So, the poem, the fifth of a proposed sequence of ten, is done! --in spite of itself. Let me explain. There was no through-line at all, no momentum. What I had was the dream I'd woken on and its affect on me, thus the initial scribbles. There was a wish to recognize concealment or at least abstain from the superficial hail & heartiness which logic places upon affable humanity; and this could be characterized as "monster" (the persona raised thereon), which figure was consonant with the most obvious aspect of The Midsummer Night's Dream (twisting my peculiar way the enchantment ruling its characters), that being the formal source of the poem(s). It's not giving too much away to offer that the first words of each poem are : "More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante". Literally, bit by bit, from 31st January, '012 to just the other day, 16th February, the poem was constructed.
Big deal! But as I consider it now, making the poem (making it more than writing it, where, for me, writing holds natural fluency) I experienced certain truths of composition which in my more-or-less spontaneous approach had slipped from consciousness. For example, that one doesnt know where the poem is going or how to get it going ought not disqualify the process. I confess, and against the way I used to teach back in the '70s & '80s, I was ready to scrub the poem several times because it wasnt immediately working! There is a psychology to the "work in progress" : one must relax & have faith... And so I did --a word here or there, a phrase, rejigging the order, but not knowing how it would or if it should coalesce. And then it did --how many days & drafts? --the words & lines came together as a poem! I was amazed!
Because I'm writing a fixed line & syllable type of poem for many years now, and also imagine series or sequences rather than individual poems [see my chapbook, EXILE TRIPTYCH (Vagabond Press, 2011) for most recent published example], the spontaneity is qualified, but even so it better describes me to myself than ever construction could. Which isnt at all to say I dont work & re-work lines, relishing the redrafting, counting, sounding out. I plainly do. I should also note there's always prose on the go (journals, journalesque criticism & review, chronicle, fiction), which means I either work simultaneously on poems & prose, or I let one go entirely for the duration of the prior commitment. Obviously, my experience of prose is free of this stop-go construction : no narrative, no prose. But maybe that's similar to the type of poetry I write --always referring to the theme or working it out. 'On song' & 'on subject' in this process are essentially adjacent.
--17/23, February, 012
Showing posts with label AUSTRALIAN POETRY COMMENTARY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AUSTRALIAN POETRY COMMENTARY. Show all posts
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Sunday, July 3, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 24, July 2011
GREGORY DAY
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
---------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
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CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
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KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
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CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
Sunday, February 20, 2011
THE CHARLES BUCKMASTER MISCELLANY
(A continuing series of poems, papers, articles, notes, letters dedicated to the memory of Charles Buckmaster, 1951-1972)
Part 1 :
Article, Larry Schwartz (1990)
Poem, Kris Hemensley (1968)
Poem, James Hamilton (2011)
______________________________________________________
LARRY SCHWARTZ
DEATH OF A POET
"Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward"
--found written on a loose sheet among Charles Buckmaster's books.
A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting.
There is the farm house and attached bungalow in which a mother found the shotgun the following morning beside the body of her beloved youngest son. That was 26 November 1972, just over four years after the youth, stifled by the idyll of the tiny community, left for the city, wearing a new suit and clutching a suitcase and a handful of poems.
A diagnosed schitzophrenic, Charles Buckmaster was to finaly succumb to the agonising mental illness when he re-enacted the suicide of an older brother, taking his own life with his brother's gun, at just 21.
"There was a lot of pain and there still is a lot of pain," says a relative of the dead poet. "You put it away and you deal with it but you never forget."
The fifth child (youngest by eight years) of a taciturn farmer who worked at his cherry and peach orchards, Buckmaster wrote of "silent / desperation / waiting for life to descend".
He finally turned his back on the farming community established by his Swiss forbears, quitting school mid-way through the matriculation year in 1968 rather than heed an instruction to cut his hair. Eric Penfold, a teacher at Lilydale High school at the time, remembers Buckmaster as "a bit of a wild boy." "I don't think Charles was a real conformist," he said.
"When I was young, people thought me a strange and moody kid," Buckmaster once said. "Often I felt myself a stranger among people I'd known all my life ... my wanting to get out, which I wanted desperately, was something my parents knew they couldn't fight."
But the lure of Gruyere was strong. Buckmaster, who travelled extensively around Australia, was to return home often, sometimes accompanied by friends for fruit-picking, and his childhood surroundings featured prominently in the poetry of the young rebel some said bore a strong physical resemblance to the ill-fated Jim Morrison of The Doors.
As the forests were cleared for subdivisions, he agonised over the vulnerability of small farmers, such as his parents, to land developers and Gruyere's future as the city sprawled outwards. "The cities will merge, " he warned in a poem called An End to Myth. "Gruyere is dying ... The green walls dissolve." It was there he returned to end his life.
"He seemed to be a prodigy, sprung from the ground!" the poet and close friend, Kris Hemensley, wrote in the last issue of The Age Monthly Review.
"No one believed he really hailed from a place called Gruyere. And no one believed Gruyere existed ..." Melbourne's young writers of the time had thought he might be a hoax "to Ern Malley their movement", Hemensley said, alluding to the fictional poet at the centre of the now-famous literary hoax created to embarrass the editors of the Angry Penguins magazine decades earlier.
Hemensley's wife, Retta, remembers the scepticism she and Kris shared after reading the "terrible scrawl" of a first letter from a high school student called Charles Buckmaster. A newspaper report on writer and poet Michael Dugan had alerted the country schoolboy to the fresh literary activity in the city. The Hemensleys corresponded with him only after being assured by Dugan both Buckmaster and Gruyere were "for real".
Despite early scepticism and that scrawl, Buckmaster, whose earliest influences included Donne, Blake and Owen, was quick to impress. He has left his mark on Australian letters despite his brief career and even though he burned much of his work, including the manuscript for a novel and poems said to be good as good as his best, before he died. His early death robbed the country of one of its most promising literary figures.
He is remembered as a poet of considerable talent who wrote several exceptional poems, his potential for major literary achievement frustrated because his death came when his career was in its infancy.
Though Charles Buckmaster left behind a small body of poetry, his work had "the best urgency of the new poetry", the poet Thomas Shapcott has said.
"...He produced a core of work quite remarkable for so young a poet..." Michael Dugan wrote in the most recent issue of Overland. "What he might have achieved if he had not been cut down by the cruel disease of schizophrenia can only be guessed at."
Now, almost 20 years after his death, the recent publication of his collected works and extensive articles in literary publications Overland and The Age Monthly Review , have highlighted his place in Australian literature and impact of the generation of writers he epitomised.
The case for Buckmaster is perhaps most forcibly put by a friend and writer, John Jenkins, who believes that had the collected poems appeared sooner it would have "put on the map" not only his own work but a stream within Australian poetry that emerged during the tumultuous transition from the conservatism of the '50s.
Jenkins says during the 1970s and much of the '80s Australian literature had been dominated by conservative elements. Only now that it was not "too hot to handle" could a collection by Buckmaster, published late last year, be released.
He sees the work as still "very contemporary". particularly in the preoccupation with the environment and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
While few of the known poems have been widely anthologised and despite two slim volumes of his poems published when he was alive, much remained out of print until publication of the University of Queensland Press collection, part of a series which includes another ill-fated poet of that era, Michael Dransfield. The publishers say though poetry is generally a poor seller, both Dransfield's and Buckmaster's collections were selling better than expected, the latter less so but heartening at up to 500 of the 1500 printed.
The book's editor, Simon McDonald, also a friend of Buckmaster, cited financial and other constraints including the difficulty in obtaining poems scattered among friends around the country, for the delay in publication. He said he had taken upon himself the task of editing because of his strong feeling for his friend and had at one stage even set up an independent publishing company to release it. He said he now felt he had at last done his duty to his friend.
Buckmaster's book with its many previously unpublished poems, has helped friends in Melbourne literary circles finally come to terms with his death. The family kept the funeral private and some close friends did not know he had died until after his cremation. They have long planned to get together to remember him and the times they shared.
"We cried in December 1972 when the news of Charles Buckmaster's suicide was telephoned through -- but the tears hardly constituted a wake," Kris Hemensley wrote. "Only now, it seems to me, with the Collected Poems in hand, can he return to us in his life and death, our youngest poet, our dear and youngest friend."
His friends remember the good times -- his humor and warmth -- along with the bad of a vigorous young man dragged down by his demons, fighting for survival all the way. Michael Dugan describes the change from "sunny personality" to manic highs and lows, bouts of self-destructiveness, severe depression. So that the Collected Poems "remind us of the essential beauty and value of a friend destroyed by circumstances beyond his control".
"He was in such pain," said Buckmaster's girlfriend, Kate Veitch, "such emotional and mental pain. I could understand absolutely why he did it. Absolutely. this guy was being destroyed from the inside. It was agony to watch. Absolute agony."
Buckmaster was a "skyrocket" which exploded, John Jenkins said. The lifestyle he chose epitomised an era to such an extent he became one of the icons. "He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of it."
The young poet's death coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary creativity among younger writers in Melbourne, railing against a perceived literary stagnation and general conservatism.
The late 1960s had seen a frenzy of poetry in roneod poetry magazines and readings centred on what came to be known as the La Mama Poetry Workshop by a new generation of writers, influenced by the innovations of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.
"There was terrific excitement," said Retta Hemensley, who. with Kris, organised the first readings at La Mama. "Something was happening in the city that had been dead for so long".
Retta Hemensley smiles mischievously when she recalls running off copies of the magazine, Our Glass, edited by Kris, while doing secretarial work for Laurie Carmichael at the then Amalgamated Engineering Union.
It was a time of strong opposition to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, a vigorous counterculture challenge to conservatism, an optimism that youth culture could change the world for the better, a naive belief in the effectiveness of "mind-expanding" drugs and a shared joy in rock music. The poetry of this era was strongly influenced by literary movements in response to the frigidity of Cold War America.
Country boy Charles Buckmaster arrived in the city, finding a first job as laboratory assistant, at a time when bonds between young Australians were strengthened by lame resistance from their elders. Retta Hemensley recalls the cries of "cut your hair, Moses" her husband endured on the streets of Melbourne. it was a time of clumsy censorship, raids on theatres with controversial plays. She recalls acting in a play at a local theatre which was interrupted at each performance by a member of the vice squad in the audience threatening to declare the theatre a "bawdy house".
For Buckmaster and his friends, Faraday Street, Carlton, where the first reading at La Mama on 3 September 1968 attracted 17 people, was a focal point for budding writers.
Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called Croscurrents, remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps, a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if he were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.
Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution.
It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beefheart's harsh Trout Mask Replica or the Songs of the Humpback Whale in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.
And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for breakfast", Buckmaster recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, The Great Auk. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claiming he could control the effect of the drug.
He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia he'd sit up in bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's Drunken Boat the other.
His close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during the last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed.
Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop. He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him cary it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player. Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors.
There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favourite painting titled 'Self Portrait', by a 13 year-old boy.
Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson. "I came home one evening and Charles was in my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible... grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of him".
"His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of it. And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to do. And he was really upset because it hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought "Ohhhh, I don't want this, I do not want this'."
Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to do crazy things". She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone...
Retta Hemensley is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the lights". Did this encourage his destructive urge?
In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge / yet cannot understand / the nature / of this fear", of "ice, brooding above me". He wrote also that "all the dark hints / were not, as I had expected, / a part of this game... "
The poem, called Willochra, showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.
Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful girl", just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love; he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at la Mama in march 1970, before he had even bothered to ask her name. And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship.
She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack.
When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will. He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said.
Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered his room with his mother. Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favourites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said.
It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time. Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room.
"For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said."There was a jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue. His mother opened a drawer in his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors."
Michael Dugan, remarked in his recent article in Overland that the poet was "tidying up" in his last months, "preparing to leave nothing behind". He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost.
While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.
John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed earmarked for disaster," he said."He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time."
Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days. he was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right slot".
According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructiveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behaviour.
Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him. The first time I went to see him I just rolled up unannounced and got directions to the ward he was in.
"I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.
"He was walking down the corridor between these two ... classic great hulking chaps in white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did."
She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge. "I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all."
She said she was elated when she left. After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside."
Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a Jerusalem Bible Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.
She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was just after she had bailed him out of Pentridge. "He was out of his mind ... God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally. I said 'Charles, you don't just walk into guys' offices like this, Charles, you haven't got any shoes on'.
"I said 'you can't go in there like this. You will get thrown out. He went in, he turned around to me and said 'you don't have to come in, man, you're so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: 'arsehole, you are not worth it. I don't care how clever you are. I don't care how talented you are. I don't care how beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth it.' And I just walked off."
Charles Buckmaster was given a good behavior bond at his trial on condition he returned to his parents' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll leave nothing behind," he had once told John Jenkins. He spent the last few months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment he might finally escape his hell.
[This the text of Larry Schwartz's feature article as published in The Sunday Age (Agenda), 5th August, 1990, with minute editing & deletion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY
GRUYERE : THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED
(for Charles Buckmaster)
1
who stayed only becos they couldnt
find their way out again ( your poem
about them )
: swiss
people.
around 1840.
& the people who are still there now
in Gruyere
you could practically call it
Buckmaster country -
at least one part of it
( yr houses at four points
spanning cherry orchards
the dam with frogs
surrounded by green flora
& brown earth
in view of Mount St Leonard
2
on the outskirts of the water :
a cows carcass
already substantially returned
to the ground
the dead cow
bones turned up / great eye cavities
where 'things' have burrowed into its cranium
its legs become part of the earth
beside the dam.
the roar of the frogs
roar enuf
to drown
out
the Ruston Lincoln
diesel pump ( we
sheltered in its shed from
the rain )
listening to bell birds
piping -
one
grey as the gum
pretended
it
was
just
a
tree
its belly softer grey than its wing.
the clouted earth / broken bracken / grey weathered
grey watered / grey forest . thataway ..
3
you know
the cicada walks right out of its shell
abandons
himself ( the husks
crustate the wooden boards
around
the diesel pump.
stationary -
fixed treadle )
& flies out & over
the patches of black slime
bearing frogs eggs ( ten-
nis balls )
amongst the reeds
& weed
spreading under the surface
end to end
dragon flies
hovering horizontally
hanging
on breezes
making it their own
eery way
4
a tungle croft
of unusual constellations
of floating forests
of sheep following their leaders from
one spot in the field
suddenly
to another part
all of them . .
it pays to look up your stars
( THIS GUN
WAS CAPTURED FROM THE
GERMANS
BY THE 41st BATTALION A.I.F.
IN BELGIUM 1918
AND PRESENTED TO THE RESIDENTS OF
SOUTH GRUYERE )
collecting
sprigs of bacon & egg ( rust &
yellow ) flower
making
garlands to wear round yr neck
: you ancient !
look up the stars .
the familiar spots / stones
you know by heart -
bush fires
some badns
thru the kitchen window
( original oil paintings
on the wall )
going back ( father
& sons )
30 years.
120 years.
30000 years
in one long sweep / of
brown
green
&
the blu of the sky.
5
climbing
over barbed wire
under branches
around thorns
dropping
deeper thru trees
some with
rough brown bark hanging a strip
grey gums
prickly wattle
tea tree
wild heath
creeper
& vines.
treading over centuries of decomposition &
regrowth.
dog
following possum to their tree nests
another cow carcass
head propped on its shoulder
bones.
its left foreleg a
few yards away
hacked off & gnawed clean.
its hide
taut across the backbone &
ribcage
you could bounce on it.
6 (i)
the fording point
too deep -
the centre of the log bridge
covered by the stream.
when cows trespass ( you told us )
others properties
you cant chase them back.
you have to wait til the
owner comes & collects.
& if the trespasser
eats off yr land or tramples
the entire farm under foot
you still have to wait.
( the cows owner pays damages of course! )
(ii)
tasting the sap
dribbling down
a tree -
brown toffee
& a flavor which hardens the entire
palate
coating the tongue with
something worse than detol
"youre not sposed to eat it..."
came
too late !
but what did they live on
before the swiss
say
centuries before
1840 ?
berries. grass. some varieties
of snake,
frogs.
possum.
