Showing posts with label Robert Lloyd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Lloyd. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2015
DELPHI SCRIBBLE
Crossing from the Northcote Shopping Plaza to the older market section revamped by the Aldi store, I don't immediately recognise the tall man in shades as Andrew Sant but it's him alright, obviously so when he removes the sunglasses. What are you doing here? he says --it's Thursday : shouldn't you be sitting in a cafe near here writing? I'm going there now, I say, --done my shopping… Just doing mine, he says… Ive been in England for a month, I say… I'm going later, he says --how was it? I'm pulling a face, composing a proper reply… You didn't want to come back! he says --adds : I know how you feel, haven't got it as bad as you but I know exactly… I begin explaining & describing : Got further into the West Country I'm forever dreaming… discovered more people & places & art & beer… you know! He smiles & nods, shakes my hand again, --got to go, he says… One day when we're both in England, he says… Yes! that'll be great!
On the spur of which I speed through the run-down arcade, blocking nostrils to the combined fug of Vietnamese nail repair salon and Greek fast food, onto High Street , cross on the lights & whaddayaknow see Pi O at the tram stop, saluting me I think, so I respond, "hello again" forming on my lips but perhaps it was someone else entirely he'd acknowledged, -- he's turned to the kerb as I pass full-tilt for the Delphi… Two whom I could imagine bumping into are Lloyd & Trimble, locals after all, around & about my own cafe & the Northcote Social Club & the old Town Hall et al --the Village in other words --the Greek village --but oh no, suddenly overcome by the image of the Widow's beating & stoning in Zorba the Greek --Irene Papas --what horror! --and then killed! --first time the other night seeing it again for many years --superstitious, bloody-minded, pre-modern, peasants-- islanders, just like Anne Axenskold was saying, treating me to afternoon tea, the day before I left Weymouth for Australia couple of weeks ago, talking about Portlanders in same tone of voice as we've reconnoitered Thomas Hardy's & JC Powys's weird & wondrous characters, --that other tribe across the Causeway, mysterious & hostile not the half of it…
[7-May, 2015/ 27-28 June, 15 tweeked]
--------------------------------------------------
Thursday, December 11, 2014
DYLAN THOMAS IN MELBOURNE, NOTES & COMMENTS 2013/14
DYLAN THOMAS IN MELBOURNE, 2013-2014
1
LLOYD & THOMAS AT HOLY TRINITY
On outset (see how I avoid 'get go') Robert Lloyd excuses his representation of Dylan Thomas from the "academic", by which one understands he wont be critically analysing the poetry but intersecting with it as an enthusiast. No slight at all to call Robert Lloyd a fan, after all he recognises Thomas as first pop-star, fore-runner of British Invasion, taking New York a decade before the Beatles. And it's true --Thomas's concerts were sell-outs --and at the end the poets of the day kept his hospital room pretty busy too…
Robert Lloyd has listened to the recordings, read all the biographies, seen all the movies, and made his Welsh & NYC pilgrimages. Personality, therefore --charisma, reputation, image, legend, & all fulfilled as myth -- defines this Dylan Thomas. One thing the academic approach doesn't do is elevate the artist above the work. For example, "the kinds of things artists have to do to survive" (RL) neither here nor there when the composition is the only essential. Except that in our age, where biography is the most popular form of history (as history itself collapses into a continuous present), familiarity & personal identification are imperative as the virtual reality is achieved. "At his best between the third & eighth drinks", according to the Richard Burton anecdote RL quotes, indicates for him the liberated tongue, delighting in word play, performing the self, as it were, amid social cacophony, the broth & froth of the everyday. All of which one can go along with given that the Thomas oeuvre, in verse & prose, original & interpretive, has long been absorbed.
"For many people these days poetry is song lyrics" is Robert Lloyd's grafting of the other Dylan & Mr Cohen & Nick Cave, Lou Reed, John Cale et al, to the body poetic, which nicely begs the question. I remember exemplary practitioner of poetry as art, John Tranter, saying as much over the radio years ago in response to the habitual question that assumes poetry's decay if not disappearance. It's alive & well (as popular form) in rock & pop lyrics, he said. He may have mentioned rap but needn't for the point to be made. Which isn't at all to posit equivalence but, in my mind, to imply the multiplicity of poetry, poetry in all of its genres, as complex ecriture & instantly available song, & all points in between.
Instructive when Lloyd described the difficulty of setting Dylan Thomas when, necessarily, the poem's formal scheme collides with the form the composer/musician is constructing for it. That tricky shit (as RL would say), & I'd contend, and probably for the benefit of poetry virgins, is at least as important as the verities of the drunken poet. Scholarly diligence & critical insight cannot be mutually exclusive of the ecstatic. With Thomas, language playfulness & profound thought & emotion co-inhere.
