21st October: On this day in 1969, Jack Kerouac died...

"21st October: On this day in 1969 Jack Kerouac died. The Lonesome Traveller. Among friends & allies here in Heaven." Our notice up on the wall at Collected Works Bookshop, 21-X-16.

[Facebook post: On that day, the day after, the morning after? the Hemensleys were visiting George Dowden in Brighton, up from Southampton for a couple of days. I'd begun corresponding with George as editor of little mag, Our Glass, in Melbourne, '69. Found his Letters to English Poets in Mike Dugan's collection in '68, which gave me a postal address. What more does a boy in the sticks require?! Anyway, cut to the chase Hemensley! George took us around the corner from his fine apartment to meet Bill Butler, fellow American, at Bill's Unicorn Bookshop. Bill was fetching us a cuppa or finding a book to show, something like that, but he returned with the newspaper, New York Times, the Herald Tribune? Oh my, he was saying, have you seen this, Jack Kerouac died. Took the wind out of our sails.
George burrowed into his shoulder bag, fetched out a note book. Ive got a new notebook, he said. This'll be the first entry I make in it. Bill Butler kind of drew himself even taller than us and said, cuttingly, I always thought one only wrote small things in small notebooks.
Ye-es. Hmmm.
On the subject of Kerouac... infinite. On the subject of Bill Butler, great little shop, nice catalogues, central to the Brighton scene. I liked him, his Americana poems. Not everyone did. I recall Andrew Crozier generally congratulating the particular issue of my English mag. Earth Ship, in '70 or so, but particularly objecting to Bill's poems. (I'll take this opportunity to reread him now; I mean Bill. Andrew's a constant though wasnt always for me...) And on the subject of George... what happened to George? Bibliographer of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s, prolific on the little mag scene. I shared poems he sent to Melbourne with other little mags. He corresponded with Charley Buckmaster; Charles hoped to get across to England.  I have some poetry on this in the book Kent MacCarter's publishing soon...
Yep! This has to be Heaven!


*

re- John Thorpe

John Thorpe is always ''descending from history''. He brings one back --to Pound (Canto II, "…Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "), that is to say, to the poetry able to listen &, whatismore, hear. He brings one back to the instant which is always local --to logography ("is the language of changing yr mind. It was not discovered by Pound (who called it ideogram) or Olson, etc it's so primary only kids & a very few writers have been able to equal -- 'english' being full of alphabetic, syllabic & prosodic reflexes."), that is to say, to writing as a way of being human, which realises & manifests nature, extending the possibility of life, enhancing the precondition, never setting out to be 'literary'.

John Thorpe is always descending from history into the present, the instant, the local, which really is the opposite of making the local etc. historical. What does he mean, "changing yr mind"? : "I make space-time. IT is not making it. (….) If i describe a condition, it changes. Or i hope to hell it does. If it didn't I'd be in trouble & I have been."

*

re- George Dowden

From This Is the Land of the Dead, The island of the Blessed, published by Hapt (Bournemouth, UK), 1970,

This is the Land of the Dead, the Island
of the Blessed

There is no Ship of Death - no where
to go but here

Here are the sweet-smelling trees, the gems
of the Earth are flowers, stones, a palace
is in the center - it is you, it is I,
that's all to know for beginning

*

Dowden's Ship of Death is a companion of John Thorpe's "Stranger in Paradise" --from Matter, or giving (Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, N.Y., '75), "we came here on the 'Stranger in Paradise.' These were americans searching ease in the orient, never leaving Paradise, their ideological capitol, to look at the earth."

Literature is their prehistory. They swear that no more will they be led astray. (Though one wonders what's happened to that resolution in Dowden's most recent publication (three works by Kaviraj [George Dowden], published as loot 1 : 3, 1979, UK), praise poems for Muktananda, which are sopping wet with sub-Beat adoration.)

*

At the beginning, Dowden was one of the poets I found in Michael Dugan's treasure-trove of English little magazines. Or, at the beginning, in Melbourne, there was Michael Dugan, with his treasure-trove of English little-magazines, through which I rummaged at his home in Canterbury… Or, at the beginning, I was in Melbourne, putting my first little mag, Our Glass, together, when Ken Taylor, in some excitement, told me about & then showed me another little magazine, Crosscurrents, emanating from completely outside of our La Mama cafe-theatre circuitry. It was produced by Michael Dugan from his home in Wentworth Street, Canterbury. For at the beginning I was an English poet in Melbourne, who reconnected with the English scene through fortuitous meeting with Michael Dugan, whose treasure-trove of English little-magazines had inspired him to publish his own, Crosscurrents, & confirmed me in my own Roneo style direction!
George Dowden's poems in an issue of Ambit had caught my eye. I found his address somewhere amongst Michael's things. I wrote to him (& to Jeff Nuttall, & Simon Cutts). He replied, with poems, "(…) from my current 'set' called EARTH INCANTATIONS (Body Chants) - Blake, "O Earth, O Earth, return!" Etc. These have been my work through 1968-69, and are proving of interest to editors in a number of countries, underground papers as well as poetry magazines. I hope you will be able to get them into papers or mags or your own roneo series there. (….) Hope this catches you before you sail [back to England via French Polynesia, the Panama, Martinique, Madeira, Marseilles, departing Sydney August, '69]. Good luck to your group, and on your trip…" (27,VII.69)

At my farewell party, given by Betty Burstall, July '69, I distributed poems by George Dowden, & Michael, similarly, poems by Jim Burns. We were four La Mama poet-editors, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Ian Robertson & myself. Buckmaster corresponded then with Dowden. Dowden negotiated an Australian issue of the English magazine, The Curiously Strong, to be edited by Buckmaster. Dowden sent copies of his books to Ken Taylor (at the ABC, the 'safest' address!) for distribution 'for everybody'. And so on…

It seemed to me, in '69, '70, that Dowden's poetry, his Blake/Ginsberg epistles, could be a stimulus & elevation in the level of political-poetic address then being attempted in Melbourne by such poets as Charles Buckmaster, Paul Adler, & Geoff Eggleston. Both Ian Robertson & Buckmaster were enthusiastic to publish him. Dowden (an American living in England, teaching, writing Ginsberg's bibliography for New Directions) was closer to the Melbourne aspiration, was more accessible than Michael McClure for example.

*

George Dowden to K.H., "Had weird letter from GREAT AUK Chas. Buckmaster. I got Fred Buck to do an Aussie issue of THE CURIOUSLY STRONG, sent a couple of samples to Chas, told him choose 3 or 4 poets there and make up (edit) the whole thing as per the way it's laid out. Said a few words I thought were encouraging, like poetry should be really strong, dangerous, etc., things I thought they were after and were finding in my poems they were praising -- he took it all wrong, thought I was trying to tell him what to write, but was only trying to impress on him the idea of making a really strong issue in his editing (what else?). It must have been that I honestly told him I didn't care for a few little poems he included in letter, wanting me to get published for him --I told him to make them better in THE CUR. STRONG. Oh, well, sensitivity and all that. I explained that 'known' poets when asked for criticism/opinion can only give it from what they want and are doing -- the younger takes it or leaves it (same as in my LETTERS TO ENGLISH POETS, 1967, where I say that they are firstly for me, and only secondly for anyone else who wants to listen). Forget it. Nothing serious. But must be understood: when one is asked for opinion, he does the younger poet no good by lying…." (30. I. 70)

"Yes, overemphasis on description in aussies -- must be a nice place to describe, physically, Pacific, the sun, greenery. But hoping that can be fused with saying something vital -- will be in best, always is (where Pound is so good so often)…." (7. II. 70)


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

Quoted from Being Here, the draft of its first part, Interference, published in the Being Here issue of H/EAR #7, 1985.

GOOD MORNING GIONA, GOOD MOURNING

1


Wake to 'friend request' from Giona Beltrametti! (Wake to the light of day, of course. Raise bamboo blind for Ushas… Flick desk-computer on…) Giona is Franco's spitting image. Notice the birthdate in the Facebook sidebar. 1966, five years older than Tim Hemensley. Son loses father, father loses son. Good morning Giona, good mourning… Twentieth anniversary of Franco Beltrametti's death --Franco, like so many other British, American & European poets, ushered my way by Tim Longville at Grosseteste Review, editor & proselytiser supreme...

"I am not immune", said in softest caveat upon involuntary vanity that perceiving flux spares one from its fateful vicissitudes --insight more fragile than Lao monk-blessed baci such as Catherine ties around my wrist, protection ensured by animist conflation of material & metaphor (--we've been here before : the feminine's place in all of this --60s & '70s paeans to the immortal dyad; fusion then return to sovereign parts, over & again, women & men in ecstasy's every combination --and recall '80s reading of the slanders upon Lou Andreas Salome for a sister's collegiality with Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud, Buber, analogy of the further trivialisation by contemporary sexual politics of muse, soul-mate, lover, protege --and I admit my head full of fathers, sons, brothers here but sisters, mothers, neither lesser nor ever  forgotten) --yet while the moment flares with knowledge, the infinite delight of illumination subtracts from commensurate world. In no way a handicap when one belatedly realises Franco Beltrametti isn't narrator of the peripatetic (except of the means it is to experience geography as itinerary, simultaneous & indivisible), but meditator he is upon transience & impermanence, the willingly conscious & joyous recorder of world-as-time : "imagine : incurable! a precise / sensation (not unpleasant -- not pleasing) / that everything is happening somewhere else / at the speed of light SVAAAM while here / 24 hours in a bolt of lightning of 6months as it was / the twisting road / up and down across the valley [3/31/70]"

Apropos 'joyous' : I wonder what my own brother Bernard wrote to him in 1992 for Franco to hope I'd be "more joyous soon"? Twenty-three years since their correspondence & five years after Bernard published it in facsimile (Stingy Artist Editions, UK, folded card; Franco Beltrametti, Two letters to Nado / Bernard Hemensley, 2 poems i.m. Franco Beltrametti) I ask myself again : weren't those good years for me? The return to England beginning 1987, visits every or every other year. Discovering the S W Victorian coast, reflection it would be, John Anderson promised, of my new found Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, --Port Campbell to Warnambool, little towns nestled within limestone cliff & agricultural green, pummeled by Bass Straight & Southern Ocean. This time of new reading & thinking in philosophy & religion. New writing albeit substantially relinquishing publishing. Perhaps post partum anguish each time leaving England, dramatising life-long identity questions, -- but what misery implied?

After Bill Brown & Maggie Brown, most named is Franco Beltrametti in James Koller's Snows Gone By : New & Uncollected Poems, 1964-2002. For example in the poem of 30 Nov 1995 :
 "Rising before me now
these mountains are the Sierra,
where you built your house.
Remember the sign : three peaks.
You & I found them,
Truth or Consequences.
I take out the red
harp, Raffaella's, play it --
hear your shadow
caught in the wind."
Helped select it, probably build it. Friendship was never more brotherly… To see a shadow 'caught in the wind'  startling enough, but to 'hear a shadow' plays with kinaesthesia whilst eliciting 'shade' from 'shadow'.

In Jim Koller's Coyote's Journal, #10, 1974, are Franco's Five Poems : linked (and linked by Franco or Koller)? They don't follow chronologically --February '72, November '71, January '72 --but unsequenced in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, UK, '73) which suggests they're random. Yet, thematically, if the (SHORT REPORT) : (TOWARDS NOVEMBER) is a five-part poem's foundation, then a psychedelic sense could be made of "a series of irresistible waves / from all directions", or "1, 2, 3 rainbows", given the explicit reference "A. Rouhier, le Peyotl, 1927 Paris"… Hadn't checked before --imagined a Paris street upon which may as well be unknown rake illicitly tripped out! But belatedly discover the pharmacist & Left Bank book publisher Alexandre Rouhier is the man, one of Andre Breton's hundred guiding heads, mescaline experimenter in the wake of Havelock Ellis & others, --the occultist Monsieur Rouhier, member of one of several underground cells, student of Fulcanelli & spoken of in same excited breath as Alistair Crowley, his "astonished eyes" as per "La Plante Qui Fait les Yeux Emeveilles : Le Peyotl", a good look for Franco & the '70s desert mountain back-country crazy gang whose total countercultural beckoning ironically induced in me the opposite reaction, freezing one in English forbidding, making perfect halfway house of Australia, as though it were the Gauguinian, Whitmanic come-all-ye Down Under, --until now that is, NOW! that these alchemical documents thaw the erstwhile timid set, flow & fly one into Illumination (poetry & world thereof)…


2

Nothing met, named, without contiguities which aggregate Real World. Same apparent obliquity first appreciated in Jung's reading of family tree. Nothing more certain than psyche nor misleading as genome, --synchronicity, sirrah, not logical progression...

Two peas in a pod, Aunty Lod of my brother Bernard & I. I didn't plan the radical separations 1966-69 or, as potentially corrosive for all its benefice, the exile I came to call it, 1975-87. Air-letter correspondence there was, the correspondence which carried the entire poetry scene, both local & international.  But from children to old men are the essential divergent journeys, mutually exclusive experiences & investments, partial to the Way's myriad matings. And brief or extended circumstance parents all manner of relation, chips off old block, motes in ur-family's eternal light.

