Around & about Matt Hall's FALSE FRUITS (Cordite Books, Castlemaine, '17)
[salvaged from Facebook]
I hope this aint talking out of school, but a month ago in 'chat' with Kent MacCarter i said how i was reading Matthew Hall's book, False Fruits. "I need to get my teeth into it but at first blush the language sings, in my sense, but i dont think that's how it's supposed to rest... i need to get with the argument or dialectic..." Well, thanks to John Hawke's words at last night's launch, April 7th, '17, we got it! Look forward to reading the speech, what amounted to a short history of the po-mo everywhichway of the lyric, the pastoral, Romanticism, etc --that is, as per Matt's project, lyric that aint lyric, pastoral that aint that kind of pastoral nor that, missus, and aint all parody since, as per Schuyler on NY poetry ca 50s (i'm throwing that in, begging yr pardon) gallons of [paint] true feeling courses it, suffuses it. And so on. Hmm. I confess the radical battle cry that poetry is violence upon language, and that all poetry shares the perspective, except of course that of the unmentionables, poetry's deplorables? --a claim i lived with myself through the 70s & 80s-- doesnt work for me in the way John announced it last night... Eeek! It's Saturday morning i think! Stuck in the middle of another dense & ingenious proposition for the Eco-poetic! Lots to think about, and the book itself to read! Congratulations everyone! It was a stimulating night!
---------------------------
Nice memory you recalled in yr remarks last night, Matt, regarding that conference you attended several years ago and the afterparty reading at Collected Works Bookshop, at wch i particularly recall your good self and David Herd's distinctive readings...
RE- violence, and of course your book, On Violence in the Work of J. H. Prynne (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) (--just reminded myself via the abstract up on the Web, and nice to see longtime-nosee Michael Tencer's name there), --the violence John Hawke indicated as a general condition of the practice is NOT, i think, the point of your submission on Prynne (or, indeed, the British poetry in the vicinity of that influence or out of similar Traditional & Modernist extrapolation as the man's), wch is a very particular project... or was --i'm sure by now it's widened to the air that's breathed there, almost commonplace assumptions & similar formal expressions.
(At the beginning of your V., am reminded of Olson, ye olde Projective Verse (how sprightly they read, all these assayes of the Big O even now) --our poet, "How he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. (.....) For a man's problem (...) to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature..." --reminded by your quotation from JHP that, like O, his poetry is another kind of human manifestation, and an imp is tickling me to suggest meta-literary, metaphysical, even of Platonism! --like for ex., Korean poet Ko Un adamant that his poetry's not to do with literature but "the universe!" --away with thee, imp!) --
I wish right here i could jump into statement of what i'm feeling (and to include something on feeling, on wch last night i thought John Hawke very good)... something about the relation to this being here, this relation to nature (and the nature of things), which is rather more interesting than literary cleaving (i mean grading) right & left & all about one! (--that vivacious intellectuality, --importunate mind, promiscuously vital --and dont i recognize that myself)...
My sentence runs away! I shall return after another helping of Fresh Fruits...!
[April 8/9, 17]
Showing posts with label J H Prynne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J H Prynne. Show all posts
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Thursday, January 26, 2017
THIS WRITING LIFE
from Journal,
17-01-17
1/
At the Shop talking to a man looking for a couple of volumes of the Complete Shelley. He's been a celebrant for 22 years. I referred to Jurate's mother's funeral & their celebrant from Alison Monkhouse, a friend of Jurate's. He said you stand up there & face the family & friends of, let's say, an 85 or 90 year-old, but what on earth do you know? what do you say? Described himself as a bookaholic. (Hah! You're in the right place then, my man!) I mentioned Des Cowley's reading of Little Gidding in the service. Obviously he knew it personally, big fan of Eliot, perhaps the later Eliot more so he said. But many of my 'customers' are from the Western Suburbs, he explained: "T.S. Eliot? wasnt he a cricketer?" But poetry of all kinds, he said, the words & music, touches & informs where the facts of a life might not…
2/
Having utilised what could be called experimental writing's template when I began teaching at the Council of Adult Education in the 1970s --believing that contemporary poetry's adventures were far more efficacious for my liberation seeking, mind expanding classes than an historical examination of form --I was redirected by later & perhaps somewhat older students into the classics. I dont mean Greek & Latin or Shakespeare, the Romantics, but the tradition as it ran through the late 19th & 20th Centuries. I had derived exercises from Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Fielding Dawson, Joe Brainard, Dadaists & Surrealists --the tradition of the New but nothing of the Tradition per se. For example, a particular gentleman tested me with his enthusiasm for G M Hopkins. For modern classics I had Robert Browning, Pound, DH Lawrence & a small amount of Eliot but now took on the Hopkins, which had probably defeated me at Tech College in the early '60s, if only to keep the discussion going at the next session! So my reeducation commenced. Similarly, I was asked for both Virginia Woolf & Sylvia Plath, for gender reasons, and investigating them anew realized their abiding value. (All true but this broad brush omits such correctives as, via a lesson Eric Rolls gave to a workshop class we shared in Bathurst,NSW in 1974, De Quincey's marvelous word music in a looping passage of The English Mailcoach --19th century? My hitherto indubitable historical aesthetics could now only unravel! Perhaps on a par with my Cambridge pal John Hall's 1969 lesson --no university in me you see-- making a relation for Robert Herrick, say, & our new British & Americans, Williams to Creeley & Oppen, including Crozier & Prynne...) When I think of it, despite one's wide-ranging reading in the new poetries, mutual exclusivity was rampant & profound. An abiding avant garde bridge should have been Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry --his blind selection (that is, unattributed selection of authors) which could often find one preferring the classic to the contemporary! Now I understood Zukofsky's test of ear, by ear, begging questions of sound & sense…
3/
