Thursday 17th December, '09; 5pm; Poetry Night in English and Arabic, featuring Iraqui poets : Basim Furat, presently living in Vientiane/Laos, and Khalid Al-Hilli, from Melbourne.
Shop 111, Whittlesea Community Connection, corner Cooper street and High street, Epping.
Friday 18th December, '09; 6 for 6.30pm; the publication of Barry Hill's chapbook, Four LinesEast, published by Anthony Lynch's Whitmore Press (Geelong); to be launched by poet and fine press printer, Alan Loney. At Collected Works Bookshop, level 1/37 Swanston street, Melbourne.
Everyone welcome!
Further enquiries, Kris Hemensley, 9654 8873
Showing posts with label Basim Furat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Basim Furat. Show all posts
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
BLOOMSDAY 2009 + COLLECTED WORKS' AUTUMN REPORT
Farewell Autumn, welcome Winter! April & May have come & gone! We'd better advertise Bloomsday then, the annual June 16th celebration falling this year on the Tuesday, which will be the next event at the Shop. In recent years, the profusion of Bloomsday events elsewhere leads us to concentrate our reading into the lunch period, midday til 2.30 or so. All James Joyce fans welcome!
The Autumn report, begun late March, was put to the side while I composed The Divine Issue (published in April), and though I took up the former again in early May, I was then wonderfully diverted by correspondence flowing from TDI as well as revisiting the same period's literary material, some of which research accrues now as its Addendum.
Had I been better organized I'd have flagged the two May events, namely the launch of Mary Napier's spoken-word CD, Open Thoughts, on the 15th, and the tribute reading for Dorothy Porter on the 28th.
A major distraction has been Loretta's health glitch (--an irregularity detected via breast screening which led to needle biopsy and then surgery for breast cancer; disappointingly this is a continuing story with further though smaller surgery in the offing)... On the day Dorothy's tribute took place at Collected Works, Loretta was having her operation at the Peter Mac. What I called 'exquisite irony', Jenny Harrison (who, with Gig Ryan, curated & catered the Tribute) named a 'symmetry' in which Dorothy was linked to Retta & all women touched by the illness. There was never a thought to cancel the event; Retta would have been appalled. She was certainly at the shop in spirit just as all her well-wishers were with her at the Peter Mac...
Disaster & disease affect everyone; the poets die the same kind of deaths as everyone else. Today I've read a notice posted by Lorin Ford on the Overload Nation poetry site concerning the death of Andrea Sherwood. We catch our breath, then breathe again... Geoff Eggleston, Dorothy Porter --mourned & celebrated by their families & literary communities in December... In February the fires came. Entire hamlets, towns disappeared. Family & friends were burnt out &/or killed. Young poet Ella Holcombe's parents perished in Kinglake. The subsequent memorial service at Montsalvat, attended by Melbourne poets in solidarity with Ella, was also a grieving for that whole community... In Redesdale, Robert Kenny faught for his house for ten minutes before abandoning it to save his own life. His academic work-in-progress was backed-up at La Trobe University but library, archives, art work & studio are all gone... From Berlin the shocking news of artist, print-maker Julia Harman's tragic & untimely death --she was Tim Hemensley's first serious partner, and felt that however separated by distance in life, & then by his death, she was always with him, and now she is I guess... Concentric circles of all whom one considers family. A good friend of the Shop, Tim Sheppard, died on the 11th March after illness. A great devotee of poetry, especially the 1st World War British poets, he also wrote poems although a collection never saw light of day...
For the poets, as I'm fond of saying, t'was always so. All of this in the midst of life. And life goes on (--and it does go on despite the traumatisation of survivors --so well and still do I recall the experience of 6 years ago when the fact of my son's death was like an imposed nakedness upon me -- worse : I felt skinned, scourged of my skin, wearing only the fact of his death, feeling as I stood there in the world that only I knew the catastrophe and no one could see what I was feeling)... Some of the life that goes on, for the poet, involves the readings & launches, gatherings of the clan... For the Melbourne poet these are all around town, constantly, if the handbills or emails I see are any indication.
