OCTOBER & NOVEMBER 2017 TIMELINE WRITINGS, SAVED FROM OBLIVION

‪Nov, '17
TO STEPHEN ELLIS
"Hi Stephen, In a message to him I'd described ex-Sydney poet Alan Jefferies' poem about the late John Forbes (in Spence's mag Oz Burp) as a play between transparency [plain speech] & syncopation [linear & spatial rhythms], and same idea came up reading yours --all youve been posting here, remarkably every day it seems -- that certain relation ('sort of', 'kind of') so not certain at all! --uncertain relation then --the double binds which move at the centre of the poem, as tho the gist, --the political, for example, "not to blame" --allied to history, grandparents as prophecy, immemorial time kept by every generation's ancients --and not to blame for ever further binds, for example smart's real limitation, re- your recent warning, so here "unaware // of the grain that the creative / advance of our / intelligent steps have crushed" --and, as you may intuit, i (holding against the debunking of imagery) simultaneously hear the complaint while rising on the music , for example, "I am my own grief" and, "walking / through wide grasslands / of paradise" ... Thanks for the good read. ‪Kris Hemensley‬"

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A week ago I'd seen Robert Podgurski's wonderful mountain photo shared on Stephen Ellis's Timeline, & messaged him abt it and the accompanying Pound quotation, "Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise" , noting the coincidence with the words of John Thorpe i'd sent to Stephen re- "what's possible is the wind…it's not wind, but the human sound of it" & etc… Robert graciously replied explaining his mountain experience, "Listening to the elements more carefully; they deserve a great amount of attention. But it takes time. Learning to just sit and be with them." I was reminded strongly of exchanges with the late John Anderson (d, 1997), recalling that "I offered once, after conversation, that if one was still enough, before the mountain, then the mountain would dance!"


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Something always seems to happen on a Friday --late morning, midday --‪Denis Smith‬ on his way back from market or art shop, ‪Pete Spence‬ into town & delivering mags or his 'lending library' of very special books (eg the large Collom, a slim Heliczer), & then other people drop in too, thus the impromptu nature of these launches & celebrations! Nice to see ‪Alan Jefferies‬ today, discussing the performance scene vis a vis the writing-writers but more importantly how we maintain our own volition through a long life in poetry... But, CORNELIS VLEESKINS : wondrous example of a constant & voluminous practice! Celebrating today Pete's friendship/collaboration with him as much as anything else...


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THE MELBOURNE CUP, 2017
November 7th
Beaten by a bloody head!! Ray in my ear as we watched it on the overhead tv at the Great Yorkshire Stingo this a/noon, the race that stops a nation (a holiday for a horse race? nah! really!!! only in Oz) --how could we not put a few bob on Johannes Vermeer! I'm so happy i scored again, every year i seem to do it, me! who knows nothing abt the noble sport! Well, Loretta & i caught the train down the line to North Richmond, then walked back up Hoddle to the appointed rendezvous... Ray & Terri were there, and Ken, and not too long afterwards the Harleys. John & Heather... an hour & a half of bonhomie and then the RACE! I punted $3 win & $2 place for six horses, one of whom, Johannes Vermeer, was beaten oh so close, into 2nd place... I collected eight bucks! but keeping up my record of a win or a place every Melbourne Cup... Terri won the trifecta but that's another story! The Harleys friend Trish, whom i thought might have been Lou Risdale, won too! Poets around their little table, talking about? --: recent poetry gigs, mention of Tina G and so cheers Tina! --talking about Mike Castro, Bede Griffiths, social / gender attitudes in the late 60s eg- Betty Burstall saying to Loretta that she'd be supporting the poet husband wldnt she? while he concentrated on his art... Haha! was funny then, crazy now! Counter culture evidently only went so far, i mean we were 21 and Betty another decade older, but she was talking out of an older perspective, elitist (no problem with that..) wherein writer/artist was to be supported... (my axiom, that art/literature scene is hierarchical but supremely democratic at point of entry... meaning anyone (everyone) an artist, poet, but one enters history, and should, one encounters immense world of merit, poets (note "poets' not poetry), meritable veritable poets) --but was woman artist supported by man at that time? not sure, i bet not!... admired Betty but surprised her when we said that wasnt our situation, the both of us had to get the rent in! --ah Betty Burstall, what a great thing you did with your junk shop/cafe/theatre in Faraday Street, Carlton, inspired by New York's off off off little theatre (Ellen Terry?)... hmm, what else we talked about, Ken mentions Kazantzakis as buddhist? didnt know that! --buddhist to travel to Moscow i guess! --beginning of Zorba recalls Heart of Darkness, sitting around in a hut waiting for a boat, waiting for weather to settle...

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Hilarious pre-Melbourne Cup day at Collected Works Bookshop y'day, the traditional standing at the large window end of the hall overlooking Swanston Street for the Cup Parade around midday, --no Beads & Trims Mary this year, interstate holiday but an hour or so before then Ken had visited, on the heels of Richard Murphet, tho Richard not here for Cup stuff, our chat about life after cessation of the 9 to 5 paradigm, my vision of the Uncollected Works bookshop in treetop in 2019! --but we open the Talisker and the day starts! --joined at the window by Jen & mum Claire, Retrostar friends, wave down at the famous horses, trainers, from the recent past, and the you-beauty Cup itself, the bagpipes, the open roofed cars, the kids on rocking horses, roller skates, the reps & flags of all the countries represented --Australia, England, Ireland, Hong Kong, France, UAE, and what's that one? Turkey? says Ken --no , Lebanon says Jen's mum (we share Middle eastern connections), --ah, Lebanon, they may have beaten France in the Rugby League World Cup the other day? Rugby? says Jen's mum, they dont win at rugby, they win at war!-- and Sophia from Brown & Bunting bookshop in Northcote visits, books not horse race conversation! --i think we're alternating the Glenlivit & the Talisker ("Made by the sea", great pun) --and a woman who's popped in says Talisker's her favourite and she's from near the Isle of Skye, and i say Mckelvie brought us this one and he's from Dundee! --she wont have one but will consider a flutter on Nakeeta the Scottish horse ive mentioned, she's going to Oaks Day on Thursday, well timed Melbourne holiday & doesn't mind this weather compared to Scotland right now, constant reminder it's all relative! -- So now it's today, THE day, we've actually had a spell of sun, but clouds are moving in again, we'll be inside anyway so doesn't really matter, coldest Cup day for a decade they say --horses on my mind, including the philosophical ethical political issue of humans & animals, my bottom line is everyone & everything is someone & something else's meat, a thought wch may have risen in a piece on Inst of Further Studies newsletter early 70s, early 80s, carumba! where does the time go except back into immense sea of mind, --all the more reason for compassion, that is the only reason for compassion, no other context for it but vale of pain, suffering, through wch no choice but to walk, gently as possible whatever the rest of 'em do --drink to that --huge wad of races' information in the newspaper, thank God for the Cup lift-out --my glory day in 2015 when my 100 to 1, Prince of Penzance with Michelle Payne in the saddle, and won me $238 for a few dollars each way! --i think ive won a little last few years -- best win would have been back in 1965 last time the Hemensleys holidayed en famille, on the Isle of Wight, ancestral Tangley Lodge grandmother's house --for me just back from British Railways booking clerk job in London, the younger sibs still at school, Bernard at the Tech or just leaving, --i'd got into the habit of having a bet with booking clerk friends at the Ladbrokes or whichever betting shop around the corner from the booking office at Watford Junction --never won, but i think my friend Nick Buck did, --he's 'Nick York' for obvious reason in my Peter Which Way novel (unpublished & somewhat scattered now) and Fred Clarke the chief clerk, in locus parentis, kind eye on all the younger staff benevolent even when i made a mess of my acting station master duties at Bricket Wood on the St Albans to Watford loop line, gave us overtime for weeks after you left Nick told me! --but one rainy afternoon of that summer holiday, last one before i hitch-hiked in Europe then went to sea and then April 66 emigrated to Melbourne! --so forgive the luminosity i attach to that Isle of Wight holiday --raining, as i say, and horse-racing on the tv, we're sitting Bernard & i and the younger brother & sister, --a great horse-woman herself, great lover of horses, as close to family as family she'd agree, --drinking beer Bernard has bought from nearest off license, and we're watching the races, and just for fun we made selections, and UNBELIEVABLY my first one wins, and then i go for a double, and that wins, and then the treble, and that wins too! --incredible-- and we'd been talking about going down to a betting shop but the rain and all the other cowardly teenager excuses! --that would have been a HUGE win! --
Sunshine again as i sit here --Melbourne Cup at Westgarth, years past, as Loretta says no one did it in those years, no one we knew anyway, --after her mother Stella's death, she'd invite her father, Jim Garvey from the typical Irish-Australian family --had horses in County Clare says Rett --grandfather, uncles --Great Uncle Michael the big punter --the 'Michael' of Tim Hemensley's name after him, Timothy Michael Hemensley --dreamt of him last night --he'd borrowed my computer wch Loretta didn't immediately tell me as i sat at desk trying to understand how the ridiculous machine before me actually worked --what is this? i demanded --it'll work she says --but this isn't my machine?!! --no, Tim's got it --whaaaaaat? --I go out to the back, shout up to him, upstairs in the loft, where he's sitting having breakfast with friends including Joel & a Matthew who i don't think is Matty Whittle --and i say to him, you could have asked! --and a bit more kindness & grace wouldn't go astray etc --ah well --but Tim would be with us on those Melbourne Cups, 80s? certainly through the 90s, --Robert K, Stella Glorie, Gay Hawkes once or twice, Frank Bren, other visitors, --we'd have lunch, snacks, wine, then all haul up the road to the nearest pub with betting facilities --the Normandy on Queens Parade? --place our bets, then hurry back to watch the race on telly --quite a crowd of us --the beginning of our tradition…
Last several years it's been at the Stingo on Hoddle in Colingwood, where we'll be again in a couple of hours! --with John, Heather Mac, and now Ray, Ken, other friends --up for it whatever it is! Here's a shaft of sun again -- Better get myself together! Ring Clementa O'Brien in Bendigo, ask her for a tip, the best tipster she is --we'll exchange news abt Catherine far far away in Vientiane but i'll have pen & paper ready for Clementa's race wisdom! --and so --Tally Ho! see youse all there!

