American Prometheus

Like her father, Toni Oppenheimer was multilingual. She wanted to be a translator in an official gov’t capacity.

Oppenheimer had been cleared of sending information to the Soviets and of being a security risk. For more than a decade afterwards the FBI kept him under surveillance. Nor would they give Toni a security clearance.

She tried to drown herself. She was rescued.

A few days later she hung herself.

I don’t know how America walk around with its eyes up.

Grace Perry: Poet, Revolutionary Editor, Promoter, Publisher

A little while ago a friend of mine joined the S.A. Writers Centre and subscribed to Australian Poetry. I mis-read that as Poetry Australia, founded and edited by Grace Perry. I'd heard a horrified whisper once - the '70s? '80s? '90s? Melbourne? Adelaide? - that she'd committed suicide.

And so I wondered about her. And so I looked around the web.

One of the first things I found was a review of Dot Jensen's biography of Perry. The biography was published in 2020; the review by Hall in January 2023.

Hall stretches the review into an argument about gender expectations of male and female poetry

The trouble is that Hall either quotes so selectively from the source material that his argument’s fatally misleading (when it’s just not plain wrong), or he ignores the source material altogether. He and ends up so far and demonstrably wrong that his argument has nothing to do with poetry and little to do with history. The history is all about gender.

The skinny on establishing cultural dominance? Read on.

THE STORY FROM JENSEN:

Perry was remarkable among Australian female poets for her willingness to become involved in the politics of Australian poetry. She threatened the hegemony of male poets and critics by establishing herself in the powerful positions of publisher and marketing director, as well as convener and director of workshops and literary events (Jensen pp. 4-5)

Dr Grace Perry took her own life at the age of sixty in 1987. Ten years later few remember her and her work is still largely unacknowledged. Her poetry is no longer in print and few of her poems [are] in the anthologies. The question has to be asked: How can she have been forgotten so quickly? How much more does a woman have to do to be included in the history of her times? (Jensen p. 5)

Hall continues:

Jensen spends some time analysing the 1964 schism in the Sydney poetry scene which saw Perry's Poetry Australia and Robert Adamson's New Poetry break away from the establishment's Poetry Magazine. And she shows, very convincingly, how Perry was unfairly blamed for these splits…

This is the series of events Jensen alludes to:

As the editor (1962-64) of Poetry Magazine, Perry gave preference to new poets such as Bruce Beaver, Roland Robinson, Geoffrey Lehmann, Rodney Hall, Craig Powell and William Hart-Smith. Following a rift over the selection of Australian poets for an English-French edition of Poetry Magazine in 1964, in a secret meeting Perry was expelled from the poetry society by Robinson, J. M. Couper and others on the grounds that she was publishing poetry that had already been printed or that came from non-members. She established a new magazine, Poetry Australia, which she edited until her death. Through her company, South Head Press (founded in 1964), she published Poetry Australia and collections of poetry, of her own and others. Frozen Section (1967), with its frequent images of containment and repression, was the only record of her response to her exclusion from the poetry society. - Australian Dictionary of Biography

Hall's argument with Jensen begins:

The problem with Jensen's explanation, however, is that Perry has not only been forgotten by males. Perry did not feature as a major poet in any of the anthologies of Australian women's poetry that began to appear in the 1970s-1980s either, such as the classic Mother I'm Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women's Poetry (1975) and edited by Kate Jennings or in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986) edited by Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn.

That is, Perry "did not feature as a major poet" in these anthologies because "not only" males had "forgotten" her.

MOTHER I'M ROOTED: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S POETRY
Fitzroy, Victoria, Outback Press, 1975, ed., Kate Jennings

At the beginning of the book Jennings describes the literary world of early- and mid-'70s Australia as "for the most part controlled by a small backstabbing backbiting group of men and a few male-identified women." (Introduction, p. [i])

Jennings and the publishers originally intended "a neat anthology of already known women writers, each with their individual poetical statement" (ibid., p. [i]).

Jennings solicited established women poets, and also asked the publishers if "I could advertise around and try and reach women poets Out There, women poets of all sizes and shapes, most of whom would never even be able to do an Emily Dickinson." (ibid., p. [i])

As a result of advertising she received over 500 submissions. (ibid., p. [i]) She "[chose] poems mainly on the grounds of women writing directly, and honestly." (ibid., p. [ii])

The writing was so raw, so far beyond the bounds of the restricted speech of conventional poetry that Rooted "slowly … metamorphosed into … a collective statement about the position of women in Australia" and Jennings used the book as "an attempt to question the standards of what is supposed to be good and bad poetry in the prevailing literary hegemony." (ibid., p. [i])

There was little response from the established women writers. "Comments (and lack of response) from established women writers who did not want to be included in an all-women's anthology were discouraging." (ibid., p. [iii])

Excluding a writer for not being a major poet was the exact opposite of Jennings' intention and procedure. She says, explicitly, that Rooted became a radical document because established women poets refused to appear in it.

