Showing posts with label Karl Gallagher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karl Gallagher. Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2015
KEROUAC'S BIRTHDAY(--BIRTHDAY?
On the 21st October, anniversary of Kerouac's birthday (--birthday? --his death day dammit! though any of us who've known deep loss begin at some time to confuse the birth & death dates-- a memorial conflation, both happy & sad, forever fused), I'm reading Lee Kofman's article Muses on Fire, excerpted from Kill Your Darlings magazine, reprinted in The Victorian Writer, April '15 issue, which I'd missed having been back home in England when it arrived and not seen till now. The iconic photograph of Cassady & Kerouac on full facing page catches my eye, apt even synchronous that it should crop up at this moment what with our HOWL 60th event of the 10th October still buzzing! Nothing like an anniversary to twig period, person, place. At every switched-on turn right now there's Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti et al. On Dave Moore's Jack Kerouac group's Facebook page I see Duane Potosky's drawing of Neal, no hands cigarette between his lips. There's Kerouac too, and on the artist's page sketches of his own stars of film, music, literature. Reading Lee Kofman and thinking of Karl Gallagher, who's been in my mind since Dave Ellison rang to tell me that our friend, painter, poet, on-line publisher of Fitzroy Dreaming, is in hospital, bearing up, in a good frame of mind he says, being well looked after. I mean to say, Karl Gallagher! --first candidate for what we've named the D M, that zone of heaven & earth where the desperate mystics disport, --desperate only as Lee Kofman has quoted Kerouac, "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow candles…" --this "now legendary sentence" she calls it…
Digress here (--as though all or any of this isn't! --this hold-all prose --parenthetical --dervish-turning to reach the essence of the impulse to begin --and begin one must-- starting out with a few accessories, literary equivalents of apple, chocolate, pen-knife --thanks Boy's Own Dad for that! --thus Kerouac, Kofman, Gallagher shoring up the expedition) : found an email from Paul & Ann Smith recording same news of Karl plus a phone-number to call, which I do today, 24th October, reporting to H.Q., touching base. Kerouac's birthday I say, not yet aware of my mistake. Is it? he says. Fancy that. And how was the Howl reading? Kerouac running around with the jugs of wine, did you do that? Hah! Helped ourselves! And who read Howl? Several poets, I say, male & female voices reprising & renovating the original. Organised by George Mouratides, who's one of the four younger scholars who edited the Scroll version of On the Road --I suggested or recruited a few readers, David Pepperell, Ken Trimble, Larry Schwartz. I was Mr Rexroth as MC, joking & kindly growling --and Ken Trimble… Ah, he's the real thing isn't he, Karl says… he read the McClure poems, I said --he's off on his world tour next year with new book of poems --Melbourne, Kyneton, & New Mexico with… Begin to pronounce "Joe Bottone" but swallow what could have spun into another Beat/God saga, though every reason to extol Joe's new poems, billowing sumptuous as the refrain of the Nick Cave song Into My Arms, which Ken's current poems coincidentally chime, and judging from his Facebook, Merton & Bede fulsomely in the wings… Image in mind now of Joe's monastery, Camaldoli, often quoted by Ken following his visit to Big Sur, and of Father Bede's Shantivanam, similarly experienced --also, sudden glinting, Bede Griffiths' Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire preceding Dom Sylvester Houedard --hah! hardly believe it! --comes to me out of the blue --sad to say out of the nowhere the British counter-culture's largely consigned to --Dom Sylvester as various as Merton, monk & poet of that era, Sixties & Seventies increasingly incredible as one's own momentum turns full circle effecting belated consideration & remembering… And then of image of Meherabad as shown me over the years by Dave Elison, but most recently illustrating one of Paul Smith's verse memoirs from his own New Humanity Books, inscribed in my mind from Karl's postings of his pilgrimages, with Phil Motherwell too, among fellow Baba lovers, amidst less Indian cliche dust & petals than fertile Maharashtra lawn & grove…
Returning to Lee Kofman --she's keenly aware of brilliance's terrible other half, I say to Karl --exemplary of Neal Cassady & June Miller in the article : "while 'burning people' have the gift for making those around them feel fully alive by rendering the everyday into a glittering fairytale, in the process they often burn themselves out". I'm wary of imposing too long with this hospital phone-call. Though he's been up for it he eventually says he'll probably hang up, but not before hailing Cassady & Kerouac. You know, he says, spiritual guys would go to San Quentin to talk to the prisoners, and they'd sometimes see Cassady, at the back, and he'd be glowing…Yes, and Kerouac, --the hopeless alcoholic, Karl says matter-of-fact.You were onto him quite young too? Yes, heard of him before I first read him… Dropped out of College, '64, desperate for deliverance from the cultureless town, poet & artist I assumed I was, --looking for any way out of it --escape to Paris? --quashed --Wales then, great in some respects but fell out with the mate I'd gone with-- hung out at the wonderful Southampton Art Gallery and the amazing upstairs Reference section of the Central Library --my 'further education'! --found Ihab Hassan writing on the post WW2 Americans, describing Charles Olson, for example, as the 'Dean of the Beats', --the Beats! Read about them, took notes in little fold-over letter-pad --but the first Kerouac I actually read was Big Sur, which was one of the numerous paperbacks I was selling in tiny kiosque aboard Sitmar Line'sFairstar late '65, the job I'd been demoted to after failing to cut it in the big shop according to my managers, --obliged to wear northern waters' blues and tropical whites past the Equator but evidently not really presentable to the passengers, aside from my atrocious attempts tying products in the hold for hoisting up to the main deck! --they were glad to hide me behind that little hatch, selling cigarettes, confectionary, & paperbacks! --and one day I picked it out, BIG SUR : "The story of the crack up of the King of the Beats" --and disbelievingly opened it --but the impact of that first line : "The church is blowing a sad windblown "Kathleen" on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I'd ruined my 'secret return' to San Francisco by getting silly drunk" & et cetera has remained with me these fifty years --I was his boy, once & for all! Quick thoughts in my head about autobiography as history, and the chronicle poems of my friend Philip Kanlides, and, quite a propos, the celebrated Pi O whose epic, Fitzroy, was launched a week ago. Karl says, Kerouac kills a mouse and he's guilty & sad forever. Reading Kerouac, Karl says, I was knocked out by his honesty… I never heard someone talk about God so openly, he says. We share taking-it-all-in chuckles. Boys or old men, no where else to go.
[--fin, 25th October, '15
Westgarth, Oz--]
Thursday, December 11, 2014
DYLAN THOMAS IN MELBOURNE, NOTES & COMMENTS 2013/14
DYLAN THOMAS IN MELBOURNE, 2013-2014
1
LLOYD & THOMAS AT HOLY TRINITY
On outset (see how I avoid 'get go') Robert Lloyd excuses his representation of Dylan Thomas from the "academic", by which one understands he wont be critically analysing the poetry but intersecting with it as an enthusiast. No slight at all to call Robert Lloyd a fan, after all he recognises Thomas as first pop-star, fore-runner of British Invasion, taking New York a decade before the Beatles. And it's true --Thomas's concerts were sell-outs --and at the end the poets of the day kept his hospital room pretty busy too…
Robert Lloyd has listened to the recordings, read all the biographies, seen all the movies, and made his Welsh & NYC pilgrimages. Personality, therefore --charisma, reputation, image, legend, & all fulfilled as myth -- defines this Dylan Thomas. One thing the academic approach doesn't do is elevate the artist above the work. For example, "the kinds of things artists have to do to survive" (RL) neither here nor there when the composition is the only essential. Except that in our age, where biography is the most popular form of history (as history itself collapses into a continuous present), familiarity & personal identification are imperative as the virtual reality is achieved. "At his best between the third & eighth drinks", according to the Richard Burton anecdote RL quotes, indicates for him the liberated tongue, delighting in word play, performing the self, as it were, amid social cacophony, the broth & froth of the everyday. All of which one can go along with given that the Thomas oeuvre, in verse & prose, original & interpretive, has long been absorbed.
