama-aphrodite. In May we reached Berlin. We had a sheaf of dates to play in Weddink, in Lichtenberg, in Pankor, none of the snob suburbs. On our first free night, Leland and I went in spite of drizzle to the center of town, to be impressed. And when we get to Berlin, he muttered in tune, the Kaiser E will say, Oh hoch mein Gott, what a bloody woeful lot of the AIFHA. We were on the spray island, just passing the Royal Palace, and Leland was saying, I think I'll sit the next war out, as a little kept woman.

When we heard yabba yabba, a big hile up ahead, over and over like surf, and saw a glow brightening. We hurried over the Schloss Bridge into Zeighausplatz, joined the edge of a great crowd there. What's on? The students, they're burning all the Jew books, and German hater books. We worked through to the steps of the Opera House for a view. We burn you segment fried for your filthy incest theories that demean mankind. We burn you aunts kasira for your corrosive Jew analysis of noble poetic thought. We burn you Heinrich Heine. They heaped the books in armfuls to be shingled on a blazing house. Second time I'd seen books burnt, and this time it was official. What's that big place they're carrying the books out of? I asked Leland. Seems it was the University. Was? Well, it won't be now. Couldn't win its arguments. That's the public library next door there where Goebbels was singing. He had a big bass voice for a pipe stem of a man. A lot in the crowd were hesitant about their Zeig hiding, but scared of those that weren't.

And I listened to a woman. These sows of scholar books have weighed us plain folk down, wrong-footed as scholars killed. I'm glad to see them burn. Culture was always for Lord Muck to sneer and pose with. He don't work out in (UNKNOWN) Burn, you flattering shit-birds. But I noticed her arm didn't lift. A bone in her shoulder, perhaps, as old ladies used to say. And the crowd was dense. As we were leaving students front of us. You're English, yes? And we sang dumb. No, mate, we're Australian. You disapprove of burning books in Australia? If you have books there? I looked at Leland. Auntie Lula had a book, didn't she? She had three or four. There was one she dipped in water to give to sick cows. What sex is the eagle, it was called? By this stage, they dismissed us for idiots and waltzed off. There were hardly any words in my act and I reckon the customers were just happy to see heaviness get lifted up where they might still walk out from under it. To me, the weights that volunteers strained at testing, plus all the motorbikes, handles, park seats and people on them, were just like zeppelins.

I laid hands on them, took off and floated overhead as I filled them with my breath. Fred is working as a strong man. Because he has lost his cutaneous sensation, the sensation in his skin, he can't feel how much effort costs and it makes him very strong. And so he's working. He did it in Australia and he's doing it in Germany there. But that's the famous burning of the books in Berlin at that time. I didn't know, and I wish I had, that the city librarian of Berlin kept the Nazis out of the library. He didn't let them burn any of the books. He must have been a real hero, that one.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah. Well, is Freddy, for you, a hero?

LES MURRAY:
He is, in a funny way. He would probably not think such. I thought it would never cross his mind. But he is the hero of a book. And he sees a lot of the history of the first half of the 20th century. The book starts in 1914 and ends in the middle 40s, about 1949, when Fred gets his sensation back. And that's a mysterious chapter as well.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Well, do you think of it, I mean, you know, it's hard to think. The New York Times praises it as a haunting, loving, fiercely democratic epic by a master poet. I love this idea of the democratic epic. Are there other democratic epics you have in mind, either in Australia or in English?

LES MURRAY:
Huckleberry Finn is one that I can think of. There are probably others. There's no sort of, or there are very few high-status people in Freddy Neptune. There's one very strange quasi-medieval German noblewoman that he runs across at one point. Oh, and he runs across a few known people. I mean, he's a friend of Marlene Dietrich. And Marlene, as we all know, if she liked a man a bit, she would sleep with him. If she liked him a lot, she would cook for him. She really believed in food. She'd been hungry in her life, you know. She knew about food.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Well, I love this idea of the democratic epic.

LES MURRAY:
That's good.

KEVIN YOUNG:
I wonder if turning to sort of your more recent work after Conscious and Verbal, that's a book of recovery for you?

