GOOD MORNING GIONA, GOOD MOURNING

1


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

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

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

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

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


2

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


3


Of Franco Beltrametti, to Judith Danciger


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

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

so

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

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

Franco

exclamations !!!!!

!!!!! flowers


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

DIVERTIMENTI : VLEESKENS, BELTRAMETTI, CALDWELL, LEBER, SPENCE

Why wouldnt I admit it? Bored, irritated, enervated by the whole biz --what John Forbes, amplifying the Sydney/Melbourne, 1970s, 'new poetry' discussion about the mainstream, called "talented earache"! Then again, as one good poem doesnt make a summer so one bad poem doesnt herald winter. Yet it speaks volumes of one's expectation for poetry that bad writing (and I hasten to qualify : in one's own opinion, thus disposition as well as the particular education undertaken in service of the art) can cause more misery than an inadequate menu or perpetually late train.
The more important complaint is not being able to see the poems for the poetics (or less --for the method of their construction). In my head I sound-off like that 70s discussion & rail against the sound of squeaky clean construction & its inevitable decorum, regardless that some of my own (particularly '90s) production is pronged on the same indictment!
And then, out of the blue, the universe deals a delightful hand --Grant Caldwell's glass clouds, Michelle Leber's The Weeping Grass, Pete Spence's Sonnets, Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti. Or do I simply wake up on the correct side of the bed? (Surely I dont have to explain that!)

A first impression of clarity of thought & expression, as I skimmed Caldwell's new collection, had me imagining a poetry of wisdom. And the image (or proposition) was still in my mind as I read Leber's poems, that they were knowing & wise. For example, regarding the latter, the gleaming blade of the line which introduces her poem, The Boonwurrung Coast, located at Cape Paterson (coincidentally where Cornelis Vleeskens hung out for many years) --"We let all things take form in the morning light."-- is capable of cutting through anything, including the taxonomy & imagery of sea-birds & flora let alone hints of initiation into shamanistic mysteries. And the triple repetition of the pregnant phrase "In the best part of May" (in the poem of that name), is similarly almost independent of the narrative (however brilliantly inhabited by the anthropomorphised persona telling its creation tale).
In Leber, the gainliness of that combination of scientific & perceptional language evokes authority. Local Barometer, for example : "Port Philip Bay is quicksilver in a glass. / Grey beryllium dust and copper sun-shards rise above waves. / A wind-whip of a baton conducts in tricky 7/8 time. / Ordinarily, a sea-gust's libretto is sung from a silver gull, / and now a gannets' gale-force chorus carves sandstone. / Within this capsule - held up by vertical cliffs / - an interior spring prevents a cloud's collapse. / The weight of water once floating in Torricelli's tube, / now scummed on a pollution-meniscus. / As a desert licks a city's hem-line, / fever rises in pacific oceans, shifts moisture to the equator; / flash-flooding in the north, yet our backyard is cinder / - tomorrow, horizon's axe will swing at noon."
No doubt these are crafted poems --they had to have been carved & chivvied to make their particular density, and a long way from what I'm going to say about Cornelis Vleeskens... But I'm being led to contradictory propositions : firstly, that what she has to say calls the tune; secondly, that her keen observation imposes veracity regardless of subject-matter. One thing for sure : no ho-hum in Michelle Leber's Weeping Grass (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010)...

As I've flagged, something of the same's entailed in Grant Caldwell's glass clouds (Five Islands Press, 2010). The tone of 'something being said' emanates from sufficient poems to impress authority. Not the old literary gravitas (no matter 'made new') but the conjunction of writing and spoken-word's well oiled tongue. From the outset let's insist Caldwell isnt casual however relaxed --the relaxation with syntax, that is, which is the crux of modern English-language poetry, --allowing then its objectors to be eccentric rather than reactionary (except for the vanguard camp, censorial to the last). Plain-speaking, however, is only one of the founding twins; the other never ditched the richer dictionary. Thus the double spring & thrust of 20thCentury & on's poetry. Caldwell's stepping-off from that rung doesnt yet qualify as construction --it's still utterance, more or less (the how it is, the what happened). And maybe it is 'irony' which distinguishes him from numerous other common speakers, and most of them unheralded --as Vleeskens is, for example --not that he's bitching : equanimity rhymes in divertimenti with wine & good music, and what more would one want?
Further to 'wise' : as though ancient Chinese hermit or mendicant poet...! Maybe it was the haiku-like poems in the centre of glass clouds (though that's 'Japanese') as well as his serious meditations on perception (necessarily equating phenomenal experience & language representation --"the window of the past is complete / but you are blind, or a blind") --which compelled the impression. Not to say subsequent reading disabused it --more, that the amount of distress also gathered there revoked the semblance of resolution. In Melbourne, though, as any capital of the Western world, where else does wisdom lie than in the tension of normal attachment & its desired opposite? Caldwell's erstwhile persona of the wry humorist (open his last book, Dreaming of Robert de Niro (FIP, '03), at random for any example) is perhaps succeeded here by the poet following doubt's philosophical trail to a halfway house of serenity (if one accepts as influence two of these poems' dedicatees, Derrida & Claire Gaskin).
Caldwell's tour de force is the hypnotic across the sea, which begins "the sea comes / across itself / here it comes / across itself / see it coming / it comes and comes / across itself / it keeps coming / it never stops", continuing in like fashion for a further 35 lines. It is a reiteration of the fact of sea --of 'the sea' as an event --which succeeds in summoning sea's ceaseless movement whilst rendering each wave's singularity, and the poet's observation of it a definitive exhileration!