& bury their dead in the forest ?
making signs
for the deliverance of obstinate
earthly trappings
bury them down the gradient
in the centre
of the thickest bush
bury them maybe
in mass graves
on the down slope towards
the river.
(iii)
one massive skull
the head larger than a cow or
horse
must be an ox
huge molars
the jaws loosened by
the wet
the teeth planted in soil
prettied with moss . .
& the legs of the monster
to the right
of the head
folded casually.
7 (i)
the comings & goings
the mainroad to Lilydale to
the City
- the way 'home' -
cars bumper to bumper
which go right on by
oblivious of the
"barbecue down the road :
if the rain holds out"
of the living
made for 30 years
off the land
amongst cherry trees
with bridesmaids veils ( in
blossom )
(ii)
behaviour patterns of country folk
whether they forecast rainstorms
by rheumatic twinges
the
incidence of various common
& obscure
neuroses
the facts & figures of sociological reports
- apply
as much to the people who go
as the people who stay
8
in the middle of the earth
does anything change substantially ?
Gruyere :
a day in a life.
the visit.
the place exists
thru memories
nothing is more certain than
the recalled materials. the composition of ground :
yr bread & eard.
nothing is deader
than when it is forgotten.
Gruyere.
(September/October 29, 1968)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
CHARLES BUCKMASTER'S MOTORCYCLE
It is strange, the places
where he rides. The spokes whir
a silver churning, a fuel gauge
where something might be written.
An absent roar the sound
of pages burning, a tank or fuselage
scrapped or kept in a dark garage,
shadow heaped on knowing metal.
I have pages creased in folders
but not the rush of their trajectory,
phantom destinations written
on worn rubber. The one lamp
dull in an old night, tracing names
of towns bypassed by the highway.
A yellow lamp lit up
in a reckless notebook,
youth's windshield. Stored away
the words wait to ride, a poem
on the mechanical horseback
of remembering.
(2011)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
Larry Schwartz wrote for the Age & the Sunday Age for many years before going freelance. His poems have occasionally appear, for example in Bob Adamson's Ulitarra magazine in the mid '90s.
James Hamilton whilst not studying at La Trobe University, pursues his own research of the life & times of Charles Buckmaster & the La Mama poets of the late 60s.
Part 1 :
Article, Larry Schwartz (1990)
Poem, Kris Hemensley (1968)
Poem, James Hamilton (2011)
______________________________________________________
LARRY SCHWARTZ
DEATH OF A POET
"Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward"
--found written on a loose sheet among Charles Buckmaster's books.
A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting.
There is the farm house and attached bungalow in which a mother found the shotgun the following morning beside the body of her beloved youngest son. That was 26 November 1972, just over four years after the youth, stifled by the idyll of the tiny community, left for the city, wearing a new suit and clutching a suitcase and a handful of poems.
A diagnosed schitzophrenic, Charles Buckmaster was to finaly succumb to the agonising mental illness when he re-enacted the suicide of an older brother, taking his own life with his brother's gun, at just 21.
"There was a lot of pain and there still is a lot of pain," says a relative of the dead poet. "You put it away and you deal with it but you never forget."
The fifth child (youngest by eight years) of a taciturn farmer who worked at his cherry and peach orchards, Buckmaster wrote of "silent / desperation / waiting for life to descend".
He finally turned his back on the farming community established by his Swiss forbears, quitting school mid-way through the matriculation year in 1968 rather than heed an instruction to cut his hair. Eric Penfold, a teacher at Lilydale High school at the time, remembers Buckmaster as "a bit of a wild boy." "I don't think Charles was a real conformist," he said.
"When I was young, people thought me a strange and moody kid," Buckmaster once said. "Often I felt myself a stranger among people I'd known all my life ... my wanting to get out, which I wanted desperately, was something my parents knew they couldn't fight."
But the lure of Gruyere was strong. Buckmaster, who travelled extensively around Australia, was to return home often, sometimes accompanied by friends for fruit-picking, and his childhood surroundings featured prominently in the poetry of the young rebel some said bore a strong physical resemblance to the ill-fated Jim Morrison of The Doors.
As the forests were cleared for subdivisions, he agonised over the vulnerability of small farmers, such as his parents, to land developers and Gruyere's future as the city sprawled outwards. "The cities will merge, " he warned in a poem called An End to Myth. "Gruyere is dying ... The green walls dissolve." It was there he returned to end his life.
"He seemed to be a prodigy, sprung from the ground!" the poet and close friend, Kris Hemensley, wrote in the last issue of The Age Monthly Review.
"No one believed he really hailed from a place called Gruyere. And no one believed Gruyere existed ..." Melbourne's young writers of the time had thought he might be a hoax "to Ern Malley their movement", Hemensley said, alluding to the fictional poet at the centre of the now-famous literary hoax created to embarrass the editors of the Angry Penguins magazine decades earlier.
Hemensley's wife, Retta, remembers the scepticism she and Kris shared after reading the "terrible scrawl" of a first letter from a high school student called Charles Buckmaster. A newspaper report on writer and poet Michael Dugan had alerted the country schoolboy to the fresh literary activity in the city. The Hemensleys corresponded with him only after being assured by Dugan both Buckmaster and Gruyere were "for real".
Despite early scepticism and that scrawl, Buckmaster, whose earliest influences included Donne, Blake and Owen, was quick to impress. He has left his mark on Australian letters despite his brief career and even though he burned much of his work, including the manuscript for a novel and poems said to be good as good as his best, before he died. His early death robbed the country of one of its most promising literary figures.
He is remembered as a poet of considerable talent who wrote several exceptional poems, his potential for major literary achievement frustrated because his death came when his career was in its infancy.
Though Charles Buckmaster left behind a small body of poetry, his work had "the best urgency of the new poetry", the poet Thomas Shapcott has said.
"...He produced a core of work quite remarkable for so young a poet..." Michael Dugan wrote in the most recent issue of Overland. "What he might have achieved if he had not been cut down by the cruel disease of schizophrenia can only be guessed at."
Now, almost 20 years after his death, the recent publication of his collected works and extensive articles in literary publications Overland and The Age Monthly Review , have highlighted his place in Australian literature and impact of the generation of writers he epitomised.
The case for Buckmaster is perhaps most forcibly put by a friend and writer, John Jenkins, who believes that had the collected poems appeared sooner it would have "put on the map" not only his own work but a stream within Australian poetry that emerged during the tumultuous transition from the conservatism of the '50s.
Jenkins says during the 1970s and much of the '80s Australian literature had been dominated by conservative elements. Only now that it was not "too hot to handle" could a collection by Buckmaster, published late last year, be released.
He sees the work as still "very contemporary". particularly in the preoccupation with the environment and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
While few of the known poems have been widely anthologised and despite two slim volumes of his poems published when he was alive, much remained out of print until publication of the University of Queensland Press collection, part of a series which includes another ill-fated poet of that era, Michael Dransfield. The publishers say though poetry is generally a poor seller, both Dransfield's and Buckmaster's collections were selling better than expected, the latter less so but heartening at up to 500 of the 1500 printed.
The book's editor, Simon McDonald, also a friend of Buckmaster, cited financial and other constraints including the difficulty in obtaining poems scattered among friends around the country, for the delay in publication. He said he had taken upon himself the task of editing because of his strong feeling for his friend and had at one stage even set up an independent publishing company to release it. He said he now felt he had at last done his duty to his friend.
Buckmaster's book with its many previously unpublished poems, has helped friends in Melbourne literary circles finally come to terms with his death. The family kept the funeral private and some close friends did not know he had died until after his cremation. They have long planned to get together to remember him and the times they shared.
"We cried in December 1972 when the news of Charles Buckmaster's suicide was telephoned through -- but the tears hardly constituted a wake," Kris Hemensley wrote. "Only now, it seems to me, with the Collected Poems in hand, can he return to us in his life and death, our youngest poet, our dear and youngest friend."
His friends remember the good times -- his humor and warmth -- along with the bad of a vigorous young man dragged down by his demons, fighting for survival all the way. Michael Dugan describes the change from "sunny personality" to manic highs and lows, bouts of self-destructiveness, severe depression. So that the Collected Poems "remind us of the essential beauty and value of a friend destroyed by circumstances beyond his control".
"He was in such pain," said Buckmaster's girlfriend, Kate Veitch, "such emotional and mental pain. I could understand absolutely why he did it. Absolutely. this guy was being destroyed from the inside. It was agony to watch. Absolute agony."
Buckmaster was a "skyrocket" which exploded, John Jenkins said. The lifestyle he chose epitomised an era to such an extent he became one of the icons. "He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of it."
The young poet's death coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary creativity among younger writers in Melbourne, railing against a perceived literary stagnation and general conservatism.
The late 1960s had seen a frenzy of poetry in roneod poetry magazines and readings centred on what came to be known as the La Mama Poetry Workshop by a new generation of writers, influenced by the innovations of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.
"There was terrific excitement," said Retta Hemensley, who. with Kris, organised the first readings at La Mama. "Something was happening in the city that had been dead for so long".
Retta Hemensley smiles mischievously when she recalls running off copies of the magazine, Our Glass, edited by Kris, while doing secretarial work for Laurie Carmichael at the then Amalgamated Engineering Union.
It was a time of strong opposition to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, a vigorous counterculture challenge to conservatism, an optimism that youth culture could change the world for the better, a naive belief in the effectiveness of "mind-expanding" drugs and a shared joy in rock music. The poetry of this era was strongly influenced by literary movements in response to the frigidity of Cold War America.
Country boy Charles Buckmaster arrived in the city, finding a first job as laboratory assistant, at a time when bonds between young Australians were strengthened by lame resistance from their elders. Retta Hemensley recalls the cries of "cut your hair, Moses" her husband endured on the streets of Melbourne. it was a time of clumsy censorship, raids on theatres with controversial plays. She recalls acting in a play at a local theatre which was interrupted at each performance by a member of the vice squad in the audience threatening to declare the theatre a "bawdy house".
For Buckmaster and his friends, Faraday Street, Carlton, where the first reading at La Mama on 3 September 1968 attracted 17 people, was a focal point for budding writers.
Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called Croscurrents, remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps, a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if he were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.
Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution.
It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beefheart's harsh Trout Mask Replica or the Songs of the Humpback Whale in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.
And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for breakfast", Buckmaster recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, The Great Auk. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claiming he could control the effect of the drug.
He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia he'd sit up in bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's Drunken Boat the other.
His close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during the last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed.
Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop. He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him cary it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player. Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors.
There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favourite painting titled 'Self Portrait', by a 13 year-old boy.
Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson. "I came home one evening and Charles was in my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible... grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of him".
"His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of it. And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to do. And he was really upset because it hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought "Ohhhh, I don't want this, I do not want this'."
Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to do crazy things". She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone...
Retta Hemensley is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the lights". Did this encourage his destructive urge?
In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge / yet cannot understand / the nature / of this fear", of "ice, brooding above me". He wrote also that "all the dark hints / were not, as I had expected, / a part of this game... "
The poem, called Willochra, showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.
Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful girl", just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love; he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at la Mama in march 1970, before he had even bothered to ask her name. And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship.
She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack.
When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will. He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said.
Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered his room with his mother. Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favourites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said.
It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time. Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room.
"For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said."There was a jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue. His mother opened a drawer in his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors."
Michael Dugan, remarked in his recent article in Overland that the poet was "tidying up" in his last months, "preparing to leave nothing behind". He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost.
While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.
John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed earmarked for disaster," he said."He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time."
Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days. he was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right slot".
According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructiveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behaviour.
Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him. The first time I went to see him I just rolled up unannounced and got directions to the ward he was in.
"I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.
"He was walking down the corridor between these two ... classic great hulking chaps in white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did."
She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge. "I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all."
She said she was elated when she left. After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside."
Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a Jerusalem Bible Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.
She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was just after she had bailed him out of Pentridge. "He was out of his mind ... God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally. I said 'Charles, you don't just walk into guys' offices like this, Charles, you haven't got any shoes on'.
"I said 'you can't go in there like this. You will get thrown out. He went in, he turned around to me and said 'you don't have to come in, man, you're so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: 'arsehole, you are not worth it. I don't care how clever you are. I don't care how talented you are. I don't care how beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth it.' And I just walked off."
Charles Buckmaster was given a good behavior bond at his trial on condition he returned to his parents' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll leave nothing behind," he had once told John Jenkins. He spent the last few months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment he might finally escape his hell.
[This the text of Larry Schwartz's feature article as published in The Sunday Age (Agenda), 5th August, 1990, with minute editing & deletion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY
GRUYERE : THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED
(for Charles Buckmaster)
1
who stayed only becos they couldnt
find their way out again ( your poem
about them )
: swiss
people.
around 1840.
& the people who are still there now
in Gruyere
you could practically call it
Buckmaster country -
at least one part of it
( yr houses at four points
spanning cherry orchards
the dam with frogs
surrounded by green flora
& brown earth
in view of Mount St Leonard
2
on the outskirts of the water :
a cows carcass
already substantially returned
to the ground
the dead cow
bones turned up / great eye cavities
where 'things' have burrowed into its cranium
its legs become part of the earth
beside the dam.
the roar of the frogs
roar enuf
to drown
out
the Ruston Lincoln
diesel pump ( we
sheltered in its shed from
the rain )
listening to bell birds
piping -
one
grey as the gum
pretended
it
was
just
a
tree
its belly softer grey than its wing.
the clouted earth / broken bracken / grey weathered
grey watered / grey forest . thataway ..
3
you know
the cicada walks right out of its shell
abandons
himself ( the husks
crustate the wooden boards
around
the diesel pump.
stationary -
fixed treadle )
& flies out & over
the patches of black slime
bearing frogs eggs ( ten-
nis balls )
amongst the reeds
& weed
spreading under the surface
end to end
dragon flies
hovering horizontally
hanging
on breezes
making it their own
eery way
4
a tungle croft
of unusual constellations
of floating forests
of sheep following their leaders from
one spot in the field
suddenly
to another part
all of them . .
it pays to look up your stars
( THIS GUN
WAS CAPTURED FROM THE
GERMANS
BY THE 41st BATTALION A.I.F.
IN BELGIUM 1918
AND PRESENTED TO THE RESIDENTS OF
SOUTH GRUYERE )
collecting
sprigs of bacon & egg ( rust &
yellow ) flower
making
garlands to wear round yr neck
: you ancient !
look up the stars .
the familiar spots / stones
you know by heart -
bush fires
some badns
thru the kitchen window
( original oil paintings
on the wall )
going back ( father
& sons )
30 years.
120 years.
30000 years
in one long sweep / of
brown
green
&
the blu of the sky.
5
climbing
over barbed wire
under branches
around thorns
dropping
deeper thru trees
some with
rough brown bark hanging a strip
grey gums
prickly wattle
tea tree
wild heath
creeper
& vines.
treading over centuries of decomposition &
regrowth.
dog
following possum to their tree nests
another cow carcass
head propped on its shoulder
bones.
its left foreleg a
few yards away
hacked off & gnawed clean.
its hide
taut across the backbone &
ribcage
you could bounce on it.
6 (i)
the fording point
too deep -
the centre of the log bridge
covered by the stream.
when cows trespass ( you told us )
others properties
you cant chase them back.
you have to wait til the
owner comes & collects.
& if the trespasser
eats off yr land or tramples
the entire farm under foot
you still have to wait.
( the cows owner pays damages of course! )
(ii)
tasting the sap
dribbling down
a tree -
brown toffee
& a flavor which hardens the entire
palate
coating the tongue with
something worse than detol
"youre not sposed to eat it..."
came
too late !
but what did they live on
before the swiss
say
centuries before
1840 ?
berries. grass. some varieties
of snake,
frogs.
possum.
& bury their dead in the forest ?
making signs
for the deliverance of obstinate
earthly trappings
bury them down the gradient
in the centre
of the thickest bush
bury them maybe
in mass graves
on the down slope towards
the river.
(iii)
one massive skull
the head larger than a cow or
horse
must be an ox
huge molars
the jaws loosened by
the wet
the teeth planted in soil
prettied with moss . .
& the legs of the monster
to the right
of the head
folded casually.
