MICHAEL FARRELL
Launch-speech for GIRLERY by Melinda Bufton (Inken Publisch, 2014), at Collected Works Bookshop, March 1st, 2014
First, some thanks. I’m not even sure who I owe thanks to, but definitely to Ann Vickery for feedback, and to Melbourne poetry editors Gig Ryan, Jessica Wilkinson and Pete Spence for publishing some of the poems, and of course Greg Taylor the book. And maybe Duncan Hose as an example of Boyery. But mostly I – we – have to thank Melinda Bufton for being the person who can write poems like this. Free verse isn’t a waste of time. I already knew that really, but Girlery’s a reminder. It’s a fresh book: 2 parts Tyra Banks and 3 parts country girl. The first poem ‘Goddesses, the Bomb’ is a declaration that the poems will be as literary as fuck, but they won’t groan about their own weight. Hooray! [Optional signing of punctuation with your finger.] Bufton’s lines are like planks that shift about a treehouse, like you’re playing an electronic xylophone with your feet-eyes. You can tell why she’s had so many office jobs too: she makes it sexy. ‘Lessons learned’ manages to be light-hearted and feminist while integrating an under-emphasised activity of country life: a lot of TV. Pop stars seem to already have everything, but ‘Lapel’ shows us the work involved, the subversive-sounding complexities of online shopping, perhaps suggesting that the Marc Jacobs dress was rescued from the store. Clothing is a medium for Bufton, the way feminism or cricket is for other poets: it is its own romance. The voices can be something like a fairy godmother entering with her lines of advice but who then starts talking about her own life while nudging the princess bassinet away with her foot. And really, princesses have had enough attention. There’s something like Frank O’Hara in Melinda’s vignettes of a Girl-about-town – like Colette out of bed – and the way she can get out of a poem like the narrator getting out of the lift in ‘Like a fingerprint’, part good-humoured don’t-need-a-man-today, part Warholian blank intrigue. The variably light tone allows for throwaway brilliance in verb and adjective, such as alice (a verb) and carethrift (an adjective) in ‘Pincushion’. Girlery abjures earnest diction, while showing how deft the playful can be: ‘Bunnies of yore my gate to the wallop’, from the church of WTF, or the devastating ‘Sonnety’, for example, which not only does the sonnet but puts it in its place, both by giving it a one-word volte (‘divot’), and concluding with a summary that’s a meta-psychological-ethical complex. A question for reviewers is how a daggy version of punk comes off as stylish? The answer’s here as plain as Paris, however: study and practice (and did I mention ‘tuneliness’?) Letter cases go up and down like heels or collars coming off, just to check your attention. Bufton knows that work can be dreary and tiring, but – and perhaps there’s a fallacy that names this – the poems don’t have to be. You can call it Romanticism, putting a nice edging on your view of the world and its working dairy, or you can call it synecdoche, citing the sweetspot that makes life worth living. A quote from ‘Bumper book for girls’:
Never mind whose territory. We had all reason to
shudder when seeing texts flung about, aimed by the
lipless to pelt us on fishnet hip, or worse,
in the soul. Look here my satin-doubters
I have never looked better than this costume
allows, there is no evidence it kills my healthy sponge
brain cells. I read theory faster in heels.
Australian poetry can risk being a bit more chick literate, ie Girlery is for boys too: a unique book in the Victorian Grain, I give you Melinda Bufton and Girlery, the bomb. [Exit as you will]
*
[Michael Farrell sent his text from Rome; it was read for him in Melbourne by Fiona Hile.]
oOo
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
[uploaded from the Alive and Well and Living in Dorset blog, stingyartistindorset.blogspot.com/]
Saturday, 10 March 2012
A DORSET TROUBADOUR WOULD SING OF PAUL BLACKBURN
Written IN Weymouth & environs - ON buses or ON coffee-house tables - ON my laptop, IN a notebook, or ON my lap - here, there & in various PREMISES - but essentially @ home @ Golden GOJI Hermitage, drinking IN & out of poetry - ingesting this or that - and THAT is what drew me to Paul Blackburn many moons ago = ALE HOUSE POEMS, BAKERY POEMS, THE PROVENCAL TROUBADOUR POETS.....earthiness & classicism. BUT what does this Great Fool, w/out a passport to his name, know of such a wor(l)d ? Albeit that his mother came from Alexandria, and gestated sons who loved books and great libraries !
#1) My brother in Oz, prodded me to write about P.B., following my quirky, previous blog-post on here, which referred to Paul Blackburn. i dismissed the idea w/out even considering that i write anything = just not up to such things (?)....less than 24 hours later, i found myself working, as if on benzedrine, on this essay/blog-post. And it is work. And it is a practice...s'thing i had never accepted 100%, as i had the practice of zazen. Just sitting, was all that mattered = SHIKANTAZA = the practice of DOGEN. Katagiri Roshi's remark to Nathalie Goldberg, that WRITING should be her LIFE-PRACTICE, never quite accorded. After-all, for Dogen, ZAZEN WAS BUDDHISM. Likewise, when Franco Beltrametti told me in the 80's, that he practiced WALKING MEDITATION, i thought - not the real thing. i had not matured by a mile. Slowly, more teachings percolated into the mind of this great fool. THICH NHAT HANH talked of WASHING-UP MEDITATION.....life itself is the great practice, life and death, THE GREAT MATTER.
#2) Could not, for the life-of-me, find Paul Blackburn's books when i wanted'em. Searched the library in vain. Then, sidetracked by rearranging some BLACK SPARROWs in studio/conservatory, i find "THE JOURNALS" under my hand & gaze. i flick thru, happy to have found s'thing. i knew Blackburn had died "young" - but OH! - only 45! (1926-1971) and realised, in that moment, that when i first read him, he was already dead. Robert Kelly writes, as editor of this book - "The last writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September, 1971."
What i "liked" about Paul Blackburn was the "open form" and his ease with contemporary NEW YORK city & translating from the Spanish eg. LORCA. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship...etc...To quote Robert Kelly, once more - "In New York which was most his home and center, he could find the sunlight on a wall not different from Barcelona."
#3) It has been so long now, since my readings of the 70's that, as i sit in "COSTA COFFEE",(decaff.espresso & soya milk), with "THE CITIES" before me & to hand, it strikes me, that these poems are "new"/still fresh. @ 45, Blackburn was still "young enough" to have gone on and worked & practiced, for many, many years. i think of Bob Dylan's refrain = "may we be forever young"...but not in this way, to not have gone on...And there are many...THE POETS OF THE GREAT WAR, JIM MORRISON, HEATH LEDGER...and in "our" family, TIM HEMENSLEY (of the POWDER MONKEYS) - i blub into my coffee. No one notices.
#4) "THE CITIES", (Blackburn's "first, extensive collection of verse" -(Grove Press - 1967)) the Author's Note reads - "Every man's stand be his own. Finally, it is a construct, out of my own isolations, eyes, ears, nose and breath.." ....i hear an echo of CHARLES OLSON in that ="No such thing as mass, as much as, many people, each with eyes in their heads, to be looked out of." Do i misquote ? That is what i have as my memory of it. i do not want to rise from my place and search it out...do not even really know where to look...Human Universe essay ? Do not wish to interrupt this flowing of "mountains walking"...?....? BUT, maybe i will...SUDDENLY, i feel i have written enough in this first draft/ this blog-post...appropriately, it is young/ still fresh...ready to be played with in this warm and early spring of ours in Weymouth, where the cherry blossom, out front, has passed full-bloom, and is falling to the ground, even as i write.....i will wait, stay my hand, and WAIT and see if it PROVES, like the bread-dough in tins, waiting for the heat of the oven.....i will soon make my way into the world - to find some fresh, young heirs (pun intended)...."The air sweeps out the odor of love from rooms / the air we love, we weep, we read, sing.."(from "The First Round", Paul Blackburn - AGAINST THE SILENCES - Permanent Press - 1980).
