I love this: “the rococo of being your own still centre.”<\/p>\n
Les Murray, \u201cThe Quality of Sprawl\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Sprawl is the quality Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly, Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer. Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall. <\/p>\n I understand Les Murray was the most famous poet in Australia for many years. While I’m sorry I didn’t know about him until recently, I’m glad I lived to learn. The poem reminds me of Whitman, but with less self-regard; perhaps more like Marianne Moore with her wry explorations and poignant celebrations.<\/p>\n I learned about this poet, this poem, and this concept from Alan Jacobs’ blog\u00a0The Homebound Symphony<\/a><\/em>. I am learning a great deal from this blog; the binge continues.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love this: “the rococo of being your own still centre.” Les Murray, \u201cThe Quality of Sprawl\u201d Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl is what the company … Continue reading
\nof the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
\ninto a farm utility truck, and sprawl
\nis what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
\nto buy the vehicle back and repair its image.<\/p>\n
\nor driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
\nIt is the rococo of being your own still centre.
\nIt is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes:
\nthat\u2019s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
\nNor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds.<\/p>\n
\nSprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised
\nnor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
\nwith mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That\u2019s Style.
\nSprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
\nor anyway the fourteenth.<\/p>\n
\nbisecting an obstructive official\u2019s desk with a chain saw.
\nNot harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,
\nthough it\u2019s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
\nat a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
\nKnowing the man\u2019s name this was said to might be sprawl.<\/p>\n
\nlines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.
\nI have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
\nTurner\u2019s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
\ncomes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl \u2013
\nexcept he didn\u2019t fire them.<\/p>\n
\n(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don\u2019t include it.
\nSome decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
\ndividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
\nIf he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.<\/p>\n
\nasleep in his neighbours\u2019 best bed in spurs and oilskins,
\nbut not having thrown up:
\nsprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house
\nreinvented the Festoon. Rather
\nit\u2019s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
\nNo Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,
\non the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
\nAn image of my country. And would that it were more so.<\/p>\n
\nSprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
\nReprimanded and dismissed,
\nit listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
\nof possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
\nBeing roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
\nAnd thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.<\/p>\n