This Blog Is In Two Parts: A chaotic poet and a wise writer.
(i) I begin with a poem by the famous Australian poet Roland Robinson, 1912-1992. He is the first half of a chaotic poet and a wise writer. Roland was a friend of my parents’ and had a chaotic lifestyle. The character “Robert” in my book “The Overlife: A Tale Of Schizophrenia” is based on Roland. The misprints in the following poem are Roland’s.
by Roland Robinson, source: allpoetry.com
I was clearing thirty or forty acres once
Out in the western range near Nightcap Mountain.
And as I was working, I heard a gathering of the crows
Singing out in a jungle gully. Their clamorous cries
Drawed the attention of all the other birds.
Jackass and butcher-bird, soldier-bird, sparrow-bird,
Scrub-robin, magpie, and the black and white cockatoo,
They all flew down to the crows in the jungle-gully.
And I followed after their clamour, and in the midst
Of all the splendid excitement of the birds
I heard one feller was singing above them all.
It was the lyre-bird, the mimic of all the scrub,
And they held this beautiful sermon for half an hour.
The birds would stop and listen a while but still
That beautiful voice, the lyre-bird, would keep on singing
And draw then and join them all to a chorus again.
And as I stood there and listened, the Scriptures was
Hitting me all the time. The sermon seemed
Like the prophecy when Christ shall come and summon
The birds, the valleys, the hills, the mountains and the ocean
To sing in praise of the grace and the reckoning day,
And the beauty of earth in the splendour that He crated.
And I went back and told my people of what I had seen,And the sermon of praise I heard in the mountain range.
This poem is based on a story told to Roland Robinson by Alexander Vesper, an Aboriginal man from New South Wales. Robinson has attempted to reproduce the story and words as Vesper related them to him. Alexander Vesper was an Aboriginal bushman, able to interpret the birds’ song for himself. Whether he imagined this bird choir or not, the fact that he could tell such a story as this shows that he was a good poet himself, who lacked only the technique to enable him to write poetry. allpoetry.com © by owner. Provided at no charge for educational purposes. Alexander Vesper may well have been both a chaotic poet and a wise writer.
The character “Robert” in my book “The Overlife: A Tale Of Schizophrenia” is based on Roland Robinson. For several years, he went hiking with my parents for days. Roland’s intellectual and political impact on my mother never died, and she spoke to me often about his poetry and his beliefs.
Roland led a genuinely chaotic life with several divorces and many affairs. He went on long trips all over Australia, gathering material for his poems. He looked wild: tall, lean, with a shock of hair. He is most remembered for his activism in supporting the Aboriginal people of Australia. He met Aboriginal people for the first time towards the end of World War II when he was working in Australia’s Northern Territory. From then on, he was on a mission to record as many Aboriginal stories and myths as possible, deeply affecting his poetry and outlook. He was writing in his chaos and the chaotic shame the white man should feel because of the way they treated the Aboriginal people throughout the history of Australia.
When I first began writing as a child, I favored poetry, and my mother’s stories about chaotic Roland deeply affected my writing. Roland lived a good kind of chaos.
These days, among the preferred terms for Australian Aboriginals is First Nations people. “Aborigine” is considered outdated and potentially offensive.
Now to the second part of the Blog: a chaotic poet and a wise writer. We have talked about the chaotic poet, now we take advice from a wise man. If you have the app MasterClass, which contains courses by well-known, successful people in many different professions, you may know the course given by Walter Mosley. The app offers several great classes teaching various types of writing, including poetry. Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, an African American private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Perhaps his most famous book is “Devil In A Blue Dress,” which was made into a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington. I learned much from Walter Mosley’s MasterClass course on “Fiction and Storytelling.” He strongly emphasized that writing should be a daily commitment; if possible, it should be the first thing you do daily, even if it’s just changing one word of your work. I have found the idea of daily commitment immensely fruitful. It helps overcome excuses like “I am not creative today” or “I am too busy,” which can undermine your efforts, leading to unfinished literary work. It’s a way to anchor the chaos in your life with a helpful task.
A daily commitment to writing is similar to keeping a diary, except it’s the diary of your characters’ lives in your book or poem.
I recommend that, on top of that, you keep a daily diary about your life, and that you be open and honest in what you write. There is a good chance some of that work will find its way into the books you write for the public. When we write, we always rely heavily on what we have experienced. My book “The Overlife: A Tale Of Schizophrenia” grew out of reams of notes I had made about how I lived with schizophrenia. I initially made the notes for my doctors, but it rapidly expanded to include my thoughts and feelings about a much broader range of topics than what I would say to my doctor at the next appointment. For example, material for my book “Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies” was implicit in my notes. The notes proved extremely valuable; there is no way I would have remembered all that material if I hadn’t written it down.
Another piece of advice from Walter Mosley that motivated my blog post “Tell Me A Story” on my website dianadirkbywrites.com is that your work should tell a good story, regardless of the genre. This advice influenced my decision to choose fiction over memoir in my books. Walter Mosley is the wise man.
Fiction also offers significant artistic flexibility, allowing you to exclude people you don’t wish to include and to create meaningful characters for a richer narrative. Plus, I love fiction, and enjoying your work is essential.
Thank you for reading this blog about the chaotic poet and the wise writer.
References:
(i) Roland Robinson (1912-1992) by Peter Kirkpatrick, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, 2021.
(ii) https://allpoetry.com/The-Sermon-of-the-Birds
(iii) “The Overlife: A Tale Of Schizophrenia,” by Diana Dirkby (visit https://amzn.to/454WgW6. #ad #commissionsearned The link is an Amazon Affiliate Link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases)
(iv) “Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies,” by Diana Dirkby (visit https://amzn.to/42Z81KY. #ad #commissionsearned The link is an Amazon Affiliate Link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
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