[27-3-16](At Weymouth Library, 29th March, transcribing from flight notebook)
In which Billy Boo attempts to read the map as described in ornate Thai characters, ditto the travel times & distances, in the second or two before the screen switches to English. "Local Time at Melbourne 3-27 -- Local Time at Bangkok 11-27". Fair enough. He's already in credit : invited to move out of tight fit threesome to the aisle of a comfortable two. Boo thinks it's because he returned clasped hands greeting with hostesses on the ramp and they misheard his Lao 'sabaidee' for Thai 'sawasdee'. He's belted in, tentatively stretches leg beneath forward seat, glances through the porthole at the cloud plain topped by blue, --imagines lick of first G&T assuredly on its way! As the share passenger's snoring establishes its rhythm, Billy remembers his friends, living & dead, either way not here. The cloud clears, beautiful tracts of land thousands of feet below where Christy is, actually happy down there, stone cottage like Ulli & Celia's place in North Wales, '72, similar embellishments, the attic skylight for example, --Nick Johnson's place in Wiltshire, 90s pied a terre, --& the Abbot in attic heaven, nearer to yoga god than any other, no face, no name, though so many statues in his hermitage one suspects he's not yet run through the argument about idolatry! One of the old crew not yet invoked is Ed. Happens each time Billy flies. Ghost is same kind of disembodiment as flying. Forget about angels, Ed wasnt one. I'll give them turbulence, he swears behind conspiratorial hand as though the weather wore jackboots.....
*
Ed has the flight crew from captain to waiters in mind, not really the elements. All the way to deity via earlier English & later Russian divines, manifestations of magnitude. Ed spittin about pretenders, pretence of authority, supercilious from tie to socks, --purple uniform ultimate slight. Ah, Ed! Ed, mate! how goes it in ghost's Yorkshire heaven? Not there yet, he says, I'm in Purgatory writing poems, sans guide, following my own beaky nose. Hah! Ed, Ed, Ed. Tutoring me yet from beyond the grave, thinks Billy Boo.
*
At Bangkok airport Boo realized that following a straight line got you absolutely nowhere, may as well have been walking in circles. So then he walked around in circles, gauging the world, the non-stop airport world, more 'international' than when first coined (--Inge's daughters crooning 'international' over "Miami Vice", late 80s, --B B 's return to Europe after 12 years exile). Seems to him the Chinese had become the new Americans and everyone else from everywhere else in no way lesser. Each elsewhere a somewhere, similarly worldly-wise, ticket to prove it, legitimate travellers, commuters, no longer exotics of any empire.
But what about Christy, and how come he's let off so easily? Mebbe Billy thinks the boyo might bat him one! (What did Peter Finch say of him once, slightly misapprehending the relation of source to poem?-- "if these are Christy's dreams he must have a head like granite!")
[NOTE :
Re- Ulli & Celia's place, in N Wales, '72 ; from Poem of the Clear Eye
(....)
there is a strangeness surrounds
which our thickest wall cannot evict
(for talisman take anything you find
a coloured slate a star from the constellation
which fills the skylight the vault of Caernarvon)
the foul smell from the town still gets to my nostrils --
Panzer fetch paper! go to
Gethsemane i rise up &
fall down i run till my side aches
i will return to the smoke only to bang the
beafeaters dead in their beds! in my boots
will make mincemeat of
rumours & subterfuge.(...)
(pp34/35; 1972/3; UK & Oz)
[In my poem, Ulli has two dogs, Panzer & Perfidy... The scenario is remembered/invented from the visit to Ulli & Celia for the Bangor Poetry Fest or the poetry event Ulli arranged at the Bangor Arts Fest back in '71 or '72... I believe that Jeremy Hilton drove me from Southampton... ah, Snowdonia…]
*
Daily round : walk from Goldy, down road, left at Pottery Lane (note to self : research derivation), through the small housing estate, cross highway at safety island to Radipole Lake foot & cycle path, past the blackberries ringing the lake six months ahead of bloom & harvest, up onto the bridge & into town... Library, Black Dog, pint!
Ed would approve : get a table, snap notebook or loose page onto it, “let’s get it over then!” through gritted teeth, lank hair & lengthening beard the frame for most ambivalent of propositions, --the argument concerning literature, thus “the literary bit”, not so much the sharing of poems but potential for such inflation as snatches poet from universe to be dropped into egotistical slurry (Ed’s favourite quote, Akhmatova’s rooster crowing upon shit-heap) --the “literary”, --snort into handkerchief, begin reading poem, over soon as began, --charmed by his accent & intonations, Bunting-ish but faster, Les Murray-ish too in that dont-take-it-too-seriously / throw-off style --not a style, an attitude --no audience but comrade t’other side of the low table, slosh of pints around & about, raucous fandango, infinitely preferable to bourgeois shush (--when you think of it, the poem cuts through the noise of the world, like sudden silence, the awareness of silence as the world’s hurtle’s suddenly brought to sudden screeching stop)...
Ask: Has my brother been in today? We were in the other day, he had a tomato juice... No, she says, dont think so... The Abbot & bro --two Abbots! --like Jack & Warnie, the Louises, or James & Stanislaus with whom BB once caned his younger for perceived deficit in fraternal support, but what would a teenager know... and too much water under bridge now...
*
All change. Traditional bar's gone. The regulars also unless sculking in the WASHROOM (white lettering on pale green board). The lacquered black of counter, tables, chairs has been replaced by grey & green throughout! What is this snack-bar, b& b, holiday-camp, light & bright in aid of?
We've only been gone a year --perhaps longer because didnt we go to the Swan (the Abbot & bro) around the corner from St Nicholas's Church last time? I'll lay bets no change there.
Ringwood Breweries' Boon Doggle's the strongest, 4.2... Innocents must understand we're on about the taste, which means a quality that tests the palate, resists it --on a continuum, then, with Frank Prince's teaching about same, --Robert Bridges, he said, ho-hum poetry aside, well worth my while to consider his thoughts on poetics... The point about form, Frank says, is that it stops one going on & on aimlessly... it resists that natural laziness, licentiousness etc...
