IN THE BELLY OF A PARADOX

"…because like Jonas himself I find myself travelling towards my destiny in the belly of a paradox."

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (Hollis & Carter, London, 1953), © By the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane

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Trimble : Here's to IMPERMANENCE!

Hemensley : Cheers! And Happy Birthday Bernard!

Trimble : Happy Birthday!

Hemensley : And to Thomas Merton!

Trimble : Cheers!

*

Sat in the garden of the Peacock Hotel, down from the peak of Ruckers' Hill, opposite to what'll always be the Town Hall despite 'Northcote Council' no more, subsumed within Darebin (impermanence). I'm keeping the dizzies at bay, enjoying a pot of the local cider, Ken's on the Cooper's Pale. Barman asks me where the burr in my accent's from --Bristol? Hah, no! But it is West Country, i say. He lived in a village just outside of Bristol once, he says (impermanence). A lovely day for it today, he says. Twenty-two degrees, blue sky, sun, a breeze. Tell him i've just received email from Weymouth artist friend, Lucas Weschke, call him Cornishman, who imagined i'd be "reading this in a land of blue honey --here it is fucking miserable and my heart feels like January." I respond that i'll send him last vestiges of our 40 degrees with which to flay his winter miseries --tho’ neither of us exclusive of either's nadir...

Hemensley : MERT (--Ken noted the birthdate yesterday, 31st January, on Facebook. He asked Bernard, in passing, what he thought of The Seven Storey Mountain --B. replied he had the books but doesn't read very much of anything in recent years --I suggest a New Year's resolution for necessary rectification! Ken says Seven Storey not his favourite --like me enjoyed Asian Journal more--Ten years ago, en route London, I was in Bangkok with Cathy and went to the King's Palace and felt i'd been walking in Merton's footsteps when i read B's copy --disagreed with Merton’s disdain of the magnificent Hindu murals which he called Disneyland kitsch! --But before I can show Ken the Merton volume ive brought in my shoulder-bag, a loan if he wants it, he's offering me J P Seaton's translation of Han Shan --i love this one, he says (--Han Shan probably many poets, he says, --Shih Te also --people added to the poem through the years --like the Homer? i say) : "Here's a word for rich folks with cauldrons & bells / Fame's empty, no good, that's for sure"…

I brought this, i say, first edition, The Sign of Jonas, Merton's journal, 1946-51. Ken reads a page, --he's a great writer, he says eventually… People forget Thomas Merton's a Christian, always a Christian, a monk --it was a hard life, --he wasn't a hippy! Laugh. Look at a passage in the introduction ---such clarity, says Ken (--what is clarity but a profound embrace of reality, and such an embrace charity? --brings to mind etymology encountered in the late 80s, that reading time's flurry of Heideggerrian language, Jan Gonda's Sanskrit commentaries, continuing elaborations from 60s/70s Anglo-American poetics featuring Olson, Duncan, Blaser, Kelly & co's Henri Corbin, MacNaughton, Thorpe, Prynne et cetera --but perception defined as "being rightly taken" which completely displaces any personal standard, relegates it to the casual lexicon --"being rightly taken" suggesting that what's NOT isn't 'perception' at all but another flake of illusion fomented both by the poetic & the everyday, --from "philosophy'''s perspective, --language & life floating between the inane & the banal) --prologue, p8 : "Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary.The monastic life is by its very nature 'ordinary.' Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings. The exterior monotony of regular observance delivers us from useless concern with the details of daily life, absolves us from the tedious necessity of making plans and of coming to many personal decisions. It sets us free to pray all day, and to live alone with God. But for me, the vow of stability has been the belly of the whale…"

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Bernard & i call him “Mert”, which familiarity probably reflects the Counter Culture's wish to recruit him to the most agreeable aspect of his ecumenism, this time's hybridity always preferred to orthodoxy & tradition (until & unless of course the latter's deemed to be the hipper) --perhaps, tho, he always came across as 'human', responsible to the problematics of practice, therefore never prim or artificially pious --a poet, a writer, editor of famous little mag (Monk's Pond), artist, --a parallel life the which he ameliorated to his monasticism… As Ken said, Thomas Merton never not a Catholic --and the straying in Ken's case is Bukowskian, as reflection of daily circumstance, rather than the Buddhist temptation, pagan as far as old fashioned church would be concerned, the Buddhism of which Ken's a novice, our Brother Pots & Pans albeit issue of traditional Catholicism & later tuned-on by India including Bede Griffiths' spiritual common cause…

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That's why we honour & admire you, i say --because you do it! One has to acknowledge the actual experience --in all things. Ken deflects my honorific with chapter & verse about his constant straying, 'playing up' --but even this has a Beat Zen status --would you agree? he says (about the Beat Buddhists, which recalls Dave Ellison's & my DESPERATE MYSTICISM hilarity, serious all the same) --Some (Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger) walk the walk, but all of the others, in & out of formal practice, are touched by it forever --they live in its language, persuaded by it psychologically, aesthetically, poetically, practically --this domain of the post- & neo- religions, politics, poetics. And Kerouac's closest to that spiritual, psychological oscillation --high on the way of The Way, then strayed, fallen over --contradictory thus fallible, exemplarily contemporary, but not the career-success contemporaneity from which hype & glister our Jack ran. Ken says Big Sur's Kerouac’s best book, wouldn't you say? First Kerouac i read, at sea in 1965, i chime --but Big Sur, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, similar confrontation, collision, alternation of the dream & the drear, the dread, the 'slough of despond' . On same page Ken & i --not like some, --i mean, he says, the Buddhist thing is for the ordinary, for ordinariness…

(--begs question, i say: for us the daily ordinariness is where it's ALL to be found --for example, Ginsberg's beautiful Sunflower Sutra, that heightened & luminous experience in the railyard shared with Kerouac, --"i walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shape of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. // Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees and machinery// (…)Look at the sunflower, he said, (…)" --Whitmanian this is, such retro-riff brilliant in & for the demand of 1955's NOW!)

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--some people don't get that, Ken says --they get it all wrong, they don't think they're ordinary, they want to be famous (--but finding their own difference & exploring it, as in Paul Celan's "each man's particular narrowness", dramatically opposes the inflation which characterises this time's 'celebrity culture' --ah yes, we agree about that)! --another cider, another Coopers, perfect little bowl of chippies & mayo --and present him with Jill Kamil's guide book to St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, and also Patrick McCauley's collaboration with Raffaella Torresan, The Sea Palace Hotel, his poems & photos, her paintings (--Raoul Duffy? says Denis Smith at the Shop next day --i can see, i say, --and Marquet?  --the little boats in the harbour...) [Later Ken messages me on Facebook regarding Pat & Raffy’s book, “Did I tell you I stayed in India at The Seaweed Hotel, on the beach at Kerala, at a place called Kovalam a sort of hippie paradise before I went to Bede Griffiths place...” Small world!]

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--Albert Marquet & i --exhibit 1: some poems in A Mile from Poetry (1973-4), after his Honfleur Harbour paintings --number 12 for instance, "at that sitting no yacht club though plenty / of tinsel & flag. generation or two & it owns one / sure enough (see the photo by any jack with guile / enough to cover his head with a cloth) // the little boats / the little boats / dead still" --initially welcomed by Adders but then used as cipher for my own sinking --"your little boats wont save you" he shot across the bows --Thank Heaven i knew where the life jacket was --swam with my little illustrated book of Albert Marquet into the international waters of which the Merri Creek was a vital tributary, --as far as the Oz Po salts would know i'd been lost at sea or like Robinson, shipwrecked! --twenty years, more? --hardly recognised when i returned! --exhibit 2: Marquet's erotic paintings which Paul Buck showed me in Maidstone in '87, --an immense compendium with the unlikeliest contributors such as Marquet --middle of the afternoon, balancing teacup & slice of cake, after walk around the partly flooded town, not only sightseeing the swollen Medway but the hotel where Jean Rhys once lived --you like her don't you? Paul remembered --portrayed, if nowhere else, in my book, Montale's Typos, in the prose-piece "England, River & So On (in the mood of Jean Rhys, after a theme of hers)" --for example, "I dreamt of being there again, & of looking thru the window, outside looking in, at her dresses on the bed, & her bib-&-braces. And the river just outside the hedge, the rushes, the submerged & sprouting stalks of this & that, greens, browns, greys, & rainbows there & gone, glints of red & turquoise; mud & shadows…" --brother B. published it, the first of his Stingy Artist editions, 1978 --quite a publisher, i impress upon Ken --

-- To Bernard! in unison salute --on eve of Ken's joining the Theravadans --

K H : And Mert!

K T : Mert!

*

[February 1-11, 2018]

KEROUAC'S BIRTHDAY(--BIRTHDAY?

On the 21st October, anniversary of Kerouac's birthday (--birthday? --his death day dammit! though any of us who've known deep loss begin at some time to confuse the birth & death dates-- a memorial conflation, both happy & sad, forever fused),  I'm reading Lee Kofman's article Muses on Fire, excerpted from Kill Your Darlings magazine, reprinted in The Victorian Writer, April '15 issue, which I'd missed having been back home in England when it arrived and not seen till now. The iconic photograph of Cassady & Kerouac on full facing page catches my eye, apt even synchronous that it should crop up at this moment what with our HOWL 60th event of the 10th October still buzzing! Nothing like an anniversary to twig period, person, place. At every switched-on turn right now there's Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti et al. On Dave Moore's Jack Kerouac group's Facebook page I see Duane Potosky's drawing of Neal, no hands cigarette between his lips. There's Kerouac too, and on the artist's page sketches of his own stars of film, music, literature. Reading Lee Kofman and  thinking of Karl Gallagher, who's been in my mind since Dave Ellison rang to tell me that our friend, painter, poet, on-line publisher of Fitzroy Dreaming, is in hospital, bearing up, in a good frame of mind he says, being well looked after. I mean to say, Karl Gallagher! --first candidate for what we've named the D M, that zone of heaven & earth where the desperate mystics disport, --desperate only as Lee Kofman has quoted Kerouac, "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow candles…" --this "now legendary sentence" she calls it…

