GOOD MORNING GIONA, GOOD MOURNING

1


Wake to 'friend request' from Giona Beltrametti! (Wake to the light of day, of course. Raise bamboo blind for Ushas… Flick desk-computer on…) Giona is Franco's spitting image. Notice the birthdate in the Facebook sidebar. 1966, five years older than Tim Hemensley. Son loses father, father loses son. Good morning Giona, good mourning… Twentieth anniversary of Franco Beltrametti's death --Franco, like so many other British, American & European poets, ushered my way by Tim Longville at Grosseteste Review, editor & proselytiser supreme...

"I am not immune", said in softest caveat upon involuntary vanity that perceiving flux spares one from its fateful vicissitudes --insight more fragile than Lao monk-blessed baci such as Catherine ties around my wrist, protection ensured by animist conflation of material & metaphor (--we've been here before : the feminine's place in all of this --60s & '70s paeans to the immortal dyad; fusion then return to sovereign parts, over & again, women & men in ecstasy's every combination --and recall '80s reading of the slanders upon Lou Andreas Salome for a sister's collegiality with Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud, Buber, analogy of the further trivialisation by contemporary sexual politics of muse, soul-mate, lover, protege --and I admit my head full of fathers, sons, brothers here but sisters, mothers, neither lesser nor ever  forgotten) --yet while the moment flares with knowledge, the infinite delight of illumination subtracts from commensurate world. In no way a handicap when one belatedly realises Franco Beltrametti isn't narrator of the peripatetic (except of the means it is to experience geography as itinerary, simultaneous & indivisible), but meditator he is upon transience & impermanence, the willingly conscious & joyous recorder of world-as-time : "imagine : incurable! a precise / sensation (not unpleasant -- not pleasing) / that everything is happening somewhere else / at the speed of light SVAAAM while here / 24 hours in a bolt of lightning of 6months as it was / the twisting road / up and down across the valley [3/31/70]"

Apropos 'joyous' : I wonder what my own brother Bernard wrote to him in 1992 for Franco to hope I'd be "more joyous soon"? Twenty-three years since their correspondence & five years after Bernard published it in facsimile (Stingy Artist Editions, UK, folded card; Franco Beltrametti, Two letters to Nado / Bernard Hemensley, 2 poems i.m. Franco Beltrametti) I ask myself again : weren't those good years for me? The return to England beginning 1987, visits every or every other year. Discovering the S W Victorian coast, reflection it would be, John Anderson promised, of my new found Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, --Port Campbell to Warnambool, little towns nestled within limestone cliff & agricultural green, pummeled by Bass Straight & Southern Ocean. This time of new reading & thinking in philosophy & religion. New writing albeit substantially relinquishing publishing. Perhaps post partum anguish each time leaving England, dramatising life-long identity questions, -- but what misery implied?

After Bill Brown & Maggie Brown, most named is Franco Beltrametti in James Koller's Snows Gone By : New & Uncollected Poems, 1964-2002. For example in the poem of 30 Nov 1995 :
 "Rising before me now
these mountains are the Sierra,
where you built your house.
Remember the sign : three peaks.
You & I found them,
Truth or Consequences.
I take out the red
harp, Raffaella's, play it --
hear your shadow
caught in the wind."
Helped select it, probably build it. Friendship was never more brotherly… To see a shadow 'caught in the wind'  startling enough, but to 'hear a shadow' plays with kinaesthesia whilst eliciting 'shade' from 'shadow'.

In Jim Koller's Coyote's Journal, #10, 1974, are Franco's Five Poems : linked (and linked by Franco or Koller)? They don't follow chronologically --February '72, November '71, January '72 --but unsequenced in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, UK, '73) which suggests they're random. Yet, thematically, if the (SHORT REPORT) : (TOWARDS NOVEMBER) is a five-part poem's foundation, then a psychedelic sense could be made of "a series of irresistible waves / from all directions", or "1, 2, 3 rainbows", given the explicit reference "A. Rouhier, le Peyotl, 1927 Paris"… Hadn't checked before --imagined a Paris street upon which may as well be unknown rake illicitly tripped out! But belatedly discover the pharmacist & Left Bank book publisher Alexandre Rouhier is the man, one of Andre Breton's hundred guiding heads, mescaline experimenter in the wake of Havelock Ellis & others, --the occultist Monsieur Rouhier, member of one of several underground cells, student of Fulcanelli & spoken of in same excited breath as Alistair Crowley, his "astonished eyes" as per "La Plante Qui Fait les Yeux Emeveilles : Le Peyotl", a good look for Franco & the '70s desert mountain back-country crazy gang whose total countercultural beckoning ironically induced in me the opposite reaction, freezing one in English forbidding, making perfect halfway house of Australia, as though it were the Gauguinian, Whitmanic come-all-ye Down Under, --until now that is, NOW! that these alchemical documents thaw the erstwhile timid set, flow & fly one into Illumination (poetry & world thereof)…


2

Nothing met, named, without contiguities which aggregate Real World. Same apparent obliquity first appreciated in Jung's reading of family tree. Nothing more certain than psyche nor misleading as genome, --synchronicity, sirrah, not logical progression...

Two peas in a pod, Aunty Lod of my brother Bernard & I. I didn't plan the radical separations 1966-69 or, as potentially corrosive for all its benefice, the exile I came to call it, 1975-87. Air-letter correspondence there was, the correspondence which carried the entire poetry scene, both local & international.  But from children to old men are the essential divergent journeys, mutually exclusive experiences & investments, partial to the Way's myriad matings. And brief or extended circumstance parents all manner of relation, chips off old block, motes in ur-family's eternal light.

For some years I've misremembered Charles Olson telling Lew Welch at the 1965 Berkeley reading (transcribed by Zoe Brown, published by Jim Koller's Coyote Books, '66), "I'm not your father, you had a father!" Now, as I read it again I find it's otherwise. Olson's talking about Worcester ("Wow, I never wrote about Gloucester like this."), reading from An Ode on Nativity, --banter with Lew Welch follows but at this stage of the night Olson confesses : "I am a perfect father, until I am not. And that's another thing I hope is happening tonight, Robert [Duncan]. And I know that beautiful story which you've told to me, that you said a thing which cleared me when you told Richard Duerden, 'He's, Olson's not your father. You had a father.' Am I right?" (The exchange with Welch always struck me as paternal, even paternalistic yet imbued with the kind of love that leadership, as epitome or at least ramification of responsibility, implies. The relationship's ambiguous for although Welch is his own man & no kid at 39, he & Olson are colleagues within a family & community of which poetry is the life-blood. --parents, aunts & uncles, siblings born & adopted… ) In the transcript, Olson is speaking about writing & publishing & the status of talking (addressing the world as if arbitrary room has become the ideal) -- : "I am now publishing. Tonight. Because I'm talking writing." Whatever he was thinking, Lew responds with the literal, "I read forty-seven times last year? Forty-seven!" Olson corrects him as he must : "Baby. Oh, I'm not-- Reading? This is a-- Are you kidding? You think this is anything but a-- […] I mean I think this is a political occasion…"

Ken Taylor wasn't my father yet his welcoming me in Melbourne,'67/'68, felt like it. I should have been prodigal son for my own father, but wouldn't have a chance to perform that role until late '69 when I returned to Southampton from Australia, by then fully fledged Melbourne poet & playwright, new husband & new Australian! But it didn't transpire; there was no reconciliation. Even the appearance of his first grandchild, Tim, didn't displace primary rancour. Not until 1987 when I was 41 and Dad 67, did he acknowledge me as an independent adult! With Ken, sixteen years my senior, amity was expressed in the combined relief & delight of mutual recognition, a relationship  which inaugurated the New Melbourne Poetry centred on the La Mama cafe theatre, late '67, early '68 and on, ultimately appreciated as a domain of the New Australian Poetry, the Australian wing of the international "new"… Back in the day, Geoff Eggleston nominated Ken & I as the La Mama poets' "elder brothers", while Ken referred to La Mama's inner circle as "brothers & sisters". Far away from Australia's sun & sea, I thrilled to reports of the brothers & sisters piling into Ken's kombi van, driving to Merricks on the Mornington Peninsula, seventy odd k from Melbourne, to commune & cavort, and why not a version of Kesey & Cassady's magic bus, Taylor's Pranksters… Thrilled & envied --my gift it seems for always missing one or the other country's great cultural events : working in London in '65 at the time of the Albert Hall Reading, I was both timid & unbelieving that the Evening Standard's headline (BEATS COME TO TOWN or BEATS TAKE OVER THE ALBERT HALL) could possibly be true; --in Melbourne in '67 missing, therefore, England's Summer of Love; --in Southampton '70-'72, missing the momentous Moratorium marches in Melbourne, and Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti's visits to Australia for good measure! Et cetera. Of course much to be counted on the other hand…

In 1970, Frank Prince was certainly old enough to have been my father, 58 to my 24. From the start he welcomed me as a new friend into his just then rejuvenating literary life --Stuart & Deirdre Montgomery at Fulcrum Press, via Lee Harwood, were bringing out his Memoirs at Oxford, his first book of poetry since The Doors of Stone, in 1963. He imagined my coming from Australia to England, albeit a return, as similar to his migration to England from South Africa in the '30s, when also in his twenties. Of course, the English wouldn't do this, he told me referring to my zeal for correspondence & communication, soliciting poems for my magazine, describing it as the "colonial energy" exemplified by Pound! Eliot wrote the better poems, he said, but Pound was the poet, the figure who attracted one to poetry as a life. Son or young friend? He complained to me once or twice of difficulties with his own children, whom I figured were older than I, as though we were contemporaries, fathers & men of the world, (--Henry Bolingbroke sotto voce in his cousin Westmoreland's ear of the disappointment young Hal was, especially compared to Hotspur)… Ken Taylor, similarly I recall, granting that parity, sounding me out, '68 or '69, on the New Age protocols concerning wives & their occasional suitors, accepting my advice that punching out the Natural History chap from BBC Bristol was ridiculous & patronising, as plainly antiquated & bad as forbidding one's spouse, he said,  to smoke cigarettes in public!

One time Frank asked me to accompany him to a  reading by poets from Southampton University, down town somewhere --the Bargate or St Michael's House?-- but at the last minute couldn't bring himself to attend. He hoped I'd still go, essentially to be his spy. I imagine he'd rather renounce his faith so adamant was he not to be there! In a sense his absence was a continuing renunciation of the literary life he'd surely conceived back in the '30s, perhaps defending himself from a repeat of the rejection which followed Eliot, his hero's, initial lionisation. Generally speaking he was a loner and until the Fulcrum Press volume not expecting a renewal of the celebrity he'd enjoyed before & after his war-time poem, Soldiers Bathing. Speculate that the Southampton University prof was at odds with the poet and only after moving on (via a series of overseas appointments) did the poet rejoin the wider world. Not quite true though --he was as happy to meet "the younger poets" as Andrew Crozier, upon hearing of our friendship, was keen for such engagement to occur. I felt then that Andrew, like me, subscribed to lineage & amelioration. It was ripe time, long overdue, for Frank Prince to meet with us, Andrew said. What did or didnt transpire at our Portswood tete-a-tete is another matter but I brought the poets (the Johns, Hall & Riley), he got the beer & Elizabeth the supper! He'd begun to subscribe to the Grosseteste Review journal & books in response to my enthusiastic prompting. He was on the board of the Poetry Review during Eric Mottram's editorship and whatever his opinion of the poetry said he believed in the younger generation, characterised by 'feeling' in terms of love & protest. It was the same feeling he was moved I'd found in his otherwise stumpy rhymed Oxford poem, as I described it in a review I blush to recall, --the feeling animating form he'd explain, --from which I extrapolate the vital part of romanticism's issue modernism, --I hear him saying that, except that he didnt, though modernism out of romanticism is his --not yet stifled by the Auden ascendancy --"a bit of a fat head" he'd quipped, rival we suppose, --over whom he briefly enjoyed Eliot's favour --but of all such brevity, jewel flash moment, is this life made...


