Showing posts with label Duncan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duncan. Show all posts
Sunday, November 9, 2014
MYTHS & TEXTS
MYTHS & TEXTS
Ive signed & inscribed it "from Retta, Myer's sale, Feb. 68" --amazement & glee when she presented Gary Snyder's little book, Myths & Texts, to me. Avant-garde hunter gatherers in them thar days. The shining lights of the New Writing ever in our sights. Golden season of Franklin's bookshop in Russell Street throughout '66, first year of my emigration, when every visit turned up something --a paperback Kerouac, Holmes or Brossard, Broyard, Cassil, Mandel (a hardback), Salinger, Mailer et al… And continued after I met Loretta, --through '67, '68, all & any of the many Melbourne bookshops --Gaston Renard, the Russian Bookshop, Cheshires, the Anchorage, --but Franklin's by far the best 2nd hander…
In February '68 I'm in the lap of luxury having been let go by the Education Department (Technical Division), advised before end of term, December '67, that I wouldn't be re-employed at Williamstown Tech after the summer holiday, yet fully paid for the entire period! Friends told me to go to the Teachers Union and fight it. The Union said it was a strange case since a sacking before end of school year normally meant no holiday wages at all. Unless I seriously wanted a teaching career they advised me to take the money & run! I'd known from the moment I set foot at Williamstown Tech that the Principal couldn't handle my looks or my books --long hair in a pony tail, poetry anthologies & anarchist tracts --and the Teachers Union anti-conscription petition I pinned up on the staff notice-board the last straw --unless it was the cricket match I unilaterally abandoned (defacto sports master & umpire in addition to my English & Social Studies brief) when one team's Anglo-Australian boys and the Greeks & others of the opposition attacked each other with bats & stumps --'race riot' as I declared it, occasioned by the Greeks belting the Aussies around the park, wielding cricket bats as though baseball clubs, not guarding their wicket, no technique, solely eye & instinct… Next day at the staff meeting, a more liberal minded teacher than most, a literary man, Tennessee Williams enthusiast, interceded in my castigation. If Mr H agreed, he said, he'd gladly cane the perpetrators, beat some respect into them! Culture & race had nothing to do with it, discipline was the key, he said!
Another teacher I occasionally spoke to, Mrs Brass, sympathised with me about the incident. Over the years I've thought her husband was the journalist Douglas Brass because of their shared name and memory of her reading & discussing articles in The Australian for which he was a columnist, but it isn't so. Additionally Ive found her on the Web described as teaching at Williamstown High, so perhaps she was only temporarily at the Tech school. Like me she wasn't trained but hired on interview in that uncredentialed era. Ruth Brass was from Germany and if we spoke in the staff-room I'm sure my friendship with Inge Timm & visiting her in Soest, Westphalia in '65 would have cropped up. She was connected with the Goethe Institute in Melbourne and the thought begins to percolate that late '70s, when Walter Billeter introduced me to its splendid library, I may have talked to her there and perhaps brought up our earlier Williamstown connection!
Peter Norman was my head of humanities, an athlete, to whom I told the story of visiting the great Percy Cerutty at his famous Portsea training camp, under the wing of my friend Kelvin Bowers, British middle-distance junior champion, whom I'd met on the migrant boat in '66, & who'd been invited to train there. I remember Peter as often around the corridor in track suit as in shirt & tie. I probably thought he was quicker on his feet than tongue. I'd picked up he was Christian and though he generally agreed with my anti-war politics, didn't sign the anti-conscription petition. I was appalled. Only a year later imagine the surprise when I saw my regular-guy colleague in the Black Power protest on the hundred metres medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics? A la Spike Milligan, had I played a part in the Aussie sprinter's radicalisation? Nah! That was the era and zeitgeist impossible to buck, or what?
I'd've been home in my tiny rented terrace cottage in Canning Street, Carlton, next to the all-night thumping of the bakery and its permanent bread-dough aroma, almost suffocating in mid-summer, the bread smells trapped in the airless heat. I'm typing poems or letters, being paid by the Education Department essentially to sit on my arse, read, study, be a poet, when Loretta came in with her prize! Perhaps I'm psyching myself up to fulfil the curtain-raiser for Michael Hudson's production of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre at the La Mama cafe-theatre around the corner in Faraday Street, Betty Burstall's good idea to justify the night's billing of such a short play, and redeemed she was when our poetry began pulling an audience in its own right. It grew another leg when Bill Beard joined me, so that Mike's Bread & Puppet appeared to be supporting us! But here it is, my God, Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts, published by Corinth Books, "in conjunction with Totem Press/Le Roi Jones" --wow-ee! What on earth was it doing, engulfed by bad popular fiction, romance, thrillers, on a sale table in the book department of Melbourne's flagship department store? The only copy, the only poetry book! What were the odds that Retta should find it? Incredible!
[22/26-5-14]
oOo
On misty, damp, after-rain morning, writing as I stand in doorway section of smooth-running stop-all-stations train from the 'Garth & Creek's quasi rurality into the Big Smoke, surrounded by pleasant hum of commuter small-talk --like I'm Walt & not Gary Snyder, subject of the memorandum I'm heading to, --Walt & not Gary, definitively, because in Gary's poetry the daily milieu is foil or natural context but its candour never so grown & substantially remarked as in Walt's inexhaustible ledger, small glint of which is mine here --and plainly isn't the point of it, isn't his ideology, like Walt's Song of this and Song of that, determined to include everyone & everything within the call's special ring, like an auctioneer in Kentucky or, nodding back through the years to my sister Monique who sent me its postcard, the Appleby Horse Fair, long long ways as these may be from Camden, New Jersey --hoo! Gary, hoo!
*
And chatting with Chris Wallace-Crabbe one morning in the Shop, on his way over the river to the William Blake exhibition at the NGV, --bright as a button, dapper as Barry Humphries --in response to his polite question about reading &/or writing, --Snyder I said, and searched for the right word to describe him --irony? no, --separateness? exclusivity? --And though we're all carried by Walt's democratic ebullience, this civic ecstasy not expected in Snyder contrary to an image perhaps preceding him? --because Snyder is found in singleness, singularity, singing also but to distinguish not occlude --each natural jewel of rain sun forest (--this is some conversation! ) --I just happen to be supervising a student in Snyder at the moment he says --laugh : let's tutor him/her together, I say! -- What I like, I say, is the simultaneity of American & Japanese --Chinese, Californian, Chris adds laughing --
But stay with the double outline, the casual slippage of ancient & modern, registered as here & now --no more arcane than acorns are --seamless collage --logger, Marxist, Wobbly, hitch-hiker. folklorist, Native-American, Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, lover, shaman --
"Bodhidharma sailing the Yangtze on a reed
Lenin in a sealed train through Germany
Hsuan Tsang, crossing the Pamires
Joseph, Crazy Horse, living the last free
starving high-country winter of their tribes.
Surrender into freedom, revolt into slavery--
Confucius no better--
(with Lao-tzu to keep him in check)
"Walking about the countryside
all one fall
To a heart's content beating on stumps." [from part 6, Burning; Myths & Texts, 1952-56]---
Snyder, --like at Collingwood Farm I told Chris, drawing the cabbage with two pencils in my hand, the blurs outlining instant contradiction, adding dimension, so is our subject all-over, all-around, always, expressed as the simultaneity of alternating here & now --
*
1968 reading Myths & Texts same age as when Snyder began writing it. What accomplishment, teens & twenties! --especially as the post WW2 generations become younger, suspended by personal prosperity/social welfare in new norm cotton wool adolescence. Reading Snyder, there's no discount for youth -- realise Snyder is as Snyder does, was ever who he is --which is how one appreciates all notable & memorable writing in the retrospect one never thought twice about at the start of it. Not that '60s reading was at the beginning of anything other than that season of English & Australian youth's education. But if only for Myths & Texts, Snyder could uncontroversially have qualified for Robert Duncan's class-roll, The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound (Agenda vol 4, no 2, 1965), wonderful to read in Melbourne in '68 --describing the importance in the late '40s, early '50s, of Pound & Williams in opening "the way for a group of younger writers --Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, Gael Turnbull, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman and myself --who were concerned with immediacy and process in the development of their poetics." Pound & Williams are unambiguously sounded by Snyder --and the only magpie would be seen & heard along what's become his very own way, killing the Buddha at every bend.
*
Walking/working backwards from his influence --on Franco Beltrametti's Nadamas for instance --I cant put my hand on the chapter he published (his own & Judith Danciger's translation) in the Grosseteste Review, '72, so refer to the section I published in Earth Ship #10/11 (Southampton, August, '72, just prior to returning to Melbourne), summed up in this sentence : "Here we are again in the swing of the events following each other always more rapidly so that you don't have to be interested if they overlap or ride over one another." As Beltrametti so Snyder --the absolute presence of the narrative, no progression only what's current, and time passing's subsumed within the concurrence or simultaneity. Beltrametti's 'additional handwritten poem' in the signed edition of Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973) makes the same call :
"reckonings don't come even
roughly on the same latitude as
Seville / Richmond / Wichita / Nigata /
Seoul / Askhabad
magpies
from one carob tree
to the next"
[10/7/70]
*
And though Snyder's Myths & Texts does 'contain history' after Pound, Williams' grafting (for example the young feller Ginsberg's correspondence included in Paterson, which serves to bless the incidental with the historical) is a propos --real bits of world, documents, quotation, letters as they come, as world comes, observed, overheard, perceived. (No reason to be peeved, if he really was, when his own stuff landed up in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Material is material and the private subordinate to a larger literary good?) All of which suggests the fluidity or openness of the poem as the measure of experience yet the Snyder poem is also composed --much more of a made poem, confirmed by standard capitalisation & lineation, than the rangy field-work of the first poems of Mountains & Rivers Without End which chronologically follow Myths & Texts.