7 (i)
the comings & goings
the mainroad to Lilydale to
the City
- the way 'home' -
cars bumper to bumper
which go right on by
oblivious of the
"barbecue down the road :
if the rain holds out"
of the living
made for 30 years
off the land
amongst cherry trees
with bridesmaids veils ( in
blossom )
(ii)
behaviour patterns of country folk
whether they forecast rainstorms
by rheumatic twinges
the
incidence of various common
& obscure
neuroses
the facts & figures of sociological reports
- apply
as much to the people who go
as the people who stay
8
in the middle of the earth
does anything change substantially ?
Gruyere :
a day in a life.
the visit.
the place exists
thru memories
nothing is more certain than
the recalled materials. the composition of ground :
yr bread & eard.
nothing is deader
than when it is forgotten.
Gruyere.
(September/October 29, 1968)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
CHARLES BUCKMASTER'S MOTORCYCLE
It is strange, the places
where he rides. The spokes whir
a silver churning, a fuel gauge
where something might be written.
An absent roar the sound
of pages burning, a tank or fuselage
scrapped or kept in a dark garage,
shadow heaped on knowing metal.
I have pages creased in folders
but not the rush of their trajectory,
phantom destinations written
on worn rubber. The one lamp
dull in an old night, tracing names
of towns bypassed by the highway.
A yellow lamp lit up
in a reckless notebook,
youth's windshield. Stored away
the words wait to ride, a poem
on the mechanical horseback
of remembering.
(2011)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
Larry Schwartz wrote for the Age & the Sunday Age for many years before going freelance. His poems have occasionally appear, for example in Bob Adamson's Ulitarra magazine in the mid '90s.
James Hamilton whilst not studying at La Trobe University, pursues his own research of the life & times of Charles Buckmaster & the La Mama poets of the late 60s.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
DIVERTIMENTI : VLEESKENS, BELTRAMETTI, CALDWELL, LEBER, SPENCE
Why wouldnt I admit it? Bored, irritated, enervated by the whole biz --what John Forbes, amplifying the Sydney/Melbourne, 1970s, 'new poetry' discussion about the mainstream, called "talented earache"! Then again, as one good poem doesnt make a summer so one bad poem doesnt herald winter. Yet it speaks volumes of one's expectation for poetry that bad writing (and I hasten to qualify : in one's own opinion, thus disposition as well as the particular education undertaken in service of the art) can cause more misery than an inadequate menu or perpetually late train.
The more important complaint is not being able to see the poems for the poetics (or less --for the method of their construction). In my head I sound-off like that 70s discussion & rail against the sound of squeaky clean construction & its inevitable decorum, regardless that some of my own (particularly '90s) production is pronged on the same indictment!
And then, out of the blue, the universe deals a delightful hand --Grant Caldwell's glass clouds, Michelle Leber's The Weeping Grass, Pete Spence's Sonnets, Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti. Or do I simply wake up on the correct side of the bed? (Surely I dont have to explain that!)
A first impression of clarity of thought & expression, as I skimmed Caldwell's new collection, had me imagining a poetry of wisdom. And the image (or proposition) was still in my mind as I read Leber's poems, that they were knowing & wise. For example, regarding the latter, the gleaming blade of the line which introduces her poem, The Boonwurrung Coast, located at Cape Paterson (coincidentally where Cornelis Vleeskens hung out for many years) --"We let all things take form in the morning light."-- is capable of cutting through anything, including the taxonomy & imagery of sea-birds & flora let alone hints of initiation into shamanistic mysteries. And the triple repetition of the pregnant phrase "In the best part of May" (in the poem of that name), is similarly almost independent of the narrative (however brilliantly inhabited by the anthropomorphised persona telling its creation tale).
In Leber, the gainliness of that combination of scientific & perceptional language evokes authority. Local Barometer, for example : "Port Philip Bay is quicksilver in a glass. / Grey beryllium dust and copper sun-shards rise above waves. / A wind-whip of a baton conducts in tricky 7/8 time. / Ordinarily, a sea-gust's libretto is sung from a silver gull, / and now a gannets' gale-force chorus carves sandstone. / Within this capsule - held up by vertical cliffs / - an interior spring prevents a cloud's collapse. / The weight of water once floating in Torricelli's tube, / now scummed on a pollution-meniscus. / As a desert licks a city's hem-line, / fever rises in pacific oceans, shifts moisture to the equator; / flash-flooding in the north, yet our backyard is cinder / - tomorrow, horizon's axe will swing at noon."
No doubt these are crafted poems --they had to have been carved & chivvied to make their particular density, and a long way from what I'm going to say about Cornelis Vleeskens... But I'm being led to contradictory propositions : firstly, that what she has to say calls the tune; secondly, that her keen observation imposes veracity regardless of subject-matter. One thing for sure : no ho-hum in Michelle Leber's Weeping Grass (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010)...
As I've flagged, something of the same's entailed in Grant Caldwell's glass clouds (Five Islands Press, 2010). The tone of 'something being said' emanates from sufficient poems to impress authority. Not the old literary gravitas (no matter 'made new') but the conjunction of writing and spoken-word's well oiled tongue. From the outset let's insist Caldwell isnt casual however relaxed --the relaxation with syntax, that is, which is the crux of modern English-language poetry, --allowing then its objectors to be eccentric rather than reactionary (except for the vanguard camp, censorial to the last). Plain-speaking, however, is only one of the founding twins; the other never ditched the richer dictionary. Thus the double spring & thrust of 20thCentury & on's poetry. Caldwell's stepping-off from that rung doesnt yet qualify as construction --it's still utterance, more or less (the how it is, the what happened). And maybe it is 'irony' which distinguishes him from numerous other common speakers, and most of them unheralded --as Vleeskens is, for example --not that he's bitching : equanimity rhymes in divertimenti with wine & good music, and what more would one want?
Further to 'wise' : as though ancient Chinese hermit or mendicant poet...! Maybe it was the haiku-like poems in the centre of glass clouds (though that's 'Japanese') as well as his serious meditations on perception (necessarily equating phenomenal experience & language representation --"the window of the past is complete / but you are blind, or a blind") --which compelled the impression. Not to say subsequent reading disabused it --more, that the amount of distress also gathered there revoked the semblance of resolution. In Melbourne, though, as any capital of the Western world, where else does wisdom lie than in the tension of normal attachment & its desired opposite? Caldwell's erstwhile persona of the wry humorist (open his last book, Dreaming of Robert de Niro (FIP, '03), at random for any example) is perhaps succeeded here by the poet following doubt's philosophical trail to a halfway house of serenity (if one accepts as influence two of these poems' dedicatees, Derrida & Claire Gaskin).
Caldwell's tour de force is the hypnotic across the sea, which begins "the sea comes / across itself / here it comes / across itself / see it coming / it comes and comes / across itself / it keeps coming / it never stops", continuing in like fashion for a further 35 lines. It is a reiteration of the fact of sea --of 'the sea' as an event --which succeeds in summoning sea's ceaseless movement whilst rendering each wave's singularity, and the poet's observation of it a definitive exhileration!
Reading Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do : almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville & John Riley, who'd advised that Franco, our fellow Grosseteste Review contributor, would be visiting London in '71 --or was it shortly before the Hemensleys returned to Melbourne in '72? --but that was cancelled. Any meeting in the flesh was forever thwarted by his sudden death in 1995. He remains an exotic correspondent, then, from the golden age of hand & typewritten letters, always missed now as though a friend.
And Vleeskens' book instantly recalls Sperlonga Manhattan Express, an international anthology edited by Beltrametti (Scorribanda Productions, San Vitale, Switzerland, 1980), because of the A-4 / 210-297mm page size & the visual content --Franco's pics from all hands & lands (e.g, P. Gigli's photo of the Berrigans, poems by Koller, Raworth, Gysin, Whalen postcard/cartoon, J Blaine, G D'Agostino, et al); Cornelis' own montage, drawings, calligraphy, typography --the same mail-art internationale, Fluxus, neo-Dada style more readily recognized from Pete Spence's affiliations & practice --particularly relevant here because of the latter's regular appearance in the divertimenti.
Vleeskens & Beltrametti are both Europeans who've crucially intersected with the anti-formal (looser, casual) English-language poetry (are they 'casualties' then!), especially the post WW2 Americans, progeny of Pound & Williams, New York, San Francisco, the West Coast, at a time when Europe was reaffirming its own liberatory tradition (Dada, Surrealism & on) &, similarly, opening to new worlds. And because they're not British or North American or Australian, except by adoption, their European origins & references are never out of mind.
Not an exact match, by any means --but somewhere along the line they've both decided to riff on life & not on literature, though there is a literature of just that sort of thing, and a life that contains literature, music, painting, etc. But theirs is another reminder of the efficacy of the un-made, journal-esque writing, --as clear & direct as we reconstruct the Ancient Chinese & Japanese to be, and whose transparency doesnt necessarily prefer the naive to the esoteric or the well-known to the uncommon (take the music Vleeskens listens to daily &, therefore, records in his communiques --or his philately habit or the breadth of his correspondence, all noted).
Beltrametti's poem The Key might be credo for Vleeskens too :
What was well started shall be finished. / What was not, should be thrown away.
Lew Welch, Hermit Poems.
1 ) the place & the season : winter
2 ) somebody (myself) right here : real & unreal
3 ) what is he doing & what's going on in his head
4 ) how & why is he saying it
5 ) to somebody else (you) elsewhere
something happens?
the circle (real & unreal)
isnt closed
[27/1/72]
--published in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973), the blurbs for which by Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Claude Pelieu, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai & Guillaume Chpaltine are fair snap of his American/European compass.
Context & correspondence, as in O'Hara, Berrigan, Phil Whalen of course, are vital here in distinguishing such notes & exclamations from the bagatelle they might otherwise be --and Jeremy Prynne's terrific comment on O'Hara jumps to mind, that unlike New York's "art gallery nympholepts", he "always has that pail of serpents in view" --: the poet's obligation, as felt, to be right here, to tell how & what it is without literary diversion, the further extent of which is selling-out, blunting if not losing the existential point. (Echoing Olson's Human Universe suit for the poem as 'one of Nature's things', Ray Di Palma hazards, "a poem is one of the almost successful / forces of nature", --in the 3rd of one of Language Poetry's more beautiful sequences, Territory (from Numbers & Tempers, Selected Early Poems, 1966-86; Sun & Moon, '93), which begins, "the desperado / and his abacus / in utopia" --the perfect cartoon for what I'm getting at?! --but that project was performed within /refined writing, albeit a stepping-up of the casual, and isnt the minstrelsy of the memorandum with which I'm ever besotted!)
Divertimenti : to amuse himself & his friends --to divert & be diverted... Diverted from what? Old cliche : the bind of daily life. But hardly, since it's all this poetry's made of. His note : "These divertimenti originally appeared as individual leaflets and were written for the poet's own amusement and that of the handful of friends who were lucky enough to receive the odd one in the mail or at a poetry reading during the last two years of his life on the Victorian coast... he now lives a totally different existence on the NSW Northern Tablelands."
How would you know? His latest Earthdance chapbook, Sandals in camel (drawings & poems), is surreal as narrative & peppered with elsewhere's place names & distinctions (New York, Parisian, Berlin, Belgian, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Italian etc), persuading one of his long assumed cosmopolitan ambit. Interesting inference though --'texts' of the life as lived versus 'poems' (importantly, formed in the cross-wires of Dutch & English).
An earlier collection, Ochre Dancer (Earthdance, '99), has the same atmosphere & tone of divertimenti or better said, the divertimenti are cut from his familiar cloth differing only in the attitude of making or framing.
That's the discussion then, in the blur of any such distinction these days... Bits of life (titles & notes of musical recordings, books, lists of food & drink bought & consumed, incoming mail) intersect with thoughts, observations, conversation.
Recalling Kath Walker (Oodgeroo of Noonucull)'s admonition not to appear like a preacher or a politician, Cornelis muses, "Sometimes I wanted to PREACH // But now I just want to share / some of the ordinary things / in the days of a retired poet..."
Diversions from the notion of retirement? Retirement from poetic ambition (craft & career)? I'd identify with that myself. Breaking the cast but keeping one's hand in, and surprising oneself when something more poem than antidote happens along. The list/letter/journal poetry of our time makes it harder to distinguish source from artefact, but found or made they provide as many pleasures as there are days.
"Ah! a new month!
So I turn the calendar to March
A Corneille arial landscape
looking like a cross between
Mondriaan's sketch of a jetty
jutting into North Sea waves
and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
The calendar was published
for Corneille's 70th birthday
11 years ago but I still
flip over each month
to show that not all days are the same"
Divertimenti is a book which can be taken up anywhere. It invites flicking because of the open-endedness of its narrative.
"Find an image
of the sun's atmosphere
in The Nature of the Universe
by Fred Hoyle (1950)
so reach for Catherine de Zegher
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
hardback catalogue
of the exhibition at
The Drawing Center, New York, 2000
& put on an old vinyl recording
of Peter Sculthorpe's Sun Music #1
for Orchestra (1965)
The sun sets at 5-58
Broodje haring
broodje kaas
en 'n zure bon
Enjoy a glass or two of red
& the clear sound of Marion Verbruggen
playing airs from van Eyck's
Der Fluyten Lust-Hof "
So many dates & times of day, month, year, but the book is always written in present tense, and a sense of the present, in which historical time is subsumed, pervades. All times in diverimenti are concurrent; even the different places defer to the here of Vleeskens' whereabouts.
Despite it being a kind of 'in-lieu of writing' (an 'in-lieu-of-writing writing'?), possessing the light touch of genial conversation & a journal's talking-to-oneself, it also teases one as a discourse on time & place, & of poem as its own place where, paradoxically, its own mercuriality might be traced.
Unsurprisingly, much of this has been the preoccupation of divertimenti's fellow classical & modern music afficianado Pete Spence --typically recalled by Vleeskens at one point, "I think up these lines / while walking home / after putting Katherine / on the 6.37 a.m. bus for Melbourne / but have to wait to write them / till the telephone wakes Pete at 10.35 // My pen & paper are on the desk / in the guestroom where he snores on"...
Spence's Sonnets (a co-production of Karl-Friedrich Hacker's Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia; limited edition of 50, 2009) have been with me throughout these reflections. Sonnet 9 is a good example:
" walking Planck's constant in a red shift?
great day! upwind the day winds down
squares of light are thrown about
should i feel ok now that yesterday
is the subject of these poems? better
to be quick about it like a shadow
taking shade from today's sun! when
will i have room where there's room
where i can roam variously & hang
my tantrums & other guests?
the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!
its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!
a mullet sidles through the air
& i'm stunned by its flight! "
Riffing off life or literature? Seems to me it's a perfect blend of voice & reference, where perfection refers to an individual's inimitable register, in this case Spence's naturalization of reference, the opposite of ornamentation, of literary embellishment. It's all become as particular as experience, and 'all' are the prime sources he's so kind to append : Ted Berrigan, Laurie Duggan, Peter Schjeldahl, plus Forbes, Satie, Beckett, Shakespeare... All adds up to "Spence"!
Looking now for the perfect conclusion I find this from near to the 'end' of divertimenti :
" That photo of Peter-Jan Wagemans
makes him look like
a well-fed Vinkenoog from the sixties
In his liner notes
he comes across
as didactic & conceited
I pull on my walking-boots
& listen to Het Landschap (1990)
played by Tomoko Mukaiyama on piano
It is not the landscape I see around me
It is not any dutch landscape I recall
He states it is the landscape
of his music - but he is wrong
It is the landscape of my writing"
Boom-boom!
------------------------------------------------------------------
[16-8-10 / 18-9-10]
Kris Hemensley
The more important complaint is not being able to see the poems for the poetics (or less --for the method of their construction). In my head I sound-off like that 70s discussion & rail against the sound of squeaky clean construction & its inevitable decorum, regardless that some of my own (particularly '90s) production is pronged on the same indictment!
And then, out of the blue, the universe deals a delightful hand --Grant Caldwell's glass clouds, Michelle Leber's The Weeping Grass, Pete Spence's Sonnets, Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti. Or do I simply wake up on the correct side of the bed? (Surely I dont have to explain that!)