#5) I'm going to THE KING'S ARMS on the harbour. Not a drinker as such - i like a good taste - a good taste of real ale, home-baked bread and poetry....a half-pint will do me. & a packet of s'thing salty....just a half-pint to keep me hand in!!....How else to encounter the world ?/ this world. It is the friction / our continually rubbing-up against / this buffering away, that will reveal the new in which we are moment by moment, breath by breath, being reborn...and it is in this, that those who are no longer visible are held in our hearts. This is all we have and it is the whole created world. It is enough....
*
[finished @ 17.30 hours,10 / march / 2012.]
Kris Hemensley's COMMENT
(collectedworks10 March 2012 18:06)
Evidently youll be continuing from yr favourite spot in the Kings Arms, perhaps the higher bar, looking out onto the Old Harbour... So,you have your Blackburn in place, you have him as poet of 'being-in-place' rather than the distinctions of any particular place? Or it seems i might, which is ironic given the inventory, the wardrobe he sits up in, peers out of! Similar search as you (where are my Blackburns?!) find first of all his poem in Allen de Loach's INTREPID magazine, #18/19 , '71, one poem's kind of ho-hum (Windsound), mere sketch, the other's HUMMM-HO, justifying the triumphant claim "All of it sung." Last line, is psycho-topography, genealogical geography, the roll-call of his place that whiskey'd moment, glass in hand saluting Olson, Julio (is that Cortazar?), Ginsberg, Snyder, and most of all Pound --memorable snapshot, "Ez's eye fixes the machine from under his neat / Alpine hat, the clean raincoat . fierce & friendly to / the mustache bristle, beard-jut, but the eye questions / the other end of this gondola, where do the steps lead? / The oarsman ferries him across to / wrap a death with windows...." etc.
Second thing i find is Pierre Joris's excellent Blackburn issue of Sixpack, (Spring/Summer, '74), indispensable really, i bet you have it under a mountain of health mags! --wch has in it this contra note, from Barry Alpert (edited the splendid Vort in that era, and who popped up on F/book recently!), whose comment puts in a nutshell not only Blackburn's situation but a larger gauging of poems/poetry... For, despite PB's obvious relish in Lorca's idea of duende, 'the straight fight with the creator on the edge of the well' (Alpert's source dramatically clearer than P's paraphrase) --& despite one knows that's the whole point of the daily witness poem, --yet in Blackburn acc. to Alpert, "most of his published poems uphold his self-abnegating conception of himself as street poet, bar room poet, occasional poet..."
That is to say, the huge risk of so-what/ery in that type of stance (i joked in my classes 40+ years ago, "I came, i saw, i wrote a poem!"), the loss of distinction or the memorable in the apparently ancient Chinese humble happenstance.
Very good to read you here!
Cheers bro!
As Blackburn has it in that instructive poem for (& against?) Ed Dorn, Pre-Lenten Gestures,"Thank God one tone or / one set of decibels is / not all there is."
oOo
KRIS HEMENSLEY
INTRODUCING JOHN MATEER; Notes, March 25th, 2014
Welcome to Collected Works Bookshop for this reading by John Mateer.
I have a few copies of Emptiness : Asian poems, 1998-2012, just published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and some of the previously published but still recent Unbelievers or 'The Moor', from Giramondo. So, although this isnt a formal launch, it is a celebration of John & his practically concurrent new books.
*
Yesterday was the Seminar at the university ["LIFE IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE : Taking his own work as example, poet John Mateer present an argument about the origins and strategies of his last four books – Ex-White: South African Poems, The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009, Southern Barbarians and Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ – and will read and reflect on his relationship between history, poesis, translation and self-hood. He will discuss the circumstances of Afrikaans as national language in South Africa, the problem caused by Aboriginal language or its absense for a grounded poetics in Australia, and the possibilities presented by reconsidering the cultural formations of East and West through imagining the colonial effects of Portugal and Spain in this part of the world. "]-- Today, here at the bookshop, it's the Reading. Not having participated in a seminar for a very long time, I'm not sure how different a poet is in the one situation from the other. I guess this evening the poetry is expected to stand up by & for itself --which I'm sure it will have every opportunity to do!
*
For introduction to the well published & travelled John Mateer, perhaps an anecdote instead of interminable CV --I don't mean John's CV is interminable but CV per se!
I remember the judging of the Victorian Premiers Prize back --when? --late '90s, early 2000s? --in the company of Doris Brett & Kevin Hart. Our deliberations had come down to a debate about the merits of collections by Bob Adamson & John Mateer amongst others --I cant remember --Tranter, Gray, Rowland, Ryan?-- all good names anyway. We'd read the books, discussed, ticked & crossed, totted up our little columns of scores on pieces of paper --crass & brutal but there it is! A competition with only one winner! The decision was made easier by the technical requirement for the majority of a collection to be "new". And so Kevin regretfully let his man, or men, slip. Adamson, Gray… At least I think so, I think that's who & what it was! I'm sure it's in my diary of the time but confess I don't quite know where that is!
In retrospect --in this possible/ retrospect --it's fair to say we found the young Mateer's poetry quite unlike anyone & anything else in that particular Premier's Prize season-- And I wonder now whether the matter of 'location' came up-- If, for instance, we were attracted by Adamson's (if it was him) --his Hawkesbury River (and perhaps the book was Juno Gemes' beautiful photo anthology, the Language of Oysters and not the Mulberry Leaves as I've been thinking? --late '90s & not early 2000s then?) --Adamson's Hawkesbury & Mateer's --what? --what & where would it have been? W A salt & wheat? A South African elsewhere? The Non-White African's elsewhere? (Tutuola's My life in the Bush of Ghosts?) Already then the awareness of John's neither here nor there --the no place or no where (which sounds like Paul Celan) --and the possible Japanese pun, the Noh where!--
Ah well --
Absence & presence
as though each other's
alias
And so, John, to quote & misquote you from a poem in your latest book, --"dear poet, close your eyes, this brothel is the only world, and we are the bhodisattvas!" -- Please welcome John Mateer...
----------------------------------------
[April 5th, 2014, Westgarth by the Sea]
Showing posts with label Kevin Hart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kevin Hart. Show all posts
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Saturday, August 30, 2008
COLLECTED WORKS BOOKSHOP EVENTS, August 2008
VIVE LE CONNECTIONS!
Following the launches, in late July, of Famous Reporter magazine (#37,'08) & Lorin Ford's A Wattle Seedpod [see the blog posting for the launch-speech on this site], Collected Works Bookshop hosted two events on Friday, 8th of August, in the Overload Poetry Festival, namely, a lunch-time reading by Pi O from his new book, Big Numbers (Collective Effort, '08), & a reading to show-case three books from Small Change Press (Queensland), featuring Matt Hetherington (I think We Have), David Stavanger (And the Ringmaster Said) & Nathan Shepherdson (What Marian Drew Never Told Me About the Light).