[Ilchester Arms, Abbotsbury, 7th April, '16]
*
[April 22, '16]
It was great meeting up with John Phillips in St Ives a few days ago... went around to his place with Kelvin Bowers my old amigo from the £10 assisted passage on the Fairsky to Melbourne, FIFTY YEARS AGO on the 26 April, '66 !!! It's due to chance meeting on the coastal path between John & Kel that I've once more caught up with Kelvin, outa sight since '03. In the conversation with John, several mutual friends featured including Clive Faust & David Miller... Nice listening to John & Kel discussing the St Ives painters up on the wall including Mathew Lanyon --the fathers & sons conversation, apropos of which the catalogue of the Karl Weschke show, on in London presently, which Lucas Weschke had given me in Weymouth, also spiced the chat. If only I was in St Ives on May 16th as well for the poetry festival when John gives a reading!
*
[April 25, '16] ·
(Re- Jenni Kerr's Facebook post of actors celebrating Shakespeare anniversary, particularly HRH who finished it beautifully!) Great meeting again y'day with David Caddy at The Dolphin, Blandford Forum, our very own local... ordered our pint and our shiraz, and got the ball rolling saying : "Apart from what's in the latest issue of Tears In The Fence, if I asked you "what's the news?" what would you answer?" David hardly considered the question --well, he said, SHAKESPEARE, the 400th anniversary of course! And so we drank to him, Shakespeare all the way...
*
Karl Weschke’s View of Kenydjack (1962; reproduced in the Tate book of the St Ives scene, 1939-64) utterly different to the Sunday painting seen at the Penwith gallery of which the probably accurate sketching is vacant compared with KW’s monolithised brown tiered landscape, so deep & occupied. Could say ‘preoccupied’ but substantial or dense oughtnt imply brooding, since for all the ‘psychological’, ‘expressionist’, ‘existential’ persona there is always painting’s natural presence and nature always present as matter & sentiment...
[St Ives, Kel & Dooze’s house, 18 April, 16]
*
Every time (how many times?) the bus swings around Portesham through to Abbotsbury & beyond (today Bridport again), see St Catherine’s Chapel on the hill. And in Abbotsbury, out the bus window, there it is leftwards over & between the houses, farms. And leaving Abbotsbury, the chapel behind one on its mount, sheep in the green fields like a canopy beneath. And startlingly distinct, on top, along slow hill climb, Chessil & the Channel over the leftside rolls of green (their rolls eventually into the sea).
What is ‘familiarity’? --the first blessing of repetition one presumes, no story but imperceptibly the rise of feeling, full swell of which is Poem, Song, this Painting...
[21 April, ‘16; Weymouth to Bridport, Dorset]
*
English Journey, ‘16 [from the diary]
Friday 22/4/16
9-05 am. (late) Weymouth --> Yeovil -->Glastonbury
Hurrying up Goldcroft aggravated the leg/thigh strain. Hopefully walk it out. Shld have applied some Deep Heat beforehand.
Rain, not heavy but from drizzle to light. If raining i wont attempt to climb the Tor.
The Classes : Passenger / “My daughter’s studying in Glasgow; when she comes down to Durdle Door it soothes her spirit...”
Driver / “Oh yeah; well anywhere’s better than Blackpool heh heh heh...”
Passenger / “You drive so well; I admire your instincts!”
Driver / “I drove lorries before, buses are much smaller. Driving 800 miles up & back soon teaches you how to drive... A spot of rain, though, and the whole road comes to a stop...”
Thinking of Paul Blackburn -- mentioned him to B. last night, how I’ve picked up his poems each visit to Goldcroft over the years. There’s a Blackburn poem for Pete Spence in the Buckmaster section of my forthcoming book. P B’s the kind of American I have in mind re- intractably American & not easily ‘Anglo-American’ or ‘British/American’ as I wrote to Colin Still last night. Were we American poets after all? i asked B some months ago, phone from Melbourne, repeated in email to Colin. He tells me about all the docos he’s made on the American poets (wch he’s offered to send me). I say that my forthcoming book of poems is partly ‘Neo-Georgian’, partly ‘New American Poetry’!
--> Yeovil... Heavier rain. Great countryside. Stone houses stretches of wall fields & meadows...
Stratton
Crewkerne
Rich country -- fallow, ploughed, strips of woods, dividing stands, --the rain enhances the lushness -- Wonderful expanse of undulating ploughed fields -- Motorway runs between these huge sails, wings, of land -- Somerset’s version of Big Country --
Beautiful dip in the landscape, --trees, fields, cows --
After earlier wet am dry again in the coach -- thank goodness for modern technology! --
Woods then village, car-sales...
Lakegate lane
Yeovil -->
Showing posts with label Paul Blackburn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Blackburn. Show all posts
Friday, May 6, 2016
Sunday, July 6, 2014
AGAINST OBLIVION : POSTS SAVED FROM F/Book, April-June, '14
June 28, '14
Great to read this blog, Bernard [B. Hemensley's blog]... Life of books, important relationships through such books... The synchronicity of the Blackburn-owned Eigner in the copy of Clouding... My feeling always to make the most of these conjunctions... Rereading your Birds [Towards a Classification of Birds, Stingy Artist, '14]book ive been thinking again of the nado / (Beltrametti) nadamas connection, luxuriating in the 'field' thus opening up to the reading... Each week Denis Smith selects a card from the box of Nat Portrait Gallery cards on the desk, as he says his 'occult method', ie, blind, and i'm sure it's another sign of his openness to the whole world appreciated as gift! But, returning to yr posting, enjoyed looking at your snaps of those Eigner covers, priceless in every sense!