A resume might run like this : In lieu of traditional form one has a syntax informed by conversation & 'utterance' (from natural strong expression to cultivated Expressionism). Conversation (good hearing / scoring by ear) might have become decoration --the decoration of the ghost of form such that it is seen or hinted at, but without the erstwhile style or gravitas. I mean, of course, the sonority --but without one, none of the other? What is said --what & how --is the priority which required poesy's junking, 19th into 20th Century… the force of saying, of telling --testimony as the new eloquence. And maximum attention to what was previously marginal --poetics of interpolation & interjection on the rebound from the excess of the literary. And so it is --1970s "literature after…", "poetry after death of…", the "belated", the "posthumous"… But, swings & roundabouts --& the gift of a slightly longer life than youth's Lyricism predicted --here one is again in & with 21st Century's "whole house of poetry" (my proposition in the mid 90s, argued in Ivor Indyk's Heat magazine)... For years now literary & anti-literary/post-literary on the same or at least facing pages... the same & not the same... Tis all good my friends... [Available for painting & renovation, local tradesman, CV on request…]
17-01-17
1/
At the Shop talking to a man looking for a couple of volumes of the Complete Shelley. He's been a celebrant for 22 years. I referred to Jurate's mother's funeral & their celebrant from Alison Monkhouse, a friend of Jurate's. He said you stand up there & face the family & friends of, let's say, an 85 or 90 year-old, but what on earth do you know? what do you say? Described himself as a bookaholic. (Hah! You're in the right place then, my man!) I mentioned Des Cowley's reading of Little Gidding in the service. Obviously he knew it personally, big fan of Eliot, perhaps the later Eliot more so he said. But many of my 'customers' are from the Western Suburbs, he explained: "T.S. Eliot? wasnt he a cricketer?" But poetry of all kinds, he said, the words & music, touches & informs where the facts of a life might not…
2/
Having utilised what could be called experimental writing's template when I began teaching at the Council of Adult Education in the 1970s --believing that contemporary poetry's adventures were far more efficacious for my liberation seeking, mind expanding classes than an historical examination of form --I was redirected by later & perhaps somewhat older students into the classics. I dont mean Greek & Latin or Shakespeare, the Romantics, but the tradition as it ran through the late 19th & 20th Centuries. I had derived exercises from Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Fielding Dawson, Joe Brainard, Dadaists & Surrealists --the tradition of the New but nothing of the Tradition per se. For example, a particular gentleman tested me with his enthusiasm for G M Hopkins. For modern classics I had Robert Browning, Pound, DH Lawrence & a small amount of Eliot but now took on the Hopkins, which had probably defeated me at Tech College in the early '60s, if only to keep the discussion going at the next session! So my reeducation commenced. Similarly, I was asked for both Virginia Woolf & Sylvia Plath, for gender reasons, and investigating them anew realized their abiding value. (All true but this broad brush omits such correctives as, via a lesson Eric Rolls gave to a workshop class we shared in Bathurst,NSW in 1974, De Quincey's marvelous word music in a looping passage of The English Mailcoach --19th century? My hitherto indubitable historical aesthetics could now only unravel! Perhaps on a par with my Cambridge pal John Hall's 1969 lesson --no university in me you see-- making a relation for Robert Herrick, say, & our new British & Americans, Williams to Creeley & Oppen, including Crozier & Prynne...) When I think of it, despite one's wide-ranging reading in the new poetries, mutual exclusivity was rampant & profound. An abiding avant garde bridge should have been Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry --his blind selection (that is, unattributed selection of authors) which could often find one preferring the classic to the contemporary! Now I understood Zukofsky's test of ear, by ear, begging questions of sound & sense…
3/
A resume might run like this : In lieu of traditional form one has a syntax informed by conversation & 'utterance' (from natural strong expression to cultivated Expressionism). Conversation (good hearing / scoring by ear) might have become decoration --the decoration of the ghost of form such that it is seen or hinted at, but without the erstwhile style or gravitas. I mean, of course, the sonority --but without one, none of the other? What is said --what & how --is the priority which required poesy's junking, 19th into 20th Century… the force of saying, of telling --testimony as the new eloquence. And maximum attention to what was previously marginal --poetics of interpolation & interjection on the rebound from the excess of the literary. And so it is --1970s "literature after…", "poetry after death of…", the "belated", the "posthumous"… But, swings & roundabouts --& the gift of a slightly longer life than youth's Lyricism predicted --here one is again in & with 21st Century's "whole house of poetry" (my proposition in the mid 90s, argued in Ivor Indyk's Heat magazine)... For years now literary & anti-literary/post-literary on the same or at least facing pages... the same & not the same... Tis all good my friends... [Available for painting & renovation, local tradesman, CV on request…]
Sunday, September 19, 2010
DIVERTIMENTI : VLEESKENS, BELTRAMETTI, CALDWELL, LEBER, SPENCE
Why wouldnt I admit it? Bored, irritated, enervated by the whole biz --what John Forbes, amplifying the Sydney/Melbourne, 1970s, 'new poetry' discussion about the mainstream, called "talented earache"! Then again, as one good poem doesnt make a summer so one bad poem doesnt herald winter. Yet it speaks volumes of one's expectation for poetry that bad writing (and I hasten to qualify : in one's own opinion, thus disposition as well as the particular education undertaken in service of the art) can cause more misery than an inadequate menu or perpetually late train.
The more important complaint is not being able to see the poems for the poetics (or less --for the method of their construction). In my head I sound-off like that 70s discussion & rail against the sound of squeaky clean construction & its inevitable decorum, regardless that some of my own (particularly '90s) production is pronged on the same indictment!
And then, out of the blue, the universe deals a delightful hand --Grant Caldwell's glass clouds, Michelle Leber's The Weeping Grass, Pete Spence's Sonnets, Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti. Or do I simply wake up on the correct side of the bed? (Surely I dont have to explain that!)
A first impression of clarity of thought & expression, as I skimmed Caldwell's new collection, had me imagining a poetry of wisdom. And the image (or proposition) was still in my mind as I read Leber's poems, that they were knowing & wise. For example, regarding the latter, the gleaming blade of the line which introduces her poem, The Boonwurrung Coast, located at Cape Paterson (coincidentally where Cornelis Vleeskens hung out for many years) --"We let all things take form in the morning light."-- is capable of cutting through anything, including the taxonomy & imagery of sea-birds & flora let alone hints of initiation into shamanistic mysteries. And the triple repetition of the pregnant phrase "In the best part of May" (in the poem of that name), is similarly almost independent of the narrative (however brilliantly inhabited by the anthropomorphised persona telling its creation tale).
