MICHAEL FITZGERALD-CLARKE
Two poems from SOFDOLREADIC MEDITATIONS ON THE PSALMS
PSALM 40
He now has a new song to sing--
The ambient fire that blinded him
Is no longer part of his memory.
God is making a cup of tea
But he has no sugar.
Other things are there, too numerous
To list: grey clouds, engines,
Secret codes - such things
Trouble list compilers, but
Where is the sugar?
God goes into the goldmine,
And when he re-surfaces to heaven
He leaves behind our planet's
Blind copulation in the dark
Nights bereft of love.
A thousand bibles on street corners,
Ten thousand bibles in schools.
Jim Morrison no longer breaks
Wind, no longer fears needles.
Elvis and Oscar Wilde look
At the fort. They have exchanged
Their greying hair for haloes,
Bad habits for certainty, for hope.
God is good, and his unfailing love
And faithfulness work miracles.
Several cubes of sugar have
Ben conjured up.
All those premature ejaculators who say,
"Aha! We've got him now!" are really
At heart, decent souls who would benefit
From the serenity of a day's fishing. Their wives
And girlfriends cook muffins in the colder months,
And their recourse to blonde tints and streaks
Isn't disgraceful, but it is a bit sad.
The delay in ending this poem has to do with
Reverence, and sincerity. I am a committed
Believer in the Father, Jesus, the Holy ghost, and
Jim Morrison, Elvis, and Oscar Wilde. My
Premature ejaculations drip over an army of
Ants, and yes, I am neither poor, nor
Needy, but rather warm in my bedroom. Finis.
*
PSALM 46
Welshmen deliver milk as mountains become pebbles--
In the laboratory quarks sing their strangeness like divas,
And Poseidon and God play scrabble,
Both claiming unquestionable as the longest
Seven letter word imaginable. And so
The oceans roar and foam, and so a small,
Costumed boy throws pebbles into the sea.
Go to a river bank to seek refuge from eternity--
See how the city's water supply is polluted
By ghosts of Welsh shepherds who can ethereally
Tip muck in from earthenware jars. Philadelphia
Is where God has his east coast base, and
All the baseball bats in all the houses
Cannot destroy it. A native American offers
A passer-by a sweet thing on a stick--
God is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.
Two vagrants set fire to a rubbish bin.
This is destruction equivalent to the loss
Of love at twenty-two, the dim bestiality
Of our planet. As John Lennon
Said, "Perfection is counted only by tossers,"
And God has fire extinguishers aplenty.
A wax sculpture of a butterfly is placed
Near the exit of the Gallery. It hardly moves.
A native American offers a passer-by a
Sweet thing on a stick - God
Is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.
*
[NOTE: In essence, Sofdolreadic Meditations on the Psalms involves writing a poem for each of the 150 Psalms in the Holy Bible. I have begun writing in the order that I pull slips of paper out of a box, believing as I do in the purposeful nature of chance. Number 46 was the first slip of paper I drew out, so two poems written and 148 to go. Though I'm still way behind William Shakespeare in this respect, since 1989 I have coined some words, and sofdolreadic is my latest. The dictionary entry will go as follows:
sofdolreadic / sof'dol'reed'ic/ a. poetically unique
The etymology of the word is: "sof" from The Doors song The Soft Parade,arguably Jim Morrison's finest moment; "dol" from 'dolmen', a megalithic tomb (nothing can be poetically unique without it being cognisant of its past); and "readic" from 'read' (a little less esoteric).
27/4/09]
________________________________________________________________
CHRIS GRIERSON
BACKYARD PASTORAL
a broken computer rotting
under jasmine
graffiti stains the fence
the neighbour's cat
descends a tree branch
the barbecue rusted
like a hulk long washed up
weeds press their claim
possums and rats
along the fence after dark
saturday night goths
drop a port bottle
from the laneway alongside
the dog three doors down
barks like a chainsaw
choking to start
an old concrete bench
protects a patch of grass
like a doting mother
last year's tomatoes
hunched like tumbleweeds
yet to be set free
a metal pipe wedges
the Hills Hoist upright
a cracked path
leads its way
out on fold-up chairs
the knee high grass
tickles our calves
drinking beer
the mosquitos moving in
*
EXCLUDE THE ASPIRANTS
A new Michael Ondaatje hardback
is something to savour
like a good op shop
rarer these days
seconds a boutique
elegantly squeezed
like a council sapling
edged in concrete
you skirt around
like a bruise
commerce doubles up
like birthday cards
stood up next to the tele
chiming media doctrine
my hawaiian shirt
wilts off the line
a page one rendezvous
scores the next decade
________________________________________________________________
NATHAN SHEPHERDSON
THREE POEMS
frypan
he stands over the fire
cooking souls in a frypan
prodding them with a knife
an attempt to discover their names
*
thought
a thought has been found
a philosopher will be called in
to determine the cause of its death
*
paddock
a white horse rests in a paddock
wet green safely coloured in around him
accompanying grey sheets squeeze from discarded eyes
a white horse is resting in a paddock
as far away from George Stubbs as he can get
________________________________________________________________
ANN SHENFIELD
FROM OUT OF NOWHERE
I won't think about where it all begins or ends
each grain of sand, blade of grass, drop of rain
I'll disregard the minutiae, even though it all starts
with a single gene, cell, idea -- on the molecular
level it's all waves anyway, all interconnected,
therefore I'll let myself forget the singular
blade, grain, drop, besides these days no one
much remembers rain, so I let go of rainy days,
even months when it must have poured
I'll allow them all to subside,
only this momentary pause--
where experience might endure beyond itself
instead I'll just accept my limitations
and let one stand for each and every
like that day walking back from the park
when I misjudged the weather, a mother
with her two children, both overshadow her now--
but then that rain, it came from out of nowhere
heavy drenching rain, with children running
sopping, running, laughing, soaking, laughing
as though nothing existed, but us and that rain,
that would stand for each and every drop.
_______________________________________________________________
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
MICHAEL FITZGERALD-CLARKE, born in England, lived in Melbourne (where he participated in Poor Tom's street poetry a couple of decades ago), & for many years in Canberra. Has published two chapbooks of poetry, S-h-h-hidelplonk (Pudding House, USA, '02), & Deep Wings (White Heron Press, USA, '04). Numerous poems have appeared in magazines here & overseas including Blast, Hobo, The Adirondack Review, The Wormwood Review. Has written poetry since he was "captivated as a teenager by a biography of John Keats", & also includes Shelley, Rilke, Lorca, Bunting, Dransfield & Olds amongst his influences.
CHRIS GRIERSON, lives in Melbourne. Has written songs, poems, short-stories & novels, some of which have been published, won awards, been performed. Publisher of poetry chapbook series, Soup, in the 1990s, whose authors included Kierran Carroll, Claire Gaskin & Cassie Lewis. Currently working on a long piece based on the life & times of Melbourne gangster, Squizzy Taylor.
ANN SHENFIELD, lives in Melbourne, recent residency at Varuna (Blue Mountains); see Poems & Pieces #8, and Poems & Pieces #2 for previous contributions.
NATHAN SHEPHERDSON, lives in the Glass House Mountains in Queensland. The son of painter Gordon Shepherdson, he is a poet & writer on visual art. Has published Sweeping the Light Back Into the Mirror (UQP, '06); What Marian Drew Never Told Me About Light (Small Change Press, Qld.,'08). Has won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize twice, in 2004 & '06, & same year won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. When not scooping prizes he follows the cricket.
