THREE FUNERALS AND A BIRTHDAY

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An Open Letter to Corinne Cantrill, in the aftermath of her 80th Birthday Celebration, at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, November 9th, 2008

Dear Corinne,
We came to praise you --and do. The strains of the traditional "Happy Birthday" & "For she's a jolly good fellow" and the cheers raised in your honour as you hovered over the cake, still ring in our ears... I anticipated bumping into so many people associated with you (--and in this instance, 'you' includes Arthur &, of course, Ivor, as well as your magazine, Cantrill's Filmnotes, & your events & programmes principally at La Mama & your former home in Brunswick Road) --and I did meet a few of these erstwhile supporters, like Michael Lee, John Flaus, Jude Telford (who was also representing the late Bernie O'Regan), and didnt I hear Solrun Hoaas's name spoken as we took our seats?

You said that one of the reasons for closing your magazine, apart from loss of AFC funding, was the burden of recording the seemingly endless succession of deaths of friends & colleagues. Yet, I must say, given relatively long & stable life, doesnt one become a memorialist, a custodian of at least the memories of our friends' works & lives? But the magazine wasnt, to my mind, burdened by that aspect. It brimmed with filmmakers' contributions & critical commentary; it brought all the news a little mag, profuse with colour & b & w reproductions, could hold. Of course, the deaths of friends is always sad, but death itself is the tragic penumbra of all human life & endeavour and the definitive element of the wonderful cycle we express & project ourselves within... So when you then disparaged your work as a filmmaker because, you said, of its inconsequentiality in this doomed world --the end of life as we know it, global warning, climate change, environmental destruction, et al --I have to disagree.

You wouldnt have seen me shaking my head in the audience but hear me now. Calamity is what it is but surely cant be a conceptual surprise; it's the proverbial wake-up call and only ever unseats illusion. One year, five, ten? --you predicted the time-frame for this end of the world. Who knows? Whoever did? People drop off the perch anytime, anywhen --and the perch itself drops off some time (the natural process or a cataclysm). Not knowing when was always the situation. That's what highlights the beauty of our art & craft, since nothing produced lasts forever. Whatever the degree of human responsibility for climate change (--and lately I've been rereading Welsh poet & environmentalist, John Barnie, on this theme, in his book No Hiding Place : Essays on the new nature and poetry (University of Wales Press, 1996), which confirms me in a kind of cheerful fatalism, encouraging my amused wonderment at the miraculous place of human life within the deepest workings of geological time), I'd have to ask you Corinne, when was your film work ever political in that literal sense? How & when did you conceive of your extensive colour-separation experiments, for example, or your major landscape works ("film-form/land-form" as you called them), as politically effective statements? Or, to put it another way, what was your political conception of these consummately visual experiences, perceptional analyses if you like, often meditative in the way they induced a state of mind akin to wide-awake dreaming? How could your films have been 'all for nothing' when the something your statement supposes has more to do with social-political documentary than anything seen in your work?

Perhaps you were teasing us into consideration of the art & politics question (which never goes away & perhaps shouldnt for the clarification that attending to it always brings)? I've been there myself recently, responding to comments by John Berger, extracted from his essay, The Hour of Poetry, by Robyn Rowland for the on-line magazine, Zest, she edits for the Australian Poetry Centre. Hard to decipher exactly what Berger was calling for in his 1982 piece : an art of witness & testimony yet somehow not guaranteed by individuality, which is how I understood his valorisation of 'totality' and relegation of the 'sentimental' in his quip, "sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible". For Berger it seems it isnt the individual & the complex of eccentricity realized as such but "poetry that makes language care because it renders everything intimate." It's as though poetry, per se, is intimate (and other forms not?), when the fact surely is that the art is made intimate by the poet's particularity & insistence on peculiarity (that is, detail & angle) whereby poem, in this case, rises to the ineffable, if that be the statement of the whole (--i cant bear to use the term 'totality' after Berger's political tar-&-feathering!), but only & always through the only-ness of an individual accent, and not the general. We're talking about that partiality which is voice and has to be to break through what every poet under the sun hears as hubub ( Berger's undifferentiated 'language') before experiencing the poem's rising up into song, as though the striving voice in each poem recognizes the chorus to which it belongs! The personal is always the pitch of it, never the general!