"For many people these days poetry is song lyrics" is Robert Lloyd's grafting of the other Dylan & Mr Cohen & Nick Cave, Lou Reed, John Cale et al, to the body poetic, which nicely begs the question. I remember exemplary practitioner of poetry as art, John Tranter, saying as much over the radio years ago in response to the habitual question that assumes poetry's decay if not disappearance. It's alive & well (as popular form) in rock & pop lyrics, he said. He may have mentioned rap but needn't for the point to be made. Which isn't at all to posit equivalence but, in my mind, to imply the multiplicity of poetry, poetry in all of its genres, as complex ecriture & instantly available song, & all points in between.
Instructive when Lloyd described the difficulty of setting Dylan Thomas when, necessarily, the poem's formal scheme collides with the form the composer/musician is constructing for it. That tricky shit (as RL would say), & I'd contend, and probably for the benefit of poetry virgins, is at least as important as the verities of the drunken poet. Scholarly diligence & critical insight cannot be mutually exclusive of the ecstatic. With Thomas, language playfulness & profound thought & emotion co-inhere.
No review of the Holy Trinity gig this jumping out-take, which would would otherwise include description of the vaulting that a cello (Adi Sapir Cohen's) creates about a guitar, filling the sails of the songs --it's simply the after-taste of that Saturday late morning in East Melbourne, at the church's anniversary arts festival, celebrating Dylan Thomas, as one trammed happily back to the commerce of the City.
[18-20/8/14]
2
As native as a nearly five decades Melburnian endows, and to that extent aware of Australian anniversaries including Collected Works Bookshop's 30 years or the La Mama Poets' Workshop's 46th (--the original La Mama one must stress, which isn't to detract from La Mama Poetica which the late Mal Morgan inaugurated in 1985 after Val Kirwan's short-lived attempt earlier in the '80s to re-establish the September '68 incarnation --and Poetica is still going) --one's more than happy to leave mainstream majors to the official calendar, --the Henry Lawson, for example, now in Tony Lambides' hands --Ken Trimble part of that too?-- while rising to the fanfare (pun intended) of Dylan Thomas's centenary which enjoyed three previews all involving Robert Lloyd, plus the Melbourne Writers Festival's own session, before the official date of October 27th '14 was reached, unleashing the world-wide centenary celebration…
Happy memories persist from last year's event (the Dylan Thomas [99th] Birthday Celebration) at Collected Works Bookshop, led by Robert Lloyd & myself, --the programme comprising R L's song-settings of Thomas poems, play (Caroline Williamson, John Flaus, Patrick Boyle memorably reading from Under Milkwood), and poetry & commentary featuring Ray Liversidge, George Genovese, Ken Trimble, Valli Poole, Michael Reynolds, Earl Livings… Add to this Lloyd's presentation of Dylan Thomas at Holy Trinity's arts festival on August 16th, accompanied by Adi Sappir Cohen who brought her sublime cello to the show, and once again at the World Poetry gig at Federation Square a week ahead of the birthday. World Poetry's run these days by Dimitris Trioditis in the wake of founder Lella Carridi's coordination. Quite a detonation to hear the Greek translations of Dylan Thomas which Trioditis rattled off at the conclusion of the Lloyd/Sapir set, and definitely needed if only to offset the rising clamour from the bar below's amplified muzak!
Two small Melbourne publications have been the direct product of the original event and all the talk around it. Shall God Be Said To Thump The Clouds : Poets Celebrate Dylan Thomas, is published by Valli Poole with her Blank Rune Press, & sports a great cover portrait by Karl Gallagher of the tousle-haired boyo, cigarette held spivilly between sensual lips. It features American poets Alexis Rhone Fancher, Bryn Fortey & Catfish McDaris, and locals Gallagher, Poole & Ben John Smith. There's also Ken Trimble's The Ghost To His Green : A Tribute to Dylan Thomas, published by Christine Mathieu's Little Fox Press, which was spoken of as a Blank Rune Press chapbook until a classic change of plan (ah, poets). Significantly, the covers of both books disport with green, befitting the age's greenest poet. Who could forget Thomas's poignant double edge : "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer." If not for its Red Dragon, Wales would be green all over too.
The thirteen poems of The Ghost To His Green are elegiac transpositions of Ken Trimble's life upon Thomas's --in October Children for example, "We are / October children / yet as different and distant as Mercury's sun / and those visits though not Fernhill were filled / with innocence now / gone". It's a passionate identification with another of his exemplary poets, just as the Beats have been in his reading & roaming life. Thomas is the figure which the biography's cut for him, amplifying the famous poems. In this regard not unlike Robert Lloyd & the poets of the Blank Rune anthology, intersecting & interacting first & foremost with the legend. In Valli Poole's & several of her contributors' cases, Caitlin has joint billing. Irrelevant to poetry, which is Dylan's first to last, but everything to do with a feminist rebalancing of the history book. No doubting the document of Caitlin's story, so what's important is the quality of the particular prism --who or what distinguishes the biography or poetry when the tag of this time is the 'bright star'.
Robert Lloyd's poignant & amusing description of his journey to Dylan Thomas country, is, for mine, always part of an attempt to redeem true poetry & feeling from the show-biz & commerce in the poet's name. Yet I have a measure of 'why not?' even to that aspect now. Springing James Joyce from Bloomsday, similarly, has its point, yet this is the age of elitist & popular culture's convergence. Postmodernism anyone? 'Here Comes Everybody'? So why not enjoy the best of both worlds and accept the versions not as trivializations but as enlightening riffs & translations as happens with the great Indian classics and wherever in the world poetry appears at the heart of the culture.
