ALL THE GOSS (July 12, 2007)

Down at the Basement one day, during our time in the Flinders Street shop, Kevin Hart greeted me with the wry comment, so who's died today? The Shop's a veritable mausoleum, he chuckled. Surrounded by the great Dead, difficult to avoid --but Kevin meant my habit of writing a R.I.P. for the local & overseas poets as news of their demise occurred. Joking aside, I suppose I could be accused of morbidity were it not for the celebration the Shop is supposed to be --celebration of the world of poetry & poets, of today & throughout the ages. The R.I.P., then, is a version of that celebration. For readers & lovers of poetry, Kevin might have been inferring, it doesnt really matter whether the poet is alive or dead --it's the poem that counts. Quite so. But in the community poets make, the poet is a social person to whom one is personally, professionally, emotionally connected and so the matter of being alive or dead is important!
In recent years I've realized that with my aging, funerals & memorials will increase as the generation of my elders passes on. It's an inevitability one accepts. A little harder are the premature deaths --illness, accident, perils of the world. Even so, shock is tempered by the overall inevitability --never if, but when (thus Donne, Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee).
Three recent memorials in my mind now --for Joyce Lee, Amanda Wilson & Ted Lord. 93, 45, 65...
Different kinds of parties, but parties all the same --readings/launchings, funerals/memorials. Spirit of "despite it all" & "against oblivion" --here we are, together, holding together, hearing one another, persevering, continuing, alive & dead, for ever & ever...
Words of Amanda Wilson, read by Patrick Boyle at the La Mama memorial, "I believe in the life everlasting" --confident that she's carried by her children, requiring her larger family to carry them on, carry her on... Which of course is the obligation one rises to, expressing it or not, --one knows that's the truth of the words one trots out, "connection", "connectivity"... No better bunch, I've always thought, than the poets to prove memory's palpable, and no better way to do it than by living to the fullest of whatever one's desire & prospect may be..
All the emotions, then --triggers, too, whether it be the language of remembrance or surge of sadness on one's own behalf or for one's own.The contradictions --diminished, replenished...