The cup of John howard's poeTry - Tom clark gives a brief rhetorispective.
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The cup of John
Howard’s poetry
Tom Clark gives a brief rhetorispective.
2001
No wonder, then, that those who might
have shown us something else,
We will decide
defeated now by poetry,
Who comes to this country –
And the circumstances had nowhere left to turn.1
In which they come.
How like a piece of poetry it was,
the roughening iambics,
I hope Geoff Page will forgive me if I differ on
points of scansion. I’d represent Howard’s as a
pair of tetrameter lines, after the rhythms of much
those sharpened ‘c’s’, like angled pikes,
of the English language’s blank verse and the over-
the two-beat lines that got us going – whelming majority of its alliterative meter. Also, I
except line 3 which had its extra do not accept Page’s reading of a hypermetric stress:
fist banged on the table. the “extra fist banged on the table.”
But that, as they say, is just the details.
Note the subtle half-rhyme, too,
I do share Page’s starting point: that Howard’s
‘country’ matched with ‘come’
infamous maxim scans as verse. I do share his
and how the preposition ‘in’
inclination to compare the public utterance to the
assumes its proper place. notion of a published poem. And, like Page, the
Like most great poetry, of course, more closely I look into Howard’s lines, the more
it’s mainly made from echoes: I realise that they are not merely comparable to
verse but the thing itself. That is not just because
the glorious Three Hundred Greeks
the lines were composed and performed to achieve
who held Thermopylae
public ends through the use of poetic techniques, it
and Winston Churchill roaring still
is also because public language is poetry.
“We shall fight them on the beaches ...” What does it mean, this claim?
Like all such deathless works of art We can take the terms one by one.
it’s shivering with myth: Firstly, for my purposes, public language means
the language that public speakers and writers such
the golden hordes who spoiled our sleep
as sports stars, business leaders, politicians and
across two centuries,
others use to audiences and through the mass me-
the bard far back with lyre and smoke
dia. It includes media-generated language (such as
declaiming his alliterations, ‘opinion’, entertainment and advertising), as well as
the ancient battles of his race language replayed or reported by the media. It is a
with dragons, gods and men. polymorphous phenomenon, then, which we define
overland 190, 2008 23more by the relationship between speakers/writers figures go to creating and sustaining the context
and listeners/readers than by the specificities of of their own reception: public figures cultivate the
its content or styling, as significant as those latter publics into whose realm their public remarks are
factors may be. published.
Secondly, when I say that public language is At the same time, Warner is careful to describe
poetry, I mean something more substantial than ‘a public’ and plural ‘publics’, as distinct from gen-
a heuristic metaphor. The relationship between eralised notions of ‘the public’. Working through
public language and poetry can be discussed con- this distinction systematically is important for our
cretely. They both share elements or qualities that understanding of the complexity in public communi-
are important to their operations. Similar shifts in cation. It shows us that the specificity of each public,
context produce like changes in both of them. While combined with the proliferation of specific publics
their teleologies, their strategic outlooks and the (and ‘counterpublics’), drives a strife of the gods in
purposes for which they are deployed may diverge public affairs, which are necessarily agonistic.
significantly (a reason why their separateness is If, as Warner argues, “a public is poetic world-
usually taken for granted), they share a common making”,4 then certain consequences follow. First,
relationship to the situational constraints upon public worlds and world publics are poetic con-
them. That relationship is one of subjection: public structs. That is, we may, and indeed normally do,
language and poetry are both subject to the rules read world affairs as we read poetry: sensually,
(ideologies) of their situations, which manifest in suggestedly, closely, if sporadically.
rules of semantics, syntax and aesthetics. Secondly, these recursive semiotics become a
Thirdly, by poetry I mean a mode of language resonance phrasing. The public persona makes
whose manifest forms are extremely diverse. Even utterances which constitute the hearing/reading ex-
its subjection to form is frequently contested. Poetry perience of her/his public and which therefore mark
valorises the aesthetics of language, including the out elements of the prosody for communication in
aesthetics of its syntax and semantics, although and with that public. In other words, the (stylistic)
the reasons why it does so and the aesthetic ele- way a public figure speaks constitutes the manner
ments valorised can vary greatly from situation in which her or his public listens.
to situation. Whether it is a memory-aid for oral Thirdly, the dialectic between and within pub-
genealogies, or a pictorial problematic in concrete lics – the negotiations and conflicts through which
poems, to name it poetry means that the form of publics are reconstituted and redefined in relation
its language is noticed and exploited by speakers, to one another – is a dialectic between worlds or
writers, listeners and readers. That a version of cosmologies. It is a clash of accounts of the past,
this observation can potentially be applied to any the present and the future. For the psychoanalyti-
language act (both uttering and interpreting) goes cal theorist, Nicolas Abraham, the reconciliation of
not so much to dilute the definition as to show how these three elements is the fundamental business of
any language act can be within, or slip into, the poetry.5 Their clashing, as Page shows, is a rivalry
poetic mode. Public language is always necessarily of poetries.
in the poetic mode.