*
What to say of his Jewish joke not quite lost in the anti-Christian jibe :
"Them Xtians out to save souls and grab land
'They'd steal Christ off the cross
if he wasn't nailed on'
The last decent carpentry
Ever done by Jews." [from Logging, section 10, Myths & Texts]?
Sure, Snyder's target is both bible-bashing colonialism and the theologically guaranteed human dominion over nature, the bete noire of the ecological philosophy & politics he champions. An example of casual anti-semitism maybe, and only funny within it. Sure, hearsay, quoted speech, but seamless in Snyder's drawl-scrawl, his droll-scroll…
*
P. S. : Rip Rap
Permit mind blown in the fatal collision of wilderness & industrial civilisation --"I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities." Consider the few days between worlds, and all gone that other one --and what another one "Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup / Looking down for miles / Through high still air." --what room for anything else when this other imposes such permanence that the very notion of contrast shrivels, no register except "caught on a snow peak / between heaven and earth" --except the lad is a scientist, can unsentimentally state "in ten thousand years the Sierras / will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion." And the Milton he's pulled out of his ruck-sack's (as last of August light extended by camp-fire's) "Too dark to read". Hah! --pun into blackguard Milton aka Western dramaturgy, --but as though autobiography, Cold Mountain's just the place to slough off "Damn me a fool last night in port drunk on the floor & damn / this cheap trash we read. Hawaiian workers shared us / beer in the long wood dredgemen's steel-men's girl-less / night drunk and gambling hall, called us strange sea- / men blala and clasped our arms and sang real Hawaiian songs " ---Ah, right royal navvy's days & nights…
*
In Rip Rap's 50th Anniversary edition there's long footnote apology for a phrase in the poem, For A Far-Out Friend. He confesses it's earned him flack over the years but now it's time to clarify. "Because once I beat you up / Drunk, stung with weeks of torment / And saw you no more", was an untruth right from the start he explains. She was the violent one, not he. "She started beating on me in some anger and I let her whack me (protesting) till I got her into the car. (….) I thought that saying I'd hit her was the more manly, or even gentlemanly, thing to say, an idea that comes from chivalry, perhaps. I never laid an ungentle hand on her. My critics, especially my colleague Sandra Gilbert, have said that there is no excuse for treating violence against women casually, and they are absolutely right. This note seems the best way to deal with the problem rather eliminate the poem or change the line in silence." Hmmm. Didn't want to change the original poem he says but bows now to feminist pressure and seeks to 'explain'…There you go. But surely, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? Snyder evidently doesn't blush for the "kulak" reference describing farmers & landowners in one of his much admired Han Shan translations, Cold Mountain poem # 16.
"Cold Mountain is a house / Without beams or walls. / The six doors left and right are open / The hall is blue sky. / The rooms are all vacant and vague / The east wall beats on the west wall / At the centre nothing. // Borrowers don't bother me / In the cold I build a little fire / When I'm hungry I boil up some greens. / I've got not use for the kulak / With his big barn and pasture - / He just sets up a prison for himself. / Once in he cant get out. / Think it over -- / You know it might happen to you."
'Kulak's traditional meaning is "a tight-fisted person"; "a peasant wealthy enough to own farm and hire labour" (Concise Oxford). But it's inextricable from the vicious Soviet connotation. This term from the Stalinist lexicon refers to as wicked a pogrom as any in the USSR, its horror & madness if anything magnified when the attitude was inherited by Maoist China. What did Snyder intend? "You know it might happen to you" a little more sinister than a comment on personal salvation? Simplest & kindest to say that in the '50s, as a young man of the left, revolting against the American way, he's amenable & acquiescent to leftist gloat and a say-what-I-like macho glib… Fiftieth anniversary or not, time's ripe, methinks, for more clarification of such hot & cold war attitudes & language… The Right is unfailingly called to proper account for its reflections of Fascism & Naziism, but the Left hardly at all for its toeing the line of iron fist Communism, Stalinism, Maoism and whatever flows on through contemporary Socialist reflexes & assumptions…
The older & younger survivors of the ideological storms are we, especially as the poets we're able to be… Time to be poets & not suckers & saps… hoo! hoo! hoo!
[7/10-10-14 (4-11-14)]
*
P-P. S
The issue of what is or isn't 'politically correct' is prickly enough in the present day. And there's a greater problem with the retrospective judgement of previous generations, earlier societies & epochs, according to contemporary attitude & belief, and not least because the legitimation of such attribution implies a standard set, unchanging through time. This installs the progressivist depiction of human affairs as the only one, coacervate, indeed, with history itself. On the other hand, reform & repudiation of atrocious acts is generally laudable & necessary. I guess expression, whether or not literary or artistic, being what is held, spoken, depicted, is rightly personal --eccentrically formed, not legislative whatever its aspiration. So the question I ask of Gary Snyder is as reader-writer of a colleague poet, though he be exemplary, & one who hasn't confined his work to the literary domain. If you like, when reader-writer addresses another it's poetry & literature of which the question is asked, asked whatismore within & behalf of poetry & literature.
[5/9-11-14]
Sunday, July 3, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 24, July 2011
GREGORY DAY
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
---------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
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CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
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KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
Thursday, January 20, 2011
AROUND & ABOUT RICHARD GROSSINGER'S 2013 : Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, Cal; 2010)
1.
The last occasion I found myself in Richard Grossinger's vicinity was the mid '80s when the equation I'd coined, Being Here (body : text : world), at last seemed a way of making sense of the sometimes contradictory concerns I'd followed since the 1960s (--e.g., the local & the international -- which at times meant junking one to attend to the other-- the hermetic & expressive notions of the art, and literature vis a vis social & political domains).
My head was full of Deep Ecology then --my lack of activism assuaged by the spiritual & non-instrumental imperatives of this revamped environmentalism. It was initially funded by John Martin's perspective, via The Deep Ecologist (his newsletter from Warracknabeal, Victoria), which also included poetry as a category of its eclectic consciousness-raising. And then came Warwick Fox's mind-blowing lecture at a Deep Ecology conference in Melbourne (ca '86) in which he collided psychology, philosophy & the environment in transpersonalism's headiest mix --all the more remarkable, I felt, for his linking of some authors & ideas I'd 'discovered' for myself amongst the dozens he cited never broached at all! I took up his reading list with alacrity!
Editing the Being Here issue of my magazine H/EAR in 1985 allowed me to recover some key references from the magazine's first series, Earth Ship, ca 1970-72 (Southampton, UK). I named them then as Kenneth Irby, John Thorpe, Richard Grossinger & Carolee Schneemann, and heralded "the reconsideration of Richard Grossinger's work, which is prolific & still accumulating..." Unfortunately I never managed to do it.
This mid '80s' reaching back to the late '60s/early '70s uncovered an interweaving of references involving Richard Grossinger & Clayton Eshleman, and the second bite as exciting as before.
I felt that Grossinger's Io magazine & Eshleman's Caterpillar together contributed "a desperate restatement of visionary poetics", specifically identifying Eshleman's Open Letter to George Stanley, Concerning the State of Our Nation, The American Spiritual Body, Which I first glimpsed in Peru; Schneemann's Notations (1958-66); Robert Duncan's Man's Fulfillment in Order and Strife (which I called "a rich & dramatic argument concerning the orders of poetry, & the Orders of the World, incorporating universal poetical & local political commentary, relating to that reality which is an order born of language other than the political, which contained a magnificent plea for a new language to repulse the slanders of the era." ).
About Grossinger's Io magazine I wrote : "Io was a further shift away from the 'literary', after Olson's example. (The whole import of the 'projective', for instance : that human act which prospered thereafter as one of Nature's things; active concordance, together productive.) Io's interdisciplinism was exciting, exotic yet practical because so evidently resonant of the planetary lot."
Grossinger's shift (explained in his preface to Charles Stein's Poems and Glyphs (Io, # 17, 1973), which I read in '84 via Melbourne poet John Anderson who'd bought it after I named Stein as a reference for his own writing) derived from his sense that the New American Poetry figures "The Beats, the Bay area poets, the Black Mountain people, and our own group are all concerned with matters of consciousness, vision, prophecy, cosmology, geography, etc., few of which are even peripheral to academic poetry in America, which is more involved in description, emotional reality, wit, and political rationalism..."
My own direction was subsequently away from the mutual exclusivity implied in Grossinger's distinction & my endorsement of it. The 'Whole House' idea I came up with in the late '90s, whilst relieving some observers, doesnt do justice to the contenders. But, that's another (& continuing) story...
Richard Grossinger, either held in Olson & co's force-field or that of his own making, always walked with an aura . He saw things, he said things --a bit like one felt about Bob Dylan in the mid '60s --the young seer. (Grossinger's image of flocks of seagulls on city rubbish dumps as evidence of the ocean's depletion has stayed with me from the first --such a thought wasnt common in 1970...)
Every time I encounter him these days I think "long time no see" --yet a year or two ago I had looked at The Bardo of Waking Life (& liked Robert Kelly's compliment to him, "To talk about the world as it happens in your head when you are in it." --which is the mercurial nub of our project), --and years earlier books like Planet Medicine & The Night Sky. It seemed to me that our counter-culture, new-writing buddy was now addressing the world audience that the Sixties' oracles assumed.
