Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the death of John Forbes at age 47. Ironic, understated, comic and deceptively erudite, Forbes’ poetry represented for many Australian poets, as Ken Bolton writes, “a high-water mark against which to judge their own work.” A keen student of philosophy, art, military history, and cultural theory, Forbes in his poetry married his intellectual fascinations to suburban landscapes and 20th century ephemera in a conversational tone and colloquial voice that owed much to his early love of the New York School, in particular John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, on who he wrote his honors thesis and a completed (but never submitted) master thesis respectively.
A precocious talent, Forbes won a major literary prize at the age of 22 with his poem “Four Heads & how to do them.” The poem borrows for its starting point a Renaissance treatise on how to paint a “Classical Head” and proceeds to riff on the form, so that the Symbolist Head “No longer begins with even a mention of anatomy, / the approach in fact leaves one with the whole glittering / universe from which only the head has been removed.” The poem launched Forbes’ career and became an anthology staple. His second collection, Stunned Mullet, was funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority for the purpose of celebrating Australia’s bicentenary in 1988. It presented Forbes with the opportunity to take on the mantle of Australia’s national poet. He was, however, far too suspicious of authority for any such pretensions, and in the book’s central poem “On the Beach” the poet goes from answering the call of his vocation to seeing:
“Milled day-glo ephemera
sell you this image of Australia
& where it appears, flogged and true-blue,
your vocation looks
more like a blurred tattoo
or something you did for a bet
& now regret, like a man
walking the length of the bar on his hands
balancing a drink on his shoe”
Yet it is precisely this cynicism and self-effacement which validates the argument for his being Australia’s national poet. Forbes’ persistent skepticism of those things which make great claims for themselves, including those things which interested him most: politics, art, philosophy, poetry, is inherently, if not uniquely, Australian, and recalls Robert Hughes’ diagnosis of Australia’s national character in which the country’s convict past has made its people at once conformist and cynical of authority.
“On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra” was first published in Forbes’ posthumous collection Damaged Glamour, which features Tiepolo’s painting, a glittering triumph of style over substance, on its cover. Forbes uses this perceived lack of substance as the substance of his poem: the extravagant, superficial display of wealth, the “sulking” royalty, the sycophantic hangers-on, the celebrity gawking—Forbes takes equal aim at both the super-rich and those who would worship such wealth, of whose gestures of contempt fail to mask “raw envy.” “On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra” exhibits Forbes’ superior ability to subtly shift perspective: From the trashy contemporary tabloids the painting comically reminds us of, to the 18th century painting itself, to the 1st century bc scene and protagonists the painting represents (“our / contemporaries minus coke and sunglasses”), these shifts produce a sliding movement throughout the poem, with one perspective seemingly sliding out from beneath the other to assert itself, a rhetorical effect that produces an irresistible momentum. And if the poem’s own social and political critique may itself be in some measure superficial, it arrives at a devastating final few lines. Agape, eclipsed by Eros and absent from the painting, has been taken down to the basement to be tortured. In the culture of spectacle, Forbes suggests, the only way in which charity and kindness can capture our attention is if they are being put on the rack. The human reflex is to want to be witness to such brutality and callousness, making us, the readers, no better than those idlers gaping on the balconies.
On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra
Any frayed waiting room copy of Who
could catch this scene: flash Eurotrash
surveys a sulky round faced
überBabe who’s got the lot—what else
could this painting mean, except that
superstars can will their luck, or
just how little raw envy’s hidden by
contempt, so words like ‘Wow! Great
Tits!’ or ‘Comic Opera Wop’ sum up
the observer, not Anthony and Cleopatra,
attached to pets & entourages—our
contemporaries minus coke & sunglasses.
What’s that pearl without price she’s
dropping in her glass? A mirror of
their self-regard, replaced by each
others’ glances. Still, it glows, blue
& blank at the centre like their hearts,
flanked by idlers on balconies leering
& placing bets. But if they suggest Eros,
what role does Agape play in this–
downstairs & screaming, being shown The
Instruments? You wish, voyeur, you wish.
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Author: Thomas Moody