We won't know whether Jennings solicited Perry or not. Whether she considered Perry a "male-identified" woman, and didn't; considered her a "male-identified" editor and promoter of poetry (Jensen, p. 103), and didn't; considered her an established woman poet, and did; whether, if Perry was contaced, she didn't reply, or whether she was and did. We simply do not know. There's no evidence either way as to whether Jennings "forgot" Perry, deliberately excluded her, or didn't hear back from her. We simply do not know. The only evidence we have is Jennings stating that she would not have excluded Perry for not being a major poet.

The reason for Perry's absence from Rooted is not cut and dried. There's no indication in Hall's review that he read the Introduction to Rooted and the reasons for its complete lack of major poets and almost complete lack of material that resembled mainstream poetry.

Perry's absence from Rooted doesn't mean what Hall says it does.

2. THE PENGUIN BOOK of AUSTRALIAN WOMEN POETS, Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin Australia, 1986, ed., Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn

In The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets there are seven poems by Judith Wright, seven by Mary Gilmore, seven by Pam Brown, seven by Judith Rodriguez, six by Gwen Harwood, six by Lesbia Harford, five by Rosemary Dobson, four by Kath Walker, one by Grace Perry.

The anthology's seal of greatness is 7 poems. Grace Perry is not treated as a great poet, though the quality of her work (see below) makes her a better poet than Pam Brown or Judith Rodriguez. Who are also not better poets than Gwen Harwood. Being in the the tight critical poetry community's eye seems to help when the community ranks its names.

Though Perry had won a medal at the New South Wales premier's literary awards in 1985 and was appointed AM the next year (summary, The Remarkable Grace Perry) these honours were retrospective, more headstone than capstone: "services to literature" (the medal); "service to Australian literature, particularly as editor of Poetry Australia" (the AM).

At the national level, which includes the Penguin anthology, Perry wasn't being forgotten so much as superannuated.

But at the local level, the mostly academic-poetic centres of power near or around Syndey University where producing, publishing and discussing Australian poetry took place, Perry's name and work had been suppressed by the males of 1964 for nearly twenty years.

Later she was comprehensively rubbished by Les Murray, for different reasons. All these punishments were inflicted because of her gender.

The reasons stem from the Poetry Society split of 1964. Despite the public overtures made by Ronald Dunlop in 1967, Perry's removal from authoritative public discourse about Australian poetry continued during the 1970s:

… Perry was never published or critically reviewed in Poetry Magazine. Nor were Mas, Robinson or Couper ever published in Poetry Australia. When the rush of new young poets flooded both magazines no one noticed the detrimental effect of the split on Perry’s acceptance in the tight critical poetry community of Sydney. Dunlop, in interview, said he was always puzzled at the way any mention was dismissed by his fellow lecturers at the University of Sydney. Perry's lack of acceptance seemed to stem from the time of the split. She was never forgiven for such unfeminine radical behaviour. (Jensen, p. 52 - emphases mine)

Perry’s expulsion from the "tight critical poetry community" continued beyond the '70s.

She became even more isolated when she fired Les Murray as co-editor of Poetry Australia in 1980. After that no connective tissue at all remained between Perry, Poetry Australia, South Head Press, and the vortex of reputation, grant money, and critical acclaim centred in Sydney.

Though Murray's reaction at the time was quite calm, by the time Alexander interviewed him (1992? 1994?) his explanations for his termination ranged from off the shelf misogyny to complete vitriol and myth-making. In his revised opinion, Perry was insecure, jealous, a “little lost girl” of a reader and poetic voice. And she was a second rate editorial talent.

The phrase has the feeling of a relief, an agreement, a satisfying formulation, a fort on a hill. It sounds technical, as though there were procedures Perry failed to follow, missing perceptions Perry couldn't include for lack of reach. It has the tone of a health warning, a well-intentioned public service announcement; it (removed her from the echelons of male power and) smoothly suggested she wasn't worth attention. It was brilliantly slimy and utterly damning.

John Tranter and Bruce Beaver were still describing Perry as “second rate” in 2003.

