Farewell Autumn, welcome Winter! April & May have come & gone! We'd better advertise Bloomsday then, the annual June 16th celebration falling this year on the Tuesday, which will be the next event at the Shop. In recent years, the profusion of Bloomsday events elsewhere leads us to concentrate our reading into the lunch period, midday til 2.30 or so. All James Joyce fans welcome!
The Autumn report, begun late March, was put to the side while I composed The Divine Issue (published in April), and though I took up the former again in early May, I was then wonderfully diverted by correspondence flowing from TDI as well as revisiting the same period's literary material, some of which research accrues now as its Addendum.
Had I been better organized I'd have flagged the two May events, namely the launch of Mary Napier's spoken-word CD, Open Thoughts, on the 15th, and the tribute reading for Dorothy Porter on the 28th.
A major distraction has been Loretta's health glitch (--an irregularity detected via breast screening which led to needle biopsy and then surgery for breast cancer; disappointingly this is a continuing story with further though smaller surgery in the offing)... On the day Dorothy's tribute took place at Collected Works, Loretta was having her operation at the Peter Mac. What I called 'exquisite irony', Jenny Harrison (who, with Gig Ryan, curated & catered the Tribute) named a 'symmetry' in which Dorothy was linked to Retta & all women touched by the illness. There was never a thought to cancel the event; Retta would have been appalled. She was certainly at the shop in spirit just as all her well-wishers were with her at the Peter Mac...
Disaster & disease affect everyone; the poets die the same kind of deaths as everyone else. Today I've read a notice posted by Lorin Ford on the Overload Nation poetry site concerning the death of Andrea Sherwood. We catch our breath, then breathe again... Geoff Eggleston, Dorothy Porter --mourned & celebrated by their families & literary communities in December... In February the fires came. Entire hamlets, towns disappeared. Family & friends were burnt out &/or killed. Young poet Ella Holcombe's parents perished in Kinglake. The subsequent memorial service at Montsalvat, attended by Melbourne poets in solidarity with Ella, was also a grieving for that whole community... In Redesdale, Robert Kenny faught for his house for ten minutes before abandoning it to save his own life. His academic work-in-progress was backed-up at La Trobe University but library, archives, art work & studio are all gone... From Berlin the shocking news of artist, print-maker Julia Harman's tragic & untimely death --she was Tim Hemensley's first serious partner, and felt that however separated by distance in life, & then by his death, she was always with him, and now she is I guess... Concentric circles of all whom one considers family. A good friend of the Shop, Tim Sheppard, died on the 11th March after illness. A great devotee of poetry, especially the 1st World War British poets, he also wrote poems although a collection never saw light of day...
For the poets, as I'm fond of saying, t'was always so. All of this in the midst of life. And life goes on (--and it does go on despite the traumatisation of survivors --so well and still do I recall the experience of 6 years ago when the fact of my son's death was like an imposed nakedness upon me -- worse : I felt skinned, scourged of my skin, wearing only the fact of his death, feeling as I stood there in the world that only I knew the catastrophe and no one could see what I was feeling)... Some of the life that goes on, for the poet, involves the readings & launches, gatherings of the clan... For the Melbourne poet these are all around town, constantly, if the handbills or emails I see are any indication.
Collected Works' Autumn season kicked off on the 12th March with the first of two new poetry collections published by Barry Scott's Transit Lounge : Kent McCarter's In the Hungry Middle of Here (--launched by Jenny Lea, whom I dont think I've seen since I dropped in on a Meanjin/Overland cricket match on the Domain Oval in South Yarra --early 90s? --I'm not sure whether she was playing or barracking but we chatted at tea in amongst the trestle tables & eskies --and what a dynamo was Meanjin's skipper, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, clapping for attention, darting hither & thither in the field when he wasnt bowling --but that's another story!), & Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobudur (launched by Tim Lindsey from the Asia Law Centre) on the 20th. Good attendances for both, more local poets at McCarter's, lots of Asian Studies people at Mackenzie's.
It's a truism in the Melbourne writing & performance community now that with the scene's current proliferation there are always going to be new names, poets one hasnt previously encountered. Blurbs from Gig Ryan & CWC for McCarter underlined my ignorance. Conversely, my blurb for Jenny Mackenzie attests a long acquaintance with author & family punctuated for the times she lived in China.