Reading Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do : almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville & John Riley, who'd advised that Franco, our fellow Grosseteste Review contributor, would be visiting London in '71 --or was it shortly before the Hemensleys returned to Melbourne in '72? --but that was cancelled. Any meeting in the flesh was forever thwarted by his sudden death in 1995. He remains an exotic correspondent, then, from the golden age of hand & typewritten letters, always missed now as though a friend.
And Vleeskens' book instantly recalls Sperlonga Manhattan Express, an international anthology edited by Beltrametti (Scorribanda Productions, San Vitale, Switzerland, 1980), because of the A-4 / 210-297mm page size & the visual content --Franco's pics from all hands & lands (e.g, P. Gigli's photo of the Berrigans, poems by Koller, Raworth, Gysin, Whalen postcard/cartoon, J Blaine, G D'Agostino, et al); Cornelis' own montage, drawings, calligraphy, typography --the same mail-art internationale, Fluxus, neo-Dada style more readily recognized from Pete Spence's affiliations & practice --particularly relevant here because of the latter's regular appearance in the divertimenti.
Vleeskens & Beltrametti are both Europeans who've crucially intersected with the anti-formal (looser, casual) English-language poetry (are they 'casualties' then!), especially the post WW2 Americans, progeny of Pound & Williams, New York, San Francisco, the West Coast, at a time when Europe was reaffirming its own liberatory tradition (Dada, Surrealism & on) &, similarly, opening to new worlds. And because they're not British or North American or Australian, except by adoption, their European origins & references are never out of mind.
Not an exact match, by any means --but somewhere along the line they've both decided to riff on life & not on literature, though there is a literature of just that sort of thing, and a life that contains literature, music, painting, etc. But theirs is another reminder of the efficacy of the un-made, journal-esque writing, --as clear & direct as we reconstruct the Ancient Chinese & Japanese to be, and whose transparency doesnt necessarily prefer the naive to the esoteric or the well-known to the uncommon (take the music Vleeskens listens to daily &, therefore, records in his communiques --or his philately habit or the breadth of his correspondence, all noted).
Beltrametti's poem The Key might be credo for Vleeskens too :

What was well started shall be finished. / What was not, should be thrown away.
Lew Welch, Hermit Poems.

1 ) the place & the season : winter
2 ) somebody (myself) right here : real & unreal
3 ) what is he doing & what's going on in his head
4 ) how & why is he saying it
5 ) to somebody else (you) elsewhere
something happens?
the circle (real & unreal)
isnt closed

[27/1/72]

--published in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973), the blurbs for which by Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Claude Pelieu, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai & Guillaume Chpaltine are fair snap of his American/European compass.
Context & correspondence, as in O'Hara, Berrigan, Phil Whalen of course, are vital here in distinguishing such notes & exclamations from the bagatelle they might otherwise be --and Jeremy Prynne's terrific comment on O'Hara jumps to mind, that unlike New York's "art gallery nympholepts", he "always has that pail of serpents in view" --: the poet's obligation, as felt, to be right here, to tell how & what it is without literary diversion, the further extent of which is selling-out, blunting if not losing the existential point. (Echoing Olson's Human Universe suit for the poem as 'one of Nature's things', Ray Di Palma hazards, "a poem is one of the almost successful / forces of nature", --in the 3rd of one of Language Poetry's more beautiful sequences, Territory (from Numbers & Tempers, Selected Early Poems, 1966-86; Sun & Moon, '93), which begins, "the desperado / and his abacus / in utopia" --the perfect cartoon for what I'm getting at?! --but that project was performed within /refined writing, albeit a stepping-up of the casual, and isnt the minstrelsy of the memorandum with which I'm ever besotted!)

Divertimenti : to amuse himself & his friends --to divert & be diverted... Diverted from what? Old cliche : the bind of daily life. But hardly, since it's all this poetry's made of. His note : "These divertimenti originally appeared as individual leaflets and were written for the poet's own amusement and that of the handful of friends who were lucky enough to receive the odd one in the mail or at a poetry reading during the last two years of his life on the Victorian coast... he now lives a totally different existence on the NSW Northern Tablelands."
How would you know? His latest Earthdance chapbook, Sandals in camel (drawings & poems), is surreal as narrative & peppered with elsewhere's place names & distinctions (New York, Parisian, Berlin, Belgian, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Italian etc), persuading one of his long assumed cosmopolitan ambit. Interesting inference though --'texts' of the life as lived versus 'poems' (importantly, formed in the cross-wires of Dutch & English).
An earlier collection, Ochre Dancer (Earthdance, '99), has the same atmosphere & tone of divertimenti or better said, the divertimenti are cut from his familiar cloth differing only in the attitude of making or framing.

That's the discussion then, in the blur of any such distinction these days... Bits of life (titles & notes of musical recordings, books, lists of food & drink bought & consumed, incoming mail) intersect with thoughts, observations, conversation.
Recalling Kath Walker (Oodgeroo of Noonucull)'s admonition not to appear like a preacher or a politician, Cornelis muses, "Sometimes I wanted to PREACH // But now I just want to share / some of the ordinary things / in the days of a retired poet..."
Diversions from the notion of retirement? Retirement from poetic ambition (craft & career)? I'd identify with that myself. Breaking the cast but keeping one's hand in, and surprising oneself when something more poem than antidote happens along. The list/letter/journal poetry of our time makes it harder to distinguish source from artefact, but found or made they provide as many pleasures as there are days.

"Ah! a new month!
So I turn the calendar to March
A Corneille arial landscape
looking like a cross between
Mondriaan's sketch of a jetty
jutting into North Sea waves
and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

The calendar was published
for Corneille's 70th birthday
11 years ago but I still
flip over each month
to show that not all days are the same"

Divertimenti is a book which can be taken up anywhere. It invites flicking because of the open-endedness of its narrative.

"Find an image
of the sun's atmosphere
in The Nature of the Universe
by Fred Hoyle (1950)
so reach for Catherine de Zegher
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
hardback catalogue
of the exhibition at
The Drawing Center, New York, 2000

& put on an old vinyl recording
of Peter Sculthorpe's Sun Music #1
for Orchestra (1965)

The sun sets at 5-58

Broodje haring
broodje kaas
en 'n zure bon

Enjoy a glass or two of red
& the clear sound of Marion Verbruggen
playing airs from van Eyck's
Der Fluyten Lust-Hof "


So many dates & times of day, month, year, but the book is always written in present tense, and a sense of the present, in which historical time is subsumed, pervades. All times in diverimenti are concurrent; even the different places defer to the here of Vleeskens' whereabouts.
Despite it being a kind of 'in-lieu of writing' (an 'in-lieu-of-writing writing'?), possessing the light touch of genial conversation & a journal's talking-to-oneself, it also teases one as a discourse on time & place, & of poem as its own place where, paradoxically, its own mercuriality might be traced.

Unsurprisingly, much of this has been the preoccupation of divertimenti's fellow classical & modern music afficianado Pete Spence --typically recalled by Vleeskens at one point, "I think up these lines / while walking home / after putting Katherine / on the 6.37 a.m. bus for Melbourne / but have to wait to write them / till the telephone wakes Pete at 10.35 // My pen & paper are on the desk / in the guestroom where he snores on"...
Spence's Sonnets (a co-production of Karl-Friedrich Hacker's Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia; limited edition of 50, 2009) have been with me throughout these reflections. Sonnet 9 is a good example:

" walking Planck's constant in a red shift?
great day! upwind the day winds down
squares of light are thrown about
should i feel ok now that yesterday
is the subject of these poems? better
to be quick about it like a shadow
taking shade from today's sun! when
will i have room where there's room
where i can roam variously & hang
my tantrums & other guests?
the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!
its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!
a mullet sidles through the air
& i'm stunned by its flight! "

Riffing off life or literature? Seems to me it's a perfect blend of voice & reference, where perfection refers to an individual's inimitable register, in this case Spence's naturalization of reference, the opposite of ornamentation, of literary embellishment. It's all become as particular as experience, and 'all' are the prime sources he's so kind to append : Ted Berrigan, Laurie Duggan, Peter Schjeldahl, plus Forbes, Satie, Beckett, Shakespeare... All adds up to "Spence"!

