i.m. John Riley, 1937- d. October 27/8, 1978 and John Anderson, 1948-d. October 28,1997

from A MILE FROM POETRY, #27

Midnight Interrogation

(A review of John Riley's

Ways of Approaching)

the feet of the old begetters make your dozen

jump : the new images observe each other

a tickle it is the freer the line the

more wilful the stirrings : no 

one halts the caravan with such

avarice as you

you would tell the first inhabitants get

out & walk if their promenade across

the mind's peace the ash-woods the

cleared fields made parade of

Oh tis Autumn or

this view Lady & you

& by the same token would

deliver you to the dreadings of your

perennial night-walk on a platter the

lines of doomed auxiliaries felling the 

after-dinner song & 

the scents of mint & nasturtiums at the

poem's centre nothing to

the nothing at your centre the

flight of love's victims the

collision of affectations & easy

procedures with love's caravan : the nothing

of which you write it's

nothing you say secured on the

base-line of an empathy with the beautiful gardens & a

native lad running his kite 

[1974]

oOo

from THE GOLDEN LAUGHTER

The Last Sulk

(acausal parallelism : ) train stopped. the (unmistakable)

river bird preens its leg of our conjunction. never 

ending city reducing vitality trailing out

along the line. mile upon mile. so what "a tennis court"

but suddenly a silver generator's just fine. John Anderson'

s the poet who explodes our "white ibis". relegated*

to a footnote is simply not what we will be. what will

he be? what will we be? Last Quill & Restaurant. 

i'm looking forward to the great blank news.

the next decade is requisitioned. whether singing 

or tilling it's our first chosen beginning.

her hair or land-mist & rivulet

red lines in my fingers. he said/she said

kiss me. almost did. provided for in day-dream.

their fare's a kind of Zion. two birds on that pond.

more mist in the eucalypts of the valley.

sunshine on rising mist & smoke-stack's

grey climb. HITLER'S WAR i'm languorous

demurring "mine". its hill profusion &

dimpled plain. & trapped fog again.

i cant help thinking Our Power Was Thrown Away.

green so swiftly purple (verdigris). i'd settled

for nothing tending the abscess my fingers

trailing through air instead of their red hair.

A NIGHTMARE. tunnel through granite. then

smooth curve of river & never-a-care.

hard to proceed from there. i hanker after

rank lines. that buggerizing jalopy the

rhyme & style. resting motors on the highway

not one car to pace the train. 

think no more.

deny upbringing's cadence.

LOST!  but in which vernacular forest forest

host of heaven. i go home

i see brown rushes

i see broken branches sawn trunks

a by-road's damp patch

pulling red lines from their hair

my fingers curl flail no more the empty air

my fingers couched in the ardent there

* there now gasp!

rapture aside

aspiring on my time

red lines at my throat

[June, '79]

ON THE RUN # 2 : Posts Retrieved from Cyberspace

April 15th, 2013

In a couple of hours Cathy & i are setting off for Brittany (St Malo) via Poole... From St Malo to Roskof (spelling? ive only heard it spoken)... The other capn advises warm clothes. Jeans, jumper, good shoes : I dont have many options!!! Raincoat? Forget it!
Y'day bus ride to West Bay to see the Paul Jones exhibition at the great Sladers Yard gallery. Yes, it has a café too! Scones with jam & cream + hot choc, coffee etc But dont spread that around! I'm supposed to be shedding weight!
Paul Jones on a continuum with Nicholson, that is clarity, precision; but then the Tapies-like metallic, mixed-media patina throws the work somewhere else. I guess the Nicholson connection is the constructed abstracted landscape, and the sculptural aspect. Also the topographical element, internal & external map. Looking at a work such as this (and perhaps ANY work) I cant help but 'see' all of the associations as though enabled to review the lot!
 Seems to me that West Bay has 'developed' somewhat since last visit [September/October, 12]; like the place is it's own now, not a bedraggled stop before Bridport. Loved the little harbour, and the dramatic cliff wall, and the big seas & spray like steam off the water.
John Anderson recommended S W Victorian coast as nearest to this cliff/sea/green apposition after I returned from late '80s English trip raving about Cornwall, Devon, Dorset coastline... remembered this & John himself as we watched the little kids dare the white seas catch them on the sand!
 So, folks, off to Brittany, and probably out of touch til Thursday when we're back to Weymouth again... Salut!


oOo

May 1st, '13

Scoured EVOLVER [Wessex Arts magazine] for likely shows to see and find Lucas Weschke exhibiting at the Bridport Arts Centre... Bernard has told me abt occasional meetings with L W in Weymouth... I knew the name Weschke as of Karl Weschke of St Ives school associations [died 2005, German expat, settled in Cornwall, intimate of Wynter, Hilton, WS Graham et al]... Sure enough Lucas is K W's son...
 Contrast of hard, sober lines & apparently whimsical figures tho' the titles suggest o/wise... Exhibition in foyer, 'continues in cafe'... thank goodness we didnt have to peer over coffee & cake patrons to see the linocuts! On the other hand, the large upstairs gallery perhaps too cold & cavernous for L W's pieces...


