This week, Bob Dylan finally gave the Nobel people an answer to their offer of the Literature Prize—he’s happy to accept, but he’s afraid he’s too busy to go pick it up. Everyone’s having a good chuckle at that. Nonetheless, the Nobel Prize-committee has explained that declining to accept in person is not without precedent, and that Dylan will nonetheless be honored for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Those new poetic expressions—modern poetry, semi-nonsense poetry—are, thanks largely to Dylan, the only kind that anyone writes anymore. Certainly it’s the only kind of poetry that anyone publishes. Finding new conventional, rhyming and coherent poetry is as unusual as finding new tonal classical music, or new paintings of boats and horses. (I don’t mean to sound curmudgeon-ish.)
Even so, classical poetry did not go gentle into that good night. And while Dylan & Dylan poetry is honored is Oslo, we should take a moment to remember the legendary Australian poet Ern Malley.
Malley is very well regarded and widely published poet who never existed. The seventeen Ern Malley poems, known collectively as “The Darkening Ecliptic,” were sent by the imaginary poet’s imaginary sister to the Australian modernist literary magazine “Angry Penguins”; they were accompanied by a note explaining that she had found them among her deceased brother’s effects, and had been told by a poetically-inclined acquaintance that they were good.
Angry Penguins’ editor Max Harris agreed. In fact he thought they were great, and published them in a special issue “to Commemorate the Australian Poet Ern Malley.” One of the choicest Malley poems begins like this:
Another goes,
The Malley poems were written, in 1943, by two Australian servicemen named James McAuley and Harold Stewart. McAuley and Steward were amateur poets of a conservative stripe, who objected to the “decay of meaning and craftsmanship” in modern poetry; the Ern Malley poems were a joke, a hoax for which a slice of the modern poetry world fell hook, line and sinker. Speaking for that slice, Max Harris called Malley “a poet of tremendous power, working through a disciplined and restrained kind of statement into the deepest wells of human experience.”
The 17 poems were written in a single afternoon; the two men said they had “opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences.” “Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other areas of stagnant water serve as breeding-grounds” was a quote from a US Army report on mosquito control. McAuley and Stewart wanted to show that readers of modern poetry had become “insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination.”
In the long run, they failed. Lots of people liked the Ern Malley poems before they were exposed as a hoax, and lots continued to like them afterwards. Editor Harris, the main hoaxee, went on to launch a new literary magazine called “Ern Malley’s Journal.” The Darkening Ecliptic has been published and republished over and over since its original debut, and has frequently been praised as surrealist genius. It has a cult following, as does Malley, and not as satire; one literary critic even went so far as to suggest that the man who wrote the quoted mosquito-control report might himself be “a suppressed poet.” The poet John Ashbery has said of the Malley collection, “I like the poems very much—they reminded me of my own first tortured experiments in surrealism, but they were much better.” All 17 Malley poems were included in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, and not as a joke.
So modern art wins again; the struggle against metallic-balloon dogs, bisected sheep and 12-tone music continues. And congratulations to Mr. Dylan.
(A citation: My main source for this piece is one of the most interesting websites on the internet, Futility Closet, run by Mr. Greg Ross. Ross describes his site as an “an idler’s miscellany of compendious amusement”; a collection of “arresting curiosities in history, literature, language, art philosophy and mathematics.” If anything, that sells it short.)
