WARREN BURT & KRIS HEMENSLEY
WARREN BURT:
Dec 14, '16
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Fellow Travelers:
Here's a link to the latest entry on my website, which features videos of me performing a new piece based on Chris Mann's voice, which was performed for the launch of his new book "Whistlin is Did," on Dec 13, 2016 at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne. Also is a video of the complete 7 minutes of the work done the next day in Daylesford. I hope you enjoy this piece, which was a lot of fun to compose and perform.
http://www.warrenburt.com/journal/2016/12/14/launching-piece-2-for-the-launch-of-chris-manns-new-book-dec.html
Cheers,
Warren
*
KRIS HEMENSLEY:
Dec 17, '16
Dear Warren, Good to see and hear you the other day at the Shop...! A great event!
THANK YOU sending your text, photos, & video...
Ive taken the liberty of further sharing it to my F/book page, and have kind of juxtaposed it with thoughts stemming from McKenzie Wark's post abt new course proposal re- Walter Benjamin & E A Poe, which i add to my refutation of derogatory "so 70s" remark made at the Shop about the Burt/Mann sound/moozik performance! That is, "70s" was a wonderfully innovative time, why
considered passe by now? Not at all! (Mine is gentle refutation, and maybe even the comment overheard & reported to me was less hard than appears BUT, opportunity to make a point! As i say in mine, tho W Benjamin agin "continuum" ['break the continuum'], there IS continuum!
All best wishes,
Kris H
[PS:(from F/book comment)
Found on the home feed early this morning a notice from McKenzie Wark regarding a course he's proposing on Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, and relation with E A Poe... Wow! In part, " Even less well known are the affinities that Benjamin's theory and work shares with Edgar Allan Poe, who he widely respected, having learned of him through Baudelaire's high opinion of the American author. Aside from producing a text not dissimilar to The Arcades Project, Poe also insisted on the power of revelation in countless of his texts. Further, he shared both tropes (e.g., the Maezel's Chess Machine) as well as fascinations (graphology, cryptography, fashion)."
I made this comment, "Love this, MW, and back to the future with bells on --comment (sort of derogatory as it was reported to me, tho many a slip between cup and lip, --made the other night at event at Collected Works Bookshop, that Warren Burt's interpretation/realization of & for Chris Mann material --Warren's composition with lap-top & amps) --"so 70s" : and this most suggestive juxtaposition (--in my own stuff late 70s, '1980, called it transposition), Benjamin & Poe --renders me incoherent in ebullience! What a buzz! Well done!
My point abt "so 70s" is that it is & was a great time of cross- fertilization & innovative thinking, and why should any of that be passe in 2016? And tho Benjamin all for 'breaking the continuum', there is a continuum!]
*
WARREN BURT:
Hi Kris:
Yes, a delight all around. Lovely to be part of, and then, the next
morning, discovering the Cordite website, which I hadn't known of
previously (nose to the grindstone at Box Hill, etc), a delightful
expansion of the horizons!
Yes "so 70's" indeed. I had a text in the 90s, which was aimed in the
friendliest possible way at Messrs Randall and Bendinelli , which
denounced the "cliched decadization of knowledge," and thinking
about it, the technology I was using was current, the software
was developed in the late 90s, the central Chris text was from the
80s, and the stuff on the iPad was all texts from the past decade,
but I guess what WAS "70's" about it was the sight of a single
person with small devices doing a performance with tiny
loudspeakers. Which WAS something that not only we (Chris,
me, Ernie Althoff, Ron Nagorcka, Ros Bandt, etc) had developed
in the 70s, but more specifically in Melbourne, (and which is now
the subject of a couple of 20-somethings writing PhDs about --
eek academic immortality!), so yes, THAT bit was 70s, and more
specifically Melbourne 70s, so doing it in a Melbourne bookshop
for a crowd, many of whom were around in the Melbourne 70s,
is extremely apt. So I hope Mr or Ms "so 70s" actually
enjoyed it!
And now, I have the pleasant task ahead, in the next week, of reading your "Your Scratch Entourage" - which to me also suggests a "Scratch Orchestra" as in Cardew, also 70s!
Speaking of continua, I was just reading a MA from another University and the student is trying to link indeterminate, automated processes with queer theory (a not unfriendly matchup), and I find myself having to write a note to remind the student about the unbroken line of queer composers in
the 20th century who were all associated both with queer thinking and with the "current avant-garde thinking" of their eras - Charles T Griffes, A.Copland, Virgil Thompson, Lou Harrison, Francis Poulenc, Cage/Cunningham,Sylvano Bussotti, Julius Eastman, Pauline Oliveros (RIP two weeks ago), and Claude Vivier, among others. (Almost typed "otters" - that would be nice!) So there's a continuum for someone!
Cheers,
Warren
*
ALEX SELENITSCH
"SO SEVENTIES"
The words ‘so seventies…” (or something like that), floated up at a recent event at Collected Works – so Kris Hemensley tells me. Was it a put-down? A witticism? A critical judgment? A moment of self exposure? a statement of solidarity? All of these, I think. All of these labels dance about as contradictory but co-existent job descriptions for living, practicing, creative workers.
