Whipped Cream Difficulties

A comment over here led me to the official website (are there many unofficial ones?) of Ern Malley, who I had never heard of previously.

Malley was an Australian poet who died at the age of 25 of Graves disease. His sister discovered his poetry in his personal effects, and sent it to Max Harris, the editor of a literary magazine called “Angry Penguins” (really, I am not making that up) for evaluation. Harris loved the poetry, and published it in the magazine, and in a book called “The Darkening Ecliptic”.

And none of what I’ve told you about Malley was true. He was actually the creation of two other poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley:

Stewart and McAuley thought modernist poetry was pretentious nonsense. They likened it to “a free association test”. They agreed with A.D. Hope that it would be a good idea to “get Maxy” and to debunk what they called the “Angry Pungwungs”.

So they created Malley and his poetry (they claimed all the poems were written “in one grand burst on a wet afternoon in their barracks”) and sent it to Harris in an attempt to puncture what they saw as the pretense of modernist poetry. Hilarity ensued…

…until Harris and “Angry Penguins” became the subject of an obscenity trial over the Malley poems. (Harris ended up being fined 5 pounds and had to pick up the garbage.)

Lawrence would probably enjoy this story, as it reminds me a lot of the “Social Text” affair. As for myself, I think “the black swan of trespass on alien waters” is a neat turn of phrase.