Looking now for the perfect conclusion I find this from near to the 'end' of divertimenti :

" That photo of Peter-Jan Wagemans
makes him look like
a well-fed Vinkenoog from the sixties
In his liner notes
he comes across
as didactic & conceited

I pull on my walking-boots
& listen to Het Landschap (1990)
played by Tomoko Mukaiyama on piano
It is not the landscape I see around me
It is not any dutch landscape I recall

He states it is the landscape
of his music - but he is wrong

It is the landscape of my writing"

Boom-boom!

------------------------------------------------------------------
[16-8-10 / 18-9-10]
Kris Hemensley

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #9

Melbourne
October 16th-30th, '07

Dear Bernard,
Back in the Shop, at the counter (my "desk") --journal, note-book, papers, your letter before me --I'm jet-lagged & more or less content.
I'm pleased you've committed some of your Stingy Artist Press history to paper, especially your relationship, as a book-maker/poetry publisher, to Salt Works & other American fine presses. I took the opportunity, while visiting you in Weymouth recently, to handle some of the lovely things stored in your shed (and what a pity they're not on display & available for purchase) --for example Cid Corman's tiny books, from Elizabeth Press & his own Origin press, with one or two word titles, haiku sequences, and one of Michael Tarachow's, an oblong-shaped book with a medieval manuscript feel to it... That's the craft, isnt it? One probably spends more time admiring the cover, the pages, the type, the sewing, the design than one does the text! One of your Stingy Artist editions is within reach of me as I write this : Franco Beltrametti's Three for Nado (1992), number 3 of a numbered edition of 175. It's one of your most elegant & tiny books : eight pages, endpapers, three of Franco's Trip Trap-like poems --constructions, throwaways, what you will --and your nick-name, Nado, which I've always spelt Naado, in the book's title (and didnt you tell me Franco liked the pun on nado / nothing?)...
Poor Franco, a Dharma Bum if ever there was, already dead 12 years. Searching for Dale Pendell a few months ago (following up on his Burning Man book, which I'd also sent to you), I reread Franco's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology (published by our great amigos, Tim Longville & John Riley, as a Grosseteste Review book, back in 1975), and then the Sperlonga Manhattan Express anthology (Scorribanda Productions, 1980), which got me thinking of Franco Beltrametti as a key European friend of the Beat idea if not also the Beats themselves. I found the website dedicated to him and read his autobiographical account there --as peripatetic an inventory as could be (enviably?) imagined! Poet, artist, traveller, --and I can hear you say "back-woodsman" in the 60s, 70s sense of do-it-yrself, build your own, well out of the work-consume-die rat-race.
Since returning to Melbourne from my 20 days with you & Mum in our dear old England (--the England I perpetually reinvent, not living there as you do, though how you do interests me given our migrant family upbringing in England following infancy in Egypt, thus English-half English childhood & beyond, until the time we must have decided to identify as English rather than exotic half this, half that), I've nibbled at Franco's legend some more. The other day the web took me to the blog of Pierre Joris --he'd posted that bonny photo of hirsute Franco with the comment that this August, Franco would have celebrated his 70th birthday. Doesnt that get you thinking? "Forever young" maybe but not Spring chickens either, any of us!
I sent an e-mail to Pierre then, greeting him after what might be thirty years (the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival, '75, in the company of Paige Mitchell, Allen Fisher?). I thanked him for remembering Franco and told him we'd been talking & thinking of Franco too, not that we'd ever met outside of correspondence & small-press publishing. I directed him to our correspondence on this blog --he replied the following day. While we're writing about Japhy & Co, he's "been teaching Japhy Ryder, his poetry & essays, & Kerouac's novel in my Ecopoetics course this Fall, also talking about Franco to my students --the crisscrossing is endless." Dont you love these synchronicities!
I was elated you didnt already own the Issa translations by Nanao Sakaki I brought to you. I'd ordered what was available of Issa in my wholesaler catalogue --Sam Hamill's Spring of My life, Lucian Stryk's The Dumpling Field, & the Sakaki of which I'd been ignorant. (I must interpolate here that since my return I've dug out some of your poetry including the beautifully made book, Cemetery Lodge Poems (Stingy Artist,1996), and was charmed by the 5th poem of the sequence : "the crying / of crickets / according to Issa / is like the / chirping of men - / easy to imagine / autumn's last song / in this place". I wonder which Issa translation you had read?)
I thought the cover drawing of the snail was also by Sakaki but it's John Brandi's. Like Sakaki's snail translation which you quote, the drawing crystalizes for me the Buddhist attitude (I'd say Zen but Issa is Pure Land I see) --it's humble & hilarious! We're invited into the snail's perspective --its relation to mountain, clouds, sky, universe --ludicrously incongruous yet no truer way of describing all living creatures', including the human, condition.
In his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, Sakaki is asked about another snail poem ''just as he is / he goes to bed and gets up / the snail" --
Brandi : Did the snail show Issa how simple life can be in the middle of all our complications & things we need?
Sakaki : I guess so. That's a great understanding. He feels jealousy, ah yeah (laughs) "I must think about money & human relations, but the snail doesn't care, just goes to sleep, just walk around, eat . . . uh-oh, But not me, why? Why?" That is his point. Why is important, why is snail that way, why I'm this way. . . strange! why? Why are we, why is the sky so shiny, why trees so green?
Bryan : It's all beautiful, why am I so uptight?
Sakaki : Yeah, the surprisement, that is haiku.
Bryan : We laugh, but at the same time we get something.
Sakaki : Yes, something comes suddenly - wisdom! (laughs)

It's a beautiful little book; designed by Jeff Bryan, Sakaki's calligraphy --the Japanese characters & English haiku translation -- and the printed line of phoneticised Japanese adds another dimension. Sakaki talks like a medium, an inheritor & promulgator : "Many beings come to me, from me, many rivers going down, running down, -- sure."
The book brings us Issa & Sakaki and makes me hungry for a large volume of the latter. If still alive he's 83 (75 at the time of Inch By Inch's publication). I hope he is --forever young!

