Showing posts with label Susan Fealy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Fealy. Show all posts
Sunday, September 4, 2016
MAY-AUGUST '16 : SAVED FROM F/B OBLIVION
May 8th
Friday the 29th April '16 was the last possible day to receive mail in Weymouth, eve of the early drive up to Heathrow, with Robin H, and the long flight back to Melbourne. Great pleasure & surprise, then, when package from Kelvin Bowers & Dooze Storey in St Ives was delivered : their gift of David Whittaker's book, Give Me Your Painting Hand : W.S. Graham & Cornwall, published by his own Wavestone Press [www.wavestonepress.co.uk]. Everywhere I went this English Journey '16, conversation ensued in which Sydney Graham's name came up. Kel, Dooze & I talked about him when we looked at the Tate's St Ives book of 1985, in which Graham's poems for painter friends appear within the illustrated text about that golden period of Cornish abstraction (Graham's more or less the poet of that practice I'd like to say). And again, just around the corner from Kel's place, with poet John Phillips, which I worked into my (compulsory) Lighthouse poem soon after. And continued in Weymouth with Lucas Weschke, and then in the New Forest with Tony & Sonia Green (whose new book on Sven Berlin is also recently published), and in Blandford Forum with David Caddy. W.S.Graham was the common un-common element in all my meetings!
Curious to read the headline in the Cornish Review, "neglected giant of Cornish literature"... In our neck of the woods, Sidney Graham is celebrated not neglected. I guess that's the disparity between mainstream & whatever our community of reading & writing is called! Certainly since Faber's whopper of a collected, Graham's been front & centre... And didnt I meself attempt a critique of WSG at the Melbourne Poets Union event at the VWC when it was next door to Collected Works Bookshop in the Nicholas Building ten or so years ago? Rhetorical question! I did! With a little bottle of whiskey beside me --I was sitting on panel with Jordie Albiston & Susan Kruss-- the whiskey was the ghost of St Ives you could say, and I was talking about Sven Berlin and other friends of our poet, imbibing as I delivered. It's on film, incidentally, but i think I'm too embarrassed to view it again! 'My Life in Theatre' indeed!
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I should have shared David Caddy's review in the TEARS IN THE FENCE blog a month ago of Sonia Green's biography of Sven Berlin, but my trip to England & not always having access to a computer got in the way... Better late than never... I've mentioned Sonia Green [Aarons] below in the note on David Whittaker's book on Sydney Graham... suffice to say I met her in 2015 through my woodworker youngest brother Robin, whose art-work relocation had led him to the Greens & their incredible archive of Sven's work... When he was introduced to the Greens he suddenly remembered my own story of meeting Sven in 1963 at Home Farm, Emery Down, in the New Forest, via college friend Billy (Will) Fisher. Robin told the Greens about the elder brother & arranged a meeting. A year on I've met them again, this time via my sister Monique who, remarkably, was able to tell Sonia her memory of Billy at our home in Thornhill, Southampton, on one or two occasions, recalling his vivid blue eyes, his beard, and long locks! Bethatasitmay, in the meantime Robin & his crew moved Sven's major sculpture, The Stag of the Forest, from the Fawley industrial complex (where our father worked for decades, at the Esso oil refinery) to the Greens' garden; and Robin built the protective shelter which has survived the long English winter Tony told & showed me. There's a photo of Robin & crew beside the shelter at the end of Sonia's book, Timeless Man (Millersford Press) and very proud of him we are too! Ah, such legacy mounted on serendipity : the figure Sven became for me, and Billy (Will) too; my life as a poet especially amidst painting & painters; the importance to me of the St Ives scene... such circles, spirals, of significance...I almost swoon!
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May 11th
Re Sharon Thesen F/b post about the Hammer Museum's Black Mountain exhibit at UCLA….
To a certain inner circle of that Melbourne incarnation, 1967-70, namely the La Mama cafe-theatre, established by the late Betty Burstall, with poetry centre stage (--"Tuesday Nights Forever!" : recall when I returned from England, late '72, young poet Pi O visited me in Kerr Street, Fitzroy, quizzed me about that claim... "So what happened?" he demanded! That's history though isnt it! --what happened...? --well, I said, I went back to England for 3 years!), --myself coordinating from start of the year, '68, after Betty's & Glen Thomasetti's Sunday salons from Winter to Summer, '67 --and this Melbourne new poetry platform arguably an outpost of the Black Mountain College we conjured from various sources... The "we" was mainly Bill Beard, Ian Robertson, Paul Adler, Geoff Eggleston, Garrie Hutchinson, Charles Buckmaster, Allison Hill, John Jenkins, Mike Dugan, Mal Morgan, ambivalently Ken Taylor, detachedly Sid Clayton, James Crouch ... I was saying to Aidan Coleman just the other day, --interviewed for his Oz Po research, especially on John Forbes --that Melbourne was Black Mountain (include a couple of Sydney poets in that, Nigel Roberts, Terry Gillmore, the poets around Free Poetry magazine, Johnny Goodall another) whilst Sydney was New York (I'm thinking of John Tranter especially) --I characterised it at the time as Melbourne/Black Mountain 'Honest Joe' vs Sydney/New York 'City Slicker'... In '73 I met Robert Kenny & Walter Billeter and that Black Mountain discussion was on again! Colin & Frances Symes came out from England (Colin's Poetree wall map, an insert in Earth Ship #1 in Southampton, 1970, already a cult reference for our group regarding the Anglo-American, especially Pound/Olson, legacy). Clive Faust returned to Melbourne from Japan & met us via the Cid Corman connection. Bernie O'Regan & Judy Telford came to Melbourne from London and were part of the enthusiasm. Met Finola Moorhead at Adelaide Festival '74 and she joined the parlez (included in the Rushall Crescent Avant Garde meetings). We met the Cantrills who touched similar base via experimental filmmaking (Stan Brakhage to Charles Olson e.g.). Same early '70s add Laurie Duggan, John Anderson, Alexandra Seddon, Ian Reid (with his Levertov, Duncan, Blaser connections)... yes, quite a crew, and my mag of that time, The Ear in a Wheatfield, our international transport... There were of course Black Mountain enthusiasts in Sydney, for example Carl Harrison-Ford, & Bob Adamson, either holus-bolus or for particular poets, Robert Duncan for example... In the early '80s add Pete Spence, Des Cowley, Jurate Sasnaitis...This aint nothing more than thinking aloud folks! Not a thesis so plenty of holes I'm sure! Also to say from the late 60s I'd been aware of New Zealand/Black Mountain connections (Freed magazine), and was in touch with Alan Loney mid-70s... Yep, it's a LARGE subject!
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May 13th
Regarding Hugh Tolhurst's memo about the POW! issue of Meanjin Quarterly... and cryptic comment, "happens to all no (A.D.) Hopers, eh Kris Hemensley"...
Not sure if we're on same page here, Hugh... Glancing at the Meanjin Quarterly preview/editorial it looked a bit 'same old' as they say, that is same-old newbies, new-old same-old & the other 57 varieties... I was there once myself, and folks like Ken Bolton quite rightly wondered how it had happened : editor of The Ear in a Wheatfield also poetry editor at Meanjin? People on t'other side asked same question, Dracula at the blood-bank... Hmmm... At that time, 1975, Jim Davidson wanted to make his own mark & to align with 'the new', so his opening salvo including me as poetry ed, Terry Smith sniffin out the art, who else? Finola Moorhead who'd been reading fiction with A A Phillips, and had pushed for me to come on board, was charged with wimmins business...
A D Hope, yes... I once declined a poem or two from him... a discussion around that could have been interesting re- old & new, laying out attitudes... it actually wasnt the poem per se but that it appeared to me to be his patter, --as I said, poetry couldnt be reproduction of one's patter... it had to be addressing the poem's possibility always anew... Ah well... a long way from POW!!!!