Crowded itineraries, Melbourne's late-winter cold snap, who knows what explains small attendances? No shortage of interest & (poetical) issues-arising though. For example, Pi O's work (& reading) in the continuing echo of the brief exchange we had years ago, down in our Flinders Street basement-shop, late 90s, early 2000s --at a reading by one of the American visitors of that year, Andrew Zawacki, which I think did attract a decent crowd (--and I recall objecting to Zawacki's statement that although the poems, of a particular sequence he was reading to us, referred to 'Scotland' --written there perhaps-- they told us nothing, he said, of 'Scotland'... At the very least I heard this as a pooh-poohing of the particularities of place and a begging the question of 'place' where 'particularity' per se might be just such a defining impress as will register 'place'... "Of course, that's the postmodernist heresy!" I interjected, having in mind the spurning of the Real in the fashionable name of the 'construct', as though the ever more sophisticated apprehension of 'representation' had excused one's existential burden & expression, rendered it passe --and I said something about 'voice' & its duel with 'text', their essential & complimentary parts in writing, and emphasised the eccentric aspect of 'voice' as the vital motor of poetry! Sounds like a speech in retrospect! --it wasnt, just the interjection & a blurted version of the foregoing --to which, I'm always amused to remember, Kevin Hart, beside me, observed genially, "that's a bold call, Kris!" He quoted some Blanchot on the relation of & distinction between Art & World; I responded saying it was never mutually exclusive; and Andrew Zawacki resumed his reading!) --At the end of formalities, Pi O told me he'd disagreed with my comments, contending that poetry depended upon 'editing', not 'voice'. I think he quoted Olson's practice, his interpretation of which I then disputed. I remain unconvinced, or rather I remain convinced of 'voice'! At some stage I'd like to think this through again, --and my thoughts on the 'saying' / 'singing' distinction offered in my recent discussion of John Kinsella [see my blog, John Kinsella & Judith Bishop's Glittering Prizes], might be a start...
The lunchtime reading confirmed for me that Pi O's 'voice' is both distinctive & essential in for, example, his Fitzroy local-history poems; no matter that he's quoting the speech around him, it's the wonderful unpredictability of voice, making & residing in very particular narratives, that informs, sustains & distinguishes his poetry. His penchant for absurd &/or ironic juxtaposition of newspaper reports & gathered statistics might be his idea of 'editing', but they're hardly unspoken, that is to say, there is a pattern to the humour or chagrin or whatever the aggregate effect might be, and in pattern there is identity, and in identity there is voice! The collage is shaped by the pattern of its elements; its shape is its voice!
Connections, coincidences, acausal parallelisms, are, if not the stuff of life then its efflorescence.The other day, for instance, about to take up pen to write a note on the Small Change Press reading --specifically to mention one or two people in the room who added an international dimension to the event (--there were the Italians, about whom something anon, & Ahmed Hashim, the first of the Iraqui poets we've come to meet in Melbourne over the past few years), in fact, Ahmed was in my head (--perhaps because I'd recently managed to open the file he'd sent me with the latest epistle in our letter-poem exchange and told him at the reading how I had it now & liked it, especially the bit about Henry Miller : "suddenly, Henry Miller knocks on my door / he was surprised, couldn't believe modern life in 2008 / doesn't respect millionaires, must be a billionaire!") when Cathy O'Brien rang me from Vientiane, not with an update about the Mekong's flooding, which had been worrying me despite her typically stoical & amused attitude to her own security, sand-bagging with her community as the river's level rose just across the street from their homes, but to tell me that the husband of one of her teacher colleagues (they'd lived in New Zealand & were now in Lao PDR) was an Iraqui poet with several books published, --Mr Furat! Cathy hasnt met a poet there in five years so she was tickled pink at the prospect!
A quick Google gave me a potted biography & an essay by Mark Pirrie (editor of Headworx, published by Salt & various NZ presses, also met some years ago in the Shop), available at www.Jehat.com. Basim Furat, born in 1967, had escaped from Iraq in '96, under threat from the Saddam regime for certain poems he'd written; came to New Zealand via Jordan in '97 and "has emerged as one of his adopted country's most gifted new poets," according to Pirrie --two books in translation, Here and There, & The Moon that Excels in Nothing but Waiting...
Next link in the chain, I thought, will be to ask Ahmed if he knows Basim! But then it dawned on me : I've actually met Basim Furat! Perhaps even introduced by Ahmed! I looked in my library and found that indeed I do have his miniature book, The Moon..., which he signed for me in the Shop in January, 2006! What a small world!
Regarding the Italians, two Maxes as it happens, one, Massimiliano Mandorlo, had found the Shop earlier in the week & so learnt of the reading. The Melbourne literary scene couldnt have been a total mystery since Simon West, whom I mentioned to Max as a reader of Zanzotto, was also known to him. On the night, Matt Hetherington, having been introduced, welcomed them to the reading with his recitation, in Italian, & from memory, of an exquisite little poem by Ungaretti, corrected for pronunciation only once by the visitors! Mandorlo had given us copies of the Italian literary journal, clanDestino (from Rimini), now in its 21st year, of which he told us he was a current collaborator. Pleasant to talk to him as the first Italian poet to visit home or shop since Adriano Spatola & Giulia Niccolai thirty years ago (--I'd described the occasion in a swan-song piece for Meanjin Quarterly that year)... Spatola, I prompted him, youngest of the Novissimi, oldest of the Gruppo 63 --and yes, he knew of him but not well. I said he had died, and remembered Adriano & Giulia as big smokers & drinkers. They were friends of the Swiss-Italian poet & artist, Franco Beltrametti, also dead now, with whom we'd corresponded in the'70s --the great connection between the experimental American & European poets of that era, perfectly reflected in the title of his anthology, The Sperlonga Manhattan Express... Mandorlo was travelling soon to Brisbane so it was especially fortuitous for him to attend the Queensland press's reading and make the aquaintance of Nathan Shepherdson & David Stavanger! I believe he's also interested in translating Shepherdson into Italian...
All of this, of course, in the wings of the Small Change poets' reading : Hetherington's aphoristic poems nailing what sounds like traditional wisdom to surrealistic masts; Stavanger's hilarious & surreal narratives, for example Letters to Your Anus & the delightfully ironic & instructive Old Poet to Young Poet; Shepherdson's unravellings of perception's daily register (in this sequence interacting with photography), lyrical & poignant in their search for meaning...
Vive le connections!
--Kris Hemensley
Following the launches, in late July, of Famous Reporter magazine (#37,'08) & Lorin Ford's A Wattle Seedpod [see the blog posting for the launch-speech on this site], Collected Works Bookshop hosted two events on Friday, 8th of August, in the Overload Poetry Festival, namely, a lunch-time reading by Pi O from his new book, Big Numbers (Collective Effort, '08), & a reading to show-case three books from Small Change Press (Queensland), featuring Matt Hetherington (I think We Have), David Stavanger (And the Ringmaster Said) & Nathan Shepherdson (What Marian Drew Never Told Me About the Light).
Crowded itineraries, Melbourne's late-winter cold snap, who knows what explains small attendances? No shortage of interest & (poetical) issues-arising though. For example, Pi O's work (& reading) in the continuing echo of the brief exchange we had years ago, down in our Flinders Street basement-shop, late 90s, early 2000s --at a reading by one of the American visitors of that year, Andrew Zawacki, which I think did attract a decent crowd (--and I recall objecting to Zawacki's statement that although the poems, of a particular sequence he was reading to us, referred to 'Scotland' --written there perhaps-- they told us nothing, he said, of 'Scotland'... At the very least I heard this as a pooh-poohing of the particularities of place and a begging the question of 'place' where 'particularity' per se might be just such a defining impress as will register 'place'... "Of course, that's the postmodernist heresy!" I interjected, having in mind the spurning of the Real in the fashionable name of the 'construct', as though the ever more sophisticated apprehension of 'representation' had excused one's existential burden & expression, rendered it passe --and I said something about 'voice' & its duel with 'text', their essential & complimentary parts in writing, and emphasised the eccentric aspect of 'voice' as the vital motor of poetry! Sounds like a speech in retrospect! --it wasnt, just the interjection & a blurted version of the foregoing --to which, I'm always amused to remember, Kevin Hart, beside me, observed genially, "that's a bold call, Kris!" He quoted some Blanchot on the relation of & distinction between Art & World; I responded saying it was never mutually exclusive; and Andrew Zawacki resumed his reading!) --At the end of formalities, Pi O told me he'd disagreed with my comments, contending that poetry depended upon 'editing', not 'voice'. I think he quoted Olson's practice, his interpretation of which I then disputed. I remain unconvinced, or rather I remain convinced of 'voice'! At some stage I'd like to think this through again, --and my thoughts on the 'saying' / 'singing' distinction offered in my recent discussion of John Kinsella [see my blog, John Kinsella & Judith Bishop's Glittering Prizes], might be a start...
