requires, in other words
you kept your sense of humour
honest, even when you said
that poems are less important
than a mortgage & a kid.‘Poem: i.m. John Forbes’ (Lucas 1999, p. 25)Notice the way this tension is tightly written into the language in such
phrases as ‘dented aspirations’ or ‘the package deal fringes of paradise’. The
subtle use of the second person ‘you’ also emphasises the split self: the poet
(who is always a fictional construct within the poem) seems both to be
talking to someone else and about himself. This distances the conflict and
yet makes it concrete.
Another way of writing the split self is to dramatise it through narrative
and situation. In Australian poet Steve Evans’s ‘Left’, the divided self
becomes a split life. The lyric in this poem stretches into a more narrative
mode:
Example 8.2
one morning the body chooses
a different outfit
leaves the suit on the hanger
leaves the front door open
turns left rather than right
at the usual corner
and never returns to the old job
old house old family
who told it to do this?
what words were used?
what spell?there it goes
into the next suburb
by nightfall it will be
almost beyond the city
blind to all previous logic
or finally seeing through it
who’s responsible?
not me says the mind
I’m just along for the ride
any steps past this onePostmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 159