________________________________________________________________
CORRESPONDENCE
FRANCES YULE
It's been a fascinating leg of the journey... finding your blogspot and having contact with old mates from the Melbourne push... and what a buzz to see our poems/freeverse published....! What I envisage as a worthy project would be to gather absolutely everything still accessible from that time... the broadsheets, mags, posters, pics, etc., and bring it all together in one magnificent book... paintings, sculptures... I won't do it... but putting the idea out there might spark someone else... You've started something... how do we broadcast your blogspot to a larger audience? John Yule (not a relly), John Tranter, Geoff Eggleston, Adrian Rawlins, all have references on the net... that's a start... and some of the living may still have memorabilia...
*
KARL GALLAGHER
6th May,'09
It bowled me over that you would devote an issue to devotional/beat poets of Melbourne and Meher Baba, it just seemed so out of the blue, a left field sort of thing. I was also impressed with the 40 year thing, because 40 is a significant number in Sufi tradition. Hafiz especially mentions 40 in connection with a couple of significant events in his life. I have a strong feeling about this year because it's 40 years since Baba dropped His body.
But when I thought about it, the devotional or spiritual aspect was very strong with the Beats, it was obvious. And it was what attracted me to Kerouac et al all those years ago...before I got connected to Baba. But the way you have focussed on that characteristic of the Beats strikes me as something not really stated by other writers. But Kerouac, Cassady & the others were very drawn to the spiritual/sacred...despite all their character defects...
12th May, '09
(....) I'm sure it has been said by others [spiritual/religious characteristics of the Beats, ed] but I don't recall that it was given more than a passing notation...it was other things about the Beat characters & writers that were given more significance. But a large part of Kerouac's alcoholism was due to disenchantment, disillusionment with the world...his path through existentialism, drugs, Buddhism, and return to Catholic (mysticism) faith of childhood, and of course his withdrawal from his old friends and social network, and his own statement prefacing last publication about being lonely, solitary, Catholic mystic madman.
And of course Neal was wired bigtime for the connection to God... "now we know TIME man"... and was in the habit of prayer and meditative reflection... His karma was also high wired to the physical domain and driven sexually and drugs too...sort of complicated things a bit. But then that's the hero's path aint it, strewn with obstacles, challenges, failures, tragedy. I think they were both tragic figures.
________________________________________________________________
Finally published this partly sunny now nippy but dry Melbourne winter's day, June 28th, 2009
--KRIS HEMENSLEY.
Showing posts with label Ann Shenfield. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ann Shenfield. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
THE MERRI CREEK #8, 2008/09 : POEMS & PIECES
SAM BYFIELD
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
Sunset, I step outside and catch
the west's last luminous seconds, the sky
evolving through its leafy spectrum,
before stars and the high pitched rhetoric
of crickets. Currawongs call in their alien
tongue, bring to mind the gentle language
of seduction, how it plays itself again
in dreams. Every evening this week
I watched the sun threading away,
into the ranges and desert belly
of this country, and I've imagined it
reaching you, setting into the Indian
Ocean, hoped that you would soon be
watching it, wishing that Winter
would hurry, so that I might return.
*
RETURNING TO LA NINA
A lizard's curiousity in the verandah's arched shade.
The smell of farms, a profusion of living after
the monotony of droughts. The garden overflows
and pulses like rainforest, spiders as big as fists
my mother tells me and I'm glad I wasn't here
to see them. Frangipanis hang like eggs, broken
and suspended. The birds are restless and the leaves
are restless. The wind and the heat. Sun's dapple
fascination. Feather pattern on the horizon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLIVE FAUST
MAXIMS, MINIMS, SQUIBS AND ESSAYETTES
1. I didn't know that Phil Whalen had lived next door to Cid in Kyoto, nor about the regular meetings in San Francisco when young. "... and we used to solve the world's problems together." Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations (in my case, with Ian Watson, say) all these years later; but that's mainly so those two young men could stay free of second thoughts , and continue being young. Besides, part of the correction would be to the hope they had; and I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope.
2. Whenever they concoct a new antibiotic for golden staph, the bacteria evolve into strains resistant to it. The micro-organisms are not stupid.
3. People come in and out of our lives casually and accidentally, as if our train were late, and we had to ask a stranger if he knew whether they'd rescheduled it, or whether this one was still meant to be departing on time.
4. I like the sound of a stamp --and on an ink pad too.
5. And real materialists, like Hume, who deny the supernatural, will usually pull some very unlikely deity out of the hat --like the "invisible hand of the market" he invoked for his friend Adam Smith. A lot of obeisance to that Deity round the bourse cathedrals of the world.
6. Blackberries hidden in prickles.
7. "Everything will be forgotten in the days to come." But only if there are days to come. And if there are no days to come, will everything still be forgotten?
8. In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you.
9. All alone one New Year's Eve, so I recalled friends, and had my Auld Lang Syne with the dead.
10. Losses of people. I don't really know how to cope. Oddly enough, the ordinary consolation that it is inevitable and universal, is more desolation than consolation for me: the idea of so much absence, and the dwindling in meaning of any one particular absence in the light/dark of that thought, of that truth in fact, is pretty much unbearable. I think how little now deaths of a hundred years ago mean, or fifty, or from one's earlier life. And how blase was one's own attitude to the death of grandparents, as being inevitable with such old people? And it was --but ... .
11. What happens after After is in the lap of the Gods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THINGS
1
sharing
the tight lipped
outside the world we love
shines attraction more crushing than
ourselves
packets
of compassion
visualise oasis
demons season and spring whisk soups
real zest
welfare
and thorny styles
imbues testy postures
detailing people gives notice
on pride
concerns
of give and take
are parlous excuses
calm moods texture reverie as
armour
full hopes
immerse on trains
while forks cut unawares
with nearly all things quiet and
trafficked
2
Judas
was double crossed
blamed on my ticklish sleeve
as delusion and faults forfeit
friendship
shiners
and leather shoes
fail to impress folklore
open myths verify jackets
tailored
bonfires
not gaiety
are love variances
heaviness radiates roaming
murmurs
umpires
and exchanges
pitch result for losers
a transplant injury mounts new
heart pumps
counsels
rouse my lament
and indict defences
what's the exposed image of lone
wedge tails?
3
lovers
and lapsed rhythms
sour most ardent courses
single mercies cherish pacing
dance steps
rackets
and landing strips
out of nowhere alight
details inflate my wanting to
crash land
milkshakes
lime and raspberry
salute a boy's penchant
while gritty dynamics secure
favours
reviews
and articles
riddle my excitement
incumbent chargers fiddle gripe
lambaste
the soul
cautiously let
have you been here that long?
Godot might ask, are you looking
at me?
[NOTES:
Judas Iscariot (died April, AD 29-33) was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve apostles, and was apparently designated to keep account of the 'money bag' but is traditionally known for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
READING
Academically
She insists
The book is about
Needing to
Observe and extend
Freud's political
Unconscious
When Graffito
Rubs against
the Holy Mary
But he quietly
Counters that
It is merely
And wholly
About Love
Memory paths
Ingrained
The grips of grief
And desires
Thwarted
And so
The Weekend
Begins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Does it help that billions of miles away
planets spin in patterns drawn from spirographs?