*

A NOTE ON SAKAKI et al
(22nd September,'07, en route Hong Kong from Melbourne)

Reading Nanao Sakaki's Inch By Inch : 45 Haiku by Issa (La Almeda Press, New Mexico, 1992), confirms one's long held idea of him as the "real thing" (--and I confess, vis a vis Gary Snyder whose name preceded him like sun & shower a rainbow --and having "missed" Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti on their 1970 Australian tour, being back in England at that time, I was more than ready for my appointment with the holy poets of the reading & imagining of my late youth --"Japhy Ryder" of course, after Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghett, Corso --one of the elect --and I'm suddenly remembering that flash of recognition, Japhy Ryder = Gary Snyder, very early 1966, and the poem I wrote to him, sitting with the College of Technology mates at the Red Lion pub in downtown Southampton --I'll have to retrieve it from the back pages of the particular exercise-book ["16.2.66 / I read my first Gary Snyder & Phil / Whalen & Michael McClure / its a night of history / historic night / man! wait til i tell colin t symes / about it / that ive read them / bhikku / means / buddhist monk / snyder who is in kerouacs / books im sure (japhy ryder?) / and michael mcclure & whalen / tho i dont know where exactly / its funny they talk & refer to so many / of their mates & acquaintances in their / poetry : which makes it beat / which makes the established schools / have acid indigestion / because just as whitman was buried / for writing I IN BIG broad / letters / so are these bringing back I & the / experience / of I as the centre & basis of poetry / the world now seems to be accepting / them / THEM / BEAT / its a pity! society licking their arses / bloody society - / but dont we know society DOESNT / WANT U?"] --O exercise-book of the era of exercise-books, hardly realizing outside of the school issue lined pages & blue covers how blessed one was, & how blessed was that time! (--and doesnt that sound like Aunty Lydia? --as though she knew much more than the platitude, the closest to that demon, Time, of all our relatives) --: Gary Snyder & Nanao Sakaki at Montsalvat, December,'81 --and for the hell of it (no, the full reference of it, being a fool for that sort of thing) I'll quote later from the report I published in my magazine, H/EAR, of that memorable Montsalvat Poetry Festival event, one glorious evening photo of which, by Bernie O'Regan, captures their souls for me and so it will be for the rest of my time! --: So, Sakaki, Sakaki's Issa : is it quirkily simplified or is it Issa's simplicity?
Sakaki's comparison of Issa & Basho begs the question, again, of the literary or learned as positive or negative influence upon poetry --Sakaki's certainty that the peasant is a better poet bespeaks a definition of poetry that would valorize testament, doubt the literary. Who has nothing & knows nothing (take note Mr Podhoretz!) is closer to the earth and can, therefore, sing the song of its elements & creatures, Sakaki implies.
If the poems arent tonic enough, there is his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, jumping with mischief, witty & self-abnegating. He appears to relish denying his would-be explicators' Buddhist understandings, insisting naturalness against the esoteric (--no, he says, Pure Land explains nothing of Issa's poetics...). The repudiations are Zen-like. Appreciating the man, his New Mexican hosts accept his "no" for the answer every time.

*

(Hong Kong to London, 23/09/07) Is it the difference (Snyder in himself, Sakaki contrasted with Snyder) between the man when he's in the field, literally doing it, and the pundit who might not even realize a particular shot is ethically cheap?
Critics bemoan the Beats' allegedly suspended adolescence --they may well have a point but part of the debate would be the imperative of maintaining the capacity for adventure & the resulting joy in the encounter with the world --"in & out of the cities" as well as the "mountains & rivers without end"! --and how does that translate in English terms? --which is the jolliest question of all for us --pivotal --since we werent turned-on by the English things of those years of our coming out (--I called it "breakthru" after Ken Geering's mimeod mag of that name, which might even have published me? --I'd left Southampton for Oz just as I submitted poems to him --but a great concept despite oodles of poets probably & appropriately still-born) --and tho Wendy Mulford called me on that in 1970 [she wrote, "How do you mean, people here are afraid to speak? I think they speak like bells (...) When I speak of a syntax of survival , it's a personal metaphor. I have this conscious sense of being english inescapably (...) I want the energy you speak of alright, but for me it thrills as well through Blake or Cowper, Browning or Clare or Byron or Christina Rossetti or or or for example..."], even that advocacy was on the coat-tails of the make-it-new biff and all of that coming-through Sixties modernity --must have been, surely? --Ginsberg's Blake, Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan's Metaphysicals not to mention his Shakespeare, Purcell, and why is O'Hara in my head with the "Elizabethan Rose"? --all variations and not the pretence, however virtuous, of seamless tradition --

*

(29-10-07) Allow me to quote from my piece,Festivals of the Oppressed : An Account of the 1981 Montsalvat Poetry Festival, & the Foundation Meeting of People for Nuclear Disarmourment (both October, 1981), published in The Merri Creek, Or Nero #7, tHEAtRe issue, Winter, 1983.
"(....)Snyder's first reading, in the festival's first evening session, was distinguished by the theme of planetary being, aided by Thoreau-ian accounting & Pound/Olson historicising. He shared top-billing with the Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki. Snyder's was the scholar-adept's response to Sakai's "natural" earthliness. Snyder was truly Sakaki's sidekick in terms of langauge/being. They're exemplary comrades. Sakaki stole the show. There was more "meaning" in a single warble of Sakaki's rendition of a traditional Japanese boatman's song, for example, than in the entire festival's parade of buskers. Perhaps Ania Walwicz's riffs went some of the way with his non-sense, with his marvellous sound. Sakaki's awareness of the nuance of occasion (literary, linguistic & social) was admirable. In contrast, so many of the "performers" that followed were just there to do their bit... From Snyder to the least performance-poet, there was struck a consensus : that language was more or less the generalizing rather than the individualizing stamp of the poet; that this generalizing langauge afforded an externalization bereft of the slightest problematic; that the language was to deliver its predetermined load then & there. This attitude dominated the 1981 festival.
.
Snyder would dearly love to have been born one of those, to quote him, who are blessed with "looser, easier walk & gaze...They are Tibetans, American-Indians, Polynesians, 'Real People'..." I wonder why this should be? As white, American, Buddhist, he's heir to a New Age cosmopolitanism that relates him closer than most to most of the world. I wonder about this reverse racism : I sense the myth of perfect genes behind the transcultural sentimentality (....)
.
Snyder's second reading, on the afternoon of the second day, tended towards recollection of the Beat ethos. His brilliant reading of the long Route 99 hiking poem is comparable to the text of Kerouac's On The Road, albeit condensed & intensified. At both of his readings Snyder referred to Lew Welch. The thought struck me that Snyder is haunted by the ultimate asceticism of the other poet --that Welch's suicide (or, at the very least, his disappearance) pointed him out, accusing him of fellow-travelling, show-biz. Welch's Turkey Buzzard poem, one of the last he wrote before his end, in 1971, contains a Will & Testament, to wit, "on a marked rock, following his orders, / place my meat(...) With proper ceremony disembowel what I / no longer need, that it might more quickly / rot & tempt // my new form" --: a 10th anniversary siren's song for such a sailor as Gary Snyder."