Collected Works' Autumn season kicked off on the 12th March with the first of two new poetry collections published by Barry Scott's Transit Lounge : Kent McCarter's In the Hungry Middle of Here (--launched by Jenny Lea, whom I dont think I've seen since I dropped in on a Meanjin/Overland cricket match on the Domain Oval in South Yarra --early 90s? --I'm not sure whether she was playing or barracking but we chatted at tea in amongst the trestle tables & eskies --and what a dynamo was Meanjin's skipper, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, clapping for attention, darting hither & thither in the field when he wasnt bowling --but that's another story!), & Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobudur (launched by Tim Lindsey from the Asia Law Centre) on the 20th. Good attendances for both, more local poets at McCarter's, lots of Asian Studies people at Mackenzie's.
It's a truism in the Melbourne writing & performance community now that with the scene's current proliferation there are always going to be new names, poets one hasnt previously encountered. Blurbs from Gig Ryan & CWC for McCarter underlined my ignorance. Conversely, my blurb for Jenny Mackenzie attests a long acquaintance with author & family punctuated for the times she lived in China.
I remember twenty years ago Jennifer thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights as a potential publisher of her Borobudur project. This must have been canvassed around about 1985 since that was when Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books withdrew from the fray, having to decline such new writers as Brian Castro as well as foreclosing what had become a new writing stable including John Scott, Anna Couani, Ken Taylor, Ken Bolton, Chris Barnett, Ania Walwicz, John Anderson, Laurie Duggan, Walter Billeter, Kenny himself & yours truly. Who knows how it might have developed had personal & financial conditions played out differently? Rigmarole might now still have been the major small-press in Australia that one or two publishers in North America survived sufficiently long to become over there. But then again, gaps are inevitably filled and the culture is always changing, implying different aesthetical & political imperatives for different times. Rigmarole in the mid to late 80s would have been a natural home for Borobudur. While congratulating Jenny Mackenzie's tenacity and sighing with her At last, at last, one realizes it was more the case of putting something aside than of battling for twenty years; even so, twenty years is quite a hiatus.
A note now on Tim Lindsey's comments (overwhelmingly in the poet's favour)... Inevitably it was an Asian Studies/Foreign Affairs appreciation of the book as a cultural-political object --that is, Mackenzie's poem was read as a long overdue Australian translation of a classic Javanese story subsuming crucial aspects of that tradition, a belated but worthy act reflecting Australian recognition of the antiquity & authority of an important geopolitical neighbour.
Lindsey's pitch was not uninteresting --indeed, in the context of an exotic literary publication, his political & economic language was an instructive counterpoint. However, as I quipped to him later, I'd contend Indonesian-Australian relations, as with East-West relations in general, are a two-way street. Interesting that Australian ignorance of Javanese epic is supposedly indicative of an Australian know-nothing arrogance which will marginalise us in the future; yet the lay observation of the Asian neighbours' voracious appetite for Western popular forms, from democracy & personal freedoms to t-shirts & rock & roll, is unmentioned. Actually, Western translation of Asian literary & religious classics is the typical form of the Anglo-European interaction with Asia over a very long period, and as fast as we gobble up their elite texts so do they our popular ones.
It also occurred to me last year, after meeting a Singaporean poet & academic, that his expertise in modern British poetry, from Hardy to the present, surely curries our conception of the post-colonial! Furthermore, the considerable East-West collaboration of artists & writers, including Australian & Asian, in my opinion significantly corrects the postcolonial ideological cliche. I offered Tim Lindsey the examples of Sandy Fitts (whose View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press, '08) has won this year's Anne Elder Prize for a first collection) & Jane Gibbian (Ardent is her first full collection, published by Giramondo Press, '08) as Aussie poets redeeming quality collaboration from their trips to Vietnam. I also mentioned to him Cathy O'Brien's description of her meeting in Vientiane, Laos with an Australian colleague's partner, the Iraqui poet Basim Furat, residing there after a spell in New Zealand where, according to Mark Pirie, he had impressed the local scene. They may well collaborate in the future. For me a tiny but interesting example of the hybridization increasingly possible in global culture.
Of course, violent displacement is also increasing & is one obvious explanation of such unlikely crosscurrents. Yet let's recall Ford Madox Ford's witty definition of English culture, against the xenophobia of his day, as the happy result of "successive periods of unrest amongst the Continental peoples".
_________________________________________________________
Kris Hemensley
March/May/June 4 '09
The Autumn report, begun late March, was put to the side while I composed The Divine Issue (published in April), and though I took up the former again in early May, I was then wonderfully diverted by correspondence flowing from TDI as well as revisiting the same period's literary material, some of which research accrues now as its Addendum.
