KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 14

LAUNCH SPEECH for SALT-LICK QUARTERLY, volume 4; 13th March,2004 at Dante's Restaurant, Fitzroy, Melbourne.

I dedicate my comments this evening to the memory of Cid Corman. Paul Croucher, one of the founders of Salt-Lick, rang me this afternoon with the sad news that Corman died on 12th March, 6 a.m., Japanese time. For several weeks he's been in & out of coma.

"Death always
reminding
us - a breath

is a breath

The sound and
spirit of
a poet."
[Corman]

Corman was one of the great editors. When the best of his magazine,Origin, was published about 30 years ago as The Gist of Origin, everyone could see what a grand job it had done --providing a platform for the inheritors of the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tendency --chiefly Olson & Creeley, the Black Mountain poets --and their colleagues & successors --all the way down to [contemporary] San Francisco poets like George Evans & our own Clive Faust, who lives quietly in Bendigo...

Corman also published important translations, ancient & modern, from the European languages & Japanese, Chinese. Whilst he supported Olson & co., he stuck by his own tastes & values against their hectoring & egotism --a bit of both of which rubbed off on me!

These days, with my bookseller's hat on, I will say that Salt-Lick is the best purely poetry magazine in Australia. But what would I have said thirty years ago? A magazine which just published poems without a literary or linguistic [poetic] programme? Wasnt that what the "new poetry" & the "new poets" wanted to transcend? Didnt we think of that sort of thing as the merely literary, the journeyman mainstream? I remember --at least I think I do --arguing the point with Michael Dugan in 1969, but I wouldnt these days --not since the '90s! Forgive me Michael...!

A whole lot of water under the bridge since the '60s & '70s. (In 1968 Michael & I published magazines, Our Glass & Crosscurrents, on different sides of the city, and until Ken Taylor told me, ignorant of one another! This event was the beginning of the "mini-mag explosion" --the rest is history!)

What I've learnt, since the '60s, is the limitation of any ideology --or certainly, the limited tenure of any ideology. In my own case, as editor/publisher & poet, I realised that the pursuit of a poetical-aesthetical & literary-political line eventually ran me into a massive cul-de-sac. I needed, personally, to re-think & re-read. I was never happier than in the late '80s, critiquing my philosophical & literary position. I felt re-born in the '90s, and I'm still reaping the benefits.

As far as I was concerned [after that re-think], postmodernism (the catch-cry of the '70s & '80s) meant, at the very least, the re-admission of all the types of poetry which had been reduced or thought to be debased & therefore excluded in the time of the ascendancy of Modernism. This meant my experiments as a poet could now also include the traditional forms & privileges of poetry in addition to all of the gifts of the wonderful adventure of free-verse from Whitman & Rimbaud to the present.

Salt-Lick is a magazine whose take on poetry & poetics is pluralist. Whatever is meant by that blurb I've read which describes Salt-Lick as "favouring Australian free-verse", it's clear Salt-Lick actually publishes poets of most tendencies writing today --it publishes poems which stand up as poems in themselves (in the very way Jenny Harrison discussed in her judge's report for the [Melbourne Poets' Union] National Poetry Prize earlier this year), poems which are self-sufficient whatever their formal or experimental entry-point.

Salt-Lick is a magazine whose production values are those of the finely printed poetry-book. Poets & poems are treated to elegant design --readers are given the best chance to enjoy the work.

Salt-Lick is a magazine with a Melbourne address. It's our magazine! Melbourne poets or Melbourne-gravitating poets regularly get into it; poets of every type, including the no-type-at-all (who seem to me to be finding form for their spoken, spieling poems)!

Salt-Lick has an e-mail address & a website. Overseas poets, presumably correspondents of the magazine, also publish in Salt-Lick. This throws up another interesting discussion. When I was actively publishing & reviewing, between the late'60s & mid-'80s, I was described as an internationalist. But it's apparent that in the age of the World Wide Web, "international" either goes without saying or "local" includes the www potential wherever one happens to be. Perhaps international, in the sense of anti-parochial, trans-national, is almost beside the point nowadays?

Salt-Lick, then, is quite obviously a Melbourne-based magazine, featuring a great range of the elite, the up & coming and the quite new poets & poetry in Australia. It is local, but it is also in the world --it receives the world into its Melbourne & Australian hospitality.

This fourth issue has changed the colour of its cover, from different shades of grey to bright red, but not the colour of its generous project. The contents page reveals the proverbial embarrassment of riches : Douglas Barbour, Peter Rose, Adrienne Eberhard, Jane Gibian, Peter Boyle, Earl Livings...Lorin Ford again!...Myron Lysenko ("biggest storm / in a hundred years - / i sleep through it" ; "too much beer / i lie in bed / & almost see something") --ah, divine!

We have four contributors to this fourth issue to read today --John Mateer, Sandra Hill [now Fitts], Ross Donlon & Danny Huppatz.

We dont have with us either Margie Cronin or Rae Desmond Jones --amongst many others --who are interstate, overseas, otherwise engaged. I'd like to offer something of these. MTC Cronin's poem, "Inviting Rain, after Tu Fu, for Kris Hemensley", includes words of mine from an e-mail exchange between us : "The man said / he is wearing his dead son / like a cloak of air"... Notwithstanding that [the sad & awful reference as well as the kind acknowledgment to myself], it's an intriguingly complex poem from a prolific & ingenious poet... Rae Desmond Jones' poem has a wonderful colloquial purr, like its subject, Dean Martin. ['"i can stay for one song" he murmurs "then i gotta go." / he turns & crosses lackey street but the kids on their skateboards don't know him. / as he passes the dribbling fountain the drunk on the bench opens one eye & watches / him wander out among the cars whispering inaudible as angels in the darkness."] His contribution allows us to recall his place in the 1970s little-magazine culture, care of the inimitable Your Friendly Fascist [the magazine he edited in Sydney], but that's yet another story...

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[This launching-speech was published in Ralph Wessman et al's Famous Reporter, #29 (June 2004). It caught a few typos, subsequently attended to with elegant correction slip.]