[1-11-15 / 22-11-15]


3


Of Franco Beltrametti, to Judith Danciger


"whisky wont lack"? Dear Judith what
ever i'm missing of your translation
this Englishing'll do for me :

whisky no end of (wouldn't say no
black ones [bears] no end of (no shortage (overrun

so

curiosity no end of (vivacity (naturally turned on
Franco no end of

no end of simpatico lifting into
whole heart sky
blooming from vulnerable chest
no end of exultation
heroic for its heedlessness
of ever more tedious
bureaucratic
world

Franco

exclamations !!!!!

!!!!! flowers


[12/11/15-19/11/15]

THE BEACH REPORT : Third Season, 2015-16

13-9-15


Now I'm one of the old men with thin legs in long shorts by the sea…


[Journal :

I had in mind to write a paragraph about the old men, which would then refer to Bill Downing as the oldest of them as per his visit to the Shop a few days ago*. Ive been thinking about him as one of the many characters around La Mama (the place and, importantly, the Poets Workshop, the poetry sheets, little mags, poetry readings, meetings) ca '68/'69. For example, have begun piece about Paul Smith describing our dispute about self-immolation political protest, wch i'd mocked in poem & he'd responded, rebuked me. May well refer to Garrie Hutchinson's reconnoiter of Vietnam War era in his book from '99 wch ive  picked up again recently. Ive described Michael Dugan in the Paul Smith piece --Michael being our reporter from the Melbourne front during '68 when we met, filling us in on all the history other side of Loretta's red flagging & Eltham lore i'd learnt through '67, thus Geoff Eggleston, Paul, Meher Baba, home grown mysticism, Beats etc… Michael prime candidate for retrieval, certainly as a character (a figure) and surely a place for his poetry as well…
Time doesn't stand still when one's youthful/active. It does later --a chance to recuperate, retrieve, right the wrongs…

*Saturday, 5-9-15
Bill Downing dropped in & then without goodbye shuffled out. Returned a few minutes later to ask me how he cld use his mobile phone to get money! I wouldn't have a clue of course so i took him to see Mary Farrugia next door. Introduced him to Mary & explained the problem and she & her customers said we shld go to the 7Eleven!  Down in the lift we went, luckily no one in their shop & they were able to explain Bill needed 'sim card' & ID & etc. Said we shld find Vodaphone shop in Bourke Street… I suggested to well & truly baffled Bill it was too complicated & that we shld now ring his wife who might then be able to come to the City? Upstairs at the Shop again i rang her (Bill knew how to locate her phone number on his mobile), explained the situation, and she said he wld have to return home & she'd help him from there! So off Bill went to catch the train. Loretta said i'm 'very kind'. Let's hope people are as kind when we're old i said. Which is the truth of it…]


oOo


Sunday, October 4th, '15


The third season begins.
Corp on cell behind me, appropriately disembodied voice : "Harry? Harry? You're dropping out. I cant hear you." But I can amigo!
God help us!
OK, it's behind me, literally. Focus instead upon the white sand & placid sea & cloudless blue sky from umbrella-less chair & table on the esplanade.
First weekend in October's pre-summer heat wraps around old bones like The Past --the past, as aggregate of equanimity that is --as --as just this, --this sea-side, --this sea-side note-book jotting, as though all perfect unbounded Mind. Then, across the sand, down to the sea and first immersion!
Cold, predictably, but not like some occasions previous summer's end. It's approaching midday & I'm the only bod in the sea, old or young. Old or young same difference in swimming togs in the sea.
Head under the water, can claim real swim now. Kick legs behind me, eyes wide open dead man's float.
Tread around small rocks on pleasantest gradation, seaweeds bobbing.
Then sudden return to the sand and stand for blissful minutes in comparative tropics --hah! --as it always was for English migrant, remember first Melbourne autumn & winter, 1966, --such cold as English made summer of…
Now ah & ah…

POETS' PORTRAITS

Should you come up to the Shop today you'll be in for a big surprise... and for certain because : charcoals by Raffaella Torresan on the high windows at the far end of the room, portraits of seven Melbourne worthies, drawn at different times in the Nineties, four of whom, sad to say, have died. The upper 4 & lower 3 sequence I've arranged in the window frames features Adrian Rawlins, Shelton Lea, Geoffrey Eggleston & Myron Lysenko, followed by Ted Lord, Colin Talbot & Patrick McCauley. Legends is a better description. Incidentally, I wonder who has drawn the women poets over the years --which isnt to join the "it's all blokes" chorus, since one's a poet ahead or despite of gender (& 'because of' would surely now apply equally)... And, another thought, is it usually women making portraits of men?

The first portrait we acquired was Nancy Buller's water-colour of Peter Bakowksi, mid-'90s. He'd sat for a St Kilda elderly women's art group I seem to recall. A chance purchase --there it was one Sunday, in a church hall or a temporary gallery at the Bowling Club --perhaps it was a St Kilda arts festival. Retta thinks she, Catherine & myself all saw it together. I bought it & someone from their group delivered it to the Shop... Next in the collection was Ashley Higgs' silk-screen of Pi O, which I saw at a Council of Adult Education exhibition in Flinders Street --more a glimpse than a study but the profile's unmistakable in its white on yellow cartoon. Its success depends upon the speed of one's look! Then, Javant Biarujia's hand-coloured photo-montage, Frank Hardy (Brushing Up On A Fallen Hero In An Era of Abstraction And Angst), featuring the laureate of Carringbush & his glowering dog in gentling yellow & sepia. It might be a surprise to many that once upon a time --this work is from 1982, acquired a couple of years ago --Javant was as serious about art-photography as writing. About the same time I bought Grant MacCracken's fiercely funny oil of the busking poet (himself as Sham Cabaret, all black shades & leathers) outside of Paul Elliott's Polyester Books & Music in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. It was in the window of the Smith Street, Collingwood picture-framers during an exhibition of his signature moonlit grey & white narratives a few years ago. Next, two pen & inks, drawn from photographs I believe, Judy Johnson by Erin Hunting, & John Tranter by Tim Bruce, both from a 2007 Victorian Writers' Centre exhibition of prize-winning authors, curated by Pam Davison. I'm constantly amused when people mistake the Tranter portrait for me! Of course it's not me, I exclaim --it's obviously Tranter! But I do confess the jolly, full cheeks' expression, could be me in a certain frame of mind (probably full of wine)!

There's a suggestion of the curled lip & raised eyebrow in Raffaella's Adrian Rawlins (1990), a touch of Frank Thring or as David Pepperell called him, Dr Nosh --perhaps thinking of the cheese-platter reward after the artist has finished! Shelton Lea (1998) combines street-wise & imperious but vulnerable too. A difficult face to capture because so well known. Geoffrey Eggleston (1994) she entitles 'Geo Egg' ("Come on the Egg!" one of his old mates yelled across the slope at Montsalvat as son, Nathaniel, buried the casket of ashes, reminding me that was the nickname we'd learned from Mike Dugan in the '60s). Flamboyant in cravat, he also wears that wonderfully stoned expression one recalls over the decades, beady-eyed, mirthful yet serene. Myron Lysenko (1995) is boyish, & there's a kind of blur as though the spectacles are necessary to clarify things. Ted Lord (1998), 'Teddy', seems to float out of a long history; he swims in mortal tenderness. Colin Talbot (1995) has a youthful, handsome athlete's face with a hint of smile he's stringing out like a kite. Patrick McCauley (1998), rugged, windblown, the patina left by a harder life, shared in the visages of Shelton & Ted.

Raffaella Torresan literally sees the best in her sitters, the best & not the beast. Her charcoal portraits are affectionate. The affection attracts & communicates life as well as likeness. It's a truism that drawings are more like living things than any photograph can be, and I swear another species of life is enacted here.

__________________
--Kris Hemensley
fin, 20th September,'09--

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #12, August, 2009

KRIS HEMENSLEY

MAINLINE TO THE HEART AND OTHER POEMS by Clive Matson, published by Regent Press (Berkeley, California), 2009

1.

Before the reader can get to Clive Matson's poems, Mainline to the Heart (which first saw light of day in 1966 & is republished now by Regent Press, Berkeley, with as many more poems of the period as the original collection contained), there are several bridges (hurdles?) to be crossed.
Firstly, Erin Matson's cover drawing (--and she's the lover named in the poems, e.g. in Talk About Love, "she rings my neck using / fingers she oints with
arsenic"; stereotypical femme fatale/object of desire) which departs from the Indianised, Beardsley figures within the book to a cartoon of male devil, assisted by female angel, impaling the hapless, falling man with bayonet-like needle. So the stage is set, the drama proclaimed. Secondly, the five pages of praises for the book from such supporters of his work as Al Young, Jack Foley, Steve Kowit, whose testimonials comprise a psychological & cultural as well as literary purview. And thirdly, the late John Wieners' original introduction.


2.


Diane di Prima & Alan Marlowe published Mainline to the Heart in '66 with their Poets Press in the Bowery. Di Prima recalls in her afterward, A Few Words (written in 2004) that it was the 6th book they'd produced --previous publications included her own Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin, a bilingual edition of a poem by Jean Genet, & Herbert Huncke's Journal. "It was an enchanted time," she says.
History doesnt always oblige one that way, but poetry scene, printing press & happy family just before Vietnam really cranked up, & a full twenty years before Gay Sunshine became the nightmare of AIDS; that period when heroin was cool enough to know its casualties as martyrs to mission & muse, & before the addiction & ODs became commonplace as the carnage on the roads; I guess it might well qualify as enchantment!
The poet whom Clive Matson was in the Sixties cant help himself : "I love drugs : / cocaine and heroin today for speed and warmth, / grass for spice." Why not? Spirituality can be just as amenable, & sex (--sex, junk, God : three-headed version of one Beat deity) --no fuss, & no mess until much later...

3.