Had I been better organized I'd have flagged the two May events, namely the launch of Mary Napier's spoken-word CD, Open Thoughts, on the 15th, and the tribute reading for Dorothy Porter on the 28th.
A major distraction has been Loretta's health glitch (--an irregularity detected via breast screening which led to needle biopsy and then surgery for breast cancer; disappointingly this is a continuing story with further though smaller surgery in the offing)... On the day Dorothy's tribute took place at Collected Works, Loretta was having her operation at the Peter Mac. What I called 'exquisite irony', Jenny Harrison (who, with Gig Ryan, curated & catered the Tribute) named a 'symmetry' in which Dorothy was linked to Retta & all women touched by the illness. There was never a thought to cancel the event; Retta would have been appalled. She was certainly at the shop in spirit just as all her well-wishers were with her at the Peter Mac...
Disaster & disease affect everyone; the poets die the same kind of deaths as everyone else. Today I've read a notice posted by Lorin Ford on the Overload Nation poetry site concerning the death of Andrea Sherwood. We catch our breath, then breathe again... Geoff Eggleston, Dorothy Porter --mourned & celebrated by their families & literary communities in December... In February the fires came. Entire hamlets, towns disappeared. Family & friends were burnt out &/or killed. Young poet Ella Holcombe's parents perished in Kinglake. The subsequent memorial service at Montsalvat, attended by Melbourne poets in solidarity with Ella, was also a grieving for that whole community... In Redesdale, Robert Kenny faught for his house for ten minutes before abandoning it to save his own life. His academic work-in-progress was backed-up at La Trobe University but library, archives, art work & studio are all gone... From Berlin the shocking news of artist, print-maker Julia Harman's tragic & untimely death --she was Tim Hemensley's first serious partner, and felt that however separated by distance in life, & then by his death, she was always with him, and now she is I guess... Concentric circles of all whom one considers family. A good friend of the Shop, Tim Sheppard, died on the 11th March after illness. A great devotee of poetry, especially the 1st World War British poets, he also wrote poems although a collection never saw light of day...
For the poets, as I'm fond of saying, t'was always so. All of this in the midst of life. And life goes on (--and it does go on despite the traumatisation of survivors --so well and still do I recall the experience of 6 years ago when the fact of my son's death was like an imposed nakedness upon me -- worse : I felt skinned, scourged of my skin, wearing only the fact of his death, feeling as I stood there in the world that only I knew the catastrophe and no one could see what I was feeling)... Some of the life that goes on, for the poet, involves the readings & launches, gatherings of the clan... For the Melbourne poet these are all around town, constantly, if the handbills or emails I see are any indication.
Collected Works' Autumn season kicked off on the 12th March with the first of two new poetry collections published by Barry Scott's Transit Lounge : Kent McCarter's In the Hungry Middle of Here (--launched by Jenny Lea, whom I dont think I've seen since I dropped in on a Meanjin/Overland cricket match on the Domain Oval in South Yarra --early 90s? --I'm not sure whether she was playing or barracking but we chatted at tea in amongst the trestle tables & eskies --and what a dynamo was Meanjin's skipper, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, clapping for attention, darting hither & thither in the field when he wasnt bowling --but that's another story!), & Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobudur (launched by Tim Lindsey from the Asia Law Centre) on the 20th. Good attendances for both, more local poets at McCarter's, lots of Asian Studies people at Mackenzie's.
It's a truism in the Melbourne writing & performance community now that with the scene's current proliferation there are always going to be new names, poets one hasnt previously encountered. Blurbs from Gig Ryan & CWC for McCarter underlined my ignorance. Conversely, my blurb for Jenny Mackenzie attests a long acquaintance with author & family punctuated for the times she lived in China.