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May 28th
Susan Fealy commented on Iggy McGovern, "He held the room with his poetry and his storytelling. A really lovely evening that opened up into great chats about poetry. Thanks Kris and Retta for such a warm, relaxed and stimulating evening. So good to be at a Collected Works event again." 'Great chats' indeed, Susan... George Genovese enquired as to the choice of sonnet for Iggy's William Hamilton book. Iggy discussed Petrarchan & Shakespearian --"And plenty more beside" he said, which gave me an opportunity to describe the 'mirror sonnet' I've been writing for 20/25 years! After the free verse adventure the 'return of/to form(s)' is similarly experimental, I said. And then Patricia Sykes opened up deliciously, instructively, on EE Cummings' sonnets.... Now that was but one portion of the session!
[Patricia Sykes : I second that about the "lovely evening"; such a pleasure to have time to chat at some length about and with a visiting poet in such a welcoming and convivial setting: thanks indeed Kris and Retta. Keen to read one of your latest "mirror" sonnets Kris. Must correct one comment though: It wasn't sonnets I was discussing in relation to eec but the spin-off about form and song the sonnet discussion generated. Lovely way to spend a couple of hours on a damp and cold Melbourne night.]
As Susan Fealy says above, Iggy held the room or at least our circle in the middle, and his storytelling (explications of the poems & their form) took us right into mathematics, poetics, history... By the way, the book is A MYSTIC DREAM OF 4 : A sonnet sequence based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton (Quaternia Press, '14). The book's 64 sonnets are arranged in 4 parts entitled 1805-1820, Geometry; 1820-1835, Algebra; 1835-1850, Metaphysics; 1850-1865, Poetry... What with Jessica Wilkinson's non-fiction (& specifically biography) poetry project via her Rabbit magazine, Iggy's presentation was timely!
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June 5th
Two wonderful meetings last summer in & around Melbourne, the first with Sharon Thesen, the second with Stephen Ellis; two North American poets & scholars, serendipitously in Oz, with Olson & co at centre of their conversation... A propos her article in Dispatches ["Charles, Frances, Ralph, and me"], our summertime tete a tete meant that I was already across the issues; laudable that Sharon's described here candidly, & so generously, what went down in making the important volumes of the Olson/Boldereff correspondence. She is beautifully found in this comment from the article : "[Which is why] we need artists, poets, and visionaries; philosophers, mystics, and geniuses; autodidacts, elders, and scholars: for the sake of joy. For the sake of the everything that is the world and the everything that is poetry.. "
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June 12th
Have begun visiting artists who exhibited in the recent Dorset Art Weeks exhibition, that is via the fabulous catalogue! As you know, Dorset is where I've been visiting family ever since life-changing 1987 trip. Weymouth in Dorset's become my English HQ & prism. Happy to be a poet amidst painting & painters, especially the West Country section. I'll not launch into vast essay here, about home making & self defining, --suffice to say this late March + April 2016 visit, which included St Ives for first time in years, fell just short of the annual Arts Weeks, but had I been there I would have tried to get around the galleries & studios. So far Ive loved the web sites &/or Facebook pages of Peter Ursem [www.peterursem.co.uk], Colin Moore (& the Chaldon Studios)[www.colinmoore.uk.com], Caz Scott [www.caz-scott.co.uk] & Carolyn Lyness [www.carolynlynessart.com]. Charmed, to say the least, by the stylization of their landscapes (oh yes, I should say that representing landscape, abstracting landscape, is my continuing & sustaining concern). Needless to say, this will become a larger reconnoitre and find it's way to ye olde blog. In the meantime, Good Morning Dorset from your Melbourne friend!
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From the Journal,
DREAM, 13-07-16
Discussing Brexit with Cathy O'Brien & other friends in the conference room I recognize from other dreams, --sunlight through large glass windows, different shades of brown-stained wooden furniture, walls, floor. [Possibly regurgitation of conversation about Brexit with Rob Kenny, his colleague Carol, Loretta, Richard Mudford, previous Sunday afternoon at the Kelvin Bar in Westgarth...] So what about Quebec? I say, and also enter Macdiarmid's defence ("you gotta have some nationalism to be 'inter' with")? Rising from low table I cross the room to where Sharon Thesen in rolled-up shirt-sleeves stands smiling, the sunlight catching her arms. I'm wondering how Durham got on in the Referendum. Basil Bunting's great isnt he? she says. Oh yes, I agree --how I wish I could have visited him in Durham… But you can now, she laughs, now you're free… But I'm 75, I say, how can I at 75? How old would you like to be? she jokes. Well, forty, forty-five… She brushes then holds my arm --let's ask this man, she says… Michael Farrell's been standing near us, listening in… I introduce them --Sharon Thesen, Michael Farrell… He's smiling. Dont ask him, I say, he's only 10!
I wake from warm, affectionate dream, telling myself to write to George Stanley to thank him for copy of his book, North of California St., received a couple of weeks ago --initially believing Sharon sent it but George's name is on sender (New Star Books, Vancouver)'s label. Also write to Sharon, so bonny in the dream.
Time flies. Eeek! Write tonight.
P.S. [7th August,'16]
Eeek indeed! Almost a month passed. Distractions, diversions. George Stanley's book is a selected poems, 1975-99, published by New Star in 2014. I think Sharon told me last Summer here that he has another in the making. Or maybe this is that volume. I've read Sharon's introduction a couple of times. So nice to know & here to say, we're on the same page. She refers to his "aboutism" wch has theoretical/political implication but also the straightforward concerns with "ideas, thoughts, locales, occasions, persons, and words…" She says that "aboutism and transportation are natural companions"; hear hear I say often enough myself in train-carriage or tram with notebook!
"Stanley's airplane poems are almost always about mortality and fatality. Flight is a subject that creates opportunities for fear of the loss of "plain reality", of losing touch with the earth, which Stanley likens to 'the truth'". Sharon Thesen continues, "The sense of loss, inspired by flight, of the world, the person, the real, and the familiar, is not a backward-glancing nostalgia for a 'golden' past, which we know, or are told we know, is a fiction; but rather derives from a sensed absence or emptiness in the present…"
Having just handed over my own mss to Kent MacCarter which means having been deeply immersed in it, in its 'vision & process' modus operandi as it may well be, I'm more than a little sensitive to the adjacency I pick up from my Vancouver correspondence…
Now it's 5-02pm!
Eeek!
Time still flying!
A wine date in the offing!
Salut!
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August 6th
Regarding the event on the 21st July arranged by Lisa Gorton... good readings by Lisa (--quite a contrast to the park/topographical poems she read at the Devin Johnston event) & Chris Wallace-Crabbe ("the Puckish chap beside me" she introduced --and his John Keats meets Robert Burns poem, published in the latest ABR, lived up to that) in support of Paul Kane's Welcome Light poems... Ive been thinking about American & British English since the night, including Australian English's situation... Broad-brush as annunciated here of course, but... And though I offered Paul probability of such concern being passe from his point of view he felt it wasnt, still an interesting thought he said... I wondered if inflection within the plain speaking American line (the conversational syntax) might dummy for my sense of British 'music'? And et cetera...
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Sunday, December 28, 2014
3 QUICKIES : in lieu of The Beach Report (numero uno, Melbourne summer 2014-15)
1
(21-12-14)
Everyone & everything connected yet one's been unaware that James Koller actually died on the 10th December, three weeks ago, on the heel must have been of Bob Arnold's first posting of Koller junior's news of his father's stroke. The notes I've been making over the period are all, therefore, after the fact. Man alive : celebratory; passed : memorial.
2
(26-12-14)
Shouldn't have been a surprise but off sparse Clifton Hill platform onto packed City train, any observation to accurately contain the word 'abuzz'! Carriage full of cricketers, all Australian & male supporters, day-after-Xmas casual style, except for two younger Indian men, orange T, floral shirt, sunglasses… And here we are, Jolimont-MCG where the carriage almost totally clears --platform bulges, the Test begins… Naturally I'd like to be amongst them despite colosseum style cricketing not my style even when i was a regular in the '70s relishing the density & atmosphere… If carriage's buzz is notable then the Melbourne Cricket Ground's is incredible; and once bitten, the bug is forever!