Swirls within swirls, fractionally rotating
in invisible patterns, like the way a lily
won't open before your eyes, or how
you might even be that lily, if you don't
concern yourself with the parasite inside;
But that lily I mean, the one you didn't notice,
it's all brown petal now, so make sure you don't step on it,
instead watch your child grow taller, and allow her to lean
away, toward a parallel orbit, accept you are peripheral
and though you might have walked around here for days
and months and years, thinking you must be moving
toward something, each day was simply busy
with its own rewriting of grander patterns,
where you fit, only as a swirl, tracing another
swirl, within another swirl,
that's within another swirl.
*
THREE GOOD THINGS
On any day it might all come down
to three good things, or the way
kindness can return unpredictably
Not everyone believes these things
but today I repeat them as a mantra,
my own song that lifts up and banks
out of the littered street,
the plastic bags whose
contemporary beauty
only serves to remind me
everyone is either buying
or selling, then discarding
These words are too weak,
a breath or two might blow
them out, as a child blows
at candles on a cake.
Three good things
candles, cake, a child.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
SAM BYFIELD, born in 1981, grew up in Newcastle and after stints in Canberra & China now lives in Melbourne. He has published one chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, and his first full-length collection, Borderlands, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney). He has been published in Australia & overseas, most recently in Heat, Famous Reporter, Meridian & The Asia Literary Review.
CLIVE FAUST lives in Bendigo to where he returned in the early '70s after several years in Kyoto. Contributed to The Ear in a Wheatfield in the '70s, featured in the 4th series of Cid Corman's Origin magazine in 1978, included in John Tranter's New Australian Poetry (Makar Press) in 1979, and has published 5 chapbooks (3 with Origin Press) and a selected poems, Cold's Determination (University of Salzburg Press). His review of John Phillips' Language Is appears in Jacket #32 ('07).
ROBERT JORDAN, see note in Poems & Pieces #4
ANNE KIRKER, see note in Poems & Pieces #1
ANN SHENFIELD, see note in Poems & Pieces #2
[Compiled November/December, '08 and typed up this 1st day of January, 2009
Kris Hemensley]
________________________________________________________________
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
Sunset, I step outside and catch
the west's last luminous seconds, the sky
evolving through its leafy spectrum,
before stars and the high pitched rhetoric
of crickets. Currawongs call in their alien
tongue, bring to mind the gentle language
of seduction, how it plays itself again
in dreams. Every evening this week
I watched the sun threading away,
into the ranges and desert belly
of this country, and I've imagined it
reaching you, setting into the Indian
Ocean, hoped that you would soon be
watching it, wishing that Winter
would hurry, so that I might return.
*
RETURNING TO LA NINA
A lizard's curiousity in the verandah's arched shade.
The smell of farms, a profusion of living after
the monotony of droughts. The garden overflows
and pulses like rainforest, spiders as big as fists
my mother tells me and I'm glad I wasn't here
to see them. Frangipanis hang like eggs, broken
and suspended. The birds are restless and the leaves
are restless. The wind and the heat. Sun's dapple
fascination. Feather pattern on the horizon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLIVE FAUST
MAXIMS, MINIMS, SQUIBS AND ESSAYETTES
1. I didn't know that Phil Whalen had lived next door to Cid in Kyoto, nor about the regular meetings in San Francisco when young. "... and we used to solve the world's problems together." Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations (in my case, with Ian Watson, say) all these years later; but that's mainly so those two young men could stay free of second thoughts , and continue being young. Besides, part of the correction would be to the hope they had; and I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope.
2. Whenever they concoct a new antibiotic for golden staph, the bacteria evolve into strains resistant to it. The micro-organisms are not stupid.
3. People come in and out of our lives casually and accidentally, as if our train were late, and we had to ask a stranger if he knew whether they'd rescheduled it, or whether this one was still meant to be departing on time.
4. I like the sound of a stamp --and on an ink pad too.
5. And real materialists, like Hume, who deny the supernatural, will usually pull some very unlikely deity out of the hat --like the "invisible hand of the market" he invoked for his friend Adam Smith. A lot of obeisance to that Deity round the bourse cathedrals of the world.
6. Blackberries hidden in prickles.
7. "Everything will be forgotten in the days to come." But only if there are days to come. And if there are no days to come, will everything still be forgotten?
8. In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you.
9. All alone one New Year's Eve, so I recalled friends, and had my Auld Lang Syne with the dead.
10. Losses of people. I don't really know how to cope. Oddly enough, the ordinary consolation that it is inevitable and universal, is more desolation than consolation for me: the idea of so much absence, and the dwindling in meaning of any one particular absence in the light/dark of that thought, of that truth in fact, is pretty much unbearable. I think how little now deaths of a hundred years ago mean, or fifty, or from one's earlier life. And how blase was one's own attitude to the death of grandparents, as being inevitable with such old people? And it was --but ... .
11. What happens after After is in the lap of the Gods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THINGS
1
sharing
the tight lipped
outside the world we love
shines attraction more crushing than
ourselves
packets
of compassion
visualise oasis
demons season and spring whisk soups
real zest
welfare
and thorny styles
imbues testy postures
detailing people gives notice
on pride
concerns
of give and take
are parlous excuses
calm moods texture reverie as
armour
full hopes
immerse on trains
while forks cut unawares
with nearly all things quiet and
trafficked
2
Judas
was double crossed
blamed on my ticklish sleeve
as delusion and faults forfeit
friendship
shiners
and leather shoes
fail to impress folklore
open myths verify jackets
tailored
bonfires
not gaiety
are love variances
heaviness radiates roaming
murmurs
umpires
and exchanges
pitch result for losers
a transplant injury mounts new
heart pumps
counsels
rouse my lament
and indict defences
what's the exposed image of lone
wedge tails?
3
lovers
and lapsed rhythms
sour most ardent courses
single mercies cherish pacing
dance steps
rackets
and landing strips
out of nowhere alight
details inflate my wanting to
crash land
milkshakes
lime and raspberry
salute a boy's penchant
while gritty dynamics secure
favours
reviews
and articles
riddle my excitement
incumbent chargers fiddle gripe
lambaste
the soul
cautiously let
have you been here that long?
Godot might ask, are you looking
at me?
[NOTES:
Judas Iscariot (died April, AD 29-33) was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve apostles, and was apparently designated to keep account of the 'money bag' but is traditionally known for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
READING
Academically
She insists
The book is about
Needing to
Observe and extend
Freud's political
Unconscious
When Graffito
Rubs against
the Holy Mary
But he quietly
Counters that
It is merely
And wholly
About Love
Memory paths
Ingrained
The grips of grief
And desires
Thwarted
And so
The Weekend
Begins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Does it help that billions of miles away
planets spin in patterns drawn from spirographs?
Swirls within swirls, fractionally rotating
in invisible patterns, like the way a lily
won't open before your eyes, or how
you might even be that lily, if you don't
concern yourself with the parasite inside;
But that lily I mean, the one you didn't notice,
it's all brown petal now, so make sure you don't step on it,
instead watch your child grow taller, and allow her to lean
away, toward a parallel orbit, accept you are peripheral
and though you might have walked around here for days
and months and years, thinking you must be moving
toward something, each day was simply busy
with its own rewriting of grander patterns,
where you fit, only as a swirl, tracing another
swirl, within another swirl,
that's within another swirl.