No review of the Holy Trinity gig this jumping out-take, which would would otherwise include description of the vaulting that a cello (Adi Sapir Cohen's) creates about a guitar, filling the sails of the songs --it's simply the after-taste of that Saturday late morning in East Melbourne, at the church's anniversary arts festival, celebrating Dylan Thomas, as one trammed happily back to the commerce of the City.
[18-20/8/14]
2
As native as a nearly five decades Melburnian endows, and to that extent aware of Australian anniversaries including Collected Works Bookshop's 30 years or the La Mama Poets' Workshop's 46th (--the original La Mama one must stress, which isn't to detract from La Mama Poetica which the late Mal Morgan inaugurated in 1985 after Val Kirwan's short-lived attempt earlier in the '80s to re-establish the September '68 incarnation --and Poetica is still going) --one's more than happy to leave mainstream majors to the official calendar, --the Henry Lawson, for example, now in Tony Lambides' hands --Ken Trimble part of that too?-- while rising to the fanfare (pun intended) of Dylan Thomas's centenary which enjoyed three previews all involving Robert Lloyd, plus the Melbourne Writers Festival's own session, before the official date of October 27th '14 was reached, unleashing the world-wide centenary celebration…
Happy memories persist from last year's event (the Dylan Thomas [99th] Birthday Celebration) at Collected Works Bookshop, led by Robert Lloyd & myself, --the programme comprising R L's song-settings of Thomas poems, play (Caroline Williamson, John Flaus, Patrick Boyle memorably reading from Under Milkwood), and poetry & commentary featuring Ray Liversidge, George Genovese, Ken Trimble, Valli Poole, Michael Reynolds, Earl Livings… Add to this Lloyd's presentation of Dylan Thomas at Holy Trinity's arts festival on August 16th, accompanied by Adi Sappir Cohen who brought her sublime cello to the show, and once again at the World Poetry gig at Federation Square a week ahead of the birthday. World Poetry's run these days by Dimitris Trioditis in the wake of founder Lella Carridi's coordination. Quite a detonation to hear the Greek translations of Dylan Thomas which Trioditis rattled off at the conclusion of the Lloyd/Sapir set, and definitely needed if only to offset the rising clamour from the bar below's amplified muzak!
Two small Melbourne publications have been the direct product of the original event and all the talk around it. Shall God Be Said To Thump The Clouds : Poets Celebrate Dylan Thomas, is published by Valli Poole with her Blank Rune Press, & sports a great cover portrait by Karl Gallagher of the tousle-haired boyo, cigarette held spivilly between sensual lips. It features American poets Alexis Rhone Fancher, Bryn Fortey & Catfish McDaris, and locals Gallagher, Poole & Ben John Smith. There's also Ken Trimble's The Ghost To His Green : A Tribute to Dylan Thomas, published by Christine Mathieu's Little Fox Press, which was spoken of as a Blank Rune Press chapbook until a classic change of plan (ah, poets). Significantly, the covers of both books disport with green, befitting the age's greenest poet. Who could forget Thomas's poignant double edge : "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer." If not for its Red Dragon, Wales would be green all over too.
The thirteen poems of The Ghost To His Green are elegiac transpositions of Ken Trimble's life upon Thomas's --in October Children for example, "We are / October children / yet as different and distant as Mercury's sun / and those visits though not Fernhill were filled / with innocence now / gone". It's a passionate identification with another of his exemplary poets, just as the Beats have been in his reading & roaming life. Thomas is the figure which the biography's cut for him, amplifying the famous poems. In this regard not unlike Robert Lloyd & the poets of the Blank Rune anthology, intersecting & interacting first & foremost with the legend. In Valli Poole's & several of her contributors' cases, Caitlin has joint billing. Irrelevant to poetry, which is Dylan's first to last, but everything to do with a feminist rebalancing of the history book. No doubting the document of Caitlin's story, so what's important is the quality of the particular prism --who or what distinguishes the biography or poetry when the tag of this time is the 'bright star'.
Robert Lloyd's poignant & amusing description of his journey to Dylan Thomas country, is, for mine, always part of an attempt to redeem true poetry & feeling from the show-biz & commerce in the poet's name. Yet I have a measure of 'why not?' even to that aspect now. Springing James Joyce from Bloomsday, similarly, has its point, yet this is the age of elitist & popular culture's convergence. Postmodernism anyone? 'Here Comes Everybody'? So why not enjoy the best of both worlds and accept the versions not as trivializations but as enlightening riffs & translations as happens with the great Indian classics and wherever in the world poetry appears at the heart of the culture.
