MYTHS & TEXTS

MYTHS & TEXTS


Ive signed & inscribed it "from Retta, Myer's sale, Feb. 68" --amazement & glee when she presented Gary Snyder's little book, Myths & Texts, to me. Avant-garde hunter gatherers in them thar days. The shining lights of the New Writing ever in our sights. Golden season of Franklin's bookshop in Russell Street throughout '66, first year of my emigration, when every visit turned up something --a paperback Kerouac, Holmes or Brossard, Broyard, Cassil, Mandel (a hardback), Salinger, Mailer et al… And continued after I met Loretta, --through '67, '68, all & any of the many Melbourne bookshops --Gaston Renard, the Russian Bookshop, Cheshires, the Anchorage, --but Franklin's by far the best 2nd hander…

In February '68 I'm in the lap of luxury having been let go by the Education Department (Technical Division), advised before end of term, December '67, that I wouldn't be re-employed at Williamstown Tech after the summer holiday, yet fully paid for the entire period! Friends told me to go to the Teachers Union and fight it. The Union said it was a strange case since a sacking before end of school year normally meant no holiday wages at all. Unless I seriously wanted a teaching career they advised me to take the money & run!  I'd known from the moment I set foot at Williamstown Tech that the Principal couldn't handle my looks or my books --long hair in a pony tail, poetry anthologies & anarchist tracts --and the Teachers Union anti-conscription petition I pinned up on the staff notice-board the last straw --unless it was the cricket match I unilaterally abandoned (defacto sports master & umpire in addition to my English & Social Studies brief) when one team's Anglo-Australian boys and the Greeks & others of the opposition attacked each other with bats & stumps --'race riot' as I declared it, occasioned by the Greeks belting the Aussies around the park, wielding cricket bats as though baseball clubs, not guarding their wicket, no technique, solely eye & instinct… Next day at the staff meeting, a more liberal minded teacher than most, a literary man, Tennessee Williams enthusiast, interceded in my castigation. If Mr H agreed, he said, he'd gladly cane the perpetrators, beat some respect into them! Culture & race had nothing to do with it, discipline was the key, he said!

Another teacher I occasionally spoke to, Mrs Brass, sympathised with me about the incident. Over the years I've thought her husband was the journalist Douglas Brass because of their shared name and memory of her reading & discussing articles in The Australian for which he was a columnist, but it isn't so.  Additionally Ive found her on the Web described as teaching at Williamstown High, so perhaps she was only temporarily at the Tech school. Like me she wasn't trained but hired on interview in that uncredentialed era. Ruth Brass was from Germany and if we spoke in the staff-room I'm sure my friendship with Inge Timm & visiting her in Soest, Westphalia in '65 would have cropped up. She was connected with the Goethe Institute in Melbourne and the thought begins to percolate that late '70s, when Walter Billeter introduced me to its splendid library, I may have talked to her there and perhaps brought up our earlier Williamstown connection!

Peter Norman was my head of humanities, an athlete, to whom I told the story of visiting the great Percy Cerutty at his famous Portsea training camp, under the wing of my friend Kelvin Bowers, British middle-distance junior champion, whom I'd met on the migrant boat in '66, & who'd been invited to train there. I remember Peter as often around the corridor in track suit as in shirt & tie. I probably thought he was quicker on his feet than tongue. I'd picked up he was Christian and though he generally agreed with my anti-war politics, didn't sign the anti-conscription petition. I was appalled. Only a year later imagine the surprise when I saw my regular-guy colleague in the Black Power protest on the hundred metres medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics?  A la Spike Milligan, had I played a part in the Aussie sprinter's radicalisation? Nah!  That was the era and zeitgeist impossible to buck, or what?

I'd've been home in my tiny rented terrace cottage in Canning Street, Carlton, next to the all-night thumping of the bakery and its permanent bread-dough aroma, almost suffocating in mid-summer, the bread smells trapped in the airless heat. I'm typing poems or letters, being paid by the Education Department essentially to sit on my arse, read, study, be a poet, when Loretta came in with her prize! Perhaps I'm psyching myself up to fulfil the curtain-raiser for Michael Hudson's production of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre at the La Mama cafe-theatre around the corner in Faraday Street, Betty Burstall's good idea to justify the night's billing of such a short play, and redeemed she was when our poetry began pulling an audience in its own right. It  grew another leg when Bill Beard joined me, so that Mike's Bread & Puppet appeared to be supporting us!  But here it is, my God, Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts, published by Corinth Books, "in conjunction with Totem Press/Le Roi Jones" --wow-ee! What on earth was it doing, engulfed by bad popular fiction, romance, thrillers, on a sale table in the book department of Melbourne's flagship department store? The only copy, the only poetry book! What were the odds that Retta should find it? Incredible!

[22/26-5-14]


oOo


On misty, damp, after-rain morning, writing as I stand in doorway section of smooth-running stop-all-stations train from the 'Garth & Creek's quasi rurality into the Big Smoke, surrounded by pleasant hum of commuter small-talk --like I'm Walt & not Gary Snyder, subject of the memorandum I'm heading to, --Walt & not Gary, definitively, because in Gary's poetry the daily milieu is foil or natural context but its candour never so grown & substantially remarked as in Walt's inexhaustible ledger, small glint of which is mine here --and plainly isn't the point of it, isn't his ideology,  like Walt's Song of this and Song of that, determined to include everyone & everything within the call's special ring, like an auctioneer in Kentucky or, nodding back through the years to my sister Monique who sent me its postcard, the Appleby Horse Fair, long long ways as these may be from Camden, New Jersey --hoo! Gary, hoo!


