C. D. BARRON
THE EMPTY SEA
"A red Daedalion on the timid Earth"
Al Aaraaf; E A Poe
As you are outside to my necessary ark
and yet inciteful - time being what it is
We eat stars and look north you say
as if Hesperus bothered us no more
though I the egg and tomb of it all
am unlikely to move that way or this
Uraniborg - you set yourself up
gilded - and it's your move now!
[7 February, 2004]
*
LIGHTENING
"all things as they were"
Lucretius
He gathers twigs
to ponder haystacks
like beehives in grey fields
His book is one of pine needles
threaded with the sentiment
of moths set free
The lichen on his branch
is a sign to place
where crust and core are one
[2008]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ASHLEY CAPES
birthday
dust quickens
like spice
in the mouth, lace
curtains
preen
and the forest of millimetres
between us
grows
*
eastern avenue
moon's hangover
hits the street in a splash of white,
outside the window
the transformer
is like a gargoyle, sitting
halfway up the electricity pole,
either too old
or too lazy to climb higher.
*
indian ocean
at scarborough beach
crows bark all morning
and gulls
fill car parks, like
beggars pecking for coins.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDDIE CREANEY
EPITAPHS
The banker
Here lies a bank manager
Who lost interest
The politician
Here lies a politician
Lying still
The train driver
Here lies a train driver
Among the other sleepers
The bookkeeper
Here lies a bookkeeper
Entered in the books of the lord
Joseph Smith
Of Mormon fame lies Joseph Smith
Progenitor of kin & kith
Shakespeare
Shakespeare lies beneath this sod
Poetry was his only god
John Milton
Here lies John Milton who told of his blindness
His other works were short on kindness
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GREGORY DAY
IN COUNTRY VICTORIA
for Peter Temple
Just like another powerless person in polar fleece
living outside the zone of influence and legitimate thought
taking over from nature, the characters of the weather,
applying the lessons as idiomatic law onto current events
rather than skulling the menu in a team-suburb;
it's a type of new pastorale, a wind's free field
refilched, thinking through bends in a clear stream
with, it has to be said, a romance that visitors will arrive.
But it's so invisible, as numerous and hidden as circuit boards:
take the freeway exit ramp, drive east, cross the railway
and follow the cypress wind breaks till the grey letterbox
like in crime fiction, because the independence is criminal,
being innocent is sneaky, and critical's just another rainy day.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RAE DESMOND JONES
RIMBAUD AT FOURTEEN
(to Liam Frost)
In front of the overhead projector's
Prophetic spidery lines
He precisely pronounced each syllable,
Controlled each pause, released each small word
Like a bird from a cage.
After the applause he sat
With a flick of hair at his pituitary
Smouldered & surveyed the future,
Whining like a helicopter
Just below the bare white ceiling.
Then, when the third eye
Burst into flame,
He skipped down the stairs with his mother
Into the damp garden.
There the shivering palm trees
Whispered sweet promises
& prophecies of savage Africa.
*
The beautiful young woman beside you glances back, into the past, into the tunnel. She turns and smiles. She would like to stop and make love beside the slow moving river past which you are now driving smoothly, but she knows that you must continue the quest. You are a man in search. Despite her eyes and the movement of her taut body, you ignore your growing erection. She sighs deeply, perhaps one of those soft light orgasms with which women express at once their love and disillusionment. The world is full of sparks and fire. The police sirens shriek from the distance but the city waits, wallowing in a future that is already gone.
Violence is deeply disturbing and stimulates you, despite your knowledge of the technological artifice in this ballet of our time. Cars and helicopters writhe in the flames. What use is metal, except as a metaphor for the heart or the body?
The road is limitless. It carries on, beyond the borders of the city, the badlands. The deserts are left behind, congealed into the dark spaces of mass and time of the last frontiers. She goes down on you. Despite the delicious sensations of her tongue around the button of your prick, you continue to hold the wheel firmly. The Ferrari shudders when at last you approach the forked lightning playing on the round hill and the sulphurous mango coloured light.
There is absolutely nothing to it, nothing at all.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EUGENIO MONTALE, translated by ANDREW TAYLOR
GODISE IL VENTO
Be happy if the wind in the orchard
floods you again with life:
here where a dead tangle
of memories lies buried,
this wasn't a garden, it was a reliquary.
The whirring you hear isn't of wings
but a stirring within the eternal womb:
look how this solitary stretch of land
is turning into a crucible.
A blaze rages here against the sheer wall.
If you keep going maybe you'll encounter
the phantom that will save you;
this is where those acts and histories are composed
that are cancelled as the future is played out.
look for a broken thread in the net,
that binds us, leap through, run for it!
