Showing posts with label Kris Hemensley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kris Hemensley. Show all posts
Monday, October 23, 2017
TOPOGRAPHY
TOPOGRAPHY
---> going nowhere
[Kerouac]
*
background dream (21st October):
visiting Aunt Lydia at her bungalow
(Penselwood) main road end of Gosling's farm
from which cruelly evicted (compulsory acquisition)
another chapter of tears in her heart-aching story
reversed in dream's current-age rendezvous
bent over her walking-frame
encouraging reconnoitre garden
kitchen dining-room bedroom
where brother & i slept-over
next door to hers & Uncle Jim's --here's
what i wanted to show you she says
encyclopaedia of world poetry
where's your name my dear?
peer together --not there! --chuckle
knowingly to myself --how could & why
have been included? --only
four 'h' surnames anyway
heh-heh!
*
1957 pretend today's the 60th anniversary
dream-like coincidence --meant to be! -- Kerouac
in London collecting royalties then onto boat-train
at Waterloo to same Southampton as our own
little family live & play in --despite father's simmering
opposition Aunt Lydia's become our second mother
*
Lonesome Traveller bought & read two weeks
before fatal voyage April '66
England to Australia
outa jail! --bewailing
misfortune waste of time! --
in ch 7 K's smitten
at St Paul's Cathedral
a "heavenly performance of the St Matthew Passion (…)
saw a vision of an angel in my mother's kitchen
and longed to get home to sweet America again" --
forgives his father --researches family name
at British Museum "'Lebris de Keroack.
Canada, originally from Brittany.
Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails.
Motto: Love, work and suffer.'
I could have known." --
blown down like the proverbial
each time i read the chapter's last lines
"On the train en route to Southampton, brain trees
growing out of Shakespeare's fields, and the dreaming
meadows full of lamb dots." --couldnt say better
having seen it with own eyes now for decades --
epiphanic long before'd earned the right
to know it --hah!
as tho' my poems'd coined it --
belated poet's vanity --
'belated' as in "poetry-after-death of" --
(Kerouac's
[22-10-2017]
Saturday, November 2, 2013
I.M. DEREK BEAN, 1924-2013
Kris Hemensley
*
in in-between world
toes point to the sun
as head is drawn to the sea-bed
off Elwood Beach
I float in a dream
of two families of uncles
inspired by the sight of
three strolling Mediterranean men
in togs without bellies
tanned brown with glinting silver hair
profuse on chest sparse on top
clad in their natures like shimmering fish
another film rewinds then
of English summer-holiday
where ever-the-world's host my father
invites his brothers for a picnic
on the beach and whatever
parents kids nephews uncles play
postponing boredom sadness end-of-holiday
like frisky bachelors
they fetch & carry for my mother
joke swim produce sixpences for ice-creams
smoke cigarettes languorous as the officers
they'd endured all their war years in North Africa
looking back at the shore
the purpose of the world seems first & last
appeasement of the senses
self & world-knowledge
gained by simply gliding body
through water or air enveloped in sunlight
anticipating the trajectories of bathers & walkers
merging with or diverging from them
as if we're all summer's melting marionettes
absolved from guilt excused consequences
but fifty years back
i was sacked for acceding to impulse
an hilarious image ballooned in my mind
demanding an hilarious act to fulfill it
i raced the yards from soft sand
to the puddled ribbed flat
exposed by outgoing tide
where my mother stood girlishly entertaining
my father & uncles
i slapped her blooming blue-costumed behind
so perfectly my right-hand stung and the
whack's echo
startled seagulls and her cry was a pure pain
encapsulating my little devil's jubilation
i ran on & on
and would have cartwheeled if i'd known how
expecting our party to laugh & applaud
instead one uncle chased me down
lectured me like a policeman
marched me back to my tearful mother
& her angry retinue
i prickled red with embarrassment
was made to stew
until awarded the cold blue mercy of banishment
in in-between world
there is no nymph called Thetis
no son Achilles dipped by the heel
into magic waters
there's only ever sea & sea
no other mother's bequest
could so nearly offer immortality
those three manicured Mediterranean men
those look-alikes aliases surrogates
those also-known-as Egyptian uncles
approach the water dainty as penguins
upon the ice-flow
attracted by the laziness of my swim
which tempts their machismo
suddenly one charges & plunges in
calling his partners to join him
then my dream pops into place
and once more real world roars around me
2003
[from DEAR TAKAMURA, 2002-03.
The English uncles are Derek & Dennis Bean; the Egyptian uncles, Gaby & Cesar Tawa. It was the gallant Uncle Derek who ran me down]
oOo
Kris Hemensley
What curious symmetry brings bad news from either side of the family within an hour of each other? English uncle, Egyptian cousin --though, as my brother elaborates, Pierre was only a couple of years younger than our mother, his aunt, who better related to him as her cousin.
An old man, tanned Mediterranean to oblige this recitation, grey hair, open necked white shirt, brown jacket & trousers, deliberates for half a minute before continuing his shuffle along the pavement. I'm reminded of my cousin but the dawdler's probably a closer resemblance to my Uncle Cesar, thirty years passed.
After my son died, his doppelgangers appeared and for several years following --jumping out of the pages of the music papers, occasionally & startlingly in the flesh. The hesitating Mediterranean is my cousin Pierre's first posthumous herald.
In England, Uncle Derek is apparently dying --the nuance or substance of the epithet 'terminal'. The age he's achieved doesn't diminish one's shock. He's always been a figure of energy & creativity. Walking, climbing, making or teaching music, driving, travelling, socialising --Derek appeared to guarantee the promise of ebullient longevity on our paternal side.
Suing for immortality was Dad's conceit, somehow hobbled by abstraction & timidity; fortunately for Derek it's his character. Perhaps because he never harped upon age, Derek's ageless. The man of wit we've always known --at home with himself --identical with his language --pilgrim's miles in his legs --newspaper beneath arm --tree, shrub or flower in his eye --a piano in his head.
4/4/13
[from DELPHI]
oOo
Kris Hemensley JOURNAL + Notebook
23/24 April, '13
[re Ringwood/Fordingbridge visit]
(…) Big hiccup at Ringwood --I realised too late after alighting from the National Express coach & mooching about in search of Pam, that I wasn't supposed to be meeting her in Ringwood at all but Fordingbridge, a short hop away on another bus. I'd attempted several calls to Bernard but for once he wasn't home --I thought he'd be able to phone Pam & tell her I was still in Ringwood. However once I did realise the mistake I caught next local bus to Fordingbridge! And there she was, at the bus-stop, waiting for me.