Digress here (--as though all or any of this isn't! --this hold-all prose --parenthetical --dervish-turning to reach the essence of the impulse to begin --and begin one must-- starting out with a few accessories, literary equivalents of apple, chocolate, pen-knife --thanks Boy's Own Dad for that! --thus Kerouac, Kofman, Gallagher shoring up the expedition) : found an email from Paul & Ann Smith recording same news of Karl plus a phone-number to call, which I do today, 24th October, reporting to H.Q., touching base. Kerouac's birthday I say, not yet aware of my mistake. Is it? he says. Fancy that. And how was the Howl reading? Kerouac running around with the jugs of wine, did you do that? Hah! Helped ourselves! And who read Howl? Several poets, I say, male & female voices reprising & renovating the original. Organised by George Mouratides, who's one of the four younger scholars who edited the Scroll version of On the Road --I suggested or recruited a few readers, David Pepperell, Ken Trimble, Larry Schwartz. I was Mr Rexroth as MC, joking & kindly growling --and Ken Trimble… Ah, he's the real thing isn't he, Karl says… he read the McClure poems, I said --he's off on his world tour next year with new book of poems --Melbourne, Kyneton, & New Mexico with… Begin to pronounce "Joe Bottone" but swallow what could have spun into another Beat/God saga, though every reason to extol Joe's new poems, billowing sumptuous as the refrain of the Nick Cave song Into My Arms, which Ken's current poems coincidentally chime, and judging from his Facebook, Merton & Bede fulsomely in the wings… Image in mind now of Joe's monastery, Camaldoli, often quoted by Ken following his visit to Big Sur, and of Father Bede's Shantivanam, similarly experienced --also, sudden glinting, Bede Griffiths' Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire preceding Dom Sylvester Houedard --hah! hardly believe it! --comes to me out of the blue --sad to say out of the nowhere the British counter-culture's largely consigned to --Dom Sylvester as various as Merton, monk & poet of that era, Sixties & Seventies increasingly incredible as one's own momentum turns full circle effecting belated consideration & remembering… And then of image of Meherabad as shown me over the years by Dave Elison, but most recently illustrating one of Paul Smith's verse memoirs from his own New Humanity Books,  inscribed in my mind from Karl's postings of his pilgrimages, with Phil Motherwell too, among fellow Baba lovers, amidst less Indian cliche dust & petals than fertile Maharashtra lawn & grove…

Returning to Lee Kofman --she's keenly aware of brilliance's terrible other half, I say to Karl --exemplary of Neal Cassady & June Miller in the article : "while 'burning people' have the gift for making those around them feel fully alive by rendering the everyday into a glittering fairytale, in the process they often burn themselves out".  I'm wary of imposing too long with this hospital phone-call. Though he's been up for it he eventually says he'll probably hang up, but not before hailing Cassady & Kerouac. You know, he says, spiritual guys would go to San Quentin to talk to the prisoners, and they'd sometimes see Cassady, at the back, and he'd be glowing…Yes, and Kerouac, --the hopeless alcoholic, Karl says matter-of-fact.You were onto him quite young too? Yes, heard of him before I first read him… Dropped out of College, '64, desperate for deliverance from the cultureless town, poet & artist I assumed I was, --looking for any way out of it --escape to Paris? --quashed --Wales then, great in some respects but fell out with the mate I'd gone with-- hung out at the wonderful Southampton Art Gallery and the amazing upstairs Reference section of the Central Library --my 'further education'! --found Ihab Hassan writing on the post WW2 Americans, describing Charles Olson, for example, as the 'Dean of the Beats', --the Beats! Read about them, took notes in little fold-over letter-pad --but the first Kerouac I actually read was Big Sur, which was one of the numerous paperbacks I was selling in tiny kiosque aboard Sitmar Line'sFairstar late '65, the job I'd been demoted to after failing to cut it in the big shop according to my managers, --obliged to wear northern waters' blues and tropical whites past the Equator but evidently not really presentable to the passengers, aside from my atrocious attempts tying products in the hold for hoisting up to the main deck! --they were glad to hide me behind that little hatch, selling cigarettes, confectionary, & paperbacks! --and one day I picked it out, BIG SUR : "The story of the crack up of the King of the Beats" --and disbelievingly opened it --but the impact of that first line : "The church is blowing a sad windblown "Kathleen" on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I'd ruined my 'secret return' to San Francisco by getting silly drunk" & et cetera has remained with me these fifty years --I was his boy, once & for all!  Quick thoughts in my head about autobiography as history, and the chronicle poems of my friend Philip Kanlides, and, quite a propos, the celebrated Pi O whose epic, Fitzroy, was launched a week ago. Karl says, Kerouac kills a mouse and he's guilty & sad forever. Reading Kerouac, Karl says, I was knocked out by his honesty… I never heard someone talk about God so openly, he says. We share taking-it-all-in chuckles. Boys or old men, no where else to go.



[--fin, 25th October, '15
Westgarth, Oz--]

THE MERRI CREEK : Poems & Pieces, #26, New Year Issue, 2012

DAVE ELLISON



LADY UNIVERSE

(For a dear lady)



In a burst of longing

Dawn grows through darkness

The heart love gives

Breathes time into us

This is the everyday

Hard work and heartache

We gain our sight

All by one sky



In a moment of light

Observe the way

Paths cross our town

Clouds parade into view

We approach night

Face the same midnight

With our candles and carols

For the child in everything



In the court of the moon

With magic of starshine

The street wind sings

May we gather a feeling

Live the new life

As great trees in our midst

And noble towers

Bow to holy night



[12 Jan. 2012]


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KRIS HEMENSLEY/KEN TRIMBLE


"the pilgrim piece"


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(October 7/2011)

Dear Kris,
I hope you enjoyed 'Shores' [Shores of American Memory, Littlefox Press, '11). I read that poem on your site about the Albion. [David Pepperell's The Albion Jukebox Murder 1972 ] Yeah I can totally relate to that. There are so many or so few depending on how you look at Facebook where I can call a person friend. In you I feel totally at home & although distant, meaning we move in different circles & distance is hard, I regard you as a friend..................cheers Ken


oOo


Dear Ken,
Yes, of course! Very much so! Book, friendship, the lot! I'd been reading it from the beginning then today began from the end! You're very much the 'silent witness', kind of imperturbable. You dont get in the way of the poem/the perception. Laudable.
By the way, I have s/one coming in next week for a copy of the new collection, and hope that another acquaintance will also be interested!
Loretta just told me she was at the Rainbow wake you write about [Nights at the Rainbow, p1]. Small world!
We'll talk again soon!
Best wishes, Kris


oOo



(October 8/2011)

Dear Kris,
Thanks for words. I was a regular at the Rainbow for some years. I used to see the Paul Williamson Hammond Combo on a Monday night. And the Grand Whazoo, and on a Sunday afternoon. Chic was a very personable fellow who had the ability to treat everyone as a friend. By accident I hadn't heard that he died. A mate who ran the Rob Roy told me that Chic had this amazing funeral so I just imagined it. While pubs can be destructive they can also be great community gatherings like a family. In the poem 'Shores Of American Memory' the section on O'Reilly's is a case in point. I met a guy who told me to go to that pub on a Monday night because they have an Irish jam session in North Beach. He sent an email to the owner Myles that I would be coming down and that I was a poet. Anyway Myles happens to love Australians. That night I met Myles and for the whole night I didn't buy a beer. He even sang And The Band Played Waltzing Matlida for me. People came up to me and said, you're that Australian. There I met a fellow who sang with Rambling Jack Elliot, & the great grandson of Gurdjieff the philosopher. It was if I was being honoured. I guess places like the Rainbow & O'Reilly's make you feel special for no specific reason, it makes you feel as if yes there is a family and life is good..........cheers Ken


oOo

(October 8/2011)

Dear Ken,
Your evocative, inspiring reply re- the Rainbow has me thinking that we could attempt the"conversation" by email? How about it?!!! (This was to be a conversation abt this & that, especially the pilgrimage aspect of both poetry and yr journey to the US, Merton , Jeffers etc)
I salute your energy & openness, I mean that you can be there in such a way as the O'Reilly's scene opened up to you! And those connections are astonishing...
Better get back to the Shop!
All best, Kris


oOo



(8/10/11)

Dear Kris,
Sure thing, that would be great. Do you mean explore more avenues of the pilgrim experience or in relation to my America trip? Because pilgrim travelling can open up a whole new world to everyone, artists, poets, anyone who is open to the journey. Personally, Joe Campbell's books on myth had a great influence. One has to cast off or shed your old skin and believe in the path. Even if a thousand people say you're crazy you have stick at it and believe in yourself. And there are times when you go 3 steps back & 1 step forward but the point is you have to get up. I am no angel and I sort of liked what St. Augustine said, 'Lord make me perfect but not just now', or something like that haha! It was like going to the monastery and meeting the gardener Joseph Bottone who turned out to be a mate of Creeley. He had a hermitage on the grounds overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One time he invited me over for a joint and a couple of shots of rum. Certainly we played up but it was great! And the whole thing becomes infectious, the pilgrimage. Suddenly not only poetry but also the monastic along the Big Sur coast became a powerful adventure for me. Because you know that Robinson Jeffers' home is in Carmel, and a few kilometres from the monastery is the Henry Miller Library and you're riding over the Bixby Bridge where Kerouac stumbled and hooped & hollered in the foggy night. That below the bridge somewhere is Ferlinghetti's cabin. You become sort of tuned into the poetry of the land. You know that Ansel Adams & Ed Weston two of America's great photographers had homes there as well so it becomes a symphony. Even New Orleans I got to know the stories of Johnny Whites Bar. A fellow by the name of Paddy told me that when hurricane Katrina rolled through, the only bar open in the whole town was this one. So I checked it out, it runs off Bourbon Street almost opposite The New Orleans Preservation Jazz Hall. A tiny bar where twenty would be a crowd and I'm having a drink while watching Germany kick our arse in the World Cup! You get immersed in the moment & because I studied photography when I was young I became a good watcher. And the whole idea of watching takes you into another world. A lot of people travel but never see or they only see postcards & that isn't travelling.............cheers Ken


oOo

(8/10/11)

Dear Kris,
More reflections on Thomas Merton this time. You know he went to Columbia University just a few years before Kerouac and others. In fact he published a novel (not sure of name) at same publishing house as Kerouac's first novel Town & City, Harcourt and Brace. His mentor & friend was Mark Van Doren who also taught Kerouac. Merton was a few years earlier than the 'Beats' but he was interested in the jazz scene, drank and smoked and had his way with women. Yet Merton was called to be a monastic and lived that way for twenty odd years. I am attracted to him because he struggled nearly every day he was in the order. Yet he stayed true. When he wrote his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, from his Trappist Monastery in Kentucky, people in America went crazy about it. It came out just after the war and I guess people were dealing with that sense of loss that war brings & so they found a prophet in Merton who spoke their language. The irony is he went in the monastery to deny his writing talent but the church had other ideas. They wanted him to utilise his talents so he could be of use in getting converts etc. Another irony and I didn't know it at the time, Merton wanted to leave the order of the Trappists and become a Camaldolse. That is the order I am in. It is more hermit whereas the Trappists are more community. You know, when he went in the church was far more restrictive than it is today after Vatican 2. The time he went in the church was convinced that it was their way or the highway as the saying goes. Meaning they had no time for other faiths and his order were very strict. There was no talking except only with meetings with the Abbot about spiritual direction with either him or a Director. Life was lived by sign language. And life was hard work. Most monasteries are run like farms. You get up early work in the fields, pray, read, eat, sleep then repeat. In fact it is a hard life. Some work in the kitchen, others may be allocated to cleaning guest house accommodation and in Merton's case he was told to write. There was tremendous tension with Merton I think because on the one hand he wanted to deny his writing talent & on the other he loved the celebrity. Even not being allowed out of his monastery he still had this aura that people craved. People like Huxley corresponded along with Joan Baez and many others. When Merton was finally allowed to attend a conference in Thailand in the 1960's he went to India & Sri Lanka. At a place called Polonnaruwa there is a giant stone Buddha reclining on his side. In his book, Asian Journals, he tells of this One Moment or unitive experience. The writing is sublime. From there after all those years in the monastery and his epiphany in Sri Lanka he is having a shower, and after he's finished he begins to shave, and is electrocuted. I reckon wow what a perfect death. So Merton in a strange way was the fore-runner of Kerouac and Jack devoured Merton but sadly couldn't grasp him...............regards Ken


oOo

(October 9/2011)