LES MURRAY:
Very literally. I was, I went down with, I went into a coma because my gallbladder burst and the little fellas that live inside you which will eat you when you don't feed them anymore, they call E. coli, they were eating my liver. It was the nicest thing they could find. And it was quite a job to turn them around and stop them doing it. And I came back by the skin of my teeth, more or less. And I thought, yeah, right over from here on, I've had my death scene, I've had my rehearsal, the rest of life is now afterlife. Somebody had in the newspaper that the doctors had said at the hospital that I was now conscious and verbal. And I thought, that is God's gift for a book title.

KEVIN YOUNG:
I love that title.

LES MURRAY:
(LAUGHS)

KEVIN YOUNG:
I love taller when prone, too. That's a great...

LES MURRAY:
Oh, yeah. I've always been, if I may boast, a reasonable inventor of titles.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Oh, yeah. I've been learning human, subhuman redneck poems.

LES MURRAY:
That was, I was gonna call it just redneck poems, but it wasn't offensive enough. I had to strengthen a subhuman redneck poem.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Tell us about that.

LES MURRAY:
I was a bit of a defender of poor people and unprivileged people in Australia, and the ones I come from. And this was despised by some of the fiercer intellectuals that defended rednecks and creatures of that sort. I thought, make a virtue of it. The book, one of only two of mine that got on the Sydney Morning Herald's bestseller list.

KEVIN YOUNG:
That's amazing.

LES MURRAY:
For a poetry book, it's unusual.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, I wonder, what's the place of poetry in Australian life? Is it like in Ireland, for instance, poetry feels like a very daily thing for your cabbie knows poems. Is there that kind of connection to poetry?

LES MURRAY:
It's partly because of the Irish that it is so in Australia. Well, not for everybody, by any means, but there is a tradition of that sort. It tends to be a bit narrowed into one kind of poetry, but the Welsh are good at commentary verse, too. And I've been very impressed by their model of poetry. There's a lot of people in Australia who consume poetry, and they don't talk about it much, but they'll congratulate you side long somewhere. No, that'll suit me. I like that. I'd hate to be famous like a rock star or a celebrity. That would be horrendous. They'd eat you alive.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, there's a poem by William Matthews where he says it's called Oxymorons, and one of them for him is a famous poet, which I always thought was quite funny. Turning back to your afterlife, as you said, tell us more about, how does that, has your poetry changed for you?

LES MURRAY:
I've been much more experimental, teaching myself to do various things. And I'll read you a couple of little poems if I may.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Sounds perfect.

LES MURRAY:
Yeah, one is related to America and to critics, and it refers to their civil war, but now I'm here in America, I'd have to say your civil war. I wrote a little haiku. I wrote a little haiku titled The Springfields. Lead drips out of a burning farm rail, their civil war. Critics didn't like it, said it was obscure. The title was the rifle both American sides bore. The lead was the heavy bullet, the minie, which tore, often wet with blood and sera, into the farmyard, timbers and forests of that era. Wood that, burnt even now, might still re-melt and pour out runs of silvery ichor the size of wasted semen it had annulled before. And, yeah, like a lot of foreigners, I'm a bit fascinated by the civil war. Now, another one altogether. The conversations, just, you know, the sheer joy we have in bits of knowledge we exchange with each other. The conversations. A full moon always rises at sunset and a person is taller at night. Many fear their phobias more than death. The glass king of France feared he'd shatter.

Chinese eunuchs kept their testes in spirit. Your brain can bleed from a sneeze breath. A full moon always rises at sunset and a person is taller when prone. Donald Duck was once banned in Finland because he didn't wear trousers. His loins were feathergirt-like daisies, but no ostrich hides its head in sand. The cure for scurvy was found, then long lost through medical theory. The beginning is a steady, white sound. The full moon rises at sunset and lemurs and capuchin monkeys pass a millipede round to get off on its powerful secretions. Mouthing it, they wriggle in bliss on the ground. The heart of a groomed horse slows down. A fact is a small, compact faith. A sense-datum to beasts, a power to man, even if true, even while true. We read these laws in Isaac Neuron. One woman had 69 children. Some lions mate 50 times a day. Napoleon had a victory addiction. A full moon always rises at sunset. Soldiers can now get in the family way.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Interesting. I love that.

