KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, #9

TRIBUTE TO JOHN ANDERSON, SERVICE OF THANKSGIVING, 5th November,1997

To Sheila, John's mother, & to his father; to his sisters & other members of John's family; and to his closest friends, especially Emma Lew; my deepest sympathy to you at this time. My love & strength to you as you live with & without John forever after.
I've been asked to speak into our memorial service for John the sorrows & kindest thoughts from several poets & writers whom I contacted last week, namely from Robert Gray in Sydney, Alexandra Seddon in Candelo, from Anna Couani in Sydney, & Alex Miller locally. All were shocked at the suddenness of his illness & death, and spoke fondly & appreciatively of John as a person & a poet.
Another of our mutual colleagues, Javant Biarujia, dedicated the poetry reading which he was mc-ing on the night of that awful Tuesday to John.
For the poets, the words are almost all-important.
This totally consuming labour extracting poetic harmony, poetic truth, poetic meaning, poetic value even poetic justice & poetic consolation from the language in which & by which we know the world. These are the accents & complexions of the world the poet makes --and of the life the poet makes --of the reason for it & the sense of it --its poetic sound & sense.
And all of it made by the poet with eyes & ears, mind, tongue, senses ever sensitive to what is given --to make something of what is given even as it presents itself complete.
John was part of my extended domestic & literary family since the early 1970s; intensely in earlier times, less so recently. He brought his friends & references into the conversation, as it were, and went away with mine.
Important as traditional British & Australian & modern European poetry were to him, so would become certain contemporary American poetry or at least certain of its poetic precepts.
His landscape poetry , which I persist in thinking of as cosmological, issues in his work as the product of that great Twentieth Century contradiction, the wonderfully artificial & the wonderfully real.
John was perplexed to find, one day, that a photograph for which he'd been very carefully posed by our late friend Bernie O'Regan, no longer included him. There was the Merri Creek & a particularly dramatic section of rock, but he'd been literally cut out of the picture! I'm moved & amused by that tale, for though John has been cut out, the landscape that remains bears him faithfully, for, as far as the poets are concerned, he also named the place and shaped it forever for us to see & to hear & to read.
As follows [from THE BLUEGUM SMOKES A LONG CIGAR, Rigmarole Books, 1978] : THE BRACHYCHITON (Kurrajong)

Study the leaves of the Brachychiton
And you will be ready for any turn in the conversation

What holds true in a grove of Brachychitons
Holds true in wheatfields and oaks

The kind of thought that I aspire to
Would not disturb one leaf of Brachychiton

I am not self conscious in the Brachychiton
Some are afraid in the Brachychiton
Brachychiton Brachychiton
Enter the Brachychiton

After a while my thoughts fly
When I chant "The Brachychiton"
They sit down and most move around in the Brachychitons
I thought my jeans were Brachychitons
Nirvana Brachychiton. Brachychiton Das Cyclamens.
It is different each time in the Brachychitons

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The Service of Thanksgiving for the Life of John Douglas Anderson, 1948-97, was held at St Mary's Church, North Melbourne, 5th November,1997. Celebrant, Father Jim Brady. Tributes were made by friends & family including Ned Johnson, Paul Poernomo, Elizabeth Connell, Kevin Pearson, Roger Smith, Cassie Lewis, Kris Hemensley, Peter Freckleton, Christopher Mariolle, Geoffrey Egglestone.

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 3

SOME WORDS FOR CLAIRE GASKIN : Saturday 23rd, September,2006 at the Victorian Writers' Centre. Launching of Claire Gaskin's A Bud, published by the John Leonard Press.