Dear Kris,
[re KH birthday greetings to KT] Facebook have it a bit early. I have it on the 12th, the same day as Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. Actually my father has the same day as well and mother is on the 12th June & my brother the 13th December, the 12th month.
Began reading Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. It is a fine book.
My friend and spiritual head of the Australian part of the Camaldolese has just returned from his own pilgrimage. He went to Italy where they have a General Chapter once every few years. He is an interesting fellow. He went to India in the Eighties and stayed with Bede Griffiths & was initiated into sanyassa. Now I went through a similar process but as a bramachari student. Am I right to say you stayed at the monastery in Kentucky where Merton lived then went onto Sri Lanka and later Thailand? If so wow. Did you see Polonnaruwa? Michael (priest friend above) is taking me out for a curry meal for my birthday. Lastly thinking about putting book in for awards. Who knows if I don't give it a go? The only thing is I get mixed up with their enrollment dates. Like the John Bray award you have to put your form in about 6 months before award is given. The only thing I worry about is that people think I am writing it as an American poetry by proxy. From my point of view it isn't, instead I wanted it to be a pilgrim piece if you will. Anyway that's the way I wrote it and that's that. Thanks for birthday greetings....................kind regards Ken


oOo

(Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:36 PM)

Dear Kris,
Any further news on that interview on pilgrimage?..................kind regards Ken


oOo


(Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 12:37 AM)

Dear Ken,
just back an hour or so after cleaning up the shop following [Owen Richardson's] launch for Gig Ryan [New & Selected Poems, published by Giramondo] ... very big affair, exhausting, and heaps of fun!
Re- the pilgrimage i/vw, --yes, will look at it again on Thursday (my day off)...
If I can get away on Saturday for your reading at Federation Square I will!Good luck!
talk soon, k


oOo


(15/10/11)

Dear Ken,
I managed to get away from the Shop around three p.m., and DID catch half of the reading at Fed Square... Was disappointed that I'd probably missed your set; heard several of Robert Lloyd's poems & couple of songs, then all of Michael Heald and then, a small miracle, you were returned to the stage for one poem! Was very interested in yr reading voice; it reminded me of Robt Lloyd's singing voice! Probably the most resonant poem I heard this a/noon! Well done! Can only guess at how you felt (reluctant?) but you sounded swell! I had to hurry off straightaway afterwards and anyway i cld see you guys closing in on one another so better (I thought) to drop you quick line than to cut in. Time for me to recouperate now. Will see what I can get together for you around yr splendid Pilgrimage responses, and will send before too long.
cheers, Kris


oOo


(15 Oct/11)

Dear Kris,
Didn't see you sadly, I was in another zone haha! Glad you liked my voice hope poem was good too. Not sure where the voice comes from but it helps with the delivery or spell of poem. Robert & I thinking of doing something together more duets in future. I really like him, he's a real nice guy. I really appreciate you coming, and when pilgrim thing is right for you I'll be here. Just got home, now 9pm, had to walk half up a mountain pitch black. Now settling in at home with a good red.....Youre the best..............Ken


oOo

Kris Hemensley
End-piece, 1

Mine have mostly been head & book journeys, Ken, though I did follow in Merton's footsteps to the King's Palace in Bangkok in 2005. Loved the Ramayana murals there but afterwards, when I checked Merton's own response in my brother Bernard's copy of Asian Journals (--I was in Bangkok en route the UK-- ) realized that Merton had only qualified appreciation (Disney kitsch etc). But yes, was well aware of Merton's Bangkok story, and so to that extent it was a kind of pilgrimage in itself. But Gethsemane in Kentucky only in my reading, for example via Merton's book. The Sign of Jonas (I have the 1953 1st British edition, Hollis & Carter, London), and appreciated immediately the tough rigour of that practice. (Penultimate paragraph in the Prologue is a beauty & somewhat a propos of even our correspondence : "A monk can always legitimately and significantly compare himself to a prophet, because the monks are the heirs of the prophets. The prophet is a man whose whole life is a living witness of the providential action of God in the world. Every prophet is a sign and a witness of Christ. Every monk, in whom Christ lives, and in whom all the prophecies are therefore fulfilled, is a witness and a sign of the Kingdom of God. Even our mistakes are eloquent, more than we know.")
Regarding Sri Lanka : I went ashore in Colombo as a 19 year old, working on the Fairstar (the Sitmar line's flagship), latter part of 1965. I only did a taxi round-trip with workmates but absorbed massive sensation & inspiration from my one & only Ceylon experience. For example, classic deja-vu on a river bank when, leaving my colleagues to the display of working elephants, I wandered off by myself, towards the cries & laughter of kids diving into the water, and suddenly realized I knew the place, that is I recognized it from a dream which I'd had in Southampton before the voyage... the colours, the heat, the angle of embankment to water, the screams of the children, the splash of water et cetera. I was shocked & amazed, walked away from it probably because called by colleagues to resume our taxi tour. But could have stood there forever, in wonderment, trying to understand what it meant!

[16th January, '012]

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End-piece, 2

A Note on Shores of American Memory

It's as though sentiment (one's disposition towards the world) might parallel insight : the personal simultaneously a universal. But Ken Trimble isnt Khalil Gibran! Dont intend unkindness or ingratitude for what was a consolation & stimulation at age twenty, but the person walking around in these poems is no spiritual cipher. By way of contrast, David Ellison & I often refer to one or another example or exemplar of the school of Desperate Mysticism. No doubt at all that this poet's a seeker, one who doesnt shy from either big Metaphor or Reference, and the imprint of the world is all over him. It's audible like the Charlie Parker & Sonny Rollins, the Hank Williams & Bob Dylan who pop up in the poetry --visible like the place names, the brand names of daily consumables, let alone the influential books & authors (Kazantzakis, Jeffers, Rimbaud, Bukowski, Hamsun, Kerouac, Whitman, Ginsberg, Micheline, Kaufmann, Shelton Lee et al) which glue his soul-scape together. Not half bad for a "beggar poet nothing more, nothing less" (p. 44, 'Sixty-Seven Cents'), --which in the Post-Literature era, as I call it (and I'm not sure I dont 'simply' mean Post-Modernism) is a pretty good manifesto. "I cannot dazzle with verse, rhyme or rhythm" the poem goes, --G M Hopkins ? (but who can after The Windhover ?)!
"Just stories of what I've seen / And what I've done. / I walk the streets of the world a homeless drifter / Australian my heritage the planet my home / Listening to stories, writing them down"...
(16th January, '012)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

ALICIA BEE


Jack Kerouac’s Holiday House


Jack Kerouac built a holiday house for Beat poetry,

Mountain climbing Matterhorn in Mill Valley California,

He took Gary Snyder from the road and made a summary,

Jack Kerouac normally lived with his (sick old) mother in Florida.

The traveller never had a daughter till taking the blood test,

“You can’t fall off a mountain” in the height of beat mania,

He wrote some good freeflow haiku - history composed the rest.

He never read every book in the Buddhism (text) library,

His confusing stream of consciousness was typing from the chest,

Rehabilitation became spirituality,

Jack Kerouac would hit the road again when he drank alcohol.


(2010)

----------------------------------------------

CECILIA WHITE


breath


i don't recall the arrival
or having left. the point
of departure is the same
as the plosive of the asterisk
on a map, monosyllabic arrow
saying 'you are here'. contexted,
antiquarian, rigidly published.
spinal-tapped into parts of speech.
i am grammatically unscathed,
unbound on page or board
detectable only in the drawing
of breath, erasure of exclamation.

in the swoop of transitive verbage
a haunting space
lifts from the flatlands. never mind that
dislocation is in the reading.
i pick at threads of frontier
with my left-handed thinking. in the torn
apparel of second language
i remove full stops from islands
of air, listing under the salt
of problematics, participles
and suitcases. i am otherly compassed,
declining rite of passage and needle.

every place was once
somewhere else. meaning unsilts
ragged settlement, indexes
the gravel of logic.
stone and ink chapter memory
under weight of light, creasing
the eye, slubbing the tongue,
less engraved, i dissolve
sediment of interpretation,
inhaling contours,
landing at the point of it all.

(2011)


-----------------------------------------------------------------


PAUL HARPER


assertive with grace & charm


counter intuitive as it may seem
grow a beard before train travel
& be accosted less by evangelists
particularly if your destination
is a small commune of musicians
across cow paddocks
from a bed & breakfast haunted
by freshly retired footballers

if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now

acquire a butterfly
some barbed wire or a tall ship
but when the toaster decides
an intricate mishmash
of marvel characters
fire & brimstone
& your topless girlfriend as a centaur
may assist two marathon runners
with their mission to negotiate peace
among rival factions
the black suits & the grey suits
in a breeding ground for ibis
not noticing can be highly functional

if you have a fly buys card please scan now

----------------------------------------------------------

ALBERT ROTSTEIN


vermeer


* * *
* * * *
everything porcelain
except the milk jug
which
spills endlessly

light * (oO enters
from the left
photons (o* exacted
by craft into
radiant iguazuae fall
*o)*O*(o
* oO * *
Oo(o)Oo ***
* * * o *
sunbeams
*o)O(o*******
gleam)"around the house
carried
on hogshair
plasma ):''''(((whooo***
sublimed
wave ((((from *
particle to
painters article
annealed and calcined
onto the days
matter
unuttered to forever

a box of quanta
through
the imprimatur of hand
through a fashioned utensil
the brush not the pencil
and thence and thus
the documenta

this alchemy will not defraud
fall from
the board
nor be marauded
by a god of love


*

-----------------------------------------------------------


JAMES HAMILTON


TOAST TO LEONORA CARRINGTON


From the newspaper, I didn't know I was on the way
to a wake. When the white horse appeared
I rode so long that I forgot
the gold star'd cloak I didn't wear

on the way here. Regret of what
she could have told our new lives
made old. Sphinxes? sure.
No state yet certain, the reddened head

glows in seeming fire. Tent in an orb
of alleyway dreaming. Seems I lost
my white horse amongst her images
maybe dreams are only an imagined "snake clock"

Here then is our cloak of stars
the cloak we take to night, to love.
A grin beneath clouded hair
levels a demon, empties a stare

of the always familiar coral skied
or basalt eyed. The kind of minotaur
that floats above knowing children,
hooded. Greenpool shade of light

which drifts above our horseless wake,
floating sound of glowing eyes, one dead star
in our mouths. Now we ride back on our blanket
of colours, life now at "the house opposite"

in the shudder-hum of art. We return to the country
we never knew, but now with her silent hall of maps
in our eyes. Nothing starts to burn. Seated at our table,
the real news fresh on the page, concealed ocean high and low