MURRAY CO-EDITS POETRY AUSTRALIA

Early in chapter 14 Alexander explains why Murray became the literary co-editor of Poetry Australia.

By 1973 Grace Perry … was tired and ill with a potassium disease which robbed her of vitality, so that increasingly she was obliged to retreat to her country home of Berrima. She approached Murray and asked him if he would edit her journal in a caretaker capacity until she recovered. He readily agreed to become what he called 'her locum tenens'. Both he and Perry thought of this as a short-term arrangement, but Murray was to remain acting editor of Poetry Australia for seven years, until 1980. (Alexander, p. 163)

The peculiarity of Grace was that she had two voices. She had a kind of out-going extrovert charm and good humour and bounding energy that was expressed in one voice, and occasionally, mostly at poetry readings, when she read her poetry, there was a strange, lost-little-girl voice that she used to read in. I thought, 'That's weird. It sounds like another personality.' That was the personality that wrote her poems. And when I suddenly got terminated in 1980 from the magazine, I had to puzzle over why, and I thought in the end, it was the little girl voice that sacked me.

It was the cheerful, outgoing friend of mine called Grace Perry who hired me, and with whom I got along, and it was that other personality that sacked me because that was the kind of jealous, clenched inner being that Grace's poetry represented.

And it was threatened by the fact that the magazine was getting beyond Grace's grip and beyond her control, and more importantly, beyond her talent, people were publishing in it who were beyond anything Grace could reach, and somehow the unstated final limit of the magazine was that it wasn't allowed to outgrow its founder. She allowed it to outgrow its founder to a good degree, it floated high but eventually it had to be reeled in. (Alexander, p. 195 - emphases mine)

Murray's first explanation takes no account of Perry's history or the state of mind her history and illness might have left her in. It misidentifies her motives.

It seems to me that any insecurity Perry suffered stemmed firstly from her ill-health and weakness, and secondly from her traumatic history with the poetry "community." Perry was still involved in medical practice and doing all the administrative work of expanding the reach of the magazine; by 1980 she was also breeding and selling horses and Simmenthal bulls and using the proceeds to fund the magazine. (Jensen, pp. 107-108) She was editing only when Murray came to her office and she was strong enough to go through submissions. "Every few weeks Murray would go to her surgery in Lyons Road, Five Dock, and 'read the drawer.'" (Alexander, p. 164) Returning to editing would signal the end of her physical weakness.

I think there are indications that 1964 and the aftermath, which still hadn't ended, left her with a great fear of direct confrontation and a repeat of 1964. Which, in turn, led to her stealth in removing Murray and her furtive reversals (Alexander, p. 194) of Murray's recent submissions acceptances.

Perry asked John Millett to replace Murray as co-editor. Millett had been her lawyer since 1962, had advised Poetry Australia on legal matters and provided accountancy services for it since 1964. He had been the managing editor while Murray was the "locum" literary editor. (Alexander, p. 194). Millett would neither create difficulties nor stage a secret takeover.

Murray's second explanation, Perry's "jealousy", is contraindicated, again by Perry's history. In the course of encouraging Australian poetry away from the old Imperial stuffiness and toward the new American directness, Perry paid on acceptance, and through South Head Press published in Poetry Australia, and in collections Murray himself, John Tranter, Bruce Beaver, Roland Robinson, Geoffrey Lehmann, Rodney Hall, Craig Powell, William Hart-Smith and many others. Though Murray's poetic and editorial reputation had been growing durng his six years at Poetry Australia (Alexander, p. 192), there's no evidence apart from Murray's word that Perry was jealous of him.

Murray's position had always been temporary and contingent. Perry was well. It was her magazine. She wanted it back now, thank you. The architecture of the situation - leaving Murray in place after she was well, while still raising cattle and horses to fund the magazine and still running her medical practice to fund the household - would have left her, effectively, working for Murray. Why would anyone in Perry's postion have intended or been happy with that? Murray had never thought the situation through. He never imagined Perry as a separate being having a separate history.

Murray's third explanation, that Perry's poetry demonstrated the "clenched little girl/lost little girl" persona, "the persona which fired him", can be tested.