I remember the late John Anderson, to whom I introduced you Corinne as I did your work to him, confessing his confusion as to whether he could achieve more as an environmental activist than a poet. His poetry, he implied, was written to raise awareness of the sacred beauty & ecological importance of, say, the eucalypts; but, he anguished, could his time & energy be better spent physically preventing their destruction? I didnt understand the mutual exclusivity within his question. What prevents the poet from also being an activist? But neither did I accept the implication that art, whatever its literal subject, was subordinate to political action.

In 1979-80, I broadcast a series of Melbourne letters for ABC radio's Books & Writing programme. On one of these I announced "the end of the world, the new world" (which sounds a bit Orson Welles-ish now)... I remember being misunderstood, as though I were nihilistically clamouring for the end or giving up the good fight. Tom Shapcott & I think Dorothy Green, wrote to encourage me away from what they assumed was my defeatism & depression in the face of that time's political crisis. I probably contributed to the misconception because my sense then of the condition of the poet, let alone of the world, was undeveloped --like many of my friends & colleagues, I spoke out of the tension between the aesthetics garnered by an avant-gardist & the politics my left-wingism proposed; though acquainted with it, I hadnt yet recovered the religious or philosophical perspective I enjoy now. At that time --and it's thirty years ago already!-- I felt that because of the threat of nuclear war (recall Carl Sagan & the acceptance by both the American & Soviet sides of his 'nuclear winter' thesis?), the condition of the world we lived & made art in had changed : the ability to think the unthinkable, that is the end of the world, had created a new condition. Whatever happened, we now lived in a new world. I have come to think, though, that this was always so : crisis is the fact of it, masked for many years sometimes, and then painfully revealed again for what it is. For the apocalypse was always adjacent. No life without a death might be the moral to assuage personal grief but speaks also for the vast non-human time described by geologists of this earth & astronomers & physicists of the universe. It's all there, isnt it, in the ancient Chinese, from Arthur Waley's translation : "Yung-men said to Meng Ch'ang-chun (d 279 BC), 'Does it not grieve you to think that a hundred years hence this terrace will be cast down?' Ch'ang-chun wept."

Though I doubt your maths, Corinne, regarding the time-line of the beginning of the end (one year, five, ten, before we suffocate on the stench of the dead krill, rising from the dead oceans to the centre of the Australian desert), how is this supposed to invalidate art & artist? The noble krill notwithstanding, when wasnt the apocalypse upon us? Poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker as historian, witness, chronicler, singer of what-is, protester of what shouldnt-be : such roles are well known. But let's not neglect or disqualify the art of the art, of the poem, of the film. Dont sacrifice it to the anxiety to which activism responds. Dont lose heart! Believe with Wallace Stevens in "the heavens full of colours and the constellations of sound", whatever the semantic content! Believe in your life, believe in your life's work. Believe like your teacher, Harry Hooton, in this great adventure of life!

Happy birthday, and may there be many more!

All best wishes, Kris Hemensley

(11-17th, November,'08)



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Mark Zenner passed away today after illness. A great reader of literature (poetry & prose), and a keen eye on contemporary cinema. He made short films and was a contributor to Senses of Cinema. We mourn him.
R.I.P. 3rd September, '08

[According to Bill Mousoulis, Mark Zenner had serious health problems in recent years. He was hospitalized in February, '08, recovered, then returned to hospital in August. He was being looked after by Sam Pupillo assisted by Daron Davies. As Bill says, "He was quite a character, fierce & unique."
At Collected Works Bookshop, I thought of him as the Russian-American, because of his accent and his literary taste. He valued Nabokov as much as Robert Lowell. He was erudite, opinionated & passionate. He coughed, smoked, spat contempt, chuckled with deep literary pleasure. He loved the art of cinema and hated the industry. His voluminous essay on Bresson is published on-line in Senses of Cinema; footage from unfinished films of his own (including a moth being eaten by ants) have been incorporated in films of Bill Mousoulis. We hope for a fuller biography of this enigmatic man in due course.]