LES MURRAY:
Well, I'm not for nothing the father of an autistic child, you see. The one thing about autees, they literally love fact. And I've always loved fact, too. I didn't realize that I was a bit of an autistic. I was not only a child off a farm, was all I knew, but that is a fairly autistic position to be in. And I thought I'd have a bit of fun with all my factual knowledge.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah. It all seems connected, though. I mean, in this poetics that you've created, I feel like.

LES MURRAY:
Oh, yeah. I'm always trying out new poetics to see how they work. Can we make this work? Yeah, that works. No, that one's not doing the right thing.

KEVIN YOUNG:
You mentioned in the poem you just read, faith, and your poems seem to have, certainly your collective poems, and I think the new poems, too, is To the Glory of God. Is that something you feel comfortable talking about?

LES MURRAY:
It's something I don't know a hell of a lot about. I have written on it a few times. There's one little poem that probably illustrates it better than, well, better than the others, called Church. I turned Catholic when I was, effectively when I was about 18, and joined up when I was about 24, and never mentioned it to my father. I was a bit shy of it because he and Mum were fiercely anti-Catholic, but he never mentioned it either, so the next 40 years, until he died, it never came up in conversation. Where are you, Church? The wish to be right has decamped in large numbers, but some come to God in hopes of being wrong. High on the end wall hangs the Gospel from before he was books. All judging ends in his fix, all including his own. He rose out of Jewish, not English evolution, and he said the lamp he held aloft to all nations was Jewish. Freedom still eats freedom, justice eats justice, love, even love. One retarded man said, Church makes me want to be naughty. But naked in a muddy trench with many thousands, someone's saying, the true God gives his flesh and blood.

Idols demand yours off you.

KEVIN YOUNG:
The only other poem I want to mention that I particularly love, and especially because you mention your father, is that poem The Last Hellos. To me, that's one of my favorite poems, period. And I read, it was in this elegy anthology I did, The Art of Losing, and I would read from it because I think it's so powerful about, well, I mean, wrestling with goodbye, but as a kind of hello.

LES MURRAY:
I'll read it for you, if you like.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, I'd love that.

LES MURRAY:
Tell you a sad story about him after, though. The Last Hellos. Don't die, Dad, but they die. This last year he was wandering. Took off a new chainsaw blade and cobbled a spear from bits. Perhaps if I lay down, my head'll come better again. His left shoulder kept rising higher in his cardigan. He could see death in a face. Family used to call him in to look at sick ones and say. At his own time, he was told. The knob found in his head was duck egg size. Never hurt. Two to six months, Cecil. I'll be right, he boomed, to his poor sister on the phone. I'll do that when I finish dyin'. Don't die, Cecil, but they do. Going for last drives in the bush, odd and massive board-slotted stumps, bony white in whipstick second growth. I could chop all day. I could always cash a cheque in Sydney or anywhere, any of the shops. Eating still at the head of the table, he now missed food on his knife's side. Sorry, Dad, but like have you forgiven your enemies, your father and all them, all his lifetime of hurt?

I must have. I don't think about that now. People can't say goodbye anymore. They say last hellos. Going fast over Christmas, he'd still stumble out of his room where his photos hang over the other furniture and play host to his mourners. The courage of his bluster, firm big voice of his confusion. Two last days in the hospital, his long forearms were still red mahogany. His hands gripped steel frame. I'm dyin'. On the second day, you're bustin' to talk, but I'm too busy dyin'. Grief ended when he died. The widower, like soldiers who won't live life their mates missed. Good boy, Cecil, no more bluey dog, no more cow time, no more stories. We're still using your imagination. It was stronger than all ours. Your grave's got littler somehow in the three months, more pointy as the clay's shriveled like a stuck zip in a coat. Your cricket boots are in the State Museum. Odd letters still come. Two more has died since you, Annie and Stuart, old Stuart. On your day, there was a good crowd, family and people from away, but of course, a lot had gone to their own funerals first.