For some years I've misremembered Charles Olson telling Lew Welch at the 1965 Berkeley reading (transcribed by Zoe Brown, published by Jim Koller's Coyote Books, '66), "I'm not your father, you had a father!" Now, as I read it again I find it's otherwise. Olson's talking about Worcester ("Wow, I never wrote about Gloucester like this."), reading from An Ode on Nativity, --banter with Lew Welch follows but at this stage of the night Olson confesses : "I am a perfect father, until I am not. And that's another thing I hope is happening tonight, Robert [Duncan]. And I know that beautiful story which you've told to me, that you said a thing which cleared me when you told Richard Duerden, 'He's, Olson's not your father. You had a father.' Am I right?" (The exchange with Welch always struck me as paternal, even paternalistic yet imbued with the kind of love that leadership, as epitome or at least ramification of responsibility, implies. The relationship's ambiguous for although Welch is his own man & no kid at 39, he & Olson are colleagues within a family & community of which poetry is the life-blood. --parents, aunts & uncles, siblings born & adopted… ) In the transcript, Olson is speaking about writing & publishing & the status of talking (addressing the world as if arbitrary room has become the ideal) -- : "I am now publishing. Tonight. Because I'm talking writing." Whatever he was thinking, Lew responds with the literal, "I read forty-seven times last year? Forty-seven!" Olson corrects him as he must : "Baby. Oh, I'm not-- Reading? This is a-- Are you kidding? You think this is anything but a-- […] I mean I think this is a political occasion…"

Ken Taylor wasn't my father yet his welcoming me in Melbourne,'67/'68, felt like it. I should have been prodigal son for my own father, but wouldn't have a chance to perform that role until late '69 when I returned to Southampton from Australia, by then fully fledged Melbourne poet & playwright, new husband & new Australian! But it didn't transpire; there was no reconciliation. Even the appearance of his first grandchild, Tim, didn't displace primary rancour. Not until 1987 when I was 41 and Dad 67, did he acknowledge me as an independent adult! With Ken, sixteen years my senior, amity was expressed in the combined relief & delight of mutual recognition, a relationship  which inaugurated the New Melbourne Poetry centred on the La Mama cafe theatre, late '67, early '68 and on, ultimately appreciated as a domain of the New Australian Poetry, the Australian wing of the international "new"… Back in the day, Geoff Eggleston nominated Ken & I as the La Mama poets' "elder brothers", while Ken referred to La Mama's inner circle as "brothers & sisters". Far away from Australia's sun & sea, I thrilled to reports of the brothers & sisters piling into Ken's kombi van, driving to Merricks on the Mornington Peninsula, seventy odd k from Melbourne, to commune & cavort, and why not a version of Kesey & Cassady's magic bus, Taylor's Pranksters… Thrilled & envied --my gift it seems for always missing one or the other country's great cultural events : working in London in '65 at the time of the Albert Hall Reading, I was both timid & unbelieving that the Evening Standard's headline (BEATS COME TO TOWN or BEATS TAKE OVER THE ALBERT HALL) could possibly be true; --in Melbourne in '67 missing, therefore, England's Summer of Love; --in Southampton '70-'72, missing the momentous Moratorium marches in Melbourne, and Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti's visits to Australia for good measure! Et cetera. Of course much to be counted on the other hand…

In 1970, Frank Prince was certainly old enough to have been my father, 58 to my 24. From the start he welcomed me as a new friend into his just then rejuvenating literary life --Stuart & Deirdre Montgomery at Fulcrum Press, via Lee Harwood, were bringing out his Memoirs at Oxford, his first book of poetry since The Doors of Stone, in 1963. He imagined my coming from Australia to England, albeit a return, as similar to his migration to England from South Africa in the '30s, when also in his twenties. Of course, the English wouldn't do this, he told me referring to my zeal for correspondence & communication, soliciting poems for my magazine, describing it as the "colonial energy" exemplified by Pound! Eliot wrote the better poems, he said, but Pound was the poet, the figure who attracted one to poetry as a life. Son or young friend? He complained to me once or twice of difficulties with his own children, whom I figured were older than I, as though we were contemporaries, fathers & men of the world, (--Henry Bolingbroke sotto voce in his cousin Westmoreland's ear of the disappointment young Hal was, especially compared to Hotspur)… Ken Taylor, similarly I recall, granting that parity, sounding me out, '68 or '69, on the New Age protocols concerning wives & their occasional suitors, accepting my advice that punching out the Natural History chap from BBC Bristol was ridiculous & patronising, as plainly antiquated & bad as forbidding one's spouse, he said,  to smoke cigarettes in public!

One time Frank asked me to accompany him to a  reading by poets from Southampton University, down town somewhere --the Bargate or St Michael's House?-- but at the last minute couldn't bring himself to attend. He hoped I'd still go, essentially to be his spy. I imagine he'd rather renounce his faith so adamant was he not to be there! In a sense his absence was a continuing renunciation of the literary life he'd surely conceived back in the '30s, perhaps defending himself from a repeat of the rejection which followed Eliot, his hero's, initial lionisation. Generally speaking he was a loner and until the Fulcrum Press volume not expecting a renewal of the celebrity he'd enjoyed before & after his war-time poem, Soldiers Bathing. Speculate that the Southampton University prof was at odds with the poet and only after moving on (via a series of overseas appointments) did the poet rejoin the wider world. Not quite true though --he was as happy to meet "the younger poets" as Andrew Crozier, upon hearing of our friendship, was keen for such engagement to occur. I felt then that Andrew, like me, subscribed to lineage & amelioration. It was ripe time, long overdue, for Frank Prince to meet with us, Andrew said. What did or didnt transpire at our Portswood tete-a-tete is another matter but I brought the poets (the Johns, Hall & Riley), he got the beer & Elizabeth the supper! He'd begun to subscribe to the Grosseteste Review journal & books in response to my enthusiastic prompting. He was on the board of the Poetry Review during Eric Mottram's editorship and whatever his opinion of the poetry said he believed in the younger generation, characterised by 'feeling' in terms of love & protest. It was the same feeling he was moved I'd found in his otherwise stumpy rhymed Oxford poem, as I described it in a review I blush to recall, --the feeling animating form he'd explain, --from which I extrapolate the vital part of romanticism's issue modernism, --I hear him saying that, except that he didnt, though modernism out of romanticism is his --not yet stifled by the Auden ascendancy --"a bit of a fat head" he'd quipped, rival we suppose, --over whom he briefly enjoyed Eliot's favour --but of all such brevity, jewel flash moment, is this life made...


[1-11-15 / 22-11-15]


3


Of Franco Beltrametti, to Judith Danciger


"whisky wont lack"? Dear Judith what
ever i'm missing of your translation
this Englishing'll do for me :

whisky no end of (wouldn't say no
black ones [bears] no end of (no shortage (overrun

so

curiosity no end of (vivacity (naturally turned on
Franco no end of

no end of simpatico lifting into
whole heart sky
blooming from vulnerable chest
no end of exultation
heroic for its heedlessness
of ever more tedious
bureaucratic
world

Franco

exclamations !!!!!

!!!!! flowers


[12/11/15-19/11/15]

TO BE AN INNOCENT

To be an innocent just hit town, walking down Flinders Lane from the Nicholas Building toward Elizabeth Street, and cross paths with loping, lunging, grimacing, gesturing man, waving bleeding hand & shouting This is Hell, demanding of the figures to the left & right of him or even in the air since his gaze is there, Cant you see? ---Imagine dreamy kid, any summer since "Flowers In Our Hair" but haywire Spring 2014 which one day'll have that handle to it, as beginnings are memorialised as must be, the mystical angle anyone brings to the resonant years ---Innocent as Charles Buckmaster summoned from tunnel of 42 years only yesterday by Barry Dickins who puffed out relief & smile that at last he'd found the Bookshop & myself in residence, a long time he'd been looking for or thinking of or wishing it ---I met Charles Buckmaster once, he said, at his bookshop, The Source, & invited him to come to my show of paintings at the Athenaeum, and took him there right then & opened up the gallery for him, put the lights on, and he looked at the paintings but didn't say much ---Barry says Charles' father was a painter, beautiful chocolate-box landscapist, Ernest Buckmaster---Um, uncle I say, ---and we drank some wine, and I liked him Barry says ---and saw him another time ---and then heard he'd shot himself --same as his brother, same gun I say ---same as Hemingway he says ---Barry right then eyes lowered from the postered wall and my face, down to the counter level, stopped in his tracks by our naming of suicide ---And I'm not sure whether Barry isn't the more likely figure of the innocence I've retained for Charles via memory of the knowing of him in 1968-'69, corresponding with the schoolboy for weeks before we physically met, and then after leaving Melbourne for England '69-'72 receiving his hopeful epistles, returning to Melbourne then but not to see him, put off by mutual friends that he was in a deeply anti-social phase ---Could be that I was being protected by them from the total deshabille of a fallen angel given my language had fashioned a Melbourne family of poets, Melbourne's Black Mountain (& read commune for college) if you will, whose collective love & genius was poetry's carapace, impregnable whatever politics' & personalities' tumult ---And they'd known of our correspondence, the teaching & nurturing, the expectation of most joyous restoration upon long awaited return ---as Black Mountain's mysterium had transferred to the West's hinterland & coast so now, after England, the bush & beach, mountains & sea of Australia promised similar extension---partly fulfilled but maintained thereafter in & as the Dream ---To be protected from the reality of  addiction & its degradation, similarly depression, the dissolution of dreams, the letting it all go, everyone's failing? ---Ken Taylor's Nothing Could Be Done echoed by the others, Michael, John, Ian, Garrie et al ---so strong the investment in 'our' & 'us', poetry scene & poem-making as togetherness, Charles' death was a mortal blow ---Despite the three years of Whitlam-Cairns Australia, hippiedom's Indian Summer, whatever-it-was was over ---Innocent as I seem to have been, innocent as Barry himself appreciating the humour & absurdity of our daily lives but constantly amazed by the cruelties, incredulous that the heaven on earth should or could be undermined, each long sentence of his stories ending with a sigh ---A long long lane it is though, irregularly spaced by drops of the troubled soul's blood upon the pavement, like tears or big raindrops on hot dusty road, tracking his lurch all the way back to the Elizabeth Street crossing ---Innocent at start of this tale would have passed the man who crouches in the alley, eyes averted, chain-smoking, all day every day, burrowing into the flagstones from which he may have emerged  --And the Middle-eastern belly-dancer whom I've picked for an exhibitionist, arms above his close-cropped head, revolving pelvis to the music percolating from his little amp, but then brings hand to face & produces impish peek-a-boo, and suddenly it's a performance, his nasty grin, tiny steps, abdominal gyration a species of theatre, sacred transvestite albeit unshaven in couldnt-care-less grey trackies & sandals ---My point is that it's all to be interpreted as Amazing World ---Now innocent's all eyes for queues outside of new coffee-shop (which once housed ancestor bookseller Ross Reading's final store), & tourist group following guide's description of historic architecture, & buskers in-between sets sitting on milk-crates, & students of all ages in & out the CAE,  & hairdressing trainees in white uniforms lighting-up, & lame & elderly's discombombulated snail-pace overtaken by the determined blind, & skateboarders, & young corporates without ties, & travellers carrying mountains of equipment departing backpacker hostel for airport Skybus, & slow prams, & fast pushchairs, & bikes ridden or wheeled or padlocked to racks, knocked flat by passers by or awkwardly parking truck ---And within the innocence described another feeling or gleaning which makes of this present cavalcade a match for the culture's previous great change ---It's as if we've returned to the Sixties or that the Sixties never disappeared, that is to say on this particular strip & on this day, its signature is reinstated in the strolling, ambling, eating, drinking, everyday Sunday Market's perpetual pedestrian traffic surrounded by the city's music, daily festival of Flinders Lane including though not every day Ross Hannaford's quintessential jazz & blues, every whichway guitar with tablas mate alongside, scruffly toughly duo,  real class for not so fast passers by, remembering something? ---Same flowers & hair of once-upon-a-time Right Here…

[November, 2014]

I.M. KEN TAYLOR, 1930-2014

THE NEWS

[Kris Hemensley :
Facebook post, April 3, 2014

Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.
(......)
Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs. ]


oOo



CORRESPONDENCE


Kris Hemensley :

Sad news Terry, and on a continuum with our good talk on Saturday last : I'm sorry to have tell you that Ken Taylor died at the Epworth Hospital on Wednesday night, 2 April, '14. Ive posted abt it on F/book but just now copied it all to my blog : see, www.collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com

Look after yrself, dear poet/gardener who reads Olson & Williams [your biog in Mike Dugan's Crosscurrents where i delightedly found you in 1968]!

best wishes, Kris

*

Terry Gillmore :

Dear Kris

I feel many things with this sad news and one of them is shame. Shame that in 1984 or thereabouts I voluntarily entered the prison of the Commonwealth public service leaving so many behind, and particularly Ken who offered me his life-home at Macedon (I was homeless) and I had moved a few things in and then the fires came, and came again.
When we were at Aragunui for a night long poetry reading under the full moon on the rock: there was a momentous storm and that is when his burning begun. Inarticulate speech of the heart. What a loss of a truly beautiful man, for he was that even though it shames me and is a failure of language. What a heart he had,  what generosity accompanied it. Death surrounds me tonight, tomorrow I will visit with a friend who lost a loved one this week. I foolishly thought I could console her. I have lost a long lost brother. 
Take care dear Kris

Terry

*

K H :
Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too...
You too Terry, look after yrself, good thoughts, very best, kris

T G :
 Dear Kris
As you say ""Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too..." Thanks for reminding me that what we are in is the precious, momentary, only game in town.
Solomon said, something about a wise man hiding his shame but use what I have written as you will, if you are to speak you can be the editor of death and use whatever you like from it.


oOo


Kris Hemensley :
[April 3, '14)

Hi John, 

Youve probably heard? from Robert K? Sad news that Ken died last night, at the Epworth... Ive posted something on F/book, can copy & paste for you if you like?

Commiserations to share.


John Jenkins :

Hi Kris
Yes, I did hear from Robert. And it's very sad to hear of Ken's death.
Oddly, as I mentioned to Robert, I was reading 'At Valentines' again, just a few days ago, and thinking of KT.
It is such a strong poem in its own right, purely in its own poetic terms, but also a wonderfully specific audit of aspects of Australian cultural history.
Ken and I had our ups and downs over the years, but the last few times I saw him we were on very good terms indeed, like the old days after La Mama. (It's nice to recall that, at this moment. ) And we had a vague idea of me seeing him at Mt Macedon, but that final meeting never eventuated.
I can access Facebook, and will read what you have posted after sending this email.
Yes, commiserations...!
Best wishes, John


oOo



Laurie  Duggan :
[April 4, '14]

Kris,
thanks for sending this. I didn't know about Ken T. I'll post something soon on the blog. I have a couple of his books, At Valentines and Africa but I missed the middle one (through being in the wrong place at the right time or whatever). I didn't ever meet Ken or hear him read for similar reasons. But I've always liked what I've seen of the work.

It's strange to think back to the La Mama years. In one sense us Monash types were your adversaries, yet a lot of the separation simply had to do with the fact that La Mama was twelve miles away. It seems ridiculous now (esp. given my own peregrinations) but twelve miles seemed a long way - once. When I started coming in to Carlton on my own it seemed an adventure. So I never met Ken (and I didn't meet Charles Buckmaster either though he may well have sold me books at Whole Earth [Bookshop]). My loss.

*

K H :

Hi Laurie, good to have yours... By the way ive been reading yr edition of LEAVES [Monash University magazine, ed Philip Chubb & Laurie Duggan, 1970] wch has my play [Stephany, directed & performed by Malcolm Robertson at La Mama] in it but also fascinating document gathered by Dennis Douglas &/or you of the La Mama poets... Certainly brings it back... Could/should be republished as part of the documentation/recapitulation of the period... wch never ended!!!

L D :

LEAVES was a strange publication. It was only half laid out, so there are a handful of pages that look ok then the rest is terrible. My co-editor added some not very good poems and in our innocence we used a press that then filled most of the mag with adverts. But I was pleased to have gotten Dennis to do the La Mama piece. I don't know that I'd want to republish it but I certainly wouldn't have any objections to pieces within being republished somewhere.
(April 5)


oOo


Kris Hemensley :
[April 5th, '14]

Hi Barry, thanks for ringing, good to hear you, you spoke wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially "Africa" tonight.... Therell be a service followed by public memorial on the Thursday... will manage the Church not sure abt the Yacht club, but maybe too...