Red Scarf (Red Scarf, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1963 – Jensen, pp. 19-21)

Next, please.
Will you come in?
Cracked shoes squeak across the vinyl floor,
and shining blue-grey squares reflect the dust
loose-hanging trousers, and the long-tongued belt,
limp shirt and bold flamboyant scarf.
What can I say?
You do not feel so well today?
You will be better soon. Sometime, but not now.
Remove your shirt and let me see.
Open your mouth and breathe for me.
Your scarf discarded on my chair
laughs in the antiseptic air:
laughs at the sterile ritual, the sad futility
of this naked acolyte who must seek
eternal life in me.
Skin hangs in folds upon your frame,
and languor slows
the rhythm of living that remains
like pale twilight rain dripping unseen
through the forests shadowed where the sun has been.
Upon your forehead sweat gleams faint and cold;
your flushed cheeks seem unreal.
I stand behind you, so I do not see
the depthless eyes, the wordless loud appeal
shrieking in black pools of pain
I am powerless to heal.
Rapid and shallow, stale air moves
through your frosted mouth,
hungry no more for news of summer
sprawling in the leaping grass.
I listen.
And soon a wind disturbs the sea,
and undulating, deadly weed
is rustling to me.
Can you not feel the sprouting death,
the blaze of splitting buds,
frenzied foam and strangled breath
insistent penetration of the bone?
Listen carefully.
Within your darkness, I can hear the sound,
crumbling and falling in slow decay,
milk-white honeycomb eaten away.
How is the cough?
Blood again, bright as a tartan scarf
crumbled on my empty chair in a crimson laugh.
I cannot restore the squandered years;
I offer only a limit of long days
of drowsy poppy magic
trailing moist fingers on your throbbing eyes,
softly untwining the tentacles of pain
and sinuously inundating the convolutions of your brain.
I give euphoria in deep injection,
yohimbine and male hormone
so that your flaccid flesh may rise again,
a full-bodied root of fire,
blood and pain forgotten in the white flood of desire.
And yet I cannot tell you these mysterious things,
for when I listen to your lungs
it is your death who sings.
You will be better soon. Sometime, but not now.
You dress and go out,
and I hear your feet disturb the sunlight in the street.
Your scarf forgotten on my chair
flames in the antiseptic air.

This is the second part of Perry's poem from The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, "Waiting for the Birth" (pp. 118-119):

2

Sky is a bronze plate
  balanced
  on scribble gums

she makes a nest
threading thistles
for a thorny bed
other animals back away
  watch beyond the shade

I sit still

we murmur to one another

the bulge the bag
birthwater
white front feet
white face
  slide towards me
the body
speckled fish
drowsy lizard

she moans and lifts her head
to lick the seacaul
from the bluetongued mouth

she does not hurry
examining the limp shape
grunts    goes on licking
over and over

fishskin dries red curls
 ears move  eyes open

he is alive

"Sky is a bronze plate/balanced/on scribble gum" is precise and confident. It's a landscape in three brushstrokes; it also sums up about a third of Australian Impressionist painting. The rest is precise and sympathetic observation. Perry eliminates punctuation to allow the whole scene to hang simultaneously in the reader's mind, eye-level, a painting on a wall.

Whatever her reading voice might have been, Perry's poetic voice is adult - observant, compassionate, clinically informed.

Murray's descriptions of Perry's poetry - produced by a clenched inner being, a lost little girl persona - so mismatch her what we can see of her poetry in Jensen and the Penguin anthology they suggest he had remade the tale of his termination into a self-soothing, self-serving myth.

In the '90s Murray seems to be looking the event wholly out of resentment. He seems to have given no thought to Perry's history, independence and indomitability, or to the effects a long debilitation and absence would have had on someone who'd been so dynamic, been stabbed in the back and banished for it, who knew she might not have the stamina or strength to recover from a repeat of it.

And so Perry removed Murray by stealth.

[Murray] only discovered she had resumed control when poems he had accepted were rejected by her, to the bewilderment of poets all over the country. 'That cost me a deal of face, but I've since grown it back, and hold no grudges', Murray wrote stoically. At the time, though, he was both hurt and puzzled, for he had very much liked Perry and thought she liked him. (Alexander, p. 194)

This is so different from the Perry of old - the one Beaver describes - I think it's an additional indication that Perry felt she couldn't weather another '64.

Though going behind Murray's back to reject work that had already been accepted seems odd - it's certainly unprofessional treatment of the contributors - it suggests to me that Perry saw Murray's expulsion as having to be so swift and complete it couldn't be argued or reversed. His removal had to be as irreversible as hers had been. It's also another indication that Perry was avoiding direct confrontation with Murray.