We raise our glasses to the cartographer
of "Down Below"


[Melbourne, 28th May 2011]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FINOLA MOORHEAD


REGARDING LEONORA CARRINGTON

[NOTE : I'd remembered Finola's mention of her "painter cousin" but was astounded when I came across her name in Paul Ray's The Surrealist Movement in England (Cornel University Press, 1971), & later in Breton's Painting & Surrealism. Her book, Down Below, was praised by Pierre Mabille & Maurice Blanchot; & in 1946, Claude Serbanne described her as the "greatest English surrealist poet, and, without any argument, one of the four or five greatest poets of surrealist tendency on the international scene." Her paintings were included in all the Surrealist exhibitions since 1937, & occupied a prominent place at the 1960 Surrealist exhibition in New York. --August, 1981; Kris Hemensley]

Nth Fitzroy,
Summer/1980

Dear Kristo --,

I'm terrified of my cousin Leonora Carrington & I'm not terrified of many people but when she is drunk & I am too, our ability to get on is positively genetic. And you have gotten the very correct word for her P R I V A T E. Her play Penelope (I think) written when she was 17 was produced 1st in something like 1966. The Hearing Trumpet written for her friends in 1954, or something, was first published in English in 1975, and so the story goes, her writing is her own and whoever wrested the mss from her to publish them must have approached her personally, got her drunk, got her respect then said Please....do it for me, go on etc. etc. I spent six weeks in Mexico with her husband, Chiqui Weicz, for whom The Stone Door was written in 1947 or something. During the war, she was put in an Asylum in Spain because she wanted to save her previous lover, Max Ernst, from the Nazis & there is an account of her time there, which is a brilliant merging of the alchemical & the surreal (truths) in the subjective (misunderstood necessarily) in booklet form, called Down Below. On the other hand her painting is public, famous in Mexico City, N Y & Paris (little bit London) & those people here who really know the Surrealists (and there are apparently FEW) of course know her work well. Periodically she'll have an exhibition in one of those Madison Ave commercial galleries which sell out --she's constantly fighting with her agent as she feels she has to KEEP her 3 men, who are those narrow-fingered aesthete demi-jewish Europeans --two sons and husband; the older son, my age, Gaby is in theatre, Pablo in medicine. She is notoriously a non-letter writer, has friends like Larry, Trotsky's son, and Luis (Bunuel) & is herself one of the big expatriot names in Mexico City where there are lots... too shy and multilingual... Chiqui was telling me of when Antonin Artaud came to stay & find out the secrets of the Shamans, pre-pre-Castaneda, & wrote that crazy book The Peyote Dance. I stayed in her house in Cuernavaca which is under the same volcano as Malcolm Lowry's. To ask me about Leonora Carrington is to ask me to explain the mysteries of my own DNA. It's queer that locked in my gaol of English Language & bonny Aussie enthusiasm I should meet or have the possibility of meeting such names so closely ... for to be the prima de Leonora Carringtom is almost to be her when she is absent, 'cos family is all-hallowed when your language is Latinate. But my ignorance beneath the enthusiasm & the awe is it, for I could only approach on the personal ... not the professional, or careerish, so I don't know really what to say. I've gathered that I should respect the private, as I know how much mail arrives to be ignored or laughed off in the Calle Chihuahua. None of them write letters, but your best bet is Gaby --Gabriel Weicz-Carringtom, Calle Chihuahua 194, Mexico City, Zona 7, for information, opinion about living surrealism, or an approach to his mother, or possibly a copy of Down Below.

A day later : yes Gaby would be more approachable & possibly a more rewarding correspondent as Leonora is at the moment incommunicado in N Y city & some Tibetan Buddhist retreat, rehashing her whole life & for her these things are passed, whereas for Gaby to put it into perspective would be good (they are muy mucho close). Perhaps you could think up some inspired questions & suggest publishing what he has to say & show him the Merri [The Merri Creek,Or Nero was Earth Ship magazine's 3rd series, & in turn presented H/EAR, eight issues, 1981-85] --whatever, it's not as though he's not a writer himself. And they're all deeply in the Anarchist tradition, so the Merri should stand on its own merits. My meetings with Leonora are/were too personal & as yet out of historical perspective to make any sort of a piece at the moment ... still haven't decided whether to use the ticket I have for Nov. 7th to return.
Wish for myself the secret of the freedom of the surrealists, for my writing I mean, but don't have it, can understand more what the Bauhaus was about, even that quite newly & to do with my own experiment [the work in progress which would become Remember the Tarantella, 1987, -ed.]...

(.....)
with love,
Finola


oOo

NOTE (1) :
After the issue was published, Finola sent an urgent note, "I have not read everything yet in H/EAR ye'll understand that. One thing I read & if you've not sent all away, fix it : I am LA PRIMA DE LEONORA, not her PRANA ((that's embarrassing for PRANA is the magical Life Force that invades orange juice & fresh air & so on and PRIMA is only 1st cousin feminine))" The correction is made in the above.

NOTE (2):
When James Hamilton told me he'd recently written a poem for/about Leonora Carrington, having read the newspaper obituary, I responded with my story of Finola's family connection and my publishing her reminiscence 20 years ago in H/EAR. We thought it would be great to publish the texts together! I sought Finola's permission to reprint her letter here. I have reinserted a couple of passages omitted from the 1981 publication. As Finola & I have agreed, publish & be damned!

----------------------------------------------------------------

CONTRIBUTORS:

DAVE ELLISON,KEN TRIMBLE, PAUL HARPER & JAMES HAMILTON have appeared in previous issues [see name index]. They're all active in Melbourne, outside of the mainstream, wholly tuned in to the music...
ALICIA BEE is a freelance journalist & blogger; has published 2 collections of poems, Bathers On The Beach, & The Book Of The Dead And Wounded, both from Good Look Books (Brunswick, Vic.). Her webpage is, http://misspiggyjournalist.wordpress.com/
CECILIA WHITE, artist, photographer, poet; first met when she performed Vicki Viidikas jazz poem at the MOK Anniversary event at Collected Works couple of years ago. Studied in Germany ('80s) & presently in New South Wales. Winner of inaugural national Cricket Poem Prize. Current project is Breathing Space.
ALBERT ROTSTEIN stalwart of boho Melbourne city & country art & poetry scenes over the decades. His poems most recently appear in Pete Spence's irregular pressings, more publicly & regularly in Pi O's Unusual Work magazine.
FINOLA MOORHEAD , poet, novelist, playwright. Books include Quilt ('85); A Handwritten Modern Classic (Post-Neo, '87); Remember the Tarantella ('87, reissued by Spinifex in '011); Still Murder ('91); My Voice ('06). Fiction editor with A A Phillips on Meanjin Quarterly in the '70s, illustrious member of the Rushall Crescent Avant-Garde in the '70s/80s.

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #15, November, 2009

"ALL YOU'VE GOT TO DO IS TUNE IN TO THE MUSIC..."

________________________________________


JOHN BENNETT


LOOKING BACK

I heard
back from
Leonard Cohen.
He wants me
to join
his tour.

Unlike the
other members of
the troupe
who wear
snappy little hats,
I'm to wear
a dunce cap.

There'll be a
gold leash
around my neck &
when Leonard
yanks it
I blurt out
a Shard.

No talk of
my playing
harmonica,
but if things
work out well
there's an
off chance
of our
cutting a
record together:
Leonard & John,
Looking Back
Thru the
Ages.

My friends
tell me
this is
the chance of
a lifetime,
but I'm a
little uneasy
about the
dunce cap &
leash.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------

GLENN COOPER


BLOWING IN THE WIND


If you join the dots on
that famous polka-dot shirt,
they form a picture
of a man as lost
in the wind as all
the answers
he once
coveted.


This thought came to me just now
as I sat in the sun and watched
the wind suddenly fill
the sleeves of my old, flannel shirt,
pegged on the line, making
a man of me at last.


ooo


DYLANHAIKU


Hotel room -

guitar on the bed

woman on the floor.


*


No direction home -

then, now

and forever.



---------------------------------------------------------------------


ANDREW FRANKS


WEEP


SINCE THERE ARE no more poets
and the MUSICIANS HAVE FLED the stage
packing pens in oak trunks/TEA CHESTS
BURYING THEIR INSTRUMENTS in the snow
since all the artists have GIN BLOSSOMING

UP TO OUR NECKS in SHIT & blood
Since beauty and DESIRE STOLE OUR last can
Dle and left us in the da
rk since the gaunt got garr

otted and fled SINCE ALL TYPOGR
aphical THINGS GO AGAINST ME since all the
sun BEACHED BLEACHED WHO
RES DECIDEd to hang thems

Elves, since HIS PULSE SLOWED DO
WN and my rage filled to OVERF
lowing, since venus AND ALL HER MAT
Es stopped DRINKING IN OUR BAR the O
NLY THINg left is to
WEEP.


ooo

As I rounded the corner

I saw him
in a white Alfa Romeo
red leather seats
on Broadwick Street
gold ring, gold watch,
white shirt, blue with white polka dot tie
dark blue mohair suit
quality shades, Gerry Mulligan crew cut
black Italian loafers
In the background
John Coltrane was easing
into the midday sun

I saw the past and my future
blurring into one


ooo


On Seeing Slim Gaillard in London three days before he died


He strode through Golden Square
shrouded in a huge woolen coat, scarf, beret, beard and a scowl.
I walked by him and as I did so
He turned his weary old head and looked me in the eye.
"Oroonie"
and then he was gone.

Over and Vout!


------
[these poems from SCRATCHED IN THE STARS, SPRAWLED IN THE SAND
(pub. Soul Bay Press (Sussex,UK, '09); see www.soulbaypress.com]

------------------------------------------------------------------------


PETE SPENCE


An Orchestra's Day Off!


string section

the thoughtless strings resonate
down an endless hallway
looking for a score!

horn section

the horns eat abalone alone
in a brightly lit restaurant!

the percussion section

are rapping on an avenue of doors
where no one is pretending
to be at home!

if the wind section

comes in from that quarter
for 3 days it'll rain!

conductor

when struck by lightning
the orchestra members
showed no spark of enthusiasm
for the gesture
being well acquainted
with the piece at hand!

the parts

are blowing in the wind!


ooo


Birthday


1.

its your birthday
but you won't hear
Siegfried Idyll live
from the bathroom!!

what will
the dogs
and parrots do
now that
Wagner's out??

though vegetarianism
is not so passe
non-violence
as an industry
is total drama!!

here's hoping
for an opera
with acne!
maybe we
can count
all the spots
before Lunch!!

2.

apart from Hasse's
La Serva Scaltra
the whole year
can be spielfrei!!
who needs
a ringside seat
in Beyrouth?
i'd rather
be a trainspotter
in Birdland
(is that "peace
from delusion")
than a member
of the Cameroon
Wagner Society
taking a nap
in the garden
at Wahnfried!!


---------------------------------------------------------------------------

CORRESPONDENCE

WARREN BURT / KRIS HEMENSLEY


Warren Burt

Wed, Oct 7, 2009

Hi Kris!

