I.M. DEREK BEAN, 1924-2013

Kris Hemensley

*

in in-between world

toes point to the sun

as head is drawn to the sea-bed

off Elwood Beach

I float in a dream

of two families of uncles

inspired by the sight of

three strolling Mediterranean men

in togs without bellies

tanned brown with glinting silver hair

profuse on chest sparse on top

clad in their natures like shimmering fish

another film rewinds then

of English summer-holiday

where ever-the-world's host my father

invites his brothers for a picnic

on the beach and whatever

parents kids nephews uncles play

postponing boredom sadness end-of-holiday

like frisky bachelors

they fetch & carry for my mother

joke swim produce sixpences for ice-creams

smoke cigarettes languorous as the officers

they'd endured all their war years in North Africa

looking back at the shore

the purpose of the world seems first & last

appeasement of the senses

self & world-knowledge

gained by simply gliding body

through water or air enveloped in sunlight

anticipating the trajectories of bathers & walkers

merging with or diverging from them

as if we're all summer's melting marionettes

absolved from guilt excused consequences

but fifty years back

i was sacked for acceding to impulse

an hilarious image ballooned in my mind

demanding an hilarious act to fulfill it

i raced the yards from soft sand

to the puddled ribbed flat

exposed by outgoing tide

where my mother stood girlishly entertaining

my father & uncles

i slapped her blooming blue-costumed behind

so perfectly my right-hand stung and the

whack's echo

startled seagulls and her cry was a pure pain

encapsulating my little devil's jubilation

i ran on & on

and would have cartwheeled if i'd known how

expecting our party to laugh & applaud

instead one uncle chased me down

lectured me like a policeman

marched me back to my tearful mother

& her angry retinue

i prickled red with embarrassment

was made to stew

until awarded the cold blue mercy of banishment

in in-between world

there is no nymph called Thetis

no son Achilles dipped by the heel

into magic waters

there's only ever sea & sea

no other mother's bequest

could so nearly offer immortality

those three manicured Mediterranean men

those look-alikes aliases surrogates

those also-known-as Egyptian uncles

approach the water dainty as penguins

upon the ice-flow

attracted by the laziness of my swim

which tempts their machismo

suddenly one charges & plunges in

calling his partners to join him

then my dream pops into place

and once more real world roars around me

2003
[from DEAR TAKAMURA, 2002-03.
The English uncles are Derek & Dennis Bean; the Egyptian uncles, Gaby & Cesar Tawa. It was the gallant Uncle Derek who ran me down]



oOo

Kris Hemensley

What curious symmetry brings bad news from either side of the family within an hour  of each other? English uncle, Egyptian cousin --though, as my brother elaborates, Pierre was only a couple of years younger than our mother, his aunt, who better related to him as her cousin.

An old man, tanned Mediterranean to oblige this recitation, grey hair, open necked white shirt, brown jacket & trousers, deliberates for half a minute before continuing his shuffle along the pavement. I'm reminded of my cousin but the dawdler's probably a closer resemblance to my Uncle Cesar, thirty years passed.

After my son died, his doppelgangers appeared and for several years following --jumping out of the pages of the music papers, occasionally & startlingly in the flesh. The hesitating Mediterranean is my cousin Pierre's first posthumous herald.

In England, Uncle Derek is apparently dying --the nuance or substance of the epithet 'terminal'. The age he's achieved doesn't diminish one's shock. He's always been a figure of energy & creativity. Walking, climbing, making or teaching music, driving, travelling, socialising --Derek appeared to guarantee the promise of ebullient longevity on our paternal side.

Suing for immortality was Dad's conceit, somehow hobbled by abstraction & timidity; fortunately for Derek it's his character. Perhaps because he never harped upon age, Derek's ageless. The man of wit we've always known --at home with himself --identical with his language --pilgrim's miles in his legs --newspaper beneath arm --tree, shrub or flower in his eye --a piano in his head.


4/4/13
[from DELPHI]



oOo



Kris Hemensley JOURNAL + Notebook
23/24 April, '13

[re Ringwood/Fordingbridge visit]

(…) Big hiccup at Ringwood --I realised too late after alighting from the National Express coach & mooching about in search of Pam, that I wasn't supposed to be meeting her in Ringwood at all but Fordingbridge, a short hop away on another bus. I'd attempted several calls to Bernard but for once he wasn't home --I thought he'd be able to phone Pam & tell her I was still in Ringwood. However once I did realise the mistake I caught next local bus to Fordingbridge! And there she was, at the bus-stop, waiting for me.
We drove fast, first leg to a local store to pick up newspaper for Derek & beer & cheese for lunch, & then on to their home.