I remember twenty years ago Jennifer thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights as a potential publisher of her Borobudur project. This must have been canvassed around about 1985 since that was when Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books withdrew from the fray, having to decline such new writers as Brian Castro as well as foreclosing what had become a new writing stable including John Scott, Anna Couani, Ken Taylor, Ken Bolton, Chris Barnett, Ania Walwicz, John Anderson, Laurie Duggan, Walter Billeter, Kenny himself & yours truly. Who knows how it might have developed had personal & financial conditions played out differently? Rigmarole might now still have been the major small-press in Australia that one or two publishers in North America survived sufficiently long to become over there. But then again, gaps are inevitably filled and the culture is always changing, implying different aesthetical & political imperatives for different times. Rigmarole in the mid to late 80s would have been a natural home for Borobudur. While congratulating Jenny Mackenzie's tenacity and sighing with her At last, at last, one realizes it was more the case of putting something aside than of battling for twenty years; even so, twenty years is quite a hiatus.
A note now on Tim Lindsey's comments (overwhelmingly in the poet's favour)... Inevitably it was an Asian Studies/Foreign Affairs appreciation of the book as a cultural-political object --that is, Mackenzie's poem was read as a long overdue Australian translation of a classic Javanese story subsuming crucial aspects of that tradition, a belated but worthy act reflecting Australian recognition of the antiquity & authority of an important geopolitical neighbour.
Lindsey's pitch was not uninteresting --indeed, in the context of an exotic literary publication, his political & economic language was an instructive counterpoint. However, as I quipped to him later, I'd contend Indonesian-Australian relations, as with East-West relations in general, are a two-way street. Interesting that Australian ignorance of Javanese epic is supposedly indicative of an Australian know-nothing arrogance which will marginalise us in the future; yet the lay observation of the Asian neighbours' voracious appetite for Western popular forms, from democracy & personal freedoms to t-shirts & rock & roll, is unmentioned. Actually, Western translation of Asian literary & religious classics is the typical form of the Anglo-European interaction with Asia over a very long period, and as fast as we gobble up their elite texts so do they our popular ones.
It also occurred to me last year, after meeting a Singaporean poet & academic, that his expertise in modern British poetry, from Hardy to the present, surely curries our conception of the post-colonial! Furthermore, the considerable East-West collaboration of artists & writers, including Australian & Asian, in my opinion significantly corrects the postcolonial ideological cliche. I offered Tim Lindsey the examples of Sandy Fitts (whose View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press, '08) has won this year's Anne Elder Prize for a first collection) & Jane Gibbian (Ardent is her first full collection, published by Giramondo Press, '08) as Aussie poets redeeming quality collaboration from their trips to Vietnam. I also mentioned to him Cathy O'Brien's description of her meeting in Vientiane, Laos with an Australian colleague's partner, the Iraqui poet Basim Furat, residing there after a spell in New Zealand where, according to Mark Pirie, he had impressed the local scene. They may well collaborate in the future. For me a tiny but interesting example of the hybridization increasingly possible in global culture.
Of course, violent displacement is also increasing & is one obvious explanation of such unlikely crosscurrents. Yet let's recall Ford Madox Ford's witty definition of English culture, against the xenophobia of his day, as the happy result of "successive periods of unrest amongst the Continental peoples".
_________________________________________________________
Kris Hemensley
March/May/June 4 '09
Showing posts with label Jennifer Mackenzie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jennifer Mackenzie. Show all posts
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Thursday, October 9, 2008
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #6, September/October, 2008
JORDIE ALBISTON
MANDALA
the tibetan monk makes the world out of sand
(it takes him seven slow days)
the tibetan monk sculpts the world out of butter
(to balance our unbalanced ways)
the tibetan monk sings the world in harmonics
(to synchronise the spheres)
the tibetan monk half closes his eyes
(to allay the world's worst fears)
the tibetan monk knows the world is ending
(it's always been like this)
the tibetan monk knows the world is ending
(& that it won't be missed)
the tibetan monk makes the world out of sand
(he sweeps it away with his hand
*
MEMORY
everything's so fragile but it's a beautiful!