We drove fast, first leg to a local store to pick up newspaper for Derek & beer & cheese for lunch, & then on to their home.
Uncle Derek in red checked shirt (or pyjama top?), fawn slacks, blanket around middle down to his feet --blue socks, one of which loosened & after an hour or so Pam pulled it up for him.
Uncle Derek's familiar smile & soft, smooth-skin handshake, more hand hold than grip.
"I bring greetings from [siblings] Bernard & Monique & Robin!" Later on I repeat Monique's best wishes. Derek says, And mine to her.
How are you? I ask --Very well, & yourself?
He alternates attention between the television & The Times crossword. Pam tells him it was my idea to get the paper (""you've got Kris to thank for it"). Derek smiles & keeps working. He's watching Question Time from Parliament. Looks fascinating. I asked him what he thought of the prime minister, David Cameron. He ponders before replying. I think he's doing a pretty good job, he says.
Was the answer contained or encouraged in the question? Pam told me she's learned to conduct just that kind of conversation with him --confusion is not what she wants to foment.
Derek enjoyed (or at least he chuckled) when I referred to Uncle Dennis's appreciation of Ray Monk's biography Wittgenstein. Oh yes, Derek said, Dennis did like Wittgenstein.
Pam had brought out ham for our lunch, the traditional English fare. When I declined she laughed it off. Salad & a chunk of cheese will be fine, I said. I don't know how much a chunk is, she said. Lunch was good, accompanied by several glasses of ale.
Pam showed me WW2 snaps of Derek --Rodger [Derek's son, my cousin] had brought them to show her and in the 45 minutes before he departed for the airport & the flight back to Australia she had them copied. Northern Germany, Hamburg for example. Very interesting was a Forces bulletin advertising a piano recital to be given by Derek Bean --Schubert & Schumann. Signalman Derek Bean.
Pam described Derek watching the broadcast of Mrs Thatcher's state funeral, and how he was impressed by the choir. I sang in St Paul's Cathedral, he said. Hmm. When footage of the Falklands War was shown he remarked he'd fought in that war. You weren't in the Falklands, derek, she laughed. Yes I was, he insisted. So what did you do in the Falklands then? I carried a rifle, he said.
Signalman Derek Bean, holding his rifle, World War 1, World War 2, the Falklands...
Uncle Derek, indomitable, incorrigible…
oOo
"TWO HEARTS UNITED"
Pam Adams :
Email / July 25, '13
Dear Kris,
Preparations for Derek's service on the 31st... I am typing up the order of the service for the printer and have reached an impasse - I am wondering if you can make a beautiful translation of this - am I correct in thinking you know German? - I think I am...
Der Abend dammert, das Mondlicht scheint,
Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint,
Und halten sich selig umfangen.
Sternau
This excerpt was included in the score by Brahms to accompany or throw light (mondlicht?) on the second movement of his Sonata in f minor, which Derek loved and played magnificently, and which will be played in his service by Gwenneth Pryor. Derek loved languages, Derek loved German literature, and I just thought it would be nice to include the excerpt in the order of service, that he would appreciate that, but I would like to add a translation as well. I can make out the words, but I can't put them beautifully - help?
Dawn of the evening, the moonlight glistens (?), the moon shines (I'm no good at this!)
Two hearts united in love (there are two hearts?)
stand in blessed embrace HELP!!! (stand? stop? stay? Aaaargh!)
*
Kris Hemensley :
Email / 26 July, '13
Hi Pam, I sent two urgent messages to 'my people' with German language : poets Cecilia White & Petra White. Cecilia, Sydney based poet, often in Europe, has responded with this 'translation' which she says is also an interpretation. She thinks it might have the musical feel you need.
Evening arrives softly
Moonlight appearing
In love, two hearts united
Holding each other in blessed embrace
I hope this either assists you in yr translation or does the job entirely...
All best, in haste, Kris
*
Pam Adams:
Email/ 27 July, '13
Hello Kris,
Thank you so much for throwing yourself into the task at hand! Urgent! I like it. And thank your people! Amazingly, I needn't have worried, the printer had a translation in her vast store of everything she's ever printed, and apparently that excerpt has come up on many an occasion! Here's what she printed and I said, okay -
Through evening's shade,
The pale moon gleams
While rapt in love's ecstatic dreams
Two hearts are fondly beating.
Okay. Somebody took tremendous liberties, but whatever.... gleams and dreams rhyme so okay.
The Order of Service looks good, I'm happy. Now I have the weekend to do the outer cover.
Found some very interesting things! A box of pictures - one of you and Derek - do you have a copy of it? from his visit [to Melbourne] at Christmastime 1997, I believe, in your shop. Will send that if you don't have it. (There were two copies of most of the pictures in that set, but only one of that photo, so you may already have it.) Also the sweetest picture - which will go on the inside back cover, along with a couple of pictures of young Derek, soldier - of Derek crouching opposite, and feeding/petting a baby kangaroo. Sweet. Also found a letter I had written him while he was in Australia, detailing what he was missing in a particular class at Morley College. He was class secretary, and in his absence it was quite chaotic - and someone turned to me and asked when Derek would be back. "Morley doesn't stand if Derek isn't here," he said. "It's like the ravens in the Tower."
*
Petra White :
Email, July 28, '13
Evening grows dark, the moonlight shines, two hearts are made one in love, holding each other in happiness.
oOo
Thursday, February 23, 2012
THIS WRITING LIFE
So, the poem, the fifth of a proposed sequence of ten, is done! --in spite of itself. Let me explain. There was no through-line at all, no momentum. What I had was the dream I'd woken on and its affect on me, thus the initial scribbles. There was a wish to recognize concealment or at least abstain from the superficial hail & heartiness which logic places upon affable humanity; and this could be characterized as "monster" (the persona raised thereon), which figure was consonant with the most obvious aspect of The Midsummer Night's Dream (twisting my peculiar way the enchantment ruling its characters), that being the formal source of the poem(s). It's not giving too much away to offer that the first words of each poem are : "More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante". Literally, bit by bit, from 31st January, '012 to just the other day, 16th February, the poem was constructed.