Uncle Derek in red checked shirt (or pyjama top?), fawn slacks, blanket around middle down to his feet --blue socks, one of which loosened & after an hour or so Pam pulled it up for him.
Uncle Derek's familiar smile & soft, smooth-skin handshake, more hand hold than grip.
"I bring greetings from [siblings] Bernard & Monique & Robin!" Later on I repeat Monique's best wishes. Derek says, And mine to her.
How are you? I ask --Very well, & yourself?
He alternates attention between the television & The Times crossword. Pam tells him it was my idea to get the paper (""you've got Kris to thank for it"). Derek smiles & keeps working. He's watching Question Time from Parliament. Looks fascinating. I asked him what he thought of the prime minister, David Cameron. He ponders before replying. I think he's doing a pretty good job, he says.
Was the answer contained or encouraged in the question? Pam told me she's learned to conduct just that kind of conversation with him --confusion is not what she wants to foment.
Derek enjoyed (or at least he chuckled) when I referred to Uncle Dennis's appreciation of Ray Monk's biography Wittgenstein. Oh yes, Derek said, Dennis did like Wittgenstein.
Pam had brought out ham for our lunch, the traditional English fare. When I declined she laughed it off. Salad & a chunk of cheese will be fine, I said. I don't know how much a chunk is, she said. Lunch was good, accompanied by several glasses of ale.
Pam showed me WW2 snaps of Derek --Rodger [Derek's son, my cousin] had brought them to show her and in the 45 minutes before he departed for the airport & the flight back to Australia she had them copied. Northern Germany, Hamburg for example. Very interesting was a Forces bulletin advertising a piano recital to be given by Derek Bean --Schubert & Schumann. Signalman Derek Bean.
Pam described Derek watching the broadcast of Mrs Thatcher's state funeral, and how he was impressed by the choir. I sang in St Paul's Cathedral, he said. Hmm. When footage of the Falklands War was shown he remarked he'd fought in that war. You weren't in the Falklands, derek, she laughed. Yes I was, he insisted. So what did you do in the Falklands then? I carried a rifle, he said.
Signalman Derek Bean, holding his rifle, World War 1, World War 2, the Falklands...
Uncle Derek, indomitable, incorrigible…


oOo


"TWO HEARTS UNITED"


Pam Adams :
Email / July 25, '13


Dear Kris,

Preparations for Derek's service on the 31st... I am typing up the order of the service for the printer and have reached an impasse - I am wondering if you can make a beautiful translation of this - am I correct in thinking you know German? - I think I am...
            
Der Abend dammert, das Mondlicht scheint,
              Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint,
              Und halten sich selig umfangen. 
                                                                          Sternau

This excerpt was included in the score by Brahms to accompany or throw light (mondlicht?) on the second movement of his Sonata in f minor, which Derek loved and played magnificently, and which will be played in his service by Gwenneth Pryor.  Derek loved languages, Derek loved German literature, and I just thought it would be nice to include the excerpt in the order of service, that he would appreciate that, but I would like to add a translation as well.  I can make out the words, but I can't put them beautifully - help?

               Dawn of the evening, the moonlight glistens (?), the moon shines (I'm no good at this!)
               Two hearts united in love (there are two hearts?)
                stand in blessed embrace   HELP!!!  (stand?  stop? stay? Aaaargh!)


*

Kris Hemensley :
Email / 26 July, '13

Hi Pam, I sent two urgent messages to 'my people' with German language : poets Cecilia White & Petra White. Cecilia, Sydney based poet, often in Europe, has responded with this 'translation' which she says is also an interpretation. She thinks it might have the musical feel you need.

Evening arrives softly
Moonlight appearing
In love, two hearts united
Holding each other in blessed embrace


I hope this either assists you in yr translation or does the job entirely...
All best, in haste, Kris


*

Pam Adams:
Email/  27 July, '13

Hello Kris,

Thank you so much for throwing yourself into the task at hand!  Urgent!  I like it.  And thank your people!  Amazingly, I needn't have worried, the printer had a translation in her vast store of everything she's ever printed, and apparently that excerpt has come up on many an occasion!  Here's what she printed and I said, okay -

Through evening's shade,
The pale moon gleams
While rapt in love's ecstatic dreams
Two hearts are fondly beating.

Okay.  Somebody took tremendous liberties, but whatever.... gleams and dreams rhyme so okay.

The Order of Service looks good, I'm happy.  Now I have the weekend to do the outer cover.
Found some very interesting things!  A box of pictures - one of you and Derek - do you have a copy of it? from his visit [to Melbourne] at Christmastime 1997, I believe, in your shop.  Will send that if you don't have it.  (There were two copies of most of the pictures in that set, but only one of that photo, so you may already have it.)  Also the sweetest picture - which will go on the inside back cover, along with a couple of pictures of young Derek, soldier - of Derek crouching opposite, and feeding/petting a baby kangaroo.  Sweet.  Also found a letter I had written him while he was in Australia, detailing what he was missing in a particular class at Morley College.  He was class secretary, and in his absence it was quite chaotic - and someone turned to me and asked when Derek would be back.  "Morley doesn't stand if Derek isn't here," he said.  "It's like the ravens in the Tower."

*

Petra White :
Email, July 28, '13

Evening grows dark, the moonlight shines, two hearts are made one in love, holding each other in happiness.


oOo

ROBERT GRAY AND PETRA WHITE READING AT COLLECTED WORKS!

Collected Works Bookshop's first poetry event of Spring is on Monday, 4th October, when we host Robert Gray & Petra White. It's an honest to goodness reading not a launching but hopefully a swag of Robert's older title, New & Selected Poems, will arrive in time to supplement his most recent, the prose memoir, The Land I Came Through Last (Giramondo, 2008). We will also have copies of Petra's second & recent collection, The Simplified World (John Leonard Press, 2010).
Let's fill the Shop!

time : 6 for 6.30
wine & nibbles : YES!
address : level 1, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, City
enquiries : tel 9654 8873

*

Ray Liversidge's reading/launching advertized in the M P U newsletter, POAM, for October 14th at Collected Works, has been postponed until November 11th. More information closer to the date.

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES #9, February, 2009

TOM BATES

SCULPTING CLARE : Extracts from working journals and sketchbooks, 1990-93
(the John Clare Cycle)


5 October 1990
Made first of three armatures to begin a cycle of sculptures about John Clare.

8 October
In this cycle of work I sense many of my preoccupations will coalesce, the question will be whether the sculptures will have vitality, power and sensitivity equivalent to the writings and temperament of the poet.