Rhetorical strategies are poetical
The scope of public language strategies
In his Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner Earlier I indicated a difference on some technical
sets out seven defining criteria for the identification points of scansion with Page. The disagreement is
of publics.2 The first, and arguably most fundamen- not nearly so significant as the points on which
tal, is that a public is constituted not by members I share (and have learned from) his reading of
so much as by texts: people come together around Howard, but here is my representation of the then
shared textual experiences. Publication is thus the Prime Minister’s lines. I have checked pause and
starting point for a public. If we reconcile this theory stress patterns against the source:6
with the notion of public language described above,
it implies a very recursive system of communica- Wé will decíde / who cómes to this cóuntry —
tion.3 We can see that the pronouncements of public and the círcumstánces / in whích they cóme.
24 overland 190, 2008The stress rhythm is strong but varied, strident yet reflects some doubt as to whether Howard had said
organic. It springs from a grand old well of poetry ‘to’ (most thought this) or ‘into’ (two respondents).
that once connected the Germanic peoples, a source Two respondents thought Howard said ‘under’ in
most brilliantly described by Eduard Sievers in his the position of X3; a third asked if the word was
Altgermanische Metrik (Old Germanic Meter).7 ‘with’, before being convinced by other friends
Each line has two verses, and each verse contains that it was probably ‘in’. Finally, some respondents
two lifts, or beats – here marked with an accent and believed that there was a final word, ‘here’, in the
in bold type. The distribution of unstressed (quieter) position marked by X4. While another opined that
syllables around those beats determines the rhythm “it would sound more impressive if there was” (and
of each verse: the Sievers approach tells us this is an compare Page’s point about the half-rhyme with
E-type verse followed by three B-type verses. The ‘country’), most were confident that this word was
juxtaposition of rhythmically varying yet metrically not present in the original.
compliant verses sustains listener interest in, and All the disparities in this sequence occur on the
engagement with, the rhythm of the poem. unstressed syllables, and even then only on some of
In true alliterative meter, such as most of the them – those unstressed syllables occurring in words
examples that Sievers describes, there would be a that included beat syllables were unanimously
requirement that the initial sounds of the beat syl- agreed upon. Likewise, those unstressed words for
lables follow one of a limited number of patterns. which Howard’s syntax left no alternative phras-
Clearly that element of versification is not operative ing were agreed. The disparities show up in those
here – and we would not expect it to be in a prime unstressed words that can be substituted by other
ministerial utterance in Australia in the year 2001. mundane words without detracting from the sense,
Nevertheless, the rhythm patterns of Germanic the syntax, or the meter of the original. That is to
versification do prevail. say, Howard’s aphorism is committed to memory
I want to turn to those quieter syllables directly in the same way as oral traditions commit their
– but first, a little empirical research. In my house- poems to memory. If it were not for the existence of
hold, we shop for our groceries at the Victoria transcriptions and recordings, we could anticipate
Market in Melbourne most Saturday mornings. that the variant recollections would be on a more
We have a group of friends whom we see there or less equal footing.
pretty consistently each week. They are aged in their Where does this leave the stressed syllables?
thirties. In the 2007 election, I am quite sure that First, they are clearly among the more memorable
all of them voted for Labor, the Greens, or parties words in this maxim. Interested citizens remembered
and candidates further to the Left. They are more Howard’s slogan quite faithfully, according to this
interested and active in political life than the major- evidence, even six years after the uttering. Even if we
ity of the Australian electorate, although none is a treat the X-disparities as positions devoid of mean-
professional politician. ing (which my respondents most certainly did not),
One Saturday, as eight of us sat around a table the key political ideas of Howard’s sentence hold up
drinking coffee, I asked our friends if they could very strongly: We decide who comes this country
recall the Howard slogan of six years previously. and the circumstances which they come.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they were not completely Secondly, note that half (that is, four) of the
consistent in their recollection. I took note of their stressed syllables fall in Latinate words: “��decíde”,
versions, which I can represent as follows: “cóuntry�������
” and “círcumstánces���������������������
”. Moreover, none of
the Latinate words in Howard’s maxim are without
Wé X1 decíde / who cómes X2 this cóuntry –
stress. In the history of Anglophone politics since
and the círcumstánces������
/ X3 whích they cóme
the Norman invasion, the Latinate vocabulary has
X4.