*
THREE GOOD THINGS
On any day it might all come down
to three good things, or the way
kindness can return unpredictably
Not everyone believes these things
but today I repeat them as a mantra,
my own song that lifts up and banks
out of the littered street,
the plastic bags whose
contemporary beauty
only serves to remind me
everyone is either buying
or selling, then discarding
These words are too weak,
a breath or two might blow
them out, as a child blows
at candles on a cake.
Three good things
candles, cake, a child.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
SAM BYFIELD, born in 1981, grew up in Newcastle and after stints in Canberra & China now lives in Melbourne. He has published one chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, and his first full-length collection, Borderlands, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney). He has been published in Australia & overseas, most recently in Heat, Famous Reporter, Meridian & The Asia Literary Review.
CLIVE FAUST lives in Bendigo to where he returned in the early '70s after several years in Kyoto. Contributed to The Ear in a Wheatfield in the '70s, featured in the 4th series of Cid Corman's Origin magazine in 1978, included in John Tranter's New Australian Poetry (Makar Press) in 1979, and has published 5 chapbooks (3 with Origin Press) and a selected poems, Cold's Determination (University of Salzburg Press). His review of John Phillips' Language Is appears in Jacket #32 ('07).
ROBERT JORDAN, see note in Poems & Pieces #4
ANNE KIRKER, see note in Poems & Pieces #1
ANN SHENFIELD, see note in Poems & Pieces #2
[Compiled November/December, '08 and typed up this 1st day of January, 2009
Kris Hemensley]
________________________________________________________________
Thursday, May 29, 2008
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #2, May/June, 2008
DAVID MCCOOEY
(WELDON KEES)
Everything is ominous.
--
Another ordered loneliness.
--
The future is fatal.
--
Even the open field, a labyrinth.
--
The afternoon idly flicks through the pages of itself.
--
A list of names : good news, or bad?
--
The long silence of rooms.
--
History with its morphine headache.
--
The anonymous rain falling on motels.
--
The atrocities played under flickering streetlights.
--
The cars parked under melodramatic weather.
--
Finally, every future is fatal.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAURICE MCNAMARA
WHAT A STORY
Was reading Robert Adamson's autobiog. A friend of mine, Johnny Goodall, is on the back cover, wearing a black cowboy hat. He bought a silver dobro, a National, off an old lady in an old folks home, and he really got into that sort of music. Had a sort of country music band in Sydney. Lovely gentle guy, but when he got drinking... I met Mr Adamson once, when Johnny moved back to Balmain, we were all tripping, and Bob said I was the devil, that sort of poetic bullshit fancy stuff. Nigel Roberts, whom I met again at Raff's, a year ago, said Johnny was now re-parked on the North Island, Nzed, drinking the homebrew. He was very influential on me, tho it took me generational change to get around to it.
Too weak and confused and stupid. But I loved that guy. Staying up all night and going round to the early opener, on one of the side streets of the spine of Balmain, alkies hopping up and down, and the wharfies coming in, and by eight o'clock in the morning, smoke in the bar, hey, it's a party! Meeting Vicki Viidikas and Michael Wilding. Ridiculous really. But that can be Sydney for you, going down a lane, a sandstone fence, a jacaranda tree, and over the fence, an ocean-liner sailing stately, blue water. Like sinking your teeth into a mango, soft and pulpy, and warm, and a stone you can't swallow.
But Mr Adamson. A mythologiser perhaps, like Shelton Lea. But what a story. The more I read it, the more I thought it could make a good movie. The dyslexic guy who's into fishing, cars, and getting into trouble. The trip north with his under-age girlfriend, stealing petrol, starving, trying to catch fish, kill a sheep. Back in gaol, raped, turning into a girl for a while, finding Rimbaud. The guy's a pastry cook, winning a prize at the Sydney Show, for his decorated cake, tiny threads of blue against the white. Writing his stuff out over and over. The bravery, the obsession, trying out drugs almost against the grain, like taking a boat out to get fish to sell, and almost drowning. Stabbing against the dark, not like the stylistic youth bo ho, de rigueur, industries sprung up to support it, we get these days.
And then the sidling, wheedling, into the polite, nice poetry twiddley-dee, and taking it over. Palace revolutions. Photos with Brett Whitely. Bad boys made good. What the fuck are you on mate? Prove it. Beautiful women. There's a movie to be made, busting out of this story.
Of course he's mythologising, but still and all, a fantastic fucking story. We don't get enough stories about the Blueys and Joe-Blows remaking themselves. Now we're ordinary intermediate international. Media fills up our mouths before we learn to breathe. We're self-conscious as fuck. Are our poetry heroes capable of kicking a footy, able to make a quid? Can they rebuild an engine, buy a block of land, plant something that grows? I can't, so maybe I'm wailing in a desert of attenuation. But the populace is out there, waiting. There's a movie in there, somewhere.
What sort of person makes a poetry hero?
[5-01-08]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KATE RIGBY
WHAT IS ECOPOETRY?
Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves are more wonderful than any words about them.
(Mary Oliver)
This statement by Mary Oliver might sound like an admission of defeat, emphasising the limits of what poetry can ever hope to say and do. Mary Oliver is not about to lay down her pen, though, and I am not suggesting that you should either! In my reading, what she does here is actually to provide in a nutshell a theory of ecopoetry. I stress that this is A theory : over the past ten years or so, various theories of ecopoetics have been hotly debated among the growing band of ecocritics (ecologically oriented literary critics) around the world, and I can't possibly cover the whole discussion here. What i should like to do, though, is to share with you my own understanding of ecopoetry as exemplified in the work of some of my favourite writers. In the case of Oliver, I think that much of her poetry does in fact say in a whole host of different ways precisely what she says here it can't say : that is to say, her poetry invites the reader, again and again, to come with her "into the field of sunflowers" (or into the woods, or down to the lake, or just along the road under the open sky...). Oliver knows that we can't take up that invitation literally : writing is "not vibrant life" and the very fact that we are reading it implies that she's not with us in person to take us for a stroll. But neither is it a "docile artifact". For better or for worse, writing has force, inflecting our perceptions and deflecting our attention away from some things and towards others. To the extent that it does not hold us spellbound by its own verbal constructions, luring us into the belief that "vibrant life" really does lurk right there in the text, poetic language has the capacity to turn our gaze to the world beyond the page : and if the world to which it urges us to attend is a more-than-human one of Earth and Sky, then this, I believe, is what qualifies it as properly "ecopoetic".
Having spent several years hunkered down with the Romantics (ok, just their writing), I find Oliver's mini-theory of ecopoetry strongly reminiscent of that articulated by Wordsworth in "The Tables Turned", in which the poet exhorts his bookish friend to "come forth into the light of things". This is an extraordinary line, because you're led to expect the cliched "light of day", but instead Wordsworth (characteristically) trips you up with this utterly unconventional and really quite mysterious image : the light of things. What on earth can this mean? In what sense do things have their own light, as distinct from being illuminated from the outside? I think that the poet gives us a clue later on when he asserts that :
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things :-
We murder to dissect.
Approaching things as objects of scientific enquiry, with a view to finding out merely how they function (and thereby also how they might be altered and utilized) prevents us from entering into the "light of things", namely by allowing them to disclose themselves to us in a situation of open-minded and non-utilitarian embodied encounter :
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves :
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Note the irony here, though : it is precisely by means of such "barren leaves" that Wordsworth issues his invitation to us! Wordsworth knows that in modernizing societies such as his own, it would be necessary to use writing, ironically, for the express purpose of urging readers to lift their eyes from the page.