21 November
Cold, very cold evenings. I have continued to rework the eighth version (study of memorial to Clare) which has served as a reminder that enthusiasm is no substitution for skill and to achieve the effects required needs hard work. Who better than Clare as example? Who could present images so fresh and vigorous and worked immensely hard to achieve those effects.

10 February 1991
I press on with drawings and correspondence in connection with a Clare monument at Peterborough Cathedral or the city centre or Helpston.

19 April
Another long hiatus caused by an asthmatic illness and completing works intended for submission to the Royal Academy. I continued to draw spasmodically and lately resumed work on the series of Clare in old age, wintering. ...I will/ must fulfill the cycle :

1. Clare as a young man with a child
2. Clare in maturity
3. Clare in old age

1. Stamford / childhood / promise / beginnings in poetry
2. Peterborough / vigorous maturity / intense objectivity
3. Northampton / solitary / become like a tree / wrecked / inward looking

9 June
Once more the wind and the rain. I wrote out the final drafts of the submission for the [Northampton] Guildhall Clare and drew until after midnight. ...I have three variants on the same theme as the choices for the final version of the Guildhall Clare and should have the submission in the post by Wednesday morning. The piece is of Clare in old age within a cage of three hawthorns, canopied over by foliage pierced for patterns of light to fall onto the head which is intended to appear sightless, inward looking.




My work does look back to my studies in Italy and France and to early heroes, Donatello, Rodin, Epstein & oddly perhaps, Jagger who was a powerful modeller with a sharp sense of composition. To a great degree I am a child of the C19th, I admire the achievements of many artists active in the early decades of this century in western European art... .

24 October 1992
In some of the sculptures of Michelangelo tensions are set up between passages roughly hewn and those vigorously drawn and become essential to the sculpture's nature and psychological density.




23 February 1993
When one looks at the Behnes portrait it reflects back the tubbiness of a meat and potato eater and a drinker of beer.

27 October 1992
I want to create the impression of Clare walking against the wind which was the element Clare associated with creation and in my experience of the region around Helpston the wind is seldom absent for long.



30 December1992
I began the journey to Stamford early yesterday, before first light, as I climbed into the car, a solitary blackbird sang into the dusky air. The journey towards Bristol was in clearing sunlight until Nailsea when I entered the twilight world of icy fog [which] lay across the Cotswolds and south western Midlands... I arrived at Stamford in glittering sunshine. With the help of Michael Key I erected the plaster, posed for photographs [Stamford Mercury] and left... reaching Thorverton before 7pm. for a drink in the Dolphin.
I anticipate the Stamford Clare won't have an easy passage, but then if I wanted an easy life I would not have chosen sculpture.

[These extracts are from the John Clare Society Journal, UK, Bicentenary number, 1993]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUSAN FEALY


NOTES ON ART & DYING


19-10-2008 ...How to paint a rose

A glass case displays the steps for painting a rose. It is like looking down through still water at a catalogue of the artist's mind. First, the water colours on white paper: orange-red, orange-purple, purple-red... like a row of summer icy-poles melting. Second: words in neat rows of type on the page: "the rose grows in the walled gardens of Highgrove and is the most glowing of reds oranges and purples - at times I had to blink to rest my eyes from its brilliance." The finished botanical lies beside the words. A single red rose, head composed high on its stem, elegant, vigorous, more luminous than its foil of white. Like the first and final drafts of a poem. The completed rose is perfect in every real detail: emblematic, cultivated to sharp points of lineage, the petals soft as blood. The real rose lies beside its representation. How do you draw a rose dying?

20-10-2008 ...The Art of imperfection

It is different in my mind's painting. There we swung on creaking swings and claimed the sky as our own. Now the pine tree is dead and the grass, in spring, is drier than summer. Aleesha's hair is crimped from yesterday's plaits, her bottom two moons in white leggings. "No," she says, "that's wrong. You do it like this." Ben tells the same story three times: "I threw this thing at a target and I won, but I cheated a bit, and I got a certifi-keet." His four-year-old eyes look somewhere - beyond his family, beyond his sturdy face. And then my mother. She and her walking-stick. My mother in her fuchsia purple and matching shoes. "I've started an art class but the teacher is not helping much," she tells me. "I can't get the light right. I am not really an artist." Her arms are a small drought, quiet as honeycomb left out to weather.

25-10-2008 ...Tableware for angels

What do angels do if they fall to earth and lose their wings? They make things to remind them of home. This white is so white it is not colour - it is a substance. This is Southern Ice Porcelain: bowls and cylinders - so perfect they name themselves to the eyes as an alphabet of shape. They have such stillness - as if they are pieces of eternity. But what work, what work: he draws clay from the earth, drives out the titanium, his hands and the wheel catch that moment when liquid slides form from its shadow. He stands them in a diamond blaze of fire and then inscripts: zephyr breeze on river water, wind in long summer grass, his dying wife's journal. In groups of three they stand on a fusion of green of earth, blue of sky. His porcelain waits for the company of angels.