*


Barry Hill :
[April 5th]

Well done Kris, for I squibbed the sea today, can’t say why, just did not feel like the cold wind beforehand.
And I have been caught up in words again today: a poem partly arising from Ken, and more fiddles with PEACEMONGER as Tess Morris Suzuki, Prof of Japanese History at ANU is going to read the straight history bits, and now you and blog.

*

It was good to get yr feedback to our chat about Ken. I needed the chat because I had my sorrow to myself, hardly knowing any other poet who knew him. On hearing the sad but inevitable news I had to pour at least one whiskey in his honour. Not that I ever really drank with him: we met only ten years ago, and we had both started to slow up. Still, in the grog shop before he came to dinner at our place in Queenscliff, he had his credit card out wanting to stock our top shelf, the debit sheet notwithstanding. Same, on that day, his wanting to pit into the hat I had began to pass around to cover some of the costs of your moving shop. The point is he had his eye and mind on what he thought mattered most: conviviality and art, money be dammed. I met him through the family: he went to school with my wife’s father, a skilled farmer, and a man who was more patient with arty self-indulgences than you might think. He stuck with Ken, sensing his unique talent, which I was struck by as soon as he put Africa into my hands. I told him it would win a prize, and it did, of course. His pleasure at that remained understated, as if he knew it would happen. I had dipped into At Valentines a long time ago and was most struck by its cultural ambience: the period here that I had missed while living in London. But there was the ease you write about in yr blog, where you start out on other poets (who I don’t know): the graphic precision, the naturalness of the unfolding, a flow like the water up there at Erskine Falls, below which it all happened in those day, evidently, garlic and wine and dope on everyone’s breath. But the lines were better than culturally expressive. They struck the bell of a clear inner self, one clarified by self interest and a kind of aristocratic sense of entitlement. Of course, he was, in a way, simulating Ammons, that was clear. Yankee ease. But much more than that, as I was also trying to get to say when we were on the phone.

Africa lay in the palm of my hand like a lover’s hand. It was a book that kind of fell out into the hand, from one hand to the other, Ken was so grateful to be gifted with the love of a beautiful and younger woman at that stage in his life. Her about 30 him about 70. Picasso could eat his heart out. When I met her, and found myself in their bedroom because he insisted I go in and look at his drawings of her, leaning against the wall not far from the underwear she had scatted near the unmade bed, I felt almost as transgressional as when a guide to Frieda and Lawrence’s house at Taormina said I should go upstairs to their bedroom. This I did, because I could not not but I did it with a silent plea that Lawrence would understand my lack of prurience. The thing about Africa, with its body heat and candor, is that Ken is more Matisse than Picasso: his aesthetic is as cool as it is hot, his designs are created standing back, their colours are perfect detachments. His lines, ravishing though they can be, hold themselves just a little away from the swoon. And I am saying lines here with his wonderful paintings and drawings in mind, thinking mainly of the Xmas cards some of us were lucky to get. Collectors items in their own right, of course. Perfect lines, and a colour spectrum as perfect as the patterns on a bird. After a few years of getting these beauties in the post it struck me that they were the direct counterpart of his most skillfully joyous poems.

After our talk you wrote back to me saying you enjoyed my remarks (words to the effect that I'd spoken "wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially Africa tonight…."). That's good, as I have never spoken them before, as I say: had no need to. And I think I added that he was, really, a classicist. Oh his stream gushed forth as romantically as anything, that was what you seem be calling the urgency of his lines and reading. But their control, to me, was the thing, the balances of their form, their measure, their grace, I suppose we might say. It was with a pure grace, it seemed to me, that he saw his lover off into her next and necessary relationship with a younger man, one she would marry. I know that various people have their stories about Ken’s excesses, but this part of his story, its expression of respect and tact, struck me as a wonderful poem in life. As selfless as his perfectly pitched lyrics.

Ken was the first poet I have met who made me feel, on first reading him, that he was the most natural of poets. Back home, in some shed of his on that mountain, he may have toiled for such a natural perfection. We know the poets who do. I don’t know if he did or he didn’t. And don’t much care, really, such was his success so often on the page. Africa made me want to set off to Africa even though Africa was never mentioned, if you know what I mean.

This poem I have come to dedicate to him began as a rough draft to a cat. It was its grace of movement in and out of sunlight which triggered it. Then, after our conversation about line and movement through spaces in Ken’s work, I found myself wondering if he would like what I was doing with the cat’s presence. If I was trying to do a Xmas card like his, I would want the cat to be in it as he did flowers, or the sea in their limpid movements.

Anyway, have a look at the poem and see what you think. Not that I need to talk about the poem. Its just good to put something down that I would have been happy to read to Ken as we drank whiskey.

All best in life and art!
B

*


Under the Wisteria

I.M.  Ken Taylor




Rumi
    our cat with the Chinese markings
        sniffs the morning
        all nostrils and twitch—
a whiskered breath-quiver of ears.

The Chinese character for listening
    has two ears
        one above the other
        beside dish over heart.

Then he’s stalking, slow-mo
    in and out
        of sunlight:
willowy patches, pond-shadows.

He crosses the lawn.
He pads, like some rich kid, on bare earth
beneath the Loess-coloured wisteria.

Not a sound on the way
to the door of the room
with the rosewood floor.

He regards the sheen that becomes him.
He senses the unwelcome table
laden with dictionaries.

No sign, as yet
    of his plans to vanish
        for the night.


(Autumn, 2014)


*

K H :

 "The most natural of poets" --yes. From the first (& I heard him Winter 67 before we met, and he had that same breathless, short-of-breath), his poems sounded like him! And because I was fascinated by the physical poetics of Olson & Creeley, I heard Ken as doing precisely what they asked for, even tho he wdnt have studied them. (I suppose another way to that wld be to investigate whether any of it is in Ammons? I mean formally but also, with Ammons, innately --ie his own & not out of the big O's thigh!)
And I like your poem, touched by the dedication of course. Its title almost sounds like a Ken Taylor title! And love your cat! That graphic first stanza description! And the easy crossing into the Chinese. Yep. Very good. 
So, all in all, you deserve a drink now! The writing's great reward for a deep & heavy week --the shock, the sadness, the thought, the talk, the poem... Well done that man!
All best,
K

*

B H :

yes, his forms were different to Ammons, he was more open than A I suppose, less affected in his openness also, somehow.
He did not need to create a lower case world, hey.
And I realised today why the Orientalism of the poem felt right. Ken had an important connection to Kyoto; he had clearly peered long and hard at those brilliantly inked Japanese woodcut prints.




oOo



Ian Robertson :
[6 April '14]

Hello Kris
it is sad news and thanks for letting me know... we never did catch up, though came close some years ago when Robert used to have his birthday gatherings at Redesdale.
Thinking of Ken immediately transports me back to the house in Parkville, the way Ken & Margaret welcomed everyone in. I see the living room and the steps down into the kitchen where food and drink and conversation flowed in an atmosphere of living intelligence, warmth, acceptance and conviviality such as I had never experienced... serious and searching conversation was mixed with stories and hearty laughter, a great humanity at a warmly human scale... to a 19/20 year-old, Ken seemed an almost giant figure but there was no distance, no separation about him at all... he was immediate, disarming, inclusive and engaging... it was surprising and so encouraging to be not just accepted into this atmosphere, but also, amazingly/apparently, to be appreciated... I remember thinking, so this is how life could be...


oOo



Susan Fealy :
[April 13th, '14]

Dear Kris,
I cobbled this from my original notes.

 Visit to Ken Taylor with Ron Pretty. Monday, October 20, 2008.

(Ken, Ron and I had attended the Glenfern Salon on Sunday, 19th : feature poets Kris Hemensley and Peter Porter.)

 His home rides over an ocean of forget-me-nots and bluebells. Huge trees on the ridges, low stonewalls and paths lead to secret ponds, closer to home,  a rustic tower, a garden shed.

Ron and I sat in his kitchen after a walk around about (he’d left the door open) and began to wonder if we had mixed up the arrangements. Then we saw his black beret and figured he would be back to get his hat and he was! He arrived with his mate Steve and brought some supplies for lunch. He wore a thin black jumper over white, white trousers .White beard, grey face. He’d laughed and said he could not believe that he had travelled around France and the only man to be found wearing a beret was his own reflection in a shop window.

From the window, in the middle of the courtyard a snow drop neighboured the rusted brazier. It tossed out its green leaves like a fountain, they shone in the afternoon sun, infant grass sprinkled the bricks.

Outside the window: bright blue-green, delicate, almost feathery leaves and old old wood, shining in the afternoon sun, outside his kitchen. What kind of tree is that? It’s a Yew Tree he said. There are more on the hill. Steeply above the house, but not far away.. a row of yew trees above a stone wall.

Ken said that his own paintings on the walls were reference points for him.Crab, sea, octopus..seals, I said border dwellers? Then he said sharks. I said sharks are not border dwellers and then we decided that maybe they are. That pure aggression ( jn us), Ken said, you see it when you arise from the sea after a swim in Brittany And it is disturbing because you see the gun slits in the wall where the guns would have killed you. We chatted about the Kris Hemensley and Peter Porter event that had happened the day prior. Ken had disliked violence used as a trope in some of Peter’s poems, said Kris’s work spoke to him more.

As he discussed the prose he was developing into a book, he said some sentences are waiting for him to turn them into drawings. We looked at his water colours, some set on the large tables, often of marine creatures. He said when I draw it is almost always from a photograph as there is so much information. We agreed that you have to find the line.

We talked about proportion, and his friend Steve suddenly formed Leonardo’s proportion of man with his outstretched arms and legs and it felt like  all four of us found a magic proportion in that moment inside his large studio. I asked Ken about the sculpture scattered around his property : he said some had been left there by sculptors, and had yet to be collected by them. Ken said sculptors are on different time , maybe they will come back in seven years… they have to listen to nature.

He let me run up the hill to collect some Lily of the Valley. He said, get as near to the earth as you can and pull straight up : it unmoors itself. I found it under the bright red Camellia tree. Tiny flames of green, green fire on the hill, tiny pearls. I said, it smells like frangipani a bit but it is not. No, he said , (somewhat sternly) it is Lily of the Valley. 


oOo

REFERENCES & SOURCES


Terry Gillmore's reference to Araganui [near Bega, NSW; Mimosa Beach National Park] returns me to the correspondence from Alexandra Seddon, published in the HEART issue of H/EAR magazine, #5, Summer 1983/4.

30.1.83
Araganui

Kris,
so in this place I must write to you. Terry Gillmore here, John Anderson, Geoff Eggleston, Ken Taylor, Leigh Stokes, & Dorothy Swoope (near Wollongong), Simon Macdonald, Cornelis Vleeskens & Jenny Mitchell, Frank (?), plus many others. A lot of my students. Trish from the Mornya Womens House with her lover, Kathy, my friends Angela Koch, Venie Holmgren. Lots of people on the rock last night, reading by hurricane lamp & fire. We (Angela & I & 2 German girls who are staying at farm) had arrived a bit late. Terry & others helped us across to the island -- the tide having risen quite high. The climb up the rock was not easy. It was amazing that so many people managed to reach that remote place. The reading did go on for most of the night, then we came back to camp & sleep for 2 hours till dawn.

What can I tell you? The atmosphere of the reading was sea, fire, wind, night -- wonderful. At about 1 o'clock when I read for the first part, I felt impelled to read Owen's Mantra -- just the first part. Although I knew it to be unwise, it seemed necessary. Terry & Ken felt it went over well. I had no way of judging. It was like switching back to a time when one lacked any confidence in the writing. Geoff's reading was alright, a bit turgid. Ken read clearly, laying things out to be seen. Cornelis read some family portraits -- excellent, precise gestures, colours, framed. Very good for reading aloud. And also some pieces where he & Jenny Mitchell read alternately, sometimes whole poems, sometimes lines. She chanting "Manna Gum" between his lines at one point. She is a painter. John Anderson's reading was wonderful -- like seeing the movie after reading the book, & being totally satisfied by it. Leigh Stokes did some strange operatic chanting in the midst of a poem for which he had made peculiarly arrogant apologies. Dorothy Swoope reminded me of Marilyn Kitchell [ex Rhode Island poet & publisher of Salt Works Press with Tom Bridwell, last heard of late '80s when she was in Mississippi]-- that fabric of things was very apparent -- clear deliberate reading. I remembered her from Wollongong. Terry read with warmth -- a sort of gentle communication. Tonight we will read again, this time not on the rock but in the tamer camping ground. There is an old thin wallaby close by. Simon Macdonald is feeding him. Terry is talking of reading your 'Being Here'. And I feel that you should be made present more obviously, perhaps in that way.

And I am trying so hard to be here. I am not planted yet, flittering at the edges, trying to grasp or enter the being here. I cannot find the words to frame anything. I am struggling with the words more than ever. I want to give you the feel, the flavour of being here but I cannot find it clearly.

There are tents set up more or less in a circle -- a table in the middle. Modest food, tea, coffee. The talk surging, going around, people wandering off to the bush or to swim. A lot of cigarettes, fires. John standing loosely by the table. He has come now to sit beside me & tell me dreams of Candelo & a radiant face in a tree -- an Aboriginal face & he is reading now from the note book which Retta gave me. He says he would like to come to the farm. I feel chastened by his gentleness & careful words. I feel chastened too by Ken Taylor's silence & speech -- both -- his economy of words...
(......)

*

[According to Mr Google, ca 2013 :

Alexandra Seddon, the founder and patron of Potoroo Palace, has a background of community, conservation, education, farming and the arts.