Poets in many times and places have celebrated their more-than-human earthly environs as a locus of meaning and value. In Western literature, for example, this, in part, is what the pastoral tradition that reaches right back to Ancient Greece has been about. As Raymond Williams argued in The Country and the City, Romantic writers like Wordsworth link up with this tradition, but take it in a new direction : Romantic neo- or counter-pastoral has an oppositional edge to it, in that it is self-consciously pitched against the increasing objectification, instrumentalisation and commodification of the Earth. Sometimes this manifests as outright protest poetry , as in the case of John Clare's "Lamentations of Round Oak Waters". This begins in the mode of a conventional pastoral elegy with the poet bewailing his personal woes by Round Oak Waters. But his lament is interrupted by the "genius of the brook", who turns his attention to the way in which this place, formerly common land, has been denuded of vegetation following its enclosure as private land destined to produce cash crops : this, then, truly is the lament of Round Oak waters. The poet is also reminded that in his recently deceased friend the brook too had lost a champion, so it is now up to him to take up her cause : not against the "sweating slaves" who did the physical damage, but against the wealthy land-owners and parliamentarians who commanded it. Environmental destruction, Clare reminds us here, is nearly always co-ordinate with social injustice. Not only is human labour regularly exploited in the process : it is generally the poor who first suffer the consequences, without enjoying benefits to the same degree, if at all. In "The Mores", moreover, he suggests that the reduction of the earth to mere private property amounts to the profanation of creation :
Fence now meets fence in little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please [...]
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine.
The voice of ecopolitical protest remains an important one in contemporary ecopoetry. As Jonathan Bate observes in The Song of the Earth with regard to Gary Snyder's "Mother Earth: Her Whales", though, the overt didacticism of some protest poetry risks preaching to the converted. By contrast, Bate points to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" as exemplifying an ecopoetics that shows why we might want to defend the existence of wild animals rather than simply telling us that we ought to do so. Bate theorises this through Martin Heidegger's late philosophy of dwelling, in which the poetic word is conceived as giving voice to the self-disclosure of things in a non-objectifying way. The problem here, in my view, is that if human language is assumed to be a wholly adequate means of responding to the call of Being, as Heidegger puts it, the poet becomes a kind of ventriloquist. Rather than speaking for the Earth, the ecopoet might instead be seen as singing along with it, as Robert Gray suggests at the end of his lyric retracing of a meditative walk along a forestry trail, in which the poet discovers that "all of us are a choir" ("On a Forestry Trail"). For Canadian poet, Tim Lilburn, too, ecopoetry encompasses the acknowledgment that words are only one way of speaking, and that "everything exceeds its name". Lilburn calls for a form of poetic attention that seeks not to appropriate the world, but to stand alongside it, knowing that you are never going to see all that is there or say all that you can see. It is because both our perceptions and our representations fall short of ever perfectly corresponding with reality that, as he puts it in the title of his recent collection, "desire never ends". Ecopoetry can only be effective in putting us back in touch with the more-than-human, glowing, singing --and increasingly imperiled --Earth, if it alerts us to its own inadequacy in mediating "vibrant life" even while seeking out words to speak of it : writing, as Lilburn puts it, is like carrying water in a sieve.
Lilburn's ecopoetics is often rapturous, unsentimentally evincing a sense of ecstatic delight in earthly existence.In the current moment of unprecedented (because humanly engendered) global environmental peril, though, I believe that songs of praise need to be complemented by words of warning. In Australian poetry, some of the most powerful were spoken by Judith Wright in her apocalyptic poem, "Dust". Written in the war-torn, drought-ridden summer of 1943, this is early Wright in full-blown prophetic mode. The idiom might be outdated, but her exhortation remains cogent:
O sighing at the blistered door, darkening the evening star,
the dust accuses. Our dream was the wrong dream,
our strength was the wrong strength.
Weary as we are, we must make a new choice,
a choice more difficult than resignation,
more urgent than our desire of rest at the end of the day.
[...]
Today, globally, it is wild weather that accuses, and nevermore so than when the storms cooked up by we who feed on fossil fuels are visited on the poor of other climes. If ecopoetry can awaken us from that old dream in which the other-than-human world figured solely as a means of wealth-creation, if it can inspire us to make a tough "new choice", then it might yet help to keep open the possibility of a just and sustainable future. As the witness of Wright also reminds us, though, realizing that possibility will require the backing of an effective global ecopolitics : words might open a world, as Heidegger puts it, but it will take more than words to save Earth's vibrant life.
__________________________________________________
[A talk delivered to the Melbourne Poets' Union, April 24th, 2008.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX SELENITSCH
THE PRINTING OF A MASTERPIECE BY ALAN LONEY (Black Pepper Press, '08)
Peter Downton, who is one of a limited circle of my friends who makes things and thinks about these same things, reported on a conversation he had had with another colleague, Andrea Mina. Andrea wondered out loud whether using two hands, as you do when making something, whether two hands in consort create a different kind of thinking to the kind that is produced while you are using one hand when writing.
I mentioned this to Alan recently, and he told me that he once asked Oliver Sachs whether typing with two hands would ultimately produce something different to the single-handed pen. Sachs thought no -- the brain's language centres are the same no matter how many hands you use. I take this to mean that Sachs thinks of language as a function of brain activity (and that he doesn't use his hands to make things) because the issue is not just a question of the brain, or even language.
One of the best books -- in my opinion, of course, which is the opinion of some-one who makes things so that he can think about them -- one of the best books about this has been Socrates' Ancestor, by Indra Kagis McEwen. This book elaborates a pre-Socratic position in Greek culture: if you make any kind of object, you make a model, which is then a cosmos. You can hear a faint reverberation of this when you speak of making a composition, or claim to have organised something. So some-one who makes a boat makes a cosmos. The same applies for a house, for a garment, for a vase, for a saddle, for a city. And the same applies for a book.
Making a book is not like writing one. It involves both hands, both handsand head, and both hands and head, and heart. In The Printing of a Masterpiece -- and what a modest title that is -- Alan just tells it like it is. Or rather like it was. First he did this, then he did that, then it was time to fix this and so on. From a stack of paper, a tray of type and a tin of ink to a compact, tactile wad of data, to something that speaks to the hands and feels marvellous to the mind.
But, of course, writing a book is also what Alan has done. And it is the contemplation of the technical context, the design and decision-making procedures that, almost by a sleight of hand, turn what could be just a report into the unfolding of a cosmos. Because any book is a complex object, and making it even more so, it is an organization in the sense of an organism with integrated sub-systems. It easily becomes a model, where the decisions and values embodied in its form and materials exhibit relationships than can be applied elsewhere. For instance, Alan writes about "going in from the outside", that is, making decisions based on a teleological vision and contrasts it with his own procedure which is "goes out from the inside", where you proceed with action before all conditions are planned, in faith, and knowing that while creative problems may be ahead, there may be better outcomes later than anything that can be predicted now. This is an old dispute in architecture, pitting the Italians against the English. You might recognize it in politics as the argument between ends and means.