night everything's so beautiful but fragile
I am ( / ) sitting on the spot marked x & the
eyes look up whilst the soul stares down
at those dumb happy ones all a-drowning
quite happily in their 'happiness' ( / ) with e
e cummings & torch in hand I stay awhile
beneath the gums & stand like the dutiful
daughter (I was) to forgive them all their
incomprehensible state/s of bliss ( / ) I think
I recall being 'happy' myself? ( / ) in bathers
in shallows with dad calling out he'd rather
I smiled for the photo: I didn't & I blinked
(I was only 3) but I think I was happy there
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLAIRE GASKIN
"looking into the eye of my addiction"
looking into the eye of my addiction
he, shaking a doll's house above his head
the blue sheets' white clouds of masturbation
debt to the blind-taste of licking an egg
I climbed up a tree with a flightless hen
the wingspan of his bed's tightening sky
the sitting is done mainly for the hen
I saw the doorway and let out a cry
he will spear a fish far too heavy to lift
under water and drowned hooked to his prey
sacrifice, sometimes given as a gift
famous for his fishing skills the osprey
only ever anger or lust he speaks
a bird of prey grasping at what he seeks
*
"the breeze lifts the fabric of solitude"
the breeze lifts the fabric of solitude
spinal staircase to a balcony brow
bats blacken the flawless sky's magnitude
at the mouth saying give me your breath now
Ficus Macrophylla folding us in
pressing, revealing one breast to your lips
mozzies as close as you and you on skin
saying my head on your chest your soul trips
I pass my heart through my mouth to escape
the ideas more important to survive
breaking concrete with roots is no mistake
I'm existing to see you I'm alive
rivers go to the sea with ambition
the sea knows nothing of competition
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MICHELLE LEBER
A DREAM ON NAXOS
There is a bay inside her, where the
long-shadowed palms darken the waves.
A place where ships are whimsy
and a night heron creaks on the white sand.
She spends all time there, reading
the isobars of absence to a hiding crab.
Under a broad-leaf canopy, sheltering
from the sun's burning kiss --
the only kiss that seeks her true brow.
________________________________________________________________
JENNIFER MACKENZIE
THE VIOLINIST 1 : XI' AN
I've been ill because the railway station was so bleak; black and grey tones weighing into twilight. A splash of red fabric through the tunnels. Nirvana! I follow the woman in red out into the street. She flags down a rickshaw and glides through the city, past the city walls and park, circles the Bell Tower, heads out for the Big Goose pagoda. She buys a ticket for the tiny Tang Dynasty painting gallery. I follow her. It is dark inside; the light comes from the warm reds and ochres of the partially restored paintings of singers and musicians. In the gallery's dark tunnels, I saw her fold into the painting of entertainers; I saw her luminous skin, her gown of red silk. Her lowered eyelids raced into my bloodstream; a nausea of silk, powder and inviting flesh. I calmed, and remembered her eyes. In my hotel foyer, I saw her again, accompanying an official from the capital. In the sauna, she was there again, in the company of another beauty who was small and fair, and whose lips were pressed between her thighs. A large, massively built man, the Party official, sipped tea and barked out orders as he watched them. He remained wrapped in a towel; his eyes never left them.
I went to the massage room. The masseuse rubbed almond oil into my limbs, then climbed on top of me. When she was satisfied, she turned me over and rubbed her sex over my back. I finished with my hands being plunged into liquid-paraffin wax, then massaged and oiled. I walked to the foyer, and saw a tall woman, with black hair down to her waist, walk to the entrance with a dozen red roses. My head exploded, I was adrift in this floating world. I looked out on the grey city in winter, its purple and ashen sky, its doorways without doors, its kettles on ancient stoves. from the outlying villages the cold night of hunger fed into my delirium. Hunger, hard labour, and a wind from hell.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHILIP SALOM
Two Poems from The Keepers
PETE
J had overdosed. He's only a friend but they called anyone who knew him
so I went. The front door was open, people were pissed under the [overhang
brashly lighting the column of blood, low drumbeats in a back room.
I was too well-dressed for this. I pushed through to the main bedroom
where they'd dragged him out from under everyone's bare feet.