She came to the Bega Valley in 1975 from Papua New Guinea, where she had been working with PNG teachers, mostly in drama and creative writing. She began farming with her brother in Candelo, and so Cowsnest Community Farm came into being, with a kibbutz type structure: to each according to his/her need, from each according to his/her ability.
The idea of Cowsnest was to set up a community farm where anyone could come and contribute their skill and labour even if they had no money to buy land.
Out of Cowsnest, in 1985, grew the Candelo Arts Society, which continues to flourish.
There is also a 57 acre feral-animal-proof Sanctuary at Cowsnest, a half-way house for injured and orphaned native animals who are on their way to soft release.
In 1996 Alexandra initiated the Waterbird Sanctuary in Pambula, which has become Panboola, Pambula Wetlands and Heritage Project (over 200 acres right in Pambula).
In 2000 she began the Pambula Flying Fox Hospital and Conservation Area (34 acres protected by Voluntary Conservation Agreement).
And on September 25th, 2006, a senescent Yellow Pinch Wildlife Park was bought, and slowly rejuvenated to become Potoroo Palace, Native Animal Educational Sanctuary.]

oOo


Re- Laurie Duggan's LEAVES magazine... The La Mama poets' segment gathered by Dennis Douglas, who was teaching at Monash then & editing poetry at The Age, quotes as its title K H's line, to be a poet amongst poets / not to be THE poet.
The segment begins with my letter (of October 25th '68) to Dennis, reproduced in the original typewriter script, from which the following paragraphs :

"(......) andy jack [correct spelling jach] another local poet wrote me the other day saying do you have to write american to make poetry today?? no. but the american influence is undeniable & one can only be enriched by it - the american [poetry] experience takes in every important writer of the postwar world - the british poets macdiarmid & bunting / the younguns pickard/liverpool/nottingham/london poets/ are all following the open way of poetry....tho this is not the only way for me and for many others...obscurity [obscurantism?] is the the thing that has been demolished!
How about doing an article on the new [La Mama, Melbourne] poets? we cd help you with the field work! wed have a ball!! [Ken] taylor/[John] romeril/[Bill] beard/[Charles] buckmaster/ [Mal] morgan/ [Geoff] eggleston /[Elaine] rushbrooke/ [Andy] jack [Jach]/[Michael] dugan/[Ian] robertson/ and i bet there's a score & more!!! interstate a free mag has started emanating from terry gillmore in sydney "free grass" [actually not! --Free Grass was John Tranter's superb hoax; Free Poetry was the real magazine, edited by Gillmore, Nigel Roberts & Johnny Goodall --I'd enthusiastically conflated fact & fiction!] - gillmore/thomson/heaslop/ from nsw - this is a sizable number [of new poets] - at la mama ive had 26 different poets read /invited &/or from the audience!.... for me its the culmination of an ambition to have a poetry workshop - there has to be a new basis for [ poetry &] society - it has to "among" instead of "sole" :-- to be a poet amongst poets/not to be THE poet.
(......)

The letter is followed by Denis Douglas's description of the new poets.

THE MEETING IN THE PARK

Who were in the park [Exhibition Gardens opposite Queensbury Street, Carlton, where the Hemensleys, invited by the actor Frank Bren, lived in the terrace house at number 21] that day? Kris Hemensley, stocky, bearded, expatriate Englishman in his early twenties, Loretta, his wife, who helped produce the magazine Our Glass, which was printed on a fordigraph duplicator purchased by Kris in the expectation that with Our Glass and other poetry jobs it would pay for itself, Bill Beard, a small, wiry, smiling fugitive from the RAAF - he had conducted a one-man non violent campaign of protest against its involvement in the Vietnam war from within the Air Force and eventually been discharged - studying philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Charles Buckmaster, who had been sent home from an upcountry high school to get his hair cut and instead of getting it cut had come to Melbourne to work as laboratory assistant and produce a poetry magazine The Great Auk, Michael Dugan, former member of a fruit picking commune, former book salesman, former publishing editor, former children's writer, former rocker, who was to do it all again (except for returning to the commune).

Who was not in the park that day? Geoffrey Eggleston, burly, aggressive artist-designer much given to the poetic exploitation of obscenity, Ken Taylor, ABC producer, who had used some of the new poetry on radio programs and written well himself in a style influenced by Whitman, Williams, and Charles Olson, Nigel Roberts and Terry Gillmore, who were living in Sydney and producing a magazine called Free Poetry, Richard Tipping and Rob Tillett, who were producing a magazine in Adelaide called Mok, Sweeney Reed, who regarded himself as the manager of a poet called Russell Deeble, and was at that time regarded by the "free magazine" editors as a trendy dilettante, although they later settled their differences (It was Sweeney who had first suggested that I get in touch with the group, remarking that no poet under thirty regarded the established literary magazines as anything but a self-enclosed and self-perpetuating middle-aged clique, utterly indifferent to anything written overseas since 1960 - Terry Gillmore was later to tell me that the mini-mags broke down the resistance to the newer verse forms within two years, suggesting almost that they were instruments used in a campaign to establish communication with an older generation, or to be able to compete with them on even terms).
(......)

Dennis Douglas's survey/celebration continues with quotations from the editorials of the little mags, & culminates with the segment, WHERE HAVE ALL THE POETS GONE?

Although the law of diminishing returns turned their minds to other things, Mike's to a rock-poetry combination, Ian's to India, Charles's to becoming the nth replacement editor for a Penguin anthology of the new poetry [for which Ken Taylor & K H  had initially been solicited by John Hooker but after much debate declined because of the political & philosophical compromises anticipated] which never appeared, Sweeney's to the Tolarno Galleries - and the amount of bread and energy that was lavished on the broadsheets should not be underestimated - although Tom Shapcott's Sun Books anthology and Poetry Magazine led the shift in critical forms that encouraged their acceptance, so that "establishment" outlets became available - although a new generation of poetry readers altered the atmosphere of the readings now held at the Arts Co-operative - although some people got busted and others got careers - although the "new thing" was no longer new - although Kris returned to England and Ken started making TV films about birds and Bill went beach-combing, there are still readings and a newer crop of magazines, and rumours of a great new well-produced publication are circulating [Dark Ages Journal, which didnt proceed beyond the manuscript], connected with rumours of Kris Hemensley's return.

What happened was not greatly different from the forging of other poetry schools in the forties and fifties - the attempts the new poets made to gain acceptance for their poetic were no more outrageous or ill-mannered than the tactics of other literary pressure groups - they generated no more antagonism - they excited no more sympathy - which is to say, they were outrageous, ill-mannered, generated much antagonism, excited much sympathy. The differences stemmed from the differences in the world the new poets inhabited, a dangerous, competitive, and hence more communally-minded world. Like other vital schools, they produced much that was ephemeral as well as much that was forceful and effective, and they made themselves known at an earlier age than most Australian groups of poets.

The main point they made was that creative forces can be channeled into the communal life of a large group of people and function there as a positive, enlightening, life-generating impulse. Perhaps the poetry of the future will be made by a by-product of the inner life of societies and less a simulacrum of some kind of collective public address system than the poetry of the past.

oOo




[edited & typed by Kris Hemensley,
April 12th/14th, 2014
Westgarth, Oz]

KEN TAYLOR, 1930-April 2nd, 2014

[These posts retrieved from Facebook.]

oOo


Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.




oOo

I want to mention John Bartlett's blog, which has republished his interview with Ken which appeared in Meanjin in 2003. The address is :

http://beyondtheestuary.com/?p=2800

Thanks for contacting me John.

Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs.

I should have mentioned John Jenkins in my first post of course --& have an idea he went up to Macedon with James Hamilton when James was getting into his Charles Buckmaster & 60s-poetry research, a couple of years ago? I'm sure there are many others who've seen Ken in recent times. Sad & ruminative, I should also have added : in fact the consolation for us who survive the death of friends (& I'm particularly thinking about fellow poets) is the work (to the extent it's intact) --the poems themselves-- & the large estate of memories. We're all in that circle of living/dying in any case (as per John Donne). And for us literary lot, history & biography's our version of immortality. Dear Ken... a life which included poetry, never an academic or a pro... A life lived large & in his own way... I wont be alone in thinking & writing on Ken in the reflective & celebratory period beginning now...

Ive been reading Ken's letter to me, published in The Ear In a Wheatfield, #16, 1975, and the piece I sent from England in June, '75, to Robert Kenny, For the Launching of Ken Taylor's Book, "At Valentines" (published by Contempa). In his letter, Ken writes that working on the book with Robert he "begin[s] to feel another chance -- the second go." And also, "I agree with you completely about writing being a dictation, however before that comes an exercise or two. This is where I must begin again, still in the landscape, but "once more at the cutting edge", the counting again and saddled with the need to change..."

And this paragraph from the piece I sent to the '75 launching, which, interestingly, reflects the mood I'm in right now : "I am as moved to write about Ken Taylor for this event as I am to dwell in the house of poetry itself. For it is all particular, & personal, all of the heart's notation when you know it as a sweetheart, realizing it at the swell of its condition, grasping it as doers of any thorough thing, say, as lovers do, as here we do as writers & readers, & thus consigned we take it on."

[April 3rd, 2014]

ON THE RUN : ABOUT KEN TRIMBLE, HARRY SADLER, LEON SHANN, & THE GRAND FINAL!

POSTS RETRIEVED FROM FACEBOOK (June/September, '13)

June 30

Tom the Street Poet in my mind (aka Poor Tom & then Tom the World Poet, as he is now, based in Austin, Texas), early 1980s, Swanston Street, centre of Melbourne, the old City Square, --he's pointing out passers by, seemingly plucking poems out of the air --rhymes, riddles, sooth-sayings --a kind of thespian rap, well ahead of the game that's even playing now, & even then its possible origin as Beat poetry long forgotten. I'm reminded of Tom as I skim Ken Trimble's The Barking Mad Poems (published this year, 2013, by Christine Mathieu's Little Fox Press, hidden away in Fitzroy), some of which I've previously read on Facebook --direct action I thought --apparently written straight to screen, thus instantly 'published' --something I daren't do myself though many do including my brother Bernard ("Stingy Artist") Hemensley, at least as far as blog & Facebook publishing is concerned-- for me, even when it's simple, the poem's worked, and publication always feels premature or a put on, but that's my problem which I'm sidling up to here!

I wondered years ago how spontaneous were Keith Jarrett's concert pieces --surely he had entire tunes at his finger-tips & ingeniously led into or found them as he improvised? The old question of the original & unrevised --Zen's suggestive yet problematic "first thought, best thought" proposition --more a question for poetry than jazz, say. All this a long or probably unnecessary bow, though Ken's a jazzer and so already on this page.

One's come to say of Ken Trimble that he's the Real Deal (I can hear our mutual friend Robert Lloyd in this chorus) --which, of course, begs the question of the literary scene's status ('real deal' where the rest of it aint?) and of the literary stance, the literary per se (notwithstanding Literature's insatiable absorption of all that's written irrespective of writer's & writing's disposition). One could say that the anti-literary is spoken in Ken's poem, One Word. It is a 'skinny poem' par excellence : the mostly one word per line of it's 27 illustrates & dramatises its particular emphases : "One day / I will / find / simple / words / to tell / you / how / I feel / so / you / can / know / in your / heart / the / clarity / of / my / seeing / and / the / truth / of / my / knowing."

It's a communique since "you" is the poem's reader, the reader or hearer without whom the poem has no point. The 'literary', in comparison, is in & of its own art, which is chipped off the old block of valorised form & content. (This is not a complaint but a description.) As I write this the example of another Ken, namely Ken Taylor, occurs to me as similarly oriented. I'm sure he'd append his name to Trimble's petition ("simple words to tell you how I feel"); for example, "As I came up from Binghamton / snow joined the / black road to night, in spindrifts / and / I dreamed again of coming out of the mountains / four of us / over the ton at / five in the morning. / Frosted cows / hedgerows and bands of / fog, / night again, / night after night of / lights brakes belts and / blinding day, / over the ton in hedgerows." (Over the Ton in Hedgerows (for Jack Ellis --who drove), from At Valentines, originally Contempa Publications, 1975, most recently Picaro Press (Art Box Series), 2010.) Taylor's poem is intimate, confidential, urgent; owing its existence to solo mulling or scatting, & it's luminosity to the telling.

Although anything might enter the poem in such a mode, there's no discounting its directness. The impulse to speak (utterance) & the drive to tell (story) are as much the attributes of the literary poem as the spontaneous, except for the obligation in the spontaneous poem to the unadorned, the naked truth (however problematic that is) : truth against art or even beauty except if & where truth is beauty! Now who & what is barking mad?

[23/30 June, 2013]


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

August 25

 Besides the impressive ornithological & topographical chronicle [see noticinganimals.blogspot.com], I'm touched by the fact of Harry Saddler walking with his old man and also by his comments on wildness/wilderness. I never experienced anything like Harry's long walk, but am reminded by his reference to their conversation & mutual excitements of the inevitable talking accompanying such walking. To an extent, the walking liberated one from talking's house-bound conventions; the out-of-doors place always larger than oneself and, therefore, the philosophical or reflective mind triggered alongside the observational. I remember Dad once taking my arm on a particularly steep & tricky pathway in Devon I think it was, early '90s --I'd offered a steadying hand --and he accepting with the comment, You realize I wont be able to return the favour! A unique happening all bound up with his sense of absolute self-reliance... Another occasion, walking up & up from Porlock, through wind-echoing woods, he joined me where I'd gone ahead (leaving him to his own pace); first thing he said : You almost killed me! He laughed, and we rested ten minutes before the far easier return walk...

 The other thought then, compelled by this of Harry's : "More, though, the search for wilderness misses the point: we learn most not in those few places where humans are absent but in those places – temporal and physical, psychological and concrete – where humans have touched the landscape, or where the landscape has touched them; where the boundaries between human and non-human, more tenuous than we usually care to admit, come closest to dissolving." Now. I dont necessarily agree that there is less to learn in 'real' wilderness, but do entirely agree with the rest of his proposition. I'd add this : the physical dimension for 'real' encounter (for encounter with the Real) doesnt have to be very large at all! Nor of very long duration. Exquisite moments...

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

"IN A WINDLESS LATITUDE"

Homeward bound from Leon Shann's posthumous book launch --"in his absence or presence" Kevin Brophy said, exemplary mc for half-&-half memorial & literary event at the Fitzroy Library, Sunday, 26th May --I drop into what was the Birmingham on the corner of Johnstone & Smith, unprepared for the OMG make-over. Recall drinking there one late evening after a gig at the Tote, friends & family in all directions except mine, hopeless compass at best of times --and a wunnerful Twilight Zone occasion was that, sir! --buying drinks for some out-of-work guy whose gripe camouflaged me in that no-hoper hospice --short-circuited the post-industrial lament trading labourer's stories from the not so distant past, my railway labourer's experiences, his the automotive industry, though my walking out of jobs the opposite of his near fatal redundancy…

I'm in-between trams from Smith Street to Northcote, Chuck Berry's honky-tonk in the air --"c'est la vie say the old folks you know you never can tell!" (--you may also need to know that the inching of grey clouds only a metre or two above the balcony facade of the shopping-strip terrace opposite me is faster than my brother Bernard's Canaletto effects on Facebook) --it had truly been the dive of dives unless you accept the Hopetoun in Mitchell Street, Bendigo as the very worst, where I spent an hour one hundred-degrees afternoon --the convenience of that watering-hole enlisting me amongst Bendigo's least respectable according to the oracle, Mrs O'Brien, had there been any other patrons that day, only leather jacketed, knuckle-dustered vibrations & shadows --though how was Iain Sinclair's or Anthony Bourdain's cousin to realise? --following nose, up for anything, destiny claiming serendipity till the cows come home…

I look out the ultra-clean window onto Smith Street's motley and think of Leon Shann --always an English friend, Melbourne Poets Union loyalist. Pimpernell isnt the description --actually, Garth Madsen, taking the launcher's baton from Brophy, had it, not so much Leon's suitability as a spy, but that "some people reveal it all in their conversation; Leon retained it for his poems". I guess I'm in the former camp --depends of course on what "it" represents, or "all" for that matter…

Hold that earlier thought : 'English friend' …and the Englishman abroad as only a member of the same species recognises --Leon forever "coming home to somewhere else" --home & away as exotic as each other with the passing of time, not that this man's poetry sports with time. Sport it is though, putting on funny voices --the lad the vocative employs. Theatre --for theatre it was --but pulpit never.