Big deal! But as I consider it now, making the poem (making it more than writing it, where, for me, writing holds natural fluency) I experienced certain truths of composition which in my more-or-less spontaneous approach had slipped from consciousness. For example, that one doesnt know where the poem is going or how to get it going ought not disqualify the process. I confess, and against the way I used to teach back in the '70s & '80s, I was ready to scrub the poem several times because it wasnt immediately working! There is a psychology to the "work in progress" : one must relax & have faith... And so I did --a word here or there, a phrase, rejigging the order, but not knowing how it would or if it should coalesce. And then it did --how many days & drafts? --the words & lines came together as a poem! I was amazed!
Because I'm writing a fixed line & syllable type of poem for many years now, and also imagine series or sequences rather than individual poems [see my chapbook, EXILE TRIPTYCH (Vagabond Press, 2011) for most recent published example], the spontaneity is qualified, but even so it better describes me to myself than ever construction could. Which isnt at all to say I dont work & re-work lines, relishing the redrafting, counting, sounding out. I plainly do. I should also note there's always prose on the go (journals, journalesque criticism & review, chronicle, fiction), which means I either work simultaneously on poems & prose, or I let one go entirely for the duration of the prior commitment. Obviously, my experience of prose is free of this stop-go construction : no narrative, no prose. But maybe that's similar to the type of poetry I write --always referring to the theme or working it out. 'On song' & 'on subject' in this process are essentially adjacent.
--17/23, February, 012
Big deal! But as I consider it now, making the poem (making it more than writing it, where, for me, writing holds natural fluency) I experienced certain truths of composition which in my more-or-less spontaneous approach had slipped from consciousness. For example, that one doesnt know where the poem is going or how to get it going ought not disqualify the process. I confess, and against the way I used to teach back in the '70s & '80s, I was ready to scrub the poem several times because it wasnt immediately working! There is a psychology to the "work in progress" : one must relax & have faith... And so I did --a word here or there, a phrase, rejigging the order, but not knowing how it would or if it should coalesce. And then it did --how many days & drafts? --the words & lines came together as a poem! I was amazed!
Because I'm writing a fixed line & syllable type of poem for many years now, and also imagine series or sequences rather than individual poems [see my chapbook, EXILE TRIPTYCH (Vagabond Press, 2011) for most recent published example], the spontaneity is qualified, but even so it better describes me to myself than ever construction could. Which isnt at all to say I dont work & re-work lines, relishing the redrafting, counting, sounding out. I plainly do. I should also note there's always prose on the go (journals, journalesque criticism & review, chronicle, fiction), which means I either work simultaneously on poems & prose, or I let one go entirely for the duration of the prior commitment. Obviously, my experience of prose is free of this stop-go construction : no narrative, no prose. But maybe that's similar to the type of poetry I write --always referring to the theme or working it out. 'On song' & 'on subject' in this process are essentially adjacent.
--17/23, February, 012
Sunday, July 3, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 24, July 2011
GREGORY DAY
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
---------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
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CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
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KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
Sunday, May 1, 2011
THE DORSET JOURNEY, 2011 : A CONVERSATION WITH THE STINGY ARTIST
KRIS & BERNARD HEMENSLEY
[20 April, 2011]
K.H. : So what is the 'Abbey' part of 'Goldy Abbey'?
B.H. : It's gone... it's the 'Hermitage' now.
K.H. : 'Goldy' of course is self-explanatory...
B.H. : From 'Goldcroft Road', plus 'gold' is a nice metaphor.
K.H. : What is the hermitage?
B.H. : It's just my place... people always equated my place with wherever I was working...
K.H. : Is this where the hermit lives?
B.H. : it's where a hermit lives, where he would like to live, he's still on the path –maybe he's an Anchorite! --I've always thought of that –I don't think it'll ever happen now : a self-limiting definition which suited the agoraphobic I was –just practice & meditate & see where that led...
K.H. : I always liked the conceit of the 'Abbot of Goldy'... I was interested in the possibilities of a certain kind of fantasy... like, to take on a role or image which did express a sense of who one was or would like to be?
B.H. : Yes, of course. You & Robin [Hemensley] dubbed me the Abbot because of my meditation practice –at one time it was three hours a day –on & off since 1970. You grow into who you're meant to be, both by the way people see you & how you see yourself. And now I feel I've got the life I always wanted & dreamt about. I'm 'busy' for up to 20 hours every day.
K.H. : So, what is this house?
B.H. : One concept derived from Robin's description of 'art houses' in Belgium, when he lived there in recent years : people would visit a house, the whole of which was an exhibition. My idea was that anything & everything in the house was for sale, including the house! Apart from that it's a place for quietness & contemplation, no longer following any one tradition but with its roots in Buddhism & Zen.
K.H. : The whole house is a living gallery –no dedicated exhibition or shop space?
B.H. : Yes, the whole house as home & studio...
K.H. : Regarding the Buddhism & et cetera : from the look of it –the vast library of contemporary & mostly American & Japanese literature –the tradition you refer to must also be based in the themes & practice of the poets, I suppose the West Coast poets?
B.H. : Not totally –I'm still interested in the New Englanders : Ted Enslin, William Bronk, Cid Corman, Larry Eigner, Wendell Berry. Otherwise it was West Coast, Japanese. The first book to get me going was Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones –my copy is the 1961 Anchor Books p/b edition –bought in the mid to late '60s. The reason for getting it was probably the influence of Dad's collection of of Yoga & esoteric books –also the Master Theiron magazines!
K.H. : Yes, and that's a whole other story!
B.H. : Yes, still very interesting. Dad was ahead of his time –auras, colours, diet –all of the New Age interests predated by Master Theiron!
K.H. : What would you like to happen in this house?
B.H. : I'd like it to bring into focus my interests, in the company of other people.
K.H. : So, is it a kind of b & b for esoterics?
B.H. : Only in a very private way –not open slather. It's not business! By invitation only --via family or my own connections...
K.H. : The obvious connections between literature –or let's say poetry --& Buddhism, say, appear to me, as I look around the house, to be Gary Snyder, the Beats –which aint exactly what you'd expect in an English country garden?!
B.H. : It's not what any other local expects either. My nearest English 'collaborator' is Owen Davis, who lives in Bournemouth, 30 miles away, who's into Bukowski, Kerouac, Patchen, Snyder, jazz... He seems to be following another direction now though these are still references in his head.