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We mourn Don Grant, a friend of this bookshop, a Scot & great enthusiast for Scottish poetry,Gaelic music & poetry, who was an artist & printmaker, a friend of artists & lover of the arts, passed away October 21st,'08 in Tatura, Victoria.
R.I.P.


[from an e-mail to Clinton Cook, October 23rd, '08 : "As I'd already shared with Julia [Harman] a couple of weeks or so ago, my anxiety for him whenever he climbed the creaking metal ladder to reach the highest shelf of the Scottish section of the bookshop. Happily never an accident. [In her email of 30th September, Julia wrote, "I can imagine Don searching in the heights for hidden treasures! I vaguely remember him climbing the ladder to the top of his own bookshelves when he knew there was something which would be of particular interest to me!"] He'd be looking for Iain Crichton Smith or Sorley Maclean, one or other of the Gaelic poets, of whom we spoke, especially after I'd begun revisiting Britain, late '80s, through the '90s. He presented me once with tapes, he'd made from his own collection of records, of such Scottish poets as Hugh McDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Norman McCaig, & Irish poets Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, & also the wonderful pipes of Seumus MacNeill & John MacFadyen. He may have first met Retta & I at Collected Works Bookshop via Julia, though intrepid bookman that he was, may also have simply discovered us on his city rounds. We were always aware of Julia's regard for him &, of course, of his championing of her as artist, printmaker let alone friend. John Ryrie was another mutual acquaintance for whom Don had great regard. After our boy Tim had visited Berlin, in the mid '90s, once with the Powder Monkeys, once solo, Don gave us a map-book of Berlin to pass on for what he assumed would be Tim's further visits. Retta & I remember him as a softly spoken gentleman, a lover of poetry, music, art, who brought his own stillness into the increasingly busy & noisy city world. Retta & I hope you can give him a great send off. Best wishes, condolences, Kris."]


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Jacob Rosenberg has died. His funeral today, 31st October,'08, at Springvale. Poet, story-teller, memoirist; accomplished in Yiddish & English.

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"Arm in arm we walk, but we walk apart
Will the horizon ever let us be?
Can we expel the ruins of our heart?"

(from My Father's Silence)


[The article on Jacob Rosenberg by Jason Steiger and the obituary by Jacob's editor & dear friend, Alex Skovron, both published in recent weeks in The Age newspaper, comprehensively describe his life & work. Having only recently viewed him on television appearing in a documentary about the international project to translate a particular Holocaust survivor's chronicle, written in Yiddish, of which he was one of the willing translators, it was a surprise then to hear of his death. I only have a few personal memories... The new & self-publishing author trying to flog us his wares back in the late 80s, early 90s, when the Shop was on the first floor of Flinders Way Arcade. He was persistent in the initial placement and the follow-up! Late 90s I remember discussing with him a new & younger poet's contention that poetry didnt or didnt have to mean anything (Wallace Stevens would have concurred), but what got up his nose was her example of Paul Celan. No meaning in Celan? Jacob was horrified. There are a thousand articles on Celan's Death Fugue alone! he said, shaking his head in exasperation. I reviewed his collection, Behind the Moon (Five Islands Press), in ABR, #237 (Dec.01/Jan.02), and quote here the opening & concluding lines. "Seamless with his two previous collections, Behind the Moon is Jacob Rosenberg's potted autobiography of a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz, delivered from the hell, of which he writes with the kindness of an angel, into the heaven that Melbourne must then logically be. To be the poet of reality and not self-delusion is his commission. The trouble he contends with is that his present is posthumous, for the contemporary world could never be charged with such reality. Heaven doesn't exist. (....) Simplicity, concision, so as not to offend the subject with anything remotely resembling ornament : Rosenberg's poetry of the place and the condition 'where language died for very fear of words'."
R. I. P.]