I remember twenty years ago Jennifer thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights as a potential publisher of her Borobudur project. This must have been canvassed around about 1985 since that was when Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books withdrew from the fray, having to decline such new writers as Brian Castro as well as foreclosing what had become a new writing stable including John Scott, Anna Couani, Ken Taylor, Ken Bolton, Chris Barnett, Ania Walwicz, John Anderson, Laurie Duggan, Walter Billeter, Kenny himself & yours truly. Who knows how it might have developed had personal & financial conditions played out differently? Rigmarole might now still have been the major small-press in Australia that one or two publishers in North America survived sufficiently long to become over there. But then again, gaps are inevitably filled and the culture is always changing, implying different aesthetical & political imperatives for different times. Rigmarole in the mid to late 80s would have been a natural home for Borobudur. While congratulating Jenny Mackenzie's tenacity and sighing with her At last, at last, one realizes it was more the case of putting something aside than of battling for twenty years; even so, twenty years is quite a hiatus.
A note now on Tim Lindsey's comments (overwhelmingly in the poet's favour)... Inevitably it was an Asian Studies/Foreign Affairs appreciation of the book as a cultural-political object --that is, Mackenzie's poem was read as a long overdue Australian translation of a classic Javanese story subsuming crucial aspects of that tradition, a belated but worthy act reflecting Australian recognition of the antiquity & authority of an important geopolitical neighbour.
Lindsey's pitch was not uninteresting --indeed, in the context of an exotic literary publication, his political & economic language was an instructive counterpoint. However, as I quipped to him later, I'd contend Indonesian-Australian relations, as with East-West relations in general, are a two-way street. Interesting that Australian ignorance of Javanese epic is supposedly indicative of an Australian know-nothing arrogance which will marginalise us in the future; yet the lay observation of the Asian neighbours' voracious appetite for Western popular forms, from democracy & personal freedoms to t-shirts & rock & roll, is unmentioned. Actually, Western translation of Asian literary & religious classics is the typical form of the Anglo-European interaction with Asia over a very long period, and as fast as we gobble up their elite texts so do they our popular ones.
It also occurred to me last year, after meeting a Singaporean poet & academic, that his expertise in modern British poetry, from Hardy to the present, surely curries our conception of the post-colonial! Furthermore, the considerable East-West collaboration of artists & writers, including Australian & Asian, in my opinion significantly corrects the postcolonial ideological cliche. I offered Tim Lindsey the examples of Sandy Fitts (whose View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press, '08) has won this year's Anne Elder Prize for a first collection) & Jane Gibbian (Ardent is her first full collection, published by Giramondo Press, '08) as Aussie poets redeeming quality collaboration from their trips to Vietnam. I also mentioned to him Cathy O'Brien's description of her meeting in Vientiane, Laos with an Australian colleague's partner, the Iraqui poet Basim Furat, residing there after a spell in New Zealand where, according to Mark Pirie, he had impressed the local scene. They may well collaborate in the future. For me a tiny but interesting example of the hybridization increasingly possible in global culture.
Of course, violent displacement is also increasing & is one obvious explanation of such unlikely crosscurrents. Yet let's recall Ford Madox Ford's witty definition of English culture, against the xenophobia of his day, as the happy result of "successive periods of unrest amongst the Continental peoples".
_________________________________________________________
Kris Hemensley
March/May/June 4 '09
Saturday, August 30, 2008
COLLECTED WORKS BOOKSHOP EVENTS, August 2008
VIVE LE CONNECTIONS!
Following the launches, in late July, of Famous Reporter magazine (#37,'08) & Lorin Ford's A Wattle Seedpod [see the blog posting for the launch-speech on this site], Collected Works Bookshop hosted two events on Friday, 8th of August, in the Overload Poetry Festival, namely, a lunch-time reading by Pi O from his new book, Big Numbers (Collective Effort, '08), & a reading to show-case three books from Small Change Press (Queensland), featuring Matt Hetherington (I think We Have), David Stavanger (And the Ringmaster Said) & Nathan Shepherdson (What Marian Drew Never Told Me About the Light).