Robert Lloyd is a storyteller for whom even the day's doings are potentially edged with mystery if not the mystical (--remember Robert Kenny's memorable lines, "Everything mystiqual, enveloped by a lovely intelligence / that seduces the rigmarole of the hours" , from his 'Poem' (Poem in inverted Commas), 1975)… Chutzpah & charm is endearing and practice makes perfect but simplest to say that Robert Lloyd addresses the audience not as a poet with a guitar or a guitarist with his poems but as a performer of the poems & songs of his personal Dylan Thomas journey. Allegories, parables, revelations along the way, all along this green year…
[23-30/10 (11-12/14]
1
LLOYD & THOMAS AT HOLY TRINITY
On outset (see how I avoid 'get go') Robert Lloyd excuses his representation of Dylan Thomas from the "academic", by which one understands he wont be critically analysing the poetry but intersecting with it as an enthusiast. No slight at all to call Robert Lloyd a fan, after all he recognises Thomas as first pop-star, fore-runner of British Invasion, taking New York a decade before the Beatles. And it's true --Thomas's concerts were sell-outs --and at the end the poets of the day kept his hospital room pretty busy too…
Robert Lloyd has listened to the recordings, read all the biographies, seen all the movies, and made his Welsh & NYC pilgrimages. Personality, therefore --charisma, reputation, image, legend, & all fulfilled as myth -- defines this Dylan Thomas. One thing the academic approach doesn't do is elevate the artist above the work. For example, "the kinds of things artists have to do to survive" (RL) neither here nor there when the composition is the only essential. Except that in our age, where biography is the most popular form of history (as history itself collapses into a continuous present), familiarity & personal identification are imperative as the virtual reality is achieved. "At his best between the third & eighth drinks", according to the Richard Burton anecdote RL quotes, indicates for him the liberated tongue, delighting in word play, performing the self, as it were, amid social cacophony, the broth & froth of the everyday. All of which one can go along with given that the Thomas oeuvre, in verse & prose, original & interpretive, has long been absorbed.
"For many people these days poetry is song lyrics" is Robert Lloyd's grafting of the other Dylan & Mr Cohen & Nick Cave, Lou Reed, John Cale et al, to the body poetic, which nicely begs the question. I remember exemplary practitioner of poetry as art, John Tranter, saying as much over the radio years ago in response to the habitual question that assumes poetry's decay if not disappearance. It's alive & well (as popular form) in rock & pop lyrics, he said. He may have mentioned rap but needn't for the point to be made. Which isn't at all to posit equivalence but, in my mind, to imply the multiplicity of poetry, poetry in all of its genres, as complex ecriture & instantly available song, & all points in between.
Instructive when Lloyd described the difficulty of setting Dylan Thomas when, necessarily, the poem's formal scheme collides with the form the composer/musician is constructing for it. That tricky shit (as RL would say), & I'd contend, and probably for the benefit of poetry virgins, is at least as important as the verities of the drunken poet. Scholarly diligence & critical insight cannot be mutually exclusive of the ecstatic. With Thomas, language playfulness & profound thought & emotion co-inhere.
No review of the Holy Trinity gig this jumping out-take, which would would otherwise include description of the vaulting that a cello (Adi Sapir Cohen's) creates about a guitar, filling the sails of the songs --it's simply the after-taste of that Saturday late morning in East Melbourne, at the church's anniversary arts festival, celebrating Dylan Thomas, as one trammed happily back to the commerce of the City.
[18-20/8/14]
2
As native as a nearly five decades Melburnian endows, and to that extent aware of Australian anniversaries including Collected Works Bookshop's 30 years or the La Mama Poets' Workshop's 46th (--the original La Mama one must stress, which isn't to detract from La Mama Poetica which the late Mal Morgan inaugurated in 1985 after Val Kirwan's short-lived attempt earlier in the '80s to re-establish the September '68 incarnation --and Poetica is still going) --one's more than happy to leave mainstream majors to the official calendar, --the Henry Lawson, for example, now in Tony Lambides' hands --Ken Trimble part of that too?-- while rising to the fanfare (pun intended) of Dylan Thomas's centenary which enjoyed three previews all involving Robert Lloyd, plus the Melbourne Writers Festival's own session, before the official date of October 27th '14 was reached, unleashing the world-wide centenary celebration…
Happy memories persist from last year's event (the Dylan Thomas [99th] Birthday Celebration) at Collected Works Bookshop, led by Robert Lloyd & myself, --the programme comprising R L's song-settings of Thomas poems, play (Caroline Williamson, John Flaus, Patrick Boyle memorably reading from Under Milkwood), and poetry & commentary featuring Ray Liversidge, George Genovese, Ken Trimble, Valli Poole, Michael Reynolds, Earl Livings… Add to this Lloyd's presentation of Dylan Thomas at Holy Trinity's arts festival on August 16th, accompanied by Adi Sappir Cohen who brought her sublime cello to the show, and once again at the World Poetry gig at Federation Square a week ahead of the birthday. World Poetry's run these days by Dimitris Trioditis in the wake of founder Lella Carridi's coordination. Quite a detonation to hear the Greek translations of Dylan Thomas which Trioditis rattled off at the conclusion of the Lloyd/Sapir set, and definitely needed if only to offset the rising clamour from the bar below's amplified muzak!
Two small Melbourne publications have been the direct product of the original event and all the talk around it. Shall God Be Said To Thump The Clouds : Poets Celebrate Dylan Thomas, is published by Valli Poole with her Blank Rune Press, & sports a great cover portrait by Karl Gallagher of the tousle-haired boyo, cigarette held spivilly between sensual lips. It features American poets Alexis Rhone Fancher, Bryn Fortey & Catfish McDaris, and locals Gallagher, Poole & Ben John Smith. There's also Ken Trimble's The Ghost To His Green : A Tribute to Dylan Thomas, published by Christine Mathieu's Little Fox Press, which was spoken of as a Blank Rune Press chapbook until a classic change of plan (ah, poets). Significantly, the covers of both books disport with green, befitting the age's greenest poet. Who could forget Thomas's poignant double edge : "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer." If not for its Red Dragon, Wales would be green all over too.
The thirteen poems of The Ghost To His Green are elegiac transpositions of Ken Trimble's life upon Thomas's --in October Children for example, "We are / October children / yet as different and distant as Mercury's sun / and those visits though not Fernhill were filled / with innocence now / gone". It's a passionate identification with another of his exemplary poets, just as the Beats have been in his reading & roaming life. Thomas is the figure which the biography's cut for him, amplifying the famous poems. In this regard not unlike Robert Lloyd & the poets of the Blank Rune anthology, intersecting & interacting first & foremost with the legend. In Valli Poole's & several of her contributors' cases, Caitlin has joint billing. Irrelevant to poetry, which is Dylan's first to last, but everything to do with a feminist rebalancing of the history book. No doubting the document of Caitlin's story, so what's important is the quality of the particular prism --who or what distinguishes the biography or poetry when the tag of this time is the 'bright star'.
Robert Lloyd's poignant & amusing description of his journey to Dylan Thomas country, is, for mine, always part of an attempt to redeem true poetry & feeling from the show-biz & commerce in the poet's name. Yet I have a measure of 'why not?' even to that aspect now. Springing James Joyce from Bloomsday, similarly, has its point, yet this is the age of elitist & popular culture's convergence. Postmodernism anyone? 'Here Comes Everybody'? So why not enjoy the best of both worlds and accept the versions not as trivializations but as enlightening riffs & translations as happens with the great Indian classics and wherever in the world poetry appears at the heart of the culture.