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[from Sharon Thesen : Hi Chris, Was reading some Jack Collom (Collum?) poems today online and thought of your work...very sim'lar, in deep ways!]


‪Kris Hemensley‬ Me darlin ‪Sharon‬ (irish) (double take-- german?) Just back from the Melbourne Cup session at the Great Yorkshire Stingo in Collingwood, melb'n... real punters, us poets, and other bibs & bobs turning up including brilliant natural girl called Trish who'd seen Midnight Oil gig last night somewhere in town, the Myer Music Bowl? but i spun silly irriot story that Peter Garrett wld do his discombobulated dance at cabinet meetings, when he was the minister in the Labor govt..,etc... i did apologise to her later... just a joke i said... she'd won pretty big i think, had shouted (aussie parlance) a plate of this & that on adjacent table... Anyway--- Jack Collom : i have on loan RED CAR GOES BY  from ‪Pete Spence‬ Jack's big selected (1955-2000) and am jumping in & out of it... What can i say, and on such (Melbourne Cup) on such a day! Love youse all, especially you xxx K

‪Stephen Ellis‬ I love Jack Collom. There's an interesting interview with him in that anthology Anselm Berrigan edited, called, 'What is poetry? (Just kidding, I know you know). And then, of course, there's one of my all-time favorite poems dedicated to Collom, by Duncan McNaughton, 'Little A and the Imperials' . . .

‪  K H :Hi Stephen , thanks for that... and parallel to the poetry i'm forever moved by the relations of poets, like here you refer me to Duncan McNaughton and i begin imagining a world spinning about him & Jack Collom... i'll look through his collections later today when i get back from the Shop, will be propitious to reread even if i dont have the actual poem... I dont know about the Anselm Berrigan anthology, have just looked it up on the Ingram catalogue and it's there from Wave Books, so i'll immediately order! Sounds excellent. Ta for the tip.

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Nov 9, '17

[from Topography, 'Levertov', 3rd section]

preceding Rexroth & Williams in 1967

Penguin Modern Poets number 9 --
whom historically she followed --

forever that troika proclaimed

on Alan Spain's photogram sun-bloodied-
fired cover-design

as if feather trees & grasses back-lit by sunrise

sunset green-flecked in world's black

vortex or aflame (Creeley flits in-between

fitful as theirs must be 
poets at world's behest

fists full of world emptying like dust in

wind's rush everything falling away day in

day out but

mystically
'lost' 
is not the end-
product (pace Olson

to be found with Eliot &
Pound hob-nailed

to ground relentlessly digging

down down down

to the centre of the truth

the before & before & before

whose after's ever now! (Duncan

jumping at shadows as though natural

positives & negatives

were the shades

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Back from the Delphi, clean up the typos of the 3rd part (above), continue on the 4th (relating Levertov & ‪Joanne Kyger‬).... Beautiful day... wash clothes & hang out to dry i think! --rather like poetry on Timeline! Thanks friends for liking the 3rd --it's another of the "---> going nowhere" Topographies, what i've been doing when i'm not on an actual journey somewhere!

‪Philip Harvey‬ : Recent piece on Denise Levertov by ‪Carol O'Connor‬ given last year at the ‪The Carmelite Library‬ in Middle Park; ‪http://thecarmelitelibrary.blogspot.com.au/.../Denise...‬

K H : Thanks for sending me Carol's paper --ive read through it but will require another slow digest! Hah! Yes --it's all there, so many formal contradictions to 'play' with through a long life, wch Carol describes... Needless to say D L was a favourite when i was a young poet... my 'Levertov' deals with that --deals with it as a piece of bioboplicity (as Mike Castro described a previous rave, on ‪Lew Welch‬)... so my vanity is part of the arraignment! Thanks again!

‪Carol O'Connor‬ : Levertov is one of the very few women poets to make it into those early Penguin Modern Poets, I think.

‪Kris Hemensley‬ : Hi Carol, just to say In those days it wasnt an issue or not the issue as can be perceived today --ie we were interested in the New Poetry per se, 'gender' was to be, in hindsight, another generation's issue... a political generation's issue ... the "rights" generation... What did Denise think? Aware of being one of the few women or what? Statistically your point obviously accurate, but only later (the particular PMP vol is 1967) that the general political consciousness inflects/affects the discussion... The women of all the days up to Womens Liberation were first & foremost writers on par with the men of the PARTICULAR writing... the big fight was for the distinctively NEW WRITING.. i remember writing to Germaine for recommendations of new women poets for my magazine Earth Ship, 1970-72, in UK -- she was teaching at Warwick Univ then, -- i had her address from new writer friend, Martin Wright, very interesting prose writer, --she said there were too many to name... etc etc What happened afterwards --W L onwards i mean -- is most definitely within women's ambition & projection, and precisely where it has to be... self determination not 'positive discrimination' & etc , i mean art & literature arent departments of the public service, or what?!

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Nov 5th, '17

Best day for a train trip, Geelong, almost scuttled before we began, had to transfer to another train because of 'police operation', but resettle with coffee, escargot, notebook (for the Topography of course, & going somewhere instead of the bioboplicities -thanks Mike Castro for that title a few weeks ago!- my "going nowhere" sub series riffing the great Americans)... After the buzz of the packed-out Archibald exhibition + considerably quieter Fred Williams You Yangs mostly plein airs --i mean the crowds not the art! --walked around looking for a watering hole and finally --last chance-- found the Workers Club in a lane off Little Mallop --a live music venue with a bar! At last! sat down at bench facing through window large b&w spray painted portrait of androgynous long-hair wearing graffiti addition of green pellet hanging out of left nostril --nice touch! Coopers appeared to young barman to be off, flat as a tack he said, but the club's own Workers Draft was good he said --like a Carlton. Basket of chips with choice of three sauces. 80s bands piped into the bar. Steve Kilby. Other mildly interesting music (no wonder the harder rock returned just then, including our God boys, & Bored! et al). And then it's the Saints, bagpipes & all, Doc Neeson, "will I ever see your face again?". Now here's the thing : my pick for the Archibald is Jun Chen's portrait of Ray Hughes beaten by the Matisse-like Mitch Cairns famously criticised by John Olsen in the press, and John's own portrait by Nicholas Harding a pretty good one too --and Pru Flint's pastel beauty similarly memorable... Back home casually listening to a radio show on 3AW, singer Christa Hughes interview, closes with her "slowed down version" of the Saints song, Will I Ever See Your Face Again --Loretta says, you know that Christa Hughes is art dealer Ray Hughes' daughter? niece? granddaughter? Amazing! I'm the biggest investor in synchronicity but this takes the biscuit! What's going on?


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November 3, '17 at 7:59am ·

A great way into the new day : Denis Smith's cat (--& ive been wondering about the apparent different look of his Japanese cats and whether [if that was so] it rubs off on the style of his Melbourne cats?!) and Norman Finkelstein's lecture (on Vimeo) on the serial poem via Jack Spicer, wch in other words is about narrative or narrating (well, it is & it isnt, for me 'problematising' this & that not the issue it must be elsewhere, 'defusing or decentering the self eg) telling, wherever it may go --an invitation to expanse not really available locally? but ah, much of one's reading has been there, how one gets to here (hear!)... Ive left off listening to the lecture at the point Norman Finkelstein refers to Jerome Rothenberg's Poland 1931 (hello Mark Olival-Bartley, forgive my inconstant correspondence!)... and now gotta get on...

‪Norman Finkelstein‬ : Amazing that the video is still available. How did you come upon it, ‪Kris‬? What isn't indicated in the video is that it was a job talk--I was applying for an endowed chair at ASU (which I didn't get, but that turned out just fine). So interesting that it turns up after all these years...


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28th October, 17
20th anniversary of our friend John Anderson's death... Liz Anderson reminded us mid-winter when she was looking for the recent Puncher & Wattmann anthology which includes her brother... he's also in the Gray/Lehmann book... Twenty years... Often thinking of him, remembering him today... thought of him yday when Melbourne history tour guide & author Meyer Eidelson popped in & was reminiscing about walks & digs on the Merri Creek with Bernie O'Regan (d 1996)... John accompanied Bernie sometimes, tho mostly a solitary walker... walker, dreamer, the poet of the Merri Creek...


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21 October, 17

After the big Ashbery Tribute night, sleeping with it, waking on it, but also the Kerouac anniversary today, and up to the writing desk to begin to type the piece ive been writing around & about Desolation Angels (isnt that funny : cover of my Andre Deutsch 1st ed, '66, by Michael Farrell! --the late Irish artist? i wonder --not our poet tho!) --as i have it in first paragraph/stanza (a la 'Desolation Angels') :---
"1
July August September Melbourne winter spring 1966 spotted DESOLATION ANGELS the silver-covered whopper Andre Deutsch hardback 1st British edition --just published --had to get it, my name on it! --no name in it now as i hold it, first end-papers gone, blotched & stained, damaged survivor of a book --but that's the story to tell
2
saw it in South Yarra bookshop --often looking in the window, not window-shopping but life-saving --penniless often as not --living off the titles, name of author, sight of the book, imagining the contents --KEROUAC! --but a little while before had entered the bookshop, browsed, put aside Lin Yutang volume purchased not long afterwards --the bookshop closer to South Yarra station on Toorak Road than to Punt Road? though image in my mind is more-or-less around the corner from terrace house in Park Street where i boarded, itself a hop & skip from the Botanical gardens, my 'Gardens of Sunlight', refuge from the slings & etc, where i'd lie out all day with inspirational reading & the notebook, writing, drawing, dreaming, longing
..."

