tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18152039812208318592024-03-05T20:26:23.050+11:00poetry & ideascollectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.comBlogger206125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-51597342658769537932020-09-20T11:00:00.000+10:002020-09-20T11:00:17.909+10:00TOPOGRAPHY<p><b>TOPOGRAPHY</b><i><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa fgxwclzu a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"></span></i></p><div class="kvgmc6g5 cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><i>13-09-20</i></div></div><p></p><div class="" dir="auto"><div class="ecm0bbzt hv4rvrfc ihqw7lf3 dati1w0a" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id="jsc_c_j"><div class="j83agx80 cbu4d94t ew0dbk1b irj2b8pg"><div class="qzhwtbm6 knvmm38d"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa fgxwclzu a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">[GOING NOWHERE] ’s all here</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">in the sun —side-door open & radio on </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">endless Sunday-morning reggae (1965 London</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Blue Beat memories —“Little Millie’s nothing”</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">hustler David teaching me —swore by Prince Buster &</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Derek Morgan —got me listening to the brass —but who was</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">David’s big man? somebody Randolph? Rudolph someone? —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">‘ts’all there in first ‘novel’ ’s (lost?) hand-written pages —hah! </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">(the take-away coffee’s 4 Beans Cafe —250 metres</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">up road past the Church —same two women of the probably</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">every day drinking their’s & chatting sat on low church-wall</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">hidden from lockdown’s spies’ eyes in Walker Street’s</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">cul-de-sac —coffee’s endless —like James Ellis’s</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">endless song of endless country road whose</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">You Tube clip Cathy’s sent me from Laos —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Dunhill-backy chewin’ Camp-kawfee drinkin’ spice</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">of life in his country voice —(The Lockdown’s</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">like 30s 40s 50s black & white pics</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">of headscarfed women chin-wagging in the sun —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Aunt Lydia in Lyons par example —early ‘60s snap —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">her host one-armed mosaic-artist whose daughter </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">came next summer to England providing Aunt Lydia</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">match-making opportunity —nephew (moi!)</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">& dark-haired dark-eyed French beauty —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">chaste kiss on cheek Aunt admonished me —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">the French way (dry) —“nothing dirty” —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Uncle Jim picked us up from our film date—</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">kept eye on us in the driver’s mirror —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">“should’ve seen ‘em!” reported to Aunt Lydia —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Astrid insisted love —pressed kisses on me in the cinema —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">called me my middle name ’Alan’ instead of ‘Christopher’ —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">(Aunty Lod prepared Greek coffee for herself —the Camp </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">for Uncle Jim —before Nescafe arrived on the shelf —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">long time ago —had his own teeth then</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">or kept the false set in (mosquitos in</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">the backyard now —time to go inside —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">small dragonfly settles on half house-brick</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">(having lost the knack of literary construction</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">or temporarily cancelled it —the higher cadence</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">or tra-la-la once called it —abandoned for common</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">speech —thinking aloud = talking —Geraldine’s</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">exasperation at the style of my contribution</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">for her British anthology —“as tho just sat down</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">& wrote it?” (Denis offers ‘fortitude’ in his daily</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Chinese calligraphy —i interpolate ‘in lieu</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">of the rhyme & rhythm of the time of plenty’</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">yet we all ameliorate —finding on-high’s </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">elegance via charitable chat (hah! perhaps that’s</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">what Eshleman meant by ‘gravelly’ as tho as poet </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">didnt indulge similar familiarity —‘gravelly’ his</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">editorial castigation ca 1970 of poems i sent him </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">hoping i’d get into Caterpillar magazine —ah! —</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">and that’s OK! or now it is!</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">fifty years down the old track</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">fifty years if it’s a day!</div></div></span></div></div></div></div>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-61760169583514207492019-04-12T13:40:00.035+10:002020-08-30T13:32:22.697+10:00MARCH 2018, around & about This Writing Life<p><br />
<b><b>17/3</b></b><br />
<br />
<b>THIS WRITING LIFE</b><br />
<br />
Our
generation lucky or not to be born within social reach (meeting,
correspondence) of giants? I call them giants but could be in democratic
era that's considered nonsensical. Continue : "In our era the
necessary pleasure of reading…" : i mean, so much to read, to have to
read as cultural & social responsibility, merely to stay with
the culture, the language, --such reading & learning equal in
our era to writing itself (aside : thus 'criticism' has become the
abundant category that it is). Was it ever different? Earlier times
there was reading & writing but (joke) no tv. Film crowds upon
our attention (include the internet). Once upon a time no such or degree
of distraction, though the younger, the newer (technologically
speaking) wouldn't accept that demarcation, couldn't recognise it in
such terms. Reminded of Olson in the Maximus,<br />
<br />
<i>“colored pictures</i><br />
<i>of all things to eat: dirty</i><br />
<i>postcards</i><br />
<i>And words, words, words</i><br />
<i>all over everything</i><br />
<i>No eyes or ears left</i><br />
<i>to do their own doings (all</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>including the mind, that worker on what is</i><br />
<i>And that other sense</i><br />
<i>made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched,</i><br />
<i>that consolation (greased</i><br />
<i>lulled</i><br />
<i>even the street-cars</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>song”</i><br />
<br />
--Yes! --words words words, like
advertisement, consumers instead of citizens & even artists
sucked in, but words in my sense still special, --Olson's repetition
summons inflation as the bastard figure, the too much of everything, the
too little of the special thing (the words of clarity, the clear image,
the clean mark)… The younger, the newer, appear to accept that clamour
& bilge, while ourselves of the older mob read & write
despite it…<br />
<br />
Our friend Trimble's unprejudiced in his
enthusiasms --ALL GREAT! --Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, Kerouac,
Steinbeck, Bukowski --George Johnston he also mentioned last time we
spoke --my own belated discovery of 2017 --the modernism of <b><i>'Clean Straw For Nothing'</i></b>
astonished me --(aside : instructive that many will refer to novelists,
prose writers, as examples of greatness which begs the question of form
& meaning especially as their mentors are realists whose
narratives bear the weight of testimony, the singular subjectivity
intersecting with the story of the times --testimony, reportage,
description, the gravitas of document (that it is specific) over
& against the amplitude of language & the play of the
imagination…) --the modernism to include disinclination to rot in the
ephemeral, the parochial, but let's stress (Correction:) the local isn't
the enemy --the enemy is volunteering for impoverishment (given an
inkling of the possible glory)! --(Clarification:) meaning not city
preferred to suburban norm, forest for farm & et cetera, but
recognising that one's own natural creativity can better prosper in
alternative milieu (unsure whether the 'intensity' i'd like to apply
relates to the inner drive or to the physical context) --dramatic
landscapes, intense (intensive) cultures? Yet nothing so easily
objectified, except one knows when one's rotting & not blooming!
--But then an example's presented of an artist, poet, who lives in
isolation, (place, temperament), and makes an art of it (isolation,
concentration, their metier), with no distraction but weather, stars,
sea, hills, harbour, fields, village. (Posit the ephemerality of the
city versus the seeming unchangingness of the country --and the opposing
art & poetry of & within that dichotomy, tho, insist,
far from absolute.) Such a one never doubts their place, is carried by
soul's immersion in the all-that-is of a concentrated world --the entire
situation & experience is soul --which isn't impoverishment at
all --is liberation, paradise!<br />
<br />
Ah, giants of my
eclectic pantheon, as they trip off my tongue, four (could’ve been 40!)
at random --Frank Prince (vividly recalled in Mark Ford's review of Will
May's anthology, Reading F. T. Prince (Liverpool, '16), photo-copy from
the LRB brought to me the other day by Stephen Hamilton who'd
remembered the <i><b>Frank & Me</b></i> section in my book, <b>Your Scratch Entourage</b>
(Cordite, '16) & rightly thought i'd be interested! --&
Ken Irby, whose notes on the late Gerrit Lansing i've reread recently;
--& Jack Collom; --& flicked at Haniel Long this hour, <i><b>Pittsburgh Memoranda </b></i>(Univ.
of Pittsburg, 1990), --"Our forefathers were pioneers. / So are we."
his history begins --Reznikoff in my mind but book’s flyleaf notes
Whitman, Anderson, Dos Passos, Edgar Lee Masters --and Creeley too?
--"our fathers died victorious over the outward. / Peace to them.
Courage to us, / who fight not Indians but insanity. / We go quietly;
there is much to do, / but nothing to do without going quietly. //
Living rooms, bedrooms, court-houses, / banks, asylums, / are no more
mysterious than the out of doors; / we shall know them and ourselves who
dwell in them, / and what the shapes that dwell in the wilderness /
within us all." --Pioneers, that’s right --as we still are, scuffing
around the feet of giants…<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>ROB SHACKNE</b></i>:-- <i><b>TOPOGRAPHIES</b></i>.
I just read it. With pleasure. More of course than road signs. In the
American experience the trip is the assumption, and the stops are
experience. The journeys end variously? <i><b>KRIS HEMENSLEY </b></i>:--
Love an implication in yours of material & metaphysical
equation/distinction... yes, the trip is the carriage, the means of
volition, but for me that speeding along matches the speed of mind and
what's observed that too is prime experience!<br />
<br />
I havent
'tagged' the named friends above not wishing to dump on their pages, but
can call them here , i think, without greater annoyance : Pete Spence
and Stephen Ellis. Re- idea of that English/American late 60s monograph
i'm thinking of David Caddy & Ian Brinton. And for remarking the
kinship with Jack Collom, Sharon Thesen. And Stephen Spooner &
Ken Trimble for the other Jack, and Bernard Hemensley for the Japhy! Had
better stop rollcalling here o/wise it'll resemble the Genesis
begets...!<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>From the Journal</b><br />
<br />
Pete
Spence's visit today, Feb 28th, coincided with delivery of small
shipment from the States which included the anthology mentioned to me
some months ago by Stephen Ellis, namely <i><b>WHAT IS</b></i> <i><b>POETRY? (JUST KIDDING)</b></i>,
edited by Anselm Berrigan (Wave Books, 2017) containing numerous
interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter, 1983-2009, and in
particular (the point of Stephen's tip) the interview with Jack Collom… I
save up the Collom for later; make this five-minutes' appetiser Larry
Fagin (memo to English friends : essay on the Americans in England, mid
to late 60s, and the English in the States same period, annotated with
photos tho cameras not everywhere then like today --but what a great
monograph that would be)… <br />
<br />
This package mainly a Jack
Collom catch-up ("who said ketchup? asks the other Jack, joking of
course, as always when there's piety to contend with, Japhy's, dressed
up as rigour"), for example Collom's poetry-exercises for children, <i><b>POETRY EVERYWHERE </b></i>(at first flick recalls Kenneth Koch's great book from the 70s, <i><b>"Wishes, Lies & Dreams</b></i>"). We looked at the Collom/Lyn Hejinian collaborations, <i><b>SITUATIONS, SINGS</b></i>, wch hasnt been on our shelf for a few years, but didnt unpack the collaboration with Reed Bye, <i><b>ADDLED SMOKE MATERIAL</b></i>,
Collaborative Poems, 1972-2017, till after Pete's departure for the SLV
(the beautiful Johanna Drucker limited edition in his hand to flap at
Richard Overall who knows a unique book when he sees one). Just to say <i><b>ADDLED SMOKE</b></i> (published by Baksun Books & Arts, Boulder) knocks my socks off! especially or primarily, "<i><b>Valvoline</b></i>" which is a 'topography' in all but name! I rise to it with amazement! joyfully!<br />
<br />
<i><b>Valvoline</b></i> ("written in '84 over a 3 day drive from New York City to Boulder, Colorado…') --yes siree, a <b>TOPOGRAPHY</b>…
The volition, carriage, what's thought on drive through the world,
what's seen of the world, what's read, heard, thought as one barrels
along highways & byways. Impeccable collaboration because it
reads seamlessly, as tho the one narrative, the two authors subsumed
within the variety & excitement of the journey, calling up the
other as monologue would address self or reader, self as reader, in the
perfection (the perfect text) of the journey…<br />
<br />
My <i><b>Topographies</b></i>
are just as notational, gleeful in their picking of road signs,
annotation of geography, but use rhymes as, maybe, endless scat, the
more likely to implicate writing in the thinking-aloud --so they're
"writing" despite "not writing"! --hesitate to say 'more' writerly since
American poets' gift has been the spoken rhythms, language as speech
before its reassembling as poem on the page.<br />
<br />
Begins <br />
<br />
<i>"12:15 Mon, noon, June 25</i><br />
<i>Reed and I leave in silver pickup truck</i><br />
<i>north thru East Village</i><br />
<i>Anne and Ambrose on sidewalk</i><br />
<i>I feel sick but cheerful</i><br />
<i>Chrysler Bldg. top in sunlite</i><br />
<i>FDR drive and river breeze"</i><br />
<br />
and ends what looks like 800 lines later, 24 small pages,<br />
<br />
<i>"down into Boulder Valley</i><br />
<i>Sugarloaf visible</i><br />
<i>past purplebrown pond</i><br />
<i>ringed w/ russian olive &</i><br />
<i>1 buffalo</i><br />
<i>Boulder 12</i><br />
<i>the hills emerge & tilt & shift</i><br />
<i>as we roll on a little</i><br />
<i>dream of detail</i><br />
<i>down the road</i><br />
<i>snow peaks sink</i><br />
<i>behind the blue-green foothills</i><br />
<i>down to a daily brown---</i><br />
<i>on the diagonal into town</i><br />
<i>Mt. Sanitas like a piece of cake</i><br />
<i>"feel like I should go trim a tree</i><br />
<i>or something"</i><br />
<i>says Reed,</i><br />
<i>mutters something abt.</i><br />
<i>the Pacific Ocean</i><br />
<br />
---<i>NYC to Boulder, 6/25-28/1984</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>17/3</b><br />
<br />
<b>Philip Harvey</b> :-- '<i><b>Big Sur</b>'
was a revelation. It's the tipping point, isn't it? The romantic
highlife has reached its peak and is going down the other side. It's a
gentle book and not surprising Gary Snyder is a presence. There's a
point where you must stop idealising Jack Kerouac. He helps you in 'Big
Sur'. Why does he drink? Why does he mess himself up? Why is he so
alone? Any reader has to come to terms with the burn out, which
continues all the way through to his death. It's not pretty and it's not
romantic. The Kerouac I return to is the poetry, '<b>Mexico City Blues</b>' and all that, where things hang in the balance.</i><br />
<br />
<b>[18/3]</b> Dragged off my hold duties on
the Fairstar in '65, i was given little kiosk on the tourist deck to run
(previous experience as British Rail booking clerk stood me in good
stead), and amongst the paperback books i had for sale was <b>Big Sur</b>! The
first Kerouac i owned, the first i'd read (tho i knew his name) : <i>"the
story of the crack up of the King of the Beats"</i>. Hauntingly brilliant.
Idealising? Yes, well for me it was a life literature, and i loved the
characters and the story like i loved life itself... or 'loved', maybe
say i held to the characters like i'd hold to life! No choice! Gary
Snyder i have a continuing to & fro on & with... Jarry Wagner in
that book!<br />
Thanks very much for your comment, Philip...<br />
PS// i'd certainly recommend a read of Lew Welch if
you havent already, as a foil to Snyder... the three Reed College mates
Snyder, Whalen, Welch... And do look up Jerry Martien's essay on Welch ,
a PDF via Google; best thing ive read on the poet, the man, the
'bioregionalist' et al<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<b>Regarding Kerouac & Welch, With Stephen Spooner, Jerry Martien </b><br />
<br />
<b>K H</b> :--A surprise to see youve shared the new "<b>This Writing Life</b>"
to your own page, Stephen Spooner, ... but want to tell you that in
earlier communication, on Bernard Hemensley 's Timeline (but gone
now), i'd highlighted particularly relevant line from your Kerouac
piece of couple of years ago, describing Kerouac & Lew Welch,
--"<i>Bigfoot had only been to Northern California once long enough to
check out Jack and Lew Welch in their Big Sur alcoholic nightmares,Jack
was all too quiet for the kind of hallucinogenic drugs Jack was taking,
port wine,port wine.Dt’s,Dt’s.It was time for Jack to relax at the hot
rod wheel drink a gallon or two of cheap port and grope for the meaning
in the perplexing highways of the mind</i>" --but also attempted to
share link i'd found by poet Jerry Martien (ex Alaska, presently in
California) on Lew Welch, an essay available as PDF (the link wdnt
copy), so you'd have to look up Lew Welch on Google and on 2nd page of
entries you'll find the reference --<i><b>Big Bridge</b></i> &
something or other -- in wch J M describes particular stretch of river
he visits, well known to Welch, a recovery place you cld call it, from
the very nightmares you touch on in yours... But i hadnt known the whole
story before, until reading Jerry Martien's essay...<br />
Check it out! In the meantime, greetings from Down Under!<br />
<br />
<b>Stephen Spooner</b>:-- and so Jerry Martiens what a nice tip...now it's time for me to read a while...<br />
<br />
[Stephen sent poem by Lew Welch:<br />
<br />
<i><b>Sausalito Trash Prayer</b></i><br />
<br />
<i>Sausalito,<br />Little Willow,<br />Perfect Beach by the last Bay<br />in the world,<br />None more beautiful,<br />Today we kneel at thy feet<br />And curse the men who have misused you<br /><br />(VII: 69)]</i><br />
<br />
<b>K H </b>:-- Isnt that lovely! Where'd you find that? Thank you... Hmmm...<br />
Dont
want to tarnish the glow of it but here's a sentence or two from the
Jerry Martien re- Kerouac & Lew; he writes abt Lew, Lenore
Kandel and the <i><b>"Big Sur</b></i>" episode :<br />
"<i>For a couple
of years they share the intense cultural life of the Haight-Ashbury and
the communal life of East-West House, living the wild scenes described
by Kerouac’s Big Sur, where they are Dave Wain and Romana Swartz.
Something of their sweet impossibility is expressed by their saving to
buy a commercial fishing boat, her with earnings from belly-dancing, his
from driving cab in the off-season. When they agree to separate in
spring of ’62 he’s without a settled livelihood and suffering severe
depression, relieved only by speed, weed, and jug wine. He goes to a
shrink, struggles to get sober, returns alone to Ferlinghetti’s cabin at
Big Sur where he eats peyote and desperately seeks a vision—but the
summer of revelation and nightmare leaves him sick and terminally strung
out. The Salmon River is his last chance."</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<b>19/3</b><br />
<br />
Hi
John [Shao / John Thorpe], thanks for what F/b now calls a
"reaction"!!!! Youre still big in my heart albeit so long ago , 47 years
& counting! Spence has evidently pulled you via his "Bolinas"
quip out of the aether!<br />
x Kris H<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>22/3</b><br />
<br />
[To Jerry Martien] Thanks
for connecting with me here Jerry Martien. And say again how valuable i
found your essay on Lew Welch (found via Google a week or so ago). Ive
recommended it now several times to Australian & American
friends.<br />
Still hoping to get couple of your own poetry collections to my bookshop tho disappointed not carried by our wholesaler, Ingram.<br />
Best wishes from Melbourne! Kris Hemensley<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><b>oOo</b><br />
</b><br />
<b> </b></p><p><b>25/3</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Ah
and hah Stephen Ellis! Thanks for this... as per the degree of paradox
you plumb here, good for me to read tho cannot have! Suddenly Prynne
pops into my noggin, --in mine not yours, just sayin'... <i>"Singleness is emphatically not to line up as showing the individual at the helm"</i> ...Much to think about ('unpack" eek), and will get back to you... (straight, no italics!)<br />
Kris<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<b> </b></p><p><b>30/3</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Haha! Yes, the wit of it! <b>"READ ON"</b> (cover art by Aaron Flores), Pete's mag & everything to do of course with the joyous Kyneton visit yesterday --"<i>the 3rd One-off magazine i have produced</i>"
Pete writes, hot off the press. Old & new friends in this mag,
discoveries (Mitch Highfill, Barbara Henning), Australian, American, all
local to Spence because reading & correspondence his modus
operandi, so natural, and step by step with WCW's well-known sense of
the experience of the little mag as walking along the street meeting
friends & colleagues. A little mag, 36 pages, and i'm happy to
declare my bias, one old & one new poem included, my pleasure of
being in it!<br />
Our ed says he doesnt pursue a "<i>one school approach</i>", and i'm sure that's so, but have to say i like the idea of sitting with <i>particular</i>
Americans, New York-y in the widest (sometimes wildest) sense,
--especially now when age disposes one to recapitulation --Gerard
Malanga's elegiac surveys in this mag for example, as in a previous <b>Have Your Chill</b>, appear part of one's own song & chronicle...<br />
I saw an opportunity to resurrect poem for Bill Berkson (written in 1974, originally published in <i><b>A Mile From Poetry</b></i>,
1979) wch maybe he never saw? --written, lost to manuscript wch took
five years to be published, and did a copy of the book ever get to the
States? --but now in such a mag as Pete's, Elysian Fields-ish, it can be
read by Bill's friends, by readers for whom Bill 's a ready
reference... something like that...<br />
Closer to home catch up with Cam Lowe, Gig Ryan, Glenn Cooper, Chris Barron...<br />
Now Read On indeed..!<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<b>30/3</b><br />
<br />
Hi Stephen Spooner, nice to listen to... performer's resonant voice...
