Text of a speech launching Sue Moss's The Upwardly Downward Mobility Blues (in the Penguin volume, Hot Collation) at the Hobart Bookshop, 17th March 1995.
The title of this collection, The Upwardly Downward Mobility Blues, encapsulates within it the three aspects
of Sue's work which I would like to draw to your attention and which give it its strength and its special character.
These three aspects I would describe as a neo-existentialist philosophical stance, the integration of the vernacular
into serious art, and performability.
In many, in fact in most, of the poems these three aspects are all evident and interwoven, but some more obviously
illustrate one of them than the others. For example, consider the issues raised by Kierkegaard in his rebuttal of
Hegel and followed up by Sartre in His Being and Nothingness where "Sartre praises Kierkegaard for maintaining
against Hegel that what I crave from the world is the recognnition of my being as an individual, and not as an
abstract truth. The essence of Sartre's attempt to describe the mind is the recognition of our contingency in the psychic
sphere, combined with the maintenance of the sovereignty of the individual consciousness."1 If you want to
grasp the essence of those issues without having to wade through several heavy tomes of philosophical discourse
written by dead white males, if you want them seared onto the sensory receptors of your brain, then just
read 'Latrobe Road'.
LATROBE ROAD
At the top of Latrobe Road
the Anglican rector gave his sermon
and one Sunday I found I didn't exist
having never been baptised & to my
nine-year-old mind not to exist
was a serious matter & I cried
so that Mum took me away
to the Church of Christ Sunday School
where people gossiped about the pastor's
affair with a woman in his congregation
& forgiveness being an odds on commodity
he was dismissed & ceased to exist
Halfway down Latrobe Road lived
my father's boss who told Dad his job
no longer existed Our house was next
to Palmer's fuel depot My brother ran home
& screamed, 'matches, kids've got matches
and they're throwing them into pools of petrol
pumped on the ground' He was afraid
of an eplosion & that Latrobe Road
would cease to exist like the couple
who lived further down & when the husband
discovered what the town already knew
he blew them both into oblivion
Existence was fragile & non-negotiable
Only now I realise the big existential questions
were already answered, growing up
In Latrobe Road
So much for neo-existentialism. But just as the existentialism of forty to fifty years ago paved the way for an infusion
of the language of the ghettos, the jazz clubs and the Greyhound bus stations into poetry, we are now, in the '90s, witnessing a
parallel phenomenon as the diction, the phrasing, the rhythms and the vocabulary of the youth shelters, the women's support
groups, the malls and KFC take their due place in the stanzas of serious art.
Examples of this phenomenon abound in Sue's collections, most patently and (dare I say it?) programmatically in such pieces as
'Greyhounds' and 'Broad Acre' where the use of the vernacular is very clerly a part of the total meaning of the poems, but
also more subtly throughout her oeuvre. This is not, even in the two poems I just mentioned, a self-conscious attempt at being
'up-to-date' or 'with-it', but rather a natural consequence of the attitude to language which flows on from her philosophical
stance and of her ear for the parole of the world with which she is, in the most valuable tradition of existentialism, engaged.
BROAD ACRE
We smoke joints on the job
in the broad acre estate
then collect kids for the creche
women for the shelter, argue with
shoulder-padded bureaucrats & placate
angry men threatening to ' ... kick the f...ing
social worker's head in'
The fortnightly cheque arrives:
the de facto boozes it
the housing department takes it
the brother borrows it for a car payment
& Kentucky Fried give back the change
Ten days till the next pay
At the neighbourhood centre
Rosie's learning to spell Stella's daughter's
off the depro & has been bleeding for a month
On a full moon night we search for Carla
who's disappeared Her mind in neutral
she walks & walks seduced by voices
Summer brings the stench of possum skins
drying in the exporter's yard The heat
increases spite, vendettas & dob-ins
A government car cruises looking for a number
Neighbours watch & wonder if it's probation
child protection or the bastards from the DSS
The women bot fags from us & tease –
'Our lives keep you lot in work How many
have jobs keepin' an eye on us
stuck out here in the bloody broad acres?'
Disconcerted we laugh at their logic
That night someone torches the pub again
My first acquaintance with Sue Moss's work was hearing her songs sung by Willie & Fleur in Hobart some six years ago, and
she has probably written more for performance, including for her own voice and presence, either unaccompanied or as half of
'bard & band' than she has specifically for the printed page. This collection includes some of the best and best known
of her 'performance' pieces, old favourites such as the title poem and 'The Over 40's Rap, and a few which, to me at least,
are new.