1970s, at its dumbest, means the decade numbered thus, plus or minus a few years into the decades at both ends. But it’s not just a calendar. It’s an appeal to a style, a zeitgeist, a codified recognizable way of doing things, an aesthetic. Codified is the key word here. Whatever the 1970s were has been settled through a power struggle and there are winners who are remembered and losers who are invisible because they have been written out, ignored or repressed.
Before the 1970s, there were the 1960s and the 1950s. Does human behavior, and the context for it, really roll along in ten-year cycles? Of course not: the decades are labels, and generalizations of the loosest sort. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the drive to shape our complicated, perhaps chaotic outputs and creative works, and the decade is probably as good as any other, and certainly the easiest to remember. The danger comes when its winning formula’s are held up as a standard or goal. That is, when in the 1970s, artists must behave and work according to the codified zeitgeist. Even worse, once the decade has passed, artists must move on to the next formula or code. Hunting the zeitgeist is the game.
For provincial artists like us here in OZ, the traditional way of doing this has been to sail and/fly to the central kitchen, steal some of the new magic pudding and bring it back to use at home. The terrible thing that can happen is that the creative life becomes a chain of fashionable actions none of which arise from the artists themselves or their eco-niche. It could be worse. Hilda Rix Nicholas, for example, was a Queensland painter who went to France at the fin-de-siecle and discovered how to paint in high key pointillist post-impressionist style. She did some beautiful paintings which show how well she learnt to do it. When she returned to OZ, she continued to paint the same style for the rest of her life, ignoring her locality and the changing world around her – at least as far as her paintings were concerned. She is not, and sad to say, will not be, the only antipodean artist who finds the latest style when young and continues with it for the rest of their life.
Many creative careers last a number of decades and persist through changed social conditions, new technologies and materials and social behaviors. These decades extend over an individual’s lifetime, and one might expect that an individual’s creative works will change as well. There is also a kind of biological/biographic image of work: a lyric poet as a youth becomes a mature observer and researcher into the discipline of poetry, moves to writing something like an epic, or epics, and finally emerges, butterfly-like as a succinct lyric poet again, but with depth and maybe darkness in the singing. The ‘late ‘ works of artists have attracted much attention because of their summary, terse and concentrated qualities, and sometimes are truly experimental. Of course, what is there in the young lyric poet can also be found in the subsequent epic and elder lyric poet. To recognize this, one might say ‘so seventies’. But here, the interest is what has been done since then to the ‘70s’ style, to the manner of working the subject matter. It’s possible that very little can change and very much at the same time, like Francis Ponge’s observation that a shrub or tree does not shift position, but engages in a lifetime of elaboration.
And then there are, to my mind, the most interesting of creative workers who are immersed in their eco-niches (local, national, international) but work through a specific vision or program of research. To some degree, creatives are pressured to invent a personal style, a brand, a unique touch which can then be marketed through objects or media. This can be easily subsumed in the borrowed fashionable-decade-style strategy of work. But the commercial pressures can also easily be ignored and a convincing body of work accumulated, extending over decades and with no reference to conventional zeitgeist formulations. This kind of work is often later folded back into revisions of the zietgeist, which can then make the contemporary zeitgeist scouts look empty and lost. This folding-in of idiosyncratic work is also ‘so seventies’. It also ‘so eighties’. And ‘so 90s’. And so on.
24-29dec2016
asele@unimelb.edu.au
Showing posts with label Warren Burt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Warren Burt. Show all posts
Monday, January 16, 2017
Saturday, October 9, 2010
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 19, October, 2010
WARREN BURT
Correspondence
August 31, 2010
Wollongong
Hi Kris!
My cousin Wilbur has been doing genealogical research, and although he's found some interesting stuff in the past (we're very distant relations with both Walt Whitman (yay!) and Dick Cheney (boo!)) he's finally struck gold. My grandfather's grandfather John Burt had a brother, Foght Burt, and Foght had a son Richard, who became a civil war hero and a poet. Had quite a few things published too. You'll be happy to know that the stuff is pretty amazing doggerel - William McGonagal comes to mind. Here's a sample:
http://www.warrenburt.com/richard-welling-burt-archive/
We did a bicentennial piece, of course, in 88. Richard beat us to it by 112 years. I've only read the first page, and I have no doubt that that's all you'll read as well. However, out of misplaced family loyalty, I think I'll try to make it through all 20 pages. I might even have some computer voices speak parts of it - although I don't know how far I'll get with that. Read it and weep! Tears of hilarity, I hope.
Cheers,
Warren
oOo
I have read the dialog with you and Cathy [Kris Hemensley & Catherine O'Brien, Art & About in Vientiane, #2, August, 2010, re- Hans Georg Berger's photography & etc.], and found it fascinating. That the abbot had a huge photography collection is not surprising in one
sense, but a delightful surprise in another.