*

And chatting with Chris Wallace-Crabbe one morning in the Shop, on his way over the river to the William Blake exhibition at the NGV, --bright as a button, dapper as Barry Humphries --in response to his polite question about reading &/or writing, --Snyder I said, and searched for the right word to describe him --irony? no, --separateness? exclusivity?  --And though we're all carried by Walt's democratic ebullience, this civic ecstasy not expected in Snyder contrary to an image perhaps preceding him? --because Snyder is found in singleness, singularity, singing also but to distinguish not occlude --each natural jewel of rain sun forest (--this is some conversation! ) --I just happen to be supervising a student in Snyder at the moment he says --laugh : let's tutor him/her together, I say! -- What I like, I say, is the simultaneity of American & Japanese --Chinese, Californian, Chris adds laughing --

But stay with the double outline, the casual slippage of ancient & modern, registered as here & now --no more arcane than acorns are --seamless  collage --logger, Marxist, Wobbly, hitch-hiker. folklorist, Native-American, Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, lover, shaman --

"Bodhidharma sailing the Yangtze on a reed
Lenin in a sealed train through Germany
Hsuan Tsang, crossing the Pamires
Joseph, Crazy Horse, living the last free
starving high-country winter of their tribes.
Surrender into freedom, revolt into slavery--
Confucius no better--
(with Lao-tzu to keep him in check)
"Walking about the countryside
all one fall
To a heart's content beating on stumps." [from part 6, Burning; Myths & Texts, 1952-56]---

Snyder, --like at Collingwood Farm I told Chris, drawing the cabbage with two pencils in my hand, the blurs outlining instant contradiction, adding dimension, so is our subject all-over, all-around, always, expressed as the simultaneity of alternating here & now -- 


*

1968 reading Myths & Texts same age as when Snyder began writing it. What accomplishment, teens & twenties! --especially as the post WW2 generations become younger, suspended by personal prosperity/social welfare in new norm cotton wool adolescence. Reading Snyder, there's no discount for youth -- realise Snyder is as Snyder does, was ever who he is --which is how one appreciates all notable & memorable writing in the retrospect one never thought twice about at the start of it. Not that '60s reading was at the beginning of anything other than that season of English & Australian youth's education. But if only for Myths & Texts, Snyder could uncontroversially have qualified for Robert Duncan's class-roll, The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound (Agenda vol 4, no 2, 1965), wonderful to read in Melbourne in '68 --describing the importance in the late '40s, early '50s, of Pound & Williams in opening "the way for a group of younger writers --Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, Gael Turnbull, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman and myself --who were concerned with immediacy and process in the development of their poetics." Pound & Williams are unambiguously sounded by Snyder --and the only magpie would be seen & heard along what's become his very own way, killing the Buddha at every bend.


*

Walking/working backwards from his influence --on Franco Beltrametti's Nadamas for instance --I cant put my hand on the chapter he published (his own & Judith Danciger's translation) in the Grosseteste Review, '72, so refer to the section I published in Earth Ship #10/11 (Southampton, August, '72, just prior to returning to Melbourne), summed up in this sentence : "Here we are again in the  swing of the events following each other always more rapidly so that you don't have to be interested if they overlap or ride over one another." As Beltrametti so Snyder --the absolute presence of the narrative, no progression only what's current, and time passing's subsumed within the concurrence or simultaneity. Beltrametti's 'additional handwritten poem' in the signed edition of Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973) makes the same call :

"reckonings don't come even
roughly on the same latitude as
Seville / Richmond / Wichita / Nigata /
Seoul / Askhabad
magpies
from one carob tree
to the next"
[10/7/70]


*

And though Snyder's Myths & Texts does 'contain history' after Pound, Williams' grafting (for example the young feller Ginsberg's correspondence included in  Paterson, which serves to bless the incidental with the historical) is a propos --real bits of world, documents, quotation, letters as they come, as world comes, observed, overheard, perceived. (No reason to be peeved, if he really was, when his own stuff landed up in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Material is material and the private subordinate to a larger literary good?) All of which suggests the fluidity or openness of the poem as the measure of experience yet the Snyder poem is also composed --much more of a made poem, confirmed by standard capitalisation & lineation, than the rangy field-work of the first poems of Mountains & Rivers Without End which chronologically follow Myths & Texts.


*

What to say of his Jewish joke not quite lost in the anti-Christian jibe :

"Them Xtians out to save souls and grab land
'They'd steal Christ off the cross
if he wasn't nailed on'
The last decent carpentry
Ever done by Jews." [from Logging, section 10, Myths & Texts]?

