Showing posts with label George Dowden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Dowden. Show all posts
Saturday, October 29, 2016
21st October: On this day in 1969, Jack Kerouac died...
"21st October: On this day in 1969 Jack Kerouac died. The Lonesome Traveller. Among friends & allies here in Heaven." Our notice up on the wall at Collected Works Bookshop, 21-X-16.
[Facebook post: On that day, the day after, the morning after? the Hemensleys were visiting George Dowden in Brighton, up from Southampton for a couple of days. I'd begun corresponding with George as editor of little mag, Our Glass, in Melbourne, '69. Found his Letters to English Poets in Mike Dugan's collection in '68, which gave me a postal address. What more does a boy in the sticks require?! Anyway, cut to the chase Hemensley! George took us around the corner from his fine apartment to meet Bill Butler, fellow American, at Bill's Unicorn Bookshop. Bill was fetching us a cuppa or finding a book to show, something like that, but he returned with the newspaper, New York Times, the Herald Tribune? Oh my, he was saying, have you seen this, Jack Kerouac died. Took the wind out of our sails.
George burrowed into his shoulder bag, fetched out a note book. Ive got a new notebook, he said. This'll be the first entry I make in it. Bill Butler kind of drew himself even taller than us and said, cuttingly, I always thought one only wrote small things in small notebooks.
Ye-es. Hmmm.
On the subject of Kerouac... infinite. On the subject of Bill Butler, great little shop, nice catalogues, central to the Brighton scene. I liked him, his Americana poems. Not everyone did. I recall Andrew Crozier generally congratulating the particular issue of my English mag. Earth Ship, in '70 or so, but particularly objecting to Bill's poems. (I'll take this opportunity to reread him now; I mean Bill. Andrew's a constant though wasnt always for me...) And on the subject of George... what happened to George? Bibliographer of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s, prolific on the little mag scene. I shared poems he sent to Melbourne with other little mags. He corresponded with Charley Buckmaster; Charles hoped to get across to England. I have some poetry on this in the book Kent MacCarter's publishing soon...
Yep! This has to be Heaven!
*
re- John Thorpe
John Thorpe is always ''descending from history''. He brings one back --to Pound (Canto II, "…Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "), that is to say, to the poetry able to listen &, whatismore, hear. He brings one back to the instant which is always local --to logography ("is the language of changing yr mind. It was not discovered by Pound (who called it ideogram) or Olson, etc it's so primary only kids & a very few writers have been able to equal -- 'english' being full of alphabetic, syllabic & prosodic reflexes."), that is to say, to writing as a way of being human, which realises & manifests nature, extending the possibility of life, enhancing the precondition, never setting out to be 'literary'.
John Thorpe is always descending from history into the present, the instant, the local, which really is the opposite of making the local etc. historical. What does he mean, "changing yr mind"? : "I make space-time. IT is not making it. (….) If i describe a condition, it changes. Or i hope to hell it does. If it didn't I'd be in trouble & I have been."
*
re- George Dowden
From This Is the Land of the Dead, The island of the Blessed, published by Hapt (Bournemouth, UK), 1970,
This is the Land of the Dead, the Island
of the Blessed
There is no Ship of Death - no where
to go but here
Here are the sweet-smelling trees, the gems
of the Earth are flowers, stones, a palace
is in the center - it is you, it is I,
that's all to know for beginning
*
Dowden's Ship of Death is a companion of John Thorpe's "Stranger in Paradise" --from Matter, or giving (Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, N.Y., '75), "we came here on the 'Stranger in Paradise.' These were americans searching ease in the orient, never leaving Paradise, their ideological capitol, to look at the earth."
Literature is their prehistory. They swear that no more will they be led astray. (Though one wonders what's happened to that resolution in Dowden's most recent publication (three works by Kaviraj [George Dowden], published as loot 1 : 3, 1979, UK), praise poems for Muktananda, which are sopping wet with sub-Beat adoration.)
*
At the beginning, Dowden was one of the poets I found in Michael Dugan's treasure-trove of English little magazines. Or, at the beginning, in Melbourne, there was Michael Dugan, with his treasure-trove of English little-magazines, through which I rummaged at his home in Canterbury… Or, at the beginning, I was in Melbourne, putting my first little mag, Our Glass, together, when Ken Taylor, in some excitement, told me about & then showed me another little magazine, Crosscurrents, emanating from completely outside of our La Mama cafe-theatre circuitry. It was produced by Michael Dugan from his home in Wentworth Street, Canterbury. For at the beginning I was an English poet in Melbourne, who reconnected with the English scene through fortuitous meeting with Michael Dugan, whose treasure-trove of English little-magazines had inspired him to publish his own, Crosscurrents, & confirmed me in my own Roneo style direction!
George Dowden's poems in an issue of Ambit had caught my eye. I found his address somewhere amongst Michael's things. I wrote to him (& to Jeff Nuttall, & Simon Cutts). He replied, with poems, "(…) from my current 'set' called EARTH INCANTATIONS (Body Chants) - Blake, "O Earth, O Earth, return!" Etc. These have been my work through 1968-69, and are proving of interest to editors in a number of countries, underground papers as well as poetry magazines. I hope you will be able to get them into papers or mags or your own roneo series there. (….) Hope this catches you before you sail [back to England via French Polynesia, the Panama, Martinique, Madeira, Marseilles, departing Sydney August, '69]. Good luck to your group, and on your trip…" (27,VII.69)
At my farewell party, given by Betty Burstall, July '69, I distributed poems by George Dowden, & Michael, similarly, poems by Jim Burns. We were four La Mama poet-editors, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Ian Robertson & myself. Buckmaster corresponded then with Dowden. Dowden negotiated an Australian issue of the English magazine, The Curiously Strong, to be edited by Buckmaster. Dowden sent copies of his books to Ken Taylor (at the ABC, the 'safest' address!) for distribution 'for everybody'. And so on…
It seemed to me, in '69, '70, that Dowden's poetry, his Blake/Ginsberg epistles, could be a stimulus & elevation in the level of political-poetic address then being attempted in Melbourne by such poets as Charles Buckmaster, Paul Adler, & Geoff Eggleston. Both Ian Robertson & Buckmaster were enthusiastic to publish him. Dowden (an American living in England, teaching, writing Ginsberg's bibliography for New Directions) was closer to the Melbourne aspiration, was more accessible than Michael McClure for example.
