THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #17, May, 2010

GERALD FITZGERALD


Regarding Bertram Higgins (1901-1974)

oOo

[Recently, Gerald Fitzgerald became interested in Bertram Higgins. He popped into Collected Works bookshop one day & asked if I had anything by Higgins or if I'd even heard of him. Much laughter when I said that indeed I had heard of him, in fact I'd dealt with him at some time when I was poetry editor at Meanjin Quarterly (1976 to '78 inclusive). I believe I was sent a batch of his poems by a friend or relative (perhaps his son) or it could even have been A.R. Chisholm... I've searched for my Meanjin era correspondences but turned up nothing; I cant find my diaries for that period either. If Meanjin retain records of correspondence between editors & contributors then perhaps the original submission & my response might turn up. My memory is that I was singularly unimpressed by the poems & probably said so. One must recall that I was the poetry editor newly appointed by Jim Davidson (Clem Christesen's successor), specifically to bring the 'new poetry' to the magazine --and mine was a particular 1960s'/'70s modernist perspective tempered only by a brief which required me to select from the best of the in-tray in addition to soliciting from the poetry world, local & overseas, I inhabited. Today I'm embarrassed by the memory of that rejection note. Had I been responding to Bertram Higgins at almost any other time in the last 30 years I would at least have been interested in his historical position. Melbourne cultural history wasnt the same type of preoccupation for me in the mid '70s as it was to become. Actually, I dont think it was until the Mallarme in Australia conference in Melbourne, September/October, 1998, curated by Michael Graf & Jill Anderson, that I was reminded of Chisholm, of course via Christopher Brennan's centrality to the theme. This doesnt mean I'd have necessarily accepted Higgins' poetry for publication back then, but would certainly have welcomed the figure he was. Today I'm sure I'd have found something in his manuscript to publish if only because of the importance I now attribute the byways, the undergrowth, the 'secret history' of this (& any) place. Naturally, I asked Gerald to write me a resume of his investigations...
Kris Hemensley]


oOo


April 30th, '10


Kris,

This is purely to keep you up to date with my Higgins news. Unsurprisingly the 'subject' burgeons, due almost entirely to his being forgotten more or less totally for a few decades. I'm not all sure anyone has had a go at surveying his multiple activities: poetry, literary reviewing, and editing avant-garde journals devoted to literature and the arts. One problem has been that so much of this activity occurred in UK, roughly between 1921-1939.
But unlike numerous expatriates he returned, twice; firstly between c.1931-33 and then c.1946 till his death in 1974.

On the bits and pieces I've so far garnered, I don't think there's any doubt he's at least a most interesting figure in the story of Australian letters, and most certainly so with regard to the era of modernism.

The following are some of these garnered bits:

- 1925-1927. Asst Editor, Calendar of Modern Letters. Higgins was a friend of Edgell Rickward (ed of CML) at Oxford. There they seemed to have initiated the idea for the Calendar. Higgins was a frequent contributor of poetry and reviews.This journal was highly esteemed by FR Leavis, and (in The London Magazine Oct 1961, 37-47) by Malcolm Bradbury who declared it in 'many ways the best' of the 'three great literary reviews of the 1920s' (the others being The Criterion and The Adelphi). In 1986 a further substantial review of the CSM appeared in the Yearbook of English Studies, V.16, 150-163, by Bernard Bergonzi.
- 1933. FR Leavis. Towards Standards of Criticism. Selections from the Calendar of Modern Letters (1925-27). Numerous of Higgins's contributions appear in Leavis's selection.
- 1931. Stream. Higgins edited (and founded!) this Melbourne journal upon avant-garde Art and Poetry. It lasted for three editions (July- September, 1931).
- 1981. Bertram Higgins, The Haunted Rendezvous: Selected Poems.

As well, there are numerous biographical bits and pieces (many culled from a biographical reminiscence by AR Chisholm in The Haunted Rendezvous):
- After one year (1920) at Melb Uni., Higgins left Australia to continue his studies at Oxford. There he became friends with Roy Campbell and Robert Graves. The former, according to HM Green (A History of Australian Literature 1920-1953) declared Higgins 'the most interesting of all the poets at Oxford'. On his appointment to the chair of English at the University of Cairo during the '30s Graves arranged for Higgins to accompany him as asst lecturer in English. However, Graves didn't take up the appointment, so Higgins's job there fell through too.
- '20/30s. Higgins does much literary reviewing in UK papers and journals. He also becomes the first cinema critic for The Spectator.