Crowded itineraries, Melbourne's late-winter cold snap, who knows what explains small attendances? No shortage of interest & (poetical) issues-arising though. For example, Pi O's work (& reading) in the continuing echo of the brief exchange we had years ago, down in our Flinders Street basement-shop, late 90s, early 2000s --at a reading by one of the American visitors of that year, Andrew Zawacki, which I think did attract a decent crowd (--and I recall objecting to Zawacki's statement that although the poems, of a particular sequence he was reading to us, referred to 'Scotland' --written there perhaps-- they told us nothing, he said, of 'Scotland'... At the very least I heard this as a pooh-poohing of the particularities of place and a begging the question of 'place' where 'particularity' per se might be just such a defining impress as will register 'place'... "Of course, that's the postmodernist heresy!" I interjected, having in mind the spurning of the Real in the fashionable name of the 'construct', as though the ever more sophisticated apprehension of 'representation' had excused one's existential burden & expression, rendered it passe --and I said something about 'voice' & its duel with 'text', their essential & complimentary parts in writing, and emphasised the eccentric aspect of 'voice' as the vital motor of poetry! Sounds like a speech in retrospect! --it wasnt, just the interjection & a blurted version of the foregoing --to which, I'm always amused to remember, Kevin Hart, beside me, observed genially, "that's a bold call, Kris!" He quoted some Blanchot on the relation of & distinction between Art & World; I responded saying it was never mutually exclusive; and Andrew Zawacki resumed his reading!) --At the end of formalities, Pi O told me he'd disagreed with my comments, contending that poetry depended upon 'editing', not 'voice'. I think he quoted Olson's practice, his interpretation of which I then disputed. I remain unconvinced, or rather I remain convinced of 'voice'! At some stage I'd like to think this through again, --and my thoughts on the 'saying' / 'singing' distinction offered in my recent discussion of John Kinsella [see my blog, John Kinsella & Judith Bishop's Glittering Prizes], might be a start...
The lunchtime reading confirmed for me that Pi O's 'voice' is both distinctive & essential in for, example, his Fitzroy local-history poems; no matter that he's quoting the speech around him, it's the wonderful unpredictability of voice, making & residing in very particular narratives, that informs, sustains & distinguishes his poetry. His penchant for absurd &/or ironic juxtaposition of newspaper reports & gathered statistics might be his idea of 'editing', but they're hardly unspoken, that is to say, there is a pattern to the humour or chagrin or whatever the aggregate effect might be, and in pattern there is identity, and in identity there is voice! The collage is shaped by the pattern of its elements; its shape is its voice!
Connections, coincidences, acausal parallelisms, are, if not the stuff of life then its efflorescence.The other day, for instance, about to take up pen to write a note on the Small Change Press reading --specifically to mention one or two people in the room who added an international dimension to the event (--there were the Italians, about whom something anon, & Ahmed Hashim, the first of the Iraqui poets we've come to meet in Melbourne over the past few years), in fact, Ahmed was in my head (--perhaps because I'd recently managed to open the file he'd sent me with the latest epistle in our letter-poem exchange and told him at the reading how I had it now & liked it, especially the bit about Henry Miller : "suddenly, Henry Miller knocks on my door / he was surprised, couldn't believe modern life in 2008 / doesn't respect millionaires, must be a billionaire!") when Cathy O'Brien rang me from Vientiane, not with an update about the Mekong's flooding, which had been worrying me despite her typically stoical & amused attitude to her own security, sand-bagging with her community as the river's level rose just across the street from their homes, but to tell me that the husband of one of her teacher colleagues (they'd lived in New Zealand & were now in Lao PDR) was an Iraqui poet with several books published, --Mr Furat! Cathy hasnt met a poet there in five years so she was tickled pink at the prospect!
A quick Google gave me a potted biography & an essay by Mark Pirrie (editor of Headworx, published by Salt & various NZ presses, also met some years ago in the Shop), available at www.Jehat.com. Basim Furat, born in 1967, had escaped from Iraq in '96, under threat from the Saddam regime for certain poems he'd written; came to New Zealand via Jordan in '97 and "has emerged as one of his adopted country's most gifted new poets," according to Pirrie --two books in translation, Here and There, & The Moon that Excels in Nothing but Waiting...
Next link in the chain, I thought, will be to ask Ahmed if he knows Basim! But then it dawned on me : I've actually met Basim Furat! Perhaps even introduced by Ahmed! I looked in my library and found that indeed I do have his miniature book, The Moon..., which he signed for me in the Shop in January, 2006! What a small world!