K.H. : Yes, I remember interviewing Owen in 1987, at Cemetery Lodge just down the road when you lived there. I had an old tape-recorder & a kind of commission from John Tranter, then with the ABC, to record some interviews with English poets to offer a picture of the contemporary situation in the UK. Pretty eccentric though : Owen Davis, Paul Buck, F.T. Prince! Nothing came of it! Actually, I'm a bit confused about the date, because I also interviewed Nicholas Johnson. Perhaps it was Owen & Paul in '87, and Frank & Nicholas in 1990? We sold a copy of Owen's Che Hamzah's Monkey, which you published (Stingy Artist, '88), at Collected Works recently-- nice poems –
B.H. : Yes, Catherine [O'Brien] thought so too –she bought some copies for I : Cat Gallery (in Vientiane). Also Cralan Kelder, on the phone recently from Amsterdam, said he was very taken by those poems...
K.H. : Ah yes, Cralan Kelder [his collection Give Some Word, from Shearsman, UK, 2010] –he'd contacted me via email having found the Poetry & Ideas blog –he's interested in Franco Beltrametti and read references to Franco in my article on Cornelis Vleeskens. And I put him in touch with you as immense stockist of Black Sparrow / Bukowski titles & everything else. And so you were able to send him the two publications of Franco you've produced...
B.H. : Yes –Three for Nado (Stingy Artist / Last Straw Press, UK, 1992) & Two Letters to Nado (Stingy Artist Editions, 2010). Nado was my nickname and in Japanese means “et cetera, et cetera” (as described in one of the Franco letters.
K.H. : It doesnt refer at all, then, to Franco's character Nadamas, in his novel of that name, a section of which I published in my mag, Earth Ship, back in '71 or '72?
B.H. : I didnt think of that --I dont know...
[Break for lunch : bottle of Old Thumper, Bernard's home baked bread, spring onions, cheddar cheese, hommous.
Bread : organic almost 100% wholemeal flours consisting of kamut, wheat, barley, molasses, barley malt, sunflower seeds, fennel seeds, salt, dried yeast, warm water, olive-oil, oat flakes decoration.
Beer : Ringwood Brewery's Old Thumper --”A Beast of a beer” --wonderful picture of boar on label, full frontal & tusked. Alc., 5.6% vol.
“Hampshire's New Forest was historically the hunting ground of legendary fierce wild boar, the prize kill of many an English king. Ringwood Brewery celebrated this heritage with a real beast of a beer in 'Old Thumper'. It delivers a deep brown strong ale with a spicy fruity hop aroma and a warming nutty finish. The distinctive taste has made it a champion Beer of Britain, popular at home and abroad.”]
oOo
[via telephone & email, 1st of May, 2011]
B.H. : Coming from a background of residential social care-work, I naturally tend towards providing a nurturing environment at Goldy. How necessary do you think that might be for writers & artists?
K.H. : I'd like to pull your question into a slightly different discussion, namely the kind of therapeutic occasion such a residence might enhance and whether the making of art, the writing of poetry, benefits from nurture! The thing is, you are making an environment at Goldy, which includes its whole house library of poetry & related literature, and, importantly, or important to you, the food you provide & its informing philosophy. You are simply but thoroughly the host. The environment itself is what will or wont nurture your guest or guests. Being a host to such visitors is not social work in the way your professional background understood it. As you say, the house is where you'll “bring into focus [my] interests, in the company of other people.”
B.H. : It's a resource for writers & artists containing an extensive Zen & Buddhist library. And I'd like to offer a healthy, mainly plant based diet. I have also imagined a Zen sitting group. And do you think a structured environment is necessary?
K.H. : Your artist & writer guests (I'm sure you include readers in that swag) might not of course be Zennists or Buddhists, but they'd be accepting of such as the accent of the place. Fundamentally for visitors it'll be a rather special pied a terre. I wonder if you ever came across the term “eco-monastery”? It was used by John Martin & others in the early '80s here, to describe places which tried to live up to (Deep) ecological principals and to be a combination of retreat & sanctuary. The structure youre wondering about is surely more a general environment or ambiance than a workshop with curriculum!
I actually feel there's a connection between your place in Weymouth, Catherine [O'Brien]'s I : Cat Gallery in Vientiane, Laos, and our Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne. Cathy told me today that she's been congratulated on her gallery's “independence”. I think that means she just gets on with it : providing a space for poetry, art, film events, and a guest-room, for which she takes the responsibility. She's not waiting on other people or organizations' say-so. I:Cat is becoming known in Vientiane but not at the cost of her personal freedom. This her life, her contribution to the creative life where she lives & works. As you say for Goldy, it's not a business! The same at Collected Works : we are a bookshop in the marketplace, but our economics are about surviving & maintaining a particular kind of creative, literary space, not being a commercial success per se.
B.H. : Based on what youve seen of Goldy on your visit, do you think rapprochement between local & international is possible?
K.H. : Well, without being cute, the existence of your house in Weymouth is that rapprochement in practice! And the contradiction of terms, local & international, is only formal; that is to say, it's not mutually exclusive, nor ever was (as if, as said elsewhere, the Ecole du Paris wasnt local)! If you mean, how will you connect with the local when what you've experienced of the local (Weymouth, Dorset, England et al) doesnt connect with you? --then you have to expand your physical/social ambit as well as your definition, otherwise wither on the vine of mutual exclusivity!
When I've asked the question, most recently in context of our Dharma Bum correspondence (elsewhere in this blog), I only ever thought in terms of connections. At the same time, Weymouth isnt Melbourne, Vientiane, California or Japan in its external forms & expressions, but must be connected as yet another place in the world with the potential for authentic encounter & practice!
[Stop, for walking in one hemisphere, sleeping in the other.]
oOo
(edited Kris Hemensley, Melbourne)
Monday, January 3, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #21, NEW YEAR 2011 ISSUE
PAUL HARPER
TWO POEMS
*
country life
every evening the same story in silence at the windmill
no more poultry
until the officials bow to the river
on a morning the colour of train tracks
near the stadium where we had that mix up with the tickets
laughter in those twin cavities in a kitchen wall
& a shared taste in literature resolve so much
a watering can reminds us of summer holidays
small ferns beside a fence
concrete cool in a place of scant sunlight
mystery & solitude fusing with the smell of green
thunder or fireworks
on a sunday we can scarcely tell
transcription of the protocol proceeds languidly
for each stroke the lustre of banana leaves & the bouyance of balloons released
oOo
heist
in response to an official notice
a blue hound may be reconfigured as a playful black cat
letter about a coral tree may be classified
unlikely to be assistance
& the eight eccentrics encouraged to no longer linger in the undergrowth at dusk
marvelling at fighter jets
the centre does
however
recognise the attraction of such machines
their velocity
their silhouettes
black against evenings sapphire
in her classic of the inner landscape
our village elder speaks harshly of our recently acquired painting
our latest cargo plane escapes comment
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
TWO POEMS
*
10-XII-2010
CANDLE FLAMES
GUTTERING
AS IF FANNED
OR IN
GENTLE BREEZE
SHETLAND'S AIRES
IN THE ROOM
HARP PIPE & FIDDLE ETC.