In Leber, the gainliness of that combination of scientific & perceptional language evokes authority. Local Barometer, for example : "Port Philip Bay is quicksilver in a glass. / Grey beryllium dust and copper sun-shards rise above waves. / A wind-whip of a baton conducts in tricky 7/8 time. / Ordinarily, a sea-gust's libretto is sung from a silver gull, / and now a gannets' gale-force chorus carves sandstone. / Within this capsule - held up by vertical cliffs / - an interior spring prevents a cloud's collapse. / The weight of water once floating in Torricelli's tube, / now scummed on a pollution-meniscus. / As a desert licks a city's hem-line, / fever rises in pacific oceans, shifts moisture to the equator; / flash-flooding in the north, yet our backyard is cinder / - tomorrow, horizon's axe will swing at noon."
No doubt these are crafted poems --they had to have been carved & chivvied to make their particular density, and a long way from what I'm going to say about Cornelis Vleeskens... But I'm being led to contradictory propositions : firstly, that what she has to say calls the tune; secondly, that her keen observation imposes veracity regardless of subject-matter. One thing for sure : no ho-hum in Michelle Leber's Weeping Grass (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010)...
As I've flagged, something of the same's entailed in Grant Caldwell's glass clouds (Five Islands Press, 2010). The tone of 'something being said' emanates from sufficient poems to impress authority. Not the old literary gravitas (no matter 'made new') but the conjunction of writing and spoken-word's well oiled tongue. From the outset let's insist Caldwell isnt casual however relaxed --the relaxation with syntax, that is, which is the crux of modern English-language poetry, --allowing then its objectors to be eccentric rather than reactionary (except for the vanguard camp, censorial to the last). Plain-speaking, however, is only one of the founding twins; the other never ditched the richer dictionary. Thus the double spring & thrust of 20thCentury & on's poetry. Caldwell's stepping-off from that rung doesnt yet qualify as construction --it's still utterance, more or less (the how it is, the what happened). And maybe it is 'irony' which distinguishes him from numerous other common speakers, and most of them unheralded --as Vleeskens is, for example --not that he's bitching : equanimity rhymes in divertimenti with wine & good music, and what more would one want?
Further to 'wise' : as though ancient Chinese hermit or mendicant poet...! Maybe it was the haiku-like poems in the centre of glass clouds (though that's 'Japanese') as well as his serious meditations on perception (necessarily equating phenomenal experience & language representation --"the window of the past is complete / but you are blind, or a blind") --which compelled the impression. Not to say subsequent reading disabused it --more, that the amount of distress also gathered there revoked the semblance of resolution. In Melbourne, though, as any capital of the Western world, where else does wisdom lie than in the tension of normal attachment & its desired opposite? Caldwell's erstwhile persona of the wry humorist (open his last book, Dreaming of Robert de Niro (FIP, '03), at random for any example) is perhaps succeeded here by the poet following doubt's philosophical trail to a halfway house of serenity (if one accepts as influence two of these poems' dedicatees, Derrida & Claire Gaskin).
Caldwell's tour de force is the hypnotic across the sea, which begins "the sea comes / across itself / here it comes / across itself / see it coming / it comes and comes / across itself / it keeps coming / it never stops", continuing in like fashion for a further 35 lines. It is a reiteration of the fact of sea --of 'the sea' as an event --which succeeds in summoning sea's ceaseless movement whilst rendering each wave's singularity, and the poet's observation of it a definitive exhileration!
Reading Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do : almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville & John Riley, who'd advised that Franco, our fellow Grosseteste Review contributor, would be visiting London in '71 --or was it shortly before the Hemensleys returned to Melbourne in '72? --but that was cancelled. Any meeting in the flesh was forever thwarted by his sudden death in 1995. He remains an exotic correspondent, then, from the golden age of hand & typewritten letters, always missed now as though a friend.
And Vleeskens' book instantly recalls Sperlonga Manhattan Express, an international anthology edited by Beltrametti (Scorribanda Productions, San Vitale, Switzerland, 1980), because of the A-4 / 210-297mm page size & the visual content --Franco's pics from all hands & lands (e.g, P. Gigli's photo of the Berrigans, poems by Koller, Raworth, Gysin, Whalen postcard/cartoon, J Blaine, G D'Agostino, et al); Cornelis' own montage, drawings, calligraphy, typography --the same mail-art internationale, Fluxus, neo-Dada style more readily recognized from Pete Spence's affiliations & practice --particularly relevant here because of the latter's regular appearance in the divertimenti.
Vleeskens & Beltrametti are both Europeans who've crucially intersected with the anti-formal (looser, casual) English-language poetry (are they 'casualties' then!), especially the post WW2 Americans, progeny of Pound & Williams, New York, San Francisco, the West Coast, at a time when Europe was reaffirming its own liberatory tradition (Dada, Surrealism & on) &, similarly, opening to new worlds. And because they're not British or North American or Australian, except by adoption, their European origins & references are never out of mind.
Not an exact match, by any means --but somewhere along the line they've both decided to riff on life & not on literature, though there is a literature of just that sort of thing, and a life that contains literature, music, painting, etc. But theirs is another reminder of the efficacy of the un-made, journal-esque writing, --as clear & direct as we reconstruct the Ancient Chinese & Japanese to be, and whose transparency doesnt necessarily prefer the naive to the esoteric or the well-known to the uncommon (take the music Vleeskens listens to daily &, therefore, records in his communiques --or his philately habit or the breadth of his correspondence, all noted).
Beltrametti's poem The Key might be credo for Vleeskens too :
What was well started shall be finished. / What was not, should be thrown away.
Lew Welch, Hermit Poems.
1 ) the place & the season : winter
2 ) somebody (myself) right here : real & unreal
3 ) what is he doing & what's going on in his head
4 ) how & why is he saying it
5 ) to somebody else (you) elsewhere
something happens?
the circle (real & unreal)
isnt closed
[27/1/72]
--published in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973), the blurbs for which by Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Claude Pelieu, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai & Guillaume Chpaltine are fair snap of his American/European compass.