I'll type up tonight, several pages, post on blog & link on Timeline.
Yes, thoughts of Kerouac, --& i'm always disagreeing with Dorn's judgement an eternity ago that nothing more to be done in/with that mode, the proto anti-lyric i guess, mid 60s.

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Confirming & reminding : Friday, 20th October, JOHN ASHBERY TRIBUTE, 6 for 6-30 at Collected Works!
Up late last night looking for books & quotes & etc to take with me today so that I can sit pretty polly this evening as one of the panel assembled by Peter Rose for the John Ashbery Tribute at Collected Works Bookshop! In my head the beginning looms large, as beginnings always do! So out of that melange of first reading, and the wonderful coincidence of Ken Taylor (just met Winter 67 at Betty Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre) he also enthusing abt Ashbery, a particular poem & aspects of wch i'd found and revelled in, relished, --and then the Southampton,UK connections via Lee Harwood, & especially F T Prince's take,1970-72, but with FTP thru to the 90s and the years passing, the years the years, attrition, & the luminosity that dearests deaths bestows, --often the aching pleasure of life understood as on-the-run, grabbing what we can (deKooning's 'glimpse' --'glance' as opposed to full frontal model), all along till now : our Ashbery reading & talking tonight...


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Oct 20, '17


Another poignant intriguing prose-piece post from Stephen Spooner on his Timeline today, on Kerouac, see my share below... --my reply, "Thank you Stephen.... approaching that same "death afternoon" with you, 'Desolation Angels' my ride... I'll post on Saturday, finished it today at the Delphi (Greek) cafe my Thursday rostered-day-off pied-a-terre! Like very much your inside-out evocation-intersection with this hero... "The beat bop of phrenology not prediction or predestination" , yes, something to chew on tonight... Fraternally, Kris H"

--Also found this by Stephen D Edington on the Jack Kerouac Group site :--
"For those of you within hailing distance of Lowell (however you may define "hailing distance"), Lowell Celebrates Kerouac is sponsoring a Jack Kerouac Memorial Walk and Gathering this Saturday, October 21. [Jack died on October 21, 1969.] We'll meet at the Lowell Grotto at 6:00 p.m., proceed over to the site of the Moody Street "Watermelon Man" Bridge, and then go down Merrimack Street, making a stop at the St. Jeanne Baptiste Church where JK's funeral was held. We'll end up at The Old Worthen, where we'll toast Jack's memory, share thoughts on his life, etc. LCK will supply food--you purchase your own drinks. The Grotto is on Pawtucket Street just beyond the Archambault Funeral Home where Jack was waked. Hope to see some of you there!"
Thanking Mr Edington for the atmospheric itinerary. Feels like we could be there even from this far away!


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Today, Sunday 15th October, '17
 from the Cathedral to Irish Murphy's Sturt St, Ballarat, en route the Gallery... settle at table in the beautiful public bar, wall notice beside us, "Live Craic, This Weekend, Irish Folk & More! The O'Dowds 2-30 / 5-30"... Must be them by the stage... abandon their grub, begin tuning up, pipe & guitar, hybrid Celtic & country... "Bewitched" on the bar's high on the wall t.v., and then "Little Big Shots" --would the O'Dowds qualify? Big Little Shots? Little Bog Shites? Biggles Short Legs? ...First Guinness for an eternity, maybe not since previous visit to Ballarat --the huge Kevin Lincoln retrospective, winter, 2015? No, dont be daft... last Bloomsday of course! The O'Dowds, she's on piano now, Conway Twitty, belt out a Ballarat version of 'Dirty Old Town', where he met his missus... Nathan Curnow photo on poster in town for November poetry reading (N C + Geoffrey Williams)... Nathan's familiar face like the Pogues' Christmas song the O'Dowds may be ending their sound-check with. Nope --a little thing by Cindy Lauper, he announces. Yep! "Time After (bloody) Time"! Guinness drank, garlic bread eaten, time to go...


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October 10, '17 ·

Giona B. reminds us last day or so that it wld have been Franco's 80th b/day... yes... the usual exclamations, happy/sad amazement etc (And Giona Beltramettis own birthday on his dad's heels...) Saw this morning comment from Louise Landes Levi, with whom briefly corresponded some years ago, --"I think same as ever miss him, of course, reread Han Shan, brought up his name at a Beat Conference in Paris, his brilliant translation of Gary's work, then reread the whole, translator named RED PINE......x" --beautiful connection, so apt for Franco...


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October 4, '17 ·

For all of bookselling's rubs there's always the good chance of very special meetings with readers, authors, fellow poets, publishers et al... Yesterday met Jim McCue at the Shop, & quickly found out he's the coeditor, with Christopher Ricks, of the Annotated Eliot currently winning praises & prizes! Didnt know him from Adam of course so first words were his enquiring what music i was playing on poor old stereo --Hayden or late Mozart? he asked. The 'Surprise', i said. Next he said something abt the Faber edition of Eliot and we were in! into it! Wonderful crisscrossing : the Laurence Whistler glass engravings at Salisbury Cathedral --i knew the beautiful illustrations of the Eliot, but cdnt recall the etched globe he described. I'd picked up a couple of L Whistler poems along the way, also taken by Rex Whistler's paintings. L W the inventor of glass engraving as we know it, Jim enthused. I accept that completely! Enthusing about the Whistlers in a Melbourne bookshop? How good is that?!!! He mentioned Bernard Stone's bookshop in Kensington, the late Bernard Stone he said. Ah yes. My walk around town with Andrew Crozier one time, Jeremy Prynne's Brass had just been published, Andrew was 'distributing'! Talk then about the recent late poets, & Cambridge. Prynne my teacher at Cambridge he said; also Christopher Rix. But, the changing shape of universities... Hmmm... And the changing shape of cities, his London, our Melbourne (my rhetorical question --"when is enough enough?"-- gaining sympathetic hearing). I'm rarely in London these years, prefer the country for all the obvious reasons. For work, galleries, the theatre it's still his abode but less & less liveable. Hmmm. Melbourne world's most liveable city? The Metro Tunnel building site continues to grow around us, though in comparison Melbourne by far the better bet Jim reckoned. I mentioned my friendship with Frank Prince in Southampton, active from 1970 to the 90s, and Frank a protege of TS Eliot. Quoted Frank's comment, "Eliot was the better poet, what? but Pound made one want to be a poet!" wch Jim took up; the mad passions of poets, mad poets & their politics --communism, fascism, 'social credit' (--'universal wage' Jim added) etc etc. Nowt to do with left or right, i offered, --it's any & all alternative in time of crisis, all & anything imagined... I say, Henry Williamson walks from Dover to to Devon on WW1 demob, "never again" not just a slogan, it's in his bones, is compelled to alternatives (how not?)... R Jeffers, 'try all ways, dont go down the dinosaur's way... He asked after New Zealand poets, & New Zealand a place i'd like to visit, --you must he said, South Island is beautiful... If it werent for the awful price of the Eliot of course we'd be stocking it... but that's another story. He had to go to Kay Craddock's up Collins Street then. I guess if this had been earlier era Charring Cross Road then i could have closed up for half an hour and gone for a sandwich... Ah & ah....
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Jim McCue‬ : Thanks Kris: it was great to meet you and to see such an amazing stock of poetry from all over and from so many small presses. I haven't figured out the Aussie poetry scene, but it was good to see this shop-window. I went on to check out the stock at Kay Craddock, Douglas Stewart and Peter Arnold, and the (rather disappointing) *Art on the Page* exhibition at Melb U., so it was a busy day -- but I'm sorry you weren't free for that lunch.


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October 1, '17 ·

Great time this morning with the two big NGV print shows, the Jim Dine yet again and the Hokusai (wch finishes soon, --Simon Schiavoni told me y'day he'd just seen it & that was the hury-up we required). Simply want to say that Hokusai's wood block the Red Fuji had me scurrying in two directions. The first, Jim Dine's Untersberger series ----i literally mean that i could go up three flights & look at Dine's print to confirm my intuition --in particular the second of the triptych with the disembodied red beard glowing, palpitating like a sacred heart in the body of the mountain --and, simultaneously, Paul Nash's Summer Solstice there on the 2nd floor, and the Nash recalling Spencer Gore's magnificent Icknield Way painting (viewed many times during the Modern Britain show at the NGV in 2007) --Gore's sky-full-heart of sun, blood radiant over quintessential English countryside… Hokusai's picture infusing the factual mountain, albeit physically imposing, with the mystical inheritance of mythical Mt Horai…

A week or so ago at the bookshop i took advantage of Pete Spence's chatting on phone long-distance to Alan Wearne to write down the poem by Jim Dine found as i flicked through the large Collected Poems of Jim Dine --the beautiful book published by Cuneiform Press, 2015, ed by Vincent Katz, Spence had recently acquired-- poem called The Untersberger Gift, as follows :

I had spoken 
to the emperor many times,

before I saw Untersberg

Untersberg seemed to me to be the body

waiting to be opened to reveal the self

(hopefully).

'Are you courageous?' asked the Emperor.

'No, ' I said, 'but I am dazzled by beauty.'

Nature gives me the courage to persist

in my quest for the fabulous treasure inside.

Barbarossa asks me to sing for him.

The mountain opens.

His long red beard encircles me.

I have returned to silver.

I touch the red stone.

Superb, shimmering poem! In turn dazzled by beauty! (Interesting to think on that equation, courage, nature, persistence, beauty... Ah, Nash, Hokusai, Dine… Add to this our following on Facebook of Denis Smith's Japanese journey, loving his daily drawings of cats of course but also that set of photos of the little harbour overlooked by mountain…! As exhilarating as it is ominous…


_____________________________________


JEROME ROTHENBERG

I imagined introducing our Rothenberg Meet & Greet with definition of Jerome the original ethnopoetics anthologist (a move joined by Tedlock, & Tarn, & Antin & many others) , & presently the exemplary figure of the non-exclusive, --as he's observed somewhere or other that for better or for worse we're all in it together now… I interpolate : all part of global, human material; and one's ethics & politics must follow the fact of historical connection & dispersal, grievous or not, & we all have to make the best of it… Simultaneously there's Jerome the poet as well who insists a particular personal, ancestral, cultural story wch may well beg the question of same…?  But i didn't take the opportunity! John Hawke was the man for that moment… In his totally reliable account, Hawke has Rothenberg updating Pound's prospectus, & reconfiguring the modernist canon… an inspiration… yes!