Robert Lloyd is a storyteller for whom even the day's doings are potentially edged with mystery if not the mystical (--remember Robert Kenny's memorable lines, "Everything mystiqual, enveloped by a lovely intelligence / that seduces the rigmarole of the hours" , from his 'Poem' (Poem in inverted Commas), 1975)… Chutzpah & charm is endearing and practice makes perfect but simplest to say that Robert Lloyd addresses the audience not as a poet with a guitar or a guitarist with his poems but as a performer of the poems & songs of his personal Dylan Thomas journey. Allegories, parables, revelations along the way, all along this green year…
[23-30/10 (11-12/14]
Thursday, September 2, 2010
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, Number 12, September, 2010
Melbourne
16 November/ 30 December, 2009
Dear Bernard,
I've begun watching the DVD of Richard Lerner's What happened to Kerouac? --such an inspiration when I saw it on the big screen in 1987. You remember the story --Retta & Tim caught it in Sydney, on their holiday with Anna Couani, same time as I saw it in Melbourne, and we all loved it --in my case, literally bounding the few miles home from the Valhalla cinema in Richmond --for the relief of it as much as anything --that the Beat life & literature had survived despite the tragic rise & fall of the chief protagonist, and was even now inspiring. I confess, though, the monster fan I'd been in the Sixties had taken a political hit from Kerouac's own, apparently reactionary, mouth in '69 when I read Vanity of Duluoz in Melbourne, and then received an aesthetic broadside in England, after reading Ed Dorn's comment in New American Story (Grove, 1965, bought from one of George Dowden's sales), that "Kerouac took care of all of what the informal range of the personal ruminator can do with our material. He continues to do so. I value his writing very much. But it is only partly satisfying. His syntax is quite dull. It allows the use of the 'I' only one device(...) But the limited presence is perhaps our greatest problem." (1963)
But, back to the film, what a buzz! I was totally energized, like Ray Smith emulating Japhy, running down the mountain --the method we learnt ourselves from Dad, as kids, --Isle of Wight summer holidays --to trust the momentum, without thought &, therefore, self-consciousness & fear! (And years passed before I tried that again --around Port Campbell (S.W. Victoria), goat-footed down the rocks & gullies, early '90s with Cathy. Must be time again for another such descent --which is a bit like saying, time I had another flying dream!)
Young acquaintance James Hamilton leant me the DVD --and it occurs to me he may be thinking of just such a project regarding the Melbourne '60s La Mama poetry scene --like, "What happened to Buckmaster (& Co.)?" The scope could & should be expanded, though the earlier one goes the less likely the subjects will be alive. This was underlined for me recently with the death of Alan Murphy. I'd hoped to conduct a formal (publishable) interview with him, informed by numerous chats we had when he visited the Shop --we'd reconnoitre his memories of WW2 & after, the '50s & '60s Melbourne scene, which I delightedly realized connected to my own forays, since the '80s, into alternative histories.
*
One of the gifts of What happened's second viewing is John Clellon Holmes' conception of Kerouac as "a prose experimenter of consequence who can be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce." The context for Kerouac's originality, says Holmes, is "The interaction of imagination & reality [which] is the source of all literature (perhaps not the Goncourt Brothers or those Realists, Naturalists, whom no one reads) in which the personality of the author, the consciousness of the author, the point of view of the author, never gets into the book."
No shock of the new when it's enjoyed or suffered half a century of amelioration! One needs, therefore, this kind of literary reminder of Kerouac's stylistic novelty. Even I tend to normalize the style as 'talk-write', familiar now in the contemporary practice of both literature & the variety of non-fiction. But when Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied on piano by Steve Allen, you hear the jazz of it --and it's the music of his language, as tho' poetry, which impresses --the texture resembling the process of remembering as well, perhaps, as the way jazz is constructed.
None of that in Bukowski whose talking-writing is more or less as-it-comes but, to use blog-lingo, he's always 'on topic'. Bukowski's facility is that ear-&-tongue craft which knows & trusts to the natural succession, succinctly deployed. No associational runs or fields, nor need there be for the writer narrator he is --just what is, what happened, what happened then, & then...
*
I'm reminded of Bukowski's great little piece on Neal Cassady as I watch the footage of Cassady & Ginsberg at City Lights Bookstore in 1965. "his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo-bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade." (Notes of a Dirty Old Man; City Lights, '69.)
In the footage, Ginsberg's stoned silly, wanting to ameliorate his friend's hostility to the young counter-culture audience. They're in front of a camera amongst a crowd you'd bet were its subscribers. Cassady ("where's the fee?" he says, as though to provoke any hippy anarchists present) can't settle. He's awkward, agitated, speedy, as if compelled to be on show --nervous as one's read of Ken Kesey or Kerouac himself come to that --nervous to express opinion. He resorts to what sounds like parody of Burroughs & Kerouac paranoia & cynicism : "All the extremists, all the civil rights, all the kids, anybody on any side(...) this is all hindsight what we're talking about --it's already too late --the Pentagon's taking care of all... they're killing us all deliberately..."
Ginsberg burbles : "Well, that's the point -- I have no idea who's running the country..." (It's only the point if running the show's important --our holy man's political shadow or his share of politics' own shadow.) As for Cassady --never an easy place to speak outside & think against the consensus. Much reason, therefore, to be jumpy.
Bukowski perceives Cassady as Kerouac's boy : "you liked him even though you didn't want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn't Neal's mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise."
Now what a can of worms that is. Off the top of my head : the ethics of attribution however complicit or acquiescent the assignee; the double edge of exemplarity; the downside of fulfilling the mythic life however transformative its promise...
*
I'll close on an entirely optimistic & beautiful note --namely, the letter from Henry Miller to Kerouac's publisher at Viking, written October 5th, 1958, reproduced in the 50th Anniversary (American) edition of The Dharma Bums (Viking, '08), which Karl Gallagher, another Dharma Bum I assure you, recently showed me. (As I understand it, your British edition has Ann Douglas's introductory essay but no letter from Miller, which is a pity.)
The line we always felt existed, as far-flung readers & enthusiasts, between Henry Miller & the Beats --though aspects of Miller also obviously resonate in Bukowski : the pariah-worker novels --Miller's Molloch, for example, a first cousin of Post Office , Ham on Rye, etc. --is here joyously underlined.
The Dharma Bums was the first Kerouac novel Miller read. His letter ripples with praise with praise & enthusiasm. He's led to say that Kerouac "is the first American writer who makes me feel optimistic about the future of American letters. Whether he is a liberated individual I don't know, but he certainly is a liberated writer. No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline." After many similar compliments, Miller concludes, "Others run out of 'material' sooner or later. Kerouac can't. He's all there is, because he's identified himself with everything, material or non-material, and with the silence and the space between. We've had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac. He doesn't throw dust in your eyes... he sings. "God, I love." Take hope, you lost ones --Jack's here!"
All best wishes for the New Year!
love,
Kris
oOo
Weymouth,
25th August, 2010
Dear Kris, Yer 'tis -- the letter that's been so long coming. I think you'll understand that I was absolutely swamped by family events. It was so difficult coping with looking after Mum as she declined following her fall last July (2009) and fracturing her left hip -- which impeded her mobility -- wheel-chair, zimmer frame and stair-lift. And then her Alzheimers.
Everything passes she said. And now she has -- April 3rd. And slowly, slowly I emerged. She released me from her for the second time. It was truly cathartic. Now I'm flowing and blossoming like never before. And I'm ready, and up for getting back to being a Dharma bum.
Having said that, I'm curtailing this correspondence for now. It certainly sustained me. Your letters kept the light flickering within me. I did tell you that it hadn't gone -- that it was still there! But now I fully understand things in my heart instead of in my head -- that poetry can save you, And what is working for me at the moment is the new initiative with my publishing. Stingy Artist Editions lives.