Robert Lloyd is a storyteller for whom even the day's doings are potentially edged with mystery if not the mystical (--remember Robert Kenny's memorable lines, "Everything mystiqual, enveloped by a lovely intelligence / that seduces the rigmarole of the hours" , from his 'Poem' (Poem in inverted Commas), 1975)… Chutzpah & charm is endearing and practice makes perfect but simplest to say that Robert Lloyd addresses the audience not as a poet with a guitar or a guitarist with his poems but as a performer of the poems & songs of his personal Dylan Thomas journey. Allegories, parables, revelations along the way, all along this green year…
[23-30/10 (11-12/14]
1
LLOYD & THOMAS AT HOLY TRINITY
On outset (see how I avoid 'get go') Robert Lloyd excuses his representation of Dylan Thomas from the "academic", by which one understands he wont be critically analysing the poetry but intersecting with it as an enthusiast. No slight at all to call Robert Lloyd a fan, after all he recognises Thomas as first pop-star, fore-runner of British Invasion, taking New York a decade before the Beatles. And it's true --Thomas's concerts were sell-outs --and at the end the poets of the day kept his hospital room pretty busy too…
Robert Lloyd has listened to the recordings, read all the biographies, seen all the movies, and made his Welsh & NYC pilgrimages. Personality, therefore --charisma, reputation, image, legend, & all fulfilled as myth -- defines this Dylan Thomas. One thing the academic approach doesn't do is elevate the artist above the work. For example, "the kinds of things artists have to do to survive" (RL) neither here nor there when the composition is the only essential. Except that in our age, where biography is the most popular form of history (as history itself collapses into a continuous present), familiarity & personal identification are imperative as the virtual reality is achieved. "At his best between the third & eighth drinks", according to the Richard Burton anecdote RL quotes, indicates for him the liberated tongue, delighting in word play, performing the self, as it were, amid social cacophony, the broth & froth of the everyday. All of which one can go along with given that the Thomas oeuvre, in verse & prose, original & interpretive, has long been absorbed.
"For many people these days poetry is song lyrics" is Robert Lloyd's grafting of the other Dylan & Mr Cohen & Nick Cave, Lou Reed, John Cale et al, to the body poetic, which nicely begs the question. I remember exemplary practitioner of poetry as art, John Tranter, saying as much over the radio years ago in response to the habitual question that assumes poetry's decay if not disappearance. It's alive & well (as popular form) in rock & pop lyrics, he said. He may have mentioned rap but needn't for the point to be made. Which isn't at all to posit equivalence but, in my mind, to imply the multiplicity of poetry, poetry in all of its genres, as complex ecriture & instantly available song, & all points in between.
Instructive when Lloyd described the difficulty of setting Dylan Thomas when, necessarily, the poem's formal scheme collides with the form the composer/musician is constructing for it. That tricky shit (as RL would say), & I'd contend, and probably for the benefit of poetry virgins, is at least as important as the verities of the drunken poet. Scholarly diligence & critical insight cannot be mutually exclusive of the ecstatic. With Thomas, language playfulness & profound thought & emotion co-inhere.
No review of the Holy Trinity gig this jumping out-take, which would would otherwise include description of the vaulting that a cello (Adi Sapir Cohen's) creates about a guitar, filling the sails of the songs --it's simply the after-taste of that Saturday late morning in East Melbourne, at the church's anniversary arts festival, celebrating Dylan Thomas, as one trammed happily back to the commerce of the City.
[18-20/8/14]
2
As native as a nearly five decades Melburnian endows, and to that extent aware of Australian anniversaries including Collected Works Bookshop's 30 years or the La Mama Poets' Workshop's 46th (--the original La Mama one must stress, which isn't to detract from La Mama Poetica which the late Mal Morgan inaugurated in 1985 after Val Kirwan's short-lived attempt earlier in the '80s to re-establish the September '68 incarnation --and Poetica is still going) --one's more than happy to leave mainstream majors to the official calendar, --the Henry Lawson, for example, now in Tony Lambides' hands --Ken Trimble part of that too?-- while rising to the fanfare (pun intended) of Dylan Thomas's centenary which enjoyed three previews all involving Robert Lloyd, plus the Melbourne Writers Festival's own session, before the official date of October 27th '14 was reached, unleashing the world-wide centenary celebration…
Happy memories persist from last year's event (the Dylan Thomas [99th] Birthday Celebration) at Collected Works Bookshop, led by Robert Lloyd & myself, --the programme comprising R L's song-settings of Thomas poems, play (Caroline Williamson, John Flaus, Patrick Boyle memorably reading from Under Milkwood), and poetry & commentary featuring Ray Liversidge, George Genovese, Ken Trimble, Valli Poole, Michael Reynolds, Earl Livings… Add to this Lloyd's presentation of Dylan Thomas at Holy Trinity's arts festival on August 16th, accompanied by Adi Sappir Cohen who brought her sublime cello to the show, and once again at the World Poetry gig at Federation Square a week ahead of the birthday. World Poetry's run these days by Dimitris Trioditis in the wake of founder Lella Carridi's coordination. Quite a detonation to hear the Greek translations of Dylan Thomas which Trioditis rattled off at the conclusion of the Lloyd/Sapir set, and definitely needed if only to offset the rising clamour from the bar below's amplified muzak!