But it's as if no time has intervened between then & now --no time since the cyclone which that era submitted as our cultural beginning & whose windfall we might be forever gathering (probably the truth of every beginning so perceived).
Imagined as one of 'our generation', admired as 'one of us' who'd already achieved more than a little of our own ambition (like, for example, 20 year-old Tom Pickard being published in Paris Review!), Grossinger's publication of a book with Black Sparrow Press in addition to his magazine Io (not just a poetry mag but a gathering of all categories of enquiry that a poet of the field, let's say, as of Olson's multidisciplinary curriculum, could naturally come into) was awe-inspiring.
The achievement was celebrated by Robert Duncan (or ratified --such was the connotation of the New American Poetry hierarchy one had accepted --& gratefully, as though it were the ascendancy of Camelot).
I hold again Duncan's pamphlet, Notes on Grossinger's Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, which accompanied the Black Sparrow book, and relive the thrill of it -- truly the older generation blessing the younger. And although, typically, two-thirds of the text doesnt name Grossinger, Duncan's concerned to bear the prodigy up & through the literature --that is, literature as though science or as evidently revelatory (--& instantly I'm pinged by memory of Roland Barthes' reference to Marxism as science, the absurdity of which appeared ever clearer for the time succeeding its brazen assertion : 'science' as authority against poetry, philosophy, religion? --considered speculations or, after Merleau-Ponty, events in language but not of the world? --miscasting objectivity, then, within the most ridiculous binary, misapprehending subjectivity also therefore). Robert Duncan's exemplars --Darwin, Whitehead --distinguish the latter. In this view literature is a portal (to use Grossinger lingo), thus Pound, Williams, &, inevitably, Olson --: through that Literature & into the beyond that the visionary, whom Duncan would take Grossinger to be, always made his here & now.
Now it is we encounter an important problem --and I may as well make this its occasion as another more precisely located : the status of the discrete object in a context of the winningly suggestive & infinitely analogical expanse. I suppose the problem isnt so much with the golden chain (perhaps we'd say 'string' now!) but with the damage such understanding deals the discrete object (poem, person, place). Although Duncan himself had it that the truly 'open' poetics necessarily contained the 'closed', the transformational attitude as regards poetry tends to disqualify (certainly traditional) craft. I've always wondered why avant-garde friends could entertain the poem as performing every possible role, as vehicle &/or vector, except its function as poem. Of course, there's just as much error from the other direction : lifeless, soulless form. Yet, since Language-poetry & other strategic practices, 'lifeless & soulless' could describe an array of both conventional & experimental poetry.
2.
Cut to the chase : In the foreword to Grossinger's book, Daniel Pinchbeck (author of 2012 : The Return of Quetzalcoatl) asks these rhetorical questions : "Is there some other dimension of being that our human species has the capacity to access as our current mistreated world convulses around us? Does the tremendous intelligence and integral efficiency of our biological matrix suggest some deeper wisdom operating in the greater universe with which we can resonate and harmonize?" (And his instant caveat : "My own quandary --it has almost silenced me recently-- is the question of what the writer, the artist, the thinker should practically and actually do in this ruinous era.") [p ix]
The first proposition is actually premised upon the second --a reiteration of a philosophical commonplace that one is within Meaning whatever it may be (thus also the World, the Universe, God, Being et al).
Regarding the New Age excitement around the Mayan prophecy, Grossinger cautions, "But I am not looking for indications of renewal externally and historically. I am looking for a gateway inside --inside consciousness, inside DNA potential, inside the zodiac. My book is not what is going to happen (or not) on December 21st, 2012 or January 1, 2013 but a 2013 context for what is already happening and has been happening since the emergence of our species, the advent of life on Earth, and the creation of this universe --impossibly big venues that cannot be queried but that mark abysses we must explore." [Introduction, pp2/3]
I identify with Grossinger's style of thinking & writing; by no means haphazard but the natural order of an intelligence following the maze of references his experience has endowed. Closer to innocence than magic, one's also been receptive to that internal/external match-up of which Grossinger derives a dramatic concordance. But it's the scale of his table & therefore the ability to exclaim & encompass (literally the same breath, the same perception) that distinguishes him.
Reflecting on his lack of recognition of Jose Arguelles' Mayan thesis at the time he was offered it for publication, Grossinger submits, "My snub became an unconscious throwback to old elitist publishing habits as to what constituted a worthy curriculum, attitudes that I was in the bare beginnings of overcoming and that were still largely unexamined. I was an intellectual snob, with vestiges of Black Mountain literary machismo in my head, and I was pretty much in thrall to the anti-kitsch imperatives of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Kelly and crew." (Introduction, p15) True enough. Which is why, perhaps, the New York Scene is what it is --serious, sincere & hilarious with the junk of the everyday --and not Black Mountain!
I simply havent delved into the authors Grossinger respects as teachers & companions --Richard Hoagland, Arguelles, Terrence McKenna among others. Some I remember from Io magazine & the milieu North Atlantic Books described. I respect that he's done the hard yards (to use an appropriate Australianism) in the mind/body practices either side of orthodoxy.
David Bohm doesnt figure in Grossinger's cavalcade but remembering my '80s reading prompts the hologramic here as relevant to his perspective. And my own sense of the infinite trajectory of pivotal, that is life endowing/defining, events which are always available to intersection & continuation (according to the apprehension one has of any one of them; that is, to reengage with the event's infinite possibility against apparent historical closure; remembering, crucially, that the dynamic is personal), assuredly resonates with Grossinger.
No surprise, really, that Grossinger shivers off association with Ken Wilber --not only because erstwhile comrades criticise him as a "self-aggrandizing, parasitical worm; even worse, a Ken Wilber wannabe" (p 551). He reflects, "Without your accusation, without its gauntlet, my writing is just fancy words, shoplifted at best, restless and hollow, dispensable, a betrayal and a failure of everything they stand for --not even third-rate Ken Wilber, as you duly say. But given what else my work must withstand, the trials coming this way in an ill and binding wind, it must be judged, scoured, and obliterated anyway, and then allowed whatever smidgen of truth and honour, if any, endure. That is the only goal worth striving for, the only reverie that might redeem us both at the final call. What I'm attempting here, consumer-culture drivel albeit, is more interesting to me than what Ken Wilber is attempting, but that is beside the point. He is doing fine at what he's doing and he's not on my radar and I don't wannabe him." (p554).
For my part, what I call the existential imperative, the here & now, flesh & blood vouchsafing of any vision, is what's sacrificed in formalizing & abstracting (whether or not intended) any definition of reality. (In my unschooled mind, totality & the totalitarian conspire.) I seem always to prefer the poet to the logician, the authorial to the theoretical, poetry to the prose of systematization...
3.
One pitfall of history or critical commentary as autobiography is the lack of distinction between the 'gross natural array' (Goethe) & the valued (by attribution or inherent), between the en passant & the gleanings of perception. But Richard Grossinger doesnt want to evade his own fact in the midst of it all. Par for the course in poetry, problematic in prose (because laid bare, unsynthesised).
I give him the benefit of the doubt despite intemperate & wrongheaded political judgments --e.g., what a truly awful analogy here, "In China people who manipulate goods or markets are executed. In the US they are allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains because they are too big to fail and anything else would be class warfare, and, god forbid, socialism..." The context for his comment is an aside on the billionaire swindler, Bernie Madoff, that he wasnt the worst : "The worst are names we will never know, secret bankers behind the global conspiracy and its invisible depositories and exchequers (and maybe even 9/11 and the missing black boxes too)." (p281) Naturally, then, the chic Left conflation with conspiracy theory on Bush, the Clintons, Obama, on Israel, even the Al Qaeda terrorists, monstrously bloated by their New Age appendices.
One's appalled that the American complexion of this politics doesnt cause the embarrassment that might engender a humility and then occasion some worldly reality to the prognostications.
Grossinger's partisan political swipes & snipes --sounding off as a lefty whose profound disappointment with the Democratic Party is matched by the vitriol he would always pour upon the Republicans-- and his rallying to the belated cause of American Pop-music in the wash of the 'the British Invasion', strike me as odd indulgences for a Time Lord. At least, though, he demonstrates fallibility, that is a humanity pursuant on This-world desires & responsibilities.
Can't help thinking that alchemy, homeopathy arent, perhaps, the best analytical tools for This-world politics! Esoteric understanding of the behavior of opposites cannot release us from our solid & historical weight, nor do dreams replace daily discourse. The contrary pertains.
To speak as though one were a player in the Big Scheme, in which game present-day humanity is qualitatitively reduced, smacks of the kind of bad faith which Michael McClure might be compelled to protest (in capital letters) : "I AM A MAMMAL PATRIOT!" Of course it's a conundrum, especially fraught because the transformative impulse, the suite for the new, arises within the breast of unknowing.
We are always in progress, knowledgeable or wise, forever on the way. And no doubt at all Richard Grossinger knows all this & more. He remains tuned in & turned on, abounding in brilliant ideas & memorable expression --loquacious, erudite & gratifyingly flawed.
The 'idiot's guide' to Richard Grossinger's book would instruct that the author doesnt expect anything to happen on December 20th, 2012 or 1st January, 2013. Nothing will necessarily happen except what is always happening. Whatever the Mayan calendar construes is held by DNA & dreamt, as it were, by the consciousness in which humanity is subsumed. Prophecy, it might continue, concentrates the mind. Transformation is inevitable; life in all its forms teleological.
In short, 2013 : Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration is a music of the spheres, and it could only have been written in 2010, in America, on this planet!