In terms of reclamation, then, Mainline to the Heart presents Clive Matson in full flight, as Sixties as they come, that is to say sex to jazz's backbeat, guys & gals, drugs, the Beat merging with the Hippy thing. It contains or assumes the bits of attitude which'd one day declare as Punk --if the love/hate ambivalence defines something of it, not to mention the explicit sexual narrative of one poem & the peppering of its detail elsewhere. No doubt the era's Liberation spiel, before & after Ginsberg, informed him, as it did everyone, though reading him out of context his text also resounds the male chauvenism the squares would always have judged it to be. And not because of the sexual subject-matter but the gluttonous objectification of the body & the act. But if sex --sexual love one should say --is merely "one more war" (& I'm quoting Tim Hemensley's refrain, exorcised as one of the Powder Monkeys songs in the '90s), even male chauvenism is beside the point --and Matson's lovers more like warriors. Probably, also, as John Wieners explains, drugs, & heroin in particular, has everything to do with it : "One wonders about the nature of love in these poems. Are they vicious or not? Has the author sacrificed anything or everything to arrive at the toughness he celebrates. It seems he has. It is not angelhood any longer. It is not nature, springing up in the woods at twilight. It is heroin and the blood he draws. It is not peace."
Wieners' introduction cues in his own gift --and one doesnt require the younger man's gaucherie for the elder to shine. Reminds one too of the remorseless passing of time. Isnt Wieners one of the new poets (as of Donald Allen's "new")?! New, young. . . as he was, of course, in 1966, in his early 30s, seven years older than Clive Matson. The New in these recent decades hardly settles before other species arise. 'Forever young' indeed...
Wieners' An Introduction to Clive Matson's Poems sitting with Diane di Prima in the twilight on a country road, diverts me to his own books... Rereading him I'm even moved to prefer him, of the poets in the eddies of Pound & William Carlos Williams, to both Olson & Creeley, his great friends, mentors, companions. Prefer him this minute, that is, given that he's a poet of the minute, a poet of presence par excellence. Certainly one might now differentiate his originality from theirs. No matter the angle or, later, the circumlocution, Wieners invariably turns towards the world (& the worldly) and is actually the opposite of Olson, the sum of whose voluminous parts suggests a mind continually courting the abstraction one assumed he opposed. J H Prynne once offered that Olson's poetry pursued the 'condition of the whole'; if it does it seems too often in flight from that palpable world celebrated by his erstwhile student. Wieners' elicitation from turn of phrase of something like a revelation is also, ultimately, not Creeley's way, as though the latter's nuancing of squint & quip guaranteed the wisdom of the everyday... Not for a moment would I avoid Olson & Creeley, but now Wieners is restored!


4.

The introductions for di Prima's series "were meant to introduce a new poet by someone from his own lineage -- to 'locate' him or her for the reader." The Wieners of this role is strung between The Hotel Wentley Poems & Pressed Wafer, his 4th & 5th collections. By then he's made it sufficiently to perform at Spoleto with Olson & meet Ezra Pound ("I felt I was in the presence of a Chinese mandarin."). Up the (Black) mountain but never left the (Beat) street. Where's an even younger poet in that? 'Post' & 'neo' this & that (--recall Pete Spence's small Melbourne press of the mid-80s, hilariously tagged Post Neo, implying every year of the Late Age's style but another inflection of belatedness) --so, Matson's neo- or post-Beat epistles & communiques... A natural reporter, and the cliches (represented in the book's testimonials) are true : raw, naked, honest etc.
Matson implies a certain reserve about republication. "Many of the poet's friends, especially Gail Ford, offered patient understanding while the poet struggled to accept the value of the persona expressed in these poems." A reluctant second coming? What's at stake in this reclamation (to republish one's first book)? Try to imagine myself here : I couldnt, wouldnt publish mine --lacking the commitment to my first collection though sometimes imagining a current selection of early poems, the forty, fifty years old young-writing. Perhaps it's the ageless character of such poems, that is, that they are young forever; lyrics that they are, song & dance of the diary of those nights & days --available still, elixir of youth for youth-prolonging seniors! On the other hand, very little of my early 20s poetry is as fulfilled as Matson's confessions. Where he trusts his own experience & language, & pushes right on through his confidence, I would allow fancy & style (aka other poets' voices) to waylay me.
First I heard of Clive Matson since the late '60s/'70s was in a poem in Nigel Roberts' collection Steps for Astaire (Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983), which good-naturedly satirised American culture. "Clive Matson's Poetry Workshop shares verse / of all kinds with appreciation & insight / providing the feedback you want, whether it be / tough criticism or careful encouragement.." I'm not sure that Roberts was gunning for the poet so much as the stereotypical creative-writing tutor, worthy therefore of the general contempt our Sydney troubadour leveled at all "shortcuts to enlightenment" (to quote one of the "New Age Listings" in Steps...), all & any duping of the muse... I recall wondering at the time how Matson regarded his own journey --from dope- & sex-fiend to creative writing tutor, desperado to counselor...


5.

Recapitulate then : Reading Matson I'm hearing & remembering the Sixties. I sympathize, identify with aspects of his testimony even as I squirm! Alive in that Peace & Love time it's obvious, as Wieners cant fail to state, that Clive Matson doesnt sing its song. In a way he's old fashioned --e.g., "jealousy is a function of love and / so is possessiveness" --but laying it out there so graphically is Sixties too. "Why does fucking mean so much?" he asks --no pose; plain prose of that cocksman tradition, Miller to Cassady spiced by Sixties' promiscuity, gay laced. And it's there that a bluer quality occurs, a quality of pain to off-set the young male & often het boasting. With heroin in the mix one can say that in Matson's poems, love is subsumed within the longueurs of mutual dependence : "I'm addicted to heroin and want a habit / so bad it'll break the deathgrip / of love's terminal habit..." (Talk About Love.) Forget about 'sedative' in the light of that...
Attempting longer poems, the young Matson continues howling long after the authentic poem's done --lyric dissipates into un-poem/note-to-self. That's my serious formal gripe. However, shorter poems and those others' better halves contain the riffs & insights this genre's meant to deliver.
The first poem in the book, Teardrop In My Eye, is addressed to Herbert Huncke who, as any Beat & Counter-Culture freak knows, needs no introduction. "Fuck you, Huncke" it begins, dead giveaway for love's infernal minstrelsy --same particulars as Wieners' life & line had marked earlier ("Knowing no other god than this: / the man who places on your mouth / a kiss. Keep no mystery / but his who whispers memory...", For Huncke). Matson reaches through Huncke to all the company of that anti-bourgeois syncopation... "Fuck you, Huncke. / Leave me / hung up for junk, waiting // alone in a dark room candles / you lit burn down in. / They unwind curls of smoke / like incense I remember we offered / weeks ago. / It is Nostalgia. // I treat you mean / and I get what's coming / down on lonely Street. / I walk amid cold winds, / leaves / rustle / while I blow. / No one to hold my hand."
I think that's the kind of 'talent' Corso had in mind praising Kerouac while keeping the 'divine' for Shelley!

6.

John Wieners introduction to Matson's poems seems to want to distinguish between transcendence & realism, & worries for both poet & poem to this conclusion : "Form is not of the question here. // Jazz, and its mainline to the heart. // Is it worth it, when the furry head is lost beside on the pillow? // When deaths congregate and nothing else. // Death is part of nature sure and something else in the spring. / Spirit. And yellow flowers on the mountainside. Opium? yes."
My Love Returned begins beautifully (& another echo of Wieners) : "The Moon rises / ass heavy: on the wane. / Wish it was full." Then the poem begins to swing : "I dream & / a huge bat wing arcs over skeleton buildings / and dips to touch ruby pinprick traffic lights / on the street's horizon in mute salute, // when I take in another block / the black wing blacks out the lights / and I know it is the Vampire, / my love returned / in the city calling me to bed / with faint irresistible siren / over the cool line of telepathic desire / or echoing 'could be' to my need..."
The poem's conjuring of vampire imagery is perfect patch for junky lyricist's emotional & conceptual chaos. "How the seasons change / and my veins hold new blood for her to suck now, / new blood I can bleed // over the white untried bed / and my teeth are white and sharp to eat with. / Now I brim over with come to shoot in her. / I flap my jaw / and smile goofy at strangers / in the fullness of it." Yes, I wince at the scatological & Burroughsian excess, so bare as it is in a poem, yet it's clear that the lyric shapes it, in a sense saves the soul within the poem, saves the soul of the poet too.

(July 27/August 30, 2009)

[Regent Press, 2747 Regent Street, Berkeley, Cal. 94705]
www.regentpress.net


________________________________________________________________


KRIS HEMENSLEY & MICHAEL TENCER


WIENERS & CO


Kris Hemensley : It felt like synchronicity when you plonked the John Wieners poems down on the Collected Works counter the other day. My head has been jumping with Wieners this last little while on account of a review I'm writing of the re-publication of '60s poet Clive Matson's Mainline to the Heart, which includes Wieners' original introduction... that is to say, reading the introduction had me return to his books on my own shelf and to relish his cadence, whatever his themes, all over again... And you have me intrigued with your reference to Jeremy Prynne to whom you referred as giving a great reading of Wieners' poem, Cocaine, on You Tube. Tell me more! What is your connection to or interest in Wieners, Prynne, English poetry, poetry in Melbourne?

Michael Tencer : Right! I'd better clear up the howler first, before your readers go searching for Prynne videos...

J.H. Prynne read John Wieners' poem 'Cocaine' in a short (1 minute 40 second) sound recording in 2004. The poem itself was originally in the book Ace of Pentacles, published by James F. Carr & Robert A. Wilson in 1964, & currently is collected in Wieners' Selected Poems 1958-1984, published by Black Sparrow Press. Prynne's recording appears on the CD-R 'Low Bleb Score', the third of four poetry-related CD-R's produced by Quid magazine, compiled, edited & distributed by Keston Sutherland & Andrea Brady through their brilliant Barque Press (www.barquepress.com). Prynne's recording is also available for free on Andrea Brady's website www.archiveofthenow.org .

For those readers unfamiliar with Prynne, & hence wondering what all the fuss is about over a short sound recording, let me briefly sum up the situation by saying that Prynne has been the most influential, intelligently experimental & reclusive British poet, bar none, for the past 40-plus years. In that time, he has done ONE public interview for radio (which has all but vanished), & has allowed his picture to be printed on perhaps three or four occasions. The fact that he was throughout that time College Lecturer & Director of Studies in English at Cambridge's Gonville & Caius College, as well as the College Librarian at Cambridge's Cockerell Library (as well as at the previous library, & during the Cockerell construction), made his reclusiveness all the more notable. His early studies with American poets during his travels included friendships with Charles Olson & Ed Dorn (Prynne's contribution to Dorn's 1976 Bean News, as 'Erasmus W. Darwin', is a particularly wild read -- the full issue of Bean News has been reprinted & is included as a supplement to Vol 15 Number 3 of Sagetrieb (Winter 1996)); & his generosity with his time & criticism for students & other poets, most clearly exhibited in his critical essays & copious letters, is legendary. All of this is quite beside the point that the actual poetry, now widely available in-near-toto in the Bloodaxe Press Poems book, has set the new standard for English poets of high modernism.

My association with Prynne is slight, though treasured. I first learned of his work through the Zappologist critic & poet Ben Watson (aka Out to Lunch), who attended Prynne's lectures at Cambridge & maintained contact with him, mentor-to-student-like, ever since. Through Ben I also met Keston Sutherland, editor/publisher/poet of Barque Press & the editor of Prynne's forthcoming & much-anticipated Complete Critical Prose. With Prynne I have had e-mail & postal contact, securing permission to publish his letter/critique of our shared friend Stuart Calton's poetry in the perennially-forthcoming Gruntwork magazine (Gruntwork or Dogfood, as the first issue shall catchily be called, is to be edited & published by Ben Watson & me). Quite generously, Prynne has sent along several books gratis, including his extraordinary full-length studies of a single Shakespeare sonnet (They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94), & Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper' (Field Notes: 'The Solitary Reaper' and others); & an extended telephone conversation with Prynne, touching on poetically peripheral points -- linguistics, other languages, word-processing & libraries -- proved inordinately delightful.

Aside from Prynne's aforementioned John Wieners reading, it's worth noting that Prynne seems to have become more comfortable with public appearances in recent years. He has, in his capacities as Visiting Foreign Expert & Guest Professor in the People's Republic of China, even gone so far as to read his own poetry on camera (available on the DVD River Pearls, from Barque Press); & his recent lectures & readings in England & the States have, I understand from word of mouth, been warmly received.