3
(Elwood Beach kiosque, 28-12-14)
Loretta says all the beach cliches are here like a Jacques Tati film! Large woman squeezed into tiny bikini with little dog on lead; vain old health-fanatic joggers; fast-walking middle-aged keep-fit duos etc… I wonder where we might fit in that scenario? L. in blouse, shoulder shawl, earrings, bead necklaces, bangles, straw hat, shades, rather like my mother when she was younger --but 'sempl', my mother's French pronunciation, with 'chic' never too far away! And moi : beach bum, stained old cap, pen & notebook, seamless alternation between the words & the world --thinking & watching… On the bus ride thinking of the local poets of the sea(side) --inevitably, then, Tsaloumas, not too far a stretch to add 'with whom we swam'. Second degree familiarity with Bob Morrow & Brook Emery as per their reports of ocean swimming & surfing. A bay dip or two shared with Claire Gaskin, Susan Fealy… --How far back does one want to go? History is a companion whenever & wherever one travels --perhaps I live here after all, sea soused & sun bathed senses warming the mutually excluding Northern imagination, softening the heart to acceptance of nearly fifty years of the Great Southern's actual life…
Monday, April 14, 2014
I.M. KEN TAYLOR, 1930-2014
THE NEWS
[Kris Hemensley :
Facebook post, April 3, 2014
Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.
(......)
Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs. ]
oOo
CORRESPONDENCE
Kris Hemensley :
Sad news Terry, and on a continuum with our good talk on Saturday last : I'm sorry to have tell you that Ken Taylor died at the Epworth Hospital on Wednesday night, 2 April, '14. Ive posted abt it on F/book but just now copied it all to my blog : see, www.collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com
Look after yrself, dear poet/gardener who reads Olson & Williams [your biog in Mike Dugan's Crosscurrents where i delightedly found you in 1968]!
best wishes, Kris
*
Terry Gillmore :
Dear Kris
I feel many things with this sad news and one of them is shame. Shame that in 1984 or thereabouts I voluntarily entered the prison of the Commonwealth public service leaving so many behind, and particularly Ken who offered me his life-home at Macedon (I was homeless) and I had moved a few things in and then the fires came, and came again.
When we were at Aragunui for a night long poetry reading under the full moon on the rock: there was a momentous storm and that is when his burning begun. Inarticulate speech of the heart. What a loss of a truly beautiful man, for he was that even though it shames me and is a failure of language. What a heart he had, what generosity accompanied it. Death surrounds me tonight, tomorrow I will visit with a friend who lost a loved one this week. I foolishly thought I could console her. I have lost a long lost brother. Take care dear Kris
Terry
*
K H :
Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too...
You too Terry, look after yrself, good thoughts, very best, kris
T G :
Dear Kris
As you say ""Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too..." Thanks for reminding me that what we are in is the precious, momentary, only game in town.
Solomon said, something about a wise man hiding his shame but use what I have written as you will, if you are to speak you can be the editor of death and use whatever you like from it.
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 3, '14)
John Jenkins :
Hi Kris
Yes, I did hear from Robert. And it's very sad to hear of Ken's death.
Oddly, as I mentioned to Robert, I was reading 'At Valentines' again, just a few days ago, and thinking of KT.
It is such a strong poem in its own right, purely in its own poetic terms, but also a wonderfully specific audit of aspects of Australian cultural history.
Ken and I had our ups and downs over the years, but the last few times I saw him we were on very good terms indeed, like the old days after La Mama. (It's nice to recall that, at this moment. ) And we had a vague idea of me seeing him at Mt Macedon, but that final meeting never eventuated.
I can access Facebook, and will read what you have posted after sending this email.
Yes, commiserations...!
Best wishes, John
oOo
Laurie Duggan :
[April 4, '14]
Kris,
thanks for sending this. I didn't know about Ken T. I'll post something soon on the blog. I have a couple of his books, At Valentines and Africa but I missed the middle one (through being in the wrong place at the right time or whatever). I didn't ever meet Ken or hear him read for similar reasons. But I've always liked what I've seen of the work.
It's strange to think back to the La Mama years. In one sense us Monash types were your adversaries, yet a lot of the separation simply had to do with the fact that La Mama was twelve miles away. It seems ridiculous now (esp. given my own peregrinations) but twelve miles seemed a long way - once. When I started coming in to Carlton on my own it seemed an adventure. So I never met Ken (and I didn't meet Charles Buckmaster either though he may well have sold me books at Whole Earth [Bookshop]). My loss.
*
K H :
L D :
LEAVES was a strange publication. It was only half laid out, so there are a handful of pages that look ok then the rest is terrible. My co-editor added some not very good poems and in our innocence we used a press that then filled most of the mag with adverts. But I was pleased to have gotten Dennis to do the La Mama piece. I don't know that I'd want to republish it but I certainly wouldn't have any objections to pieces within being republished somewhere.
(April 5)
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 5th, '14]
Hi Barry, thanks for ringing, good to hear you, you spoke wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially "Africa" tonight.... Therell be a service followed by public memorial on the Thursday... will manage the Church not sure abt the Yacht club, but maybe too...
*
Barry Hill :
[April 5th]
Well done Kris, for I squibbed the sea today, can’t say why, just did not feel like the cold wind beforehand.
And I have been caught up in words again today: a poem partly arising from Ken, and more fiddles with PEACEMONGER as Tess Morris Suzuki, Prof of Japanese History at ANU is going to read the straight history bits, and now you and blog.
*
It was good to get yr feedback to our chat about Ken. I needed the chat because I had my sorrow to myself, hardly knowing any other poet who knew him. On hearing the sad but inevitable news I had to pour at least one whiskey in his honour. Not that I ever really drank with him: we met only ten years ago, and we had both started to slow up. Still, in the grog shop before he came to dinner at our place in Queenscliff, he had his credit card out wanting to stock our top shelf, the debit sheet notwithstanding. Same, on that day, his wanting to pit into the hat I had began to pass around to cover some of the costs of your moving shop. The point is he had his eye and mind on what he thought mattered most: conviviality and art, money be dammed. I met him through the family: he went to school with my wife’s father, a skilled farmer, and a man who was more patient with arty self-indulgences than you might think. He stuck with Ken, sensing his unique talent, which I was struck by as soon as he put Africa into my hands. I told him it would win a prize, and it did, of course. His pleasure at that remained understated, as if he knew it would happen. I had dipped into At Valentines a long time ago and was most struck by its cultural ambience: the period here that I had missed while living in London. But there was the ease you write about in yr blog, where you start out on other poets (who I don’t know): the graphic precision, the naturalness of the unfolding, a flow like the water up there at Erskine Falls, below which it all happened in those day, evidently, garlic and wine and dope on everyone’s breath. But the lines were better than culturally expressive. They struck the bell of a clear inner self, one clarified by self interest and a kind of aristocratic sense of entitlement. Of course, he was, in a way, simulating Ammons, that was clear. Yankee ease. But much more than that, as I was also trying to get to say when we were on the phone.
Africa lay in the palm of my hand like a lover’s hand. It was a book that kind of fell out into the hand, from one hand to the other, Ken was so grateful to be gifted with the love of a beautiful and younger woman at that stage in his life. Her about 30 him about 70. Picasso could eat his heart out. When I met her, and found myself in their bedroom because he insisted I go in and look at his drawings of her, leaning against the wall not far from the underwear she had scatted near the unmade bed, I felt almost as transgressional as when a guide to Frieda and Lawrence’s house at Taormina said I should go upstairs to their bedroom. This I did, because I could not not but I did it with a silent plea that Lawrence would understand my lack of prurience. The thing about Africa, with its body heat and candor, is that Ken is more Matisse than Picasso: his aesthetic is as cool as it is hot, his designs are created standing back, their colours are perfect detachments. His lines, ravishing though they can be, hold themselves just a little away from the swoon. And I am saying lines here with his wonderful paintings and drawings in mind, thinking mainly of the Xmas cards some of us were lucky to get. Collectors items in their own right, of course. Perfect lines, and a colour spectrum as perfect as the patterns on a bird. After a few years of getting these beauties in the post it struck me that they were the direct counterpart of his most skillfully joyous poems.