Your snaps of the Eigner & the Blackburn from those 60s70s times are a reminder of the extent to which the little mags defined poetry's parameters for many of us --the production of the books & mags, the ambition for the poem itself, the world that such involvement in the 'new' & 'experimental' writing enabled... And it is an important question to ask of oneself as well as of the succeeding times, "what happened?" How did we change? How did the poetry scene change? How did life change? It does depend on ourselves, enthusiasts, to advocate for our poets, especially after their time. Life as a continuing im memorium, poetry as a continuous rereading (riff, elegy, celebration)... In which regard, i copy this passage from David Caddy 's recent review of the latest issue of the Long Poem Magazine (#11, 2014), --"Issue 11 is no exception to the usual high standard. Robert Vas Dias’ essay on Paul Blackburn’s The Journals (1975) is a wonderfully written personal and critical introduction to the subject. It is highly informative, providing a contextualised reading of a neglected, major American poet. By the way, Simon Smith is editing a Paul Blackburn Reader for publication by Shearsman in 2015, which will include hitherto unpublished material from the Blackburn archive at San Diego." --We've recently, indeed often, spoken about the dropping out of the conversation of so many poets we've regarded as major --fashion as instrument of oblivion --Paul Blackburn for one. So it's great to be given the opportunity to think about P B again via yr lovely note and to anticipate both Vas Dias' & Simon Smith's re-views! (I still have Robert V-D issue of Sixpack devoted to Blackburn, when was it, London '75? --just after the Cambridge Fest, his party for Jackson MacLow in Hampstead wch John Robinson & i attended... another great story!)
oOo
May 17th, '14
How's this for a synchronous series : from K H 's Journal, 13-5-14
Does anyone remark a connection between Howard Skempton's piano pieces and Herbert Howells' clavichord compositions (played by John McCabe, Helios, '93)[present from Alan Pose]? Or is it simply the English miniature tradition?
Shared this question with Paul (Georgie Fame, Mose Allison etc fan)-- he's brought in for me a 2011 disc of Robert Wyatt… Coincidentally, the other Paul (Harper) has 'burnt' me a copy of Zoot Sims' Baden Baden concert (June 23, 1958) --Paul first heard ZS playing in the Shop… and because of affinity i felt between his poems (PH's) & what i remember of Kenward Elmslie, and after John Tranter had spoken to me about Elmslie this morning (for instance, wonderful reading he gave in Sydney a few years ago), i suggested Elmslie to Paul who's looking for new reading matter --He bought City Junket & also Clark Coolidge on Kerouac & jazz, Now It's Jazz --Paul's poems & methods do also remind me of Coolidge….
oOo
April 20th, '14
Thank you Denis... ASYMPTOTE [on-line ; www.asymptotejournal.com/] always interesting. Permit me to sidetrack on its theme of diaspora. When i began regular home trips back to England in '87 it occurred to me one morning at the Dorset Brewers in Hope Square, Weymouth, as i looked at the postcards & photos behind the bar, that a fundamental dynamic of that little seaside town cld be summarized 'those who stay and those who go away'. Those who stay remember those who went away, and the latter think of home & intermittently return. It's the foundational equation. 'Diaspora' has become a loose ascription due to overuse. Many people & peoples in the world have had to leave their homes. As an expat ive experienced all emotions from anguish to nostalgia, and i'm a voluntary exile. Diaspora = post-colonialism's looking glass. When i was responding to Geraldine Monk's commission for her CUSP anthology, it was a shock to realize how long i'd lived in Melbourne and how warmly i felt towards it. In a way i was part of it, yet only accidentally... Darzet isnt my Darzet no matter what the song says! Southampton was more so because i grew up there. But Melbourne isnt mine either. And postmodernism's 'no home' isnt a salve at all. Circa 1972, I accepted totally Bolinas poet John Thorpe's proposition that Romanticism's Stranger was not the figure for our time & condition. Yet i struggle to be 'here' unconditionally, privileging particular (other) place(s) in the world... And so it goes, on & on!
oOo
April 6th, '14
Regarding :
Thank you Geraldine Monk... Brilliant! When i was growing up in Thornhill/Southampton there was definitely a Southampton accent wch itself differed from the County accent (both posh & broad). Years passed and then the great population 'spill' out of London enveloped Southampton, so much so that the 'original' local sound was more or less lost to it. I'm very happy (aappy i mean) that the family moved to Darzet in the mid '80s, and though that accent is probably being affected by looser Londonese it's West Country, innit? sufficiently, at least for my arrs to feel returned to childhood's home. We probably have an Aussie Andrew Jack to perform similar trick here, to demonstrate the differences between the various Australian states. But that doesnt account for the non-Anglo speakers whose English language is affected by their own original or family influenced accents. Nor indigenous people's distinctive English speaking. Thanks for ringing my ears!
Great to read this blog, Bernard [B. Hemensley's blog]... Life of books, important relationships through such books... The synchronicity of the Blackburn-owned Eigner in the copy of Clouding... My feeling always to make the most of these conjunctions... Rereading your Birds [Towards a Classification of Birds, Stingy Artist, '14]book ive been thinking again of the nado / (Beltrametti) nadamas connection, luxuriating in the 'field' thus opening up to the reading... Each week Denis Smith selects a card from the box of Nat Portrait Gallery cards on the desk, as he says his 'occult method', ie, blind, and i'm sure it's another sign of his openness to the whole world appreciated as gift! But, returning to yr posting, enjoyed looking at your snaps of those Eigner covers, priceless in every sense!
Your snaps of the Eigner & the Blackburn from those 60s70s times are a reminder of the extent to which the little mags defined poetry's parameters for many of us --the production of the books & mags, the ambition for the poem itself, the world that such involvement in the 'new' & 'experimental' writing enabled... And it is an important question to ask of oneself as well as of the succeeding times, "what happened?" How did we change? How did the poetry scene change? How did life change? It does depend on ourselves, enthusiasts, to advocate for our poets, especially after their time. Life as a continuing im memorium, poetry as a continuous rereading (riff, elegy, celebration)... In which regard, i copy this passage from David Caddy 's recent review of the latest issue of the Long Poem Magazine (#11, 2014), --"Issue 11 is no exception to the usual high standard. Robert Vas Dias’ essay on Paul Blackburn’s The Journals (1975) is a wonderfully written personal and critical introduction to the subject. It is highly informative, providing a contextualised reading of a neglected, major American poet. By the way, Simon Smith is editing a Paul Blackburn Reader for publication by Shearsman in 2015, which will include hitherto unpublished material from the Blackburn archive at San Diego." --We've recently, indeed often, spoken about the dropping out of the conversation of so many poets we've regarded as major --fashion as instrument of oblivion --Paul Blackburn for one. So it's great to be given the opportunity to think about P B again via yr lovely note and to anticipate both Vas Dias' & Simon Smith's re-views! (I still have Robert V-D issue of Sixpack devoted to Blackburn, when was it, London '75? --just after the Cambridge Fest, his party for Jackson MacLow in Hampstead wch John Robinson & i attended... another great story!)
oOo
May 17th, '14
How's this for a synchronous series : from K H 's Journal, 13-5-14
Does anyone remark a connection between Howard Skempton's piano pieces and Herbert Howells' clavichord compositions (played by John McCabe, Helios, '93)[present from Alan Pose]? Or is it simply the English miniature tradition?