Two small Melbourne publications have been the direct product of the original event and all the talk around it. Shall God Be Said To Thump The Clouds : Poets Celebrate Dylan Thomas, is published by Valli Poole with her Blank Rune Press, & sports a great cover portrait by Karl Gallagher of the tousle-haired boyo, cigarette held spivilly between sensual lips. It features American poets Alexis Rhone Fancher, Bryn Fortey & Catfish McDaris, and locals Gallagher, Poole & Ben John Smith. There's also Ken Trimble's The Ghost To His Green : A Tribute to Dylan Thomas, published by Christine Mathieu's Little Fox Press, which was spoken of as a Blank Rune Press chapbook until a classic change of plan (ah, poets). Significantly, the covers of both books disport with green, befitting the age's greenest poet. Who could forget Thomas's poignant double edge : "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer." If not for its Red Dragon, Wales would be green all over too.
The thirteen poems of The Ghost To His Green are elegiac transpositions of Ken Trimble's life upon Thomas's --in October Children for example, "We are / October children / yet as different and distant as Mercury's sun / and those visits though not Fernhill were filled / with innocence now / gone". It's a passionate identification with another of his exemplary poets, just as the Beats have been in his reading & roaming life. Thomas is the figure which the biography's cut for him, amplifying the famous poems. In this regard not unlike Robert Lloyd & the poets of the Blank Rune anthology, intersecting & interacting first & foremost with the legend. In Valli Poole's & several of her contributors' cases, Caitlin has joint billing. Irrelevant to poetry, which is Dylan's first to last, but everything to do with a feminist rebalancing of the history book. No doubting the document of Caitlin's story, so what's important is the quality of the particular prism --who or what distinguishes the biography or poetry when the tag of this time is the 'bright star'.
Robert Lloyd's poignant & amusing description of his journey to Dylan Thomas country, is, for mine, always part of an attempt to redeem true poetry & feeling from the show-biz & commerce in the poet's name. Yet I have a measure of 'why not?' even to that aspect now. Springing James Joyce from Bloomsday, similarly, has its point, yet this is the age of elitist & popular culture's convergence. Postmodernism anyone? 'Here Comes Everybody'? So why not enjoy the best of both worlds and accept the versions not as trivializations but as enlightening riffs & translations as happens with the great Indian classics and wherever in the world poetry appears at the heart of the culture.
Robert Lloyd is a storyteller for whom even the day's doings are potentially edged with mystery if not the mystical (--remember Robert Kenny's memorable lines, "Everything mystiqual, enveloped by a lovely intelligence / that seduces the rigmarole of the hours" , from his 'Poem' (Poem in inverted Commas), 1975)… Chutzpah & charm is endearing and practice makes perfect but simplest to say that Robert Lloyd addresses the audience not as a poet with a guitar or a guitarist with his poems but as a performer of the poems & songs of his personal Dylan Thomas journey. Allegories, parables, revelations along the way, all along this green year…
[23-30/10 (11-12/14]
Thursday, February 18, 2010
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #16, February, 2010
SERAPH BE
LOVE, LAUGHTER AND LIGHT
I dream of Jeanie..Major Nelson in black and white.
I dream of Jeanie naked in her timeless bottle..
washed up in Barbara Eden's backyard.
I dream of Larry Hagman..old and tormented by
nightmares of J.R.'s assassination.
Jeanie immortal for the ages..
bewitched with Bewitched..jealous of Samantha Stevens
and her life as wife and mother, two radiant women
subservient to a fifties mirage..galactic time-travel,
stellar avenues of infinite delight, pale to a life
in the burbs with the love of a good man.
Poor Jeanie..the bubble-head of blink and wink..
Tony hedging bets, lame to the core..obsessed with
flight paths, blind to the bottle rocket orbiting
his living room.
I dream of Jeanie..of Aladdin and Ali Baba..the buried
treasure of childhood midday movies..of pirates and
exotic shores. I dream of Tony and Rodger secretly gay..
using Rodger's place for hapless rendezvous..poor Jeanie
without a clue.
All the world's a stage of faceless celluloid wishing,
boxed lives of sixties re run tv.
I dream a heaven of Jeanies..a sanctuary of Samanthas..
a generation of Tonys..a swag of Darrens..peace to all..
blissful delight to children..wistful Arabian nights.