Interesting poem by Snyder but as ever, i confess, am never quite sure
what he's saying! I guess one's to accept he's proposing an equanimity,
an equality in fullness of time... and yet... Easter greetings by the
way... especially today, Holy Friday, at the start of the Passion...<br />
All best to you & yours, kris<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>30/3</b><br />
<br />
<br />
...with the rider, Stephen Ellis, description of poem isnt the poem
itself, the which (bless you) is as mysterious as life is! --for any of
us going <b>further</b> (Kesey) /<b> father</b> (McNaughton) --huh? what that i'm sayin?! --& havent yet said how beautiful is that line, "<i>despite / unwavering belief in / semiotic majesty"</i>...so, please no confirmation but with you in affirmation...!<br />
Easter Greetings in midst of the Passion,<br />
--best, Kris<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>oOo</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>31/3/18</b><br />
<br />
Response to Sharon Thesen's share of my Kyneton post of March, 29th :<br />
<br />
"Hi Sharon, A pleasant surprise to find me here, ahead of myself as it were! Ta for sharing. <br />
Similar surprise was to encounter you in early copies of<b> Raddle Moon</b>
ive found as i rummage, sort, pack books & mags at the Shop
(with the end of the year removal of stock to my bookshop-in-the-treetop
in mind)…<br />
A propos is opening of yr poem The Stone, in Raddle Moon #3,<br />
<i>"Good Friday, fragile / in the mirror, passion / in the music / on the slow radio"</i><br />
--amazed i should be reading it on Good Friday, 2018! <br />
Then in <b>Raddle Moon</b>, #2, Oct'84, read J Barton's review of <b><i>Holding the Pose </i></b>(Coach House, '83), first line of wch makes the heart jump :<i> "At last a poet of talent and potential lives among us."</i><br />
<br />
Easter Greetings to you & yours from Melbourne! <br />
Kris H<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</p>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-32547037636247293502018-02-13T01:31:00.000+11:002018-02-13T07:44:04.741+11:00OCTOBER & NOVEMBER 2017 TIMELINE WRITINGS, SAVED FROM OBLIVION<i><b>Nov, '17</b></i><br />
<i><b>TO STEPHEN ELLIS</b></i><br />
<i>"Hi Stephen, In a message to him I'd described ex-Sydney poet Alan Jefferies' poem about the late John Forbes (in Spence's mag Oz Burp) as a play between transparency [plain speech] & syncopation [linear & spatial rhythms], and same idea came up reading yours --all youve been posting here, remarkably every day it seems -- that certain relation ('sort of', 'kind of') so not certain at all! --uncertain relation then --the double binds which move at the centre of the poem, as tho the gist, --the political, for example, "not to blame" --allied to history, grandparents as prophecy, immemorial time kept by every generation's ancients --and not to blame for ever further binds, for example smart's real limitation, re- your recent warning, so here "unaware // of the grain that the creative / advance of our / intelligent steps have crushed" --and, as you may intuit, i (holding against the debunking of imagery) simultaneously hear the complaint while rising on the music , for example, "I am my own grief" and, "walking / through wide grasslands / of paradise" ... Thanks for the good read. Kris Hemensley"</i><br />
<br />
<b>______________</b><br />
<br />
A week ago I'd seen Robert Podgurski's wonderful mountain photo shared on Stephen Ellis's Timeline, & messaged him abt it and the accompanying Pound quotation, "Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise" , noting the coincidence with the words of John Thorpe i'd sent to Stephen re- "what's possible is the wind…it's not wind, but the human sound of it" & etc… Robert graciously replied explaining his mountain experience, "Listening to the elements more carefully; they deserve a great amount of attention. But it takes time. Learning to just sit and be with them." I was reminded strongly of exchanges with the late John Anderson (d, 1997), recalling that "I offered once, after conversation, that if one was still enough, before the mountain, then the mountain would dance!" <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>__________________</b><br />
<br />
Something always seems to happen on a Friday --late morning, midday --Denis Smith on his way back from market or art shop, Pete Spence into town & delivering mags or his 'lending library' of very special books (eg the large Collom, a slim Heliczer), & then other people drop in too, thus the impromptu nature of these launches & celebrations! Nice to see Alan Jefferies today, discussing the performance scene vis a vis the writing-writers but more importantly how we maintain our own volition through a long life in poetry... But, CORNELIS VLEESKINS : wondrous example of a constant & voluminous practice! Celebrating today Pete's friendship/collaboration with him as much as anything else...<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>________________________</b><br />
<br />
<b>THE MELBOURNE CUP, 2017</b><br />
<i><b>November</b> 7th </i><br />
Beaten by a bloody head!! Ray in my ear as we watched it on the overhead tv at the Great Yorkshire Stingo this a/noon, the race that stops a nation (a holiday for a horse race? nah! really!!! only in Oz) --how could we not put a few bob on Johannes Vermeer! I'm so happy i scored again, every year i seem to do it, me! who knows nothing abt the noble sport! Well, Loretta & i caught the train down the line to North Richmond, then walked back up Hoddle to the appointed rendezvous... Ray & Terri were there, and Ken, and not too long afterwards the Harleys. John & Heather... an hour & a half of bonhomie and then the RACE! I punted $3 win & $2 place for six horses, one of whom, Johannes Vermeer, was beaten oh so close, into 2nd place... I collected eight bucks! but keeping up my record of a win or a place every Melbourne Cup... Terri won the trifecta but that's another story! The Harleys friend Trish, whom i thought might have been Lou Risdale, won too! Poets around their little table, talking about? --: recent poetry gigs, mention of Tina G and so cheers Tina! --talking about Mike Castro, Bede Griffiths, social / gender attitudes in the late 60s eg- Betty Burstall saying to Loretta that she'd be supporting the poet husband wldnt she? while he concentrated on his art... Haha! was funny then, crazy now! Counter culture evidently only went so far, i mean we were 21 and Betty another decade older, but she was talking out of an older perspective, elitist (no problem with that..) wherein writer/artist was to be supported... (my axiom, that art/literature scene is hierarchical but supremely democratic at point of entry... meaning anyone (everyone) an artist, poet, but one enters history, and should, one encounters immense world of merit, poets (note "poets' not poetry), meritable veritable poets) --but was woman artist supported by man at that time? not sure, i bet not!... admired Betty but surprised her when we said that wasnt our situation, the both of us had to get the rent in! --ah Betty Burstall, what a great thing you did with your junk shop/cafe/theatre in Faraday Street, Carlton, inspired by New York's off off off little theatre (Ellen Terry?)... hmm, what else we talked about, Ken mentions Kazantzakis as buddhist? didnt know that! --buddhist to travel to Moscow i guess! --beginning of Zorba recalls <i>Heart of Darkness</i>, sitting around in a hut waiting for a boat, waiting for weather to settle...<br />
<br />
<b>___________________________</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Hilarious pre-Melbourne Cup day at Collected Works Bookshop y'day, the traditional standing at the large window end of the hall overlooking Swanston Street for the Cup Parade around midday, --no Beads & Trims Mary this year, interstate holiday but an hour or so before then Ken had visited, on the heels of Richard Murphet, tho Richard not here for Cup stuff, our chat about life after cessation of the 9 to 5 paradigm, my vision of the Uncollected Works bookshop in treetop in 2019! --but we open the Talisker and the day starts! --joined at the window by Jen & mum Claire, Retrostar friends, wave down at the famous horses, trainers, from the recent past, and the you-beauty Cup itself, the bagpipes, the open roofed cars, the kids on rocking horses, roller skates, the reps & flags of all the countries represented --Australia, England, Ireland, Hong Kong, France, UAE, and what's that one? Turkey? says Ken --no , Lebanon says Jen's mum (we share Middle eastern connections), --ah, Lebanon, they may have beaten France in the Rugby League World Cup the other day? Rugby? says Jen's mum, they dont win at rugby, they win at war!-- and Sophia from <i><b>Brown & Bunting</b></i> bookshop in Northcote visits, books not horse race conversation! --i think we're alternating the Glenlivit & the Talisker ("Made by the sea", great pun) --and a woman who's popped in says Talisker's her favourite and she's from near the Isle of Skye, and i say Mckelvie brought us this one and he's from Dundee! --she wont have one but will consider a flutter on Nakeeta the Scottish horse ive mentioned, she's going to Oaks Day on Thursday, well timed Melbourne holiday & doesn't mind this weather compared to Scotland right now, constant reminder it's all relative! -- So now it's today, <i>THE</i> day, we've actually had a spell of sun, but clouds are moving in again, we'll be inside anyway so doesn't really matter, coldest Cup day for a decade they say --horses on my mind, including the philosophical ethical political issue of humans & animals, my bottom line is everyone & everything is someone & something else's meat, a thought wch may have risen in a piece on Inst of Further Studies newsletter early 70s, early 80s, carumba! where does the time go except back into immense sea of mind, --all the more reason for compassion, that is the only reason for compassion, no other context for it but vale of pain, suffering, through wch no choice but to walk, gently as possible whatever the rest of 'em do --drink to that --huge wad of races' information in the newspaper, thank God for the Cup lift-out --my glory day in 2015 when my 100 to 1, Prince of Penzance with Michelle Payne in the saddle, and won me $238 for a few dollars each way! --i think ive won a little last few years -- best win would have been back in 1965 last time the Hemensleys holidayed en famille, on the Isle of Wight, ancestral Tangley Lodge grandmother's house --for me just back from British Railways booking clerk job in London, the younger sibs still at school, Bernard at the Tech or just leaving, --i'd got into the habit of having a bet with booking clerk friends at the Ladbrokes or whichever betting shop around the corner from the booking office at Watford Junction --never won, but i think my friend Nick Buck did, --he's 'Nick York' for obvious reason in my <i><b>Peter Which Way</b></i> novel (unpublished & somewhat scattered now) and Fred Clarke the chief clerk, in locus parentis, kind eye on all the younger staff benevolent even when i made a mess of my acting station master duties at Bricket Wood on the St Albans to Watford loop line, gave us overtime for weeks after you left Nick told me! --but one rainy afternoon of that summer holiday, last one before i hitch-hiked in Europe then went to sea and then April 66 emigrated to Melbourne! --so forgive the luminosity i attach to that Isle of Wight holiday --raining, as i say, and horse-racing on the tv, we're sitting Bernard & i and the younger brother & sister, --a great horse-woman herself, great lover of horses, as close to family as family she'd agree, --drinking beer Bernard has bought from nearest off license, and we're watching the races, and just for fun we made selections, and UNBELIEVABLY my first one wins, and then i go for a double, and that wins, and then the treble, and that wins too! --incredible-- and we'd been talking about going down to a betting shop but the rain and all the other cowardly teenager excuses! --that would have been a HUGE win! --<br />
Sunshine again as i sit here --Melbourne Cup at Westgarth, years past, as Loretta says no one did it in those years, no one we knew anyway, --after her mother Stella's death, she'd invite her father, Jim Garvey from the typical Irish-Australian family --had horses in County Clare says Rett --grandfather, uncles --Great Uncle Michael the big punter --the 'Michael' of Tim Hemensley's name after him, Timothy Michael Hemensley --dreamt of him last night --he'd borrowed my computer wch Loretta didn't immediately tell me as i sat at desk trying to understand how the ridiculous machine before me actually worked --what is this? i demanded --it'll work she says --but this isn't my machine?!! --no, Tim's got it --whaaaaaat? --I go out to the back, shout up to him, upstairs in the loft, where he's sitting having breakfast with friends including Joel & a Matthew who i don't think is Matty Whittle --and i say to him, you could have asked! --and a bit more kindness & grace wouldn't go astray etc --ah well --but Tim would be with us on those Melbourne Cups, 80s? certainly through the 90s, --Robert K, Stella Glorie, Gay Hawkes once or twice, Frank Bren, other visitors, --we'd have lunch, snacks, wine, then all haul up the road to the nearest pub with betting facilities --the Normandy on Queens Parade? --place our bets, then hurry back to watch the race on telly --quite a crowd of us --the beginning of our tradition…<br />
Last several years it's been at the Stingo on Hoddle in Colingwood, where we'll be again in a couple of hours! --with John, Heather Mac, and now Ray, Ken, other friends --up for it whatever it is! Here's a shaft of sun again -- Better get myself together! Ring Clementa O'Brien in Bendigo, ask her for a tip, the best tipster she is --we'll exchange news abt Catherine far far away in Vientiane but i'll have pen & paper ready for Clementa's race wisdom! --and so --Tally Ho! see youse all there!<br />
<br />
<b>______________________________</b><br />
<br />
<br />
[from <b>Sharon Thesen </b>: <i>Hi Chris, Was reading some Jack Collom (Collum?) poems today online and thought of your work...very sim'lar, in deep ways!</i>]<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Kris Hemensley</b> <i>Me darlin Sharon (irish) (double take-- german?) Just back from the Melbourne Cup session at the Great Yorkshire Stingo in Collingwood, melb'n... real punters, us poets, and other bibs & bobs turning up including brilliant natural girl called Trish who'd seen Midnight Oil gig last night somewhere in town, the Myer Music Bowl? but i spun silly irriot story that Peter Garrett wld do his discombobulated dance at cabinet meetings, when he was the minister in the Labor govt..,etc... i did apologise to her later... just a joke i said... she'd won pretty big i think, had shouted (aussie parlance) a plate of this & that on adjacent table... Anyway--- Jack Collom : i have on loan <b>RED CAR GOES BY</b> from Pete Spence Jack's big selected (1955-2000) and am jumping in & out of it... What can i say, and on such (Melbourne Cup) on such a day! Love youse all, especially you xxx K</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><b>Stephen Ellis</b> I love Jack Collom. There's an interesting interview with him in that anthology Anselm Berrigan edited, called, 'What is poetry? (Just kidding, I know you know). And then, of course, there's one of my all-time favorite poems dedicated to Collom, by Duncan McNaughton, 'Little A and the Imperials' . . .</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><b> K H </b>:Hi Stephen , thanks for that... and parallel to the poetry i'm forever moved by the relations of poets, like here you refer me to Duncan McNaughton and i begin imagining a world spinning about him & Jack Collom... i'll look through his collections later today when i get back from the Shop, will be propitious to reread even if i dont have the actual poem... I dont know about the Anselm Berrigan anthology, have just looked it up on the Ingram catalogue and it's there from Wave Books, so i'll immediately order! Sounds excellent. Ta for the tip.</i><br />
<br />
<b>_____________________________</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Nov 9, '17</b><br />
<br />
[from <b>Topography</b>, '<i><b>Levertov'</b></i>, 3rd section]<br />
<br />
<i>preceding Rexroth & Williams in 1967</i><br />
<i>
Penguin Modern Poets number 9 --
whom historically she followed --
</i><br />
<i>forever that troika proclaimed</i><br />
<i>
on Alan Spain's photogram sun-bloodied-
fired cover-design</i><br />
<i>
as if feather trees & grasses back-lit by sunrise
</i><br />
<i>sunset green-flecked in world's black
</i><br />
<i>vortex or aflame (Creeley flits in-between</i><br />
<i>
fitful as theirs must be
poets at world's behest
</i><br />
<i>fists full of world emptying like dust in
</i><br />
<i>wind's rush everything falling away day in
</i><br />
<i>day out but</i><br />
<i>
mystically
'lost'
is not the end-
product (pace Olson
</i><br />
<i>to be found with Eliot &
Pound hob-nailed
</i><br />
<i>to ground relentlessly digging</i><br />
<i>
down down down
</i><br />
<i>to the centre of the truth
</i><br />
<i>the before & before & before
</i><br />
<i>whose after's ever now! (Duncan</i><br />
<i>
jumping at shadows as though natural</i><br />
<i>
positives & negatives
</i><br />
<i>were the shades</i><br />
<br />
<b>_____________________________</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Back from the Delphi, clean up the typos of the 3rd part (above), continue on the 4th (relating Levertov & Joanne Kyger).... Beautiful day... wash clothes & hang out to dry i think! --rather like poetry on Timeline! Thanks friends for liking the 3rd --it's another of the "---> going nowhere" <i><b>Topographies</b></i>, what i've been doing when i'm not on an actual journey somewhere!<br />
<br />
<b>Philip Harvey</b> : Recent piece on Denise Levertov by Carol O'Connor given last year at the The Carmelite Library in Middle Park; http://thecarmelitelibrary.blogspot.com.au/.../Denise...<br />
<br />
<b>K H</b> : Thanks for sending me Carol's paper --ive read through it but will require another slow digest! Hah! Yes --it's all there, so many formal contradictions to 'play' with through a long life, wch Carol describes... Needless to say D L was a favourite when i was a young poet... my 'Levertov' deals with that --deals with it as a piece of <i>bioboplicity</i> (as Mike Castro described a previous rave, on Lew Welch)... so my vanity is part of the arraignment! Thanks again!<br />
<br />
<b>Carol O'Connor</b> : Levertov is one of the very few women poets to make it into those early Penguin Modern Poets, I think.<br />
<br />
<b>Kris Hemensley</b> : Hi Carol, just to say In those days it wasnt an issue or not the issue as can be perceived today --ie we were interested in the New Poetry per se, 'gender' was to be, in hindsight, another generation's issue... a political generation's issue ... the "rights" generation... What did Denise think? Aware of being one of the few women or what? Statistically your point obviously accurate, but only later (the particular PMP vol is 1967) that the general political consciousness inflects/affects the discussion... The women of all the days up to Womens Liberation were first & foremost writers on par with the men of the PARTICULAR writing... the big fight was for the distinctively NEW WRITING.. i remember writing to Germaine for recommendations of new women poets for my magazine <i><b>Earth Ship</b></i>, 1970-72, in UK -- she was teaching at Warwick Univ then, -- i had her address from new writer friend, Martin Wright, very interesting prose writer, --she said there were too many to name... etc etc What happened afterwards --W L onwards i mean -- is most definitely within women's ambition & projection, and precisely where it has to be... self determination not 'positive discrimination' & etc , i mean art & literature arent departments of the public service, or what?!<br />
<br />
________________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Nov 5th, '17</b><br />
<br />
Best day for a train trip, Geelong, almost scuttled before we began, had to transfer to another train because of 'police operation', but resettle with coffee, escargot, notebook (for the Topography of course, & going somewhere instead of the <i>bioboplicities</i> -thanks Mike Castro for that title a few weeks ago!- my "going nowhere" sub series riffing the great Americans)... After the buzz of the packed-out Archibald exhibition + considerably quieter Fred Williams You Yangs mostly plein airs --i mean the crowds not the art! --walked around looking for a watering hole and finally --last chance-- found the Workers Club in a lane off Little Mallop --a live music venue with a bar! At last! sat down at bench facing through window large b&w spray painted portrait of androgynous long-hair wearing graffiti addition of green pellet hanging out of left nostril --nice touch! Coopers appeared to young barman to be off, flat as a tack he said, but the club's own Workers Draft was good he said --like a Carlton. Basket of chips with choice of three sauces. 80s bands piped into the bar. Steve Kilby. Other mildly interesting music (no wonder the harder rock returned just then, including our God boys, & Bored! et al). And then it's the Saints, bagpipes & all, Doc Neeson, "will I ever see your face again?". Now here's the thing : my pick for the Archibald is Jun Chen's portrait of Ray Hughes beaten by the Matisse-like Mitch Cairns famously criticised by John Olsen in the press, and John's own portrait by Nicholas Harding a pretty good one too --and Pru Flint's pastel beauty similarly memorable... Back home casually listening to a radio show on 3AW, singer Christa Hughes interview, closes with her "slowed down version" of the Saints song, Will I Ever See Your Face Again --Loretta says, you know that Christa Hughes is art dealer Ray Hughes' daughter? niece? granddaughter? Amazing! I'm the biggest investor in synchronicity but this takes the biscuit! What's going on?<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>__________________________</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>November 3, '17 at 7:59am</b> ·<br />
<br />
A great way into the new day : Denis Smith's cat (--& ive been wondering about the apparent different look of his Japanese cats and whether [if that was so] it rubs off on the style of his Melbourne cats?!) and Norman Finkelstein's lecture (on Vimeo) on the serial poem via Jack Spicer, wch in other words is about narrative or narrating (well, it is & it isnt, for me 'problematising' this & that not the issue it must be elsewhere, 'defusing or decentering the self eg) telling, wherever it may go --an invitation to expanse not really available locally? but ah, much of one's reading has been there, how one gets to here (hear!)... Ive left off listening to the lecture at the point Norman Finkelstein refers to Jerome Rothenberg's <i><b>Poland 1931</b></i> (hello Mark Olival-Bartley, forgive my inconstant correspondence!)... and now gotta get on...<br />
<br />
<b>Norman Finkelstein</b> : Amazing that the video is still available. How did you come upon it, Kris? What isn't indicated in the video is that it was a job talk--I was applying for an endowed chair at ASU (which I didn't get, but that turned out just fine). So interesting that it turns up after all these years...<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>_____________________________</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>28th October,</b> <b>17</b><br />
20th anniversary of our friend John Anderson's death... Liz Anderson reminded us mid-winter when she was looking for the recent <i>Puncher & Wattmann</i> anthology which includes her brother... he's also in the Gray/Lehmann book... Twenty years... Often thinking of him, remembering him today... thought of him yday when Melbourne history tour guide & author Meyer Eidelson popped in & was reminiscing about walks & digs on the Merri Creek with Bernie O'Regan (d 1996)... John accompanied Bernie sometimes, tho mostly a solitary walker... walker, dreamer, the poet of the Merri Creek...<br />
<br />
<br />
_________________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>21 October, 17</b><br />
<br />
After the big Ashbery Tribute night, sleeping with it, waking on it, but also the Kerouac anniversary today, and up to the writing desk to begin to type the piece ive been writing around & about <i><b>Desolation Angels</b></i> (isnt that funny : cover of my Andre Deutsch 1st ed, '66, by Michael Farrell! --the late Irish artist? i wonder --not our poet tho!) --as i have it in first paragraph/stanza (a la 'Desolation Angels') :---<br />
<i>"1
July August September Melbourne winter spring 1966 spotted DESOLATION ANGELS the silver-covered whopper Andre Deutsch hardback 1st British edition --just published --had to get it, my name on it! --no name in it now as i hold it, first end-papers gone, blotched & stained, damaged survivor of a book --but that's the story to tell</i><br />
<i>2
saw it in South Yarra bookshop --often looking in the window, not window-shopping but life-saving --penniless often as not --living off the titles, name of author, sight of the book, imagining the contents --KEROUAC! --but a little while before had entered the bookshop, browsed, put aside Lin Yutang volume purchased not long afterwards --the bookshop closer to South Yarra station on Toorak Road than to Punt Road? though image in my mind is more-or-less around the corner from terrace house in Park Street where i boarded, itself a hop & skip from the Botanical gardens, my 'Gardens of Sunlight', refuge from the slings & etc, where i'd lie out all day with inspirational reading & the notebook, writing, drawing, dreaming, longing
..."</i><br />
<br />
I'll type up tonight, several pages, post on blog & link on Timeline.