Shared this question with Paul (Georgie Fame, Mose Allison etc fan)-- he's brought in for me a 2011 disc of Robert Wyatt… Coincidentally, the other Paul (Harper) has 'burnt' me a copy of Zoot Sims' Baden Baden concert (June 23, 1958) --Paul first heard ZS playing in the Shop… and because of affinity i felt between his poems (PH's) & what i remember of Kenward Elmslie, and after John Tranter had spoken to me about Elmslie this morning (for instance, wonderful reading he gave in Sydney a few years ago), i suggested Elmslie to Paul who's looking for new reading matter --He bought City Junket & also Clark Coolidge on Kerouac & jazz, Now It's Jazz --Paul's poems & methods do also remind me of Coolidge….
oOo
April 20th, '14
Thank you Denis... ASYMPTOTE [on-line ; www.asymptotejournal.com/] always interesting. Permit me to sidetrack on its theme of diaspora. When i began regular home trips back to England in '87 it occurred to me one morning at the Dorset Brewers in Hope Square, Weymouth, as i looked at the postcards & photos behind the bar, that a fundamental dynamic of that little seaside town cld be summarized 'those who stay and those who go away'. Those who stay remember those who went away, and the latter think of home & intermittently return. It's the foundational equation. 'Diaspora' has become a loose ascription due to overuse. Many people & peoples in the world have had to leave their homes. As an expat ive experienced all emotions from anguish to nostalgia, and i'm a voluntary exile. Diaspora = post-colonialism's looking glass. When i was responding to Geraldine Monk's commission for her CUSP anthology, it was a shock to realize how long i'd lived in Melbourne and how warmly i felt towards it. In a way i was part of it, yet only accidentally... Darzet isnt my Darzet no matter what the song says! Southampton was more so because i grew up there. But Melbourne isnt mine either. And postmodernism's 'no home' isnt a salve at all. Circa 1972, I accepted totally Bolinas poet John Thorpe's proposition that Romanticism's Stranger was not the figure for our time & condition. Yet i struggle to be 'here' unconditionally, privileging particular (other) place(s) in the world... And so it goes, on & on!
oOo
April 6th, '14
Regarding :
Thank you Geraldine Monk... Brilliant! When i was growing up in Thornhill/Southampton there was definitely a Southampton accent wch itself differed from the County accent (both posh & broad). Years passed and then the great population 'spill' out of London enveloped Southampton, so much so that the 'original' local sound was more or less lost to it. I'm very happy (aappy i mean) that the family moved to Darzet in the mid '80s, and though that accent is probably being affected by looser Londonese it's West Country, innit? sufficiently, at least for my arrs to feel returned to childhood's home. We probably have an Aussie Andrew Jack to perform similar trick here, to demonstrate the differences between the various Australian states. But that doesnt account for the non-Anglo speakers whose English language is affected by their own original or family influenced accents. Nor indigenous people's distinctive English speaking. Thanks for ringing my ears!
Saturday, April 5, 2014
IN FAVOUR OF MELINDA BUFTON, PAUL BLACKBURN, & JOHN MATEER
MICHAEL FARRELL
Launch-speech for GIRLERY by Melinda Bufton (Inken Publisch, 2014), at Collected Works Bookshop, March 1st, 2014
First, some thanks. I’m not even sure who I owe thanks to, but definitely to Ann Vickery for feedback, and to Melbourne poetry editors Gig Ryan, Jessica Wilkinson and Pete Spence for publishing some of the poems, and of course Greg Taylor the book. And maybe Duncan Hose as an example of Boyery. But mostly I – we – have to thank Melinda Bufton for being the person who can write poems like this. Free verse isn’t a waste of time. I already knew that really, but Girlery’s a reminder. It’s a fresh book: 2 parts Tyra Banks and 3 parts country girl. The first poem ‘Goddesses, the Bomb’ is a declaration that the poems will be as literary as fuck, but they won’t groan about their own weight. Hooray! [Optional signing of punctuation with your finger.] Bufton’s lines are like planks that shift about a treehouse, like you’re playing an electronic xylophone with your feet-eyes. You can tell why she’s had so many office jobs too: she makes it sexy. ‘Lessons learned’ manages to be light-hearted and feminist while integrating an under-emphasised activity of country life: a lot of TV. Pop stars seem to already have everything, but ‘Lapel’ shows us the work involved, the subversive-sounding complexities of online shopping, perhaps suggesting that the Marc Jacobs dress was rescued from the store. Clothing is a medium for Bufton, the way feminism or cricket is for other poets: it is its own romance. The voices can be something like a fairy godmother entering with her lines of advice but who then starts talking about her own life while nudging the princess bassinet away with her foot. And really, princesses have had enough attention. There’s something like Frank O’Hara in Melinda’s vignettes of a Girl-about-town – like Colette out of bed – and the way she can get out of a poem like the narrator getting out of the lift in ‘Like a fingerprint’, part good-humoured don’t-need-a-man-today, part Warholian blank intrigue. The variably light tone allows for throwaway brilliance in verb and adjective, such as alice (a verb) and carethrift (an adjective) in ‘Pincushion’. Girlery abjures earnest diction, while showing how deft the playful can be: ‘Bunnies of yore my gate to the wallop’, from the church of WTF, or the devastating ‘Sonnety’, for example, which not only does the sonnet but puts it in its place, both by giving it a one-word volte (‘divot’), and concluding with a summary that’s a meta-psychological-ethical complex. A question for reviewers is how a daggy version of punk comes off as stylish? The answer’s here as plain as Paris, however: study and practice (and did I mention ‘tuneliness’?) Letter cases go up and down like heels or collars coming off, just to check your attention. Bufton knows that work can be dreary and tiring, but – and perhaps there’s a fallacy that names this – the poems don’t have to be. You can call it Romanticism, putting a nice edging on your view of the world and its working dairy, or you can call it synecdoche, citing the sweetspot that makes life worth living. A quote from ‘Bumper book for girls’:
Never mind whose territory. We had all reason to
shudder when seeing texts flung about, aimed by the
lipless to pelt us on fishnet hip, or worse,
in the soul. Look here my satin-doubters
I have never looked better than this costume
allows, there is no evidence it kills my healthy sponge
brain cells. I read theory faster in heels.
