LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR LITERARY CREATURES
[Literary Creatures : Drawings, Poetry, Group Terms : A book of animals in alphabet; edited & drawn by Raffaella Torresan; published August, 2009, by Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Vic. 3204]
+ Raffaella Torresan's exhibition, Book Animals (8-19 August,'09)]
Saturday 8th August,'09 at the Victorian Artists Society, 430 Albert Street, East Melbourne.
*
[Not all of the following notes were used in the speech, nor do some of the spoken comments appear in these notes, as is the way of speeches!]
*
Congratulations to Hybrid Publishers on the publication...
And congratulations to Raffaella on bringing her idea for the book through to this gorgeous fruition!
I was explaining to a colleague recently my continuing reticence to publish in what can be called authorised anthologies, but had to say I did have a couple of poems in an animal anthology... The 'Contemporary Australian Poetry' perspective gives me problems but 'Animal Poetry' evidently doesnt! There are reasons for this, which I'll touch upon in a moment...
All of us grew up with 'literary creatures' in the poems we encountered at primary & secondary school... For me it was the likes of Shelley's Skylark --"Hail to thee, blithe spirit! / Bird thou never wert...".
And D H Lawrence's Snake, which I'll always remember for giving me the word 'expiate'; that final stanza --"And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of Life. / And I have something to expiate : / A pettiness."
And, of course, G M Hopkins' The Windhover --"I caught this morning morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." --Hopkins whom I didnt understand at the tender age but in my young 30s finally got!
*
The poets in Raff's book are mostly not the Australian canon --apart, say, from Bruce Dawe & Les Murray... And there's Bernard Smith from the highest echelon of Australian art --his Place, Taste & Tradition written when he was 21 or 22 years old, published 65 or so years ago? --as legendary, I suppose, as Phar Lap, the subject of his own poem in the book... But no Judith Wright & co., or what the wider Aussie net could catch.
Literary Creatures is Raffaella's own anthology, a personal anthology of predominately Melbourne & Victorian poets, invited by Raff... As Alan Wearne says in his introduction, "What really grabs me about this book is the wonderful off-the-wall combination of contributors she has been able to assemble; from Les Murray to the late Geoffrey Eggleston via Robyn Rowland and Lynn Hard is quite an accomplishment."
Alan distinguishes between 'big survey' or 'state of the art' anthologies & such a collection as Raff's, the genre collection...
Well, it's the season of the big numbers --the Nicholas Jose Macquarrie, the John Kinsella Penguin, Jamie Grant's 100 Australian Poems, Geoff Page's 60 Classics, but the genre anthology is something else...
I've been thinking about this recently, in another context, & came up with the notion of the affection for the subject propelling the work (the poem, the painting) into whatever expression... As Alan says of the genre collection, "that's when we really get to discover plenty [of works] that are refreshingly different, be they naive or sophisticated... a lot like discovering a new species"...
Readers are in for a treat...
*
At the risk of offending by omission I'd like to mention some of the poetry to delight me...
No better place than here to quote from Jen Jewel Brown's Nest of Vipers, beginning "Like a hiss of poets snaky at being overlooked / their unpaid brilliance rears / Glittering scales of justice rattling inflate / bare fangs spit venom angst ennui" etc
Becca Kellaway's Ode to a Wombat had me in fits, especially "O! for a cool slab of VB, that hath soaketh / In an esky, chilled by its icy embrace / tasting of angels' piss; but it so inebriateth / Mine mind, that I no longer see her face. / Instead tis thee, Wombat...."
A different kind of poignancy with Kerry Scuffins' Totem Horse, especially the last line, "Let her run, let her think she's free." --which raises enormous & philosophical issues, & the relation of reality & conceit in which we humans hold all animals...
Bruce Dawe's "This dog and this cat / weave their lives / within our own..." ; "we have by now been thoroughly integrated / into their mutual strangeness / (as they into ours)" might extend Kerry's thought...
I liked two kinds of beautiful poem --Eric Beach's wonderful vernacular ear, rhythmic & tonally perfect --"they would've laughed marco polo out of town / if he'd tried to describe a flock of emus / as busy as a fat lady's bum in a tight pair of slacks / in an egg & spoon race..." ; "larrikin bird, disdaining fines, eating fences / strange to see you smoke through an exercise yard / wheeling in humped, broken ranks, one eye cocked / to a sun drilled like a rifle bore..." --And Lorin Ford's courtly, romantic pantoum, Like Bees in the Lamplight, "Too beautiful to put away in the wardrobe, / the Chinese silk dress on the wooden hanger / caresses the mind as water soothes the skin. / Gold butterflies swarm like bees in the lamplight." etc
Many, many others... Robyn Rowland's cuttlefish & sea-horses, Les Murray's Two Dogs, Jenny Harrison's Showering Together, Aileen Kelly's Domestic Geese, Jenny Compton's hens, Phil Motherwell's Cuckoo-bugger sitting in his gum tree, Alex Skovron's possums, Patrick McCauley's platypus, Jordie Albiston's Whale Song...