oOo


PS : May 8th,'13; Heathrow to Bangkok

Captain speaking : 10 hours &15 minutes flight...
There's a general spreading out from allotted to what're perceived as better seats. Christy allows himself gleeful chuckle sufficient to alert jovial ghosts though not fellow passengers. Historically aching legs now have 3 seat spread to flex in.
12.32, rolling...
12.41, taxiing...
12.52, here we go, here we go, here we go... turning, turning, following American Airlines flight to the runway...
Altitude 735 feet hitting the cloud but English fields discernible...
Lost in the fog, says Ed, where blue is sea or sky, archipelagos on high. And Christy spies the drinks trolly though Ed it is who calls it like it is : even better with G&T, he snaps.
From his angle peering up the aisle, Christy sees gowned nurses with portable drips...
At 19,000 feet see the leaving of England, darling strands of beach, the Channel, encroaching the breadth of Europe. The bumf says Eddie...


oOo

 May 19, '13

I'll take advantage of the Boswell Festival's focus by thinking aloud, at a tangent, about a contemporary writing that's in & out of (i say 'in & out of' because 'simultaneously' not quite right) biography, autobiography, memoir, history & commentary. 50 years years ago Mailer's Advertisements for Myself wowed me; 40 years ago Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, with its wonderfully novelistic beginning; also the many forms of the New Journalism... Then there's Iain Sinclair's writing, notably his John Claire book... and a book i'm currently reading, David Caddy's Cycling After Thomas & the English...
In fact, now that ive begun this survey it's as though the 'in & out of''s more the rule than the rarity! In this time of which we're writers, 'in & out of' , with its begging of categories, sits happily beside pure biography & history... Local examples would include our friends Robert Kenny (The Lamb Enters the Dreaming) & Evelyn Juers (House of Exile)...


oOo

May 21st, '13

Recall late 60s, copy of the Village Voice at Betty Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre in Faraday Street, Carlton, --at least i think it was Village Voice? --could have been I.T.? --no, Village Voice --and there was a pic & article about Jim Morrison & Michael McClure --Morrison staying with McClure in latter poet's loft. Mention this as important music/poetry connection in our casual education them thar times. Years later realized that McClure & Manzarek were touring --in Europe i think. Manzarek's novel about Morrison, The Poet in Exile (pub Thunders Mouth, 2001) has its moments; "You son-of-a-bitch," I said, 'Don't tell me the rumours are true." (Morrison replies, "I haven't heard the rumours.") Retta reminds me, singing "When the music's over, turn out the light..." Except it isnt ever over!!! Ray Manzarek, RIP


oOo

May 23rd, '13

Exactly as Mandy Pannett says, the kind of thing i also love! Must see if i can order via Ingram for Collected Works Bookshop...

"Original and fascinating" a review of: Cycling After Thomas And The English...
[www.amazon.co.uk]
22 May 2013
By
Mandy Pannett "wordshopper"


"This is the kind of travel writing I love. Not only is its journey inspired by Edward Thomas, one of my favourite poets, but David Caddy's imaginative counterpart to the linear route he takes is a lateral one, full of anecdotes and observations, everyday tidbits, reflections on literature, history, geography and nature - a broad and intriguing canvas. Robert Frost's poem `The Road Not Taken' is based on the many long walks he took with Edward Thomas and the way his friend would try to show him lots of things at once, all in different directions. There is something of this outspreading, this reaching out to grasp the essence of things, in this book. In the chapter on Salisbury, for instance, the author, stands on a spot where Constable painted and describes what he sees, but the next paragraph begins `I could cycle north west to Salisbury Plain where Wordsworth walked' and in the paragraph after that he muses on the fact that `I could cycle north and east a few miles along the A30 to Figsbury Rings.' Edward Thomas would have understood such dilemmas very well.

The quest (which is how the journey seems to me, a quest that is both physical and spiritual) begins with the author's desire to repeat the poet's travels by cycling round parts of southern England. At the same time there is a wish to pin down the intangible and find what it means to be `peculiarly English'. In this context, throughout the book, certain key words recur: heritage, topography, local, identity, tradition, freedom. We are offered no definitive conclusions, no answers to the questions, only hints and suggestions and the joys of exploration.

`Cycling After Thomas' was inspired by Edward Thomas' `In Pursuit of Spring' (1914). David Caddy's motivation is clear: `When I reread this montage of stories, quotations, voices, literary criticism, digressions and odd juxtapositions, I knew I had to emulate the journey and see what was left and who had subsequently lived along the route.' From this reading begins the bicycle journey that starts and ends in Dorset with many digressions and stopping off points along the way.

There is a wealth of material in this book, too much to cover here. Like David Caddy and like Edward Thomas I could say I'll refer to this, I could talk about that, I might discuss a comment or digress to an anecdote - but since that would be distracting and haphazard I'll just mention parts of the book that interest me most - possibly because they take place in areas I know well. I love the chapter about Box Hill where Jane Austen sets the picnic in `Emma', the discussion on Vaughan Williams' `The Lark Ascending' together with the whole background and roots of folk music, and the wonderful chapter on Winchester where Keats began his `Ode to Autumn' and where, near the water meadows, `by squinting and removing all the cars and car parks there is still a strong sense of the natural world present.'

There is more, lots more. This book entices me, as I'm sure it will other readers, to follow the quest for myself." 