Continuing our discussion of months ago, when I was in the shop, you asked about why people (these days) would use non-personal processes (for lack of a better term, and I'm sure there are lots of them) to make work. I found this quote from Herbert Brun the other day. Brun (1918-2000) was a composer, writer, computer pioneer, and political activist. Born in Germany, and riding out WWII in Palestine, he taught from 1963 at the University of Illinois, and a list of his students is a who's who of composers, writer, cyberneticians, and activists. In fact, for the past few years, students of his have been the controlling faction on the Urbana, Illinois, city council, making that city a model of Green politics in the USA. He was one for the bottom-up approach in pretty much all things, and whereas I was saying that one might use "non-personal processes" (how to encapsulate a world of extremely different ideas and techniques in a sound byte???) as a medium of discovery, Brun expresses it much more politically:

"It is one thing to search for events that will produce the sound one wants, and quite another to discover the sound of the events one wants. In the first case the wanted sound renders desirable the necessary events; in the second the wanted events are the standard for the desirability of the resulting sound. These are not only two different approaches to the composition of music, but also two different political attitudes."

Substitute words for sound, poetry for music, or whatever medium one is dealing with, and the quote may be more or less applicable.....

Brun, by the way, was one of the idols of Mr. Mann - whenever Chris was in the US, he would make a beeline for Urbana to have a cup of tea and "good old Berlin Jews arguing" with Herbert.

I liked seeing your early 70s poem-portraits on the CW web-thing the other day, by the way. It occurs to me that whatever styles we work in, even when we know each other, the work itself remains often inaccessible. Which reminds me - I promised myself that October would be the month I got my website and source of materials up and running, and here we are 7 days into it, and I haven't even started yet!

Hope you're well, and cheers,

Warren


ooOOoo



Kris Hemensley


Thu, Oct 8, 2009

Dear Warren, Thank you for yours... Yes, it was a good little
discussion that day at the Shop, an impromptu seminar! And Alan [Pose]
recalling La Trobe University days & mutual tutors, colleagues,
friends in your music department... We were talking abt computer
generated language programmes, and the criticism I'd heard of John
Tranter : not that he was employing a particular programme but that he
then edited or corrected the results. My acquaintances must be closet
dadaists! I have problems with both the computer generation and the
criticism made of Tranter's correction!
Interesting what you say about Herbert Brun; firstly, because of the
tantalising adjacency of poetry & music regarding composition &
especially where any degree of abstraction is involved (& perhaps it
is always involved!); secondly, for the distinction Brun finds
between the 'wanted sound' & 'wanted events'... I'm reminded of the
Wallace Stevens I've been (mis)quoting for donkeys years; his response
to the "but what does it mean?" question : Mean? says Stevens : It
means nothing but the heavens full of colours & the constellations of
sound (or vice-versa --and that vice-versa is a funny one too! --what
status any proposition that can be so immediately reversible?)!
Creeley's quip "form is never more than an extension of content",
though liberating was always problematic. Could the Brun's proposition
be understood as politically desired & approved content guaranteeing a
work irrespective of its language --which to me is often recipe for
sentimentality or as George Oppen said about political intent,
therapy; And not what the poetry might be on about!
Best wishes, Kris


ooOOoo


Warren Burt

Hi Kris!

Forgive me for treating you like a telephone book, but do you have an email for Walter Billeter? Sorry to do that, but you're the first person who comes to mind who might. I want to tell him about the radio show about Paul Celan that just came on Radio National. He might be interested.

A very good insight about Brun's statement! I think the reply would be that if one brings about desired political conditions, and then proceeds to write sentimental theraputic work in the same old way (think of Stalin Odes as the most extreme example), then the "desired political conditions" haven't gone far enough, or one hasn't really changed oneself enough. But I think what he was talking about there was more the use of processes to generate material and then the observing of the results of those processes. That is, to make a musical analogy - if one writes a program to generate a melody, and then listens to that melody with the same criteria one would judge a, say, Bach melody by, then the criticism would be that one is not listening to the melody with an open-minded enough set of ears, so that one can discover the inner-structure of the machine produced melody, and find out what the program one wrote was really doing, on the deepest level.

This doesn't mean that one creates processes uncritically, or listens to/observes the results of the process uncritically. The famous example (at least I tell everyone about it) is the tell-all interview that John Cage gave to Stephen Montague in the late 1970s, where Cage discusses his "random" composing methods, with especial reference to his orchestra and chorus piece "Apartment House 1776." Cage recounts that the piece went through seven complete rewrites before he "got it right." Each time before that, the process was producing results that even by Cage's Buddhistic "listen to everything for it's own interest" standards, were just dead boring. It was only on the 7th attempt, that the de-composition / re-composition process (he was using American colonial tunes and hymns by the 18th century maverick composer William Billings) he was trying to make finally produced results that made Billings work come to (a contemporary) life in a way that pleased him. You've probably never written an orchestra piece, but you've written books, so you have some idea of the amount of work involved in seven complete rewrites of a major work. Astounding! This was also a period in Cage's work where he was re-examining the idea of harmony, which he'd given up on after 2 years of Arnold Schoenberg's harmony bootcamp in the 1930s (apparently Cage was brilliant at the counterpoint exercises, but they meant nothing to him emotionally - he said he had absolutely no "feeling for harmony.") At this period Cage was talking a lot with James Tenney, who was re-evaluating harmony in terms of the microtonal practices of the ancient Greeks (we were all doing that in the 70s - me too! someday someone will have to write a paper about the Ptolemaic-Archytan revival in Western classical music of the 1970s!), and the eventual results of that thinking were, among other things, Cage's last series of works from the 1980s & early 1990s "the number pieces," where his choices of pitches to randomly order in time are just exquisitely sensitive.
So back to Brun - he was concerned with an attitude to politics that wasn't just one party or another, but one which changed the individual (very much like Ghandi - "democracy is not so much about self-rule and self-transformation" or something like that). And knowing him, I know he was absolutely opposed to mind control or processes of change imposed from the top-down (or peer pressure processes imposed from both sides!).
Anyway, this could go on, but I've got to finish up a review for a Brazilian webmag, and continue celebrating my 60th birthday, young pup that I am!

Cheers,

Warren

-------------------------------------------------------------------

CORRESPONDENCE

'DEVA' DAVE ELLISON

November, 2009

Kris, I feel privileged to read Tim Sheppard's marvellous writing [see TIM SHEPPARD, blog 8/11/09]. A writer can do no more with the dark and light of words on a page, and on the screen of creation. Here is the form and the content. Everything is here. Tim's writing spans the dreaming universe. Time and space fade inside the moment of poetic clarity. In such moments, the reader can sense their true self, within and without. The true self is boundless.


--------------------------------------------------------------

TIM SHEPPARD


INTERVAL

Light penetrating
the early morning stillness
seeking its own within each new
form of life,
each giving to the other
a strength and purpose vital
to its own being -
admired for its own sake - - - - - while
colour and tone acting with incredible
playfulness
play havoc on the grass
each shaded by its own perfection of loveliness.


----------------------------------------------------------------

KENNETH TRIMBLE


BIRDLAND

There is a tree
I know, that talks to me at dusk

Yellow light falling
falling

I walk past you
and hear the ringing
of church bells.

Oh but I was mistaken
It's a symphony
playing Birdland.


ooo

WHITE MOON

White moon sits

on a black canvas night

Come home.


ooo


RED MOUNTAIN

Under the barren red mountain
I had come for Shiva's night.

A festival of fire
to the un-manifested
becoming manifested
as the sun dissolves into
You.

Ten thousand strong
with the moon
in their eyes
and fire in their hearts.
we waited for the Brahmin Priests
to light the ghee.

An ancient cry of O shiva, O shiva
as a wild woman came
with snake apparitions in here eyes
ablaze with the madness of love
to Arunachala.


ooo

THE HERMIT

Silent waters
yellow moon,
mountain mist,
and deer on the run.
Prayer mat and beer
which will I have first?

Drifting silence and wet afternoons
I think I'll read Kerouac,
perhaps St. Augustine
the black.

Lonely sun
tired days,
friends come around.


-----------------------------
[these poems are published in Clouds on Hanover Street, published by Littlefox Press, 159 Brunswick St., Fitzroy, Vic. 3056; www.littlefoxpublishing.com]


-----------------------------------------------------------

MAX RYAN

Allen Ginsberg, the real story

I slept all afternoon and when I awoke it was morning; I didn’t know where I was — I had no name for India. — Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals

Where to begin? Firstly, dear reader, in my story Allen Ginsberg is but one of many players but I did meet him (sort of) and even exchanged words with the Great Man. It was 1980 in Vienna and winter was starting to dig in its bitter heels in more ways than one. The reason I was there, and still the only one that now or then makes any sense, was the enchanting Eva. We’d met at a Buddhist retreat in the south of England, had a sweet love in the summer sun time together and then she’d gone back to Wien to finish her medical studies. When I’d rung from London she’d told me it wasn’t a good time to come, she was studying for her finals etc but still I went.

Day one: I’m in Wien, staying with E (in her spare bedroom) and we’re at her folks’ place for lunch. After the meal, E’s dad who’s a doctor and, it turns out, an ex-Nazi, gets out his scrapbook of the War. There’s a comic-book type picture of Russian soldiers being blown up by Panzer tanks. (There’s also a black and white photo of him as a cavalry officer posing next to his horse in the snow, which is somehow touching). I say something about how killing all those Russians wasn’t very good to which he retorts: 
You Australians, you know nossing!
Well, in this case, he was probably right. We end up in her brother’s room where he proceeds to assail us with, to my ears, some fairly disturbing music. He also whips out a joint from which Eva takes a toke and I, in true biblical style, inhale (right in) too. By now the music has grown more disturbing and I say something like, could we have some Donovan or something and he just laughs, sneers is more the word. Was E sneering too? I can’t remember but already I know this boy from Newcastle is way out of his depth. Please remember, dear reader, that until my time in the meditation centre in England, I’d been almost five years in India, meditating, living for lengthy periods in the Himalayas with a few fellow seekers amidst goats and sheep. We end up at a party across town where I feel like I’m in a scene from a Hermann Hesse novel. There’s a band playing some fairly smarmy jazz and I’m sitting on a blanket on the floor. I’m wearing, in classic nerd, a tweed jacket someone in England’s given me, corduroy (beige) trousers and a scarf of many colours about ten feet long that I found in an op-shop in Cambridge. Suddenly I hear the cry Achtung Achtung! but already my scarf, which seems to be following me around the room, has knocked over someone’s glass of wine. By then E, I can see, is starting to wonder where she could have found me.

Not long after I decide to withdraw the forces for the evening. Some of E’s friends can let me off (without her) at her place. Auf wiedersehen, I say clambering out of their car and I wave as I walk to her place and pull the heavy wooden door (Vienna’s apartments are like medieval forts) behind me. But it isn’t her place and through the fog I realise I’m locked in. Oh well go up the stairs and ask some kindly burgher to please just press the ‘open’ button. Only no one wants to know me. Nein Nein is all I get when I gently knock on each door and burble: ‘scuse me kind sir…really sorry and all but I’m locked in… from Australia you see just arrived in your fair city. Finally I press a button. Almost immediately, it seems, the ground-floor door bursts open and four young guys in navy blue uniform rush in carrying machine guns. I’m strangely unperturbed as I walk down the stairs to greet them.
Sorry man, wrong door didn’t mean to disturb anyone, just arrived, you know, errr…
They can see I’m harmless, let me out and I’m back just behind E who treats my lapse as another sign of my total imbecility.