-------------------------------------------
[30th September, '10 to the 4th November, '10; cleaned up / typed, January, 2011; Melbourne]
The last occasion I found myself in Richard Grossinger's vicinity was the mid '80s when the equation I'd coined, Being Here (body : text : world), at last seemed a way of making sense of the sometimes contradictory concerns I'd followed since the 1960s (--e.g., the local & the international -- which at times meant junking one to attend to the other-- the hermetic & expressive notions of the art, and literature vis a vis social & political domains).
My head was full of Deep Ecology then --my lack of activism assuaged by the spiritual & non-instrumental imperatives of this revamped environmentalism. It was initially funded by John Martin's perspective, via The Deep Ecologist (his newsletter from Warracknabeal, Victoria), which also included poetry as a category of its eclectic consciousness-raising. And then came Warwick Fox's mind-blowing lecture at a Deep Ecology conference in Melbourne (ca '86) in which he collided psychology, philosophy & the environment in transpersonalism's headiest mix --all the more remarkable, I felt, for his linking of some authors & ideas I'd 'discovered' for myself amongst the dozens he cited never broached at all! I took up his reading list with alacrity!
Editing the Being Here issue of my magazine H/EAR in 1985 allowed me to recover some key references from the magazine's first series, Earth Ship, ca 1970-72 (Southampton, UK). I named them then as Kenneth Irby, John Thorpe, Richard Grossinger & Carolee Schneemann, and heralded "the reconsideration of Richard Grossinger's work, which is prolific & still accumulating..." Unfortunately I never managed to do it.
This mid '80s' reaching back to the late '60s/early '70s uncovered an interweaving of references involving Richard Grossinger & Clayton Eshleman, and the second bite as exciting as before.
I felt that Grossinger's Io magazine & Eshleman's Caterpillar together contributed "a desperate restatement of visionary poetics", specifically identifying Eshleman's Open Letter to George Stanley, Concerning the State of Our Nation, The American Spiritual Body, Which I first glimpsed in Peru; Schneemann's Notations (1958-66); Robert Duncan's Man's Fulfillment in Order and Strife (which I called "a rich & dramatic argument concerning the orders of poetry, & the Orders of the World, incorporating universal poetical & local political commentary, relating to that reality which is an order born of language other than the political, which contained a magnificent plea for a new language to repulse the slanders of the era." ).
About Grossinger's Io magazine I wrote : "Io was a further shift away from the 'literary', after Olson's example. (The whole import of the 'projective', for instance : that human act which prospered thereafter as one of Nature's things; active concordance, together productive.) Io's interdisciplinism was exciting, exotic yet practical because so evidently resonant of the planetary lot."
Grossinger's shift (explained in his preface to Charles Stein's Poems and Glyphs (Io, # 17, 1973), which I read in '84 via Melbourne poet John Anderson who'd bought it after I named Stein as a reference for his own writing) derived from his sense that the New American Poetry figures "The Beats, the Bay area poets, the Black Mountain people, and our own group are all concerned with matters of consciousness, vision, prophecy, cosmology, geography, etc., few of which are even peripheral to academic poetry in America, which is more involved in description, emotional reality, wit, and political rationalism..."
My own direction was subsequently away from the mutual exclusivity implied in Grossinger's distinction & my endorsement of it. The 'Whole House' idea I came up with in the late '90s, whilst relieving some observers, doesnt do justice to the contenders. But, that's another (& continuing) story...
Richard Grossinger, either held in Olson & co's force-field or that of his own making, always walked with an aura . He saw things, he said things --a bit like one felt about Bob Dylan in the mid '60s --the young seer. (Grossinger's image of flocks of seagulls on city rubbish dumps as evidence of the ocean's depletion has stayed with me from the first --such a thought wasnt common in 1970...)
Every time I encounter him these days I think "long time no see" --yet a year or two ago I had looked at The Bardo of Waking Life (& liked Robert Kelly's compliment to him, "To talk about the world as it happens in your head when you are in it." --which is the mercurial nub of our project), --and years earlier books like Planet Medicine & The Night Sky. It seemed to me that our counter-culture, new-writing buddy was now addressing the world audience that the Sixties' oracles assumed.
But it's as if no time has intervened between then & now --no time since the cyclone which that era submitted as our cultural beginning & whose windfall we might be forever gathering (probably the truth of every beginning so perceived).
Imagined as one of 'our generation', admired as 'one of us' who'd already achieved more than a little of our own ambition (like, for example, 20 year-old Tom Pickard being published in Paris Review!), Grossinger's publication of a book with Black Sparrow Press in addition to his magazine Io (not just a poetry mag but a gathering of all categories of enquiry that a poet of the field, let's say, as of Olson's multidisciplinary curriculum, could naturally come into) was awe-inspiring.
The achievement was celebrated by Robert Duncan (or ratified --such was the connotation of the New American Poetry hierarchy one had accepted --& gratefully, as though it were the ascendancy of Camelot).
I hold again Duncan's pamphlet, Notes on Grossinger's Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, which accompanied the Black Sparrow book, and relive the thrill of it -- truly the older generation blessing the younger. And although, typically, two-thirds of the text doesnt name Grossinger, Duncan's concerned to bear the prodigy up & through the literature --that is, literature as though science or as evidently revelatory (--& instantly I'm pinged by memory of Roland Barthes' reference to Marxism as science, the absurdity of which appeared ever clearer for the time succeeding its brazen assertion : 'science' as authority against poetry, philosophy, religion? --considered speculations or, after Merleau-Ponty, events in language but not of the world? --miscasting objectivity, then, within the most ridiculous binary, misapprehending subjectivity also therefore). Robert Duncan's exemplars --Darwin, Whitehead --distinguish the latter. In this view literature is a portal (to use Grossinger lingo), thus Pound, Williams, &, inevitably, Olson --: through that Literature & into the beyond that the visionary, whom Duncan would take Grossinger to be, always made his here & now.
Now it is we encounter an important problem --and I may as well make this its occasion as another more precisely located : the status of the discrete object in a context of the winningly suggestive & infinitely analogical expanse. I suppose the problem isnt so much with the golden chain (perhaps we'd say 'string' now!) but with the damage such understanding deals the discrete object (poem, person, place). Although Duncan himself had it that the truly 'open' poetics necessarily contained the 'closed', the transformational attitude as regards poetry tends to disqualify (certainly traditional) craft. I've always wondered why avant-garde friends could entertain the poem as performing every possible role, as vehicle &/or vector, except its function as poem. Of course, there's just as much error from the other direction : lifeless, soulless form. Yet, since Language-poetry & other strategic practices, 'lifeless & soulless' could describe an array of both conventional & experimental poetry.
2.
Cut to the chase : In the foreword to Grossinger's book, Daniel Pinchbeck (author of 2012 : The Return of Quetzalcoatl) asks these rhetorical questions : "Is there some other dimension of being that our human species has the capacity to access as our current mistreated world convulses around us? Does the tremendous intelligence and integral efficiency of our biological matrix suggest some deeper wisdom operating in the greater universe with which we can resonate and harmonize?" (And his instant caveat : "My own quandary --it has almost silenced me recently-- is the question of what the writer, the artist, the thinker should practically and actually do in this ruinous era.") [p ix]
The first proposition is actually premised upon the second --a reiteration of a philosophical commonplace that one is within Meaning whatever it may be (thus also the World, the Universe, God, Being et al).
Regarding the New Age excitement around the Mayan prophecy, Grossinger cautions, "But I am not looking for indications of renewal externally and historically. I am looking for a gateway inside --inside consciousness, inside DNA potential, inside the zodiac. My book is not what is going to happen (or not) on December 21st, 2012 or January 1, 2013 but a 2013 context for what is already happening and has been happening since the emergence of our species, the advent of life on Earth, and the creation of this universe --impossibly big venues that cannot be queried but that mark abysses we must explore." [Introduction, pp2/3]
I identify with Grossinger's style of thinking & writing; by no means haphazard but the natural order of an intelligence following the maze of references his experience has endowed. Closer to innocence than magic, one's also been receptive to that internal/external match-up of which Grossinger derives a dramatic concordance. But it's the scale of his table & therefore the ability to exclaim & encompass (literally the same breath, the same perception) that distinguishes him.
Reflecting on his lack of recognition of Jose Arguelles' Mayan thesis at the time he was offered it for publication, Grossinger submits, "My snub became an unconscious throwback to old elitist publishing habits as to what constituted a worthy curriculum, attitudes that I was in the bare beginnings of overcoming and that were still largely unexamined. I was an intellectual snob, with vestiges of Black Mountain literary machismo in my head, and I was pretty much in thrall to the anti-kitsch imperatives of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Kelly and crew." (Introduction, p15) True enough. Which is why, perhaps, the New York Scene is what it is --serious, sincere & hilarious with the junk of the everyday --and not Black Mountain!
I simply havent delved into the authors Grossinger respects as teachers & companions --Richard Hoagland, Arguelles, Terrence McKenna among others. Some I remember from Io magazine & the milieu North Atlantic Books described. I respect that he's done the hard yards (to use an appropriate Australianism) in the mind/body practices either side of orthodoxy.
David Bohm doesnt figure in Grossinger's cavalcade but remembering my '80s reading prompts the hologramic here as relevant to his perspective. And my own sense of the infinite trajectory of pivotal, that is life endowing/defining, events which are always available to intersection & continuation (according to the apprehension one has of any one of them; that is, to reengage with the event's infinite possibility against apparent historical closure; remembering, crucially, that the dynamic is personal), assuredly resonates with Grossinger.