I dont have Edward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring, and since David described it to me, in the Dolphin couple of weeks ago, I've been intrigued, but have found two extracts in a Thomas anthology i do own, Edward Thomas on the Countryside : A selection of his prose & verse, ed Roland Gant (Faber, '77)... Read them last night before sleeping : lovely stuff! And can imagine the encouragement David felt for his own heightened reportage from ET's noting & quoting.


oOo

June 1st, '13

Thank you Andrew Kingsford for yr tip : I regret to say that if i have even heard of Raphael Samuel it's only the merest echo in my thick head...

 [See : Bishopsgate Institute - Samuel, Raphael - The Raphael Samuel Archive    www.bishopsgate.org.uk   Raphael Samuel Archive at the Bishopsgate Library]

The context for Andrew's suggestion was my description of conversations with David Caddy last month in which I wondered about the reception David's book, Cycling After Thomas & the English, might have received in England. In my mind was a sense of a general avoidance by sophisticated criticism of questions of 'identity', characterizing it as passe at best & more often a dangerous distraction. In the conversation with DC, he confirmed his tradition as Christopher Hill, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm... Andrew agreed there was a left-wing shrugging off of 'identity' but not all them, he said : Thompson, Raymond Williams, and crucially Raphael Samuel...
 OK, let's get ready to read!
+

A Melbourne connection with the generality of the above is an argument i began shaping in response to Waleed Aly's opinion piece in The Age (May 17,'13), headlined "Tory Politics : pact to the rafters in contradiction" & sub-headed "Tea Party in the US, the UKIP in Britain --Abbott better beware of the rising attraction of conservative splitters"... It seemed to me, though interesting, that Aly's piece was misleading insofar as its marxist or at least economic template prohibits any mention of questions of identity expressed nationally though deeply, personally experienced. I'm not across Tea Party or (Bob Katter's) Australia Party agendas like Waleed Aly, but have followed the discussion in England for several decades and recognize UKIP as a player in an utterly proper & necessary cultural questioning. (Questioning as critically remembering & celebrating...) At one time the contrast was with the USA --for example the discussion of British & American English (WW1 to the present) as prism for shifting authority (--poetry's foremost in this poet's mind but economic & political power's caught in the same wash). Ever since Britain's entry into the EEC, 'Europe''s been the necessary issue, and certainly what most exercises the minds of any number of people in Britain, let alone UKIP... This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and needless to say my response to Aly (probably a book and as much autobiography as political critique) hasnt left my notebook!
+
In his article, Waleed Aly's political-economic analysis contends, "We're entering a new phase in which the Western world is no longer globalisation's biggest winner. Bob Katter's constituency have long been globalisation's losers. (...) Katter and UKIP are, in some muddled way, attempting to capture what conservative politics lost when it got radically liberal : an abiding concern for the local, and privileging of the local, and a rejection of political programs that bring huge structural change." Aly's phrase 'muddled way' perhaps acknowledges the establishment's cliche depiction 'loony', but that aside, he's got the equation right : globalization & the local. And in the heart of the local is the cultural, the identity question. Not at all sure what parallels can be drawn along that line between Australia & Britain. The people ive talked to, as recently as a few weeks ago, are concerned abt sovereignty vis a vis the EEC's bureaucracy. None of them have yet voted for UKIP! Their's is a concern on behalf of a 21st century multi-ethnic Britain against a version of the global emanating from Brussells wch depersonalises & decontextualises a society, an economy, a culture... I'm at one with them in a happy, whole-hearted struggle for particularity against abstraction! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera....
 +

From a review of Raphael Samuel and relating to my interest :   

"Theatres of Memory:    Volume 1. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
[Verso, 1994,  479 pages]  [Review from Political Science, ?'94]
 The idea that the past is a plaything of the present, or a 'metafiction', is only now beginning to disturb the tranquillity of professional historians, but for some twenty years it has been a commonplace of epistemological criticism, and a mainspring of experimental work in literature and the arts. Thus in 'magical realism' or 'modern Gothic' the fairy tale can appear as the latest thing; while in the visual arts, futurist installations offer themselves as parodies of Old Masters. 'Back to the future' is also a leitmotiv in commodity marketing and design - something discussed here under the heading of 'Retrochic' - while in Britain, as in other advanced capitalist societies, conservation has been the cutting edge of the business recolonization of the inner city.
 According to critics of the heritage industry the current obsession with the past signals not a return to tradition but the exhaustion of history's grand narratives. The postmodern condition, so the argument runs, is one where the future has spectacularly parted company from the past. Nostalgia is the sigh of the historically orphaned, heritage a symptom of national decay.
 In this book - the first of a trilogy - Raphael Samuel takes issue with the heritage baiters. He offers an alternative genealogy of resurrectionism, relating it to the environmentalist movements of our time. He argues that we live in an expanding historical culture, one which is newly alert to the evidence of the visual, and which is reconnecting the study of landscape and townscape to that of the natural world. It is also, he argues, more democratic than earlier versions of the national past, and much more hospitable to hitherto stigmatized minorities. The volume is prefaced with a long essay on unofficial knowledge and has an Afterword on 'allegories of the real'. "

Hmmm. Well, we'll see!
   



THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #1, April 2008

"The Merri Creek
A wise wince in the landscape
A complex cavalcade and gallery folded into the
Melbourne plain"
[John Anderson, the forest set out like the night, Black Pepper Press, 1995]

"The braille of the poet's words brushes my fingers and moves through them into my different calligraphy. The calligraphy tells less than the fingers feel; 'sumptuous despair' loses its dark glamour as the hand falters after it. But the hand loves the contour, tracing obscure lineaments, translating them into language. Is the language signed? Only namelessly by its century & its country of origin, influencing invisibly the contour it felt. The hand is anonymous, mine and not mine, even if my name signs what it has written."
[Helen Vendler, from the introduction to Soul Says, Harvard University Press, 1995]

"In the wintertime the Rat slept a great deal, resting early and rising late. During his short day he sometimes scribbled poetry or did other small domestic jobs about the house; and, of course, there were always animals dropping in for a chat, and consequently there was a good deal of story-telling and comparing notes on the past summer and all its doings."
[from The Wild Wood, chapter 3 of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, 1908]

_____________________________________________________________________

LAURIE FERDINANDS


STOLEN CAR

Quest for the morning
In dingy establishments
Yearning, crying, missing
Watch the gold woman
So sad to be left out


BORING ENCOURAGEMENTS

Stapled to the lapel
Were found the only words
She'd ever written
In a fit of rage
A pilgrim's song


CLAPPERS

Seething with anger
He mowed more furiously
Revisiting the sordid
Collection of clappers
Transparent as glass


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


CAROL JENKINS


IN CASE I EVER FORGET

getting wrapped up into a mermaid's tail of newspaper
in Ettalong Scout Hall, in the shadow of Blackwall Mountain
a place before known to me only from the outside, waiting
for my brother, carried in for a needle and carried out wailing
when he was of that age,
but when I am there, I am chosen for my smallness,
to be turned into a half-fish, half-girl
poured into broadsheet newsprint, exultant
to be swaddled in paper, with my feet inching forward
half a floor board at a time, so happy it is me
from all the supplicants to be the winning Brownie mermaid,
and then so perfectly, when it is done
someone comes in a car and takes me home.


ARTIFACT FROM A DREAM OF HAPPINESS


All those brave blue mornings that I was,
all those hopelessly soft sunsets
you fell through, the blaze of lastness
with the lake bleeding into twilight's black and white
while the highway sped past all sharp corners,
speed and mesmerism, as something waltzed languid
and wondering through our blood,
burning the idea of ecstasy into a slow reverberatory neural
loop bridging two hemispheres of cells
that was me, the language that we are.



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


ANNE KIRKER


WILL I CEASE TO WONDER?

At the small

Figure perched

On the cave's ledge

Cradling

Her hair


A bundle

Strapped with

Cord and

Saffron robed


Marking a life

Over seventy years

Facing Ganesha

[Batu Caves, Malaysia, 2006]


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

GREG MCLAREN


ON LOOKING INTO PAM BROWN'S SELECTED

It's a Lewisham mid-afternoon,
clear-skied mid-winter. In the park,
reading poetry and a British non
photographer's history
of American photography.
There are children
running noisily between the trees,
bored with the see-saw,
the roundabout, the sandpit.
Page nineteen of Pam's Selected Poems 1971-
1982 is now a palimpsest.
At the start of the poem,
Pam quotes Ginsberg, and,
pencilled-in below, -- poet.
They have circled Pam's benzedrine /tequila,
and scrawled beneath, also circled, drug
and alcohol. The children's father
is naming the eucalypts to his wife,
and she calls to the kids : Jaiden! Brianna!
Back to the table! Their shadows lengthen.
CASSADY IS DEAD,
Pam proclaims, and our reader,
the book's first owner,
has inscribed : Pop star (cult heroes -- drugs, etc).


_____________________________________________________________________

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Laurie Ferdinands, lives in Melbourne. Contact, lferdinands@ihug.com.au
Carol Jenkins, lives in Sydney. Her work is published in Island, Heat, Southerly, Cordite, Antipodes, & various online journals. First book f'coming in '09 with Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney), Fishing in the Devonian. She is the publisher of the River Road Press audio-CD series of contemporary Australian poets (including P. Boyle, V. Smith, J. Beveridge, S. Hampton amongst others).
Anne Kirker, lives in Queensland. Mostly writes haiku-like verse, collaborates on artists' books with digital printmaker Normana Wight; sometimes they produce 'stand-alone' text/prints. Their books are held in special collections in Australian state & university libraries. Website, www.annekirker.com.au
Greg McLaren, grew up in the Coalfields of NSW's Hunter Valley and has since escaped to Sydney. Publications are Everything Falls In (Vagabond,2000); Darkness Disguised (Sidewalk, '02); The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, '07).