*

A NOTE ON DALE PENDELL'S INSPIRED MADNESS : The Gifts of Burning Man (Frog Ltd., 2006)

(30.7.07-11.8.07) The rep shows me his list --a grab-bag of smaller Australasian & overseas presses including Bob Adamson's Paper Bark (prestigious Australian poets like Adamson himself, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Maiden, Martin Harrison), New Falcon (Crowlie, Regardie, Leary? et al), & North Atlantic --ring a bell? Remember Richard Grossinger's press? The wunderkind of our own time, born in that confluence of New American Poetry & the Counter Culture, with (reputedly) hotel-chain dollars at his disposal to support the wonderful Io magazine --not as literary as Stony Brook (I remember your copies, Bernard) but how exciting! Ecology, homeopathy, astrology, sci-fi, dream, baseball & poetry!
Every now & then something jumps out of the title-sheets, e.g., Tom Clarke's gripping biography of Ed Dorn (particularly for the English years in which Clarke also partook). I'm writing this as introduction to Dale Pendell's book published by Frog Ltd. / North Atlantic --there it was in the rep's checklist --Dale Pendell whom I instantly remembered as poet associated with Gary Snyder, possibly published in Eshleman's Caterpiller magazine?
As we've both since ascertained, Pendell isnt there (maybe Sulpher?) though he is in Jim Koller's Coyote Review & in Franco Beltrametti's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology, alongside Will Staple, Steve Stansfield, Peter Coyote & co. And Peter Coyote & Snyder claim him in blurbs for this book.
It's a rollicking story (no, this isnt Belloc's Four Men! --though quest it is however constituted) --an update on The Dharma Bums offering one outcome of Japhy's rucksack revolution : the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert --celebratory, sensory, sensual, ecstatic, never mind-dulling, nothing to do with getting on, some of the best of the 60s, 70s "alternative" scene...
Can one be nostalgic for a life one only peripherally experienced or be inspired by description of events & activities one'll not necessarily emulate? Same questions as posed by our enthusiasm for the subjects of our correspondence I think...
Dale Pendell's major reference is to Norman O. Brown, the mere mention of whom recalls our 1960s, full feathers & bells! And while not dreaming its reinstatement, Pendell is obliged by its revelation. Personal experience doesnt imply social process, indeed the chimerical is where eccentric reality might be happily held, suspended from time & social consequence. The historical faces-off the chimerical in Pendell's field-report of the Burning Man Festival. I'm sure he doesnt conceive an every day of the year/ every year of one's life festival a la Burning Man, but I do think he endorses its periodic eruption as crucial political & psychological benefice. Programmatic revolution & its totalitarian wellspring far less providential than democracy & the free market for, yes it's true, rock'n'roll does save your immortal soul!
Pendell, p78, "Living with some risk makes me feel more alive. I'm not saying that I'm against safety, or even security, or that I want more risk. There is already plenty of risk. But the attempt to eliminate all risk usually destroys what it was you were trying to protect in the first place."
p79, " In Brown's system, risk is Dionysus. Dionysian energy has its own violence --it's transgressive by nature --and Brown was against the attempt of many to sanitize Dionysian energy. But he was steadfast that the suppression of the Dionysian influence is far more tragic than the wreckage characteristic of the passage of the young god himself. For the rites of Dionysius, waste, fire, licentiousness, risk and drug-induced madness, are seemly. Burning Man is an experiment in healing, and it should be considered one of our current national treasures."
p.90, "Brown recognizes that in the era of HCE ("Here Comes Everybody"), the outcome depends on whether or not the masses settle for vicarious enetertainment,
Blake's "spectral enjoyment." Spectator. Here, watch the gladiator shed blood, right on your television. "The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy. The Dionysian bets the Grand Inquisitor is wrong." (Brown,1996). Brown follows Blake, that the violence of Dionysius is preferable to the violence of Mars. That, following Euripides, the suppression of Dionysius leads to the sacrifice of children. And that, following the most ancient threads of religious and magical belief, the rites of Dionysius are prophylactic. Blake wrote : "I will not cease from Mental Fight."
For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the
Court, and the University : who would, if
they could, forever depress Mental and
prolong Corporeal War.
Blake, "Milton".