The lunchtime reading confirmed for me that Pi O's 'voice' is both distinctive & essential in for, example, his Fitzroy local-history poems; no matter that he's quoting the speech around him, it's the wonderful unpredictability of voice, making & residing in very particular narratives, that informs, sustains & distinguishes his poetry. His penchant for absurd &/or ironic juxtaposition of newspaper reports & gathered statistics might be his idea of 'editing', but they're hardly unspoken, that is to say, there is a pattern to the humour or chagrin or whatever the aggregate effect might be, and in pattern there is identity, and in identity there is voice! The collage is shaped by the pattern of its elements; its shape is its voice!
Connections, coincidences, acausal parallelisms, are, if not the stuff of life then its efflorescence.The other day, for instance, about to take up pen to write a note on the Small Change Press reading --specifically to mention one or two people in the room who added an international dimension to the event (--there were the Italians, about whom something anon, & Ahmed Hashim, the first of the Iraqui poets we've come to meet in Melbourne over the past few years), in fact, Ahmed was in my head (--perhaps because I'd recently managed to open the file he'd sent me with the latest epistle in our letter-poem exchange and told him at the reading how I had it now & liked it, especially the bit about Henry Miller : "suddenly, Henry Miller knocks on my door / he was surprised, couldn't believe modern life in 2008 / doesn't respect millionaires, must be a billionaire!") when Cathy O'Brien rang me from Vientiane, not with an update about the Mekong's flooding, which had been worrying me despite her typically stoical & amused attitude to her own security, sand-bagging with her community as the river's level rose just across the street from their homes, but to tell me that the husband of one of her teacher colleagues (they'd lived in New Zealand & were now in Lao PDR) was an Iraqui poet with several books published, --Mr Furat! Cathy hasnt met a poet there in five years so she was tickled pink at the prospect!
A quick Google gave me a potted biography & an essay by Mark Pirrie (editor of Headworx, published by Salt & various NZ presses, also met some years ago in the Shop), available at www.Jehat.com. Basim Furat, born in 1967, had escaped from Iraq in '96, under threat from the Saddam regime for certain poems he'd written; came to New Zealand via Jordan in '97 and "has emerged as one of his adopted country's most gifted new poets," according to Pirrie --two books in translation, Here and There, & The Moon that Excels in Nothing but Waiting...
Next link in the chain, I thought, will be to ask Ahmed if he knows Basim! But then it dawned on me : I've actually met Basim Furat! Perhaps even introduced by Ahmed! I looked in my library and found that indeed I do have his miniature book, The Moon..., which he signed for me in the Shop in January, 2006! What a small world!
Regarding the Italians, two Maxes as it happens, one, Massimiliano Mandorlo, had found the Shop earlier in the week & so learnt of the reading. The Melbourne literary scene couldnt have been a total mystery since Simon West, whom I mentioned to Max as a reader of Zanzotto, was also known to him. On the night, Matt Hetherington, having been introduced, welcomed them to the reading with his recitation, in Italian, & from memory, of an exquisite little poem by Ungaretti, corrected for pronunciation only once by the visitors! Mandorlo had given us copies of the Italian literary journal, clanDestino (from Rimini), now in its 21st year, of which he told us he was a current collaborator. Pleasant to talk to him as the first Italian poet to visit home or shop since Adriano Spatola & Giulia Niccolai thirty years ago (--I'd described the occasion in a swan-song piece for Meanjin Quarterly that year)... Spatola, I prompted him, youngest of the Novissimi, oldest of the Gruppo 63 --and yes, he knew of him but not well. I said he had died, and remembered Adriano & Giulia as big smokers & drinkers. They were friends of the Swiss-Italian poet & artist, Franco Beltrametti, also dead now, with whom we'd corresponded in the'70s --the great connection between the experimental American & European poets of that era, perfectly reflected in the title of his anthology, The Sperlonga Manhattan Express... Mandorlo was travelling soon to Brisbane so it was especially fortuitous for him to attend the Queensland press's reading and make the aquaintance of Nathan Shepherdson & David Stavanger! I believe he's also interested in translating Shepherdson into Italian...
All of this, of course, in the wings of the Small Change poets' reading : Hetherington's aphoristic poems nailing what sounds like traditional wisdom to surrealistic masts; Stavanger's hilarious & surreal narratives, for example Letters to Your Anus & the delightfully ironic & instructive Old Poet to Young Poet; Shepherdson's unravellings of perception's daily register (in this sequence interacting with photography), lyrical & poignant in their search for meaning...
Vive le connections!
--Kris Hemensley
Monday, August 4, 2008
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #4, July/August, 2008
JENNIFER HARRISON
TEA LEAVES
A man and woman disappear
where the light flows up hill
where an archetypal table has unlaid
its cutlery, emptied the decanters
and seated an absent guest at the head
of the country's upturned table.
We've drawn new flags of crayoned dunes
and bothered the stars with deeper blues.
A rear-vision mirror distracts those
who gaze amazed at the shadows, yet scalded
by our lack of rain, farms lie in the dust
thirsting towards an unguent sun.
Our Tarot cards, transparent,
predict we are unchanged in our changing.
The future is cracked porcelain.
And tea cups, if left to tell their fable
might speak of black stars in a white night,
carcasses scattered across salt pan draught,
snow melting from Antarctic rock,
words disorganising into fear & flight.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN HART
FEBRUARY
There is a weariness that finds a home at last
Inside your bones as winter bites its third thin month,
As though a death were leaning on you all the day
And weighed a shadow more than any man, two men,
Your father's death perhaps that must come very soon,
Grandfather's death that's been and gone yet hangs around;
And then there's a weariness older than the dust,
That spinifex will tell you all about, and more,
One quite at home inside those shattered, simple rocks
You find out west in Queensland when old roads give out,
And in those words you whisper to yourself at night,
Words with dark rooms that open onto darker rooms;
And there's a weariness that's vaguely young, that runs
Its bony fingers through the fringes of your thoughts
And blunts their edge : louche angel of death, your own
Perhaps, though one still hanging loose and at a loss.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
NO LONGER YOUR POEM : TO MICHAEL SHARKEY
No longer am I your poem, your breath has left me,
I am grafted to this page. Go, from now on I keep
verbs to myself, you can no longer tamper
with my pronouns. Punctuate someone else.
I divorce myself from you, disown you
and your pencil thin prerogatives.
I am a postulate, traveling, camping out,
a poem of independent memes.
You remember me as this static page,
your lazy snapshot memory that erases
my early life, my permutations, and later travels.
Are we each a single dose to each other?
I am no longer yours, it is my breath
that holds up the spaces on this page.
I keep your word? You do not.