*
George Dowden to K.H., "Had weird letter from GREAT AUK Chas. Buckmaster. I got Fred Buck to do an Aussie issue of THE CURIOUSLY STRONG, sent a couple of samples to Chas, told him choose 3 or 4 poets there and make up (edit) the whole thing as per the way it's laid out. Said a few words I thought were encouraging, like poetry should be really strong, dangerous, etc., things I thought they were after and were finding in my poems they were praising -- he took it all wrong, thought I was trying to tell him what to write, but was only trying to impress on him the idea of making a really strong issue in his editing (what else?). It must have been that I honestly told him I didn't care for a few little poems he included in letter, wanting me to get published for him --I told him to make them better in THE CUR. STRONG. Oh, well, sensitivity and all that. I explained that 'known' poets when asked for criticism/opinion can only give it from what they want and are doing -- the younger takes it or leaves it (same as in my LETTERS TO ENGLISH POETS, 1967, where I say that they are firstly for me, and only secondly for anyone else who wants to listen). Forget it. Nothing serious. But must be understood: when one is asked for opinion, he does the younger poet no good by lying…." (30. I. 70)
"Yes, overemphasis on description in aussies -- must be a nice place to describe, physically, Pacific, the sun, greenery. But hoping that can be fused with saying something vital -- will be in best, always is (where Pound is so good so often)…." (7. II. 70)
----------------------------
Quoted from Being Here, the draft of its first part, Interference, published in the Being Here issue of H/EAR #7, 1985.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 19
LAUNCHING OF LORIN FORD'S A WATTLE SEEDPOD (published by POSTPRESSED, Queensland, 2008), at Collected Works Bookshop, 25th July, 2008
Thank you Lorin for asking me to launch your little book tonight. Poetry & the little book, poetry & the small press, are inseparable. At Collected Works Bookshop we're partial to little books -- although I do recall Bill Butler, ex-pat American poet, replying to the very excited George Dowden, ditto, in Bill's celebrated Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, UK --and it was the day that Jack Kerouac's death was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, October,1969, and a shocked Bill Butler had pointed it out to us --and George showed off his new pocket-sized note-book and said he'd write a poem in it, straightaway, about Kerouac's death --Bill said, coldly, I've always thought only small poems get written in small books! George was Ginsberg's bibliographer at the time and even more earnest & expansive in his confessions than his master --but that's another story entirely!
Lorin's isnt a small book in that sense, but perfectly efficacious & elegant within the constraints of its production --and the moments it contains are infinite in their extent.
*
As ever, an occasion like this book-launching is an intersection of lives & stories. I hope you'll permit me to range around & about book, person & poetry.
*
We do go back a long way, as they say. Lorin was the daughter of the house I boarded in, back in 1966, in Park Street, South Yarra, around the corner from the Botanical Gardens which she may know I called The Gardens of Sunlight in my personal myth & writings of that first Melbourne winter of my Australian emigration. We became acquainted in the pre-hippy Bohemian Melbourne and from there the trail takes in the La Mama poetry scene of the late '60s, and the counter-culture '70s, and our respective baby sons & their irregular schooling, and our different vantages in the education system... From youth's dream of poets & poetry to the grim & glorious actuality! -- of which A Wattle Seedpod is a shining example... And so into the dream once again...
*
Thirty-odd years ago, Jim Davidson asked me to write a survey of the new Australian poetry, to introduce my poetry editorship of Meanjin Quarterly. Every few years I have a peek at it as I did the other day. On this occasion I've been embarrassed by my carping & cleaving & general belabouring! I sound like the "wrathful deity", which is how my Buddhist & haiku enthusiast brother Bernard characterizes me when I'm aroused!
In retrospect I've come to realize that militantly pushing a literary programme, a la Pound & Wyndham Lewis, Olson, the Language School et cetera, as I did myself in the '60s & '70s & into the '80s, doesnt necessarily serve poetry well, if at all.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because included in my poetry review of 1976 was comment on some Australian haiku, which might be interesting to recall now.
Having earlier in the article berated Peter Porter & Graham Rowlands, and railed at Richard Tipping & Tom Shapcott, I turned to, or upon, Robert Gray's Creekwater Journal. To quote, "Though the direction is valid [by which I meant the embrace of Japanese but in Robert's case also a Chinese sensibility concerning human affairs & landscape] the contents are lacklustre." I continued, "The motor of the collection is three sets of three-liners [I dont even call them haiku] (...) which instead of firing rather enervate the entire book, ranging in tone from soft to silly, so cliched are some of the subjects and surrounding sentiments. It is these wee ones' failings that explains the demise of the long poems."