Jensen quotes Murray's resignation letter of May 22, 1980:

Your six years of freedom from most of the editorial if not the administrative and worrying function of the journal have restored your vim to the point where the magazine can now flourish … There's also of course the breakdown of our old delegated editorship agreement and my inability to adapt to the new rules – but I won't give you the usual lecture about keeping faith with the contributors, your breaking my promises for me, etc. That's been given. It just seems we can't get the new editing rules to work properly and I suspect I'm the impediment with my stiff-necked lone-wolf ways. So I drop out without resentments; the mag was an epoch in my life and no-one ever gave me a greater compliment of trust than you did. Six and a half years. We grew some poets in that time, didn't we. (p. 108 - emphasis mine)

The letter establishes that Perry's health had improved so much she could take over the editorship again. "[N]ew editing rules" suggests she wanted a stronger say in the magazine's direction, or closer supervision of Murray's work and intentions. Murray's "stiff-necked lone-wolf ways" couldn't accommodate that much close control.

"I suspect I'm the impediment," Murray says. "[I'll] drop out without resentments" implies that Murray was finally prepared to accept the temporary and contingent nature of their original agreement / his co-editorship. Perry had recovered; Perry owned the magazine; his position had always been temporary and contingent. Murray's later summary - that under him the magazine had "floated high" and that Perry had "reeled [it] in" is a good indication of the great amount of autonomy he'd had while she'd been sick. It's another reason removing Murray came to look so much like uprooting couch grass.

Murray didn't have a "personal disagreement" with Perry. Being fired from Poetry Australia wasn't the result of the insecurity and jealousy of a lost little girl with a second rate talent, it was the result of creative differences. (See note below.) Perry's secret-meeting-expulsion from the Poetry Society was office politics. Exactly as Murray's 1991 forced resignation from the position he'd held since 1976 as Angus & Robertson's poetry reader, intrigued at by John Tranter, would be. (Alexander, pp. 197-205) But by 1992-94, when he was talking to Alexander, Murray was far more vicious about Perry than about Tranter. His recorded reaction to Tranter's treachery was to look for work to replace his lost income.

The best that can be said for Murray's fourth explanation - There is no best that can be said for it. Murray had been considered Australia's pre-eminent poet since The Vernacular Republic (1976). For over a decade he was an odds-on favourite for the Nobel Prize. He had no need to attack a dead woman who he knew had been driven to suicide partly by the sustained ill will of men he knew.

PERRY AS EDITOR

Quoted by Hall, Jensen describes Perry as a revolutionary editor:

Her editorial choices in both Poetry Magazine and Poetry Australia gave preference to the new verse forms, inspired by the American poets, in a local climate that was reactionary and conservative. Her international vision...was the motivation for extraordinary entrepreneurial activities that placed Australian poets on an equal footing with their international contemporaries.

Hall paraphrasing Jensen:

Perry was forceful in her support of new voices and was the first to publish books by such poets as Bruce Beaver, Rodney Hall, John Millett, Craig Powell, Norman Talbot, John Tranter and Meredith Wattison; she also published an early collection by Jennifer Maiden. Along with supporting other poets, Perry published eight collections of her own. Another scholar, Lawrence Bourke writes that Perry 'was a person of prodigious enthusiasm and vitality [who] found time not only to be a poet and physician but also to chase (and catch) sponsors for poetry prizes, organise poetry workshops and edit a poetry periodical' (1992, 12). Bourke comments that Perry's Poetry Australia 'became one of the most important poetry periodicals in Australia' (1992, 12)....

It is arguable, however, that [no editor] did more than Grace Perry - in her publishing ventures and in her writing - to see that it was the American model - especially Williams - which set the pace for radically transforming Australian poetry.

Being considered a revolutionary editor depends who's doing the considering.

OTHER FACTORS IN PERRY'S DESCENT FROM VISIBILITY:

I don't think Hall grasped the length and extent and sheer effectiveness of the Sydney poetry establishment's campaign against Perry. They treated her with silence for twenty years, neither publishing her nor writing about her work; they continued to ignore her for another thirty-odd. Their silence was fatal to her reputation, and to the fact of her epic work in making Australian poetry a factor in the poetry of the world.

Mark Butler...was an aspiring young university poet in the early 1970s. He remembered attending poetry events, but said, influenced by Professor Couper at the University of New South Wales, he was more attracted to Roland Robinson, Joan Mas and Robert Adamson .... Most [contemporary Sydney poets] seem to have heard of Grace Perry but few had any idea of her role in masterminding [the workshops at Macquarie University] (Jensen, pp. 100-101)

Or put it this way: if Perry had been as much an acknowledged member of the Sydney poetry establishment as, say, Adamson or Dawe, over those twenty years, the new radical feminist editors would have heard of her. There would have been no "forgetting" to wonder at now.

