Upon being appointed to the federal Arts portfolio, Labor frontbencher Tony Burke confessed a love for poetry, saying he reads it every day. That's good, since his responsibilities as Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities as well as Arts, read like a post-modernist poem in themselves.
To be seduced by both policy and poetry might seem like a contradiction. But it doesn't have to be.
Buddhist poet Daisaku Ikeda described poetry as an attitude of the heart, an openness to the world, a vital sense of the connection between one's life and the life within all things. The 'poetic spirit', he says, is the impulse, the vibrancy, at the core of all artistic expression.
If poetry is the pulse of our cultural life, so too can it be seen as the pulse of our public decisions.
Take the environment, where every decision has a ripple effect on society. Emotions are roused, disappointments dealt with or suffered, heat generated, satisfaction is (rarely) reached. This, or somewhere within it, is the poem.
Our poetry loving Minister for the Environment pleases some clearly identifiable groups by declining to proclaim heritage protection for anything but a tiny percentage of the Tarkine Wilderness area in Tasmania.
Trade Unions cheer, local mayors count the coming influx of workers (and municipal rates), miners gear up to rip the guts out of the forests for minerals, loggers fall asleep counting crashing trees, and the people who have marvelled at rain forest and mountain are left in deep mourning.
The poetry of the wilderness will be gone, the mourners say. The poem is all around us, they say; its core is the beauty of the wilderness. The canker, the 'invisible worm' (as in Blake's poem 'The Sick Rose') that a core of beauty seems to inevitably contain, is the minister's decision to leave the wilderness vulnerable.
Those who fight for heritage recognition of the whole Tarkine area will see Burke's decision as akin to the last two lines of a Shakespeare sonnet:
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,To love that well, which thou must leave e're long.
And Burke, what poem swirls in his sub-conscious? This, perhaps, from T. S. Eliot (who incidentally is one of Burke's favourites)?
Shall I part my hair behind, do I dare to eat a peach?
No, like Eliot's Prufrock, he didn't dare:
No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;Am an attendant lord ...
Attendant, say his opponents, on the