Next, I approvingly held up the "meagrely published Gerard Smith" for comparison; and then commented on Janice Bostok's haiku collection, Walking Into the Sun : "though naive and nowhere near as loaded as Gray or Smith," I wrote, "[it] is palpable : 'in summer meadow / this bird silence' is its most exciting and resonant instance. Six words with which to launch a world. Which is the requirement of the forms Gray attempts. Even when you have enough words, they must be the right words" I finger-wagged..
In the years since 1976, I've re-thought & revised my general literary position. I realize, for example, how wrong i was about Robert Gray's haiku & certainly the longer poems. He's said to me that I probably had a point back then, but I think he's being gracious (as befits his name), & possibly facetious too!
Gerard Smith died young, without a book as such. His friend Janice Bostok, who's especially thanked by Lorin in her book, is now a major force in the Australian haiku world.
By 1976, the Sixties' generation of La Mama poets, amongst whom Lorin once numbered, had long dispersed, but their individual paths continued & the spirit carried over elsewhere.
*
For all this time we've lived in the magnitude of modern poetry. Even in its provinces, ancient Chinese & Japanese approaches (for example, the representation of nature to include human lives, particularly manifest as haiku) have never been too far away. And that's because it was brought out of the exoticised, but crucial, 19th Century interest & into our time by moderns like Englishman Arthur Waley & American Ezra Pound. And so it flows through the Poundian practice, particularly in the US --and it underscores the Objectivists (think of Oppen, Lorine Niedecker), Cid Corman, so also the Beats, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and then the contemporary legions.
And translation of the ancients continues in the wake of Pound by numerous hands --Bill Porter & Sam Hamill amongst the best today. And then there's the Formalist revival, or revival of forms, from the '80s to the present. And coincident with this new formalism, haiku has proliferated as an English-language form. Poetry schools have aided & abetted the process. If pantoums, sestinas, sonnets & villanelles why not haiku, tanka & et cetera? Anyone for ghazals?!
*
Lorin has been an astonishingly active poet in the past few years of the English-language haiku phenomenon. It's rare not to see her haiku published somewhere in Melbourne, in Australia. She's equally well published in overseas' haiku magazines & anthologies. There seems to me to be something of the Welsh Eistedfott about the haiku scene if only in their competition for prizes & titles..! Lorin's been in the thick of that! She's published a couple of hundred haiku in print & internet magazines, and that spells tenacity & possibly addiction for the form & perhaps the comraderie too!
And at last she has a book! I am surprised something didnt come out earlier --but that's life, as many of us will attest...
A Wattle Seedpod is published by PostPressed in Queensland. John Bird, one of Australian haiku's stalwarts, contributes an instructive forward which contains Lorin's thoughts on haiku, describing her progress from the "so what?" we've all experienced to the "ah ha!" we long for. She refers to the "physical quiver of recognition" upon hearing a particular haiku : "It made me realize," she writes, "that haiku are meant to be 'seen through' by us as readers, to our own experiences in the world."
You'll observe with me that this transparency is in direct contradiction to the Western literary attitude, whether or not fully born out in practice. Poem as existential mirror is a wonderful challenge to the self-conscious postmodern manner, for instance. Of course, in practice, things are never so black & white, but the dichotomy bears thinking about.
*
"This poet," John Bird says, "does not live in Haikuland. She may well become a haijin who helps move English-langauge haiku closer to poetry." John Bird seems to be suggesting that there's a deficit between Haikuland practitioners & Poetry...
To be sure, Lorin is an otherwise formed poet who has taken up & taken to the haiku. And yet she does endorse haiku's traditional imperatives & their Western evolution.
*
I'll bring my remarks to a close by opening Lorin's little book upon a couple of my favourites in this first collection.
How poignant is this, for example :
"River sunrise
a girl's shadow
swims from my ankles"
What a beautiful allusion to the 'consciousness of the passing of time' (if I might misquote Gertrude Stein) --the chaste expression grants equanimity even as wistfulness presses on the heart...
Then there's the synaesthesia of :
"clear water --
a magpie's song drops
into the pond"
Simultaneously one sees, hears & feels the event.
And then there's the perfect one-liner :
"on a bare twig rain beads what light there is"
which is, I think, in the vicinity of what Judith Bishop often attains --not Nature Poetry pure & simple but how phenomena is apprehended; a poetry, therefore, of conscious & perceiving being.
*
And so, I'm pleased to declare this little book published, and now invite Lorin to speak to us &, hopefully, read.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley, July, 2008.
Thank you Lorin for asking me to launch your little book tonight. Poetry & the little book, poetry & the small press, are inseparable. At Collected Works Bookshop we're partial to little books -- although I do recall Bill Butler, ex-pat American poet, replying to the very excited George Dowden, ditto, in Bill's celebrated Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, UK --and it was the day that Jack Kerouac's death was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, October,1969, and a shocked Bill Butler had pointed it out to us --and George showed off his new pocket-sized note-book and said he'd write a poem in it, straightaway, about Kerouac's death --Bill said, coldly, I've always thought only small poems get written in small books! George was Ginsberg's bibliographer at the time and even more earnest & expansive in his confessions than his master --but that's another story entirely!
Lorin's isnt a small book in that sense, but perfectly efficacious & elegant within the constraints of its production --and the moments it contains are infinite in their extent.
*
As ever, an occasion like this book-launching is an intersection of lives & stories. I hope you'll permit me to range around & about book, person & poetry.
*
We do go back a long way, as they say. Lorin was the daughter of the house I boarded in, back in 1966, in Park Street, South Yarra, around the corner from the Botanical Gardens which she may know I called The Gardens of Sunlight in my personal myth & writings of that first Melbourne winter of my Australian emigration. We became acquainted in the pre-hippy Bohemian Melbourne and from there the trail takes in the La Mama poetry scene of the late '60s, and the counter-culture '70s, and our respective baby sons & their irregular schooling, and our different vantages in the education system... From youth's dream of poets & poetry to the grim & glorious actuality! -- of which A Wattle Seedpod is a shining example... And so into the dream once again...