There are a lot of amazing stories of East West contact. One of my favorite is about the Japanese composer of the 30s and 40s - Mr Ozawa (I forget his first name). He studied with Schoenberg in Berlin, then went back to Japan, and wrote orchestral music in a style very similar to the French neo-classicist Francis Poulenc. Things like the Kamikaze Piano Concerto (not related to WWII suicide bombers, but the experimental fighter plane of the 1930s, which was quite an innovation when it happened, apparently). These days, my Japanese composer friends are more than faintly embarrassed by the renewed interest in him in the West...but it is pretty amazing - the unknown "Sept" of "Les Six" and he lived in obscurity in Tokyo......
---------------------------------------------------------------
JUSTIN CLEMENS
3 POEMS
*
Space Pen
The manufacturer informs us:
It writes UNDERWATER!
In 400° CENTIGRADE!
In ZERO GRAVITY!
So tell me, my friend —
where do you plan to use it?
*
Perfective II
EMPTY fur-flesh
skin-fear uneffaced;
even meat there found
its letter-plug
litter of silenced earth.
*
Oh to hello ago I go agogo
The more I know his trumpet ‘tis truly so
me trumpet’s trumpet pinned his pegs akimbo,
clyster-pipes and organs humpherumphing happily
hanging a tail by many a wind instrument that blew
the bag-men’s big cheeks pup-puffing up to kiss
the equipment of their pleasures — reserve
this vessel for my lord! they insinuate,
as if they’d walk to Palestine for a touch
of his nether lips and a long hard look down the gyrating barrel
of the biggest revulva youse or I’s has ever seens.
---------------------------------------------------
TINA GIANNOUKOS
from SONNETS
III
When you touch me it is the hand of God.
I agree to restrain the gravity of this emotion.
I begin the long march in death's dominion.
I bear the thought imperfectly that I'm alone.
Mona Lisa's smile remains enigmatic.
This is the only wisdom I possess:
They marked you. They marked you all your life.
Moonlight still shines on what you left behind.
The will is muscular. Like muscle, it tears.
You sentence me to hard labour. Once,
I was beautiful but that was rapture.
The tongue of love tastes tough in these bull days.
This is the conspiracy of the figure two:
the flowers in the garden grow mottled.
oOo
XXX
When the time comes, whenever that be,
I shall look back to my ancestors,
seafarers all, gliding over oceans,
now coming into ports. This earth,
this blue planet, will not circumscribe me.
I will sail across the empty doom searching
for cyclopean marvels; a half-horse, half-man
figure will appear from behind that band
of stars beyond the edge of the Milky Way.
The astrophysics of our encounter,
this dark energy of love, are unknown.
In a singular moment the explosion
that drove all things apart drove us too.
In space I hold the horn of plenty.
------------------------------------------------------------
JENNIFER HARRISON
Ian McBryde’s The Adoption Order
(published by 5 Islands Press 2009)
[Launch Speech presented at Collected Works 15.10.09]
Rapture be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer
(Rapture, lyric by Blondie)
It’s a privilege to launch Ian McBryde’s sixth major collection of poetry, The Adoption Order, here at Collected Works by grace of Kris and Retta Hemensley. Thanks to Ian and 5 Islands Press for the honour. I hadn’t actually seen the book until tonight but I can see the fine publishing job accomplished by Kevin Brophy, Dan Disney and Lyn Hatherly at 5 Islands Press. When I was reading Ian’s book in manuscript form, as I have several times over the last few weeks, I began to think about the light and dark, the beauty and horror, that makes Ian’s poetry so wild and impressively individual. The French poet René Char once said (quote taken from The Poet’s Work):
‘behind the poet’s shutter of blood burns the cry of a force that will destroy itself
because it abhors force . . . Read me. Read me again. He (the poet) does not always come
away unscathed from his page, but like the poor, he knows how to make use of the
olive’s eternity.’
Or as Blondie expressed it in a lyric from her 1981 single Rapture:
Rapture, be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer.
In The Adoption Order Ian does not flinch from the dark and desolate places of the heart. From the dystopian palace in the poem ‘News from the Palace’ to the abandoned landscape of ‘Tunnel 3’ with its nameless station, its unknown slope, its unreadable lights, its rusted, unused rails, its uncertain carriages and clammy track to nowhere, we enter an imagination that is surreal, tender and savage. Take, for example, these memorable lines from the poem ‘A Second Lake’ (the quote is the entire poem):
Deep in the interior water has cut stone open, filled in
the scar, iced over. No fish swim beneath this seal,
and no animals venture down to test the edge
of this ripped shore, this brittle lace,
this ghost of gauze over the old
and frozen wound.
Take note of the arrangement of the words on the page, the inexorable tightening of skin over that strange and frosty wound. An Ian McBryde poem is never un-imperilled. Words are never wasted. His imagery is both elemental, often of the sea, the dream, the cave, the animal - and his imagery is sharper than the sound of the words that make the image—by which I mean it is the visual elements of Ian’s imagery that etch themselves so sharply on the mind. Whether this particular talent comes from Ian’s drawing and illustrative abilities I’m not sure. It is a talent.