Context & correspondence, as in O'Hara, Berrigan, Phil Whalen of course, are vital here in distinguishing such notes & exclamations from the bagatelle they might otherwise be --and Jeremy Prynne's terrific comment on O'Hara jumps to mind, that unlike New York's "art gallery nympholepts", he "always has that pail of serpents in view" --: the poet's obligation, as felt, to be right here, to tell how & what it is without literary diversion, the further extent of which is selling-out, blunting if not losing the existential point. (Echoing Olson's Human Universe suit for the poem as 'one of Nature's things', Ray Di Palma hazards, "a poem is one of the almost successful / forces of nature", --in the 3rd of one of Language Poetry's more beautiful sequences, Territory (from Numbers & Tempers, Selected Early Poems, 1966-86; Sun & Moon, '93), which begins, "the desperado / and his abacus / in utopia" --the perfect cartoon for what I'm getting at?! --but that project was performed within /refined writing, albeit a stepping-up of the casual, and isnt the minstrelsy of the memorandum with which I'm ever besotted!)
Divertimenti : to amuse himself & his friends --to divert & be diverted... Diverted from what? Old cliche : the bind of daily life. But hardly, since it's all this poetry's made of. His note : "These divertimenti originally appeared as individual leaflets and were written for the poet's own amusement and that of the handful of friends who were lucky enough to receive the odd one in the mail or at a poetry reading during the last two years of his life on the Victorian coast... he now lives a totally different existence on the NSW Northern Tablelands."
How would you know? His latest Earthdance chapbook, Sandals in camel (drawings & poems), is surreal as narrative & peppered with elsewhere's place names & distinctions (New York, Parisian, Berlin, Belgian, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Italian etc), persuading one of his long assumed cosmopolitan ambit. Interesting inference though --'texts' of the life as lived versus 'poems' (importantly, formed in the cross-wires of Dutch & English).
An earlier collection, Ochre Dancer (Earthdance, '99), has the same atmosphere & tone of divertimenti or better said, the divertimenti are cut from his familiar cloth differing only in the attitude of making or framing.
That's the discussion then, in the blur of any such distinction these days... Bits of life (titles & notes of musical recordings, books, lists of food & drink bought & consumed, incoming mail) intersect with thoughts, observations, conversation.
Recalling Kath Walker (Oodgeroo of Noonucull)'s admonition not to appear like a preacher or a politician, Cornelis muses, "Sometimes I wanted to PREACH // But now I just want to share / some of the ordinary things / in the days of a retired poet..."
Diversions from the notion of retirement? Retirement from poetic ambition (craft & career)? I'd identify with that myself. Breaking the cast but keeping one's hand in, and surprising oneself when something more poem than antidote happens along. The list/letter/journal poetry of our time makes it harder to distinguish source from artefact, but found or made they provide as many pleasures as there are days.
"Ah! a new month!
So I turn the calendar to March
A Corneille arial landscape
looking like a cross between
Mondriaan's sketch of a jetty
jutting into North Sea waves
and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
The calendar was published
for Corneille's 70th birthday
11 years ago but I still
flip over each month
to show that not all days are the same"
Divertimenti is a book which can be taken up anywhere. It invites flicking because of the open-endedness of its narrative.
"Find an image
of the sun's atmosphere
in The Nature of the Universe
by Fred Hoyle (1950)
so reach for Catherine de Zegher
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
hardback catalogue
of the exhibition at
The Drawing Center, New York, 2000
& put on an old vinyl recording
of Peter Sculthorpe's Sun Music #1
for Orchestra (1965)
The sun sets at 5-58
Broodje haring
broodje kaas
en 'n zure bon
Enjoy a glass or two of red
& the clear sound of Marion Verbruggen
playing airs from van Eyck's
Der Fluyten Lust-Hof "
So many dates & times of day, month, year, but the book is always written in present tense, and a sense of the present, in which historical time is subsumed, pervades. All times in diverimenti are concurrent; even the different places defer to the here of Vleeskens' whereabouts.
Despite it being a kind of 'in-lieu of writing' (an 'in-lieu-of-writing writing'?), possessing the light touch of genial conversation & a journal's talking-to-oneself, it also teases one as a discourse on time & place, & of poem as its own place where, paradoxically, its own mercuriality might be traced.
Unsurprisingly, much of this has been the preoccupation of divertimenti's fellow classical & modern music afficianado Pete Spence --typically recalled by Vleeskens at one point, "I think up these lines / while walking home / after putting Katherine / on the 6.37 a.m. bus for Melbourne / but have to wait to write them / till the telephone wakes Pete at 10.35 // My pen & paper are on the desk / in the guestroom where he snores on"...
Spence's Sonnets (a co-production of Karl-Friedrich Hacker's Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia; limited edition of 50, 2009) have been with me throughout these reflections. Sonnet 9 is a good example:
" walking Planck's constant in a red shift?
great day! upwind the day winds down
squares of light are thrown about
should i feel ok now that yesterday
is the subject of these poems? better
to be quick about it like a shadow
taking shade from today's sun! when
will i have room where there's room
where i can roam variously & hang
my tantrums & other guests?
the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!
its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!
a mullet sidles through the air
& i'm stunned by its flight! "
Riffing off life or literature? Seems to me it's a perfect blend of voice & reference, where perfection refers to an individual's inimitable register, in this case Spence's naturalization of reference, the opposite of ornamentation, of literary embellishment. It's all become as particular as experience, and 'all' are the prime sources he's so kind to append : Ted Berrigan, Laurie Duggan, Peter Schjeldahl, plus Forbes, Satie, Beckett, Shakespeare... All adds up to "Spence"!