Yes, thoughts of Kerouac, --& i'm always disagreeing with Dorn's judgement an eternity ago that nothing more to be done in/with that mode, the proto anti-lyric i guess, mid 60s.<br />
<br />
________________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
Confirming & reminding : Friday, <b>20th October</b>, JOHN ASHBERY TRIBUTE, 6 for 6-30 at Collected Works!<br />
Up late last night looking for books & quotes & etc to take with me today so that I can sit pretty polly this evening as one of the panel assembled by Peter Rose for the John Ashbery Tribute at Collected Works Bookshop! In my head the beginning looms large, as beginnings always do! So out of that melange of first reading, and the wonderful coincidence of Ken Taylor (just met Winter 67 at Betty Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre) he also enthusing abt Ashbery, a particular poem & aspects of wch i'd found and revelled in, relished, --and then the Southampton,UK connections via Lee Harwood, & especially F T Prince's take,1970-72, but with FTP thru to the 90s and the years passing, the years the years, attrition, & the luminosity that dearests deaths bestows, --often the aching pleasure of life understood as on-the-run, grabbing what we can (deKooning's 'glimpse' --'glance' as opposed to full frontal model), all along till now : our Ashbery reading & talking tonight...<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>_______________________________</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Oct 20, '17</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Another poignant intriguing prose-piece post from Stephen Spooner on his Timeline today, on Kerouac, see my share below... --my reply, "<i>Thank you Stephen.... approaching that same "death afternoon" with you, 'Desolation Angels' my ride... I'll post on Saturday, finished it today at the Delphi (Greek) cafe my Thursday rostered-day-off pied-a-terre! Like very much your inside-out evocation-intersection with this hero... "The beat bop of phrenology not prediction or predestination" , yes, something to chew on tonight... Fraternally, Kris H"</i> <br />
<br />
--Also found this by Stephen D Edington on the Jack Kerouac Group site :--<br />
<i>"For those of you within hailing distance of Lowell (however you may define "hailing distance"), Lowell Celebrates Kerouac is sponsoring a Jack Kerouac Memorial Walk and Gathering this Saturday, October 21. [Jack died on October 21, 1969.] We'll meet at the Lowell Grotto at 6:00 p.m., proceed over to the site of the Moody Street "Watermelon Man" Bridge, and then go down Merrimack Street, making a stop at the St. Jeanne Baptiste Church where JK's funeral was held. We'll end up at The Old Worthen, where we'll toast Jack's memory, share thoughts on his life, etc. LCK will supply food--you purchase your own drinks. The Grotto is on Pawtucket Street just beyond the Archambault Funeral Home where Jack was waked. Hope to see some of you there!"</i><br />
Thanking Mr Edington for the atmospheric itinerary. Feels like we could be there even from this far away!<br />
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<b>Today, Sunday 15th October,</b> '<b>17</b><br />
<b> </b>from the Cathedral to Irish Murphy's Sturt St, Ballarat, en route the Gallery... settle at table in the beautiful public bar, wall notice beside us, "<i>Live Craic, This Weekend, Irish Folk & More! The O'Dowds 2-30 / 5-30"</i>... Must be them by the stage... abandon their grub, begin tuning up, pipe & guitar, hybrid Celtic & country... "Bewitched" on the bar's high on the wall t.v., and then "Little Big Shots" --would the O'Dowds qualify? Big Little Shots? Little Bog Shites? Biggles Short Legs? ...First Guinness for an eternity, maybe not since previous visit to Ballarat --the huge Kevin Lincoln retrospective, winter, 2015? No, dont be daft... last Bloomsday of course! The O'Dowds, she's on piano now, Conway Twitty, belt out a Ballarat version of 'Dirty Old Town', where he met his missus... Nathan Curnow photo on poster in town for November poetry reading (N C + Geoffrey Williams)... Nathan's familiar face like the Pogues' Christmas song the O'Dowds may be ending their sound-check with. Nope --a little thing by Cindy Lauper, he announces. Yep! "Time After (bloody) Time"! Guinness drank, garlic bread eaten, time to go...<br />
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<b>October 10, '17 </b>·<br />
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Giona B. reminds us last day or so that it wld have been Franco's 80th b/day... yes... the usual exclamations, happy/sad amazement etc (And Giona Beltramettis own birthday on his dad's heels...) Saw this morning comment from Louise Landes Levi, with whom briefly corresponded some years ago, --<i>"I think same as ever miss him, of course, reread Han Shan, brought up his name at a Beat Conference in Paris, his brilliant translation of Gary's work, then reread the whole, translator named RED PINE......x"</i> --beautiful connection, so apt for Franco...<br />
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<b>October 4, '17 ·</b><br />
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For all of bookselling's rubs there's always the good chance of very special meetings with readers, authors, fellow poets, publishers et al... Yesterday met Jim McCue at the Shop, & quickly found out he's the coeditor, with Christopher Ricks, of the Annotated Eliot currently winning praises & prizes! Didnt know him from Adam of course so first words were his enquiring what music i was playing on poor old stereo --Hayden or late Mozart? he asked. The 'Surprise', i said. Next he said something abt the Faber edition of Eliot and we were in! into it! Wonderful crisscrossing : the Laurence Whistler glass engravings at Salisbury Cathedral --i knew the beautiful illustrations of the Eliot, but cdnt recall the etched globe he described. I'd picked up a couple of L Whistler poems along the way, also taken by Rex Whistler's paintings. L W the inventor of glass engraving as we know it, Jim enthused. I accept that completely! Enthusing about the Whistlers in a Melbourne bookshop? How good is that?!!! He mentioned Bernard Stone's bookshop in Kensington, the late Bernard Stone he said. Ah yes. My walk around town with Andrew Crozier one time, Jeremy Prynne's <i><b>Brass</b></i> had just been published, Andrew was 'distributing'! Talk then about the recent late poets, & Cambridge. Prynne my teacher at Cambridge he said; also Christopher Rix. But, the changing shape of universities... Hmmm... And the changing shape of cities, his London, our Melbourne (my rhetorical question --"when is enough enough?"-- gaining sympathetic hearing). I'm rarely in London these years, prefer the country for all the obvious reasons. For work, galleries, the theatre it's still his abode but less & less liveable. Hmmm. Melbourne world's most liveable city? The Metro Tunnel building site continues to grow around us, though in comparison Melbourne by far the better bet Jim reckoned. I mentioned my friendship with Frank Prince in Southampton, active from 1970 to the 90s, and Frank a protege of TS Eliot. Quoted Frank's comment, "Eliot was the better poet, what? but Pound made one want to be a poet!" wch Jim took up; the mad passions of poets, mad poets & their politics --communism, fascism, 'social credit' (--'universal wage' Jim added) etc etc. Nowt to do with left or right, i offered, --it's any & all alternative in time of crisis, all & anything imagined... I say, Henry Williamson walks from Dover to to Devon on WW1 demob, "never again" not just a slogan, it's in his bones, is compelled to alternatives (how not?)... R Jeffers, 'try all ways, dont go down the dinosaur's way... He asked after New Zealand poets, & New Zealand a place i'd like to visit, --you must he said, South Island is beautiful... If it werent for the awful price of the Eliot of course we'd be stocking it... but that's another story. He had to go to Kay Craddock's up Collins Street then. I guess if this had been earlier era Charring Cross Road then i could have closed up for half an hour and gone for a sandwich... Ah & ah....<br />
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<b>Jim McCue</b> : Thanks Kris: it was great to meet you and to see such an amazing stock of poetry from all over and from so many small presses. I haven't figured out the Aussie poetry scene, but it was good to see this shop-window. I went on to check out the stock at Kay Craddock, Douglas Stewart and Peter Arnold, and the (rather disappointing) *Art on the Page* exhibition at Melb U., so it was a busy day -- but I'm sorry you weren't free for that lunch.<br />
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<b>October 1, '17 ·</b><br />
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Great time this morning with the two big NGV print shows, the Jim Dine yet again and the Hokusai (wch finishes soon, --Simon Schiavoni told me y'day he'd just seen it & that was the hury-up we required). Simply want to say that Hokusai's wood block the Red Fuji had me scurrying in two directions. The first, Jim Dine's Untersberger series ----i literally mean that i could go up three flights & look at Dine's print to confirm my intuition --in particular the second of the triptych with the disembodied red beard glowing, palpitating like a sacred heart in the body of the mountain --and, simultaneously, Paul Nash's Summer Solstice there on the 2nd floor, and the Nash recalling Spencer Gore's magnificent Icknield Way painting (viewed many times during the Modern Britain show at the NGV in 2007) --Gore's sky-full-heart of sun, blood radiant over quintessential English countryside… Hokusai's picture infusing the factual mountain, albeit physically imposing, with the mystical inheritance of mythical Mt Horai…<br />
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A week or so ago at the bookshop i took advantage of Pete Spence's chatting on phone long-distance to Alan Wearne to write down the poem by Jim Dine found as i flicked through the large <i><b>Collected Poems of Jim Dine</b></i> --the beautiful book published by Cuneiform Press, 2015, ed by Vincent Katz, Spence had recently acquired-- poem called <i>The Untersberger Gif</i>t, as follows :<br />
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<i>I had spoken
to the emperor many times,</i><br />
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before I saw Untersberg
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<i>Untersberg seemed to me to be the body</i><br />
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waiting to be opened to reveal the self
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<i>(hopefully).
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<i>'Are you courageous?' asked the Emperor.</i><br />
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'No, ' I said, 'but I am dazzled by beauty.'</i><br />
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Nature gives me the courage to persist</i><br />
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in my quest for the fabulous treasure inside.
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<i>Barbarossa asks me to sing for him.
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<i>The mountain opens.
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<i>His long red beard encircles me.
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<i>I have returned to silver.
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<i>I touch the red stone.</i><br />
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Superb, shimmering poem! In turn dazzled by beauty! (Interesting to think on that equation, courage, nature, persistence, beauty... Ah, Nash, Hokusai, Dine… Add to this our following on Facebook of Denis Smith's Japanese journey, loving his daily drawings of cats of course but also that set of photos of the little harbour overlooked by mountain…! As exhilarating as it is ominous…<br />
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<b>JEROME ROTHENBERG</b><br />
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I imagined introducing our Rothenberg Meet & Greet with definition of Jerome the original ethnopoetics anthologist (a move joined by Tedlock, & Tarn, & Antin & many others) , & presently the exemplary figure of the non-exclusive, --as he's observed somewhere or other that for better or for worse we're all in it together now… I interpolate : all part of global, human material; and one's ethics & politics must follow the fact of historical connection & dispersal, grievous or not, & we all have to make the best of it… Simultaneously there's Jerome the poet as well who insists a particular personal, ancestral, cultural story wch may well beg the question of same…? But i didn't take the opportunity! John Hawke was the man for that moment… In his totally reliable account, Hawke has Rothenberg updating Pound's prospectus, & reconfiguring the modernist canon… an inspiration… yes!<br />
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Ah, Rothenberg, Rothenberg, Rothenberg, Rothenberg : a Miracle…! <br />
As Pete Spence remarked, an historic event --most unlikely it'll be repeated, Jerome aged 85 now & Australia a long way from home, --Dianne told me she was same age (a few months difference) --i told her i knew her name well from the co-editing of Symposium of the Whole --other things as well, she said, the Picasso translation… <br />
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Collected Works bookshop a good room for the poet who made the most of it in obviously practiced way. A chronological reading, poems from the 50s,60s through the decades to now, but same template… i heard elements of Ginsberg's <i>Howl</i> & <i>Kaddish</i> in Rothenberg's <i>Poland 1931</i> --that repetition, invocation, chant, emphatic intonation. Major difference would be Rothenberg's explicit humour --Rabelaisian could say, the grotesque & the absurd, so not the ironic humour around social issues which is Ginsberg's marriage of personal & public in essentially political story, ditto Ferlinghetti & others. DADA obviously dear to Rothenberg even apart from his wonderful performance of the Hugo Ball classic sound poem, "<i>Karawane"</i>, and the whistling whirring orange-tube number. <br />
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Stand outs of the reading were <i>Poland 193</i>1, the Hugo Ball, the late 80s Holocaust poems. His Beaver poem, after the Native-American, recalled Jack Collom's <i>Blue Heron</i> poem recently reread… He read a poem carrying dedication to Collom (if only i had the reference) at mention of wch i didn't restrain "oh dear" recognition which he immediately picked up on --who's just died, he said looking sideways to me & raised his glass which i followed, "to Jack", --i looked behind me where Spence was standing, caught his eye, a fan too… Jack was much more involved in ecology, said Rothenberg. --in fact i'm hardly at all, --city life not Nature --almost goes without saying, Rothenberg urban, historical, a different place to erstwhile comrades Snyder, McClure et al. He & Pierre Joris, therefore, explicating contemporary modernist practice (the post & the neo --hi there Pete!) & not principally the Ancient & the Traditional per se, honoured of course within the vis-a-vis, which i described to him as some of the big difference of opinion with Eric Mottram & English friends (Allen Fisher, Pierre…) in London, i think it was '75, after the Cambridge Poetry Festival… Two-fold disagreement : my quoting Frank Prince's "who's doing anything now [1970s] aside of John Ashbery?" wch had Eric spluttering angrily, proof (he declared) of FTP's marginality now! 'Out of touch' & 'say no more' the better version of 'moronic' & 'idiotic' which the temper of the New would naturally inveigh & construe. I spoke as square peg in round hole, still do, --experimenter as of Field, the Open, the Projective, yet couldn't & wouldn't block my ear to older music & the consequence of such sympathy, --shape, therefore, syntax, sound… <br />
Rothenberg nodded from some way away from such recherche argument, called elsewhere then by his chaperones & new friends, --time for dinner with Australian supporters not for reprising the 60s & 70s with some Pommy bastard!<br />
<i>[Melbourne, 29/30-July, 2017] </i><br />
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Hm, yes, --Alan Wearne circling the subject (Jerome Rothenberg's reading, Collected Works Bookshop, 28 July, '17). Not exactly where he's at he suggests, but, ah, yes, any number of them (the New Americans) he didn't mind, could take or leave, --except, probably, Duncan, found him unapproachable… Duncan could certainly talk, i said, --talked all day when he came for lunch in Westgarth in '76 (--point out the photograph taken by the late Bernie O'Regan [d 1996], wch hangs to the side of the American shelves top my left where i'm invariably standing at the counter…Alan says he heard Rothenberg in London in 1973 --ah, the American conference there, convened by Eric Mottram --i was back in Oz by then, was it '73 or '74, --or both? two conferences? --Bernie O'Regan sent me cassette-tapes of the sessions he attended, recorded on his lap from where he was sitting, London Polytechnic? Particularly interesting to me the conversation between Duncan & George Oppen, parts of wch i transcribed for my own use, --for example, Oppen's distinguishing between political, therapeutic writing & poetry, "I do not write what I know…", how better beg the fundamental question --another line wch stuck, "I believe in consciousness, but consciousness of what?"<br />
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Alan said he recalls Robert Bly 'gatecrashing' the readings, they put him on the programme because he was there. Alan said Bly was wearing --a dress>-- no, a kaftan kind of thing! Ah, he would have, yes. Beautiful poem on or after Mirabai --but also recall Berrigan, probably following Bly to the stage, gagging to the audience, about Bly --and all in casual, first-name mode --that is, i didn't detect electricity of malice in the air --ah, says Alan, hmm, --well, i add, obviously the ideological lines were clearly known, drawn, understood, but… Ted says of Robert, man with big head hangs hat in small closet…! something like that! --maybe, man hangs big hat in small closet… I forget… and the audience laughs good naturedly. It's all on the tape. Bernie sent them from London, i played them to our old & new friends --Robert Kenny, Mike Dugan, Phil Edmonds, John Jenkins, Jim Duke, Walter Billeter, others… Other tapes i had too --Ed Dorn, Larry Eigner (he'd made for me, as a letter, reading & commenting on some of mine, his own…), Ulli McCarthy, Tim Longville ("this is fast poetry reading, folks!") --&, wch is entirely a propos, the wonderful multi-media version of <i>Poland 1931</i> by Jerome Rothenberg, on the cassette-tape Black Box magazine, sound & text montage, a la John Cage's <i>Roarotorio</i> (after Joyce's <i>Finnegans Wake</i>), wch Walter Billeter copied for me, a favourite for us both --but haunted forever after by Rothenberg's rabbi-radio-klezma-muzak accompaniment of his reading --to the line & its turning, a la Olson, Duncan, Kelly et al, -- impressing his own story the while, the embellishment & run-on, all to the poem's glory! And Chris Mann asked for a lend & gave me tape of Sun Ra as insurance, but i never got my Rothenberg back! And years later Tim Hemensley stole the Sun Ra, when he was in his teens, making his own music by then! Hah! <br />
<br />
I told this to Jerome as he stood at the counter at end of the Meet & Greet event --Chris Mann? Ah, yes, he said, remembering something, smiling.<br />
The Shop, house of spirits as it is, as every house is, when truly lived in, concentration of living, like a poem's energies inhering after the intense deposit that writing is, available therefore to similarly intense excavation, exhumation, that is reading, --writing written into & across time by sheer intensity… --"this fabled place" Jerome said when he rose to speak after John Hawke's talk & Joan Fleming's poems, --'fabled' because fellow poets know the Shop & mention it, like Mark Olival-Bartley in the American Poetry Institute in Munich, who urged Rothenberg to visit if ever he came to Melbourne --maybe others, ---Joris? --if they're still connected (after the <i>Millennium </i>anthologies why wouldn't they be?) --Joris reminded of us here by English friends Paul Buck, Glenda George? <br />
<br />
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<i>[August 1st, 2017, Melbourne]</i> collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-24320241391551880862018-02-12T23:07:00.001+11:002018-02-12T23:58:33.065+11:00IN THE BELLY OF A PARADOX<div class="_3_s0 _1toe _3_s1 _3_s1 uiBoxGray noborder" data-testid="ax-navigation-menubar" id="u_0_w">
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<i>"…because like Jonas himself I find myself travelling towards my destiny in the belly of a paradox</i>."</div>
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Thomas Merton, <b>The Sign of Jonas</b> (Hollis & Carter, London, 1953), © By the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane</div>
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<i><b>Trimble</b></i> : Here's to IMPERMANENCE!</div>
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<i><b>Hemensley</b></i> : Cheers! And Happy Birthday Bernard!</div>
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<i><b>Trimble</b></i> : Happy Birthday!</div>
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<i><b>Hemensley</b></i> : And to Thomas Merton!</div>
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<i><b>Trimble</b></i> : Cheers! </div>
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Sat in the garden of the Peacock Hotel, down from the peak of Ruckers' Hill, opposite to what'll always be the Town Hall despite 'Northcote Council' no more, subsumed within Darebin (impermanence). I'm keeping the dizzies at bay, enjoying a pot of the local cider, Ken's on the Cooper's Pale. Barman asks me where the burr in my accent's from --Bristol? Hah, no! But it is West Country, i say. He lived in a village just outside of Bristol once, he says (impermanence). A lovely day for it today, he says. Twenty-two degrees, blue sky, sun, a breeze. Tell him i've just received email from Weymouth artist friend, Lucas Weschke, call him Cornishman, who imagined i'd be "<i>reading this in a land of blue honey --here it is fucking miserable and my heart feels like January</i>." I respond that i'll send him last vestiges of our 40 degrees with which to flay his winter miseries --tho’ neither of us exclusive of either's nadir...</div>
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<i><b>Hemensley</b></i> : MERT (--Ken noted the birthdate yesterday, 31st January, on Facebook. He asked Bernard, in passing, what he thought of <b><i>The Seven Storey Mountain</i></b> --B. replied he had the books but doesn't read very much of anything in recent years --I suggest a New Year's resolution for necessary rectification! Ken says <b><i>Seven Storey</i></b> not his favourite --like me enjoyed Asian Journal more--Ten years ago, en route London, I was in Bangkok with Cathy and went to the King's Palace and felt i'd been walking in Merton's footsteps when i read B's copy --disagreed with Merton’s disdain of the magnificent Hindu murals which he called Disneyland kitsch! --But before I can show Ken the Merton volume ive brought in my shoulder-bag, a loan if he wants it, he's offering me J P Seaton's translation of Han Shan --i love this one, he says (--Han Shan probably many poets, he says, --Shih Te also --people added to the poem through the years --like the Homer? i say) : "<i>Here's a word for</i> <i>rich folks with cauldrons & bells / Fame's empty, no good, that's for sure"</i>… </div>
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I brought this, i say, first edition, <b><i>The Sign of Jonas</i></b>, Merton's journal, 1946-51. Ken reads a page, --he's a great writer, he says eventually… People forget Thomas Merton's a Christian, always a Christian, a monk --it was a hard life, --he wasn't a hippy! Laugh. Look at a passage in the introduction ---such clarity, says Ken (--what is clarity but a profound embrace of reality, and such an embrace charity? --brings to mind etymology encountered in the late 80s, that reading time's flurry of Heideggerrian language, Jan Gonda's Sanskrit commentaries, continuing elaborations from 60s/70s Anglo-American poetics featuring Olson, Duncan, Blaser, Kelly & co's Henri Corbin, MacNaughton, Thorpe, Prynne et cetera --but perception defined as "being rightly taken" which completely displaces any personal standard, relegates it to the casual lexicon --"being rightly taken" suggesting that what's NOT isn't 'perception' at all but another flake of illusion fomented both by the poetic & the everyday, --from "philosophy'''s perspective, --language & life floating between the inane & the banal) --prologue, p8 : "<i>Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary.The monastic life is by its very nature 'ordinary.' Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings. The exterior monotony of regular observance delivers us from useless concern with the details of daily life, absolves us from the tedious necessity of making plans and of coming to many personal decisions. It sets us free to pray all day, and to live alone with God. But for me, the vow of stability has been the belly of the whale…</i>" </div>