So this is the background to my stay although by now I’m starting to get out and about including to a chanting group where I get to play harmonium and sing bhajans and a classical Indian music performance by the Dagar Brothers (one of the many versions), held in some rich guy’s chateau just out of town. He’s got a world-famous collection of erotic art in a huge private gallery which looks bizarre after hearing such sublime music. But Allen Ginsberg is coming to town, turns out he’s a follower of the Tibetan Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa. E knows some people in town who are also disciples and they’re involved in organising Ginsberg’s reading at the university.

I can’t remember there being too many at the reading (50, 60?), pretty well a standard crowd for a poetry event anywhere. Peter Orlovsky, I remember, did a lively enactment of a poem about fucking a woman outside on the grass and a marvellous one about recycling human shit to make vegetables and flowers grow (music to my ears after weeks in a very intense Wien). I can’t remember much about Ginsberg’s offering except that many of his poems were performed on a portable harmonium and accompanied by a young guy, Steven Taylor, on guitar. (I’d studied Indian music in India and learnt to play simple ragas on harmonium and when a friend sent me Ginsberg’s First Blues Rags, Ballads And Harmonium Songs, I’d started playing chords and doing some of the pieces such as Father Death Blues.) The highlight was when Ginsberg closed the evening with Blake’s The Nurse’s Song, turning the last line ‘And all the hills echoed’ (with emphasis on the final syllable) into a powerful mantra. The small lecture room almost shook as everyone joined in. It’s still one of the most powerful performances of poetry I’ve seen.

We all end up in some basement cafe downtown, a gathering of local poets and Trungpa devotees. I remember talking to Orlovsky about India and his telling me how he’d love to go back one day. Everyone is gathered round a long table. I’m sitting across from the great man but end up talking to Steven Taylor about music and Bob Dylan whom he sometimes hangs out with back home. Ginsberg is in a dark suit and tie (part of Trungpa’s teaching about the necessity of living in the world) and he’s polishing off a steak and a few beers (also, I’m told, part of the practice of engagement with worldly life) and ends up picking his teeth and holding court to a retinue of local poets, even drawing up lists of essential reading of Central European poets for them. Ginsberg doesn’t seem overly interested in me. I seem to remember saying something slightly inane earlier about how he could come back to E’s and we could play some records or something, to which he says something like it sounding like a lot of hippy shit etc, so I’ve pretty well decided to cease any further dialogue. (Why didn’t I mention I played some of his songs, had read (several times) Indian Journals, was a big fan etc? Maybe I’d fallen into the role of playing the buffoon from the bush and couldn’t stop.) A young Viennese poet whom I’d met before is telling me how I should visit Venice in winter when all the tourists are gone and there’s fog over the water and the walls are covered in moss. He also says something I’ve never forgotten and which at the time perfectly describes my sense of the city I’m marooned in: Ze valls are tsickar (thicker) here in Wien.

Dear reader (are you still there?), the one scene that stays with me now is Ginsberg having what looks like a very taut conversation with a young local poet who’s all in black and is festooned with gold chains (what you now might call bling). Suddenly Bling stands up, steps back a few paces and calls out to Ginsberg: What? You mean you don’t like me or somezing? Ginsberg, still seated and picking his teeth, looks at the guy for what seems like a minute or so then slowly answers: No, not really…pride…too much pride. Soon it’s time to go. Ginsberg wants to visit the large Breughel collection at the City Gallery in the morning and we’re invited.

Outside Bling walks along with E and me or should I say, with E, and me coming along. He’s telling her of his accomplishments and how he writes poems for all occasions and makes a good living at it. Fortunately he leaves us after a few blocks. Then it’s just E and me walking along in the almost deserted streets. We walk for miles not saying much but it’s a ritual I’ve come to enjoy with her. I decide not to join the Breughel tour in the morning. An idea starts to build in my head: I’ll get back to my friends in Rome, find a cheap ticket to Sri Lanka and take the ferry across to southern India then travel through to Varanasi. There’s a blind singer I heard singing at a house-concert down an alleyway there. I’ll find where he is and study classical vocals with him. As Eve and I cross a footbridge, I can see the Danube under the streetlight. There’s ice on its banks and it’s moving swift and strong through the night.

(2009)


---------------------------------------------------------------------

CORNELIS VLEESKENS

KAREL APPEL
translated by Cornelis Vleeskens


THE HUNGER WINTER

I wish I were a bird
and flew with them above the fields
where no farmers sowed
and no horses ploughed
and the people sighed in the camps
while the birds flew free

I wish I were a bird
and not the rabbit I waylaid
to ease my hunger

when the people put on their uniforms
they were no longer people
they no longer had faces
but the birds flew free
the crow and the blackbird
(but not the rabbit)
I wish I were a bird


-------
[included in NO HOLDS BARRED : Dutch Poetry in the Post War Years, published for the exhibition & catalogue, intensely dutch (Art Gallery of NSW; 5 June -23 August,2009)]


ooOOoo


FOUR POEMS

*

Now that New York
WHIRLS
finger-wagging
and tut-tutting
through a 60s-style romance
spurred by an impetuous remark
about the Parisian prettiness
of hardworking security guards
and a misfit's adventure

Who could
coax a 60 year old fountain
to SUCH
prime cuts?


*****

A cut above the visuals
the painted ladies
CHASE
their own
unconventional
fish and chip shop farce
through neutral territory

And while
well-placed brushstrokes help
barefoot thespians
ANGLE fragrance-free
forget grosting
for no other reason
than a climatic one


*****

Euphoria's bimbo talk
makes the media
saddle up her mother
for skewed angles
and HEAD SPINNING
high heels

Le puriste
attracts
new long lasting
physicality

And musical and literary figures
POST cartoon-style topless babes
in Swiss organic cheese


*****

It may look
SPIRITED
but a far-flung
tiger packing a punch
in l'espace lumierre
GOES GLOBAL

And you encouraged him
with style and humour
coming on vertically
insensitive to
the horror
and anguish
suffered
in this squatter's rest

As the economy lifts off
your RIDER has gone home
and a new language is
brewing in the auction rooms


--------------------------------------------------------------------

ANDREW BURKE

SHOPPING CENTRE GENIUS
"the nothingness of human matters" --de Man quoting Rousseau


How many suburban shopping centres
have I walked, only to see you
in the eyes of the man
who wanders rootless by himself,
torn summer t-shirt and hooded
winter jacket. He isn't you

yet I see you in his faulty step
forward, hear you in his every phrase,
a patois of too many pills
and sleepless nights. Bored,

security guards name him
The Professor, then offer him
the door, bowing, mock courteous
in their security.

They let you out yet locked you in,
didn't they. Now your day begins
in a chemical blur through
shrubbery in manicured gardens where
once you debated the de Man question.


ooo


ON CHAPMAN HILL


Let's walk to get the city out
of our bones. I'll show you red gums,
xanthorrhoea with spears, flame-tailed
black cockatoos - no strangers here
unless you hear the protea's accent
on the evening breeze.

See, kangaroos' paws break
the tractor tread marks, while
off that story corner a body rusts,
wings and bonnets, flat trays
and drive shafts, welded
wildly by the elements.

Tonight, you'll hear boobooks
stretch silence horizon to horizon
in the bright moonlight. It sends
Pancho into a barking frenzy,
shouting down the ghost in the trees -
attack his best line of defence.

Sure as day follows night, there's
growth in decay. This land, once
Noongar, is now plotted and pieced. By
the water tank, old Buddha stands silent,
eyes hooded among raindrops sparkling
on gum leaves in sudden sunlight.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Edited & typed 21 October/20 something, November, '09, come heatwave, deluge, & thunderstorm!--


CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
JOHN BENNETT, San Francisco poet & musician, Beat & underground affiliated, his poems once compared to Kenneth Patchen. Recent books include Firestorm (Pudding House Press), & Cobras & Butterflies. JB is on Facebook where this poem (he calls them shards)first appeared.
GLENN COOPER, long-time correspondent of Collected Works Bookshop, lives in country NSW, & has recently published Tryin' To Get To Heaven : Poems about, to & inspired by Bob Dylan (Blind Dog Press, USA, '08).
ANDREW FRANKS, born in Sussex, commutes between the UK and Sydney. Scratched in the stars, sprawled on the sand (Soul Bay, '09) is his first collection of poems.
PETE SPENCE, poet (forty years since his debut in Makar,Queensland) & international mail-art high roller (since the '80s). See previous issues (#14, #10)
DAVE ELLISON, poet, Melbourne muso & holy-roller. See previous issues, (#10)
The late TIM SHEPPARD (1955-2009), see selection of poems on previous blog post for 8-11-09
MAX RYAN, poet & musician, lives in Byron Bay/NSW. Rainswayed Night (pub. Dangerously Poetic, Byron Bay, '05) won the Anne Elder Award (Vic) for best 1st collection.
CORNELIS VLEESKENS, born in Holland, '48, lived in Australia since '58. Edited poetry mag, Fling, with artist Jenni Mitchell way back when; Earthdance is his little press (PO Box, 465, Glen Innes, NSW, 2370). Books include The Day the River (UQP,'84), Nothing Kept (Brunswick Hill,'86), The Wider Canvas : A retrospective (Earthdance, '96). Poet, artist, translator from the Dutch.
KENNETH TRIMBLE, much travelled in Europe & Asia, including to Bede Griffiths' ashram in Shantivanam, India. Lives out of town. His first book, Clouds on Hanover Street, pub. Littlefox Press, Melbourne, '09 (contains illuminating biographical note).
WARREN BURT, born in Baltimore, '49, in Australia since 1975; lived in Melbourne until 2004, thereafter Wollongong, backwards & forwards to Europe & the USA. Prolific composer, performer, writer et al; numerous publications, recordings, concerts, events, films etc. His website (www.warrenburt.com/), "gives some idea of what I've been up to".
ANDREW BURKE, a veteran of the 60s Australian New Poetry's Perth chapter, where he edited Thrust with Ken Hudson. His books include Let's Face the Music & Dance ('75), On the Tip of My Tongue ('83), Pushing at Silence ('96), Whispering Gallery (2001), & most recently, Beyond City Limits (Edith Cowan University, '09).

-------------------------------------------------------------------
--all done, 28 November, 2009!--
K.H.

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 13, September, 2009

KRIS HEMENSLEY

FIVE PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE


MIKE

He makes no man his enemy.
he is not many men.
he is himself.
he helps himself.
his enemy is not many men.
he stands amongst many men.
he is himself amongst many men.

GEOFF

He comes from nowhere & says something.
he goes somewhere with nothing.
he says somewhere is nowhere & nothing is something.
he comes & goes.
he says he is somewhere you havent been.
he says you are somewhere else.
he is something for nothing.

