MALLEY POEMS - Ronn Morris - 2001
The following poems were written in response to Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic and after viewing Sidney Nolan’s accompanying paintings and calligraphic drawings in the 1974 R Alistair McAlpine publication. As you recall Ernest Lalor Malley began life as a hoax whose oeuvre and circumstances were authored by poets Douglas Stewart and James McAuley.
Douglas Stewart - James McCauley = Ern Malley
As Michael Heyward notes in his book, The Ern Malley Affair, (UQP, 1991): “He (Nolan) wanted to show that Malley ‘did make sense by doing a drawing of each four lines to try to prove to McAuley and Stewart that the thing did have a logic and a meaning like other forms of poetry, and it wasn’t a nonsense’” (175). This poem sequence has been written in the spirit of Nolan’s Ern Malley drawing and painting: it is to be read as a fathoming of the verse of Ern Malley and as a series of encounters with Nolan’s and Heyward’s differently compelling engagements with Malley.
In writing the following poems I acknowledge Heyward’s fine scholarship and lucid narrative style. His chapter on the trial, and in particular, on the Detective Vogelesang’s and Crown Prosector, Mr D.C. William’s interrogation of the Ern Malley poems, through the unfortunate person of Max Harris, their publisher, is particularly interesting. It is from this chapter, “Indecent, Immoral, Obscene”, and in reference to the outré notion of a policeman reading surrealist poetry as evidence of obscenity that I take the phrase, “ fingering his truncheon” (190) as subtitle for the first of the “Sonnets for the Pain”.
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The complete suite of 'Malley Poems' were completed in 2002 as part of a collaborative poerty - painting project between Ronn Morris & Gary Willis.
Voss - Gary Willis - oil on cotton rag - 2001
Nolan: Malley Country, 1944-1974
Not knowing then that he perceived it too
I looked beyond horizon fraught with scabby leaves
And saw unrelenting haze as cataract on sky.
The vast blue stretching like Heaven’s cloth
For a hammy Atlas to hold aloft
— Pure Nolan confection.
But the painter’s china blue eyes know
That this interminable sky
Is particulate with gritty dust
It tastes like iron in the mouth
And smells like blood and wafts
Like sleep-time narcotic in these our veins.
Ronn Morris
More 'Malley Country' poems - Ronn Morris; (by arrangement)
DESIRE: A MOCUMENTARY
INNUMERATE THESE PRICKS
SONNETS FOR THE PAIN
(i)Prophylactic Measures in the Court of the Dark Surrealist Muse,
― Or, We Are Not Amused: What the Good Detective Read as He Fingered His Truncheon
(ii) Poetry, You, too, Dislike it.
UNDO ME, HE SAYS, AS LEDA WAS UNDONE BY HER LOVER
MARINA TO BOULT
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