Some of which we'll hear very soon from the poets themselves, though most are for the readers of the book to discover...
*
So, let me repeat my congratulations to Hybrid Press, to Raphaella, & to all the poets for a lovely book --which I hereby declare launched!
*
[Bernard Smith spoke about poetry & painting, & read from memory some of his poem, followed by Jordie Albiston, Kevin Brophy, Barry Dickins, Jennifer Harrison, Marietta Elliott-Kleerkoper, Ian McBryde, Patrick McCauley, Grant Caldwell & Kerry Scuffins. Raffaella Torresan's thank yous closed the formalities.]
[Extras :
*One Summer holiday, when I was about 10 years old, my father & brother Bernard & I, visited Sandown Zoo on the Isle of Wight (then part of Hampshire, in the UK). Mum must have been with the babies. Dad was a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories, which enthusiasm Bernard & I inherited. I had learnt the word 'kadoga', which was how the great apes demanded surrender when they fought their enemies. As we walked around the zoo we passed a pen of llamas. I cant remember whether we were talking about Tarzan, but I looked over the fence and caught the eye of one of the llamas. "Kadoga!" I said threateningly. The response was swift & violent. The llama spat at me full in the face. My hair was matted in llama vomit! My father & brother fell about laughing. We returned to the chalet for me to wash & change my clothes! What is the moral of this story and how does it relate to the relationship of poets & animals?
*The Victorian Artists Society is situated in Albert Street not far from where the offices of the AEU (the Amalgamated Engineering Union) used to be on a terrace in Victoria Parade. I would visit the gallery in 1967 in the company of Loretta Garvey & sometimes Peg Cregan, who worked in the office at the AEU and needed such a place as the VAS to repair their spirits at lunch-time! A particular painter impressed me greatly with his water-colours --wet looking earthy landscapes. McAlpine?
* With Raff's anthology in mind I looked at the beautiful edition of Judith Wright's collection of poems, Birds, republished by the National Library of Australia, illustrated by historic paintings from their own natural history collection. Judith Wright & her lorrikeets... "On the bough of blue summer / hangs one crimson berry. / Like the blood of a lover / is the breast of a lory." Once upon a time when I was a poet, I read on a bill with Chris Wallace-Crabbe & Judith Wright at the May Daze poetry festival at the University of Melbourne, 1974. Her poetry-speaking voice that day reminded me of a crow. She wore a hearing-aid of course but I didnt immediately think of deafness, rather, my English ear registered Judith's caw-caw as essentially Australian --as (Anglo) Australian as the long, long faces of the figures in Drysdale's paintings. "But 'The heart's red is my reward,' / the old crow cries / 'I'll wear his colour on my black / the day the lory dies.'"
_____________________________________________________
-Kris Hemensley,
August 7/8th, 2009-
Showing posts with label Lorin Ford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lorin Ford. Show all posts
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 19
LAUNCHING OF LORIN FORD'S A WATTLE SEEDPOD (published by POSTPRESSED, Queensland, 2008), at Collected Works Bookshop, 25th July, 2008
Thank you Lorin for asking me to launch your little book tonight. Poetry & the little book, poetry & the small press, are inseparable. At Collected Works Bookshop we're partial to little books -- although I do recall Bill Butler, ex-pat American poet, replying to the very excited George Dowden, ditto, in Bill's celebrated Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, UK --and it was the day that Jack Kerouac's death was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, October,1969, and a shocked Bill Butler had pointed it out to us --and George showed off his new pocket-sized note-book and said he'd write a poem in it, straightaway, about Kerouac's death --Bill said, coldly, I've always thought only small poems get written in small books! George was Ginsberg's bibliographer at the time and even more earnest & expansive in his confessions than his master --but that's another story entirely!
Lorin's isnt a small book in that sense, but perfectly efficacious & elegant within the constraints of its production --and the moments it contains are infinite in their extent.
*
As ever, an occasion like this book-launching is an intersection of lives & stories. I hope you'll permit me to range around & about book, person & poetry.
*
We do go back a long way, as they say. Lorin was the daughter of the house I boarded in, back in 1966, in Park Street, South Yarra, around the corner from the Botanical Gardens which she may know I called The Gardens of Sunlight in my personal myth & writings of that first Melbourne winter of my Australian emigration. We became acquainted in the pre-hippy Bohemian Melbourne and from there the trail takes in the La Mama poetry scene of the late '60s, and the counter-culture '70s, and our respective baby sons & their irregular schooling, and our different vantages in the education system... From youth's dream of poets & poetry to the grim & glorious actuality! -- of which A Wattle Seedpod is a shining example... And so into the dream once again...
*
Thirty-odd years ago, Jim Davidson asked me to write a survey of the new Australian poetry, to introduce my poetry editorship of Meanjin Quarterly. Every few years I have a peek at it as I did the other day. On this occasion I've been embarrassed by my carping & cleaving & general belabouring! I sound like the "wrathful deity", which is how my Buddhist & haiku enthusiast brother Bernard characterizes me when I'm aroused!