*
Thirty-odd years ago, Jim Davidson asked me to write a survey of the new Australian poetry, to introduce my poetry editorship of Meanjin Quarterly. Every few years I have a peek at it as I did the other day. On this occasion I've been embarrassed by my carping & cleaving & general belabouring! I sound like the "wrathful deity", which is how my Buddhist & haiku enthusiast brother Bernard characterizes me when I'm aroused!
In retrospect I've come to realize that militantly pushing a literary programme, a la Pound & Wyndham Lewis, Olson, the Language School et cetera, as I did myself in the '60s & '70s & into the '80s, doesnt necessarily serve poetry well, if at all.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because included in my poetry review of 1976 was comment on some Australian haiku, which might be interesting to recall now.
Having earlier in the article berated Peter Porter & Graham Rowlands, and railed at Richard Tipping & Tom Shapcott, I turned to, or upon, Robert Gray's Creekwater Journal. To quote, "Though the direction is valid [by which I meant the embrace of Japanese but in Robert's case also a Chinese sensibility concerning human affairs & landscape] the contents are lacklustre." I continued, "The motor of the collection is three sets of three-liners [I dont even call them haiku] (...) which instead of firing rather enervate the entire book, ranging in tone from soft to silly, so cliched are some of the subjects and surrounding sentiments. It is these wee ones' failings that explains the demise of the long poems."
Next, I approvingly held up the "meagrely published Gerard Smith" for comparison; and then commented on Janice Bostok's haiku collection, Walking Into the Sun : "though naive and nowhere near as loaded as Gray or Smith," I wrote, "[it] is palpable : 'in summer meadow / this bird silence' is its most exciting and resonant instance. Six words with which to launch a world. Which is the requirement of the forms Gray attempts. Even when you have enough words, they must be the right words" I finger-wagged..
In the years since 1976, I've re-thought & revised my general literary position. I realize, for example, how wrong i was about Robert Gray's haiku & certainly the longer poems. He's said to me that I probably had a point back then, but I think he's being gracious (as befits his name), & possibly facetious too!
Gerard Smith died young, without a book as such. His friend Janice Bostok, who's especially thanked by Lorin in her book, is now a major force in the Australian haiku world.
By 1976, the Sixties' generation of La Mama poets, amongst whom Lorin once numbered, had long dispersed, but their individual paths continued & the spirit carried over elsewhere.
*
For all this time we've lived in the magnitude of modern poetry. Even in its provinces, ancient Chinese & Japanese approaches (for example, the representation of nature to include human lives, particularly manifest as haiku) have never been too far away. And that's because it was brought out of the exoticised, but crucial, 19th Century interest & into our time by moderns like Englishman Arthur Waley & American Ezra Pound. And so it flows through the Poundian practice, particularly in the US --and it underscores the Objectivists (think of Oppen, Lorine Niedecker), Cid Corman, so also the Beats, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and then the contemporary legions.
And translation of the ancients continues in the wake of Pound by numerous hands --Bill Porter & Sam Hamill amongst the best today. And then there's the Formalist revival, or revival of forms, from the '80s to the present. And coincident with this new formalism, haiku has proliferated as an English-language form. Poetry schools have aided & abetted the process. If pantoums, sestinas, sonnets & villanelles why not haiku, tanka & et cetera? Anyone for ghazals?!
*
Lorin has been an astonishingly active poet in the past few years of the English-language haiku phenomenon. It's rare not to see her haiku published somewhere in Melbourne, in Australia. She's equally well published in overseas' haiku magazines & anthologies. There seems to me to be something of the Welsh Eistedfott about the haiku scene if only in their competition for prizes & titles..! Lorin's been in the thick of that! She's published a couple of hundred haiku in print & internet magazines, and that spells tenacity & possibly addiction for the form & perhaps the comraderie too!
And at last she has a book! I am surprised something didnt come out earlier --but that's life, as many of us will attest...
A Wattle Seedpod is published by PostPressed in Queensland. John Bird, one of Australian haiku's stalwarts, contributes an instructive forward which contains Lorin's thoughts on haiku, describing her progress from the "so what?" we've all experienced to the "ah ha!" we long for. She refers to the "physical quiver of recognition" upon hearing a particular haiku : "It made me realize," she writes, "that haiku are meant to be 'seen through' by us as readers, to our own experiences in the world."
You'll observe with me that this transparency is in direct contradiction to the Western literary attitude, whether or not fully born out in practice. Poem as existential mirror is a wonderful challenge to the self-conscious postmodern manner, for instance. Of course, in practice, things are never so black & white, but the dichotomy bears thinking about.
*
"This poet," John Bird says, "does not live in Haikuland. She may well become a haijin who helps move English-langauge haiku closer to poetry." John Bird seems to be suggesting that there's a deficit between Haikuland practitioners & Poetry...
To be sure, Lorin is an otherwise formed poet who has taken up & taken to the haiku. And yet she does endorse haiku's traditional imperatives & their Western evolution.
*
I'll bring my remarks to a close by opening Lorin's little book upon a couple of my favourites in this first collection.
How poignant is this, for example :
"River sunrise
a girl's shadow
swims from my ankles"
What a beautiful allusion to the 'consciousness of the passing of time' (if I might misquote Gertrude Stein) --the chaste expression grants equanimity even as wistfulness presses on the heart...