After our talk you wrote back to me saying you enjoyed my remarks (words to the effect that I'd spoken "wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially Africa tonight…."). That's good, as I have never spoken them before, as I say: had no need to. And I think I added that he was, really, a classicist. Oh his stream gushed forth as romantically as anything, that was what you seem be calling the urgency of his lines and reading. But their control, to me, was the thing, the balances of their form, their measure, their grace, I suppose we might say. It was with a pure grace, it seemed to me, that he saw his lover off into her next and necessary relationship with a younger man, one she would marry. I know that various people have their stories about Ken’s excesses, but this part of his story, its expression of respect and tact, struck me as a wonderful poem in life. As selfless as his perfectly pitched lyrics.
Ken was the first poet I have met who made me feel, on first reading him, that he was the most natural of poets. Back home, in some shed of his on that mountain, he may have toiled for such a natural perfection. We know the poets who do. I don’t know if he did or he didn’t. And don’t much care, really, such was his success so often on the page. Africa made me want to set off to Africa even though Africa was never mentioned, if you know what I mean.
This poem I have come to dedicate to him began as a rough draft to a cat. It was its grace of movement in and out of sunlight which triggered it. Then, after our conversation about line and movement through spaces in Ken’s work, I found myself wondering if he would like what I was doing with the cat’s presence. If I was trying to do a Xmas card like his, I would want the cat to be in it as he did flowers, or the sea in their limpid movements.
Anyway, have a look at the poem and see what you think. Not that I need to talk about the poem. Its just good to put something down that I would have been happy to read to Ken as we drank whiskey.
All best in life and art!
B
*
Under the Wisteria
I.M. Ken Taylor
Rumi
our cat with the Chinese markings
sniffs the morning
all nostrils and twitch—
a whiskered breath-quiver of ears.
The Chinese character for listening
has two ears
one above the other
beside dish over heart.
Then he’s stalking, slow-mo
in and out
of sunlight:
willowy patches, pond-shadows.
He crosses the lawn.
He pads, like some rich kid, on bare earth
beneath the Loess-coloured wisteria.
Not a sound on the way
to the door of the room
with the rosewood floor.
He regards the sheen that becomes him.
He senses the unwelcome table
laden with dictionaries.
No sign, as yet
of his plans to vanish
for the night.
(Autumn, 2014)
*
K H :
"The most natural of poets" --yes. From the first (& I heard him Winter 67 before we met, and he had that same breathless, short-of-breath), his poems sounded like him! And because I was fascinated by the physical poetics of Olson & Creeley, I heard Ken as doing precisely what they asked for, even tho he wdnt have studied them. (I suppose another way to that wld be to investigate whether any of it is in Ammons? I mean formally but also, with Ammons, innately --ie his own & not out of the big O's thigh!)
And I like your poem, touched by the dedication of course. Its title almost sounds like a Ken Taylor title! And love your cat! That graphic first stanza description! And the easy crossing into the Chinese. Yep. Very good.
So, all in all, you deserve a drink now! The writing's great reward for a deep & heavy week --the shock, the sadness, the thought, the talk, the poem... Well done that man!
All best,
K
*
B H :
yes, his forms were different to Ammons, he was more open than A I suppose, less affected in his openness also, somehow.
He did not need to create a lower case world, hey.
And I realised today why the Orientalism of the poem felt right. Ken had an important connection to Kyoto; he had clearly peered long and hard at those brilliantly inked Japanese woodcut prints.
oOo
Ian Robertson :
[6 April '14]
Hello Kris
it is sad news and thanks for letting me know... we never did catch up, though came close some years ago when Robert used to have his birthday gatherings at Redesdale.
Thinking of Ken immediately transports me back to the house in Parkville, the way Ken & Margaret welcomed everyone in. I see the living room and the steps down into the kitchen where food and drink and conversation flowed in an atmosphere of living intelligence, warmth, acceptance and conviviality such as I had never experienced... serious and searching conversation was mixed with stories and hearty laughter, a great humanity at a warmly human scale... to a 19/20 year-old, Ken seemed an almost giant figure but there was no distance, no separation about him at all... he was immediate, disarming, inclusive and engaging... it was surprising and so encouraging to be not just accepted into this atmosphere, but also, amazingly/apparently, to be appreciated... I remember thinking, so this is how life could be...
oOo
Susan Fealy :
[April 13th, '14]
REFERENCES & SOURCES
Terry Gillmore's reference to Araganui [near Bega, NSW; Mimosa Beach National Park] returns me to the correspondence from Alexandra Seddon, published in the HEART issue of H/EAR magazine, #5, Summer 1983/4.
30.1.83
Araganui
Kris,
so in this place I must write to you. Terry Gillmore here, John Anderson, Geoff Eggleston, Ken Taylor, Leigh Stokes, & Dorothy Swoope (near Wollongong), Simon Macdonald, Cornelis Vleeskens & Jenny Mitchell, Frank (?), plus many others. A lot of my students. Trish from the Mornya Womens House with her lover, Kathy, my friends Angela Koch, Venie Holmgren. Lots of people on the rock last night, reading by hurricane lamp & fire. We (Angela & I & 2 German girls who are staying at farm) had arrived a bit late. Terry & others helped us across to the island -- the tide having risen quite high. The climb up the rock was not easy. It was amazing that so many people managed to reach that remote place. The reading did go on for most of the night, then we came back to camp & sleep for 2 hours till dawn.
What can I tell you? The atmosphere of the reading was sea, fire, wind, night -- wonderful. At about 1 o'clock when I read for the first part, I felt impelled to read Owen's Mantra -- just the first part. Although I knew it to be unwise, it seemed necessary. Terry & Ken felt it went over well. I had no way of judging. It was like switching back to a time when one lacked any confidence in the writing. Geoff's reading was alright, a bit turgid. Ken read clearly, laying things out to be seen. Cornelis read some family portraits -- excellent, precise gestures, colours, framed. Very good for reading aloud. And also some pieces where he & Jenny Mitchell read alternately, sometimes whole poems, sometimes lines. She chanting "Manna Gum" between his lines at one point. She is a painter. John Anderson's reading was wonderful -- like seeing the movie after reading the book, & being totally satisfied by it. Leigh Stokes did some strange operatic chanting in the midst of a poem for which he had made peculiarly arrogant apologies. Dorothy Swoope reminded me of Marilyn Kitchell [ex Rhode Island poet & publisher of Salt Works Press with Tom Bridwell, last heard of late '80s when she was in Mississippi]-- that fabric of things was very apparent -- clear deliberate reading. I remembered her from Wollongong. Terry read with warmth -- a sort of gentle communication. Tonight we will read again, this time not on the rock but in the tamer camping ground. There is an old thin wallaby close by. Simon Macdonald is feeding him. Terry is talking of reading your 'Being Here'. And I feel that you should be made present more obviously, perhaps in that way.
And I am trying so hard to be here. I am not planted yet, flittering at the edges, trying to grasp or enter the being here. I cannot find the words to frame anything. I am struggling with the words more than ever. I want to give you the feel, the flavour of being here but I cannot find it clearly.
There are tents set up more or less in a circle -- a table in the middle. Modest food, tea, coffee. The talk surging, going around, people wandering off to the bush or to swim. A lot of cigarettes, fires. John standing loosely by the table. He has come now to sit beside me & tell me dreams of Candelo & a radiant face in a tree -- an Aboriginal face & he is reading now from the note book which Retta gave me. He says he would like to come to the farm. I feel chastened by his gentleness & careful words. I feel chastened too by Ken Taylor's silence & speech -- both -- his economy of words...
(......)
*
[According to Mr Google, ca 2013 :
The idea of Cowsnest was to set up a community farm where anyone could come and contribute their skill and labour even if they had no money to buy land.
Out of Cowsnest, in 1985, grew the Candelo Arts Society, which continues to flourish.
There is also a 57 acre feral-animal-proof Sanctuary at Cowsnest, a half-way house for injured and orphaned native animals who are on their way to soft release.
In 1996 Alexandra initiated the Waterbird Sanctuary in Pambula, which has become Panboola, Pambula Wetlands and Heritage Project (over 200 acres right in Pambula).