In retrospect I've come to realize that militantly pushing a literary programme, a la Pound & Wyndham Lewis, Olson, the Language School et cetera, as I did myself in the '60s & '70s & into the '80s, doesnt necessarily serve poetry well, if at all.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because included in my poetry review of 1976 was comment on some Australian haiku, which might be interesting to recall now.
Having earlier in the article berated Peter Porter & Graham Rowlands, and railed at Richard Tipping & Tom Shapcott, I turned to, or upon, Robert Gray's Creekwater Journal. To quote, "Though the direction is valid [by which I meant the embrace of Japanese but in Robert's case also a Chinese sensibility concerning human affairs & landscape] the contents are lacklustre." I continued, "The motor of the collection is three sets of three-liners [I dont even call them haiku] (...) which instead of firing rather enervate the entire book, ranging in tone from soft to silly, so cliched are some of the subjects and surrounding sentiments. It is these wee ones' failings that explains the demise of the long poems."
Next, I approvingly held up the "meagrely published Gerard Smith" for comparison; and then commented on Janice Bostok's haiku collection, Walking Into the Sun : "though naive and nowhere near as loaded as Gray or Smith," I wrote, "[it] is palpable : 'in summer meadow / this bird silence' is its most exciting and resonant instance. Six words with which to launch a world. Which is the requirement of the forms Gray attempts. Even when you have enough words, they must be the right words" I finger-wagged..
In the years since 1976, I've re-thought & revised my general literary position. I realize, for example, how wrong i was about Robert Gray's haiku & certainly the longer poems. He's said to me that I probably had a point back then, but I think he's being gracious (as befits his name), & possibly facetious too!
Gerard Smith died young, without a book as such. His friend Janice Bostok, who's especially thanked by Lorin in her book, is now a major force in the Australian haiku world.
By 1976, the Sixties' generation of La Mama poets, amongst whom Lorin once numbered, had long dispersed, but their individual paths continued & the spirit carried over elsewhere.
*
For all this time we've lived in the magnitude of modern poetry. Even in its provinces, ancient Chinese & Japanese approaches (for example, the representation of nature to include human lives, particularly manifest as haiku) have never been too far away. And that's because it was brought out of the exoticised, but crucial, 19th Century interest & into our time by moderns like Englishman Arthur Waley & American Ezra Pound. And so it flows through the Poundian practice, particularly in the US --and it underscores the Objectivists (think of Oppen, Lorine Niedecker), Cid Corman, so also the Beats, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and then the contemporary legions.
And translation of the ancients continues in the wake of Pound by numerous hands --Bill Porter & Sam Hamill amongst the best today. And then there's the Formalist revival, or revival of forms, from the '80s to the present. And coincident with this new formalism, haiku has proliferated as an English-language form. Poetry schools have aided & abetted the process. If pantoums, sestinas, sonnets & villanelles why not haiku, tanka & et cetera? Anyone for ghazals?!
*
Lorin has been an astonishingly active poet in the past few years of the English-language haiku phenomenon. It's rare not to see her haiku published somewhere in Melbourne, in Australia. She's equally well published in overseas' haiku magazines & anthologies. There seems to me to be something of the Welsh Eistedfott about the haiku scene if only in their competition for prizes & titles..! Lorin's been in the thick of that! She's published a couple of hundred haiku in print & internet magazines, and that spells tenacity & possibly addiction for the form & perhaps the comraderie too!
And at last she has a book! I am surprised something didnt come out earlier --but that's life, as many of us will attest...
A Wattle Seedpod is published by PostPressed in Queensland. John Bird, one of Australian haiku's stalwarts, contributes an instructive forward which contains Lorin's thoughts on haiku, describing her progress from the "so what?" we've all experienced to the "ah ha!" we long for. She refers to the "physical quiver of recognition" upon hearing a particular haiku : "It made me realize," she writes, "that haiku are meant to be 'seen through' by us as readers, to our own experiences in the world."
You'll observe with me that this transparency is in direct contradiction to the Western literary attitude, whether or not fully born out in practice. Poem as existential mirror is a wonderful challenge to the self-conscious postmodern manner, for instance. Of course, in practice, things are never so black & white, but the dichotomy bears thinking about.
*
"This poet," John Bird says, "does not live in Haikuland. She may well become a haijin who helps move English-langauge haiku closer to poetry." John Bird seems to be suggesting that there's a deficit between Haikuland practitioners & Poetry...
To be sure, Lorin is an otherwise formed poet who has taken up & taken to the haiku. And yet she does endorse haiku's traditional imperatives & their Western evolution.
*
I'll bring my remarks to a close by opening Lorin's little book upon a couple of my favourites in this first collection.
How poignant is this, for example :
"River sunrise
a girl's shadow
swims from my ankles"
What a beautiful allusion to the 'consciousness of the passing of time' (if I might misquote Gertrude Stein) --the chaste expression grants equanimity even as wistfulness presses on the heart...
Then there's the synaesthesia of :
"clear water --
a magpie's song drops
into the pond"
Simultaneously one sees, hears & feels the event.