Sure, Snyder's target is both bible-bashing colonialism and the theologically guaranteed human dominion over nature, the bete noire of the ecological philosophy & politics he champions. An example of casual anti-semitism maybe, and only funny within it.  Sure, hearsay, quoted speech, but seamless in Snyder's drawl-scrawl, his droll-scroll…


*

P. S. : Rip Rap


Permit mind blown in the fatal collision of wilderness & industrial civilisation --"I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities." Consider the few days between worlds, and all gone that other one --and what another one "Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup / Looking down for miles / Through high still air."  --what room for anything else when this other imposes such permanence that the very notion of contrast shrivels, no register except "caught on a snow peak / between heaven and earth" --except the lad is a scientist, can unsentimentally state "in ten thousand years the Sierras / will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion." And the Milton he's pulled out of his ruck-sack's (as last of August light extended by camp-fire's) "Too dark to read". Hah! --pun into blackguard Milton aka Western dramaturgy, --but as though autobiography, Cold Mountain's just the place to slough off "Damn me a fool last night in port drunk on the floor & damn / this cheap trash we read. Hawaiian workers shared us / beer in the long wood dredgemen's steel-men's girl-less / night drunk and gambling hall, called us strange sea- / men blala and clasped our arms and sang real Hawaiian songs " ---Ah, right royal navvy's days & nights…

*

In Rip Rap's 50th Anniversary edition there's long footnote apology for a phrase in the poem, For A Far-Out Friend. He confesses it's earned him flack over the years but now it's time to clarify. "Because once I beat you up / Drunk, stung with weeks of torment / And saw you no more", was an untruth right from the start he explains. She was the violent one, not he. "She started beating on me in some anger and I let her whack me (protesting) till I got her into the car. (….) I thought that saying I'd hit her was the more manly, or even gentlemanly, thing to say, an idea that comes from chivalry, perhaps. I never laid an ungentle hand on her. My critics, especially my colleague Sandra Gilbert, have said that there is no excuse for treating violence against women casually, and they are absolutely right. This note seems the best way to deal with the problem rather eliminate the poem or change the line in silence." Hmmm. Didn't want to change the original poem he says but bows now to feminist pressure and seeks to 'explain'…There you go. But surely, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? Snyder evidently doesn't blush for the "kulak" reference describing farmers & landowners in one of his much admired Han Shan translations, Cold Mountain poem # 16.

"Cold Mountain is a house / Without beams or walls. / The six doors left and right are open / The hall is blue sky. / The rooms are all vacant and vague / The east wall beats on the west wall / At the centre nothing. // Borrowers don't bother me / In the cold I build a little fire / When I'm hungry I boil up some greens. / I've got not use for the kulak / With his big barn and pasture - / He just sets up a prison for himself. / Once in he cant get out. / Think it over -- / You know it might happen to you."

'Kulak's traditional meaning is "a tight-fisted person"; "a peasant wealthy enough to own farm and hire labour" (Concise Oxford). But it's inextricable from the vicious Soviet connotation. This term from the Stalinist lexicon refers to as wicked a pogrom as any in the USSR, its horror & madness if anything magnified when the attitude was inherited by Maoist China. What did Snyder intend? "You know it might  happen to you" a little more sinister than a comment on personal salvation? Simplest & kindest to say that in the '50s, as a young man of the left, revolting against the American way, he's amenable & acquiescent to leftist gloat and a say-what-I-like macho glib… Fiftieth anniversary or not, time's ripe, methinks, for more clarification of such hot & cold war attitudes & language… The Right is unfailingly called to proper account for its reflections of Fascism & Naziism, but the Left hardly at all for its toeing the line of iron fist Communism, Stalinism, Maoism and whatever flows on through contemporary Socialist reflexes & assumptions…

The older & younger survivors of the ideological storms are we, especially as the poets we're able to be… Time to be poets & not suckers & saps… hoo! hoo! hoo!

[7/10-10-14 (4-11-14)]


*


P-P. S


The issue of what is or isn't 'politically correct' is prickly enough in the present day. And there's a greater problem with the retrospective judgement of previous generations, earlier societies & epochs, according to contemporary attitude & belief, and not least because the legitimation of such attribution implies a standard set, unchanging through time. This installs the progressivist depiction of human affairs as the only one, coacervate, indeed, with history itself. On the other hand, reform & repudiation of atrocious acts is generally laudable & necessary. I guess expression, whether or not literary or artistic, being what is held, spoken, depicted, is rightly personal --eccentrically formed, not legislative whatever its aspiration. So the  question I ask of Gary Snyder is as reader-writer of a colleague poet, though he be exemplary, & one who hasn't confined his work to the literary domain. If you like, when reader-writer addresses another it's poetry & literature of which the question is asked, asked whatismore within & behalf of poetry & literature.

[5/9-11-14]

ON THE RUN

ON THE RUN : as though a journal : posts retrieved from Facebook

   December 2, 2012

    I.M. Charles Buckmaster, 40th anniversary of that terrible day, 26th November, 1972. Tonight i share a paragraph from my December 1972 journal, a page following report on Gough Whitlam's momentous federal election victory :

    "[3rd December,'72] The suicide of Charles Buckmaster was the sad news forwarded to us from 2 different sources last week. Michael Dugan phoned one evening --& Margaret Taylor on the Thursday evening we were out (visiting Betty Burstall & later Paul Adler & Ena in Carlton). It was not unexpected. Margaret sd that he had seen 'top consultants' & that he was 'doomed'. We are told that there is a family history of this... Charles was 21. So young. & yet --the poem he published in The Age 2 years ago --which i hadnt seen until Judy Duffy [Loretta's sister] showed it to us a couple of weeks or so ago-- was astonishingly authoritative & mature. [The Age poem was 'Starting Out', beginning, "That the changes have been swift / and uninvited. // That their year tore by, your holy face / matures like the dawn: centering / on some great simplicity / of right living. // I can't know you at all..."]] In retrospect all the poems appear to be suicide notes (Mark Hyatt [English poet] was another such case) --but 2 poems in particular --The Age poem, & 'Seed' which i published in Earth Ship #7 --the most moving epistles. i wrote a piece of prose for/to Charles three evenings ago....