AH!
IT'S THE BREATH
THAT STIRS
oOo
14.XI.2010
CRACKED WINDOWS
RELEASE STEAM &
CONDENSATION.
CAULIFLOWER PICKLES
IN MORNING CHILL.
INSTANT MISO
AND STOVE
FOR WARMTH
WHILE POT SIMMERS
FOR HOURS.
B'FAST RICE CREAM
HEALS.
NO SALTED PLUMS.
SCALLIONS TO GARNISH
LATER ON.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNIE O'REGAN [1938-1996]
POEM FOR KRIS HEMENSLEY
Every day you wait for the mail
some times it comes late
ten years late
or never
just "one man's opinion of moonlight"
Retta is silent
you are talking
we go to the galleries
we look for delight
in front of Melbourne university
we wonder if we are getting old
oOo
[Jude Telford sent me this poem ages ago, typewritten on water stained A-4 page; salvaged from Bernie's papers, aftermath of his sad demise.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NICK POWELL
TWO POEMS
*
MAAILMA
You say you 'love the song of currawongs
when they strike up their orchestra'.
Everything is tendrils, special tendrils.
Song is growth; no we are not spared
sentimental formulas
of minimalist photosynth-pop
and acorn percussion. What pomp,
twirling a pencil in the humble world,
or twirling the self, effortlessly.
Perfume on the pencil. Whose?
The future and the frond fan outward.
Maailma: World
Maa (dirt), ilma (air).
Marry me, broadly speaking.
oOo
KUMILY TO COCHIN
In the bus from the highland to the sea
garlands of bougainvillia and marigold
offered to Our Lady of the Highway
glow and swing through fields of tea.
as tired eyes yield to sleep of dream
of gentle scenes more puzzling than art,
so our bodies relax and are vivified
by faith in the invisible and unforeseen.
Looking back, many details are lost,
fine layers of experience shaded,
so that a scene in a life is reduced
to bas-relief: a road, foliage, a bus.
Smoke and mist in the ancient valleys,
your smile on seeing the wide white smile
of the Kerelan girl in the turquoise dress,
or the nun travelling alone. I find my keys
to the many sections of that hasppiness
overlap like clouds, everything touching.
oOo
[from the pamphlet, The True Maps;
horsedrawnpress@yahoo.com.au]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROB SCHACKNE
THREE POEMS
*
TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF BEING HERE
for Will Knox
First, the tunnel metaphor will smile on you too
If the desperate sides be avoided, estrangement
From all that we were never invited to understand;
A sometimes unstately progress through not by
The myriad reasons we have for not being here.
Then, unwelcome, untie that hurt from our own hurt;
There is no minor skirmish that is worth the battle
That lost the war. Anyhow, we’re survivors, not soldiers.
Leave all battles internecine and your self unscathed
As you choose your way carefully through the night.
Then, untouched by insult, chicanery, and deceit
We will at last emerge to daylight on the other side
And looking back…but no, we will never look back
At the unhappiness we did not cause, nor the pain
We did not stop to answer. We were not saints.
(2008)
oOo
IN THE YEAR 2666
for Roberto Bolano
After three wrong turns, a tractor and a flat
You're at The House Of Vanished Writers
After all, that was always your destination
You park your unreviewed car and go right in
Sitting and waiting, smoking and watching
Joe, the Indian, who never could get started
Sophia, who once was beautiful, great shorts
No power to stay long enough on the page
Fred, whose fiction fried like a skillet, killed it
And you, who are merely visiting, get a key
A towel and the schedule of daily readings
Who are these happy people you are thinking
Why do they look at me like that? One part pen
One part the next event, one part is wind
Where did all the vanished writers go?
When did they write their perfect poems
Who said they'd had enough and could leave?
Your room has a limited view of the forest
It is possible the birds will sing there again
Second seating meal is vegetable soup with bread
Dessert is an autumn ice cream you don't remember
Afterwards the word games and the music upset you.
(2010)
oOo
EXILES
It took seven years to build the box
From discarded paper and dreams
As deep as it is wide, at times you forget
Exactly how you decided its dimensions
No candy store, no Chinese restaurants
Many a stained-glass window at the top
Everything is blue when the sun pours in
Deli, record store, a massage parlour
Open all night, oddly buzzing, no customers
There's a very good small library
Of books you always meant to study
Furniture copied from another tidy book
A fireplace that heats but doesn't burn
A few students were allowed in once
They dusted off their prints and fled
On the inside an ornate exit with a sign
That reads Don't Leave Till You're Ready
Next to it a fire axe, a cheap suit on a hook
Today that box is almost empty
Outside is a sunset and birds.
( 2010)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
A GO BY, for Jack Collom
ute with 2 dogs
out back goes by
blue ute
with roll bars
2 birds go by
sans ute!
car does u turn
white car
white car
white car
flaming red flash!
turquoise station wagon
through the trees
the trees aren't moved!
floods in central N.S.W.
roads closed ac/dc!
how many ways
can you close a road?
Jack Collom goes by
looking for the elusive
red car!
oOo
PETE SPENCE/CORNELIS VLEESKENS
from The Glen Innes Collaborations
*
LADY DAY OR A MASS IN MORRIS MAJOR
no!
i don't
think i've met
Agnes Day!
but i know
her mum!
Doris.
didn't she
have a sister
Gloria?
G-l-o-r-i-a
no!
that's a burger
playing Tesla!
Kyrie & Kyrie!
is you lisping?
no!
ahhh! amen
to that!
oOo
THE JACK
figs can fly!
flush!
that's straight!
i have five
sad forests!
i'll raise you
ten matchsticks
must be a pyro hand?
C U
that's a soft bet
chips of down!
fold!
oOo
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
4 Poems
*
LETTER TO VINCENT
for Billy Jones
tiger tiger
old stone house
creeping vines
stony rises
floaters belch
keep those sheep
off the road Velsen!!