And then there's the perfect one-liner :
"on a bare twig rain beads what light there is"
which is, I think, in the vicinity of what Judith Bishop often attains --not Nature Poetry pure & simple but how phenomena is apprehended; a poetry, therefore, of conscious & perceiving being.
*
And so, I'm pleased to declare this little book published, and now invite Lorin to speak to us &, hopefully, read.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley, July, 2008.
Thank you Lorin for asking me to launch your little book tonight. Poetry & the little book, poetry & the small press, are inseparable. At Collected Works Bookshop we're partial to little books -- although I do recall Bill Butler, ex-pat American poet, replying to the very excited George Dowden, ditto, in Bill's celebrated Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, UK --and it was the day that Jack Kerouac's death was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, October,1969, and a shocked Bill Butler had pointed it out to us --and George showed off his new pocket-sized note-book and said he'd write a poem in it, straightaway, about Kerouac's death --Bill said, coldly, I've always thought only small poems get written in small books! George was Ginsberg's bibliographer at the time and even more earnest & expansive in his confessions than his master --but that's another story entirely!
Lorin's isnt a small book in that sense, but perfectly efficacious & elegant within the constraints of its production --and the moments it contains are infinite in their extent.
*
As ever, an occasion like this book-launching is an intersection of lives & stories. I hope you'll permit me to range around & about book, person & poetry.
*
We do go back a long way, as they say. Lorin was the daughter of the house I boarded in, back in 1966, in Park Street, South Yarra, around the corner from the Botanical Gardens which she may know I called The Gardens of Sunlight in my personal myth & writings of that first Melbourne winter of my Australian emigration. We became acquainted in the pre-hippy Bohemian Melbourne and from there the trail takes in the La Mama poetry scene of the late '60s, and the counter-culture '70s, and our respective baby sons & their irregular schooling, and our different vantages in the education system... From youth's dream of poets & poetry to the grim & glorious actuality! -- of which A Wattle Seedpod is a shining example... And so into the dream once again...
*
Thirty-odd years ago, Jim Davidson asked me to write a survey of the new Australian poetry, to introduce my poetry editorship of Meanjin Quarterly. Every few years I have a peek at it as I did the other day. On this occasion I've been embarrassed by my carping & cleaving & general belabouring! I sound like the "wrathful deity", which is how my Buddhist & haiku enthusiast brother Bernard characterizes me when I'm aroused!
In retrospect I've come to realize that militantly pushing a literary programme, a la Pound & Wyndham Lewis, Olson, the Language School et cetera, as I did myself in the '60s & '70s & into the '80s, doesnt necessarily serve poetry well, if at all.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because included in my poetry review of 1976 was comment on some Australian haiku, which might be interesting to recall now.
Having earlier in the article berated Peter Porter & Graham Rowlands, and railed at Richard Tipping & Tom Shapcott, I turned to, or upon, Robert Gray's Creekwater Journal. To quote, "Though the direction is valid [by which I meant the embrace of Japanese but in Robert's case also a Chinese sensibility concerning human affairs & landscape] the contents are lacklustre." I continued, "The motor of the collection is three sets of three-liners [I dont even call them haiku] (...) which instead of firing rather enervate the entire book, ranging in tone from soft to silly, so cliched are some of the subjects and surrounding sentiments. It is these wee ones' failings that explains the demise of the long poems."
Next, I approvingly held up the "meagrely published Gerard Smith" for comparison; and then commented on Janice Bostok's haiku collection, Walking Into the Sun : "though naive and nowhere near as loaded as Gray or Smith," I wrote, "[it] is palpable : 'in summer meadow / this bird silence' is its most exciting and resonant instance. Six words with which to launch a world. Which is the requirement of the forms Gray attempts. Even when you have enough words, they must be the right words" I finger-wagged..
In the years since 1976, I've re-thought & revised my general literary position. I realize, for example, how wrong i was about Robert Gray's haiku & certainly the longer poems. He's said to me that I probably had a point back then, but I think he's being gracious (as befits his name), & possibly facetious too!
Gerard Smith died young, without a book as such. His friend Janice Bostok, who's especially thanked by Lorin in her book, is now a major force in the Australian haiku world.
By 1976, the Sixties' generation of La Mama poets, amongst whom Lorin once numbered, had long dispersed, but their individual paths continued & the spirit carried over elsewhere.
*
For all this time we've lived in the magnitude of modern poetry. Even in its provinces, ancient Chinese & Japanese approaches (for example, the representation of nature to include human lives, particularly manifest as haiku) have never been too far away. And that's because it was brought out of the exoticised, but crucial, 19th Century interest & into our time by moderns like Englishman Arthur Waley & American Ezra Pound. And so it flows through the Poundian practice, particularly in the US --and it underscores the Objectivists (think of Oppen, Lorine Niedecker), Cid Corman, so also the Beats, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and then the contemporary legions.
And translation of the ancients continues in the wake of Pound by numerous hands --Bill Porter & Sam Hamill amongst the best today. And then there's the Formalist revival, or revival of forms, from the '80s to the present. And coincident with this new formalism, haiku has proliferated as an English-language form. Poetry schools have aided & abetted the process. If pantoums, sestinas, sonnets & villanelles why not haiku, tanka & et cetera? Anyone for ghazals?!
