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."

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 10

WORDS FOR BERNIE : An eulogy on the occasion of Bernie O'Regan's Funeral, 15th November, 1996

I'm here to bury a friend and inaugurate a remembering of him which I hope I'll attend to henceforth. Life is so ruthless in the service of the living; and the dead disappear so quickly...

I've lived with Bernie O'Regan's photographs for the 25 years, more or less, that I've known him --his portraits of the family dominate our notice-board and can be found scattered throughout the house. He's been an important family documentor!
The last photos he took of me were in the Collected Works Bookshop a few months ago. On the Bookshop wall is a photo he took of Collected Works' predecessor, Nick Kimberley's poetry department of Compendium Bookshop in Camden Town, London, around 1972. Nick sits at his table just as I stand at my counter now. Both pictures own that rich congestion of old-fashioned kitchens! I think Bernie would be very much at home with that analogy.

Although Bernie's always been around me with his photographs, he hasnt been as present for me for years as in the last couple of weeks of his life & death.
I thank John Anderson for keeping me informed over a long time of the ups & downs of Bernie's condition --and commend him for his good companionship to Bernie during this remarkable period of almost spectacular well-being as well as illness.
What ironies to contemplate : that one's life, sometimes, diverts one from old friends, develops one in different directions in which friendships are tested, and wax & wane; and that the shadow of death sometimes heightens one's sense of life and makes one live at one's very best.
Quality of life is one of those phrases one would love to abolish because of its over-use --yet Bernie seemed to have exemplified it at this end of his life, as though all the years of his restlessness, nervousness & anxiety had been worked through to both best & worst conclusions --as though Bernie really was fulfilled in his contradictions at the last.

I met Bernie in 1972, at the Totnes Arts Festival in South Devon in England. I was one of the poets and Bernie was the experimental filmmaker, both of us invited by our mutual friend, the poet John Hall. Cleo Laine & the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra was the other act!
It was a crucial meeting for both of us. Retta & I were preparing to return to Melbourne after three years in England, and Bernie was beginning to question his life in London after a decade away [from Melbourne]. As it transpired, our enthusiastic reports of life & art in contemporary Melbourne persuaded Bernie & Jude [Telford] to follow us back. I have to say that as often as I remember Bernie I think of Bernie & Jude. Dinners, outings, great raves, films, photographs shared together. I also think of their dog Bobby, but that's another story.

Bernie was a film-maker but more importantly a photographer among the poets, a photographer for whom poetry & the optic which poets have of the world was of major importance. In the '70s, in both England & Australia, this relationship was socially realized --but thereafter, as the visionary spirit of the '60s finally evaporated, it was internalised, adhered to as practice without expectation of social reflection.

I'd like to think that we were both becoming other kinds of person & artist in the last ten years --and that if & when our time-tables coincided we'd have been able to share & explore our new thoughts & works. I certainly agree with something Jude Telford said when Bernie died, that it was a terrible shame he wouldnt be taking any more photographs. Whatever his achievement is, I feel he was still working something out in his Letters to Friends project --involving a wonderful distillation or crystalization of intuition & collage, in which reality not only could be said to have "adhered to the photographic surface" [F. Sommer] but was created.

I'll read a couple of poems or parts of poems that touched &/or reflected Bernie, plus a couple of Bernie's own poems, which reveal him, poignantly...

When I ask Kris
should I be flattered or amazed
when he says he will publish my poems
he says
be amazed,
I am amazed
I guess I am often amazed
in a soporific sort of way,
I am certainly not certain
of the reason why I am here
and here, for now is
Australia
Melbourne
Brunswick
Albion St.
number 213


*

At the Dental Hospital

Today
there are 2 reasons, at least,
for not killing myself.
Gilbert Sorrentino is only 45
and just thinking what is to come
before he is dead.
Frank O'Hara is dead
but he has left 500 pages
of poems to be read before
I am dead

*

(by John Hall)

the things wrong with my car
are easier to talk about
than the things wrong with me, less
intimate perhaps, but more intimate
than other people's cars. the things
wrong with other people is
the best subject of all but needs always
the right audience, easy enough to gain
where we are all intimate
with each other's defects. the audience
for the conversation about the
things wrong with me
must think about it as I would like to
as offering grounds for a more intimate
& flattering interpretation. so the surroundings
must be quiet & the converation
not overheard the which conditions
are not at all necessary
for the things wrong with my car.

(by Ted Berrigan)

III (Sonnet)

Stronger than alcohol, more great than song,
deep in whose reeds great elephants decay;
I, an island, sail, and my shores toss
on a fragrant evening, fraught with sadness
bristling hate.
It's true, I weep too much. Dawns break
slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea,
what other men sometimes have thought they've seen.
And since then I've been bathing in the poem
lifting her shadowy flowers up for me,
and hurled by hurricanes to a birdless place
the waving flags, nor pass by prison ships
O let me burst, and I will be lost at sea!
and fall on my knees then womanly.

*

(by Robert Duncan)

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
(....)
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.


---------------------------------------------------------
[Bernie O'Regan (21/6/38-9/11/96), buried at Arthur's Creek, outer Melbourne, 15th November,1996.]