Then there's the synaesthesia of :
"clear water --
a magpie's song drops
into the pond"
Simultaneously one sees, hears & feels the event.
And then there's the perfect one-liner :
"on a bare twig rain beads what light there is"
which is, I think, in the vicinity of what Judith Bishop often attains --not Nature Poetry pure & simple but how phenomena is apprehended; a poetry, therefore, of conscious & perceiving being.
*
And so, I'm pleased to declare this little book published, and now invite Lorin to speak to us &, hopefully, read.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley, July, 2008.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS (part 4)
October 4, 2006
Melbourne
Dear Bernard, I'd begun writing my next letter (22/8) a few days before you commenced yours. And of course when the sad but inevitable event of Dad's death occurred, on September 5th, we agreed we'd exchange letters in person when I came to Weymouth for the funeral.
Dad's early influence upon us and latterly his illness has been present at the edges of our correspondence; now his death takes centre stage.
From the late 80s on, when I began to regularly visit you all in England, I accepted he was who he was for all the strife it had caused me and tried, thereafter, to be a friend for him on his walks & in his talks. For some years I think he reciprocated although you always said that how he presented himself during my visits wasnt what he was like usually. You also said that his walks around Radipole Lake bird reserve or on the first stretch of the Dorset Downs had less to do with environment or aesthetics than his own physical constitution, though he could wax lyrically about the experience. Unfortunately any weather less than golden summer kept him indoors. So he really wasnt a walker & philosopher like your Goldcroft Road neighbour Anne Axenskold's late father, Frank Brown, whose two posthumously published books of "reflections" one might have thought would have interested Dad. But Frank Brown appears to have been a contemporary man for whom the references & concerns of tradition continued to resonate, whereas Dad took refuge in the effects of the past : a nostalgist, outide of culture & society. He was increasingly reserved in his interests & opinions with less & less time for other people & the world.
Relating this to The Dharma Bums for a moment : when I first encountered the figure of Japhy's father in the book, a kind of Pan who outdid Japhy in his partying, I seriously wished Dad had been the same kind of turned-on man! Rereading TDB I'm not so sure! And the awful thought arises that perhaps Tim had to contend with me as libertarian rival during his youth? But, Tim left home early, had his own social & music scene and a secret life which didnt overlap ours... An interesting tack, maybe, to account for Japhy in the light of his father's example --age-old theme, of course; fathers & sons...
*
(August/September,'06) Have we asked the question, what & why the attraction to the whole Beat thing, especially the concept of "dharma bums"? I probably can't do better than quote the grab from The Listener, on the cover of my Great Pan paperback, "Adds up to one hell of a philosophy of life"!
Before the Beats one had an idea of the artist's life, fed as much by the 19thCentury images of poets & painters in Paris as anything contemporary or local. "Artist's life" conflated with "student's life", especially the example of the art college student's. You know, I can still feel horror at the prospect , then, of living & working for the whole of one's life in a small town such as Southampton was in the 50s & 60s, without ever experiencing the bliss & revelation anticipated in one's reading. Living in a conventional manner in Southampton was the premature burial writ big : Pete Seeger's "little boxes". Eric Burden's "I just gotta get out of this place" was the anthem of escape!
I suppose London was the obvious location for an English boy's alternatives, but how was a provincial lad to make a life there? And the alternative wasn't altogether defined by getting a start in the literary mainstream either. In the generational hiatus between Beats & Counter Culture there fell our reading, writing, hitch-hiking, emigration... To an extent, the life I lived in Melbourne in 1966 & 1967, before & after I met Loretta Garvey, continuing through the La Mama cafe-theatre years, 1968-69, was my truly Beat phase. Finding a place in the progressivist culture & politics as a poet was as significant to me as gaining publication. That age-old contradiction of opposition & disaffiliation on the one hand, and seeking acceptance on the other. (In that sense, cliche or not, Kerouac's inability to cope with success was a blessing since it always returned him to the world. The novels which record actual disintegration foretell his doom and are part & parcel of his legend. Minutia is irredeemable but Kerouac's Whitmanish accumulation and the drive infusing it is the means of its transformation.)
*
(October 14th-18th incorporating August,06 notes) Tedious to trace one's Beat affinity through forty years but misleading if I dont state my falling out of love with Kerouac in 1969 and the many years in which the Beats were only in the background of my thinking.
In 1969, Henry Rosenbloom, nowadays the publisher of Scribe books in Melbourne, solicited a review from me of The Vanity of Dulouoz for the Melbourne University magazine. He'd heard from one or two of the student poets who'd joined us at La Mama (which since '68 had become the La Mama Poets' Workshop) , namely Marc Radyzner & Garrie Hutchinson, that I was a Kerouac fan. But the politics Kerouac paraded in that book shocked me to the core. In that black & white era of the war in Vietnam and the international youth culture, Kerouac was suddenly an enemy! I damned the book for its red-neck conservatism and the editor rejected my article. He wrote to me that I evidently didnt realize the importance of Kerouac! Me, Kerouac's number one fan? I was hurt, indignant & confused.
I dont think I properly mourned Kerouac's death later that year because of this volte-face. Retta & I, in England now, were visiting George Dowden, the American poet living in Brighton, who was working on Ginsberg's bibliography amongst many other things. He'd taken us to meet Bill Butler, another poet & American ex-pat, who owned the prestigious Unicorn Bookshop. We'd hardly exchanged greetings when Bill, clutching the New York Herald Tribune, asked if we'd heard Kerouac was dead? We stood around gawping at the obituary. Bill was serious & seriously affected. George produced a small, hardback notebook : my new notebook, he said showing it off; I'll write a poem about this, it'll be the first entry in my new notebook. Bill barely glanced at it : I've always found, he said, that one only writes small poems in small notebooks. Quite a deal of tid for tat between them.
