Peter Steele's seven types of ingenuity

03 July 2012

Even in his own lifetime John Donne was criticised for writing TMI poetry: too much information, Reverend Dean.

That his contemporary in London William Shakespeare was doing exactly the same thing in helter-skelter speeches did not elicit similar complaints. Shakespeare had to get his people inside the heads of the audience, so hours of normal connective thought and feeling were compressed into sixty seconds of words.

Miraculously, it works. Donne made poems in which every line can be a new simile, an outrageous inversion, a nerve-racking pun.

His poems are an anthology of knowledge where, somewhere, an argument or an emotion waits to be revealed. The reader has to have determination. This ingenuity of the anthology is also a characteristic of the poetry of Peter Steele.

The American poet Marianne Moore had the felicitous knack of finding the just-so quote. She also had the audacity, borne of a democratic spirit, of not privileging one source over another, so a distinguished declaration of Henry James could find itself beside the home-grown idea of a baseball hero she’d heard on the radio that morning.

The polished and the popular found company in the same poem. Literary distinctions do not count when you need the bon mot, something we find over again in Steele’s writing and teaching. This ingenuity with the appropriate, which we dare to call wisdom, capsizes snobbery and chortles with common sense.

More than once I have observed him walking from the Medley Building of the University of Melbourne to Newman College reading a book, not looking up. I will alert the reader to the many corners on that course.

With anyone else, such behaviour would be thought attention seeking or eccentric. But I wish to picture the emblem of the book leading the human through the everyday world.

No bookish adjective gets close to the way learning with Steele was a means to creative ends. The poetry at its best bounds forth as one inspired and energised by these providers of language. Barracking, banter, backchat, blessing and occasional battle come fresh to us as Steele engages with the big past in an ingenuity of belief statements.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream says the poet 'gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. In the same magical outpouring Shakespeare talks of how ' imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown.' Solo quips, haiku sprees, Skeltonic skittering, the thin slalom of chopped prose, postmodern agglutinations – none of

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ARTS AND CULTURE

Peter Steele's seven types of ingenuity

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