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January 7th, 2013

Turn on the telly and who should be on the screen but Silka Genovese being interviewed by Jane Edmondson (from Gardening Australia and 3AW's Big Back Yard) about the w/ful horticultural history of an Italian family's hectare in Brunswick, ultimately gifted to CERES (for whom Silka works). If that wasnt sufficient fame to absorb, turn the telly back on for the doco on Twiggy (England in the 60s via Carnaby Street, King's Road, Chelsea et al) and there's Jeremy Reed, sociologically erudite, sharp as a pin and dressed to the nines (as befitted the subject).
 It was nice to catch up with Silka at George G's book launching at Collected Works late November, but havent seen Jeremy for ten years? Last time was with John Robinson driving us to & fro Marc Almond's book launch at Borders in Brighton; stuck in central London grid lock (wch we werent to know was consequence of Brixton bombing), and then all that tea at the Grand Hotel finally catching up with us : hilarious attempt to relieve bladders in a side street wch John brilliantly discovered but only to be lit up like rabbits when the apartment block's security lights turned night into day! I'll be tuning in for tonight's trysting with celebrities with baited breath!


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  January 17th, 2013

    A great night, kicking off our Summer in the City series (next is the Yeats Poetry Prize committee's lunchtime session to celebrate another Yeats anniversary, 29th January --cdnt have it on the official date, wch is Australia Day & a holiday) : Pam Brown lead in by Corey Wakeling, Duncan Hose & Ann Vickery. A full house --thanks everyone for turning out.
    A distinctive feature of the reading was its curator's introduction & mini-critique of each of her guests, ie, what & why Gig Ryan [poet & poetry editor at The Age, Melbourne] appreciated in their poetry & poetics. I think that was valuable in itself. The 'proof of the pudding' beside the point...
    During the a/noon had another conversation with Alan Pose abt the way we think of & listen to contemporary (any) music --i've been enjoying Chris Dench & Diana Burrell CDs, recent purchases. But i was unaware of any connection between the two until Alan told me of Chris Dench appreciation of her. Excuse the long-windedness of this comment but to an extent the conversation [in my mind, that is : Alan is hereby excused any responsibility!] turned upon the adequacy or validity of the pictorial/representational vs abstract categorisations often fielded. All too obvious that there's no clear or absolute distinction : envisaged space (landscape eg) & aural or phonic space (music) occupy a continuum. I could say that it's governed by perception rather than description (seen/scene/seen)...Listening to the reading i felt beautifully prepared by that discussion (as well as the music)! Pam Brown (& what a great long last poem she read --vernacular's sleight-of-hand, the diary meta-poem) described the Melbourne posse as fellow experimenters --i guess she meant poets who're seriously engaged with the late modernist english-language poetry, all new yorky even when it aint!
It is invidious here to call preferences because the reading was very much a conversation or collective demonstration of shared mode at the heart of wch was a 'golden laughter'...

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[January 21, 2013
By MelbourneArtNetwork
Lecture | ‘Broken Pastoral and the English Folk’ Professor Tim Barringer
 Paul Mellon Professor of Art History, Yale University

This paper examines the revived interest in folk culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, exploring the relationships between ethnography, musicology and the study of historical arts and crafts.

It places within this matrix the work of photographers, painters and composers, who derived both motifs and models for avant-garde artistic identity from the study of the rural poor. Professor Tim Barringer contends that the aesthetic potency of visual and musical compositions drawing on folk sources lay in the widespread acknowledgement of the imminent disappearance of folk culture in the face of modernity and mechanized warfare.

Under consideration are the photographer P.H. Emerson, painters George Clausen, Henry Herbert La Thangue and Augustus John, the gardener and writer Gertrude Jekyll, ethnographer E.B. Tylor, and composers Sir Hubert Parry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger.]

The art & music we've come to know, love, and fundamentally refer to, elicited by yesteryear's avant-garde from "the rural poor" (according to the abstract above) has surely became an optic for the general culture's celebration of the non-metropolitan, sourced in the country & ex-urban environments. What did i see on F/book the other day? : oh yes, a lovely painting by Eric Ravilious matched to a photograph of the actual village & landscape... nothing earth-shattering abt that but simply a tiny example of the way art reflects life reflects art : creativity's essential dynamic! What i dont want to hear at the lecture is cliches abt elitist exploitation, wayward nostalgia & etc! But, yes, sounds good!

*

Furthermore (yes! ive been sitting in the front room/library, thinking), a great resource for this discussion is Alexandra Harris's brilliantly researched & exceptionally readable book, Romantic Moderns : English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (T&H, 2010). Reflecting upon Benjamin Britten's cynicism abt the relationship of the folk movement to the English Musical Renaissance, she says, "He was certainly right(...) : folk song had not played much part in musical life for centuries. [But] The point of the revival was to close over the gap, asserting by sheer force of will that the vital rhythms of English music had been continuous across the ages. Where the folk revival was potentially limiting, the closely related return to Renaissance court music offered both patriotic appeal and more scope for complex experiment. Britten turned to the 'discordant harmonies' of Purcell, taking inspiration from his fusion of the familiar and the strange. Extensive scholarship on 16th & 17th C music, pioneered by Arnold Dolmetsch and gathering momentum all through the 1920s and 1930s, opened new possibilities for composition. Just as medieval stained glass suggested to John Piper ways of understanding the abstractions of Leger, early music offered English composers new perspectives on the modern. it is characteristic of this generation that Peter Warlock, whose 1926 book The English Ayre recovered a whole corpus of early songs, was also the first Englishman to write a substantial appreciation of Arnold Schoenberg." I doffs me cap and rests me case!!!