In 2000 she began the Pambula Flying Fox Hospital and Conservation Area (34 acres protected by Voluntary Conservation Agreement).
And on September 25th, 2006, a senescent Yellow Pinch Wildlife Park was bought, and slowly rejuvenated to become Potoroo Palace, Native Animal Educational Sanctuary.]
oOo
Re- Laurie Duggan's LEAVES magazine... The La Mama poets' segment gathered by Dennis Douglas, who was teaching at Monash then & editing poetry at The Age, quotes as its title K H's line, to be a poet amongst poets / not to be THE poet.
The segment begins with my letter (of October 25th '68) to Dennis, reproduced in the original typewriter script, from which the following paragraphs :
"(......) andy jack [correct spelling jach] another local poet wrote me the other day saying do you have to write american to make poetry today?? no. but the american influence is undeniable & one can only be enriched by it - the american [poetry] experience takes in every important writer of the postwar world - the british poets macdiarmid & bunting / the younguns pickard/liverpool/nottingham/london poets/ are all following the open way of poetry....tho this is not the only way for me and for many others...obscurity [obscurantism?] is the the thing that has been demolished!
How about doing an article on the new [La Mama, Melbourne] poets? we cd help you with the field work! wed have a ball!! [Ken] taylor/[John] romeril/[Bill] beard/[Charles] buckmaster/ [Mal] morgan/ [Geoff] eggleston /[Elaine] rushbrooke/ [Andy] jack [Jach]/[Michael] dugan/[Ian] robertson/ and i bet there's a score & more!!! interstate a free mag has started emanating from terry gillmore in sydney "free grass" [actually not! --Free Grass was John Tranter's superb hoax; Free Poetry was the real magazine, edited by Gillmore, Nigel Roberts & Johnny Goodall --I'd enthusiastically conflated fact & fiction!] - gillmore/thomson/heaslop/ from nsw - this is a sizable number [of new poets] - at la mama ive had 26 different poets read /invited &/or from the audience!.... for me its the culmination of an ambition to have a poetry workshop - there has to be a new basis for [ poetry &] society - it has to "among" instead of "sole" :-- to be a poet amongst poets/not to be THE poet.
(......)
The letter is followed by Denis Douglas's description of the new poets.
THE MEETING IN THE PARK
Who were in the park [Exhibition Gardens opposite Queensbury Street, Carlton, where the Hemensleys, invited by the actor Frank Bren, lived in the terrace house at number 21] that day? Kris Hemensley, stocky, bearded, expatriate Englishman in his early twenties, Loretta, his wife, who helped produce the magazine Our Glass, which was printed on a fordigraph duplicator purchased by Kris in the expectation that with Our Glass and other poetry jobs it would pay for itself, Bill Beard, a small, wiry, smiling fugitive from the RAAF - he had conducted a one-man non violent campaign of protest against its involvement in the Vietnam war from within the Air Force and eventually been discharged - studying philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Charles Buckmaster, who had been sent home from an upcountry high school to get his hair cut and instead of getting it cut had come to Melbourne to work as laboratory assistant and produce a poetry magazine The Great Auk, Michael Dugan, former member of a fruit picking commune, former book salesman, former publishing editor, former children's writer, former rocker, who was to do it all again (except for returning to the commune).
Who was not in the park that day? Geoffrey Eggleston, burly, aggressive artist-designer much given to the poetic exploitation of obscenity, Ken Taylor, ABC producer, who had used some of the new poetry on radio programs and written well himself in a style influenced by Whitman, Williams, and Charles Olson, Nigel Roberts and Terry Gillmore, who were living in Sydney and producing a magazine called Free Poetry, Richard Tipping and Rob Tillett, who were producing a magazine in Adelaide called Mok, Sweeney Reed, who regarded himself as the manager of a poet called Russell Deeble, and was at that time regarded by the "free magazine" editors as a trendy dilettante, although they later settled their differences (It was Sweeney who had first suggested that I get in touch with the group, remarking that no poet under thirty regarded the established literary magazines as anything but a self-enclosed and self-perpetuating middle-aged clique, utterly indifferent to anything written overseas since 1960 - Terry Gillmore was later to tell me that the mini-mags broke down the resistance to the newer verse forms within two years, suggesting almost that they were instruments used in a campaign to establish communication with an older generation, or to be able to compete with them on even terms).
(......)
Dennis Douglas's survey/celebration continues with quotations from the editorials of the little mags, & culminates with the segment, WHERE HAVE ALL THE POETS GONE?
Although the law of diminishing returns turned their minds to other things, Mike's to a rock-poetry combination, Ian's to India, Charles's to becoming the nth replacement editor for a Penguin anthology of the new poetry [for which Ken Taylor & K H had initially been solicited by John Hooker but after much debate declined because of the political & philosophical compromises anticipated] which never appeared, Sweeney's to the Tolarno Galleries - and the amount of bread and energy that was lavished on the broadsheets should not be underestimated - although Tom Shapcott's Sun Books anthology and Poetry Magazine led the shift in critical forms that encouraged their acceptance, so that "establishment" outlets became available - although a new generation of poetry readers altered the atmosphere of the readings now held at the Arts Co-operative - although some people got busted and others got careers - although the "new thing" was no longer new - although Kris returned to England and Ken started making TV films about birds and Bill went beach-combing, there are still readings and a newer crop of magazines, and rumours of a great new well-produced publication are circulating [Dark Ages Journal, which didnt proceed beyond the manuscript], connected with rumours of Kris Hemensley's return.
What happened was not greatly different from the forging of other poetry schools in the forties and fifties - the attempts the new poets made to gain acceptance for their poetic were no more outrageous or ill-mannered than the tactics of other literary pressure groups - they generated no more antagonism - they excited no more sympathy - which is to say, they were outrageous, ill-mannered, generated much antagonism, excited much sympathy. The differences stemmed from the differences in the world the new poets inhabited, a dangerous, competitive, and hence more communally-minded world. Like other vital schools, they produced much that was ephemeral as well as much that was forceful and effective, and they made themselves known at an earlier age than most Australian groups of poets.
The main point they made was that creative forces can be channeled into the communal life of a large group of people and function there as a positive, enlightening, life-generating impulse. Perhaps the poetry of the future will be made by a by-product of the inner life of societies and less a simulacrum of some kind of collective public address system than the poetry of the past.
oOo
[edited & typed by Kris Hemensley,
April 12th/14th, 2014
Westgarth, Oz]
[Kris Hemensley :
Facebook post, April 3, 2014
Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.
(......)
Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs. ]
oOo
CORRESPONDENCE
Kris Hemensley :
Sad news Terry, and on a continuum with our good talk on Saturday last : I'm sorry to have tell you that Ken Taylor died at the Epworth Hospital on Wednesday night, 2 April, '14. Ive posted abt it on F/book but just now copied it all to my blog : see, www.collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com
Look after yrself, dear poet/gardener who reads Olson & Williams [your biog in Mike Dugan's Crosscurrents where i delightedly found you in 1968]!
best wishes, Kris
*
Terry Gillmore :
Dear Kris
I feel many things with this sad news and one of them is shame. Shame that in 1984 or thereabouts I voluntarily entered the prison of the Commonwealth public service leaving so many behind, and particularly Ken who offered me his life-home at Macedon (I was homeless) and I had moved a few things in and then the fires came, and came again.
When we were at Aragunui for a night long poetry reading under the full moon on the rock: there was a momentous storm and that is when his burning begun. Inarticulate speech of the heart. What a loss of a truly beautiful man, for he was that even though it shames me and is a failure of language. What a heart he had, what generosity accompanied it. Death surrounds me tonight, tomorrow I will visit with a friend who lost a loved one this week. I foolishly thought I could console her. I have lost a long lost brother. Take care dear Kris
Terry
*
K H :
Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too...
You too Terry, look after yrself, good thoughts, very best, kris
T G :
Dear Kris
As you say ""Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too..." Thanks for reminding me that what we are in is the precious, momentary, only game in town.
Solomon said, something about a wise man hiding his shame but use what I have written as you will, if you are to speak you can be the editor of death and use whatever you like from it.