Regarding the Italians, two Maxes as it happens, one, Massimiliano Mandorlo, had found the Shop earlier in the week & so learnt of the reading. The Melbourne literary scene couldnt have been a total mystery since Simon West, whom I mentioned to Max as a reader of Zanzotto, was also known to him. On the night, Matt Hetherington, having been introduced, welcomed them to the reading with his recitation, in Italian, & from memory, of an exquisite little poem by Ungaretti, corrected for pronunciation only once by the visitors! Mandorlo had given us copies of the Italian literary journal, clanDestino (from Rimini), now in its 21st year, of which he told us he was a current collaborator. Pleasant to talk to him as the first Italian poet to visit home or shop since Adriano Spatola & Giulia Niccolai thirty years ago (--I'd described the occasion in a swan-song piece for Meanjin Quarterly that year)... Spatola, I prompted him, youngest of the Novissimi, oldest of the Gruppo 63 --and yes, he knew of him but not well. I said he had died, and remembered Adriano & Giulia as big smokers & drinkers. They were friends of the Swiss-Italian poet & artist, Franco Beltrametti, also dead now, with whom we'd corresponded in the'70s --the great connection between the experimental American & European poets of that era, perfectly reflected in the title of his anthology, The Sperlonga Manhattan Express... Mandorlo was travelling soon to Brisbane so it was especially fortuitous for him to attend the Queensland press's reading and make the aquaintance of Nathan Shepherdson & David Stavanger! I believe he's also interested in translating Shepherdson into Italian...
All of this, of course, in the wings of the Small Change poets' reading : Hetherington's aphoristic poems nailing what sounds like traditional wisdom to surrealistic masts; Stavanger's hilarious & surreal narratives, for example Letters to Your Anus & the delightfully ironic & instructive Old Poet to Young Poet; Shepherdson's unravellings of perception's daily register (in this sequence interacting with photography), lyrical & poignant in their search for meaning...
Vive le connections!
--Kris Hemensley
Following the launches, in late July, of Famous Reporter magazine (#37,'08) & Lorin Ford's A Wattle Seedpod [see the blog posting for the launch-speech on this site], Collected Works Bookshop hosted two events on Friday, 8th of August, in the Overload Poetry Festival, namely, a lunch-time reading by Pi O from his new book, Big Numbers (Collective Effort, '08), & a reading to show-case three books from Small Change Press (Queensland), featuring Matt Hetherington (I think We Have), David Stavanger (And the Ringmaster Said) & Nathan Shepherdson (What Marian Drew Never Told Me About the Light).
Crowded itineraries, Melbourne's late-winter cold snap, who knows what explains small attendances? No shortage of interest & (poetical) issues-arising though. For example, Pi O's work (& reading) in the continuing echo of the brief exchange we had years ago, down in our Flinders Street basement-shop, late 90s, early 2000s --at a reading by one of the American visitors of that year, Andrew Zawacki, which I think did attract a decent crowd (--and I recall objecting to Zawacki's statement that although the poems, of a particular sequence he was reading to us, referred to 'Scotland' --written there perhaps-- they told us nothing, he said, of 'Scotland'... At the very least I heard this as a pooh-poohing of the particularities of place and a begging the question of 'place' where 'particularity' per se might be just such a defining impress as will register 'place'... "Of course, that's the postmodernist heresy!" I interjected, having in mind the spurning of the Real in the fashionable name of the 'construct', as though the ever more sophisticated apprehension of 'representation' had excused one's existential burden & expression, rendered it passe --and I said something about 'voice' & its duel with 'text', their essential & complimentary parts in writing, and emphasised the eccentric aspect of 'voice' as the vital motor of poetry! Sounds like a speech in retrospect! --it wasnt, just the interjection & a blurted version of the foregoing --to which, I'm always amused to remember, Kevin Hart, beside me, observed genially, "that's a bold call, Kris!" He quoted some Blanchot on the relation of & distinction between Art & World; I responded saying it was never mutually exclusive; and Andrew Zawacki resumed his reading!) --At the end of formalities, Pi O told me he'd disagreed with my comments, contending that poetry depended upon 'editing', not 'voice'. I think he quoted Olson's practice, his interpretation of which I then disputed. I remain unconvinced, or rather I remain convinced of 'voice'! At some stage I'd like to think this through again, --and my thoughts on the 'saying' / 'singing' distinction offered in my recent discussion of John Kinsella [see my blog, John Kinsella & Judith Bishop's Glittering Prizes], might be a start...