[Note
These poems were written after a visit to the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in October 2008. Les Blakebrough's Ceramics and Anne O'Connor's Botanical Paintings were on display. Les Blakebrough's web site is http://www.lesblakebrough.com.au/ ]


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUE STANFORD



THE POTTER'S RETREAT
(for Peter Rushforth)


approaching
through spring apple trees --
a white horse


so many shiny cars
around the potter's retreat


set on garden stumps
blossom vases
catch the bush light


the kiln's molten red
cools to soft blue


iron-speckled glaze --
five colours
of lichen on the sandstone


froom lip to belly and back
I stroke my favourite pot


the tea cup is full --
bamboo flue music
drifts over the cliff edge

*

[published in The Neon City]


*

Kris Hemensley / Sue Stanford
10/9/08
Dear Sue, Didnt attend an acquaintance's exhibition opening last night because heavy & tired & etc...oh well... However, what I did do was resolve to write you about a poem in your little book [The Neon City, pub. Post Pressed Press, Queensland, 2008] : The Potter's Retreat (for Peter Rushforth). Is there more for you to say about Peter Rushforth? Do you know him? Have you been around his work for a while? I'm increasingly a fan of certain strands in Australian pottery/ceramics, and respect him as one of the originals, as it were...
Kris

*

12/9/08

Dear Kris, Yes, I do/did know Peter Rushforth a little and wrote those haiku for him and at an open day/ sale he had in his place in the Blue Mountains sometime in the late 90s.

Long ago, I was lucky enough to get a place at East Sydney Tech to study ceramics full-time when Peter & Col Levy were working there. Silly me -- I didn't realise what a chance I'd been given and dropped out after about six months when it all started to get high pressure! But Peter (and Col) by introducing me to Japanese pottery were probably a bigger influence than I usually realise on Bill and I deciding to go there [Japan] and teach. Something we did before it was the thing to do.
(...) I guess you know about his background as a POW? I admire the way he put it to use (or overcame it?) and to have then gone to Japan to study ceramics. (...)
Sue

*

13/9/08
Dear Sue, thanks for stimulating e/ on the potters... My introduction to these great artists was the Australian craftsman potters book [Nine Artist Potters, ed Alison Littlemore & Kraig Carlstrom; pub Jack Pollard Craftsmaster, Sydney, 1973]. This year I've seen two wonderful shows at Anna Maas's Skepsi Gallery, top of Swanston Street, one by Ivor McMeekin's daughter, Susan, the other by Col Levy's wife, Maureen Williams-Levy... Is there a narrative here about potter fathers & children, spouses? In the gallery's cabinets there are Rushforth & co... You probably know all this... My brother Bernard is a Zen man in darkest Dorset... his pottery love out of Leach & Hamada... He has a couple of pieces, a Cardew, a son of Leach's... we share a little bowl we bought together on Portland... I've begun to think that I value the "Australian" aspect more in the potters than the painters... because of the material's relation to place & person as transforming entity... Would love to chat about this sometime... And about your Japan of course...
Best wishes, Kris

*

17/9/08
Dear Kris, (....) Do know all about Leach, Hamada, Cardew etc. (Or did!) It's a long time now. I expect you know the website http://www.e-yakimono.net/ ? Some fantastic photos. I had a small collection of mostly Bizenyaki and Tambayaki. But they all got smashed in the earthquake. Passed the time in my life for collections now! (Except perhaps for books -- but even there I have no space to keep what I won't read again.)
Cheers, Sue

*

1/10/08
Dear Sue (....) A monograph on Les Blakebrough came for me today. I'm fascinated, as you'd guess in that Japanese chapter of his life... he was in Kyoto with other poet artist expats in the early 60s...
Kris

*

"IN THE BEGINNING WOMAN WAS THE SUN"
(a salute to Hiratsuka Raichou)

Half sleeping, I am trembling
like the body of the plane.
Some papery husks lie offered on my tray.
"In the beginning woman was the sun."

Outside, the stratosphere
is minus fifty-two. Strapped here within
the darkened fuselage, my arm has fused
against another dreamer's arm.
How dull we look, though an inferno burns
beneath each well-banked surface.
"In the beginning woman was the sun."

My clock's awry! In flashbacks of Bizen
massed pots glow in the roar of the long kilns.
For sleepless days and sleepless nights,
an old man squints to judge the temperature.
"In the beginning woman was the sun."

Each character is formed by chance
and where the piece was stacked.
A storm of ash solidifies to sheen,
or tiny archipelagos of glaze.
A red rimmed blotch, so like a recent scab,
appears on separated neighbours.
"In the beginning woman was the sun."

Piled eastern cumuli release my window blind.
The attendant pours a cup of orange juice.
Chaotic turbulence resolves
into a sweet citric solar circle.
"In the beginning woman was the sun."


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


JAN STUMBLES / KRIS HEMENSLEY


October 11, 2008

Dear Jan, I'd been looking forward to seeing Tony Smibert's exhibition at the Glen Eira Gallery, having picked him out of the September '08 Art Almanac, and couldnt believe it when, in course of a recent telephone call, you told me it had finished on the 5th! The advert in the Almanac --& I'm looking at it now -- states 24th September-15th October --evidently an error! More salt in the wound!
I didnt kmow his name or work, or at least cannot remember seeing him previously. What caught my eye was the juxtaposition of the dramatically lit mountain landscape and the Zen-like zig-zag slashes in two of the inset reproductions --water-colours --and the brief description referring to Smibert's involvement with JMW Turner, akkido, calligraphy, abstract expressionism. I guess this resonated with my own preoccupations or, better said, continuing attempts to define the equation which might hold the spontaneous along with the attention necessary for topographical art (which begs a question, I know, about the degree of body & imagination occurring in, say, landscape art) : the equation or relation of spontaneity & transcription, invention & document...
Our conversation about Tony Smibert & related matters did assuage my grievance at missing the show. And I'd like to recover some of it here and tickle it further. For starters : I thrilled to your comment that water-colour (your own medium) in the Western tradition, is to us what Chinese & Japanese ink-brush is to them.
And, of course, Turner might well be another key. I'd just been looking at reproductions of Turner's Rain - Steam - Speed(1844) painting, which was a reference in a topographical piece I was writing, about Melbourne or rather Westgarth & Clifton Hill [since published in HEAT, #18, December '08]... But I should also be writing about Chinese poems & paintings and everything else thrown up by my brother Bernard's & my correspondence on Kerouac's Dharma Bums!
I did look for Smibert on the Web, and found fascinating report on his work on Turner, at the Tate, and will follow up your suggestions regarding viewing otherexamples of his own work, including the technical videos...
Hope this finds you in a good space, and hope you can read my handwriting!
Best wishes,
Kris