I dream of Jeanie and Samantha walking hand in hand..
dream from within..imploding in showers of love,
laughter and light..
(1998)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GLENN COOPER
RIMBAUD'S VALISE
I am afraid to open Rimbaud's valise for fear of what it might contain. It lies there silent as a stone, a museum-piece from another world, tempting us. Heart thumping, I run one pink fingertip along the metal fastener with all the nervous intensity of a teenage boy struggling to unclasp his girlfriend's bra on the back seat of a car. The valise does not respond, does not groan in anticipation. I examine more closely the fastener, observe the rust that has long ago begun its relentless encroachment. Some of it has rubbed off on my finger - the same process, I imagine, that liberated Rimbaud first from his leg and then from his life. I wipe it off on my shirt. I want to open the valise; my hands rest on the sides as though on the shoulders of a dear friend whose eyes are full of the vast melancholy of departure. Already the rust has penetrated my shirt, burning a hole over my heart that roughly approximates the shape of Africa. I realize there is no need to open Rimbaud's valise.
oOo
HEAT
Didn't someone once say that if you don't want to drown you must become like the ocean? There's no use talking about the heat in the desert - it becomes you, you it. Resistance is futile, even for Rimbaud, alchemist and seer. But what did he expect to find when he came out here? A new life? A new identity? Certainly a new climate. Heat. Then, after eleven years in the cauldron, he is back at the farm in Roche, leg gone, spirit mutilated. It is only the heat of north Africa that can cure him, he believes. Heat: the same thing that brought him to this sorry state shall be the thing that heals him. It is a strategy that only Rimbaud could entertain. On his boyhood bed he lies, loyal sister Isabelle tending his every whim, the cancer spreads through the wreck of his body like ink poured slowly onto a clean sheet of paper. Maybe he regales her with stories of strange people in strange lands. Maybe he plucks sadly a melancholy melody on an Absyssinian harp, his childhood dreams of adventure, of a pure and astonishing new world, obliterated! - his drunken boat sunken, gathering barnacles like tumours in some cold, dark sea.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
BURN THE FLOOR
(Burn before Eating or Burn't Offerings)
Written for the occasion of Julie & Moray McDonald's Burns Night
23 January 2010
Coming up the road
If a Moray, met a motor
coming up the road -
if a Moray raced a lorrie
and a few red lights -
would a copper book a Moray
or would he vanish straight from Sight?
Till the tyres gang flat
Oh his love is like a red, red bike
that's newly bought in June
Oh his loves are really two red, one white
that sweetly spin in tune
How fare thy wheels, my only loves
how fare thy brakes and gears
Oh I will love thee still fair bike
Until some time mid next year
Right gude-willie -- waught
Or the haughty overdraft
Should olden debts be forgot
In any agency, or bought or sold
or traded on, or left unsecure to go to pot?
Oh here's a block, it's Bessemer
the mortgagee cant sleep
a loan's a cup of kindness
with crack that always leaks.
A Lousy sonnet
All impudence, the louse may sleep
in Melbourne nights on dames hats
in Toorak street, but if they raced
our lad would place a bet, perhaps, upon it
Scotch Eggs
Let other nations raise daft chickens
that peck at corns, we start from scratch
our good scotch egg is boiled
and meated shortly after it is hatched.
So drink to Scotch eggs
that fill the wame, clad in crumbs
humble ovals, first friend of the whisky keg.
To Old McDonald's Clocks
The McDonald's terr-
Orr souse
Clicks and ticks
And teams with clocks
Some second hand
Most, alarming, a set of pendulous
Feckless old timers
Waiting for a Burn-ish rhymer.
To Our Julie's Haggis
Our Julie's rushed it
From the shop
Chopped its tiny feet off
Squeezed its neck
Full out of breath
And filled its heart
To treat us.
As handsome is the Haggis picker
So Handsome is the pudding
Go eat your fill of this good paunch
Just don't ask what's in it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT LLOYD
Three poems
*
ONE THING I ASK FOR
One thing I ask for, one thing I hope -
To live in your house, all the days of my life -
To behold your loveliness
every morning in the light.
Hear my voice, when I speak -
Be gracious and answer me. I wait only for you.
Without faith it's unthinkable -
without hope I wont see your face.
With joy in my heart. Whom should I fear?
My singing is all for you - my playing is gifted too -
I'm speaking in your voice.
Your presence is with me now.
[based on Psalm 27]
oOo
DAFFODIL DREAM
It's dusk in Paris, and the flower sellers in the old market
Are packing up for the day.
As they hose down the walkways,
The wet smell of daffodils, carnations and roses
Fills the air.
What luck!
They are giving away bunches of daffodils
To passers by.
I gratefully receive mine,
And wonder how long these vendors
Have been giving away flowers at this hour!