Blondie’s Deborah Harry, was also adopted and although many of the poems in Ian’s The Adoption Order do touch on that theme, the poems seems less interested in recording or evoking confessional feelings about adoption or loss and more concerned with embodying the ongoing struggle of words to ground themselves in a world where loss, separation and grief happen. I spent some time thinking about why these poems, despite their sometimes bleak imagery, are so moving, so emotionally chiselled and fulfilling to read. I did not experience them as nihilistic, but as generous. I think it has something to do with what, again, the French lyricist poet René Char (1907-1988)[1] said (as reported by Edward Hirsch in How To Fall in Love with Poetry): that ‘the poem is the realised love of desire still desiring’. The Russian poet Tsvetaeva asks ‘what shall I do as I go over the bridge of my enchanted visions that cannot be weighed in a world that deals only in weights and measure?’
Whether it is the child who desires a mother or father they might never know, or a lover who desires the one they might never attain or keep, or the adult who desires a childhood that continues to mesmerise time, Ian is exploring marooned desire, a grief that somehow becomes a wound of history because we are always losing the present and never in perfect harmony with the world. Perhaps love and loss are the Castor and Pollux of poetry, the twinned forces which poetry attempts to reconcile yet ultimately fails because the past, the beloved are beyond the temporality of language. As Ian says in the last stanza of the villanelle ‘We Touch On and are Lifted from the Earth’:
All our art is the murmuring of surf
Love is where the sea spray meets and marries.
We touch on and are lifted from the earth.
We now are past the moment of our birth.
and later in ‘38th Parallel’: ‘ I have learned nothing but thirst, the only truth of the marooned’.
And later, still, in ‘A Silhouette on Water’:
The image quivers, disperses, splits into
patterns of shadow and elusive light which
never really finish, never really begin.
We often talk about the strength of image in this or that poetry or in this or that poem, as though it is in opposition to weaknesses of image. In Ian’s poetry imagery isn’t a strength, it is the essence of the poetry. The book is a beautiful imagining of imagery. And so beautiful. Here in the poem ‘Before Waking’: ‘I dreamt rain on slate. I dreamt fine china carefully arranged on the floors of caves.’ When I read these images, these lines, I think of carefully arranged words in the darkness of the poem’s cave, I think of all the cultural history of civilisation from the cave to Doulton’s fine bone china factories and I think of human skulls, Pompeii and the fragility of bones. Every poem in The Adoption Order is a scene of spare, concentrated imagery, a dramatic distillation of the lyric’s power and each poem is a play where the self takes centre stage as landscape, as divided mirror or as a numbed survivor on a raft drifting.
The whispering of the poems is intimate as though it’s assumed that you, too, are familiar with the longhouse, the disintegrating palace, the old and frozen scar and the faces of the other children of the raft. The language is very precise and the choice of a particular word often startling. For example, consider the final lines from ‘Instead of Your Breast’ (again reproduced here in its entirety):
Instead of your breast
a ghost treasure,
an alarm sent out.
Instead of your voice
the locked wing,
the lightning shield.
Instead of your breath
a jungle of drums
and the gathering dusk.
Instead of your hands
the terminal, the stretched
mile and instead of your
presence, the faces of
other children of the raft.
Instead of other possibilities (other children on the raft) these are the children of the raft: children who are perhaps destined for dangerous sadness, adventure and drifting. When I read these lines I think of Klaus Kinski in the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, The Wrath of God, (the final scenes of the film when monkeys overcome the raft); I think of asylum seekers adrift, I think of the literature of shipwreck and of the often vulnerable children I work with as a child psychiatrist. This power of imagery does not open a small niche in experience – this imagery opens a tender Pandora’s box of history, both personal and shared, both particular and ethereal.
The Adoption Order is about the power of families. It begins with a poem called ‘Genealogy’ and ends with a poem called ‘Motherlode’. In between are poems about the loneliness of childhood, about the pain of adoption, about the Irish diaspora. And there are magnificent elegies for lost parents. The poem ‘Satellite’ from Ian’s first book The Shade of Angels (1990) re-appears and Ian and has given us another poem/chapter from the ongoing sequence ‘Reports from the Palace’ a sequence which threads through his earlier published works, with versions appearing in The Familiar (1994), Flank (1998) and Equatorial (2001). Thus, in terms of the process of the book, poems can be traced back to past collections as one might also trace the genealogy of a family (or be unable to do so, at least in the past, if adopted). The Adoption Order is the fruit of many generations of poems, not only Ian’s. McBryde’s ‘Icarus’ joins a long tradition of Icarus poems including those of Auden and William Carlos Williams to name just two. This is one of my favourite poems in the book, although to say so feels a little unfair to myself as I value so many. In this Icarus tale, the son’s fiery death is the final triumph which frees him from family and, strangely, this poem seems to capture the actual moment a real event becomes myth.
Icarus (Last Words)
As I fall I watch
my father float
to safety on less
rapid atmosphere
His wings intact,
he hovers high above
me as I plummet.
And yet long after
he lands, long after he
is held in my mother’s
grieving arms it is not
his wisdom but
my bright death that will
be celebrated.
My ribbons of wax.
My shout in the clouds.
A glassy sea beneath
me as I melt and am
finally unfeathered.
At last I have
honoured my island.
I have passed beyond
family. I will be
Falling for centuries,
suspended forever
in the rich, dense air
of legend.