A first impression of clarity of thought & expression, as I skimmed Caldwell's new collection, had me imagining a poetry of wisdom. And the image (or proposition) was still in my mind as I read Leber's poems, that they were knowing & wise. For example, regarding the latter, the gleaming blade of the line which introduces her poem, The Boonwurrung Coast, located at Cape Paterson (coincidentally where Cornelis Vleeskens hung out for many years) --"We let all things take form in the morning light."-- is capable of cutting through anything, including the taxonomy & imagery of sea-birds & flora let alone hints of initiation into shamanistic mysteries. And the triple repetition of the pregnant phrase "In the best part of May" (in the poem of that name), is similarly almost independent of the narrative (however brilliantly inhabited by the anthropomorphised persona telling its creation tale).
In Leber, the gainliness of that combination of scientific & perceptional language evokes authority. Local Barometer, for example : "Port Philip Bay is quicksilver in a glass. / Grey beryllium dust and copper sun-shards rise above waves. / A wind-whip of a baton conducts in tricky 7/8 time. / Ordinarily, a sea-gust's libretto is sung from a silver gull, / and now a gannets' gale-force chorus carves sandstone. / Within this capsule - held up by vertical cliffs / - an interior spring prevents a cloud's collapse. / The weight of water once floating in Torricelli's tube, / now scummed on a pollution-meniscus. / As a desert licks a city's hem-line, / fever rises in pacific oceans, shifts moisture to the equator; / flash-flooding in the north, yet our backyard is cinder / - tomorrow, horizon's axe will swing at noon."
No doubt these are crafted poems --they had to have been carved & chivvied to make their particular density, and a long way from what I'm going to say about Cornelis Vleeskens... But I'm being led to contradictory propositions : firstly, that what she has to say calls the tune; secondly, that her keen observation imposes veracity regardless of subject-matter. One thing for sure : no ho-hum in Michelle Leber's Weeping Grass (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010)...
As I've flagged, something of the same's entailed in Grant Caldwell's glass clouds (Five Islands Press, 2010). The tone of 'something being said' emanates from sufficient poems to impress authority. Not the old literary gravitas (no matter 'made new') but the conjunction of writing and spoken-word's well oiled tongue. From the outset let's insist Caldwell isnt casual however relaxed --the relaxation with syntax, that is, which is the crux of modern English-language poetry, --allowing then its objectors to be eccentric rather than reactionary (except for the vanguard camp, censorial to the last). Plain-speaking, however, is only one of the founding twins; the other never ditched the richer dictionary. Thus the double spring & thrust of 20thCentury & on's poetry. Caldwell's stepping-off from that rung doesnt yet qualify as construction --it's still utterance, more or less (the how it is, the what happened). And maybe it is 'irony' which distinguishes him from numerous other common speakers, and most of them unheralded --as Vleeskens is, for example --not that he's bitching : equanimity rhymes in divertimenti with wine & good music, and what more would one want?
Further to 'wise' : as though ancient Chinese hermit or mendicant poet...! Maybe it was the haiku-like poems in the centre of glass clouds (though that's 'Japanese') as well as his serious meditations on perception (necessarily equating phenomenal experience & language representation --"the window of the past is complete / but you are blind, or a blind") --which compelled the impression. Not to say subsequent reading disabused it --more, that the amount of distress also gathered there revoked the semblance of resolution. In Melbourne, though, as any capital of the Western world, where else does wisdom lie than in the tension of normal attachment & its desired opposite? Caldwell's erstwhile persona of the wry humorist (open his last book, Dreaming of Robert de Niro (FIP, '03), at random for any example) is perhaps succeeded here by the poet following doubt's philosophical trail to a halfway house of serenity (if one accepts as influence two of these poems' dedicatees, Derrida & Claire Gaskin).
Caldwell's tour de force is the hypnotic across the sea, which begins "the sea comes / across itself / here it comes / across itself / see it coming / it comes and comes / across itself / it keeps coming / it never stops", continuing in like fashion for a further 35 lines. It is a reiteration of the fact of sea --of 'the sea' as an event --which succeeds in summoning sea's ceaseless movement whilst rendering each wave's singularity, and the poet's observation of it a definitive exhileration!
Reading Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do : almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville & John Riley, who'd advised that Franco, our fellow Grosseteste Review contributor, would be visiting London in '71 --or was it shortly before the Hemensleys returned to Melbourne in '72? --but that was cancelled. Any meeting in the flesh was forever thwarted by his sudden death in 1995. He remains an exotic correspondent, then, from the golden age of hand & typewritten letters, always missed now as though a friend.
And Vleeskens' book instantly recalls Sperlonga Manhattan Express, an international anthology edited by Beltrametti (Scorribanda Productions, San Vitale, Switzerland, 1980), because of the A-4 / 210-297mm page size & the visual content --Franco's pics from all hands & lands (e.g, P. Gigli's photo of the Berrigans, poems by Koller, Raworth, Gysin, Whalen postcard/cartoon, J Blaine, G D'Agostino, et al); Cornelis' own montage, drawings, calligraphy, typography --the same mail-art internationale, Fluxus, neo-Dada style more readily recognized from Pete Spence's affiliations & practice --particularly relevant here because of the latter's regular appearance in the divertimenti.
Vleeskens & Beltrametti are both Europeans who've crucially intersected with the anti-formal (looser, casual) English-language poetry (are they 'casualties' then!), especially the post WW2 Americans, progeny of Pound & Williams, New York, San Francisco, the West Coast, at a time when Europe was reaffirming its own liberatory tradition (Dada, Surrealism & on) &, similarly, opening to new worlds. And because they're not British or North American or Australian, except by adoption, their European origins & references are never out of mind.
Not an exact match, by any means --but somewhere along the line they've both decided to riff on life & not on literature, though there is a literature of just that sort of thing, and a life that contains literature, music, painting, etc. But theirs is another reminder of the efficacy of the un-made, journal-esque writing, --as clear & direct as we reconstruct the Ancient Chinese & Japanese to be, and whose transparency doesnt necessarily prefer the naive to the esoteric or the well-known to the uncommon (take the music Vleeskens listens to daily &, therefore, records in his communiques --or his philately habit or the breadth of his correspondence, all noted).
Beltrametti's poem The Key might be credo for Vleeskens too :
What was well started shall be finished. / What was not, should be thrown away.
Lew Welch, Hermit Poems.
1 ) the place & the season : winter
2 ) somebody (myself) right here : real & unreal
3 ) what is he doing & what's going on in his head
4 ) how & why is he saying it
5 ) to somebody else (you) elsewhere
something happens?
the circle (real & unreal)
isnt closed
[27/1/72]
--published in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973), the blurbs for which by Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Claude Pelieu, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai & Guillaume Chpaltine are fair snap of his American/European compass.
Context & correspondence, as in O'Hara, Berrigan, Phil Whalen of course, are vital here in distinguishing such notes & exclamations from the bagatelle they might otherwise be --and Jeremy Prynne's terrific comment on O'Hara jumps to mind, that unlike New York's "art gallery nympholepts", he "always has that pail of serpents in view" --: the poet's obligation, as felt, to be right here, to tell how & what it is without literary diversion, the further extent of which is selling-out, blunting if not losing the existential point. (Echoing Olson's Human Universe suit for the poem as 'one of Nature's things', Ray Di Palma hazards, "a poem is one of the almost successful / forces of nature", --in the 3rd of one of Language Poetry's more beautiful sequences, Territory (from Numbers & Tempers, Selected Early Poems, 1966-86; Sun & Moon, '93), which begins, "the desperado / and his abacus / in utopia" --the perfect cartoon for what I'm getting at?! --but that project was performed within /refined writing, albeit a stepping-up of the casual, and isnt the minstrelsy of the memorandum with which I'm ever besotted!)
Divertimenti : to amuse himself & his friends --to divert & be diverted... Diverted from what? Old cliche : the bind of daily life. But hardly, since it's all this poetry's made of. His note : "These divertimenti originally appeared as individual leaflets and were written for the poet's own amusement and that of the handful of friends who were lucky enough to receive the odd one in the mail or at a poetry reading during the last two years of his life on the Victorian coast... he now lives a totally different existence on the NSW Northern Tablelands."
How would you know? His latest Earthdance chapbook, Sandals in camel (drawings & poems), is surreal as narrative & peppered with elsewhere's place names & distinctions (New York, Parisian, Berlin, Belgian, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Italian etc), persuading one of his long assumed cosmopolitan ambit. Interesting inference though --'texts' of the life as lived versus 'poems' (importantly, formed in the cross-wires of Dutch & English).
An earlier collection, Ochre Dancer (Earthdance, '99), has the same atmosphere & tone of divertimenti or better said, the divertimenti are cut from his familiar cloth differing only in the attitude of making or framing.
That's the discussion then, in the blur of any such distinction these days... Bits of life (titles & notes of musical recordings, books, lists of food & drink bought & consumed, incoming mail) intersect with thoughts, observations, conversation.
Recalling Kath Walker (Oodgeroo of Noonucull)'s admonition not to appear like a preacher or a politician, Cornelis muses, "Sometimes I wanted to PREACH // But now I just want to share / some of the ordinary things / in the days of a retired poet..."
Diversions from the notion of retirement? Retirement from poetic ambition (craft & career)? I'd identify with that myself. Breaking the cast but keeping one's hand in, and surprising oneself when something more poem than antidote happens along. The list/letter/journal poetry of our time makes it harder to distinguish source from artefact, but found or made they provide as many pleasures as there are days.
"Ah! a new month!
So I turn the calendar to March
A Corneille arial landscape
looking like a cross between
Mondriaan's sketch of a jetty
jutting into North Sea waves
and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
The calendar was published
for Corneille's 70th birthday
11 years ago but I still
flip over each month
to show that not all days are the same"
Divertimenti is a book which can be taken up anywhere. It invites flicking because of the open-endedness of its narrative.
"Find an image
of the sun's atmosphere
in The Nature of the Universe
by Fred Hoyle (1950)
so reach for Catherine de Zegher
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
hardback catalogue
of the exhibition at
The Drawing Center, New York, 2000
& put on an old vinyl recording
of Peter Sculthorpe's Sun Music #1
for Orchestra (1965)
The sun sets at 5-58
Broodje haring
broodje kaas
en 'n zure bon
Enjoy a glass or two of red
& the clear sound of Marion Verbruggen
playing airs from van Eyck's
Der Fluyten Lust-Hof "
So many dates & times of day, month, year, but the book is always written in present tense, and a sense of the present, in which historical time is subsumed, pervades. All times in diverimenti are concurrent; even the different places defer to the here of Vleeskens' whereabouts.
Despite it being a kind of 'in-lieu of writing' (an 'in-lieu-of-writing writing'?), possessing the light touch of genial conversation & a journal's talking-to-oneself, it also teases one as a discourse on time & place, & of poem as its own place where, paradoxically, its own mercuriality might be traced.
Unsurprisingly, much of this has been the preoccupation of divertimenti's fellow classical & modern music afficianado Pete Spence --typically recalled by Vleeskens at one point, "I think up these lines / while walking home / after putting Katherine / on the 6.37 a.m. bus for Melbourne / but have to wait to write them / till the telephone wakes Pete at 10.35 // My pen & paper are on the desk / in the guestroom where he snores on"...
Spence's Sonnets (a co-production of Karl-Friedrich Hacker's Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia; limited edition of 50, 2009) have been with me throughout these reflections. Sonnet 9 is a good example:
" walking Planck's constant in a red shift?
great day! upwind the day winds down
squares of light are thrown about
should i feel ok now that yesterday
is the subject of these poems? better
to be quick about it like a shadow
taking shade from today's sun! when
will i have room where there's room
where i can roam variously & hang
my tantrums & other guests?
the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!
its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!
a mullet sidles through the air
& i'm stunned by its flight! "
Riffing off life or literature? Seems to me it's a perfect blend of voice & reference, where perfection refers to an individual's inimitable register, in this case Spence's naturalization of reference, the opposite of ornamentation, of literary embellishment. It's all become as particular as experience, and 'all' are the prime sources he's so kind to append : Ted Berrigan, Laurie Duggan, Peter Schjeldahl, plus Forbes, Satie, Beckett, Shakespeare... All adds up to "Spence"!
Looking now for the perfect conclusion I find this from near to the 'end' of divertimenti :
" That photo of Peter-Jan Wagemans
makes him look like
a well-fed Vinkenoog from the sixties
In his liner notes
he comes across
as didactic & conceited
I pull on my walking-boots
& listen to Het Landschap (1990)
played by Tomoko Mukaiyama on piano
It is not the landscape I see around me
It is not any dutch landscape I recall
He states it is the landscape
of his music - but he is wrong
It is the landscape of my writing"
Boom-boom!
------------------------------------------------------------------
[16-8-10 / 18-9-10]
Kris Hemensley
Sunday, May 2, 2010
MAY 2010, COMMENTARY
A REVIEW OF THE RECENT AUSTRALIAN POETRY ANTHOLOGIES
Confession as preamble
I've been sitting on what I intended to be a review of the recent swag of Australian poetry anthologies for two months or so! I've accumulated notes, discussed the topic with fellow poets & readers (including a frolic on Facebook), yet I've clearly dragged the chain, feeling more daunted by the day. It wasnt going to be an exhaustive review, more a kind of 'thoughts arising' on the subject. But even skirting these anthologies' rationales -- and I should clarify that I principally had in mind The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Kinsella (2009) & The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Leonard (2009), although David McCooey's post-1950 poetry selection within the humungus Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature (general editor, Nicholas Jose,A & U, 2009) & the genre anthologies, if that isnt a loaded or misleading term (Martin Langford's Harbour City Poems : Sydney in Verse, 1788-2008 (P&W, '09) ; Jenny Harrison & Kate Waterhouse's Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry, 1986-2008 (P&W,'09); Michael Farrell & Jill Jones', Out of the Box : Contemporary Australian Gay & Lesbian Poets (P&W,'09)), are obviously apropos -- I'm reminded, forcibly, that the anthologies' historical & cultural references are not, or only superficially, mine. I should say, 'reminded of this yet again', --in the course of which I'm confronted with the perennial problems of identity & representation. Oh dear! Angst & ennui! I tire myself out & probably bore silly all my chums of the dinky-di!
It's clear that anything & everything I think & say about Australian poetry is skewed by an ultimate foreignness. This wasnt always the case although some may have long suspected it, for example, Tom Shapcott, back in '75/'76, when he was compiling the Contemporary American & Australian Poetry anthology (UQP, '76). It was a collection I felt I should have been in but even more, a connection I believed I could countersign! (If that doesnt ring with 'entitlement' nothing does! And I say that now with no little embarrassment, notwithstanding the reality of my involvement, as colleague & editor, with American poetry at that time.) Shapcott said he wondered about my longer term affiliation to Australian poetry. I evidently convinced him that I qualified. I showed my gratitude by curating a symposium on the anthology in Meanjin Quarterly, for which I was then poetry editor. It was probably put to me that since the opinions of my four contributors (messers Tranter, Reid, Faust & Duncan) were more or less critical, I ought to invite someone else, Peter Porter for instance, to provide balance. Balance, of course, isnt a word in a radical's lexicon. I fancy the fall-out from that episode hung around me for quite a while. At that time I abstracted the literary or poetic values I held from any set of social relationships it might seem I inhabited. I suppose this is the form absolute commitment to one's beliefs might take, but it's also the stuff of elitism & social alienation...