Further, the book Alan has written is about making a book, which could be seen as a microcosmic bit of behaviour. Does the book which is the main character of this narrative actually exist? If it does,I will be disappointed to hear of it; I prefer to think of it as an imaginary object into which all of Alan's printing experience has gone. It's an imaginary book, but not the ethereal "book" of the French School, of Jabes, Blanchot and Derrida, people who separate themselves from matter; people who think with only one hand. This imaginary black book of Alan's is a curious thing when you think about it. Problematic gold ink on black paper, a too-short text about the philosophical issue of "nothing" by Leonardo da Vinci. It's a conglomerate of problems and perhaps deliberately so. What could be more boring than a report on things that have been effortless and smooth? I'm reminded of Maurice Ravel's idea for a book on orchestration, which he was going to fill with examples of faulty orchestration : all the better to learn from than perfections. This is not exactly what Alan has done, but his self-imposed difficulties allow him to branch out from the technical diary, to history, and to the problems of creativity, and art and craft.
The English crafter David Pye, wrote a wonderful book called The Nature of Design. One of its chapters dealt with the uselessness of workmanship. Pye later extended this idea into two other books, but the essence of his argument is that workmanship is unnecessary work for function to be fulfilled, but nevertheless we treasure it. Uselessness, in fact, is a value that allows some overlap between art and craft. Generally, these disciplines are separated by us. The difference between art and craft is that the former gets matter to ask questions by rendering everything semantic, while the latter takes matter and gets it to behave, to keep quiet. In art, function is taken away by mislabelling, alteration, interference -- in my case, for example, by cutting away parts of a book -- but in craft, workmanship removes all traces of faulty human endeavour, and matter becomes eloquent and assertive, outside convention.
Karl Krauss once wrote that no matter how hard you look at language, it always stares back. It's that moment when the book asserts itself as an independent object, which Alan describes in the last chapter of this book under the title of The nonchalance of the master craftsman. In this case, the black book is dazzling to its maker. As a flicker, you can see Adam attracting God's attention. If you make things, you know the feeling : you stand there and wonder whether this object in front of you came through your hands, from you imagination, or were you just the medium IT used so that it could come into existence. At such moments, we are flummoxed and charmed, and often want to do the whole thing over again; this effect is the source of Marcel Duchamp's famous quip that art is a habit-forming drug.
Well, here I am adding to the nothing that Leonardo observed, and I should stop so that something can happen. This something is to announce that The Printing of a Masterpiece has moved from Alan Loney's private imagination to our social imaginary world. I always like to find a material analogue of the imaginary, but I don't believe the windows open in this room and somehow throwing a copy out into the outside space would just mean throwing it onto the footpath -- SO, imagine me throwing a copy into your imagination. I'm sure that the publisher would like you to convert that imaginary event into a material one by buying the book and reading it. I think you should.
__________________________________________________________________
[launch speech delivered at the Leigh Scott Room, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne,
13th May,'08]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
IN THE BACKGROUND
I'd always thought that a noise in the ear
would manifest itself as constant ringing
but the noise my mother hears,
she says, is more like an orchestra
or even a string quartet, I ask her if she recognises
the melody but she says, no it's too faint, too far
in the background, like an ocean liner on the horizon
or the ship that brought them here, an ocean liner
with a dining room and a band playing music
at night, my mother, not yet my mother,
twenty-six, and not in the dining room
but below the deck, an uncomprehending
refugee, with my father whose heart beats
like clockwork which is not yet unwound,
(that is five years hence)
refugees with all that word
connotes and there on board
the future looks hopeful
like a distant light across the ocean
there's even a band playing.
[2008]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
David McCooey is the author of Blister Pack (Salt), which won the 2006 Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for 4 other major awards. He lives in Geelong, where he works at Deakin University.
Maurice McNamara lives in Melbourne. Performer & organiser at many live poetry occasions including Melbourne Poets Union, the Celtic Club, the Overload Poetry Festival. Recently published in Swings & Roundabouts : Poems on Parenthood (ed E. Neale, Godwit/Random House, New Zealand, '08).
Kate Rigby works at Monash University in German Studies, Comparative Literature & Critical Theory. Co-edits PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature) magazine. Most recent book is Topographies of the Sacred : The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (University of Virginia Press, '04). Contact is, Kate.Rigby@arts.monash.edu.au
Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect, and a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne. Contact is, asele@unimelb.edu.au
Ann Shenfield lives in Melbourne and apart from her life in animation-film is a poet who has won the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize in 2007, also that year receiving commendation in the Alec Bolton Manuscript Prize and 2nd prize in the John Shaw Nielson Award. Her children's book, Scribble Sunset, was published by Lothian ('08).
(WELDON KEES)
Everything is ominous.
--
Another ordered loneliness.
--
The future is fatal.
--
Even the open field, a labyrinth.
--
The afternoon idly flicks through the pages of itself.
--
A list of names : good news, or bad?
--
The long silence of rooms.
--
History with its morphine headache.
--
The anonymous rain falling on motels.
--
The atrocities played under flickering streetlights.
--
The cars parked under melodramatic weather.
--
Finally, every future is fatal.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAURICE MCNAMARA
WHAT A STORY
Was reading Robert Adamson's autobiog. A friend of mine, Johnny Goodall, is on the back cover, wearing a black cowboy hat. He bought a silver dobro, a National, off an old lady in an old folks home, and he really got into that sort of music. Had a sort of country music band in Sydney. Lovely gentle guy, but when he got drinking... I met Mr Adamson once, when Johnny moved back to Balmain, we were all tripping, and Bob said I was the devil, that sort of poetic bullshit fancy stuff. Nigel Roberts, whom I met again at Raff's, a year ago, said Johnny was now re-parked on the North Island, Nzed, drinking the homebrew. He was very influential on me, tho it took me generational change to get around to it.
Too weak and confused and stupid. But I loved that guy. Staying up all night and going round to the early opener, on one of the side streets of the spine of Balmain, alkies hopping up and down, and the wharfies coming in, and by eight o'clock in the morning, smoke in the bar, hey, it's a party! Meeting Vicki Viidikas and Michael Wilding. Ridiculous really. But that can be Sydney for you, going down a lane, a sandstone fence, a jacaranda tree, and over the fence, an ocean-liner sailing stately, blue water. Like sinking your teeth into a mango, soft and pulpy, and warm, and a stone you can't swallow.
But Mr Adamson. A mythologiser perhaps, like Shelton Lea. But what a story. The more I read it, the more I thought it could make a good movie. The dyslexic guy who's into fishing, cars, and getting into trouble. The trip north with his under-age girlfriend, stealing petrol, starving, trying to catch fish, kill a sheep. Back in gaol, raped, turning into a girl for a while, finding Rimbaud. The guy's a pastry cook, winning a prize at the Sydney Show, for his decorated cake, tiny threads of blue against the white. Writing his stuff out over and over. The bravery, the obsession, trying out drugs almost against the grain, like taking a boat out to get fish to sell, and almost drowning. Stabbing against the dark, not like the stylistic youth bo ho, de rigueur, industries sprung up to support it, we get these days.
And then the sidling, wheedling, into the polite, nice poetry twiddley-dee, and taking it over. Palace revolutions. Photos with Brett Whitely. Bad boys made good. What the fuck are you on mate? Prove it. Beautiful women. There's a movie to be made, busting out of this story.