*

14-10-08
Dear Kris, It has arrived! Thank you so much. I've done a little "dipping" but thought I should reacquaint myself with Celan, Jabes and Kafka, at least a little, before I begin.
The Tony Smibert thing is interesting re spontaneity & attention -- he has written a series of articles for The Australian Artist --a monthly magazine --on imaginative landscapes, which you might like. There's a couple on the web I think.
It's strange the spontaneity & attention/awareness thing -- in ink brush it was the thing, in its way, even though you were mostly engaged in copying the master's work which he had just done in front of you as a demonstration.
As regards my own 'practice' : I started ink brush with an art therapy book called Art is a Way of Knowing & discovered it was. The exercise I liked most was one where you held a feeling you had --without naming it-- shut your eyes and make marks on the paper with your pencil or pen and then looked to see what you 'had' : which was often nothing to speak of and went on from there. A doodling exercise in a sense -- that grew into the weird and wonderful. Spontaneous yet totally 'deliberate' & completely absorbing -- you became lost in it. It was a great way for me to avoid the self-harm demon but went on from that.
I almost regret the Botanicals etc because Art Brut as it's called is made with spontaneous intent & is made out of your inner self in much the same way, metaphorically speaking, that a spider spins its web.
As far as Watercolor goes & its relation to the way of the brush -- I don't know that the West has used it that way with all its under-drawing etc -- except perhaps for Mr Turner who dispensed with all of that -- it's just that it's a medium that can be used that way if you wish. Hence Smibert's appeal to me I guess. It's a familiarity born of my ink-brush lessons where we used watercolour for colour instead of coloured ink sticks or powder which are very toxic usually.
When it comes to the topographical I'm one for the landscapes of the mind, like Hopkins and other poets I'm thinking around but whose names escape me just at this minute -- Chinese poets of course!
Getting back to our Reluctant Theologians [ : Kafka, Celan, Jabes, by Beth Hawkins, pub. Fordham University Press, '02], I am interested in the relation between the unutterable and the unspeakable -- and so I think is Les Murray -- his darkness of course is different. The natural order is there as well. The light of Australia as opposed to the dark grey of Europe seems an almost Real Presence. In Kevin Hart too, I think.
Have you tried reading in concert a Christian English translation of Genesis with a Jewish English translation? If you haven't I recommend the Stone Chumash published by Artscroll. How strange -- the same yet they're not a fit. Also the commentary in the latter is wonderful -- Rashi, Rambam et al. Extraordinary insight that i find strangely echoed in the first pages of Vol 1 of Jabes, The Book of Questions.
I don't know if you've come across The Particulars of Rapture [Exodus] or The Beginnings of Desire [Genesis] by Avivah Gottlieb Zomberg? They are truly wonderful -- but like so much Jewish writing on these things so dense & rich that one can only manage a little at a time. I hope I will manage to get to the end sometime before I die --the same with The Infinite Conversation.
This brings me full circle to Zen & tao as almost it seems "stopping up" thought in favour of present awareness. It's beautiful --especially in the brush. But I cannot give up or escape words. The Word. "Going visual" for me has caused something of a crisis. The old saw : "Show Don't Tell" and "a picture paints a thousand words" is so true that for some time now I have felt I have lost my words -- for such things as poetry or fiction -- I want them back, I really do. There is something choked off in the heart of me, that has to do with this. Words are for something other than the visual I think --which belies some of what I have just written; but it has something to do with the work of our reluctant theologians and is beauty, depth, fear & trembling of course --but also of us & words and how we make them and they make us into something other.
I have never forgotten an English priest who came to speak to us in Matric. He said it's easy to prove the existence of the spiritual. the material, he said, you cannot give a way and keep at the same time --but an idea, now that's entirely something else. I think he's right.
I'll stop now. Save some for next time.

Jan S.