Livingstone stumbles
into the Stanley camp
grass orchids
open to the sky
as we cross
Mary Smokes Creek
a blue iris goes by
oOo
THE 98 FLOOD
blue heron out of his depth
egret pale and wan
weeks now and no let up
road closed
moorhen clings to her nest
as it bobs and eddies
(as in whirlpool)
ochre waters rage
road closed (bis)
high and dry
on the verandah
a cheese platter
dolmades avocado
a Chemin des Papes
red cedar floats by
dead cow dead cow
bloated sheep
oOo
JACK'S POEM
the kitchen midden
shows the remains
of a great feast
blood drips
from the seabird's beak
red cargo goes by
the ancestors smile
oOo
QUIET IN MY HAT
line dangling from my big toe
misty mooring dry red
blue whale goes by
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN
Launch speech for Lee Fuhler's We Pale Inhabitants (Earthdance, 13 Jones St., Brunswick, Vic. 3056),
at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010.
One of my many distinctions in the literary world is to be the first to publish a poem of Lee Fuhler's. That was in about 1993 when I was bringing out a folded double sided A3 of poems called Poetry on Paper. There were fewer readings then but with bigger attendances and I always thought they doubled as drinking clubs. Less so these days. Much has changed, many people alive then are now dead. Or not so dead but remembered and incorporated into our work, sometimes without our knowledge or permission.
I think Lee was off the sauce by then -- there was something about the intent with which he read -- so I approached him and, I think this is the technical term, solicited a poem from him.
I've brought it today to give back to him -- kind of like the completion of a circle but in a bigger
circle. Before the poems in this book, or most of them, Lee didn't write for some years. So you can get better, but it doesn't get any easier.
You wonder what happens to poets when they go home -- if they get to their desks -- how they drive their minds -- if they can reach into their hearts -- what they can face -- what they can't -- nights alone -- reading poems out of a book -- or dreaming at an empty window -- it's so slow and the notes are so far apart.
The first line of the first poem Lee gave me was : "your heart it is a thief". The final line of one of the poems in this book is "we're only poor tenants and here for a while". I did like that first line but these days he writes fuller, with more depth like the stones are watching. With these poems you can read a line and see how strong everything is, what things are invested with -- you can see everything in the light of a huge apricot -- the man who's wrestled with his blues can split the wind
-- everything is burning -- we're losing it all
what can we do but sing.
[at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010. Other poets supporting Lee Fuhler, reading from his new collection, were Ian McBryde, Lyn Boughton, & Lish Skec (who also read for Kerry Scuffins who couldnt attend).]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CYRIL WONG
Excerpts from Satori Blues
*
What fails to be reined in
pushes out, freezes, breaks off—crashes.
No telling who might place a chunk
in their mouth. (Who wouldn’t pay to watch them
taste it?) Some protrusions merge with air, but
not before melting a little, flowing everywhere
within the self, hardening in places it never
meant to make a home.
oOo
Fields of emptiness between the wild arc
of electrons and every atom—a vacuum not
nothing after all, but the purest form
of something like compulsion that fixes
us into being, stopping the self from
coming, no, flying everywhere apart.
oOo
What we talk about when we talk about loss
are the catastrophes: walls collapsing
and the terrible flood. What we forget is what
we fail to detect: the line opening like an eye
from one end of a dam to another;
a startled look and the averted vision
at a wrong word at yet another wrong time.
Loss is an ever-growing thing. The same
is true of how we win.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Typed-up the 2nd & 3rd January, 2011. NOT the Boy's Own Edition of Poems & Pieces, simply how the pieces fell together at this time! --so saith yr holidaying ed!]
oOo
CONTRIBUTORS :
PAUL HARPER, a friend of Collected Works Bookshop, has poems recently in Roomers magazine (Melbourne).
BERNARD HEMENSLEY, previously published here; has revived his Stingy Artist small press (85, Goldcroft Road, Weymouth, Dorset, DT4 OEA, UK) after many years hibernation. Hot off the press are a bunch of ephemera including a Franco Beltrametti fold-out. Welcome back bro!
BERNIE O'REGAN, fourteen years since the photographer/super 8 filmmaker/poet died in Melbourne. See index for Archive of Miscellaneous Critical Writings #11 (7/4/07) re- K.H.'s Introduction to the Archive of Enigma screening of B O'R's films (June 15,'98); also Archive, #10 (24/6/07) re- K.H.'s Words for Bernie : Eulogy... (15/11/96)
NICK POWELL is living in Brisbane after some years overseas, mainly Finland. In 2007 his chapbook Of Fallen Myth was published by the Poets Union (Sydney). The poems here are from The True Maps (Horse Drawn Press,'10), mostly written in Finland.
ROB SCHACKNE born in New York, came to Australia in 1971. We made his acquaintance via the Bookshop in the 90s. In China for a decade, currently Shanghai, where he's published a couple of collections; Snake Wine ('06), Where Sound Goes When It's Done ('10). His self-portrait reveals, "He listens to The Grateful Dead. He claims that he can read Shakespeare in the original. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao." His blog is The Tao That Can Be Named, www.borisknack.blogspot.com
PETE SPENCE & CORNELIS VLEESKENS have appeared in Poems & Pieces before (see the index). They're both active in the Mail Art internationale. Their most recent publications are (P.S.) Sonnets (Footura press, Germany) & (C.V.) Divertimenti (Earthdance, Glen Innes).
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN is one of the Melbourne scene's true gentlemen. Co-edited with Rex Buckingham, From the Rochester Castle anthology (1988), and his own Poetry on Paper (1989-93). Included in Raffaella Torresan's Literary Creatures anthology (Hybrid Press, 2009).