R.I.P. Leon Shann

[26-30/5/13; ed 8/9/13]

[ps : Leon's friend & supporter Marietta Elliott-Kleerkoper wrote, "Many of you will be familiar with Leon's work, which he regularly performed in his fruity baritone. He was a keen observer of even the smallest details, which he would present with his characteristic self-deprecating irony. He travelled not only around the world, but into his own spirit and emotions."]


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29-9-13

I confess : not that I actually 'follow' Hawthorn but it has been the favourite of my teams and that's been constant since I first emigrated. In fact, not long after Kelvin Bowers & I disembarked (& I joined him at Mrs Crispin's boarding house in Burwood Road, Hawthorn, opposite the station wch was very handy for me, a notorious oversleeper at that time, so I cld leap out of bed, throw on clothes, race across the road to my job at the station, booking clerk for Vic Rail!)-- it was late May or in June '66 --we attended an Australian Rules game at the Glenferrie Oval, just down the road, --Hawthorn vs St Kilda. A bizarre experience for English football fans --the colossal score, the waving of streamers behind the goal as the kicks were taken, the game itself like rugby & basketball but with the atmosphere around the ground of soccer. Ive always remembered, though, that Peter Hudson & Daryl Baldock were the respective champions for Hawthorn & St Kilda. So, not entirely dispassionately, I listened to some of yday's Grand Final on the radio as I munched in the kitchen, home from Collected Works half-day session, and then ten minutes before end of 3rd quarter turned on the telly, and watched it to the end. Ah yes, we're a happy team at Hawthorn....


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

I.M. BETTY BURSTALL, 1926-2013

I'm looking at Nicole Emanuel's photograph of Betty Burstall from 2005, reproduced for Sonia Harford's valedictory article in The Age (June 18, '13), "Melbourne mourns 'La Mama' of contemporary theatre scene". The photo's taken from low down, looking up into Betty's sunny face, artfully juxtaposed with a Charles Blackman girl on the nearside wall, suggesting perhaps that Child is judge of Age, its grave beauty, coursing the years, secure finally in the septuagenarian bloom. Inset in the frame is a pic of Betty sitting at one of the original La Mama cafe-theatre's signature small  tables, candle in bottle & steaming coffee before her, this from the first flush of La Mama news worthiness…

Another : Betty in her twenties, sitting on bush grass & wild flowers beside sprawled Tim in the cover-photograph of Memoirs of a Young Bastard : The Diaries of Tim Burstall, November 1953 to December 1954, the superbly produced Miegunyah Press volume, published in 2012 ('introduced & annotated by Hilary McPhee with Ann Standish'), and though it's a mid '50s pic I'm struck  that she looks exactly as I remember her in the '60s --same curly brown hair, head-scarf, bursting with vitality, and a mixture of querulousness & determination in her eye --that thinking, critical, intelligent eye on the world. Ditto the '70s when we met up again after the Hemensleys' years in England, --& the '80s when she was en route to Greece or returning, trading in Greek textiles. A painter now, the artist she'd probably always been --recall the set of earthenware mugs she presented to us for our wedding in '68 (included in the huge trunk of mostly poetry books we took to England with us, on the long voyage late '69 on the French cargo-boat through New Caledonia, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Panama, Martinique, Madeira, to Marseilles & home)-- supplying us, at Collected Works bookshop, with postcard reproductions of her own town & country Australian & Greek-island paintings…

One day at the Shop (in Smith Street, Collingwood), mid '80s, catching sight of an issue of my mag, H/EAR, Betty asked about its production (silk-screen cover, mimeographed A-4 pages, filled with poetry, commentary, correspondence) & straightaway decided it was important & required sponsorship! She invited me to her Palmerston Street, Carlton  house for breakfast with Arthur Boyd. Evidently in the interim she'd shown him the mag. When I called on her, a little coyly I must say, Arthur was already there & casting his eye over Betty's paintings, praising & encouraging. I told him I'd been to his house in Highgate around 1970/71, invited by Garrie Hutchinson, one of the 1969 La Mama alumni, who'd house-sat while Arthur was in Portugal overseeing the production of tapestries based on his paintings. I vividly remembered the tapestries hanging over the bannister all the way upstairs. Fifteen years later here we were meeting! Arthur asked me about my magazine's form & direction, particularly interested in the art & poetry interaction and the historical chronicling. Reaching into his jacket pocket he peeled off a wad of notes & pressed them into my hand, wishing the mag & I the best of luck. The arrival of Betty's daughter-in-law, Sigrid Thornton, signalled the end of breakfast.

The particular issue of the mag enabled by his patronage happened to contain my interview with Pete Spence mainly about art, particularly Pete's hostility to what he contended was Nolan, Boyd & co's monopoly of Australian critical attention -- Pete's critique was consistent with the opinion & interest of many of us in favour of the marginalised practice in all the arts. Although aware I was biting the hand that feeds, I couldn't censor the interview. Dutifully I sent copies of the issue to Betty & Arthur but never heard back from either… Apart from passing in the street, perhaps the last time I saw Betty was with Tim Burstall (and of course we'd met Tim & their boys back in the day) at Collected Works for the launching of Rudi Krausmann & Andrew Sibley's (poems & drawings) collaboration, ca 2003 --the smallest return for her unrivalled hospitality at La Mama…

Memories of Betty Burstall are inseparable from the La Mama cafe-theatre on Faraday Street in Carlton where we met around about this time 46 years ago. Winter 1967 : small tables & chairs downstairs, bric-a-brac, junk/furniture upstairs. One-act plays performed beside & amongst the coffee-drinkers. Log fire in wall grate; coffee urn bubbling. A poetry reading organised by the folk-singer Glen Thomasetti, well-known from the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, that featured or happened to include a poet, in his late thirties (being 21 or so an older poet one had to have perceived), leg in plaster &/or balancing on crutches, jacket, shirt, beard trimmed to cheek : Charles Kenneth Taylor (called Ken by some, Charles by others), working in the talks department at the ABC. As far as I was concerned, the reading was momentous. His reading voice accurately describing his poems' pace & lineation, and his references to Ashbery & Snyder sheer music to my ears for though well acquainted with such poetry I hadn't yet heard it even cited in Melbourne. All this is inscribed in other histories or should be! Suffice to say here that I celebrated Ken Taylor's reading with a poem, Poem For Ken Taylor (first published in the 1968 chapbook, Two Poets [Ken Taylor & Kris Hemensley], with its our glass motif silk-screen cover by Mike Hudson), which I read later in '67 at one of Glen's readings, word of which got back to Ken --probably Betty told him (the Burstalls & the Taylors & the Wallace-Crabbes had all been in New York around 1965/6 via Harkness Fellowships). She introduced us, and that was the origin of the Melbourne chapter of the New Australian Poetry (as I conceived it) --true to say, and I say it as I think it, the contemporary continues its particular & timely articulation in & from that occasion's significant swing…

Betty Burstall had returned to Melbourne from New York inspired by alternative theatre in the Village, especially Ellen Stewart's La Ma Ma Experimental Theatre Club (founded in 1961).  Just as Ken Taylor returned on a mission --to establish the Australian extension to John Gill & Earle Birney's New American & Canadian Poetry (magazine & books), out of Trumansburg in up-state New York , so Betty sought to emulate New York's La Ma Ma : theatre presented outside of the normal performance settings in Melbourne, amateur or commercial. Betty's vision was for a space  to hold all the arts --theatre, poetry, music, film. Upstairs & downstairs it became a regular hang-out for some of us in 67/8 --Frank Bren, Bill Beard, Michael Hudson, Gary Petersen, Elaine Rushbrooke, Sid Clayton et al… Having experienced the productions of Jack Hibberd's playlets, I'd reported back to the New Theatre, of which Loretta Garvey, Frank & Bill were younger stalwarts, that the real new theatre, innovative & politically aware, was occurring at La Mama :  if we really believed New Theatre's manifestos then La Mama was where we should also be. Minus the Communist Party bit of course --easier to negotiate in 67/8 with the alternative presence of the New Left than before I suspect. And so we came across the road to Betty Burstall's La Mama without abandoning the New Theatre although, naturally, that was how our expedition was viewed by some…

Betty & theatre : The New Australian Theatre, in its Melbourne manifestation, depends upon the particular place & space of La Mama for its origin & subsequent development…

Betty & the poets : The New Australian Poetry, in its Melbourne manifestation, depends upon that particular place & space for its origin & subsequent development…

Betty the hostess of fabulous dinners in the cafe-theatre where she conscientiously set about bridging the personalities & generations, the different tribes & their territories via Bohemian bonhomie & a wholesome menu of wine, platters of hard & soft cheeses, bread, olives, sausage, salad… I see Betty setting me down at a table with Keith Harrison, the Australian poet visiting from the States, & Philip Martin, poet & younger academic from Monash. Perfect example of her mix & match, not that she foresaw Philip taking the liberty of introducing me to Keith & describing me as a representative of the new Melbourne poetry's Wordsworthian tendency! I hit the roof : Wordsworth? Our poets were Pound, Williams, the Beats, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York et al with Liverpool Scene, Tarn, MacDiarmid, Bunting, Turnbull & other British thrown in. Our politics collaged Berkeley, Paris, Berlin, London, Che & Ho Chi Minh! Betty flew to my side to tamp down the anger! Amazing to me, Keith knew my poetry references & pouring out the good wine ameliorated the argument : it was Wordsworth the erstwhile sympathiser of the French Revolution whom Philip had in mind he interceded, while Olson & Co & all the bards of hippiedom were a rather different kettle of fish, ill-fitting Philip's equation. I left La Mama that night excited by the older generation ex-pat's broad mindedness, wishing he lived & taught in Melbourne instead of the US, wishing Australia could have held him and, despite the rising of the New, already suspecting why it mightnt… At another dinner, recall being called over by John Perceval, whom I'd already met in out-of-the-city, leafy Canterbury, introduced by Mike Dugan whose neighbour he was, to join him in polishing off a carafe… Tony Murphett, wearing ostentatious necklace-broach he claimed once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empress, careered  around the tables… The wonder of being an English immigrant youth, plucked out of the obscurity of nowhere Southampton & sub-Bohemian Melbourne, into proximity of the locally celebrated art & literature, still tickles me nearly half a century on… I think Betty understood her role as medium, moderator, provider, proselytiser : I wouldn't be alone in saying she was La Mama… 

One day, summer '68, she asked me to go around the corner from the cafe-theatre to a terrace house in Elgin Street and, virtually, save a poet! His name is Shelton Lea, she said, --he needs to know about La Mama, he needs to meet other poets, he's isolated, desperate, in need of nurture, connection et cetera. So I strolled around. Shelton was tall, slender, high cheeked, Roman-like, trembling with intensity. He immediately stated his contempt for that modern poetry which eschewed regular rhyme & metre & demanded from me the rationale for free verse. He enthused about Countee Cullen (whom I misheard as Cunty Cullen), unknown to me but evidently Shelton's example of a great poet. I spoke about the emergent new Melbourne poetry and our, mostly, American references. I remember saying that poems don't have to rhyme though the rhythm of speech & mind was a given. In my mind he's smoking, juggling a baby, another tripping around his feet, with his dark eyed, long haired, similarly slender actress wife in & out of the room with coffee. He said he'd try to come to La Mama but was flat out struggling to exist…

Around this time, impressed by the popularity of the curtain-raiser poetry performances I provided for Mike Hudson's versions of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre, Betty invited me to take on a regular poetry evening. She proposed we go 50/50 on the door, and so long as I could pay the rent would be part of La Mama's permanent programme. We planned but didn't bite the bullet until September '68 when the inaugural reading of what I named the La Mama Poets Workshop began with its boast "Tuesday nights forever!" By August '69 the Hemensleys were off to Europe, leaving the Workshop in the hands of Mike Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Bill Beard, Ian Robertson, Geoff Eggleston, Garrie Hutchinson & others, until sometime in 1970 they moved on to the Melbourne Arts Co-Op (another history yet to be analysed & written). Betty threw a going-away party for us in her Eltham house, wished us all the best but insisted we return to Melbourne & La Mama. Late '72 we did, but though she invited me start up poetry at La Mama again one had obviously moved on. 'Breakthrough' politics & poetics had grown, after the 1970-72 English infusion, into the 'international' perspective --that is, Melbourne & Australian poetry in the world of poetry. Ten years later Val Kirwin had a go, on Betty's successors, Maureen Hartley & Liz Jones' instigation, & invited me to read with her at the well-attended first salon, but it wasn't until Mal Morgan, whom I'd put on the bill back in 68/9, began his La Mama Poetica a few years later that the La Mama tradition resumed. It continues to this day…

Betty's generosity to the new playwrights & actors (Hibberd, Blundell, Davies, Romeril & co) is legend, to the extent of warping the actual history of performance (of new music & film as well as theatre) at La Mama, especially in the first couple of years. After the resident group suddenly abandoned La Mama, hurting & shocking her to the core, she came to see it as an opportunity for ever greater variety of the new & experimental.  Her devotion to the theatre was equalled by her support of the poets. Tim Burstall, in contrast, could be critical & dismissive of the La Mama poets. I recall Betty once more keeping the peace & explaining that Tim was a poet himself once. Her own children also had inclinations to write --I think it was young Tom who hung around the barely older Charles Buckmaster, which may have exacerbated Burstall senior's inter-generational irritation… 

In the three years I was away ('69-'72), Betty had me sending her playscripts for which she found directors, mounting a succession of productions of my plays at La Mama. From the day in late '67 when she recruited Malcolm Robertson (moonlighting from the MTC under the pseudonym 'Garibaldi') to direct my first La Mama play, The Blind, she was my greatest advocate. Our last collaboration was in 1973 when she invited me to join herself & Wilfrid Last as the La Mama/Australian Performance Group's contribution to the Independent Schools' Drama Conference in Canberra. Among the other presenters were Roger Pulvers & (the late) Solrun Haas. The play I wrote for the event, The Grand Centenary Cricket Match, was performed by dozens of students & directed (choreographed) by Wilfrid. Betty & I led discussion of contemporary theatre, critiquing short plays by the school groups. Unqualified academically, we'd become a reference for Australian theatre through experience & enthusiasm. Precisely what Ken Taylor meant when he said that with the inception of the La Mama poetry readings, a poet no longer required a license from the English department of Melbourne University!