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    January 28th, 2013

    Hemensleys down to the sea again this morning, and once on the beach, altho no one else in the water, just had to go in! Coldish but quickly adapted. Beach & Bay report classified Elwood as Good and believe me the sea was clear, gentle waves, no burning sun, totally acceptable. Float on back, dog paddle, stick head under water & look around, the whole biz! (No, didnt actually swim hard or far!) How many more beach days does this summer hold? After drying/changing on the grass banking, breakfasted at the little kiosque and once more made short work of the toasted cheese & tomato s/wiches! Washed down with tea/coffee. Continued my latest note on Ivor Gurney in notebook. Dawned on me i was sitting in the particular way with the very expression Dad adopted when the aggregate of an occasion's pleasure suffused like a blush. He'd have liked this, i said. In his prime. Hopefully i'm still in mine!
   
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January 30th, 2013


 One can but note & mourn the passing of the men & women of one's time. Anselm Hollo (1934-2013) a little older than us lot. His UK class would include Edwin Brock (1927-97), Tarn (b.'28), Alan Brownjohn (b.'31), Geoffrey Hill (b.'32), Jeff Nuttall (1933-04), B S Johnson (1933-73), Harry Fainlight (1935-82), Michael Horowitz (b '35)... Come to think of it, same era as Peter Porter & Chris Wallace-Crabbe... Different kinds of poets, all mortal... I think Hollo went to the US ahead of Tarn, had only been in London a few years. I loved the image of him as per a review in the English papers ca '65/66, the Venusian from Helsinki or was it the Finn from Venus?!! RIP, indeed.
 Of course, most of the above well behind him as he became an American poet. Many lives indeed. An interesting paper wld be abt those who left the UK for the US & other places. Whether they commuted (like many of the Irish, feet firmly in both) or cast off old world like previous skin. You hear my own song in that, hopefully not a wail!


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February 9th, 2013

Tim Barringer's lecture last night worth its weight in gold if only for the audio-visual illustrations, the singing of the great Joseph Taylor for example. I suppose the prof was running the gauntlet between latterday 'everything's a construct' cynicism & erstwhile 'the real thing' nostalgia. Like the good thing he evidently is, Barringer resolved the 'argument' with that hybrid which close-reading encourages. The extension of his presentation would, I hope, throw it all into another spin as 'tradition' & 'avant garde' exchange positions through the years! I'm on the run this morning so more later! Excellent support for the lecture.

*

 I wish you'd all been there! I wonder if papers from the conference (Tim B's talk was a keynote) are up on the web anywhere? Naturally one brings one's own box & dice to any such presentation, for example my long standing belief that the sincere response (in this case to the pastoral) is a meeting with and extension of that source. It is manipulation on technical/techique level but not distortion or falsification in ethical or moral sense --Vaughn Williams, Delius, Percy Grainger were surely proceeding from the folk songs, riffing in favour of their own music. In the case of the Joseph Taylor recording which the prof played, the singer's distinctive trill in Brig Fair is actually quoted or retained in the modern version. Pure magic to my ears! So yes, i had a number of "yes but"s in my notebook at lecture's end, which didnt in any way diminish my respect for the presentation & quality of research & suggestive insight. The William Barnes example was one such. I loved his reference to Barnes but disagreed totally that V Williams' Linden Lea sanitized the dialect, as if (my point) Barnes were some peasant-innocent and not the grammarian & linguist he was, who wrote in Standard English as well as Dialect. Etc etc etc Most stimulating as i hope you appreciate. Washed down with a pint of cider at Percy's (most appropriate) in company of Alan Pose!
(Tim B told us at the start that he'd spent the day at the Grainger Museum in Parkville and what he'd gleaned had affected his own thesis! Local boy makes good on one level ('we love you Melbourne') but pretty interesting...)



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February 12th, 2013

Letter to Ted Reilly, re- 50th Anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death

 Hi Ted, wish i had been given Plath at school but it was all too new then! I loved Lawrence, disliked Hardy, got Spender but struggled with Hopkins & McNiece. That was in 1963, unaware of contemporary poets, wch also might mean the teacher was too; or she stuck to the GCE syllabus so as not to distract us. Southampton Tech College, 1962-64. I was writing vastly more prose than poems, dropped out the next year, didnt really encounter Plath (& it was Plath & co, that is Lowell & co) til Xmas '66, in Oz by now, when i was given the The New Poetry anthology, edited by Alvarez, masquerading beneath Jackson Pollock cover. I say 'masquerading' deliberately because i didnt find the "new" i desperately wanted to encounter... I'd taken to Williams in '65, and Ginsberg, Snyder, Levertov & the Beats followed. Not much room for Plath... I recall hating Lowell in that anthology, but liking Berryman (still a poet i read)! And Nat Tarn's essay World Wide Open, published in International Times in '67, gave me the excuse for my avoidance & ideological repudiations : Tarn's quip, 'we cannot afford madness' (that is in this politically apocalyptic time)... as though it were a choice... I preferred Bly, & older poets like Jeffers, and Pound NOT Eliot... you get the picture Ted!!! I guess it wasnt really until i was a (still) young poet & teaching at the Council of Adult Education in Melbourne, mid '70s, through the '80s, that i allowed myself to read the other side (as it felt), if only to join my students in their reading tastes. So Hopkins, Eliot, & Plath... The teacher taught by his students! That is, the openness i was encouraging (Olson & Duncan my mentors) opened my ears & eyes to the poems themselves, free from partisan distraction & fashion! Letting the words (the poems) enflame, not the lives of the poets! Or, not merely the misleading lives...Thanks for yr words Ted... Are you still teaching?


