Micheal Dransfield

Michael Dransfield: A poet you can feel, but never truly understand.

During a time of great change, both ideally and physically, in Australian history, a young man by the name of Michael Dransfield made his presence known in the highly evolving scene of poetry. Dransfield was an eccentric character, to say the least, and was recognized for his masterful ability of truly capturing the essence of many of life's situations. Regardless of the "heaviness" or the difficulties of the subject matter being portrayed throughout his poetry, Dransfield was mentally equipped to fully encompass any life experience and dawn light on some of its "eternal truths" in the world. Although he tragically died of a heroin overdose in 1973 (he was 24 years old), Dransfield made a lasting impression on Australian poetry; never to be forgotten and to be forever considered "one of the foremost poets of the '68 generation of counter-cultural dreamers" (Chan, 2002).

Throughout his brief existence on this earth, Dransfield was able to produce an extensive body of work that ranged from the human act of "loving" to the dreadful experience of having a drug overdose. His work is "framed within the literary construct of the 'Generation of '68'" because it undeniably challenged the "literary status quo" during that period of time, and he "overwhelmed it with sheer talent" (Kinsella, 2002). Dransfield was innovative, unique, and was seen as somewhat a "global poet, and something of a prophet" (Kinsella, 2002). He existed during a time where poets were more inclined to avoid any mention of what they really did ( in the drug using sense), taking refuge in the socially accepted subject of football, rather than confronting the challenges associated with drug use. Dransfield had no such inhibitions, he was the "quintessential drug poet" in Australian literary history, and it was through his drug usage--both the beauty and the destruction of it--that Dransfield was able to fully let his talent and generosity shine for all to see. He blazed the new trails for all those that were to follow him, and successfully created a place for the "authentic experience" in the realm of poetry.

It is a shame that it took such a personal tragedy "for [Dransfield] to engage so definitively with the experience of addiction...in such an astonishingly short time" (Armand, 1997). His work can only be marveled at and admired for its "richly cosmopolitan tone, its urgent sense of possibility, its sheer 'cannibal energy', and its persistent attempt to resolve difficult emotional problems" (Armand, 1997). He was an incredibly complex and witty character, and truly wove his existence in and out of reality; leaving his readers unsure of what was "real" and what was not. Some say that "he embroidered everything, including correspondence and his conversation and relationships, with his imagination", creating a world in which "reality" no longer had a dominant presence (Adamson, 1999). Using drugs as his creative catalyst for both his real life and his poetry, Dransfield "dropped acid and used heroin in the attempt to push himself beyond the boundaries of the known" (Chan, 2002). "As if to validate a process of enlightenment that would otherwise be submerged in guilt... [Dransfield] used drugs and drug culture as figurative vehicles--frameworks for a language of investigation and exploration of the creative principle (Kinsella, 2002). He gave up his sense of an individual self, and aimed to truly become the essence of his poetry.

In his poem 'Like this for years', Dransfield claims that 'to be a poet in Australia is the ultimate commitment/ [of] knowing that you are completely alone in a desert full of strangers'. You can sense his feelings off loneliness and self-sacrifice in his tone, almost to the extreme of martyrdom. He gives the reader the sense that he has given the totality of himself to the life of the "struggling, misunderstood poet", regardless of all the negatives that this existence can bring. He choose to be the implement in which the creative source of the world worked through; acting almost as a prism, exuding the creative light of the world for all to see. Dransfield accepted all consequences that came with the total submersion into the drug world, and understood this to be the only way in which his unique poetic personae could grow and develop.

As his poetic existence flourished, Dransfield himself began to die inside. The Australian attitudes and standards during the late 1960's have been said to be contributors and possible destroyers of Michael Dransfield's spirit. To many he was considered "a drug addict, a draft dodger, a uni drop out and a hippy", and during those times these stereotypes were invitations for abuse and societal rejection (Aitken, 2000). Despite all of this, Dransfield strived to make his poetry represent more than just the words used to describe certain situations. He has an underlying meaning in his work that is apparent in between the lines of each and every verse and phrase. This meaning was created through his physical use of drugs and manifested into poetry that can be seen as none other than a "real sense experience". Dransfield appreciated the drug experience, claiming that 'once you become a drug addict/ you will never want to become anything else', and used the transcendental nature of the experience to take his poetry to a new dimension.

Dransfield's poetry has the ability of fully embodying the soul's experience. There is a raw sensationalism in is work that dawns light of life's simply treasures and great tragedies, alike. Regardless of the topic at hand, Dransfield never ceases to fully capture the subject and relate it to a multitude of other life realities. He was "constantly investigating the way the self and subject-object relationship shift in the poem [hoping to] attain some kind of symbolist purity in art, to lift spiritually above the material, but [to remain] analytic and empirical" (Kinsella, 2002). In his poem 'Epiderm', Dransfield fully allows the reader to take another look at the mysterious and unique nature of human skin; an organ which we are all so familiar with.

EPIDERM

Canopy of nerve ends

marvelous tent

airship skying in crowds and blankets

pillowslip

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