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Bernard & i call him “Mert”, which familiarity probably reflects the Counter Culture's wish to recruit him to the most agreeable aspect of his ecumenism, this time's hybridity always preferred to orthodoxy & tradition (until & unless of course the latter's deemed to be the hipper) --perhaps, tho, he always came across as 'human', responsible to the problematics of practice, therefore never prim or artificially pious --a poet, a writer, editor of famous little mag (<b><i>Monk's Pond</i></b>), artist, --a parallel life the which he ameliorated to his monasticism… As Ken said, Thomas Merton never not a Catholic --and the straying in Ken's case is Bukowskian, as reflection of daily circumstance, rather than the Buddhist temptation, pagan as far as old fashioned church would be concerned, the Buddhism of which Ken's a novice, our Brother Pots & Pans albeit issue of traditional Catholicism & later tuned-on by India including Bede Griffiths' spiritual common cause…</div>
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That's why we honour & admire you, i say --because you do it! One has to acknowledge the actual experience --in all things. Ken deflects my honorific with chapter & verse about his constant straying, 'playing up' --but even this has a Beat Zen status --would you agree? he says (about the Beat Buddhists, which recalls Dave Ellison's & my DESPERATE MYSTICISM hilarity, serious all the same) --Some (Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger) walk the walk, but all of the others, in & out of formal practice, are touched by it forever --they live in its language, persuaded by it psychologically, aesthetically, poetically, practically --this domain of the post- & neo- religions, politics, poetics. And Kerouac's closest to that spiritual, psychological oscillation --high on the way of The Way, then strayed, fallen over --contradictory thus fallible, exemplarily contemporary, but not the career-success contemporaneity from which hype & glister our Jack ran. Ken says <b><i>Big Sur</i></b>'s Kerouac’s best book, wouldn't you say? First Kerouac i read, at sea in 1965, i chime --but <b><i>Big Sur</i></b>, <i><b>Dharma Bums</b>, <b>Desolation Angels</b></i>, similar confrontation, collision, alternation of the dream & the drear, the dread, the 'slough of despond' . On same page Ken & i --not like some, --i mean, he says, the Buddhist thing is for the ordinary, for ordinariness…</div>
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(--begs question, i say: for us the daily ordinariness is where it's ALL to be found --for example, Ginsberg's beautiful<i> <b>Sunflower Sutra</b></i>, that heightened & luminous experience in the railyard shared with Kerouac, --"<i>i walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shape of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. // Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees and machinery// (…)Look at the sunflower, he said, (…)</i>" --Whitmanian this is, such retro-riff brilliant in & for the demand of 1955's NOW!)</div>
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--some people don't get that, Ken says --they get it all wrong, they don't think they're ordinary, they want to be famous (--but finding their own difference & exploring it, as in Paul Celan's "each man's particular narrowness", dramatically opposes the inflation which characterises this time's 'celebrity culture' --ah yes, we agree about that)! --another cider, another Coopers, perfect little bowl of chippies & mayo --and present him with Jill Kamil's guide book to St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, and also Patrick McCauley's collaboration with Raffaella Torresan, <b><i>The Sea Palace Hotel</i></b>, his poems & photos, her paintings (--Raoul Duffy? says Denis Smith at the Shop next day --i can see, i say, --and Marquet? --the little boats in the harbour...) [Later Ken messages me on Facebook regarding Pat & Raffy’s book, “Did I tell you I stayed in India at The Seaweed Hotel, on the beach at Kerala, at a place called Kovalam a sort of hippie paradise before I went to Bede Griffiths place...” Small world!] </div>
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--Albert Marquet & i --<b>exhibit 1</b>: some poems in <b><i>A Mile from Poetry </i></b>(1973-4), after his Honfleur Harbour paintings --number 12 for instance, "<i>at that sitting no yacht club though plenty / of tinsel & flag. generation or two & it owns one / sure enough (see the photo by any jack with guile / enough to cover his head with a cloth) // the little boats / the little boats / dead still</i>" --initially welcomed by Adders but then used as cipher for my own sinking --"your little boats wont save you" he shot across the bows --Thank Heaven i knew where the life jacket was --swam with my little illustrated book of Albert Marquet into the international waters of which the Merri Creek was a vital tributary, --as far as the Oz Po salts would know i'd been lost at sea or like Robinson, shipwrecked! --twenty years, more? --hardly recognised when i returned! --<b>exhibit 2</b>: Marquet's erotic paintings which Paul Buck showed me in Maidstone in '87, --an immense compendium with the unlikeliest contributors such as Marquet --middle of the afternoon, balancing teacup & slice of cake, after walk around the partly flooded town, not only sightseeing the swollen Medway but the hotel where Jean Rhys once lived --you like her don't you? Paul remembered --portrayed, if nowhere else, in my book,<b><i> Montale's Typos</i></b>, in the prose-piece "England, River & So On (in the mood of Jean Rhys, after a theme of hers)" --for example, "<i>I dreamt of being there again, & of looking thru the window, outside looking in, at her dresses on the bed, & her bib-&-braces. And the river just outside the hedge, the rushes, the submerged & sprouting stalks of this & that, greens, browns, greys, & rainbows there & gone, glints of red & turquoise; mud & shadows…</i>" --brother B. published it, the first of his Stingy Artist editions, 1978 --quite a publisher, i impress upon Ken --</div>
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-- To Bernard! in unison salute --on eve of Ken's joining the Theravadans --</div>
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<i><b>K H</b></i> : And Mert!</div>
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<i><b>K T </b></i>: Mert! </div>
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*</div>
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[<i>February 1-11, 2018</i>]</div>
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collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-58197573589174149802018-01-05T20:08:00.000+11:002018-01-05T22:06:42.135+11:00TOPOGRAPHY<br />
<br />
[---> Elwood<br />
1/1/18<br />
<br />
10.05's allowed to be late any time missus<br />
if it means ma & pa kettle<br />
can stumble up to Clifton Hill terminus<br />
from the 'Garth<br />
& catch it at ten past ten --<br />
long runs of clear traffic on New Year's Day<br />
deserted roads no one aboard the bus --<br />
after first fusillade of midnight fireworks<br />
hit the hay (a la Heaney "<i>I dreamt we slept in a moss<br />in Donegal / On turf banks under blankets</i>" <br />
misremembered always from P. Gebhardt's <br />
rare edition of <b>Glanmore Sonnet</b> number ten<br />
"<i>laid down my head on a square of turf</i>" --Peter ay? <br />
last post cuts through all the crap right here --as Retta<br />
in '73 upon waking --of Buckmaster<br />
"<i>the dead come back to us / like clear water<br />in a dream</i>" --how to deal with this<br />
unannounced convocation <br />
Seamus --Peter -- Charles?)<br />
slept like a --like the proverbial --<br />
<br />
cop cars & ambulance pass bus unhurriedly --<br />
dance of cirrus across pure azure --<br />
down Punt Road's gentle hill & icons<br />
Bill Nuttall's Niagara Gallery the cricket ground & no parking<br />
park --the Cricketers pub & the topless barmaids other one --<br />
thirty years since "<i>The Last Gardens</i>" preoccupied me --<br />
Judith Rodriguez at Penguin Books when was that?<br />
late '80s '90? wrote despite this or that part<br />
it was "intractable" ( i.e. didn't give a shit<br />
for 'readers'?) --both Nick Johnson & John Kinsella<br />
read & liked it but it got lost<br />
& then i lost the yen for publishing it!<br />
mystical milieu of my poem all around the Royal Botanical --<br />
& the river --<br />
South Yarra's posh European tone --<br />
like Gauloises wafting Italian equivalent --<br />
tonal mist the gist of it --<br />
scuffing past the fine houses --<br />
does periphery qualify as stuff of history?<br />
invisible at the edges Poet's remit<br />
though Poetry itself another element<br />
amidst the powers that be!<br />
<br />
down down now into the hip hop of St Kilda Junction<br />
the massive dial --<br />
fifty years ago another configuration<br />
pre-motorway historic shops & housing<br />
old world's demolition --<br />
ritzy then as now --Kings Cross's little Melbourne<br />
cousin --same vibe now as before on<br />
Fitzroy Street --recognize the "bums <br />
beatniks & bastards"from pre-Oz Emigration manuscript --<br />
anticipated in Southampton <br />
holding out for another world --<br />
after library & gallery the general cemetery<br />
far preferable for mooning teenage artist<br />
to our village bloated by housing boom<br />
into anonymous nowhere's-ville<br />
<br />
every summer's destination ELWOOD --hollowed from<br />
sea's reverberation heard on late afternoon's approach<br />
escaped from City "Gone Fishing" the notice<br />
pinned on bookshop door --<br />
a sense of pre-fabs among the grand olds<br />
extending from St Kilda --the ephemeral straggle <br />
DHL identified Sydney to Thirroul <br />
that "next wind might blow away" --<br />
Elwood's beach house encampment<br />
emigres' struggles resolved within cooee<br />
of beach & water --pre-de luxe marina<br />
& walking paths era --<br />
rough & ready 'off the rocks'<br />
at year's turn 1966 --<br />
closest ever came to Greece --Miller's <b>Colossus </b><br />
fomented idée fixe --free at last<br />
& subject only to sand & sea & wave-slapped rocks<br />
beneath great southern sun --<br />
Greek idyll dreamt of in<br />
Southampton parks laid in<br />
fully clothed in summer<br />
huddled in winter<br />
Old Dart's natural season --<br />
<br />
ten minutes stroll from Thackeray Street <br />
over the Beach Road & rugged landfill to the sea --<br />
lodging with Penny Poynton in her little house <br />
whose mercy delivered me from the calamity<br />
across town in Ascot Vale --<br />
how could love come undone so?<br />
not love but its ambivalent rhetoric --<br />
young & old tied in knots by it --<br />
much vaunted home of free-spirits<br />
free-love FREEDOM contorted into haunted house --<br />
ghosts of suicide & murder spooking art-of-life's<br />
studio --as tho (& no flippant reference<br />
as my ideal reader could guess)<br />
Dostoevsky's darkest direst testament<br />
had obliterated Khalil Gibran's enlightenment --<br />
overnight! -- <br />
curses threats desperate sex --<br />
death's door off the latch & not the half of it!<br />
<br />
last January fifty years ago<br />
took new met girl there to greet<br />
could say fellow exiles part-<br />
Bohemian part-suburban <br />
in the almost sweet Peace of Penny's house<br />
by the sea ("<i>the sea! the sea!</i>") --<br />
after Ascot Vale such equanimity <br />
a kind of blasphemy they might have said --<br />
and the Peace lasted --<br />
for a while --<br />
and can only smile now<br />
by the sea<br />
the sea<br />
<br />
<br />
[<i>1-5 January, 2018</i>]collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-38163247632411547152017-10-23T02:34:00.001+11:002017-10-26T14:50:20.820+11:00TOPOGRAPHY<br />
<b>TOPOGRAPHY</b><br />
<br />
<i>---> going nowhere</i><br />
<br />
[Kerouac]<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
background dream (21st October):<br />
visiting Aunt Lydia at her bungalow<br />
(<i>Penselwood</i>) main road end of Gosling's farm<br />
from which cruelly evicted (compulsory acquisition) <br />
another chapter of tears in her heart-aching story <br />
reversed in dream's current-age rendezvous <br />
bent over her walking-frame <br />
encouraging reconnoitre garden <br />
kitchen dining-room bedroom <br />
where brother & i slept-over<br />
next door to hers & Uncle Jim's --here's<br />
what i wanted to show you she says<br />
encyclopaedia of world poetry<br />
where's your name my dear?<br />
peer together --not there! --chuckle<br />
knowingly to myself --how could & why<br />
have been included? --only <br />
four 'h' surnames anyway <br />
heh-heh!<br />
<b><br />*</b><br />
<br />
1957 pretend today's the 60th anniversary <br />
dream-like coincidence --<i>meant to be</i>! -- Kerouac <br />
in London collecting royalties then onto boat-train<br />
at Waterloo to same Southampton as our own<br />
little family live & play in --despite father's simmering<br />
opposition Aunt Lydia's become our second mother<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<i>Lonesome Traveller</i> bought & read two weeks<br />
before fatal voyage April '66<br />
England to Australia <br />
outa jail! --bewailing<br />
misfortune waste of time! --<br />
in ch 7 K's smitten<br />
at St Paul's Cathedral<br />
a "heavenly performance of the <i>St Matthew Passion</i> (…)<br />
saw a vision of an angel in my mother's kitchen<br />
and longed to get home to sweet America again" --<br />
forgives his father --researches family name <br />
at British Museum "'Lebris de Keroack. <br />
Canada, originally from Brittany. <br />
Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. <br />
Motto: Love, work and suffer.'<br />
I could have known." --<br />
blown down like the proverbial<br />
each time i read the chapter's last lines<br />
"On the train <i>en route</i> to Southampton, brain trees<br />
growing out of Shakespeare's fields, and the dreaming<br />
meadows full of lamb dots." --couldnt say better<br />
having seen it with own eyes now for decades --<br />
epiphanic long before'd earned the right<br />
to know it --hah!<br />
as tho' my poems'd coined it --<br />
belated poet's vanity --<br />
'belated' as in "poetry-after-death of" --<br />
(Kerouac's<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>[22-10-2017]</i><br />
<br />collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-60437328738985774982017-04-09T11:13:00.000+10:002017-04-09T11:16:55.525+10:00THIS WRITING LIFE<b>Around & about Matt Hall's FALSE FRUITS</b> (<i><b>Cordite Books</b></i>, Castlemaine, '17)<br />
<i>[salvaged from Facebook</i>]<br />
<br />
I hope this aint talking out of school, but a month ago in 'chat' with Kent MacCarter i said how i was reading Matthew Hall's book, <b>False Fruits</b>. <i>"I need to get my teeth into it but at first blush the language sings, in my sense, but i dont think that's how it's supposed to rest... i need to get with the argument or dialectic..."</i> Well, thanks to John Hawke's words at last night's launch, April 7th, '17, we got it! Look forward to reading the speech, what amounted to a short history of the po-mo everywhichway of the lyric, the pastoral, Romanticism, etc --that is, as per Matt's project, lyric that aint lyric, pastoral that aint that kind of pastoral nor that, missus, and aint all parody since, as per Schuyler on NY poetry ca 50s (i'm throwing that in, begging yr pardon) gallons of [paint] true feeling courses it, suffuses it. And so on. Hmm. I confess the radical battle cry that poetry is violence upon language, and that all poetry shares the perspective, except of course that of the unmentionables, poetry's deplorables? --a claim i lived with myself through the 70s & 80s-- doesnt work for me in the way John announced it last night... Eeek! It's Saturday morning i think! Stuck in the middle of another dense & ingenious proposition for the Eco-poetic! Lots to think about, and the book itself to read! Congratulations everyone! It was a stimulating night!<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>---------------------------</b><br />
<br />
Nice memory you recalled in yr remarks last night, Matt, regarding that conference you attended several years ago and the afterparty reading at Collected Works Bookshop, at wch i particularly recall your good self and David Herd's distinctive readings...<br />
<br />
RE- <i>violence</i>, and of course your book, <i><b>On Violence in the Work of J. H. Prynne</b></i> (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) (--just reminded myself via the abstract up on the Web, and nice to see longtime-nosee Michael Tencer's name there), --the violence John Hawke indicated as a general condition of the practice is <i>NOT</i>, i think, the point of your submission on Prynne (or, indeed, the British poetry in the vicinity of that influence or out of similar Traditional & Modernist extrapolation as the man's), wch is a very <i>particular</i> project... or was --i'm sure by now it's widened to the air that's breathed there, almost commonplace assumptions & similar formal expressions.<br />
<br />
(At the beginning of your <i><b>V</b></i>., am reminded of Olson, ye olde Projective Verse (how sprightly they read, all these assayes of the Big O even now) --our poet, "How he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. (.....) For a man's problem (...) to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature..." --reminded by your quotation from JHP that, like O, his poetry is another kind of human manifestation, and an imp is tickling me to suggest meta-literary, metaphysical, even of Platonism! --like for ex., Korean poet Ko Un adamant that his poetry's not to do with literature but "the universe!" --away with thee, imp!) --<br />
<br />
I wish right here i could jump into statement of what i'm feeling (and to include something on <i>feeling</i>, on wch last night i thought John Hawke very good)... something about the relation to this <i>being here</i>, this relation to nature (and the nature of things), which is rather more interesting than literary cleaving (i mean grading) right & left & all about one! (--that vivacious intellectuality, --importunate mind, promiscuously vital --and dont i recognize that myself)...<br />
<br />
My sentence runs away! I shall return after another helping of<i><b> Fresh Fruits</b></i>...!<br />
<br />
<br />
[April 8/9, 17] collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-49029904446354521002017-02-12T16:34:00.000+11:002017-02-14T09:07:01.697+11:00THE BEACH REPORT, February 4th, '17<br />
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High temperature returns and the little beach becomes <i>the</i> most popular strip on the Bay --well, not the <i>most</i>, that being St Kilda & all along the watch-tower, Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, Albert Park, Middle Park & further, oh yes, further --Brighton, Sandringham, Black Rock --one end's big by dint of punter volume, the other by head of wealth, --but Elwood resembles these bigger brothers on such a day as this. Find a space to drop sandals, bag, towel, then straight into the clear sea, shallow for yards tho' discover raised shelf suddenly runs out & midriff's depth leaps to armpits. Hot sun, cool water & clearest sea yet yours truly's blind to a submerged slab of rock, --like the ditched trunk of one fallen on the proverbial hard times, everything he could hock done so including --if this were my story, say Melbourne in Winter,'66 --the wristwatch given me by my Aunt, the charcoal-grey John Collier suit, souvenir of my work voyage on the Fairstar, good now I thought for white-collar job-interviews in Oz, & the best black shoes to match --inevitably tripped & stumbled in avoidance of the barnacled rock and concerned not to fall, trying to maintain balance, smashed my heels into the end of it --heftier bash to left heel than right. Hauled grazes & bruises up the sand --hardly an accident compared to the cut feet & knees swimming "off the rocks" years ago, the beginning times, remembered but borne by hardly changing shoreline --is that true?-- the land-fill further submerged below the hardly new Marina, through which one'd walk, --strange landscape, spongy, compost-warm, broken down waste, broken up building materials. If nothing else the walking-path & the Marina have reconfigured the landscape, but the context, the sight & sound of it, the feel of it, is eternal --each intersection, each trajectory, eternal too. </div>
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I sound like Kerouac or how Kerouac might sound to the uninitiated, as tho' Little Golden Book religiosity or --only talking about it on the bus this day, Loretta's Aunty Laurie, on our wedding day for Heaven's sake, April '68, describing new book she'd been reading, <b><i>The Dharma Bums</i></b>! --much she could <i>endorse</i>, she said, funny word? reveals quite another attitude, but said she was disappointed by the characters' <i>apoliticism</i> --well of course, Loretta says (--is Laurie short for Loretta? & Loretta named after her aunt? --hasnt this come up before? --growing up within the figure of the aunt & not the mother? --not on account of the name but the apparent personality or character, --as i wondered then although a stranger to the family, but encouraged too by the girlfriend's declarations about her relatives --phew!) --politics, the correct politics, the Party's line, "politics" was everything! --in the understanding of which, i interpolate, everything else is missed! Whatever K said later or in contradistinction to Gary Snyder/Japhy Ryder's "ruck-sack revolution", the prophecy of thousands, millions, of said 'revolutionaries', the young --young men in Kerouac's mind --but of course young women, understood though not yet written (--<i style="font-weight: bold;">Of the Beautiful Young, </i>poem i'm writing in 1971, "<i>neither Men nor Women", "who cannot tell yachts from tears", "my beautiful young cannot sail or cry / they are magnificent in their captivity / they drown tearlessly almost i think fearlessly / whilst we walk dry bottom / full of the knowing / of yachts & tears / the years of the beautiful young"</i>) --within the enormous suggestivity of the conflation, and i guess ambiguity could retrospectively be claimed, that is author distinguishing between self & character even though the genre being conjured overrides the conventional literary theorem, -- Kerouac's being acclaimed by my time's envoy, Ed Sanders, on telly, on Mr Buckley's show, on behalf of our Hippy generation, "we come to praise you Mr K…", which Jack brushes off peremptorily, no time for hippies since even the shine of his beats had long dissolved, --but hey! the damage was done! --i mean, the history a done deal, all around & everywhere to be seen, --but fancy Aunty Laurie reading <b><i>The Dharma Bums</i></b>, evidently containing sufficient pieces of her own life's jig-saw, not least the encounter with nature, ancient Taoist/Buddhist accented appreciation of trails & peaks, eternal corollary ancient or modern, --Laurie at the helm, as she believed, of the modern, Communism's fail-safe schema, to which every particle of existing & potential being was subservient… I wrote about this in 1968, still going on about it! --but the times repeat, similar dynamic excite similar psychologies, and who remembers anything anyway (Santayana)?</div>
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*</div>
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Back on the sand, towel around shoulders looking like a Bedouin, surveying the beach & the tribe thereon, sunbathers & tanners of the cliche one thought surpassed, --casually return to the water's edge, the shells there glinting like coins, ingots, treasures from the deep, & the seaweed, the green & brown, the stars & urchins, -- not a prospector now but Doc Ricketts found to have migrated from <b><i>Canary Row</i></b> & <b><i>Sweet Thursday</i></b> to his own book, <b><i>The Log from the Sea of Cortez</i></b>, --brother Bernard's book, recall his Steinbeck collection of paperbacks, read or not i don't know --I'd handled & sampled & taken away with me in my imagination to Australia in '66 --recognised on every beach in every rock-pool thereafter…</div>
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<b>OF STEINBECK'S DOC</b></div>