- c.1974. Thesis. The Nature of Bertram Higgins' Poetry. Copy in State Lib of NSW.
- 1968-1974. Correspondence between James McAuley and Bertram Higgins. Held in the McAuley collection. State Lib of NSW.


These details are still a mishmash. Bits and pieces. I'm trying to track down Robert J King, and Higgins's children (who are proving difficult to find). Still far too early to put together a coherent survey. Higgins spent the final 30 years of his life in Melbourne. What in the heck was he up to then? Jim Griffin, the historian, ran into him in the Beehive Hotel in Kew sometime during this period, noted what an interesting character he seemed to be, but (being an historian!) didn't pursue this 'literary' figure. That was a missed opportunity.

Cheers, Gerald

oOo


May 3

Kris,

The Selected Poems were published in 1981, almost certainly therefore at the instigation of someone(s) else - maybe Chisholm, or Michael Parer, or one of Higgins's children. At this stage I have no idea how representative of his work this collection is. The poems that I would like to see are those of the '20s, which clearly impressed people such as Campbell and Graves.

The Robert J King I refer to in my previous email is the author of the thesis now held in the SLNSW. I'm also trying to contact Ken Hince. One of Hince's colleagues whilst they were teachers at Xavier (where Higgins also went to school) I know did make contact with Higgins.

Chisholm seems to have been alive at the time (1981) of the publication of the Selected Poems.

Cheers
Gerald

oOo


May 3

Chisholm died in 1981, at 93. He was always interested in contemporary Australian poetry, as you probably know.
His major (publication) interest was in the French Symbolists. Both of these strands would have readily lead him to Higgins.
G



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JURATE SASNAITIS


Two poems from GRAVELLY VIEWS


*

OM MANE PADME HUNG (repeat)

The sun kissed my cheek

And inspired the chant.



*


ECHO

I am mutable and infinite, I reflect exactly
Whatever it is you want to be. I show you.
My slippery tongue between your words,
I might trip you up, but never myself.
I cannot lie. I do. Lately more and more.
You are pompous and pigheaded, arrogant
And vain. I cannot help you. The truth alternates
---yours and mine---yours and mine---
I am not here to show you up. I am here to plump.
Now I am a cat. My tail twists between your legs,
A tickle up the trousers, and you splutter, utterly charmed
By your own wit and wisdom and superior intellect.
Gosh you're attractive! As if it matters what I think
When you're here to tell me what that is.
I want to please. I do. Most of the time.
I hold you in my eyes and wonder what you see.
It only happened once that someone noticed
My eyes are green. But so were his.


*


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LAURIE FERDINANDS


FOUR POEMS

*


Ancestors on show


Bleeding in the corner

A troubled

connection

Met by loathing

And selfish love

A cruel joke


*

Second cremation


His death was

slow

Predictably so

Giving time for her

To run the lines

And find her own

casket


*

Someone to trust


When she's gone

The world will

shrink

And become like a

wallnut

Perhaps trust is

everything

Blood and bones


*

Trotting pages


A clever collection

Full of life

Incinerators and

boys

Lasting years as

Chronicles of fun


*

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GEORGE LEVENTAKIS


*

Born from the edge of the water
Diving at the end of the stream
Life in the city would mean
just a picture of one world to me
that says something else
Keep me alive dear Sir,
Keep me alive dear Sir
Give me memories of love I hold in my mind
as sacred.
Because just a picture of the one world
to me that says
I'm there
and you're here
is alive.
Keep me alive dear Sir
Keep me alive.


*

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ALBERT TRAJSTMAN

Two poems from TURDUS MERULA SINGING IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT

*

[from the Introduction : "The title of this collection comes from the first line of a Lennon and McCartney song "Blackbird". It's not that I particularly like the song; it's nice enough. But I am intrigued by the image of a blackbird singing in the dead of night and by the realisation that unless the blackbird is singing no one would know that it existed. these poems are my attempt to acknowledge my own existence.
The technical name for a blackbird is Turdus merula hence the title of this collection.
--Melbourne, 2010.]


oOo

[The Seed: My wife's family had a painting with a life of its own until my wife killed it after her brother had killed himself.]