Looking now for the perfect conclusion I find this from near to the 'end' of divertimenti :
" That photo of Peter-Jan Wagemans
makes him look like
a well-fed Vinkenoog from the sixties
In his liner notes
he comes across
as didactic & conceited
I pull on my walking-boots
& listen to Het Landschap (1990)
played by Tomoko Mukaiyama on piano
It is not the landscape I see around me
It is not any dutch landscape I recall
He states it is the landscape
of his music - but he is wrong
It is the landscape of my writing"
Boom-boom!
------------------------------------------------------------------
[16-8-10 / 18-9-10]
Kris Hemensley
The more important complaint is not being able to see the poems for the poetics (or less --for the method of their construction). In my head I sound-off like that 70s discussion & rail against the sound of squeaky clean construction & its inevitable decorum, regardless that some of my own (particularly '90s) production is pronged on the same indictment!
And then, out of the blue, the universe deals a delightful hand --Grant Caldwell's glass clouds, Michelle Leber's The Weeping Grass, Pete Spence's Sonnets, Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti. Or do I simply wake up on the correct side of the bed? (Surely I dont have to explain that!)
A first impression of clarity of thought & expression, as I skimmed Caldwell's new collection, had me imagining a poetry of wisdom. And the image (or proposition) was still in my mind as I read Leber's poems, that they were knowing & wise. For example, regarding the latter, the gleaming blade of the line which introduces her poem, The Boonwurrung Coast, located at Cape Paterson (coincidentally where Cornelis Vleeskens hung out for many years) --"We let all things take form in the morning light."-- is capable of cutting through anything, including the taxonomy & imagery of sea-birds & flora let alone hints of initiation into shamanistic mysteries. And the triple repetition of the pregnant phrase "In the best part of May" (in the poem of that name), is similarly almost independent of the narrative (however brilliantly inhabited by the anthropomorphised persona telling its creation tale).
In Leber, the gainliness of that combination of scientific & perceptional language evokes authority. Local Barometer, for example : "Port Philip Bay is quicksilver in a glass. / Grey beryllium dust and copper sun-shards rise above waves. / A wind-whip of a baton conducts in tricky 7/8 time. / Ordinarily, a sea-gust's libretto is sung from a silver gull, / and now a gannets' gale-force chorus carves sandstone. / Within this capsule - held up by vertical cliffs / - an interior spring prevents a cloud's collapse. / The weight of water once floating in Torricelli's tube, / now scummed on a pollution-meniscus. / As a desert licks a city's hem-line, / fever rises in pacific oceans, shifts moisture to the equator; / flash-flooding in the north, yet our backyard is cinder / - tomorrow, horizon's axe will swing at noon."
No doubt these are crafted poems --they had to have been carved & chivvied to make their particular density, and a long way from what I'm going to say about Cornelis Vleeskens... But I'm being led to contradictory propositions : firstly, that what she has to say calls the tune; secondly, that her keen observation imposes veracity regardless of subject-matter. One thing for sure : no ho-hum in Michelle Leber's Weeping Grass (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010)...
As I've flagged, something of the same's entailed in Grant Caldwell's glass clouds (Five Islands Press, 2010). The tone of 'something being said' emanates from sufficient poems to impress authority. Not the old literary gravitas (no matter 'made new') but the conjunction of writing and spoken-word's well oiled tongue. From the outset let's insist Caldwell isnt casual however relaxed --the relaxation with syntax, that is, which is the crux of modern English-language poetry, --allowing then its objectors to be eccentric rather than reactionary (except for the vanguard camp, censorial to the last). Plain-speaking, however, is only one of the founding twins; the other never ditched the richer dictionary. Thus the double spring & thrust of 20thCentury & on's poetry. Caldwell's stepping-off from that rung doesnt yet qualify as construction --it's still utterance, more or less (the how it is, the what happened). And maybe it is 'irony' which distinguishes him from numerous other common speakers, and most of them unheralded --as Vleeskens is, for example --not that he's bitching : equanimity rhymes in divertimenti with wine & good music, and what more would one want?
Further to 'wise' : as though ancient Chinese hermit or mendicant poet...! Maybe it was the haiku-like poems in the centre of glass clouds (though that's 'Japanese') as well as his serious meditations on perception (necessarily equating phenomenal experience & language representation --"the window of the past is complete / but you are blind, or a blind") --which compelled the impression. Not to say subsequent reading disabused it --more, that the amount of distress also gathered there revoked the semblance of resolution. In Melbourne, though, as any capital of the Western world, where else does wisdom lie than in the tension of normal attachment & its desired opposite? Caldwell's erstwhile persona of the wry humorist (open his last book, Dreaming of Robert de Niro (FIP, '03), at random for any example) is perhaps succeeded here by the poet following doubt's philosophical trail to a halfway house of serenity (if one accepts as influence two of these poems' dedicatees, Derrida & Claire Gaskin).
Caldwell's tour de force is the hypnotic across the sea, which begins "the sea comes / across itself / here it comes / across itself / see it coming / it comes and comes / across itself / it keeps coming / it never stops", continuing in like fashion for a further 35 lines. It is a reiteration of the fact of sea --of 'the sea' as an event --which succeeds in summoning sea's ceaseless movement whilst rendering each wave's singularity, and the poet's observation of it a definitive exhileration!
Reading Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do : almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville & John Riley, who'd advised that Franco, our fellow Grosseteste Review contributor, would be visiting London in '71 --or was it shortly before the Hemensleys returned to Melbourne in '72? --but that was cancelled. Any meeting in the flesh was forever thwarted by his sudden death in 1995. He remains an exotic correspondent, then, from the golden age of hand & typewritten letters, always missed now as though a friend.
And Vleeskens' book instantly recalls Sperlonga Manhattan Express, an international anthology edited by Beltrametti (Scorribanda Productions, San Vitale, Switzerland, 1980), because of the A-4 / 210-297mm page size & the visual content --Franco's pics from all hands & lands (e.g, P. Gigli's photo of the Berrigans, poems by Koller, Raworth, Gysin, Whalen postcard/cartoon, J Blaine, G D'Agostino, et al); Cornelis' own montage, drawings, calligraphy, typography --the same mail-art internationale, Fluxus, neo-Dada style more readily recognized from Pete Spence's affiliations & practice --particularly relevant here because of the latter's regular appearance in the divertimenti.