I've not had the head or feeling to publish anything since 1996 --14 years --& now everything --including the publishing --is flowing again. It started with my poems for Mum in July (4 Poems, i. m. Berthe Tawa). And because of that I thought of two further projects. One, for Franco Beltrametti -- a folded broadside -- two of his letters to me -- facsimile -- & two poems I'd written for him. The other publication is for dear friend Marilyn Kitchell --I wonder where she is? --a similar thing --but a folded card. In total I've got plans for a dozen or so publications between now & the end of next year. I'll be ready for 2012!
Big Dharma explosion? Where will the Bums take us? Reminds me of Franco's poem, Crucial Matters (to Robert Creeley), in Three for Nado, by Franco, which I published in 1992 :
come here
see it in print
keep it together
give me a break
and never be done
with all of it
hummingbird
on snapdragon
(?. VI.89)
We'll never be done with any of it! Anyway, Dharma brothers forever!
Love,
Bernard
________________________________________________
16 November/ 30 December, 2009
Dear Bernard,
I've begun watching the DVD of Richard Lerner's What happened to Kerouac? --such an inspiration when I saw it on the big screen in 1987. You remember the story --Retta & Tim caught it in Sydney, on their holiday with Anna Couani, same time as I saw it in Melbourne, and we all loved it --in my case, literally bounding the few miles home from the Valhalla cinema in Richmond --for the relief of it as much as anything --that the Beat life & literature had survived despite the tragic rise & fall of the chief protagonist, and was even now inspiring. I confess, though, the monster fan I'd been in the Sixties had taken a political hit from Kerouac's own, apparently reactionary, mouth in '69 when I read Vanity of Duluoz in Melbourne, and then received an aesthetic broadside in England, after reading Ed Dorn's comment in New American Story (Grove, 1965, bought from one of George Dowden's sales), that "Kerouac took care of all of what the informal range of the personal ruminator can do with our material. He continues to do so. I value his writing very much. But it is only partly satisfying. His syntax is quite dull. It allows the use of the 'I' only one device(...) But the limited presence is perhaps our greatest problem." (1963)
But, back to the film, what a buzz! I was totally energized, like Ray Smith emulating Japhy, running down the mountain --the method we learnt ourselves from Dad, as kids, --Isle of Wight summer holidays --to trust the momentum, without thought &, therefore, self-consciousness & fear! (And years passed before I tried that again --around Port Campbell (S.W. Victoria), goat-footed down the rocks & gullies, early '90s with Cathy. Must be time again for another such descent --which is a bit like saying, time I had another flying dream!)
Young acquaintance James Hamilton leant me the DVD --and it occurs to me he may be thinking of just such a project regarding the Melbourne '60s La Mama poetry scene --like, "What happened to Buckmaster (& Co.)?" The scope could & should be expanded, though the earlier one goes the less likely the subjects will be alive. This was underlined for me recently with the death of Alan Murphy. I'd hoped to conduct a formal (publishable) interview with him, informed by numerous chats we had when he visited the Shop --we'd reconnoitre his memories of WW2 & after, the '50s & '60s Melbourne scene, which I delightedly realized connected to my own forays, since the '80s, into alternative histories.
*
One of the gifts of What happened's second viewing is John Clellon Holmes' conception of Kerouac as "a prose experimenter of consequence who can be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce." The context for Kerouac's originality, says Holmes, is "The interaction of imagination & reality [which] is the source of all literature (perhaps not the Goncourt Brothers or those Realists, Naturalists, whom no one reads) in which the personality of the author, the consciousness of the author, the point of view of the author, never gets into the book."
No shock of the new when it's enjoyed or suffered half a century of amelioration! One needs, therefore, this kind of literary reminder of Kerouac's stylistic novelty. Even I tend to normalize the style as 'talk-write', familiar now in the contemporary practice of both literature & the variety of non-fiction. But when Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied on piano by Steve Allen, you hear the jazz of it --and it's the music of his language, as tho' poetry, which impresses --the texture resembling the process of remembering as well, perhaps, as the way jazz is constructed.
None of that in Bukowski whose talking-writing is more or less as-it-comes but, to use blog-lingo, he's always 'on topic'. Bukowski's facility is that ear-&-tongue craft which knows & trusts to the natural succession, succinctly deployed. No associational runs or fields, nor need there be for the writer narrator he is --just what is, what happened, what happened then, & then...
*
I'm reminded of Bukowski's great little piece on Neal Cassady as I watch the footage of Cassady & Ginsberg at City Lights Bookstore in 1965. "his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo-bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade." (Notes of a Dirty Old Man; City Lights, '69.)
In the footage, Ginsberg's stoned silly, wanting to ameliorate his friend's hostility to the young counter-culture audience. They're in front of a camera amongst a crowd you'd bet were its subscribers. Cassady ("where's the fee?" he says, as though to provoke any hippy anarchists present) can't settle. He's awkward, agitated, speedy, as if compelled to be on show --nervous as one's read of Ken Kesey or Kerouac himself come to that --nervous to express opinion. He resorts to what sounds like parody of Burroughs & Kerouac paranoia & cynicism : "All the extremists, all the civil rights, all the kids, anybody on any side(...) this is all hindsight what we're talking about --it's already too late --the Pentagon's taking care of all... they're killing us all deliberately..."
Ginsberg burbles : "Well, that's the point -- I have no idea who's running the country..." (It's only the point if running the show's important --our holy man's political shadow or his share of politics' own shadow.) As for Cassady --never an easy place to speak outside & think against the consensus. Much reason, therefore, to be jumpy.
Bukowski perceives Cassady as Kerouac's boy : "you liked him even though you didn't want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn't Neal's mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise."
Now what a can of worms that is. Off the top of my head : the ethics of attribution however complicit or acquiescent the assignee; the double edge of exemplarity; the downside of fulfilling the mythic life however transformative its promise...
*
I'll close on an entirely optimistic & beautiful note --namely, the letter from Henry Miller to Kerouac's publisher at Viking, written October 5th, 1958, reproduced in the 50th Anniversary (American) edition of The Dharma Bums (Viking, '08), which Karl Gallagher, another Dharma Bum I assure you, recently showed me. (As I understand it, your British edition has Ann Douglas's introductory essay but no letter from Miller, which is a pity.)
The line we always felt existed, as far-flung readers & enthusiasts, between Henry Miller & the Beats --though aspects of Miller also obviously resonate in Bukowski : the pariah-worker novels --Miller's Molloch, for example, a first cousin of Post Office , Ham on Rye, etc. --is here joyously underlined.
The Dharma Bums was the first Kerouac novel Miller read. His letter ripples with praise with praise & enthusiasm. He's led to say that Kerouac "is the first American writer who makes me feel optimistic about the future of American letters. Whether he is a liberated individual I don't know, but he certainly is a liberated writer. No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline." After many similar compliments, Miller concludes, "Others run out of 'material' sooner or later. Kerouac can't. He's all there is, because he's identified himself with everything, material or non-material, and with the silence and the space between. We've had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac. He doesn't throw dust in your eyes... he sings. "God, I love." Take hope, you lost ones --Jack's here!"
All best wishes for the New Year!
love,
Kris
oOo
Weymouth,
25th August, 2010
Dear Kris, Yer 'tis -- the letter that's been so long coming. I think you'll understand that I was absolutely swamped by family events. It was so difficult coping with looking after Mum as she declined following her fall last July (2009) and fracturing her left hip -- which impeded her mobility -- wheel-chair, zimmer frame and stair-lift. And then her Alzheimers.