Even though it's been 44 years since I emigrated to Australia, I couldnt swear the customary allegiance. Today I would say I am an English visitor in Australia, albeit since 1989 with a certificate of Australian citizenship, who retains his British passport; a dual citizen with the classic divided loyalties. My commuting since 1987, Melbourne to Dorset & back, returned a home to me that I'd all but lost (except in vivid dreams). 'Internationalism' saved my bacon hitherto : Melbourne as a city in the world, and the world calling the shots. 1987 was my first trip back to the UK since 1975, the year I'd attended the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival (reading there with fellow poets published by Grosseteste Books), reconnected with family, colleagues & friends, and flirted with the tenuous possibility of remaining in England. For some of the '70s & '80s in Melbourne I was an exile, soothed somewhat by a philosophy of belatedness. But a 'turn' in the mid '80s provided for both a break with radical politics & avant-garde art & literature, & a re-embrace of a traditional & sacramental life. This still pertains, but now the sacrament has an English accent and is in need of regular succour! Yet I pulled out of a collection with Salt a few years ago --a publisher situated in England, with Australian interests close to its heart. Strategically what could have been better? Writing about it in Island magazine, I offered that I was afraid the selection of poems didnt represent me & that they wouldnt survive their (necessary) encounter with the world. Plainly I no longer had the courage of my own convictions. The longer the project took to materialize, the more I agonised. Pulling the rug ("to save us both embarrassment," as I emailed Chris Hamilton-Emery) was the solution. Though offered collections since then by Australian publishers or invited to be in anthologies, the best I can think to do is decline. I'd feel a fraud & counterfeit otherwise. (I should declare, though, that I'm in Raffaella Torresan's illustrated anthology Literary Creatures : A book of animals in alphabet, Hybrid Publishers, '09 --perhaps because I'd rather 'talk to the animals'! And my CD selection, My Life in Theatre, with River Road Press, '09, partially avoids the questions that a book would present me with --it's in the listener's ear & not a reader's eye after all, so I can represent myself...)
No amount of 'post-colonial' critiquing & redefining of the Australian situation & condition attracts me or assuages my disinclination to accept the tag for myself. At the same time I do feel I am a Melbournean without identifying as Australian.This is much the same, I think, as my dear maman being Alexandrian without identifying as Egyptian or at least, less & less, after the ousting of the monarchy & the ascendancy of the new nationalist order : her family's cultural viability depended upon the multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism necessarily jettisoned by the revolution & that revolution's enrollment in the anti-Western side of the Cold War argument... I was never entirely sure whether my mother was anguished or profoundly amused that her papers, upon departing Alexandria for the UK, were marked "stateless". I wonder if some of that rubbed off on me... Additionally, although my father may have presented as a typical Englishman, he apparently hankered after a reconnection with his Huguenot mother's South African home (where he was conceived), who'd been robbed of it by an English settler husband's dispatch of her to England while he (my grandfather) remained with a bigamous consort... My parents were happy where they lived when they were, dispirited & displaced when they werent --Mum referring to Alexandria or the fantasy of a French life (on the wing of an Alexandrian Lycee Francaise upbringing); Dad desiring greener fields, briefly experienced on European & West Country holidays, but staying put to dig his Hampshire then Dorset garden, dutifully sacrificing himself on Esso BP's altar for the family's provision...
I enjoy the memory of my connection with pre-nationalist Egypt, having lived several pre-school years in Alexandria & Suez (it's an Egypt of the mind, sustained by literature) but mostly & crucially identify with England. I am, therefore, an English man in Australia, & a Melbournean whose qualities I carry with me in England! Declining to be an Australian (poet) is one thing; having next to no credibility as a writer in England is another, yet I feel 'unfinished business' on many levels with the Old Dart! It's the expat's double-bind, I guess. But an obvious contradiction to all of this is the greater affinity I've felt for Australian sport (cricket, tennis, rugby, swimming) than English; frankly, the games I follow are better expressed in & by Australia than England! And because I've lived here so long, I have a 'local' connection with contemporary Australian art. Flicking through a recent issue of Meanjin Quarterly devoted to 'the British question', I've found the phrase "British roots, Australian fruits" which might explain some of the anomaly, though I'm well aware how anachronistic, even reactionary, that can be read today. I havent said much about my earlier American connections, but suffice to say they continue, --Whitman, Pound, Williams, the Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York, Deep Image et al, & whole worlds of literary fiction, art, music-- & have expanded in the same way as my appreciation of the British & Australians (thus old & new formalists, & numerous independents).
Regarding the "New"
It was the 'new' part of the term "New Australian Poetry" with which I identified in the late '60s. (I believe I coined the term in an article, Towards a New Australian Poetry, commissioned for Meanjin Quarterly; written in '69, published in 1970 when I was back in England.) My 'new' was inspired by Donald Allen's New American Poetry, 1945-60 & later by Penguin's 'New Writing' series of anthologies (British, American, German, French et al) rather than Al Alvarez's The New Poetry, with its dramatic Jackson Pollock cover (which disappointed me when I read it in 1966; it seemed like the old poetry to me then, a dichotomy, I hasten to say, I'd finally rescinded by the late '80s, early '90s).
In 1969, Ken Taylor & I had been asked by John Hooker at Penguin Books to edit an Australian New Writing, but after much consideration we declined, certain that inevitable compromises would distort if not destroy the project. (Charles Buckmaster, around 1970-71, took up a similar commission, but nothing came of that either.) Taylor's acquaintance John Gill, whom he'd met in New York in 1965 whilst on a Harkness Fellowship to Columbia University, edited with Earl Birney the magazine New : American & Canadian Poetry (Trumansburg, New York). They published Ken Taylor & then myself there, and suggested that Ken start an Australian wing of the magazine. But this idea was jumped by Melbourne's ''mini-mag explosion" (as the Monash academic Dennis Douglas described it) of '68, '69...
This idea of 'new' melded with a sense or imperative of 'now' --it was urgent & actual, resonating the uniqueness of the time & place... The world of the New was both intensely local & promiscuously international. Its sources were as inter-disciplinary as literary. Fondness for the appellation 'experimental' had more to do with accommodating & shaping the floods of new concepts & forms of expression flowing through the as-perceived Sleepy Hollow than any Poundian renovation of Tradition. Naturally, practice makes perfect : we learnt on the job, but without "the license from the English Department" as per Ken Taylor's brag. We were, as I've written before, the illiterati!
Of course, Pound's perspectives were important, so too Williams' & Olson's. For our Melbourne generation, the American take on almost everything hitherto pronounced upon by the British was an opportunity for what today's lingo calls the post-colonial. American literary perspectives & practice were preferred to the British, and provided the means for an independent Aussie articulation, --independent but seeking equivalence.
It might be of interest to note that at the very time I was possessed by Olson, whom I saw as expressing the very opposite of the academic attitude & epitomising the 'new', John Gill railed against him as its apotheosis! He held up the new vernacular Americans, as the true poets of the democratic idiom, against the high falutin' Black Mountain academicians. (Echoes of Williams' criticism of Eliot!) I was astonished. Black Mountain, New York, San Francisco were on the street in Oz & not in the academy! Similarly surprised when I returned to the UK, in 1969/70, to find our 'underground' exemplars taught in some universities!
In retrospect, I realize that the 'new' of my young time was situational (new in one place, passe in another) & its absolutes only temporary. I wonder, though, if one can say that the ambitions of the New, which transcended the conventional categories in every respect, were diverted by the temptation of respectability (grants, status) &, paradoxically, education, back into the mainstream? However, 'mainstream' itself changes &/or is redefined. I would like to believe that writers of my generation, whether from experimental or traditional roots, now have a nuanced sense of 'mainstream'. Our experience would surely have taught that it is the statement of deep rapprochement and not one side of an eternal mutual exclusivity. It is also what the 'canon' might now be --where history's products rest within their tested differences, the propositional best of an era's diverse bunch... During the same period, erstwhile stuffy institutions came to embrace the openness we might ourselves have once advanced & benefited from. For a start, 'Creative writing' on the higher education syllabus, --but if poetry & fiction were solely a product of study instead of also a political & emotional necessity's expression --if these factors didnt both comprise our practice's equation-- the entire game would be lost! New poets, in the sense of theoretical & expressive innovators, were now, more often than not, the products of universities. Astonishing, really, to the '60s generation, that formal study might relate itself to the formerly radically independent modes of thought & practice, so much so that the avant-garde's viability is currently vouchsafed by the academy!
Regarding my abandonment of 'career', it's the business of it, the 'publish or perish', the industry which most put me off, especially when elevated from a necessary evil to the essence of the enterprise. Back in the '70s, when my late friend, the English poet John Riley, approvingly quoted Anna Akhmatova's contention that Literature was a dung hill on top of which the poet crowed, I didnt quite get it. And though by now I do understand both Akhmatova's & Riley's positions, I dont want to appear precious about it all. Mine's more a love/hate relationship than a complete disavowal. Best to say, I'm an amateur who's deadly serious about a vocation & its practice but cavalier about the profession --who'd rather sit in the shade of a tree, munching a crust of bread & cheese, vino or ale in my hand, with my head in a book, writing or reading, than attend a festival or conference, or would work forever on a poem rather than seeking to publish or perform it!
Thoughts arising...
# A stampede of anthologies? An avalanche? An armchair? A hedge-fund?
# There was a time when locals would envy Scribners' annual Best American & wish we had something similar. Eventually we did --we have two Best Australian (the Black Inc & the UQP) anthologies in addition to the Newcastle Prize. Evidently we dont do things by halves! Six Aussie anthologies --seven if one includes the little Shoestring Press (UK) compilation edited by Adrian Caesar --and another, the Gray/Lehmann, in the wings! One could be forgiven for thinking a new bout of national definition is occurring; present territories being staked out, the future up for grabs! ('Ruddist' perhaps? All the swish & swagger of the new broom, the new deal, but when the dust has cleared it's more or less how it always was?!)
# In the late '70s, John Tranter invited me to be in the New Australian Poetry anthology he was editing for Martin Duwell's Makar Press (Brisbane). I accepted but was shocked that a poet like Ken Taylor, possibly the same kind of elder sibling for the 'new' Melbourne poets as Bruce Beaver in Sydney, hadnt been considered. After all, poets like Charles Buckmaster, John Jenkins & Garrie Hutchinson from the same Melbourne scene, & a little later on Robert Kenny, were represented, each of whom owed something to Taylor or were better understood in relation to him. Additionally I felt Walter Billeter's work was part of Jenkins', Kenny's & my own explication, & that Clive Faust, who'd come to us via Cid Corman's American/Japanese circuit, was an important ally. I also proposed that Ken Bolton & Anna Couani deserved guernseys. John accepted most of this; but Bolton & Couani were too recent to be included he felt. Some years later, having drinks with Michael Ondaatje in Carlton in the company of Judith Rodriguez, Tom Shapcott, Jenny Strauss & others, I described for the visitor's benefit, how what he'd extolled as an excellent anthology had come about. Judith Rodriguez took me to task : it wasnt my place to have second-guessed Tranter, she argued, far less to use one's own invitation as a bargaining chip. But, I did, & had. At that time I felt representation was a political issue, and considered I was arguing for poetics which would otherwise be ignored or demeaned. I thought too that I was supporting poets who'd fallen under the radar. I assumed every poet had a duty to advocate in this way. I thought this constituted 'the discussion'. Not to be in an anthology was always one's final card, and the making of another or counter anthology always an option. This paragraph could lead me into an analysis of "the poetry wars" of the 1970s & '80s, --friction within the avant-garde, opposition to it from without, ameliorations, divergences -- but though instructive it would be a distraction here. Another time... Suffice to say, principal ought always have been the point & not personality; years later there was poetical rapprochement (the Mead/Tranter Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, for example, which revised & resituated the original New Australian Poetry as part of a continuum, Slessor to Kinsella, largely transcending the Generation of '68/Younger Australian Poets divide) &, hopefully, personal injury recognized & repaired. But even so, contemporary pluralism doesnt nullify difference & opposition even though radicals & conservatives occasionally seek to discredit it. These days I wouldnt want to influence an editor unless consulted but neither am I seeking publication...
# Whilst particular absences are notable in one compilation (for example, & as they come, no Buckmaster, Maiden, Bolton, Brown, Duggan, Jill Jones, Cronin, Farrell or Bishop in Leonard), they're usually rectified in one or more of the others. But some arent in any at all. No Nigel Roberts (though he deservedly scores in Harbour City Poems), Tim Thorne, Eric Beach, Grant Caldwell, Myron Lysenko, Lauren Williams, Shelton Lea (which sounds like a school reeled off like that); no Mal Morgan, Ian McBryde, Jennifer Compton, Selwyn Pritchard, Robyn Rowland, Peter Bakowski, Andy Kissane, Jane Williams, Joel Deane, Louise Crisp, John West; no John Anderson, Ken Taylor; no Gary Catalano. (The women here are all in Motherlode.) Invidious to call a roll in this way, for this salon de refusers could contain as many poets & more again as were published in the anthologies... And I'm well aware that I'm looking out of Melbourne eyes : assuredly lists could be compiled reflecting the perspective of every city/state of the commonwealth. It might be argued that patterns of omission are the more interesting to consider, in which the contradiction of po-mo unmade & lyrical well-made, though that's only one broad brush beginning to debate, appears to identify John Leonard's with the mutually-exclusive point of view.
# Where the canonical anthology is concerned, I think it's probably editorially risky to consider young first bookers. It's not those particular poets' fault that equally talented first timers are excluded. It's for the editors to justify. But when, in the case of the Leonard anthology, every debutante published by the John Leonard Press appears ahead of a list which could include Chris Andrews, Judith Bishop, Nathan Shepherdson, Greg McLaren, Lisa Gorton, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Carol Jenkins, David McCooey, Angela Gardner,Tina Giannoukos, Kate Middleton, Mal McKimmie, to name some at random, one must wonder how & why. Indeed, every John Leonard Press author appears in his Puncher & Wattmann anthology, so where space is, apparently, a consideration, --in Leonard's own words, "a judgement of preferences given limited space", --a larger conflict of interest might be argued! (I should say, though, that several of those poets were included in pre-JLP era compilations. I guess it's just 'not a good look' in this time of 'perception' politics.) By the same token, Kinsella omits most of the JLP authors whilst his own Salt press is the publisher of a very large number in the Penguin. Regrettable, to say the least, if the editors felt their credibility as publishers was at stake!
# Every reason then to have Younger Poets anthologies, however arbitrary the qualification age, or Introductions --anthologies of every sort --'genre' as opposed to the 'canonical' or even to oppose it. Academic imprimatur can be the kiss of death, and with the best will in the world, the majors are all tinged with it. Interestingly, the blurb for the (125-poets, 175 poems) Motherlode anthology includes a canonical accent : "Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal appear alongside the major poets of today, including Judith Beveridge, Jan Owen, MTC Cronin, JS Harry, joanne burns and Tracy Ryan..." But there's no consensus on that claim in the majors, thus the rationale for the women's anthology! No joke of course : the motivations for Kate Jennings' mid-'70s anthology are probably as relevant today as then, although Jenny Harrison & Kate Waterhouse concentrate upon the sub-divisions of their female & feminist narrative and bridle at the mainstream only in passing in their lucid introduction.
# Kerry Scuffins' poem, Bear's air, in Motherlode, is as tender a poem as one would want to read of a very particular experience, one which is only incidental in the poetry of purportedly larger thematic & expressive schemes (the whole point of genre let alone gender specificity). When 'woman' is the paradigm, every incident speaks the reams now available to it. With all respect to the poem's original publication, in this anthology it becomes memorable. Inflation's slain by the small words, the little rhymes of the infinite world of mother & child, for which the toy bear is both witness to & alter-ego of the naturally suffering mother. Scuffins' poem is memorable because it isnt exasperation's reportage; something else happens --"she looks into the eyes of Bear. // She touches noses / with Bear. / She puts her head on the head of Bear / and sighs, and tiredly, dog-gedly, / breathes Bear's air."
# It's often said that context is all --so how distinguish the poems in Out of the Box, remembering that it's subtitled Gay & Lesbian Poets & not poems, implying that the G & L status is crucial to the work? Could it solely be a matter of the content --poems about relationships, lovers; poems of the momentary, of what remorselessly passing time makes ephemeral --the poetry that dares to speak its name, as it were? How distinguish poets in this context from any other they may inhabit? I remember Paul Knobel, when visiting Collected Works from Sydney, maybe 20 years ago, challenging me on the absence of a Gay poetry section in the bookshop. The first thought in my head was, What would we do with the American section then? I was thinking specifically of numerous poets who are better (& self) identified with the school of New York, say, more than their sexual preference; ditto San Francisco Renaissance poets, the Beats & etc --& so many others who're only defined as Gay by their biography rather than poetry. At the same time, the hilarious flippancy & the mercuriality of tone & image, which is a hallmark of much New York poetry, obviously corresponds to what one would generally assume today as a Gay style, one which now actually transcends sexual distinction. An answer, maybe, in Jill Jones' comment that "Words operate in relationships, grammars, that readers make meanings from" --therefore the availability of the Gay & Lesbian meaning, & this anthology's suit for its relevance. Among poets in Out of the Box one would not encounter elsewhere are Terry Jaensch (especially his poem Mouse), Nandi Channa (King Brown), Stephen Williams (Cathedrals in their middle age), Maria Zajkowski (Colour), Kerry Leves, Denis Gallagher... One strength of Out of the Box (& it's the smallest of the anthologies) is the variety of the poems and the dispersal of the several poems per poet throughout the collection --it's made to be read rather than consulted. Although I'm not sure that a Pam Brown or David Malouf or Peter Rose or Martin Harrison or Dipti Saravanamutu or even Javant Biarujia poem differs in this context from elsewhere, even spread throughout the collection they do represent their authors & the anthology with unusual frisson! Much to savour in this anthology; Chris Edwards, joanne burns, Angela Gardner, Susan Hawthorne amongst others... Harrison's Aubade, beginning "If an extremely blue, misty, angular winter early morning / left its traces, its minnows and shimmers, in your eyes", ably extends grammar to hold a thought/conceit without strain. It's an elegant & mellifluous composition that denies the usual mushiness of romantic poems & speaks for the best of the anthology.