[8/11/04]
oOo
I GAVE MY RABBI
I gave my Rabbi a Leonard Cohen CD
which he plays in his car.
He called me while driving to thank me
and give me a blessing.
oOo
PSALM
Hear my prayer
listen to my song
I am in despair
from days of grief.
Gone are the times
of satisfaction in the ways
of darkness.
My hope is for an opening!
My voice rises up
like a candle flame
searching for your support.
Be with me now,
Be with me in my
time of need!
[2003]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
Sonnet: Flat Evening Surface
long into a flat evening surface
the depths are in focus a supermarket
trolley under some bushes
glints in streaks of moonlight
through breaks in storm clouds
the air alive as a strong breeze
comes around corners straightens up
like water under a bridge
a rumble in shadow after the flash
the muggy aftermath as the breeze rests
hot & cold you mix them to have a good shower
the moon comes out as the sky clears
the storm recedes indifferent
over the rust of the future
[2/1/2010]
oOo
The Rocks
i snip then find
light traveling in
but the whirl doesn't spend
a moment away
from its shadow
from its shadow
an echo performs
like the lid of a thought
and thousands of homeless sheep
march on the capitol
the capitol is just
a pile of rocks
collected randomly
without haste
from a great distance
distance is full of errors
mostly the wrong ones
well snip the light
has gone from its shadow
filtering the air
the air stiffens
is cut into strips
and wound around the capital
with or without delay
or so you observe
to observe: BREAK GLASS
but avoid the sheep
nesting in the trees
there is no emergency
in a pile of rocks
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
Three Poems
.
the wisdom and dignity
of lives lived on the street
and under thatch
tends to be practical
delicate and unperfumed
*
exiled from the sandcastle
some people discover
they risk a big fine
for a crisp freshness
and the ethos of giving
tomorrow's parties
rather than receiving
the final salute
in boyish classroom classics
*
we all say the same thing
about the tailoring
the architect of a new
crossing of the chasm
is effectively moistured
and it's all systems go
as fashion gets fast and furious
oOo
DARWIN
a tropical sweat
white ants communication
the books moulder
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
Karl Gallagher
[8-2-2010]
Yr site's last posting [see Being Here Retrieved, re- Alan Murphy & Shmuel Gorr] is terrific.
Funny thing about the passage of time and paths crossing - briefly - in 1963 Felix Werder came to 'A' Division in Pentridge Prison to conduct a weekly music class. After a few weeks we never saw him again - someone else continued with the class.
Adrian [Rawlins] of course I knew well - met him early '66.
[Francis] Brabazon I met in '75 at Avatar's Abode in Queensland - I had a few brief conversations with him. But I already knew a lot about him - and the early days (30s, 40s) through close frequent contact with an old pal of Francis's - Ozwald Hall (and also Stan Adams). Francis and Ozzie (a painter) had close contact with Heidi and the Reeds et al.
Adrian told me that - its on record - somewhere - that Sydney Nolan said that Brabazon, of any others, had the greatest influence on his painting.
cheers Karl
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS
SERAPH B (aka Brendan Carey)'s poem is from the self-published A Joyful Noise (Melbourne, '98). The pseudo blurbs for that collection can stand in for his biog here : "Brendan Carey puts the beat back into beatitude!" -- "A celebration of mystic everness and cosmic beingness...From jazz to somewhere else..." His references from that time continue to the present : Sun Ra, Bob Kaufman, Mingus, Coltrane, Kerouac... His contact is,
jca82879@bigpond.net.au
ROBERT LLOYD is the composer, singer-songwriter now back in Melbourne after many years in Sydney & on the road. Writing songs, poems & a novel. Rock & acoustic background; toured with his band around the world. Has written for the Ohio Ballet & the Australian Dance Theatre amongst others. His discs include Robert Lloyd (keyboards, piano, percussion), 2001, & Songs of Robert Lloyd (guitar, vocals), 2007.
GLEN COOPER, CAROL JENKINS, PETE SPENCE & CORNELLIS VLEESKINS have all appeared in previous issues.
oOo
--that's it then!
18/2/2010--
LOVE, LAUGHTER AND LIGHT
I dream of Jeanie..Major Nelson in black and white.
I dream of Jeanie naked in her timeless bottle..
washed up in Barbara Eden's backyard.
I dream of Larry Hagman..old and tormented by
nightmares of J.R.'s assassination.
Jeanie immortal for the ages..
bewitched with Bewitched..jealous of Samantha Stevens
and her life as wife and mother, two radiant women
subservient to a fifties mirage..galactic time-travel,
stellar avenues of infinite delight, pale to a life
in the burbs with the love of a good man.
Poor Jeanie..the bubble-head of blink and wink..
Tony hedging bets, lame to the core..obsessed with
flight paths, blind to the bottle rocket orbiting
his living room.