Illness & other interlocking factors:

Jensen says (p. 62) that in 1970 Perry had a minor stroke which she described [to everyone else] as "the Flu;". This seemed to have begun her long-term debilitation as the same sentence continues: "and in 1973 Les Murray took over the editorship of the magazine ... so that she could retain her old vitality and concentrate on her writing and medical practice."

In 1973-74 Perry was awarded a $3000 Writer's Fellowship. She took the year to write, moving to Berrima for 4 days a week. (Jensen, p. 106) The effects of the her move to Berrima and her illness overlapped and potentiated:

a) In 1974 she moved Poetry Australia's address to a P.O. Box in Berrima. The country town address gave the impression that Poetry Australia had moved out of the poetry mainstream. Perry managed her medical practice in Five Dock with several locums. (Jensen, p. 108)

b) Between 1973 and 1980 guest editors prepared several issues of the magazine while Murray managed the rest; Perry was less visibly tied to the editorship.

c) After 1973 Perry's community of poets became dispersed - Beaver was writing, Craig Powell moved to Canada, John Millett began breeding racehorses follwing the collapse of his legal practice. Under his guidance Perry bought property in Moss Vale and began breeding sheep and Simmental bulls to add to her income and continue funding Poetry Australia. (Jensen, pp. 107-108)

d) After 1975 the university workshops were organized by the universities. (Jensen, p. 107) The younger poets emerging from those workshops were even less likely to send material to Poetry Australia than before: the magazine was no longer Syndey-based, and Perry's founding of the workshops was lost and ancient history.

e) During the 1970s Perry also focused on publishing core Poetry Australia writers through South Head Press: 2 books each by John Millett, Bruce Beaver and herself, and one book each by Norman Talbot and Noel Stock.

f) During the '80s Perry published a number of issue-length collections by Poetry Australia poets - Jennifer Maiden For the left hand (#78, 1981), John Millett Tail Arse Charlie (#82, 1982), Peter Murphy Lies (#90, 1983), Barry Donoghue View from a first floor window (#91, 1983), Grace Perry Be kind to animals (#94, 1984), and Craig Powell A face in your hands (#97, 1984). Though these were "important collections of poetry in the development of each poet" (Jensen, p. 110), they show Perry and Poetry Australia focused more inward than outward. “[Perry’s] personal power as based on her role as editor, publisher and controller of grant money declined." (Jensen, p. 110)

Perry did publish women poets: J. S. Harry, Rhyll McMaster, Mirian Stone (another then-new pseudonym of Gwen Harwood), Joan Mas, Jennifer Maidan and Vicki Viidikas, for example. Because none of these poets became as well-known as Dawe, Beaver, Tranter, Adamson or Murray, identifying Perry as their publisher would not have raised her reputation. (Who? Who?) And so her actual feminism and real feminist credentials also became invisible.

But greater than these were the efforts of the men who elided her existence. Being considered a major poet, or even a poet at all, depends on who's doing the considering.

ONE POEM

Because of the awards she received in 1985 and 1986 Perry couldn't be excluded from The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets. But she couldn't be resurrected, either.

The longer she was buried the more awkward resurrecting her became. Prolific poet and poetry promoter, founding editor of Poetry Australia, founding editor of South Head Press, NSW literary prize-winner, AM honouree - how had someone with that kind of CV disappeared? Loud and awkward questions.

It's hard to see how her resurrection could have been managed without scandal, and scandals have financial consequences. In 1986 Roland Robinson, J M Couper, Bruce Beaver, John Tranter, Les Murray and Perry herself were all still alive. In a period of fermenting feminism, hints of well-known male writers' roles in the erasure of someone with Perry's CV would have had unpredictable financial and personal consequences. The anthology itself had Literature Board Funding. Eighty percent of what happens is covering up what people actually do.

Though Hall is a thoroughly unreliable narrator, he did publicize Jensen's biography of Perry, and for that I'm grateful. In his Plumwood Mountain Journal essays he urges a re-assessment of Perry's poetry. Though that's extremely unlikely now, so many years later, in such a different world, it's freeing to know about Perry, bare the levers of a machine of manufactured culture and manufactured absence.


BACKGROUND

1 - SO, APART FROM NOBODY, WHO AM I?