typically been privileged over the mundane Ger-
X1 represents the first of the words on which there manic vocabulary around it. Church Latin (as well
was disagreement: while several believed it was as church-imported Greek) and Norman French
‘will’, two thought it was ‘shall’, another that there have provided the bulk of the English language’s
was no word in this position – and then several be- words for abstract thought, religious devotion, le-
came unsure when presented with the dilemma. X2 gal title, parliament, the judiciary, the military, the
overland 190, 2008 25prison system, high culture, trade and commerce, electorate. The alternative story of the late Peter
and so forth. Andren, returned with an increased majority at the
In this example we can hear the stress patterns same election, in his inherently conservative elector-
of the phrases chiming with their underlying hier- ate, and despite standing out publicly against the
archies of power. Howard government’s approach to refugees, pro-
Thirdly, although the stressed words comprise vides an instructive example of what the Australian
seven of this utterance’s fifteen words, note how Labor Party failed to do.
they coincide with the majority of poetic resonance
achieved through consonance and assonance: we, A formulaic poetics for public
the deciders (which circumstances) – come, country language
come! In particular, note how the action becomes Poets produce their work through a combination of
increasingly focused on the concept of arrival or scripted and improvised language: no poetic work
invasion as the sentence develops, resonating on is perfectly improvised or completely free from im-
syllables with the structure . provisation; no performance is completely scripted
That is to say, these syllables both alliterate or perfectly free from scripting. For the most part,
and rhyme: ‘comes’, ‘coun-,’ ‘-cum-’ and ‘come’. the balance between scripting and improvisation is
The conceptual problem of the first verse (E-type determined by poetic genre. In other words, it is a
rhythm) is thus amplified through a phonic panic- function of the prosody of its genre. Thus we find
note in the last three (B-type rhythm). Its echoes of that freestyle hip-hop is demonstrably more impro-
pornography remind us that a vital narrative here vised than the bush ballad, even though both are
is the trajectory towards imminent (immanent!) current rhyming verse styles. That does not mean
release. This unruliness, the spillage that is wrought freestyle is free from prescription, though. Its per-
by people who do not understand (white, Christian, formers predominantly create their poetry through
conservative) Australia’s laws makes for an extreme- the use of ready-made phrases that reference well-
ly strong example of Howard’s widely discussed known topics, practised rhyming links, preconceived
rhetoric of fear. At the same time, its internal logic syntactic relations between rhymed phrases, and
is a call for denial of that release, for containment. variations on the rhythmic positioning of rhyme
Their freedom is imminent: arrest them! and stress syllables that vary within a more or less
Fourthly, mindful of Page’s reading, note how fixed paradigm. Often the poetry is as self-generat-
different orders or levels of stress collide, merge ing – as automatic – as it is composed. Even a highly
and compete with one another. A stressed syllable rehearsed example can illustrate the point:
stresses the importance of a word. Thus Howard cal-
culated to stress the importance and the stressfulness D-Boy baby mama actin’ roudy outside,
of his topic. But in stressing ‘our’ stresses, Howard Roudy outside, roudy outside
thwarted any view of the asylum seekers’ di-stress. D-Boy baby mama actin’ roudy outside,
The white, Christian, conservative and other publics “Later!” for that shit, we don’t fuck with ’em
to which his comments were aimed were bolstered like swine
by those comments and their priorities. Other pub- Actin’, maxin,
lics, including the asylum seekers themselves, were Blappin’ automatics
‘defeated now by poetry’ indeed. Savage to extensive damage
Could Howard have achieved similar ends with Havin’ sucker-absent
more prosaic language? This (rhetorical) question Man, look at baby – she want me to tap it!
misses the point: his ends were thoroughly poetical. If I hit it once, she gonna jock me & trap it
Howard’s slogan, maxim, proclamation serves as a Strip the game naked like Mac & Magic Mike
key text in the history of his publics. That Austral- And I come from the slum where life is strife
ians voted for him – and in sufficient numbers to But tonight, pass the Remy right
wreck the credibility and political capital of his To a Mac, like a Gucciano blessing the mic
main opponent in the 2001 election, Kim Beazley Cutthroats in the building, and you know they
– is a function of how well Howard’s textual strat- high
egies constituted his publics within the Australian Chastise sayin’ “Mac’n, yo flow so tight!”
26 overland 190, 2008For real, Side Show pliance with the prosody is already established.