Of course he's mythologising, but still and all, a fantastic fucking story. We don't get enough stories about the Blueys and Joe-Blows remaking themselves. Now we're ordinary intermediate international. Media fills up our mouths before we learn to breathe. We're self-conscious as fuck. Are our poetry heroes capable of kicking a footy, able to make a quid? Can they rebuild an engine, buy a block of land, plant something that grows? I can't, so maybe I'm wailing in a desert of attenuation. But the populace is out there, waiting. There's a movie in there, somewhere.
What sort of person makes a poetry hero?
[5-01-08]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KATE RIGBY
WHAT IS ECOPOETRY?
Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves are more wonderful than any words about them.
(Mary Oliver)
This statement by Mary Oliver might sound like an admission of defeat, emphasising the limits of what poetry can ever hope to say and do. Mary Oliver is not about to lay down her pen, though, and I am not suggesting that you should either! In my reading, what she does here is actually to provide in a nutshell a theory of ecopoetry. I stress that this is A theory : over the past ten years or so, various theories of ecopoetics have been hotly debated among the growing band of ecocritics (ecologically oriented literary critics) around the world, and I can't possibly cover the whole discussion here. What i should like to do, though, is to share with you my own understanding of ecopoetry as exemplified in the work of some of my favourite writers. In the case of Oliver, I think that much of her poetry does in fact say in a whole host of different ways precisely what she says here it can't say : that is to say, her poetry invites the reader, again and again, to come with her "into the field of sunflowers" (or into the woods, or down to the lake, or just along the road under the open sky...). Oliver knows that we can't take up that invitation literally : writing is "not vibrant life" and the very fact that we are reading it implies that she's not with us in person to take us for a stroll. But neither is it a "docile artifact". For better or for worse, writing has force, inflecting our perceptions and deflecting our attention away from some things and towards others. To the extent that it does not hold us spellbound by its own verbal constructions, luring us into the belief that "vibrant life" really does lurk right there in the text, poetic language has the capacity to turn our gaze to the world beyond the page : and if the world to which it urges us to attend is a more-than-human one of Earth and Sky, then this, I believe, is what qualifies it as properly "ecopoetic".
Having spent several years hunkered down with the Romantics (ok, just their writing), I find Oliver's mini-theory of ecopoetry strongly reminiscent of that articulated by Wordsworth in "The Tables Turned", in which the poet exhorts his bookish friend to "come forth into the light of things". This is an extraordinary line, because you're led to expect the cliched "light of day", but instead Wordsworth (characteristically) trips you up with this utterly unconventional and really quite mysterious image : the light of things. What on earth can this mean? In what sense do things have their own light, as distinct from being illuminated from the outside? I think that the poet gives us a clue later on when he asserts that :
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things :-
We murder to dissect.
Approaching things as objects of scientific enquiry, with a view to finding out merely how they function (and thereby also how they might be altered and utilized) prevents us from entering into the "light of things", namely by allowing them to disclose themselves to us in a situation of open-minded and non-utilitarian embodied encounter :
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves :
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Note the irony here, though : it is precisely by means of such "barren leaves" that Wordsworth issues his invitation to us! Wordsworth knows that in modernizing societies such as his own, it would be necessary to use writing, ironically, for the express purpose of urging readers to lift their eyes from the page.
Poets in many times and places have celebrated their more-than-human earthly environs as a locus of meaning and value. In Western literature, for example, this, in part, is what the pastoral tradition that reaches right back to Ancient Greece has been about. As Raymond Williams argued in The Country and the City, Romantic writers like Wordsworth link up with this tradition, but take it in a new direction : Romantic neo- or counter-pastoral has an oppositional edge to it, in that it is self-consciously pitched against the increasing objectification, instrumentalisation and commodification of the Earth. Sometimes this manifests as outright protest poetry , as in the case of John Clare's "Lamentations of Round Oak Waters". This begins in the mode of a conventional pastoral elegy with the poet bewailing his personal woes by Round Oak Waters. But his lament is interrupted by the "genius of the brook", who turns his attention to the way in which this place, formerly common land, has been denuded of vegetation following its enclosure as private land destined to produce cash crops : this, then, truly is the lament of Round Oak waters. The poet is also reminded that in his recently deceased friend the brook too had lost a champion, so it is now up to him to take up her cause : not against the "sweating slaves" who did the physical damage, but against the wealthy land-owners and parliamentarians who commanded it. Environmental destruction, Clare reminds us here, is nearly always co-ordinate with social injustice. Not only is human labour regularly exploited in the process : it is generally the poor who first suffer the consequences, without enjoying benefits to the same degree, if at all. In "The Mores", moreover, he suggests that the reduction of the earth to mere private property amounts to the profanation of creation :
Fence now meets fence in little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please [...]
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine.
The voice of ecopolitical protest remains an important one in contemporary ecopoetry. As Jonathan Bate observes in The Song of the Earth with regard to Gary Snyder's "Mother Earth: Her Whales", though, the overt didacticism of some protest poetry risks preaching to the converted. By contrast, Bate points to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" as exemplifying an ecopoetics that shows why we might want to defend the existence of wild animals rather than simply telling us that we ought to do so. Bate theorises this through Martin Heidegger's late philosophy of dwelling, in which the poetic word is conceived as giving voice to the self-disclosure of things in a non-objectifying way. The problem here, in my view, is that if human language is assumed to be a wholly adequate means of responding to the call of Being, as Heidegger puts it, the poet becomes a kind of ventriloquist. Rather than speaking for the Earth, the ecopoet might instead be seen as singing along with it, as Robert Gray suggests at the end of his lyric retracing of a meditative walk along a forestry trail, in which the poet discovers that "all of us are a choir" ("On a Forestry Trail"). For Canadian poet, Tim Lilburn, too, ecopoetry encompasses the acknowledgment that words are only one way of speaking, and that "everything exceeds its name". Lilburn calls for a form of poetic attention that seeks not to appropriate the world, but to stand alongside it, knowing that you are never going to see all that is there or say all that you can see. It is because both our perceptions and our representations fall short of ever perfectly corresponding with reality that, as he puts it in the title of his recent collection, "desire never ends". Ecopoetry can only be effective in putting us back in touch with the more-than-human, glowing, singing --and increasingly imperiled --Earth, if it alerts us to its own inadequacy in mediating "vibrant life" even while seeking out words to speak of it : writing, as Lilburn puts it, is like carrying water in a sieve.
Lilburn's ecopoetics is often rapturous, unsentimentally evincing a sense of ecstatic delight in earthly existence.In the current moment of unprecedented (because humanly engendered) global environmental peril, though, I believe that songs of praise need to be complemented by words of warning. In Australian poetry, some of the most powerful were spoken by Judith Wright in her apocalyptic poem, "Dust". Written in the war-torn, drought-ridden summer of 1943, this is early Wright in full-blown prophetic mode. The idiom might be outdated, but her exhortation remains cogent:
O sighing at the blistered door, darkening the evening star,
the dust accuses. Our dream was the wrong dream,
our strength was the wrong strength.
Weary as we are, we must make a new choice,
a choice more difficult than resignation,
more urgent than our desire of rest at the end of the day.
[...]
Today, globally, it is wild weather that accuses, and nevermore so than when the storms cooked up by we who feed on fossil fuels are visited on the poor of other climes. If ecopoetry can awaken us from that old dream in which the other-than-human world figured solely as a means of wealth-creation, if it can inspire us to make a tough "new choice", then it might yet help to keep open the possibility of a just and sustainable future. As the witness of Wright also reminds us, though, realizing that possibility will require the backing of an effective global ecopolitics : words might open a world, as Heidegger puts it, but it will take more than words to save Earth's vibrant life.