No surprise, really, that Grossinger shivers off association with Ken Wilber --not only because erstwhile comrades criticise him as a "self-aggrandizing, parasitical worm; even worse, a Ken Wilber wannabe" (p 551). He reflects, "Without your accusation, without its gauntlet, my writing is just fancy words, shoplifted at best, restless and hollow, dispensable, a betrayal and a failure of everything they stand for --not even third-rate Ken Wilber, as you duly say. But given what else my work must withstand, the trials coming this way in an ill and binding wind, it must be judged, scoured, and obliterated anyway, and then allowed whatever smidgen of truth and honour, if any, endure. That is the only goal worth striving for, the only reverie that might redeem us both at the final call. What I'm attempting here, consumer-culture drivel albeit, is more interesting to me than what Ken Wilber is attempting, but that is beside the point. He is doing fine at what he's doing and he's not on my radar and I don't wannabe him." (p554).
For my part, what I call the existential imperative, the here & now, flesh & blood vouchsafing of any vision, is what's sacrificed in formalizing & abstracting (whether or not intended) any definition of reality. (In my unschooled mind, totality & the totalitarian conspire.) I seem always to prefer the poet to the logician, the authorial to the theoretical, poetry to the prose of systematization...
3.
One pitfall of history or critical commentary as autobiography is the lack of distinction between the 'gross natural array' (Goethe) & the valued (by attribution or inherent), between the en passant & the gleanings of perception. But Richard Grossinger doesnt want to evade his own fact in the midst of it all. Par for the course in poetry, problematic in prose (because laid bare, unsynthesised).
I give him the benefit of the doubt despite intemperate & wrongheaded political judgments --e.g., what a truly awful analogy here, "In China people who manipulate goods or markets are executed. In the US they are allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains because they are too big to fail and anything else would be class warfare, and, god forbid, socialism..." The context for his comment is an aside on the billionaire swindler, Bernie Madoff, that he wasnt the worst : "The worst are names we will never know, secret bankers behind the global conspiracy and its invisible depositories and exchequers (and maybe even 9/11 and the missing black boxes too)." (p281) Naturally, then, the chic Left conflation with conspiracy theory on Bush, the Clintons, Obama, on Israel, even the Al Qaeda terrorists, monstrously bloated by their New Age appendices.
One's appalled that the American complexion of this politics doesnt cause the embarrassment that might engender a humility and then occasion some worldly reality to the prognostications.
Grossinger's partisan political swipes & snipes --sounding off as a lefty whose profound disappointment with the Democratic Party is matched by the vitriol he would always pour upon the Republicans-- and his rallying to the belated cause of American Pop-music in the wash of the 'the British Invasion', strike me as odd indulgences for a Time Lord. At least, though, he demonstrates fallibility, that is a humanity pursuant on This-world desires & responsibilities.
Can't help thinking that alchemy, homeopathy arent, perhaps, the best analytical tools for This-world politics! Esoteric understanding of the behavior of opposites cannot release us from our solid & historical weight, nor do dreams replace daily discourse. The contrary pertains.
To speak as though one were a player in the Big Scheme, in which game present-day humanity is qualitatitively reduced, smacks of the kind of bad faith which Michael McClure might be compelled to protest (in capital letters) : "I AM A MAMMAL PATRIOT!" Of course it's a conundrum, especially fraught because the transformative impulse, the suite for the new, arises within the breast of unknowing.
We are always in progress, knowledgeable or wise, forever on the way. And no doubt at all Richard Grossinger knows all this & more. He remains tuned in & turned on, abounding in brilliant ideas & memorable expression --loquacious, erudite & gratifyingly flawed.
The 'idiot's guide' to Richard Grossinger's book would instruct that the author doesnt expect anything to happen on December 20th, 2012 or 1st January, 2013. Nothing will necessarily happen except what is always happening. Whatever the Mayan calendar construes is held by DNA & dreamt, as it were, by the consciousness in which humanity is subsumed. Prophecy, it might continue, concentrates the mind. Transformation is inevitable; life in all its forms teleological.
In short, 2013 : Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration is a music of the spheres, and it could only have been written in 2010, in America, on this planet!
-------------------------------------------
[30th September, '10 to the 4th November, '10; cleaned up / typed, January, 2011; Melbourne]
Thursday, September 17, 2009
DAVID BROMIGE, 1933-2009; R.I.P.
Shocked & saddened since scrolling the Poetry Flash (San Francisco) site a few days ago, to find the announcement of David Bromige's death back in June. I was unsuspectingly responding to the suggestion that I become a Face Book Friend of Poetry Flash, with which I'd corresponded in the late '70s, when Steve Abbott was its editor & I was publishing my mag-in-an-envelope, The Merri Creek or Nero. I wonder now how I've missed this bad news --perhaps I had come across it at the time & promptly forgot? Which would be sad in itself, --a comment on the level of distraction which is the contemporary world and one's own complicity or failing within it. (Face Book? Ah, but that's another interesting story.) And then, looking for Steve Abbott's present whereabouts, I find he died in the early '90s. Same wondering --had I known? have I forgotten? Oh dear.
I realize years have passed since David & I last exchanged letters or publications, and I dont remember ever emailing, but he was one of the writers with whom I assumed the kind of relationship which might be resumed at any time. I'm also astonished that David was 76 --of course I'd read his dates, but for some reason I had him younger : older than me but not by thirteen years... And yet, what's thirteen years in a lifetime or, as one gets to think, in eternity?
What a curious thing it all is --how one perceives age, especially one's own in relation to others. If David Bromige was 76 then I'm no Spring chicken myself --and yet, within the Shangri-la of the poetry scene, one enjoys a kind of agelessness, a time out of time in which even the ancients seem like contemporaries (--the figure of Keats in my mind now because of the pulse it is within David's own recapitulation of the history his own life as poet galvanized), and the passing years of our time on earth like a continuous present. What's past, & who have passed, held in the mind as though just yesterday, just yesterday, just yesterday...
We got in touch with one another after Eric Mottram published us both in Poetry Review (London) [Vol 61, #4], Winter 1971/72. I promptly solicited something for my Earth Ship magazine; he accepted & made comment that one of my poems in the issue, Castles (written to my brother Bernard), was a welcome criticism & advance upon a poetics still bound up with Stephen Spender! In retrospect, I wonder if he thought that he'd observed in my minor effort an attempt to marry traditional music with something cannier; whatever, the imperative for sophistication or improvement isnt one I hold these days, --certainly meta-poetry is even less my metier than it was then, after all it led me into a cul-de-sac from which it took me the best part of two decades to escape! Not so David Bromige, I hazard the guess.
David was an obvious candidate for the Writing Writing issue of the Melbourne successor to Earth Ship, The Ear In A Wheatfield, in 1975. The line-up is worth recording : Anthony Barnett, Colin Symes, Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Michael Davidson, David Bromige, Edmond Jabes translated by Rosmary Waldrop, Victoria Rathbun on Walter Billeter's translation of Paul Celan's Breath Crystal. In my mind, then, there was a connection between the writing of Celan & Jabes and the Anglo-American inheritors of Joyce & Stein, importantly Robert Duncan (one specifically recalls his Stein Variations & the Writing Writing sequence in the Derivations volume of his British Selected Poems [Fulcrum Press, 1968]) via whom the younger generation poets such as Palmer & Bromige. Olson is there too, of course --in the mutation I want to say, the spelling out of which enjoys its own rich domain.
Writing 'writing' was my erstwhile co-conspiritor Colin Symes' correction to the title : the single inverted commas "draws attention to the character of writing 'writing'." he suggested. "In this genre it is the writing that is all important. Unless such a punctuative insertion is made it gives the impression that the genre is principally concerned with so much calligraphic exercise. Which it is most certainly not."
Writing writing was a version of what I thought the whole biz was about from my desk (the very same one at which I sit now, tapping away on the computer- keyboard instead of the manual Olympia typewriter I had then) in Melbourne, Australia in 1975 --part of an experimental welter to eventually include Bernstein, Silliman, Watten, Hejinian & co's L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E project. Though it couldnt have been the whole biz, after all in '74 I was excited to publish a supplement devoted to the Bolinas poets, whom I imagined as New York going West & meeting the sons & daughters of Black Mountain & the Beats, and certainly didnt think was surpassed by Writing Writing! Holding it all is ever the challenge!
When we met in September,1987, in London, --my first trip home since 1975, & David showing Cecilia where once he was from-- he characterised us as supporters of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E as a tendency but not of the Party it seemed to have become! Quite so, --we were all for experimentation's balloons but not for any Commissariat! However, years later, rereading such books as My Poetry & the issue of The Difficulties devoted to him, I recognized myself in the kind of thing he both cheerfully lampooned & vehemently opposed! Bromige's cut-up & pastiche notwithstanding, since his techniques surely permitted truth, and though I agreed with his (persona's) Romantic proposition of poetry's realness, I felt my own writing fell within his definition of "a stupid & stupefying occupation for zombies" (My Poetry, p18)!
Today I would like to have argued the toss with him over any number of his pronouncements occurring, for example, in the interview with Tom Beckett (The Difficulties, vol 3 #1, '87). Let's take one : "I am interested in a present writing, and find the pretext of presence counter-productive. The present for either writer-reader or reader-writer involves a text, and the attempts to make this vanish beneath a 'voice' insisting on its presence strike me as peurile. Too, 'voice' (= person) invariably is the hypostatization of one or two aspects of self, thenceforth taken as the entirety of that highly elusive, allusive, various and questionable construct, in the interests of a commodity society...."