Smokin’ Backwoods with my folks.8 Improvising poets rely on formulas in at least five
ways:
Mac Mall and John Howard answer to quite
1. As an organising device – helping composi-
different prosodic and political imperatives. The
tional arrangement;
rapper deploys his symbolic violence and his iden-
2. As a mnemonic device – a way to recall in-
tity markers for different strategic purposes – but
formation;
he still fundamentally answers to both categories.
3. As a rhetoric-disciplining device – helping
He is fundamentally a public language performer:
poets stick to topics and phrases that do not get
how he comes across is still fundamentally what
them into trouble (e.g. through self-contradic-
he stands for.
tion, or through uncontrolled nuance);
Variation within a fixed paradigm is what Sievers
4. As a ‘verbomotor’10 – enabling poets to gener-
describes. Looking at the prosodies of old Germanic
ate words that fill out texts and performances;
verse, he finds five essential verse rhythms (with
and
myriad sub-type variants). These stretch in their
5. As a headlining and summarising device
practical application across dozens of dialects,
– enabling poets to name the themes of their texts
thousands of kilometres, and at least one (and quite
and performances in ways that make explicit the
likely several) millennium. Subsequent scholarship
lines of interest for their audiences.
is still fundamentally indebted to his breakthrough
research. It seems that, whether in slowly crafted The performance of public language is also
texts or in transcripts from improvised perform- dominated by formulaic composition, although we
ance, the old Germanic poets were using tried and don’t usually attribute it to poetry. George Orwell
tested patterns of rhythm to meet the requirements clearly detested the “prefabricated” nature of public
of their meter. phrasing.11 Don Watson targets the uncritical reuse
A similar observation can be made about phras- of pre-loved phrases when he laments a “death of
ing: the poetry of each dialect relies heavily on public language” throughout Australia and the
phrases found nowhere other than in poetic texts, Anglosphere more generally.12 In other words, an
but found abundantly throughout the surviving po- artistic technique that many philologists appreciate
ems of that dialect. Comparable phrases in Homer’s under the name of formulas is one that many politi-
epics provided the standout evidence for what the cal commentators deplore as cliché and platitude.
classicist Milman Parry dubbed the poetic formula: When it comes to cliché and platitude, Howard
“a group of words which is regularly employed has hardly been outstanding. Kevin Rudd’s ac-
under the same metrical conditions to express a ceptance speech on 24 November 2007 must rate
given essential idea”.9 The key to this concept, as higher on scales of derivative expression than any
with any formal aspect of versification, is resonance: speech Howard gave during his term in office.13 The
formulas play on the idea that a phrase has been Chaser compiled a brief video montage in which
heard before and is likely to be heard again. And they captured Rudd uttering the phrase ‘working
it is not restricted to resonance within a poem. families’ 300 times during the course of the elec-
Formulas are phrases and themes common across tion campaign – and to date, nobody has tendered
entire traditions of verse. In other words, when we a satisfactory definition of what, if anything, the
notice a phrase or theme in a formulaic poem, we term is supposed to mean. But Howard as prime
assume it is likely to recur – more or less verbatim minister was an especially improvisatory public
– every time the same meaning becomes relevant in speaker. He was keen to project the image of a pub-
the same prosodic circumstances. lic figure armed, not with speaking notes, but with
Formulas are everywhere in poetic genres, not a cup of tea – precisely because it communicated
least the bush ballad, but they take on a particular that he was responsive to the electorate, sensitive to
importance for the more improvised genres. An changing moods, an improviser. This means that he
improvising poet is especially reliant on stringing was particularly reliant on his poetic formulas and
together sequences of pre-worked language, phrases that he worked them particularly hard.
whose meaning is already proven and whose com- We can identify several formulaic qualities in
overland 190, 2008 27the ‘We will decide’ couplet, but I want to illustrate word “loathe” is strikingly quaint. It is self-con-
this aspect of Howard’s poetics with a more recent sciously archaic, as with so many of those phrases
example. Announcing the date for the 2007 election, that philologists call ‘poetic lexicon’. And so we
Howard said, “Love me or loathe me, the Australian recall that Howard is the love-me-or-loathe-me guy.
people know where I stand on all the major issues But we also recall the idea that Howard stands. He
of importance to their future.”14 was an outstanding stander. He was forever adopt-
If we allow that journalistic commentary sits ing stances. The context and permutations of his
within the broad poetic tradition of Australian standing were flexible, which is to say renewable,
political language, the take-up and repetition of as the circumstances of his utterances changed,
this sentence makes it a perfect case in point. Every but the formula always reminded his public that
metropolitan daily newspaper, every national net- Mr Love-Loathe stands on. And just as we knew
work for radio and television, reported or directly where he stands, he invited us (X1) to know (X2)
quoted Howard’s self-assessment. Revealingly, as where (X3) we (X4) stand in relation to him (Y):
with ‘We will decide’, there were some small-scale love me or loathe me.
discrepancies in the phrasing as quoted, especially
if we extend the bounds of the reportage to include Conclusion
blog commentary: Appreciating Howard’s domination of Australian
public language since Keating15 means understand-
Love me or loathe me, X know/s where I stand Y.
ing how his peculiar style of poetry worked.