# The academic (traditional or avant-garde) imprimatur should be as incidental as popularity, one factor among several reckonings. In the '70s, the Melbourne/Sydney avant-garde discussion, in which I participated, mocked poetry's 'subject-matter domination', valorising 'the poem itself'. It probably needed to given the erstwhile conventional concentration upon 'communication' wherein 'themes' were 'effectively' expressed. But the wheels of practice & fashion turn, so direct or plain speaking returns. And even the conventional dichotomies dissolve, thus today there's a concurrence of realists & surrealists, Language poets & New Formalists, & all their hybrids. So it is and will always be, again & again & again! The moral? No more dogmas! Everything & nothing; everything or nothing!
# The canonical is central to both the Kinsella & the Leonard no matter either editor's provisos. Given my own reservations about the 'Australian' definition, I suppose I should be sympathetic to Kinsella's escape-clause that as an anti-nationalist he's an unlikely compiler of an Australian anthology. Naturally he's a coloniser too, albeit in the name of the transgressive & subversive. Although his redefinition of Australia doesnt do much more than add black, green & red stars to the national constellation, it's probably worthwhile. Not being (not being allowed, --after all it is the Penguin anthology & the widest readership is presumed) a fully fledged experimental anthology (in which his interesting but dubious notion that 'Australian' poetry is historically 'experimental', conflating with the formally experimental), it has a bitsy feel (a bit of this, a bit of that, & with some obvious exceptions, a little bit from everyone). Its success would be as the necessary complement to any standard anthology, providing the antithetical coda. The fashion of the day might describe it as an Eco-Poetical anthology...
# John Leonard's anthology probably began life as one thing (an update of his 1998 AustralianVerse : An Oxford Anthology, but with another publisher now since OUP abandoned the field) and became something else as it responded to the influence of a decade of new poets & new poetry. The two Johns concur that contemporary poetry is booming & may well represent the brightest it's ever been. Leonard calls the period from 1998 to the present, "unusually rich"; furthermore, " the number of poets writing original and high-quality work is larger than at any time in this country's history." Kinsella chimes, "It will probably strike readers of this anthology that it is unusual for so many contemporary writers to be represented in an historical anthology. I have done this because I feel that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have proven and are proving to be fertile periods for poetry."
# Comments in their introductions suggest that both editors plot their poetry as parallel to the national history & responsive to the country's geophysical stereotypes. Apart from more or less passing remarks, neither editor really describes or analyses the aesthetical/poetical distinctions & directions of their anthology --not because they cant but wont. For Kinsella I suppose it's largely due to his sense of poetry's political imperative (at least, the transferability &, in his eye, the impossibility of distinguishing such categories). For Leonard it's as though the beans arent his to spill --either the 'delight', which he'd say is always the arbiter of a poem's worth, is for the reader to explicate, or it's all been done to excess previously. He explains, "I will refrain from giving a version of the usual story of the evolution of Australian poetry in terms of influence, movements in poetics, and sheer personal alliances. A reader can easily search for this elsewhere. The ghost of its scaffolding is discernible here, but my instinct is not to trammel the poems. Poems can interestingly outgrow their first labels." I wish our editor had provided & discussed an example of this tantalising statement --such poetical analysis would hardly be 'trammeling' but a demonstration of the very reading he urges in his introduction. In short, I'd love to know how our editors understand the (language) 'riches' of their selections. (Repeating the tale of free verse's historical ascendancy over the metrical, albeit allowing for free verse's ever greater complexity &, indeed, for the new career of formal composition during the post-modern, is the barest beginning, and left at that might thoroughly mislead an innocent reader as to the nature of the art & craft!)
# Because, in the Macquarie, David McCooey is placing (I almost write 'insinuating') poetry into the entire Australian literary frame, one that's politically responsive to the current historical register (as no better displayed than in the holus-bolus inclusion of what had been the self-contained & previously published volume of indigenous literature, edited by Anita Heiss & Peter Minter), the poetry (which includes examples of comedians' Barry Humphreys, John Clark & Michael Leunig, as well as a song by Nick Cave) might be expected to represent more than its intrinsic effects. And although the largest poem in his selection is by his own slim volume's publisher, John Kinsella, --a sprawling spiel, a signature aspect of his writing but not a patch, I'd hazard, on his W.A. situated & elegant magical-realisms that achieve all he'd ever want to bang on about --McCooey's selection doesnt follow his champ's 'experimental' (didactic & oppositional) line. For all the cultural-studies predilection, McCooey honours both po-mo & trad, equally aware of lyric & gravitas, irony & humour. He's an ammeliorist. Couldnt help feeling, though, how much like filler the poetry appeared, & the category itself so fragile in the Big Mac, heavied by the tome's portentious seeming prose!
# At random : open the Leonard & let the eye fall upon whatever it finds there. Page 140 : Geoffrey Lehmann's The Two Travellers. (I'm thinking it's what a disinterested reader would do : open a book & flick. I dont mean disinterested; I mean an interested reader, without axe to grind.) I like it! Immediate Laurentian asociations (that river-side taverna in the first part of Aaron's Rod, perhaps) arise-- but that's me -- impressions & sensations of young men's joi-de-vivre offset by nostalgia & mystery. The rhyming couplets are a delight. Several stories implied, as in the closing lines : "A parsley field and church shone in the sun, / The girl was there. We diced and my friend won." --the apposition of the girl & the friends' dicing may or not be consequential. I'm impressed by the poem being no more than the telling of a story in almost guileless couplets --no breast-beating or tub-thumping --simply a poem. And this day that is a great pleasure to me! It was written in 1972. I dont remember reading it then, & if I had probably wouldnt have appreciated it. What can I say : I inhabited a set of angles then which no longer dominate! Thank God for long reading lives & the chance for second bites & opinions!
# Caught by Lehmann I look for him in the other anthologies. Suddenly he's everywhere! That is to say, suddenly I'm aware of his centrality! In the Kinsella, his Pear Days in Queensland, probably botanically, agriculturally & historically accurate, is a tour de force : bourgeoning like creation myth, enveloping one like a Weird Tales fantasy. I wonder again about a DHL connection ('gentian violet' in the first stanza); his repetition of "pear" throughout the poem is rousing & hypnotic. It also recalls to me Ken Taylor's At Valentines (part 1) for the way a poem might insist its particulars --an oral gambit, I suppose, but so disposed as to transform the lists of items into richly layered narrative. In the Sydney anthology, Lehmann's to be found again with another big hit. Also from '72, Elegy for Jan is memorable as elegy & also litmus of an early '60s city of the young. And in the Macquarie, 13 long playing haiku, with its obvious reference to Stevens' Blackbird, is a musical tour from Debussy & Ravel to John Lee Hooker & Lou Reed; poignant, comic, deft & direct.
# Open the Kinsella at random : p.331, Jill Jones' The 7.17 Silver Machine, & in particular, "(...)we are racing time and track work / as the splayed out, the curved and embryonic lurch / towards dark Sydney - the dome, the nipple / the snow white breasts of midnight / waiting till we step down in the light " --not quite as speedy as a jump-cut Farrell or Gig Ryan but pretty fast &, like Ryan, atmospheric & beautiful!
# Something which has bugged me for a while is the status accorded the Ern Malley phenomenon. To wit : Why does the 'Ern Malley' confabulation of James McAuley & Harold Stewart have its own moniker without also bearing the names of its authors? Did proponents of new & innovative poetry understand the 'Ern Malley' hoax as a victory for their own poetic principals or was it a joke at the expense of the perpetrators, a bit of anti-conservative pay-back? And for how long can the joke remain funny? If the McAuley & Stewart 'Malley' poems stand up, why is there no attention paid to the original Apocalyptic & Surrealist poets of the '40s, even from the standpoint of historical representation? Judith Wright's negative judgements in her '50s Oxford appear to have become the orthodoxy. Even the Jindyworabaks seem to have had a better run, as evidenced by John Kinsella's remarks & inclusions in his anthology. It's long been time for serious reassessment, especially since the '60s & '70s' restoration of surrealism & etc as legitimate practice in Oz.
# Only one poet is in everything; Dorothy Porter. No more fitting memorial for a beloved late colleague. Many others are in the Big Three (several additionally in one or more of the Genres). Were it not for their much publicised spat with Kinsella (leading to withdrawal from the Penguin), Robert Adamson & Anthony Lawrence would have joined that company which includes Adam Aitken, Jordi Albiston, Bruce Beaver, Judy Beveridge, Vincent Buckley, Bruce Dawe, Sarah Day, Rosemary Dobson, Michael Dransfield, Jack Davis, Stephen Edgar, John Forbes, Peter Goldsworthy, Alan Gould, Robert Gray, J S Harry, Kevin Hart, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Philip Hodgins, A D Hope, Martin Johnston, John Kinsella, Geoffrey Lehmann, Emma Lew, Roger MacDonald, James McAuley, 'Ern Malley', David Malouf, Les Murray, Oodgeroo, Geoff Page, Peter Porter, Peter Rose, Gig Ryan, Philip Salom, John Scott, Tom Shapcott, Vivien Smith, Jennifer Strauss, John Tranter, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Ania Walwicz, Francis Webb, Judith Wright, Fay Zwicky.
In two or more : Lisa Bellear, Ken Bolton, Kevin Brophy, Pam Brown, Luke Davies, Laurie Duggan, Lionel Fogarty, Rodney Hall, Jill Jones, Jennifer Maiden, Mudrooroo, Ouyang Yu, Jennifer Rankin, Tracy Ryan, Craig Sherbourne, R A Simpson, Peter Sryznecki, Peter Steele, Roberta Sykes, Andrew Taylor, Alan Wearne, John Blight, Peter Boyle, Caroline Caddy, Alison Croggon, Jane Gibbian, Kevin Gilbert, Jennifer Harrison, Bill Hart-Smith, Coral Hull, John Jenkins, Bronwyn Lea, John Mateer, Pi O, Elizabeth Riddell, Judith Rodriguez, Alex Skovron, Dimitris Tsaloumas, Vicki Viidikas.
And numerous one-offs including Muk Muk Burke, Barry Hill, Catherine Bateson, Elizabeth Campbell, Julian Croft, Lidija Cvetkovic, Rebecca Edwards, Anne Elder, Brook Emery, Diane Fahey, Claire Gaskin, Barbara Giles, Martin Harrison, Jill Hellyer, Sophie Holland-Batt, L K Holt, Yvette Holt, Emma Jones, Evan Jones, Peter Kirkpatrick, Tony Lintermans, Kathryn Lomer, Paul Magee, Philip Martin, Geraldine Mckenzie, Graeme Miles, David Musgrave, Mark O'Connor, Marcella Pollain, Dipti Saravanamatu, Morgan Yasbincek, Simon West, Petra White, John Watson, Ali Alizadeh, Javant Biarujia, Judith Bishop, Merlinda Bobis, Charles Buckmaster, Michael Brennan, David Brooks, MTC Cronin, JH Duke, Geoofrey Dutton, Michael Farell, Geoff Goodfellow, Philip Hammial, Dennis Haskell, Anita Heiss, Paul Hetherington, Antigone Kefala, SK Kelen, Mike Ladd, Kate Lilley, Kate Llewellyn, Miriam Wei-Wei Lo, Rhyl McMaster, Chris Mansell, Miles Merrill, Peter Minter, Phillip Neilsen, Grace Perry, Glen Phillips, Andrew Sant, Jaya Savige, Randolph Stow, Harold Stewart, Norman Talbot, Richard Tipping.
# Recurring poems include Slessor's Five Bells, & Beach Burial, Peter Porter's An Exequy, Beveridge's The Domesticity of Giraffes, Croggon's The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop, Strauss's Tending the Graves, Murray's The Quality of Sprawl, Forbes' Love Poem, & Speed : A Pastoral... Classics major & minor. If poems rather than poets were school texts (and I think they should be) these might lead the way...
# Based on the Big Three & the Twos, convergence of taste seems more the stamp of the anthologies than divergence, but for all that there are numerous memorable poems. Add to the previously named the likes of Zwicky's Makasser, 1956, Lucy Holt's Waking : for Kafka, Wagan-Watson's Skeleton Dance, Albiston's The Fall, Pi O's Yoori, Gray's In Departing Light, Salom's The Composer Shostakovich Orders His Funeral, Adamson's The Language of Oysters, Dobson's Folding the Sheets, Gig Ryan's Swoons, Sherbourne's Strapper, Cronin's The Floor, The Thing, Kinsella's Drowning in Wheat, Bishop's Rabbit, Robert Harris's They Assume... Again, far too many to mention... Duggan's, Buckley's, Owen's, Gaskin's... Unfair to have begun...
# All in all, happy days for so many contemporary Australian poets represented in this swag of anthologies. I congratulate them & share in their pleasure. I almost wish that I could join them!
oOo
(February/May, 2010)
Kris Hemensley
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[CORRECTION :
I'm grateful to Jan Owen who has informed me that she is included in 3 of the 6 recent Australian anthologies; 4 of 7 if one includes Take Five (edited by Adrian Caesar, Shoestring Press,UK) which I havent discussed. Somehow in my long trails of paper with biro tabulations her name must have fallen off ! Belatedly, & for the record, she features in Kinsella/Penguin, Leonard/P & W, Harrison & Waterhouse/Motherload. So she ought to have been in my "two or more" majors. I do apologise for this carelessness; in my head she was never an omission!
Thursday, 18th November,'10]
Confession as preamble
I've been sitting on what I intended to be a review of the recent swag of Australian poetry anthologies for two months or so! I've accumulated notes, discussed the topic with fellow poets & readers (including a frolic on Facebook), yet I've clearly dragged the chain, feeling more daunted by the day. It wasnt going to be an exhaustive review, more a kind of 'thoughts arising' on the subject. But even skirting these anthologies' rationales -- and I should clarify that I principally had in mind The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Kinsella (2009) & The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Leonard (2009), although David McCooey's post-1950 poetry selection within the humungus Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature (general editor, Nicholas Jose,A & U, 2009) & the genre anthologies, if that isnt a loaded or misleading term (Martin Langford's Harbour City Poems : Sydney in Verse, 1788-2008 (P&W, '09) ; Jenny Harrison & Kate Waterhouse's Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry, 1986-2008 (P&W,'09); Michael Farrell & Jill Jones', Out of the Box : Contemporary Australian Gay & Lesbian Poets (P&W,'09)), are obviously apropos -- I'm reminded, forcibly, that the anthologies' historical & cultural references are not, or only superficially, mine. I should say, 'reminded of this yet again', --in the course of which I'm confronted with the perennial problems of identity & representation. Oh dear! Angst & ennui! I tire myself out & probably bore silly all my chums of the dinky-di!