This is a classy, humane book. It deserves great respect and recognition. Although working at an interface that is almost pre-speech, pre-definition these poems are paradoxical artworks of precise speech, chiselled lyricism, formal refrain and earthy textures carved into the cave wall of a page. The Adoption Order is a book of dreams, a book of riddles and a book which fears the end of dreams. René Char said in ‘The Formal Share’: ‘It is from a lack of inner justice that the poet suffers most in his relations with the world. Caliban’s sewer window, behind which Ariel’s powerful and sensitive eyes are angry.’; Ian McBryde says:
I bit the rain.
oOo
Notes:
[1] Rene Char’s mature poetry was published in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France; his poetry is at once a lyrical summoning of natural correspondences and a meditation on poetry itself; his single line famous poem To the Health of the Serpent’—published in Fureur etmystère, Éditions Gallimard, 1962—for me has a kinship with Ian’s fabulous one-line poems published in Slivers, Flat Chat Poets, 2005.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
THE PORTRAIT
I am hung
next to paintings
about the same size -
an unorthodox
(conservative-wise)
gesture
nailed into place
One precise metre
from the curlicues of
my frame
a landscape with tower
is abstracted into
vertical planes
defying depth
From the other side
florid dahlias
in their crystal vase
suggest a tasteful encounter
with the zig-zag
rhythm of my
portrait's scarf
These companions
are unknown to me
(and I to them)
though we are linked
capriciously for a month
as intimates
on public display
------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID SHEPHERD
KING KONG GOT IT WRONG:
NO MAN IS A MANHATTAN
That ain't no monkey on my back
It's a gorilla
That insidious old ape
Still crouches on my shoulder
He's perched up there
Like Goya's grinning ghoul
He just climbed up
My skyscraper spine
You can still see
The marks he made
He razed my city
To the ground
And stole my loved one
With his gnarled hand
He's too big
And heavy
To stay up there for long
One good bi-plane
To the back of the head
He'll fall a hundred stories
And crush everything
Then I'll be rid of him
Until the next organ grinder
Comes to town
And his simian side kick
Casts his dark shadow
Down my long haul
Whispering
Every man is a Manhattan
[2004]
oOo
ACROSS CHERRY LAKE
Smokestack
Bellows black
Bluffing its way
Into innocent clouds.
Turner's torrid trowel
Smears
The bloody sunset
Grey
Broken winged duck
Last spastic dance
On dim mirror plate.
Chimney vomit
Turns white
Near night.
Atomic bomb crucifix
Smites the sun
Of man.
Burning tonsure.
Cold halo.
[Winter, 2010]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
WARREN BURT prolific composer & performer, for many years on the Melbourne scene, currently in Wollongong. His website is www.warrenburt.com
JUSTIN CLEMENS active in literature, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, art criticism, & is the author of several books including The Mundiad (Black Inc, '04), Black River (re.press, '07), Villain (Hunter Publishers, 2009). Phew! He teaches at the University of Melbourne.
<>
TINA GIANNOUKOS has published In A Bigger City (Five Islands Press, '05). She teaches at University of Melbourne where she is completing her PHD. In 2010 addressed a conference in Shanghai, read at the Beijing Bookworm & gave lecture in Beijing. Link to the review of In a Bigger City
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ras/article/view/444/490
Her review of Angela Gardner's Views of the Hudson in Jacket 40:
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-gardner-rb-giannoukos.shtml
JENNIFER HARRISON has published several collections including Michaelangelo's Prisoners ('95), which won that year's Anne Elder Award; & most recently Folly & Grief (Black Pepper, '06), & Colombine : New & Selected Poems (Black Pepper, Melbourne, '10). Co-edited with Kate Waterhouse, Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry, 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, '09).
ANNE KIRKER, well known as a curator of modern & contemporary painting in New Zealand & Australia; appears in Poems & Pieces, # 1, & #8. Her website is, www.annekirker.com.au
DAVID SHEPHERD's website is http://www.terrorlostralis.blogspot.com/ which contains extensive biography. Similarly see http://fitzroydreaming.blogspot.com/ for recent feature with Dave Ellison on Karl Gallagher's illustrious site.
Correspondence
August 31, 2010
Wollongong
Hi Kris!
My cousin Wilbur has been doing genealogical research, and although he's found some interesting stuff in the past (we're very distant relations with both Walt Whitman (yay!) and Dick Cheney (boo!)) he's finally struck gold. My grandfather's grandfather John Burt had a brother, Foght Burt, and Foght had a son Richard, who became a civil war hero and a poet. Had quite a few things published too. You'll be happy to know that the stuff is pretty amazing doggerel - William McGonagal comes to mind. Here's a sample:
http://www.warrenburt.com/richard-welling-burt-archive/
We did a bicentennial piece, of course, in 88. Richard beat us to it by 112 years. I've only read the first page, and I have no doubt that that's all you'll read as well. However, out of misplaced family loyalty, I think I'll try to make it through all 20 pages. I might even have some computer voices speak parts of it - although I don't know how far I'll get with that. Read it and weep! Tears of hilarity, I hope.