4th December, 2008

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KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 18

LAUNCHING SPEECH for John Mateer's ELSEWHERE (Salt, UK, 2008), at Collected Works Bookshop, Melbourne, Wednesday,April 2nd, 2008.

I'll begin by congratulating John on his new book -- [APPLAUSE]
It's his fifteenth all up --books & chapbooks, commercially published &/or privately circulated --and it's adding up to his work, to the John Mateer oeuvre, so to speak .
Notwithstanding certain ironies & paradoxes, on the social surface as well as deeply inscribed within his poetry, he writes & publishes with a regularity one could call prolific. As far as publishing is concerned, he is out there --out & about. I wish I had now some of that zest for the writing & publishing life --
I have written at some length recently on John's book, Southern Barbarians (published by Zero Press, South Africa, 2007), and dont want to repeat myself here. Actually, when John told me he'd read my long blog I was intrigued he wanted me to launch this new book! But, whatever our differences, I welcome at least a couple of important things -- One, is John's essayistic line --not always employed of course, but often enough to have impressed me into feeling that his was a sustained alternative to the imagistic or expressionistic phrase composition abundant elsewhere! I mean, misusing a comment about a poet I like a lot, namely Robert Creeley, John could never be described as an asthmatic poet! So, I've enjoyed the sense of a whole sentence --of space for the poet to walk & talk & think in --and congratulate him for this essayistic, discoursive poetry.
Secondly, he has something to say --issues he needs to explore --and in that way is political. And he, necessarily, invites us to react. So I praise him for enabling thought & discussion. Agreeing or disagreeing is one's own privilege --but being enabled to think & discuss is everyone's.

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The postcolonial --whatever it is to be called, although it seems now to have changed from adjective to noun, become the place where the end of the "hegemony of the West" is assumed --and for literature that means the repositioning of the so-called Western Canon, often its side-lining if not repudiation -- : this "postcolonial" appears to be where John Mateer is at -- : as the blurb, he may or may not have written himself, states, "one person's poetic & moral accounting of the past 500 years of Western colonization" [INTERJECTION, John Mateer : "And why not?"]
Yes, indeed, that's your prerogative, just as there are, of course, different positions held & espoused in this place --and I guarantee that the readers of John's book will find their own thoughts & feelings reacting to the --and I struggle for the word --the sensation-ism? the vibrancy? the vivacity? the visually seductive & authoritative language of Elsewhere --indeed, of all his work hitherto. The reader cant fail to rise to the intimacy each poem invites. By the same token, the palpability of the poet's scenes of life are accompanied or informed by the identity questions which assuredly course their author's being. And because of John Mateer's place of birth, in South Africa, his Western genealogy & its dramatic face-off with the risen African heritage in the new South Africa & in this place of the postcolonial everywhere, these matters of identity are conduits of revelation -- : of the conventional personal type & of the person-as-body-of-the-political (--a trope well known to even dilettante browsers of Continental philosophy or theory!) -- : they are unpredictable --and this I think is a strength, despite an occasional howler or let's call it a John Lennonism, -- this unpredictability is a strength of a writing which often elsewhere is an exercise in control, from first line to last. For many "political" poets, the poem is basically therapy & political opinion (as of George Oppen's famous comment) and not one of consciousness and the perception which flows from acute consciousness, from nerves-on-end attention to what is given --
To be sure, John is often riven --his heart aches. At this level of pain he doubts the efficacy of communicable language even as he plays his hand in poetry's compulsive and, indeed, required game. Because he is a "poet", isnt he?
I'm reminded of my New Left / Counter Culture youth, coming across this comment by John Dewey, and whether I've misquoted him or not this is what I've always remembered : "community is defined by the ability to communicate what is held in common." What a delicious spanner to be thrown into the works, mid 60s, when "community", "communication" & "commonality" were assumed by so many to be as natural as the flowers in one's hair?!
You may recall this poem, which I'll read, Dark Horse (for J M Coetzee), from the Calyx anthology published in 2000 -- : Calyx, 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (--and John's also been in a new South African poets anthology --the more the merrier, perhaps, in the postcolonial?!) --