_______________________________________________________________________

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


*

At the Dental Hospital

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

*

(by John Hall)

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

(by Ted Berrigan)

III (Sonnet)

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

*

(by Robert Duncan)

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

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

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

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

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


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

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, #9

TRIBUTE TO JOHN ANDERSON, SERVICE OF THANKSGIVING, 5th November,1997

To Sheila, John's mother, & to his father; to his sisters & other members of John's family; and to his closest friends, especially Emma Lew; my deepest sympathy to you at this time. My love & strength to you as you live with & without John forever after.
I've been asked to speak into our memorial service for John the sorrows & kindest thoughts from several poets & writers whom I contacted last week, namely from Robert Gray in Sydney, Alexandra Seddon in Candelo, from Anna Couani in Sydney, & Alex Miller locally. All were shocked at the suddenness of his illness & death, and spoke fondly & appreciatively of John as a person & a poet.
Another of our mutual colleagues, Javant Biarujia, dedicated the poetry reading which he was mc-ing on the night of that awful Tuesday to John.
For the poets, the words are almost all-important.
This totally consuming labour extracting poetic harmony, poetic truth, poetic meaning, poetic value even poetic justice & poetic consolation from the language in which & by which we know the world. These are the accents & complexions of the world the poet makes --and of the life the poet makes --of the reason for it & the sense of it --its poetic sound & sense.
And all of it made by the poet with eyes & ears, mind, tongue, senses ever sensitive to what is given --to make something of what is given even as it presents itself complete.
John was part of my extended domestic & literary family since the early 1970s; intensely in earlier times, less so recently. He brought his friends & references into the conversation, as it were, and went away with mine.
Important as traditional British & Australian & modern European poetry were to him, so would become certain contemporary American poetry or at least certain of its poetic precepts.
His landscape poetry , which I persist in thinking of as cosmological, issues in his work as the product of that great Twentieth Century contradiction, the wonderfully artificial & the wonderfully real.
John was perplexed to find, one day, that a photograph for which he'd been very carefully posed by our late friend Bernie O'Regan, no longer included him. There was the Merri Creek & a particularly dramatic section of rock, but he'd been literally cut out of the picture! I'm moved & amused by that tale, for though John has been cut out, the landscape that remains bears him faithfully, for, as far as the poets are concerned, he also named the place and shaped it forever for us to see & to hear & to read.
As follows [from THE BLUEGUM SMOKES A LONG CIGAR, Rigmarole Books, 1978] : THE BRACHYCHITON (Kurrajong)

Study the leaves of the Brachychiton
And you will be ready for any turn in the conversation

What holds true in a grove of Brachychitons
Holds true in wheatfields and oaks

The kind of thought that I aspire to
Would not disturb one leaf of Brachychiton

I am not self conscious in the Brachychiton
Some are afraid in the Brachychiton
Brachychiton Brachychiton
Enter the Brachychiton

After a while my thoughts fly
When I chant "The Brachychiton"
They sit down and most move around in the Brachychitons
I thought my jeans were Brachychitons
Nirvana Brachychiton. Brachychiton Das Cyclamens.
It is different each time in the Brachychitons

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The Service of Thanksgiving for the Life of John Douglas Anderson, 1948-97, was held at St Mary's Church, North Melbourne, 5th November,1997. Celebrant, Father Jim Brady. Tributes were made by friends & family including Ned Johnson, Paul Poernomo, Elizabeth Connell, Kevin Pearson, Roger Smith, Cassie Lewis, Kris Hemensley, Peter Freckleton, Christopher Mariolle, Geoffrey Egglestone.

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 3

SOME WORDS FOR CLAIRE GASKIN : Saturday 23rd, September,2006 at the Victorian Writers' Centre. Launching of Claire Gaskin's A Bud, published by the John Leonard Press.