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It begins with Ed Ricketts' death --Steinbeck's straightforward prose protects the event from sentimentality; it owns no greater tragedy than its matter-of-course, its dailiness. The writer celebrates his friend, brings him back to the world, --the world <i>in memorium</i> for every lived, loved & gone day; each lived, loved & gone person & place. For sure, the Doc doesn't die every day, but every day any one of us might. And not going out into the world is the kind of death one's loathe to contemplate. Such is the adventure of each day set against the everyday's incremental dulling. The Doc's surely not a dull man but a daily one, given over to the day's exigencies, as defined by these as by his eccentricities & prejudices which his friend details without the judgements informing them. Steinbeck's Doc is an unruffled man about a small town, except when he isn't. And he & his is the form i now adopt looking into a rock pool, hat on pate, looking & seeing despite, whatismore, his own understanding of the world, especially in its immediacy, as much further & deeper than the 'particular segment' in view --thus ecology, myth, genetics, poetry & philosophy, Ancient & Modern of East & West. Now he is bending to his work, poking through the water, lifting shell or seaweed. He is poking & peering as in the painting of him on the cover of the <i>Corgi</i> paperback, collecting bucket in hand, backpack of implements over his shoulder. First sun or last, sun up or sun down, unambiguously there, as we are here, eternal antidote to the drear & the fear. Clear.</div>
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<i>[4-8/2/17]</i></div>
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collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-73117794531467397872017-01-26T19:50:00.000+11:002017-01-26T20:01:30.335+11:00THIS WRITING LIFE<b>from Journal,</b><br />
<i>17-01-17</i><br />
<br />
<b>1/</b><br />
At the Shop talking to a man looking for a couple of volumes of the Complete Shelley. He's been a celebrant for 22 years. I referred to Jurate's mother's funeral & their celebrant from Alison Monkhouse, a friend of Jurate's. He said you stand up there & face the family & friends of, let's say, an 85 or 90 year-old, but what on earth do you know? what do you say? Described himself as a bookaholic. (Hah! You're in the right place then, my man!) I mentioned Des Cowley's reading of <i>Little Gidding</i> in the service. Obviously he knew it personally, big fan of Eliot, perhaps the later Eliot more so he said. But many of my 'customers' are from the Western Suburbs, he explained: "T.S. Eliot? wasnt he a cricketer?" But poetry of all kinds, he said, the words & music, touches & informs where the facts of a life might not…<br />
<br />
<b>2/</b><br />
Having utilised what could be called experimental writing's template when I began teaching at the Council of Adult Education in the 1970s --believing that contemporary poetry's adventures were far more efficacious for my liberation seeking, mind expanding classes than an historical examination of form --I was redirected by later & perhaps somewhat older students into the classics. I dont mean Greek & Latin or Shakespeare, the Romantics, but the tradition as it ran through the late 19th & 20th Centuries. I had derived exercises from Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Fielding Dawson, Joe Brainard, Dadaists & Surrealists --the tradition of the New but nothing of the Tradition per se. For example, a particular gentleman tested me with his enthusiasm for G M Hopkins. For modern classics I had Robert Browning, Pound, DH Lawrence & a small amount of Eliot but now took on the Hopkins, which had probably defeated me at Tech College in the early '60s, if only to keep the discussion going at the next session! So my reeducation commenced. Similarly, I was asked for both Virginia Woolf & Sylvia Plath, for gender reasons, and investigating them anew realized their abiding value. (All true but this broad brush omits such correctives as, via a lesson Eric Rolls gave to a workshop class we shared in Bathurst,NSW in 1974, De Quincey's marvelous word music in a looping passage of <i>The English Mailcoach</i> --19th century? My hitherto indubitable historical aesthetics could now only unravel! Perhaps on a par with my Cambridge pal John Hall's 1969 lesson --no university in me you see-- making a relation for Robert Herrick, say, & our new British & Americans, Williams to Creeley & Oppen, including Crozier & Prynne...) When I think of it, despite one's wide-ranging reading in the new poetries, mutual exclusivity was rampant & profound. An abiding avant garde bridge should have been Zukofsky's <i><b>A Test of Poetry</b></i> --his blind selection (that is, unattributed selection of authors) which could often find one preferring the classic to the contemporary! Now I understood Zukofsky's test of ear, by ear, begging questions of sound & sense…<br />
<br />
<b>3/</b><br />
A resume might run like this : In lieu of traditional form one has a syntax informed by conversation & 'utterance' (from natural strong expression to cultivated Expressionism). Conversation (good hearing / scoring by ear) might have become decoration --the decoration of the ghost of form such that it is seen or hinted at, but without the erstwhile style or gravitas. I mean, of course, the sonority --but without one, none of the other? What is said --what & how --is the priority which required poesy's junking, 19th into 20th Century… the force of saying, of telling --testimony as the new eloquence. And maximum attention to what was previously marginal --poetics of interpolation & interjection on the rebound from the excess of the literary. And so it is --1970s "literature after…", "poetry after death of…", the "belated", the "posthumous"… But, swings & roundabouts --& the gift of a slightly longer life than youth's Lyricism predicted --here one is again in & with 21st Century's "whole house of poetry" (my proposition in the mid 90s, argued in Ivor Indyk's <i><b>Heat</b></i> magazine)... For years now literary & anti-literary/post-literary on the same or at least facing pages... the same & not the same... Tis all good my friends... <i>[Available for painting & renovation, local tradesman, CV on request…]</i> collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-54751036107833266032017-01-16T23:14:00.000+11:002017-01-17T08:30:38.724+11:00"SO SEVENTIES"<b>WARREN BURT & KRIS HEMENSLEY</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>WARREN BURT</i>:</b><br />
<br />
<i>Dec 14, '16</i><br />
<br />
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Fellow Travelers:<br />
<br />
Here's a link to the latest entry on my website, which features videos of me performing a new piece based on Chris Mann's voice, which was performed for the launch of his new book "Whistlin is Did," on Dec 13, 2016 at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne. Also is a video of the complete 7 minutes of the work done the next day in Daylesford. I hope you enjoy this piece, which was a lot of fun to compose and perform.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.warrenburt.com/journal/2016/12/14/launching-piece-2-for-the-launch-of-chris-manns-new-book-dec.html">http://www.warrenburt.com/journal/2016/12/14/launching-piece-2-for-the-launch-of-chris-manns-new-book-dec.html</a><br />
<br />
Cheers,<br />
<br />
Warren<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
<i><b><br />KRIS HEMENSLEY:</b></i><br />
<br />
<i>Dec 17, '16</i><br />
<br />
Dear Warren, Good to see and hear you the other day at the Shop...! A great event!<br />
THANK YOU sending your text, photos, & video...<br />
Ive taken the liberty of further sharing it to my F/book page, and have kind of juxtaposed it with thoughts stemming from McKenzie Wark's post abt new course proposal re- Walter Benjamin & E A Poe, which i add to my refutation of derogatory "so 70s" remark made at the Shop about the Burt/Mann sound/moozik performance! That is, "70s" was a wonderfully innovative time, why<br />
considered passe by now? Not at all! (Mine is gentle refutation, and maybe even the comment overheard & reported to me was less hard than appears BUT, opportunity to make a point! As i say in mine, tho W Benjamin agin "continuum" ['break the continuum'], there IS continuum!<br />
All best wishes,<br />
Kris H<br />
<br />
[<i>PS</i>:(<i><b>from F/book comment</b></i>)<br />
<i> Found on the home feed early this morning a notice from McKenzie Wark regarding a course he's proposing on Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, and relation with E A Poe... Wow! In part, " Even less well known are the affinities that Benjamin's theory and work shares with Edgar Allan Poe, who he widely respected, having learned of him through Baudelaire's high opinion of the American author. Aside from producing a text not dissimilar to The Arcades Project, Poe also insisted on the power of revelation in countless of his texts. Further, he shared both tropes (e.g., the Maezel's Chess Machine) as well as fascinations (graphology, cryptography, fashion)."<br />I made this comment, "Love this, MW, and back to the future with bells on --comment (sort of derogatory as it was reported to me, tho many a slip between cup and lip, --made the other night at event at Collected Works Bookshop, that Warren Burt's interpretation/realization of & for Chris Mann material --Warren's composition with lap-top & amps) --"so 70s" : and this most suggestive juxtaposition (--in my own stuff late 70s, '1980, called it transposition), Benjamin & Poe --renders me incoherent in ebullience! What a buzz! Well done!<br />My point abt "so 70s" is that it is & was a great time of cross- fertilization & innovative thinking, and why should any of that be passe in 2016? And tho Benjamin all for 'breaking the continuum', there is a continuum!</i>]<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>WARREN BURT</b></i>:<br />
<br />
Hi Kris:<br />
<br />
Yes, a delight all around. Lovely to be part of, and then, the next<br />
morning, discovering the Cordite website, which I hadn't known of<br />
previously (nose to the grindstone at Box Hill, etc), a delightful<br />
expansion of the horizons!<br />
<br />
Yes "so 70's" indeed. I had a text in the 90s, which was aimed in the<br />
friendliest possible way at Messrs Randall and Bendinelli , which<br />
denounced the "cliched decadization of knowledge," and thinking<br />
about it, the technology I was using was current, the software<br />
was developed in the late 90s, the central Chris text was from the<br />
80s, and the stuff on the iPad was all texts from the past decade,<br />
but I guess what WAS "70's" about it was the sight of a single<br />
person with small devices doing a performance with tiny <br />
loudspeakers. Which WAS something that not only we (Chris,<br />
me, Ernie Althoff, Ron Nagorcka, Ros Bandt, etc) had developed<br />
in the 70s, but more specifically in Melbourne, (and which is now<br />
the subject of a couple of 20-somethings writing PhDs about --<br />
eek academic immortality!), so yes, THAT bit was 70s, and more<br />
specifically Melbourne 70s, so doing it in a Melbourne bookshop<br />
for a crowd, many of whom were around in the Melbourne 70s, <br />
is extremely apt. So I hope Mr or Ms "so 70s" actually<br />
enjoyed it!<br />
<br />
And now, I have the pleasant task ahead, in the next week, of reading your "Your Scratch Entourage" - which to me also suggests a "Scratch Orchestra" as in Cardew, also 70s!<br />
<br />
Speaking of continua, I was just reading a MA from another University and the student is trying to link indeterminate, automated processes with queer theory (a not unfriendly matchup), and I find myself having to write a note to remind the student about the unbroken line of queer composers in<br />
the 20th century who were all associated both with queer thinking and with the "current avant-garde thinking" of their eras - Charles T Griffes, A.Copland, Virgil Thompson, Lou Harrison, Francis Poulenc, Cage/Cunningham,Sylvano Bussotti, Julius Eastman, Pauline Oliveros (RIP two weeks ago), and Claude Vivier, among others. (Almost typed "otters" - that would be nice!) So there's a continuum for someone!<br />
<br />
Cheers,<br />
<br />
Warren<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>ALEX SELENITSCH</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>"SO SEVENTIES"</b></i><br />
<br />
<br />
The words ‘so seventies…” (or something like that), floated up at a recent event at Collected Works – so Kris Hemensley tells me. Was it a put-down? A witticism? A critical judgment? A moment of self exposure? a statement of solidarity? All of these, I think. All of these labels dance about as contradictory but co-existent job descriptions for living, practicing, creative workers.<br />
<br />
1970s, at its dumbest, means the decade numbered thus, plus or minus a few years into the decades at both ends. But it’s not just a calendar. It’s an appeal to a style, a zeitgeist, a codified recognizable way of doing things, an aesthetic. Codified is the key word here. Whatever the 1970s were has been settled through a power struggle and there are winners who are remembered and losers who are invisible because they have been written out, ignored or repressed.<br />
<br />
Before the 1970s, there were the 1960s and the 1950s. Does human behavior, and the context for it, really roll along in ten-year cycles? Of course not: the decades are labels, and generalizations of the loosest sort. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the drive to shape our complicated, perhaps chaotic outputs and creative works, and the decade is probably as good as any other, and certainly the easiest to remember. The danger comes when its winning formula’s are held up as a standard or goal. That is, when in the 1970s, artists must behave and work according to the codified zeitgeist. Even worse, once the decade has passed, artists must move on to the next formula or code. Hunting the zeitgeist is the game.<br />
<br />
For provincial artists like us here in OZ, the traditional way of doing this has been to sail and/fly to the central kitchen, steal some of the new magic pudding and bring it back to use at home. The terrible thing that can happen is that the creative life becomes a chain of fashionable actions none of which arise from the artists themselves or their eco-niche. It could be worse. Hilda Rix Nicholas, for example, was a Queensland painter who went to France at the fin-de-siecle and discovered how to paint in high key pointillist post-impressionist style. She did some beautiful paintings which show how well she learnt to do it. When she returned to OZ, she continued to paint the same style for the rest of her life, ignoring her locality and the changing world around her – at least as far as her paintings were concerned. She is not, and sad to say, will not be, the only antipodean artist who finds the latest style when young and continues with it for the rest of their life.<br />
<br />
<br />
Many creative careers last a number of decades and persist through changed social conditions, new technologies and materials and social behaviors. These decades extend over an individual’s lifetime, and one might expect that an individual’s creative works will change as well. There is also a kind of biological/biographic image of work: a lyric poet as a youth becomes a mature observer and researcher into the discipline of poetry, moves to writing something like an epic, or epics, and finally emerges, butterfly-like as a succinct lyric poet again, but with depth and maybe darkness in the singing. The ‘late ‘ works of artists have attracted much attention because of their summary, terse and concentrated qualities, and sometimes are truly experimental. Of course, what is there in the young lyric poet can also be found in the subsequent epic and elder lyric poet. To recognize this, one might say ‘so seventies’. But here, the interest is what has been done since then to the ‘70s’ style, to the manner of working the subject matter. It’s possible that very little can change and very much at the same time, like Francis Ponge’s observation that a shrub or tree does not shift position, but engages in a lifetime of elaboration.<br />
<br />
And then there are, to my mind, the most interesting of creative workers who are immersed in their eco-niches (local, national, international) but work through a specific vision or program of research. To some degree, creatives are pressured to invent a personal style, a brand, a unique touch which can then be marketed through objects or media. This can be easily subsumed in the borrowed fashionable-decade-style strategy of work. But the commercial pressures can also easily be ignored and a convincing body of work accumulated, extending over decades and with no reference to conventional zeitgeist formulations. This kind of work is often later folded back into revisions of the zietgeist, which can then make the contemporary zeitgeist scouts look empty and lost. This folding-in of idiosyncratic work is also ‘so seventies’. It also ‘so eighties’. And ‘so 90s’. And so on.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>24-29dec2016</i><br />
<a href="mailto:asele@unimelb.edu.au">asele@unimelb.edu.au</a>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-70505569054607000752017-01-14T19:16:00.000+11:002017-01-14T19:16:12.246+11:00THE BEACH REPORT, 12/14-1-17<br />At this level of reality (or do i mean perception?) --Malcolm Lowry's, mine, even Dad's (his rhetorical question regarding the overwhelmingly attractive thought that a journey might continue infinitely, --to keep walking to wherever & as long as the path or landscape, the amplified energies, led one on), & if Dad's then, with all due respect, anyone's, everyone's --the journey isn't particular though abounding in particularities. No, it's the ultimate generality whose idea suffuses one from even before the outset, aggregating every step, minute, mile, --filling, fulfilling, fuelling expectation --the promise inherent in Journey…<br /><br /><b>*</b><br /><br />Freighters in the Bay, near horizon. The first one with green flanks carrying red containers; the second, smaller, rust-brown painted. Clear blue sky. White-caps on the shoreline, & gulls sitting in the sand, nestled, nesting. Even from a distance see a large man in long grey shirt, brown trousers, sock & shoeless, curled beside the gulls, his head supported with right hand, left hand on upjutting left hip. <i><b>Canary Row</b></i> i'm thinking : fellow stumbles out of alley, first light of day, shuffles to the beach, follows gulls' example, snuggles into nest of sand. Falls into sudden deep sleep, Rock Candy Mountain sheer relief. Awoken by sea's soughing & feels the spears of sun warming one or other side of face. On the street dosser can be moved-on but not i suspect on the beach. Darkness benevolent in that respect, daylight a dobber. In 2016 this is how it is in a novel because, apparently, city by-laws no longer apply to pavement sitting or sleeping --corollary of which, no contemporary bum distinguished by epithets of nobility including freedom, or rather, no erstwhile bum today would associate with the misfits on the city's streets since, motivated by self-respect (unless also banned by Health & Safety cum Human Rights regimen?), sufficient to cobble together minimum dollars for a room or accept the Salvo's dormitory rather than lay-about in sorry stupor or sometimes belligerent bravado beneath the necessarily purposeful feet of the citizenry.<br /><br />Now, where's his shoes? But rolls over, then's sitting facing the sea and i realise <i>she's</i> no more derelict than i am, has a mobile-phone as well in which she's more interested than the tidal oscillation a hop & a jump ahead of her. It's a gardener's hat pulled down her face, the beach must be bottom of the old suburban block, this her daily constitutional. Stands up, collects sandals & is on her way. Trudge. <br /><br /><br /><b>*</b><br /><br />Couple of years ago wholesale change of staff at the kiosque. --the mix of English & Spanish replaced next season by the current local boy & girl. Even so recognition's still champion. Third season's hello ("How's the family?" "All well, the kids are at home driving tier mother mad!") bestows consummate belongingness. Come to think of it, never see the old parents now. Passed on? But old cant be older than me! <br /><br /><br /><b>*</b> <br /><br />Seagull gives me the stare. Surely toasted sandwich crumbs not as good for you as plankton? Go on! Get out of here…<br /><br /><br /><i>[12-14/01/2017]</i><br />collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-65317508294566671562017-01-14T19:09:00.000+11:002017-01-14T19:09:43.613+11:00THE BEACH REPORT, 6/8-1-2017<b>6th, 7th, 8th January, '17</b><br />
<br />
<br />
The funeral guests follow the coffin out of the chapel into blazing sunlight. We're listening to the adult purr of Charles Trenet's <i>La Mer</i>. Our friend is there mingling on the pavement with her own & suddenly gone mother's family & friends. We waved from our hearts, i explain. We had Charles Trenet's permission to return to the sea --mother of all elements, elemental mother... Our friend's given names --Franceska Jurate Kristina, like the sea a complex manifold. Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Europe, Australia. Imbroglio that is legacy, discordantly chorused as history, life-long striving for singularity sounded through fracture.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
Swish motorboat anchored on water's edge. Black-gleaming outboard motor like a gun-mounting. 30-something dad on board relaxing, all the time in the world, waiting for young teen son who's picking way across the sand with ice-cream cones & large bag of potato-chips from the kiosque. Helps him aboard. The two laze on the deck, eating, taking in the view including yours truly swimming, keeping clear of their mooring rope. Now father & son bob in the water, pull boat away from the shallows. Father & son could do anything & everything together. Son's The Man in lieu of dad's work-mates or brothers. Son is forever the long awaited one, manifestation of own childhood regained, happenstance twin signifying far deeper than reflection, so atavism pronounces its own relations. Now another dad & boy stride off the beach & into the water with rubber-ring to skid & bounce off the surface, footy leap & catch, dive, matching throw for throw, cry Oh & Aah, crow claim to Elwood Beach champions.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Dried, dressed, sitting on foreshore bench, wondering how safe is the blow-up plastic dingy & the tiny children within it which their mother --perhaps their sister? hardly larger than the kids --attempts repeatedly to launch on a wave. Couldn't it so easily propel into deep water? Concurrent image then of those children on the wild beach at Mount Lavinia, gleefully jumping the waves which suddenly became enveloping, overwhelming monstrous maelstrom --and the men on the beach, slow to react, but then brothers & fathers & uncles to a man, frantically, furiously swimming out to the tragedy occurring before them --everyone on the beach, then, shouting, calling, crying, then cheering, laughing, congratulating the rescue, embracing their almost drowned children --and i mean <i>theirs</i>, this Ceylonese community, fishermen & hotel workers & the village infrastructure around the foreign tourists, their avoidance of tragedy, their communal deliverance --i was 19yearold sailor boy, secretly courting the Scottish hairdressers --where was the Fairstar? --how far from the port this storm-ridden resort? --could have been witnessing stomach-turning disaster as if nightmare story expelled from out of one's own sick feelings --journey's excitement & education but simultaneously perilous, on one's sailorboy tod, no one but no one to save my soul, no body that is, but some books surely and the pen & paper by which one confessed, call it journal or novel or poem of the boiling blue sea, the dark blue day, the blue dark night, as many hours of the day that were free of roster & crew's assumed obligation to the Company & one another… And when a man in familiar lifesaver yellow & red gear walked by, yelling into megaphone, i thought he was reacting to the potential danger of the little family in the plastic float, but then heard him say we had to clear the beach, the beach was being temporarily closed because <i><b>SHARK</b></i> had been sighted in St Kilda, a hop & a skip down the road… <i><b>SHARKS!</b></i> now that's a first for Elwood, friendly as a back-yard pool… <i><b>SHARKS!</b></i>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-6101125425514605942017-01-14T18:41:00.000+11:002017-01-14T18:41:35.484+11:00THE BEACH REPORT, 5-1-17<br />Serving <i>"who's the coffee? tea?"</i> to the table --would have thought i'd know by now, lad laughs --but <i>i</i> didn't know or remember he <i>wasn't</i> English backpacker for in this moment i'm sure he's Greek, especially if over-familiar man under further canopy of kiosque forecourt, adjacent to concrete esplanade & the beach, is the dad? Ah, couldn't be! --mebee related to the little Greek family business, --partner? --a regular customer, little business's esteemed 'regular', every day of the season like old-timers in pub hoping for a pot on the house, picking up the dead glasses & carafes, this guy gathers tea & coffee cups like kiosque's best girl or boy, otherwise sits at a table, grey & white fluffy dog at his feet, -- he reads the paper, drinks his coffee, pecks doughnut or chip, converses with whomever's closest, the weather, the government…<br /><br />Only the third attendance of the summer yet seems the British & Europeans aren't here, working or playing. Index of world economy --less travel-money, change of visa requirements, reduced energy, curiosity. Instead, different leagues of local --arrived such & such a year, live in that street, suburb, or came after, but long enough to establish cactus in rockery, privet bush above subterranean car-port --or always wuz 'ere, almost original, like Arthur, Peg Cregan's husband --his all-seasons' browned legs --like Peg herself --that is, Arthur like Peg, her standard, sockless, sandals --his Diet Ale, her claret --dressed up when he had to be --Australian Railways Union business --but at home, whoever was around, in his garden shorts, colourful shirt flapping --easy in his own skin --seen & heard it all yet attentive, curious, for duration of any conversation --<i>Peg's</i> poets, painters, musicians, --eccentrics --<i>his</i> trade unionists --all of 'em <i>their </i>comrades… "<i>Look at this house Mr Brezhnev</i>" i had him saying in <i><b>The Poem of the Clear Eye</b></i> (1972/3), "<i>a worker's house comrade a bloody mansion!</i>" --as too the prettiest terrace on Victoria Parade, <i>"(with blistered feet i come to savour your cool / ness Princess at the offices of Amalgamated / Engineers (our Movement / the beer & mighty bulls refined by / a frieze of realistic art & discourse / Watan & Counihan the mild Jack Hutson the dreaded / Carmichael the gallant O'Neill the last Paraguayans / mate & mate mopping up blood of comrades in Jakarta every / where"</i> --and why have i been thinking of him recently? --figures of age, of ageing, of the older into which one's moved unintentionally…<br /><br />And the floppy beach hat i retrieve from the water after my dip --thought it was a jelly fish --like one of Arthur's --no tickets, that's what it is, talking about the Australian character, --any kind of hat, anything'll do, anything if it does the job, --sounding like Lawrence now narrating <i><b>Kangaroo</b></i> --British but without the pettier class reflexes, imposed & reversed snobbery --Jack as good as his master --shock of the colonial new --one can be lighter there, my Lawrence says, --refreshed, renewed, and transformed --transformation in the fullest brightest light, not a smidgin of the ambivalent dark, dark sun & et cetera --imagine him, his surrogate, intuiting, sounding off like that. It's a child's hat. Yours? i indicate to sporty man striding towards me along the water line. No! he laughs, not mine! Slim girl in bikini actually rises from her sunbathing beside us & suggests the owner's to be found among the group of little kids & adults previously playing in our vicinity --screaming, in & out the water after dad has rafted three lucky ones to deeper water & back. She's right. Not that the mother immediately claimed it --but one of the five children did, raising hand as though in yesteryear's classroom --it's mine, she said… And that was that...collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-33000655134616600552017-01-14T18:28:00.000+11:002017-02-12T18:51:23.039+11:00THE BEACH REPORT, 4-1-17<b>January 4th, 2017</b><br />