He might have been a bomb, someone said: once people saw
that he'd OD'd they ran as far from the room as possible
then carried on as if he'd already blown. He was gaunt and bare-chested
like Christ taken down from the cross in those classical paintings.
We held him up in a death position Carravagio would have loved
though lit better. We shook him as he drooled and foamed and finally
vomited down his ribs. It was repulsive. It turned me cold.
I stood feeling out of it, clean where everybody else seemed rubbed
in some more urgent substance. I thought how if I had words for it,
words that used up lines of breath not coke, words kept me safe...
The ambulance saved me. My words told me to drive home. I did what
they said. But then they said I was a health-and-safety novelist. Unable or
unwilling, devastated. Something without words had OD'd in me.
*
RE-READING FRANCIS WEBB
Tiled rooves in Orange miraging around you, the nerving
home above the park, the mad and ordinary moments
washed by the common soap. From this battered linoleum
ordinary you founded intensity and God. The poems
rhymed into the past with grace and violence, your pure impure
directions, your long wires, your inner Spinning Jenny.
Inside the pyjamas, the drugs, the chance, a teleology
was rolling through the 50s television screen, its vertical hold
there and nowhere as you sat around chomping apples,
the ones you didn't drop, alone in the rising gravity
you heard equally in Jussi Bjorling or in the mad-for-God
supplicants you saw wandering your imagination, or eating
from refectory plates on Sunday evenings, or smudging
through letters to the godofnoaddress by the poor unfamilied
schizophrenics. The after-life for itinerants.
The fruit-pickers have come to pick and the garden's
full of secateurs, like sanity, so sharp you shrink back into poetry,
or should those clarities be reversed?
God's the trick. Not the skin, the blight, the dapple and myrrh,
the impure pure and cortex-firing ecstasies we might call God
but the dogma of God. Like Beaver, the under-terror. All.
The black hole. The rifling of chalices, Eucharists, the closed
text pretending it was open. Your own, thankfully, the open
text hoping it was closed. You let God in. You let us in.
________________________________________________________________
DAVID WHEATLEY
EMIL CIORAN IN TATTERS
12
I'd rather have been a plant, you bet,
and spent my life guarding a piece of shit.
11
I'd like to devour my fellow man
less for the pleasure of eating than
of vomiting him back up again.
10
All the philosophers combined
dissolve in the tears of just one saint.
9
Approach each day as a Rubicon
not to cross but to jump in and drown.
8
My thoughts are only of God
since but for him I might
have to think about man instead
and could I sink lower than that?
7
Preposterous thought:
an impotent rat.
6
Epicurus, the sage I need most,
wrote three hundred books. Thank God they're all lost!
5
Not even a killer, I make no sense:
the Rasholnikov of innocence.
4
Never to sleep, the insomniac's curse:
heroic agonies flat on my arse!
3
Will-to-die that I eat, sleep and breathe,
you've stolen it from me, stolen my death.
2
No sleep as tight
after decades without
as the sleep of the man
they'll shoot at dawn.
1
Who more than I has embraced his fate?
At birth I was offered the world on a plate
and screamed at them, Sorry, too late, too late!
*
PROSOPAGNOSIA
after Pierre Reverdy
a little light
you see a rushlight
descend to light up your stomach
a woman is a rocket's arc
down there a shadow is a reader
her bare feet couldn't be prettier
cardiac short-circuit
flames leap from the bonnet
what magnet keeps me stuck on
this wrong turn my eyes and my love have taken
a nothing a fire we light that dies
enough of the breeze
enough of heaven
all in the end's a phantasm even
your mouth and yet
where your hand falls I race with heat
you open the door and I don't go through
I see your face and can't believe it's you
pale one the vigil we kept
that night we lay on a suitcase and wept
to the sound of men laughing
have-naked urchins stravaguing
the water was transparent
a red copper wire bled radiance
the sun and your heart are one substance
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
JORDIE ALBISTON lives in Melbourne, where she was born in 1961. Has published 5 poetry collections. Australian composer Andree Greenwell has adapted two of her books (Botany Bay Document, retitled Dreaming Transportation, and The Hanging of Jean Lee) for music-theatre; both enjoyed recent seasons at the Sydney Opera House. Nervous Arcs won the Mary Gilmore Award for a first book of Australian poetry in 1995. Her 4th book, The Fall, was shortlisted for Premier's Prizes in Victoria, NSW & Queensland. Her most recent collection is Vertigo : A Cantata (John Leonard Press, 2007).
