The Darkening Ecliptic

Ern Malley

• Publisher: ETT Imprint
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781925416893
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In 1944 the Australian literary world was rocked by a hoax which was to become a worldwide scandal. Ern Malley, deceased motor mechanic and poet, was the invention of two Sydney poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who were intent on proving that modern poetry was a sham. The work of Malley comprised lines and words selected randomly, everywhere from Shakespeare to an American report on the drainage of the breeding grounds of mosquitoes. Max Harris published the poetry in the literary magazine Angry Penguins but when the deception was revealed he was mercilessly lampooned, tried and convicted of publishing 'indecent advertisements'. This definitive edition contains all of the poems, a new introduction by artist Albert Tucker, and historical background by Max Harris, John Reed and Colin Wilson; augmented by the unique contribution of drawings and etchings by Garry Shead.

PREFACE

These poems are complete. There are no scoriae or unfulfilled intentions. Every note and revision has been destroyed. There is no biographical data.

These poems are complete in themselves. They have a domestic economy of their own and if they face outwards to the reader that is because they have first faced outwards to themselves. Every poem should be an autarchy.

The writing was done over five years. Certain changes of mental allegiance and superficial method took place. That is all that needs to be said on the subject of schools and influences.

To discover the hidden fealty of certain arrangements of sound in a line and certain concatenations of the analytic emotions is the ‘secret’ of style.

When thought, at a certain level, and with a certain intention, discovers itself to be poetry it discovers also that duty does after all exist: the duty of a public act. That duty is wholly performed by setting the pen to paper. To read what has thus been done is another thing again, and implies another order of loyalty. Simplicity in our time is arrived at by an ambages. There is, at this moment, no such thing as a simple poem if what is meant by that is a point-to-point straight line relation of images. If I said that this was so because on the level where the world is mental occurrence a point-to-point relation is no longer genuine I should be accused of mysticism, yet it is so.

Those who say: What might not X have done if he had lived? demonstrate their different way of living from the poet’s way. It is a kind of truth, which I have tried to express, to say in return: All one can do in one’s span of time is to uncover a set of objective allegiances. The rest is not one’s concern.

Durer: Innsbruck, 1495

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,

Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,

As I knew it would be, the colourful spires

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,

All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters—

Not knowing then that Durer Perceived it too.

Now I find that once more I have shrunk

To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,

I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

Sonnets for the Novachord

(i)

Rise from the wrist, o kestrel

Mind, to a clear expanse.

Perform your high dance

On the clouds of ancestral

Duty. Hawk at the wraith

Of remembered emotions.

Vindicate our high notions

Of a new and pitiless faith.

It is not without risk!

In a lofty attempt

The fool makes a brisk

Tumble. Rightly contempt

Rewards the could-foot unwary

Who falls to the prairie.

(ii)

Poetry: the loaves and fishes,

Or no less miracle;

For in this deft pentacle

We imprison our wishes.

Though stilled to alabaster

This Ichthys shall swim

From the mind’s disaster

On the volatile hymn.

If this be the norm

Of our serious frolic

There’s no remorse:

Our magical force

Cleaves the ignorant storm

On the hyperbolic.

Untitled, 2004
33 x 40 cm, Pen and brown ink, wash on paper

Sweet William

I have avoided your wide English eyes:

But now I am whirled in their vortex.

My blood becomes a Damaged Man

Most like your Albion;

And I must go with stone feet

Down the staircase of flesh

To where in a shuddering embrace

My toppling opposites commit

The obscene, the unforgivable rape.

One moment of daylight let me have

Like a white arm thruist

Out of the dark and self-denying wave

And in the one moment I

Shall irremediably attest

How (though with sobs, and torn cries bleeding)

My white swan of quietness lies

Sanctified on my black swan’s breast.

Boult to Marina, 2001
29.5 x 21 cm, ink, wash and printed paper

Boult to Marina

Only a part of me shall triumph in this

(I am not Pericles)

Though I have your silken eyes to kiss

And ma...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• THE HOAX
• THE DARKENING ECLIPTIC
• PREFACE
• ERN MALLEY
• EDITORIAL