<br />
Head full of Greece out of early morning emails with Jenni K --reciting the influence of the Durrells, Miller, Clift & Johnson, Leonard Cohen (--i appear to be the only one of the generation who <i>never </i>went to India or Greece or Paris for that matter --friend Cathy's 70's overland adventure its epitome --though naturally always in my head, --and Paris on the map in 1964 but something happened to prevent Christopher Owen, with whom i shared a passion for Oscar Wilde & whose idea it was to drop out of the Tech College in Southampton & go to Paris with me, --my actor friend with the parley vous & the aristo manners & a double crown, --suddenly we werent going -- his pater he said, or his mater, no money forthcoming --ah well, i went to South Wales instead ℅ of a few quid from Aunty Lydia who shared my disappointment at the abandonment of the Parisian reconnoitre -- yet Amsterdam was ever mine, & Ostend & Aachen & some of the German towns, especially Koln, Soest, Dortmund --and India, Greece…? --hmm… "next life" i mutter…) --once more at the kiosque --<i>heard you were still here, Happy New Year</i>--<br />
<br />
--but the Point Ormond end of Elwood Beach's sou-westerly bluster's more like the Skegness of another life's forbearance --that is, desire's English inventory of never-visited seaside towns, fed by schoolfriends' holiday reports. However, there was always the Isle of Wight, a jewel compared to the smaller, shalier, stonier, scrubbier Hampshire resorts. Bournemouth we never ever got to, --posher, cosmopolitan, sandy, everything the Aunty in her sophistication would insist as almost acceptable in eternal competition with the Alexandria of her childhood & youth.<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
<br />
When encountered, Summer's here-again-ness could never not have been! One minute of summer day's sand, sea & sky causes instant forgetfulness of Winter --the cliche of the constantly warm-weathered Australia absolutely restored…<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
Two little boys squabbling over ball, bucket, ice-cream; third little feller inured from the fight by innocent infancy. Mediterranean mother sprawled in the recliner on the sand shrieks instructions for the three to enact the perfect family photograph, otherwise ignores their mayhem. Kayakers return to the water's edge, survey the chop, then quickly into their craft & paddle out. Three swimmers who pulled past in deep water far beyond where our kind of splashers on a brighter, stiller day would abound, reverse now on seemingly effortless point-to-point. From rocks & sea-wall a hundred, two hundred yards away near the old yacht club, the children's playground, toilet block, food vans, presently closed restaurant, back to Point Ormond…<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
Port Philip Bay's EPA warnings taken to heart --spit out face full of salty, sea-weedy water. One immersion's enough. Throw strange ball back to player with bandy bat. What's that? i'm asking. Thank you, he says clubbing the ball fifty yards across the grass. Hurling, he says --it's an Irish game! Ah --I was thinking lacrosse or a form of bush tennis. Now dried off & dressed, notebook in hand, i've commandeered the best bench. Only now, Loretta observes, are others entering the water. The sun's hotter. Your reporter's on his way...collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-89247445959920091052017-01-14T18:00:00.002+11:002017-01-14T18:12:27.951+11:00DAVID MELTZER, 1937-2016, R.I.P.<a href="http://culturecountermag.com/wandering-jew-eternal-beat-the-david-meltzer-syory">http://culturecountermag.com</a><br />
[Found a post from Joseph Murray on the Jack Kerouac site this afternoon. Mr Murray's preface, "David Meltzer, one of my favorite beat poets died today after suffering a major stroke. This article was written last year." But it's disappeared from my page in the hours ive been elsewhere. Will attempt to rewrite what i had put up... ]
<br />
<br />
Sad to hear that David Meltzer has died. His name's been in my head for decades. Probably first found him in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (1960; my copy the tenth printing, purchased in 1967). I have a memory of seeing his magazine Tree in Nat Tarn's library late '69 or '70, must have been '70 +, and also at favourite bookseller Nick Kimberley (Compendium Bookshop)'s place either '70/72 or in '75 when i was back in England from Melbourne again. Wherever & whenever, a great era of widening, deepening sources & corollaries for the new poetry, including Meltzer & Rothenberg's work with the kabbalah.
R.I.P. David Meltzer, 1937-2016<br />
<br />
Further : Alongside Ron Loewinsohn, Meltzer's the youngest poet in the Donald Allen anthology. How the years fly; 79 now. Four poems there, 2 of his Ragas series, and a lovely thing, Prayerwheel / 2 (for John Wieners). Reading it now, as tho for the first time, I hear both New York & San Francisco in it. Start of it recalls Lee Harwood (r.i.p.) --maybe a Boston thing then! For example, "Don't worry about growing old. / When we talk / it is the sea I see from your mouth. / The winds, the wee fish (silver / parasites) feeding on the whale's white hide. / Why not die alone?" He refers to the "gone Bond sign -- once high / above Broadway. That's it. / What I mean, when I talk about poetry." And the beautiful last lines of the final stanza, "Somewhere, without mind, / Love begins. The poet begins / to examine the dissolution of Love. / The sea continues. We continue / talking, growing nervous, drinking / too much coffee." The magic is in that glint of true feeling off the contemporary poetry of the era's sardonic play... Must look in the catalogues now for the poetry & maybe the music too...<br />
<a href="http://www.collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com.au/"><br /></a>
<a href="http://www.collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com.au/">See, http://culturecountermag.com/wandering-jew-eternal-beat-the-david-meltzer-story</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<i>[January 2nd, 2017]</i><br />
<br />
<b><i>Note:</i></b><br />
<i>Click "culturecountermag" and find David Meltzer in the index...</i><b><i> </i></b><br />
<i> </i>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-71269578694315800252016-12-26T23:46:00.000+11:002016-12-27T01:00:28.090+11:00THIS WRITING LIFE<br />
Introducing novelists Colin Talbot & Shane Maloney at Collected Works Bookshop recently, for the former's book launch on December 9th, '16, I described a potential customer's enquiry as to whether we stocked any "amusing travel books"… Jules Verne? I wondered to our audience. Joseph Conrad? Malcolm Lowry? B Traven? Traven Collins <i>aka</i> Colin Talbot? <br />
<br />
Long captivated by the splicing of author & character(s) in novels, I'm led to ask the question What is "fiction"? --what is fiction for Colin Talbot, for example, who's first to confess that his form of detective fiction isn't concerned with serial killers! He'll say it's his vehicle for writing, writing <i>per se</i>. There'll be another opportunity to discuss Talbot's work, but since mentioning Lowry that night the latter has been in my mind, and only yesterday did I select <i><b>Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place</b></i> as my travelling companion to & fro' the sea on the 246 bus, & whose author was then quoted into my Christmas Day <i>"Beach Report</i>" largely written <i>in situ</i> (posted on F/book & the Poetry & Ideas blog).<br />
<br />
Thinking about Malcolm Lowry and reading the collection's first couple of stories, <i>The Bravest Boat</i> & <i>Through the Panama</i>, moved to say that it's a writing laden with 'the art of'. Author's investment in novel as if mythology --concurrent levels of the revelatory fiction. Author here symbolist but not psycho-analyst whatever the volition of his time. He is artist projecting own system of significance but intuits there's no interpretation ahead of the experience which, for consummate writer, is doubly recollected --by & as intense memory & intense invention, & remembered again & again.<br />
<br />
Imagine Lowry --poet, poetic intellectual, novelist in age of realism become more-or-less reportage --Bellow, for example, in the '40s, memorably exploiting one of Joyce's tricks without concomitant commitment to larger scheme or idea --story-telling entirely within rhythm of the colloquial, sounding out 'as we think & speak' which was called, when we were young, "contemporary", meaning, I think, post-literary --H E Bates for example, as present-time D H Lawrence one thought then, having cut to the vernacular chase, as earthy & corporeal as DHL but novelistically one-dimensional… Imagine Lowry seeking something else, perhaps as something-else's conduit… Doesn't he let it all slip there on p27 of the paperback collection (leapt when I read it)? "The further point is that the novel is about a character who becomes enmeshed in the plot of the novel he has written, as I did in Mexico. But now I am becoming enmeshed in the plot of a novel I have scarcely begun. Idea is not new, at least so far as enmeshment with characters is concerned. Goethe, Wilhelm von Scholz, 'The Race with a Shadow.' Pirandello, etc. But did these people ever have it happen to them?<br />
Turn this into triumph : the furies into mercies. <br />
-- The inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are; the billows of inexhaustible anguish haunted by the insatiable albatross of self."<br />
<br />
Philosophical complexity of 'having no right' allows practical translation at least as no ease with conventional relations, that is regarding definition of the story & story-telling, where elegance & efficacy congeal, & the edges refined, the bumps & whorls of perception's plenitude eliminated… <br />
<br />
<i>26-12-16</i>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-19306510112240838322016-12-25T20:45:00.000+11:002016-12-25T20:45:27.990+11:00THE BEACH REPORT, Christmas Day, 2016<br />Malcolm Lowry's Hemensley is no Old Man of the Sea --how could he be? so grounded (Lowry & Hemensley both) in --in his books -- so enfolded in ground, exactly like the longed-for earth after weeks at sea on one's sole working voyage --Perth wasn't it? maniacal drive with the Ship Shop's manager & deputy --Fremantle to Perth --is that possible? -- t'other end of which kicking a football around on the dewy lawn of house of Shop manager's Australian mate --one starlit night on the Earth in 1965 --& heaven on earth after the constant heave of ocean --yet that billowing, sometimes bellowing push & pull of sea is solid ground's eternal counterpoint --and the rest of it, fierce wind, rain-like spray, errant waves, from which any Crew Only door's an escape but full roar & only man on deck's the opportunity usually experienced in books, best written when author's unhooked from feather-down suburbia -- bliss though in quiet room in quiet street, reading, writing…<br /><br />"…in the park of the seaport…" our Lowry will write --understanding, like his Hemensley, that even the terrestrial accoutrement is suffused with sea --for example, that bunch of men in the parcels section of the Post Office, Southampton, Christmas '65 & again in 1970 --one of those forever available jobs, you'd simply turn up & apply, last years of the industrial age --a bunch of men in-between ships, best bets for unflagging labour, night shift --of course they were sailors but their camaraderie & gusto surely inspired the landlubber casuals, transformed the parcels room into ship's hold, the parcels into slithering fish, the parcel sacks into overflowing fishing nets--<br /><br />"…in the park of the seaport…" --first sight of Elwood's grassed & shrubbed foreshore, before the sand & the bay of blue sea, the entirely blue sky…<br /><br /><br />collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-3563712088438189662016-12-08T21:48:00.002+11:002016-12-08T22:12:07.747+11:00MEETING MARK OLIVAL-BARTLEYA great pleasure to have met Mark Olival-Bartley over the last week. Could hardly not feel well-disposed to a man who makes the following observation, "<i>Collected Works Bookshop, a literary haven and quite possibility the best antiquarian poetry bookshop in the world."</i> I dont know about that; if it's anywhere near so then my world is reducing. English-speaking world one wld have to qualify. <br />
From Hawaii & living in Munich ("<i>presently reappraising the sonnets of E A Robinson for his dissertation at Amerika-Institut of Ludwing-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen"</i>), Mark was poet-in-residence at the recent international Eco-Health Alliance conference in Melbourne.<br />
First question he asked when he walked into the Shop was whether we had any Edgar Arlington Robinson. Turns out he might be our time's expert on Robinson! We did of course have Robinson in the Boydell series of Arthurian poets, also Yvor Winters' little guide and a 1st edition Robinson, <i><b>Matthias at the Door</b></i>. Proves that every book has its reader and obscurity a relative concept.<br />
We've talked long & variously about poets & poetry, including the scene in Hawaii which I experienced in 1990 for a week when I was there as a guest of Kiki Davis & EWEB/University of Hawaii Press. <br />
We bandy about the word 'form' in Melbourne, but chatting with Mark it's obvious we're largely on a different page. In my own case, the forms were available once free verse ceased to be the exciting adventure of my beginnings. Late 80s early 90s I was extricating from avant garde cul-de-sac. Not a formalist but happy to experiment with the forms. Sonnet sequences, for example, and latterly syllable counts. Not a formalist but happy as poet to restore to my reading what free verse had junked.<br />
We spent a little while on Wednesday a/noon reading & discussing Mark's possibly favourite poem of all, Robinson's "<i><b>Eros Turannos</b></i>". It aroused a thought in my mind about the relationship of the form & the story --seemed to me, on the spur, that a couple of verses stood alone as beautiful constructions whereas the form felt a little strained as the story pushed through in the poem. I'll be rereading it of course. (Mark points us to Robert Pinsky's discussion of the poem available on the web in <i>Harriet</i>, the Poetry Foundation's blog.) <br />
And thanks to the web we'll stay in touch!<br />
<br />
[<i>Melbourne, 8th December, '16]</i>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-77997728658423250582016-12-08T21:37:00.000+11:002016-12-27T00:41:10.700+11:00THIS WRITING LIFE<br />
<br />
<br />
Listening to the British Library's <i>British Poets</i> CD, which Robert Mitchell kindly gave me the other day because, disappointingly, it was a dud: his expectations of disc 3's WS Graham, Amis, Edwin Morgan, G. Mackay Brown et al, dashed upon the rock'n'roll of Ferlinghetti, Bukowski, Ginsberg, --the American disc slipped incorrectly into the British box-set. And it is a shock on the ear let alone sensibility; the speak easy vs the elocution lesson… The contrast's the greater because one's probably missing Whitman's introduction, from whence the long century of a determined modern cultivation, mostly all free one imagines, even as Ashbery's sestina or Sexton's parables, the colloquial messing up the old poetical. <br />
<br />
On the 2nd English disc, Dylan Thomas follows George Barker, and it's his dramatic diddledy-di which upsets the decorous continuum, as far as annunciation's concerned, from C Day-Lewis through John Betjeman (full of fun, a poetry that sticks in the ear, history recorded via nostalgia and as true as comedy allows), Spender, Auden. Sorley MacLean is different & not only due to the Gaelic (that is, the Gaelic's thoroughly not-Englishness); and R S Thomas in another way. But Dylan Thomas is something else, the strong & continuous flowing, the rhymes & rhythms, the repetitious or better said, the apparent circularity of image & rhyme; in the spirit of Hopkins & Yeats, accessible to their great spirits. <br />
<br />
The British disc is an entire lesson, whether or not in the largely bypassed diction --a lesson in the old craft by its late practitioners, the mid 20th Century's sages & stars who were the main men on the shelf when I was beginning, hardly beginning, early '60s ℅ Southampton's public libraries. I got into my own stride by rejecting the lot of them. I was looking for W C Williams not Charles on the poetry shelf! <br />
<br />
Listening to the American disc, I can imagine the converse surprise of the American poetry buff, the horror listening to Larkin or Hughes instead of John Ashbery or Le Roi Jones… And I can hear how Adrienne Rich connects with Anne Sexton & I'm sure Sylvia Plath too. Incantation by which didactic is kept sweet to the lyric. Question : How remain individual (retain eccentric personality) in the vortex of the topical (perhaps the involuntary generality)? How save individual in the maelstrom of the everyday (one's 'particular narrowness' as per Celan)? How prevent the signature American poetry (the declasse vernacular to which all accents adhere, Walt's 'democratic idiom') convoluting to artless prose? My questions, only mine, never finally put away…<br />
<br />
(December, 8th, '16)collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-78796166489892989762016-11-27T15:03:00.001+11:002016-11-27T15:09:54.156+11:00BARRY HUMPHRIES ASKS FOR WILLIAM PLOMER<br />
Barry Humphries enters the Shop through the bead curtain. 'ello, I say, casual London style I've taken on this morning. He knows the Shop of course, began visiting during our Flinders Way Arcade years. His friend Neil Munro introduced him. Every year or so he pops in. One time in the Nicholas Building he was accompanied by a film-crew; photos & article duly appeared in the paper. He sat in the black painted bamboo chair, fitted with Cathy O'Brien's embroidered green cushions (--the chair the late Dr Norman Saffin always sat in, commandeered it --one time totally put out when, as a joke, Kris Coad saw him coming up the corridor & beat him to it! --poor Dr Saffin stood at the door non-plussed, had to be convinced to enter & take up his usual position), --the famous chair, therefore, which Barry pulled away from the eccentric & eclectic 'Shire' shelf over to the Irish section that suited the photographer far better. Next visit he enquired whether we'd benefited from his plug for the Shop, and we had. Funnily enough, on this occasion I'm not entirely sure it is him! As he shuffles the chapbooks in front of me at the counter, I formulate a comment which'll confirm one way or t'other : I saw you recently in Ballarat, I say. Oh? he says, what was I doing? You were hanging, I said (Louise Hearman's 2016 winning Archibald Prize portrait). Oh yes, and he chuckles, they're touring me around now!<br />
He asks for William Plomer. Would I have anything? I look; we have <b>Celebrations</b>, a first edition. South African you know, he says. Yes, I enjoyed his memoir… I had a South African friend too, I say, the poet Frank Prince, lived in Southampton… Don't know him, Barry says. Died a few years ago, aged 92. Everyone's dying, he said. Frank's famous WW2 poem was <i><b>Soldiers Bathing</b></i>… Oh yes, I know, he says --speculatively… <br />
Taking the Plomer down from its high shelf I also remove Ruth Pitter. Ah, he says, Ruth Pitter --I spoke to her on the phone just before she died… Flicking through the Plomer he says, read <i><b>The</b><b> Planes of Bedford Square</b></i> --beautiful poem --note the internal rhymes, brilliant. "Never were the plane trees loftier, leafier, / the planes of Bedford Square, / and of all that summer foliage motionless / not one leaf / had fallen yet, one afternoon / warm in the last world-peace before / the First World War." <br />
Anna Wickham, he plucks out of the air… Same generation I say (Prince, Plomer, Pitter, Ridler et al)… Do you have any? No, but you know there's a collected Wickham due next year from the University of West Australia Press… young chap Nathaniel O'Reilly's scholarship. Because of the Australian connection, Barry muses, she published two collections in Australia you know… He wonders whether any of these older poets is remembered now? What can one say? To oneself, "that's our job". <br />
At the counter again, before leaving, he looks around him. It's good to be back, he says, back in an older Melbourne… I like old, he says. We're not really a part of that, I say, not historically --the Shop's only existed since 1984 though I personally remember mid '60s Melbourne.... but temperamentally of course... How old were you when you arrived? 19 as a sailor in '65, 20 as a migrant the next year…<br />
A couple of times you've been here & I've had English classics on the stereo, and I've asked you to guess who… one time not Rubbra or Bax or Howells or Finzi… Finzi, Barry echoes… none of them --it was E G Moeran! Oh yes, he says, smiling. Glazed look, peering through the maze of memory? We shake hands, say goodbye till next time. His companion has the Plomer in a paper bag. Their voices trail away en route the lifts. <br />
<br />
[from Journal, 19th November, '16]<br />
<br />
" collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-6177864669894050682016-10-30T17:26:00.000+11:002016-10-30T17:33:20.245+11:00ADDITIONAL to "On this day..."<b>K H :</b> <br />
Hi Tim, I posted some thoughts about John Thorpe & others on my blog y'day, usual memoir/intersection style of thang... <br />
<br />
Cheers for now,<br />