CLAIRE GASKIN's book of poems, A Bud (John Leonard Press, 2006) was shortlisted for the John Bray Award for Poetry in 2008. She is Victorian editor for the literary journal, Blue Dog. Contact; clairegaskin@aapt.net.au
MICHELLE LEBER has a history as a spoken word poet at many venues around Melbourne. Won the Poetry Slam at the St Kilda Writers Festival in 2006. One of her poems is traveling on Melbourne trains as part of the Moving Galleries Autumn series, 2008.
JENNIFER MACKENZIE studied at the University of Melbourne in the early 70s, where she began writing & publishing. Long standing interest in Asia, traveling to India, Indonesia, Cambodia and China. A fascination with Old Asia led to her Borobudur project, to be published by Transit Lounge (Melbourne) in 2009. Contact; jmac_cn@yahoo.com
PHILIP SALOM's most recent book, The Well Mouth, a collection of voices from the underworld, was named as a Sydney Morning Herald Book of the Year. It is now in its 3rd printing. His collections & novels have won many awards, including two Commonwealth Poetry Prizes. In 2006/07, during an Australian Council fellowship, he completed The Keepers, due to be published by Giramondo (Sydney) in 2009.
DAVID WHEATLEY recently visited Australia c/o the 2008 Vincent Buckley Prize. He has published several books & chapbooks, including Thirst, Misery Hill, & Mocker (all with Gallery Press, Ireland). He edited James Clarence Mangan's Poems (Gallery Press,'03). Included in New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe Books,UK, '05). Currently teaching at the University of Hull's Philip Larkin Centre.
________________________________________________________________
MANDALA
the tibetan monk makes the world out of sand
(it takes him seven slow days)
the tibetan monk sculpts the world out of butter
(to balance our unbalanced ways)
the tibetan monk sings the world in harmonics
(to synchronise the spheres)
the tibetan monk half closes his eyes
(to allay the world's worst fears)
the tibetan monk knows the world is ending
(it's always been like this)
the tibetan monk knows the world is ending
(& that it won't be missed)
the tibetan monk makes the world out of sand
(he sweeps it away with his hand
*
MEMORY
everything's so fragile but it's a beautiful!
night everything's so beautiful but fragile
I am ( / ) sitting on the spot marked x & the
eyes look up whilst the soul stares down
at those dumb happy ones all a-drowning
quite happily in their 'happiness' ( / ) with e
e cummings & torch in hand I stay awhile
beneath the gums & stand like the dutiful
daughter (I was) to forgive them all their
incomprehensible state/s of bliss ( / ) I think
I recall being 'happy' myself? ( / ) in bathers
in shallows with dad calling out he'd rather
I smiled for the photo: I didn't & I blinked
(I was only 3) but I think I was happy there
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLAIRE GASKIN
"looking into the eye of my addiction"
looking into the eye of my addiction
he, shaking a doll's house above his head
the blue sheets' white clouds of masturbation
debt to the blind-taste of licking an egg
I climbed up a tree with a flightless hen
the wingspan of his bed's tightening sky
the sitting is done mainly for the hen
I saw the doorway and let out a cry
he will spear a fish far too heavy to lift
under water and drowned hooked to his prey
sacrifice, sometimes given as a gift
famous for his fishing skills the osprey
only ever anger or lust he speaks
a bird of prey grasping at what he seeks
*
"the breeze lifts the fabric of solitude"
the breeze lifts the fabric of solitude
spinal staircase to a balcony brow
bats blacken the flawless sky's magnitude
at the mouth saying give me your breath now
Ficus Macrophylla folding us in
pressing, revealing one breast to your lips
mozzies as close as you and you on skin
saying my head on your chest your soul trips
I pass my heart through my mouth to escape
the ideas more important to survive
breaking concrete with roots is no mistake
I'm existing to see you I'm alive
rivers go to the sea with ambition
the sea knows nothing of competition
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MICHELLE LEBER
A DREAM ON NAXOS
There is a bay inside her, where the
long-shadowed palms darken the waves.