Three short weeks ago --is that a long time? --three long weeks ago, I saw Claire read at the Melbourne Writers' Festival --saw her and heard her. I only attended two sessions --Jenny Harrison's book launch [Folly and Grief, Black Pepper Press, with Dorothy Porter doing the honours] and what I think of as Claire's reading --two of my favourite women on this diverse & ever stimulating Melbourne poetry scene --and they were both superb-- looking & speaking exquisitely-- picking their words perfectly.
About Claire's gig, I wrote this in my journal : "I think the reading revolved about music or sound & sense. Brook Emery all sense and [to my ear] little sound [that not being where his poetry's located]; George Szirtes the perfect balance; Mark Reid more in line with Brook and with genuine comic touch; Claire's almost total investment in imagery, for which she's found a measure, quite unusual for English-language poetry... George followed her reading with her book [on his lap] --he looked interested-- I wonder if he found an affinity via East [& Central] European surrealism? Claire should feel more than relieved-- She's grown a leg --the book is compelling, her reading as clear as she could make it --brave as a writer & performer on the day --I'm moved & proud of her..."
Now --Grant [Caldwell] is launching this book and I'm just saying a few words! Inevitably, though, I began constructing a piece in my mind [the moment my plane took off for Europe a couple of weeks ago] : "Some Words for Claire Gaskin". What words? Maybe words around the letters of her name, Claire. Same time as thinking these things I was being haunted by lines of a song by Jane Birkin [the CD given me a couple of months ago by Cathy] --you may know it --from the album Rendezvous -- "The simple story, that you told me / As if you / lay down with a dream you'll wake up lonely" --The connection with Claire is in my image of the poet she may be --a kind of surrealist, a type of dreamer (--the references in her book to Neruda, the reply to Andre Breton) --And it anguished me to think of Claire as the unhappy surrealist! What an irony that loneliness would be the price of the oracle?
So had I followed my initial plan, "C" would have gone something like this : "A calamity it would be if the dreams which fund her poetry, rob her in daily life..."
Oh dear! Heavy! And this isnt the launching speech; just a few words, an accompaniment...
I'd also thought of quoting a passage from my journal of 20-odd years ago when Claire came to my creative writing class at the CAE in Degraves Street --but I can neither find my notes for that series of classes nor the relevant journal --Maybe it isnt 1986 but '84 or '85 or'87? Following my alphabetic plan [this] "C" would have begun something like : "Class of '86 (or whichever is the right date) whose two bubbliest students were Claire Gaskin & Lisa Jacobson" --though I think Lisa was the verbal one --I imagine Claire in a green jumper or jacket --I remember her as a teenager, as a sweet, delightful youngster --I remember her smiles, her quiet enthusiasm...
The "A" of Claire would have been for John Anderson --and it's probably his version of the dreamer that's closest to Claire --I remember her telling me years ago how taken she's been by his "dream lines", the words, phrases he'd wake with, and his use of this dreamed material in his poetry, ultimately following his friend Emma Lew's idea of using the pantoum to bring out the full poetic energy of the lines... And I'm reminded in a way of John in Claire's forming poems of amusing, wry, poignant, cryptic phrases & sentences --it's a kind of resurrection if you like --not merely hommage but a continuing life... John Anderson : "the choice of a subject like the choice of a glance / I hold things to the wall. What wall? Your choice and mine."
So, here am I with my unrealized idea, but with a few more things to say...
Firstly, a qualification of "dreams" & "surrealism" & so on : Claire may or may not be a Buddhist, but she certainly practices yoga & meditation... It's come to be seen, especially in Beat & "Language"-writing, that there's a link between the super- or trans-realism of the classic 20thCentury European poets & their English-language epigones, and the Zen poets' hyper attention to the objects of consciousness, whether in dream or world (and that continuum of dream & world)...
Claire's practice as a poet in Melbourne means she's been writing at a time when free-verse poets have been stimulated by the neo-formalists --Her poetry is, like other Melbourne poetry, often more obviously artful than Californian poetry for example --but a typical Californian like Joanne Kyger is in her practice a cousin for Claire --and for me --and this poem tells us something of Claire and something of me too : "This poem is more / like a picture / postcard isnt it // romantic? I'm in / god's fussy hands / leaving these words for you"...
So, without further ado, may I hand over to Grant Caldwell...