Ah, Rothenberg, Rothenberg, Rothenberg, Rothenberg : a Miracle…!
As Pete Spence remarked, an historic event --most unlikely it'll be repeated, Jerome aged 85 now & Australia a long way from home, --Dianne told me she was same age (a few months difference) --i told her i knew her name well from the co-editing of Symposium of the Whole --other things as well, she said, the Picasso translation…

Collected Works bookshop a good room for the poet who made the most of it in obviously practiced way. A chronological reading, poems from the 50s,60s through the decades to now, but same template… i heard elements of Ginsberg's Howl & Kaddish in Rothenberg's Poland 1931 --that repetition, invocation, chant, emphatic intonation. Major difference would be Rothenberg's explicit humour --Rabelaisian could say, the grotesque & the absurd, so not the ironic humour around social issues which is Ginsberg's marriage of  personal & public in essentially political story, ditto Ferlinghetti & others. DADA obviously dear to Rothenberg even apart from his wonderful performance of the Hugo Ball classic sound poem, "Karawane", and the whistling whirring orange-tube number.

Stand outs of the reading were Poland 1931, the Hugo Ball, the late 80s Holocaust poems. His Beaver poem, after the Native-American, recalled Jack Collom's Blue Heron poem recently reread… He read a poem carrying dedication to Collom (if only i had the reference) at mention of wch i didn't restrain "oh dear" recognition which he immediately picked up on --who's just died, he said looking sideways to me & raised his glass which i followed, "to Jack",  --i looked  behind me where Spence was standing, caught his eye, a fan too… Jack was much more involved in ecology, said Rothenberg. --in fact i'm hardly at all, --city life not Nature --almost goes without saying, Rothenberg urban, historical, a different place to erstwhile comrades Snyder, McClure et al. He & Pierre Joris, therefore, explicating contemporary modernist practice (the post & the neo --hi there Pete!) & not principally the Ancient & the Traditional per se, honoured of course within the vis-a-vis, which i described to him as some of the big difference of opinion with Eric Mottram & English friends (Allen Fisher, Pierre…) in London, i think it was '75, after the Cambridge Poetry Festival… Two-fold disagreement : my quoting Frank Prince's "who's doing anything now [1970s] aside of John Ashbery?" wch had Eric spluttering angrily, proof (he declared) of FTP's marginality now! 'Out of touch' & 'say no more' the better version of 'moronic' & 'idiotic' which the temper of the New would naturally inveigh & construe. I spoke as square peg in round hole, still do, --experimenter as of Field, the Open, the Projective, yet couldn't & wouldn't block my ear to older music & the consequence of such sympathy, --shape, therefore, syntax, sound…
Rothenberg nodded from some way away from such recherche argument, called elsewhere then by his chaperones & new friends, --time for dinner with Australian supporters not for reprising the 60s & 70s with some Pommy bastard!
[Melbourne, 29/30-July, 2017]

*

Hm, yes, --Alan Wearne circling the subject (Jerome Rothenberg's reading, Collected Works Bookshop, 28 July, '17). Not exactly where he's at he suggests, but, ah, yes, any number of them (the New Americans) he didn't mind, could take or leave, --except, probably, Duncan, found him unapproachable… Duncan could certainly talk, i said, --talked all day when he came for lunch in Westgarth in '76 (--point out the photograph taken by the late Bernie O'Regan [d 1996], wch hangs to the side of the American shelves top my left where i'm invariably standing at the counter…Alan says he heard Rothenberg in London in 1973 --ah, the American conference there, convened by Eric Mottram --i was back in Oz by then, was it '73 or '74, --or both? two conferences? --Bernie O'Regan sent me cassette-tapes of the sessions he attended, recorded on his lap from where he was sitting, London Polytechnic? Particularly interesting to me the conversation between Duncan & George Oppen, parts of wch i transcribed for my own use, --for example, Oppen's distinguishing between political, therapeutic writing & poetry, "I do not write what I know…", how better beg the fundamental question --another line wch stuck, "I believe in consciousness, but consciousness of what?"

Alan said he recalls Robert Bly 'gatecrashing' the readings, they put him on the programme because he was there. Alan said Bly was wearing --a dress>-- no, a kaftan kind of thing! Ah, he would have, yes. Beautiful poem on or after Mirabai --but also recall Berrigan, probably following Bly to the stage, gagging to the audience, about Bly --and all in casual, first-name mode --that is, i didn't detect electricity of malice in the air --ah, says Alan, hmm, --well, i add, obviously the ideological lines were clearly known, drawn, understood, but… Ted says of Robert, man with big head hangs hat in small closet…! something like that! --maybe, man hangs big hat in small closet… I forget… and the audience laughs good naturedly. It's all on the tape. Bernie sent them from London, i played them to our old & new friends --Robert Kenny, Mike Dugan, Phil Edmonds, John Jenkins, Jim Duke, Walter Billeter, others… Other tapes i had too --Ed Dorn, Larry Eigner (he'd made for me, as a letter, reading & commenting on some of mine, his own…), Ulli McCarthy, Tim Longville ("this is fast poetry reading, folks!") --&, wch is entirely a propos, the wonderful multi-media version of Poland 1931 by Jerome Rothenberg, on the cassette-tape Black Box magazine, sound & text montage, a la John Cage's Roarotorio (after Joyce's Finnegans Wake), wch Walter Billeter copied for me, a favourite for us both --but haunted forever after by Rothenberg's rabbi-radio-klezma-muzak accompaniment of his reading --to the line & its turning, a la Olson, Duncan, Kelly et al, -- impressing his own story the while, the embellishment & run-on, all to the poem's glory! And Chris Mann asked for a lend & gave me tape of Sun Ra as insurance, but i never got my Rothenberg back! And years later Tim Hemensley stole the Sun Ra, when he was in his teens, making his own music by then! Hah!

I told this to Jerome as he stood at the counter at end of the Meet & Greet event --Chris Mann? Ah, yes, he said, remembering something, smiling.
The Shop, house of spirits as it is, as every house is, when truly lived in, concentration of living, like a poem's energies inhering after the intense deposit that writing is, available therefore to similarly intense excavation, exhumation, that is reading, --writing written into & across time by sheer intensity… --"this fabled place" Jerome said when he rose to speak after John Hawke's talk & Joan Fleming's poems, --'fabled' because fellow poets know the Shop & mention it, like Mark Olival-Bartley in the American Poetry Institute in Munich, who urged Rothenberg to visit if ever he came to Melbourne --maybe others, ---Joris? --if they're still connected (after the Millennium anthologies why wouldn't they be?) --Joris reminded of us here by English friends Paul Buck, Glenda George?


[August 1st, 2017, Melbourne]

THIS WRITING LIFE

Listening to the British Library's British Poets CD, which Robert Mitchell kindly gave me the other day because, disappointingly, it was a dud: his expectations of disc 3's WS Graham, Amis, Edwin Morgan, G. Mackay Brown et al, dashed upon the rock'n'roll of Ferlinghetti, Bukowski, Ginsberg, --the American disc slipped incorrectly into the British box-set. And it is a shock on the ear let alone sensibility; the speak easy vs the elocution lesson… The contrast's the greater because one's probably missing Whitman's introduction, from whence the long century of a determined modern cultivation, mostly all free one imagines, even as Ashbery's sestina or Sexton's parables, the colloquial messing up the old poetical.

On the 2nd English disc, Dylan Thomas follows George Barker, and it's his dramatic  diddledy-di which upsets the decorous continuum, as far as annunciation's concerned, from C Day-Lewis through John Betjeman (full of fun, a poetry that sticks in the ear, history recorded via nostalgia and as true as comedy allows), Spender, Auden. Sorley MacLean is different & not only due to the Gaelic (that is, the Gaelic's thoroughly not-Englishness); and R S Thomas in another way. But Dylan Thomas is something else, the strong & continuous flowing, the rhymes & rhythms, the repetitious or better said, the apparent circularity of image & rhyme; in the spirit of Hopkins & Yeats, accessible to their great spirits.

The British disc is an entire lesson, whether or not in the largely bypassed diction --a lesson in the old craft by its late practitioners, the mid 20th Century's sages & stars who were the main men on the shelf when I was beginning, hardly beginning, early '60s ℅ Southampton's public libraries. I got into my own stride by rejecting the lot of them. I was looking for W C Williams not Charles on the poetry shelf!