Here X is an obligatory position, designating a In Howard, over several decades, we witnessed
phrase for the Australian people or electorate. Y an extraordinary resourcefulness in the develop-
is an optional position, designating a phrase that ment and the deployment of formulas. He crafted
sets the frame of reference or context for Howard’s a range of phrases, phrase-building tools and the-
stand. But for all the reportage that this utterance matic connections that complied with the prosodic
received, Howard actually used the formula many requirements of the situations in which he found
times before 13 October 2007 (and several times himself – that is to say, the situations which Howard
afterwards). had constructed for us to observe him in. In so do-
Several of those other occasions also received ing, he had a lengthy and uninterrupted period to
significant reportage. When we synthesise the range build up the publics in which his poetics resounded.
of Howard’s ‘Love me or loathe me’ utterances, as Thus his clichés and platitudes achieved a resonance
well as the media reportage of them, the formula can greater than political commentators have managed
be reduced to an even more flexible kernel: to explain so far.
Finally, it is a kind of ‘poetic justice’ that
Love me or loathe me, X1 X2 X3 X4 stand Y.
Howard’s political odyssey was brought to its end
Here Y is still an optional position and X is still by a new style of cliché and platitude – that is to
an obligatory position. X1 designates a phrase for say, a new formulaic poetics. “A journey is like a
the Australian people or electorate. X2 designates journey,” as I once heard at a wedding reception.
a phrase for knowing, acknowledging, appreciat- But a poem can be uncannily like a poem, too.
ing, or even being happy. X3 designates a syntactic
bridge, a phrase that will link X1, X2 and X4 to the 1. Geoff Page, ‘2001’, Overland 181, 2005, p. 92.
fixed verb ‘stand’. Finally, X4 designates a phrase 2. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, Zone
Books, New York, 2002, pp. 65–124.
for Howard, or for the party or government that 3. Compare the notion of ‘recursive governance’ in Michael
he leads. Crozier, ‘Recursive Governance: Contemporary Political
Mindful of the ‘We will decide’ analysis already Communication and Public Policy,’ Political Communica-
tion, vol. 24, January 2007, pp. 1–18.
undertaken, we can see how the formula in this case
4. Warner, p. 114.
has given us limited flexibility around a memorable 5. Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation,
phrase and a core verbal process. ‘Love me or loathe and Psychoanalysis, trans. B. Thigpen and N. Rand, Stan-
me’ turns up every time. What is more, much as ford University Press, Stanford, 1995, pp. 65–103.
6. John Howard, ‘Address at the Federal Liberal Party Cam-
Page identified in the syntax of “the circumstances paign Launch,’ transcript of a speech given 28 October
in which they come”, we can see that Howard’s 2001, National Library of Australia Pandora Archive,
28 overland 190, 2008, viewed 3 December guage, Random House Australia, Sydney, 2003.
2007. 13. Kevin Rudd, ‘Election Victory Speech,’ transcript of a
7. Eduard Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik, Max Niemeyer, speech given on 24 November 2007, Australian Labor
Halle, 1893. Party website, , viewed 3 December 2007.
Original Hip-Hop (Rap) Lyrics Archive Version 2.0 14. ABC News, ‘Howard announces Nov 24 poll’, news
(Beta), , viewed 15 August 2007. Some typo- ing Corporation website, , viewed 3 December 2007.
9. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The col- 15. Keating, for his own part, makes a fascinating case study
lected papers of Milman Parry, Adam Parry (ed.), Claren- in the tensions between fluent oral improvisation and
don Press, Oxford, 1971, p. 272. tongue-tied performances from script.
10. Berkley Peabody, The Winged Word: A Study in the
Technique of Ancient Greek Oral Composition as Seen
Principally through Hesiod’s Works and Days, State
University of New York Press, Albany, 1975. Tom Clark is a lecturer in the School of Communication
11. George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ in Culture and Languages at Victoria University. This article
Selected Essays, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1957, pp. arises from his research project, examining the poetics of
143–157. public language.
overland 190, 2008 29You can also read