*

25-10-2008
Dear Jan, Thank you for your ink-penned letter -- I actually bought myself an art pen, which isnt the pen & nib you've encouraged but would have been a step from the common blue biro, I resort to once again, had I not promptly mislaid it! And, though impressed by the wax seal on yours, I'm not equipped to follow suit! Please know I treasure both ink & seal --the touch of the centuries, after all, which is something to do with our conversation --the patina of tradition, which is probably also the way it would be disparaged, but for me it's living thread --as I said once, to my boy Tim, talking about the seemingly immense gulf of time between ourselves & the Ancient Egyptians, and I fudged the maths just a little bit : that's only thirty generations, thirty lifetimes, --nothing in the grand scheme of things --and Tim caught my humour, appreciated that image of tangibility.
After your reference to Hopkins and what you call landscapes of the mind I've returned to him, not that a particular reason is ever needed but it was a nicely troublesome one for me. That is to say, apart from the poems, I always visualise Hopkins's note-book selections, which are alive with the details gathered from his walks, and sometimes accompanied by thumb-nail sketches --so my first thought of him relates to acuity of observation, and he's right there with Gilbert White and all the naturalists on the shelf!
Still trying to meet your "landscapes of the mind" reference, I'm reminded of a phrase (and maybe it's my paraphrase) I've held for 30 years now, Husserl's "environment is perception", which might do the trick!
I guess your Mr Smibert holds a key --how he manages the difference between his Turneresque Tasmanian mountain grandeur and the dart & dash of the ink brush (--I'm referring to the small reproductions in the September Art Almanac).
The "eco-poetry" thing rolls on -- and all strength to it, tho' I'm keeping faith by my "topographical" project & prospectus! Louise Crisp was here the other day and we talked about the poets enrolling under the 'eco-poetry' tag, and she remarked apropos a contemporary that she was concerned such a poetry not be the dense & busy construction produced in its name. Mind you, her own work is sparse either in the Chinese/Beat manner or the French (like Jean Daive, a contemporary of one of your reluctant theologians, Celan, & others like du Bouchet & Guillevic), but her point was that for the landscape to speak the conventional poet had better be quiet & still!
I've been stimulated to think through some of this by a piece by Petra White, published in the Victorian Writer, which discussed what was meant by the sense of "place" in poetry [see the blog Placing Petra White].
In my mind, also, is a sequence of poems by Barry Hill, annotating a Chinese physician's journey to meet Taoist masters, ca 1380 A.D., after an exhibition of paintings, Fantastic Mountains : Chinese Landscape Painting from the Shanghai Museum (NSW, 2004). Barry's book is called As We Draw Ourselves (Five Islands Press, '08), and carries a lovely blurb from our mutual friend John Wolseley --the English painter who's evidently been born again as an Australian in this same period in which I'm identifying as a visitor &/or commuter!
Best Wishes,
Kris

*

14/12/08
Dear Kris, Thanks so much for the books. They actually arrived the day following our conversation on the 'phone. I have read some of the essays in the book on the New York Poets. I have some trouble in taking it in seriously. I keep wanting to sing to the writers & Poets (except maybe K. Koch) :
"Sing ho! for the life of a bear!
Sing ho! for the life of a bear...
The more it snows (tiddely pom!)
The more it snows (tiddely pom!)
The more it goes (tiddely pom!)
On Snowing."
It's time for the hums of Pooh to come into their own!
Happy Christmas to you & yours Kris,
Regards,
Jan S.


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CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

TOM BATES Ex- UK, nowadays lives in South Australia, continues work on his Clare cycle of sculptures. Contributes to the John Clare Society Journal.
SUSAN FEALY, see Poems & Pieces #5, August/Sept,'08
SUE STANFORD lives in Melbourne, active locally & internationally on the poetry scene. Enrolled at Monash University engaged on a PHD involving translation & critical discussion of early 20thCentury Japanese haiku poets. Publications include Haiku Poetry Ancient & Modern (MQ Publications, London), Recollections (self-published chapbook), Opal (Flat Chat press, Melbourne, 2006).
JAN STUMBLES worked in the book trade in the golden age. Studied writing with Alan Wearne & co at RMIT before taking up the brush.

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Edited by Kris Hemensley, with particular assistance from David Lumsden with the reproduction of images (for which, muchos gracias).
February 8th-19th, 2008
Melbourne

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #7, October/November, 2008

KLARE LANSON


Two Poems

GRAPH AXIS


we are all pushed along by books, dragged by boxes
counted by other peoples numbers, silenced by a roller
coaster, driven by the vision of the other and how bout

the mask that only seems to cover half the face these days.
most i's are in capitals yet this eye turns lines and graphs
into curves of water that drip fluidly into the place where

your most cherished dreams live. It's love in shades of blue.
It's life that equates meaning. It's an x with kisses and a y can't
we all just stop for a minute. It's clusters of memory that knead

us into recognition of self and plead with you to come to your
senses and cherish the colour of the sky. there is a loss of visible
markers, the blurs always make new scuffs into the streaming

voice of your body. dripping with sensibility are the hands shaken,
recording the unknown possibility. arrows are coordinates
for how we measure our life. they form stairways that lead into

a supermarket where we buy our daily needs. remote control
us. scratch raw figures. create formulas that socially collide,
make form blush with embarrassment, stretching for numbers.


***

TOLARNO IV


You walk through layers of dust
then climb into a bed made of
clean sheets that don't even
smell like you.

Glasses of unknown redness
clink lightly in the background,
our minds are entwined
with fragments of amber
filled nostalgia while our
bodies simply go along
for the ride.

We grow vines of Grenache
on arid land (with our bar talk,
small sighs and transparent
conversation).

You don't want a lover yet
somehow this drink of rusty wine
is cleansing and keeps the
dread and doubt filtered
through the eyes of
thoughtfully painted
glass windows.


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DAVID LUMSDEN


Two Poems


THE WHAT IS IT?
-William Henry Johnson (1957-1926) a.k.a. 'Zip'

From P.T. Barnum to the X-Files
it is clear we love to be humbugged.
So a young black man with a tiny skull
spent life exhibited in a gorilla costume
earning an extra dollar on days he did not speak.

Today how many grandparents
look back with half-averted eye
to a still clear image of him in his cage,
the indelible mark of a summer outing,
firm emblem of fears that cannot be classified?


***


CASA-MUSEU GAUDI, BARCELONA


There's something sparse
about the way he lived, at least
seen through the lens of what remains:
the little metal coffee cup,
plain bed, religious texts.

Outside another doomed project
grew around him like a garden,
the playground mosaics accreted
month by month, marine deposits.

Out towards the calm sea the imagined
vista of a cathedral's towers one day
high above the sprawling city,
the terrain so flat, yet life
one steep long homeward climb.