*
Lorin has been an astonishingly active poet in the past few years of the English-language haiku phenomenon. It's rare not to see her haiku published somewhere in Melbourne, in Australia. She's equally well published in overseas' haiku magazines & anthologies. There seems to me to be something of the Welsh Eistedfott about the haiku scene if only in their competition for prizes & titles..! Lorin's been in the thick of that! She's published a couple of hundred haiku in print & internet magazines, and that spells tenacity & possibly addiction for the form & perhaps the comraderie too!
And at last she has a book! I am surprised something didnt come out earlier --but that's life, as many of us will attest...
A Wattle Seedpod is published by PostPressed in Queensland. John Bird, one of Australian haiku's stalwarts, contributes an instructive forward which contains Lorin's thoughts on haiku, describing her progress from the "so what?" we've all experienced to the "ah ha!" we long for. She refers to the "physical quiver of recognition" upon hearing a particular haiku : "It made me realize," she writes, "that haiku are meant to be 'seen through' by us as readers, to our own experiences in the world."
You'll observe with me that this transparency is in direct contradiction to the Western literary attitude, whether or not fully born out in practice. Poem as existential mirror is a wonderful challenge to the self-conscious postmodern manner, for instance. Of course, in practice, things are never so black & white, but the dichotomy bears thinking about.
*
"This poet," John Bird says, "does not live in Haikuland. She may well become a haijin who helps move English-langauge haiku closer to poetry." John Bird seems to be suggesting that there's a deficit between Haikuland practitioners & Poetry...
To be sure, Lorin is an otherwise formed poet who has taken up & taken to the haiku. And yet she does endorse haiku's traditional imperatives & their Western evolution.
*
I'll bring my remarks to a close by opening Lorin's little book upon a couple of my favourites in this first collection.
How poignant is this, for example :
"River sunrise
a girl's shadow
swims from my ankles"
What a beautiful allusion to the 'consciousness of the passing of time' (if I might misquote Gertrude Stein) --the chaste expression grants equanimity even as wistfulness presses on the heart...
Then there's the synaesthesia of :
"clear water --
a magpie's song drops
into the pond"
Simultaneously one sees, hears & feels the event.
And then there's the perfect one-liner :
"on a bare twig rain beads what light there is"
which is, I think, in the vicinity of what Judith Bishop often attains --not Nature Poetry pure & simple but how phenomena is apprehended; a poetry, therefore, of conscious & perceiving being.
*
And so, I'm pleased to declare this little book published, and now invite Lorin to speak to us &, hopefully, read.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley, July, 2008.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS (3)
25/6-28/6/06 , rewritten August, 2006
Weymouth & Melbourne
Dear Bernard, Regarding your day of Kerouac synchronicity & scores has me thinking of the way Kerouac entered my life. The first Kerouac I ever saw & purchased was Big Sur, a Mayflower-Dell pb, found right under my nose amongst the general literature, thrillers, romances, in the tiny kiosque I was required to work in, on the tourist deck of the then Sitmar Line's flagship, Fairstar, late September, 1965. Just as I'd been disbelieving of the hoo-hah around the Albert Hall poetry reading earlier that year --one of those "almost" experiences because I was working on the railways in London and could have attended-- so was I suspicious of Big Sur's lurid blurb, "the story of the crack-up of the King of the Beats"! However, I enjoyed it and the clincher was the fantastic sound poem at the end of the book, Kerouac's transcription of the ocean at Big Sur... Back home from the voyage (Southampton to Australia via Suez, Aden returning via Singapore, Colombo, Aden & Naples) I researched the Beats at our beloved Reference Library at the Civic Centre and began hunting for Kerouac & Co. around the new & secondhand bookshops in town.
I found On The Road on a stall in Kingsland Square Market; The Dharma Bums somewhere in St Mary's Street; new editions of Lonesome Traveller, Visions of Gerard, & Burroughs' Dead Fingers Talk at the Paperback Parade, bottom of East Street & adjacent to the Tech & the Art College in the Docks area.
In 1964 I made the momentous discovery of Whitman's Leaves of Grass in an 1896 hardback pocket edition on the pavement table outside Gilbert's! When I read Ginsberg later on I immediately sensed Whitman as his progenitor. Whitman was my daily companion when I sailed for Melbourne on the migrant ship Fairsky in 1966.
On the family summer-holiday on the Isle of Wight in 1965, prior to my voyage on the Fairstar, Uncle Dennis (Bean), Dad's step-brother, gave me a copy of the first issue (Autumn, 1952) of Perspectives , which I thought a wonderful American literary mag (and in retrospect I've realized it had to be since it was probably doing its cultural-political bit in those first years of the Cold War), containing poems & prose by William Carlos Williams. The poems astonished me (they included Proletarian Portrait, Poem /"so much depends", This Is Just To Say /"I have eaten the plums")! I hardly believed they were "poems" at all coming as I was from an enthusiastically consumed diet of DH Lawrence & the school syllabus of Chaucer, Shakespeare,R. Browning et al! I remember discussing the poems with you --it seemed like the simplest sentences had been rearranged vertically and called poems! We were shocked, amused, delighted by the simplicity. I tried my own hand at the style --wrote 20 or 30 in a day-- they werent any good but at least the cat was out of the bag...