It's clear that anything & everything I think & say about Australian poetry is skewed by an ultimate foreignness. This wasnt always the case although some may have long suspected it, for example, Tom Shapcott, back in '75/'76, when he was compiling the Contemporary American & Australian Poetry anthology (UQP, '76). It was a collection I felt I should have been in but even more, a connection I believed I could countersign! (If that doesnt ring with 'entitlement' nothing does! And I say that now with no little embarrassment, notwithstanding the reality of my involvement, as colleague & editor, with American poetry at that time.) Shapcott said he wondered about my longer term affiliation to Australian poetry. I evidently convinced him that I qualified. I showed my gratitude by curating a symposium on the anthology in Meanjin Quarterly, for which I was then poetry editor. It was probably put to me that since the opinions of my four contributors (messers Tranter, Reid, Faust & Duncan) were more or less critical, I ought to invite someone else, Peter Porter for instance, to provide balance. Balance, of course, isnt a word in a radical's lexicon. I fancy the fall-out from that episode hung around me for quite a while. At that time I abstracted the literary or poetic values I held from any set of social relationships it might seem I inhabited. I suppose this is the form absolute commitment to one's beliefs might take, but it's also the stuff of elitism & social alienation...
Even though it's been 44 years since I emigrated to Australia, I couldnt swear the customary allegiance. Today I would say I am an English visitor in Australia, albeit since 1989 with a certificate of Australian citizenship, who retains his British passport; a dual citizen with the classic divided loyalties. My commuting since 1987, Melbourne to Dorset & back, returned a home to me that I'd all but lost (except in vivid dreams). 'Internationalism' saved my bacon hitherto : Melbourne as a city in the world, and the world calling the shots. 1987 was my first trip back to the UK since 1975, the year I'd attended the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival (reading there with fellow poets published by Grosseteste Books), reconnected with family, colleagues & friends, and flirted with the tenuous possibility of remaining in England. For some of the '70s & '80s in Melbourne I was an exile, soothed somewhat by a philosophy of belatedness. But a 'turn' in the mid '80s provided for both a break with radical politics & avant-garde art & literature, & a re-embrace of a traditional & sacramental life. This still pertains, but now the sacrament has an English accent and is in need of regular succour! Yet I pulled out of a collection with Salt a few years ago --a publisher situated in England, with Australian interests close to its heart. Strategically what could have been better? Writing about it in Island magazine, I offered that I was afraid the selection of poems didnt represent me & that they wouldnt survive their (necessary) encounter with the world. Plainly I no longer had the courage of my own convictions. The longer the project took to materialize, the more I agonised. Pulling the rug ("to save us both embarrassment," as I emailed Chris Hamilton-Emery) was the solution. Though offered collections since then by Australian publishers or invited to be in anthologies, the best I can think to do is decline. I'd feel a fraud & counterfeit otherwise. (I should declare, though, that I'm in Raffaella Torresan's illustrated anthology Literary Creatures : A book of animals in alphabet, Hybrid Publishers, '09 --perhaps because I'd rather 'talk to the animals'! And my CD selection, My Life in Theatre, with River Road Press, '09, partially avoids the questions that a book would present me with --it's in the listener's ear & not a reader's eye after all, so I can represent myself...)
No amount of 'post-colonial' critiquing & redefining of the Australian situation & condition attracts me or assuages my disinclination to accept the tag for myself. At the same time I do feel I am a Melbournean without identifying as Australian.This is much the same, I think, as my dear maman being Alexandrian without identifying as Egyptian or at least, less & less, after the ousting of the monarchy & the ascendancy of the new nationalist order : her family's cultural viability depended upon the multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism necessarily jettisoned by the revolution & that revolution's enrollment in the anti-Western side of the Cold War argument... I was never entirely sure whether my mother was anguished or profoundly amused that her papers, upon departing Alexandria for the UK, were marked "stateless". I wonder if some of that rubbed off on me... Additionally, although my father may have presented as a typical Englishman, he apparently hankered after a reconnection with his Huguenot mother's South African home (where he was conceived), who'd been robbed of it by an English settler husband's dispatch of her to England while he (my grandfather) remained with a bigamous consort... My parents were happy where they lived when they were, dispirited & displaced when they werent --Mum referring to Alexandria or the fantasy of a French life (on the wing of an Alexandrian Lycee Francaise upbringing); Dad desiring greener fields, briefly experienced on European & West Country holidays, but staying put to dig his Hampshire then Dorset garden, dutifully sacrificing himself on Esso BP's altar for the family's provision...
I enjoy the memory of my connection with pre-nationalist Egypt, having lived several pre-school years in Alexandria & Suez (it's an Egypt of the mind, sustained by literature) but mostly & crucially identify with England. I am, therefore, an English man in Australia, & a Melbournean whose qualities I carry with me in England! Declining to be an Australian (poet) is one thing; having next to no credibility as a writer in England is another, yet I feel 'unfinished business' on many levels with the Old Dart! It's the expat's double-bind, I guess. But an obvious contradiction to all of this is the greater affinity I've felt for Australian sport (cricket, tennis, rugby, swimming) than English; frankly, the games I follow are better expressed in & by Australia than England! And because I've lived here so long, I have a 'local' connection with contemporary Australian art. Flicking through a recent issue of Meanjin Quarterly devoted to 'the British question', I've found the phrase "British roots, Australian fruits" which might explain some of the anomaly, though I'm well aware how anachronistic, even reactionary, that can be read today. I havent said much about my earlier American connections, but suffice to say they continue, --Whitman, Pound, Williams, the Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York, Deep Image et al, & whole worlds of literary fiction, art, music-- & have expanded in the same way as my appreciation of the British & Australians (thus old & new formalists, & numerous independents).
Regarding the "New"
It was the 'new' part of the term "New Australian Poetry" with which I identified in the late '60s. (I believe I coined the term in an article, Towards a New Australian Poetry, commissioned for Meanjin Quarterly; written in '69, published in 1970 when I was back in England.) My 'new' was inspired by Donald Allen's New American Poetry, 1945-60 & later by Penguin's 'New Writing' series of anthologies (British, American, German, French et al) rather than Al Alvarez's The New Poetry, with its dramatic Jackson Pollock cover (which disappointed me when I read it in 1966; it seemed like the old poetry to me then, a dichotomy, I hasten to say, I'd finally rescinded by the late '80s, early '90s).
In 1969, Ken Taylor & I had been asked by John Hooker at Penguin Books to edit an Australian New Writing, but after much consideration we declined, certain that inevitable compromises would distort if not destroy the project. (Charles Buckmaster, around 1970-71, took up a similar commission, but nothing came of that either.) Taylor's acquaintance John Gill, whom he'd met in New York in 1965 whilst on a Harkness Fellowship to Columbia University, edited with Earl Birney the magazine New : American & Canadian Poetry (Trumansburg, New York). They published Ken Taylor & then myself there, and suggested that Ken start an Australian wing of the magazine. But this idea was jumped by Melbourne's ''mini-mag explosion" (as the Monash academic Dennis Douglas described it) of '68, '69...
This idea of 'new' melded with a sense or imperative of 'now' --it was urgent & actual, resonating the uniqueness of the time & place... The world of the New was both intensely local & promiscuously international. Its sources were as inter-disciplinary as literary. Fondness for the appellation 'experimental' had more to do with accommodating & shaping the floods of new concepts & forms of expression flowing through the as-perceived Sleepy Hollow than any Poundian renovation of Tradition. Naturally, practice makes perfect : we learnt on the job, but without "the license from the English Department" as per Ken Taylor's brag. We were, as I've written before, the illiterati!
Of course, Pound's perspectives were important, so too Williams' & Olson's. For our Melbourne generation, the American take on almost everything hitherto pronounced upon by the British was an opportunity for what today's lingo calls the post-colonial. American literary perspectives & practice were preferred to the British, and provided the means for an independent Aussie articulation, --independent but seeking equivalence.
It might be of interest to note that at the very time I was possessed by Olson, whom I saw as expressing the very opposite of the academic attitude & epitomising the 'new', John Gill railed against him as its apotheosis! He held up the new vernacular Americans, as the true poets of the democratic idiom, against the high falutin' Black Mountain academicians. (Echoes of Williams' criticism of Eliot!) I was astonished. Black Mountain, New York, San Francisco were on the street in Oz & not in the academy! Similarly surprised when I returned to the UK, in 1969/70, to find our 'underground' exemplars taught in some universities!
In retrospect, I realize that the 'new' of my young time was situational (new in one place, passe in another) & its absolutes only temporary. I wonder, though, if one can say that the ambitions of the New, which transcended the conventional categories in every respect, were diverted by the temptation of respectability (grants, status) &, paradoxically, education, back into the mainstream? However, 'mainstream' itself changes &/or is redefined. I would like to believe that writers of my generation, whether from experimental or traditional roots, now have a nuanced sense of 'mainstream'. Our experience would surely have taught that it is the statement of deep rapprochement and not one side of an eternal mutual exclusivity. It is also what the 'canon' might now be --where history's products rest within their tested differences, the propositional best of an era's diverse bunch... During the same period, erstwhile stuffy institutions came to embrace the openness we might ourselves have once advanced & benefited from. For a start, 'Creative writing' on the higher education syllabus, --but if poetry & fiction were solely a product of study instead of also a political & emotional necessity's expression --if these factors didnt both comprise our practice's equation-- the entire game would be lost! New poets, in the sense of theoretical & expressive innovators, were now, more often than not, the products of universities. Astonishing, really, to the '60s generation, that formal study might relate itself to the formerly radically independent modes of thought & practice, so much so that the avant-garde's viability is currently vouchsafed by the academy!
Regarding my abandonment of 'career', it's the business of it, the 'publish or perish', the industry which most put me off, especially when elevated from a necessary evil to the essence of the enterprise. Back in the '70s, when my late friend, the English poet John Riley, approvingly quoted Anna Akhmatova's contention that Literature was a dung hill on top of which the poet crowed, I didnt quite get it. And though by now I do understand both Akhmatova's & Riley's positions, I dont want to appear precious about it all. Mine's more a love/hate relationship than a complete disavowal. Best to say, I'm an amateur who's deadly serious about a vocation & its practice but cavalier about the profession --who'd rather sit in the shade of a tree, munching a crust of bread & cheese, vino or ale in my hand, with my head in a book, writing or reading, than attend a festival or conference, or would work forever on a poem rather than seeking to publish or perform it!
Thoughts arising...
# A stampede of anthologies? An avalanche? An armchair? A hedge-fund?
# There was a time when locals would envy Scribners' annual Best American & wish we had something similar. Eventually we did --we have two Best Australian (the Black Inc & the UQP) anthologies in addition to the Newcastle Prize. Evidently we dont do things by halves! Six Aussie anthologies --seven if one includes the little Shoestring Press (UK) compilation edited by Adrian Caesar --and another, the Gray/Lehmann, in the wings! One could be forgiven for thinking a new bout of national definition is occurring; present territories being staked out, the future up for grabs! ('Ruddist' perhaps? All the swish & swagger of the new broom, the new deal, but when the dust has cleared it's more or less how it always was?!)
# In the late '70s, John Tranter invited me to be in the New Australian Poetry anthology he was editing for Martin Duwell's Makar Press (Brisbane). I accepted but was shocked that a poet like Ken Taylor, possibly the same kind of elder sibling for the 'new' Melbourne poets as Bruce Beaver in Sydney, hadnt been considered. After all, poets like Charles Buckmaster, John Jenkins & Garrie Hutchinson from the same Melbourne scene, & a little later on Robert Kenny, were represented, each of whom owed something to Taylor or were better understood in relation to him. Additionally I felt Walter Billeter's work was part of Jenkins', Kenny's & my own explication, & that Clive Faust, who'd come to us via Cid Corman's American/Japanese circuit, was an important ally. I also proposed that Ken Bolton & Anna Couani deserved guernseys. John accepted most of this; but Bolton & Couani were too recent to be included he felt. Some years later, having drinks with Michael Ondaatje in Carlton in the company of Judith Rodriguez, Tom Shapcott, Jenny Strauss & others, I described for the visitor's benefit, how what he'd extolled as an excellent anthology had come about. Judith Rodriguez took me to task : it wasnt my place to have second-guessed Tranter, she argued, far less to use one's own invitation as a bargaining chip. But, I did, & had. At that time I felt representation was a political issue, and considered I was arguing for poetics which would otherwise be ignored or demeaned. I thought too that I was supporting poets who'd fallen under the radar. I assumed every poet had a duty to advocate in this way. I thought this constituted 'the discussion'. Not to be in an anthology was always one's final card, and the making of another or counter anthology always an option. This paragraph could lead me into an analysis of "the poetry wars" of the 1970s & '80s, --friction within the avant-garde, opposition to it from without, ameliorations, divergences -- but though instructive it would be a distraction here. Another time... Suffice to say, principal ought always have been the point & not personality; years later there was poetical rapprochement (the Mead/Tranter Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, for example, which revised & resituated the original New Australian Poetry as part of a continuum, Slessor to Kinsella, largely transcending the Generation of '68/Younger Australian Poets divide) &, hopefully, personal injury recognized & repaired. But even so, contemporary pluralism doesnt nullify difference & opposition even though radicals & conservatives occasionally seek to discredit it. These days I wouldnt want to influence an editor unless consulted but neither am I seeking publication...
# Whilst particular absences are notable in one compilation (for example, & as they come, no Buckmaster, Maiden, Bolton, Brown, Duggan, Jill Jones, Cronin, Farrell or Bishop in Leonard), they're usually rectified in one or more of the others. But some arent in any at all. No Nigel Roberts (though he deservedly scores in Harbour City Poems), Tim Thorne, Eric Beach, Grant Caldwell, Myron Lysenko, Lauren Williams, Shelton Lea (which sounds like a school reeled off like that); no Mal Morgan, Ian McBryde, Jennifer Compton, Selwyn Pritchard, Robyn Rowland, Peter Bakowski, Andy Kissane, Jane Williams, Joel Deane, Louise Crisp, John West; no John Anderson, Ken Taylor; no Gary Catalano. (The women here are all in Motherlode.) Invidious to call a roll in this way, for this salon de refusers could contain as many poets & more again as were published in the anthologies... And I'm well aware that I'm looking out of Melbourne eyes : assuredly lists could be compiled reflecting the perspective of every city/state of the commonwealth. It might be argued that patterns of omission are the more interesting to consider, in which the contradiction of po-mo unmade & lyrical well-made, though that's only one broad brush beginning to debate, appears to identify John Leonard's with the mutually-exclusive point of view.
# Where the canonical anthology is concerned, I think it's probably editorially risky to consider young first bookers. It's not those particular poets' fault that equally talented first timers are excluded. It's for the editors to justify. But when, in the case of the Leonard anthology, every debutante published by the John Leonard Press appears ahead of a list which could include Chris Andrews, Judith Bishop, Nathan Shepherdson, Greg McLaren, Lisa Gorton, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Carol Jenkins, David McCooey, Angela Gardner,Tina Giannoukos, Kate Middleton, Mal McKimmie, to name some at random, one must wonder how & why. Indeed, every John Leonard Press author appears in his Puncher & Wattmann anthology, so where space is, apparently, a consideration, --in Leonard's own words, "a judgement of preferences given limited space", --a larger conflict of interest might be argued! (I should say, though, that several of those poets were included in pre-JLP era compilations. I guess it's just 'not a good look' in this time of 'perception' politics.) By the same token, Kinsella omits most of the JLP authors whilst his own Salt press is the publisher of a very large number in the Penguin. Regrettable, to say the least, if the editors felt their credibility as publishers was at stake!
# Every reason then to have Younger Poets anthologies, however arbitrary the qualification age, or Introductions --anthologies of every sort --'genre' as opposed to the 'canonical' or even to oppose it. Academic imprimatur can be the kiss of death, and with the best will in the world, the majors are all tinged with it. Interestingly, the blurb for the (125-poets, 175 poems) Motherlode anthology includes a canonical accent : "Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal appear alongside the major poets of today, including Judith Beveridge, Jan Owen, MTC Cronin, JS Harry, joanne burns and Tracy Ryan..." But there's no consensus on that claim in the majors, thus the rationale for the women's anthology! No joke of course : the motivations for Kate Jennings' mid-'70s anthology are probably as relevant today as then, although Jenny Harrison & Kate Waterhouse concentrate upon the sub-divisions of their female & feminist narrative and bridle at the mainstream only in passing in their lucid introduction.