Unfortunately, word of mouth is all I can tell you as an American living in Melbourne, having been perplexingly refused entry to England on two separate occasions! Should it prove feasible in the next several years, my fiancée & I hope to travel there & gain some firsthand experience of the British poetic universe beyond the e-mails & postal dispatches, but until then I remain regrettably peripheral & decidedly blog-gossipy round that particular hub.

For those who wish to know, there's an excellent, albeit incomplete, bibliography of Prynne online at
www.ndorward.com/poetry/articles_etc/prynne_checklist.htm , compiled by Nate Dorward. It misses out on the reprint of The Oval Window, designed by Ian Friend & published in Brisbane, Australia, as well as some more obscure older texts & some not-so-obscure recent texts, but it remains the touchstone of Prynniana at the present.

Regarding my own poetry & associations, very little of what I do could be recognisably linked to Prynne's work, or to any of the American poets, John Wieners included. My work comes from primarily musical influences -- Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Edgard Varèse, Anton Webern, Conlon Nancarrow, Howlin' Wolf -- all of whom had far more impact on my concept of poetry than any on-the-page poets. The international poetic worlds that matter to me tend to be, at least on the surface, impossibly varied: Prynne & the Cambridge school, jwcurry's Canadian concrete poetry & environs (for a good time write to: ROOM 302 BOOKS, #302 – 880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa, Canada K1R 6R7), the still-active Surrealist Group led by the Rosemonts in Chicago (www.surrealistmovement-usa.org -- though any reader of this blog should already have this site bookmarked!). I am directly part of the movement initiated by Ben Watson, known as the Esemplasm, from a coinage by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see www.militantesthetix.co.uk for more info), &, on learning of the death of the great Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont, I co-initiated the New Zealand Surrealist Group in Wellington, for the continuing production & dissemination of freedom through desire.

My pursuit of knowledge with regard to poetic traditions has been a posteriori rather than imposed; having avoided creative writing & poetry classes like the plague, my poetic ideas & my tactile sense of what constitutes good poetry were formed outside the influence of poets-on-the-page almost entirely, with the possible exceptions of cummings, Pound & Joyce. This has proven, as we discussed in the store, a great boon to me, as I've been able to learn & decide for myself poetic traditions of my choice without feeling beholden to any particular pre-made path. Thus, I greatly admire Prynne's work, though I'm clearly out of place among his epigones; I savour the works of William Burroughs but care little for Jack Kerouac & the verbal diarrhoea school of Beat production; I devour anything of Surrealism & dada, anything revolutionary & modernist, & remain open to anything truly alive, but, while reading & learning as much as I can about as much as I can, I remain critical, exert the primacy of my own taste & subjectivity, & stand firmly against the anything goes, everything-is-relative ideology of post-modernism & its -ism ilk.

I can't say much about Melbourne poetry, since all I've experienced here so far was the Doris Leadbetter Melbourne Poetry Cup on Saturday, & that was drop dead dreadful. Then again, it's a rare performance poetry event that's any different, whether in New York, London, Brisbane or Wellington, so for now I won't judge the bubbly by the dregs. The only Australian poet I've read with pleasure so far is Nathan Shepherdson: I like his rubble-in-the-silence lyricism, it has some of the twisted alchemy & weighted space of Paul Celan or Malcolm de Chazal.

With that, I think I'll wrap up the rant -- what kind of desperate reader would possibly devote this much time & interest to an unknown seppo? I do recommend, though, for anyone who can appreciate the seemingly effortless work of John Wieners, his unerring ability to capture thought in motion & what his urban ballads have done to the poète maudit lyric, the British poet Sean Bonney is an excellent extension & distillation of this impulse into the 21st century. From his typographic 'translations' of Baudelaire to his orgone-popping poetry readings, Bonney takes all the sharpest edges & gooiest innards of Bob Cobbing, Tom Raworth & Barry MacSweeney & agglutinates them into a pulsing anti-capitalist subjectivity shorn of sentiment. Sean Bonney gets my vote for the best performing poet alive today (though perhaps if J.H. Prynne let out a few more recordings, he might indeed put up some competition...)
Thanks a million, Kris!
Keep up the good word work.

K H : OK, You Tube's been spared! When I mentioned it yesterday to
Alan Pose, who'd come in to the Shop as we were talking the other day, he suggested I'd got that wrong...! Of course, 'getting it wrong' is how I suspect my radical colleagues characterise me, and for many years now. Keeping the conversation going, though, is what I've set out to do, probably
since I edited my mag Earth Ship in Southampton, 1970-72, and all its Australian incarnations til 1985 when I stopped --my hands had fallen off! Remember, roneo stencils and manual typewriters?! I'm usually square peg in round hole of whatever conversation I find myself in. The English poets I was friends with in the UK at that time included Colin & Frances Symes, John Hall, John Riley & Tim Longville, Allen Fisher, Paul Buck, John Robinson, Jacqui Benson, Lee Harwood, Frank Prince, Andrew Crozier, John Freeman, Jeremy Hilton, Martin Wright, David Chaloner,Gael Turnbull,George Dowden, Nathanial Tarn, David Tipton et al...and by correspondence Peter Riley, Douglas Oliver, Peter Finch,Veronica Forrest-Thomson & many, many more. All over the shot! Deliberately. Driven by curiosity I suppose and incredibly contradictory literary fancies. And so it has been all the way. Nowadays I'm picking up all the loose ends --in fact they're all loose ends! And I must be the "happy man" I once wrote to ask Peter Riley about ... I'm not sure Peter quite understood the nature of my enquiry ('happiness' to mean ease with the human life that has death all about it and inevitably at the end of it whenever that happens! Is there a way to be, a way out of mortal fear etc? --could have been that kind of 20 year old's question)! Peter said I should ask John Zorn**, "he seems to be a happy man!" Hmm. I dont know Sean Bonney. I must investigate; though "anti-capitalist subjectivity shorn of sentiment" has me staggering in search of a stiff drink! Mention of Barry MacSweeney recalls the sadness of his recent death --I've always enjoyed some of his poetry (tho' it's also true that I didnt understand what either he or Elaine Randell were writing in 1972 when I wrote to them --I rejected their submissions, and ditto, in another direction, Penelope Shuttle --of course I know better now!) --I maintain an as yet unfulfilled pledge to read him in toto, for myself. As for 'sentiment' --the word's probably closer to me than it is to you and your circle! As Kerouac is --you'll detect from the Dharma Bum(s) correspondence with my brother Bernard on the blog... On which note, I'll close and with much pleasure and many thanks for your sparkling, brilliant response!
Kris

[August 18/19, 2009]

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


[**CORRECTION! Just now discovered! In midst of conversation with Warren Burt & Alan Pose at ye olde shoppe this afternoon, Warren mentioned Jon Rose, and suddenly I realized my mistake. The "happy man" suggested to me by Peter Riley was not John Zorn (hardly out of high school, Alan had remarked at the time of my reminiscence) but Jon Rose. Most appropriate that it was another composer who invoked Jon Rose. Apologies in case I've misled any reader. --Kris Hemensley. September 8th, '09] ________________________________________________________________



KARL GALLAGHER

TWO POEMS


Dharma for Joan Sedorkin



Five years ago she came to the art class I ran

with five different groups over four years

Joan came to the first and stayed till the last

it was two years before she told me she’d read

‘On The Road’ in 1958 and with a girlfriend hitched

north from Sydney stopped at Cairns

met and married a Russian fisherman

made a home raised a family buried a husband.



Then aged seventy-eight she left Cairns

with two suitcases to get away

from demands of family ‘to find her self’

moved into a rooming-house in Brisbane

started to paint and write haiku.



We had both lived a life knee-capped

by low self-esteem non existent self confidence

but over the years I’d learned how

to change that handicap learned how to dismantle

its power

bit by bit I showed her how to do it.



Later I found out she was blind

in one eye sight failing in the other

no wonder she couldn’t draw details

then an Indian doctor and laser surgery

restored the sight in her good eye

enter a king-tide of colour like a sudden burst

of wild parrots among a crush of blossoms.



I watched her discover a sense of her Self

And become a terrific painter

she drew with an intoxicating fragile line

self-confident

admiring of her own work

no longer putting it down.



Her death a few months ago affected me

more than I would have thought.



Dharma Bums was her favourite Kerouac book

for her I later wrote of the silent encounter

I’d had with Gary Snyder

her favourite poet

in a bar in Melbourne

in the later years of my alcoholism.



oOo


Going Home to Ballachulish



Someone passed him a joint

'No thanks, not something I do much these days.

I can't handle it anymore, it takes me apart

and any sense of what's left of my identity.'

said to Stanley who may or may not have been

the one passing the joint.

'It gets me like a death-adder fanging into me

feel like I'm walking around sort of queer

legs rubbery dragging a serpent attached to my ankle

and I have to keep on functioning in company

as if nothing is out of the ordinary.'

'Oh is that so' he heard Stanley say

looking at him with those bug eyes

his lips moving speaking who knew what

as nothing filled the air.



Then he felt himself going under

looking over at Guido their eyes connected

as Guido's face began to fade

felt himself going down - as if tied to weights

a thickness closed over him

cutting off what moments ago he could see

in the dusk and soft night and last light of the day

taking him back to his childhood in Scotland

its long summer twilight bird calls

smell of coal smoke the scent of pine

he knew then that he was dying.



[2000]


________________________________________________________________

JENNI MITCHELL

Geoffrey Eggleston,

Memorial, Sunday 21 December 2008



This is a personal tribute of my friendship with Geoffrey.

Geoffrey Eggleston was an enigma who not only touched many people’s lives but influenced them deeply. On reflecting upon Geoffrey I realised he had been in my life for over thirty years in varying degrees. I first him when Siri Omberg was renting my old cottage in Fordhams road, a stone's throw down the hill from Montsalvat. At the time I was working with computers in the city and spending weekends in Eltham prior to travelling overseas. Geoffrey would turn up any time of the day or night. When I returned from my year overseas I stayed in Eltham and renovated my father’s shed on the same property and Siri stayed in the house. Later, when Siri left and I moved back into my cottage, Geoffrey continued to visit stating ‘he came with the house’. And so he did for the next thirty odd years – even when we pulled down the old cottage and built a mud brick house on the site. He was extraordinary - not in the ‘extra ordinary’ sense but in being connected to a multi dimensional world. I would sense his imminent arrival by an image of a serpent in my mind – and sooner or later he would appear; via my mother’s garden facing the main road which he would say was a short cut to Montsalvat from the station or a lift he had hitched from the city. I failed to understand how our hill was shorter.

Geoffrey was the greatest of net workers; a walking hub and repository for artists, musicians, poets, performers and 'want ta bees’ He connected people and brought artists and writers to the dinner table. He created circles of like minded people and loved nothing more than to be amidst a group of his creative friends eating, drinking and smoking his small pipe. His talents and interests were many and included his work as a poet, musician, painter, printmaker and philosopher. I spent many days with Geoffrey painting around Christmas Hills and for a short time we shared a studio near Greensborough at Green Hills.

As I was saying earlier – Geoffrey not only touched lives but influenced them too. I don’t know how my life would be shaped if it were not for knowing Geoffrey. It was Geoffrey who first introduced me to poetry all those years ago when he began running the Montsalvat poetry festival. My cottage down the hill was perfect for Geoffrey to billet poets out from interstate. I didn’t have to have much say at the time – he would ‘send’ me poets to house for the weekend (or week) and bring a box of food to turn into soup. We would have a stream of poets walking down the hill from Montsalvat, through the cemetery fence and up the gravel road to my cottage. Poets would sleep on the floors around the cottage and even in the bathroom! Every festival was Geoffrey’s party.