If Betty Burstall's Memorial in the forecourt of La Mama in Faraday Street, Carlton was her final performance, where she was hailed by friends & colleagues traversing the 46 years since her creation of that theatre --with mostly theatre people speaking, which both Ken Taylor, down from Mount Macedon for the event, & I anticipated --La Mama's poets & poetry sidelined by the actors (--we're here for Betty & that's all that matters, he said --this is where she introduced us & how it all began) -- it's another performance, in which she serendipitously featured, which  leaps out of my memory… Sometime in 1969, one of Sid Clayton's marvellous & inscrutable events --that poet-composer's magical theatre, part meticulous composition, part happening --for the crux of which he'd directed the audience to become participants in a ritual procession around a table, onto which Betty had unexpectedly hopped up & now lay supine! We were to circle clock-wise --though I remember rebelling against that  expectation, circling the other way. Ironically, Sid attempted to shepherd me back into the orthodox circle. Betty was taken over by the 'ceremony'. Bill Beard equally enthusiastic (as was his nature). Recorded music or percussion played ever louder around us. It was dark apart from candle-light. And it only finished when we left off. Betty was the last. From the sidelines we saw her slide off the table, flushed cheeks, exhilarated…


[18/19-6 // 27-7  // 15-9-2013] 

BEING HERE : RETRIEVED

Kris Hemensley

The 7th issue of my magazine H/EAR(1981-85) was entitled BEING HERE.
One of its components was a particular take on local art & literature within, one could say, an exploration of the relationship or oscillation of 'the local' & 'the world'.
Returning to materials I'd gathered but never used, since I'd stopped publishing the magazine after the 8th issue, I've realized that even in my exploration of 1960s & 1940s poetics & practice (a juxtaposition I'll elaborate later), in Australia & elsewhere, there's a fascination with the secret history, as it were. I mean 'secret' in the sense of unacknowledged, perhaps even as of Shelley's famous phrase! And
I remain interested in the non-mainstream figures & activities (even though these might be the 'other end of London & New York business', as D H Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo) --a melange of the esoteric & mystical, our own Beats & Surrealists, for example, connected to more or less celebrated rebel & exploratory impulses overseas. This doesnt now imply the mutual exclusivity which characterized my younger undertakings, though points of difference & departure are to be valued (& perhaps to a greater degree in this time of accord & equanimity).The Post Modern opportunity, as I've often commented, really does mean that everything's back in consideration and former contentions have no currency as eternally opposing blocs!
Robert Kenny's essay, A Secret Australia : on the poetry of Ken Taylor (which accompanies the selected poems of the same name, published by Kenny's Rigmarole Books in 1985), begins with a chapter entitled Nostalgia, Minutiae & a Search. That could also be a subtitle for the psychology of my project --& another definition of 'history', per se!
The "secret Australia" coined by Ken Taylor in one of his great poems of the 1960s (& still unacknowledged in the official anthologies), Maurie speaks about a secret Australia while in Iceland, refers both to a nostalgia for & a departure from a place & state of mind. The hospital in the country, the young man dying with cancer are no less actual for the symbols they also are. A companion poem, Maurie and the hotel game, seems even more a metaphor of the anachronism & decrepitude one might dress the older Australia in, and no shock at all to the reader at the possibility that "Old Maurie himself had been the manager of that dreary place"!
Perhaps against the intention of Ken Taylor's phrase, I've allowed it to conflate with something like a 'secret place', --this secret place, Melbourne, which has been my place in the world for twice as long as my southern & west country English homes but without displacing them... It attaches to my other place(s) to form the home one knows the instant one's there, --here & there, continuously...
I intend a series of reconnoitres ramifying the general theme, Being Here, utilizing in part some of the contents of a couple of the H/EAR magazine issues.
In my 1980s 'documenta' project, I attempted to tap the excitement of the '60s as a necessary rejuvination for the later period's end-of-the-world milieu. Now, in 2010, it's time to catch up the '80s' swirl of research, without of course ceasing to attend to the living present!

[28/30-01-10]


oOo


AS THOUGH A EULOGY, ALAN MURPHY (10/4/22 - 2/11/09)

[When Alan Murphy's wife, Alison, rang me with the sad news of his death, she mentioned the possibility of my saying a few words at the funeral. With that in mind I assembled some notes but, in the event, wasnt called upon. Talking with me afterwards, Alex Skovron, one of his valued collaborators, suggested I publish the notes anyway, which is all that they are. Inevitably I would have improvised upon the notes.]

*

Condolences to Alison & the family--

Loretta & I got to know Alan through Collected Works Bookshop. I think the first chat I had with him was at the book-launching for Aileen Kelly at the CAE Library --late 90s? early 2000?--

Alan talked with me about poetry, poets, ideas and with Loretta often of Melbourne identities important to both of them, like Artur Turnbull, Ruth Bergner--

One day, a few months back, I asked him if Shmuel Gorr's name meant anything to him. Oh, Shmuel? Shmuel Gorr? Oh yes! And he laughed impishly. We planned to sit down sometime & have a formal talk about such identities as Shmuel & the people he, Alan, knew at Norman Robb's Bookshop, including the poets Keith Harrison & Harold Stewart. He has written about this in his self-published book of poems & reminiscences, Somnambulant in Wetlands (2006)--

Alan was a great enthusiast for poetry & poets. He'd enjoyed Alan Wearne's classes at the RMIT in the mid '90s where he was a classmate of Cassie Lewis, Emma Lew, Jan Stumbles, Claire Gaskin & others. Alan Wearne celebrated him in a poem [Ballade to Alan Gould] about several 'Alan's' of his acquaintance. Alan Murphy also wrote music for another of Alan Wearne's poems [The Stags, from The Lovemakers, 04]--

Alan for many years was an enthusiastic contributor to the Deakin Literary Society's meetings, convened by Brian Edwards, and to Aileen Kelly's poetry groups alongside Fiona Benneton, Hellena Allan, Raffaella Torresan & others. I think he met Ken Taylor there, who was a guest for one or two sessions [perhaps Ken attended at Alan's behest, or was it Ron Pretty arranged his participation?].

Ken Taylor, who sends his deepest condolences & was most upset when I told him the sad news, referred to their mutual Ballarat connection : "I was from the east, he was from the west!" he told me this morning. He had hoped they'd be able to do something together on new Ballarat material : he'd found tapes recently which he thought had perished in the 1983 Macedon fire. He wanted to play them for Alan--

It was Ken who organised the poets to march with him at the Shrine of Remembrance (Melbourne) in 2004, to lay a wreath in honour of the great British WW2 soldier-poet, Keith Douglas. Our detachment comprised Ken, Alan, Jenny Harrison & myself. Alan, of course, was the only genuine soldier among us --though he only wanted to be there as a poet honouring a poet--

Which is what I'm doing today --honouring a man who loved poetry & poets, art & artists, & of course music & musicians --who knew the characters over several decades of Melbourne cultural history, & was one himself--

(November 9th,'09)


oOo



Kris Hemensley

from Letters to Takamura (2003-04)

7th Letter


Dear Takamura, everything's been said.
Melbourne Autumn neither one thing nor an-
other on spur of oldest continent.
Unlike yesterday gas-fire was today's
constant companion. Grazed like an old
horse beside it --green-tea & black-rye toast.
Consumed the heat. Stared at the cloudless blue
over my neighbour's roof. Drifted in &
out of your story dreaming forever-more's
calender of never-to-know-agains.

You & yours. Me & mine. Annually
the different degrees of mourning will
coup us up. I mean to be positive
now : to be laced by anniversaries --
set on the path as a bright new barrel --
braced by life's hard stuff not lacerated
like a teaching quack's morbid specimen.

And there I was -- drinking with Alan who'd
served in New Guinea before I was born --
appreciating this most curious
intersection of life & death where the
sons & lovers we'd always celebrate
looped around our poets' conversation
as simultaneously real subjects
& metaphor. Could have cried. Laughed instead.

Everything's been said? Clink pint of Guinness
on his light-ale glass. D-Day's sixtieth --
not yet leached of its liveliness. Toast the
poet & soldier Captain Douglas
wasted in France -- twenty-four. Toast the wee
alliance reclaiming ancestor Keith.
In our own ways Ken Jenny Alan me
are equerries of night-seen-through-to-day.
Accompanied the Normandy vets -- placed
our wreath with theirs. Men & women -- not ghosts.
Men & women Takamura -- men &
women again -- at Life's immortal posts.

(27/5 - 21/6/04)

[NOTES :
Keith Douglas,1920-44; Takamura Kotaro, Japanese artist & poet, 1883-1956]



oOo


Alan Murphy's Somnambulant in Wetlands (the title from his memorial poem for the artist Dawn Westbrook) : Selected Poems, 1987-2006, contains valuable reminiscence of a particular Melbourne scene in the 1960s, some of the roots of which derive from before WW2. Good fortune has made Alan an important link between generations & a witness of past times.

He recalls, "In the early sixties when I began teaching music in secondary schools in Victoria, I met Keith Harrison at a CAE Summer school in Albury. Like me he was also a graduate of Melbourne University and was teaching English in a country High School, if my memory serves. Between lectures or classes we would play recorder trios with another player who, like me, was a member of the Dorian Singers. Leonard Fullard, organist at Christ Church, Sth Yarra directed this group. (.....) From the Albury encounters, back in Melbourne I was invited to play more of these trios, for soprano, treble and tenor recorder, with Keith, and a Harold Stewart, on Sunday afternoons. The venue was Norman Robb's bookshop in Little Collins Street. Robb was a kindred spirit who let us have his space on the Sabbath. Stewart, I learned later, was he who had assisted James McAuley in creating Ern Malley. (Or did Malley re-create McAuley/Stewart?)"

His evocation of those Sunday afternoons is a gem of the lost world :
"With Harold quietly making herb tea after we'd studiously played through, say, Giles Farnaby's three pieces, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Keith, confidential, loquacious, would talk dismissively of The Jindies and Rex Ingamells, but warmly of Japanese poetry, Eastern art, and Coomeraswami (as one of the writers they'd both read, blissfully). Harold would read a few of his translations of Japanese haiku, and Keith, some of his Basho poems. They wrote in small bound black notebooks with broad-nibbed black fountain-pens in an exquisite calligraphy."
As he said himself, "These occasions were contemporary [with] but a far cry from those of the social realist artists Aileen Palmer, Ruth & Yosl Bergner, and Jim Wigley : a poet, a dancer, and two painters. Jim & Yosl painted sets for Ruth's dances at the Carlton Kadimah. Ruth would move to Aileen's poems in recitals where she was also performing Jewish dances to my accompaniments on piano or recorder. I also played bamboo flute to her Indian dances, these either folk dances, or, moving to poems by Tagore. Ruth would use the mudras of the Kathakali tradition as experienced by her when working with visiting Indian dancer, Shivaram. They danced together in Sydney and Fiji. I worked as Ruth's accompanist for two years when she ran Saturday sessions in contemporary dance where dancers such as Jack Manual and Arthur [Artor] Turnbull attended; and where Ruth passed on the aesthetics and practices of teachers who'd trained and inspired her in pre-war Warsaw. I was accompanist for these classes, often diverging from set music to improvise at the piano as the group moved to suggestions from Ruth, with performances down the track in mind. Arthur in turn had pupils, among them Retta Hemensley, partner of Kris, poet & proprietor of Collected Works [bookshop]. Retta, an Early Childhood Educator, also assists in the bookshop. Such dance recitals were varied with interludes of short musical items, such as Two Women of Hiroshima, a duo for guitar and recorder especially composed by Felix Werder, and drawing on some images from The Hiroshima Panels. The guitarist was Sadie Bishop, with whom I occasionally gave recitals for the ABC. Ruth's movements interpreted the music written in response to the atomic destruction of a city. Her unforgettable solo dance, The Cry, to a Shostakovitch Prelude was performed in The New Theatre."

Alan's reference to Aileen Palmer's publication of World Without Strangers (by Overland, in 1964), and of the readings "organized at the Palmers' house in Kew", reminds us of her iconic parents, Vance & Nettie, and retrieves all three from the oblivion of passing time. Aileen Palmer's "most powerful poem, Remembering Garcia Lorca, was read by Lorraine Murphy, to my semi-flammenco strumming of the guitar. Aileen's poem marked the 25th anniversary of the poet's death, he, murdered near Granada in August 1936. The Guards of tradition and pain called los Theveeileays, (who never come out but in pairs) Aileen reports here, would murder the gypsies at night. During the Civil War, Aileen and her sister were volunteer ambulance drivers in Spain."

Alan's Tasmanian years, 1968-76, began with his appointment to a music lectureship at the conservatorium, where he "joined The Renaissance Ensemble of the Tasmanian University, who specialized in Elizabethan Songs and the Morley Consort Lessons, perhaps the first ensemble of fixed instrumentation in the Western tradition." (In a footnote he quips, "What a time to leave Melbourne, when Kris Hemensley and Ken Taylor, among La Mama poets, were published; & Glen Tomasetti was singing her folksongs.")
"It was here in Hobart that I first met Jim McAuley, who with Stewart had put together the hoax poems when they worked together in Victoria Barracks. McAuley was now Director of the English Department at the University and organized a series of lunchtime concerts to link in with the students' studies. McAuley took a great interest in our Consort. Elizabethan keyboard music was played by him on spinet at his home, when he wasn't playing jazz on the piano, or perhaps also on the spinet. He would sometimes come to our rehearsals, and on two yearly occasions engaged us to play at his lunchtime soirees at the University."

And so he recounts the years, through the 70s, 80s & 90s, the musician & composer gradually turning towards literature & particularly poetry. No better way to remember him, apart from his poems & compositions of course, in which erudition, humour & formal elegance inimitably combine.


oOo


Alan Murphy
ca 2007/08

Dear Kris & Retta,
Seasons Greetings & Blessings, & to you both, warmest thanks for your lovely card & thoughts; most moved Kris by your appellation of me as haunter of Collected Works.
Yes I love my visits to you both there, & the nourishing talks we have, sharing ideas, & music from time to time. What a treasure-house I visit! Yes the Aileen/Arcade axis is a vibrant reality.
Ken [Taylor]'s card is one of his attractive seasonal ones, with its images of colour & words. We must get our heads together about planning a trip up to him [Mount Macedon] in the new year. Looking forward to seeing you both in January.

P.S.
Having run out of Xmas cards, I send this one of Givenchy [Le pont japonais dans le jardin de Monet] & enclose a poem about Susan Kruss's poem & some tangential allusions.
I hope you are both well & have had a bit of a break with the Xmas occasions.
We have had colds, with Alison's confined to the head, & mine, drifting chesty, so the G.P. put me on anti-biotics, a bit of nausea one of the drawbacks to keeping bronchitis at bay.
Should be right in a few days.
Kris, checking my book-shelf I note that I haven't after all, got the two 07 Best [Australian] Poems volumes. If you have them still, put copies aside for me.
Love to you both,
Alan

*


A Response to Susan Kruss's Osage etc.


The poet's Osage haunts me & my history:
My Uncle Fred, of blessed memory, one day
called me into his cabinet-maker's workshop.
'Alan, hold this? You might have a use for it.'