In Southampton I looked for WCW at the Civic Centre Library but could only find Charles Williams. Had I not been exposed to WCW, Charles wouldnt have seemed a dud, and it wasnt until the late 1980s that I read him again (in the context of the Arthurian mythos & the Inklings I was happilly researching for myself & to stock at the Shop). But you came home one night from work with WCW's Kora, Or a Season in Hell, snaffled at Gilbert's, the best bookshop (new & secondhand) in town. Later you brought home Paterson , in the Macgibbon & Kee edition, which you must have ordered specially. Paterson, of course, carried dedications & material for Allen Ginsberg whom we'd read in the Penguin Modern Poets series, in the volume with Corso & Ferlinghetti. In retrospect, what a marvellous period of literary discovery, characterized by the displacement by the new Americans of the British & European (mostly French) writing we'd thrived on previously. Important to state here that the Beats were slotting into the place made by the following American writers (I quote from the lists I have from 1965-66) : Faulkner, Saroyan (read as early as 1963),Baldwin, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Hemingway... That time's crucial academic critics for me were Ihab Hassan & Leslie Fiedler, and foremost of the new commentators was Norman Mailer following on from the great trailblazer Henry Miller...
The hunt for Kerouac & the Beats resumed in Melbourne after emigration in 1966. My Alladin's cave was Franklin's, the secondhander in Russell Street on the edge of Chinatown. Maggie Cassidy , The Subterraneans, Protest (the anthology juxtaposing the Beats & the Angry Young Men, to the former's obvious advantage one must say), The Village Voice Reader, all came my way in quick succession. The fuller context included Randall Jarrell, Bellow, JD Salinger... I bought Desolation Angels from the South Yarra bookshop in Toorak Road, around the corner from where I was living in Park Street (Lorin Ford's dad's boarding house as fate would have it --and that's a whole other story). There it was, the Andre Deutsch, British first-edition, in its silver dust-jacket, in the bookshop window, waiting for me! The baby of a girl-friend wet on it one day, soaking the front-cover & ruining the end-papers. Although aghast I had to accept it as a Beat annointment!
*
Thinking about Morley on the trio's mountain climb... Initially I accepted that the none too subtle foil he plays to his Zen-lunatic pals was all that he was, in every way the straight man. But,in retrospect, Morely actually survives the figure of irritating buffoon drawn by Kerouac, perceived by Ray. It took courage, after all, to climb the mountain by himself (a kind of punishment for his dereliction with the crank-shaft and the earlier problem with the sleeping-bag) --he accomplishes it with a humour that's somehow older & zanier than either Ray or Japhy. He isnt anxious about not climbing the summit, happy to lie on his back at the penultimate stage, content within himself. there's a nobility about him...
I wonder what you make of theBuddhism in TDB? Can you remember your impression years ago and how does it strike you now?
Love, Kris
26th August,2006
Weymouth
Dear Kris, Absolutely ages since I've written. I don't want that to be my constant plaint tho'. Or that I've been diverted --but I have-- Dad's illness having galloped on somewhat. He has leukaemia now and I don't think he knows. He told me his MDS had transformed to anaemia, the consultant informed him. But I think he misheard due to his deafness, and what the consultant actually said was leukaemia. Well, this is the Great Matter, Life & Death, that we are all involved in, which leads one to Zen --"trying to do something about 'me'!" Zen is the step one takes after psychiatry & psychology have failed according to Roshi Jiyu Kennett.
Dogen : "The most important question for all Buddhists is how to understand birth and death completely for then, should you be able to find the Buddha within birth and death, they both vanish."
Buddhism and Zen is what drew me to Kerouac. I don't think it was as early as you. First of all I bought and read Zen Flesh, Zen Bones --the Paul Reps compilation. I would quote 'stories' to everyone from it, circa 1970 --I don't have your memory for events and don't have voluminous diaries either. But about this time I was aware that something different was afoot. Different to our Western, Christian society (helped along by Jung and Hesse). My first reading of TDB would be after that. As to whether I was aware of Kerouac in the late Sixties --I don't think so. I was 20 in 1968, when I left home, and I'm sure I didn't know Kerouac then. I missed an opportunity, in 1969, to run the poetry section in a bookshop near Winchester Cathedral. Maybe if I had I'd've run into him. It seems to me that when I went to Buddhist Summer School in 1971 for a few days with my friend John, on the invitation of Patti Ellwood, his mother, I think I was aware of Kerouac. It was here I bought one of the volumes of R.H. Blythe's Haiku. I wish I'd bought the set.
I don't know what sort of meditation I was doing at the Buddhist Summer School. I just sat on cushion. Most people sat on chairs. And I don't remember the incident you've retold me of how I was still sitting on my cushion when everyone else had gone and the monk told me I could "go now"... I do remember the bell resounding, on and on, for an eternity. Then nothing. Blissed out maybe.