The lunchtime reading confirmed for me that Pi O's 'voice' is both distinctive & essential in for, example, his Fitzroy local-history poems; no matter that he's quoting the speech around him, it's the wonderful unpredictability of voice, making & residing in very particular narratives, that informs, sustains & distinguishes his poetry. His penchant for absurd &/or ironic juxtaposition of newspaper reports & gathered statistics might be his idea of 'editing', but they're hardly unspoken, that is to say, there is a pattern to the humour or chagrin or whatever the aggregate effect might be, and in pattern there is identity, and in identity there is voice! The collage is shaped by the pattern of its elements; its shape is its voice!
Connections, coincidences, acausal parallelisms, are, if not the stuff of life then its efflorescence.The other day, for instance, about to take up pen to write a note on the Small Change Press reading --specifically to mention one or two people in the room who added an international dimension to the event (--there were the Italians, about whom something anon, & Ahmed Hashim, the first of the Iraqui poets we've come to meet in Melbourne over the past few years), in fact, Ahmed was in my head (--perhaps because I'd recently managed to open the file he'd sent me with the latest epistle in our letter-poem exchange and told him at the reading how I had it now & liked it, especially the bit about Henry Miller : "suddenly, Henry Miller knocks on my door / he was surprised, couldn't believe modern life in 2008 / doesn't respect millionaires, must be a billionaire!") when Cathy O'Brien rang me from Vientiane, not with an update about the Mekong's flooding, which had been worrying me despite her typically stoical & amused attitude to her own security, sand-bagging with her community as the river's level rose just across the street from their homes, but to tell me that the husband of one of her teacher colleagues (they'd lived in New Zealand & were now in Lao PDR) was an Iraqui poet with several books published, --Mr Furat! Cathy hasnt met a poet there in five years so she was tickled pink at the prospect!
A quick Google gave me a potted biography & an essay by Mark Pirrie (editor of Headworx, published by Salt & various NZ presses, also met some years ago in the Shop), available at www.Jehat.com. Basim Furat, born in 1967, had escaped from Iraq in '96, under threat from the Saddam regime for certain poems he'd written; came to New Zealand via Jordan in '97 and "has emerged as one of his adopted country's most gifted new poets," according to Pirrie --two books in translation, Here and There, & The Moon that Excels in Nothing but Waiting...
Next link in the chain, I thought, will be to ask Ahmed if he knows Basim! But then it dawned on me : I've actually met Basim Furat! Perhaps even introduced by Ahmed! I looked in my library and found that indeed I do have his miniature book, The Moon..., which he signed for me in the Shop in January, 2006! What a small world!
Regarding the Italians, two Maxes as it happens, one, Massimiliano Mandorlo, had found the Shop earlier in the week & so learnt of the reading. The Melbourne literary scene couldnt have been a total mystery since Simon West, whom I mentioned to Max as a reader of Zanzotto, was also known to him. On the night, Matt Hetherington, having been introduced, welcomed them to the reading with his recitation, in Italian, & from memory, of an exquisite little poem by Ungaretti, corrected for pronunciation only once by the visitors! Mandorlo had given us copies of the Italian literary journal, clanDestino (from Rimini), now in its 21st year, of which he told us he was a current collaborator. Pleasant to talk to him as the first Italian poet to visit home or shop since Adriano Spatola & Giulia Niccolai thirty years ago (--I'd described the occasion in a swan-song piece for Meanjin Quarterly that year)... Spatola, I prompted him, youngest of the Novissimi, oldest of the Gruppo 63 --and yes, he knew of him but not well. I said he had died, and remembered Adriano & Giulia as big smokers & drinkers. They were friends of the Swiss-Italian poet & artist, Franco Beltrametti, also dead now, with whom we'd corresponded in the'70s --the great connection between the experimental American & European poets of that era, perfectly reflected in the title of his anthology, The Sperlonga Manhattan Express... Mandorlo was travelling soon to Brisbane so it was especially fortuitous for him to attend the Queensland press's reading and make the aquaintance of Nathan Shepherdson & David Stavanger! I believe he's also interested in translating Shepherdson into Italian...
All of this, of course, in the wings of the Small Change poets' reading : Hetherington's aphoristic poems nailing what sounds like traditional wisdom to surrealistic masts; Stavanger's hilarious & surreal narratives, for example Letters to Your Anus & the delightfully ironic & instructive Old Poet to Young Poet; Shepherdson's unravellings of perception's daily register (in this sequence interacting with photography), lyrical & poignant in their search for meaning...
Vive le connections!
--Kris Hemensley
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