In mid-late 1969, Professor R. W. V. Elliott asked me if I would like to submit something to Poetry Australia. He was sitting behind his desk and a tri-fold letter. Flinders was low on the totem pole; I assumed that if Flinders got a letter then Poetry Australia must have been contacting every university in the country asking for work from interested/promising students. (I've only found from Jensen that he became a consulting editor for Poetry Australia in 1968 and edited its South Australia edition in 1969. Jensen, p. 91)

The issue came out in early '70. I remember the shiny red cover, the whitewhite paper and the very deep black and shiny print, and poems by J S Harry and Rhyll McMaster. I remember looking and looking at a 5-line poem by Harry in a later issue - it contained the word "crucifix" - and wondering how Harry'd done it - simple, unimaginable beforehand, just there. I remember looking in the same wondering way at another poem, by Rhyll McMaster. And at the ending of yet another poem, in another later issue, by a man whose name I have no idea of, his last lines quiet and still and complete in ways I had no vocabulary to explain - "she took me/to the last/drop."

I didn't know anything about any of the writers except the work on the page. At the time I had nothing to associate them with, no other way to know or remember them.

I suppose I knew theoretically that editors are people who edit, but the idea of knowing or contacting an actual person, who actually physically edited the magazine in my hands, was so far outside my immediate terrors and concerns that it never occurred to me.

I remember Poetry Australia becoming boring. I particularly remember the entire issue devoted to John Ciardi's new translation of Dante's Inferno. I read it from cover to cover, didn't understand a word, hated myself for not understanding it, hated it for boring me, hated finding it boring, hated myself for being bored by it. I found the issues that followed less and less interesting. They weren't nourishing. I've ways preferred being astonished to being lectured, and those little poems were astonishing. (Hyacinths trodden to a purple stain.) I didn't renew my subscription.

I relocated from Adelaide to Melbourne in 1975, Melbourne to L.A. in 1982, and L.A. to Portland, Oregon, in 1992. In 2002 I co-founded the Portland-based, multi-lingual journal Gobshite Quarterly, and in 2008 co-founded Reprobate/GobQ Books.

2 - PROBLEMS READING THE SOUTHERLY INTERVIEW

I wanted to read all of John Tranter's interview with Bruce Beaver to get more context, if there were any to be had, but the link led to a splash page which said that before I could continue I had to download a Firefox extension which would change my default search engine. (Click here.)

Our computers are set up by our tech guy, our own as well as the Company's. I wasn't enthusiastic about adding an unnamed extension to Firefox and replacing duckduckgo with an unspecified search engine. So the Beaver interview/Tranter material remains unviewed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Alexander, Peter, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hampton, Susan, and Llewellyn, Kate, eds., The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin Australia, 1986.

Jennings, Kate, ed., Mother I'm Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women's Poetry, Fitzroy, Victoria, Outback Press, 1975.

Jensen, Dorothy, Grace Perry: Australian Poet, Publisher and Paediatrician, Sydney, Boraga Academic, 2020.

Jensen, Dorothy, The Remarkable Grace Perry: Poet and Publisher of Poetry Australia Paediatrician and breeder of Simmental Bulls, Independently published, 2020.

WEBLIOGRAPHY:
Hall, Phillip, "Grace Perry: Australian Poet, Publisher and Paediatrician" 2023
https://plumwoodmountain.com/book-review/dot-jensen-grace-perry-australian-poet-publisher-and-paediatrician-a-review-by-phillip-hall/

Hall, Phillip, "Poplars Stripped Bare and Mental Health and Other Catastrophes in the Poetry of Grace Perry" 2017
https://plumwoodmountain.com/essays-interviews/poplars-stripped-bare-mental-health-and-other-catastrophes-in-the-poetry-of-grace-perry/

Adamson, Robert, biography: https://robertadamson.com/about/

Beaver, Bruce, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Beaver

Beaver, Bruce, poems: https://www.poemhunter.com/bruce-beaver/

Couper, J M, biography (AustLit): https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A8536

Elliott, Ralph, biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Elliott

Hall, Phillip, biography: https://recentworkpress.com/product-author/phillip-hall/

Jensen, Dorothy, biography (AustLit): https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A72061

Millett, John, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Millett_(poet)

Murray, Les, biography (Wikipedia); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Murray_(poet)

Perry, Grace, biography (National Library of Australia) (from back cover of Jensen's bio): https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/246069520?keyword=grace%20perry

Perry, Grace, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Perry

Robinson, Roland, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Robinson_(poet)

Tranter, John, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tranter

Tranter, John, poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-tranter#tab-poems

Coda

Money's an illusion. The lack of it will kill you.
If centres are great then pity the edges.
Thinner than petals, the lives we lose.