I think I recall from our correspondence, David working through Michael Polanyi & Merleau-Ponty. Evidently he ended up with a rather serious Frankfurt Marxism. He had the gift of the gab though! It would have been a good conversation... I realize now he was one of the bona fide fractions of the revolution whereas I had merely crossed its path; he'd mistakenly accepted me as another shade of red when I was actually one of the whites!
Contrary to his own supposed antipathy for the 'e.y.e.s', the aspect I've liked best of David Bromige's writing is the dialogue or sport between the autobiographer & the subject arising from its avoidance (--& I mean subject as in subject-matter as well as the veiled narrator), my favourite example of which, from his published work, is the haibun-like Six of One, Half-a-Dozen of the Other. I quote from the first piece, A Defect --the short poem & the first lines of the prose :
The doctors doubted any cause for it
since birth or even conception
but he finds a way to suffer it.
Couldn't it have been something
I did? Long ago, some blow struck
for meaning.
__________
"A defect" takes me back to the time I met Freud. The year was 1939, the day, a Sunday, & my father was taking me for a walk across Hampstead heath. this cottage was where John Keats wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale,' this patch of gorse was where Eeyore lost his tail, this pub was where Jack Straw roused the rabble a scant 600 years before, this small hollow in the crotch of a tree, filled with rainwater, beside the dark duckpond, was Pooh's Cup. This was all too much, I had to run in widening spirals or pee my pants, so he gave me my head, my foot snagged in a gnarled tree-root & my knees skidded in the gravel. Someone like my grandfather was bending over me, though at first I hardly noticed him, for I'd glimpsed my own blood & was howling in panic. Taking out his hankie, he dipped it in Pooh's Cup, & then applied it to my wounds. When my father came up he thanked the old man, giving him a rather stiff grin. Facing my father he said, Not to worry. Then, patting my head, he added: Later, he vill remember zis differently.
(.....)"
The dialogue implies, if it doesnt also actually involve, a jig-saw of fiction & history, though exactly which is the other's coda may have contributed to the amusement of his lengthening days. I wonder if David produced or was working towards a definitive rapprochement of the issues he fielded in statements & writings over the years, not only the standard binaries (lyric, intellectual, musical, reflexive) but the meaning of history, self, poetry, the social, the political, you name it --& the status of poet & poem within that.
In Barbara Weber's Annotated Bibliography which appeared in the David Bromige Issue of The Difficulties (& my copy is inscribed, "For Kris in the Notting Hill Cafe Sep. 5 / 87 Love David"), the chapbook my brother Bernard published is described thus :
It's the Same Only Different / The Melancholy Owed Categories. Weymouth, England: Last Straw Press, 1984. 4pp., 200 copies.
3 -- or perhaps 4 -- poems in one: Bromige wrote two poems using the rhyme scheme from Keats' "Ode on Melancholy", and then intercalated these to make a third poem; readers who recognize the rhyme words from Keats will also hear his poem behind the scenes. There is also an extract from a letter written by Bromige to his publisher, Bernard Hemensley, which appropriates a letter Keats wrote to his brother. "Bernard as early as 1981 was in touch with me requesting a small book. I felt this work appropriate for my first publication in the country of my birth, so I sent it to him. A severe flu early in '84 had got me reading Keats, feverishly, and I'd made a number of rime-identity poems from his work. Rime is always a question of identity and non-identity, either of a like and an unlike sound combined, or of two or more (to move a step away) concepts of alleged universal currency, such as 'justice', and speaks to us of how we learn -- and raise the question of how we must apply these to a range of experience. these considerations embodied in the formal aspects of this work thus apply its content as well."
The little blue, square-covered booklet actually carries the address of Stingy Artist, 33 Shelley Road, Thornhill, Southampton, which was the Hemensley family home before the move to Weymouth in the neighboring county of Dorset. The letter extract is as follows :
"... you see, Bernard, the poetical character has no self... and does no harm from its relish of the dark side... or the bright : both end in speculation. The poet has no identity -- he is continually informing and filling some other body.... I deemed it appropriate, this being my first book to be published in England, and my earliest poetic memory, being led by my father over Hampstead Heath to see the cottage where the Nightingale Ode was written (after which we returned to 254A W. End Lane where he read me to sleep from Milne), to use Keats' 'Ode to Melancholy' as armature : the ideas then discovered (to borrow Hejinian's insight) to me by such vocabulary must also be fitting, being such as troubled the imperious syntax of my youthful education.... But not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. Yet I am ambitious of doing the world some good! If only by keeping it in mind of Negative capability.... I chose this particular Ode perhaps because its third stanza celebrates a mode of love-making at once more accurate to the relief of Beauty and less invasive than the missionary inflictions of the Egotistical Sublime. Of course nothing of this remains in the poem I have made, and yet shadows it even as the English English diction colors it...." [letter extract - 9/12/84]
Bernard was expecting David & Cecilia to visit him in Weymouth in September, '87 at about the time I was bound for England. It was then mooted that the Bromiges would travel down with me, but this didnt eventuate. Bernard of course had been excited at the prospect of a visit & was sorry it hadnt occurred. I conveyed David's apologies & love. A few years earlier, David & Larry Eigner had written to Bernard, brought down by agoraphobia, not to worry about their belated books. "He must be exploring the underside of Merry, Hearty, Happy -- a terrible place" David wrote me. As I write this, Bernard is in that same place again, attempting to rise again...
Back in '87, in Weymouth, I began a series of poems, the first of which was Wind in the Trees, an earlier version of which was published by Robert Adamson in Ulitarra magazine (NSW, 1996). Here is what might be the final version.
WIND IN THE TREES
wind in the trees Alice Notley
wind in the trees of Bernard's cemetery
the way David Bromige pronounced Bernard :
Ber-nard he said as though
another life's confidante :
Ber-nard's cemetery
full of wind & maybe it is rain Bernard says
& Bernard says do you know Alice Notley's
Doctor William' Heiresses? ["Poe was the first one,
he mated with a goddess. His children were
Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman -- out of wedlock
with a goddess."] -- reading it quickly
with an American accent the lineage
soon yields Alice Notley & Anne Waldman & Bernadette Mayer
& all of us no fuss
& Bernard only plays goddesses on the stereo
Kate Bush & Patti Smith & Stevie Nicks
& the poem threatens to run out as suddenly as it began
but inclusion is this one's device
count us in then
Christopher in Bernard's room at Cemetery Lodge
Christopher with Retta's & Catherine's air-letters
& history is that lace-curtained window
& the cemetery's spruce elms oaks & pines
are something else
& yes i know Alice Notley
yes i know
yes i know
[Weymouth, September '87
rejigged '02; & March 2005]
The poem now seems to me to carry David Bromige as an hommage in the same way as it continues to hold my brother and, indeed, Alice Notley, to whom it was initially addressed, in her own mourning, doubled since.
Dear David, may he rest in peace.
___________________________
Kris Hemensley, September 4th/17th, 2009
Melbourne, Oz
I realize years have passed since David & I last exchanged letters or publications, and I dont remember ever emailing, but he was one of the writers with whom I assumed the kind of relationship which might be resumed at any time. I'm also astonished that David was 76 --of course I'd read his dates, but for some reason I had him younger : older than me but not by thirteen years... And yet, what's thirteen years in a lifetime or, as one gets to think, in eternity?
What a curious thing it all is --how one perceives age, especially one's own in relation to others. If David Bromige was 76 then I'm no Spring chicken myself --and yet, within the Shangri-la of the poetry scene, one enjoys a kind of agelessness, a time out of time in which even the ancients seem like contemporaries (--the figure of Keats in my mind now because of the pulse it is within David's own recapitulation of the history his own life as poet galvanized), and the passing years of our time on earth like a continuous present. What's past, & who have passed, held in the mind as though just yesterday, just yesterday, just yesterday...
We got in touch with one another after Eric Mottram published us both in Poetry Review (London) [Vol 61, #4], Winter 1971/72. I promptly solicited something for my Earth Ship magazine; he accepted & made comment that one of my poems in the issue, Castles (written to my brother Bernard), was a welcome criticism & advance upon a poetics still bound up with Stephen Spender! In retrospect, I wonder if he thought that he'd observed in my minor effort an attempt to marry traditional music with something cannier; whatever, the imperative for sophistication or improvement isnt one I hold these days, --certainly meta-poetry is even less my metier than it was then, after all it led me into a cul-de-sac from which it took me the best part of two decades to escape! Not so David Bromige, I hazard the guess.
David was an obvious candidate for the Writing Writing issue of the Melbourne successor to Earth Ship, The Ear In A Wheatfield, in 1975. The line-up is worth recording : Anthony Barnett, Colin Symes, Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Michael Davidson, David Bromige, Edmond Jabes translated by Rosmary Waldrop, Victoria Rathbun on Walter Billeter's translation of Paul Celan's Breath Crystal. In my mind, then, there was a connection between the writing of Celan & Jabes and the Anglo-American inheritors of Joyce & Stein, importantly Robert Duncan (one specifically recalls his Stein Variations & the Writing Writing sequence in the Derivations volume of his British Selected Poems [Fulcrum Press, 1968]) via whom the younger generation poets such as Palmer & Bromige. Olson is there too, of course --in the mutation I want to say, the spelling out of which enjoys its own rich domain.
Writing 'writing' was my erstwhile co-conspiritor Colin Symes' correction to the title : the single inverted commas "draws attention to the character of writing 'writing'." he suggested. "In this genre it is the writing that is all important. Unless such a punctuative insertion is made it gives the impression that the genre is principally concerned with so much calligraphic exercise. Which it is most certainly not."