Although I recorded a talk on the 10th Anniversary of Kerouac's death, broadcast on the ABC, and wrote book-discussion notes for On The Road a year or two later, it wasnt until 1986 or 7 that the love-affair resumed in earnest! That was the year of Richard Lerner & Lewis MacAdams' wonderful documentary Whatever Happened to Kerouac? There they all were --the oh so familiar names with their twenty years' older faces : Corso, amusing & insightful ("Kerouac had talent but Shelley was divine!"); McClure still the handsome man described by Kerouac... I think Retta, Tim & I saw it together or they saw it in Sydney and I attended by myself in Melbourne. I was exhilerated --skipped the couple of miles from the Valhalla cinema, then in Richmond, home to Westgarth. It was time to begin building my Beats & Co shelf at the Shop. In between his rocknroll, Tim joined the conversation, eventually preferring Burroughs to all the Kerouac he'd borrowed from me --for obvious reason as time would ultimately & tragically tell...
*
It occurrs to me that the viewing of the film coincided with the period I've called my "enlightenment reading" in the mid to late 1980s, when I read extensively in the areas of psychology, religion, & philosophy attempting to find a way around the cul de sac postmodernism had become for me. It seemed to me that personal & common experience was now denigrated, and that personal expression & expressive writing was thought to be passe. It was time for me to turn away from "theory" and re-encounter self & world more or less transparently. Some of my greatest literary pleasures in recent years have been types of memoir & commentary in which questions about life & orientation are the actual basis of the travel, natural history, topographical, spiritual, even cullinary writing at hand.
Larry Schwartz, journalist friend from The Age, said an interesting thing at the Shop today. Why do I love all of this Beat stuff? he exclaimed. Is it because they liberated us? he said. I agreed that they had. And the kind of literature they were writing was one we identified with, I said. So is it our own lives we're reading about then? And are we writing those books? he said. I think that degree of transparency is involved insofar as the author is soliciting identification & correspondence. That's been the case since Whitman but it gathers steam with the Beats and their legacy...
A slim volume I intend sending to you is Kenneth White's Travels in the Drifting Dawn (Penguin,1990) : definitely not the work of genius claimed by the blurbs and perhaps also by the author but White's tastings of British & European places & atmospheres occasionally do convince one that something more suggestive than an adolescent egotism is at stake. I mean, give me Kerouac's ego any day if Kenneth White's Sixties' good times are the alternative. With Kerouac one would flee the pseudo-intellectuals & artists to whom White so readily submits his gift (and he has a gift undoubtedly). But you be the judge --the literary & philosophical references are familiar even where the landscapes are not. You'll think of Basho as well as the Beats...
Love, Kris
Weymouth
Halloween, 2006
Dear Kris, Sleepless early hours of the 31st October --uncomfortable chest easing as I write. The Doors' "Light my Fire" prompts me on Janice Long's morning radio show. Got me to thinking that it was really American music that led me. Kerouac and the Beats came afterwards. It was the mid-Sixties that I turned on to the folk music of Peter,Paul & Mary, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. That was when I started buying records in a big way. I remember having Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" and Dad actually allowing me to play it on Xmas Day, '66 --usurping Harry Belafonte! But the electric music wasn't in keeping, I know, with a family Christmas, much as I was keen to hear my favourite --"Visions of Johanna". (Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were all the rage at Southampton Tech College the year I was there in 1965.)
To think I've been back home with the parents twenty-five years. Time has collapsed, as I did, like a concertina. Whew! I've lived here all that time --apart from when dad resisted welcoming me home to "his" house. Like you, I felt he wasn't the father I wanted. I consciously looked for a father-figure for years --someone who could tell me something. Never found one. I think I felt cast adrift in an unfriendly universe --heightened, possibly, when you emigrated to Oz --and then suffering years of apprehension and existential terror. But nursing Dad along for his last two years we did share something. Poor Dad, all he wanted to do at the end was pull the covers overs his head, sleep and blot everything out. Possibly the metaphor for his life.
He was a solitary man. A man who would've liked to build a boat and sail around the world to a South Sea island, as you mentioned in your eulogy for him at St John's Church.
(11/11/06) One thing that did irk me about Dad's illness was that he would never accept the help of a more healing diet. My low-fat vegan diet might have assisted. Or macrobiotic diet. Or raw-food diet. All of which I know about. But he didn't have any faith in such things. I'm pleased we could accomodate his tastes in what he wanted to eat --cream cakes for afternoon tea! bangers & mash! --he loved mashed potatoes. And although all his life he ate steamed vegetables he couldn't tolerate the taste towards the end. Tho' he liked green peas. I'd try to encourage him to eat a different diet; tell him about miso soup or fresh fruit & vegetable juices, but he didn't want to move in that direction. Ah, well!
Talking of food, I saw our friend Anthony Bourdain on t.v. last night. We've agreed he's a Kerouacian figure --writer, traveller. How much Kerouac was into food I don't know. We know of his love for booze! --but food in TDB was nothing to write home about. Japhy had his bulghur wheat for the mountain trip up the Matterhorn. But when they came down it was a "great dinner of baked potatoes and porkchops and salad and hot buns and blueberry pie and the works." Anyway, the highlight on Bourdain's programme for me --he was in Korea-- was watching his young companion making country-style kim-chee pickles. I didn't go much for eating chopped octopus that was so fresh the suckers on the tentacles were clinging and clamping on to Bourdain's mouth as he ate! Wriggling on the plate! I'd love to make pickles. Get into home food production. Sourdough breads etc. And if I could make amazake myself I'd save a lot of money. Naturally fermented foods are very good for you...