DARK HORSE

As I write this line it is in a foreign language.
As I think What does this mean? I remember a sentence
by the allegorical novelist who is said not to speak.
He was a linguist, and his wife is said to interrupt party conversations
by saying : "John has something to say." Can I say,
I oppose all civilization, without being in a city under siege,
without being a Trojan horse?

As I write these words,
the sentence I DO NOT SPEAK MY OWN LANGUAGE is in my head
like the line of an ascending aeroplane piercing through cloud.
But I must tell (who?) --

Beware of those bearing grief in comprehensible words.
Beware of your mouths.

--in a way, this is the John Mateer poem par excellence. It carries a vulnerability, a tentativeness --but it reads to me didactically. Yet it is also lyrical --slightly mysterious despite the strength of its closing words. It is candid of the poet --it admits his vulnerability and relinquishes the usual control of the didactic author. It refers to the famous novelist but as tho the narrator were also at the party --he's made the information an essential piece of gossip (as Robert Duncan might have said)! He admits the vulnerability at his core and makes it his strength --"I DO NOT SPEAK MY OWN LANGUAGE" -- : he might be talking about Dutch-South African, he might be talking about the Mateer version of the pure poetry which the 19thCentury & into the 20thCentury French & others aspired to; he might be alluding to political shackles & burdens and their psychological corollaries --think of Paul Celan for an awful moment --the Paul Celan who is one of the very, very few Western poets referenced in any of John Mateer's writing --but that's for an academic paper, not for this book launching!

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From the blurb, "Elsewhere is an exciting introduction to a poet whose work has been receiving international attention for the past decade." I imagine this means an introduction to the British readership in the first instance, for whom John Kinsella's Salt is one of the big three poetry publishers alongside Neil Astley's Bloodaxe & Michael Schmidt's Carcanet, or four when you add Tony Frazer's Shearsman, from Exeter. Shearsman, by the way, have begun publishing a complete edition of Pessoa who just happens to be a key reference in John Mateer's previous book, Southern Barbarians --the Pessoa he quotes at the head of that book, "I write to forget"; and the Pessoa John addresses in a poem, "You are my self captured in this photograph / And I am your sole surviving heteronym."
It would be deeply ironic, tho very Mateerish, if one were introducing John to an Australian or, specifically, Melbourne readership! He's lived & published here extensively after all --
But he's the peripatetic poet --never happier, perhaps, than when on the move, which could cast him as Romanticism's iconic subject, the other half of the exoticist, the adventurer, the traveller, namely the Stranger, a stranger on the earth, stranger to society --and maybe there is some of that in the postcolonialism I've given him here.
He'll often quote expressions of negativity, e.g., heading The Ancient Capital of Images in the new book is the Japanese poet, Tamura Ryuichi, "because there is no answer but emptiness."

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I'll close on that theme (--the academic paper if anyone here wants to write it will be called something like "John Mateer's Azanian Poetics of Negativity"!) and read the poem on page 77,

DEAD LEAVES OF TOKYO
--an aquarelle series by Eugene Carchesio

Whether collected from the gardens or temples
fallen leaves are an undoing of substance,
a subtle melancholia, an almost unheard of music.

Bell-solid and a whispering, little deaths and the Chinese whimperings of memory,
those leaves under intense light on a city desk, observed
by a miniaturist's eye or a composer's ear, prove existence
as in the mind they are perpetuated in aquarelle,
each life-size on a page large and white and void.

A chronicle, a diary?

The poet's mouth opens slowly, releasing the leaves and the wind
that these words are.


--I declare this book, Elsewhere, launched --and invite John to speak & read to you.


_______________________
Kris Hemensley, April 2nd, 2008