Australian poetry can risk being a bit more chick literate, ie Girlery is for boys too: a unique book in the Victorian Grain, I give you Melinda Bufton and Girlery, the bomb. [Exit as you will]
*
[Michael Farrell sent his text from Rome; it was read for him in Melbourne by Fiona Hile.]
oOo
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
[uploaded from the Alive and Well and Living in Dorset blog, stingyartistindorset.blogspot.com/]
Saturday, 10 March 2012
A DORSET TROUBADOUR WOULD SING OF PAUL BLACKBURN
Written IN Weymouth & environs - ON buses or ON coffee-house tables - ON my laptop, IN a notebook, or ON my lap - here, there & in various PREMISES - but essentially @ home @ Golden GOJI Hermitage, drinking IN & out of poetry - ingesting this or that - and THAT is what drew me to Paul Blackburn many moons ago = ALE HOUSE POEMS, BAKERY POEMS, THE PROVENCAL TROUBADOUR POETS.....earthiness & classicism. BUT what does this Great Fool, w/out a passport to his name, know of such a wor(l)d ? Albeit that his mother came from Alexandria, and gestated sons who loved books and great libraries !
#1) My brother in Oz, prodded me to write about P.B., following my quirky, previous blog-post on here, which referred to Paul Blackburn. i dismissed the idea w/out even considering that i write anything = just not up to such things (?)....less than 24 hours later, i found myself working, as if on benzedrine, on this essay/blog-post. And it is work. And it is a practice...s'thing i had never accepted 100%, as i had the practice of zazen. Just sitting, was all that mattered = SHIKANTAZA = the practice of DOGEN. Katagiri Roshi's remark to Nathalie Goldberg, that WRITING should be her LIFE-PRACTICE, never quite accorded. After-all, for Dogen, ZAZEN WAS BUDDHISM. Likewise, when Franco Beltrametti told me in the 80's, that he practiced WALKING MEDITATION, i thought - not the real thing. i had not matured by a mile. Slowly, more teachings percolated into the mind of this great fool. THICH NHAT HANH talked of WASHING-UP MEDITATION.....life itself is the great practice, life and death, THE GREAT MATTER.
#2) Could not, for the life-of-me, find Paul Blackburn's books when i wanted'em. Searched the library in vain. Then, sidetracked by rearranging some BLACK SPARROWs in studio/conservatory, i find "THE JOURNALS" under my hand & gaze. i flick thru, happy to have found s'thing. i knew Blackburn had died "young" - but OH! - only 45! (1926-1971) and realised, in that moment, that when i first read him, he was already dead. Robert Kelly writes, as editor of this book - "The last writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September, 1971."
What i "liked" about Paul Blackburn was the "open form" and his ease with contemporary NEW YORK city & translating from the Spanish eg. LORCA. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship...etc...To quote Robert Kelly, once more - "In New York which was most his home and center, he could find the sunlight on a wall not different from Barcelona."
#3) It has been so long now, since my readings of the 70's that, as i sit in "COSTA COFFEE",(decaff.espresso & soya milk), with "THE CITIES" before me & to hand, it strikes me, that these poems are "new"/still fresh. @ 45, Blackburn was still "young enough" to have gone on and worked & practiced, for many, many years. i think of Bob Dylan's refrain = "may we be forever young"...but not in this way, to not have gone on...And there are many...THE POETS OF THE GREAT WAR, JIM MORRISON, HEATH LEDGER...and in "our" family, TIM HEMENSLEY (of the POWDER MONKEYS) - i blub into my coffee. No one notices.
#4) "THE CITIES", (Blackburn's "first, extensive collection of verse" -(Grove Press - 1967)) the Author's Note reads - "Every man's stand be his own. Finally, it is a construct, out of my own isolations, eyes, ears, nose and breath.." ....i hear an echo of CHARLES OLSON in that ="No such thing as mass, as much as, many people, each with eyes in their heads, to be looked out of." Do i misquote ? That is what i have as my memory of it. i do not want to rise from my place and search it out...do not even really know where to look...Human Universe essay ? Do not wish to interrupt this flowing of "mountains walking"...?....? BUT, maybe i will...SUDDENLY, i feel i have written enough in this first draft/ this blog-post...appropriately, it is young/ still fresh...ready to be played with in this warm and early spring of ours in Weymouth, where the cherry blossom, out front, has passed full-bloom, and is falling to the ground, even as i write.....i will wait, stay my hand, and WAIT and see if it PROVES, like the bread-dough in tins, waiting for the heat of the oven.....i will soon make my way into the world - to find some fresh, young heirs (pun intended)...."The air sweeps out the odor of love from rooms / the air we love, we weep, we read, sing.."(from "The First Round", Paul Blackburn - AGAINST THE SILENCES - Permanent Press - 1980).
#5) I'm going to THE KING'S ARMS on the harbour. Not a drinker as such - i like a good taste - a good taste of real ale, home-baked bread and poetry....a half-pint will do me. & a packet of s'thing salty....just a half-pint to keep me hand in!!....How else to encounter the world ?/ this world. It is the friction / our continually rubbing-up against / this buffering away, that will reveal the new in which we are moment by moment, breath by breath, being reborn...and it is in this, that those who are no longer visible are held in our hearts. This is all we have and it is the whole created world. It is enough....
*
[finished @ 17.30 hours,10 / march / 2012.]
