Ouyang Yu: the Space of the Tale114

224 S PATIAL R ELATIONS a combination. His poems have a verbal glow. These lines from “The Monroe Survey” live as a verbal moment in time outside the ‘meaning’ of the poem: Gut-coloured vast tube life-forms sup their overflow as it streams down. This is visceral stuff; what poetry is all about. Murray uses the full panoply (there are many military metaphors in his work) to evoke the material world of human sensibilities. He speaks to people, not just ‘the people’. Ouyang Yu: The Space of the Tale114 HAUCER WAS A TRAVELLER, and his contact with France and Italy in particular helped shape what we term ‘English literature’. Ouyang C Yu’s Kingsbury Tales are the poems – in the ostensibly narrative form of a “novel” – of a traveller, an exile, a displaced poet, and a poet of two homes. The tension between these factors drives the poetry of this book. The qualification, ownership, and identification of ethnicity, language, and origin are obsessive motifs. They are also obsessively deconstructed, and with a matter-of-factness akin to a day’s ‘bowel-movements’. Racial identification is at once sacred and scatological: it is a paradox. The Kingsbury Tales begins with a ‘beginning’: Verse novel? No, that’s a tautology or an oxy Moron The Kingsbury Tales are no match For The Canterbury Tales Hear-hear to that Because they are not poetry Sounds like poultry? Not my fault A novel, tentatively To write in a jagged form A crap old Format That treats others’ histories as If they were my own 114 “Preface” to Ouyang Yu, The Kingsbury Tales: a novel (Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2008): 7–13. a On Australian Poetry and Poets: Longer Views on Individuals 225 Or my own As others’. which sets the reader up for an anti- and contrary reading in so many ways. It connects with traditions that may or may not be its own; it challenges format and epistemology, and questions the nature of history, or histories, and whose histories they are. ‘Set’ primarily in Australia, spiralling out of the Melbourne suburb of Kingsbury, Ouyang Yu’s main place of abode (and home), and China (of early life experience, of a return to Wuhan, as conceptual space for all those who connect with its five-thousand-year history... the algorithm is complex and changing) – with asides to all other places whose cultures Ou- yang is connected with – the work is exponential. The slippage of identity, and how societies invest or alter identity, is constantly under examination. Reading early “tales” from this work, I asked Ouyang about the influence on them of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and he replied that it was very little, if at all. There’s a comment here about the weight of expectancy an English- language reader (especially of relatively narrow cross-cultural experience) might bring to the work. Ouyang Yu’s ‘beginning’ clearly registers this. The familiarity of tale-telling, of sharing a story, echoes ironically and at times tenderly through Ouyang’s masterwork. There is certainly a tone of sharing horror and joy, and the many voices of this work, the many kinds of tales, seem mediated through a figure we might name ‘Ouyang Yu’. But this figure is a multiple personality, a paranoid zone wrestling with its own exclusion and belonging. It gives away its privacy and exposes itself to hurt and pain as a kind of deliverance. Excoriating racism, excoriating compartmentalizing (the Chinese and Western Orientalists), it becomes a book of listening and telling, of witness and bemusement, of the re-origining of language. Bigotry comes through segregated ways of seeing, but also from segrega- tions of language. Ouyang has much to say on accent, on the manners of speech. His rhetoric, strewn with devastating images, is a new-created tongue. He is a resister, a fighter against proper forms, while obsessively determined to master and re-invent those forms. In doing this, he has created a new poetry. A new Australian poetry, a new Chinese poetry. Along with Lionel Fogarty and Javant Biarujia, he might be one of the few poets in Australia, maybe the world, who have been driven to create a new language because of the limita- tions and complicities of an English that is exclusionary, protective, and delet- ing. The ironies of teaching language (and being excluded from places of teaching) compel a number of these poems. During the recent election cam- paign, a ‘liberal voter’ on the John Laws Radio Program (as reported in the .

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