I follow Soto school of Zen now. That was my inclination since the mid-70s. Shikantaza = just sitting. I don't know what Japhy was doing when he sat and meditated with his eyes open, which was a revelation to Smith -- "and Japhy sat down in full lotus posture cross-legged on a rock and took out his wooden juju prayerbeads and prayed.' That is, he simply held the beads in his hands, the hands upsidedown with thumbs touching, and stared straight ahead and didn't move a bone. I sat down as best I could on another rock and we both said nothing and meditated. Only I meditated with my eyes closed." (TDB, p53.)
Hey, it's just gone five p.m. --time for my meditation/zazen. I've resumed my practice. Things are always changing. Nothing stays the same. I sit on chair now. Years on my little black cushion have ruined my left hip. But I'm just so pleased to be sitting again. Important thing is to be upright. Sitting on zafu is such a lovely feeling tho'! Not that "lovely feelings" are the point of course. Japhy obviously a young yogi to be able to manage full-lotus. I used to sit Burmese posture -- simply sitting with one leg in front of other, which I feel is no small feat in itself for me. Maybe if I can overcome hip problem through yoga I'll sit on cushion again one day. But who cares? Sitting up, lying down --do the best you can.
Love, Bernard
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[posted 11 April '06] to be continued
Weymouth & Melbourne
Dear Bernard, Regarding your day of Kerouac synchronicity & scores has me thinking of the way Kerouac entered my life. The first Kerouac I ever saw & purchased was Big Sur, a Mayflower-Dell pb, found right under my nose amongst the general literature, thrillers, romances, in the tiny kiosque I was required to work in, on the tourist deck of the then Sitmar Line's flagship, Fairstar, late September, 1965. Just as I'd been disbelieving of the hoo-hah around the Albert Hall poetry reading earlier that year --one of those "almost" experiences because I was working on the railways in London and could have attended-- so was I suspicious of Big Sur's lurid blurb, "the story of the crack-up of the King of the Beats"! However, I enjoyed it and the clincher was the fantastic sound poem at the end of the book, Kerouac's transcription of the ocean at Big Sur... Back home from the voyage (Southampton to Australia via Suez, Aden returning via Singapore, Colombo, Aden & Naples) I researched the Beats at our beloved Reference Library at the Civic Centre and began hunting for Kerouac & Co. around the new & secondhand bookshops in town.
I found On The Road on a stall in Kingsland Square Market; The Dharma Bums somewhere in St Mary's Street; new editions of Lonesome Traveller, Visions of Gerard, & Burroughs' Dead Fingers Talk at the Paperback Parade, bottom of East Street & adjacent to the Tech & the Art College in the Docks area.
In 1964 I made the momentous discovery of Whitman's Leaves of Grass in an 1896 hardback pocket edition on the pavement table outside Gilbert's! When I read Ginsberg later on I immediately sensed Whitman as his progenitor. Whitman was my daily companion when I sailed for Melbourne on the migrant ship Fairsky in 1966.
On the family summer-holiday on the Isle of Wight in 1965, prior to my voyage on the Fairstar, Uncle Dennis (Bean), Dad's step-brother, gave me a copy of the first issue (Autumn, 1952) of Perspectives , which I thought a wonderful American literary mag (and in retrospect I've realized it had to be since it was probably doing its cultural-political bit in those first years of the Cold War), containing poems & prose by William Carlos Williams. The poems astonished me (they included Proletarian Portrait, Poem /"so much depends", This Is Just To Say /"I have eaten the plums")! I hardly believed they were "poems" at all coming as I was from an enthusiastically consumed diet of DH Lawrence & the school syllabus of Chaucer, Shakespeare,R. Browning et al! I remember discussing the poems with you --it seemed like the simplest sentences had been rearranged vertically and called poems! We were shocked, amused, delighted by the simplicity. I tried my own hand at the style --wrote 20 or 30 in a day-- they werent any good but at least the cat was out of the bag...
In Southampton I looked for WCW at the Civic Centre Library but could only find Charles Williams. Had I not been exposed to WCW, Charles wouldnt have seemed a dud, and it wasnt until the late 1980s that I read him again (in the context of the Arthurian mythos & the Inklings I was happilly researching for myself & to stock at the Shop). But you came home one night from work with WCW's Kora, Or a Season in Hell, snaffled at Gilbert's, the best bookshop (new & secondhand) in town. Later you brought home Paterson , in the Macgibbon & Kee edition, which you must have ordered specially. Paterson, of course, carried dedications & material for Allen Ginsberg whom we'd read in the Penguin Modern Poets series, in the volume with Corso & Ferlinghetti. In retrospect, what a marvellous period of literary discovery, characterized by the displacement by the new Americans of the British & European (mostly French) writing we'd thrived on previously. Important to state here that the Beats were slotting into the place made by the following American writers (I quote from the lists I have from 1965-66) : Faulkner, Saroyan (read as early as 1963),Baldwin, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Hemingway... That time's crucial academic critics for me were Ihab Hassan & Leslie Fiedler, and foremost of the new commentators was Norman Mailer following on from the great trailblazer Henry Miller...