Kris Hemensley's COMMENT
(collectedworks10 March 2012 18:06)
Evidently youll be continuing from yr favourite spot in the Kings Arms, perhaps the higher bar, looking out onto the Old Harbour... So,you have your Blackburn in place, you have him as poet of 'being-in-place' rather than the distinctions of any particular place? Or it seems i might, which is ironic given the inventory, the wardrobe he sits up in, peers out of! Similar search as you (where are my Blackburns?!) find first of all his poem in Allen de Loach's INTREPID magazine, #18/19 , '71, one poem's kind of ho-hum (Windsound), mere sketch, the other's HUMMM-HO, justifying the triumphant claim "All of it sung." Last line, is psycho-topography, genealogical geography, the roll-call of his place that whiskey'd moment, glass in hand saluting Olson, Julio (is that Cortazar?), Ginsberg, Snyder, and most of all Pound --memorable snapshot, "Ez's eye fixes the machine from under his neat / Alpine hat, the clean raincoat . fierce & friendly to / the mustache bristle, beard-jut, but the eye questions / the other end of this gondola, where do the steps lead? / The oarsman ferries him across to / wrap a death with windows...." etc. Second thing i find is Pierre Joris's excellent Blackburn issue of Sixpack, (Spring/Summer, '74), indispensable really, i bet you have it under a mountain of health mags! --wch has in it this contra note, from Barry Alpert (edited the splendid Vort in that era, and who popped up on F/book recently!), whose comment puts in a nutshell not only Blackburn's situation but a larger gauging of poems/poetry... For, despite PB's obvious relish in Lorca's idea of duende, 'the straight fight with the creator on the edge of the well' (Alpert's source dramatically clearer than P's paraphrase) --& despite one knows that's the whole point of the daily witness poem, --yet in Blackburn acc. to Alpert, "most of his published poems uphold his self-abnegating conception of himself as street poet, bar room poet, occasional poet..." That is to say, the huge risk of so-what/ery in that type of stance (i joked in my classes 40+ years ago, "I came, i saw, i wrote a poem!"), the loss of distinction or the memorable in the apparently ancient Chinese humble happenstance. Very good to read you here! Cheers bro! As Blackburn has it in that instructive poem for (& against?) Ed Dorn, Pre-Lenten Gestures,"Thank God one tone or / one set of decibels is / not all there is."
oOo
KRIS HEMENSLEY
INTRODUCING JOHN MATEER; Notes, March 25th, 2014
Welcome to Collected Works Bookshop for this reading by John Mateer.
I have a few copies of Emptiness : Asian poems, 1998-2012, just published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and some of the previously published but still recent Unbelievers or 'The Moor', from Giramondo. So, although this isnt a formal launch, it is a celebration of John & his practically concurrent new books.
*
Yesterday was the Seminar at the university ["LIFE IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE : Taking his own work as example, poet John Mateer present an argument about the origins and strategies of his last four books – Ex-White: South African Poems, The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009, Southern Barbarians and Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ – and will read and reflect on his relationship between history, poesis, translation and self-hood. He will discuss the circumstances of Afrikaans as national language in South Africa, the problem caused by Aboriginal language or its absense for a grounded poetics in Australia, and the possibilities presented by reconsidering the cultural formations of East and West through imagining the colonial effects of Portugal and Spain in this part of the world. "]-- Today, here at the bookshop, it's the Reading. Not having participated in a seminar for a very long time, I'm not sure how different a poet is in the one situation from the other. I guess this evening the poetry is expected to stand up by & for itself --which I'm sure it will have every opportunity to do!
*
For introduction to the well published & travelled John Mateer, perhaps an anecdote instead of interminable CV --I don't mean John's CV is interminable but CV per se!
I remember the judging of the Victorian Premiers Prize back --when? --late '90s, early 2000s? --in the company of Doris Brett & Kevin Hart. Our deliberations had come down to a debate about the merits of collections by Bob Adamson & John Mateer amongst others --I cant remember --Tranter, Gray, Rowland, Ryan?-- all good names anyway. We'd read the books, discussed, ticked & crossed, totted up our little columns of scores on pieces of paper --crass & brutal but there it is! A competition with only one winner! The decision was made easier by the technical requirement for the majority of a collection to be "new". And so Kevin regretfully let his man, or men, slip. Adamson, Gray… At least I think so, I think that's who & what it was! I'm sure it's in my diary of the time but confess I don't quite know where that is!
In retrospect --in this possible/ retrospect --it's fair to say we found the young Mateer's poetry quite unlike anyone & anything else in that particular Premier's Prize season-- And I wonder now whether the matter of 'location' came up-- If, for instance, we were attracted by Adamson's (if it was him) --his Hawkesbury River (and perhaps the book was Juno Gemes' beautiful photo anthology, the Language of Oysters and not the Mulberry Leaves as I've been thinking? --late '90s & not early 2000s then?) --Adamson's Hawkesbury & Mateer's --what? --what & where would it have been? W A salt & wheat? A South African elsewhere? The Non-White African's elsewhere? (Tutuola's My life in the Bush of Ghosts?) Already then the awareness of John's neither here nor there --the no place or no where (which sounds like Paul Celan) --and the possible Japanese pun, the Noh where!--
Ah well --
Absence & presence
as though each other's
alias
And so, John, to quote & misquote you from a poem in your latest book, --"dear poet, close your eyes, this brothel is the only world, and we are the bhodisattvas!" -- Please welcome John Mateer...