I dream of Jeanie..of Aladdin and Ali Baba..the buried
treasure of childhood midday movies..of pirates and
exotic shores. I dream of Tony and Rodger secretly gay..
using Rodger's place for hapless rendezvous..poor Jeanie
without a clue.
All the world's a stage of faceless celluloid wishing,
boxed lives of sixties re run tv.
I dream a heaven of Jeanies..a sanctuary of Samanthas..
a generation of Tonys..a swag of Darrens..peace to all..
blissful delight to children..wistful Arabian nights.
I dream of Jeanie and Samantha walking hand in hand..
dream from within..imploding in showers of love,
laughter and light..
(1998)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GLENN COOPER
RIMBAUD'S VALISE
I am afraid to open Rimbaud's valise for fear of what it might contain. It lies there silent as a stone, a museum-piece from another world, tempting us. Heart thumping, I run one pink fingertip along the metal fastener with all the nervous intensity of a teenage boy struggling to unclasp his girlfriend's bra on the back seat of a car. The valise does not respond, does not groan in anticipation. I examine more closely the fastener, observe the rust that has long ago begun its relentless encroachment. Some of it has rubbed off on my finger - the same process, I imagine, that liberated Rimbaud first from his leg and then from his life. I wipe it off on my shirt. I want to open the valise; my hands rest on the sides as though on the shoulders of a dear friend whose eyes are full of the vast melancholy of departure. Already the rust has penetrated my shirt, burning a hole over my heart that roughly approximates the shape of Africa. I realize there is no need to open Rimbaud's valise.
oOo
HEAT
Didn't someone once say that if you don't want to drown you must become like the ocean? There's no use talking about the heat in the desert - it becomes you, you it. Resistance is futile, even for Rimbaud, alchemist and seer. But what did he expect to find when he came out here? A new life? A new identity? Certainly a new climate. Heat. Then, after eleven years in the cauldron, he is back at the farm in Roche, leg gone, spirit mutilated. It is only the heat of north Africa that can cure him, he believes. Heat: the same thing that brought him to this sorry state shall be the thing that heals him. It is a strategy that only Rimbaud could entertain. On his boyhood bed he lies, loyal sister Isabelle tending his every whim, the cancer spreads through the wreck of his body like ink poured slowly onto a clean sheet of paper. Maybe he regales her with stories of strange people in strange lands. Maybe he plucks sadly a melancholy melody on an Absyssinian harp, his childhood dreams of adventure, of a pure and astonishing new world, obliterated! - his drunken boat sunken, gathering barnacles like tumours in some cold, dark sea.
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CAROL JENKINS
BURN THE FLOOR
(Burn before Eating or Burn't Offerings)
Written for the occasion of Julie & Moray McDonald's Burns Night
23 January 2010
Coming up the road
If a Moray, met a motor
coming up the road -
if a Moray raced a lorrie
and a few red lights -
would a copper book a Moray
or would he vanish straight from Sight?
Till the tyres gang flat
Oh his love is like a red, red bike
that's newly bought in June
Oh his loves are really two red, one white
that sweetly spin in tune
How fare thy wheels, my only loves
how fare thy brakes and gears
Oh I will love thee still fair bike
Until some time mid next year
Right gude-willie -- waught
Or the haughty overdraft
Should olden debts be forgot
In any agency, or bought or sold
or traded on, or left unsecure to go to pot?
Oh here's a block, it's Bessemer
the mortgagee cant sleep
a loan's a cup of kindness
with crack that always leaks.
A Lousy sonnet
All impudence, the louse may sleep
in Melbourne nights on dames hats
in Toorak street, but if they raced
our lad would place a bet, perhaps, upon it
Scotch Eggs
Let other nations raise daft chickens
that peck at corns, we start from scratch
our good scotch egg is boiled
and meated shortly after it is hatched.
So drink to Scotch eggs
that fill the wame, clad in crumbs
humble ovals, first friend of the whisky keg.
To Old McDonald's Clocks
The McDonald's terr-
Orr souse
Clicks and ticks
And teams with clocks
Some second hand
Most, alarming, a set of pendulous
Feckless old timers
Waiting for a Burn-ish rhymer.
To Our Julie's Haggis
Our Julie's rushed it
From the shop
Chopped its tiny feet off
Squeezed its neck
Full out of breath
And filled its heart
To treat us.
As handsome is the Haggis picker
So Handsome is the pudding
Go eat your fill of this good paunch
Just don't ask what's in it.
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ROBERT LLOYD
Three poems
*
ONE THING I ASK FOR
One thing I ask for, one thing I hope -
To live in your house, all the days of my life -
To behold your loveliness
every morning in the light.
Hear my voice, when I speak -
Be gracious and answer me. I wait only for you.
