ALL THE GOSS #2

Pretty good when a singer-songwriter finds & makes song of your poems, which is what we heard at Collected Works last Saturday, 28/4/07, when Gen Fitzgerald, guitar, returned the favour of Louise Crisp's reading from her new book, Uplands. I think it was the first time Louise had heard the song. Great compliment & potentially instructive interpretation. A pity that not many Melbourne poets or poetry audience were there (--I remember years ago Alan Wearne warning that Autumn & Winter Saturday afternoons were a no-no in Melbourne because of the footy, and in his case could not attend anything if the Dons were playing!). FIP publisher Ron Pretty explained it to one of Louise's supporters as typical of the Melbourne scene's response to out-of-town & inter-state poets : if they know you there's a chance, if not, not! But Louise Crisp has been around for many years, though Bairnsdale is a long way away, & maybe further in the imagination than Warnambool (--note that Brendan Ryan will be reading/launching in town soon, also for FIP) or Geelong, Castlemaine... Ah well, quality not quantity as they say, but audience is important not least because of sales & distribution of the project that's probably been in train for a significant time. I certainly dont go to everything so probably shouldnt grizzle, but neither do I restrict attendance to one particular venue or stable of writers. Event- saturation, restricted time & energy are proper excuses but lack of curiousity & other species of laziness dont wash!
Paul Sinclair's launching speech was a classic meeting of worlds. (Mr Wearne's still in my head for some reason but I immediately recall Judith Brett's speech for Alan's The Nightmarkets (publ. Penguin), back in the 80s (85? 86?), at the Napier Hotel, around the corner from Collected Works when it was in Smith Street : Judy's own Melbourne- politics- & -sociology enthusiasm & expertise was probably perfect reception for Alan's narrative. Sociology isnt often the most understanding of optics for poetry but, whatever I may have muttered at the time, it was for Alan Wearne that day.) Paul Sinclair, speaking as an environmental scientist (& the author of The Murray : A River & its People, MUP, '01), was eloquent & persuasive in his support of both the activism & the poetry that informs book & poet. Just as the fish of this or that river is imbued with the taste of its own place so, he stressed, is the language. Louise's language of rocks & rivers is particular to her place, and of late the Snowy has been her prime topographical & political location. Of course we would respond that the poetry, & Louise's in particular, isnt a transparent window on & for the place. But for one who's been where the poet's been, or wants to be so transported, who's drawn into & yields to that empathy, it is crystal clear! Certainly Dr Sinclair, for one, spoke as a true believer influencing us all to the same opinion! The qualification I shared with Andy Jackson when we chatted afterwards was that the literary references in this book are a counterpoint or a descant to her main voice, and that such references boost other themes & glintings. For example, Rene Char is a significant signpost in the book, but isnt the first reference when one thinks of environmentalism or even environmental poetry. Ashbery's there too, John Anderson, John Forbes, Cixous, Machado...
I look forward to the reviews...
At not too wide a tangent to the Crisp & etc, talking with Barry Hill recently about Gary Snyder, whose new book of essays, Back On Fire, has arrived, I said how the poet-scholar-activist Snyder still has, maybe always had, dirt under his fingernails (--I got the same impression about Paul Sinclair). There's a lumberman background there, a climber, a traveller. He's part of the world and therefore within the critique he mounts. And yet, in 1981, listening to him at the Montsalvat poetry festival, I had another point of view. It was in response to what I thought of as an earth [earth first?] fascism, which I'd broached regarding poems by Jonathon Griffin (for which I sometimes felt Tony Rudolf, his friend & publisher, never forgave me) : Snyder's blue jay scorning the humans on the ground as nuclear-armed jets screeched overhead...a bit like taking the side of the cockroaches as the great survivors! My point being (& Michael McClure's wonderful yell,"I am a mammal patriot!" still rings in my ear), surely it's disingenuous to forfeit or deny humanity (one's own type of being, one's only agency in Being) in order or by way of criticising human dastardry & silliness. I know Barry's been into Snyder for the past year or so but havent caught up with his writings yet. And I've been back with Snyder in Kerouac's representation as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums' correspondence with my brother Bernard [see On The Dharma Bum(s) With the Hemensley Brothers elsewhere on this blog], which has returned me to Snyder's poetry (especially his take on Han Shan) and from there right to the T'ang dynasty poets and thinking about Taoism vis a vis Buddhism...
What else? Returning to the poetry & music theme : a marvellous feature of the programme for the launching of Kathryn Hamann's Saint Moon (from Richard Hillman's Sidewalk Books), at St Dunstan's Anglican Church, Camberwell (April 22/07), was her daughter Judith's perfect playing of the exquisite piece for cello by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks... Ignoramus that I am, I'd not heard of Vasks, but immediately felt this was the territory of Arvo Part, Aulis Sallinen... Apropos science & sociology meeting poetry (as per Brett & Sinclair above), Sue Stanford's speech was strung (more cello?) between social history & mythology. Most striking was the particularly threatening portrait she drew of the cultural & political milieu for the Australian family of the 50s & 60s ,from which the poet Kathryn Hamann emerges. Sue Stanford was relating the ramifications of attitudes of the day to the life of the family, suggesting that the poems in Saint Moon were an urgent recapitulation of such general & particular trauma. That sounds dry but it was a scintillating address...

May 3rd, 2007