Everything passes she said. And now she has -- April 3rd. And slowly, slowly I emerged. She released me from her for the second time. It was truly cathartic. Now I'm flowing and blossoming like never before. And I'm ready, and up for getting back to being a Dharma bum.
Having said that, I'm curtailing this correspondence for now. It certainly sustained me. Your letters kept the light flickering within me. I did tell you that it hadn't gone -- that it was still there! But now I fully understand things in my heart instead of in my head -- that poetry can save you, And what is working for me at the moment is the new initiative with my publishing. Stingy Artist Editions lives.
I've not had the head or feeling to publish anything since 1996 --14 years --& now everything --including the publishing --is flowing again. It started with my poems for Mum in July (4 Poems, i. m. Berthe Tawa). And because of that I thought of two further projects. One, for Franco Beltrametti -- a folded broadside -- two of his letters to me -- facsimile -- & two poems I'd written for him. The other publication is for dear friend Marilyn Kitchell --I wonder where she is? --a similar thing --but a folded card. In total I've got plans for a dozen or so publications between now & the end of next year. I'll be ready for 2012!
Big Dharma explosion? Where will the Bums take us? Reminds me of Franco's poem, Crucial Matters (to Robert Creeley), in Three for Nado, by Franco, which I published in 1992 :
come here
see it in print
keep it together
give me a break
and never be done
with all of it
hummingbird
on snapdragon
(?. VI.89)
We'll never be done with any of it! Anyway, Dharma brothers forever!
Love,
Bernard
________________________________________________
Saturday, June 5, 2010
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #18; June/July/August, 2010
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Thursday, February 18, 2010
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #16, February, 2010
SERAPH BE
LOVE, LAUGHTER AND LIGHT
I dream of Jeanie..Major Nelson in black and white.
I dream of Jeanie naked in her timeless bottle..
washed up in Barbara Eden's backyard.
I dream of Larry Hagman..old and tormented by
nightmares of J.R.'s assassination.
Jeanie immortal for the ages..
bewitched with Bewitched..jealous of Samantha Stevens
and her life as wife and mother, two radiant women
subservient to a fifties mirage..galactic time-travel,
stellar avenues of infinite delight, pale to a life
in the burbs with the love of a good man.
Poor Jeanie..the bubble-head of blink and wink..
Tony hedging bets, lame to the core..obsessed with
flight paths, blind to the bottle rocket orbiting
his living room.
I dream of Jeanie..of Aladdin and Ali Baba..the buried
treasure of childhood midday movies..of pirates and
exotic shores. I dream of Tony and Rodger secretly gay..
using Rodger's place for hapless rendezvous..poor Jeanie
without a clue.
All the world's a stage of faceless celluloid wishing,
boxed lives of sixties re run tv.
I dream a heaven of Jeanies..a sanctuary of Samanthas..
a generation of Tonys..a swag of Darrens..peace to all..
blissful delight to children..wistful Arabian nights.
I dream of Jeanie and Samantha walking hand in hand..
dream from within..imploding in showers of love,
laughter and light..
(1998)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GLENN COOPER
RIMBAUD'S VALISE
I am afraid to open Rimbaud's valise for fear of what it might contain. It lies there silent as a stone, a museum-piece from another world, tempting us. Heart thumping, I run one pink fingertip along the metal fastener with all the nervous intensity of a teenage boy struggling to unclasp his girlfriend's bra on the back seat of a car. The valise does not respond, does not groan in anticipation. I examine more closely the fastener, observe the rust that has long ago begun its relentless encroachment. Some of it has rubbed off on my finger - the same process, I imagine, that liberated Rimbaud first from his leg and then from his life. I wipe it off on my shirt. I want to open the valise; my hands rest on the sides as though on the shoulders of a dear friend whose eyes are full of the vast melancholy of departure. Already the rust has penetrated my shirt, burning a hole over my heart that roughly approximates the shape of Africa. I realize there is no need to open Rimbaud's valise.
oOo
HEAT
Didn't someone once say that if you don't want to drown you must become like the ocean? There's no use talking about the heat in the desert - it becomes you, you it. Resistance is futile, even for Rimbaud, alchemist and seer. But what did he expect to find when he came out here? A new life? A new identity? Certainly a new climate. Heat. Then, after eleven years in the cauldron, he is back at the farm in Roche, leg gone, spirit mutilated. It is only the heat of north Africa that can cure him, he believes. Heat: the same thing that brought him to this sorry state shall be the thing that heals him. It is a strategy that only Rimbaud could entertain. On his boyhood bed he lies, loyal sister Isabelle tending his every whim, the cancer spreads through the wreck of his body like ink poured slowly onto a clean sheet of paper. Maybe he regales her with stories of strange people in strange lands. Maybe he plucks sadly a melancholy melody on an Absyssinian harp, his childhood dreams of adventure, of a pure and astonishing new world, obliterated! - his drunken boat sunken, gathering barnacles like tumours in some cold, dark sea.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
BURN THE FLOOR
(Burn before Eating or Burn't Offerings)
Written for the occasion of Julie & Moray McDonald's Burns Night
23 January 2010
Coming up the road
If a Moray, met a motor
coming up the road -
if a Moray raced a lorrie
and a few red lights -
would a copper book a Moray
or would he vanish straight from Sight?
Till the tyres gang flat
Oh his love is like a red, red bike
that's newly bought in June
Oh his loves are really two red, one white
that sweetly spin in tune
How fare thy wheels, my only loves
how fare thy brakes and gears
Oh I will love thee still fair bike
Until some time mid next year
Right gude-willie -- waught
Or the haughty overdraft
Should olden debts be forgot
In any agency, or bought or sold
or traded on, or left unsecure to go to pot?
Oh here's a block, it's Bessemer
the mortgagee cant sleep
a loan's a cup of kindness
with crack that always leaks.
A Lousy sonnet
All impudence, the louse may sleep
in Melbourne nights on dames hats
in Toorak street, but if they raced
our lad would place a bet, perhaps, upon it
Scotch Eggs
Let other nations raise daft chickens
that peck at corns, we start from scratch
our good scotch egg is boiled
and meated shortly after it is hatched.
So drink to Scotch eggs
that fill the wame, clad in crumbs
humble ovals, first friend of the whisky keg.
To Old McDonald's Clocks
The McDonald's terr-
Orr souse
Clicks and ticks
And teams with clocks
Some second hand
Most, alarming, a set of pendulous
Feckless old timers
Waiting for a Burn-ish rhymer.
To Our Julie's Haggis
Our Julie's rushed it
From the shop
Chopped its tiny feet off
Squeezed its neck
Full out of breath
And filled its heart
To treat us.
As handsome is the Haggis picker
So Handsome is the pudding
Go eat your fill of this good paunch
Just don't ask what's in it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT LLOYD
Three poems
*
ONE THING I ASK FOR
One thing I ask for, one thing I hope -
To live in your house, all the days of my life -
To behold your loveliness
every morning in the light.
Hear my voice, when I speak -
Be gracious and answer me. I wait only for you.
Without faith it's unthinkable -
without hope I wont see your face.
With joy in my heart. Whom should I fear?