Snobs mind us off religion now, those if they can. Fuck them. I wish you God.

KEVIN YOUNG:
That's beautiful.

LES MURRAY:
That got me a certain amount of trouble, that last line. It's the most notorious line in Australian literature, that one. How

KEVIN YOUNG:
do they argue with it?

LES MURRAY:
Oh, it's very improper and very undignified and shouldn't have done it. Come here and accept a whack across the hand.

KEVIN YOUNG:
But you're writing about grief and loss.

LES MURRAY:
I'm also writing in the language Dad and I spoke to each other. It's a slightly different dialect from the regular round of city speech. It's a bit more old-fashioned. You'd be surprised how hard it was to get some of those things printed. They would correct the grammar every time, and you'd have to correct it back out of correct.

KEVIN YOUNG:
In the spokenness, I think that's one of the things, hearing you read it, but also when I read it first, that strikes me, is that spoken quality that I think courses through all your work. And really is this human language as opposed to some ideal language? I love that you call your selected poems learning human. There's something really human and humane about that.

LES MURRAY:
Very good. I like that. I remember the very nice lunch that my English publisher and my American publisher had with me in London the day we invented that one. They said, in America, we never call the book selected poems. We want a proper title. I said, how about learning human? Well, yes, everybody loved that. But my father, poor fellow, he had a disaster which caused a lot of follow-on disaster in the family. He refused to cut a tree down for his father, who was his employer and landlord. Devious old alcoholic. He called upon Dad's next brother down to come and cut this tree. It was rotten, you see. It wasn't worth anything. It was hard to get down. The younger brother, Archie, cut it down and it cut him down. It fell on him and killed him. So Dad and his father had this terrible subterranean battle all the rest of their lives. The grandfather, who owned the farm we were on, kept Dad and Mum poor as punishment.

KEVIN YOUNG:
That's tough.

LES MURRAY:
It's a grim little story, that one. Took me a long time to work it out. What's going on? Where are they so angry?

KEVIN YOUNG:
Do you ever write about the incident?

LES MURRAY:
I did only fairly recently. I finally sorted it out. I knew most of the elements, but I didn't know how they joined up. Because Dad, instead of telling me about it and saying this is what caused us to be poor, expected me to work it out for myself, and if I hadn't, I was stupid.

KEVIN YOUNG:
I come from a long line of farmers and I can see that people don't tell you how things happen necessarily.

LES MURRAY:
They're strange that way. The deepest things go unexplained. You know, people talk about Catholic guilt. I tell you, there's one that's as bad, and that's Presbyterian blame. Dad and his father went in for Presbyterian blame. They never forgave each other. Until Dad couldn't remember that he had forgiven, he said, oh, he must have. Because his brain had a tumor in it, and I was sort of rejoiced to hear that. I thought, on whatever terms, I'm glad that nightmare's over.

KEVIN YOUNG:
Yeah, yeah. Well, you write about it so beautifully, and about family and faith and place and home and, the future.

LES MURRAY:
No wonder they call me a redneck.

ED HERMAN:
That was Les Murray speaking with Kevin Young. This program was recorded at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on April 25, 2013, as part of International Poets in Conversation and was sponsored by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. Les Murray is the author of over 30 collections of poetry, most recently, Killing the Black Dog, A Memoir of Depression, Taller When Prone, and The Biplane Houses. He's also written numerous collections of essays and other prose, two novels in verse, and is the editor of several poetry anthologies. Kevin Young is currently Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta. His next volume of poems, Book of Hours, is forthcoming from Knopf. You can learn more about Les Murray and Kevin Young and read some of their poetry by visiting PoetryFoundation.org, where you'll also find articles by and about poets, an online archive of more than 10,000 poems, the Harriet blog about poetry, the complete back issues of Poetry Magazine, and other audio programs to download.

I'm Ed Herman. Thanks for listening to Poetry Lectures from PoetryFoundation.org.