That was in the early 1980s. The portrait under glass of Geoffrey was the beginning of my series of poets’ portraits. Today there are 118 paintings of more than 100 poets and the collection continues to grow. Along with my landscape and ice paintings and photographs the poets' portraits have become one of my life projects. The second portrait of Geoffrey was painted after he had commented that Nigel Roberts' and Terry Gillmore’s portraits being on canvas and larger than his... and my final portrait of Geoffrey was painted recently during his illness.

In 1982 Alec Hope was invited to the Montsalvat Poetry Festival as Feature Poet – and I was asked to put him up for a few days. Alec by now was an old man and had had enough of festivals and didn’t feel up to ‘hanging’ around Montsalvat for what was then a three day event. Not knowing what to do with him I asked him to sit for a portrait in my studio and began what became three portraits and an important life friendship. Alec subsequently introduced me to the poets in Canberra including Judith Wright, Mark O’Connor, Rosemary Dobson and Alan Gould; all of whom sat for a portrait. Through this project I came to know and make friendships with many famous and less known poets and each year Montsalvat was the perfect event to invite an interstate poet to spend a day or two in my studio sitting for a portrait. Among those who came to sit in my studio were Gwen Harwood and Tim Thorne from Tasmania, Rebecca Edwards from Queensland and Fay Zwicky from Western Australia and Les Murray, Chris Mansell and Cornelis Vleeskens from New South Wales. As the series grew began to travel interstate to paint the poets who did not make it to Montsalvat. I am grateful to Geoffrey for the introduction to poetry and some of the best minds our country has produced.

That was the thing about Geoffrey – his web spread across Australia with threads linking every state and he was proud of the fact he could travel between Melbourne and Sydney, Brisbane or Adelaide and get a bed for the night at someone’s place. He even managed to bring Gary Snyder from the United States to a Montsalvat Poetry festival one year and we had Gary and entourage planting trees in Wingrove Park.

Geoffrey spent many Christmas dinners with us – he admired my mother Grace’s organic garden and wonderful cooking. Sometimes we would have an array of poets still here as an overflow from the festival. Geoffrey was at home wherever he went.

Geoffrey was a passionate, compulsive, obsessive person who felt deeply and was terrier like in his pursuit of projects. He did so much with so little. If not for his at times infuriating demanding and aggressive manner any events and festivals may not have happened. He did not take no lightly for an answer. In fact the word NO was a red rag to this bull who would then pursue whatever it was with words and letters and banter until he got his own way. We can only wonder what he could have achieved if he had had the grants and assistance he so wanted and was denied so often.


Geoffrey was particularly proud of his two children Ninianne and Nathanial; they were quite young when he first brought them to visit. I haven’t seen much of them these past years but would hear about the wonderful things they were doing and the creative careers they are perusing. Three weeks ago when Nathanial came to let us know that Geoffrey had died he stayed for dinner and I could not help but notice how much he has become his father's son – his passionate talk of organising festivals of musicians and the use of the internet to achieve his networking. Geoffrey lives on through Nathaniel.

Bringing people together was his passion and I thank him for being Geoffrey and an influence in part of my world.



[Eltham]


__________________________________________________________________
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES

MICHAEL TENCER, currently residing & studying in Melbourne. Other bio in his comments on Prynne & et cetera above.
KARL GALLAGHER, has poems & correspondence in previous issues of The Merri Creek : Poems & Pieces. See #11; & Addendum to The Divine Issue.
JENNI MITCHELL, artist up Eltham way. Edited with Cornelis Vleeskens the poetry mag, Fling, in the '80s. Other bio contained in her eulogy for Geoff Eggleston, above and on www.jennimitchell.com.au

__________________________________________________________________


[-- Phew! All done this Sunday, 30th August, 2009, at the desk in the little Westgarth weatherboard, which Jeff Nuttall called a 'cottage' back in the early 80s when he visited though I didnt know then that it was!--
Kris Hemensley]

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #10, March/April 2009

THE DIVINE ISSUE
[EASTER, 2009]

KRIS HEMENSLEY

Sitting at small table in what I call hole-in-the-wall coffee place in Elizabeth Street, above the staircase of City Basement Books, and like the manager, whom I've named The Guy, once-upon-a-time Pasolini ragazzi or Caravaggio naughty-boy, I'm relaxed into survey of the street, totally acquiescent to the way the world passes by, as though just meant to be, a frame of the world's movie or a novel called The Day (not Joyce's but equally inventorial) or even This Minute (Warholean then?) --for example, that group of back-packer girls, raucous with the telling of previous night's adventures, leggy, goldened by holidaying sun, setting out from the hostel across the street whose upstairs balcony- bar's being hosed or vacuumed by its manager, a similar do-everything guy like my guy, and The Guy adjusts his posture as though to wave to the other guy, implying their perennial conversation about the takings, the punters, the street, the girls...

But I've brought monstrous news to my table, front page of Thursday, 15th of January's Age, headline "Schizophrenic set alight in Rosebud arson horror" and a series of photos in which the innocent man, variegated by tubes & bandages, propped up in hospital bed, is juxtaposed with five teens & twenties, gormless cherubim, dolts & drongoes, perpetrators of what one defence counsel described as "a cruel & nasty prank that's gone horribly wrong" (--which brings to mind Graham Greene's story, The Destructors, studied at secondary school in the UK, in an anthology which included Katherine Mansfield, D H Lawrence & Saki amongst others, in which Greene's even younger pranksters were in no doubt at all about the goal of their game, recounted as the same type of evil as this latterday but real life campaign) --and what makes it even worse in the reading is the name of the victim, Richard Plotkin. In the paper Steve Butcher reports, "A bright boy, young Richard had won poetry prizes, excelled at writing and played musical instruments at Wesley College. It was, says his sister, a 'middle-class, educated background'. Their father,Irving Samuel Plotkin, was a solicitor, Melbourne city councillor and ALP member until his death in 1976, Labor leader Arthur Calwell had been a family friend..." --indeed, it's the very same Richard Plotkin who was Michael Dugan's friend and whom, I'm pretty sure, I met --I'd need my diaries or, better, an assistant to read through them for mentions of Michael & accounts of his conversation which surely contained references to Plotkin, What's in my head is the Plotkin known to Michael since their Wesley schooldays, part of his myth, --poet & dreamer to whose place in the country Michael'd repair, for wild times or respite? --certainly author of a line, quoted by Michael at the head of his own Finished Poem (published in his collection Clouds, Outback Press, 1975) , "An unfinished poem is like a dead child." And Plotkin is probably to be counted amongst the devotees of Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Brennan & Blake in his poem, worshippers of "the supposed madness of genius / until identification becomes reality, / till success / and the love of your friends / becomes hollow mockery, and you turn / to spit in their faces, then cry alone." The figure in the first stanza ("The woods spit forth their child, / scribbler across city walls") seems to me that of Charles Buckmaster, "Poet of gentle images / whose nightmares slash at the hearts / of friends, and turn his own brain / to perpetual fear of its own visions." --but such aspects might well have enrolled Richard & Michael too...

I finish hot chocolate & fruit toast, brush off crumbs far easier than the atrocious story, trot downstairs into the bookshop on a mission, inspired by Carol Jenkins's email, to find Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, so to discuss an idea about poetry or a question asked of poetry by prose (what did I think, she asked, of McEwan's proposition in the book, "Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling."?) --but it seems there's a McEwan famine in Melbourne! Almost immediately, though, I've scored two compensatory gems, out of the blue as they always are --Helen Adam's San Francisco Burning : A Ballad Opera [Book by Helen & Pat Adam, lyrics by Helen, additional lyrics by Pat, music by Al Carmines, &, my o my, drawings by Jess] (Hanging Loose, pb, 1985), and an inscribed copy of Louis Johnson's Bread and a Pension : Selected Poems (Pegasus Press, New Zealand, 1964).

The Helen Adam (--Robert Duncan's poem to her, an angelic letter as he described them, recently in my mind : "An imaginary woman reads by her lamplight, inclining her head slightly, listening to the words as I write them : we are there, as the poem comes into existence -- she and I -- losing ourselves in the otherness of what is written. I too then am imaginary..." [ Letters :Poems 1953-56, republished by Flood Editions, 2003]) --mysterious outside of concentric circles of San Francisco (though more of her history than I'd ever read before appeared in Sydney magazine Boxkite a few years ago --to be expected? --Scottish editor James Taylor, teenage prodigy here in the 60s, publishes his Scotch lady, as she would describe herself, in Australia, as the ripples of the Magic Workshop found their furthest shore) feels to me like a blessing after the reading of Richard Plotkin's diabolical saga & the sad associations it throws up regarding Mike Dugan...

The Louis Johnson instantly recalls Nigel Roberts's recommendation at the Free Poetry magazine reading, as I recall it, at La Mama cafe-theatre, mid '69, when I introduced to our crowd Nigel, Terry Gilmore, possibly Johnny Goodall & Martyn Sanderson too? & Allison Hill with Terry by then? "You ask me what's happening in Sydney and here we are at La Mama?!" Nigel exclaimed. He talked as a New Zealander as much as a Sydney poet, praising Louis Johnson, who seemed from his description to have been a Kiwi connection with the wider poetry world, mentioning Bruce Beaver & his own contemporaries, and the Americans Wantling and Blazek too...

And so it's Nigel in my head now, rarely seen in Melbourne for years but here for two funerals recently --well, one, because Shelton Lea's event wasnt a funeral but the book-launching, a week before he died : a life-thumping fist in the eye of death if anything, with Dorothy Porter, only the other day dreadfully snatched from the poets herself, leading the defiance that night with her rousing speech in favour of Shelton's selected poems, Nebuchadnezzar (Black Pepper Press, 2007), which would have given him wings. Dorothy's words & Shelton's so-stately final fling inspired the loudest & most sustained cheering I've ever experienced at a literary do. Nigel was snapping away --first I saw of him that incredible night was on top of a table, wedged above the throng to my left, just through the doorway of the inner bar at the Rochester, looking down & along the tops of bobbing heads. Later, after Shelton & his helpers had left the stage, I noticed the line a group of us made along the wall, the serendipity of myself, Nigel, John Jenkins, Robert Kenny, Michael Dugan --& Geoff Eggleston too? --perhaps Geoffrey was in the public bar, with Michael Hudson, or au solitaire... I exclaimed that this would make a rather special photograph, especially if Ken Taylor were to join us (he was stuck in even thicker scrum a wide arc to the right)... Did Nigel snap us for the posterity that's even now closing in? He had his digital at Montsalvat for Geoff Eggleston's memorial service in December '08, & was showing around an album of historical photos --era of the younger Bob Adamson, John Tranter, John Forbes, Rudi Krausmann, Vicki Viidikas, Bill Beard, Richard Tipping, Rae Jones, Ken Bolton et al... Like that first conversation, 40 years ago, he brought as much New Zealand as Sydney news, for example the plaintive story of poet David Mitchell's current plight ... A drink, a smoke, then off to the airport for his flight.

