the view from the farm, and getting out of one’s (own) way.
Alan Jacobs writes on Les Murray, his New and Selected Poems at Books & Culture here.
It’s a lovely essay, Horatian in tone. These passages flavored the day.
- “Because there’s plenty of room in the countryside, the view from the farm is a sprawling one, and Murray is an advocate of sprawl. To sprawl is to ease past boundaries, cheerfully, without aggression. ‘Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people / (every kind that comes in kinds),’ but sprawl doesn’t worry too much about this.” —
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility.
And, in a discussion of short (trousers), this — - “But for Murray they [shorts] are best and most importantly seen as Scunge, ‘the entropy of costume.’ Scunge ‘is holiday, is freedom from ambition. / Scunge makes you invisible / to the world and yourself.‘”
Being invisible to the world, and oneself. I like that.
Alan Jacobs once upon a time tweeted;
blogs (infrequently) at text patterns;
microblogs at microblog; and
(recently)
has been sending out “a weekly look at some of the ups and downs of art and culture” at Snakes & Ladders
16 May 2019,
a couple of weeks following Les Murray‘s death. *
tags:
invisibility; Oz; scunge; sprawl; tone
Alan Jacobs; Les Murray