Naturally, the body of the book describes, indeed it witnesses, the Burning Man festival. The point of it, though, is cultural-political critique, so no matter how out-of-it the experience Pendell describes, it's always significant --the reporter always mindfully out of his mind!
p99, "Hope. It gives me hope. That tolerance and self-reliance have a chance in a world that seems headed in the opposite direction. Hope against idolatry, in all of its forms. Hope against bigotry, against all the false consciousness that says it can't be done, against all the false gods of modesty, taste, moderation and morality. That there can still be, in the twenty-first century, a Feast of Fools, a backwards day of love and heresy, a day for the god named...no, lets just call him the god of the potlatch. His alternative worship is war."
Wonderful red flag of a declaration, one that speaks for large parts of my formative years, teens & twenties, thirties, but whose implications now pin me to what feels like a fundamental contradiction. In a nutshell, how can one support a war, military action, this or that country's or people's sovereignty, this or that set of conventions, be it Law or Tradition, while simultaneously subscribing to the libertarian agenda? At this very time I often feel I'm America's only friend in the poetry world! --the only poet who doesnt froth at the mouth when, for example, personalities or policies of the Australian federal government are mentioned or, more seriously, Israel discussed.
You told me years ago, after the first two or three of my second era of regular visits to England, that Dad had commented, "Kris has mellowed!" Well, we certainly discovered that we agreed about the propriety of the Gulf War --the first contemporary aggression I'd supported, believing there'd be a repeat of the Czeckoslovakian appeasement of 1938, and Israel in the firing-line not to mention Arab opponents of Saddam, were we not to defend Kuwait. We welcomed the end of the Cold War, happy that Britain & Europe in particular, the rest of the world in general, were delivered from the nuclear-war nightmare, and sure that the collapse of the Soviet Union & the anti-communist revolutions in the Baltics & Eastern & Central Europe proved, once & for all, that Communism was the Russian Empire's vicious counterfeit. Dad's anti-communist instinct was correct, my communist utopianism utter crap! Dad was probably surprised by the comprehensivity of my concession. And then came Yugoslavia, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq...
Our greatest agreement revolved about the despicable nature of terrorism, and the moral & political bankruptcy of its use to justify struggle for ethnic, religious or national freedom. For me this repugnance extended to the plethora of anti-globalist militancy around the world which seemed to me an echo of Cold War anti-westernism and whose language indulged a degree of self-righteousness which effectively released it from history & above humanity whilst purportedly acting in its name...
Ah well, Dale Pendell may or may not be "anti-globalist" & all that entails. But his approving quotation from (Situationist) Rene Riesel tickles me, especially this : "Radicalism means, literally, 'grasping things by their roots,' not rejuvinating a peremptory anti-capitalism adorned by cliches from Bourdieu." I'd punch the air & yell Right On were it not for thinking for many years now that whilst politics might be most people's best means of understanding & influencing the world, it isnt the only one.
Finding political agreement with Dad in the 1990s didnt mean I'd junked all my 1960s opinions & actions. Some of course; for example I'd now assumed a Churchillian view of the Second World War having realised the folly informing a statement like "Hitler was wrong but the Allies werent correct either". That was a comment I'd read by '60s poet Dan Georgakis somewhere --Margaret Randall's El Corno Emplumado or in something George Dowden had sent me? Have cake & eat it too --typical all across the radical board. What Dad called "antiism" though he neither understood or accepted our generation's sense of suppression & grasping for "freedom"... I'd also outgrown, by the late 1980s, the idea that the State owed me, as poet/artist, a living... Grants & the like are best thought of as a lottery; one should avoid becoming a creature of the State, a voluntary or involuntary dependent.
On which note I'll close,
Love, Kris


*


Weymouth
Mid-November, 2007

Dear Kris,
Oh wow! What a monster letter from you! A surfeit of candy -- spoiled for choice! Like my reaction to long poems (" a poem can't be short enough" -- predilection for haiku etc), I'll have to adjust my thinking!
The Michael Tarachow/Pentagram Press book you mention must've been Potterwoman by Barbara Moraff. I wrote to her years ago, sending her one of Simon Drew's cards -- a picture of the Dalai Lama with horns, entitled 'The Origins of Phrases' -- it read, "To be caught on the horns of a Dalai Lama." --there's a fish caught on his horns. I hope her Tibetan Buddhist sensibilities weren't offended! She never answered my letter!
As I said, too much candy... I haven't read the Dale Pendell book yet -- Inspired Madness. I know of the Burning Man festival through one of my 'girlfriends' -- Justine Shapiro (she's great) on Lonely Planet documentary.
The alternative scene, as with you, always beckoned -- but I passed, unlike you and the other sibs.
Not attending too closely to poetry at the moment because of my obsession with health & nutrition -- macrobiotics-McDougall meets Vegan-raw food diet. My favourite books right now areThe Great Life Diet, Danny Waxman (Pegasus Books, 2007); My Beautiful Life, Mina Dobic (Square One, 2007); The Miso Book, John & Jan Bellame (Square One, 2004); Japanese Foods That Heal (Tuttle, 2007). And I'm eating plenty of raw garlic. It helps with reducing cholesterol, blood pressure and blood viscosity.
But I do have Mad Dogs of Trieste : New & Selected Poems by Janine Pommy Vega (Black Sparrow, 2000) beside me as well. And a whole pile of other things including Thomas Merton...I've been meaning to have a good read of the Vega for a long time, and it's come to hand whilst sorting my books...
Janine Pommy Vega is definitely a traveller and seeker. I get the sense Beat but not Buddhist. Would she be a Dharma Bum? Seeker of the truth, no matter what tradition. Travelled through Israel & Europe in the early '60s, then South America in early '70s. All documented in her book, Tracking the Serpent (City Lights, 1997). At high school she "had been reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road. All the characters seemed to move with an intensity that was missing in my life. A magazine article about the Beats mentioned the Cedar Bar in New York City. We decided to check it out." (Tracking the Serpent, p2)
She met with Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Jack Kerouac and other writers... "All that winter and into the spring I read. Emily Dickinson, Christopher Smart, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Catullus, John Weiners : anything anyone else was reading. This was my education."
Our friend Bob Arnold pops up in the dedication to that book : "for Bob, Susan & Carson Arnold and all fellow travellers." As I said, traveller -- from Glastonbury to Nepal. I'll have to read it again. Get some clues, maybe, for the journey. For my journey,

*

"Once delusion is extinguished your wisdom naturally arises and you don't differentiate suffering and joy. Actually, this joy and suffering -- they are the same." So starts the film I have on DVD. "Amongst White Clouds", film-maker, Edward A. Burger. Went to China on the strength of Bill Porter's book, Road to Heaven (Rider, 1994) -- decided to make a film on Chinese hermits. Not extinguished by Mao. Amazing that they're still there. He found a master with whom he's been studying for more than five years now. That would be something : to go to China.
But I've found a couple of gems. Firstly, an acupuncturist & healer called Sue Branch, here in Weymouth. And a Zen teacher in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives living in Aberwystwyth, Wales. As you always reproach me -- you don't have to go anywhere exotic. It's all around you wherever you are. Circumnambulate Radipole Lake. Everywhere/everything is sacred.
Rev. Master Myoho Harris has been very kindly in her(?) letters from Aberwystwyth in regard to my questions about practice. Very encouraging. "Just wanting to meditate is training. It will lead you forward. Help flows to meet us in many ways. Keep offering yourself to the boundless heart of the Buddha and, most importantly of all, listening deeply to what your own body and mind tells you." (Letter, 13th August, '07)
And Sue Branch has been offering Bu Qi -- acupuncture healing without needles as i had bad reaction to needles. Too sensitive. I'm looking forward to some tai chi training too.
Anyway, all for now. Too many Xmas letters to write.
Love,
Bernard

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS (part 5)