2

A year or so ago I wrote --wrote? but certainly spoke with John Jenkins about Geoffrey Eggleston in the context of gathering up as much history as one could from our own friends & colleagues, specifically the La Mama era poets, before they forgot everything or didnt care or died. Geoffrey was fighting for his life, either before or after entering hospital for cancer --the ideological decision he had to make between natural healing & general medicine's drugs, radiation & surgery. I mentioned to John the valuable job it would be to get a tape-recorder and to reminisce between ourselves, perhaps include Geoffrey, Lorin, Ken Taylor, Garrie Hutchinson & doubtless others. JJ responded positively --we'd remind one another. And soon. But it hasnt happened yet, and Geoffrey, for one, is another sadly gone. Historians in the midst of ever demanding life --perhaps that's a nuance of Olson's comment concerning the difficulty of being both poet & historian...

The occasion of the particular conversation with JJ was the launching of Lorin Ford's haiku chapbook at Collected Works bookshop (July,'08)--an event Geoff had said he'd of course attend, agreeing she could count on the support of the friends from the La Mama days. He didnt. Should have realized then things werent well. He'd popped into the Shop not so long before, almost on closing-time and stayed an hour. Unlike previous visits, when he was dining out on the truly amazing circumstance surrounding his ultimately successful operation, happy with recovery, thanking his lucky stars & the world around him (--it was a visiting specialist who just happened to be the husband of one of Geoff's Eltham friends, who recognized our patient's name on his round & immediately adopted him) --on this occasion it was his shadow, rueful, dismissive, insisting the show was over, all gone & pointless. I said I was sorry to receive him so dejected, but the fact remained, good prognosis or bad, that as long as one was alive, the poet-artist or anyone with spirit had life to live --no point in brooding --only time now, more than ever before, to do what you like & have to do : write, draw, read, meet friends, have a smoke & drink a whiskey... Surely? And so we talked, and Geoffrey got into the pleasure of the conversation during which of course he mentioned Montsalvat in its highs & lows --his love & simultaneous anger with its principals, the derrogation of the original dream-- and about other possible festivals & meets he was going to organise or have others organise in his stead. He spoke about the possibilities of the internet --the networking he had promoted as the core of the culture, the web-site he wanted to develop for news & historical archive...

And suddenly in my mind a memory of a letter from Geoffrey to me in England, around 1970, --"we're learning to use the microphone", as of Melbourne Arts Co-Op programmes, the poets tripping over the rock'n'rollers' leads, as it were --or maybe that wasnt Geoff but wunderkind Paul Adler? The only La Mama poets' precedent I can think of is Andrew Jach, who directed the readings for the few weeks the Hemensleys were grape-picking in Mildura, February/March '69 --remember returning to the Tuesday night fixture to find Andy perched on a ceiling-high platform the current play's actors had built, with his girl-friend Deirdre Kesteven, performing poems with a microphone, amplified & distorted, not at all the La Mama style! --Andy's performance probably only appreciated by Michael Dugan of the inner circle, perhaps due to shared Pop enthusiasms --Dugan led his own King Hippo Poetry Band at the Melbourne Arts Co-Op & the legendary T F Much Ballroom & other venues, all gone I fear but for brief footage on Corinne & Arthur Cantrill's film, The Skin of the Eye... The point of this aside merely to note Geoff's intention always to be right where It was and often succeeding!

Geoffrey left the Shop, his swag over his shoulder, containing heaven knows what mass of papers --poems, handbills, correspondences with the powers-that-be at local, state, federal & who knows international level, concerning housing rezonings, forests, arts funding, all or any of his issues. I needed that, he said --I know what I've got to do, I'm back on track now... That was the last time I saw him, hauling his load down the stairs of the Nicholas Building as I shut the landing's doors for the night...


3

In a recent letter to Bernard Hemensley, in the context of discussing the English side of the Beats, I asked/joked what kind of Bums could there be without the Dharma (especially if the devotional be part of that term)? When one reviews the 1960s New in Melbourne or from a Melbourne point of view, it's obvious that Eastern inspired (say Chinese & Japanese) poetry, & the devotional attitude, looms large. For example, the second issue of Crosscurrents magazine could be said to have featured the inside-cover drawing of Meher Baba by Karl Gallagher as well as introduced poems by Paul Smith & Geoffrey Eggleston, all three of whom were Baba followers. At the time what would an English blow-in like me know or make of this? Michael it was who first told me about Baba & the Australian group. I think I understood Baba as a kind of guru-saint situated between the faiths --Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism. Baba, I gleaned, was the teacher who hadnt spoken at all for years, and whose best-known Australian followers were the older generation poet Francis Brabazon, the somewhat younger Adrian Rawlins & younger still Paul Smith... Like my brother Bernard, I'd inherited our father's interest in Paul Brunton, Theos Bernard, & the Master Theiron, from whence we'd found our own way to Suzuki, Alan Watts, the Beats. By those late Sixties, however, what had been the 'mysticism' of Dad's appreciation was now a generation's lingua-franca, for example the Maharishi's TM halo around the music-&-drugs nurtured youth culture. But years would pass before 'god-realization' reentered the prospectus, in my case via studies in transpersonal psychology, theology, Buddhism et al, my mid-1980s "enlightenment reading"! --and more or less where I am today...

Could be said that right in the middle of one's consideration of the question in respect of '60s, '70s Melbourne is Paul Smith. But such is the ignorance --the cultural forgetfulness that characterizes the kind of society we have become, and due to what : mere mass of population & media, simple diversity & density, burying if not destroying a specific identity as the acme of history & place? --the wherewithal of which defines all one's ever been about as remembering what is so quickly forgotten -- one could be tempted into full scale Lives of the Poets (which is partly where I think the Kerouacian project is situated, the secret history, but through no omission of its players, --secret because personal & forgotten, which requires its poet & chronicler now to tell it and not at all to the exclusion of non-poets but to include in & as that epic telling everyone & everything , --and in Paul's case where better beginning than "bookseller poet" --which was, surprisingly, not his biographical note in Crosscurrents number one (April, '68) --"22 years old, lives at Eltham (Vic.) with his wife, dog and cat.", but typical of his modesty. Some great bio, though, in the clarion opening para of Geoff Eggleston's rave in the first issue of the Whole Earth Sun Moon Review (ca1973), entitled (echoing Mailer), Advertisement for Ourselves or further Notes to Understand the New Humanity; or we were rough and ready guys but oh how we could humanize. Thus, "As youths Paul Smith went to a Catholic school and I attended a nearby Protestant one. A friend across the road from Paul became my friend, during my last year at Secondary school. So Paul and I became friends. But 'Micks and Prodos' were discouraged from fraternising so we became rebels. We argued a lot but it is the same argument we have been having for over 10 years, so we refine it, a continuing dialectic. We (at 17 years) read Rimbaud, Verlaine, Huxley, Orwell and all about the Beat Generation. We listened to Jazz...New Orleans, Modern, Bop and the Blues and Folk Music. And we concerned ourselves in chasing some strange quality found in the fastest spaces called Zen."

Returning to 1967/8, doing one's own thing, reading & writing, surviving, and always on the look-out for a scene! Imagine finding & reading in Dugan's little mag the contributor's notes for Eggleston & Terry Gillmore! I quote, "TERRY GILLMORE, born 1944, working towards open universe. Poetic influences - Pound, W.C.Williams, Olson, et al. Wandering poet/gardener. Rest should be in the poems." "GEOFFREY EGGLESTON, born Springvale, 1944, studied commercial art before doing the 'On The Road' Sydney/Adelaide/Melbourne circuit. Worked at the printing industry and in 25 hang up jobs. Now works in ceramic industry, studies pottery and studies at the National Gallery Art School. Writes for something else to do, hopes to make poems with a movie camera. Hopes to make his Old Man Poem a total environmental soil sculpture called a garden."

How brilliant were these? I for one was home at last and it was paradise after all! A secret sign in them thar dark ages --viz., Al Alvarez to the Melbourne University extension lecture audience one night, 1967, "W C Williams is a blind spot of mine!" : our esteemed English visitor, champion of the trans-atlantic confessionals & the Iron Curtain poets, lecturing on Robert Lowell, discounting his valorised subject's own appreciations. Worse than Alvarez's peremptory dispatch of Williams & the allied poetics was the (self)congratulatory chuckle from the lecture theatre's front row! Bill muttered that this disdain was just what one would expect of the English Department! Ah well, so much water under the bridge though this retrospect momentarily renews my interest : the know-what-you-mean'ers sharing Alvarez's not-getting Lowell's regard for the Doc presumably including poets & academics one's since met halfway in this city. Who knows... Many moods in the department since, and what was the department almost gone... Bill Beard, AWOL from the RAAF, an actor at the New Theatre in Melbourne with Retta Garvey, introduced by me to the genuinely new theatre possibilities of Betti Burstall's just-beginning La Mama cafe-theatre was, as far as the University knew, a cleaner then, who occasionally sat in, illicitly, on classes. He'd interjected comments about Olson & the Black Mountain poets & John Cage, et al, on one occasion, much to the puzzlement of the lecturer, so extra-curricular were these references --where are you getting this stuff? he enquired. At La Mama, Bill apparently replied --as though it were the only real university in town!

A simple example of the younger poets' sensibility which the older generation's authorities seemed not to get, is a little thing by Terry Gillmore. The Sydney poet Gillmore's poems, recruited by Geoff Eggleston for the early issues of Crosscurrents, whilst resembling William Carlos Williams, are something else again. Like WCW, the visual observations & spoken thoughts appear as objects, found or chiseled. They're also like some of the ancient Chinese, infused with or informed by day's & world's god-givenness. For example, one of his untitled poems from the 60s : "people do stare / for long periods / of / time / resisting / the orange white / rose"... [collected in Further, Poems 1966-1976, published New Poetry, '77] When one reads the Sixties back into Williams and then moves the whole thing forward again, the way any era encounters &/or creates its lineage, there's a sense of each word's loading, psychedelic perhaps, comporting the poem as tho' it's rune read as writ. I think this is an extension of the Williams' jewel! I'm wont to say that with the Sixties any such poem was also beneficiary of a glorious eclecticism in which the works of prophets & poets effected the same resonance. The Gita & Blake, Hafiz & Yeats and et cetera, now appeared to be the natural threshold of this fraction of the New. One of that poetry's, not to say sensibility's, numerous Melbourne successors is Dave Ellison; for glorious example, "Raindrops / In sunlight / Hang the bare tree / With jewels / Brighter / Than diamonds" [from the chapbook, Full Moon, King Tide, 1997]...

To return to Paul Smith & the 'bookseller-poet' ascription : there's a fascinating Melbourne bookshop history could be told, if only in terms of bookshop as workplace of poets & artists, another surrogate college... Before ever I arrived in Melbourne, the legendary bookseller Jack Bradstreet was at Hall's in Prahran, with James Crouch, Robert Rooney & others, including the young poet David Miller (in England for many decades), working there under his wing. Michael Dugan, in 1968 my guide to the local history, putting names to the faces I'd seen at Cheshires basement bookshop, amongst whom were Paul Smith & James Crouch (--whose sister Margaret I'd met during 1966, my first winter Down Under, at Lorin Ford's father's terrace boarding-house in South Yarra, a writer herself who leant me her typewriter for the days & hours she was at her job whilst I was once more happily unemployed in my room, compiling the story of my up & down days, and never knew of her brother til the La Mama times --in fact she brought him, or he brought her? to the Marcel Duchamp Memorial Event I'd organized at La Mama, October '67, the posters for which Paul & James displayed at Cheshires for me --saw them sitting there, the years since I'd seen her might as well have been an aeon in experience & consciousness!)... But this isnt even a footnote to that bookseller history, just a context for Paul... A more crucial encounter with him was at a La Mama poetry reading, sometime before or after the Duchamp event, perhaps before, when he objected, and properly tho' it wasnt clear to me then, to one of my poems, received by the 'committed' audience with approval I recall, in which I portrayed the Buddhist prayer-wheel as impersonal, escapist, pseudo-practice and the self-immolations of monks as hollow gestures in the face of such a crisis as the war in Vietnam. Paul strenuously contradicted me : the monks, he said, were in the forefront of resistance, the fiery immolations were the ultimate personal sacrifice. Indeed, indeed. But this was the thick of Sixties' radical political activism, which one's come to see is the literal at the complete expense of the symbolic, necessarily an obliteration of the subtlety you'd expect a poet to respect as well as of the spiritual plane upon which the other life plays out. One can only now plead teens & twenties, not yet learnt in the Sixties to bite tongue on words better thought through than expressed, to say nothing of acts...