I am now thou to thee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
Two sequences of cinquain*
treason
and weasel words
crank tangent creeds
a welter of display performs
two-up
flight paths
and soft landings
dad brings his trade song....
Valderie, echoes down Collins
and home
Gusto
and festivals
Japan tailors English
with blossoms springing liaisons
take out
bouquets
and avenues
connive books and burnings
spirit barrels hunger incense
and thirst
households
endure rebuke
table grace pots the word
mum rattles kids scolding water
rations
-----
cool eyes
and assignments
jostle lovers drabness
mistaken paring off hones lost
design
cryptic
and rotten flicks
turns tolerant offense
to advents bending in takeoff
runway
manners
stun tarred silence
goading egotists spray
while camber tarps the revelry
poolside
the scrub
after the fires
cools earthen ceramics
ravages putter turning points
in kiln
film scores
and pot boilers
ghostly lairs surrender
crisp flavors succeed shared outlook
release
--------
[Note : Cinquain, a five line stanza that can simply be a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. In the first sequence, Valderie is the famous song, "I love to go a-wandering along a mountain track"; Collins is Collins Street in Melbourne; Gusto is the name of a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX LEWIS
THREE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SPANISH
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO (1864-1936)
from In the Cemetery of a Castilian Place
Flocks of the dead, among poor walls
are shifting to their common clay.
Poor flocks - the scythe has been put down.
This cross above an empty field
is your only emblem now.
By these walls the sheep have shelter
from the shocks of northern wind,
while history's vain rumours
break up these walls like waves.
Shining like an island in June,
you swim amid a windy sea
of golden grain, while over you
the lark sings its harvester's song.
[The word "barro'' means "clay" in Spanish, but is sometimes used in biblical translation rather than "polvo", "dust". It carries the same biblical associations that "dust" carries in English.]
*
FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1899-1936)
RIDER'S SONG
Cordoba is distant.
And lonely.
Black nag, big moon,
and olives in my saddle bag.
And though I know these roads
I shall not make Cordoba.
Over the plain and through the wind,
black nag, blood moon.
And death is watching me
from the towers of Cordoba.
*
PEDRO GIMFERRER (1945-)
HOMAGE TO JOHANNES SEBASTIAN BACH
In the forest they give chase to Jesus and to elks
With dark sweet diamonds with lilies in their mouths
Silence the steps of Autumn in the villages
Heaven like a name pronounced in a low voice
Jesus Jesus the rifles sounding through Spring
The belly of a naked girl over the sea petal and cloud
The belly of a girl torn open by mastiffs
o my God
*
[ Note : I have tried to make versions that are readable as English poems, and to this end have taken many liberties with the literal texts. Lorca's Cancion de Jinette is rightly famous. Pedro Gimferrer is a prominent Spanish poet born in 1945 who has translated widely from the French & English, including TS Eliot, Beckett & de Sade. De Unamuno, b 1864, was a leading member of the 'Generation of '98'; revered as sage, essayist & novelist who explored existential themes, & also wrote a considerable body of poetry. ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Ian Campbell lives in Sydney. Biographical information contained within his detailed correspondence published in this issue.
Jennifer Harrison [Sydney's loss & Melbourne's gain] is the author of four collections, the most recent of which, Folly & Grief, was published by Black Pepper Press (Melbourne) in 2oo6. A volume of New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Black Pepper in 2009. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Australian women's poetry. Her contact is j.har@bigpond.com
Kevin Hart [Australia's loss & America's gain] left Melbourne in 2001 to take up a position at University of Notre Dame and is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. He has eleven poetry collections (books & chapbooks) including Wicked Heat ('99) & Flame Tree ('02). His several books of literary & philosophical criticism include The Trespass of the Sign; Postmodernism : A Beginner's Guide; The Dark Gaze : Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. A new collection, Young Rain, is due soon from Giramondo (Sydney).
Carol Jenkins continues to record & publish the River Road CD series of Australian poets from her Sydney pad. See Poems & Pieces #1 for more bio. Her first collection of poems is due soon from Puncher & Wattman.
Robert Jordan after a sojourn in Japan, lives in Melbourne's West, thus a Bulldogs supporter. A Guinness & green tea drinker. Once upon a time a painter of icons within the Orthodox community, an exhibiting artist, a tram-conductor, ESL teacher, & always a note-taker. Now, a writer of cinquain. His contact is tahongo@yahoo.com
Alex Lewis lives in Melbourne. Published a collection of prose fiction in 2007 in the wake of his winning the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition. Recently returned from his Grand Tour which included Spain.
Earl Livings lives in Melbourne, heading up the Box Hill creative writing programme and editing Divan, which was Australia's first on-line poetry journal. His collection, Further than Night (Bystander Press) published in 2000. His contact is e.livings@bhtafe.edu.au
TEA LEAVES
A man and woman disappear
where the light flows up hill
where an archetypal table has unlaid
its cutlery, emptied the decanters
and seated an absent guest at the head
of the country's upturned table.
We've drawn new flags of crayoned dunes
and bothered the stars with deeper blues.
A rear-vision mirror distracts those
who gaze amazed at the shadows, yet scalded
by our lack of rain, farms lie in the dust
thirsting towards an unguent sun.
Our Tarot cards, transparent,
predict we are unchanged in our changing.
The future is cracked porcelain.
And tea cups, if left to tell their fable
might speak of black stars in a white night,
carcasses scattered across salt pan draught,
snow melting from Antarctic rock,
words disorganising into fear & flight.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN HART
FEBRUARY
There is a weariness that finds a home at last
Inside your bones as winter bites its third thin month,
As though a death were leaning on you all the day
And weighed a shadow more than any man, two men,
Your father's death perhaps that must come very soon,
Grandfather's death that's been and gone yet hangs around;
And then there's a weariness older than the dust,
That spinifex will tell you all about, and more,
One quite at home inside those shattered, simple rocks
You find out west in Queensland when old roads give out,
And in those words you whisper to yourself at night,
Words with dark rooms that open onto darker rooms;
And there's a weariness that's vaguely young, that runs
Its bony fingers through the fringes of your thoughts
And blunts their edge : louche angel of death, your own
Perhaps, though one still hanging loose and at a loss.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
NO LONGER YOUR POEM : TO MICHAEL SHARKEY
No longer am I your poem, your breath has left me,
I am grafted to this page. Go, from now on I keep
verbs to myself, you can no longer tamper
with my pronouns. Punctuate someone else.
I divorce myself from you, disown you
and your pencil thin prerogatives.
I am a postulate, traveling, camping out,
a poem of independent memes.
You remember me as this static page,
your lazy snapshot memory that erases
my early life, my permutations, and later travels.
Are we each a single dose to each other?
I am no longer yours, it is my breath
that holds up the spaces on this page.
I keep your word? You do not.
I am now thou to thee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
Two sequences of cinquain*
treason
and weasel words
crank tangent creeds
a welter of display performs
two-up
flight paths
and soft landings
dad brings his trade song....
Valderie, echoes down Collins
and home
Gusto
and festivals
Japan tailors English
with blossoms springing liaisons
take out
bouquets
and avenues
connive books and burnings
spirit barrels hunger incense
and thirst
households
endure rebuke
table grace pots the word
mum rattles kids scolding water
rations
-----
cool eyes
and assignments
jostle lovers drabness
mistaken paring off hones lost
design
cryptic
and rotten flicks
turns tolerant offense
to advents bending in takeoff
runway
manners
stun tarred silence
goading egotists spray
while camber tarps the revelry
poolside
the scrub
after the fires
cools earthen ceramics
ravages putter turning points
in kiln
film scores
and pot boilers
ghostly lairs surrender
crisp flavors succeed shared outlook
release
--------
[Note : Cinquain, a five line stanza that can simply be a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. In the first sequence, Valderie is the famous song, "I love to go a-wandering along a mountain track"; Collins is Collins Street in Melbourne; Gusto is the name of a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX LEWIS
THREE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SPANISH
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO (1864-1936)
from In the Cemetery of a Castilian Place
Flocks of the dead, among poor walls
are shifting to their common clay.
