A thought with Les Murray

Last Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of hearing an established Poet share some of his work at a reading in his honor. Les Murray is a one of the five authors in the distinguished writers series, and the first to share poetry. I was especially looking forward to hearing his work because poetry my most favored form of expression over the past year. Though I had never heard of Murray, I did some quick googling of him hours before the event (ok I looked him up on wikipedia) and found great reviews of his work, the site claiming that he is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation." The more I read about him, the more respected he became to me as a writer, learning of his endless rewards and recognition for his success as a poet. This sparked some genuine curiosity, as i had never head poetry from and Australian writer before.

Sadly, I wasn't wise in choosing my seat when arriving to the reading, finding a seat in the back that would make it hard for me to hear well. Though it was also Murray's thick Austalian accent that had me scratching my head as I'd try to make out the words of the poetry he chose to share.
A rather jolly man, he had an endless selection of pieces to choose from, though it wasn't until he was asked to share one from his darker times that I began to feel moved by his words, even though there were some stanzas I couldn't make out.

Following the lecture, I looked up more of his poetry and thankfully I could understand them more easily on paper. Personally, my favorite themse for poetry is nature. I adore the use of emotion though plants, trees and water. In Murray's large collection of work, I found some poems that met my fancy. I enjoied one entitles Late Summer Fired, mainly because it was simple and didn't say too muuch but rather left some room in the imagination.

Another poem of his I articularly enjoied was Music To Me Is Like Days, mainly because it spoke so much truth about the transition of music as an expressive artform to a way of promoting bad values in society. Throughout the whole poem he has a consistent flow of points to prove the theme to be true, even including some Australian tongue that, though a bit confusing, never took away from the message he was stressing.

its bodice of always-weak laces
the entirely promiscuous art
pours out in public spaces 

Non fiction Entry 2

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander is probably one of the best memiors I've ever written because it kept me laughing nearly the whole way through. There is nothing better then an author who knows how to get a reader laughing, because comedy is not as easiy done on paper like it is on stage.

Non Fiction Unit Entry 1

Throughout the non fiction unit, there has been one text in particular that's really stuck with me since I first read it. Jane Didion's Goodbye To All That was a perfect example of how I'd want to write my memoir. It felt more raw and honest then some other pieces where the author writes about themselves. Here it feels like she is hiding nothing, rather she introduces information about her environment and how it made her feel in a way that was almost darkly poetic. Gradually, we can see the light leaving her eyes as her perception of the city changes and its clear what she thought would be was no so easily what she got, which is a painful lesson people eventually learn.

Her story is one I know I will have to face one day- leaving my hometown to start completely new on my own. But more then that, its of discovering who she was without the safety of her old life.
"But where is the school girl who used to be me" was one on of my many favorite lines in this text. She so gracefully takes a simple thought and writes it in a way that almost sounds achingly romanticised, as if she's living in a ancient Greek tragedy and her fate has already been set, one that she does not wish to fulfil.

Its almost sad, how she makes being young into a highlight of her life. As if her whole youth was spent fervently anticipation her grand future, but once she reached there all she realized was how much better she thought it would be. That's another painful reality of life I suppose. It makes me want to capture every important moment in my youth and paint it on the page with my words. I want to share the absurdities of life and then turn it into a peice of art, like Didion did.

Whats lovely that she does so well is relating something that seems complex to something that's universal, like when she describes her love for the city like the love you have for the first person who ever shows you what beng in love truly feels like. Its magical, breathtaking and life altering.
"I still believed in possibilities then, still had a sense so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day any month." I so often get lost in this exact hopeful feeling that my life woud take a turn and it would be in that moment that I would truly start living.

I aso enjoied how she emphasised on the "idea of New York" to an outsiders perspective compared to living there on a daily basis. She described the city as a "infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself" and goes on to elaborate on how the place was like Oz, a dream within a dream. But she speaks in a past tense and as a reader I had to remind myself that this was how she saw NYC before she was there, and that a more negative light was soon to shine on the beloved city.