A place where ships are whimsy
and a night heron creaks on the white sand.
She spends all time there, reading
the isobars of absence to a hiding crab.
Under a broad-leaf canopy, sheltering
from the sun's burning kiss --
the only kiss that seeks her true brow.
________________________________________________________________
JENNIFER MACKENZIE
THE VIOLINIST 1 : XI' AN
I've been ill because the railway station was so bleak; black and grey tones weighing into twilight. A splash of red fabric through the tunnels. Nirvana! I follow the woman in red out into the street. She flags down a rickshaw and glides through the city, past the city walls and park, circles the Bell Tower, heads out for the Big Goose pagoda. She buys a ticket for the tiny Tang Dynasty painting gallery. I follow her. It is dark inside; the light comes from the warm reds and ochres of the partially restored paintings of singers and musicians. In the gallery's dark tunnels, I saw her fold into the painting of entertainers; I saw her luminous skin, her gown of red silk. Her lowered eyelids raced into my bloodstream; a nausea of silk, powder and inviting flesh. I calmed, and remembered her eyes. In my hotel foyer, I saw her again, accompanying an official from the capital. In the sauna, she was there again, in the company of another beauty who was small and fair, and whose lips were pressed between her thighs. A large, massively built man, the Party official, sipped tea and barked out orders as he watched them. He remained wrapped in a towel; his eyes never left them.
I went to the massage room. The masseuse rubbed almond oil into my limbs, then climbed on top of me. When she was satisfied, she turned me over and rubbed her sex over my back. I finished with my hands being plunged into liquid-paraffin wax, then massaged and oiled. I walked to the foyer, and saw a tall woman, with black hair down to her waist, walk to the entrance with a dozen red roses. My head exploded, I was adrift in this floating world. I looked out on the grey city in winter, its purple and ashen sky, its doorways without doors, its kettles on ancient stoves. from the outlying villages the cold night of hunger fed into my delirium. Hunger, hard labour, and a wind from hell.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHILIP SALOM
Two Poems from The Keepers
PETE
J had overdosed. He's only a friend but they called anyone who knew him
so I went. The front door was open, people were pissed under the [overhang
brashly lighting the column of blood, low drumbeats in a back room.
I was too well-dressed for this. I pushed through to the main bedroom
where they'd dragged him out from under everyone's bare feet.
He might have been a bomb, someone said: once people saw
that he'd OD'd they ran as far from the room as possible
then carried on as if he'd already blown. He was gaunt and bare-chested
like Christ taken down from the cross in those classical paintings.
We held him up in a death position Carravagio would have loved
though lit better. We shook him as he drooled and foamed and finally
vomited down his ribs. It was repulsive. It turned me cold.
I stood feeling out of it, clean where everybody else seemed rubbed
in some more urgent substance. I thought how if I had words for it,
words that used up lines of breath not coke, words kept me safe...
The ambulance saved me. My words told me to drive home. I did what
they said. But then they said I was a health-and-safety novelist. Unable or
unwilling, devastated. Something without words had OD'd in me.
*
RE-READING FRANCIS WEBB
Tiled rooves in Orange miraging around you, the nerving
home above the park, the mad and ordinary moments
washed by the common soap. From this battered linoleum
ordinary you founded intensity and God. The poems
rhymed into the past with grace and violence, your pure impure
directions, your long wires, your inner Spinning Jenny.
Inside the pyjamas, the drugs, the chance, a teleology
was rolling through the 50s television screen, its vertical hold
there and nowhere as you sat around chomping apples,
the ones you didn't drop, alone in the rising gravity
you heard equally in Jussi Bjorling or in the mad-for-God
supplicants you saw wandering your imagination, or eating
from refectory plates on Sunday evenings, or smudging
through letters to the godofnoaddress by the poor unfamilied
schizophrenics. The after-life for itinerants.
The fruit-pickers have come to pick and the garden's
full of secateurs, like sanity, so sharp you shrink back into poetry,
or should those clarities be reversed?
God's the trick. Not the skin, the blight, the dapple and myrrh,
the impure pure and cortex-firing ecstasies we might call God
but the dogma of God. Like Beaver, the under-terror. All.