Vleeskens & Beltrametti are both Europeans who've crucially intersected with the anti-formal (looser, casual) English-language poetry (are they 'casualties' then!), especially the post WW2 Americans, progeny of Pound & Williams, New York, San Francisco, the West Coast, at a time when Europe was reaffirming its own liberatory tradition (Dada, Surrealism & on) &, similarly, opening to new worlds. And because they're not British or North American or Australian, except by adoption, their European origins & references are never out of mind.
Not an exact match, by any means --but somewhere along the line they've both decided to riff on life & not on literature, though there is a literature of just that sort of thing, and a life that contains literature, music, painting, etc. But theirs is another reminder of the efficacy of the un-made, journal-esque writing, --as clear & direct as we reconstruct the Ancient Chinese & Japanese to be, and whose transparency doesnt necessarily prefer the naive to the esoteric or the well-known to the uncommon (take the music Vleeskens listens to daily &, therefore, records in his communiques --or his philately habit or the breadth of his correspondence, all noted).
Beltrametti's poem The Key might be credo for Vleeskens too :
What was well started shall be finished. / What was not, should be thrown away.
Lew Welch, Hermit Poems.
1 ) the place & the season : winter
2 ) somebody (myself) right here : real & unreal
3 ) what is he doing & what's going on in his head
4 ) how & why is he saying it
5 ) to somebody else (you) elsewhere
something happens?
the circle (real & unreal)
isnt closed
[27/1/72]
--published in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973), the blurbs for which by Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Claude Pelieu, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai & Guillaume Chpaltine are fair snap of his American/European compass.
Context & correspondence, as in O'Hara, Berrigan, Phil Whalen of course, are vital here in distinguishing such notes & exclamations from the bagatelle they might otherwise be --and Jeremy Prynne's terrific comment on O'Hara jumps to mind, that unlike New York's "art gallery nympholepts", he "always has that pail of serpents in view" --: the poet's obligation, as felt, to be right here, to tell how & what it is without literary diversion, the further extent of which is selling-out, blunting if not losing the existential point. (Echoing Olson's Human Universe suit for the poem as 'one of Nature's things', Ray Di Palma hazards, "a poem is one of the almost successful / forces of nature", --in the 3rd of one of Language Poetry's more beautiful sequences, Territory (from Numbers & Tempers, Selected Early Poems, 1966-86; Sun & Moon, '93), which begins, "the desperado / and his abacus / in utopia" --the perfect cartoon for what I'm getting at?! --but that project was performed within /refined writing, albeit a stepping-up of the casual, and isnt the minstrelsy of the memorandum with which I'm ever besotted!)
Divertimenti : to amuse himself & his friends --to divert & be diverted... Diverted from what? Old cliche : the bind of daily life. But hardly, since it's all this poetry's made of. His note : "These divertimenti originally appeared as individual leaflets and were written for the poet's own amusement and that of the handful of friends who were lucky enough to receive the odd one in the mail or at a poetry reading during the last two years of his life on the Victorian coast... he now lives a totally different existence on the NSW Northern Tablelands."
How would you know? His latest Earthdance chapbook, Sandals in camel (drawings & poems), is surreal as narrative & peppered with elsewhere's place names & distinctions (New York, Parisian, Berlin, Belgian, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Italian etc), persuading one of his long assumed cosmopolitan ambit. Interesting inference though --'texts' of the life as lived versus 'poems' (importantly, formed in the cross-wires of Dutch & English).
An earlier collection, Ochre Dancer (Earthdance, '99), has the same atmosphere & tone of divertimenti or better said, the divertimenti are cut from his familiar cloth differing only in the attitude of making or framing.
That's the discussion then, in the blur of any such distinction these days... Bits of life (titles & notes of musical recordings, books, lists of food & drink bought & consumed, incoming mail) intersect with thoughts, observations, conversation.
Recalling Kath Walker (Oodgeroo of Noonucull)'s admonition not to appear like a preacher or a politician, Cornelis muses, "Sometimes I wanted to PREACH // But now I just want to share / some of the ordinary things / in the days of a retired poet..."
Diversions from the notion of retirement? Retirement from poetic ambition (craft & career)? I'd identify with that myself. Breaking the cast but keeping one's hand in, and surprising oneself when something more poem than antidote happens along. The list/letter/journal poetry of our time makes it harder to distinguish source from artefact, but found or made they provide as many pleasures as there are days.
"Ah! a new month!
So I turn the calendar to March
A Corneille arial landscape
looking like a cross between
Mondriaan's sketch of a jetty
jutting into North Sea waves
and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
The calendar was published
for Corneille's 70th birthday
11 years ago but I still
flip over each month
to show that not all days are the same"
Divertimenti is a book which can be taken up anywhere. It invites flicking because of the open-endedness of its narrative.
"Find an image
of the sun's atmosphere
in The Nature of the Universe
by Fred Hoyle (1950)
so reach for Catherine de Zegher
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
hardback catalogue
of the exhibition at
The Drawing Center, New York, 2000
& put on an old vinyl recording
of Peter Sculthorpe's Sun Music #1
for Orchestra (1965)
The sun sets at 5-58
Broodje haring
broodje kaas
en 'n zure bon
Enjoy a glass or two of red
& the clear sound of Marion Verbruggen
playing airs from van Eyck's
Der Fluyten Lust-Hof "
So many dates & times of day, month, year, but the book is always written in present tense, and a sense of the present, in which historical time is subsumed, pervades. All times in diverimenti are concurrent; even the different places defer to the here of Vleeskens' whereabouts.
Despite it being a kind of 'in-lieu of writing' (an 'in-lieu-of-writing writing'?), possessing the light touch of genial conversation & a journal's talking-to-oneself, it also teases one as a discourse on time & place, & of poem as its own place where, paradoxically, its own mercuriality might be traced.
Unsurprisingly, much of this has been the preoccupation of divertimenti's fellow classical & modern music afficianado Pete Spence --typically recalled by Vleeskens at one point, "I think up these lines / while walking home / after putting Katherine / on the 6.37 a.m. bus for Melbourne / but have to wait to write them / till the telephone wakes Pete at 10.35 // My pen & paper are on the desk / in the guestroom where he snores on"...