Love, Bernard
______________________________________
(to be continued)
Melbourne
Dear Bernard, I'd begun writing my next letter (22/8) a few days before you commenced yours. And of course when the sad but inevitable event of Dad's death occurred, on September 5th, we agreed we'd exchange letters in person when I came to Weymouth for the funeral.
Dad's early influence upon us and latterly his illness has been present at the edges of our correspondence; now his death takes centre stage.
From the late 80s on, when I began to regularly visit you all in England, I accepted he was who he was for all the strife it had caused me and tried, thereafter, to be a friend for him on his walks & in his talks. For some years I think he reciprocated although you always said that how he presented himself during my visits wasnt what he was like usually. You also said that his walks around Radipole Lake bird reserve or on the first stretch of the Dorset Downs had less to do with environment or aesthetics than his own physical constitution, though he could wax lyrically about the experience. Unfortunately any weather less than golden summer kept him indoors. So he really wasnt a walker & philosopher like your Goldcroft Road neighbour Anne Axenskold's late father, Frank Brown, whose two posthumously published books of "reflections" one might have thought would have interested Dad. But Frank Brown appears to have been a contemporary man for whom the references & concerns of tradition continued to resonate, whereas Dad took refuge in the effects of the past : a nostalgist, outide of culture & society. He was increasingly reserved in his interests & opinions with less & less time for other people & the world.
Relating this to The Dharma Bums for a moment : when I first encountered the figure of Japhy's father in the book, a kind of Pan who outdid Japhy in his partying, I seriously wished Dad had been the same kind of turned-on man! Rereading TDB I'm not so sure! And the awful thought arises that perhaps Tim had to contend with me as libertarian rival during his youth? But, Tim left home early, had his own social & music scene and a secret life which didnt overlap ours... An interesting tack, maybe, to account for Japhy in the light of his father's example --age-old theme, of course; fathers & sons...
*
(August/September,'06) Have we asked the question, what & why the attraction to the whole Beat thing, especially the concept of "dharma bums"? I probably can't do better than quote the grab from The Listener, on the cover of my Great Pan paperback, "Adds up to one hell of a philosophy of life"!
Before the Beats one had an idea of the artist's life, fed as much by the 19thCentury images of poets & painters in Paris as anything contemporary or local. "Artist's life" conflated with "student's life", especially the example of the art college student's. You know, I can still feel horror at the prospect , then, of living & working for the whole of one's life in a small town such as Southampton was in the 50s & 60s, without ever experiencing the bliss & revelation anticipated in one's reading. Living in a conventional manner in Southampton was the premature burial writ big : Pete Seeger's "little boxes". Eric Burden's "I just gotta get out of this place" was the anthem of escape!
I suppose London was the obvious location for an English boy's alternatives, but how was a provincial lad to make a life there? And the alternative wasn't altogether defined by getting a start in the literary mainstream either. In the generational hiatus between Beats & Counter Culture there fell our reading, writing, hitch-hiking, emigration... To an extent, the life I lived in Melbourne in 1966 & 1967, before & after I met Loretta Garvey, continuing through the La Mama cafe-theatre years, 1968-69, was my truly Beat phase. Finding a place in the progressivist culture & politics as a poet was as significant to me as gaining publication. That age-old contradiction of opposition & disaffiliation on the one hand, and seeking acceptance on the other. (In that sense, cliche or not, Kerouac's inability to cope with success was a blessing since it always returned him to the world. The novels which record actual disintegration foretell his doom and are part & parcel of his legend. Minutia is irredeemable but Kerouac's Whitmanish accumulation and the drive infusing it is the means of its transformation.)
*
(October 14th-18th incorporating August,06 notes) Tedious to trace one's Beat affinity through forty years but misleading if I dont state my falling out of love with Kerouac in 1969 and the many years in which the Beats were only in the background of my thinking.
In 1969, Henry Rosenbloom, nowadays the publisher of Scribe books in Melbourne, solicited a review from me of The Vanity of Dulouoz for the Melbourne University magazine. He'd heard from one or two of the student poets who'd joined us at La Mama (which since '68 had become the La Mama Poets' Workshop) , namely Marc Radyzner & Garrie Hutchinson, that I was a Kerouac fan. But the politics Kerouac paraded in that book shocked me to the core. In that black & white era of the war in Vietnam and the international youth culture, Kerouac was suddenly an enemy! I damned the book for its red-neck conservatism and the editor rejected my article. He wrote to me that I evidently didnt realize the importance of Kerouac! Me, Kerouac's number one fan? I was hurt, indignant & confused.
I dont think I properly mourned Kerouac's death later that year because of this volte-face. Retta & I, in England now, were visiting George Dowden, the American poet living in Brighton, who was working on Ginsberg's bibliography amongst many other things. He'd taken us to meet Bill Butler, another poet & American ex-pat, who owned the prestigious Unicorn Bookshop. We'd hardly exchanged greetings when Bill, clutching the New York Herald Tribune, asked if we'd heard Kerouac was dead? We stood around gawping at the obituary. Bill was serious & seriously affected. George produced a small, hardback notebook : my new notebook, he said showing it off; I'll write a poem about this, it'll be the first entry in my new notebook. Bill barely glanced at it : I've always found, he said, that one only writes small poems in small notebooks. Quite a deal of tid for tat between them.