Listening to the American disc, I can imagine the converse surprise of the American poetry buff, the  horror listening to Larkin or Hughes instead of John Ashbery or Le Roi Jones… And I can hear how Adrienne Rich connects with Anne Sexton & I'm sure Sylvia Plath too. Incantation by which didactic is kept sweet to the lyric. Question : How remain individual (retain eccentric personality) in the vortex of the topical (perhaps the involuntary generality)? How save individual in the maelstrom of the everyday (one's 'particular narrowness' as per Celan)? How prevent the signature American poetry (the declasse vernacular to which all accents adhere, Walt's 'democratic idiom') convoluting to artless prose? My questions, only mine, never finally put away…

(December, 8th, '16)

In Memorium, DAVID CHALONER, 1944-May 10th, 2010

[photograph by Colin Still of John Hall, David Chaloner, Kris Hemensley; Totnes, UK; March, 1972]

A SNAPSHOT : REMEMBERING DAVID CHALONER AND THE EARLY SEVENTIES ON THE ENGLISH POETRY SCENE

As curious a set of signs as one might imagine has led me to the sad news of David Chaloner's death. He'd popped up on Facebook some months ago. He was in Amsterdam --I cant recall whether he said living there or on business. (This has been a period for me in which some of the English poets of my time on the Small Press scene, 1969-72, have come back into my life. Having maintained an at best intermittent correspondence with them over the years, I've been feeling my way back to something more substantial.)
A recent Thursday, day off from the Shop, my mess finally got to me --time to forgo the writing & begin sorting & labeling years of journals, papers, & photographs. And out of a particular folder I pulled a large format, black & white, head & shoulders portrait of an hirsute, smiling trio of poets --John Hall, David Chaloner & myself, in what I recall was a long, upstairs room of John's flat in Totnes, South Devon, invited there by John for the Totnes Arts Festival in March, 1972.
In addition to ourselves there was Bernie O'Regan (photographer & filmmaker, who died in Melbourne in 1996), & Colin Still (a photographer, creator of the photo I've described). David & I gave a poetry reading & also conducted a writing workshop; Bernie showed some short, 8 mm, silent movies (& I have a memory that he baked bread &/or cooked for us, a la Alice's Restaurant), Colin's photos were on show, &, the creme de la creme, John Dankworth's jazz orchestra with Cleo Laine, capped off the festival.**[[see correction]]

Rather like our friend Opal L Nations' fancy of a man "who entered pictures" (--I like these without reservation, Andrew Crozier reportedly told Opal after reading the prose pieces; what have you got against Red Indians? Opal responded), I enter the room in Colin's photograph. Like a friendly ghost I encircle the figures, peering into their faces (our faces)... Most of all, I seeking to enter the moment the photograph captures & forever enacts --that moment which is the world as was configured, right there & then...
Colin's probably said, & I can hear him : keep talking, I want you natural not posed! Possibly the camera's clicked as we've been talking, causing us to pause... John, gripping mug of tea, holds me in a friendly & amused contemplation; David's downward gaze neither here nor there, a chap who's happy in language's air; I'm probably flying, eyes bright with laughter & chat. John's solidly moored by Arran jumper's cable-stitch; David's in sharp jacket, hands in loose-change pockets; yours truly's arms folded across chest, in Indian braided crimson cotton shirt, least prepared for March shivers...
John's jumper catches most of the light that Colin imagined available to his contrasting black & white, anticipated as atmospheric... Did he also have a sense of the drama 'posterity' would inevitably bestow? Could he frame a future's retrospectivity? And what history pulses there (such matter of fact not requiring ramification)?
Holding that photograph for minutes on end, understanding that each one of the trio is who they are, aware there was no situation better than where they were right then. Amen.

Slept on it. Friday morning broke on Facebook 'friend request' from Lucy Chaloner. I couldnt remember if I knew her or not; I imagined she was David's daughter & perhaps he'd referred her to me. I was running late for the train to the City, so postponed opening the email until the evening's return. Thought of David, particularly, during the day. Around closing time Alan Pose says, No doubt you're aware that one of your English poet friends has died? I'm taken aback : Who? David Chaloner, he says, it's on Silliman's Blog & Alan Baker's Leafe site, probably all over Google...
Back home I open Lucy's email. She's inviting me in a general communique to join family & friends at David's funeral, Thursday, 20th May at 1pm, St Peter's Church, Belsize Square in London; "readings by friends & family will be followed by drinks & food in the church (he would have loved that) then on to a nearby pub, details of which will be confirmed. Please come along & be there for him." Later I find on Ken Edwards' blog that David's death follows an 18month battle with cancer.

oOo

Journal, 18 May, 2010
As one's own generation dies -- each time a member of the generation dies --one also grieves for the person one was within that confluence, also gone -- But 'now' & 'then' is congealed by emotion -- As each member dies i realize that part of my sadness is for the life i contributed & was given, the spirit that enlivened me as it coursed through us all -- Crystal identity of the generation -- day, month, year, decade -- And in my case it is the "unfinished business" i have with England --
Brian Marley responded to my Facebook email -- The loss not only for family & friends, he says -- it's for readers also -- DC's poetry is something to cherish -- Let the cherishing begin i agreed --
(...)
To Brian this morning i said that like me, at that time, 1970/71/72, David wasnt in a particular groove -- i mean of course, as i added, he grooved a variety of tunes -- This is seen by the different kinds of poet he published in One -- Peter Hoida & Alistair Wisker e.g., --or was Wisker in Hoida's magazine [Inherited Magazine] alongside David? -- which points back to the (Cambridge) maligned Children of Albion anthology [which actually included poets like Andrew Crozier, John James, Tom Pickard, Tom Raworth & others alongside the disparaged motley] -- which disappointed me too for wanting something it couldnt, & probably now i would say shouldnt, have been -- but the kind of New American poetry we'd have imagined in Melbourne -- something to sit up on same shelf as New Writing USA -- But that anthology represented a lot of what England was & not only according to Michael Horowitz -- If England wasnt, --the New England that is, --if it wasnt the jazzy & performance antidotes to the Movement, & the Pop poets reflecting Pop art & music, it would have been a concoction --another academic formulation albeit non-mainstream -- i guess the Cambridge poets hated the Beat/Hippie/Jazzer image -- I should have been braver & kinder to Horowitz & his anthology -- but i was on a Serious Mission with the American secret service! -- I should say all this somewhere --
[ May 30, 2010. Flicking through some old mags, I find in Poetry London Newsletter (#29, Spring, 1998), in John Welch's review of Barry MacSweeney's The Book of Demons (publ. Bloodaxe), a line to that earlier mentioned antipathy or at least dichotomy. Referring to MacSweeney's first collection, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother (1968), Welch observes, "There were obvious echoes of the Sixties popular music scene in this debut, and the beginnings of a new sense of poetry as performance. A closer inspection of the landscape of attempted poetic renewal at that time might suggest there was a soft-centred and a hard-centred version." Welch's quoting of John Wilkinson (from Angel Exhaust, #11, '94), --"MacSweeney possessed from the start a restless intelligence which alienated him from both the gelatinous culture of the prevalent mainstream verse, and from writers of a lazily sentimental counter-culture who offered direct and untroubled access to a repertoire of self-patented feeling"-- indicates the continuous whetting of the prim & proper brigade's ideological hatchet down through the decades! Even Welch's concluding congratulation of MacSweeney's long line continues the carp, thus the 'voice' MacSweeney 'constructed', "makes use of some of the more positive aspects of the Sixties, its music as well as the very real sense of new possibilities in poetry"! One wonders what a half-decade has to do before it's wholly accepted as birthright! That is to say, ultimately indisputable --and soft centre / hard centre, pah! --we are all made of the time of Our Time!] (...)

[Facebook to Brian Marley : "I'm reordering his Collected (publ. by Salt) for the Shop.. rereading his many little collections last few days... a self-reflexivity wch doesnt exempt the lyrical... and especially rereading letters in which he thinks & rethinks his process & the wherewithal of the poets/poems he's reading... instructive & moving... like me he was not settled into a groove at that time (early 70s); i mean, he grooved a variety of tunes! imagine David on Olson's Archaeologist of Morning (a chalonerish phrase when i think of it!) side by side with his K. Elmslie! Yes, Brian, let the cherishing begin!"]


Wednesday, 19th May, 2010
(...)
Facebook message from Philip Jenkins this morning -- I found him on either Brian Marley's or David C's list of Friends -- Astonishingly he hadnt heard of David's demise -- (...) He said he realized now how important it was to maintain contact -- & a macabre thought, /most of us facing our last years! -- I said that the poet has always known the 'last days' --(it's the condition of the poet's vision) -- I told him everyone is held in one another's memory (he was castigating himself for infidelity)--
(...)

oOo

After three & a half years in Melbourne, I returned, with Retta, to England in September, 1969. Not long back before I was writing to the English poets & little magazine editors I'd discovered on expeditions from Southampton to Indica Bookshop in London where Nick Kimberley was working prior to managing the upstairs poetry department at Compendium Books in Camden Town. Retta recalls to me one of the legendary names of the era. He was Indica's co-owner John Dunbar, and Marianne Faithful's autobiography, Faithful (Penguin, 1994), confirms, "Very shortly after I met John, it was Peter Asher who put the money up for Indica, the art gallery and bookstore John ran together with Barry Miles."
I'd already been in contact with Jim Burns & George Dowden, whose addresses I found in Mike Dugan's great trove of English mags the year before in Melbourne; and I'd begun corresponding with Nathaniel Tarn, whose book, The Beautiful Contradictions, excited both Ken Taylor & myself (--I'd previously known him from his World Wide Open essay/manifesto, published in Miles' International Times counter-culture tabloid, sweet music to my ears). My redrawn map of England included Gordon Jackson & Tim Longville's Grosseteste books & journal, Andrew Crozier's Ferry Press & The Park, Peter Riley's Collection, Peter Finch's Second Aeon, Franklin & Williams' Cyclops, --oh so many mags & numerous poets, willy-nilly across the board... (No wonder F T Prince attributed 'colonial energy' to me, a la Pound, when we met in Southampton via Lee Harwood's direction (--an energy locals didnt normally display, he said; your Australian like Pound's American)-- I was happily but conscientiously all over the place!)

In February, 1970, David responded to my "letter of October", which confirms that he must have been amongst the first of the new correspondents. Poor David explained that his magazine, One, "is hung up... the first plates failed + we are faced with having to type the entire thing + get it back to the printers! ONE/2 is also ready to be put out + I'm sad because of broken promises abt appearance date etc." --the usual et cetera well known to poet-editor-publishers since time immemorial!
"God! Breakthru seems a long way off now! as it must to you with those thousands of miles behind you!" he exclaims. I'm presuming David must have been published in Ken Geering's archetypal & monumental full-scap, mimeod mag of the 60s --and I had left for Australia in April '66 before I knew the fate of the poems I'd submitted, though most probably didnt make the grade! The idea if not the physical form of Breakthru influenced my own early editorial & curatorial endeavours in Melbourne between 1967 & '69. My mag, Our Glass & the La Mama poetry readings (both '68-9) were just such 'breakthrough' manifestations.
Invited by Betty Burstall on my return to Melbourne, '72/3, to revive the La Mama readings, I declined, explaining that I was now committed to an 'internationalist' project, connecting new Australians, for example, with new British & N. Americans just as in the U.K., with my Earth Ship magazine (Southampton, 1970-72), I'd made a place for Australians & N. Americans amongst the new British. I could no longer dedicate myself to grassroots & 'breakthrough' activities --not that they were redundant, but simply someone else would have to take them on. Valery Kirwan enrolled me in one revival around 1981, but it wasnt until Mal Morgan, himself one of the original La Mama Poetry Workshop poets, took it up in 1985, under the name La Mama Poetica, that it was restored. And so it prospers to this day. I suppose the Dan O'Connell & other 'open-mic' readings are the closest to that inaugural come all ye philosophy & format currently.