I am really pleased to see the texts of these raps and other performance-orientated works alongside the other poems. The
under-valuing of the creation and peformance of poetry as an integrated art form, and therefore of the work
produced by so-called 'performance poets' is something against which I have long been campaigning. I am in danger of
riding this hobby horse of mine way past the boundaries of an appropriate speech for the launching of this book, so I will
rein it in, but not before complimenting Penguin and Judith Rodriguez for doing what many other poetry publishers have
baulked at doing – emphasising the poetry in performance poetry and acknowledging the validity of such
work by not separating it out, not even insisting on it being a sub-section of the collection. Perhaps they did, and Sue
talked them out of it. I don't know, but the result is that the reader is not given a prejudicial context for
these poems. I wish it could happen more often.
But the performability to which I referred at the outset applies beyond the raps, beyond the other pieces which were
obviously written with performance in mind as an essential part of the poem's total message. It also applies
to those works to which, on a first, silent reading, one might not think to apply it. The reason for this is the skill and
precision
with which Sue has used language to create poems of a deceptive simplicity, poems which any of us can 'perform' in our heads as
we read them silently because the words, the phrases, the whole range of linguistic raw materials to which she has brought
her techniques have made this way of reading inevitable. Among the best examples of this are the opening poem, 'The annual
mothers' and daughters' night', 'Half-Leg Wax' and 'Mum's Funeral Fund', but it is true to some extent of every poem
in the collection.
The Upwardly Downward Mobility Blues provides a guided tour of an inner and outer world – actually, it's more of a dance
than a tour but she teaches us the steps as we go (as she does for Gertrude Stein) – a world whose inhabitants include
French feminist theoreticians, Jack Kerouac, the 19th Century photographer Julia Cameron, Marx and Engels, a
wonderful assortment of uncles and the entire Australian cricket team.
It is a world which is unique (as, of course, the world belonging to each of us in unique) and whose uniqueness is
emphasised by the original angle from which it is viewed, but which at the same time has enough of the universal to it for
us all to feel that we belong there, in fact, that we have never really lived anywhere else. Part of the world of Sue Moss is
joyously recognisable to anyone who has known utes, greyhounds, Queenie O'Hara or Glamorgan goose. Another part may carry
a special resonance fot those familiar wth Mietta's, Derrida, dinner-party Buddhism or The Pram Factory.
While there are a number of people, including a few Tasmanian writers, who have migrated from the former part of that world
to the latter, most, I suspect, seem to spend the greatest part of their lives in either one of the other. For some of
us that world is indivisible, as we dance through it we see its unity: Sara Hussen Ben dancing with Merv Hughes, Emily
Dickinson sitting one out with Bobby Zimmerman and Mary Wollstonecraft getting it together with the women from the
Bridgewater Neighbourhood House. For those who read and respond to these poems, this unity, this indivisibility will become
natural and obvious, to the point where one will wonder how survival is possible in only a moiety of one's habitat.
Even since the metaphysical poets of the early 17th Century we have known that poetry is made out of the yoking
together of unlikely and disparate elements. That Sue makes convincing poetry out of the juxtapositions I have referred
to is because of the three aspects of her work which I outlined at the beginning.
An artist creating within the context of an awareness of essential contingency is well placed to make use of
yabbying, shoulder pads and zydeco, to see the detritus of bathrooms as a metaphor for the human condition. But whereas for
the original existentialists, 'the very fact of expression is a theft of thought', to quote Sartre, Sue Moss, as
a neo-existentialist, gives freely, forestalling the theft.
Again, the incorporation of what used to be called, with a slight sneer, demotic diction is an enabling process,
a means of facilitating the poetic leaps which make this work such an exciting dance. Although it is overly mechanistic
and simplistic to talk of a 'vehicle', the inclusive richness of her language does transport a load of passengers and freight
which might not fit in the tray of a lesser writer's ute.
Finally, the poet's voice (or, better, her presence, because performance is a lot more than voice) contributes to the success of
the syntheses of her poetry. The very fact of performing, of daring, of the kind of reverse strip-tease which performance
poetry is (clothing your private self in public until vulnerable nakedness has turned into a combination
of armour, sequins and sensible work gear) which is implicit in these poems even on the page, creates an encompassing magic,
beyond mere alchemy.
I feel honoured to have been asked to launch this book. I do so with admiration for its contents, with congratulations to the
publisher, and with best wishes for its success in both the literal market place and that metaphorical one where ideas and
works of art grow though continual exchange.
1 Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Fontana 1967) pg 99