YOUR FAMILY HEIRLOOM PAINTING

Ah that big brown painting.
Painted by an ancestor.
Painted 150 years ago, or so Ma said.
Big, dark and poorly executed.
Wrongly shaped bodies with pin sized heads.
Bodies in stiff unnatural postures in some bucolic Victorian landscape.
A family legend went with the scene.
The painting even had a name:
"Lord Somers negotiating with brigands in Italy to secure the release of his beloved."
A big, brown ugly painting that seemed to say:
"I've earned my right to be ugly and revered - I've been around for ever."
that painting hung in your bedroom.
It must have witnessed your youthful lust and your experiments.
Seen you when your head was bent at your desk.
Seen you when dozed off at your studies.
Or when you roasted your legs with the blower heater.
The painting moved when you moved.
It even followed you when you married.
Finally in the interest of tasteful decor it went.
You couldn't bring yourself to dispose it for ever more
So you gave it to your brother.
At least it's still in the family you said.
At least it suits his style of home you said.
Exiled, it stayed with him.

It was hanging there the night he did the same.
He had thought you liked it so he left it to you in his will.
The day we cleared his house you took a knife to that painting.
The exhilaration as the knife sliced at the brittle canvas.
The joy of ripping strips just like lifting tops off scabs.
In the end it was easy.
In the end it was just a pile of little brown stiff rags.
In the end it was nothing.


oOo

[The Seed: After 60 years I hunted out the Paris apartment block where I had spent my first three years.]

AN APARTMENT ON RUE DE VINAIGRIERS

In my first three years
I lived in an apartment.
On the Rue de Vinaigriers.
A street linking Boulevard de Magenta to the canal.
Over the years
I believed it was a grand apartment.
Like those in films set in Paris.
A half a dozen decades later I returned.
But it was not what I remembered.
Surely I had never lived in an ugly concrete block.
In my memory my block echoed La belle Epoch.
In my memory my block complimented Haussmann's grand plan.
In my memory my block had charming wrought iron balconies.
Balconies forbidden to any bebe choux lest he should fall.
I didn't remember this featureless building.
Mine could not have been a between-the-wars concrete block
I never gazed out of mean little windows.
In its best years this building could never have been hospitable.
The building across the street was more like the sort
I thought I lived in - typically Parisian.
Surely that was the one - that was my building.
But the block number in notes from impeccable sources
Said: "No".
Mine was the ugly block with the mean windows
And I had spent my first three years gazing at that Parisian beauty opposite.


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

CLAIRE GASKIN


INFALLIBILITY

writing face down
the only sense is collage

praying for approval in front of a statue
god-mother telling mother to tell you off for idolatry

leave me alone on the page
I can feel the capillaries breaking in my legs
and my pen running out of ink

I am up to my knees in the story of :
we are only doing this because we love you

slashing tyres
cutting poems

when beliefs are more important than people
we are beetles on our backs

children in strollers holding dolls on nooses

prostitution doesn't stop rape
a child holding a bunch of daisies bigger than her face
it exists because of rape

footsteps in the cemetery
I will dye my hair in Autumn
control being a response to loss

a belief you can't be wrong
while the leaves loosen like promises

a belief you can't control your urges
bubble wrap between stacked marble at the masons

both beliefs that you can't
and here in the story up to my hips


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


GREGORY DAY


COMPOSTED

I was still laughing from the world's last joke
when the chicken farmer came into the co-op.
I straightened as they strined some nonsense
about oysters pleasing the missus.
Common enough joke in a fish co-op
but that wasn't what disappointed me.
I knew from their downbeaten colonial drawl,
not to mention the younger one's hairlip,
that they weren't your off-the-shelf yobbos
on a lark or a bender, but rather
deeply outcasted, outlasted hicks.

Why should they have to pretend otherwise
in a time that already wished them dead, buried
or at best composted? And with that barbed thought
I heard a keening right there across the counter :
A weird enough gift to right the broken world.