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IAN McBRYDE


Two Poems


ATLANTIS


Now Atlantis. Beneath the flood sleeps the collective exhalation of those
submerged early, those who entwined ride this breathless city.

Trapped between pews at the sodden tops of naves, the peeling hands
brushing algaed glass. Bumping roughly together in halls, in common rooms,
or puffed up and alone in long-drowned attics, wrapped in unravelled clothing.

If you take any words with you make them the opposite of these:
Edge out into the shoals. Leave no last note. Point away from the lake.


***


PIGEON ENGLISH


Each afternoon and the day's expected
rain lets itself gently down. From under

the ivy's hiss and drip, the pigeons are
cautiously calling to each other.

The north wind. You choose. No, you.
Soft walls, the torn broken covers

of our world. You choose. Bluefruit,
new schools, the roof of gloom.

The pigeons stop just after the rain does.
I hear them mutter, flick the water off

their wings, and then silence until dawn.
Torn corners, the north wind. You choose.


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SARI WAWN

CORRESPONDENCE


Kris, I read Petra White's article, Placing Poetry, in the Victorian Writer, June 2008 [it brought back memories of Petra's recent readings at Ruffy store and the 'particular placeness' in her poems] and your blog, Placing Petra White, with great interest. How good it is to find a conversation exploring the compelling --and vexed --issue of 'place'. As you imply, Petra is to be congratulated for tackling such an elusive topic in such a small piece.

As a refugee from the Wimmera plains, addicted ever since to wide open spaces with spare topography, I have been particularly interested in the concepts or genres of Place / Sense of Place / Landscape / Ecopoetry / Nature Writing and in recent years I have spent a lot of time reading and trying to write myself into both real and imaginary places. I really like your term 'topographical' writing. It invites a range of metaphors and carries so far no hint of cliche.

Is part of the problem, in tackling the issue of 'place', the term itself? My recent ventures into the field of Ecopoetry [see August blog, Mary Oliver's Sunflowers on
/The Edge_Collective/edge_pages/edge_blog11.html] have me questioning the whole process of labeling. Of course many poems labeled as eco or nature poetry have been wonderful explorations of ecology/nature, but then so have many others. As Susan Fealy's comments suggest [see Placing Petra White, "comments"], don't all poems assume the existence of a place created by the poet?

There may well be a gender aspect to consider here too in relation to outwardness/interiority, but there certainly are male poets who tend towards interiority on occasions. For example, in Songs My Mother Taught Me by John Koethe, are the lines :

"The place endures, unmindful and unseen / Until its very absence comes to seem a shape / That seems to stand for something // Why can't the unseen world - the real world - / Be like the aspects of a place that one remembers? / (....) why can't we believe in some imaginary realm / beyond belief, in which all time seems equal / and without the space between the way things are / and how they merely seem? In which the minor, / incidental shapes that meant the world to me - are real too? / Suppose that time were nothing but erasure / And that years were just whatever one had lost."

Each section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets is named for a particular place; also, at the beginning of Chris Wallace-Crabbe's wonderful, unsettling poem, The Rescue Will Not Take Place, are these lines :

"What do we live for? / We sort of know but / Can't quite put a name to the something which is / slipping away beneath us more - or maybe / Less - all the time, like a dream which won't / Disclose what it's deeply about but / Permeates a ripe summer day with / Its pauses and precedents..."

Finally, where would I be without the Web? Without blogs? Like many others, I visit more virtual places than any other these days, as a tourist, traveler, dreamer and even poet. My sense of space would be diminished without my virtual journeying. I should add too that I often find the idea of resorting to 'language' unhelpful : what does it really mean when you say that you like 'the language' of some writing? Surely it means the writing evokes something - a particular place or an idea or something else? Actually, I could go on talking about this all day. Maybe http://edgecollective.blogspot.com/ is the best place for this... And I haven't even started to discuss the women : my current favourites are Joy Harjo and Paula Gunn Allen - and of course there's Mary Oliver...

--October,2008
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

KLARE LANSON works with poetry, sound and live art performance, fusing her words with electronic music, moving imagery, mobile film and voice effecting technology. Has released an album, Every Third Breath, completed an artist's residency at FRUC in France, and performed in London, Berlin, New York, New Zealand. Co-editor for Going Down Swinging (Melbourne). Contact, http://klarelanson.net
DAVID LUMSDEN lives once again in Melbourne after a prolonged stay in Warsaw, Poland. His poems have appeared literary magazines including P. N. Review (UK) and Fulcrum (USA). His blog of poetry commentary can be found at http://sparksfromstones.blogspot.com/
IAN McBRYDE is a Canadian born, Melbourne poet, widely published and anthologised nationally and overseas. He has published 8 collections of poetry and released 2 CDs of spoken-word. He has performed his work at many venues and festivals across Australia, as well as in England, Canada & the USA. His next collection, The Adoption Order, will be published by Five Islands Press (Melbourne), in 2009.
SARI WAWN is a member of The Edge Art Collective, based at Terip Terip in Victoria. The group's projects include a book, Palimpsests of Gooram Gooram Gong, and quiet but persistent music [the title is from Jonathon Bate's The Song of the Earth], --a celebration of all unsung places where the voices of the natural world hold sway over their human occupants.