TERRY

He is never seen.
he is still away.
he is sometimes very still.
he arrived unannounced.
he is still unannounced.
he is never far away from stillness.
he sees the announcer.

NIGEL

He is the man who knows who sd it.
he is the man who says he knows.
he is the man who stays awake.
he knows the man.
he says the man doesnt know.
he is the man who does.
he is the man who doesnt.

BILL

He is the stranger who smiles.
he smiles at strangers.
he is strangely strong.
he has the strangest of smiles.
he has found a string.
he smells a rat.
he strings along.


[Southampton/UK, 1971;
first published in Mal Morgan's Parachute Poems, Melbourne, 1972]

Note:
The portraits are of Michael Dugan, Geoffrey Eggleston, Terry Gillmore, Nigel Roberts & Bill Beard.


________________________________________________________________

TERRY GILLMORE

CORRESPONDENCE

[14/09/09]
Dear Kris

I guess this is the ‘unutterable news that comes out of silence’ – the dead and the dying – Geoffrey is dead/Alison is dead; there is a meaningless private synchronicity in this coupling, for me.

Yesterday, I spent my lunchtime in a bookshop and sped-read Shelton’s biography, and afterwards searched his name in Google, and found your archive; I can’t bring myself to use the ‘b’ word. I am out-of-date since poetry in my poor fella country turned into a farce, or just seemed that way to me.

I thought I should write to you because I have always been ‘soft’ for you, and I think you are, and have always appeared to be, so non-judgemental, so inclusive.

Beyond that, you are spot-on about ‘The Crimson Jargon’. It was such a labour of love for Alison and even though I don’t have a copy, her images and Baldessin’s are inscribed in my neurons – nearly 40 years later. Also inscribed is the confrontation with the executive of RMIT that were trying to censor the publication. The only good thing about that is George Orwell’s (I am reading the thousand pages of his Essays etc in the ‘Everyman’ edition) central thesis that the only thing that separates the capitalist democracies from the totalitarian states is the principle, and passage, of free speech. The word, the word…

I still write poetry, and write (supposedly) for a living; although it’s time I was on the road again.

Anyway as Alison was dying I was writing this – I sent it to our son, that night. So for the record this is what was happening with me.


"Dearest Jerome

After four stubbies of Cooper's Pale Ale, I'm moved to send you what I wrote around 10am this morning. I know that it is not, expressly, particular to your mother but I was writing it at the time of her passing.


It is relevant because of her quality of soul. She perceived so much, as you know, through this opening. I should hope that we could speak more about this when we next meet.


Forgive the tone of what follows but I was writing it for common debate in a 'style' that I hoped could be in the public domain.


My son I cannot touch your grief or that of Ian and his sisters. However, I sincerely believe, that the sentiments expressed are something that she would have had 'some' sympathy for.


Your father

ooOOoo

Whatever happened to the Holy Ghost? In my lifetime, which takes in more than half of last century, Jesus Christ and, to a lesser extent, God have had their names in 12pt. While the 'Ghost' seems to have been lurking, slinking in the footnotes, at best masquerading as the glue that holds that Trinity together. Why this pecking order when the Trinity is paradoxically and theologically inseparably separable? Is it because that now ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ and the sneerers etc have decided for eternity that the soul does not exist, that God is dead even though the sun shines most days in this drought riven land. It appears that Jesus Christ is certainly dead despite resurrection rumours that he is cohabiting with Osiris in another universe. But is he really dead – I cannot resile from the reality that in the beginning there was the ‘word’, and in the end there will be the death of the ‘word’, and we’re not there, yet, even though we’re moving toward it with unseemly haste. I remember that my paternal grandmother had an embroidered plaque on her lounge room wall that said ‘God is Love’. At four, just able to read, it seemed so simple that I dared not ask what it meant and because, as I know now, it was of that class of knowledge that once known, seems to have been always known. I knew what it meant but cannot, even now, begin to articulate the full meaning of this artless, Blake-like profundity. It was as if its meaning was inscribed in its simplicity. What is this Ghost? On my reckoning it is love, is compassion, is the 2nd commandment which more than complements the 1st. It is what speaks to our poor lonely souls which do exist – it is a question of thirst, of listening, of being able to hear and feel, and be overcome and comforted.

ooOOoo

And Jerome here is a little poem I wrote two days ago:



‘the Holy Ghost draweth with His love’[1]

I faced the full moon rising in the east
And the Ghost was in me.

I know that this was the ‘love’
I sought in the wasted years.

[1] Meister Eckhart's Sermons / translated into English by Claud Field

ooOOoo

Anyway dear Kris, I will send this in all its callow crassness, already regretting it. We rarely speak as we would like, and mostly hold our silence with the dead. The above stems from being swept away recently by Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home’ and ‘Gilead’. She is a ‘great’ writer, if there is such a beast.

Love

Terry


ooOOoo

[15/09/09]
Dear Terry, heart felt condolences regarding Alison... A shock and continuing sadness... Ironic for me that I was reading all around her as I wrote that piece (The Divine Issue followed up with the Addendum, wch you saw)... And we spoke after I'd published the first piece. She said she too had been thinking of those times & people and wd look the piece up & read it & get back to me... Life so relentlessly busy that tho I knew she hadnt been back in a while it was as it always was... often months if not a year will go by between her visits to the bookshop... Ah well... As you say, Geoffrey, Alison, too many... Shelton, Michael Dugan... THANK YOU though for sending me your message to Jerome and the poem... It wd be good to catch up, as of course youve begun here... Re- my "b." --it's an archive/running commentary/magazine, obviously not the 'hi ya' kind of caper... Here in the old Melbourne I run the Bookshop with Retta's help... she's receiving radiation treatment at moment for breast cancer... After our son's death Retta's attitude and mine has been that the worst that cd happen HAS happened...so we get on with it, and happily...All very best to you, with good thoughts for the old days and now, and blessings for Alison,
As ever, Kris


ooOOoo

[15/09/09]
Dear Kris

Thanks for your reply and your thoughts. It seems of late that I am surrounded by death - well, I am 65. I didn't know about your son's death or Michael's. As you probably know, I know about children dying before their time, and your's and Retta's response that the worst that could happen - has happened, however after thirty years, new but unwanted things subsume the grief, and the butter falling out of the fridge does drive you crazy. Give Retta my regards and my deep wish for her recovery. I am so sorry about your son, don't let me pick at the wound. You're right as Dylan said 'keep on keeping on / like a bird that flew / tangled up in blue (blew). It is a miracle, the whole shebang...I am frequently reminded of Afterman's poem - I think it was called Pieta - the essence that I took from it was that it is a wonder that we are not daily on our knees praying at the pity, the sadness of it all. On the other hand why are we not dancing daily at the miracle, the wonder and beauty of it all on this remote outpost/backwater of the multiverses?

with affection

Terry


ooOOoo


Going inside



What is inside

Is not as temporary

As what is outside.



My being’s soul

Is that of my child


ooOOoo



Essentially, eternally

I am you, am him.



Your birth my birth

Everything is born.


_______________________________________________________________


KARL GALLAGHER


CORRESPONDENCE
[August,'09]


Dave Ellison et al; are without any pretension beat, among other things,

and in an un self-conscious way as writers, not in a negative way,

but simply being oneself in a creative way naturally; culturally influenced by diverse

streams of humanity and themselves as historical players, with identity;

that I am somehow or other out of touch with modern times and the younger generation is probably due to age difference and experience and memories of times gone by

and as an old man remembering those who are gone

now I am looking at modern times through bifocals, deaf in right ear, hearing aid in the left, chronic back and neck pain et al, looking at seventy I’m 66, part time socially active, still smoke .

I always find that a book of poems will never let me down no matter what -- poetry a spiritual world that anyone can enter and that I enter – the beauty of modern times -- I can get that way. The knowing that it can happen, is that memory, of an identity from an old dream? of ghosts Neal and Jack and the women that they, and that we all knew, in many ways a more innocent time amidst post war changes.

I don’t recall Kerouac ever express anything political, I mean, he said almost nothing of world war two yet he was a merchant seaman – when much later, as an alcoholic he appeared on a now infamous televised debate with a student activist –

he was focussed only on the cultural and liberating, I mean how clean is politics – no dharma there.

He said he was a ’yes’ man, being for and not a ‘no’ man and being against, anyway he had said the same thing years before in ‘On the Road’

it was what attracted him to Neal and vice versa, they were young and crazy to burn to talk to talk, to go somewhere to Harlem or Birdland to hear Miles or someone else on Bleaker St or the Cedar Bar where Pollock and others be there, and those musicians all knew him and liked and respected him and had a drink or chat with him, they dug him, they knew that he dug and knew their art, like Neal he understood and loved the music, Kerouac personally knew a lot of jazz/ bop players.

Dave Ellison and the others are prime examples of the living spirit of the hip dharma bums of modern times, in any location in the world – the planetary village’s writers and the normalising globalising of beat - and other influences, past present cultural and spiritual influences, that are always part of who we are, how ever we are,

as writers and of course as human individuals with a personal social life. To write is to dream.


oo00oo


HOLY BARBARIANS
[7th/August,'09]


Kris,

did you ever come across a book called ‘The Holy Barbarians’ Published 1959? I was given a throw away copy in early 1965 and it put me ‘on to’ all that followed regarding the beats, voluntary poverty, Buddhism, etc. it made a major impact on me and what happened thereafter. At the time I was an art student, nights, at RMIT and just meeting some of the local beat types, i.e. Alison Hill, and Nigel Roberts among others on a visit from Syd at Maisy’s hotel in South Yarra, one of the hangouts, a 100metres from ‘The Fat Black Pussycat’. It’s been out of print for years. It was one of the first books that I asked Geoff Eggleston ‘have you read this book?’ the Holy Barbarians was my measure, if you had read that one, then ok lets talk. And of course the title is very suggestive. Lipton spelled it out clearly, that is was a spiritual awakening - (just preceding the explosion of the counter culture). That was just what I was looking for – a major change of attitude and lifestyle, spiritual in character – as a way out of gang culture.



From that book, I bought The Way of Zen, On the Road, Howl, Henry Miller, et al. And I picked up in a second-hand bookstore in Russell St two LPs one Kerouac reading with sax backing, and Dylan Thomas recorded in NY (on his 33rd or 34th birthday) he was dead a month later. Both LPs went missing early. I had new friends. Some who didn’t have the same standards regarding stealing from friends as my previous network - the Melbourne docks and underworld.