CYRIL WONG lives in Singapore where he edits Soft Blow poetry journal. One of a group of Singaporean poets who've made substantial connections with Australia over the past 10 years. Has published 8 poetry collections & 1 book of tales. Co-authored with Terry Jaensch, Excess Baggage & Claim (Transit Lounge, Melbourne, '07). Satori Blues, from which the poems here are taken, is published by Soft Blow (2011). Website, http://www.cyrilwong.org
TWO POEMS
*
country life
every evening the same story in silence at the windmill
no more poultry
until the officials bow to the river
on a morning the colour of train tracks
near the stadium where we had that mix up with the tickets
laughter in those twin cavities in a kitchen wall
& a shared taste in literature resolve so much
a watering can reminds us of summer holidays
small ferns beside a fence
concrete cool in a place of scant sunlight
mystery & solitude fusing with the smell of green
thunder or fireworks
on a sunday we can scarcely tell
transcription of the protocol proceeds languidly
for each stroke the lustre of banana leaves & the bouyance of balloons released
oOo
heist
in response to an official notice
a blue hound may be reconfigured as a playful black cat
letter about a coral tree may be classified
unlikely to be assistance
& the eight eccentrics encouraged to no longer linger in the undergrowth at dusk
marvelling at fighter jets
the centre does
however
recognise the attraction of such machines
their velocity
their silhouettes
black against evenings sapphire
in her classic of the inner landscape
our village elder speaks harshly of our recently acquired painting
our latest cargo plane escapes comment
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
TWO POEMS
*
10-XII-2010
CANDLE FLAMES
GUTTERING
AS IF FANNED
OR IN
GENTLE BREEZE
SHETLAND'S AIRES
IN THE ROOM
HARP PIPE & FIDDLE ETC.
AH!
IT'S THE BREATH
THAT STIRS
oOo
14.XI.2010
CRACKED WINDOWS
RELEASE STEAM &
CONDENSATION.
CAULIFLOWER PICKLES
IN MORNING CHILL.
INSTANT MISO
AND STOVE
FOR WARMTH
WHILE POT SIMMERS
FOR HOURS.
B'FAST RICE CREAM
HEALS.
NO SALTED PLUMS.
SCALLIONS TO GARNISH
LATER ON.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNIE O'REGAN [1938-1996]
POEM FOR KRIS HEMENSLEY
Every day you wait for the mail
some times it comes late
ten years late
or never
just "one man's opinion of moonlight"
Retta is silent
you are talking
we go to the galleries
we look for delight
in front of Melbourne university
we wonder if we are getting old
oOo
[Jude Telford sent me this poem ages ago, typewritten on water stained A-4 page; salvaged from Bernie's papers, aftermath of his sad demise.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NICK POWELL
TWO POEMS
*
MAAILMA
You say you 'love the song of currawongs
when they strike up their orchestra'.
Everything is tendrils, special tendrils.
Song is growth; no we are not spared
sentimental formulas
of minimalist photosynth-pop
and acorn percussion. What pomp,
twirling a pencil in the humble world,
or twirling the self, effortlessly.
Perfume on the pencil. Whose?
The future and the frond fan outward.
Maailma: World
Maa (dirt), ilma (air).
Marry me, broadly speaking.
oOo
KUMILY TO COCHIN
In the bus from the highland to the sea
garlands of bougainvillia and marigold
offered to Our Lady of the Highway
glow and swing through fields of tea.
as tired eyes yield to sleep of dream
of gentle scenes more puzzling than art,
so our bodies relax and are vivified
by faith in the invisible and unforeseen.
Looking back, many details are lost,
fine layers of experience shaded,
so that a scene in a life is reduced
to bas-relief: a road, foliage, a bus.
Smoke and mist in the ancient valleys,
your smile on seeing the wide white smile
of the Kerelan girl in the turquoise dress,
or the nun travelling alone. I find my keys
to the many sections of that hasppiness
overlap like clouds, everything touching.
oOo
[from the pamphlet, The True Maps;
horsedrawnpress@yahoo.com.au]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROB SCHACKNE
THREE POEMS
*
TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF BEING HERE
for Will Knox
First, the tunnel metaphor will smile on you too
If the desperate sides be avoided, estrangement
From all that we were never invited to understand;
A sometimes unstately progress through not by
The myriad reasons we have for not being here.
Then, unwelcome, untie that hurt from our own hurt;
There is no minor skirmish that is worth the battle
That lost the war. Anyhow, we’re survivors, not soldiers.
Leave all battles internecine and your self unscathed
As you choose your way carefully through the night.
Then, untouched by insult, chicanery, and deceit
We will at last emerge to daylight on the other side
And looking back…but no, we will never look back
At the unhappiness we did not cause, nor the pain
We did not stop to answer. We were not saints.
(2008)
oOo
IN THE YEAR 2666
for Roberto Bolano
After three wrong turns, a tractor and a flat
You're at The House Of Vanished Writers
After all, that was always your destination
You park your unreviewed car and go right in
Sitting and waiting, smoking and watching
Joe, the Indian, who never could get started
Sophia, who once was beautiful, great shorts
No power to stay long enough on the page
Fred, whose fiction fried like a skillet, killed it
And you, who are merely visiting, get a key
A towel and the schedule of daily readings
Who are these happy people you are thinking
Why do they look at me like that? One part pen
One part the next event, one part is wind
Where did all the vanished writers go?
When did they write their perfect poems
Who said they'd had enough and could leave?
Your room has a limited view of the forest
It is possible the birds will sing there again
Second seating meal is vegetable soup with bread
Dessert is an autumn ice cream you don't remember
Afterwards the word games and the music upset you.
(2010)
oOo
EXILES
It took seven years to build the box
From discarded paper and dreams
As deep as it is wide, at times you forget
Exactly how you decided its dimensions
No candy store, no Chinese restaurants
Many a stained-glass window at the top
Everything is blue when the sun pours in
Deli, record store, a massage parlour
Open all night, oddly buzzing, no customers
There's a very good small library
Of books you always meant to study
Furniture copied from another tidy book
A fireplace that heats but doesn't burn
A few students were allowed in once
They dusted off their prints and fled
On the inside an ornate exit with a sign
That reads Don't Leave Till You're Ready
Next to it a fire axe, a cheap suit on a hook
Today that box is almost empty
Outside is a sunset and birds.
( 2010)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
A GO BY, for Jack Collom
ute with 2 dogs
out back goes by
blue ute
with roll bars
2 birds go by
sans ute!
car does u turn
white car
white car
white car
flaming red flash!
turquoise station wagon
through the trees
the trees aren't moved!
floods in central N.S.W.
roads closed ac/dc!
how many ways
can you close a road?
Jack Collom goes by
looking for the elusive
red car!
oOo
PETE SPENCE/CORNELIS VLEESKENS
from The Glen Innes Collaborations
*
LADY DAY OR A MASS IN MORRIS MAJOR
no!
i don't
think i've met
Agnes Day!
but i know
her mum!
Doris.
didn't she
have a sister
Gloria?
G-l-o-r-i-a
no!
that's a burger
playing Tesla!
Kyrie & Kyrie!
is you lisping?
no!
ahhh! amen
to that!
oOo
THE JACK
figs can fly!
flush!
that's straight!
i have five
sad forests!
i'll raise you
ten matchsticks
must be a pyro hand?