Although I recorded a talk on the 10th Anniversary of Kerouac's death, broadcast on the ABC, and wrote book-discussion notes for On The Road a year or two later, it wasnt until 1986 or 7 that the love-affair resumed in earnest! That was the year of Richard Lerner & Lewis MacAdams' wonderful documentary Whatever Happened to Kerouac? There they all were --the oh so familiar names with their twenty years' older faces : Corso, amusing & insightful ("Kerouac had talent but Shelley was divine!"); McClure still the handsome man described by Kerouac... I think Retta, Tim & I saw it together or they saw it in Sydney and I attended by myself in Melbourne. I was exhilerated --skipped the couple of miles from the Valhalla cinema, then in Richmond, home to Westgarth. It was time to begin building my Beats & Co shelf at the Shop. In between his rocknroll, Tim joined the conversation, eventually preferring Burroughs to all the Kerouac he'd borrowed from me --for obvious reason as time would ultimately & tragically tell...
*
It occurrs to me that the viewing of the film coincided with the period I've called my "enlightenment reading" in the mid to late 1980s, when I read extensively in the areas of psychology, religion, & philosophy attempting to find a way around the cul de sac postmodernism had become for me. It seemed to me that personal & common experience was now denigrated, and that personal expression & expressive writing was thought to be passe. It was time for me to turn away from "theory" and re-encounter self & world more or less transparently. Some of my greatest literary pleasures in recent years have been types of memoir & commentary in which questions about life & orientation are the actual basis of the travel, natural history, topographical, spiritual, even cullinary writing at hand.
Larry Schwartz, journalist friend from The Age, said an interesting thing at the Shop today. Why do I love all of this Beat stuff? he exclaimed. Is it because they liberated us? he said. I agreed that they had. And the kind of literature they were writing was one we identified with, I said. So is it our own lives we're reading about then? And are we writing those books? he said. I think that degree of transparency is involved insofar as the author is soliciting identification & correspondence. That's been the case since Whitman but it gathers steam with the Beats and their legacy...
A slim volume I intend sending to you is Kenneth White's Travels in the Drifting Dawn (Penguin,1990) : definitely not the work of genius claimed by the blurbs and perhaps also by the author but White's tastings of British & European places & atmospheres occasionally do convince one that something more suggestive than an adolescent egotism is at stake. I mean, give me Kerouac's ego any day if Kenneth White's Sixties' good times are the alternative. With Kerouac one would flee the pseudo-intellectuals & artists to whom White so readily submits his gift (and he has a gift undoubtedly). But you be the judge --the literary & philosophical references are familiar even where the landscapes are not. You'll think of Basho as well as the Beats...
Love, Kris
Weymouth
Halloween, 2006
Dear Kris, Sleepless early hours of the 31st October --uncomfortable chest easing as I write. The Doors' "Light my Fire" prompts me on Janice Long's morning radio show. Got me to thinking that it was really American music that led me. Kerouac and the Beats came afterwards. It was the mid-Sixties that I turned on to the folk music of Peter,Paul & Mary, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. That was when I started buying records in a big way. I remember having Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" and Dad actually allowing me to play it on Xmas Day, '66 --usurping Harry Belafonte! But the electric music wasn't in keeping, I know, with a family Christmas, much as I was keen to hear my favourite --"Visions of Johanna". (Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were all the rage at Southampton Tech College the year I was there in 1965.)
To think I've been back home with the parents twenty-five years. Time has collapsed, as I did, like a concertina. Whew! I've lived here all that time --apart from when dad resisted welcoming me home to "his" house. Like you, I felt he wasn't the father I wanted. I consciously looked for a father-figure for years --someone who could tell me something. Never found one. I think I felt cast adrift in an unfriendly universe --heightened, possibly, when you emigrated to Oz --and then suffering years of apprehension and existential terror. But nursing Dad along for his last two years we did share something. Poor Dad, all he wanted to do at the end was pull the covers overs his head, sleep and blot everything out. Possibly the metaphor for his life.
He was a solitary man. A man who would've liked to build a boat and sail around the world to a South Sea island, as you mentioned in your eulogy for him at St John's Church.
(11/11/06) One thing that did irk me about Dad's illness was that he would never accept the help of a more healing diet. My low-fat vegan diet might have assisted. Or macrobiotic diet. Or raw-food diet. All of which I know about. But he didn't have any faith in such things. I'm pleased we could accomodate his tastes in what he wanted to eat --cream cakes for afternoon tea! bangers & mash! --he loved mashed potatoes. And although all his life he ate steamed vegetables he couldn't tolerate the taste towards the end. Tho' he liked green peas. I'd try to encourage him to eat a different diet; tell him about miso soup or fresh fruit & vegetable juices, but he didn't want to move in that direction. Ah, well!
Talking of food, I saw our friend Anthony Bourdain on t.v. last night. We've agreed he's a Kerouacian figure --writer, traveller. How much Kerouac was into food I don't know. We know of his love for booze! --but food in TDB was nothing to write home about. Japhy had his bulghur wheat for the mountain trip up the Matterhorn. But when they came down it was a "great dinner of baked potatoes and porkchops and salad and hot buns and blueberry pie and the works." Anyway, the highlight on Bourdain's programme for me --he was in Korea-- was watching his young companion making country-style kim-chee pickles. I didn't go much for eating chopped octopus that was so fresh the suckers on the tentacles were clinging and clamping on to Bourdain's mouth as he ate! Wriggling on the plate! I'd love to make pickles. Get into home food production. Sourdough breads etc. And if I could make amazake myself I'd save a lot of money. Naturally fermented foods are very good for you...
Love, Bernard
______________________________________
(to be continued)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)