I took the 2 x 2 inch-thick dressed meter
from his sensitive and calloused hands, the ones
that had gonged it, left hand holding it vertical,
the right, giving it a slap so it was a swung bell.

'It's an off-cut piece of Osage Orange,' Fred said,
'a very hard wood that resounds and shines; I've no
use for it now, and I'm cleaning up here.' I struck it,
feeling the weight, left fingers tingling, ears charmed.

Like yours, Susan, faint smell of oranges, the grain
already rich of hue and line. You end saying 'nothing
lives forever, not even trees.'My Uncle, who knew
the meaning of wood, was knelled two months later.

*

Fred had known I was a recorder-player who'd
had instruments made by another Frederick, that
one called Morgan, reaping a Churchill award,
a local virtuoso winning wide fame as a maker.

Susan, did you know of him, shaper of recorders,
you whose debut book of poems The Meaning of
Wood, might have stirred Morgan, in his decades of
lathe-turning, bore-reaming, mean-tone tuning?

Just as he turned out, to long-term orders, troves of
Bressans, (those Stradsof Baroque trebles), for the
virtuosi, Bruggan, Boeke & Linde, so his fingers woo'd
uncle's Osage wood into a lyrical warbler of a Descant.

Susan you tell of a retiree who was given a shaped piece of
Osage from a tree he'd cut down after lightning cleaved it.
Fred Morgan, of blessed memory, driving back one night
to Daylesford from Ballarat (your home-town & once mine),
hit, fatally, a tree. In your next collection you valiantly hail
the women of Eureka, a timely history of their contribution
just as stockade timbers had done their stout best to prevail.

(June 07)

*

Notes on the above poem, & others

1. Copy of Osagh from Monet's Garden and other poems by Susan Kruss (Wagtail #61, Picaro Press, Dec '06); see also my sestina poem, Come into the Garden, Who? which refers to Kruss's Monet's Garden poems. See also The Meaning of Wood, and Calico Ceilings - TheWomen of Eureka (Five Islands Press, '04).

2. Fred Morgan was recognized as the leading recorder player in Melbourne from the 60s & 70s on. His career as an instrument maker began humbly when he took over from Ade Monsborough the production of the Pan school descant recorders. After overseas apprenticeship in the craft his range of makes included all the historical & regional types from the voice flute to the Italian Garnassi division recorder, and a Renaissance Alto Flute for a Morley Consort Lesson Ensemble based in Tasmania. He have frequent demonstration talks on the tuning systems and the comparative traditions of woods used by period makers. As a recitalist he worked with his harpsichordist partner Ann Murphy.

3. The Sydney composer Nigel Butterley wrote a piece for harpsichord and sopranino recorder entitled The White-Throated Warbler, a local bird he'd hear in his outskirts suburb. The sopranino's range is an octave above that of the treble F recorder. The descant's range is intermediate, in C.

4. Osage
When he retired they gave him a shaped
piece of osage orange, polished so the grain
lemon to sienna shone. The faint odour of
oranges hung around the wood, sculpted
from the heart of the tree he cut down
after lightning split it in two. One side fell
on a car, students protested, he didn't want
to do it but after years working with trees
he knew there was no hope of saving this one.
In better days its green fruit would drop
inedible but smelling of oranges. He and
the gardener would bowl them down the slope
gathering speed to the front gate. Loss
of the osage orange was a reminder that nothing
lives forever, not even trees, not always.

[Susan Kruss]


5. Fred Pollard served in an A.I.F. Tank Regiment in the western desert campaign that led to Rommel's defeat. Back home he left the rag trade (Love and Pollard, who had several Melbourne shops) and with great success took up cabinet-making. (Not so much my uncle as the husband of my cousin, Joyce Pollard, nee Barnett.)


oOo


Lovell House, 389 Alma Road, Caulfield Nth, Vic. 3161 Wed. Sept 16 // 09

Dear Kris, So glad to get your letter, which Alison told me was on its way. I've been thinking of you & Loretta, & we hope the radiotherapy goes well. Your family news was quite dramatic, hope it quietly enlivened all concerned.
Did Fleur Adcock come from New Zealand? Alison chuckled over "Cider with Rosie", we'll run it down. Books I've started are "The Slap" Christos Tsiolkas --quite a ride!; "Wanting" Richard Flannagan's latest novel (short listed for the Miles Franklin) & some shorter poems of Hardy (ed John Wain). Alison has just finished "Raising My Voice" by that Afghan woman who dares to speak out -- Malalai Joya.
Another Franklin was Lady Franklin wife of Sir John Franklin the explorer. In 1839 they adopted Mathinna (treated seriously in "Wanting"), a young aboriginal girl, to 'prove savages could be civilised'. It ended tragically. I think the Victorian Ballet Guild did a ballet on the theme, way back in the 1930s here.
Looking forward to seeing you soon. Alison will drive me down to Collected Works. While there we'll arrange a time to come again & have a retrospective talk.
Hope also to catch up with Fiona, & possibly Aileen.
(There's a poet here who writes succinctly & has veiled confessional lines in her work, Anne Parrat.)
Best to you both,

Alan

oOo


______________________________________________________________


SHMUEL GORR (22-09-31 / 3-09-88)

*

[Kris Hemensley
Journal; July/October, 1983

2nd September, 83
(....)
[after Fling magazine launching, ed Jenni Mitchell & Cornelis Vleeskens] I spoke to Mal [Morgan], mentioned Shmuel Gorr --his first reaction, that bullshitting bastard (in the sense of "that incorrigible rogue")-- followed up with the compulsory "though i love him" : "we used to screw the same girl 20 years ago" ---I said i'd found Gorr on my hunt for Max Dunn!-- he didnt know Dunn, tho of course he was aware of Brabazon-- i asked what the Ben Yuri Association was-- he sd it was a group of Jewish writers, painters mainly, who got together to discuss art, philosophy, literature & so on. Mal sd that Shmuel claimed he was a Rabbi, but he hadnt any rabbinical qualifications whatsoever. I remembered what R. A. Simpson had said of Dunn, 'living in a fantasy world.' Mal's few expostulations abt Shmuel Gorr suggested a bird of a feather! He was in Israel in any case, he sd-- digging for treasures.
I asked Mal if the Western Buddhist Association meant anything to him-- he sd it wouldnt have involved Shmuel-- he was much too Jewish for that. He sd he'd ask some of his friends, get his address for me (it wouldnt be any problem). Well, whilst i slumbered this morning, Rett took call from Mal-- i now have [Shmuel's] address in Jerusalem--. I will write for information.
It's not a history i'm involved in, but a mosaic! As I've quipped to Des [Cowley], & Pete [Spence], it's a reinvention of Melbourne. It really is!

(....)
7 Sept, '83
(....) [re my work on H/EAR magazine] I'm really putting together the archive, the record, that i've wanted to-- it's actually happening! I was saying to Rett today that i always wanted to be a "historian'"-- & this is the occasion!
The point to be made regarding the '40s painting references is that it's not academic history : it's a history being made right now. That is, it suits us, it meets our requirements, right now! We are its justification! (after W Whitman, 'those who follow...') We are joined with it. "We" i say-- yes, as Melbournite, citizen, soul-mate to Nibbi, Vassilieff, that is migrants, & to Tucker & Lawler, the socialists & the apocalyptics, all those antipodeans who rose to the moment (what Lawlor says so magnificently in his Eliminations, "contemporaneity")-- It's the coalescence of various historical moments-- just as current experimentalism picks up its local forbears, so does current feminism rehabilitate the likes of Clarice Beckett & Joy Hester-- history is something done, is the mobilization of the record.

(....)
30 Sept, '83
[after seeing Desiderius Orban show at Niagara Gallery, Punt Road, Melbourne]
(....) Just as Janina [Green] said, the directors are young & friendly-- we spoke to one, Bill-- i sd i'd like to sit down & chat with him, show him my magazine [H/EAR]--
(....)Bill said that the intention of the Australian Surrealism exhibition was to show that there were other painters involved in the movement besides Thake, Purves-Smith, & Gleeson.
Writing our names into visitors' book i noticed "J. Henshaw" & a ph-no. Is that the Godfrey Miller man? i asked! Yes, he sd, we had a Godfrey Miller show on here a while ago. We seem to have missed everything-- on other hand, as Rett sd, it's only in the last year that we've become aware of [all these] Australian modernists. In fact, the past few months of research & visits has been the watershed.

(....)
1 Oct, '83
(....) I spent great afternoon in the [Botanical] Gardens. Temp. was low 20s. Summery. I took 2nd Aeon [ed Peter Finch, Wales], G Dowden Letters to English Poets, & Wm Wantling's San Quentin Stranger, accessories to Terry [Gilmore]'s 1966-76 volume [Further]-- & managed to write 3 pages-- developing argument of Terry as "metaphysical"-- relating the Hard Mouths to Visionary poetry, via George [Dowden]'s argument. Sense vs sound. Tracked down the Wantling quote in Terry's afterword to Poetry/ poem (manifesto) in Wantling's book.
I've got the run of the essay worked out now. Importantly the Apocalypse poets will get their first run since the 40s, & 1st mention maybe since Judith Wright's put down. The Apocalypses & Jindy bits will be little gems! And the note on the bankruptcy of Hope & pussyfooting of McAuley, quoting Kenneth Mackenzie (who was Jim Hamilton's big'n years ago), & D.B. Kerr (whose death in action was mourned in Angry Penguins at some length i recall)--.
What i think i've done is to locate the late '60s/early '70s new writing in a local history of modernist/metaphysical argument, & of course to equip it with the logical international references. Began typing it up. Feels good! Oh yes-- plus apposition of '40s war & '60s '70s war environments, similar apocalypse-ism. ]


oOo



THE LEVITE PRESS
Flat 34, 52 Hantke Street, Kiryat Hayovel, Jerusalem, Israel

25th. Havshan 5 7 4 4 1st. November
[1983]

Dear Kris Hemensley,

First of all let me tell you how delighted i was to receive your letter. I was somewhat flattered that I am still remembered in Melbourne Literary Circles. when I lived and worked in my native Melbourne, I could never break 'The Aussie Barrier' - notwithstanding that I am a full-bred Aussie. the fact that I am a deeply observant Jew should make no difference. After all, Australia is a secular State - meaning that Australia has a complete separation of State and Religion (like all Democracies).

Notwithstanding that my fist book of Poems and aphorisms "Out of the Depth" was sent to all Book review Forums, it was only the Adelaide Advertiser that afforded me three or four lines of review - and stated that the Book would have very limited circulation. The others just ignored me. I did have a personal interview write-up in the Literary Supplement of the Age - but as stated just now, it was simply an interview. Meanjin, had the courtesy of returning to me one of my 'Hand Printed' books with a 'SORRY' note.

You who are right in 'the middle of it' in Australia will certainly understand what I am writing about. Of course, there were many Literary friends of mine from all walks of life and cultural Australian backgrounds who were a little in contact with a little of my work, who did enjoy my writings and told me so. One such gentleman was the head of the Australian Literature Department in some College in Geelong, and it wanted to make my small book (mentioned above) as compulsory reading - but his Board of Directors squashed the plan.

But I am 'jumping the gun'. Let me give you a short biographical description of 'the artistic and literary activities' of one Shmuel Gorr, born in Melbourne 1931, in Parkville. Attended elementary school in North carlton. Went through Elwood Central Secondary High School, and then continued till the end at Scotch College in Melbourne.

In 1947 he was the first-ever, Australian-born, Jewish lad to venture overseas to study for the Rabbinate. that was in Cleveland, Ohio. Then he came back home and studied locally. In 1950, the same year as he returned from the States, he proceeded to Gateshead, England, to continue his Rabbinical Studies. In 1952 (January), he returned to his hometown, Melbourne.

At the end of 1952 on completion of his Rabbinical Studies, his father Chaim Gorr (a well-known local portraitist and general artist), passed away. Shmuel Gorr was then forced to enter the family business, GORR & SALLICK, the Australian specialists in Bolts, Nuts, and Washers. This establishment should still be remembered by all Melbourne 'back-yard mechanics'. In 1968 Shmuel Gorr, together with his mother, joined his sister Gwen Gorr, and migrated to the Holy City of Jerusalem, where he has resided till today.

The first four and a half years in Jerusalem were spent working for the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Shmuel Gorr wrote all the articles on Australian Jewish Artists for that prestigious Publication. Then he was transferred to the History Division where he completed articles on the Jewish Communities of Australia. Finally he moved on to the Illustrations division.

Now to Literature and Art:

Shmuel Gorr wrote and had published in the now defunct 'Australian Jewish Herald' his first poems. He was eleven years old at the time. He has never stopped writing since. (The Australian Jewish Herald was the longest-going Jewish Periodical in Australian History, being roughly 88 years old when it closed down in about 1967.)

Shmuel Gorr was an ardent Illuminator and produced many works of art in this Medium. They are to be found in a number of Australian Synagogues, decorating the Holy Arks therein; and in many private collections.

He was founder and editor of the Monthly Journal of the Rabbinical College in Cleveland where he spent a number of years. After his return from England in 1952, he was commissioned to write a unique serialisation of his years as a rabbinical Student in America, Sheparton, and Gateshead (England). This was serialised in an English Religious Jewish Youth Magazine for two and a half years. He plans to edit the lot and have it published as a book. It was started to be serialised in 'The Australian Jewish Herald', but was never finished due to certain factors beyond everyone's control.

During the many years of conducting the family business, Shmuel's creative talents did not become stifled. In 1960 he founded the Australian Jewish Art Museum, BEN URI GALLERIES, which many will recall in Commercial Road, South Yarra. For many years Shmuel worked at making the Institution the Mecca (excuse the expression) for Australian Jewish Artistic and Literary Talent. And so thus it became. Except for the Annual holiday period at the end of the year, the Art Museum managed to present monthly exhibitions of major (and some new talent) Australian Jewish Artists. Also, the exhibitions of overseas Jewish Artists were also brought to Australia for exhibition - and some of the more important ones were taken and shown in all Australian Capital Cities. From some of these Exhibitions a number of works were purchased by the Victorian and Other State National Galleries.

Notwithstanding that Shmuel Gorr was comparatively young when he first ventured out overseas on two occasions, the impressions were strong and lasting. During the years of directing the Ben Uri Galleries (The Australian Jewish Art Museum) Shmuel continued to write Poetry and Prose.

In 1964 the Ben Uri Literary Society (a wing of the Art Museum of the same name) honoured Shmuel Gorr by publishing a selection of his writings - Poetry and Aphorisms. The book was entitled: 'Out of the Depths'. It was published in a limited edition of 1,000.

During this period, Shmuel Gorr had the fortune to make a - what then became - a life long friendship with well-known Australian (Irish born, ordained Buddhist priest in the Zen Order, and the Western World Order) Poet, the late Max Dunn. The friendship was mutually productive. Max unabashedly admitted to stealing bits and pieces from some of Shmuel's Poems. Shmuel learnt from Max Dunn's more sophisticated style of expression and some ground rules in Poetry Writing.