Three short weeks ago --is that a long time? --three long weeks ago, I saw Claire read at the Melbourne Writers' Festival --saw her and heard her. I only attended two sessions --Jenny Harrison's book launch [Folly and Grief, Black Pepper Press, with Dorothy Porter doing the honours] and what I think of as Claire's reading --two of my favourite women on this diverse & ever stimulating Melbourne poetry scene --and they were both superb-- looking & speaking exquisitely-- picking their words perfectly.
About Claire's gig, I wrote this in my journal : "I think the reading revolved about music or sound & sense. Brook Emery all sense and [to my ear] little sound [that not being where his poetry's located]; George Szirtes the perfect balance; Mark Reid more in line with Brook and with genuine comic touch; Claire's almost total investment in imagery, for which she's found a measure, quite unusual for English-language poetry... George followed her reading with her book [on his lap] --he looked interested-- I wonder if he found an affinity via East [& Central] European surrealism? Claire should feel more than relieved-- She's grown a leg --the book is compelling, her reading as clear as she could make it --brave as a writer & performer on the day --I'm moved & proud of her..."
Now --Grant [Caldwell] is launching this book and I'm just saying a few words! Inevitably, though, I began constructing a piece in my mind [the moment my plane took off for Europe a couple of weeks ago] : "Some Words for Claire Gaskin". What words? Maybe words around the letters of her name, Claire. Same time as thinking these things I was being haunted by lines of a song by Jane Birkin [the CD given me a couple of months ago by Cathy] --you may know it --from the album Rendezvous -- "The simple story, that you told me / As if you / lay down with a dream you'll wake up lonely" --The connection with Claire is in my image of the poet she may be --a kind of surrealist, a type of dreamer (--the references in her book to Neruda, the reply to Andre Breton) --And it anguished me to think of Claire as the unhappy surrealist! What an irony that loneliness would be the price of the oracle?
So had I followed my initial plan, "C" would have gone something like this : "A calamity it would be if the dreams which fund her poetry, rob her in daily life..."
Oh dear! Heavy! And this isnt the launching speech; just a few words, an accompaniment...
I'd also thought of quoting a passage from my journal of 20-odd years ago when Claire came to my creative writing class at the CAE in Degraves Street --but I can neither find my notes for that series of classes nor the relevant journal --Maybe it isnt 1986 but '84 or '85 or'87? Following my alphabetic plan [this] "C" would have begun something like : "Class of '86 (or whichever is the right date) whose two bubbliest students were Claire Gaskin & Lisa Jacobson" --though I think Lisa was the verbal one --I imagine Claire in a green jumper or jacket --I remember her as a teenager, as a sweet, delightful youngster --I remember her smiles, her quiet enthusiasm...
The "A" of Claire would have been for John Anderson --and it's probably his version of the dreamer that's closest to Claire --I remember her telling me years ago how taken she's been by his "dream lines", the words, phrases he'd wake with, and his use of this dreamed material in his poetry, ultimately following his friend Emma Lew's idea of using the pantoum to bring out the full poetic energy of the lines... And I'm reminded in a way of John in Claire's forming poems of amusing, wry, poignant, cryptic phrases & sentences --it's a kind of resurrection if you like --not merely hommage but a continuing life... John Anderson : "the choice of a subject like the choice of a glance / I hold things to the wall. What wall? Your choice and mine."
So, here am I with my unrealized idea, but with a few more things to say...
Firstly, a qualification of "dreams" & "surrealism" & so on : Claire may or may not be a Buddhist, but she certainly practices yoga & meditation... It's come to be seen, especially in Beat & "Language"-writing, that there's a link between the super- or trans-realism of the classic 20thCentury European poets & their English-language epigones, and the Zen poets' hyper attention to the objects of consciousness, whether in dream or world (and that continuum of dream & world)...
Claire's practice as a poet in Melbourne means she's been writing at a time when free-verse poets have been stimulated by the neo-formalists --Her poetry is, like other Melbourne poetry, often more obviously artful than Californian poetry for example --but a typical Californian like Joanne Kyger is in her practice a cousin for Claire --and for me --and this poem tells us something of Claire and something of me too : "This poem is more / like a picture / postcard isnt it // romantic? I'm in / god's fussy hands / leaving these words for you"...
So, without further ado, may I hand over to Grant Caldwell...

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS (part 5)

28/30 December, 2006
Melbourne

Dear Bernard,
The day I read your letter at the Shop I'd just opened box of books from Ingram International and imagine my astonishment, with your reference to Anthony Bourdain fresh in my mind, to find him quoted on the back of the John Fante Reader (Ecco,'o2)! To wit, "John Fante was the grand master of So Cal underbelly fiction. His unblinking eye and heroically unsparing prose gave no quarter and took no prisoners, yet his work --however debased, deluded or cruel his subjects --remains always beautiful. No one working the same side of the street --then or now --can touch him." Fante was always one of yours, via Bukowski I guess, but how interesting to find Bourdain there as well --the "brotherhood of the grape" perhaps?!
I cant claim synchronicity for the Bourdain I'm now reading. Retta has been aware of my new enthusiasm for a while, which then climbed a notch after the July UK visit when you & I watched a couple of episodes of his tremendously entertaining television series together, but her Xmas gift was a pleasant surprise. His chapter in Kitchen Confidential (Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly) about the precocious little kid he was, in France holidaying with brother & parents, hating everything except fries & burgers until the moment of his life-determining gastronomic awakening, is guilelessly poignant. His humour hardly disturbs the text's limpidity. I'd like to see his fiction now if only for a test of his narrative style. But what could beat this : "I'd sit in the garden [in the Gironde] among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was a wonderland for under-age drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaise and the Katzenjammer Kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinees in French, until the pictures swam in front of my eyes, smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane."

*

I'm also reading Vanity of Duluoz and, you'll be amused to hear, enjoying it. A great deal changes in 40 years! Because I havent yet located a copy of my rejected 1969 review in all my mess of manuscripts & diaries, I'm intrigued to find what might have been the references & passages that offended me back then.
Perhaps the address "wifey" provoked me from the outset --I could well have conjured mysogeny from that device. Today I immediately pick up on the Celinesque gambit of regailing the recent past from the very present with a narrative profitably unsentimental & spikier I think than earlier Kerouac. But "wifey" gratuitously makes one eavesdropper rather than direct recipient of the narrative. I suppose I'm being too literal --after all, Kerouac is really only ever talking to his reader. Vanity of Duluoz is subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-46". It is a concertina of a book, expanding, encapsulating, digressing and eventually reaching both the chronological & philosophical conclusion signalled at the beginning.
How & why then is "mysogenist, anti-Semitic, conservative rant" the main memory I've coddled all these years? Che as Fascist would have been a severe irk in 1969! "In those days [the Fourties] we were all pro-Lenin, or pro-whatever, Communists. It was before we found out that Henry Fonda in Blockade was not such a great anti-Fascist idealist at all, just the reverse of the coin of Fascism, i.e., what the hell's the difference between Fascist Hitler and anti-Fascist Stalin, or, as today, Fascist Lincoln Rockwell and anti-Fascist Ernesto Guevero, or name your own?"
My 1960s leftism was, I've come to realise, influenced as much by "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" politics as by genuine idealism --psychologically explicable for a 20-yearold though ethically monstrous at all times. Kerouac's equation of left & right-wing politics as the same kind of gangsterism employing the same lies was too confusing then for me to comprehend. It took me a long time to appreciate anti-totalitarian dissent. "Commitment" blinkered me for years --mind you, by the end of the 1970s getting into the 80s, I was beginning to see clearly again...