'Have you heard, the chicken farmer's fecund lament
Made of pullets and stink, insignificance, vile roughage
And oh such a relief? A whole town has been healed
From that one frankly extravagant outburst
Sung with an eye turned-in to the heavens
And with sorrow's tears falling out into joy.'

But nup, a fly buzzed, their orders ensued typically.
The hairlip bit and with his downturn of phrase
merely handed me the dosh. It was a fair exchange:
One dozen oysters for a sweet dream short of a quid.


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

ED MYCUE


I STAND BY THE ROSE

Viewing and reviewing my stay is an art formed in simple words of surviving, growing old, doing a good job necklaced like the world that can change from one day to the next and hangs on. And I stand by the rose without clean hands although summer is over and passages of melancholy loss recess in dreams that curl like the bannister or a squirrel's tail, squeaking, shivering with possibility for the right moment. all the while dewy mornings, azure skies, pussy willow trees---kit, caboodle of dreams' stocks-in-trade---confront the knife, a tiny blade that conspires like needles, stars, explosions and yet are still not night but light on light: the lake. Between past and future is now, no hands in the stone although breath has many doors to mix retrospect with apprehension, maybe told, forgotten, lost, found this morning.


oOo

TRANSLUCENCE
for Thom Gunn


as we rose, we changed---birthslug, toddler,

kiddo, preteen brainiac out through serious
awkwardness, bootielateral-liciously present

into some normatively developed willfulness
termed 'translucent' 'conduit'---symbols for such

flowering forms transversing to any seedy end.

the who we were and are will swell, seek, range,
swim within the scale our mature notions permit

wading through them conducting translucent lives


oOo

PEACE CORPS SKETCH

I honor the Peace Corps and those who brought it into being.
I honor the dedication of its Volunteers and staff.

Before it began, as a WGBH-TV (then located on the MIT campus) as a lowell fellow (lowell institute for cooperative broadcasting) intern in 1960-61, I met (as switcher/technical assistant director) candidate John Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Harold Stassen, Adlai Stevenson and others who discussed (on Nieman Foundation curator Louis Lyons' thrice weekly 14 minute 25 second shows on WGBH-TV the then New England Television-NET that preceded PBS) its establishment; and also worked on putting together at WGBH-TV the announcement program that aired on all major commercial networks in the Spring 1961 under the direction of the cameraman and director from our station who gone and gotten the footage in Washington, D.C.

Then when the test was given at Harvard yard, I took it. I got and accepted the call to go to U.C.-Berkeley for training for the Ghana 1 contingent (the first of several that went out then); in due course, after meeting the President in the Rose Garden and in his White House Oval Office, we left for Accra from Washington, D.C. in late August 1961 in a two engine prop Convair across the Atlantic stopping for refueling in the Azores, and again in Dakar, Senegal rearing up above the Ocean before coming down over the beaches of Ghana.

So it is with sorrow that I feel the Pace Corps has been dishonored and irrevocably tainted by the Bush and Cheney administration who for a time gathered it into the American military's house. I, after consultation with others, began to compose a draft, a protest. I sent the completed 'draft' to the Poets Against The War protest site:

MOMENTO MORI

today as we look forward now let us say
goodbye to our hopeful good past and not
let it stink and fray along with the misdeeds
we have recently been made party to, for

by including the Peace Corps as a career path
of military service under the guise of
some "national service" rubric, the great
ideas has been fatally compromised, dissembling

the intent in John F. Kennedy's creation
of the Peace Corps by a sneaky reformulation
the substance gone, what's left is a shadow
of a dream now morphed into the nightmare.

the ethical and criminal, even treasonous
contempt toward the American people by the
Bush-Cheyney administration stains even our
history. Peace Corps in practice is now dead.