Writing writing was a version of what I thought the whole biz was about from my desk (the very same one at which I sit now, tapping away on the computer- keyboard instead of the manual Olympia typewriter I had then) in Melbourne, Australia in 1975 --part of an experimental welter to eventually include Bernstein, Silliman, Watten, Hejinian & co's L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E project. Though it couldnt have been the whole biz, after all in '74 I was excited to publish a supplement devoted to the Bolinas poets, whom I imagined as New York going West & meeting the sons & daughters of Black Mountain & the Beats, and certainly didnt think was surpassed by Writing Writing! Holding it all is ever the challenge!
When we met in September,1987, in London, --my first trip home since 1975, & David showing Cecilia where once he was from-- he characterised us as supporters of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E as a tendency but not of the Party it seemed to have become! Quite so, --we were all for experimentation's balloons but not for any Commissariat! However, years later, rereading such books as My Poetry & the issue of The Difficulties devoted to him, I recognized myself in the kind of thing he both cheerfully lampooned & vehemently opposed! Bromige's cut-up & pastiche notwithstanding, since his techniques surely permitted truth, and though I agreed with his (persona's) Romantic proposition of poetry's realness, I felt my own writing fell within his definition of "a stupid & stupefying occupation for zombies" (My Poetry, p18)!
Today I would like to have argued the toss with him over any number of his pronouncements occurring, for example, in the interview with Tom Beckett (The Difficulties, vol 3 #1, '87). Let's take one : "I am interested in a present writing, and find the pretext of presence counter-productive. The present for either writer-reader or reader-writer involves a text, and the attempts to make this vanish beneath a 'voice' insisting on its presence strike me as peurile. Too, 'voice' (= person) invariably is the hypostatization of one or two aspects of self, thenceforth taken as the entirety of that highly elusive, allusive, various and questionable construct, in the interests of a commodity society...."
I think I recall from our correspondence, David working through Michael Polanyi & Merleau-Ponty. Evidently he ended up with a rather serious Frankfurt Marxism. He had the gift of the gab though! It would have been a good conversation... I realize now he was one of the bona fide fractions of the revolution whereas I had merely crossed its path; he'd mistakenly accepted me as another shade of red when I was actually one of the whites!
Contrary to his own supposed antipathy for the 'e.y.e.s', the aspect I've liked best of David Bromige's writing is the dialogue or sport between the autobiographer & the subject arising from its avoidance (--& I mean subject as in subject-matter as well as the veiled narrator), my favourite example of which, from his published work, is the haibun-like Six of One, Half-a-Dozen of the Other. I quote from the first piece, A Defect --the short poem & the first lines of the prose :
The doctors doubted any cause for it
since birth or even conception
but he finds a way to suffer it.
Couldn't it have been something
I did? Long ago, some blow struck
for meaning.
__________
"A defect" takes me back to the time I met Freud. The year was 1939, the day, a Sunday, & my father was taking me for a walk across Hampstead heath. this cottage was where John Keats wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale,' this patch of gorse was where Eeyore lost his tail, this pub was where Jack Straw roused the rabble a scant 600 years before, this small hollow in the crotch of a tree, filled with rainwater, beside the dark duckpond, was Pooh's Cup. This was all too much, I had to run in widening spirals or pee my pants, so he gave me my head, my foot snagged in a gnarled tree-root & my knees skidded in the gravel. Someone like my grandfather was bending over me, though at first I hardly noticed him, for I'd glimpsed my own blood & was howling in panic. Taking out his hankie, he dipped it in Pooh's Cup, & then applied it to my wounds. When my father came up he thanked the old man, giving him a rather stiff grin. Facing my father he said, Not to worry. Then, patting my head, he added: Later, he vill remember zis differently.
(.....)"
The dialogue implies, if it doesnt also actually involve, a jig-saw of fiction & history, though exactly which is the other's coda may have contributed to the amusement of his lengthening days. I wonder if David produced or was working towards a definitive rapprochement of the issues he fielded in statements & writings over the years, not only the standard binaries (lyric, intellectual, musical, reflexive) but the meaning of history, self, poetry, the social, the political, you name it --& the status of poet & poem within that.
In Barbara Weber's Annotated Bibliography which appeared in the David Bromige Issue of The Difficulties (& my copy is inscribed, "For Kris in the Notting Hill Cafe Sep. 5 / 87 Love David"), the chapbook my brother Bernard published is described thus :
It's the Same Only Different / The Melancholy Owed Categories. Weymouth, England: Last Straw Press, 1984. 4pp., 200 copies.
3 -- or perhaps 4 -- poems in one: Bromige wrote two poems using the rhyme scheme from Keats' "Ode on Melancholy", and then intercalated these to make a third poem; readers who recognize the rhyme words from Keats will also hear his poem behind the scenes. There is also an extract from a letter written by Bromige to his publisher, Bernard Hemensley, which appropriates a letter Keats wrote to his brother. "Bernard as early as 1981 was in touch with me requesting a small book. I felt this work appropriate for my first publication in the country of my birth, so I sent it to him. A severe flu early in '84 had got me reading Keats, feverishly, and I'd made a number of rime-identity poems from his work. Rime is always a question of identity and non-identity, either of a like and an unlike sound combined, or of two or more (to move a step away) concepts of alleged universal currency, such as 'justice', and speaks to us of how we learn -- and raise the question of how we must apply these to a range of experience. these considerations embodied in the formal aspects of this work thus apply its content as well."
The little blue, square-covered booklet actually carries the address of Stingy Artist, 33 Shelley Road, Thornhill, Southampton, which was the Hemensley family home before the move to Weymouth in the neighboring county of Dorset. The letter extract is as follows :
"... you see, Bernard, the poetical character has no self... and does no harm from its relish of the dark side... or the bright : both end in speculation. The poet has no identity -- he is continually informing and filling some other body.... I deemed it appropriate, this being my first book to be published in England, and my earliest poetic memory, being led by my father over Hampstead Heath to see the cottage where the Nightingale Ode was written (after which we returned to 254A W. End Lane where he read me to sleep from Milne), to use Keats' 'Ode to Melancholy' as armature : the ideas then discovered (to borrow Hejinian's insight) to me by such vocabulary must also be fitting, being such as troubled the imperious syntax of my youthful education.... But not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. Yet I am ambitious of doing the world some good! If only by keeping it in mind of Negative capability.... I chose this particular Ode perhaps because its third stanza celebrates a mode of love-making at once more accurate to the relief of Beauty and less invasive than the missionary inflictions of the Egotistical Sublime. Of course nothing of this remains in the poem I have made, and yet shadows it even as the English English diction colors it...." [letter extract - 9/12/84]
Bernard was expecting David & Cecilia to visit him in Weymouth in September, '87 at about the time I was bound for England. It was then mooted that the Bromiges would travel down with me, but this didnt eventuate. Bernard of course had been excited at the prospect of a visit & was sorry it hadnt occurred. I conveyed David's apologies & love. A few years earlier, David & Larry Eigner had written to Bernard, brought down by agoraphobia, not to worry about their belated books. "He must be exploring the underside of Merry, Hearty, Happy -- a terrible place" David wrote me. As I write this, Bernard is in that same place again, attempting to rise again...
Back in '87, in Weymouth, I began a series of poems, the first of which was Wind in the Trees, an earlier version of which was published by Robert Adamson in Ulitarra magazine (NSW, 1996). Here is what might be the final version.
WIND IN THE TREES
wind in the trees Alice Notley
wind in the trees of Bernard's cemetery
the way David Bromige pronounced Bernard :
Ber-nard he said as though
another life's confidante :
Ber-nard's cemetery
full of wind & maybe it is rain Bernard says
& Bernard says do you know Alice Notley's
Doctor William' Heiresses? ["Poe was the first one,
he mated with a goddess. His children were
Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman -- out of wedlock
with a goddess."] -- reading it quickly
with an American accent the lineage
soon yields Alice Notley & Anne Waldman & Bernadette Mayer
& all of us no fuss
& Bernard only plays goddesses on the stereo
Kate Bush & Patti Smith & Stevie Nicks
& the poem threatens to run out as suddenly as it began
but inclusion is this one's device
count us in then
Christopher in Bernard's room at Cemetery Lodge
Christopher with Retta's & Catherine's air-letters
& history is that lace-curtained window
& the cemetery's spruce elms oaks & pines
are something else
& yes i know Alice Notley
yes i know
yes i know
[Weymouth, September '87
rejigged '02; & March 2005]
The poem now seems to me to carry David Bromige as an hommage in the same way as it continues to hold my brother and, indeed, Alice Notley, to whom it was initially addressed, in her own mourning, doubled since.
Dear David, may he rest in peace.
___________________________
Kris Hemensley, September 4th/17th, 2009
Melbourne, Oz
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 11
INTRODUCTION TO THE ARCHIVE OF ENIGMA screening of BERNIE O'REGAN'S FILMS; at the Dancehouse, Melbourne, June 15th, 1998
I like the title of tonight's presentation of the late Bernie O'Regan's films.
It's an "archive of enigma" because he didnt, apparently, leave his work in any discernible order --that is, apart from his work-books, which would have to be as important a legacy of his work as his completed artefacts & recent projects.
He's an enigma in himself and, dare I say it, to himself. Of course that's true in varying extent for anyone, --so it's the extent of mystery, of doubt, in respect of origin, derivation, prospect, perspective, attitude, direction, accent & subject that makes Bernie O'Regan so much more of an enigma as person & poet-photographer.