Spence's Sonnets (a co-production of Karl-Friedrich Hacker's Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia; limited edition of 50, 2009) have been with me throughout these reflections. Sonnet 9 is a good example:
" walking Planck's constant in a red shift?
great day! upwind the day winds down
squares of light are thrown about
should i feel ok now that yesterday
is the subject of these poems? better
to be quick about it like a shadow
taking shade from today's sun! when
will i have room where there's room
where i can roam variously & hang
my tantrums & other guests?
the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!
its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!
a mullet sidles through the air
& i'm stunned by its flight! "
Riffing off life or literature? Seems to me it's a perfect blend of voice & reference, where perfection refers to an individual's inimitable register, in this case Spence's naturalization of reference, the opposite of ornamentation, of literary embellishment. It's all become as particular as experience, and 'all' are the prime sources he's so kind to append : Ted Berrigan, Laurie Duggan, Peter Schjeldahl, plus Forbes, Satie, Beckett, Shakespeare... All adds up to "Spence"!
Looking now for the perfect conclusion I find this from near to the 'end' of divertimenti :
" That photo of Peter-Jan Wagemans
makes him look like
a well-fed Vinkenoog from the sixties
In his liner notes
he comes across
as didactic & conceited
I pull on my walking-boots
& listen to Het Landschap (1990)
played by Tomoko Mukaiyama on piano
It is not the landscape I see around me
It is not any dutch landscape I recall
He states it is the landscape
of his music - but he is wrong
It is the landscape of my writing"
Boom-boom!
------------------------------------------------------------------
[16-8-10 / 18-9-10]
Kris Hemensley
Sunday, August 30, 2009
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 Var̬se, 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 Р880 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]
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 Var̬se, 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 Р880 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
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]
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 11
INTRODUCTION TO THE ARCHIVE OF ENIGMA screening of BERNIE O'REGAN'S FILMS; at the Dancehouse, Melbourne, June 15th, 1998
I like the title of tonight's presentation of the late Bernie O'Regan's films.
It's an "archive of enigma" because he didnt, apparently, leave his work in any discernible order --that is, apart from his work-books, which would have to be as important a legacy of his work as his completed artefacts & recent projects.
He's an enigma in himself and, dare I say it, to himself. Of course that's true in varying extent for anyone, --so it's the extent of mystery, of doubt, in respect of origin, derivation, prospect, perspective, attitude, direction, accent & subject that makes Bernie O'Regan so much more of an enigma as person & poet-photographer.
As Jude Telford states in her perfect & poignant reminiscence, Memories of London, (that is, the London of 1971), "for some of us poetry was in film"...
Important to establish this right from the start --Bernie O'Regan was a film-maker/photographer in an environment whose crucial language was poetry. For some film-makers this is a boon, for others a deadweight. Some of that is covered by Stan Brakhage, who deals with it problematically though of course so very interestingly. Bernie would have found in Brakhage the inspiration for an instinctual or natural film-making, just as he would have found in Frederick Sommer a yielding to the given --the given image as a meeting of internal & external nature perhaps.
Bernie's first poet friend was the English poet, John Hall --John had been a student at Cambridge [in the mid 1960s], where everyone's a poet and has been forever --and John was publishing poetry within what came to be known as the Cambridge School fraction of the New British Poetry.
John had the English tradition in him --Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, et al --but I think only as established by Ezra Pound's canon. He had encountered Charles Olson & Robert Duncan through his teacher Jeremy Prynne's influence. He read his Black Mountain school and also his New York school...
Bernie got that much closer to whatever of the New Poetry he'd read through knowing John Hall.
I met Bernie at the Totnes Arts Festival in South Devon in 1972 . I'd met John Hall in 1970 [in Southampton] and we'd corresponded --he was the first of my blue-pencil critics on the English scene --poets whose criticism I trusted. He'd invited Bernie O'Regan as the film-maker for the festival. I was one of the poets [David Chaloner was the other]. And a friendship & colleagueship began.
I remember that the movie Bernie showed at the Festival was silent , accompanied by a tape of rock music --I seem to recall the Rolling Stones. I dont think any of his films had sound aside of music.
I also think that words, especially poetical conceptions/poetry, surround his photographs --and that the photo sequences he produced later in his life are like films...
Certainly, our unfinished photo & text collaboration, which I called BIOAUTOGRAPHY, was a kind of film which would have been seen as a book as well as an exhibition.
I want to suggest that as a film-maker/photographer among poets, Bernie constructed a poetics which derived at least equally from poets as from film-makers & photographers.
Part of a poem by John Hall called European History, is a chronology --"the chronology," says the poet, "is that of poignant grief." "The story begins / with wonder and pilfering just like poetry."
The last 3 items are :
"(24) history is bigger than any of us, hence 'tragedy' or, if the doomed aren't
beautiful
(25) despair
there is no direct mention of war, partly because the astute always see it
coming and partly because I understand it as little as I do peace or poetry
(26) pastime
this history is about daily life : the details fill themselves in."
Another book [of poems] by John Hall, Meaning Insomnia [Grosseteste,UK, 1978], is dedicated to Bernie. It was published 20 years ago. It contains a prose-piece, The Field in Bernie's Photograph, and I'll quote : " If it is the first or second day of 1970 and you are walking towards Toby's Point, there is snow on the ground in the fields that you pass. (...) Bernie, who makes photographs, passed by this field during the two days in which, according to our hypothesis, you may also have been there. The snow is not the whitest thing in his photograph; there is whiter in the sky...."
In 1983 I published [in H/EAR magazine, #4, Melbourne] a sequence of poems by Bernie entitled "1981 : A series of Photographs in the manner of one of my poems?" I quote :
"a man is walking
he is carrying something yellow
we can not see that it is yellow because this is black and white photography
however it has yellow written on it.
he is out of doors.
he is resting
the yellow thing he is carrying is like a flag
we cannot read the word yellow completely because it hangs down half furled"
I can imagine them with a title not mentioning photographs --and a poetry reader being quite satisfied with them as poems...