[Forward email Peace Corps Response / 1111 20th Street NW / Washington, D.C. / 20526]


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CONTRIBUTORS

GERALD FITZGERALD, ex Classics at Monash University, well-known Proustian, & now for something completely different!
JURATE SASNAITIS, artist, bookseller colleague at the Greville Street Bookshop (Prahran, Victoria). These poems from Gravelly Views (Ratas Editions, February 2010). Her book of prose pieces, Sketches, published by Nosukumo (Melbourne, 1989). Contact, www.gravellyviews.wordpress.com
LAURIE FERDINANDS, Melbourne librarian, previously in Poems & Pieces #1
GEORGE LEVANTAKIS, one of Melbourne's Nicholas Building poets, via Button Mania. Working on a first collection to be published in Greece.
ALBERT TRAJSTMAN, once a mathematician now a poet on Melbourne's spoken word scene, e.g, the Dan, Passionate Tongues.
CLAIRE GASKIN, Melbourne writer & writing teacher around town. Anthologised in the Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, & Motherlode (both 2009). Previously in Poems & Pieces #6
GREGORY DAY's two novels with Picador are Patron Saint of Eels (2005), Ron McCoy'sSea of Diamonds (2007). Various limited edition books with his Merrijig Word & Sound Company, including Where Darkness Never Seeps : Poems of the CBD (featuring M Farrell, C Grierson, K Hemensley, A Stewart, J Taylor) (1999). Previously in Poems & Pieces #3
ED MYCUE lives in San Francisco. Seventeen collections of poetry, most recently Mindwalking, 1937-2007 (Philo Press, 2008). Longstanding Australian (via K Hemensley's H/EAR, W Billeter's Paper Castle) & English (via B Hemensley's Stingy Artist, & P Green's Spectacular Diseases) connections. Aka, The Chronicler. Previously in Poems & Pieces #13

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--A couple of months in the gathering, finally done this day, 9th May, 2010

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 7

LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR BECOMING BUDDHA : THE STORY OF SIDDHARTHA, BY WHITNEY STEWART & SALLY RIPPIN; 4th May, 2005, at the Greville Street Bookstore, Greville Street, Prahran [Melbourne].