*

Something about Snyder I found in Rebecca Solnit's stimulating Wanderlust : A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000) : quoting from David Robertson's book, Dharma Bums, in Real Matter (Utah,1997), she refers to Snyder's encounter with the banned 19C mountaineering religion Shugendo while he was studying Buddhism in Japan in the 50s. Snyder & Kerouac's climb was "not the object of a quest, as for the grail. Instead it goes round and round and on and on, rather like the hike that Kerouac and Snyder took and even more like the poem [Mountains & Rivers Without End] that Snyder projected writing..."
This brings me to the book I sent you for Christmas, Opening the Mountain (S&H,'06) : Searching on the internet for David Robertson, jumping around the Gary Snyder sites, I found the account of the 1996 circumnambulation of Mt Tamalpais when Snyder & Robertson led what has become the annual hike. It's a lovely book & record in itself but the inspiration I hoped for you wasnt at all on the Mt Tamalpais scale. The reverse, though definitely connected. About Tamalpais Snyder wrote : " Circling -- climbing -- chanting -- to show respect & to clarify the mind. Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg & I learned the practice in Asia. So we opened a route around Tam. It takes a day." Cutting to the chase alright!
My journeys with Cathy O'Brien,in the late 80s & early 90s, to Port Campbell, where the Southern Ocean meets the limestone & bush of the national park adjacent to the green agricultural inland, had this celebratory & meditative quality. Our friend, the late John Anderson, had, as you might recall, suggested that the South-west Victorian coastline might be the closest I could get in Australia to what I'd been experiencing in Dorset, Devon & Cornwall. He was right. What would it have been like to have hiked with him? I can just imagine he & Cathy ambling along in endless, wide-awake dreamland! Dead nine years now...
Similar sensations on the small walks on the Dorset Downs, solo or with the family, and particularly many climbs up & around St Catherine's Mount in Abbotsbury overlooking Chessil Beach. And it all began with the circuits of Radipole, the RSPB sanctuary you introduced me to in 1987. As Snyder implies, it's the respect of nature & the clarification of mind the place affords. That's why Haiku Bums popped into my mind when we were on the phone at Christmas speaking about these things! We'd like to be Dharma Bums --and what an example Cathy is to us, there in Laos, schoolteaching, experiencing the animist & Buddhist life, continuing now waht she began as a hippy girl, overland with boyfriend in Asia, in the 1970s --but ours is an imagined project extended on the far smaller physical scale.Or what?
Happy 2007!
Love, Kris

*

RE- TRIP TRAP AND ALBERT SAIJO

(7/01/07) I knew Trip Trap years ago --thought I knew, I should say, though it may not be faulty memory but the case this current edition has extras like the Lew Welch novel extract, his letters to Kerouac (1959-60) and perhaps even Albert Saijo's A Recollection (1973), which is one of the best pieces in the book. I ordered copies for the Shop after you mentioned buying a copy (from Alan Halsey's catalogue or your esoteric book distributor?) --they've arrived and I'm thoroughly charmed!
I reread the sections of Big Sur (Saijo refers to it as the "beautifully sustained prose of his book of suffering") in which Saijo , "a serious young lay priest of Japanese Buddhism when all is said and done", is a character alongside Lew Welch.
I'm writing this at Kris Coad's flat (I want to say "great little pad" a la Saijo's evocation of his San Francisco neighbourhood fifty years ago) : a ceramicist (for some reason I resist the present usage "ceramist")' s environment. It's all on display, her studio & living-space. Table-ware, prayer-flags, stuff found along the shore, objects she collects. Half Morandi, half Buddhist monastery! In the breeze now of the early morning "change" the humidity of the night-before disperses. Cathy's farewell dinner-party last night the reason why I'm still here with a little hang-over! She flies back to Vientiane via Bangkok tonight. Kris has booked her ticket to visit in February. Come & go, here again then gone again...
(9-01-07) How else to be but matter-of-fact when flux is so evident?It's a state of mind isnt it? Thus the matter-of-fact style of the Buddhist Beat writers, infused with the wistfulness of the ancient Chinese (Taoist?) poets they loved.
I "googled" Albert Saijo... The photograph heading the article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for July (?) 1997 I've copied & sent to you, entitled "Running on Rhapsody", is exactly how one imagines Saijo from Kerouac's description of him as George Baso (surely pronounced Basho). He has the same kempt, bony, bespectacled features as Snyder --little, wiry & more ageless than the epithet "old" (Kerouac's "little, old, George Baso") confers (ditto Snyder).
If he's still alive he'll be 81 or thereabouts. In 1997 he'd have been in Hawaii six years, enjoying its multicultural alternative to mainland American "white-male dominant society." None of his books appear to be in print, aside of the collaborative Trip Trap. I'll write to Bamboo Ridge Press in Hawaii for Outspeaks a Rhapsody (1997) though --"a series of stream-of-consciousness rants and rhapsodies on topics such as the pain ("Analgesia --Land of Pain Free") and the horrors of a technological society ("Luddite Manque")." --according to the article.
I wonder if my attraction (yours too?) to the bit-players, the extras, is because that's where we also fit in to this weird & wonderful scheme of things. "All the world's a stage" etc. As you said, in different context, "sitting up, lying down, do the best you can." Add : And not giving in to conformity; not closing one's mind to wisdom, beauty, wonder; not disqualifying one's own contribution amongst the big glister & bluster! Hail Albert Saijo! Hail John Montgomery! Hail Will Petersen! Hail the Haiku Bums!