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 3, '14)
Hi John,
Youve probably heard? from Robert K? Sad news that
Ken died last night, at the Epworth... Ive posted something on F/book,
can copy & paste for you if you like?
Commiserations to share.John Jenkins :
Hi Kris
Yes, I did hear from Robert. And it's very sad to hear of Ken's death.
Oddly, as I mentioned to Robert, I was reading 'At Valentines' again, just a few days ago, and thinking of KT.
It is such a strong poem in its own right, purely in its own poetic terms, but also a wonderfully specific audit of aspects of Australian cultural history.
Ken and I had our ups and downs over the years, but the last few times I saw him we were on very good terms indeed, like the old days after La Mama. (It's nice to recall that, at this moment. ) And we had a vague idea of me seeing him at Mt Macedon, but that final meeting never eventuated.
I can access Facebook, and will read what you have posted after sending this email.
Yes, commiserations...!
Best wishes, John
oOo
Laurie Duggan :
[April 4, '14]
Kris,
thanks for sending this. I didn't know about Ken T. I'll post something soon on the blog. I have a couple of his books, At Valentines and Africa but I missed the middle one (through being in the wrong place at the right time or whatever). I didn't ever meet Ken or hear him read for similar reasons. But I've always liked what I've seen of the work.
It's strange to think back to the La Mama years. In one sense us Monash types were your adversaries, yet a lot of the separation simply had to do with the fact that La Mama was twelve miles away. It seems ridiculous now (esp. given my own peregrinations) but twelve miles seemed a long way - once. When I started coming in to Carlton on my own it seemed an adventure. So I never met Ken (and I didn't meet Charles Buckmaster either though he may well have sold me books at Whole Earth [Bookshop]). My loss.
*
K H :
Hi Laurie, good to have yours... By
the way ive been reading yr edition of LEAVES [Monash University magazine, ed Philip Chubb & Laurie Duggan, 1970] wch has my play [Stephany, directed & performed by Malcolm Robertson at La Mama] in it but
also fascinating document gathered by Dennis Douglas &/or you of
the La Mama poets... Certainly brings it back... Could/should be republished
as part of the documentation/recapitulation of the period... wch never
ended!!!
L D :
LEAVES was a strange publication. It was only half laid out, so there are a handful of pages that look ok then the rest is terrible. My co-editor added some not very good poems and in our innocence we used a press that then filled most of the mag with adverts. But I was pleased to have gotten Dennis to do the La Mama piece. I don't know that I'd want to republish it but I certainly wouldn't have any objections to pieces within being republished somewhere.
(April 5)
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 5th, '14]
Hi Barry, thanks for ringing, good to hear you, you spoke wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially "Africa" tonight.... Therell be a service followed by public memorial on the Thursday... will manage the Church not sure abt the Yacht club, but maybe too...
*
Barry Hill :
[April 5th]
Well done Kris, for I squibbed the sea today, can’t say why, just did not feel like the cold wind beforehand.
And I have been caught up in words again today: a poem partly arising from Ken, and more fiddles with PEACEMONGER as Tess Morris Suzuki, Prof of Japanese History at ANU is going to read the straight history bits, and now you and blog.
*
It was good to get yr feedback to our chat about Ken. I needed the chat because I had my sorrow to myself, hardly knowing any other poet who knew him. On hearing the sad but inevitable news I had to pour at least one whiskey in his honour. Not that I ever really drank with him: we met only ten years ago, and we had both started to slow up. Still, in the grog shop before he came to dinner at our place in Queenscliff, he had his credit card out wanting to stock our top shelf, the debit sheet notwithstanding. Same, on that day, his wanting to pit into the hat I had began to pass around to cover some of the costs of your moving shop. The point is he had his eye and mind on what he thought mattered most: conviviality and art, money be dammed. I met him through the family: he went to school with my wife’s father, a skilled farmer, and a man who was more patient with arty self-indulgences than you might think. He stuck with Ken, sensing his unique talent, which I was struck by as soon as he put Africa into my hands. I told him it would win a prize, and it did, of course. His pleasure at that remained understated, as if he knew it would happen. I had dipped into At Valentines a long time ago and was most struck by its cultural ambience: the period here that I had missed while living in London. But there was the ease you write about in yr blog, where you start out on other poets (who I don’t know): the graphic precision, the naturalness of the unfolding, a flow like the water up there at Erskine Falls, below which it all happened in those day, evidently, garlic and wine and dope on everyone’s breath. But the lines were better than culturally expressive. They struck the bell of a clear inner self, one clarified by self interest and a kind of aristocratic sense of entitlement. Of course, he was, in a way, simulating Ammons, that was clear. Yankee ease. But much more than that, as I was also trying to get to say when we were on the phone.
Africa lay in the palm of my hand like a lover’s hand. It was a book that kind of fell out into the hand, from one hand to the other, Ken was so grateful to be gifted with the love of a beautiful and younger woman at that stage in his life. Her about 30 him about 70. Picasso could eat his heart out. When I met her, and found myself in their bedroom because he insisted I go in and look at his drawings of her, leaning against the wall not far from the underwear she had scatted near the unmade bed, I felt almost as transgressional as when a guide to Frieda and Lawrence’s house at Taormina said I should go upstairs to their bedroom. This I did, because I could not not but I did it with a silent plea that Lawrence would understand my lack of prurience. The thing about Africa, with its body heat and candor, is that Ken is more Matisse than Picasso: his aesthetic is as cool as it is hot, his designs are created standing back, their colours are perfect detachments. His lines, ravishing though they can be, hold themselves just a little away from the swoon. And I am saying lines here with his wonderful paintings and drawings in mind, thinking mainly of the Xmas cards some of us were lucky to get. Collectors items in their own right, of course. Perfect lines, and a colour spectrum as perfect as the patterns on a bird. After a few years of getting these beauties in the post it struck me that they were the direct counterpart of his most skillfully joyous poems.
After our talk you wrote back to me saying you enjoyed my remarks (words to the effect that I'd spoken "wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially Africa tonight…."). That's good, as I have never spoken them before, as I say: had no need to. And I think I added that he was, really, a classicist. Oh his stream gushed forth as romantically as anything, that was what you seem be calling the urgency of his lines and reading. But their control, to me, was the thing, the balances of their form, their measure, their grace, I suppose we might say. It was with a pure grace, it seemed to me, that he saw his lover off into her next and necessary relationship with a younger man, one she would marry. I know that various people have their stories about Ken’s excesses, but this part of his story, its expression of respect and tact, struck me as a wonderful poem in life. As selfless as his perfectly pitched lyrics.
Ken was the first poet I have met who made me feel, on first reading him, that he was the most natural of poets. Back home, in some shed of his on that mountain, he may have toiled for such a natural perfection. We know the poets who do. I don’t know if he did or he didn’t. And don’t much care, really, such was his success so often on the page. Africa made me want to set off to Africa even though Africa was never mentioned, if you know what I mean.
This poem I have come to dedicate to him began as a rough draft to a cat. It was its grace of movement in and out of sunlight which triggered it. Then, after our conversation about line and movement through spaces in Ken’s work, I found myself wondering if he would like what I was doing with the cat’s presence. If I was trying to do a Xmas card like his, I would want the cat to be in it as he did flowers, or the sea in their limpid movements.
Anyway, have a look at the poem and see what you think. Not that I need to talk about the poem. Its just good to put something down that I would have been happy to read to Ken as we drank whiskey.
All best in life and art!
B
*
Under the Wisteria
I.M. Ken Taylor
Rumi
our cat with the Chinese markings
sniffs the morning
all nostrils and twitch—
a whiskered breath-quiver of ears.
The Chinese character for listening
has two ears
one above the other
beside dish over heart.
Then he’s stalking, slow-mo
in and out
of sunlight:
willowy patches, pond-shadows.
He crosses the lawn.
He pads, like some rich kid, on bare earth
beneath the Loess-coloured wisteria.
Not a sound on the way
to the door of the room
with the rosewood floor.
He regards the sheen that becomes him.
He senses the unwelcome table
laden with dictionaries.
