ECPS Seminar Series: Paul Magee
10 September 2008
‘A creature in youman form’: on poetry as subjective universality
Paul Magee
There is clearly considerable egotism involved in putting one’s poetry out in the world to be read. I begin this paper with a case in point: the ego-maniacal Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose first book was entitled I, and whose last At the Top of My Voice. Yet if poetry is an egotistical pursuit, this is only part of the picture. For publication simultaneously involves submitting one’s words to judgement. In this paper, which draws upon Mayakovsky’s life and writings, an archive of interviews with leading contemporary Australian poets, and W.H. Auden’s famous discussion of poetic production, ‘Making, Knowing, Judging’, I suggest that the judgement to which poets submit is first and foremost their own, in the act of editing. Mayakovsky described editing as follows: ‘It is as though for the hundredth time a crown is being unsuccessfully fitted to a tooth, and finally, after the hundredth attempt, it is pressed in and falls into place’. The violence of this image, with all the violation of bodily comfort and integrity it connotes, makes clear that Mayakovsky’s egomania was bounded by a greater force, one of his own making.
The burden of this paper is to work out how our typical pictures of the poet – as a creature of the unconscious, as an egotist, as a liberated individual - might appear, once we incorporate into them the fact that art also involves ferocious self-judgement. Looked at in this light, a figure like Mayakovsky, the futurist poet of the Russian revolution (‘from the heights of skyscrapers we look down on their insignificance’), appears curiously medieval. Only there’s no God, nor even any third person beyond the poet and his reader. To the contrary, poetry’s moral drama occurs right here, in the youman form of an ego that responds to the ‘subjective universality’ of the super-ego’s absolute judgment. Other sorts of law must seem quite tame in comparison.
Paul Magee studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. His first book, From Here to Tierra del Fuego, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2000. It was based on fieldwork in the far South of South America. His first volume of poetry, _Cube Root of Book _was published by John Leonard Press in 2006. It was shortlisted for the Innovation Award at the 2008 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and highly commended in the Ann Elder and Mary Gilmore Awards. Paul is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design and Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, and President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia. He has abiding interests in idleness, boredom, stagnation and revolution.
- 3:00 to 5:00 PM - Wednesday 10 September
- Elizabeth Burchill Rooms, Performing Arts Complex, Monash University Clayton Campus (see map below)
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