# Kerry Scuffins' poem, Bear's air, in Motherlode, is as tender a poem as one would want to read of a very particular experience, one which is only incidental in the poetry of purportedly larger thematic & expressive schemes (the whole point of genre let alone gender specificity). When 'woman' is the paradigm, every incident speaks the reams now available to it. With all respect to the poem's original publication, in this anthology it becomes memorable. Inflation's slain by the small words, the little rhymes of the infinite world of mother & child, for which the toy bear is both witness to & alter-ego of the naturally suffering mother. Scuffins' poem is memorable because it isnt exasperation's reportage; something else happens --"she looks into the eyes of Bear. // She touches noses / with Bear. / She puts her head on the head of Bear / and sighs, and tiredly, dog-gedly, / breathes Bear's air."
# It's often said that context is all --so how distinguish the poems in Out of the Box, remembering that it's subtitled Gay & Lesbian Poets & not poems, implying that the G & L status is crucial to the work? Could it solely be a matter of the content --poems about relationships, lovers; poems of the momentary, of what remorselessly passing time makes ephemeral --the poetry that dares to speak its name, as it were? How distinguish poets in this context from any other they may inhabit? I remember Paul Knobel, when visiting Collected Works from Sydney, maybe 20 years ago, challenging me on the absence of a Gay poetry section in the bookshop. The first thought in my head was, What would we do with the American section then? I was thinking specifically of numerous poets who are better (& self) identified with the school of New York, say, more than their sexual preference; ditto San Francisco Renaissance poets, the Beats & etc --& so many others who're only defined as Gay by their biography rather than poetry. At the same time, the hilarious flippancy & the mercuriality of tone & image, which is a hallmark of much New York poetry, obviously corresponds to what one would generally assume today as a Gay style, one which now actually transcends sexual distinction. An answer, maybe, in Jill Jones' comment that "Words operate in relationships, grammars, that readers make meanings from" --therefore the availability of the Gay & Lesbian meaning, & this anthology's suit for its relevance. Among poets in Out of the Box one would not encounter elsewhere are Terry Jaensch (especially his poem Mouse), Nandi Channa (King Brown), Stephen Williams (Cathedrals in their middle age), Maria Zajkowski (Colour), Kerry Leves, Denis Gallagher... One strength of Out of the Box (& it's the smallest of the anthologies) is the variety of the poems and the dispersal of the several poems per poet throughout the collection --it's made to be read rather than consulted. Although I'm not sure that a Pam Brown or David Malouf or Peter Rose or Martin Harrison or Dipti Saravanamutu or even Javant Biarujia poem differs in this context from elsewhere, even spread throughout the collection they do represent their authors & the anthology with unusual frisson! Much to savour in this anthology; Chris Edwards, joanne burns, Angela Gardner, Susan Hawthorne amongst others... Harrison's Aubade, beginning "If an extremely blue, misty, angular winter early morning / left its traces, its minnows and shimmers, in your eyes", ably extends grammar to hold a thought/conceit without strain. It's an elegant & mellifluous composition that denies the usual mushiness of romantic poems & speaks for the best of the anthology.
# The academic (traditional or avant-garde) imprimatur should be as incidental as popularity, one factor among several reckonings. In the '70s, the Melbourne/Sydney avant-garde discussion, in which I participated, mocked poetry's 'subject-matter domination', valorising 'the poem itself'. It probably needed to given the erstwhile conventional concentration upon 'communication' wherein 'themes' were 'effectively' expressed. But the wheels of practice & fashion turn, so direct or plain speaking returns. And even the conventional dichotomies dissolve, thus today there's a concurrence of realists & surrealists, Language poets & New Formalists, & all their hybrids. So it is and will always be, again & again & again! The moral? No more dogmas! Everything & nothing; everything or nothing!
# The canonical is central to both the Kinsella & the Leonard no matter either editor's provisos. Given my own reservations about the 'Australian' definition, I suppose I should be sympathetic to Kinsella's escape-clause that as an anti-nationalist he's an unlikely compiler of an Australian anthology. Naturally he's a coloniser too, albeit in the name of the transgressive & subversive. Although his redefinition of Australia doesnt do much more than add black, green & red stars to the national constellation, it's probably worthwhile. Not being (not being allowed, --after all it is the Penguin anthology & the widest readership is presumed) a fully fledged experimental anthology (in which his interesting but dubious notion that 'Australian' poetry is historically 'experimental', conflating with the formally experimental), it has a bitsy feel (a bit of this, a bit of that, & with some obvious exceptions, a little bit from everyone). Its success would be as the necessary complement to any standard anthology, providing the antithetical coda. The fashion of the day might describe it as an Eco-Poetical anthology...
# John Leonard's anthology probably began life as one thing (an update of his 1998 AustralianVerse : An Oxford Anthology, but with another publisher now since OUP abandoned the field) and became something else as it responded to the influence of a decade of new poets & new poetry. The two Johns concur that contemporary poetry is booming & may well represent the brightest it's ever been. Leonard calls the period from 1998 to the present, "unusually rich"; furthermore, " the number of poets writing original and high-quality work is larger than at any time in this country's history." Kinsella chimes, "It will probably strike readers of this anthology that it is unusual for so many contemporary writers to be represented in an historical anthology. I have done this because I feel that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have proven and are proving to be fertile periods for poetry."
# Comments in their introductions suggest that both editors plot their poetry as parallel to the national history & responsive to the country's geophysical stereotypes. Apart from more or less passing remarks, neither editor really describes or analyses the aesthetical/poetical distinctions & directions of their anthology --not because they cant but wont. For Kinsella I suppose it's largely due to his sense of poetry's political imperative (at least, the transferability &, in his eye, the impossibility of distinguishing such categories). For Leonard it's as though the beans arent his to spill --either the 'delight', which he'd say is always the arbiter of a poem's worth, is for the reader to explicate, or it's all been done to excess previously. He explains, "I will refrain from giving a version of the usual story of the evolution of Australian poetry in terms of influence, movements in poetics, and sheer personal alliances. A reader can easily search for this elsewhere. The ghost of its scaffolding is discernible here, but my instinct is not to trammel the poems. Poems can interestingly outgrow their first labels." I wish our editor had provided & discussed an example of this tantalising statement --such poetical analysis would hardly be 'trammeling' but a demonstration of the very reading he urges in his introduction. In short, I'd love to know how our editors understand the (language) 'riches' of their selections. (Repeating the tale of free verse's historical ascendancy over the metrical, albeit allowing for free verse's ever greater complexity &, indeed, for the new career of formal composition during the post-modern, is the barest beginning, and left at that might thoroughly mislead an innocent reader as to the nature of the art & craft!)
# Because, in the Macquarie, David McCooey is placing (I almost write 'insinuating') poetry into the entire Australian literary frame, one that's politically responsive to the current historical register (as no better displayed than in the holus-bolus inclusion of what had been the self-contained & previously published volume of indigenous literature, edited by Anita Heiss & Peter Minter), the poetry (which includes examples of comedians' Barry Humphreys, John Clark & Michael Leunig, as well as a song by Nick Cave) might be expected to represent more than its intrinsic effects. And although the largest poem in his selection is by his own slim volume's publisher, John Kinsella, --a sprawling spiel, a signature aspect of his writing but not a patch, I'd hazard, on his W.A. situated & elegant magical-realisms that achieve all he'd ever want to bang on about --McCooey's selection doesnt follow his champ's 'experimental' (didactic & oppositional) line. For all the cultural-studies predilection, McCooey honours both po-mo & trad, equally aware of lyric & gravitas, irony & humour. He's an ammeliorist. Couldnt help feeling, though, how much like filler the poetry appeared, & the category itself so fragile in the Big Mac, heavied by the tome's portentious seeming prose!
# At random : open the Leonard & let the eye fall upon whatever it finds there. Page 140 : Geoffrey Lehmann's The Two Travellers. (I'm thinking it's what a disinterested reader would do : open a book & flick. I dont mean disinterested; I mean an interested reader, without axe to grind.) I like it! Immediate Laurentian asociations (that river-side taverna in the first part of Aaron's Rod, perhaps) arise-- but that's me -- impressions & sensations of young men's joi-de-vivre offset by nostalgia & mystery. The rhyming couplets are a delight. Several stories implied, as in the closing lines : "A parsley field and church shone in the sun, / The girl was there. We diced and my friend won." --the apposition of the girl & the friends' dicing may or not be consequential. I'm impressed by the poem being no more than the telling of a story in almost guileless couplets --no breast-beating or tub-thumping --simply a poem. And this day that is a great pleasure to me! It was written in 1972. I dont remember reading it then, & if I had probably wouldnt have appreciated it. What can I say : I inhabited a set of angles then which no longer dominate! Thank God for long reading lives & the chance for second bites & opinions!
# Caught by Lehmann I look for him in the other anthologies. Suddenly he's everywhere! That is to say, suddenly I'm aware of his centrality! In the Kinsella, his Pear Days in Queensland, probably botanically, agriculturally & historically accurate, is a tour de force : bourgeoning like creation myth, enveloping one like a Weird Tales fantasy. I wonder again about a DHL connection ('gentian violet' in the first stanza); his repetition of "pear" throughout the poem is rousing & hypnotic. It also recalls to me Ken Taylor's At Valentines (part 1) for the way a poem might insist its particulars --an oral gambit, I suppose, but so disposed as to transform the lists of items into richly layered narrative. In the Sydney anthology, Lehmann's to be found again with another big hit. Also from '72, Elegy for Jan is memorable as elegy & also litmus of an early '60s city of the young. And in the Macquarie, 13 long playing haiku, with its obvious reference to Stevens' Blackbird, is a musical tour from Debussy & Ravel to John Lee Hooker & Lou Reed; poignant, comic, deft & direct.
# Open the Kinsella at random : p.331, Jill Jones' The 7.17 Silver Machine, & in particular, "(...)we are racing time and track work / as the splayed out, the curved and embryonic lurch / towards dark Sydney - the dome, the nipple / the snow white breasts of midnight / waiting till we step down in the light " --not quite as speedy as a jump-cut Farrell or Gig Ryan but pretty fast &, like Ryan, atmospheric & beautiful!
# Something which has bugged me for a while is the status accorded the Ern Malley phenomenon. To wit : Why does the 'Ern Malley' confabulation of James McAuley & Harold Stewart have its own moniker without also bearing the names of its authors? Did proponents of new & innovative poetry understand the 'Ern Malley' hoax as a victory for their own poetic principals or was it a joke at the expense of the perpetrators, a bit of anti-conservative pay-back? And for how long can the joke remain funny? If the McAuley & Stewart 'Malley' poems stand up, why is there no attention paid to the original Apocalyptic & Surrealist poets of the '40s, even from the standpoint of historical representation? Judith Wright's negative judgements in her '50s Oxford appear to have become the orthodoxy. Even the Jindyworabaks seem to have had a better run, as evidenced by John Kinsella's remarks & inclusions in his anthology. It's long been time for serious reassessment, especially since the '60s & '70s' restoration of surrealism & etc as legitimate practice in Oz.
# Only one poet is in everything; Dorothy Porter. No more fitting memorial for a beloved late colleague. Many others are in the Big Three (several additionally in one or more of the Genres). Were it not for their much publicised spat with Kinsella (leading to withdrawal from the Penguin), Robert Adamson & Anthony Lawrence would have joined that company which includes Adam Aitken, Jordi Albiston, Bruce Beaver, Judy Beveridge, Vincent Buckley, Bruce Dawe, Sarah Day, Rosemary Dobson, Michael Dransfield, Jack Davis, Stephen Edgar, John Forbes, Peter Goldsworthy, Alan Gould, Robert Gray, J S Harry, Kevin Hart, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Philip Hodgins, A D Hope, Martin Johnston, John Kinsella, Geoffrey Lehmann, Emma Lew, Roger MacDonald, James McAuley, 'Ern Malley', David Malouf, Les Murray, Oodgeroo, Geoff Page, Peter Porter, Peter Rose, Gig Ryan, Philip Salom, John Scott, Tom Shapcott, Vivien Smith, Jennifer Strauss, John Tranter, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Ania Walwicz, Francis Webb, Judith Wright, Fay Zwicky.
In two or more : Lisa Bellear, Ken Bolton, Kevin Brophy, Pam Brown, Luke Davies, Laurie Duggan, Lionel Fogarty, Rodney Hall, Jill Jones, Jennifer Maiden, Mudrooroo, Ouyang Yu, Jennifer Rankin, Tracy Ryan, Craig Sherbourne, R A Simpson, Peter Sryznecki, Peter Steele, Roberta Sykes, Andrew Taylor, Alan Wearne, John Blight, Peter Boyle, Caroline Caddy, Alison Croggon, Jane Gibbian, Kevin Gilbert, Jennifer Harrison, Bill Hart-Smith, Coral Hull, John Jenkins, Bronwyn Lea, John Mateer, Pi O, Elizabeth Riddell, Judith Rodriguez, Alex Skovron, Dimitris Tsaloumas, Vicki Viidikas.
And numerous one-offs including Muk Muk Burke, Barry Hill, Catherine Bateson, Elizabeth Campbell, Julian Croft, Lidija Cvetkovic, Rebecca Edwards, Anne Elder, Brook Emery, Diane Fahey, Claire Gaskin, Barbara Giles, Martin Harrison, Jill Hellyer, Sophie Holland-Batt, L K Holt, Yvette Holt, Emma Jones, Evan Jones, Peter Kirkpatrick, Tony Lintermans, Kathryn Lomer, Paul Magee, Philip Martin, Geraldine Mckenzie, Graeme Miles, David Musgrave, Mark O'Connor, Marcella Pollain, Dipti Saravanamatu, Morgan Yasbincek, Simon West, Petra White, John Watson, Ali Alizadeh, Javant Biarujia, Judith Bishop, Merlinda Bobis, Charles Buckmaster, Michael Brennan, David Brooks, MTC Cronin, JH Duke, Geoofrey Dutton, Michael Farell, Geoff Goodfellow, Philip Hammial, Dennis Haskell, Anita Heiss, Paul Hetherington, Antigone Kefala, SK Kelen, Mike Ladd, Kate Lilley, Kate Llewellyn, Miriam Wei-Wei Lo, Rhyl McMaster, Chris Mansell, Miles Merrill, Peter Minter, Phillip Neilsen, Grace Perry, Glen Phillips, Andrew Sant, Jaya Savige, Randolph Stow, Harold Stewart, Norman Talbot, Richard Tipping.
# Recurring poems include Slessor's Five Bells, & Beach Burial, Peter Porter's An Exequy, Beveridge's The Domesticity of Giraffes, Croggon's The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop, Strauss's Tending the Graves, Murray's The Quality of Sprawl, Forbes' Love Poem, & Speed : A Pastoral... Classics major & minor. If poems rather than poets were school texts (and I think they should be) these might lead the way...
# Based on the Big Three & the Twos, convergence of taste seems more the stamp of the anthologies than divergence, but for all that there are numerous memorable poems. Add to the previously named the likes of Zwicky's Makasser, 1956, Lucy Holt's Waking : for Kafka, Wagan-Watson's Skeleton Dance, Albiston's The Fall, Pi O's Yoori, Gray's In Departing Light, Salom's The Composer Shostakovich Orders His Funeral, Adamson's The Language of Oysters, Dobson's Folding the Sheets, Gig Ryan's Swoons, Sherbourne's Strapper, Cronin's The Floor, The Thing, Kinsella's Drowning in Wheat, Bishop's Rabbit, Robert Harris's They Assume... Again, far too many to mention... Duggan's, Buckley's, Owen's, Gaskin's... Unfair to have begun...
# All in all, happy days for so many contemporary Australian poets represented in this swag of anthologies. I congratulate them & share in their pleasure. I almost wish that I could join them!
oOo
(February/May, 2010)
Kris Hemensley
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[CORRECTION :
I'm grateful to Jan Owen who has informed me that she is included in 3 of the 6 recent Australian anthologies; 4 of 7 if one includes Take Five (edited by Adrian Caesar, Shoestring Press,UK) which I havent discussed. Somehow in my long trails of paper with biro tabulations her name must have fallen off ! Belatedly, & for the record, she features in Kinsella/Penguin, Leonard/P & W, Harrison & Waterhouse/Motherload. So she ought to have been in my "two or more" majors. I do apologise for this carelessness; in my head she was never an omission!
Thursday, 18th November,'10]
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