Go! that's my prayer for you - my thirst
will be lightened then, my bitterness less sharp.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
C.D. BARRON lives in the Mountains outside of Melbourne where she continues her studies in the Mysteries.
ASHLEY CAPES co-founded Egg (Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006, He is currently studying Arts & Education at Monash, while co-editing the literary web-site www.holland1945.net.au His first collection of poetry, pollen and the storm, 2008, published with the assistance of Small Change Press (Queensland).
EDDIE CREANY lives in Melbourne. Long-standing servant of local poetry organizations. Delivered his Epitaphs at the June reading at the Eco-House in St Kilda (where your editor snapped them up).
GREGORY DAY is a writer, poet & musician living on the southwest coast of Victoria. His latest novel, Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds (Picador, '07) was shortlisted for this year's NSW Premier's Prize for fiction.
RAE DESMOND JONES is a much published poet, short-story writer & novelist of the 70s, 80s, & 90s. Edited the little mag, Your Friendly Fascist. After an extended period as a literary enfant terrible, he paddled through a dour but eventful middle age as a Councillor & Mayor for Ashfield, an inner-Western municipality of Sydney. He has since decided to return to his original calling. There are a few more years of fun beckoning yet, as an old fart terrible. He can be disabused on raedeejay@optusnet.com.au
ANDREW TAYLOR's Collected Poems were published by Salt Publications (UK) in 2004. In that year, during a Residency at the BR Whiting Library in Rome, courtesy of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, he translated a number of Eugenio Montale's poems, which have been broadcast on Mike Ladd's ABC radio programme, Poetica. Teaches at Edith Cowan University, WA.
____________________________________________________________________
Showing posts with label Rae Desmond Jones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rae Desmond Jones. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Sunday, August 5, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 14
LAUNCH SPEECH for SALT-LICK QUARTERLY, volume 4; 13th March,2004 at Dante's Restaurant, Fitzroy, Melbourne.
I dedicate my comments this evening to the memory of Cid Corman. Paul Croucher, one of the founders of Salt-Lick, rang me this afternoon with the sad news that Corman died on 12th March, 6 a.m., Japanese time. For several weeks he's been in & out of coma.
"Death always
reminding
us - a breath
is a breath
The sound and
spirit of
a poet."
[Corman]
Corman was one of the great editors. When the best of his magazine,Origin, was published about 30 years ago as The Gist of Origin, everyone could see what a grand job it had done --providing a platform for the inheritors of the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tendency --chiefly Olson & Creeley, the Black Mountain poets --and their colleagues & successors --all the way down to [contemporary] San Francisco poets like George Evans & our own Clive Faust, who lives quietly in Bendigo...
Corman also published important translations, ancient & modern, from the European languages & Japanese, Chinese. Whilst he supported Olson & co., he stuck by his own tastes & values against their hectoring & egotism --a bit of both of which rubbed off on me!
These days, with my bookseller's hat on, I will say that Salt-Lick is the best purely poetry magazine in Australia. But what would I have said thirty years ago? A magazine which just published poems without a literary or linguistic [poetic] programme? Wasnt that what the "new poetry" & the "new poets" wanted to transcend? Didnt we think of that sort of thing as the merely literary, the journeyman mainstream? I remember --at least I think I do --arguing the point with Michael Dugan in 1969, but I wouldnt these days --not since the '90s! Forgive me Michael...!
A whole lot of water under the bridge since the '60s & '70s. (In 1968 Michael & I published magazines, Our Glass & Crosscurrents, on different sides of the city, and until Ken Taylor told me, ignorant of one another! This event was the beginning of the "mini-mag explosion" --the rest is history!)
What I've learnt, since the '60s, is the limitation of any ideology --or certainly, the limited tenure of any ideology. In my own case, as editor/publisher & poet, I realised that the pursuit of a poetical-aesthetical & literary-political line eventually ran me into a massive cul-de-sac. I needed, personally, to re-think & re-read. I was never happier than in the late '80s, critiquing my philosophical & literary position. I felt re-born in the '90s, and I'm still reaping the benefits.