A letter from John Hall (to whom I'd been referred by Tim Longville as another local poet I might like to meet), in April 1970, attempted to put me right regarding my understanding of Chaloner & Crozier. I dont have my side of the correspondence but can guess that I was after a poetry of statement & larger moves than I was encountering in the English poets.
'Critic' in any sense would be disowned by John, but often he was right on the button where his own poetical companie was involved. For example, regarding David he wrote : "I always read his things hopefully. I take them to be marginal notes on various life processes, simple and obvious, and each one, if it works as song, an analogy or type for other sources of life or energy -- the register of surprise, wonder and therefore love. Very conservative; that is he observes as though there had been no great change in the relation (gravitation) between any objects (living or dead), and I cant see that he's wrong there. His best poems are and will be domestic, his politics is the music that takes place /inside the skull."
Obviously this isnt all that could be said, but sometimes first thought is truly best, and when poets find their work, first wrought's rationale is often still standing at the end. John Hall didnt need to speculate about Andrew Crozier's workings --at times he might well have been his closest relative.
"He's a fastidious poet who works out from an ordinary conversational or meditative cadence, which to a lazy reading [--that's me folks! --though it's less to do with 'laziness' (unless a certain English quality is being ranked here above & against others within the kingdom & certainly amongst the dominions) than it is the estrangement of an unexpected sound, & quite probably what was disadvantaged in the vernacular rampage on both sides of the Atlantic, that exclamatory modernism drowning out most of everything else] can easily disguise the care for the texture and sound of the line. If you take it slowly it's like coming indoors to a darkened room; it's only slowly yr eyes pick out the shapes and colours taht do still gleam there. He eschews false lighting and surface glitter(...)."
Yes indeed; and the case for that kind of English poetry, exemplified by Crozier but shared with others, including David Chaloner, must even now be made, though there may be a greater receptivity at last. What's 40 years in the centuries' old battle of taste? But it goes on --these poetry (fashion) wars --and rereading Robert Hampson & Peter Barry's New British Poetries : The scope of the possible (Manchester Univ. Press, 1993), ostensibly for references to Chaloner, I found in R.J.Ellis's chapter, Mapping the U.K. Little Magazine field, a fair representation of this argument's clash & clamour.
According to Ellis, "Robert Sheppard's defence of The New British Poetry [Paladin, '88] against a Peter Porter attack, clarifies well the discouraging gulf that still exists : "So many aggressive terms in Peter Porter's review for The Observer could be translated from the sneering of the well-anthologised into the language of the neglected. For 'whingeing' read 'angry'; for 'Sixties Old Boys' Society' read 'poets who, since the flash of publicity in the 1960s, have been forced further underground than the 'Underground' ever was; for 'ageing experimentalist' read 'senior formalists'; for 'self-refering hagiography' read 'axiomatic reference points not normally associated with British poetry'."
Hopefully, 21st Century blues contain different orders of distinction & complaint!

*

Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire 26th August, 1970

Dear Kris -- thanks for yr long letter -- hope yr sojourn with John Hall is pleasant -- he lives in a beautiful place!
I'm enclosing some poems [for Earth Ship magazine] -- + a sort of commentary rushed off last night in abt 1 1/2 hours -- I don't know what you feel abt it -- they're only notes of urgency really, are they not? anyway do as you wish with it -- if you decide not to use it will you return it as I've not kept a copy -- just rattled it straight off / OK?
(...)
love to you both from us [David & Mary]
David


oOo
COLLECTED PROMISES

Last night, resting, I noted on the back of an envelope, "the sky so neutral, so pale, it seems hardly to exist". Looking back, 24 hours later, those words seem a suitable description of poetry publishing ventures at the moment.
It occurs to me that somewhere there must be a vast stockpile of poetry, waiting for a new magazine, a new front at which to assemble. Where will it be, in which direction, who will be in command, & with what preconceived notions?

The English Intelligencer, Move, The Park, Broadsheet, Resuscitator, Solstice, Tzarad & Collection (as separate publications & as an amalgamation) have seen their time come & go & have conceded to hang-ups such as financial difficulties, physical & mental factors that can, & do, so easily interfere with an editor's freedom of choice/mind & movement (the latter being an assumption that, more often than not, editors tend to lead a rather nomadic existence), & all the need for them to concentrate on their own work & its development; all of which combines to freeze the urge that motivates their productions.

We are, though, left with one or two magazines that may well help to become the necessary prime movers & foundations for a desperately required resurgence & display of strength: The Curiously Strong - changing hands from Fred Buck who is returning to the US, to Ian Patterson; The Blacksuede Boot - that Barry MacSweeney is to put out; Grosseteste Review - which may well disappear soon, after its time under the editorship of Tim Longville, who controlled its high & refreshing standard of presentation; & Big Venus/Queen Camel - from Nick Kimberley, based at Compendium bookshop in Camden High Street, that should rock the becalmed ship & agitate the passengers!
& of course I have my own little contribution to the list of failures....back in 1967 Barry Dixon, Robert Powell and myself decided to establish our own total revolution. Working from Manchester, a common base, we met & discussed & made plans & got smashed & fell about & finally fell apart. Barry & I gathered the pieces & set to work contacting poets & other editors & contributors & interested people & established our "arts" magazine ONE. Plates for the first issue were typed out, & art-work prepared for Barry's cover design, all of which went to the printer who had promised a cheap, to the point of being almost free, run off of the first issue. 4 weeks later I was informed that of the 250 copies run off, about 3 had been successful. The calamity resulted in despair, & loss of interest, for several months, during which time work for the second issue started to arrive through my letter box.

My own work took precedence, & the lack of action gave me time to regather my dissipated spiritual forces. Barry moved from Manchester work in London, & domestic problems & crises served to hold me away from the next, and overdue, advance. Well, the plates have been re-typed; again, they are ready to be run off: BUT! we're too late, the age of the work in this issue renders it invalid. Now I can only think to include the older work as a supplement to something that will smell of fresh air, & be contemporary to the existing situation; & less tainted with the marks of editorial incompetence. And what may help is a letter I received some weeks back from a guy, Peter Baker, who wishes to get something going, & really sounds like he will. Barry may then get his batch of magazines one fine morning to hawk over the streets, & into the bookshops of London. So in many ways this has a confessional air about it, with the hint of a general apology for all the broken promises, re-promises, capitulations & reassurances through the last few, dragging, fruitless months. So it looks like we may be getting somewhere.... which is the most recent edition of my Collected promises that has not met its deadline. Where is the thing moving again? I'd like to do it, but lack the determination, perhaps; I don't feel qualified to judge this aspect of my life, my poems stand, instead, as the result of the labours the time of the editor. I don't think that being a poet/editor is a bad thing, but from my experience one tends to become subservient to the other, & I know how I prefer to channel my efforts at the moment.

[published in Earth Ship, #1, October,1970.]

oOo

As it happens, the issue also contained correspondence & poetry from Ian Robertson, whom I considered the closest to my own vision of the (Melbourne) La Mama poets' perspective.The little poems, two of three dedicated to Kenneth Patchen & Robert Duncan, are mystical with a political pulse. It's instructive & poignant to read Robertson's confession of September 24th, 1970, and its dovetail with David Chaloner's missive astonishes me all over again.
"dear Kris & Retta -- the sky is so very high over Burwood tonight -- so very high over Melbourne over Australia & it is so comforting to know that it is the same sky over us three, us ALL, that seems, that /is, to me right now, so very comforting. (...)
Flagstones no. 5 was the final edition of the magazine... I just cannot do another one (....) I received yr aerogram on Tuesday Kris -- to read of Dave Chaloner wanting to send me poems -- & of you -- how do i feel! or, how i do feel! it makes me feel as tho' i have let you down at this end of the world(...)"
If one could reach back through time, as hopefully one did through space back then, & say there, there, it's OK, that's life -- 'life' that things end (that is, /things end) and guilt isnt appropriate where harm wasnt intended... If one could know, body & soul, how life's wheels turn, however long they take --the magic of this kind of life-view --and that nothing actually stopped when a /magazine terminated. It had done its job, representing poets & poetry of feeling & spirit; a magazine amenable to vision, embodying community. Well, that was the Sixties & some of the Seventies, & not at all 'academic'!
In the footnote to Ian's contribution, I summarised Flagstones (5 issues, July '69 to April '70) as having "published the best of the New Australian Poetry including Buckmaster / Ken Taylor / Beard / Hutchinson / [John] Jenkins / Adler / [Stephen] Gray / Radzyner / [Lorin] Ford / Costelloe / Egglestone / Kinnaird / [Graeme] Smith / [Alison] Hill / Goodall / Terry Gillmore / Robertson / Dugan & others. Also : [George] Dowden / Margaret Randall / [Jim] Burns / [Tim] Longville / K[ris] & B[ernard] Hemensley."