It's a great pleasure for me to be launching Sally Rippin's book tonight. I've got to know Sally as a neighbour at the Writers' Centre where she occupies a studio adjacent to Collected Works Bookshop on the 1st floor of the Nicholas Building. I'm aware of her working away next door and always look forward to our conversations & green teas!
I'm dedicating my remarks tonight to my brother Bernard, who I've recently visited in Weymouth,UK --Bernard and his long struggle with agoraphobia and, of a more positive kind, with Buddhism's precepts & practices, its Asian traditions & its manifestations over the past century in the West... And to my dear friend Cathy O'Brien who presently lives & works in Laos, and apart from teaching English to everyone in Vientiane she's up to her ever widening eyes in that fantastic amalgamation of animist & Buddhist ceremony & practice... I dedicate it also to the continuing conversation between Cathy, myself & Kris Coad, the ceramic artist, around & about Indian, Chinese, Japanese & SE Asian aesthetics & themes...
It's also very nice to reacquaint with Jurate [Sasnaitis] in her shop [Greville Street Bookstore], and with [co proprietor] Des Cowley, who were friends & colleagues for many years at Collected Works...
This launching gives me the opportunity to tie together several strands of my life & my loves!
I was in Bangkok recently, to meet Cathy and to attend the wonderful retrospective exhibition of the Thai artist,the late Montian Boonma... It was impressive to say the least... He is one of Asia's preeminent contemporary artists [sculpture & installation] whose modern art practice is also perfectly explicable as Buddhist art --as his catalogue noted, "Boonma returned to local wisdom due to his consciousness of traditional society and his appreciation of Thai art"...
Cathy took me to the King's Palace temple complex, and I realised what an important place it was in the Buddhist world... And I was overwhelmed by the temples, the statuary, the sense of 'living temple' or church --and by the magnificent murals, hundreds of yards of the Ramayana story...
It so happens I'm a reader of Thomas Merton, who died tragically in Bangkok in 1968 --so when I arrived in England [the next leg of my '05 journey] I raided my brother Bernard's extensive library for his Mertons and found the Asian Journal...[I feel very much like Thomas Merton who on the occasion he was asked to lead a prayer confessed, "I have no idea what I am going to say." He then spoke profoundly about openness... "I am going to be silent a minute, then I will say something... 'O God we are one with you, you have made us one with you, you have taught us if we are open to one another You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts.' ]
This is Thomas Merton at the King's Palace : "There are of course Disneyland tendencies in all these Thai wats and I suppose at times they go over the line... As for the frescos, yes they were good too, in their way, so close to a comic strip; this is not meant to imply a judgement good or bad, after all I think the murals are perhaps the best thing in the whole temple. Hanuman has a prominent place in all this --he is at once a monkey, god and successful fighter and I think this says much that illumines the whole comic book and pre comic book tradition." --which takes me to illustration and specifically this book by Whitney Stewart & Sally Rippin.
My only personal experience of such a project has been working with Jiri Tibor Novak twenty years ago on my book, our book, Christopher... But I've always loved the pictures accompanying text, for prime example the Universal Comics era of literary classics --Mort D'Arthur, especially the Holy Grail chapter when Galahad lays eyes on the challice...
Let us open the book, Becoming Buddha... On the title page Sally's wild goose... In the book-trade I came to know it as the logo of Scottish press, Floris, publisher mostly of Rudolph Steiner titles but also Celtic & Scottish Gaelic works of literature & spirituality... I visited the abbey at Iona in the west of Scotland in 1990, whose symbol is the wild goose...
On the next page [the foreward by Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama] the lotus flower & the leaf of the Bodhi tree --beautiful marginal decoration... This is, of course, a book dedicated to the Tibetan cause & its form of Buddhist practice. It is blessed by the Dalai Lama. It is a picture book of one of the great stories of the world...
The writer's sentence, "At a time when the oldest bodhi trees in Asia were still in youthfull bloom..." is juxtaposed on this page with Sally's dance of leaves. Of course, the branch is assumed --literally, the leaves hang --but without the branch the leaves are miraculously suspended... The child is looking out of the pouch of the mother --with them there eyes!
[And so we follow the story of Siddhartha from baby to boy to youth to marriage to his life outside the palace.] Here Siddartha & his friend meet the monk... Sally's picture of Siddhartha's face is, I think, deliberately unformed --that is, it has less delineation than the monk's. But, one anticipates Siddhartha's progress in the beatific expression of the monk who meditates --in the story an as yet unknown practice. The face of the Buddha, as we would recognize it from its thousands of images in the great Asian traditions, is more that of the monk than Siddhartha...
The picture of Siddhartha as an experienced meditator yields, I think, to a kind of androgeny in its representation... Neither male nor female --maybe like one of the sacred transvestites of India, male & female simultaneously --the shaven dome of both baby & old one --the closed lids of an inner-seeing & not-sleeping person. And note the brilliant touch of the blue ribbon of thought/non-thought, the ribbon or vibration, the invisible thread which illustrates a transportation, a beyond-oneself, a transpersonality... The lumpyness of it is so much to the point of the realness of meditation --it's great that we dont have some wafting airy-fairy emanation! And the lumps perhaps contain monkey feet & tails! The figures work as decoration & the imagery suggested by the text...
In all the pictures thus far, black is border & background, positively or implied. But in this picture, which illustrates a scene prior to Siddhartha's enlightenment, --we could call it the Temptation and accept the Christian significance of that term --Sally has bordered the dramatic event with blue. I think the blue is the prelude to the golden orange of the magnificent next chapter/next page... Blue is a transcending colour, the colour of sky, of air (if it could be coloured) --it's the colour of the sea as well but that's the reflection of the sky!
The image of Siddhartha, on this orange & gold page, touching the earth with the fingertips of his right hand as his left hand rests across his thigh, is absolutely at one with Whitney Stewart's text... "Siddhartha's mind was steady. No trace of inner darkness blinded him. Free from pride, doubt and fear, from anger, excitement and sorrow. Siddhartha had clear vision..."
Here is Buddhism's figure of the enlightened person --here is the continuum of earth, nature, mind, and one thinks of Romanticism's legacy to modernity, including environmentalism's mystical aura & etc...
In her 'Illustrator's Note', Sally states she's not a Buddhist, "but have a great respect for Buddhism and the Dalai Lama. I knew that in illustrating this book, the challenge for me would be to work with historical images of Siddhartha already created by many wonderful artists over hundreds of years , but also to bring to each picture my own interpretation of Whitney's text. I began by collecting together as many beautiful materials and images of Siddhartha as I could find to inspire me. From there I began to paint Siddhartha the way that he appeared to me in my mind. While I painted each illustration, I practised the Dalai Lama's meditation exercises in this book and worked to create the most peaceful and beautiful image I could, all the while aiming to represent the light and compassion that Siddhartha, and now the Dalai Lama, bring to this world."
For those wishing to explore further I'd recommend, in addition to the multitudinous classical Buddhist literature, Herman Hesse's wonderful Siddhartha, which many people here would already know, and Thich Nhat Hanh's recent 600 page life of the Buddha, Old Path White Clouds, which draws on 24 Pali, Sanskrit & Chinese sources...
So, without further ado, I declare Sally's book, Sally & Whitney's book, launched!