Kris<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>oOo</b></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>TIM WRIGHT :</b><br />
I hadn't heard of John Thorpe - but will remember the name now. The<br />
quotes were interesting to me - particularly that connection between<br />
what Pound was getting at with the ideogram and that ease that kids <br />
have in writing (painting) and later generally lose - "the language of<br />
changing yr mind" I like. You lost me a bit on the opposition between<br />
history -> present/present -> history but maybe I need to read some of<br />
Thorpe's writing to catch your drift here.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>oOo</b></i><br />
<br />
<b><br />K H :</b><br />
Now then, re- the history thing. Me too have to get head back into whatever it was, out of Thorpe and then my own riff...<br />
Maybe I mean that the --rephrase, maybe I <i>meant</i> back in 1985! --maybe in the context where the <i>value</i> is in the 'making it historical', because obviously history such a loaded category, such a phenomenal vector. But to fall out of history into the local, the local as <i>all-that-we-have</i>, I mean the 'that's all folks!' versus endless semantic aggregation (data, symbolism et al) , maybe that's the difference I was feeling... And because I was tapping "<i>being here</i>" at that time and, I recall, distinguishing between 'here' & Heideggerian 'there"... Any lack of clarity is because of that focus, an ecstasy of thinking & feeling & writing I remember inhabiting at that time! <br />
<br />
Re- John Thorpe himself, several books of poems, proses, commentary. In my piece I refer to his booklet, <i><b>MATTER, or giving</b></i>, wch was part of the inspiring series published by the late John Clarke, out of Buffalo. I was in touch with those people once upon a time, a brilliant time, and actually to an extent recovered by meetings in February & March '16 in Melbourne, separately, with our two North American visitors, Sharon Thesen & Stephen Ellis...<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>oOo</b></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>TIM WRIGHT :</b><br />
I guess my comment was just an inclination<br />
or tendency to think (or try to think) of those two ..vectors.. as<br />
somehow the same, if oppositional, which may or may not be different<br />
to your take - I'll have to read over your email below again. Reading the<br />
blog again I also like his <i>'I make space-time. IT is not making it (….)<br />If i describe a condition, it changes</i>' which seems a completely sensible<br />
position, in that any poem will articulate a time-sense of some kind,<br />
when heard/read by others...<br />
<br />
<i>[Email conversation, Sunday, 30th October, '16]</i>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-64611171752657628912016-10-29T23:46:00.000+11:002016-10-30T12:57:06.051+11:0021st October: On this day in 1969, Jack Kerouac died... <br />
"21st October: On this day in 1969 Jack Kerouac died. The Lonesome Traveller. Among friends & allies here in Heaven." Our notice up on the wall at Collected Works Bookshop, 21-X-16.<br />
<br />
[<b>Facebook</b> post: On that day, the day after, the morning after? the Hemensleys were visiting George Dowden in Brighton, up from Southampton for a couple of days. I'd begun corresponding with George as editor of little mag, Our Glass, in Melbourne, '69. Found his <i>Letters to English Poets</i> in Mike Dugan's collection in '68, which gave me a postal address. What more does a boy in the sticks require?! Anyway, cut to the chase Hemensley! George took us around the corner from his fine apartment to meet Bill Butler, fellow American, at Bill's Unicorn Bookshop. Bill was fetching us a cuppa or finding a book to show, something like that, but he returned with the newspaper, New York Times, the Herald Tribune? Oh my, he was saying, have you seen this, Jack Kerouac died. Took the wind out of our sails.<br />
George burrowed into his shoulder bag, fetched out a note book. Ive got a new notebook, he said. This'll be the first entry I make in it. Bill Butler kind of drew himself even taller than us and said, cuttingly, I always thought one only wrote small things in small notebooks. <br />
Ye-es. Hmmm. <br />
On the subject of Kerouac... infinite. On the subject of Bill Butler, great little shop, nice catalogues, central to the Brighton scene. I liked him, his Americana poems. Not everyone did. I recall Andrew Crozier generally congratulating the particular issue of my English mag. Earth Ship, in '70 or so, but particularly objecting to Bill's poems. (I'll take this opportunity to reread him now; I mean Bill. Andrew's a constant though wasnt always for me...) And on the subject of George... what happened to George? Bibliographer of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s, prolific on the little mag scene. I shared poems he sent to Melbourne with other little mags. He corresponded with Charley Buckmaster; Charles hoped to get across to England. I have some poetry on this in the book Kent MacCarter's publishing soon...<br />
Yep! This has to be Heaven!<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
<b>re- John Thorpe</b><br />
<br />
John Thorpe is always ''descending from history''. He brings one back --to Pound (Canto II, "…Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "), that is to say, to the poetry able to listen &, whatismore, hear. He brings one back to the instant which is always local --to logography ("is the language of changing yr mind. It was not discovered by Pound (who called it ideogram) or Olson, etc it's so primary only kids & a very few writers have been able to equal -- 'english' being full of alphabetic, syllabic & prosodic reflexes."), that is to say, to writing as a way of being human, which realises & manifests nature, extending the possibility of life, enhancing the precondition, never setting out to be 'literary'.<br />
<br />
John Thorpe is always descending from history into the present, the instant, the local, which really is the opposite of making the local etc. historical. What does he mean, "changing yr mind"? : "I make space-time. IT is not making it. (….) If i describe a condition, it changes. Or i hope to hell it does. If it didn't I'd be in trouble & I have been."<br />
<br />
<b>* </b><br />
<br />
<b>re- George Dowden</b><br />
<br />
From <i>This Is the Land of the Dead, The island of the Blessed</i>, published by Hapt (Bournemouth, UK), 1970,<br />
<br />
This is the Land of the Dead, the Island<br />
of the Blessed<br />
<br />
There is no Ship of Death - no where<br />
to go but here<br />
<br />
Here are the sweet-smelling trees, the gems<br />
of the Earth are flowers, stones, a palace<br />
is in the center - it is you, it is I,<br />
that's all to know for beginning<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Dowden's Ship of Death is a companion of John Thorpe's "Stranger in Paradise" --from <i>Matter, or</i> <i>giving</i> (Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, N.Y., '75), "we came here on the 'Stranger in Paradise.' These were americans searching ease in the orient, never leaving Paradise, their ideological capitol, to look at the earth." <br />
<br />
Literature is their prehistory. They swear that no more will they be led astray. (Though one wonders what's happened to that resolution in Dowden's most recent publication (three works by Kaviraj [George Dowden], published as loot 1 : 3, 1979, UK), praise poems for Muktananda, which are sopping wet with sub-Beat adoration.)<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
At the beginning, Dowden was one of the poets I found in Michael Dugan's treasure-trove of English little magazines. Or, at the beginning, in Melbourne, there was Michael Dugan, with his treasure-trove of English little-magazines, through which I rummaged at his home in Canterbury… Or, at the beginning, I was in Melbourne, putting my first little mag, <i>Our Glass</i>, together, when Ken Taylor, in some excitement, told me about & then showed me another little magazine, <i>Crosscurrents</i>, emanating from completely outside of our La Mama cafe-theatre circuitry. It was produced by Michael Dugan from his home in Wentworth Street, Canterbury. For at the beginning I was an English poet in Melbourne, who reconnected with the English scene through fortuitous meeting with Michael Dugan, whose treasure-trove of English little-magazines had inspired him to publish his own, <i>Crosscurrents</i>, & confirmed me in my own Roneo style direction! <br />
George Dowden's poems in an issue of Ambit had caught my eye. I found his address somewhere amongst Michael's things. I wrote to him (& to Jeff Nuttall, & Simon Cutts). He replied, with poems, "(…) from my current 'set' called EARTH INCANTATIONS (Body Chants) - Blake, "O Earth, O Earth, return!" Etc. These have been my work through 1968-69, and are proving of interest to editors in a number of countries, underground papers as well as poetry magazines. I hope you will be able to get them into papers or mags or your own roneo series there. (….) Hope this catches you before you sail <i>[back to England via French Polynesia, the Panama, Martinique, Madeira, Marseilles, departing Sydney August, '69</i>]. Good luck to your group, and on your trip…" (27,VII.69)<br />
<br />
At my farewell party, given by Betty Burstall, July '69, I distributed poems by George Dowden, & Michael, similarly, poems by Jim Burns. We were four La Mama poet-editors, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Ian Robertson & myself. Buckmaster corresponded then with Dowden. Dowden negotiated an Australian issue of the English magazine, <i>The Curiously Strong</i>, to be edited by Buckmaster. Dowden sent copies of his books to Ken Taylor (at the ABC, the 'safest' address!) for distribution 'for everybody'. And so on…<br />
<br />
It seemed to me, in '69, '70, that Dowden's poetry, his Blake/Ginsberg epistles, could be a stimulus & elevation in the level of political-poetic address then being attempted in Melbourne by such poets as Charles Buckmaster, Paul Adler, & Geoff Eggleston. Both Ian Robertson & Buckmaster were enthusiastic to publish him. Dowden (an American living in England, teaching, writing Ginsberg's bibliography for New Directions) was closer to the Melbourne aspiration, was more accessible than Michael McClure for example. <br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<b>George Dowden to K.H.</b>, "Had weird letter from GREAT AUK Chas. Buckmaster. I got Fred Buck to do an Aussie issue of THE CURIOUSLY STRONG, sent a couple of samples to Chas, told him choose 3 or 4 poets there and make up (edit) the whole thing as per the way it's laid out. Said a few words I thought were encouraging, like poetry should be really strong, dangerous, etc., things I thought they were after and were finding in my poems they were praising -- he took it all wrong, thought I was trying to tell him what to write, but was only trying to impress on him the idea of making a really strong issue in his editing (what else?). It must have been that I honestly told him I didn't care for a few little poems he included in letter, wanting me to get published for him --I told him to make them better in THE CUR. STRONG. Oh, well, sensitivity and all that. I explained that 'known' poets when asked for criticism/opinion can only give it from what they want and are doing -- the younger takes it or leaves it (same as in my LETTERS TO ENGLISH POETS, 1967, where I say that they are firstly for me, and only secondly for anyone else who wants to listen). Forget it. Nothing serious. But must be understood: when one is asked for opinion, he does the younger poet no good by lying…." (30. I. 70)<br />
<br />
"Yes, overemphasis on description in aussies -- must be a nice place to describe, physically, Pacific, the sun, greenery. But hoping that can be fused with saying something vital -- will be in best, always is (where Pound is so good so often)…." (7. II. 70)<br />
<br />
<br />
----------------------------<br />
<br />
<i>Quoted from Being Here, the draft of its first part, Interference, published in the Being Here issue of H/EAR #7, 1985. </i>collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-70803974741264473862016-10-13T16:15:00.000+11:002016-12-27T00:41:39.792+11:00THIS WRITING LIFE : James Liddy & et cetera<b>From Journal</b>,<br />
<i>[Saturday, 8 Oct. ‘16]</i><br />
<br />
Ive been reading James Liddy’s <b>It Swings from Side to Side</b> (Arlen House, 2011), poems written in 2008 during his illness, a knowingly posthumous collection? Again I’m struck by the exultant writing which is the timbre of thinking aloud/talking/singing in the moment, receptive, responsible indeed, to the frame, the field delineated by the moment. Nothing to do with style, everything to do with being present. Paradoxically such a writer is historically fluent, for the history that flows in the poetry is ultimately opportunity for his own song, that is his own compounded phrasing, intent for his own sound, intensely himself. <br />
<br />
<i><b>P.S.</b></i><br />
<i>[Tuesday, 11 Oct. ‘16]</i><br />
<br />
This kind of historical man --history not incorporated as Whitman, Pound, but constituent of the flow, perhaps even constituting it --for which “song of myself” the intensity of presence is what one reads & hears.<br />
<br />
<i><b>P.S. (2)</b></i><br />
<i>[from Facebook post, 13 Oct. 16]</i><br />
<br />
Suddenly realized that the author of the article "<i><b>A note on the legacy of Patrick Kavanagh</b></i>" in the splendid <b>Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice : A Tribute to James Liddy </b>(ed Michael Begnal, Arlen House, Galway, 2006), is the same Emily Cullen met here in Melbourne couple of years or so ago! Dropped her a line, described current reading around George Stanley, James Liddy & other Irish & American poets. She confirmed, mentioned the introduction to Libby Hart, a continuing connection she says. Likes my description of Liddy's poetry as 'powerful & poignant'...<br />
<br />
Meanwhile Ive read Brendan Kennelly's essay on Patrick Kavanagh (in <b>Journey into Joy</b>, Bloodaxe, '94), excellent in itself, in which Liddy is described as a 'loner'. Kennelly, "I'm thinking of poets who, instead of becoming embroiled in Ireland's local squabbles, write and work in different parts of the world. Bernard O'Donoghue, Eamon Grennan, Peter McDonald, Greg Delanty, James Liddy, Matthew Sweeney are, literally, outsiders whose work reflects that fact. Ireland is an island washed, in the eyes of many exiles, by nostalgic seas. None of the poets I've mentioned has been a victim of this nostalgia." Whilst holding up as & within an Irish literary-political perspective, Liddy's hardly a loner in the psychological sense, and in America was a San Franciscan at an important time for the New Poetry, and later in Wisconsin, pivotal to Irish & American cross-currents.<br />
<br />
Regarding the Kavanagh/Liddy correlation Emily writes, "In the same way that James Liddy is uniquely James Liddy, Patrick Kavanagh was Patrick Kavanagh alone --his own man, true to himself --ultimately inscrutable, but wonderfully original in every way. It is one of the tragedies of Irish literature that the gift of Patrick Kavanagh was not more widely appreciated during his lifetime. Without the recognition Kavanagh received from a core group of the upcoming generation of poets, including Liddy, Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly, Leland Bardwell, Paul Durcan, etc., there would be a palpable gap in the acknowledgement and passing on of the poet's work..."collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-48382775532829079782016-09-04T12:06:00.001+10:002016-09-04T12:33:29.416+10:00MAY-AUGUST '16 : SAVED FROM F/B OBLIVION<br />
<br />
<b>May 8th</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Friday the 29th April
'16 was the last possible day to receive mail in Weymouth, eve of the
early drive up to Heathrow, with Robin H, and the long flight back to
Melbourne. Great pleasure & surprise, then, when package from
Kelvin Bowers & Dooze Storey in St Ives was delivered : their
gift of David Whittaker's book, <i><b>Give Me Your Painting Hand : W.S. Graham & Cornwall</b></i>, published by his own Wavestone Press [<a href="http://www.wavestonepress.co.uk/">www.wavestonepress.co.uk</a>].
Everywhere I went this English Journey '16, conversation ensued in
which Sydney Graham's name came up. Kel, Dooze & I talked about
him when we looked at the Tate's St Ives book of 1985, in which Graham's
poems for painter friends appear within the illustrated text about that
golden period of Cornish abstraction (Graham's more or less the poet of
that practice I'd like to say). And again, just around the corner from
Kel's place, with poet John Phillips, which I worked into my
(compulsory) <i>Lighthouse</i> poem soon after. And continued in
Weymouth with Lucas Weschke, and then in the New Forest with Tony
& Sonia Green (whose new book on Sven Berlin is also recently
published), and in Blandford Forum with David Caddy. W.S.Graham was the
common un-common element in all my meetings! <br />
<br />
Curious to read the headline in the Cornish Review, <i><b>"neglected giant of Cornish literature</b></i>"...
In our neck of the woods, Sidney Graham is celebrated not neglected. I
guess that's the disparity between mainstream & whatever our
community of reading & writing is called! Certainly since
Faber's whopper of a collected, Graham's been front & centre...
And didnt I meself attempt a critique of WSG at the Melbourne Poets
Union event at the VWC when it was next door to Collected Works
Bookshop in the Nicholas Building ten or so years ago? Rhetorical
question! I did! With a little bottle of whiskey beside me --I was
sitting on panel with Jordie Albiston & Susan Kruss-- the
whiskey was the ghost of St Ives you could say, and I was talking about
Sven Berlin and other friends of our poet, imbibing as I delivered. It's
on film, incidentally, but i think I'm too embarrassed to view it
again! 'My Life in Theatre' indeed!<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>-------------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
I should have shared David Caddy's review in the <a href="http://tearsinthefence.com/"><i><b>TEARS IN THE FENCE</b></i></a>
blog a month ago of Sonia Green's biography of Sven Berlin, but my trip
to England & not always having access to a computer got in the
way... Better late than never... I've mentioned Sonia Green [Aarons]
below in the note on David Whittaker's book on Sydney Graham... suffice
to say I met her in 2015 through my woodworker youngest brother Robin,
whose art-work relocation had led him to the Greens & their
incredible archive of Sven's work... When he was introduced to the
Greens he suddenly remembered my own story of meeting Sven in 1963 at
Home Farm, Emery Down, in the New Forest, via college friend Billy
(Will) Fisher. Robin told the Greens about the elder brother &
arranged a meeting. A year on I've met them again, this time via my
sister Monique who, remarkably, was able to tell Sonia her memory of
Billy at our home in Thornhill, Southampton, on one or two occasions,
recalling his vivid blue eyes, his beard, and long locks! Bethatasitmay,
in the meantime Robin & his crew moved Sven's major sculpture,
The Stag of the Forest, from the Fawley industrial complex (where our
father worked for decades, at the Esso oil refinery) to the Greens'
garden; and Robin built the protective shelter which has survived the
long English winter Tony told & showed me. There's a photo of
Robin & crew beside the shelter at the end of Sonia's book, <b>Timeless Man</b> (<a href="http://www.millersford.co.uk/">Millersford Press</a>) and
very proud of him we are too! Ah, such legacy mounted on serendipity :
the figure Sven became for me, and Billy (Will) too; my life as a poet
especially amidst painting & painters; the importance to me of
the St Ives scene... such circles, spirals, of significance...I almost
swoon!<br />
<b><br />----------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>May 11th</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Re Sharon Thesen F/b post about the Hammer Museum's Black Mountain exhibit at UCLA….<br />
To
a certain inner circle of that Melbourne incarnation, 1967-70, namely
the La Mama cafe-theatre, established by the late Betty Burstall, with
poetry centre stage (--"Tuesday Nights Forever!" : recall when I
returned from England, late '72, young poet Pi O visited me in Kerr
Street, Fitzroy, quizzed me about that claim... "So what happened?" he
demanded! That's history though isnt it! --what happened...? --well, I said, I went back to England for 3 years!), --myself
coordinating from start of the year, '68, after Betty's & Glen
Thomasetti's Sunday salons from Winter to Summer, '67 --and this
Melbourne <i>new poetry</i> platform arguably an outpost of the Black
Mountain College we conjured from various sources... The "we" was mainly
Bill Beard, Ian Robertson, Paul Adler, Geoff Eggleston, Garrie
Hutchinson, Charles Buckmaster, Allison Hill, John Jenkins, Mike Dugan,
Mal Morgan, ambivalently Ken Taylor, detachedly Sid Clayton, James
Crouch ... I was saying to Aidan Coleman just the other day,
--interviewed for his Oz Po research, especially on John Forbes --that
Melbourne was Black Mountain (include a couple of Sydney poets in that,
Nigel Roberts, Terry Gillmore, the poets around Free Poetry magazine,
Johnny Goodall another) whilst Sydney was New York (I'm thinking of John
Tranter especially) --I characterised it at the time as Melbourne/Black
Mountain 'Honest Joe' vs Sydney/New York 'City Slicker'... In '73 I met
Robert Kenny & Walter Billeter and that Black Mountain
discussion was on again! Colin & Frances Symes came out from
England (Colin's <i><b>Poetree</b></i> wall map, an insert in Earth Ship
#1 in Southampton, 1970, already a cult reference for our group
regarding the Anglo-American, especially Pound/Olson, legacy). Clive
Faust returned to Melbourne from Japan & met us via the Cid
Corman connection. Bernie O'Regan & Judy Telford came to
Melbourne from London and were part of the enthusiasm. Met Finola
Moorhead at Adelaide Festival '74 and she joined the parlez (included in
the Rushall Crescent Avant Garde meetings). We met the Cantrills who
touched similar base via experimental filmmaking (Stan Brakhage to
Charles Olson e.g.). Same early '70s add Laurie Duggan, John Anderson,
Alexandra Seddon, Ian Reid (with his Levertov, Duncan, Blaser
connections)... yes, quite a crew, and my mag of that time, <i><b>The Ear in a Wheatfield</b></i>,
our international transport... There were of course Black Mountain
enthusiasts in Sydney, for example Carl Harrison-Ford, & Bob
Adamson, either holus-bolus or for particular poets, Robert Duncan for
example... In the early '80s add Pete Spence, Des Cowley, Jurate
Sasnaitis...This aint nothing more than thinking aloud folks! Not a
thesis so plenty of holes I'm sure! Also to say from the late 60s I'd
been aware of New Zealand/Black Mountain connections (Freed magazine),
and was in touch with Alan Loney mid-70s... Yep, it's a LARGE subject!<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>-----------------------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>May 13th</b><br />
<br />
Regarding Hugh Tolhurst's memo about the <b>POW!</b> issue of Meanjin Quarterly... and cryptic comment, "happens to all no (A.D.) Hopers, eh Kris Hemensley"...<br />
Not
sure if we're on same page here, Hugh... Glancing at the Meanjin
Quarterly preview/editorial it looked a bit 'same old' as they say, that
is same-old newbies, new-old same-old & the other 57
varieties... I was there once myself, and folks like Ken Bolton quite
rightly wondered how it had happened : editor of <i>The Ear in a Wheatfield</i>
also poetry editor at Meanjin? People on t'other side asked same
question, Dracula at the blood-bank... Hmmm... At that time, 1975, Jim
Davidson wanted to make his own mark & to align with 'the new',
so his opening salvo including me as poetry ed, Terry Smith sniffin out
the art, who else? Finola Moorhead who'd been reading fiction with A A
Phillips, and had pushed for me to come on board, was charged with
wimmins business...<br />
A D Hope, yes... I once declined a poem or two
from him... a discussion around that could have been interesting re-
old & new, laying out attitudes... it actually wasnt the poem
per se but that it appeared to me to be his <i>patter</i>, --as I said,
poetry couldnt be reproduction of one's patter... it had to be
addressing the poem's possibility always anew... Ah well... a long way
from POW!!!!<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>-------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>May 28th</b><br />
<br />
Susan Fealy commented on Iggy McGovern, "<i>He
held the room with his poetry and his storytelling. A really lovely
evening that opened up into great chats about poetry. Thanks Kris and
Retta for such a warm, relaxed and stimulating evening. So good to be at
a Collected Works event again.</i>" 'Great chats' indeed, Susan...