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February 14th, 2013

 My best sense of Robert Bly admittedly from a long time ago, 60s, The Light Around the Body etc I wrote to him ca 1967 when he donated his Pulitzer (or Nat Bk Award?) money to a draft resister. Also sent him copy of my little mag, Our Glass, wch had published translations from contemporary Swedish poets by Peter Adams (student of Marianne Berregren in Swedish Dept at Melb University). Mr Bly endorsed them!
 His 'Leaping Poetry' essay was important i think. And 'Deep Image' out of Lorca, Rilke et al brilliant contradiction to A-A-A-American localism (itself attractive --WCW, Olson etc)... Iron John was fun but so too the Great Mother he thought to supplant... His Mirabai wonderful... CONGRATULATIONS!

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February 21st, 2013

I hadnt thought too much abt Richard Alpert (+ Timothy Leary) after the '60s, but mid '80s when i began re-thinking & rereading philosophical, political & literary positions, i came upon Baba Ram Dass --probably via Transpersonal Psychology journal, and that via wonderful lecture at the 1984 Deep Ecology conference in Melbourne given by Warwick Fox. And then, Cathy O'Brien said she'd always had this copy of Be Here Now by Ram Dass, since the 70s at least...!

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February 21st, 2013

To Pamela Robertson-Pearce re- Graeme Miles' Recurrence (John Leonard Press, Melbourne,2012)

Graeme Miles' Recurrence is one of the best of the recent crop (and it's a veritable Aussie harvest these days)... Elizabeth Campbell's discussion could have been described as "the status of myth in post-modernity"!  Naturally her respect & enthusiasm for the poems ultimately had Graeme's unique collection centre stage. I wonder if there's a discussion to be had around the highly individual accomplishment of a number of ex-West Australian poets in recent times? Michael Heald, Phil Salom, Mal McKimmie, & Marion May Campbell also spring to mind. By individual i mean determinedly out-of-left-field works... and heady without sacrificing the palpable. Something like that!

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March 6th, 2013

Thinking y'day about my own change of mind re- Thos Hardy, wrote in my journal : "When Eric Mottram described my poems [Poem of the Clear Eye?] as the opposite of 'Hardyesque modesties', i felt vindicated --ambition in terms of subject & form being my register --& for many years -- Ah well, the wheel turns -- Ancient Chinese & medieval Japanese (current reading) hardly modest in the way i was opposing when i was younger --but if Hardy has a place for me now it's within the equanimity established by them (the T'ang ancients)..."
This still in my mind as i listened to Lyn McCredden's brilliant encapsulation of Chris Wallace-Crabbe's body of work, that (if i remember correctly) despite the 'thing itself' yielding to the facts of the day (& everyday), his doggedness & stoicism, his wit to see & respond, there were the darker edges, deep sadnesses...
Not sure as i write this how the two states of mind coalesce! Still thinking this through...
Maybe it's the Hardy of "he was a man who remembered such things" (--the poem i'd disliked when young but came around to understanding later) i'm relating to CWC...

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March 9th, 2013

Preparing for my next trip to England. Consult Vivienne Light's great compendium, Circles & Tangents : Art in the shadow of Cranbourne Chase (Canterton Books, 2011). I remember conversation with Bernard H years ago : he'd written his Cemetery Lodge Poems and we envisaged ever widening circle, thus the Thomas Hardy Poems, and further, further... Vivienne Light explains, "The 'circles' of the title are of interconnected artists, though 'loose networks' might describe them better, for they are rarely neat or circular. The 'tangents' of the title are those in which I, as author, have spun off in pursuit of some theme or connection in the life or work of an artist, often travelling far beyond the bounds of Cranbourne Chase. As Virginia Woolf once put it: 'smooth narrative can't be right. Things don't happen like that'."
She describes Cranbourne Chase, "a landscape of bare-bone beauty and for many has offered a place of retreat. Its dramatic landscape and sense of remoteness (though now under two hours from london), have been its foremost attractions. Spanning Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, it was originally established by William the Conqueror as a royal hunting ground, with the rivers Avon, Allen, Stout, Fontnell and Nadder as its boundaries. Its physical geography is both demanding and spectacular, nurturing and isolating, consisting of high, exposed rolling downland, steep escarpments, winterbourne chalk streams and vertiginous valleys, as well as old broad-leaf woodland, shadow-flickering coppices, junipers, hedgerow yews, and bird-nesting hawthorn thickets. The Chase is an ancient landscape."
And then Vivienne Light quotes H J Massingham. My Massingham! Wow! That was an obsession late 80s, 90s, Must look at him again too.


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RIVER ROAD CD DOUBLE LAUNCH! NOVEMBER 22nd, at GLENFERN, EAST ST KILDA

Come for the entire afternoon to the Australian Poetry Centre's final programme at the historic Glenfern mansion in East St Kilda, before they join the VWC & co at the Centre for Books, Writing & Ideas at the State Library of Victoria.
As far as I know, there's the launch of the new edition of the Famous Reporter, as well as Sarah Day's new book of poems, Grass Notes (Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney). The meat in the sandwich is Carol Jenkins' River Road Press's double launch of Chris (The Domestic Sublime) & Kris (My Life in Theatre)'s spoken word CDs!
Some meat, some sandwich!