Cheers,
Warren
oOo
I have read the dialog with you and Cathy [Kris Hemensley & Catherine O'Brien, Art & About in Vientiane, #2, August, 2010, re- Hans Georg Berger's photography & etc.], and found it fascinating. That the abbot had a huge photography collection is not surprising in one
sense, but a delightful surprise in another.
There are a lot of amazing stories of East West contact. One of my favorite is about the Japanese composer of the 30s and 40s - Mr Ozawa (I forget his first name). He studied with Schoenberg in Berlin, then went back to Japan, and wrote orchestral music in a style very similar to the French neo-classicist Francis Poulenc. Things like the Kamikaze Piano Concerto (not related to WWII suicide bombers, but the experimental fighter plane of the 1930s, which was quite an innovation when it happened, apparently). These days, my Japanese composer friends are more than faintly embarrassed by the renewed interest in him in the West...but it is pretty amazing - the unknown "Sept" of "Les Six" and he lived in obscurity in Tokyo......
---------------------------------------------------------------
JUSTIN CLEMENS
3 POEMS
*
Space Pen
The manufacturer informs us:
It writes UNDERWATER!
In 400° CENTIGRADE!
In ZERO GRAVITY!
So tell me, my friend —
where do you plan to use it?
*
Perfective II
EMPTY fur-flesh
skin-fear uneffaced;
even meat there found
its letter-plug
litter of silenced earth.
*
Oh to hello ago I go agogo
The more I know his trumpet ‘tis truly so
me trumpet’s trumpet pinned his pegs akimbo,
clyster-pipes and organs humpherumphing happily
hanging a tail by many a wind instrument that blew
the bag-men’s big cheeks pup-puffing up to kiss
the equipment of their pleasures — reserve
this vessel for my lord! they insinuate,
as if they’d walk to Palestine for a touch
of his nether lips and a long hard look down the gyrating barrel
of the biggest revulva youse or I’s has ever seens.
---------------------------------------------------
TINA GIANNOUKOS
from SONNETS
III
When you touch me it is the hand of God.
I agree to restrain the gravity of this emotion.
I begin the long march in death's dominion.
I bear the thought imperfectly that I'm alone.
Mona Lisa's smile remains enigmatic.
This is the only wisdom I possess:
They marked you. They marked you all your life.
Moonlight still shines on what you left behind.
The will is muscular. Like muscle, it tears.
You sentence me to hard labour. Once,
I was beautiful but that was rapture.
The tongue of love tastes tough in these bull days.
This is the conspiracy of the figure two:
the flowers in the garden grow mottled.
oOo
XXX
When the time comes, whenever that be,
I shall look back to my ancestors,
seafarers all, gliding over oceans,
now coming into ports. This earth,
this blue planet, will not circumscribe me.
I will sail across the empty doom searching
for cyclopean marvels; a half-horse, half-man
figure will appear from behind that band
of stars beyond the edge of the Milky Way.
The astrophysics of our encounter,
this dark energy of love, are unknown.
In a singular moment the explosion
that drove all things apart drove us too.
In space I hold the horn of plenty.
------------------------------------------------------------
JENNIFER HARRISON
Ian McBryde’s The Adoption Order
(published by 5 Islands Press 2009)
[Launch Speech presented at Collected Works 15.10.09]
Rapture be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer
(Rapture, lyric by Blondie)
It’s a privilege to launch Ian McBryde’s sixth major collection of poetry, The Adoption Order, here at Collected Works by grace of Kris and Retta Hemensley. Thanks to Ian and 5 Islands Press for the honour. I hadn’t actually seen the book until tonight but I can see the fine publishing job accomplished by Kevin Brophy, Dan Disney and Lyn Hatherly at 5 Islands Press. When I was reading Ian’s book in manuscript form, as I have several times over the last few weeks, I began to think about the light and dark, the beauty and horror, that makes Ian’s poetry so wild and impressively individual. The French poet René Char once said (quote taken from The Poet’s Work):
‘behind the poet’s shutter of blood burns the cry of a force that will destroy itself
because it abhors force . . . Read me. Read me again. He (the poet) does not always come
away unscathed from his page, but like the poor, he knows how to make use of the
olive’s eternity.’
Or as Blondie expressed it in a lyric from her 1981 single Rapture:
Rapture, be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer.
In The Adoption Order Ian does not flinch from the dark and desolate places of the heart. From the dystopian palace in the poem ‘News from the Palace’ to the abandoned landscape of ‘Tunnel 3’ with its nameless station, its unknown slope, its unreadable lights, its rusted, unused rails, its uncertain carriages and clammy track to nowhere, we enter an imagination that is surreal, tender and savage. Take, for example, these memorable lines from the poem ‘A Second Lake’ (the quote is the entire poem):
Deep in the interior water has cut stone open, filled in
the scar, iced over. No fish swim beneath this seal,
and no animals venture down to test the edge
of this ripped shore, this brittle lace,
this ghost of gauze over the old
and frozen wound.