I'm sure Paul Smith would say his major work was his translation/edition of the complete ghazals of Hafiz (central to the Baba ethos & mythos), and I wouldnt disagree; but a monument to that time's spiritually invested poetry & art and to his own place within it, is the massive compendium PIE (Whole Earth Catalogue Publications, '74). One can still find the odd copy in a second-hander on a shelf designed for outsized books. It's a gem --in terms of small-press & counter-culture book production and as a cross-section of the life of an era, for some contributors their first-stirrings, for others as articulate as they & their concerns would ever be. The 628 page anthology (configured alphabetically as a divan), with covers by Dale Hickey & John Adam, Oswald Hall's broad-brush swirling "Aum" visual introduction to the book, and drawings by artists including Mirka Mora, Karl Gallagher, Andre Sollier (sumi-e), also features an issue of Mal Morgan's Parachute Poems, the editorial of which perfectly dovetails with PIE's forward. Paul Smith's paraphrase of the philosophia perennis would have it that, "Art, when inspired with love leads to higher realms. When the artist is involved in the act of painting, poetry, dance etc... his ego diminishes, Love appears... and when love appears... God is approached. Art is divine. Through it... the artist meets God within himself, mankind sees God within itself." Mal Morgan's poet "is the waking Prophet in this cities concrete that I address -- the Burning Phoenix, Christ, Clown, Anarchist, Egocentric, Buffoon -- all of these and more(.....)Through him is the Returning. He gives back to you that which is yours. He bears that which you were forced to relinquish, your sacrifice on his shoulders -- his shoulders pinned, hinged to the door of a gaping dream..."

A mystical rather than political appreciation of the Tradition contextualizes PIE, and thirty-five years on holds more life for me, even as fascination, than the progressive precepts & politics of the time now do... Rosemary Adam's interpretation of Fabre D'Olivet's Cosmogony of Moses; Meher Baba's & Dr Munsiff's versions & commentaries on Hafiz; Paul Smith's article on Baba, Hafiz & others; Oswald Hall's poems including The Brood of Exile (written in 1951) & his essay The Source of Styles (A Primer on the Soul of Western Culture) which wouldnt have been out of place in Temenos, Kathleen Raine & friends' magazine in the UK, a decade or so later; Francis Brabazon's A Dream of Wet Pavements; Leo Kelly (--one of Geoff Eggleston's heroes from the realm of the great unsung, ultimately what all of this is about : his claims for Kelly corroborated years later when Carmel Kelly, whom we'd known via Anna Couani's Sea Cruise Books (Sydney), which published her prose-pieces The Waters of Vanuatu (1985), visited the Bookshop and related a daughter's version of Geoffrey's legendary man & poet), whose long poem In Memorium addresses Danillo Vassilief (--typical invocation of the perspective PIE illustrates --Melbourne's Russian as easily missed when all the lights are on Nolan & Boyd, which isnt to doubt their genius at all, as proletarians are when it's all la-dee-da, or mystics when realism rules the roost, or the real & true when textuality's the thing --from the fashionable point of view may as well have never existed); --all these comprise an older arc of the New Age prospectus against which a portion of the variety of the counter-culture, alive & well in the mid '70s, abuts.

From this memo's perspective, the sets of poems by Paul Smith, Geoff Eggleston & Mal Morgan are as priceless as the company they keep. Of names we'd recall today one might list Alan Afterman (who returned to the US, achieving acclaim for his studies in the kabbalah, alas dead now), Eric Beach, Charles Buckmaster (whose chapbook Deep Blue & Green, published by Crosscurrents, is reproduced, perhaps as memorial to Charles, three years gone by PIE's publication), Mike Dugan, Jas Duke, Billy Jones, Phil Motherwell, Ian Mudie, Peter Murphy, Pi O, Shelton Lea, Terry Harrington, John Jenkins, Barbara Giles, Poor Tom, Andrew Donald, David Pepperell. Less heard of on these days' poetry scene would be Alison Hill,Ross Bennett, Ron Eden, Gundel (apparently a niece of Herman Hesse I seem to remember?), Ian Hill, John Levy, Marc Radzyner, Tim Doyle, Karl Gallagher, Frances Yule... As David Pepperell recalls Paul Smith spruiking : send me something, all of Melbourne's in it! Even a single entry like John Tranter's Aum poem, whether it's parody or an instructive peculiarity (--whose last two enigmatic lines are "From darkness God is born the Word / And as the Word I greet it."), speaks the reams jumping around my head, which could & should be written sometime by someone, somewhere!

Reminded by Ross Keating in his book Francis Brabazon : Poet of the Silent Word -- A Modern Hafiz (World Axis Press,NSW, '02), that Brabazon was invited to read at the Montsalvat Poetry Festival by Eggleston & friends in 1979, which would have been the 10th anniversary of Meher Baba's death as it happens. Keating describes Brabazon's reaction : "In a letter to the organizers he wrote, in part, that he was very pleased to receive the invitation, that he would like to attend, but he would not be able to personally read his poetry. It seems, by this stage, that Brabazon had lost confidence in his ability to speak in public : '...I am an old man with forty years of work behind me; and although still intensely creative cuts a rather foolish figure when he takes to the platform. (The old man for reflection, the young men for battle.)' "

The old men & women were, of course, essential to Geoffrey's scheme. No matter the irreverent language at times, he honoured what he regarded as theTradition & its exemplars --his old men included Alec Hope & Frank Kellaway, his old women Barbara Giles, Joyce Lea, Connie Barber, Gwen Harwood... For Geoff, such people had both survived the years & carried its history and were poets besides. Into this company Ken Taylor eventually stepped (--tho' Geoff had dubbed Ken & I the elder brothers in his early-70s Whole Earth Catalogue piece recapitulating on beginnings & directions), and, it must be said, Geoff did too, as our entire generation ticked off the epochal numbers --into our sixties, the Sixties in its sixties, our seventies beckoning...


[January/April,2009]

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


KRIS HEMENSLEY & JOHN TRANTER


AN INSTANT INTERVIEW

March 28th, '09

Dear John,

In the course of a comprehensive rereading of the new poetry mags of the 1960s & '70s --a historically informed nostalgia should the latter occur to you as my sole motivation! --I've been impressed by the strong devotional current running through what was, definitively, that counter-culture era, and nowhere so strongly as in Paul Smith's gi-normous compendium, PIE (from 1974). As would be expected with any of Paul's projects, Meher Baba is a major presence there, in amongst that new age's psychedelic evangelism. And there you are too, represented by your poem Aum, the most formal poem in the 628 page anthology, and even if there's some literary mischief afoot, seems to me, in retrospect, to achieve a little magic. Paul, of course, you published in your own mag of the '60s, Transit... You once joked that your mag was the missing end of the Melbourne/Sydney axis : did you also share in any of the devotions?

Best wishes,
Kris


OoO

March 29th, '09

Hi, Kris.

I had forgotten that poem: could you send me a copy?

I was interested in Chinese poetry and Buddhist philosophy from the age of about seventeen to about twenty-six, and did quite a lot of reading in Zen, the Tao Te Ching, and some meditating during those years. I did write one or two poems along these lines in those early days, but dualism (in the illusory and beautiful and horrible world of Maya), where the energies of dualist conflict got the poem moving. ("Without contraries is no progression..." Blake.) A truly enlightened poem would be silent.

Here's a more recent meeting with Aum:
http://johntranter.com/prose/ny-diary-2003.shtml

Keep well,
John


OoO


March 29th, '09

Dear John,

Here is the poem from PIE (p561).


AUM


"...in the beginning
was the Word..."

Break your neck you see
The blood that's in it, otherwise unseen.
Crack the apple's heart the seed
Drops to earth to break it,
Grows down, thinks, and comes up green.
Thus does death forsake it.

Plant the pulsing deep
And light that's on it deep within the sea's
Echo in the eye. The sleeping
Bone shall then awaken,
Grow up, burst, become a tree.
Thus is death forsaken.

Sing your song you hear
The death that made it, otherwise unheard.
Cry the dying sun the air
Leaps the heart to meet it.
From darkness God is born the Word
and as the Word I greet it.



OoO


March 29th, '09

Thanks for that poem, Kris. Jesus Christ! What was I trying to do...impress James McAuley? Outdo Les Murray in devotional verse?

That's what reading Dylan Thomas does to you: turns you into a babbling, rhyming rhetorician. Oh, well, I wrote it, so I can't really disown it, though I don't have any idea what I meant by the word "God" in that poem. I mean, I had no idea then, and less today.

Best,
John



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

GEOFFREY EGGLESTON


THE SON IS FATHER TO THE MAN.
as I observed my son's heartbreak
as his sweetheart
sailed away.

And I remember
the amazing sadness
poignancy of
love flowering,
the garden of
innocence fades
and 17 years
of age loses
its charm.

THESE HALCYON DAYS... 1984
devotions to Isis or Kali


Be patient my son
There is much terror
In this place terra firma.

How firm is this earth
Once a ball of fire?
Its shadow is still with us:
All things in flux.

Let me say to you
Who believe your mother's words,
The sea is of our blood
And there is little treasure
Found beneath the waves,
The pearls of the teeth, the storm.

The mother I know is fierce
As a wolf and as beautiful
As the sunrise.

She nourishes me with her songs of pain and birth
And she is the mother we share as all women.

I have watched too many put all aside
And embrace ignorance like a coat of night.

I have known others
Who have climbed on their own pedestals
And postured as they teetered.

Transfixed on their own reflection
In the mundane mirror of everyday
They fake a melodramatic death,
Angry as she whose obituary reads:
"Perished by her own hand"

Or they slowly retire
To the sanatorium of dulled fantasies
The place where impossible dreams
Are cut from the heart and left to shrink
Like bloodclots in the infernal trashcans.

Discursive is not beating around the bush
But proceeding with a logic
Of rambling doom on the installment plan
as human ecology collapses
as we seek the integrals or archetype
In complexity and chaos.

Only fools perceive profundity as turgid
As they pack like little hens
In the garden of Eden
As what they miss sprouts
To regenerate new flowerings.

2

Confusing simple with simplicity
They value their dread of life beyond life
As their sad lights dim,
Bitter in their worship of what is younger than them
The welts of self flagellation
The only roses perceived
Continually crucified by self doubt
Without redemption.

Plundering the monuments of the past
Without oblations due
Is as grotesque as neglecting today for the future
Which is always today.

But remember as the scenery
Is being changed in the global theatre
the scenario or choreography is charted
As a map of the mind's continent
in this fiery dance.

To the Hindu
The Lord Shiva
Dances the world pulse
And times change.

The belle of the masque ball
Is encouraged not to swap her insouciance
For a tea towel and the frump pumps
So stimulation vicarious or actual
Is weighed against the thrill of guilt.


