Illegal Harmonies: Song of the Quiet Revolution

Among the leading prizes for poetry in the world is the one offered for an unpublished poem by The Moth,Art and Literature, a journal published in Ireland. Since its beginning in 2011, The Moth International Poetry Prize has been judged by some of the great poets: Louise Glück, Claudia Rankine, Nick Laird, Billy Collins, Marie Howe. Because of the calibre of the judges, the anonymity of the judging, and the size of the pot (11,000 Euros), loads of poets from everywhere enter each year. I’ve tried a few times, spurred by the example of the Australian poet with the Irish name, Damen O’Brien, who won the prize in 2018, and the Australian-Irish poet Audrey Molloy, who shortlisted in 2017. Anthony Lawrence has, I believe done well in this prize, as in so many others, and David Stavangar, I notice, has also shortlisted.

The latest iteration of the prize, the 2025 Moth Poetry Prize, has been judged, and last week four shortlisted poets were named in The Irish Times. This year’s judge was Ishion Hutchinson, a very young-looking professor of humanities at Cornell, and a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in the States. The poems vying for the prize sound austere and impressive, and all four poets are already much awarded and very serious in their concerns : Elena Croitoru-Reed, Julius Ghunta, Ronald Carson, and Adam Oliver.

I am delighted to have made the list of commended poets this time round for “Song of the Quiet Revolution,” a nine-by-nine-by-nine, which ponders the uses of poetry and of any given life in times like these. “Poetry is the revolution/ Already,” it proposes. “The revolution refutes all/ Language, all action, that denies life;/ It happens in your heart, at your door./ It wants from you small good words for what/ Loves you…” And “Rhythm’s half of how/ The revolution works …” Considering the horrors of Gaza and the killing times in Australia’s foundation and across the globe through time, the poem veers close to despair: “We learn/ Nothing, and nothing is as violent/ As ignorance and how easily/ It’s misled.” But then it lands back in the lyric courage the poem is advocating, finding that embodied in a bird: “There now:/ The yellow-tailed black cockatoo wails/ Lyrics as it flies, drunk with grey skies,/ And anyone who hears them hears grief/ And delight at once.”

The quiet revolution is poetry, of course, and the justice one might hope to do with one’s own days, to share with others something useful from the gift one has been given. The poem is a quiet paean to the ordinary, the lyric, the undemonstrative, things. But when, this morning, I tried to record the poem, trains rolled past along the line and vacuum cleaners roared down the hall and dogs yelped and butcherbirds carolled and nothing anywhere wanted to stay quiet or still. The quietness the poem wants includes, of course, these illegal harmonies, as John Cage called them, but all that ordinary cacophony, the revolution of the real, made the recording long and muddy. Poetry has this way of bringing things to pass, in particular the affirmations of life my quiet song advertises and commends.

I got there, imperfectly, in the end. Birdsong and backfire and barking orchestrating my reading. And so it goes.

Eight of us were commended for our poems this year, just outside the top four. And I’m glad to share that honour with Anthony Lawrence (his poem “The Bastards”).

My poem will appear in Chain of Ponds, my new and selected poems, out this July (5Islands). I thank the magazine and its editor Rebecca O’Connor. I congratulate the shortlisted poets and my fellow commended. Gratitude, too, for Ishion H. I’m glad my poem cleared his high bar. Lyric poetry, like humility and civility and craft are not much in fashion these days, sadly, and so it is a relief and a surprise to find my poem recognised by Ishion and the journal. It mattered a lot to me, this poem, and I was glad to get it said and sung, and so it gives me joy to know it has been read and regarded highly.  

Mark reads Song of the Quiet Revolution

Song of the Quiet Revolution: Poem Written in Sudden Sickness on My Sixty-Second Birthday

Don’t die before you die. It’s possible, even

in dark days, to wake in wonder, lift your gaze…

—Kim Stafford, “Be Alive”

1.

T H E white daisies I bought for tonight,

When I thought I’d share dinner with friends,

Look like they think they’ve the whole summer

Ahead of them; I give them five days.

Meantime, let them bloom in innocence,

Young women in summer frocks. Meantime,

Struck down with the flu on my birthday,

I sit outside, grumbling. And no bombs

Drop and no floods rise. How much worse, eh?

2.

I’m reading Ha Jin’s Life of Li Bai.

Perhaps my future’s like Bai’s: short

Pieces, finely wrought, from troubles and

Travels. The work is to do justice—

With your life, with words, with whatever

You’ve got—to the beauty that finds you.

And keeps you. The world will ail—see how

It ails—if all we speak is power,

If all we do is complain and want.

3.

Poetry is the revolution

Already. It always was. These soft

Bombs it throws, which take the legs out from

Under the overculture, as Orr

Calls it.  Whatever else you must do

To right what wrongs afflict us, recall

The courage of the daisies, how short

Their lives; find the song in the swift smile

The mother pushing her pram throws you,

4.

Walking past, when, sitting on the stoop,

You shoosh the dogs in case her baby

Sleeps. The revolution refutes all

Language, all action, that denies life;

It happens in your heart, at your door.

It wants from you small good words for what

Loves you. It’s how, notwithstanding,

You love back. In case you forget how,

Walk often in trees, be with birds, dogs.

5.

Horses, too, are good at it. Canter

On one you love, as I canter mine,

Trying to make it look like sitting

In a saddle at that speed, at this

Age, isn’t hard. Rhythm’s half of how

The revolution works.  The other

Half is the way books and rivers teach

You how to see the world and say it

So that everyone feels seen and said.

6.

I find it hard to believe Li Bai

Wrote so well so drunk. I must have been

Drinking the wrong stuff.  Intoxicate

Each moment with your being in it.

Even this one, the afternoon sky

Thick as thought and my mind overcast.

I’ll try that. We are as passing cars,

As cut flowers, as the cries of bright

Birds. Many don’t get the chance you have,

7.

So, start, I guess. The world has asked you,

Like the whipbird I heard in the trees

At the lapsed quarry again today,

And what do you suppose you will have

To answer? What will your life be? What

Use will you find for your pain? Don’t stop

Wondering. Listening’s a calling

I commend: too many have signed up

For talking, and nothing good to say.

8.

I never saw such dying, they say,

Thinking of what should be called the Rape

Of Gaza. But there was such dying

Often: the Rape of Nanking, Myall

Lake, Hiroshima, Pol Pot. We learn

Nothing, and nothing is as violent

As ignorance and how easily

It’s beguiled. And all that goes wrong starts

In language that’s a calculus of power.

9.  

Reading Li Bai’s life got me thinking:

Although every moment won’t be right,

Write more often, small things, trust yourself.

The revolution of love rolls out

In short verses, in minutes. There now:

The yellow-tailed black cockatoo wails 

Lyrics as it flies, drunk with grey skies,

And anyone who hears them hears grief

And delight at once. A birthday rag.

CODA

Or else, let’s end the poem like this:

Last time I was ill, Mum was still here.

Two years ago. How fast the days pass.

Now my father, also afflicted,

Sits on the couch with reruns, tennis.

“Coffee?” he comes to the deck to ask.

Mum would be pleased with him, she’d be pleased

With me. In the birches, the koel

Starts. At my back the mountain assents.