Poor flocks - the scythe has been put down.
This cross above an empty field
is your only emblem now.
By these walls the sheep have shelter
from the shocks of northern wind,
while history's vain rumours
break up these walls like waves.
Shining like an island in June,
you swim amid a windy sea
of golden grain, while over you
the lark sings its harvester's song.
[The word "barro'' means "clay" in Spanish, but is sometimes used in biblical translation rather than "polvo", "dust". It carries the same biblical associations that "dust" carries in English.]
*
FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1899-1936)
RIDER'S SONG
Cordoba is distant.
And lonely.
Black nag, big moon,
and olives in my saddle bag.
And though I know these roads
I shall not make Cordoba.
Over the plain and through the wind,
black nag, blood moon.
And death is watching me
from the towers of Cordoba.
*
PEDRO GIMFERRER (1945-)
HOMAGE TO JOHANNES SEBASTIAN BACH
In the forest they give chase to Jesus and to elks
With dark sweet diamonds with lilies in their mouths
Silence the steps of Autumn in the villages
Heaven like a name pronounced in a low voice
Jesus Jesus the rifles sounding through Spring
The belly of a naked girl over the sea petal and cloud
The belly of a girl torn open by mastiffs
o my God
*
[ Note : I have tried to make versions that are readable as English poems, and to this end have taken many liberties with the literal texts. Lorca's Cancion de Jinette is rightly famous. Pedro Gimferrer is a prominent Spanish poet born in 1945 who has translated widely from the French & English, including TS Eliot, Beckett & de Sade. De Unamuno, b 1864, was a leading member of the 'Generation of '98'; revered as sage, essayist & novelist who explored existential themes, & also wrote a considerable body of poetry. ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Ian Campbell lives in Sydney. Biographical information contained within his detailed correspondence published in this issue.
Jennifer Harrison [Sydney's loss & Melbourne's gain] is the author of four collections, the most recent of which, Folly & Grief, was published by Black Pepper Press (Melbourne) in 2oo6. A volume of New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Black Pepper in 2009. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Australian women's poetry. Her contact is j.har@bigpond.com
Kevin Hart [Australia's loss & America's gain] left Melbourne in 2001 to take up a position at University of Notre Dame and is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. He has eleven poetry collections (books & chapbooks) including Wicked Heat ('99) & Flame Tree ('02). His several books of literary & philosophical criticism include The Trespass of the Sign; Postmodernism : A Beginner's Guide; The Dark Gaze : Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. A new collection, Young Rain, is due soon from Giramondo (Sydney).
Carol Jenkins continues to record & publish the River Road CD series of Australian poets from her Sydney pad. See Poems & Pieces #1 for more bio. Her first collection of poems is due soon from Puncher & Wattman.
Robert Jordan after a sojourn in Japan, lives in Melbourne's West, thus a Bulldogs supporter. A Guinness & green tea drinker. Once upon a time a painter of icons within the Orthodox community, an exhibiting artist, a tram-conductor, ESL teacher, & always a note-taker. Now, a writer of cinquain. His contact is tahongo@yahoo.com
Alex Lewis lives in Melbourne. Published a collection of prose fiction in 2007 in the wake of his winning the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition. Recently returned from his Grand Tour which included Spain.
Earl Livings lives in Melbourne, heading up the Box Hill creative writing programme and editing Divan, which was Australia's first on-line poetry journal. His collection, Further than Night (Bystander Press) published in 2000. His contact is e.livings@bhtafe.edu.au
Saturday, September 1, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS , # 16
LAUNCHING SPEECH IN FAVOUR OF TREMORS : NEW & SELECTED POEMS BY ANDREW SANT (published by Black Pepper Press, Melbourne); August 30th, 2004
Andrew asked Kevin [Pearson, of BPP] to ask me to launch his NEW & SELECTED POEMS. . . Sure, it's been a busy week, what with the bookshop [Collected Works], & helping a friend pack up a house & fly to Laos, and then there's the Melbourne Writer's Festival, two events for which I had to prepare... So I felt tentative about accepting... The real reason, of course, was defensive --because I suddenly realised Andrew was getting his own back on this review --published 15 years ago to the month, --in the August,1989 issue of the Australian Book Review --a review of his 3rd collection, Brushing the Dark...
I didnt meet Andrew until recent years --maybe late '90s, certainly before 2001 which is the date of another of our auspicious connections... But it was a Melbourne Writers Festival and our mutual friend, now American friend, Kevin Hart, introduced us. Oh, hello, I said, we havent met but I did review you once! Andrew shook my hand and said yes, you gave me a bollucking! He laughed, I think... I was genuinely surprised --I dont recall it that way, I said. Andrew insisted. I said I thought I was making a discussion or receiving his book into a discussion. If there was an error --I say tonight, with the proverbial benefit of hindsight --it was to treat books as representatives of poetry in general, that is, the Australian poetry being written now vis a vis an idea of poetry, an ambition for poetry... Certainly, the editor who'd asked me to review poetry for ABR in that period, was aware of the discourse I'd probably instigate; that was why she'd appointed me --but it wouldnt have been clear to either the readership or the authors... Ah well... Water under the bridge! But at that same meeting Andrew & I bonded... Humid weather, alcohol, the company of poets, what else would one expect?!
Andrew told me --and I'd only just met him remember --that he knew my brother...
I have two brothers & a sister --and the brother with whom I've shared a life-time love of poetry & small press & so on, Bernard Hemensley, is agoraphobic and never been to Australia...
You must have got him mixed up with someone else, I stammered... You couldnt have met my brother... There arent any other Hemensleys in Australia (which is not quite true)...
Yes I did, Andrew said, Robin, Robin Hemensley!
Robin? I said --but he's never been here either --are you sure?
Yes, he said --he's a red-head, like me, and it wasnt here --it was at a party in Kingston-on-Thames --the girls we were with knew each other!
Anyway, I felt it was incredible --Andrew Sant had met my baby brother! They'd partied together! In Surrey! I've felt we were family ever since --especially when, in 2001 I think it was, Andrew has told me he saw me walking along a street in Dorchester when he was travelling in a coach. I was utterly amazed when he told me! Where will we two meet again?!
So much for frivolity! Now we get serious... Now we have the bollucking!
When Kevin Pearson delivered this New & Selected to me the other day, my first response was "wow! it's big" --my second was "what a great cover, it looks like a thriller, a crime book!"
Kevin said that was an interesting reaction, one which Andrew would probably be tickled by, and for obvious reasons, he said. Perhaps the most obvious reason I've now discovered is one of the longest poems in the book, called "Crime Fiction" --it's in the new poems section of the book, which we'll get to in a minute...
It is a big fat book, and published by a small press... And all one can say (to quote a friend of Andrew's & mine, the little chap on the Guinness ad. some of you may have seen on t.v.) is "Brilliant! Brilliant!"
Small presses dont usually publish 258 page books of poetry --although with proper support they could... Tim Thorne's Cornford Press[Tasmania] published Selwyn Pritchard's Letters & Characters, about 200 pages; Pi O's Collective Effort Press did the monumental 24 Hours and a couple of Jas Duke tomes... But these are honourable exceptions.