The hunt for Kerouac & the Beats resumed in Melbourne after emigration in 1966. My Alladin's cave was Franklin's, the secondhander in Russell Street on the edge of Chinatown. Maggie Cassidy , The Subterraneans, Protest (the anthology juxtaposing the Beats & the Angry Young Men, to the former's obvious advantage one must say), The Village Voice Reader, all came my way in quick succession. The fuller context included Randall Jarrell, Bellow, JD Salinger... I bought Desolation Angels from the South Yarra bookshop in Toorak Road, around the corner from where I was living in Park Street (Lorin Ford's dad's boarding house as fate would have it --and that's a whole other story). There it was, the Andre Deutsch, British first-edition, in its silver dust-jacket, in the bookshop window, waiting for me! The baby of a girl-friend wet on it one day, soaking the front-cover & ruining the end-papers. Although aghast I had to accept it as a Beat annointment!
*
Thinking about Morley on the trio's mountain climb... Initially I accepted that the none too subtle foil he plays to his Zen-lunatic pals was all that he was, in every way the straight man. But,in retrospect, Morely actually survives the figure of irritating buffoon drawn by Kerouac, perceived by Ray. It took courage, after all, to climb the mountain by himself (a kind of punishment for his dereliction with the crank-shaft and the earlier problem with the sleeping-bag) --he accomplishes it with a humour that's somehow older & zanier than either Ray or Japhy. He isnt anxious about not climbing the summit, happy to lie on his back at the penultimate stage, content within himself. there's a nobility about him...
I wonder what you make of theBuddhism in TDB? Can you remember your impression years ago and how does it strike you now?
Love, Kris
26th August,2006
Weymouth
Dear Kris, Absolutely ages since I've written. I don't want that to be my constant plaint tho'. Or that I've been diverted --but I have-- Dad's illness having galloped on somewhat. He has leukaemia now and I don't think he knows. He told me his MDS had transformed to anaemia, the consultant informed him. But I think he misheard due to his deafness, and what the consultant actually said was leukaemia. Well, this is the Great Matter, Life & Death, that we are all involved in, which leads one to Zen --"trying to do something about 'me'!" Zen is the step one takes after psychiatry & psychology have failed according to Roshi Jiyu Kennett.
Dogen : "The most important question for all Buddhists is how to understand birth and death completely for then, should you be able to find the Buddha within birth and death, they both vanish."
Buddhism and Zen is what drew me to Kerouac. I don't think it was as early as you. First of all I bought and read Zen Flesh, Zen Bones --the Paul Reps compilation. I would quote 'stories' to everyone from it, circa 1970 --I don't have your memory for events and don't have voluminous diaries either. But about this time I was aware that something different was afoot. Different to our Western, Christian society (helped along by Jung and Hesse). My first reading of TDB would be after that. As to whether I was aware of Kerouac in the late Sixties --I don't think so. I was 20 in 1968, when I left home, and I'm sure I didn't know Kerouac then. I missed an opportunity, in 1969, to run the poetry section in a bookshop near Winchester Cathedral. Maybe if I had I'd've run into him. It seems to me that when I went to Buddhist Summer School in 1971 for a few days with my friend John, on the invitation of Patti Ellwood, his mother, I think I was aware of Kerouac. It was here I bought one of the volumes of R.H. Blythe's Haiku. I wish I'd bought the set.
I don't know what sort of meditation I was doing at the Buddhist Summer School. I just sat on cushion. Most people sat on chairs. And I don't remember the incident you've retold me of how I was still sitting on my cushion when everyone else had gone and the monk told me I could "go now"... I do remember the bell resounding, on and on, for an eternity. Then nothing. Blissed out maybe.
I follow Soto school of Zen now. That was my inclination since the mid-70s. Shikantaza = just sitting. I don't know what Japhy was doing when he sat and meditated with his eyes open, which was a revelation to Smith -- "and Japhy sat down in full lotus posture cross-legged on a rock and took out his wooden juju prayerbeads and prayed.' That is, he simply held the beads in his hands, the hands upsidedown with thumbs touching, and stared straight ahead and didn't move a bone. I sat down as best I could on another rock and we both said nothing and meditated. Only I meditated with my eyes closed." (TDB, p53.)
Hey, it's just gone five p.m. --time for my meditation/zazen. I've resumed my practice. Things are always changing. Nothing stays the same. I sit on chair now. Years on my little black cushion have ruined my left hip. But I'm just so pleased to be sitting again. Important thing is to be upright. Sitting on zafu is such a lovely feeling tho'! Not that "lovely feelings" are the point of course. Japhy obviously a young yogi to be able to manage full-lotus. I used to sit Burmese posture -- simply sitting with one leg in front of other, which I feel is no small feat in itself for me. Maybe if I can overcome hip problem through yoga I'll sit on cushion again one day. But who cares? Sitting up, lying down --do the best you can.
Love, Bernard
---------------------------------------------------
[posted 11 April '06] to be continued
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