As far as I was concerned [after that re-think], postmodernism (the catch-cry of the '70s & '80s) meant, at the very least, the re-admission of all the types of poetry which had been reduced or thought to be debased & therefore excluded in the time of the ascendancy of Modernism. This meant my experiments as a poet could now also include the traditional forms & privileges of poetry in addition to all of the gifts of the wonderful adventure of free-verse from Whitman & Rimbaud to the present.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose take on poetry & poetics is pluralist. Whatever is meant by that blurb I've read which describes Salt-Lick as "favouring Australian free-verse", it's clear Salt-Lick actually publishes poets of most tendencies writing today --it publishes poems which stand up as poems in themselves (in the very way Jenny Harrison discussed in her judge's report for the [Melbourne Poets' Union] National Poetry Prize earlier this year), poems which are self-sufficient whatever their formal or experimental entry-point.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose production values are those of the finely printed poetry-book. Poets & poems are treated to elegant design --readers are given the best chance to enjoy the work.
Salt-Lick is a magazine with a Melbourne address. It's our magazine! Melbourne poets or Melbourne-gravitating poets regularly get into it; poets of every type, including the no-type-at-all (who seem to me to be finding form for their spoken, spieling poems)!
Salt-Lick has an e-mail address & a website. Overseas poets, presumably correspondents of the magazine, also publish in Salt-Lick. This throws up another interesting discussion. When I was actively publishing & reviewing, between the late'60s & mid-'80s, I was described as an internationalist. But it's apparent that in the age of the World Wide Web, "international" either goes without saying or "local" includes the www potential wherever one happens to be. Perhaps international, in the sense of anti-parochial, trans-national, is almost beside the point nowadays?
Salt-Lick, then, is quite obviously a Melbourne-based magazine, featuring a great range of the elite, the up & coming and the quite new poets & poetry in Australia. It is local, but it is also in the world --it receives the world into its Melbourne & Australian hospitality.
This fourth issue has changed the colour of its cover, from different shades of grey to bright red, but not the colour of its generous project. The contents page reveals the proverbial embarrassment of riches : Douglas Barbour, Peter Rose, Adrienne Eberhard, Jane Gibian, Peter Boyle, Earl Livings...Lorin Ford again!...Myron Lysenko ("biggest storm / in a hundred years - / i sleep through it" ; "too much beer / i lie in bed / & almost see something") --ah, divine!
We have four contributors to this fourth issue to read today --John Mateer, Sandra Hill [now Fitts], Ross Donlon & Danny Huppatz.
We dont have with us either Margie Cronin or Rae Desmond Jones --amongst many others --who are interstate, overseas, otherwise engaged. I'd like to offer something of these. MTC Cronin's poem, "Inviting Rain, after Tu Fu, for Kris Hemensley", includes words of mine from an e-mail exchange between us : "The man said / he is wearing his dead son / like a cloak of air"... Notwithstanding that [the sad & awful reference as well as the kind acknowledgment to myself], it's an intriguingly complex poem from a prolific & ingenious poet... Rae Desmond Jones' poem has a wonderful colloquial purr, like its subject, Dean Martin. ['"i can stay for one song" he murmurs "then i gotta go." / he turns & crosses lackey street but the kids on their skateboards don't know him. / as he passes the dribbling fountain the drunk on the bench opens one eye & watches / him wander out among the cars whispering inaudible as angels in the darkness."] His contribution allows us to recall his place in the 1970s little-magazine culture, care of the inimitable Your Friendly Fascist [the magazine he edited in Sydney], but that's yet another story...
-------------------------------------------------
[This launching-speech was published in Ralph Wessman et al's Famous Reporter, #29 (June 2004). It caught a few typos, subsequently attended to with elegant correction slip.]
I dedicate my comments this evening to the memory of Cid Corman. Paul Croucher, one of the founders of Salt-Lick, rang me this afternoon with the sad news that Corman died on 12th March, 6 a.m., Japanese time. For several weeks he's been in & out of coma.
"Death always
reminding
us - a breath
is a breath
The sound and
spirit of
a poet."
[Corman]
Corman was one of the great editors. When the best of his magazine,Origin, was published about 30 years ago as The Gist of Origin, everyone could see what a grand job it had done --providing a platform for the inheritors of the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tendency --chiefly Olson & Creeley, the Black Mountain poets --and their colleagues & successors --all the way down to [contemporary] San Francisco poets like George Evans & our own Clive Faust, who lives quietly in Bendigo...
Corman also published important translations, ancient & modern, from the European languages & Japanese, Chinese. Whilst he supported Olson & co., he stuck by his own tastes & values against their hectoring & egotism --a bit of both of which rubbed off on me!
These days, with my bookseller's hat on, I will say that Salt-Lick is the best purely poetry magazine in Australia. But what would I have said thirty years ago? A magazine which just published poems without a literary or linguistic [poetic] programme? Wasnt that what the "new poetry" & the "new poets" wanted to transcend? Didnt we think of that sort of thing as the merely literary, the journeyman mainstream? I remember --at least I think I do --arguing the point with Michael Dugan in 1969, but I wouldnt these days --not since the '90s! Forgive me Michael...!
