Ron Dowd

Advance reviews have appeared for The Goose Bath, a selection of Janet Frame’s poetry that’s due out in Australia this month.

On the recent theme of outsiders, Janet Frame was yet another. Here’s her niece Pamela Gordon (in a recent Sydney Morning Herald review of the book) on Janet:

…she never called herself a poet. She always used to say “You can’t call yourself a poet, only other people can do that”.

She felt ambivalent about her poetry, she was always wanting to perfect it. And what she did write, she protected very much with a fierce artistic pride. She knew what she wanted to say, and to say it a certain way, and she stuck with that. Poetry was like breathing to her.

It’s a true mark of the determined outsider, unswayed by profit and public opinion. The attitude is encapsulated in this wonderful poem from the book:

I Do Not Want To Listen

I do not want to listen
I refuse to listen
to the geometric noises
of black and white.

My big colourful mouth
has enough to eat thank you
without tasting
a plain triangle or two.

Yes, I know rain-
drops are as heavy
and colourless as stones
and fall tropically

rain-bashing what
scurries
without obvious form
and certainly without hope

to the defining
shelter of a microscope.
And I’ve heard
of stick insects and figures

and striped beds
in a sky and rows
of disembodied black
and white flowers yet

poor as rainbows are
against the pressure
and purity
of no-colour

I must fight and fight
with my red and yellow head
even after I am dead, to stay
my own way, my own way

Tags: outsider art, poetry