C U
that's a soft bet
chips of down!
fold!
oOo
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
4 Poems
*
LETTER TO VINCENT
for Billy Jones
tiger tiger
old stone house
creeping vines
stony rises
floaters belch
keep those sheep
off the road Velsen!!
Livingstone stumbles
into the Stanley camp
grass orchids
open to the sky
as we cross
Mary Smokes Creek
a blue iris goes by
oOo
THE 98 FLOOD
blue heron out of his depth
egret pale and wan
weeks now and no let up
road closed
moorhen clings to her nest
as it bobs and eddies
(as in whirlpool)
ochre waters rage
road closed (bis)
high and dry
on the verandah
a cheese platter
dolmades avocado
a Chemin des Papes
red cedar floats by
dead cow dead cow
bloated sheep
oOo
JACK'S POEM
the kitchen midden
shows the remains
of a great feast
blood drips
from the seabird's beak
red cargo goes by
the ancestors smile
oOo
QUIET IN MY HAT
line dangling from my big toe
misty mooring dry red
blue whale goes by
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN
Launch speech for Lee Fuhler's We Pale Inhabitants (Earthdance, 13 Jones St., Brunswick, Vic. 3056),
at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010.
One of my many distinctions in the literary world is to be the first to publish a poem of Lee Fuhler's. That was in about 1993 when I was bringing out a folded double sided A3 of poems called Poetry on Paper. There were fewer readings then but with bigger attendances and I always thought they doubled as drinking clubs. Less so these days. Much has changed, many people alive then are now dead. Or not so dead but remembered and incorporated into our work, sometimes without our knowledge or permission.
I think Lee was off the sauce by then -- there was something about the intent with which he read -- so I approached him and, I think this is the technical term, solicited a poem from him.
I've brought it today to give back to him -- kind of like the completion of a circle but in a bigger
circle. Before the poems in this book, or most of them, Lee didn't write for some years. So you can get better, but it doesn't get any easier.
You wonder what happens to poets when they go home -- if they get to their desks -- how they drive their minds -- if they can reach into their hearts -- what they can face -- what they can't -- nights alone -- reading poems out of a book -- or dreaming at an empty window -- it's so slow and the notes are so far apart.
The first line of the first poem Lee gave me was : "your heart it is a thief". The final line of one of the poems in this book is "we're only poor tenants and here for a while". I did like that first line but these days he writes fuller, with more depth like the stones are watching. With these poems you can read a line and see how strong everything is, what things are invested with -- you can see everything in the light of a huge apricot -- the man who's wrestled with his blues can split the wind
-- everything is burning -- we're losing it all
what can we do but sing.
[at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010. Other poets supporting Lee Fuhler, reading from his new collection, were Ian McBryde, Lyn Boughton, & Lish Skec (who also read for Kerry Scuffins who couldnt attend).]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CYRIL WONG
Excerpts from Satori Blues
*
What fails to be reined in
pushes out, freezes, breaks off—crashes.
No telling who might place a chunk
in their mouth. (Who wouldn’t pay to watch them
taste it?) Some protrusions merge with air, but
not before melting a little, flowing everywhere
within the self, hardening in places it never
meant to make a home.
oOo
Fields of emptiness between the wild arc
of electrons and every atom—a vacuum not
nothing after all, but the purest form
of something like compulsion that fixes
us into being, stopping the self from
coming, no, flying everywhere apart.
oOo
What we talk about when we talk about loss
are the catastrophes: walls collapsing
and the terrible flood. What we forget is what
we fail to detect: the line opening like an eye
from one end of a dam to another;
a startled look and the averted vision
at a wrong word at yet another wrong time.
Loss is an ever-growing thing. The same
is true of how we win.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Typed-up the 2nd & 3rd January, 2011. NOT the Boy's Own Edition of Poems & Pieces, simply how the pieces fell together at this time! --so saith yr holidaying ed!]
oOo
CONTRIBUTORS :
PAUL HARPER, a friend of Collected Works Bookshop, has poems recently in Roomers magazine (Melbourne).
BERNARD HEMENSLEY, previously published here; has revived his Stingy Artist small press (85, Goldcroft Road, Weymouth, Dorset, DT4 OEA, UK) after many years hibernation. Hot off the press are a bunch of ephemera including a Franco Beltrametti fold-out. Welcome back bro!
BERNIE O'REGAN, fourteen years since the photographer/super 8 filmmaker/poet died in Melbourne. See index for Archive of Miscellaneous Critical Writings #11 (7/4/07) re- K.H.'s Introduction to the Archive of Enigma screening of B O'R's films (June 15,'98); also Archive, #10 (24/6/07) re- K.H.'s Words for Bernie : Eulogy... (15/11/96)
NICK POWELL is living in Brisbane after some years overseas, mainly Finland. In 2007 his chapbook Of Fallen Myth was published by the Poets Union (Sydney). The poems here are from The True Maps (Horse Drawn Press,'10), mostly written in Finland.
ROB SCHACKNE born in New York, came to Australia in 1971. We made his acquaintance via the Bookshop in the 90s. In China for a decade, currently Shanghai, where he's published a couple of collections; Snake Wine ('06), Where Sound Goes When It's Done ('10). His self-portrait reveals, "He listens to The Grateful Dead. He claims that he can read Shakespeare in the original. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao." His blog is The Tao That Can Be Named, www.borisknack.blogspot.com
PETE SPENCE & CORNELIS VLEESKENS have appeared in Poems & Pieces before (see the index). They're both active in the Mail Art internationale. Their most recent publications are (P.S.) Sonnets (Footura press, Germany) & (C.V.) Divertimenti (Earthdance, Glen Innes).
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN is one of the Melbourne scene's true gentlemen. Co-edited with Rex Buckingham, From the Rochester Castle anthology (1988), and his own Poetry on Paper (1989-93). Included in Raffaella Torresan's Literary Creatures anthology (Hybrid Press, 2009).
CYRIL WONG lives in Singapore where he edits Soft Blow poetry journal. One of a group of Singaporean poets who've made substantial connections with Australia over the past 10 years. Has published 8 poetry collections & 1 book of tales. Co-authored with Terry Jaensch, Excess Baggage & Claim (Transit Lounge, Melbourne, '07). Satori Blues, from which the poems here are taken, is published by Soft Blow (2011). Website, http://www.cyrilwong.org
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