28/30 December, 2006
Melbourne

Dear Bernard,
The day I read your letter at the Shop I'd just opened box of books from Ingram International and imagine my astonishment, with your reference to Anthony Bourdain fresh in my mind, to find him quoted on the back of the John Fante Reader (Ecco,'o2)! To wit, "John Fante was the grand master of So Cal underbelly fiction. His unblinking eye and heroically unsparing prose gave no quarter and took no prisoners, yet his work --however debased, deluded or cruel his subjects --remains always beautiful. No one working the same side of the street --then or now --can touch him." Fante was always one of yours, via Bukowski I guess, but how interesting to find Bourdain there as well --the "brotherhood of the grape" perhaps?!
I cant claim synchronicity for the Bourdain I'm now reading. Retta has been aware of my new enthusiasm for a while, which then climbed a notch after the July UK visit when you & I watched a couple of episodes of his tremendously entertaining television series together, but her Xmas gift was a pleasant surprise. His chapter in Kitchen Confidential (Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly) about the precocious little kid he was, in France holidaying with brother & parents, hating everything except fries & burgers until the moment of his life-determining gastronomic awakening, is guilelessly poignant. His humour hardly disturbs the text's limpidity. I'd like to see his fiction now if only for a test of his narrative style. But what could beat this : "I'd sit in the garden [in the Gironde] among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was a wonderland for under-age drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaise and the Katzenjammer Kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinees in French, until the pictures swam in front of my eyes, smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane."

*

I'm also reading Vanity of Duluoz and, you'll be amused to hear, enjoying it. A great deal changes in 40 years! Because I havent yet located a copy of my rejected 1969 review in all my mess of manuscripts & diaries, I'm intrigued to find what might have been the references & passages that offended me back then.
Perhaps the address "wifey" provoked me from the outset --I could well have conjured mysogeny from that device. Today I immediately pick up on the Celinesque gambit of regailing the recent past from the very present with a narrative profitably unsentimental & spikier I think than earlier Kerouac. But "wifey" gratuitously makes one eavesdropper rather than direct recipient of the narrative. I suppose I'm being too literal --after all, Kerouac is really only ever talking to his reader. Vanity of Duluoz is subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-46". It is a concertina of a book, expanding, encapsulating, digressing and eventually reaching both the chronological & philosophical conclusion signalled at the beginning.
How & why then is "mysogenist, anti-Semitic, conservative rant" the main memory I've coddled all these years? Che as Fascist would have been a severe irk in 1969! "In those days [the Fourties] we were all pro-Lenin, or pro-whatever, Communists. It was before we found out that Henry Fonda in Blockade was not such a great anti-Fascist idealist at all, just the reverse of the coin of Fascism, i.e., what the hell's the difference between Fascist Hitler and anti-Fascist Stalin, or, as today, Fascist Lincoln Rockwell and anti-Fascist Ernesto Guevero, or name your own?"
My 1960s leftism was, I've come to realise, influenced as much by "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" politics as by genuine idealism --psychologically explicable for a 20-yearold though ethically monstrous at all times. Kerouac's equation of left & right-wing politics as the same kind of gangsterism employing the same lies was too confusing then for me to comprehend. It took me a long time to appreciate anti-totalitarian dissent. "Commitment" blinkered me for years --mind you, by the end of the 1970s getting into the 80s, I was beginning to see clearly again...

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Something about Snyder I found in Rebecca Solnit's stimulating Wanderlust : A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000) : quoting from David Robertson's book, Dharma Bums, in Real Matter (Utah,1997), she refers to Snyder's encounter with the banned 19C mountaineering religion Shugendo while he was studying Buddhism in Japan in the 50s. Snyder & Kerouac's climb was "not the object of a quest, as for the grail. Instead it goes round and round and on and on, rather like the hike that Kerouac and Snyder took and even more like the poem [Mountains & Rivers Without End] that Snyder projected writing..."
This brings me to the book I sent you for Christmas, Opening the Mountain (S&H,'06) : Searching on the internet for David Robertson, jumping around the Gary Snyder sites, I found the account of the 1996 circumnambulation of Mt Tamalpais when Snyder & Robertson led what has become the annual hike. It's a lovely book & record in itself but the inspiration I hoped for you wasnt at all on the Mt Tamalpais scale. The reverse, though definitely connected. About Tamalpais Snyder wrote : " Circling -- climbing -- chanting -- to show respect & to clarify the mind. Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg & I learned the practice in Asia. So we opened a route around Tam. It takes a day." Cutting to the chase alright!
My journeys with Cathy O'Brien,in the late 80s & early 90s, to Port Campbell, where the Southern Ocean meets the limestone & bush of the national park adjacent to the green agricultural inland, had this celebratory & meditative quality. Our friend, the late John Anderson, had, as you might recall, suggested that the South-west Victorian coastline might be the closest I could get in Australia to what I'd been experiencing in Dorset, Devon & Cornwall. He was right. What would it have been like to have hiked with him? I can just imagine he & Cathy ambling along in endless, wide-awake dreamland! Dead nine years now...
Similar sensations on the small walks on the Dorset Downs, solo or with the family, and particularly many climbs up & around St Catherine's Mount in Abbotsbury overlooking Chessil Beach. And it all began with the circuits of Radipole, the RSPB sanctuary you introduced me to in 1987. As Snyder implies, it's the respect of nature & the clarification of mind the place affords. That's why Haiku Bums popped into my mind when we were on the phone at Christmas speaking about these things! We'd like to be Dharma Bums --and what an example Cathy is to us, there in Laos, schoolteaching, experiencing the animist & Buddhist life, continuing now waht she began as a hippy girl, overland with boyfriend in Asia, in the 1970s --but ours is an imagined project extended on the far smaller physical scale.Or what?
Happy 2007!
Love, Kris

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RE- TRIP TRAP AND ALBERT SAIJO