Take note of the arrangement of the words on the page, the inexorable tightening of skin over that strange and frosty wound. An Ian McBryde poem is never un-imperilled. Words are never wasted. His imagery is both elemental, often of the sea, the dream, the cave, the animal - and his imagery is sharper than the sound of the words that make the image—by which I mean it is the visual elements of Ian’s imagery that etch themselves so sharply on the mind. Whether this particular talent comes from Ian’s drawing and illustrative abilities I’m not sure. It is a talent.
Blondie’s Deborah Harry, was also adopted and although many of the poems in Ian’s The Adoption Order do touch on that theme, the poems seems less interested in recording or evoking confessional feelings about adoption or loss and more concerned with embodying the ongoing struggle of words to ground themselves in a world where loss, separation and grief happen. I spent some time thinking about why these poems, despite their sometimes bleak imagery, are so moving, so emotionally chiselled and fulfilling to read. I did not experience them as nihilistic, but as generous. I think it has something to do with what, again, the French lyricist poet René Char (1907-1988)[1] said (as reported by Edward Hirsch in How To Fall in Love with Poetry): that ‘the poem is the realised love of desire still desiring’. The Russian poet Tsvetaeva asks ‘what shall I do as I go over the bridge of my enchanted visions that cannot be weighed in a world that deals only in weights and measure?’
Whether it is the child who desires a mother or father they might never know, or a lover who desires the one they might never attain or keep, or the adult who desires a childhood that continues to mesmerise time, Ian is exploring marooned desire, a grief that somehow becomes a wound of history because we are always losing the present and never in perfect harmony with the world. Perhaps love and loss are the Castor and Pollux of poetry, the twinned forces which poetry attempts to reconcile yet ultimately fails because the past, the beloved are beyond the temporality of language. As Ian says in the last stanza of the villanelle ‘We Touch On and are Lifted from the Earth’:
All our art is the murmuring of surf
Love is where the sea spray meets and marries.
We touch on and are lifted from the earth.
We now are past the moment of our birth.
and later in ‘38th Parallel’: ‘ I have learned nothing but thirst, the only truth of the marooned’.
And later, still, in ‘A Silhouette on Water’:
The image quivers, disperses, splits into
patterns of shadow and elusive light which
never really finish, never really begin.
We often talk about the strength of image in this or that poetry or in this or that poem, as though it is in opposition to weaknesses of image. In Ian’s poetry imagery isn’t a strength, it is the essence of the poetry. The book is a beautiful imagining of imagery. And so beautiful. Here in the poem ‘Before Waking’: ‘I dreamt rain on slate. I dreamt fine china carefully arranged on the floors of caves.’ When I read these images, these lines, I think of carefully arranged words in the darkness of the poem’s cave, I think of all the cultural history of civilisation from the cave to Doulton’s fine bone china factories and I think of human skulls, Pompeii and the fragility of bones. Every poem in The Adoption Order is a scene of spare, concentrated imagery, a dramatic distillation of the lyric’s power and each poem is a play where the self takes centre stage as landscape, as divided mirror or as a numbed survivor on a raft drifting.
The whispering of the poems is intimate as though it’s assumed that you, too, are familiar with the longhouse, the disintegrating palace, the old and frozen scar and the faces of the other children of the raft. The language is very precise and the choice of a particular word often startling. For example, consider the final lines from ‘Instead of Your Breast’ (again reproduced here in its entirety):
Instead of your breast
a ghost treasure,
an alarm sent out.
Instead of your voice
the locked wing,
the lightning shield.
Instead of your breath
a jungle of drums
and the gathering dusk.
Instead of your hands
the terminal, the stretched
mile and instead of your
presence, the faces of
other children of the raft.
Instead of other possibilities (other children on the raft) these are the children of the raft: children who are perhaps destined for dangerous sadness, adventure and drifting. When I read these lines I think of Klaus Kinski in the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, The Wrath of God, (the final scenes of the film when monkeys overcome the raft); I think of asylum seekers adrift, I think of the literature of shipwreck and of the often vulnerable children I work with as a child psychiatrist. This power of imagery does not open a small niche in experience – this imagery opens a tender Pandora’s box of history, both personal and shared, both particular and ethereal.
The Adoption Order is about the power of families. It begins with a poem called ‘Genealogy’ and ends with a poem called ‘Motherlode’. In between are poems about the loneliness of childhood, about the pain of adoption, about the Irish diaspora. And there are magnificent elegies for lost parents. The poem ‘Satellite’ from Ian’s first book The Shade of Angels (1990) re-appears and Ian and has given us another poem/chapter from the ongoing sequence ‘Reports from the Palace’ a sequence which threads through his earlier published works, with versions appearing in The Familiar (1994), Flank (1998) and Equatorial (2001). Thus, in terms of the process of the book, poems can be traced back to past collections as one might also trace the genealogy of a family (or be unable to do so, at least in the past, if adopted). The Adoption Order is the fruit of many generations of poems, not only Ian’s. McBryde’s ‘Icarus’ joins a long tradition of Icarus poems including those of Auden and William Carlos Williams to name just two. This is one of my favourite poems in the book, although to say so feels a little unfair to myself as I value so many. In this Icarus tale, the son’s fiery death is the final triumph which frees him from family and, strangely, this poem seems to capture the actual moment a real event becomes myth.