On the death of Max Dunn in 1967/8 Shmuel inherited (stated in his 'Will & Last Testament') the magnificent 'Hand Press' of 1730. Shmuel was elated. No more did he have to plead with publishers. He would learn how to print and publish his own books.

The Ben Uri Art Museum initiated a number of sub-groups... Life classes were conducted weekly; a Literary Group functioned weekly; a Dramatic Group was formed and a number of major productions were also achieved at "Emerald Hill' Theatre in South Melbourne (I think that's its name); a Sculpting Group was formed; and a Musical Group was formed under the leadership of Felix Werder the renowned Music Critic.

For a number of years the Ben Uri Art Museum promoted annually a 'Jewish Arts Festival' during which all Groups thereof participated. This was highly received not only by the public, but also by the many Melbourne professional critics.

One of the younger brilliant artists that was a member of the Ben Uri Art Museum, is a top level graphic Artist by the name of Sidney (Simchah in Hebrew) Fetter. Shmuel gave Fetter a copy of his book "Out of the Depths". That was the beginning of a marvellous partnership which produced a number of magnificent works. Fetter read through the book and produced a number (13) of woodcut and linocut illustrations for Shmuel's Poems. They decided to publish their first joint efort. That was 'MONO POEMS'. Shmuel's 13 Poems, and Fetter's 13 brilliant illustrations. They were ALL printed by hand on Shmuel's 1730 Hand-Press that he had inherited from the late Poet, Max Dunn.

Dr. Ursula Hoff, the Curatoress of Prints - at the time - of the Victorian National gallery, considered the edition more than a book and purchased a copy for the national collection. two more hand-printed Books were together published by Gorr and Fetter... 'Something Happened at Lubavitch' and 'No Haloes'. One more Book was produced on Australian shores, 'The End of Days'. This time the Book was illustrated with relief etchings by the great Australian Artist (residing in Adelaide), Franz Kempf. This work was reviewed to some degree - but again, although it was a very positive review, it was limited in scope, as the critic reviewing the Book claimed ignorance of the contents as it was Judaic in content. The critic said that the contents should be handled by someone acquainted with Biblical Literature - or some such bull-shit.

One important creative production promoted by the Ben Uri Dance Group, was a 'POETRY READING' put to 'MOVEMENT'. A complete production was made at the Ben Uri Galleries - with lighting, and some pieces of back-drop etc. - of a Dance Recital without any Music and purely to the tempo of first class Poetry Reading presented by George Dixon and Lola (I forget her maiden name - she was George's wife), in the background. The critic of The Bulletin came, and later reviewed this presentation. It received a top billing review.

On the basis of that presentation, the whole Dance-Poetry Recital was invited to be presented at Monash University Theatre. that evening's event was highly praised by the critic of the Monash University's Literary magazine. As a further result of the two performances, an enlarged presentation was performed at the 'Emerald Hill' Theatre.

Shmuel Gorr has many Poems in manuscripts which have not yet seen the light. The most prestigious Israeli 'Quarterly Review of the Arts' (Ariel no. 41) in Israel, did a full article on Shmuel and his Poetry. Many Poems never published In Australia (although written there), were published for the first time. Shmuel Gorr continues to write till today. No poet, let alone a Jewish one, can live and create in Jerusalem without experiencing something special in the Holy City of Jerusalem.

To make a living, Shmuel has turned to his other talents to success. he is today working full-time in the field of Jewish Genealogical Research, and is considered the World's leading Jewish Genealogist. He is continually being invited to lecture on this subject, and was also invited to Washington in 1982 to be the guest speaker at a "National Seminar on Jewish Genealogy".

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

Okay, matey. That's enough EAR-BASHING for anyone to be subjected to. Now I'll read your letter again and see what specific questions you'd like to be answered.

I forgot one BOOK. With the inherited Hand Printing Press that Max Dunn left me, there was much printing pieces of different usage. Also, there was already set up in hand type the complete Poem "The Jewel String of Dipankara". Before leaving Australia, I was determined to publish that original work of my late dear friend Max Dunn. You saw the result thereof.

Max Dunn re-married an Australian woman who he had met at the Buddhist Society of Victoria. At the time when I met Max Dunn I was involved in a major research program (personal, for my own interest) of 'Comparative Religions'. That led a mutual friend to bring Max and I together. Max Dunn had studied the Classical Biblical Hebrew and knew it well. He had made his won translation of 'The Song of Songs' by King Solomon and wrote his own Commentary thereto. He had even sent a copy of that work to the Hebrew University to some professor. I do not recall what the result was. It was through Max Dunn that I was able to make a serious indepth study of the Philosophy of all Schools of Buddhism. I remember Max Dunn once telling me that I was the most learned Jew in the field of Buddhist Philosophy and Theology, and I countered that he was probably the most learned Buddhist in the field of Judaic Philosophy.

By the time I met Max Dunn he had no longer copies of all the books he had printed by hand on his Hand Press. But a few he had, and he presented me with them. Their titles (of those I have) are as follows : 'The Mirror and the Rose', 'Into the Radiance', 'No Asterisks', and 'Portrait of a Country' - a truly Australian Poem.

Max had a keen sense of humour and thrived with young or old company. He was at home with anyone. A truly cosmopolitan man - although a strict Buddhist Priest in his Own conduct. He never ate before noon - the half a day's fast imposed on Buddhist Priests. He had artistic talent and I have two small paintings (unframed) that he presented to me. Once, when we had gone with a few friends for an outing to the bush, Max, unknown to me made a painting of me standing next to a tree whilst meditating the Jewish Afternoon Prayers. A few years later he gave that painting to me.

Till he married he lived at the back of an ancient shop in Toorak Road just down from Chapel Street, diagonally opposite from 'Capital Bakeries'. It was a jungle of bric-a-brac and bits and pieces of everything and anything. (It was a kind of disorderly 'Ye Old Curiousity Shop'.) After he married his wife Joan, they found a modest house in a street which runs parallel to Punt Road, between Commercial and Toorak Roads. I forget its name. There at least, he lived in a very orderly atmosphere. The house was always very well ordered and clean. He had his own little garden in which he worked in the backyard. The house was a wooden one, and it had no front garden at all. It was straight onto the footpath.

To some degree - but not identical - Max Dunn also suffered from the parochialism of Australian attitudes as far as his writings were concerned. He was older and certainly more established than I ever managed to achieve in my native land. Except for 'Portrait of a Country', his most celebrated work, the majority of his works are philosophical and Universal in theme.

To some degree I am a little 'sour' on what did - or in my case, didn't - happen with myself concerning my writings and the Australian critics etc. Either an Australian Jew can consider himself part and parcel of the Australian scene, or he cannot. An Australian Greek, Italian, Lebanese or Jew should be able to write and be accepted with his personal and Australian background. After all (to get a bit prosaic), "There is no 'Universal' without the 'Individual'; and certainly no 'Individual' that does not reflect the 'Universal'".

Notwithstanding that I did come in contact with many local poets, I just do not remember many names anymore. (I just remembered the critic of the 'Bulletin' who reviewed us at Ben Uri Galleries. It was Bill Hannon. Also, the Dance Recital was composed and enacted by Arthur Turnbull. Funny how names just come to one.) I do not remember the name Francis Brabazon. I don't recall, unfortunately, having ever met you in Melbourne. (Obviously my loss.)

There was another 'twilight' character who used to come in and out of the groups I moved in. That was Adrian Rawlins. Truly a 'way out' person. Another group that I had strong contact with early in my career was headed by the eminent Jewel Artist. Matcham Skipper. I was first invited to visit his home - if indeed it could have been called a home. At that time he lived at the back of Russell Street Police Headquarters. It was pretentiously 'done up' to look like old time provincial artistic French Studio-come-home. It was my first real contact with anything vaguely representative of 'Bohemianism'. ALTHOUGH I liked Matcham as a human being (and still do - and we became good friends till I left Aussie), I could not abide his life style. His wife Myra is a fine woman - and a saint - to have lived the life she did at Matcham's wish and bidding.

I followed Matcham out to Montsalvat and used to visit often. My first visits to Matcham Skipper's group at the back of the 'Cop Shop', inspired at least two poems that are printed in my 'Out of the Depths'. They are the ones entitled; "The Endless Wheel", and "The Cosmic Urge". Both are on page 12 of my Book. I also held a number of Poetry Readings at Matcham Skipper's place at the back of the "cop shop".

Well, matey, I think that's about it. I'm being called to come and have my dinner before it gets burnt. I hope I have supplied something of what you actually wanted from me. I am sure I could offer you more, but I think i have given enough material for you to digest and to know whether you want more of what I could give.

ALL the above is straight off the 'top of my head' from memory. I would be more than happy to correspond with you and to send you more of my reminiscences.

Incidentally, from where do you know my cousin Rosa Murdoch? I look forward to hearing from you in the near future with answers/comments etc. to all the above. in the meantime I wish you all the success in the world, and hope some day to have the pleasure of meeting you personally.

Shalom from Holy Jerusalem

(Rabbi) Shmuel Gorr


oOo


K. H.

Journal, 10th November, '09
(....)Alex [Skovron] sd. perhaps i could place my piece [on Alan Murphy] in one of the writers' mags [Melbourne Poets Union or Victorian Writers Centre for example] --But i think the blog will be the place. I said to Alan Pose y'day that i'd go ahead now & publish the letter from Shmuel Gorr --it wd be a kind of tribute to Alan M. -- Alan P. told me he'd only just learnt from his father that Shmuel's sister was in Melbourne from Israel for a few days --his father had given her a copy of the letter --Alan wondered if i'd like to talk to her --could he give her my telephone number? Yes, of course, i agreed-- It's a kind of synchronicity after all.
So today i've received ph-call from Shmuel's sister Riva! Sounded much younger than the 80+ she must be --She asked how old i was --I said i was younger than i sounded --when i said early 60s [to her promptings], she said i was just a youngster compared to her --I said she sounded great, my age! --I got the sense of a vivacious woman, --"Riva means 'a young lass'," she said --"my soul is young forever!" I mentioned Max Dunn. She said, "Max Dunn used to visit us. My mother was jealous. He was older than her but he could stand on his head!"

Note, 20-1-10
Shmuel's sister said she'd read the letter, shown to her by Mr Pose. (How that came about is also worth a little story. Talking with Alan P. one day about past decades' Melbourne scenes, I asked him if Shmuel's name meant a/thing to him. He wasnt sure. I described the context & my current interest. He promised to ask his parents. Apparently, the occasion he talked to them coincided with the delivery, out of the blue, of a copy of the Gorr family tree! The upshot of it all was that Shmuel, in various capacities, was known to them &, indeed, there was a tenuous family connection! )
Riva said she found it a sad letter, "what do you think?"
I hadnt thought it was sad but then there are probably nuances of expression which reveal more to a sibling than a correspondent.
Shmuel admits to being 'a little sour' about his experience but to my mind the context is Australian 'parochialism' & not malice. Shmuel Gorr is sardonic & not really gnashing teeth. And he's keen to remember, to record his fraction of the history rather than retire in abjection...
"Incidentally," he asks in 1983, "from where do you know my cousin Rosa Murdoch?" I think now she must have given me or Mal Morgan (coincidentally also known to the Poses) Shmuel's address in Jerusalem.

Research is a funny business, and mess is another. Without mess & concomitant loss there's no 'research'! The original documents are one thing; one's own burrowings & annotations something else again. History is always what one makes of it; and what one brings to it is, midrashically, immediately part of the record.

*

Post script:

Alan wondered if I was aware of Adrian Rawlins' publication, Lament For The Makers: 1997 (published Soup, Melbourne, 1998) --he'd googled a reference to Shmuel. Yes indeed, --Rawlins' poem, dedicated "In memoriam John Anderson 1948-97", though I'd forgotten it includes in its roll call, Shmuel Gorr.
The particular verse of the poem is as follows :

"Max Dunn, naughty fibber yet devotee true,
Who, ignoring money, did exactly what he had to do,
Who each day looked the Buddha in the eye
And taught: "Who seeks to know all of the loved will see love die,";
Shmuel Gorr, his pupil, so wild in love yet to devotion meek...
Whose angry death still left him up the creek;
(...)"

Methinks there's a certain irony in Adrian calling Dunn a 'naughty fibber'! (He speculates in a footnote that Dunn's "fanciful C.V. published in the Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1958) caused him to be dropped from subsequent editions.") And it's ambiguous to me whose 'angry death' --Max Dunn's or Shmuel Gorr's --is referred to in the poem. Rawlins' own fascinating family tree, even as sketched in the poem, is yet another reminder of the importance of his biography and, when written, what a document it will undoubtedly be.

*

My own googling rewarded me with two reminiscences of Shmuel Gorr in Jerusalem, from colleagues in the world of Jewish genealogical scholarship, penned at the time of his death, published in the journal Search (vol 8, #3, Fall. '88)
Chaim (Keith) Freedman refers to Rabbi Gorr's 1968 "Aliyah to Isreal, together with his mother, and they made their home in Kiryat Yovel in his beloved Jerusalem." He describes Gorr's work for the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Yad Vashem, & the manuscript department at the National Library, & mentions that in 1973, "Rabbi Gorr served in the Israeli army in the Yom Kippur War."
Freedman notes that "Rabbi Gorr's innate fascination with genealogy soon became his profession and he spent the last twenty years of his life immersed day and night in unravelling the complex family relationships of tens of thousands of Jews throughout the centuries..."
Freedman affords a glimpse of Shmuel's daily life : "Rabbi Gorr kept open house for a never ending stream of colleagues, friends and clients. His marathon telephone conversations across the country, his tenacity for seeking out far-flung leads to sources, his vibrant enthusiasm to picture every last link in the chain of Jewish existence, all were integral facets of his personality."
Importantly, "Rabbi Gorr was a staunch adherent of Chabad, revering its leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe."
Easy then to imagine Shmuel as "a familiar figure in Jerusalem and as he walked the streets downtown he would be greeted by acquaintances on nearly every corner. Many are the anecdotes he told and fond memories held by his friends. His untimely passing is a tragic blow to his life's work in genealogy and leaves a chasm of loss in the hearts of his friends. He is survived in Jerusalem by his mother, Haya Sora (Anna) and sister, Riva."
Another colleague, Charles B. Bernstein, a Chicago attorney involved in genealogical research, recalls that Shmuel Gorr's "bigger than-life persona is unforgettable : the little 'Tevya' cap, the unkempt informal clothing, the Chassidic display of his tzitzit, coupled with the marked Australian accent which in turn was flavored with witticisms, Yiddishisms, and Words of Torah, incongruously juxtaposed with the most familiar American colloquialisms..."
Could a picture improve upon that brilliant & poignant cameo?

K. H.
6th February, 2010

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