The Instagram View

THE ORIGINAL

Which I like, is the complete instant: the woman is alert, curious, alive, listening to someone she knows. It’s a snapshot, but it has an extreme version of a snapshot’s qualities – the sense of life, character, arrested or potential movement. The downward drape of her bangs echoed and lengthened by the long fall of her necklace suggest being pressed upon by more weight than she can bear. The whole figure in itself suggests a sophisticated awareness, but a physical vulnerability.

The space around the figure gives the woman's eyes and the slope of her shoulders: isolation, an awareness of distance, a possible sadness. It leaves room for her to exist and think; it allows her an inner dimension, readable/unreadable as it may be.


THE FIRST CROP

The edit straigtens the image. The figure now has an air of diffidence and uncertainty. The glass of beer is still visible, still off-putting, still reminds the viewer of the setting and the world beyond the frame - the lines of trailing foam mean clearing up, washing up, drying, putting away, sweeping, dusting, the entire labour of maintaining the functions of a space. The glass is large, the standard size. It’s anyone’s glass. It is not particularly a woman's (stereotypically smaller) glass, let alone a beautiful woman's (sterotypically more elegant and expensive) glass.

If you look at the shadowed side of the woman’s face and read it upwards, past the eye and onto the forehead, there is something like the trace of an old scar or other slight damage. This woman is not flawless and without history. She’s not necessarily as young as she might have seemed at first glance.

Eliminating the space behind her left shoulder and back makes her seem physically stronger.

Like mine, one of her eyes takes everything in, unfiltered; the other eye judges. Behind her skin she is evaluating. She is listening, but both her arms are loosely folded near and across the core of her body. She is listening but not abandoning thought or defence. She seems curious, compassionate, gentle; but not a fool.


THE INSTAGRAM CROP

When I first saw this image I was stunned. It’s beautiful. (How could I have taken such a beautiful photo?) This beautiful skin, flawless, this balance of composition, this woman, who is beautiful, offering beauty, vulnerability, dependence?

An instant later: how many other beautiful photos are still hidden in images I thought were finished? (Had some part of my mind, which I should have been listening to all along, seen her this way?)

For a long time I was stunned by this seamless perfection. The photo reminded me of thousands of other photos I'd seen. (Somehow something I'd done achieved parity with the well-regarded. Somehow I'd finally learnt my lesson.)

(How? When?)

It was almost as though that was why I thought it was beautiful - that its agreement with so much I’d seen was its achievement. The beer glass has become Platonic!

The Instagram crop at the bottom of the photo is very, very clever.

That image wasn’t an image of my making. It was what Instagram had done with the interim version, the one I'd tried to post. I think I'd asked for "original" as the crop, but it's more than possible that I misremebered 4:5 (one of the other choices) as being "original".

In the Instagram edit there's no isolation in a pub booth, no glass needing washing after, no possible scar on the forehead, no loosely defensive body position. The woman's eyes aren’t considering so much as fastened on whoever is engaging her. They seem beseeching more than anything.

The photo is otherwise occupied with the woman’s flawless skin, her long necklace drawing attention down to the deep v-cut of her dress and up to her neck and face and eyes.

In this image there is no question of consent: there’s no distance, no evidence of thought, history, evaluation, mind, soul, personhood. The woman is wholly beseeching eyes and undefended skin, beauty and ornament. The image is all invitation.

With a small shock, not much more than a blink of the mind, I realized that the Instagram crop gives us the essence of the male gaze.

The Undertow - Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War opens with an essay on Harry Belafonte. Describing the Civil Rights marches, Sharlet paraphrases Belafonte:

After that day in Montgomery, Klansmen murdered a mother of five who was driving back to Selma. “After every great victory, a great murder.”

Sharlet:

Then it clicks. The code. The murder is the blackface. It’s the cork. It’s the minstrel show, the act replayed, second time perverse. (p. 31)

I think Sharlet’s right to link the murders to blackface. It seems to me that blackface is a dramatization of the desire to obliterate. Under the black skin there is no Black person; there’s a White one.

That’s the Great Replacement in the white supremacist fever-dream.

Sharlet, Jeff, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, New York, Norton, 2023

After Leonard French

In the jeweled earth
in the skyloam
stars are buried;
rubies, garnets, in the Aboriginal earth.

Beyond the frame, through the windscreen
sparse, lonely wheat.

August