3

The leaden gravity dulls
And again though the judgement
Is like a bowl of blood
For Kali's exquisite thirst
All is possible when done with love,
The only absolution.

Legends are legend
For when a leitmotiv is discovered
Its key opens more than one door.

Fantasy in the playgrounds
And pleasure gardens of love
A folderol of memory
That decorates those raiments
Worn for the streets of desire
Like the crazes and mischief of children
That spread like an epidemic
Desire thrills and chills
as it kisses my earlobe like a butterfly.

Again the wanderer is betrayed
By the confused breath of desire
And the famine that takes life from the bones
Arises fierce and vicious.

Her will like the hounds of hell
Must be felt by the vital breath
Of the hero battling ghosts.

Her smile is death
And as fetid as any monster
Atavistic and regressive
Out of the primordial swamp of revenge
She is as eons of clashing swords.

Some heroes die on her altar
And some she will love insanely
And tell all of the knots
Of sinew and womanly music
For she is the only measure of heroes.


4

All those bloody poems
About fear and lost love
Easy notes plucked
From the pages of others' songs
Urban blues spoken patois
Dumb as a lamp-post
Prosaic as a journalist's perception.

Without lyrics on our lips
We devour the crumbs of a meagre repast
Not the last supper but leftovers
As if two eggs are tits on a plate.

The bare page is no nude descending a staircase
But some sacred cow who ate all the grass and went home.

So we imprint our grubby minds
Our machine is greased
Our palms are sweaty
as the keys fall away from our fingers
the exactitude of ideas and symbols
Merge into infrasound
And reverence flies over the moon.

Is it only the tears of virgins and whores
That purify the tiresome streets of everyday?

But don't weep for me.

I have learnt much
From Her
The Queen of the starry vault of heaven,
And stand inviolate
For my laurels are many
And all the old gods
Metamorphose into the one.

_____________________________
[Note:
Written by Geoff mid to late 80s? Given to me late 80s, 90s in envelope marked "for your perusal (keep it for archives)"... No better archive at present than here...KH]


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


DAVE ELLISON

To the Dreamer of our dreams


***


A SAILOR NEEDS THE SEA


Within the sands of time
My heart continued on
Across those rolling fields
For though I love the earth
A sailor needs the sea

I tramped through welcome towns
Oases in the heat
And never wished to stay

The journey wore me down
Till fevers cleared away
Before a sparkling beach

I danced among the waves
But know my destiny
Is with the deepest calm
For though I love the earth
A sailor needs the sea


***


High Summer
Commands
The heat-haze
To levitate
Our town


***


HINT OF YOUR PERFUME


Unseen hand
Here at home
Flowers pressed in books

Hint of your perfume

Wind-chimes ring
In this love
Keen to be and breathe

Hint of your perfume

Living room
Daydream blue
Closer to the heart



***


The wind
Boxes your ears
For heading
That way
And that way
Was chosen



***

THE COMING OF SILENCE


Earth is veiled in static
Planes circle the avalanche
Sounds of crowded islands
Tears flood the telegraph
Then silence
Come the hush of love

News of unseen planets
Hope drums out on ticker-tape
Young blood prowls the desert
Blues echo a lonely place
Then silence
Come the hush of love

Vows made over wireless
Souls wail through megaphones
Make the talking picture
Read the script where all time unfolds
Then silence
Come the hush of love


***


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


CATHERINE O'BRIEN


from WALKING POEMS


1. Pii Mai Lao : Plain of Jars, Phonsavan


the bombing of heaven

waves sweeping the sky
clouds
falling into jars
a silence
of air
and small
winds
this far up...
mist white
into evening
peering into
pools
of water,
deep inside
the
giant
Guardian
vessels.

abundance of offerings
across
the magnetic plains

I can walk
into the Plain of Jars
1960-1970
trench line
and
through
bowl-shaped
craters
on the
surface
of
Earth.....
where bombs
fell
silent

Shall i tell you the story of the jars?


2. Pii Mai Lao : Luang Prabung


...into the house of red cloth

the young man carries
a crystal bowl...
within
white leaves
floating
on yellow
sweet water
for
washing
the
ashes
of
his ancestors....

...window I pray....
mist wrapped
over
the sacred....
white
upon
white

pouring the
water
where
white stones
bled red...


3. Pii Mao Lau : Um Muang, Champassak


....once there was a forest
now a circle
of trees' bones
white.
someone has
left for the spirits
leaf and twig.
one red thread
from a branch.
shadow and skies
float
in black water
within the rock...
Rudani
face pasted
white on stone
waits....

I place
a fallen
leaf..........

Touch forever... .
Sitting with the clouds... .
Night bats... .
Fireflies... .
Cicadas... .
Darkness... .
Ghosts... .
In and out of the stars... .


[Muong Noi.... June, 2006]


*

[NOTE:
Pii Mai Lao is the Lao New Year festival in April
Rudani is the consort of Shiva
The poems are written in notebooks while walking]



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

JUSTIN LOWE


JOSQUIN


you are given over sometimes
to what perhaps you should admit is your element
the chalky soup of hotel sheets
the stale air forced from a tyre
poet because you have no time
because you were not intended
lately it seems to be this alone that drives you
that wakes you bright and early with the last dying stars
milky as your reckonings, your flaky tablature of slights
what you could not fit quite so snugly into verse
a flint that burns like dying inside you
an arresting but not unpleasant smell
of one who sighs obliquely in supermarket lines
whose eyes are the first to well up in the wind
God, if there is any chance you'll listen still
grant me the strength to outlive this man
to forgive all slights that bind me to him
unwrite the poems that show his hand
kiss the woman goodnight who shuddered at his sense
undo his doings everywhere
like your son with the pungent lepers
so that I too may touch without flinching
without thinking always how pure am I


*


THE WHO


she is the promise of Marlowe
that I will rise tomorrow
a whisper of sweet parting and coffee on the stove
her lipstick kiss on the bathroom mirror
dust motes giggling in the winter sun

the house seems cleaner for her
as though some brick had broken wind
the catches have give again
the rust has left the pipes
my home has grown wings, stone angel

she is that mirror draws men's stomachs in
since she cupped her hands on my kidneys
I have begun catching doors in the wind
traversing lost years with a wink
qualifying no more

for she leaves these bushfire mornings
as though returning were neither
an option or an answer
but as though to a man nursing a riddle
a cat turned ginger in the sun


*
[NOTE:
The Who was published in Justin Lowe's collection, Mistaken for Strangers (Bluepepper, 2008)... These poems are copyright, 2008, 2009.]


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PETE SPENCE


ACROSTICS

*


VIE D'HENRI BEYLE

Hanging about in Grenoble
Eyeing off the chocolates
Not 'till you've eaten lunch
Riled Dr. Gagnon
I mean it!

Blah thought Henri
Eyeing further delights
You go on and on!
Like it or not I'll keep
Eyeing off the chocolates

*


EN BLANC ET NOIR (LOUISE NEVELSON)

Louvers of square light
Over jet black panels
Usurp daylight through
Insets of space
See how it runs over
Everything in sight

Nowhere is as how
Ever that might be again
Verges that sit
Etched in air
Leanings that trace
Solids that fall
Over space made spare
Never it seems too soon

*


KAREL APPEL

Klash! the blue goat turns
Apricot and like a green
Rebus with an orange wing
Escapes time
Leaping over a camel

Air black and swept
Pours out of the wind
Porcupine yellow
Elopes with the sun
Late in the skin of night


*

PAM BROWN

Pared Down the line is still
Ample and clear
Meandering around space

Beauty attests
Retrogradually itself
Or i am
What i am
No poem sans question!


*

JOHN FORBES

Jokingly Balmain falls
On its feet
Hurries off sporadically
Nikes aware!

Folderols are for the effete
Or anyone with poetic
Rickets or into sun
Bastes! oven fresh
Energy everywhere
Stuns the pullets!


*

REED BYE (JOIN THE PLANETS)

Relish on the blue
Entertainment bubbly
Effervescent and folding
Down along the table

Black coffee after
Your platter of words
Everything is turning to sky


*

KILGORE TROUT

Kallamity with an
Ice-cap equals
Life so it
Goes like an
Orderly diaspora
Reclining before
Error!

Terra! Terror!
Rampantly in
Orbit on skis
Utterly homesick but
Traveling on!


*

GREGORY CORSO (1930-2001)
for Norma

Gregarious might be a sandwich
Resisting hunger...
Each to their own i say
Grinning like a door
Over the skylight
Right above that cloud
Yesterday or the moment before!

Crowds continue to grow
On the shore watching the water
Rise and fall while you snore in
Sync as the tide gathers sand
Over the preceding!


*

TENZIN GYATSO

Tentatively vitality
Emerges in the odd
Nuance of complete
Zeal noisy like an
Inept parrot at
Night (Gottschalk)

Go there and
You stay
Arriving for once
Twice if you try
So many times
Over & over it's ne'er done


*

[NOTE:
Re- Henri Beyle : Stendahl spent his childhood winking in Grenoble
Louise Nevelson : high falutin sculptor lady from New York
Kilgore Trout : Kurt Vonnegut
Reed Bye's book is Join the Planets; blue is perhaps a reference to Wallace Stevens' Blue Guitar]


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CONTRIBUTORS NOTES

KRIS HEMENSLEY your host
JOHN TRANTER edited Transit magazine in Sydney in the late 1960s; thirty years later began the on-line magazine, Jacket, http://jacketmagazine.com/. Numerous publications, including his most recent selection, Urban Myths : 210 Poems : New & Selected (pub, UQP, 'o6). Co-edited the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) which extended from his seminal anthology, The New Australian Poetry (Makar Press, 1979). Website, http://johntranter.com/
GEOFF EGGLESTON (1944-2008), great stalwart of poetry in Melbourne. Directed the Montsalvat Festival of Poetry & Music (Eltham, Vic) for many years. His books first announced in the '70s are still forthcoming. He is mourned.
'DEVA' DAVE ELLISON thanks Kris Hemensley and Vera Di Campli San Vito for bringing light to his contribution here. Dave has lived near the Maribyrnong Rivers since he was newborn in 1953. He's more mystic than poet. Poetry is a shining trail, left by the snail. Francis Brabazon, close personal disciple of Meher Baba, was more poet than mystic. Deva Dave ruminates on this. He is grateful to the devotional poets of Melbourne. They were his real education.
CATHERINE O'BRIEN lives & works in Vientiane (Lao PDR) when she's not in Melbourne or Bendigo. Occasionally publishes poetry (H/ear, Hobo, Small Packages) and shows visual poems, photographs, & textile installations since the '80s. See Catherine O'Brien Archive for more.
JUSTIN LOWE has published 6 books including The Glass Poems, The Great Big Show, Magellenica, & his new collection Mistaken for Strangers (all from Bluepepper Press).[see www.bluepepper.blogspot.com] As well as writing he collaborates with some of Sydney's finest songwriters. Lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
PETE SPENCE first published in the late '60s,early '70s, eg Makar. After a decade's hiatus edited Post Neo magazine and publications in the '80s and began contributing collages & visual poetry in Australia & overseas. More recently has had poems & visual poems published in New London (USA),by Tom Weigel, & in Germany by Karl-Friedrich Hacker. Included in his umpteenth group exhibition in Naples, Futurismo, a homage to Italian Futurism presently touring Italy.

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Finished typing April, '09
[many thanks to Donal Ellis for creating the picture file for Cathy O'Brien's red pillow, and to Carol Jenkins for finally placing it in the text!]
Kris Hemensley