My singing is all for you - my playing is gifted too -
I'm speaking in your voice.
Your presence is with me now.
[based on Psalm 27]
oOo
DAFFODIL DREAM
It's dusk in Paris, and the flower sellers in the old market
Are packing up for the day.
As they hose down the walkways,
The wet smell of daffodils, carnations and roses
Fills the air.
What luck!
They are giving away bunches of daffodils
To passers by.
I gratefully receive mine,
And wonder how long these vendors
Have been giving away flowers at this hour!
[8/11/04]
oOo
I GAVE MY RABBI
I gave my Rabbi a Leonard Cohen CD
which he plays in his car.
He called me while driving to thank me
and give me a blessing.
oOo
PSALM
Hear my prayer
listen to my song
I am in despair
from days of grief.
Gone are the times
of satisfaction in the ways
of darkness.
My hope is for an opening!
My voice rises up
like a candle flame
searching for your support.
Be with me now,
Be with me in my
time of need!
[2003]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
Sonnet: Flat Evening Surface
long into a flat evening surface
the depths are in focus a supermarket
trolley under some bushes
glints in streaks of moonlight
through breaks in storm clouds
the air alive as a strong breeze
comes around corners straightens up
like water under a bridge
a rumble in shadow after the flash
the muggy aftermath as the breeze rests
hot & cold you mix them to have a good shower
the moon comes out as the sky clears
the storm recedes indifferent
over the rust of the future
[2/1/2010]
oOo
The Rocks
i snip then find
light traveling in
but the whirl doesn't spend
a moment away
from its shadow
from its shadow
an echo performs
like the lid of a thought
and thousands of homeless sheep
march on the capitol
the capitol is just
a pile of rocks
collected randomly
without haste
from a great distance
distance is full of errors
mostly the wrong ones
well snip the light
has gone from its shadow
filtering the air
the air stiffens
is cut into strips
and wound around the capital
with or without delay
or so you observe
to observe: BREAK GLASS
but avoid the sheep
nesting in the trees
there is no emergency
in a pile of rocks
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
Three Poems
.
the wisdom and dignity
of lives lived on the street
and under thatch
tends to be practical
delicate and unperfumed
*
exiled from the sandcastle
some people discover
they risk a big fine
for a crisp freshness
and the ethos of giving
tomorrow's parties
rather than receiving
the final salute
in boyish classroom classics
*
we all say the same thing
about the tailoring
the architect of a new
crossing of the chasm
is effectively moistured
and it's all systems go
as fashion gets fast and furious
oOo
DARWIN
a tropical sweat
white ants communication
the books moulder
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
Karl Gallagher
[8-2-2010]
Yr site's last posting [see Being Here Retrieved, re- Alan Murphy & Shmuel Gorr] is terrific.
Funny thing about the passage of time and paths crossing - briefly - in 1963 Felix Werder came to 'A' Division in Pentridge Prison to conduct a weekly music class. After a few weeks we never saw him again - someone else continued with the class.
Adrian [Rawlins] of course I knew well - met him early '66.
[Francis] Brabazon I met in '75 at Avatar's Abode in Queensland - I had a few brief conversations with him. But I already knew a lot about him - and the early days (30s, 40s) through close frequent contact with an old pal of Francis's - Ozwald Hall (and also Stan Adams). Francis and Ozzie (a painter) had close contact with Heidi and the Reeds et al.
Adrian told me that - its on record - somewhere - that Sydney Nolan said that Brabazon, of any others, had the greatest influence on his painting.
cheers Karl
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS
SERAPH B (aka Brendan Carey)'s poem is from the self-published A Joyful Noise (Melbourne, '98). The pseudo blurbs for that collection can stand in for his biog here : "Brendan Carey puts the beat back into beatitude!" -- "A celebration of mystic everness and cosmic beingness...From jazz to somewhere else..." His references from that time continue to the present : Sun Ra, Bob Kaufman, Mingus, Coltrane, Kerouac... His contact is,
jca82879@bigpond.net.au
ROBERT LLOYD is the composer, singer-songwriter now back in Melbourne after many years in Sydney & on the road. Writing songs, poems & a novel. Rock & acoustic background; toured with his band around the world. Has written for the Ohio Ballet & the Australian Dance Theatre amongst others. His discs include Robert Lloyd (keyboards, piano, percussion), 2001, & Songs of Robert Lloyd (guitar, vocals), 2007.
GLEN COOPER, CAROL JENKINS, PETE SPENCE & CORNELLIS VLEESKINS have all appeared in previous issues.
oOo
--that's it then!
18/2/2010--
LOVE, LAUGHTER AND LIGHT
I dream of Jeanie..Major Nelson in black and white.
I dream of Jeanie naked in her timeless bottle..
washed up in Barbara Eden's backyard.
I dream of Larry Hagman..old and tormented by
nightmares of J.R.'s assassination.
Jeanie immortal for the ages..
bewitched with Bewitched..jealous of Samantha Stevens
and her life as wife and mother, two radiant women
subservient to a fifties mirage..galactic time-travel,
stellar avenues of infinite delight, pale to a life
in the burbs with the love of a good man.
Poor Jeanie..the bubble-head of blink and wink..
Tony hedging bets, lame to the core..obsessed with
flight paths, blind to the bottle rocket orbiting
his living room.
I dream of Jeanie..of Aladdin and Ali Baba..the buried
treasure of childhood midday movies..of pirates and
exotic shores. I dream of Tony and Rodger secretly gay..
using Rodger's place for hapless rendezvous..poor Jeanie
without a clue.
All the world's a stage of faceless celluloid wishing,
boxed lives of sixties re run tv.
I dream a heaven of Jeanies..a sanctuary of Samanthas..
a generation of Tonys..a swag of Darrens..peace to all..
blissful delight to children..wistful Arabian nights.
I dream of Jeanie and Samantha walking hand in hand..
dream from within..imploding in showers of love,
laughter and light..
(1998)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GLENN COOPER
RIMBAUD'S VALISE
I am afraid to open Rimbaud's valise for fear of what it might contain. It lies there silent as a stone, a museum-piece from another world, tempting us. Heart thumping, I run one pink fingertip along the metal fastener with all the nervous intensity of a teenage boy struggling to unclasp his girlfriend's bra on the back seat of a car. The valise does not respond, does not groan in anticipation. I examine more closely the fastener, observe the rust that has long ago begun its relentless encroachment. Some of it has rubbed off on my finger - the same process, I imagine, that liberated Rimbaud first from his leg and then from his life. I wipe it off on my shirt. I want to open the valise; my hands rest on the sides as though on the shoulders of a dear friend whose eyes are full of the vast melancholy of departure. Already the rust has penetrated my shirt, burning a hole over my heart that roughly approximates the shape of Africa. I realize there is no need to open Rimbaud's valise.
oOo
HEAT
Didn't someone once say that if you don't want to drown you must become like the ocean? There's no use talking about the heat in the desert - it becomes you, you it. Resistance is futile, even for Rimbaud, alchemist and seer. But what did he expect to find when he came out here? A new life? A new identity? Certainly a new climate. Heat. Then, after eleven years in the cauldron, he is back at the farm in Roche, leg gone, spirit mutilated. It is only the heat of north Africa that can cure him, he believes. Heat: the same thing that brought him to this sorry state shall be the thing that heals him. It is a strategy that only Rimbaud could entertain. On his boyhood bed he lies, loyal sister Isabelle tending his every whim, the cancer spreads through the wreck of his body like ink poured slowly onto a clean sheet of paper. Maybe he regales her with stories of strange people in strange lands. Maybe he plucks sadly a melancholy melody on an Absyssinian harp, his childhood dreams of adventure, of a pure and astonishing new world, obliterated! - his drunken boat sunken, gathering barnacles like tumours in some cold, dark sea.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
BURN THE FLOOR
(Burn before Eating or Burn't Offerings)
Written for the occasion of Julie & Moray McDonald's Burns Night
23 January 2010
Coming up the road
If a Moray, met a motor
coming up the road -
if a Moray raced a lorrie
and a few red lights -
would a copper book a Moray
or would he vanish straight from Sight?