As Jude Telford states in her perfect & poignant reminiscence, Memories of London, (that is, the London of 1971), "for some of us poetry was in film"...
Important to establish this right from the start --Bernie O'Regan was a film-maker/photographer in an environment whose crucial language was poetry. For some film-makers this is a boon, for others a deadweight. Some of that is covered by Stan Brakhage, who deals with it problematically though of course so very interestingly. Bernie would have found in Brakhage the inspiration for an instinctual or natural film-making, just as he would have found in Frederick Sommer a yielding to the given --the given image as a meeting of internal & external nature perhaps.
Bernie's first poet friend was the English poet, John Hall --John had been a student at Cambridge [in the mid 1960s], where everyone's a poet and has been forever --and John was publishing poetry within what came to be known as the Cambridge School fraction of the New British Poetry.
John had the English tradition in him --Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, et al --but I think only as established by Ezra Pound's canon. He had encountered Charles Olson & Robert Duncan through his teacher Jeremy Prynne's influence. He read his Black Mountain school and also his New York school...
Bernie got that much closer to whatever of the New Poetry he'd read through knowing John Hall.
I met Bernie at the Totnes Arts Festival in South Devon in 1972 . I'd met John Hall in 1970 [in Southampton] and we'd corresponded --he was the first of my blue-pencil critics on the English scene --poets whose criticism I trusted. He'd invited Bernie O'Regan as the film-maker for the festival. I was one of the poets [David Chaloner was the other]. And a friendship & colleagueship began.
I remember that the movie Bernie showed at the Festival was silent , accompanied by a tape of rock music --I seem to recall the Rolling Stones. I dont think any of his films had sound aside of music.
I also think that words, especially poetical conceptions/poetry, surround his photographs --and that the photo sequences he produced later in his life are like films...
Certainly, our unfinished photo & text collaboration, which I called BIOAUTOGRAPHY, was a kind of film which would have been seen as a book as well as an exhibition.
I want to suggest that as a film-maker/photographer among poets, Bernie constructed a poetics which derived at least equally from poets as from film-makers & photographers.
Part of a poem by John Hall called European History, is a chronology --"the chronology," says the poet, "is that of poignant grief." "The story begins / with wonder and pilfering just like poetry."
The last 3 items are :
"(24) history is bigger than any of us, hence 'tragedy' or, if the doomed aren't
beautiful
(25) despair
there is no direct mention of war, partly because the astute always see it
coming and partly because I understand it as little as I do peace or poetry
(26) pastime
this history is about daily life : the details fill themselves in."
Another book [of poems] by John Hall, Meaning Insomnia [Grosseteste,UK, 1978], is dedicated to Bernie. It was published 20 years ago. It contains a prose-piece, The Field in Bernie's Photograph, and I'll quote : " If it is the first or second day of 1970 and you are walking towards Toby's Point, there is snow on the ground in the fields that you pass. (...) Bernie, who makes photographs, passed by this field during the two days in which, according to our hypothesis, you may also have been there. The snow is not the whitest thing in his photograph; there is whiter in the sky...."
In 1983 I published [in H/EAR magazine, #4, Melbourne] a sequence of poems by Bernie entitled "1981 : A series of Photographs in the manner of one of my poems?" I quote :
"a man is walking
he is carrying something yellow
we can not see that it is yellow because this is black and white photography
however it has yellow written on it.
he is out of doors.
he is resting
the yellow thing he is carrying is like a flag
we cannot read the word yellow completely because it hangs down half furled"
I can imagine them with a title not mentioning photographs --and a poetry reader being quite satisfied with them as poems...
I'll close by quoting Bernie's poem in which he records his debt to [Melbourne poet] Ken Taylor, and some of the poem he refers to by Ken Taylor :
"(...)I have heard Ken Taylor / read Maurie speaks of a secret Australia / while in Iceland/ it is changed / or a rechanged / or recharged / it can save your life / literally / or at least my life / Frank O'Hara / you will know / I do not often speak of ten pin bowling / I said to Finola, with respect / after this I can become an Australian artist / with respect (...)"
"(...)Maurie told me of / a secret Australia, / of nurses and wood-cutters, / farmers, a young man / with cancer, / isolated behind the / cast-iron fence, / a Base Hospital in / a country town, / mid-week races on / a radio somewhere, / men in dressing gowns / to stop other men / in the street / to buy bottles of beer / through the cast-iron fence..." And from the end, "(...)Death in a cicada / summer and / everywhere / a sense of life / as cold / and as still / as that swing, said Maurie, / pointing."
I like the title of tonight's presentation of the late Bernie O'Regan's films.
It's an "archive of enigma" because he didnt, apparently, leave his work in any discernible order --that is, apart from his work-books, which would have to be as important a legacy of his work as his completed artefacts & recent projects.
He's an enigma in himself and, dare I say it, to himself. Of course that's true in varying extent for anyone, --so it's the extent of mystery, of doubt, in respect of origin, derivation, prospect, perspective, attitude, direction, accent & subject that makes Bernie O'Regan so much more of an enigma as person & poet-photographer.
As Jude Telford states in her perfect & poignant reminiscence, Memories of London, (that is, the London of 1971), "for some of us poetry was in film"...
Important to establish this right from the start --Bernie O'Regan was a film-maker/photographer in an environment whose crucial language was poetry. For some film-makers this is a boon, for others a deadweight. Some of that is covered by Stan Brakhage, who deals with it problematically though of course so very interestingly. Bernie would have found in Brakhage the inspiration for an instinctual or natural film-making, just as he would have found in Frederick Sommer a yielding to the given --the given image as a meeting of internal & external nature perhaps.
Bernie's first poet friend was the English poet, John Hall --John had been a student at Cambridge [in the mid 1960s], where everyone's a poet and has been forever --and John was publishing poetry within what came to be known as the Cambridge School fraction of the New British Poetry.
John had the English tradition in him --Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, et al --but I think only as established by Ezra Pound's canon. He had encountered Charles Olson & Robert Duncan through his teacher Jeremy Prynne's influence. He read his Black Mountain school and also his New York school...
Bernie got that much closer to whatever of the New Poetry he'd read through knowing John Hall.
I met Bernie at the Totnes Arts Festival in South Devon in 1972 . I'd met John Hall in 1970 [in Southampton] and we'd corresponded --he was the first of my blue-pencil critics on the English scene --poets whose criticism I trusted. He'd invited Bernie O'Regan as the film-maker for the festival. I was one of the poets [David Chaloner was the other]. And a friendship & colleagueship began.
I remember that the movie Bernie showed at the Festival was silent , accompanied by a tape of rock music --I seem to recall the Rolling Stones. I dont think any of his films had sound aside of music.
I also think that words, especially poetical conceptions/poetry, surround his photographs --and that the photo sequences he produced later in his life are like films...
Certainly, our unfinished photo & text collaboration, which I called BIOAUTOGRAPHY, was a kind of film which would have been seen as a book as well as an exhibition.
I want to suggest that as a film-maker/photographer among poets, Bernie constructed a poetics which derived at least equally from poets as from film-makers & photographers.
Part of a poem by John Hall called European History, is a chronology --"the chronology," says the poet, "is that of poignant grief." "The story begins / with wonder and pilfering just like poetry."
The last 3 items are :
"(24) history is bigger than any of us, hence 'tragedy' or, if the doomed aren't
beautiful
(25) despair
there is no direct mention of war, partly because the astute always see it
coming and partly because I understand it as little as I do peace or poetry
(26) pastime
this history is about daily life : the details fill themselves in."
Another book [of poems] by John Hall, Meaning Insomnia [Grosseteste,UK, 1978], is dedicated to Bernie. It was published 20 years ago. It contains a prose-piece, The Field in Bernie's Photograph, and I'll quote : " If it is the first or second day of 1970 and you are walking towards Toby's Point, there is snow on the ground in the fields that you pass. (...) Bernie, who makes photographs, passed by this field during the two days in which, according to our hypothesis, you may also have been there. The snow is not the whitest thing in his photograph; there is whiter in the sky...."
In 1983 I published [in H/EAR magazine, #4, Melbourne] a sequence of poems by Bernie entitled "1981 : A series of Photographs in the manner of one of my poems?" I quote :
"a man is walking
he is carrying something yellow
we can not see that it is yellow because this is black and white photography
however it has yellow written on it.
he is out of doors.
he is resting
the yellow thing he is carrying is like a flag
we cannot read the word yellow completely because it hangs down half furled"
I can imagine them with a title not mentioning photographs --and a poetry reader being quite satisfied with them as poems...
I'll close by quoting Bernie's poem in which he records his debt to [Melbourne poet] Ken Taylor, and some of the poem he refers to by Ken Taylor :
"(...)I have heard Ken Taylor / read Maurie speaks of a secret Australia / while in Iceland/ it is changed / or a rechanged / or recharged / it can save your life / literally / or at least my life / Frank O'Hara / you will know / I do not often speak of ten pin bowling / I said to Finola, with respect / after this I can become an Australian artist / with respect (...)"
"(...)Maurie told me of / a secret Australia, / of nurses and wood-cutters, / farmers, a young man / with cancer, / isolated behind the / cast-iron fence, / a Base Hospital in / a country town, / mid-week races on / a radio somewhere, / men in dressing gowns / to stop other men / in the street / to buy bottles of beer / through the cast-iron fence..." And from the end, "(...)Death in a cicada / summer and / everywhere / a sense of life / as cold / and as still / as that swing, said Maurie, / pointing."
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