Thursday, 18-11-09
C O R R E C T I O N :
Am reliably informed that Famous Reporter will not be launching. Wires crossed for wch many apologies. In actual fact, Simon West will be launching his new book, Selected Poems of Guido Cavalcanti : Critical English edition (published by English press, Troubador). Now there is a little bird making noises in my left ear : get it right, she's saying : no more mistakes!

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #7, October/November, 2008

KLARE LANSON


Two Poems

GRAPH AXIS


we are all pushed along by books, dragged by boxes
counted by other peoples numbers, silenced by a roller
coaster, driven by the vision of the other and how bout

the mask that only seems to cover half the face these days.
most i's are in capitals yet this eye turns lines and graphs
into curves of water that drip fluidly into the place where

your most cherished dreams live. It's love in shades of blue.
It's life that equates meaning. It's an x with kisses and a y can't
we all just stop for a minute. It's clusters of memory that knead

us into recognition of self and plead with you to come to your
senses and cherish the colour of the sky. there is a loss of visible
markers, the blurs always make new scuffs into the streaming

voice of your body. dripping with sensibility are the hands shaken,
recording the unknown possibility. arrows are coordinates
for how we measure our life. they form stairways that lead into

a supermarket where we buy our daily needs. remote control
us. scratch raw figures. create formulas that socially collide,
make form blush with embarrassment, stretching for numbers.


***

TOLARNO IV


You walk through layers of dust
then climb into a bed made of
clean sheets that don't even
smell like you.

Glasses of unknown redness
clink lightly in the background,
our minds are entwined
with fragments of amber
filled nostalgia while our
bodies simply go along
for the ride.

We grow vines of Grenache
on arid land (with our bar talk,
small sighs and transparent
conversation).

You don't want a lover yet
somehow this drink of rusty wine
is cleansing and keeps the
dread and doubt filtered
through the eyes of
thoughtfully painted
glass windows.


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DAVID LUMSDEN


Two Poems


THE WHAT IS IT?
-William Henry Johnson (1957-1926) a.k.a. 'Zip'

From P.T. Barnum to the X-Files
it is clear we love to be humbugged.
So a young black man with a tiny skull
spent life exhibited in a gorilla costume
earning an extra dollar on days he did not speak.

Today how many grandparents
look back with half-averted eye
to a still clear image of him in his cage,
the indelible mark of a summer outing,
firm emblem of fears that cannot be classified?


***


CASA-MUSEU GAUDI, BARCELONA


There's something sparse
about the way he lived, at least
seen through the lens of what remains:
the little metal coffee cup,
plain bed, religious texts.

Outside another doomed project
grew around him like a garden,
the playground mosaics accreted
month by month, marine deposits.

Out towards the calm sea the imagined
vista of a cathedral's towers one day
high above the sprawling city,
the terrain so flat, yet life
one steep long homeward climb.



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IAN McBRYDE


Two Poems


ATLANTIS


Now Atlantis. Beneath the flood sleeps the collective exhalation of those
submerged early, those who entwined ride this breathless city.

Trapped between pews at the sodden tops of naves, the peeling hands
brushing algaed glass. Bumping roughly together in halls, in common rooms,
or puffed up and alone in long-drowned attics, wrapped in unravelled clothing.

If you take any words with you make them the opposite of these:
Edge out into the shoals. Leave no last note. Point away from the lake.


***


PIGEON ENGLISH


Each afternoon and the day's expected
rain lets itself gently down. From under

the ivy's hiss and drip, the pigeons are
cautiously calling to each other.

The north wind. You choose. No, you.
Soft walls, the torn broken covers

of our world. You choose. Bluefruit,
new schools, the roof of gloom.

The pigeons stop just after the rain does.
I hear them mutter, flick the water off

their wings, and then silence until dawn.
Torn corners, the north wind. You choose.


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SARI WAWN

CORRESPONDENCE


Kris, I read Petra White's article, Placing Poetry, in the Victorian Writer, June 2008 [it brought back memories of Petra's recent readings at Ruffy store and the 'particular placeness' in her poems] and your blog, Placing Petra White, with great interest. How good it is to find a conversation exploring the compelling --and vexed --issue of 'place'. As you imply, Petra is to be congratulated for tackling such an elusive topic in such a small piece.

As a refugee from the Wimmera plains, addicted ever since to wide open spaces with spare topography, I have been particularly interested in the concepts or genres of Place / Sense of Place / Landscape / Ecopoetry / Nature Writing and in recent years I have spent a lot of time reading and trying to write myself into both real and imaginary places. I really like your term 'topographical' writing. It invites a range of metaphors and carries so far no hint of cliche.

Is part of the problem, in tackling the issue of 'place', the term itself? My recent ventures into the field of Ecopoetry [see August blog, Mary Oliver's Sunflowers on
/The Edge_Collective/edge_pages/edge_blog11.html] have me questioning the whole process of labeling. Of course many poems labeled as eco or nature poetry have been wonderful explorations of ecology/nature, but then so have many others. As Susan Fealy's comments suggest [see Placing Petra White, "comments"], don't all poems assume the existence of a place created by the poet?

There may well be a gender aspect to consider here too in relation to outwardness/interiority, but there certainly are male poets who tend towards interiority on occasions. For example, in Songs My Mother Taught Me by John Koethe, are the lines :

"The place endures, unmindful and unseen / Until its very absence comes to seem a shape / That seems to stand for something // Why can't the unseen world - the real world - / Be like the aspects of a place that one remembers? / (....) why can't we believe in some imaginary realm / beyond belief, in which all time seems equal / and without the space between the way things are / and how they merely seem? In which the minor, / incidental shapes that meant the world to me - are real too? / Suppose that time were nothing but erasure / And that years were just whatever one had lost."