No sign, as yet
of his plans to vanish
for the night.
(Autumn, 2014)
*
K H :
"The most natural of poets" --yes. From the first (& I heard him Winter 67 before we met, and he had that same breathless, short-of-breath), his poems sounded like him! And because I was fascinated by the physical poetics of Olson & Creeley, I heard Ken as doing precisely what they asked for, even tho he wdnt have studied them. (I suppose another way to that wld be to investigate whether any of it is in Ammons? I mean formally but also, with Ammons, innately --ie his own & not out of the big O's thigh!)
And I like your poem, touched by the dedication of course. Its title almost sounds like a Ken Taylor title! And love your cat! That graphic first stanza description! And the easy crossing into the Chinese. Yep. Very good.
So, all in all, you deserve a drink now! The writing's great reward for a deep & heavy week --the shock, the sadness, the thought, the talk, the poem... Well done that man!
All best,
K
*
B H :
yes, his forms were different to Ammons, he was more open than A I suppose, less affected in his openness also, somehow.
He did not need to create a lower case world, hey.
And I realised today why the Orientalism of the poem felt right. Ken had an important connection to Kyoto; he had clearly peered long and hard at those brilliantly inked Japanese woodcut prints.
oOo
Ian Robertson :
[6 April '14]
Hello Kris
it is sad news and thanks for letting me know... we never did catch up, though came close some years ago when Robert used to have his birthday gatherings at Redesdale.
Thinking of Ken immediately transports me back to the house in Parkville, the way Ken & Margaret welcomed everyone in. I see the living room and the steps down into the kitchen where food and drink and conversation flowed in an atmosphere of living intelligence, warmth, acceptance and conviviality such as I had never experienced... serious and searching conversation was mixed with stories and hearty laughter, a great humanity at a warmly human scale... to a 19/20 year-old, Ken seemed an almost giant figure but there was no distance, no separation about him at all... he was immediate, disarming, inclusive and engaging... it was surprising and so encouraging to be not just accepted into this atmosphere, but also, amazingly/apparently, to be appreciated... I remember thinking, so this is how life could be...
oOo
Susan Fealy :
[April 13th, '14]
| ||||
| ||||
Visit to Ken Taylor with Ron Pretty. Monday, October 20, 2008.
(Ken, Ron and I had attended the Glenfern Salon on Sunday, 19th : feature poets Kris Hemensley and Peter Porter.)
His
home rides over an ocean of forget-me-nots and bluebells. Huge trees
on the ridges, low stonewalls and paths lead to secret ponds, closer
to home, a rustic tower, a garden shed.
Ron
and I sat in his kitchen after a walk around about (he’d left the
door open) and began to wonder if we had mixed up the arrangements. Then
we saw his black beret and figured he would be back to get his hat and
he was! He arrived with his mate Steve and brought some supplies for
lunch. He wore a thin black jumper over white, white trousers .White
beard, grey face. He’d laughed and said he could not believe that he
had travelled around France and the only man to be found wearing a beret
was his own reflection in a shop window.
From the window, in the middle of the courtyard a snow drop
neighboured the rusted brazier. It tossed out its green leaves like a
fountain, they shone in the afternoon sun, infant grass sprinkled the
bricks.
Outside
the window: bright blue-green, delicate, almost feathery leaves and
old old wood, shining in the afternoon sun, outside his kitchen. What
kind of tree is that? It’s a Yew Tree he said. There are more on the
hill. Steeply above the house, but not far away.. a row of yew trees
above a stone wall.
Ken
said that his own paintings on the walls were reference points for
him.Crab, sea, octopus..seals, I said border dwellers? Then he said
sharks. I said sharks are not border dwellers and then we decided
that maybe they are. That pure aggression ( jn us), Ken said, you see it
when you arise from the sea after a swim in Brittany And it is disturbing
because you see the gun slits in the wall where the guns would have
killed you. We chatted about the Kris Hemensley and Peter Porter event
that had happened the day prior. Ken had disliked violence used as a
trope in some of Peter’s poems, said Kris’s work spoke to him more.
As
he discussed the prose he was developing into a book, he said some
sentences are waiting for him to turn them into drawings. We looked at
his water colours, some set on the large tables, often of marine
creatures. He said when I draw it is almost always from a photograph as
there is so much information. We agreed that you have to find the line.
We
talked about proportion, and his friend Steve suddenly formed
Leonardo’s proportion of man with his outstretched arms and legs and
it felt like all four of us found a magic proportion in that moment
inside his large studio. I asked Ken about the sculpture scattered
around his property : he said some had been left there by sculptors,
and had yet to be collected by them. Ken said sculptors are on different
time , maybe they will come back in seven years… they have to listen to
nature.
He
let me run up the hill to collect some Lily of the Valley. He said,
get as near to the earth as you can and pull straight up : it unmoors
itself. I found it under the bright red Camellia tree. Tiny flames of
green, green fire on the hill, tiny pearls. I said, it smells like
frangipani a bit but it is not. No, he said , (somewhat sternly) it is
Lily of the Valley.
oOo
oOo
REFERENCES & SOURCES
Terry Gillmore's reference to Araganui [near Bega, NSW; Mimosa Beach National Park] returns me to the correspondence from Alexandra Seddon, published in the HEART issue of H/EAR magazine, #5, Summer 1983/4.
30.1.83
Araganui
Kris,
so in this place I must write to you. Terry Gillmore here, John Anderson, Geoff Eggleston, Ken Taylor, Leigh Stokes, & Dorothy Swoope (near Wollongong), Simon Macdonald, Cornelis Vleeskens & Jenny Mitchell, Frank (?), plus many others. A lot of my students. Trish from the Mornya Womens House with her lover, Kathy, my friends Angela Koch, Venie Holmgren. Lots of people on the rock last night, reading by hurricane lamp & fire. We (Angela & I & 2 German girls who are staying at farm) had arrived a bit late. Terry & others helped us across to the island -- the tide having risen quite high. The climb up the rock was not easy. It was amazing that so many people managed to reach that remote place. The reading did go on for most of the night, then we came back to camp & sleep for 2 hours till dawn.
What can I tell you? The atmosphere of the reading was sea, fire, wind, night -- wonderful. At about 1 o'clock when I read for the first part, I felt impelled to read Owen's Mantra -- just the first part. Although I knew it to be unwise, it seemed necessary. Terry & Ken felt it went over well. I had no way of judging. It was like switching back to a time when one lacked any confidence in the writing. Geoff's reading was alright, a bit turgid. Ken read clearly, laying things out to be seen. Cornelis read some family portraits -- excellent, precise gestures, colours, framed. Very good for reading aloud. And also some pieces where he & Jenny Mitchell read alternately, sometimes whole poems, sometimes lines. She chanting "Manna Gum" between his lines at one point. She is a painter. John Anderson's reading was wonderful -- like seeing the movie after reading the book, & being totally satisfied by it. Leigh Stokes did some strange operatic chanting in the midst of a poem for which he had made peculiarly arrogant apologies. Dorothy Swoope reminded me of Marilyn Kitchell [ex Rhode Island poet & publisher of Salt Works Press with Tom Bridwell, last heard of late '80s when she was in Mississippi]-- that fabric of things was very apparent -- clear deliberate reading. I remembered her from Wollongong. Terry read with warmth -- a sort of gentle communication. Tonight we will read again, this time not on the rock but in the tamer camping ground. There is an old thin wallaby close by. Simon Macdonald is feeding him. Terry is talking of reading your 'Being Here'. And I feel that you should be made present more obviously, perhaps in that way.
And I am trying so hard to be here. I am not planted yet, flittering at the edges, trying to grasp or enter the being here. I cannot find the words to frame anything. I am struggling with the words more than ever. I want to give you the feel, the flavour of being here but I cannot find it clearly.
There are tents set up more or less in a circle -- a table in the middle. Modest food, tea, coffee. The talk surging, going around, people wandering off to the bush or to swim. A lot of cigarettes, fires. John standing loosely by the table. He has come now to sit beside me & tell me dreams of Candelo & a radiant face in a tree -- an Aboriginal face & he is reading now from the note book which Retta gave me. He says he would like to come to the farm. I feel chastened by his gentleness & careful words. I feel chastened too by Ken Taylor's silence & speech -- both -- his economy of words...