----------------------------------------
[April 5th, 2014, Westgarth by the Sea]
Launch-speech for GIRLERY by Melinda Bufton (Inken Publisch, 2014), at Collected Works Bookshop, March 1st, 2014
First, some thanks. I’m not even sure who I owe thanks to, but definitely to Ann Vickery for feedback, and to Melbourne poetry editors Gig Ryan, Jessica Wilkinson and Pete Spence for publishing some of the poems, and of course Greg Taylor the book. And maybe Duncan Hose as an example of Boyery. But mostly I – we – have to thank Melinda Bufton for being the person who can write poems like this. Free verse isn’t a waste of time. I already knew that really, but Girlery’s a reminder. It’s a fresh book: 2 parts Tyra Banks and 3 parts country girl. The first poem ‘Goddesses, the Bomb’ is a declaration that the poems will be as literary as fuck, but they won’t groan about their own weight. Hooray! [Optional signing of punctuation with your finger.] Bufton’s lines are like planks that shift about a treehouse, like you’re playing an electronic xylophone with your feet-eyes. You can tell why she’s had so many office jobs too: she makes it sexy. ‘Lessons learned’ manages to be light-hearted and feminist while integrating an under-emphasised activity of country life: a lot of TV. Pop stars seem to already have everything, but ‘Lapel’ shows us the work involved, the subversive-sounding complexities of online shopping, perhaps suggesting that the Marc Jacobs dress was rescued from the store. Clothing is a medium for Bufton, the way feminism or cricket is for other poets: it is its own romance. The voices can be something like a fairy godmother entering with her lines of advice but who then starts talking about her own life while nudging the princess bassinet away with her foot. And really, princesses have had enough attention. There’s something like Frank O’Hara in Melinda’s vignettes of a Girl-about-town – like Colette out of bed – and the way she can get out of a poem like the narrator getting out of the lift in ‘Like a fingerprint’, part good-humoured don’t-need-a-man-today, part Warholian blank intrigue. The variably light tone allows for throwaway brilliance in verb and adjective, such as alice (a verb) and carethrift (an adjective) in ‘Pincushion’. Girlery abjures earnest diction, while showing how deft the playful can be: ‘Bunnies of yore my gate to the wallop’, from the church of WTF, or the devastating ‘Sonnety’, for example, which not only does the sonnet but puts it in its place, both by giving it a one-word volte (‘divot’), and concluding with a summary that’s a meta-psychological-ethical complex. A question for reviewers is how a daggy version of punk comes off as stylish? The answer’s here as plain as Paris, however: study and practice (and did I mention ‘tuneliness’?) Letter cases go up and down like heels or collars coming off, just to check your attention. Bufton knows that work can be dreary and tiring, but – and perhaps there’s a fallacy that names this – the poems don’t have to be. You can call it Romanticism, putting a nice edging on your view of the world and its working dairy, or you can call it synecdoche, citing the sweetspot that makes life worth living. A quote from ‘Bumper book for girls’:
Never mind whose territory. We had all reason to
shudder when seeing texts flung about, aimed by the
lipless to pelt us on fishnet hip, or worse,
in the soul. Look here my satin-doubters
I have never looked better than this costume
allows, there is no evidence it kills my healthy sponge
brain cells. I read theory faster in heels.
Australian poetry can risk being a bit more chick literate, ie Girlery is for boys too: a unique book in the Victorian Grain, I give you Melinda Bufton and Girlery, the bomb. [Exit as you will]
*
[Michael Farrell sent his text from Rome; it was read for him in Melbourne by Fiona Hile.]
oOo
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
[uploaded from the Alive and Well and Living in Dorset blog, stingyartistindorset.blogspot.com/]
Saturday, 10 March 2012
A DORSET TROUBADOUR WOULD SING OF PAUL BLACKBURN
Written IN Weymouth & environs - ON buses or ON coffee-house tables - ON my laptop, IN a notebook, or ON my lap - here, there & in various PREMISES - but essentially @ home @ Golden GOJI Hermitage, drinking IN & out of poetry - ingesting this or that - and THAT is what drew me to Paul Blackburn many moons ago = ALE HOUSE POEMS, BAKERY POEMS, THE PROVENCAL TROUBADOUR POETS.....earthiness & classicism. BUT what does this Great Fool, w/out a passport to his name, know of such a wor(l)d ? Albeit that his mother came from Alexandria, and gestated sons who loved books and great libraries !
#1) My brother in Oz, prodded me to write about P.B., following my quirky, previous blog-post on here, which referred to Paul Blackburn. i dismissed the idea w/out even considering that i write anything = just not up to such things (?)....less than 24 hours later, i found myself working, as if on benzedrine, on this essay/blog-post. And it is work. And it is a practice...s'thing i had never accepted 100%, as i had the practice of zazen. Just sitting, was all that mattered = SHIKANTAZA = the practice of DOGEN. Katagiri Roshi's remark to Nathalie Goldberg, that WRITING should be her LIFE-PRACTICE, never quite accorded. After-all, for Dogen, ZAZEN WAS BUDDHISM. Likewise, when Franco Beltrametti told me in the 80's, that he practiced WALKING MEDITATION, i thought - not the real thing. i had not matured by a mile. Slowly, more teachings percolated into the mind of this great fool. THICH NHAT HANH talked of WASHING-UP MEDITATION.....life itself is the great practice, life and death, THE GREAT MATTER.
#2) Could not, for the life-of-me, find Paul Blackburn's books when i wanted'em. Searched the library in vain. Then, sidetracked by rearranging some BLACK SPARROWs in studio/conservatory, i find "THE JOURNALS" under my hand & gaze. i flick thru, happy to have found s'thing. i knew Blackburn had died "young" - but OH! - only 45! (1926-1971) and realised, in that moment, that when i first read him, he was already dead. Robert Kelly writes, as editor of this book - "The last writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September, 1971."
What i "liked" about Paul Blackburn was the "open form" and his ease with contemporary NEW YORK city & translating from the Spanish eg. LORCA. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship...etc...To quote Robert Kelly, once more - "In New York which was most his home and center, he could find the sunlight on a wall not different from Barcelona."
#3) It has been so long now, since my readings of the 70's that, as i sit in "COSTA COFFEE",(decaff.espresso & soya milk), with "THE CITIES" before me & to hand, it strikes me, that these poems are "new"/still fresh. @ 45, Blackburn was still "young enough" to have gone on and worked & practiced, for many, many years. i think of Bob Dylan's refrain = "may we be forever young"...but not in this way, to not have gone on...And there are many...THE POETS OF THE GREAT WAR, JIM MORRISON, HEATH LEDGER...and in "our" family, TIM HEMENSLEY (of the POWDER MONKEYS) - i blub into my coffee. No one notices.
#4) "THE CITIES", (Blackburn's "first, extensive collection of verse" -(Grove Press - 1967)) the Author's Note reads - "Every man's stand be his own. Finally, it is a construct, out of my own isolations, eyes, ears, nose and breath.." ....i hear an echo of CHARLES OLSON in that ="No such thing as mass, as much as, many people, each with eyes in their heads, to be looked out of." Do i misquote ? That is what i have as my memory of it. i do not want to rise from my place and search it out...do not even really know where to look...Human Universe essay ? Do not wish to interrupt this flowing of "mountains walking"...?....? BUT, maybe i will...SUDDENLY, i feel i have written enough in this first draft/ this blog-post...appropriately, it is young/ still fresh...ready to be played with in this warm and early spring of ours in Weymouth, where the cherry blossom, out front, has passed full-bloom, and is falling to the ground, even as i write.....i will wait, stay my hand, and WAIT and see if it PROVES, like the bread-dough in tins, waiting for the heat of the oven.....i will soon make my way into the world - to find some fresh, young heirs (pun intended)...."The air sweeps out the odor of love from rooms / the air we love, we weep, we read, sing.."(from "The First Round", Paul Blackburn - AGAINST THE SILENCES - Permanent Press - 1980).