Love, Kris


*

17th January, 2007
Weymouth

Dear Kris, Too much! Your letter just in! It's a huge thing we're doing! I hadn't dreamt it would grow and envelop so much. I do like Albert Saijo. Many thanks for printing that stuff off the internet for me. He's a little man, isnt he? Looks like a Japanese Gandhi in the picture. I like that. Small people are more handy. Less expanded. More yang. I'm reminded also of Haru Arai --a traditional Japanese Barrel Maker (Okayasan) as described in one of my favourite books, Cullinary Treasures of Japan. "He was very small, under five feet tall and about eighty pounds, with gentle black eyes and short silver hair. He was dressed in a traditional thick cotton vest and baggy pants with a split for his big toe... Arai-san was exceptional; his skill, strength and wittiness are rare at any age." He's described felling a large bamboo (thirty-f00t and one-hundred pounds), picking it up and shouldering it down a steep mountainside at 71 years of age. Albert Saijo would be good company for him. The same breed I'm sure. You say Saijo is Roshi now. I wonder,living in Hawaii, if he's something to do with Robert Aitken.
"A Recollection" by Saijo is great opener for Trip Trip. I wonder what stirs in our imaginations to relate to the "trip" so strongly? I guess it's voyage of discovery. Inwards and outwards. As you say --we'd like to be Dharma Bums / Haiku Bums. Got to get my shit together!
By the way, I ordered Trip Trap from my 'friends' at Green Spirit Books in Wiltshire. They belong to the Schumaker Society (small is beautiful) and are a not-for-profit business. They'd never heard of Kerouac when I asked for a list of his books in print!
The haiku/poems in Trip Trap are playful and fun to read but not eminently great. Maybe it's not the point to make great literature. Just get it all down, record the trip/ the journey.
I picked-up on the fact that both Kerouac and Lew Welch had their mothers figuring in their lives. And here am I living with Mum. Twenty years now. And alone together now since Dad died. It made me laugh that we had that something in common.
John Fante? I haven't read him for over twenty years! I was very excited when I received Ask the Dust from Black Sparrow Press, knowing he was one of Charles Bukowski's inspirations. That would be 1980. And unfortunately Black Sparrow is no more. I can agree with Anthony Bourdain, whom you quote from that John Fante Reader, that the writing is "debased, cruel and beautiful." For example, "Treat her rough, Bandini, treat her around and she'll wrap around your cock and die there." (Prologue to Ask the Dust, Black Sparrow, 1990.) Buk was onto a good one there! Sadly, I've so many books piled-up here and there about the house I can't find Ask the Dust --I've just had a look for it. It must be upstairs in the loft maybe. So many books. Might well be a good idea to finally get that bookshop and be a bookseller like you. Who would be interested in Fante and Bukowski in Dorset tho? But I did see a mass-market paperback of Buk's Factotum when I was in Dorchester last week. Shop might be the best thing before the books get damaged. Been dreaming of a bookshop for thirty years now! Two of my social-work friends and I were actually looking around Gosport for premises in the mid'70s...
(11-February'07) 4.15 a.m. Still very dark. Birds chirping outside --accompaniment to the radio. I thought birds waited until first light? Maybe it's the street-lights. I've been reading George Crane's book --about the monk T'sung T'sai again. But I've just been downstairs to fetch up TDB and Opening the Mountain. Birds and radio apart nothing intrudes and obsessions of the day haven't started on at me.
Opening the Mountain was such a wonderful present to get from you for Xmas. I love the photographs. That picture of mushrooms... Just me to pick out food!
I do understand what you say about making our own walks a ritual, our own environment 'sacred'. Don't have to go to Tamalpais or Higi or Kailash. But wouldn't it be great to do just that. To be able to do it. Walking up to St Catherine's at Abbotsbury that first time with you last summer (June'06) was great for me. It took me 20 years to think my heart would take the effort. Ah, the view. But we climb the mountain to climb the mountain. As Snyder says, "The main thing is to pay your regards, to play, to engage, to stop and pay attention. It's just a way of stopping and looking at your self too". And Smith (TDB, p63) quotes "the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.'" Smith realises then that he doesn't have to climb the mountain. And that everyone's trip is going to be different. "Now there's the karma of these three men here : Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountain-top and makes it, I almost make it and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all is that poet's poet [Morley] lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, goddammit they'll never get me up here again."
This ascending mountains, or circumnambulating is not about getting to the top or walking all day. The journey is the thing. Just being on the path is enough. Being on the path is enlightenment. "Ordinary mind is enlightenment itself," as an 8th Century Chinese master said, talking about zazen. Being ordinary is enlightenment... I have my Chafey's and Radipole paths...

Love, Bernard


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(to be continued)