__________________________________________________
[A talk delivered to the Melbourne Poets' Union, April 24th, 2008.]
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ALEX SELENITSCH
THE PRINTING OF A MASTERPIECE BY ALAN LONEY (Black Pepper Press, '08)
Peter Downton, who is one of a limited circle of my friends who makes things and thinks about these same things, reported on a conversation he had had with another colleague, Andrea Mina. Andrea wondered out loud whether using two hands, as you do when making something, whether two hands in consort create a different kind of thinking to the kind that is produced while you are using one hand when writing.
I mentioned this to Alan recently, and he told me that he once asked Oliver Sachs whether typing with two hands would ultimately produce something different to the single-handed pen. Sachs thought no -- the brain's language centres are the same no matter how many hands you use. I take this to mean that Sachs thinks of language as a function of brain activity (and that he doesn't use his hands to make things) because the issue is not just a question of the brain, or even language.
One of the best books -- in my opinion, of course, which is the opinion of some-one who makes things so that he can think about them -- one of the best books about this has been Socrates' Ancestor, by Indra Kagis McEwen. This book elaborates a pre-Socratic position in Greek culture: if you make any kind of object, you make a model, which is then a cosmos. You can hear a faint reverberation of this when you speak of making a composition, or claim to have organised something. So some-one who makes a boat makes a cosmos. The same applies for a house, for a garment, for a vase, for a saddle, for a city. And the same applies for a book.
Making a book is not like writing one. It involves both hands, both handsand head, and both hands and head, and heart. In The Printing of a Masterpiece -- and what a modest title that is -- Alan just tells it like it is. Or rather like it was. First he did this, then he did that, then it was time to fix this and so on. From a stack of paper, a tray of type and a tin of ink to a compact, tactile wad of data, to something that speaks to the hands and feels marvellous to the mind.
But, of course, writing a book is also what Alan has done. And it is the contemplation of the technical context, the design and decision-making procedures that, almost by a sleight of hand, turn what could be just a report into the unfolding of a cosmos. Because any book is a complex object, and making it even more so, it is an organization in the sense of an organism with integrated sub-systems. It easily becomes a model, where the decisions and values embodied in its form and materials exhibit relationships than can be applied elsewhere. For instance, Alan writes about "going in from the outside", that is, making decisions based on a teleological vision and contrasts it with his own procedure which is "goes out from the inside", where you proceed with action before all conditions are planned, in faith, and knowing that while creative problems may be ahead, there may be better outcomes later than anything that can be predicted now. This is an old dispute in architecture, pitting the Italians against the English. You might recognize it in politics as the argument between ends and means.
Further, the book Alan has written is about making a book, which could be seen as a microcosmic bit of behaviour. Does the book which is the main character of this narrative actually exist? If it does,I will be disappointed to hear of it; I prefer to think of it as an imaginary object into which all of Alan's printing experience has gone. It's an imaginary book, but not the ethereal "book" of the French School, of Jabes, Blanchot and Derrida, people who separate themselves from matter; people who think with only one hand. This imaginary black book of Alan's is a curious thing when you think about it. Problematic gold ink on black paper, a too-short text about the philosophical issue of "nothing" by Leonardo da Vinci. It's a conglomerate of problems and perhaps deliberately so. What could be more boring than a report on things that have been effortless and smooth? I'm reminded of Maurice Ravel's idea for a book on orchestration, which he was going to fill with examples of faulty orchestration : all the better to learn from than perfections. This is not exactly what Alan has done, but his self-imposed difficulties allow him to branch out from the technical diary, to history, and to the problems of creativity, and art and craft.
The English crafter David Pye, wrote a wonderful book called The Nature of Design. One of its chapters dealt with the uselessness of workmanship. Pye later extended this idea into two other books, but the essence of his argument is that workmanship is unnecessary work for function to be fulfilled, but nevertheless we treasure it. Uselessness, in fact, is a value that allows some overlap between art and craft. Generally, these disciplines are separated by us. The difference between art and craft is that the former gets matter to ask questions by rendering everything semantic, while the latter takes matter and gets it to behave, to keep quiet. In art, function is taken away by mislabelling, alteration, interference -- in my case, for example, by cutting away parts of a book -- but in craft, workmanship removes all traces of faulty human endeavour, and matter becomes eloquent and assertive, outside convention.
Karl Krauss once wrote that no matter how hard you look at language, it always stares back. It's that moment when the book asserts itself as an independent object, which Alan describes in the last chapter of this book under the title of The nonchalance of the master craftsman. In this case, the black book is dazzling to its maker. As a flicker, you can see Adam attracting God's attention. If you make things, you know the feeling : you stand there and wonder whether this object in front of you came through your hands, from you imagination, or were you just the medium IT used so that it could come into existence. At such moments, we are flummoxed and charmed, and often want to do the whole thing over again; this effect is the source of Marcel Duchamp's famous quip that art is a habit-forming drug.
Well, here I am adding to the nothing that Leonardo observed, and I should stop so that something can happen. This something is to announce that The Printing of a Masterpiece has moved from Alan Loney's private imagination to our social imaginary world. I always like to find a material analogue of the imaginary, but I don't believe the windows open in this room and somehow throwing a copy out into the outside space would just mean throwing it onto the footpath -- SO, imagine me throwing a copy into your imagination. I'm sure that the publisher would like you to convert that imaginary event into a material one by buying the book and reading it. I think you should.
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[launch speech delivered at the Leigh Scott Room, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne,
13th May,'08]
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ANN SHENFIELD
IN THE BACKGROUND
I'd always thought that a noise in the ear
would manifest itself as constant ringing
but the noise my mother hears,
she says, is more like an orchestra
or even a string quartet, I ask her if she recognises
the melody but she says, no it's too faint, too far
in the background, like an ocean liner on the horizon
or the ship that brought them here, an ocean liner
with a dining room and a band playing music
at night, my mother, not yet my mother,
twenty-six, and not in the dining room
but below the deck, an uncomprehending
refugee, with my father whose heart beats
like clockwork which is not yet unwound,
(that is five years hence)
refugees with all that word
connotes and there on board
the future looks hopeful
like a distant light across the ocean
there's even a band playing.
[2008]
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CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
David McCooey is the author of Blister Pack (Salt), which won the 2006 Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for 4 other major awards. He lives in Geelong, where he works at Deakin University.
Maurice McNamara lives in Melbourne. Performer & organiser at many live poetry occasions including Melbourne Poets Union, the Celtic Club, the Overload Poetry Festival. Recently published in Swings & Roundabouts : Poems on Parenthood (ed E. Neale, Godwit/Random House, New Zealand, '08).
Kate Rigby works at Monash University in German Studies, Comparative Literature & Critical Theory. Co-edits PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature) magazine. Most recent book is Topographies of the Sacred : The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (University of Virginia Press, '04). Contact is, Kate.Rigby@arts.monash.edu.au
Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect, and a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne. Contact is, asele@unimelb.edu.au
Ann Shenfield lives in Melbourne and apart from her life in animation-film is a poet who has won the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize in 2007, also that year receiving commendation in the Alec Bolton Manuscript Prize and 2nd prize in the John Shaw Nielson Award. Her children's book, Scribble Sunset, was published by Lothian ('08).
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