If you don’t know the book, or haven’t had a copy in years then:

The full text is available here:



http://www.archive.org/stream/holybarbarians000549mbp/holybarbarians000549mbp_djvu.txt



or here too:



http://www.archive.org/details/holybarbarians000549mbp

karl



________________________________________________________________


EDWARD MYCUE



[local pieces part history and part gratitude]

JUSTINE JONES FIXEL & HER KIND SAN FRANCISCO



she was from bingham canyon and salt lake city in utah & she loved the name (of a younger cousin) jersey justine, justine being the name given to girls all down the generations. her



mom's & dad's folks were breakaway mormans. a justine said to be the youngest of joseph smith's “six” wives taken in by brigham young to the Promised Land of utah when smith was



murdered in illinois . justine came to san francisco at 21 with a b.a. from the catholic women's college in salt lake city .. her dad had a bar in bingham canyon (that city no longer exists because of the copper mines tunnelled underneath) & later in salt lake city and there would be poker games in their salt lake city house late into the night. her brother kendell jones ten years older had come earlier to the university in berkeley . justine went into social work, but i don't recall it



that was her first job. when the war began she became a WAVE and lived with 3 others—jean broadbent, winifred lair, cecelia hurwich (“92 stairs”, says cecel, to get to their apt penthouse at 1230B washington st bet. jones & taylor in ‘the casbah” on telegraph hill). farwell taylor (for



whom mingus wrote “farewell, farewell”) also lived in the casbah and did that painting of justine & cecel the lifetime best pals. her palship w/ bari rolfe, mime and mime teacher, goes back to bari’s & marcel marceau years together (in the 50’s or 60’s). & warren anderson who played a beautiful piano and became kendell’s lifelong partner. after the war following an interval of modeling & partying & before getting her masters from the social welfare school, uc-berkeley,



justine was a social worker, & around that time worked for Canon Kip program, still going, of the Episcopal church (canon kip was a san francisco hero of 1906 earthquake days). i recall her stories of spending nights with kids rescued, & before they were able to be placed, in the loft of the old bldg on l9th avenue and ortega that later became for decades the san francisco music conservatory (before its recent move to oak/van ness/market). therapist wings. academic articles.



met larry by or in 1950's. they'd been married before (she to keith). (larry a daughter kate frankel in los angeles--granddaughter adrian & grandson joshua.). stayed married. larry died in 2003.



justine got a fulbright to italy to consult on changing their social work system at univ level etc, had extensions twice—rare, 3 years in rome 1960-63. while larry wrote. came back a year &



headed for mexico for another year (looking for george price larry's best bud, & to see if they could find a way to support/live there. later learned they'd crossed w/george returning to sf where



george a writing professor at sf state had returned via los angeles where he met zdena berger (price). zdena wrote TELL ME ANOTHER MORNING publ 1961 recently 2007 republd by

paris press as a refound woman hero writer--abt surviving camps --she was from prague &

of her wide family she, an aunt, a cousin survived world war 2.). justine when i first knew her in



1970 was teaching at uc-berkeley in the school of social work and practicing as a founding member of the family therapy center in sf (then a pioneering approach). she had a long productive life. larry used to complain that justine was a great source of misinformation, which



mostly amused her because maybe only larry could be teased that way and i heard it as



"mixedinformation". in her practice, justine’s “sand tray” therapy, its development and her



teaching its use lead back to her work as a painter of oil on canvas to her incorporations, assemblings, environments with miniature figures, furniture, the natural world & symbols



including her last great achievement “the white house”, her Venetian paintings, a series of frieze-like sculptures suffused with Jungian themes, & household objects combined into a mixed conglomeration arranged into painted autobiography and family history (much of this documented on film by al leveton). memories of justine, of larry, names that drift up, constellate



& swim, a history, pantheon, honorable people. I thought of ruth witt-diamant again last night (justine & larry’s neighbor and friend who began the poetry center as san francisco state) & thanked her for all her kindnesses; oldest friend george & mary oppen through whom I met lawrence & justine fixel in 1970; of florence hegi, oldest of the family therapy group of friends



& colleagues (al, eva, bob hovering over her to the very end) that justine belonged to: eva & al leveton w/ ben handleman the prime founders,& virginia belfort, sue eldredge; roz parenti, bob



cantor, michael geis. neighbors too in those early days: lois and roy steinberg & julian, then 5, now a photographer; mark citret (ansel adams’ last student, then 22-- eminent now); of al and minnie (a founding member of the california communist party, related to my sister jane by marriage) and daughter laura bock down high willard street; judy pollatsek and her kids josh & jessica; the wolfe’s on farnsworth steps; al palavin; the jaeks, a nice couple w/ kids goldsworths



(he at uc-sf & judy) next to ruth witt’s; & memories of anais nin when she was lodged uphill in a cottage ruth found for her; the then taos-bound dorothy kethler; & in taos, bob eliot, who built



said justine the ideal house; jo lander; florida & angela who worked for the un’s fao in rome; bill



minshew first met in rome; george hitchcock; cass humble; edouard roditi who often returned from france--an old schoolmate of ruth’s at uc berkeley in the 30’s; james broughton; justine van gundy who taught at sf state; her san diego cousin dianne cawood, soprano; diane scott her therapist; tom, stephanie, dante sanchez; always cecelia (“cecel”, “cese”) & b.j., lynn, rudy



hurwich; larry’s nephew robbie berkelman; & “old jack” (w.w.. lyman, jr.) of bayles mill—born there in napa valley 1885--ruth brought me over to meet (‘the oldest living poet’ she’d drive up to bring down to san francisco . i was her gardener & the then young poet, 35, she wanted him to connect with, his wife helen hoyt an esteemed poet who’d been asst editor to harriet monroe at poetry magazine in chicago dead a decade or more by then)(his three volumes of typed memoirs--he lived to1983 leaving a son amos hoyt at bayles mill--are in st. helena, ca public library’s



locked room); & others who make their entries but who’s names now escape me but will possibly come tomorrow; folks we met, knew together--panjandrum press & poetry flash crowds & dennis

koran; richard steger; lennart & sonia bruce; exemplary pals william dickey & adrianne marcus ;shirley kaufman & jack gilbert; laura ulewicz; anthony rudolf; jo-anne rosen; laura beausoleil; david & judy gascoyne ; sybil wood/cooper; sharon coleman; gerald fleming; carl rakosi & marilyn kane. many gone before justine & so many more left because this was a woman



who knew people & was interested in them: remembering her is to consider friends you make in life, who contributed to who you became, you’ve helped, who’ve helped you. final days,weeks, months, years, close were naomi schwartz , josephine moore, gail lubin, christina fisher, toby damon, andrea rubin, marsha trainer, al & eva leveton, ken meacham & pearl, wendy rosado-



berkelman (larry’s sister pearl fixel berkelman’s daughter), her daughter sunya; tom sanchez; cecilia london (justine’s student at uc-berkeley who who returned to justine in those four years after larry’s death as justine’s guide/ social worker), & always stephanie sanchez, bob cantor, naomi, al & eva, george & zdena, cecel & don (ross)—friends, colleagues, confidantes.

accretion. attrition. vale.


[11 OCTOBER 2007]


ooOOoo


[for Justine Jones Fixel (Sept. 5, 1920-Aug. 5, 2007)]

A SEA CHANGE



Fish in a net, old salts,

as the wheels keep turning,

a spinning plate half-dipping

into the Pacific Ocean here

you and I are at Land’s End



on this tilting/raked stage

where great ships foundered.

Their sentences of life, death

are unfinished symphonies;

a future out there our audience



who’ve sailed-in to watch

a sea change, diminishing star

dust a gusher pinkening milky

sunrise, sunset in the gloaming

thickening light a sea scar as



roses silt down the sea to sleep.

The wheel is round; life pushes;

photography winds over time,

westering, voicing the mind’s

brown shale for it will take, it



took a lifetime to flower, to fly,

to sail this sea this widening

light where I hear voices under

the surface of consciousness:

harmony’s memory rising up.


ooOOoo


WHEN JUSTINE FIXEL DIED AUG 5, 2007 JUST ONE MONTH SHORT OF HER 87th BIRTHDAY



when justine jones fixel died aug 5, 2007 just one month short of her 87th birthday. i was brokenhearted. her husband lawrence fixel had been my best friend from the time i came back to san francisco to live. george oppen had introduced us. he was sure we would be great for each other. and justine also became a great friend, and mentor. larry died 4 years ago. she had been very ill, but i just didn't want to have her forgotten. she was at the center of the cultural/literary life of this san francisco area. and she was a great and professional jungian therapist & teacher who also was a painter and artist of assembleges. after she died, i wrote and expanded and corrected the piece on her, the one you have being the one beginning the growing versions that ended with the nov.5 piece of now 4 pages titled GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY: JUSTINE JONES FIXEL AND HER KIND SAN FRANCISCO.

I sent many copies of each developing version w/some as submissions and some probably just information copies to spread the work about the end of a time when justine and larry and their friends george oppen, rosalie moore, carl rakosi, josephine miles, and a zillion others lent their intellects and sound moral floor to so many of us then and now so many less alive now. the coda poem "fish in a net" that ended the first group. with george price's help (larry's oldest friend--he was writing professor at sf state) i cut the poem by a third and retitled it "a sea change" from the shakespeare line already in the first poem. in the beginning the piece was more memoir/biography. then i began to see it at cultural history and thus appropriated heinrich boll's GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY a novel of 40 years ago and that for me referenced his THE CLOWN as well (portrait of the artist) and also reference to christopher isherwood's CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND.

i worked on it 4 months never needing to thinking of publication because i continually corrected it and altered it. no doubt some of this might come under a rubric of "grieving".

at 70 i have lost many kin and many more kith, especially during the aids crisis in the 1980's up through the 1990's primarily. now they are almost all gone.



i just call it cultural history. i am no sociologist, no intellectual, no historian. it hasn't pleased me as writing but it has given me relief to write it--to write it and honor my friends seeing them in such a rosy glow again as if from the beginning.


________________________________________________________________


CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
TERRY GILLMORE, part of the Free Poetry (Sydney) crew of the late '60s (with Nigel Roberts, Johnny Goodall & co). Two published collections, Further, Poems 1966-76 (New Poetry, Sydney, 1977), Surviving the Shadow (Paper Bark Press, Sydney, 1990). Robert Harris wrote of the latter poems, "Love, friendship and poetry have each become more, rather than less, substantial to Terry Gillmore, but differently contoured and wracked on human realities...[he] is, in our time, an Australian Orpheus, and like Orpheus, he is the singer of urgent and neglected knowledge."
KARL GALLAGHER see previous numbers of Poems & Pieces for bio; most recently is represented on the new Meher Baba poets & artists website, http://mehermelb.jimdo.com/
EDWARD MYCUE, San Francisco poet, goes back a long time and with the Australian & English connection (which includes The Merri Creek Or Nero & H/EAR magazines). Has published around 17 books & chapbooks, most recently his selected poems, Mindwalking, 1937-2007 (Philos Press, '08). Other books include Damage Within the Community (Panjandrum, '73), Route, Route & Range : The Song Returns (published by Walter Billeter's Paper Castle, Melbourne, '79), The Singing Man My Father Gave Me (Menard Press,UK, '80), Pink Gardens/Brown Trees (Bernard Hemensley's Stingy Artist/Last Straw Press, UK, '90). Forthcoming is The San Francisco Poems, from Paul Green's Spectacular Diseases Press,UK.

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-That's all folks! -done on a wet & blustery Melbourne Sunday afternoon, 27th September, 2009-
Kris Hemensley