oOo

Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire 8 April '71

Dear Kris, how many million words do I owe you both
been pretty pissed off of late and the cap came to fit the whole show with a letter from Barry MacSweeney abt that article of mine in ES1 which he's really taken exception to ( / ) I think that he's misread lot of what I was trying to say in those moments of despair when I praised the ones who can admitting that perhaps I am one who can not ( / ) that in his eyes appears to be criminal ( / ) (....)
Yes I've now got me a copy of [Olson's] Archaeologist of the Morning ( / ) not fully into it but getting there ( / ) I mean time rather than understanding ( / ) I get into that man's music from the first pages on in ( / ) have a copy of Distances in the Grove edition from many moons ago ( / ) so know some of the poems of old but the majority are new to me ( / ) & it's really something to have a hold of ( / ) the physical properties of the volume are so related to the man as a poet person ( / ) one wonders if that was considered ( / ) can we trust a publisher to do that with his people ( / ) to get that far into something ( / ) one doubts it ( / ) no, perhaps a happy accident
(...)

oOo

One of the first reviews I wrote in England was of David Chaloner's dark pages slow turns brief salves (Ferry Press, '69). Tim Longville published it in Grosseteste Review (vol. 4, #1), Spring, 1971. I'd written it mid-year 1970. In his letter of 16 August, '70, David disclosed, "Tim tells me that you've written a review of dark pages which he praises highly, & i look forward to seeing yr reactions especially from this distance from the collection in time, looking back etc."
Poet & poem were oracles for me then, literally psychological & political guides for the perplexed. I quite probably assumed the art as given, seeming to overlook the writing itself, keen to suss the ideas. I should say that although intensely caught up in politics, I read massively more poetry than politics. Poets brought the news /not politicians though I respected the charismatic activists.

from "Words for the Lady"

In the very first poem in his book Chaloner writes: "it is / a landscape / I cannot explain / the colours / assail my / eyes" -- this is the problem he seeks to answer thruout the book.
Here is the poet in great doubt of his role -- "I have / named it & / admit to its existence" in this way "the 4 winds rampage / the white chairs / leap" -- (Schwitters wrote that a door didnt slam by accident but by its own will & was himself the best example of an artist who treated all objects as equal in the sense that a zen artist wd have afforded the painting of a human figure the same consideration as a tree which is to say that animate & inanimate objects were of the same magnitude.) By doubt i mean that tho he writes of components he hankers after the whole:
"that speech gags the mouth & words sleep / lightly on the page (what matter) / that windows reflect a passing moon offers / only a factor of the nights motion"
"speech" & "sleep" are synonymous - becos the poem can never record the total picture (with Chaloner reality is always exterior) - the poem is only a reflection - altho later lines show him to grant: "that page that window they are alive" but only in as much "a dark page / slowly turns". His poems have no innate luminous quality - they have no energy of their own except for the inherent energy of the objects they carry. "He offers "discreet comment - / this as token of my / response" & another poem describes his design:
"an exorcism / (of sorts) / a putting into place / writing down / a rearrangement / of said things / there is a calculated / objectivism / a notion of final assembly."
But compare Chaloner's sense of "calculated objectivism" with that of Reznikoff (whose Domestic Scenes are as objective as court logs) or Rakosi -- for in these poems that "final asembly" is far away even tho it intends that state -- the poems are of /intentions rather than /finalities."
(David reminded me of Larry Eigner, although, "Generally Eigner is more assured than Chaloner". But no hint then of his New Yorkers, especially of that English appreciation one only came to know later. )
In the final poem of the book Chaloner furthers the equation: "did I say from here we can hear / trains the swish of lorries one / road away spasmodic voices cleaving / the night / our speech / a cross-reference / codification of events we / redestroy with words / a necessary conflict // as the poem / becomes the precise act / of volition / an obligation / structure which takes the voice to / speech with / words for the lady & / the location"
The book thus 'ends' - Chaloner has travelled from the assertion of words which inadequately reflect to a precise act of volition... During its course i was reminded of a phrase of Louis Zukofsky: "To see is to re-form all speech". Struggles are seldom speedily resolved. Chaloner mentions the "necessary conflict" between speech & words" -- i wd venture the belief that the total man will ultimately record the total picture - will realize himself even as fragment to be par to the whole thing - will unify those departments of vision language & speech -- such is the anticipatory unity of this book.

oOo

Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire 25 June 1971

Dear Kris, this must be the hundredth time I have set-to to write this letter in answer to yours (the very long one!) [indeed! And I'm still amused by Ken Bolton's comment that my book, ThePoem of the Clear Eye (1975, reissued '82) should have been called The Poem of the Big Mouth! As Ken Taylor observed after a particularly long launching-speech I gave : Well, you obviously had something to say, & you said it! But letters are something else --or once they were, before email, before cheap telephone calls damn it!] It's just not been right, that is, what I was about to say each time!
So I will once more begin. Please give Retta our good wishes, its fine about the new Hemensley!
You know I've not even got into the ARCHAEOLOGIST yet, let alone come to a decision on writing on it -- let that fall as it will. Your review of my book didn't come over as presumptious in the least -- far from it, you opened up a lot for me, things that I had not perhaps realized, certainly it was illuminating in the true sense of the word, and something I was pleased to see in such a place, only sad thing is that it will be on no use to anyone who hasn't already got a copy of the book as its out of print, except for those copies still lying in dusty bookshops on dustier book shelves!
This thing about poetry, I don't even know how to categorize my own reactions. I know what you're saying and appreciate your saying it, but I cant get into Kelly, Eshleman et al as I can get into Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch et al and derivations by the company. But I'm truly troubled by Ashbery, in the sense that some of his poems I find so beautiful and lyrical, others so obscure they lose me instantly. I've read his work over and over - intend to continue doing just that until I break through. O'Hara has been on my list for years, and he's OK down the line for me. it occurs to me to wonder what connections this might have with 'painting' -- this will go some of the way, maybe all, to answering your question about the authenticity of the poems - PAINTING, "tomorrow i'll be going out into march", "sunlight slants in", and SWIRL -- God yes they ARE my concerns, and come from very direct experiences, MINE, and recent to the date on the page. They are different because they have to be -- I am unable not to to let my poems move of the same 'ground' as myself, mentally, physically etc etc. I paint. In the 'sunlight' poem I am the protagonist, I /have to be, thats how I work, write, live (I hope!) (How pompous!) (but you'll know what I mean) Only on those occasions when i am moved by my personal mythologies do I 'invent', but again, it's me at the helm, "land ho!", I see the magic island; I suppose its my substitute for drugs, no loner using them, or feeling the need, particularly. I get so 'stoned' on other things (sky, clouds, friends, buildings, pictures, books, possibilities, being)! (....)
Now we're getting to music (all music, as it must be), witness my poem for Maxwell Davies, a superb composer! Its the music of some of these poets, the audacity,put some strange group of words onto a page and Lord you have to work like fuck, or perhaps give up wondering -- I cannot condemn until I am COMPLETELY sure. The reaction in paris to Stravinsky's 'Rites' was a picture of "We don't understand, we will not be troubled, after all there is NO TUNE!"
You see Elmslie has done a considerable amount of work as a librettist. He's into music, therefore, to me, he comes over with a kind of verbal timefulness, a phonetic effect as well as the poem being 'a poem'. Although he is included in the New York Anthology, I think that is a quite loose definition (as far as most of them are concerned!), I would say he might even be closer to Koch than any of the others, an interesting guy altogether.
(....)

*

14 September 1971 Dear Kris,
what occurs in poetry for me has to appeal to the inner whatsit and make me restless, I think, and aware. also, of possibility, and further, so that I am directly affected. Now this maybe because i also write! I don't know? Yes I do, thats true! Anyway language and painting if we're going to use these 2 (and why not?) should contain, (for me), similar elements of structuring. One applies a colour ((or line) or shape) but, need these be related in any other way than being united by the 'frame' (extent of the poem) which after all does provide its own 'significance' and 'meaning'. do you see what I'm getting at. Angela and John Hall spent the weekend up here recently, and a lot of this was worked through at that time, particularly as I have been doing battle for the last year! with my own work, and now, I think, getting somewhere.... And its not to say that the 'frame' takes on the responsibility of a detention centre either, rather it should offer no restriction at all so that all that is around us gets itself included as well, and in no uncertain terms.
(17 September)
Your poems now Kris! ---
What really worries me is this Eshleman/Kelly influence. I have tried to get into what they're doing and trying to say and I'm just left cold -- their stuff seems / sounds (when read aloud) /so archaic, + I can't get its relevance, not to /me anyway. Caterpillar i've gotten a copy of # 14 with some Michael Palmer poems in it and they're about all I can get to -- I pick the thing up continually, its always lying around, but have yet to come into the crystal dawn of its /meaning beyond occult mystery + religious innuendo.
In the Miro sequence the poems that really actually take my eye for more reading (several times in TOTAL) are the "reverie before Jealousy", 1 + 2 of "Photos" and probably "Portrait 1 - 1938". these seem to have a greater sense of control and a density (to use a Hallism) that the rest seem, for me at least, to miss out on a bit.
This criticism applies also to CONSIDERATIONS -- Satyricon 2 is really getting towards the kind of feeling about an event that /I imagine O'Hara used to have (you mention ODES in the 'previous-but--one' poem). How do you feel about him? Those beautiful ODES and The Lunch Poems and the rest. I would see, do see, far more to what he did than I get from the mystics -- and going further to Ashbery, I think what I can best do is quote from the back of "The Double Dream of Spring":
"consciously or not, he has realized that work of the complexity to which he has aspired demands placement against a background fully documenting his wrestlings with problems of scale, syntactical limitations, dislocation and organization.... The chances are very good that he will come to dominate the last third of the century as Yeats, also afflicted with this madness to explain, dominated the first" Howard Wamsley (Poetry)
Elmslie + Koch also do what Ashbery does; but in totally unique and individual ways, creating whole new worlds+ places out of the langauge -- and using a language that is so often underworked and ignored and grey + boring, to build poems of rich multi-coloured multi-directional-dimensional possibilities. (...)
I knew John James and Jeremy Prynne had been at The SONNETS for a long time and I do feel that has percolated through, most certainly as those 2 gentlemen are very much on the MacSweeney hero list to all intents and purposes. I think that Berrigan can do some good things out of that hip posturing (which is only to say, he belongs to a tradition we do not belong to, a cultural background undiluted by the Atlantic. Like the old days when to hitch [? was to hitch] lorries to our California / Cornwall, But lets face it, it's not like the New York / San Francisco thing is it?
I've had much joy from the SONNETS and MANY HAPPY RETURNS and IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN.
(....)