#5) I'm going to THE KING'S ARMS on the harbour. Not a drinker as such - i like a good taste - a good taste of real ale, home-baked bread and poetry....a half-pint will do me. & a packet of s'thing salty....just a half-pint to keep me hand in!!....How else to encounter the world ?/ this world. It is the friction / our continually rubbing-up against / this buffering away, that will reveal the new in which we are moment by moment, breath by breath, being reborn...and it is in this, that those who are no longer visible are held in our hearts. This is all we have and it is the whole created world. It is enough....
*
[finished @ 17.30 hours,10 / march / 2012.]
Kris Hemensley's COMMENT
(collectedworks10 March 2012 18:06)
Evidently youll be continuing from yr favourite spot in the Kings Arms, perhaps the higher bar, looking out onto the Old Harbour... So,you have your Blackburn in place, you have him as poet of 'being-in-place' rather than the distinctions of any particular place? Or it seems i might, which is ironic given the inventory, the wardrobe he sits up in, peers out of! Similar search as you (where are my Blackburns?!) find first of all his poem in Allen de Loach's INTREPID magazine, #18/19 , '71, one poem's kind of ho-hum (Windsound), mere sketch, the other's HUMMM-HO, justifying the triumphant claim "All of it sung." Last line, is psycho-topography, genealogical geography, the roll-call of his place that whiskey'd moment, glass in hand saluting Olson, Julio (is that Cortazar?), Ginsberg, Snyder, and most of all Pound --memorable snapshot, "Ez's eye fixes the machine from under his neat / Alpine hat, the clean raincoat . fierce & friendly to / the mustache bristle, beard-jut, but the eye questions / the other end of this gondola, where do the steps lead? / The oarsman ferries him across to / wrap a death with windows...." etc. Second thing i find is Pierre Joris's excellent Blackburn issue of Sixpack, (Spring/Summer, '74), indispensable really, i bet you have it under a mountain of health mags! --wch has in it this contra note, from Barry Alpert (edited the splendid Vort in that era, and who popped up on F/book recently!), whose comment puts in a nutshell not only Blackburn's situation but a larger gauging of poems/poetry... For, despite PB's obvious relish in Lorca's idea of duende, 'the straight fight with the creator on the edge of the well' (Alpert's source dramatically clearer than P's paraphrase) --& despite one knows that's the whole point of the daily witness poem, --yet in Blackburn acc. to Alpert, "most of his published poems uphold his self-abnegating conception of himself as street poet, bar room poet, occasional poet..." That is to say, the huge risk of so-what/ery in that type of stance (i joked in my classes 40+ years ago, "I came, i saw, i wrote a poem!"), the loss of distinction or the memorable in the apparently ancient Chinese humble happenstance. Very good to read you here! Cheers bro! As Blackburn has it in that instructive poem for (& against?) Ed Dorn, Pre-Lenten Gestures,"Thank God one tone or / one set of decibels is / not all there is."
oOo
KRIS HEMENSLEY
INTRODUCING JOHN MATEER; Notes, March 25th, 2014
Welcome to Collected Works Bookshop for this reading by John Mateer.
I have a few copies of Emptiness : Asian poems, 1998-2012, just published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and some of the previously published but still recent Unbelievers or 'The Moor', from Giramondo. So, although this isnt a formal launch, it is a celebration of John & his practically concurrent new books.
*
Yesterday was the Seminar at the university ["LIFE IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE : Taking his own work as example, poet John Mateer present an argument about the origins and strategies of his last four books – Ex-White: South African Poems, The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009, Southern Barbarians and Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ – and will read and reflect on his relationship between history, poesis, translation and self-hood. He will discuss the circumstances of Afrikaans as national language in South Africa, the problem caused by Aboriginal language or its absense for a grounded poetics in Australia, and the possibilities presented by reconsidering the cultural formations of East and West through imagining the colonial effects of Portugal and Spain in this part of the world. "]-- Today, here at the bookshop, it's the Reading. Not having participated in a seminar for a very long time, I'm not sure how different a poet is in the one situation from the other. I guess this evening the poetry is expected to stand up by & for itself --which I'm sure it will have every opportunity to do!
*
For introduction to the well published & travelled John Mateer, perhaps an anecdote instead of interminable CV --I don't mean John's CV is interminable but CV per se!
I remember the judging of the Victorian Premiers Prize back --when? --late '90s, early 2000s? --in the company of Doris Brett & Kevin Hart. Our deliberations had come down to a debate about the merits of collections by Bob Adamson & John Mateer amongst others --I cant remember --Tranter, Gray, Rowland, Ryan?-- all good names anyway. We'd read the books, discussed, ticked & crossed, totted up our little columns of scores on pieces of paper --crass & brutal but there it is! A competition with only one winner! The decision was made easier by the technical requirement for the majority of a collection to be "new". And so Kevin regretfully let his man, or men, slip. Adamson, Gray… At least I think so, I think that's who & what it was! I'm sure it's in my diary of the time but confess I don't quite know where that is!
In retrospect --in this possible/ retrospect --it's fair to say we found the young Mateer's poetry quite unlike anyone & anything else in that particular Premier's Prize season-- And I wonder now whether the matter of 'location' came up-- If, for instance, we were attracted by Adamson's (if it was him) --his Hawkesbury River (and perhaps the book was Juno Gemes' beautiful photo anthology, the Language of Oysters and not the Mulberry Leaves as I've been thinking? --late '90s & not early 2000s then?) --Adamson's Hawkesbury & Mateer's --what? --what & where would it have been? W A salt & wheat? A South African elsewhere? The Non-White African's elsewhere? (Tutuola's My life in the Bush of Ghosts?) Already then the awareness of John's neither here nor there --the no place or no where (which sounds like Paul Celan) --and the possible Japanese pun, the Noh where!--
Ah well --
Absence & presence
as though each other's
alias
And so, John, to quote & misquote you from a poem in your latest book, --"dear poet, close your eyes, this brothel is the only world, and we are the bhodisattvas!" -- Please welcome John Mateer...
----------------------------------------
[April 5th, 2014, Westgarth by the Sea]
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