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Published November 6th, 2008

PLACING PETRA WHITE

In the eternal conversation in my head, I continue to worry at the theme of --and here I'm struggling to find the words-- 'person & place', 'representation', 'the traditional address'-- all or any of these as they fold in on one another, even as I try to clarify my thoughts! --and in particular, the value of such tropes within the ramification of postmodernism. So, in this foray, augmenting the crumbs I've already salvaged from memory of my brief exchange about poetry & place with Andrew Zawacki & others during a reading at Collected Works, ca '99 or so [see Vive la Connections, September blog, poetry & ideas], is the stimulation of Petra White's article in the Victorian Writer of June, '08, entitled Placing poetry (in which, according to the sub-heading, she "considers the role of 'place' in poetry").
The theme of that issue of the Victorian Writers Centre magazine is A sense of place, and besides PW's piece there are contributions from Alex Miller, Betty Pike/Charles Balnaves, & Julie Gittus, about political & spiritual identity, & what might be called the authenticating relation of literary character to place.
Often agreeing with her I still find myself raising objections, and vice-versa! For example, and right at the start of her article, no reason at all why she shouldnt declare she's "not altogether sure what is meant by 'a sense of place' in poetry", but to follow with, "for me, what makes a poem viable - gives it a reality - is its language", suggesting the opposition of 'sense of place' & 'language', has me jumping!
Referring to poems in her collection, The Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press, 2007), she explains that "place is not the focus of these poems so much as the site for them..." I wonder how 'focus' really differs from 'site'? Ultimately it's an individual taste & purpose that distinguishes the poem in which place is an effect from that in which it is the crux, and no bigger deal than the poem makes for itself...
Her key paragraph might be the following : "Writing about place for its own sake is quite difficult: the danger, particularly from a travel perspective, is of producing something like the doddery jottings of a detached, interested [is this a typo? 'disinterested' intended?] observer; a dreary parade of random otherness. How do you make the otherness part of you, so that it matters? Can we write about the effect a place has on us, avoiding Baedecker poetry?"
This is the quizzical point of her piece, though what an example of that error might be is left to one's own prejudice (assuming it's shared with her). When I think of what I've always called 'topographical writing' , which I realize has become a major part of my own project through the years, the concept 'spirit of place' comes to mind as its herald. Now, how adjacent is that to White's 'Baedecker poetry'?
It occurs to me that a fear of the obvious may underscore her objection, but even the baldest inventory differs according to poet & poem. Perhaps it's an attitude that's being impugned here --a suspicion of what I'm sure is variously decried as literal, naive, transparent and whatever else is jettisoned from the postmodernist bag. Not that Petra White is necessarily a subscriber but there's no doubting that the mood of this time, informed as it is by a supposedly new science of life, encourages a range of pseudo-sophistication of which the pejorative 'Baedecker poetry' might be one!
Assuming one's not referring to doggerel & deliberately light verse, like Dorothea McKeller's My Country perhaps, which are the Baedecker poems? William Blake's London? Wordsworth? Whitman? Brooke's Grantchester? Lowell's sumptuous family catalogue? Betjeman I suppose, but isnt he indelibly true to period & place, isnt the persona(lity) point perfect? Who else? The New Yorkers I guess, O'Hara, Denby, Schuyler, Berrigan et al.
At the same time, PW's appreciation of Wallace Stevens is commendable, as she writes, "Consider Wallace Stevens' famous poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, which has nothing to say about Key West, but is entirely concerned with the mystery of a woman singing to an audience. Key West remains in the reader's awareness throughout the poem as the site, and possible source, of an opening into imagination, and a place to return to." And what she discerns is probably typical of the behaviour of poets & poems vis a vis place most of the time.
Alternatively, from the ancient Chinese & Japanese (& that magnificent influence in their contemporary poetry) to the city & bush Beats (--though that tradition's created back to front in actual fact; the moderns' embrace of the concrete & colloquially concise against the loftily metaphorical, leading to what the holos-bolus translation of Eastern poetry & philosophy has made contemporary), there is an attempt to be so grounded in 'place' as for it to resound without interlocutor, or at least for poet to be the 'jotter' Petra White maligns. Of our era, consider the Objectivists (with Pound & Williams in the wings), Rakosi & Niedecker for example, and then Ginsberg & Snyder et al, and in our neck of the woods Ken Taylor, John Anderson, Robert Gray, or from another & somewhat dissimilar angle, Laurie Duggan, Pam Brown, Ken Bolton... I have to say I dont mind the jotters at all! 'Random', she says, 'dreary' --but too much in the eye or ear of the beholder for any general rule.
With reference to one of her own poems, she closes thus, "If there is a sense of vividness in Munich, it is not the result of description alone, but of finding the purpose of the poem and the significance of the places [Munich, Adelaide, Stoke-on-Trent], and charging them with the lightning thread of the movement of mind through language and the world."
It occurs to me that there may well be a gender aspect to the discussion : masculine outwardness, feminine interiority. Discussed by many, including Elizabeth Janeway whom I recall quoting in my book discussion services notes for On The Road (Council of Adult Education, c 1981). She described women writers who "seem to be putting themselves at risk purposively, in order to penetrate to the heart of the mystery of being(...)It is possible to see this kind of journey interior, as a counterpoint to the masculine drive to physical journeying, to 'the road' of Kerouac and the Beats." (Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, 1979.) The point here being that recording, transcribing, notating & even jotting down the world's particulars, as given, without author's 'charging', might reflect gender as much as stylistic difference or preference.
My other objection in this instance revolves around PW's term 'description alone', for the question is surely begged as to whether 'description' is ever alone, that is without authorial distinction ('voice' at its most basic). It also invites discussion of the contrast between pictorial & conceptual (the limitations of the former, the limits to the latter), representational & abstract and even the true poem versus the strategic...

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Kris Hemensley
25th September/12th October, '08