oOo

Cheadle Hulme 14 January 1972
Dear Kris

(....) its some time since I ;ast wrote and this is really related more to a lack of pressure 'outwards' on my part than being 'too busy'! But i have been wooed back, as it were, with a burst of necessary response to various letters; one being John[Hall]'s request to read in Totnes at the end of March. Which I've accepted...... and I'll look forward to seeing you if you do the same..... if all goes to plan etc.
(....)
Congratulations on Timothy to you + Retta (who after all, did the real work of bearing and giving birth) How soon will he set up his own magazine to blast us all apart !?*@@!@
Who exactly is Jacquie Benson? John Robinson mentions her as also being in the first issue of his magazine JOE DIMAGGIO (I've some poems there and CURTAINS/2 (Paul Buck) and Sesheta 2)
(...)
Right then - as soon as i have some poems I'll send them on --
Goodwishes + love to the 3 of you from Mary + me
David

oOo

High Street, Totnes, S,Devon 20th February 1972

Dear Kris, thanks for the two letters, yours and your alter ego's. The latter I passed on to the Arts Fest. committee who okayed it. So 5Pounds plus travelling expenses will be yours. The date of the reading (morning) and workshop (afternoon) will be Monday 27th March. We'll be expecting you on the Satyrday or Nereidday. David [Chaloner] /will becoming, so will Bernie [O'Regan]. I've told Tim [Longville] and John [Riley] about it, so they may be able to come up and see us all some time during your stay.
About poems for Earthship - will try to have a sort out and disentangle what hasnt been either sent or accepted by another mag. The last few months have left me a little confused. I cant remember what I sent to David. Also I dont know yet whether or not Andrew [Crozier] intends to use Week's Bad Groan. I'll have to write and ask him to say finally yes or no. I'd like that to appear somewhere very soon. Meanwhile I have to stockpile fragments and ideas, and wait for the time when I can sort through them and put an unhurried ear to them.
There are two I know are free, because Dave didnt want them for last One. Will enclose them, tho i doubt your interest.
Spent a few hours last Tuesday writing out a little poem 105 times for DAYS.

Love,
John [Hall]

oOo

High Street, Totnes 16th March 1972

Dear Kris,
Thanks. See you on Saturday. If you let me know what time your train arrives I'll meet you. If not, ask the quickest way to the top of the High Street & you'll find that we're above a shop called the Emily Whitby Gallery. Purple.
Look forward to seeing you. Can't promise you a very restful time. by the e nd o fthe term we aren't either rested or restful. And there will be altogether too much happening for comfort.
The reading is scheduled for about 11.00 a.m. on Monday 27th, due to break at 12.30. It's time-tabled against a concert by the school's Pop Group, so all the heads will probably be at that instead. No idea yet how many will be likely to come.
See you, pere de famille. Love to the rest.
John

oOo
London. [May or June, 1972?]

dear Kris & Retta,
news came today (via david chaloner) of Mark Hyatt's death. its probable you already know, it came as a terrible & unexpected shock to me - mainly because we had exchanged a few letters back in march, at the time of his failed suicide attempt & he did seem a little depressed & was let out of hospital. his manuscripts are being gathered by Donald Haworth [Blackburn, Lancashire]. I'm going to get intouch with Donald Haworth about the poems mark sent to me, ie what to use, whether to use at all . . . .
(....)
John [Robinson]

oOo

Dartmouth Park Road, London NW5 3rd July 1972

Dear Kris, What an age I've taken getting these pictures together! Do forgive me. I only hope you think they were worth waiting for.
Actually I quite like one or two of them. I think the 'trio' shot is quite nice. For me it seems to encapsulate what I thought was a very good weekend. That's a very pretentious thing to say! What I really mean is that you're all smiling, and that despite the most appallingly low light level there's some nice texture on John's sweater and on your embroidered shoulder. Whenever I look at that picture I find my eye drawn back and forth from face to face, from John's self-conscious grin to your own leonine smile. I can't help wondering what the conversation was about!
I also like the very black side-lit one. This is the one that reminds me a bit of Michael McClure. (Did you see, by the way, the Peter Fonda film 'The Hired Hand'? - McClure acted in it, playing a poker-playing heavy in the saloon scene!) It might look better with the white border trimmed off.
the three-quarter shot is a bit disappointing, though I'm sure I can do a much better print. I'll have another go next time I'm round Bernie's. I'd like to try a couple of experiments with it: I'd like to print it in sepia to enhance that primitive 'Buffalo Bill' feeling, and I'd also like to try double-printing it with a textured surface, like a rough wall or the bark of a tree. Hopefully the hair, the eyes and the heavy shadow would go black, and the now textureless face would be full of rather bizarre detail, like crumbling brickwork for example.
The fourth picture I don't really care for. the only bit I like is John's out-of-focus head, which I blew up to 10" x 8". It looks quite good. The grain is very crisp and sharp, and it has a nice pointillist texture; and at that size is almost abstract.
Enough about these pictures. Next time I see you I'll do some good ones.
Thank you very, very much for letting me have those Earthships. They gave me a lot of pleasure, and I'm really looking forward to the next one.
Oh, I have a question: what was the source of Prynne's letter to Olson quoted by John Thorpe in 4/5? Has it ever been published?
I'm was sorry to miss you and your wife when you came up to London. Drop a line next time you're coming. Bernie says you're planning to go back to Australia. When will that be?
I hope you 'll get a chance to come up to London a few times before you go. As I'm sure you will have read, the Barnett Newman exhibition opened last week at the Tate, and from all accounts it is very good.
I may be moving in the near future, to a huge flat I've found in Blackheath. It's about two minutes from Greenwich Park, and about five minutes from the Thames. Right on the Meridian. If I move in before you go, (if you go), you must come down.
I'm sorry it's taken me such an age to write. I hope you like the pictures. to stop them going frilly at the ages, stick them on card with Cow gum.

my best to you,
Colin [Still]

oOo

Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire 8 July 1972

Dear Kris, thankyou for the John Thorpe issue -- I've been interested in the odd things he's been doing that have appeared sparsely before and I'm going to give this body of work some attention to determine exactly how and if he's going to meet my expectations.
(....)
I appreciate your comment about Mark Hyatt but his "problem" was not in any way a pose (as I see it) but related to the confusing psychological sociological /facts of his life. I know exactly what you're getting at with "the cul-de-sac of personal determinism" but that was not a chosen stance, it was imposed by external factors on a mind unable to cope totally with their damning consequences.
(.....)
P.S.
I'm working on your cover for ARC [Tony Ward's press, Todmorden, Lancashire]. (I've just completed + sent off the artwork for ROLLING UP HILL / used to be GAINING MOMENTUM, Nick [Kimberley] has started to run that book off--) I'll be writing to Tony in the next few days ---
I think as you said to him that we ought to stick to a typographical cover -- the time + energy in getting permission from publisher + owner for use of THE FARM as a cover illustration may prove to be rather extended -- but if you'd like me to try I will! My idea is to use a type-face that "suggest" some of the character of Miro's paintings, a difficult task but not insurmountable! you'll see soon anyway ---
(...)
David

oOo
Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire 23 October 1972

Dear Kris,
we had hoped to be in London this weekend, as, I believe, you and Retta intend to be, but it now looks quite doubtful, which is very sad. Our trip to Southampton, in fact many planned visits had to be cancelled because I got a part-time job teaching students at Bolton College of Art and Design how to approach their design problems in a way that would suit the world of commerce, where, god help them, they are soon to make the essential bread and butter monies. Anyway, that absorbs the thursday and friday I was normally able to use for travel visits and extended run arounds. The pressures and responsibility of teaching are quite extreme, and very exhausting, at least right now while its all relatively new to me. And of course time is used outside of college hours to prepare, familiarise, and think about whats to come.
With this letter our goodbyes, our love, our good wishes and all other offerings are yours, Retta's and Timothy's for the voyage south and away. It all begins to sound like a nineteenth century novel, certainly some of that "adventure" will be present for you, even though you have been there before, and Retta belongs there etc.
Mary is working on the final skins of ONE/2, but its not likely to be run off and finished until mid-november so it'll be essential for you to let me have a forwarding address as soon as convenient or possible. Time is short, and of course you'll be totally involved in packing, so if you can't spare time or energy to reply before you leave, thats OK.
Eric Mottram has asked for, and accepted, six poems for the winter '72 issue of Poetry Review, he says that he is rather surprised that those gods of literature who make up the [Poetry] society gang have not told him to piss off, or offered some crippling ultimatum. I often wonder what it must cost in the way of integrity, and all such heady notions, to mix with those ageing (and young) academic leeches, whose one desire seems to [be to?] determine the limits of what they feel is their domain by inheritance, and paid up dues, and friends with "influence".
Andrew [Crozier] will have the copy for CHOCOLATE SAUCE with the printers by now, and Nick is working on the last bits of "putting together" on ROLLING UP HILL. I'm working quite well on my prose pieces, and am half way through the B section. As more get written down the principles and notions become that much clearer in that the pieces themselves are often about writing them. Narrative is the medium used to express this. And the characters who involve themselves through me to abstract from the process some part for their own adventures. I mean, essentially the whole exercise /is an adventure, right through from me to the reader, that is if all the clues and various devices act, react and interact as they should. It won't be until the whole "group" has been completed that the "feeling" will project as an advance from point A to point B, and indicate some idea of movement, growth, maturity etc.

Mary's love to all, and mine - good wishes, Bon voyage
David + Mary


ooOoo


[finished typing June 3,2010, in Westgarth, Melbourne;
this hommage dedicated to Mary & Lucy Chaloner]

[Many thanks to Vera Di Campli San Vito for uploading Colin Still's original photograph]

[[July 28/10, ** see correction in July,10 Poems & Pieces]]