I have to confess to a surge of optimism holding this book in the aftermath of the Overload Poetry Festival, pleasantly tired by the Writers' Festival & the poetry events I attended or participated in --a surge of optimism for poetry, for the lives of poets -- and this notwithstanding Barry Hill's "salt versus sugar" admonition on Saturday at the Malthouse, in fact including that spirited (& inspiring) ethical & political discussion of the poetry scene --I feel an optimism that the concentric rings of poetry's various life in the world are turning --things are moving --gently! Readers & writers are enthusiastic! But maybe this is all the fantasy which festival frisson inspires?!
The New & Selected gives everyone the chance of a second bite --the reader & the author --especially if the collection is the author's choice. Readers can then enjoy the variants --and so long as there are libraries, can prefer an earlier version over a later, or vice-versa... But the notion of a New & Selected is an interesting one : it suggests that whether published or not the writing is a work-in-progress --and that the poetry selected for the edition is considered a manuscript, and that the changes are made according to the author's current poetic-linguistic position...
In my 20s & 30s, when friends were publishing their selecteds --several with University of Queensland Press --it struck me that a selected was a kind of premature burial. But I think early 50s is a good age for it --and the additional "new poems" shows there's life yet...
I suppose the Collected is the next rite of passage... When my late friend Frank Prince published his Collected in England & the US in 1993, he told me that was it --here it all was --no more. He was 80, but strong faced, alert, so one didnt think of him as an aged man. Anyway, he sounded just a bit resigned --and I suggested to him that he'd surely "trump" his collected with at least another substantial poem . He didnt think so --but inevitably he did, a poem of a couple of hundred lines on the occasion of Keats' bicentenary...
So, there's always life for the poem! --after a selected and even after a collected!
Proper or not to look for key words, essential motifs, across such a book?
There's a poem, "Wren", from Andrew's first collection, The Caught Sky, p15 here, which seems to me exemplary of Andrew's way of connecting observation or perception to an aspect of representation... It's a beautiful poem, suggestive of its particular subject-matter and, in the same breath or the same mode, of the writerly aspect also. The very first poem of the book performs the same act, but here's "Wren":
"A wren appears on the branch like an asterisk -
I refer back through
memory to a time of more constant
immersion of self in details -
once this would have been complete experience,
the wren offering itself
for my abandonment in detail,
landing on the fuchsia,
shaking the million purple bells
of my delight.
The wren flies off.
I'm left with a footnote of detail
towards an imminent theme."
So, and maybe you're alongside my thinking here, is this the poet's project? --ever apprehending the imminent theme which can only arise from the particularity of detail...
One observes the shorter & longer sequences coursing Andrew's work --especially the last decade or so. They're topographical ("Mt Wellington", "A Vineyard Quartet", "A Shower Medley", "The Sunlight Inland"), autobiographical (maybe "Voyage", "Stories of my Father"), occasionally historical. Perhaps this is the novelist poet's rehearsal, the poet who one day will produce his verse-novel...
And in this book, sequences like "Summertime : A Holiday Chronicle" and "Crime Fiction", which, to quote our friend from the Guinness ad again, are just brilliant!, these definitely augur an Oneigin or Golden Gate or something like it...
"Crime Fiction", of these new poems, is something else. It reminds me of John Tranter's great but short fictions in his book Ultra --the language is canny, it's quick, it's hard --it's like crime fiction whatever the subject... It's very knowing of popular culture, commercial culture, political culture --or it's political (discerning & disarming) of cultures & languages left & right of poetry's.
Let me say something about "Stanzas" (p219)--the first poem and a sequence from the new poems section --it too is brilliant! --a tour de force! The stanzas, isolated as they are --their natural procession broken by the titular number despite their momentum --arouse in me both a technical & a narrative excitement. The poem reminds me of one of Steven Edgar's baroque tales, so meticulously constructed that it might be misapprehended for a bloodless exercise. I appreciate the ingenuity --something ingenious & mellifluous, well-made yet still surprising --like a "but, hey" colloquialism thrown into a line --which breaks the spell of the written text, returns us to or reminds us of the palpable, present-time language...
And now I think it's time to hear some of it from Andrew himself... So, with great pleasure, I declare this book launched!
------------------------------------------------
[Launched at the Purple Turtle pub in Johnston Street, Fitzroy; August 30, 2004.]
Andrew asked Kevin [Pearson, of BPP] to ask me to launch his NEW & SELECTED POEMS. . . Sure, it's been a busy week, what with the bookshop [Collected Works], & helping a friend pack up a house & fly to Laos, and then there's the Melbourne Writer's Festival, two events for which I had to prepare... So I felt tentative about accepting... The real reason, of course, was defensive --because I suddenly realised Andrew was getting his own back on this review --published 15 years ago to the month, --in the August,1989 issue of the Australian Book Review --a review of his 3rd collection, Brushing the Dark...
I didnt meet Andrew until recent years --maybe late '90s, certainly before 2001 which is the date of another of our auspicious connections... But it was a Melbourne Writers Festival and our mutual friend, now American friend, Kevin Hart, introduced us. Oh, hello, I said, we havent met but I did review you once! Andrew shook my hand and said yes, you gave me a bollucking! He laughed, I think... I was genuinely surprised --I dont recall it that way, I said. Andrew insisted. I said I thought I was making a discussion or receiving his book into a discussion. If there was an error --I say tonight, with the proverbial benefit of hindsight --it was to treat books as representatives of poetry in general, that is, the Australian poetry being written now vis a vis an idea of poetry, an ambition for poetry... Certainly, the editor who'd asked me to review poetry for ABR in that period, was aware of the discourse I'd probably instigate; that was why she'd appointed me --but it wouldnt have been clear to either the readership or the authors... Ah well... Water under the bridge! But at that same meeting Andrew & I bonded... Humid weather, alcohol, the company of poets, what else would one expect?!
Andrew told me --and I'd only just met him remember --that he knew my brother...
I have two brothers & a sister --and the brother with whom I've shared a life-time love of poetry & small press & so on, Bernard Hemensley, is agoraphobic and never been to Australia...
You must have got him mixed up with someone else, I stammered... You couldnt have met my brother... There arent any other Hemensleys in Australia (which is not quite true)...
Yes I did, Andrew said, Robin, Robin Hemensley!
Robin? I said --but he's never been here either --are you sure?
Yes, he said --he's a red-head, like me, and it wasnt here --it was at a party in Kingston-on-Thames --the girls we were with knew each other!
Anyway, I felt it was incredible --Andrew Sant had met my baby brother! They'd partied together! In Surrey! I've felt we were family ever since --especially when, in 2001 I think it was, Andrew has told me he saw me walking along a street in Dorchester when he was travelling in a coach. I was utterly amazed when he told me! Where will we two meet again?!
So much for frivolity! Now we get serious... Now we have the bollucking!
When Kevin Pearson delivered this New & Selected to me the other day, my first response was "wow! it's big" --my second was "what a great cover, it looks like a thriller, a crime book!"
Kevin said that was an interesting reaction, one which Andrew would probably be tickled by, and for obvious reasons, he said. Perhaps the most obvious reason I've now discovered is one of the longest poems in the book, called "Crime Fiction" --it's in the new poems section of the book, which we'll get to in a minute...
It is a big fat book, and published by a small press... And all one can say (to quote a friend of Andrew's & mine, the little chap on the Guinness ad. some of you may have seen on t.v.) is "Brilliant! Brilliant!"
Small presses dont usually publish 258 page books of poetry --although with proper support they could... Tim Thorne's Cornford Press[Tasmania] published Selwyn Pritchard's Letters & Characters, about 200 pages; Pi O's Collective Effort Press did the monumental 24 Hours and a couple of Jas Duke tomes... But these are honourable exceptions.