Without faith it's unthinkable -
without hope I wont see your face.
With joy in my heart. Whom should I fear?
My singing is all for you - my playing is gifted too -
I'm speaking in your voice.
Your presence is with me now.
[based on Psalm 27]
oOo
DAFFODIL DREAM
It's dusk in Paris, and the flower sellers in the old market
Are packing up for the day.
As they hose down the walkways,
The wet smell of daffodils, carnations and roses
Fills the air.
What luck!
They are giving away bunches of daffodils
To passers by.
I gratefully receive mine,
And wonder how long these vendors
Have been giving away flowers at this hour!
[8/11/04]
oOo
I GAVE MY RABBI
I gave my Rabbi a Leonard Cohen CD
which he plays in his car.
He called me while driving to thank me
and give me a blessing.
oOo
PSALM
Hear my prayer
listen to my song
I am in despair
from days of grief.
Gone are the times
of satisfaction in the ways
of darkness.
My hope is for an opening!
My voice rises up
like a candle flame
searching for your support.
Be with me now,
Be with me in my
time of need!
[2003]
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PETE SPENCE
Sonnet: Flat Evening Surface
long into a flat evening surface
the depths are in focus a supermarket
trolley under some bushes
glints in streaks of moonlight
through breaks in storm clouds
the air alive as a strong breeze
comes around corners straightens up
like water under a bridge
a rumble in shadow after the flash
the muggy aftermath as the breeze rests
hot & cold you mix them to have a good shower
the moon comes out as the sky clears
the storm recedes indifferent
over the rust of the future
[2/1/2010]
oOo
The Rocks
i snip then find
light traveling in
but the whirl doesn't spend
a moment away
from its shadow
from its shadow
an echo performs
like the lid of a thought
and thousands of homeless sheep
march on the capitol
the capitol is just
a pile of rocks
collected randomly
without haste
from a great distance
distance is full of errors
mostly the wrong ones
well snip the light
has gone from its shadow
filtering the air
the air stiffens
is cut into strips
and wound around the capital
with or without delay
or so you observe
to observe: BREAK GLASS
but avoid the sheep
nesting in the trees
there is no emergency
in a pile of rocks
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
Three Poems
.
the wisdom and dignity
of lives lived on the street
and under thatch
tends to be practical
delicate and unperfumed
*
exiled from the sandcastle
some people discover
they risk a big fine
for a crisp freshness
and the ethos of giving
tomorrow's parties
rather than receiving
the final salute
in boyish classroom classics
*
we all say the same thing
about the tailoring
the architect of a new
crossing of the chasm
is effectively moistured
and it's all systems go
as fashion gets fast and furious
oOo
DARWIN
a tropical sweat
white ants communication
the books moulder
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
Karl Gallagher
[8-2-2010]
Yr site's last posting [see Being Here Retrieved, re- Alan Murphy & Shmuel Gorr] is terrific.
Funny thing about the passage of time and paths crossing - briefly - in 1963 Felix Werder came to 'A' Division in Pentridge Prison to conduct a weekly music class. After a few weeks we never saw him again - someone else continued with the class.
Adrian [Rawlins] of course I knew well - met him early '66.
[Francis] Brabazon I met in '75 at Avatar's Abode in Queensland - I had a few brief conversations with him. But I already knew a lot about him - and the early days (30s, 40s) through close frequent contact with an old pal of Francis's - Ozwald Hall (and also Stan Adams). Francis and Ozzie (a painter) had close contact with Heidi and the Reeds et al.
Adrian told me that - its on record - somewhere - that Sydney Nolan said that Brabazon, of any others, had the greatest influence on his painting.
cheers Karl
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CONTRIBUTORS
SERAPH B (aka Brendan Carey)'s poem is from the self-published A Joyful Noise (Melbourne, '98). The pseudo blurbs for that collection can stand in for his biog here : "Brendan Carey puts the beat back into beatitude!" -- "A celebration of mystic everness and cosmic beingness...From jazz to somewhere else..." His references from that time continue to the present : Sun Ra, Bob Kaufman, Mingus, Coltrane, Kerouac... His contact is,
jca82879@bigpond.net.au
ROBERT LLOYD is the composer, singer-songwriter now back in Melbourne after many years in Sydney & on the road. Writing songs, poems & a novel. Rock & acoustic background; toured with his band around the world. Has written for the Ohio Ballet & the Australian Dance Theatre amongst others. His discs include Robert Lloyd (keyboards, piano, percussion), 2001, & Songs of Robert Lloyd (guitar, vocals), 2007.
GLEN COOPER, CAROL JENKINS, PETE SPENCE & CORNELLIS VLEESKINS have all appeared in previous issues.
oOo
--that's it then!
18/2/2010--
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