Each section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets is named for a particular place; also, at the beginning of Chris Wallace-Crabbe's wonderful, unsettling poem, The Rescue Will Not Take Place, are these lines :

"What do we live for? / We sort of know but / Can't quite put a name to the something which is / slipping away beneath us more - or maybe / Less - all the time, like a dream which won't / Disclose what it's deeply about but / Permeates a ripe summer day with / Its pauses and precedents..."

Finally, where would I be without the Web? Without blogs? Like many others, I visit more virtual places than any other these days, as a tourist, traveler, dreamer and even poet. My sense of space would be diminished without my virtual journeying. I should add too that I often find the idea of resorting to 'language' unhelpful : what does it really mean when you say that you like 'the language' of some writing? Surely it means the writing evokes something - a particular place or an idea or something else? Actually, I could go on talking about this all day. Maybe http://edgecollective.blogspot.com/ is the best place for this... And I haven't even started to discuss the women : my current favourites are Joy Harjo and Paula Gunn Allen - and of course there's Mary Oliver...

--October,2008
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

KLARE LANSON works with poetry, sound and live art performance, fusing her words with electronic music, moving imagery, mobile film and voice effecting technology. Has released an album, Every Third Breath, completed an artist's residency at FRUC in France, and performed in London, Berlin, New York, New Zealand. Co-editor for Going Down Swinging (Melbourne). Contact, http://klarelanson.net
DAVID LUMSDEN lives once again in Melbourne after a prolonged stay in Warsaw, Poland. His poems have appeared literary magazines including P. N. Review (UK) and Fulcrum (USA). His blog of poetry commentary can be found at http://sparksfromstones.blogspot.com/
IAN McBRYDE is a Canadian born, Melbourne poet, widely published and anthologised nationally and overseas. He has published 8 collections of poetry and released 2 CDs of spoken-word. He has performed his work at many venues and festivals across Australia, as well as in England, Canada & the USA. His next collection, The Adoption Order, will be published by Five Islands Press (Melbourne), in 2009.
SARI WAWN is a member of The Edge Art Collective, based at Terip Terip in Victoria. The group's projects include a book, Palimpsests of Gooram Gooram Gong, and quiet but persistent music [the title is from Jonathon Bate's The Song of the Earth], --a celebration of all unsung places where the voices of the natural world hold sway over their human occupants.


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Published November 6th, 2008

ALL THE GOSS

WEATHER : It's Good Friday in Westgarth, climatically not unlike my recollection of childhood Eastertides in the village of Thornhill, 4 miles from the centre of Southampton, southern England. We've had sun, there's a breeze & a blue sky. We've also scoffed a plate of Retta's hot cross buns! In Vientiane the temp. is 40+ outdoors and inside Cathy O'Brien's room-of-her-own it's 32C. No Easter bunny there but the Lao water festival is just around the corner!

WORLD NEWS : At Collected Works Bookshop yesterday evening, 5 for 5.30 the invitation said and we got off before 6 ,if my good cask- red addled memory can be trusted, we launched Michael Sharkey's THE SWEEPING PLAIN, published by Five Islands Press. Ron Pretty called me to say a few words just as I was settling into my glass : an auspicious (aushhhhpisshhhous) occasion, I said : this book is one of the last batch that Ron will see into publication from go to whoa; it's also Michael Sharkey's umpteenth book... I think there are only 5 more titles in Ron's pipeline before Five Islands Press as his own imprint ceases to publish and a group of poets (Kevin Brophy, Dan Disney, Lyn Hatherley, Robyn Rowland) begin a new list with, I suppose, another rationale. Ron said of Michael that he was a poet in the old Bulletin tradition, satirical, political, humorous as well as the conventional "deep"; poets are generally a serious lot, he said. (It's true; didnt I just decline Mal McKimmie's offer of free tickets for a show at the Comedy Festival? I laugh a lot, but as a poet? Hmm, vurry interestin [EP of HD somewhere or other]) And Michael proved Ron's pudding sure enough. They was rockin in the aisles, sir, creased they was with mirth. A good audience, buzzing atmosphere, all done before 8 when a party set off to wine & dine up town.

ANTHROPOLOGY : What happens at book launchings & readings, especially amongst poets? What is it that gets into us (apart from the alcohol)? We're all recognized in Elizabeth Campbell's inimitable "hello gorgeous"! No, I'm being serious. We engage, we are engaged, we are engaged for angels' & devils' work. We are caught up in or by the social energy of
our heightened language. Hanging on words, looking into our colleagues' faces, as if trying to physically, socially unravell some mystery or the secrets that otherwise scramble our poems! (Elizabeth C has left the room by now, disgusted by this old man's superstition! And so she should be.) I re-introduced Alan Murphy to Chris Wallace-Crabbe early in the night. Turns out they were both contributors to the gatherings in the 1950s at Norman Robb's bookshop in the City. Keith Harrison too of course, Chris began to say... Yes, Keith Harrison, Alan said, I played recorder with him at the music afternoons... Norman Robb's Bookshop in Alan's head because I'd just told him of Peter Kelly's book on Harold Stewart, Buddha in a Bookshop, delivered recently by the author... What would you call that ? The importance of reminding ourselves, of discovering, our history; the importance of circulating that history...

--Kris Hemensley, 6 April 07