------------------------------------
Becoming Buddha : the story of Siddhartha, published by Lothian Books , Melbourne, 2005.

BEST LITTLE POETRY BOOKSHOP ON THE PRAIRIE

...so they say. Maybe this life I'll still get to visit the States and check out the San Francisco, New York, Boston, LA, and I dont know where else, bookstores. And that goes for Europe too. This life I certainly visit some of the British bookshops (though Charring Cross Road that was is now only part of London lore)... But, Collected Works, the bookshop of Poetry & Ideas, tries to be first cousin of the great poetry/ the great literary bookshops of the world. Rephrase that, because this is the age of the mega bookstore and we're never going to compete with those : we're first cousin of the great LITTLE bookshops of the world, the little specialists. And I'm thinking English speaking world : must be fabulous bookstores in Europe, Latin America and other parts of the world....
Half of the stock of our bookshop is a book of poetry or a book directly related to poetry. The rest of the shop consists of literary fiction, some biography & criticism, a professional section (how to do/s, guides, dictionaries) from Americans like Mary Kinzie, Kenneth Koch, Nathalie Goldberg & Harold Bloom to Aussies like Kate Grenville, Kevin Brophy, Ron Pretty, Kevin Hart (now," is he an Aussie, is he? was he?" who sang that?) and such British as Paul Hyland, Chris Emery, Terry Eagleton & Stephen Fry.... Then there is a philosophy section (ancient & modern), a bit of psyche ("Mind's Matter"), some old & new speerituality; there's a Nature section, theatre, art, music, film...But in no way a general bookstore. Thus, POETRY & IDEAS, poetry & its affinities... Wow, what a range! I delight myself. (I remember Bill Matthews of the excellent secondhander, City Basement Books on Elizabeth St Melbourne, advising me 20 years ago? that I mustnt stock my shop according to my own taste; that would cause me the booktrade equivalent of the sickness unto death (that's my paraphrase)...But I knew no better, and anyway wanted to play and wanted the world to come in , in their ones & twos, and play with me (so to speak)... And so they have! We survive! 1984 to 2007! Astonishing for amateurs, enthusiasts, dilletantes!
And who are the ubiquitous "we" (some of whom can spell better than others)? There's me, Kris Hemensley, who manages the Shop, coordinates its literary activities & etc, in the Shop every day except my rostered Wednesday off (home to write sir, at the double!); Retta
Hemensley, who moonlights as a kindergarten assistant when not at the Shop, creative in every way ; and Cathy O'Brien,day job teacher/ night job artist & writer, who came on board around 86 and was my deputy when I ran away three months at a time in those days to England, but these recent years lives & works in Laos.
And what of the Bookshop's past heroes & heroines (all of whom had some vital connection to local Melbourne writing to qualify as group members)? Well, important indeed to mention Robert Kenny, whose idea it was to have a shop which might house the fruits of the labours of the government assisted employment project (the Small Publishers Collective) back in 1984; he's an academic historian nowadays, a poet & prosewriter once upon a time, editor & publisher... Just prior to dissolution the group included Jurate Sasnaitis (now Greville Street Bookshop), Des Cowley (at the SLV), Nan McNab (freelance writer, editor), Pete Spence (poet, collagist, mail-art/ist extraordinaire), Rob Finlayson (a literature officer in W.A. in recent years), Michael Loosli (in the Sydney booktrade now)... But, oh, many, many men & women, worthies all...
Someone should write a history....

--Kris Hemensley, April 2007