(7/01/07) I knew Trip Trap years ago --thought I knew, I should say, though it may not be faulty memory but the case this current edition has extras like the Lew Welch novel extract, his letters to Kerouac (1959-60) and perhaps even Albert Saijo's A Recollection (1973), which is one of the best pieces in the book. I ordered copies for the Shop after you mentioned buying a copy (from Alan Halsey's catalogue or your esoteric book distributor?) --they've arrived and I'm thoroughly charmed!
I reread the sections of Big Sur (Saijo refers to it as the "beautifully sustained prose of his book of suffering") in which Saijo , "a serious young lay priest of Japanese Buddhism when all is said and done", is a character alongside Lew Welch.
I'm writing this at Kris Coad's flat (I want to say "great little pad" a la Saijo's evocation of his San Francisco neighbourhood fifty years ago) : a ceramicist (for some reason I resist the present usage "ceramist")' s environment. It's all on display, her studio & living-space. Table-ware, prayer-flags, stuff found along the shore, objects she collects. Half Morandi, half Buddhist monastery! In the breeze now of the early morning "change" the humidity of the night-before disperses. Cathy's farewell dinner-party last night the reason why I'm still here with a little hang-over! She flies back to Vientiane via Bangkok tonight. Kris has booked her ticket to visit in February. Come & go, here again then gone again...
(9-01-07) How else to be but matter-of-fact when flux is so evident?It's a state of mind isnt it? Thus the matter-of-fact style of the Buddhist Beat writers, infused with the wistfulness of the ancient Chinese (Taoist?) poets they loved.
I "googled" Albert Saijo... The photograph heading the article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for July (?) 1997 I've copied & sent to you, entitled "Running on Rhapsody", is exactly how one imagines Saijo from Kerouac's description of him as George Baso (surely pronounced Basho). He has the same kempt, bony, bespectacled features as Snyder --little, wiry & more ageless than the epithet "old" (Kerouac's "little, old, George Baso") confers (ditto Snyder).
If he's still alive he'll be 81 or thereabouts. In 1997 he'd have been in Hawaii six years, enjoying its multicultural alternative to mainland American "white-male dominant society." None of his books appear to be in print, aside of the collaborative Trip Trap. I'll write to Bamboo Ridge Press in Hawaii for Outspeaks a Rhapsody (1997) though --"a series of stream-of-consciousness rants and rhapsodies on topics such as the pain ("Analgesia --Land of Pain Free") and the horrors of a technological society ("Luddite Manque")." --according to the article.
I wonder if my attraction (yours too?) to the bit-players, the extras, is because that's where we also fit in to this weird & wonderful scheme of things. "All the world's a stage" etc. As you said, in different context, "sitting up, lying down, do the best you can." Add : And not giving in to conformity; not closing one's mind to wisdom, beauty, wonder; not disqualifying one's own contribution amongst the big glister & bluster! Hail Albert Saijo! Hail John Montgomery! Hail Will Petersen! Hail the Haiku Bums!

Love, Kris


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17th January, 2007
Weymouth

Dear Kris, Too much! Your letter just in! It's a huge thing we're doing! I hadn't dreamt it would grow and envelop so much. I do like Albert Saijo. Many thanks for printing that stuff off the internet for me. He's a little man, isnt he? Looks like a Japanese Gandhi in the picture. I like that. Small people are more handy. Less expanded. More yang. I'm reminded also of Haru Arai --a traditional Japanese Barrel Maker (Okayasan) as described in one of my favourite books, Cullinary Treasures of Japan. "He was very small, under five feet tall and about eighty pounds, with gentle black eyes and short silver hair. He was dressed in a traditional thick cotton vest and baggy pants with a split for his big toe... Arai-san was exceptional; his skill, strength and wittiness are rare at any age." He's described felling a large bamboo (thirty-f00t and one-hundred pounds), picking it up and shouldering it down a steep mountainside at 71 years of age. Albert Saijo would be good company for him. The same breed I'm sure. You say Saijo is Roshi now. I wonder,living in Hawaii, if he's something to do with Robert Aitken.
"A Recollection" by Saijo is great opener for Trip Trip. I wonder what stirs in our imaginations to relate to the "trip" so strongly? I guess it's voyage of discovery. Inwards and outwards. As you say --we'd like to be Dharma Bums / Haiku Bums. Got to get my shit together!
By the way, I ordered Trip Trap from my 'friends' at Green Spirit Books in Wiltshire. They belong to the Schumaker Society (small is beautiful) and are a not-for-profit business. They'd never heard of Kerouac when I asked for a list of his books in print!
The haiku/poems in Trip Trap are playful and fun to read but not eminently great. Maybe it's not the point to make great literature. Just get it all down, record the trip/ the journey.
I picked-up on the fact that both Kerouac and Lew Welch had their mothers figuring in their lives. And here am I living with Mum. Twenty years now. And alone together now since Dad died. It made me laugh that we had that something in common.
John Fante? I haven't read him for over twenty years! I was very excited when I received Ask the Dust from Black Sparrow Press, knowing he was one of Charles Bukowski's inspirations. That would be 1980. And unfortunately Black Sparrow is no more. I can agree with Anthony Bourdain, whom you quote from that John Fante Reader, that the writing is "debased, cruel and beautiful." For example, "Treat her rough, Bandini, treat her around and she'll wrap around your cock and die there." (Prologue to Ask the Dust, Black Sparrow, 1990.) Buk was onto a good one there! Sadly, I've so many books piled-up here and there about the house I can't find Ask the Dust --I've just had a look for it. It must be upstairs in the loft maybe. So many books. Might well be a good idea to finally get that bookshop and be a bookseller like you. Who would be interested in Fante and Bukowski in Dorset tho? But I did see a mass-market paperback of Buk's Factotum when I was in Dorchester last week. Shop might be the best thing before the books get damaged. Been dreaming of a bookshop for thirty years now! Two of my social-work friends and I were actually looking around Gosport for premises in the mid'70s...
(11-February'07) 4.15 a.m. Still very dark. Birds chirping outside --accompaniment to the radio. I thought birds waited until first light? Maybe it's the street-lights. I've been reading George Crane's book --about the monk T'sung T'sai again. But I've just been downstairs to fetch up TDB and Opening the Mountain. Birds and radio apart nothing intrudes and obsessions of the day haven't started on at me.
Opening the Mountain was such a wonderful present to get from you for Xmas. I love the photographs. That picture of mushrooms... Just me to pick out food!
I do understand what you say about making our own walks a ritual, our own environment 'sacred'. Don't have to go to Tamalpais or Higi or Kailash. But wouldn't it be great to do just that. To be able to do it. Walking up to St Catherine's at Abbotsbury that first time with you last summer (June'06) was great for me. It took me 20 years to think my heart would take the effort. Ah, the view. But we climb the mountain to climb the mountain. As Snyder says, "The main thing is to pay your regards, to play, to engage, to stop and pay attention. It's just a way of stopping and looking at your self too". And Smith (TDB, p63) quotes "the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.'" Smith realises then that he doesn't have to climb the mountain. And that everyone's trip is going to be different. "Now there's the karma of these three men here : Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountain-top and makes it, I almost make it and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all is that poet's poet [Morley] lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, goddammit they'll never get me up here again."
This ascending mountains, or circumnambulating is not about getting to the top or walking all day. The journey is the thing. Just being on the path is enough. Being on the path is enlightenment. "Ordinary mind is enlightenment itself," as an 8th Century Chinese master said, talking about zazen. Being ordinary is enlightenment... I have my Chafey's and Radipole paths...

Love, Bernard


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(to be continued)