Till the tyres gang flat
Oh his love is like a red, red bike
that's newly bought in June
Oh his loves are really two red, one white
that sweetly spin in tune
How fare thy wheels, my only loves
how fare thy brakes and gears
Oh I will love thee still fair bike
Until some time mid next year
Right gude-willie -- waught
Or the haughty overdraft
Should olden debts be forgot
In any agency, or bought or sold
or traded on, or left unsecure to go to pot?
Oh here's a block, it's Bessemer
the mortgagee cant sleep
a loan's a cup of kindness
with crack that always leaks.
A Lousy sonnet
All impudence, the louse may sleep
in Melbourne nights on dames hats
in Toorak street, but if they raced
our lad would place a bet, perhaps, upon it
Scotch Eggs
Let other nations raise daft chickens
that peck at corns, we start from scratch
our good scotch egg is boiled
and meated shortly after it is hatched.
So drink to Scotch eggs
that fill the wame, clad in crumbs
humble ovals, first friend of the whisky keg.
To Old McDonald's Clocks
The McDonald's terr-
Orr souse
Clicks and ticks
And teams with clocks
Some second hand
Most, alarming, a set of pendulous
Feckless old timers
Waiting for a Burn-ish rhymer.
To Our Julie's Haggis
Our Julie's rushed it
From the shop
Chopped its tiny feet off
Squeezed its neck
Full out of breath
And filled its heart
To treat us.
As handsome is the Haggis picker
So Handsome is the pudding
Go eat your fill of this good paunch
Just don't ask what's in it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT LLOYD
Three poems
*
ONE THING I ASK FOR
One thing I ask for, one thing I hope -
To live in your house, all the days of my life -
To behold your loveliness
every morning in the light.
Hear my voice, when I speak -
Be gracious and answer me. I wait only for you.
Without faith it's unthinkable -
without hope I wont see your face.
With joy in my heart. Whom should I fear?
My singing is all for you - my playing is gifted too -
I'm speaking in your voice.
Your presence is with me now.
[based on Psalm 27]
oOo
DAFFODIL DREAM
It's dusk in Paris, and the flower sellers in the old market
Are packing up for the day.
As they hose down the walkways,
The wet smell of daffodils, carnations and roses
Fills the air.
What luck!
They are giving away bunches of daffodils
To passers by.
I gratefully receive mine,
And wonder how long these vendors
Have been giving away flowers at this hour!
[8/11/04]
oOo
I GAVE MY RABBI
I gave my Rabbi a Leonard Cohen CD
which he plays in his car.
He called me while driving to thank me
and give me a blessing.
oOo
PSALM
Hear my prayer
listen to my song
I am in despair
from days of grief.
Gone are the times
of satisfaction in the ways
of darkness.
My hope is for an opening!
My voice rises up
like a candle flame
searching for your support.
Be with me now,
Be with me in my
time of need!
[2003]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
Sonnet: Flat Evening Surface
long into a flat evening surface
the depths are in focus a supermarket
trolley under some bushes
glints in streaks of moonlight
through breaks in storm clouds
the air alive as a strong breeze
comes around corners straightens up
like water under a bridge
a rumble in shadow after the flash
the muggy aftermath as the breeze rests
hot & cold you mix them to have a good shower
the moon comes out as the sky clears
the storm recedes indifferent
over the rust of the future
[2/1/2010]
oOo
The Rocks
i snip then find
light traveling in
but the whirl doesn't spend
a moment away
from its shadow
from its shadow
an echo performs
like the lid of a thought
and thousands of homeless sheep
march on the capitol
the capitol is just
a pile of rocks
collected randomly
without haste
from a great distance
distance is full of errors
mostly the wrong ones
well snip the light
has gone from its shadow
filtering the air
the air stiffens
is cut into strips
and wound around the capital
with or without delay
or so you observe
to observe: BREAK GLASS
but avoid the sheep
nesting in the trees
there is no emergency
in a pile of rocks
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
Three Poems
.
the wisdom and dignity
of lives lived on the street
and under thatch
tends to be practical
delicate and unperfumed
*
exiled from the sandcastle
some people discover
they risk a big fine
for a crisp freshness
and the ethos of giving
tomorrow's parties
rather than receiving
the final salute
in boyish classroom classics
*
we all say the same thing
about the tailoring
the architect of a new
crossing of the chasm
is effectively moistured
and it's all systems go
as fashion gets fast and furious
oOo
DARWIN
a tropical sweat
white ants communication
the books moulder
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
Karl Gallagher
[8-2-2010]
Yr site's last posting [see Being Here Retrieved, re- Alan Murphy & Shmuel Gorr] is terrific.
Funny thing about the passage of time and paths crossing - briefly - in 1963 Felix Werder came to 'A' Division in Pentridge Prison to conduct a weekly music class. After a few weeks we never saw him again - someone else continued with the class.
Adrian [Rawlins] of course I knew well - met him early '66.
[Francis] Brabazon I met in '75 at Avatar's Abode in Queensland - I had a few brief conversations with him. But I already knew a lot about him - and the early days (30s, 40s) through close frequent contact with an old pal of Francis's - Ozwald Hall (and also Stan Adams). Francis and Ozzie (a painter) had close contact with Heidi and the Reeds et al.
Adrian told me that - its on record - somewhere - that Sydney Nolan said that Brabazon, of any others, had the greatest influence on his painting.
cheers Karl
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS
SERAPH B (aka Brendan Carey)'s poem is from the self-published A Joyful Noise (Melbourne, '98). The pseudo blurbs for that collection can stand in for his biog here : "Brendan Carey puts the beat back into beatitude!" -- "A celebration of mystic everness and cosmic beingness...From jazz to somewhere else..." His references from that time continue to the present : Sun Ra, Bob Kaufman, Mingus, Coltrane, Kerouac... His contact is,
jca82879@bigpond.net.au
ROBERT LLOYD is the composer, singer-songwriter now back in Melbourne after many years in Sydney & on the road. Writing songs, poems & a novel. Rock & acoustic background; toured with his band around the world. Has written for the Ohio Ballet & the Australian Dance Theatre amongst others. His discs include Robert Lloyd (keyboards, piano, percussion), 2001, & Songs of Robert Lloyd (guitar, vocals), 2007.
GLEN COOPER, CAROL JENKINS, PETE SPENCE & CORNELLIS VLEESKINS have all appeared in previous issues.
oOo
--that's it then!
18/2/2010--
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