The black hole. The rifling of chalices, Eucharists, the closed
text pretending it was open. Your own, thankfully, the open
text hoping it was closed. You let God in. You let us in.
________________________________________________________________
DAVID WHEATLEY
EMIL CIORAN IN TATTERS
12
I'd rather have been a plant, you bet,
and spent my life guarding a piece of shit.
11
I'd like to devour my fellow man
less for the pleasure of eating than
of vomiting him back up again.
10
All the philosophers combined
dissolve in the tears of just one saint.
9
Approach each day as a Rubicon
not to cross but to jump in and drown.
8
My thoughts are only of God
since but for him I might
have to think about man instead
and could I sink lower than that?
7
Preposterous thought:
an impotent rat.
6
Epicurus, the sage I need most,
wrote three hundred books. Thank God they're all lost!
5
Not even a killer, I make no sense:
the Rasholnikov of innocence.
4
Never to sleep, the insomniac's curse:
heroic agonies flat on my arse!
3
Will-to-die that I eat, sleep and breathe,
you've stolen it from me, stolen my death.
2
No sleep as tight
after decades without
as the sleep of the man
they'll shoot at dawn.
1
Who more than I has embraced his fate?
At birth I was offered the world on a plate
and screamed at them, Sorry, too late, too late!
*
PROSOPAGNOSIA
after Pierre Reverdy
a little light
you see a rushlight
descend to light up your stomach
a woman is a rocket's arc
down there a shadow is a reader
her bare feet couldn't be prettier
cardiac short-circuit
flames leap from the bonnet
what magnet keeps me stuck on
this wrong turn my eyes and my love have taken
a nothing a fire we light that dies
enough of the breeze
enough of heaven
all in the end's a phantasm even
your mouth and yet
where your hand falls I race with heat
you open the door and I don't go through
I see your face and can't believe it's you
pale one the vigil we kept
that night we lay on a suitcase and wept
to the sound of men laughing
have-naked urchins stravaguing
the water was transparent
a red copper wire bled radiance
the sun and your heart are one substance
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
JORDIE ALBISTON lives in Melbourne, where she was born in 1961. Has published 5 poetry collections. Australian composer Andree Greenwell has adapted two of her books (Botany Bay Document, retitled Dreaming Transportation, and The Hanging of Jean Lee) for music-theatre; both enjoyed recent seasons at the Sydney Opera House. Nervous Arcs won the Mary Gilmore Award for a first book of Australian poetry in 1995. Her 4th book, The Fall, was shortlisted for Premier's Prizes in Victoria, NSW & Queensland. Her most recent collection is Vertigo : A Cantata (John Leonard Press, 2007).
CLAIRE GASKIN's book of poems, A Bud (John Leonard Press, 2006) was shortlisted for the John Bray Award for Poetry in 2008. She is Victorian editor for the literary journal, Blue Dog. Contact; clairegaskin@aapt.net.au
MICHELLE LEBER has a history as a spoken word poet at many venues around Melbourne. Won the Poetry Slam at the St Kilda Writers Festival in 2006. One of her poems is traveling on Melbourne trains as part of the Moving Galleries Autumn series, 2008.
JENNIFER MACKENZIE studied at the University of Melbourne in the early 70s, where she began writing & publishing. Long standing interest in Asia, traveling to India, Indonesia, Cambodia and China. A fascination with Old Asia led to her Borobudur project, to be published by Transit Lounge (Melbourne) in 2009. Contact; jmac_cn@yahoo.com
PHILIP SALOM's most recent book, The Well Mouth, a collection of voices from the underworld, was named as a Sydney Morning Herald Book of the Year. It is now in its 3rd printing. His collections & novels have won many awards, including two Commonwealth Poetry Prizes. In 2006/07, during an Australian Council fellowship, he completed The Keepers, due to be published by Giramondo (Sydney) in 2009.
DAVID WHEATLEY recently visited Australia c/o the 2008 Vincent Buckley Prize. He has published several books & chapbooks, including Thirst, Misery Hill, & Mocker (all with Gallery Press, Ireland). He edited James Clarence Mangan's Poems (Gallery Press,'03). Included in New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe Books,UK, '05). Currently teaching at the University of Hull's Philip Larkin Centre.
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