I'll close by quoting Bernie's poem in which he records his debt to [Melbourne poet] Ken Taylor, and some of the poem he refers to by Ken Taylor :
"(...)I have heard Ken Taylor / read Maurie speaks of a secret Australia / while in Iceland/ it is changed / or a rechanged / or recharged / it can save your life / literally / or at least my life / Frank O'Hara / you will know / I do not often speak of ten pin bowling / I said to Finola, with respect / after this I can become an Australian artist / with respect (...)"
"(...)Maurie told me of / a secret Australia, / of nurses and wood-cutters, / farmers, a young man / with cancer, / isolated behind the / cast-iron fence, / a Base Hospital in / a country town, / mid-week races on / a radio somewhere, / men in dressing gowns / to stop other men / in the street / to buy bottles of beer / through the cast-iron fence..." And from the end, "(...)Death in a cicada / summer and / everywhere / a sense of life / as cold / and as still / as that swing, said Maurie, / pointing."
I like the title of tonight's presentation of the late Bernie O'Regan's films.
It's an "archive of enigma" because he didnt, apparently, leave his work in any discernible order --that is, apart from his work-books, which would have to be as important a legacy of his work as his completed artefacts & recent projects.
He's an enigma in himself and, dare I say it, to himself. Of course that's true in varying extent for anyone, --so it's the extent of mystery, of doubt, in respect of origin, derivation, prospect, perspective, attitude, direction, accent & subject that makes Bernie O'Regan so much more of an enigma as person & poet-photographer.
As Jude Telford states in her perfect & poignant reminiscence, Memories of London, (that is, the London of 1971), "for some of us poetry was in film"...
Important to establish this right from the start --Bernie O'Regan was a film-maker/photographer in an environment whose crucial language was poetry. For some film-makers this is a boon, for others a deadweight. Some of that is covered by Stan Brakhage, who deals with it problematically though of course so very interestingly. Bernie would have found in Brakhage the inspiration for an instinctual or natural film-making, just as he would have found in Frederick Sommer a yielding to the given --the given image as a meeting of internal & external nature perhaps.
Bernie's first poet friend was the English poet, John Hall --John had been a student at Cambridge [in the mid 1960s], where everyone's a poet and has been forever --and John was publishing poetry within what came to be known as the Cambridge School fraction of the New British Poetry.
John had the English tradition in him --Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, et al --but I think only as established by Ezra Pound's canon. He had encountered Charles Olson & Robert Duncan through his teacher Jeremy Prynne's influence. He read his Black Mountain school and also his New York school...
Bernie got that much closer to whatever of the New Poetry he'd read through knowing John Hall.
I met Bernie at the Totnes Arts Festival in South Devon in 1972 . I'd met John Hall in 1970 [in Southampton] and we'd corresponded --he was the first of my blue-pencil critics on the English scene --poets whose criticism I trusted. He'd invited Bernie O'Regan as the film-maker for the festival. I was one of the poets [David Chaloner was the other]. And a friendship & colleagueship began.
I remember that the movie Bernie showed at the Festival was silent , accompanied by a tape of rock music --I seem to recall the Rolling Stones. I dont think any of his films had sound aside of music.
I also think that words, especially poetical conceptions/poetry, surround his photographs --and that the photo sequences he produced later in his life are like films...
Certainly, our unfinished photo & text collaboration, which I called BIOAUTOGRAPHY, was a kind of film which would have been seen as a book as well as an exhibition.
I want to suggest that as a film-maker/photographer among poets, Bernie constructed a poetics which derived at least equally from poets as from film-makers & photographers.
Part of a poem by John Hall called European History, is a chronology --"the chronology," says the poet, "is that of poignant grief." "The story begins / with wonder and pilfering just like poetry."
The last 3 items are :
"(24) history is bigger than any of us, hence 'tragedy' or, if the doomed aren't
beautiful
(25) despair
there is no direct mention of war, partly because the astute always see it
coming and partly because I understand it as little as I do peace or poetry
(26) pastime
this history is about daily life : the details fill themselves in."
Another book [of poems] by John Hall, Meaning Insomnia [Grosseteste,UK, 1978], is dedicated to Bernie. It was published 20 years ago. It contains a prose-piece, The Field in Bernie's Photograph, and I'll quote : " If it is the first or second day of 1970 and you are walking towards Toby's Point, there is snow on the ground in the fields that you pass. (...) Bernie, who makes photographs, passed by this field during the two days in which, according to our hypothesis, you may also have been there. The snow is not the whitest thing in his photograph; there is whiter in the sky...."
In 1983 I published [in H/EAR magazine, #4, Melbourne] a sequence of poems by Bernie entitled "1981 : A series of Photographs in the manner of one of my poems?" I quote :
"a man is walking
he is carrying something yellow
we can not see that it is yellow because this is black and white photography
however it has yellow written on it.
he is out of doors.
he is resting
the yellow thing he is carrying is like a flag
we cannot read the word yellow completely because it hangs down half furled"
I can imagine them with a title not mentioning photographs --and a poetry reader being quite satisfied with them as poems...
I'll close by quoting Bernie's poem in which he records his debt to [Melbourne poet] Ken Taylor, and some of the poem he refers to by Ken Taylor :
"(...)I have heard Ken Taylor / read Maurie speaks of a secret Australia / while in Iceland/ it is changed / or a rechanged / or recharged / it can save your life / literally / or at least my life / Frank O'Hara / you will know / I do not often speak of ten pin bowling / I said to Finola, with respect / after this I can become an Australian artist / with respect (...)"
"(...)Maurie told me of / a secret Australia, / of nurses and wood-cutters, / farmers, a young man / with cancer, / isolated behind the / cast-iron fence, / a Base Hospital in / a country town, / mid-week races on / a radio somewhere, / men in dressing gowns / to stop other men / in the street / to buy bottles of beer / through the cast-iron fence..." And from the end, "(...)Death in a cicada / summer and / everywhere / a sense of life / as cold / and as still / as that swing, said Maurie, / pointing."
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