I have to confess to a surge of optimism holding this book in the aftermath of the Overload Poetry Festival, pleasantly tired by the Writers' Festival & the poetry events I attended or participated in --a surge of optimism for poetry, for the lives of poets -- and this notwithstanding Barry Hill's "salt versus sugar" admonition on Saturday at the Malthouse, in fact including that spirited (& inspiring) ethical & political discussion of the poetry scene --I feel an optimism that the concentric rings of poetry's various life in the world are turning --things are moving --gently! Readers & writers are enthusiastic! But maybe this is all the fantasy which festival frisson inspires?!
The New & Selected gives everyone the chance of a second bite --the reader & the author --especially if the collection is the author's choice. Readers can then enjoy the variants --and so long as there are libraries, can prefer an earlier version over a later, or vice-versa... But the notion of a New & Selected is an interesting one : it suggests that whether published or not the writing is a work-in-progress --and that the poetry selected for the edition is considered a manuscript, and that the changes are made according to the author's current poetic-linguistic position...
In my 20s & 30s, when friends were publishing their selecteds --several with University of Queensland Press --it struck me that a selected was a kind of premature burial. But I think early 50s is a good age for it --and the additional "new poems" shows there's life yet...
I suppose the Collected is the next rite of passage... When my late friend Frank Prince published his Collected in England & the US in 1993, he told me that was it --here it all was --no more. He was 80, but strong faced, alert, so one didnt think of him as an aged man. Anyway, he sounded just a bit resigned --and I suggested to him that he'd surely "trump" his collected with at least another substantial poem . He didnt think so --but inevitably he did, a poem of a couple of hundred lines on the occasion of Keats' bicentenary...
So, there's always life for the poem! --after a selected and even after a collected!
Proper or not to look for key words, essential motifs, across such a book?
There's a poem, "Wren", from Andrew's first collection, The Caught Sky, p15 here, which seems to me exemplary of Andrew's way of connecting observation or perception to an aspect of representation... It's a beautiful poem, suggestive of its particular subject-matter and, in the same breath or the same mode, of the writerly aspect also. The very first poem of the book performs the same act, but here's "Wren":
"A wren appears on the branch like an asterisk -
I refer back through
memory to a time of more constant
immersion of self in details -
once this would have been complete experience,
the wren offering itself
for my abandonment in detail,
landing on the fuchsia,
shaking the million purple bells
of my delight.
The wren flies off.
I'm left with a footnote of detail
towards an imminent theme."
So, and maybe you're alongside my thinking here, is this the poet's project? --ever apprehending the imminent theme which can only arise from the particularity of detail...
One observes the shorter & longer sequences coursing Andrew's work --especially the last decade or so. They're topographical ("Mt Wellington", "A Vineyard Quartet", "A Shower Medley", "The Sunlight Inland"), autobiographical (maybe "Voyage", "Stories of my Father"), occasionally historical. Perhaps this is the novelist poet's rehearsal, the poet who one day will produce his verse-novel...
And in this book, sequences like "Summertime : A Holiday Chronicle" and "Crime Fiction", which, to quote our friend from the Guinness ad again, are just brilliant!, these definitely augur an Oneigin or Golden Gate or something like it...
"Crime Fiction", of these new poems, is something else. It reminds me of John Tranter's great but short fictions in his book Ultra --the language is canny, it's quick, it's hard --it's like crime fiction whatever the subject... It's very knowing of popular culture, commercial culture, political culture --or it's political (discerning & disarming) of cultures & languages left & right of poetry's.
Let me say something about "Stanzas" (p219)--the first poem and a sequence from the new poems section --it too is brilliant! --a tour de force! The stanzas, isolated as they are --their natural procession broken by the titular number despite their momentum --arouse in me both a technical & a narrative excitement. The poem reminds me of one of Steven Edgar's baroque tales, so meticulously constructed that it might be misapprehended for a bloodless exercise. I appreciate the ingenuity --something ingenious & mellifluous, well-made yet still surprising --like a "but, hey" colloquialism thrown into a line --which breaks the spell of the written text, returns us to or reminds us of the palpable, present-time language...
And now I think it's time to hear some of it from Andrew himself... So, with great pleasure, I declare this book launched!
------------------------------------------------
[Launched at the Purple Turtle pub in Johnston Street, Fitzroy; August 30, 2004.]
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
ALL THE GOSS (July 12, 2007)
Down at the Basement one day, during our time in the Flinders Street shop, Kevin Hart greeted me with the wry comment, so who's died today? The Shop's a veritable mausoleum, he chuckled. Surrounded by the great Dead, difficult to avoid --but Kevin meant my habit of writing a R.I.P. for the local & overseas poets as news of their demise occurred. Joking aside, I suppose I could be accused of morbidity were it not for the celebration the Shop is supposed to be --celebration of the world of poetry & poets, of today & throughout the ages. The R.I.P., then, is a version of that celebration. For readers & lovers of poetry, Kevin might have been inferring, it doesnt really matter whether the poet is alive or dead --it's the poem that counts. Quite so. But in the community poets make, the poet is a social person to whom one is personally, professionally, emotionally connected and so the matter of being alive or dead is important!
In recent years I've realized that with my aging, funerals & memorials will increase as the generation of my elders passes on. It's an inevitability one accepts. A little harder are the premature deaths --illness, accident, perils of the world. Even so, shock is tempered by the overall inevitability --never if, but when (thus Donne, Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee).
Three recent memorials in my mind now --for Joyce Lee, Amanda Wilson & Ted Lord. 93, 45, 65...
Different kinds of parties, but parties all the same --readings/launchings, funerals/memorials. Spirit of "despite it all" & "against oblivion" --here we are, together, holding together, hearing one another, persevering, continuing, alive & dead, for ever & ever...
Words of Amanda Wilson, read by Patrick Boyle at the La Mama memorial, "I believe in the life everlasting" --confident that she's carried by her children, requiring her larger family to carry them on, carry her on... Which of course is the obligation one rises to, expressing it or not, --one knows that's the truth of the words one trots out, "connection", "connectivity"... No better bunch, I've always thought, than the poets to prove memory's palpable, and no better way to do it than by living to the fullest of whatever one's desire & prospect may be..
All the emotions, then --triggers, too, whether it be the language of remembrance or surge of sadness on one's own behalf or for one's own.The contradictions --diminished, replenished...
In recent years I've realized that with my aging, funerals & memorials will increase as the generation of my elders passes on. It's an inevitability one accepts. A little harder are the premature deaths --illness, accident, perils of the world. Even so, shock is tempered by the overall inevitability --never if, but when (thus Donne, Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee).
Three recent memorials in my mind now --for Joyce Lee, Amanda Wilson & Ted Lord. 93, 45, 65...
Different kinds of parties, but parties all the same --readings/launchings, funerals/memorials. Spirit of "despite it all" & "against oblivion" --here we are, together, holding together, hearing one another, persevering, continuing, alive & dead, for ever & ever...
Words of Amanda Wilson, read by Patrick Boyle at the La Mama memorial, "I believe in the life everlasting" --confident that she's carried by her children, requiring her larger family to carry them on, carry her on... Which of course is the obligation one rises to, expressing it or not, --one knows that's the truth of the words one trots out, "connection", "connectivity"... No better bunch, I've always thought, than the poets to prove memory's palpable, and no better way to do it than by living to the fullest of whatever one's desire & prospect may be..
All the emotions, then --triggers, too, whether it be the language of remembrance or surge of sadness on one's own behalf or for one's own.The contradictions --diminished, replenished...
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