George Genovese enquired as to the choice of sonnet for Iggy's William
Hamilton book. Iggy discussed Petrarchan & Shakespearian --"And
plenty more beside" he said, which gave me an opportunity to describe
the 'mirror sonnet' I've been writing for 20/25 years! After the free
verse adventure the 'return of/to form(s)' is similarly experimental, I
said. And then Patricia Sykes opened up deliciously, instructively, on
EE Cummings' sonnets.... Now that was but one portion of the session!<br />
<br />
[<i><b>Patricia Sykes</b></i>
: I second that about the "lovely evening"; such a pleasure to have
time to chat at some length about and with a visiting poet in such a
welcoming and convivial setting: thanks indeed Kris and Retta. Keen to
read one of your latest "mirror" sonnets Kris. Must correct one comment
though: It wasn't sonnets I was discussing in relation to eec but the
spin-off about form and song the sonnet discussion generated. Lovely way
to spend a couple of hours on a damp and cold Melbourne night.]<br />
<br />
As Susan Fealy says above, Iggy <i>held</i>
the room or at least our circle in the middle, and his storytelling
(explications of the poems & their form) took us right into
mathematics, poetics, history... By the way, the book is <b>A MYSTIC DREAM OF 4 : A sonnet sequence based on the life of William</b> <b>Rowan Hamilton </b>(Quaternia
Press, '14). The book's 64 sonnets are arranged in 4 parts entitled
1805-1820, Geometry; 1820-1835, Algebra; 1835-1850, Metaphysics;
1850-1865, Poetry... What with Jessica Wilkinson's non-fiction
(& specifically biography) poetry project via her Rabbit
magazine, Iggy's presentation was timely!<br />
<br />
<b><br />-----------------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>June 5th</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Two wonderful meetings
last summer in & around Melbourne, the first with Sharon Thesen,
the second with Stephen Ellis; two North American poets &
scholars, serendipitously in Oz, with Olson & co at centre of
their conversation... A propos her article in <a href="http://dispatchespoetry.com/articles/commentary">Dispatches</a> [<i><b>"Charles, Frances, Ralph,</b></i> <i><b>and me"</b></i>],
our summertime tete a tete meant that I was already across the issues;
laudable that Sharon's described here candidly, & so generously,
what went down in making the important volumes of the Olson/Boldereff correspondence. She is beautifully found in this comment from the
article : <i>"[Which is why] we need artists, poets, and visionaries;
philosophers, mystics, and geniuses; autodidacts, elders, and scholars:
for the sake of joy. For the sake of the everything that is the world
and the everything that is poetry.. "</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>---------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b><b>June 12th</b></b><br />
<br />
Have begun visiting artists who
exhibited in the recent Dorset Art Weeks exhibition, that is via the
fabulous catalogue!
As you know, Dorset is where I've been visiting
family ever since life-changing 1987 trip. Weymouth in Dorset's become
my English HQ & prism. Happy to be a poet amidst painting
& painters, especially the West Country section.
I'll not
launch into vast essay here, about home making & self defining,
--suffice to say this late March + April 2016 visit, which included St
Ives for first time in years, fell just short of the annual Arts Weeks,
but <i>had</i> I been there I would have tried to get around the
galleries & studios.
So far Ive loved the web sites
&/or Facebook pages of Peter Ursem [<a href="http://www.peterursem.co.uk/">www.peterursem.co.uk</a>], Colin Moore (& the Chaldon Studios)[<a href="http://www.colinmoore.uk.com/">www.colinmoore.uk.com</a>], Caz Scott [www.caz-scott.co.uk] & Carolyn Lyness [<a href="http://www.carolynlynessart.com/">www.carolynlynessart.com</a>].
Charmed,
to say the least, by the stylization of their landscapes (oh yes, I
should say that representing landscape, abstracting landscape, is my
continuing & sustaining concern).
Needless to say, this will
become a larger reconnoitre and find it's way to ye olde blog. In the
meantime, Good Morning Dorset from your Melbourne friend!<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>------------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>From the Journal,</b><br />
<b>DREAM, 13-07-16</b><br />
<br />
Discussing Brexit with Cathy O'Brien & other friends in the conference room I recognize from other dreams, --sunlight through large glass windows, different shades of brown-stained wooden furniture, walls, floor. [Possibly regurgitation of conversation about Brexit with Rob Kenny, his colleague Carol, Loretta, Richard Mudford, previous Sunday afternoon at the Kelvin Bar in Westgarth...] So what about Quebec? I say, and also enter Macdiarmid's defence (<i>"you gotta have some nationalism to</i> <i>be 'inter' with</i>")? Rising from low table I cross the room to where Sharon Thesen in rolled-up shirt-sleeves stands smiling, the sunlight catching her arms. I'm wondering how Durham got on in the Referendum. Basil Bunting's great isnt he? she says. Oh yes, I agree --how I wish I could have visited him in Durham… But you can now, she laughs, now you're free… But I'm 75, I say, how can I at 75? How old would you like to be? she jokes. Well, forty, forty-five… She brushes then holds my arm --let's ask this man, she says… Michael Farrell's been standing near us, listening in… I introduce them --Sharon Thesen, Michael Farrell… He's smiling. Dont ask him, I say, he's only 10! <br />
I wake from warm, affectionate dream, telling myself to write to George Stanley to thank him for copy of his book, <i><b>North of California St.</b></i>, received a couple of weeks ago --initially believing Sharon sent it but George's name is on sender (New Star Books, Vancouver)'s label. Also write to Sharon, so bonny in the dream.<br />
Time flies. Eeek! Write tonight.<br />
<br />
<b>P.S.</b> [<i>7th August,'16</i>]<br />
Eeek indeed! Almost a month passed. Distractions, diversions. George Stanley's book is a selected poems, 1975-99, published by New Star in 2014. I think Sharon told me last Summer here that he has another in the making. Or maybe this is that volume. I've read Sharon's introduction a couple of times. So nice to know & here to say, we're on the same page. She refers to his "aboutism" wch has theoretical/political implication but also the straightforward concerns with "ideas, thoughts, locales, occasions, persons, and words…" She says that "aboutism and transportation are natural companions"; hear hear I say often enough myself in train-carriage or tram with notebook! <br />
"Stanley's airplane poems are almost always about mortality and fatality. Flight is a subject that creates opportunities for fear of the loss of "plain reality", of losing touch with the earth, which Stanley likens to 'the truth'". Sharon Thesen continues, "The sense of loss, inspired by flight, of the world, the person, the real, and the familiar, is not a backward-glancing nostalgia for a 'golden' past, which we know, or are told we know, is a fiction; but rather derives from a sensed absence or emptiness in the present…" <br />
Having just handed over my own mss to Kent MacCarter which means having been deeply immersed in it, in its 'vision & process' modus operandi as it may well be, I'm more than a little sensitive to the adjacency I pick up from my Vancouver correspondence…<br />
Now it's 5-02pm!<br />
Eeek!<br />
Time still flying!<br />
A wine date in the offing!<br />
Salut! <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>------------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>August 6th</b><br />
<br />
Regarding the event on the 21st July arranged by Lisa Gorton... good readings by Lisa (--quite a
contrast to the park/topographical poems she read at the Devin Johnston
event) & Chris Wallace-Crabbe ("the Puckish chap beside me" she
introduced --and his John Keats meets Robert Burns poem, published in
the latest <i>ABR</i>, lived up to that) in support of Paul Kane's <i><b>Welcome Light</b></i>
poems... Ive been thinking about American & British English
since the night, including Australian English's situation... Broad-brush
as annunciated here of course, but... And though I offered Paul
probability of such concern being passe from his point of view he felt
it wasnt, still an interesting thought he said... I wondered if <i>inflection</i>
within the plain speaking American line (the conversational syntax)
might dummy for my sense of British 'music'? And et cetera...<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>-----------------</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1815203981220831859.post-73316006317052886342016-05-06T00:03:00.000+10:002016-05-06T00:03:24.242+10:00THE ENGLISH JOURNEY, '16 [<b>27-3-16</b>]<i>(At Weymouth Library, 29th March, transcribing from flight notebook)</i><br />
<br />In which Billy Boo attempts to read the map as described in ornate Thai characters, ditto the travel times & distances, in the second or two before the screen switches to English. <i><b>"Local Time at </b><b>Melbourne 3-27 -- Local Time at Bangkok 11-27</b></i>". Fair enough. He's already in credit : invited to move out of tight fit threesome to the aisle of a comfortable two. Boo thinks it's because he returned clasped hands greeting with hostesses on the ramp and they misheard his Lao 'sabaidee' for Thai 'sawasdee'. He's belted in, tentatively stretches leg beneath forward seat, glances through the porthole at the cloud plain topped by blue, --imagines lick of first G&T assuredly on its way! As the share passenger's snoring establishes its rhythm, Billy remembers his friends, living & dead, either way not here. The cloud clears, beautiful tracts of land thousands of feet below where Christy is, actually happy down there, stone cottage like Ulli & Celia's place in North Wales, '72, similar embellishments, the attic skylight for example, --Nick Johnson's place in Wiltshire, 90s <i>pied a terre</i>, --& the Abbot in attic heaven, nearer to yoga god than any other, no face, no name, though so many statues in his hermitage one suspects he's not yet run through the argument about idolatry! One of the old crew not yet invoked is Ed. Happens each time Billy flies. Ghost is same kind of disembodiment as flying. Forget about angels, Ed wasnt one. I'll give them turbulence, he swears behind conspiratorial hand as though the weather wore jackboots.....<br />
<br />
<b>*</b><br />
<br />
Ed has the flight crew from captain to waiters in mind, not really the elements. All the way to deity via earlier English & later Russian divines, manifestations of magnitude. Ed spittin about pretenders, pretence of authority, supercilious from tie to socks, --purple uniform ultimate slight. Ah, Ed! Ed, <i>mate!</i> how goes it in ghost's Yorkshire heaven? Not there yet, he says, I'm in Purgatory writing poems, sans guide, following my own beaky nose. Hah! Ed, Ed, Ed. Tutoring me yet from beyond the grave, thinks Billy Boo.<br /><br />
*<br /><br />
At Bangkok airport Boo realized that following a straight line got you absolutely nowhere, may as well have been walking in circles. So then he walked around in circles, gauging the world, the non-stop airport world, more 'international' than when first coined (--Inge's daughters crooning 'international' over "<i><b>Miami Vice</b></i>", late 80s, --B B 's return to Europe after 12 years exile). Seems to him the Chinese had become the new Americans and everyone else from everywhere else in no way lesser. Each elsewhere a somewhere, similarly worldly-wise, ticket to prove it, legitimate travellers, commuters, no longer exotics of any empire.<br />But what about Christy, and how come he's let off so easily? Mebbe Billy thinks the boyo might bat him one! (What did Peter Finch say of him once, slightly misapprehending the relation of source to poem?-- "if these are Christy's dreams he must have a head like granite!")<br /><br />[<i>NOTE</i> :<br />Re- Ulli & Celia's place, in N Wales, '72 ; from<i><b> Poem of the Clear Eye</b></i><br /><br />
(....)<br />there is a strangeness surrounds<br />
which our thickest wall cannot evict<br />
(for talisman take anything you find<br />
a coloured slate a star from the constellation
<br />
which fills the skylight the vault of Caernarvon)<br />
the foul smell from the town still gets to my nostrils --<br />
Panzer fetch paper! go to<br />
Gethsemane i rise up &<br />
fall down i run till my side aches<br />
i will return to the smoke only to bang the<br />
beafeaters dead in their beds! in my boots
<br />
will make mincemeat of
<br />
rumours & subterfuge.(...)<br /><br />
(<i>pp34/35; 1972/3; UK & Oz</i>)<br />[<i>In my poem, Ulli has two dogs, Panzer & Perfidy... The scenario is remembered/invented from the visit to Ulli & Celia for the Bangor Poetry Fest or the poetry event Ulli arranged at the Bangor Arts Fest back in '71 or '72... I believe that Jeremy Hilton drove me from Southampton... ah, Snowdonia…</i>]<br /><br /><br /><b>*</b><br />
<br />
Daily round : walk from Goldy, down road, left at Pottery Lane (<i>note to self : research derivation</i>), through the small housing estate, cross highway at safety island to Radipole Lake foot & cycle path, past the blackberries ringing the lake six months ahead of bloom & harvest, up onto the bridge & into town... Library, Black Dog, pint! <br /><br />
Ed would approve : get a table, snap notebook or loose page onto it, “let’s get it over then!” through gritted teeth, lank hair & lengthening beard the frame for most ambivalent of propositions, --the argument concerning literature, thus “the literary bit”, not so much the sharing of poems but potential for such inflation as snatches poet from universe to be dropped into egotistical slurry (Ed’s favourite quote, Akhmatova’s rooster crowing upon shit-heap) --the “literary”, --snort into handkerchief, begin reading poem, over soon as began, --charmed by his accent & intonations, Bunting-ish but faster, Les Murray-ish too in that dont-take-it-too-seriously / throw-off style --not a style, an attitude --no audience but comrade t’other side of the low table, slosh of pints around & about, raucous fandango, infinitely preferable to bourgeois shush (--when you think of it, the poem cuts through the noise of the world, like sudden silence, the awareness of silence as the world’s hurtle’s suddenly brought to sudden screeching stop)...<br /><br />
Ask: Has my brother been in today? We were in the other day, he had a tomato juice... No, she says, dont think so... The Abbot & bro --two Abbots! --like Jack & Warnie, the Louises, or James & Stanislaus with whom BB once caned his younger for perceived deficit in fraternal support, but what would a teenager know... and too much water under bridge now...<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><b>*</b><br /><br />
All change. Traditional bar's gone. The regulars also unless sculking in the WASHROOM (white lettering on pale green board). The lacquered black of counter, tables, chairs has been replaced by grey & green throughout! What is this snack-bar, b& b, holiday-camp, light & bright in aid of?
We've only been gone a year --perhaps longer because didnt we go to the Swan (the Abbot & bro) around the corner from St Nicholas's Church last time? I'll lay bets no change there.
Ringwood Breweries' Boon Doggle's the strongest, 4.2... Innocents must understand we're on about the taste, which means a quality that tests the palate, resists it --on a continuum, then, with Frank Prince's teaching about same, --Robert Bridges, he said, ho-hum poetry aside, well worth my while to consider his thoughts on poetics... The point about form, Frank says, is that it stops one going on & on aimlessly... it resists that natural laziness, licentiousness etc...<br /><i>[Ilchester Arms, Abbotsbury, 7th April, '16]</i><br /><br /><b>*</b><br /><br /><b>[April 22, '16]</b> <br /><br />
It was great meeting up with John Phillips in St Ives a few days ago... went around to his place with Kelvin Bowers my old amigo from the £10 assisted passage on the Fairsky to Melbourne, <i><b>FIFTY</b></i> <i><b>YEARS AGO</b></i> on the 26 April, '66 !!! It's due to chance meeting on the coastal path between John & Kel that I've once more caught up with Kelvin, outa sight since '03. In the conversation with John, several mutual friends featured including Clive Faust & David Miller... Nice listening to John & Kel discussing the St Ives painters up on the wall including Mathew Lanyon --the fathers & sons conversation, apropos of which the catalogue of the Karl Weschke show, on in London presently, which Lucas Weschke had given me in Weymouth, also spiced the chat. If only I was in St Ives on May 16th as well for the poetry festival when John gives a reading!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><b>*</b><br /><b> </b><br />
<b>[April 25, '16] </b>·<br /><br /><i>(Re- Jenni Kerr's Facebook post of actors celebrating Shakespeare anniversary, particularly HRH who finished it beautifully!)</i> Great meeting again y'day with David Caddy at The Dolphin, Blandford Forum, our very own local... ordered our pint and our shiraz, and got the ball rolling saying : "Apart from what's in the latest issue of <i>Tears In The Fence</i>, if I asked you "what's the news?" what would you answer?" David hardly considered the question --well, he said, <i><b>SHAKESPEARE</b></i>, the 400th anniversary of course! And so we drank to him, Shakespeare all the way...<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><b>*</b><br /><br />
<br />
Karl Weschke’s <i><b>View of Kenydjack</b></i> (1962; reproduced in the Tate book of the St Ives scene, 1939-64) utterly different to the Sunday painting seen at the Penwith gallery of which the probably accurate sketching is vacant compared with KW’s monolithised brown tiered landscape, so deep & occupied. Could say ‘preoccupied’ but substantial or dense oughtnt imply brooding, since for all the ‘psychological’, ‘expressionist’, ‘existential’ persona there is always painting’s natural presence and nature always present as matter & sentiment...<br />[<i>St Ives, Kel & Dooze’s house, 18 April, 16</i>]<br />
<b><br />*</b><br /><br />
Every time (how many times?) the bus swings around Portesham through to Abbotsbury & beyond (today Bridport again), see St Catherine’s Chapel on the hill. And in Abbotsbury, out the bus window, there it is leftwards over & between the houses, farms. And leaving Abbotsbury, the chapel behind one on its mount, sheep in the green fields like a canopy beneath. And startlingly distinct, on top, along slow hill climb, Chessil & the Channel over the leftside rolls of green (their rolls eventually into the sea).<br />
<br />
What is ‘familiarity’? --the first blessing of repetition one presumes, no story but imperceptibly the rise of feeling, full swell of which is Poem, Song, this Painting...<br /><br />
<i>[21 April, ‘16; Weymouth to Bridport, Dorset]</i><br />
<i> </i><br /><br /><b>*</b><br /><b>English Journey, ‘16 </b>[<i><b>from the diary]</b></i><br /><br />
<b>Friday 22/4/16</b><br />
<b> </b><br />9-05 am. (late) Weymouth --> Yeovil -->Glastonbury<br /><br />
Hurrying up Goldcroft aggravated the leg/thigh strain. Hopefully walk it out. Shld have applied some Deep Heat beforehand. <br />Rain, not heavy but from drizzle to light. If raining i wont attempt to climb the Tor.<br /><br />
The Classes : Passenger / “My daughter’s studying in Glasgow; when she comes down to Durdle Door it soothes her spirit...” <br />Driver / “Oh yeah; well anywhere’s better than Blackpool heh heh heh...”<br />Passenger / “You drive so well; I admire your instincts!”<br />Driver / “I drove lorries before, buses are much smaller. Driving 800 miles up & back soon teaches you how to drive... A spot of rain, though, and the whole road comes to a stop...”<br /><br />
Thinking of Paul Blackburn -- mentioned him to B. last night, how I’ve picked up his poems each visit to Goldcroft over the years. There’s a Blackburn poem for Pete Spence in the <i><b>Buckmaster</b></i> section of my forthcoming book. P B’s the kind of American I have in mind re- intractably American & not easily ‘Anglo-American’ or ‘British/American’ as I wrote to Colin Still last night. Were we American poets after all? i asked B some months ago, phone from Melbourne, repeated in email to Colin. He tells me about all the docos he’s made on the American poets (wch he’s offered to send me). I say that my forthcoming book of poems is partly ‘Neo-Georgian’, partly ‘New American Poetry’!<br /><br />
--> Yeovil... Heavier rain. Great countryside. Stone houses stretches of wall fields & meadows...<br /><br />
Stratton<br /><br />
Crewkerne<br /><br />
Rich country -- fallow, ploughed, strips of woods, dividing stands, --the rain enhances the lushness -- Wonderful expanse of undulating ploughed fields -- Motorway runs between these huge sails, wings, of land -- Somerset’s version of Big Country --<br /><br />
Beautiful dip in the landscape, --trees, fields, cows --<br /><br />
After earlier wet am dry again in the coach -- thank goodness for modern technology! --<br /><br />
Woods then village, car-sales...<br /><br />
<br />
Lakegate lane<br /><br />
Yeovil --><br />collectedworkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10768731698615085925noreply@blogger.com3