(......)
*
[According to Mr Google, ca 2013 :
Alexandra Seddon, the founder and patron of Potoroo Palace, has a background of community, conservation, education, farming and the arts.
She came to the Bega Valley in 1975 from Papua New Guinea, where she had been working with PNG teachers, mostly in drama and creative writing. She began farming with her brother in Candelo, and so Cowsnest Community Farm came into being, with a kibbutz type structure: to each according to his/her need, from each according to his/her ability.The idea of Cowsnest was to set up a community farm where anyone could come and contribute their skill and labour even if they had no money to buy land.
Out of Cowsnest, in 1985, grew the Candelo Arts Society, which continues to flourish.
There is also a 57 acre feral-animal-proof Sanctuary at Cowsnest, a half-way house for injured and orphaned native animals who are on their way to soft release.
In 1996 Alexandra initiated the Waterbird Sanctuary in Pambula, which has become Panboola, Pambula Wetlands and Heritage Project (over 200 acres right in Pambula).
In 2000 she began the Pambula Flying Fox Hospital and Conservation Area (34 acres protected by Voluntary Conservation Agreement).
And on September 25th, 2006, a senescent Yellow Pinch Wildlife Park was bought, and slowly rejuvenated to become Potoroo Palace, Native Animal Educational Sanctuary.]
oOo
Re- Laurie Duggan's LEAVES magazine... The La Mama poets' segment gathered by Dennis Douglas, who was teaching at Monash then & editing poetry at The Age, quotes as its title K H's line, to be a poet amongst poets / not to be THE poet.
The segment begins with my letter (of October 25th '68) to Dennis, reproduced in the original typewriter script, from which the following paragraphs :
"(......) andy jack [correct spelling jach] another local poet wrote me the other day saying do you have to write american to make poetry today?? no. but the american influence is undeniable & one can only be enriched by it - the american [poetry] experience takes in every important writer of the postwar world - the british poets macdiarmid & bunting / the younguns pickard/liverpool/nottingham/london poets/ are all following the open way of poetry....tho this is not the only way for me and for many others...obscurity [obscurantism?] is the the thing that has been demolished!
How about doing an article on the new [La Mama, Melbourne] poets? we cd help you with the field work! wed have a ball!! [Ken] taylor/[John] romeril/[Bill] beard/[Charles] buckmaster/ [Mal] morgan/ [Geoff] eggleston /[Elaine] rushbrooke/ [Andy] jack [Jach]/[Michael] dugan/[Ian] robertson/ and i bet there's a score & more!!! interstate a free mag has started emanating from terry gillmore in sydney "free grass" [actually not! --Free Grass was John Tranter's superb hoax; Free Poetry was the real magazine, edited by Gillmore, Nigel Roberts & Johnny Goodall --I'd enthusiastically conflated fact & fiction!] - gillmore/thomson/heaslop/ from nsw - this is a sizable number [of new poets] - at la mama ive had 26 different poets read /invited &/or from the audience!.... for me its the culmination of an ambition to have a poetry workshop - there has to be a new basis for [ poetry &] society - it has to "among" instead of "sole" :-- to be a poet amongst poets/not to be THE poet.
(......)
The letter is followed by Denis Douglas's description of the new poets.
THE MEETING IN THE PARK
Who were in the park [Exhibition Gardens opposite Queensbury Street, Carlton, where the Hemensleys, invited by the actor Frank Bren, lived in the terrace house at number 21] that day? Kris Hemensley, stocky, bearded, expatriate Englishman in his early twenties, Loretta, his wife, who helped produce the magazine Our Glass, which was printed on a fordigraph duplicator purchased by Kris in the expectation that with Our Glass and other poetry jobs it would pay for itself, Bill Beard, a small, wiry, smiling fugitive from the RAAF - he had conducted a one-man non violent campaign of protest against its involvement in the Vietnam war from within the Air Force and eventually been discharged - studying philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Charles Buckmaster, who had been sent home from an upcountry high school to get his hair cut and instead of getting it cut had come to Melbourne to work as laboratory assistant and produce a poetry magazine The Great Auk, Michael Dugan, former member of a fruit picking commune, former book salesman, former publishing editor, former children's writer, former rocker, who was to do it all again (except for returning to the commune).
Who was not in the park that day? Geoffrey Eggleston, burly, aggressive artist-designer much given to the poetic exploitation of obscenity, Ken Taylor, ABC producer, who had used some of the new poetry on radio programs and written well himself in a style influenced by Whitman, Williams, and Charles Olson, Nigel Roberts and Terry Gillmore, who were living in Sydney and producing a magazine called Free Poetry, Richard Tipping and Rob Tillett, who were producing a magazine in Adelaide called Mok, Sweeney Reed, who regarded himself as the manager of a poet called Russell Deeble, and was at that time regarded by the "free magazine" editors as a trendy dilettante, although they later settled their differences (It was Sweeney who had first suggested that I get in touch with the group, remarking that no poet under thirty regarded the established literary magazines as anything but a self-enclosed and self-perpetuating middle-aged clique, utterly indifferent to anything written overseas since 1960 - Terry Gillmore was later to tell me that the mini-mags broke down the resistance to the newer verse forms within two years, suggesting almost that they were instruments used in a campaign to establish communication with an older generation, or to be able to compete with them on even terms).
(......)
Dennis Douglas's survey/celebration continues with quotations from the editorials of the little mags, & culminates with the segment, WHERE HAVE ALL THE POETS GONE?
Although the law of diminishing returns turned their minds to other things, Mike's to a rock-poetry combination, Ian's to India, Charles's to becoming the nth replacement editor for a Penguin anthology of the new poetry [for which Ken Taylor & K H had initially been solicited by John Hooker but after much debate declined because of the political & philosophical compromises anticipated] which never appeared, Sweeney's to the Tolarno Galleries - and the amount of bread and energy that was lavished on the broadsheets should not be underestimated - although Tom Shapcott's Sun Books anthology and Poetry Magazine led the shift in critical forms that encouraged their acceptance, so that "establishment" outlets became available - although a new generation of poetry readers altered the atmosphere of the readings now held at the Arts Co-operative - although some people got busted and others got careers - although the "new thing" was no longer new - although Kris returned to England and Ken started making TV films about birds and Bill went beach-combing, there are still readings and a newer crop of magazines, and rumours of a great new well-produced publication are circulating [Dark Ages Journal, which didnt proceed beyond the manuscript], connected with rumours of Kris Hemensley's return.
What happened was not greatly different from the forging of other poetry schools in the forties and fifties - the attempts the new poets made to gain acceptance for their poetic were no more outrageous or ill-mannered than the tactics of other literary pressure groups - they generated no more antagonism - they excited no more sympathy - which is to say, they were outrageous, ill-mannered, generated much antagonism, excited much sympathy. The differences stemmed from the differences in the world the new poets inhabited, a dangerous, competitive, and hence more communally-minded world. Like other vital schools, they produced much that was ephemeral as well as much that was forceful and effective, and they made themselves known at an earlier age than most Australian groups of poets.
The main point they made was that creative forces can be channeled into the communal life of a large group of people and function there as a positive, enlightening, life-generating impulse. Perhaps the poetry of the future will be made by a by-product of the inner life of societies and less a simulacrum of some kind of collective public address system than the poetry of the past.
oOo
[edited & typed by Kris Hemensley,
April 12th/14th, 2014
Westgarth, Oz]
Sunday, February 8, 2009
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.
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
(...) 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
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
___________________________________________________________________
Edited by Kris Hemensley, with particular assistance from David Lumsden with the reproduction of images (for which, muchos gracias).
February 8th-19th, 2008
Melbourne
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
___________________________________________________________________
Edited by Kris Hemensley, with particular assistance from David Lumsden with the reproduction of images (for which, muchos gracias).
February 8th-19th, 2008
Melbourne
Thursday, November 6, 2008
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published November 6th, 2008
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
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