A whole lot of water under the bridge since the '60s & '70s. (In 1968 Michael & I published magazines, Our Glass & Crosscurrents, on different sides of the city, and until Ken Taylor told me, ignorant of one another! This event was the beginning of the "mini-mag explosion" --the rest is history!)
What I've learnt, since the '60s, is the limitation of any ideology --or certainly, the limited tenure of any ideology. In my own case, as editor/publisher & poet, I realised that the pursuit of a poetical-aesthetical & literary-political line eventually ran me into a massive cul-de-sac. I needed, personally, to re-think & re-read. I was never happier than in the late '80s, critiquing my philosophical & literary position. I felt re-born in the '90s, and I'm still reaping the benefits.
As far as I was concerned [after that re-think], postmodernism (the catch-cry of the '70s & '80s) meant, at the very least, the re-admission of all the types of poetry which had been reduced or thought to be debased & therefore excluded in the time of the ascendancy of Modernism. This meant my experiments as a poet could now also include the traditional forms & privileges of poetry in addition to all of the gifts of the wonderful adventure of free-verse from Whitman & Rimbaud to the present.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose take on poetry & poetics is pluralist. Whatever is meant by that blurb I've read which describes Salt-Lick as "favouring Australian free-verse", it's clear Salt-Lick actually publishes poets of most tendencies writing today --it publishes poems which stand up as poems in themselves (in the very way Jenny Harrison discussed in her judge's report for the [Melbourne Poets' Union] National Poetry Prize earlier this year), poems which are self-sufficient whatever their formal or experimental entry-point.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose production values are those of the finely printed poetry-book. Poets & poems are treated to elegant design --readers are given the best chance to enjoy the work.
Salt-Lick is a magazine with a Melbourne address. It's our magazine! Melbourne poets or Melbourne-gravitating poets regularly get into it; poets of every type, including the no-type-at-all (who seem to me to be finding form for their spoken, spieling poems)!
Salt-Lick has an e-mail address & a website. Overseas poets, presumably correspondents of the magazine, also publish in Salt-Lick. This throws up another interesting discussion. When I was actively publishing & reviewing, between the late'60s & mid-'80s, I was described as an internationalist. But it's apparent that in the age of the World Wide Web, "international" either goes without saying or "local" includes the www potential wherever one happens to be. Perhaps international, in the sense of anti-parochial, trans-national, is almost beside the point nowadays?
Salt-Lick, then, is quite obviously a Melbourne-based magazine, featuring a great range of the elite, the up & coming and the quite new poets & poetry in Australia. It is local, but it is also in the world --it receives the world into its Melbourne & Australian hospitality.
This fourth issue has changed the colour of its cover, from different shades of grey to bright red, but not the colour of its generous project. The contents page reveals the proverbial embarrassment of riches : Douglas Barbour, Peter Rose, Adrienne Eberhard, Jane Gibian, Peter Boyle, Earl Livings...Lorin Ford again!...Myron Lysenko ("biggest storm / in a hundred years - / i sleep through it" ; "too much beer / i lie in bed / & almost see something") --ah, divine!
We have four contributors to this fourth issue to read today --John Mateer, Sandra Hill [now Fitts], Ross Donlon & Danny Huppatz.
We dont have with us either Margie Cronin or Rae Desmond Jones --amongst many others --who are interstate, overseas, otherwise engaged. I'd like to offer something of these. MTC Cronin's poem, "Inviting Rain, after Tu Fu, for Kris Hemensley", includes words of mine from an e-mail exchange between us : "The man said / he is wearing his dead son / like a cloak of air"... Notwithstanding that [the sad & awful reference as well as the kind acknowledgment to myself], it's an intriguingly complex poem from a prolific & ingenious poet... Rae Desmond Jones' poem has a wonderful colloquial purr, like its subject, Dean Martin. ['"i can stay for one song" he murmurs "then i gotta go." / he turns & crosses lackey street but the kids on their skateboards don't know him. / as he passes the dribbling fountain the drunk on the bench opens one eye & watches / him wander out among the cars whispering inaudible as angels in the darkness."] His contribution allows us to recall his place in the 1970s little-magazine culture, care of the inimitable Your Friendly Fascist [the magazine he edited in Sydney], but that's yet another story...
-------------------------------------------------
[This launching-speech was published in Ralph Wessman et al's Famous Reporter, #29 (June 2004). It caught a few typos, subsequently attended to with elegant correction slip.]
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