Icarus (Last Words)
As I fall I watch
my father float
to safety on less
rapid atmosphere
His wings intact,
he hovers high above
me as I plummet.
And yet long after
he lands, long after he
is held in my mother’s
grieving arms it is not
his wisdom but
my bright death that will
be celebrated.
My ribbons of wax.
My shout in the clouds.
A glassy sea beneath
me as I melt and am
finally unfeathered.
At last I have
honoured my island.
I have passed beyond
family. I will be
Falling for centuries,
suspended forever
in the rich, dense air
of legend.
This is a classy, humane book. It deserves great respect and recognition. Although working at an interface that is almost pre-speech, pre-definition these poems are paradoxical artworks of precise speech, chiselled lyricism, formal refrain and earthy textures carved into the cave wall of a page. The Adoption Order is a book of dreams, a book of riddles and a book which fears the end of dreams. René Char said in ‘The Formal Share’: ‘It is from a lack of inner justice that the poet suffers most in his relations with the world. Caliban’s sewer window, behind which Ariel’s powerful and sensitive eyes are angry.’; Ian McBryde says:
I bit the rain.
oOo
Notes:
[1] Rene Char’s mature poetry was published in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France; his poetry is at once a lyrical summoning of natural correspondences and a meditation on poetry itself; his single line famous poem To the Health of the Serpent’—published in Fureur etmystère, Éditions Gallimard, 1962—for me has a kinship with Ian’s fabulous one-line poems published in Slivers, Flat Chat Poets, 2005.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
THE PORTRAIT
I am hung
next to paintings
about the same size -
an unorthodox
(conservative-wise)
gesture
nailed into place
One precise metre
from the curlicues of
my frame
a landscape with tower
is abstracted into
vertical planes
defying depth
From the other side
florid dahlias
in their crystal vase
suggest a tasteful encounter
with the zig-zag
rhythm of my
portrait's scarf
These companions
are unknown to me
(and I to them)
though we are linked
capriciously for a month
as intimates
on public display
------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID SHEPHERD
KING KONG GOT IT WRONG:
NO MAN IS A MANHATTAN
That ain't no monkey on my back
It's a gorilla
That insidious old ape
Still crouches on my shoulder
He's perched up there
Like Goya's grinning ghoul
He just climbed up
My skyscraper spine
You can still see
The marks he made
He razed my city
To the ground
And stole my loved one
With his gnarled hand
He's too big
And heavy
To stay up there for long
One good bi-plane
To the back of the head
He'll fall a hundred stories
And crush everything
Then I'll be rid of him
Until the next organ grinder
Comes to town
And his simian side kick
Casts his dark shadow
Down my long haul
Whispering
Every man is a Manhattan
[2004]
oOo
ACROSS CHERRY LAKE
Smokestack
Bellows black
Bluffing its way
Into innocent clouds.
Turner's torrid trowel
Smears
The bloody sunset
Grey
Broken winged duck
Last spastic dance
On dim mirror plate.
Chimney vomit
Turns white
Near night.
Atomic bomb crucifix
Smites the sun
Of man.
Burning tonsure.
Cold halo.
[Winter, 2010]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
WARREN BURT prolific composer & performer, for many years on the Melbourne scene, currently in Wollongong. His website is www.warrenburt.com
JUSTIN CLEMENS active in literature, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, art criticism, & is the author of several books including The Mundiad (Black Inc, '04), Black River (re.press, '07), Villain (Hunter Publishers, 2009). Phew! He teaches at the University of Melbourne.
<>
TINA GIANNOUKOS has published In A Bigger City (Five Islands Press, '05). She teaches at University of Melbourne where she is completing her PHD. In 2010 addressed a conference in Shanghai, read at the Beijing Bookworm & gave lecture in Beijing. Link to the review of In a Bigger City
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ras/article/view/444/490
Her review of Angela Gardner's Views of the Hudson in Jacket 40:
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-gardner-rb-giannoukos.shtml
JENNIFER HARRISON has published several collections including Michaelangelo's Prisoners ('95), which won that year's Anne Elder Award; & most recently Folly & Grief (Black Pepper, '06), & Colombine : New & Selected Poems (Black Pepper, Melbourne, '10). Co-edited with Kate Waterhouse, Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry, 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, '09).
ANNE KIRKER, well known as a curator of modern & contemporary painting in New Zealand & Australia; appears in Poems & Pieces, # 1, & #8. Her website is, www.annekirker.com.au
DAVID SHEPHERD's website is http://www.terrorlostralis.blogspot.com/ which contains extensive biography. Similarly see http://fitzroydreaming.blogspot.com/ for recent feature with Dave Ellison on Karl Gallagher's illustrious site.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #15, November, 2009
"ALL YOU'VE GOT TO DO IS TUNE IN TO THE MUSIC..."
________________________________________
JOHN BENNETT
LOOKING BACK
I heard
back from
Leonard Cohen.
He wants me
to join
his tour.
Unlike the
other members of
the troupe
who wear
snappy little hats,
I'm to wear
a dunce cap.
There'll be a
gold leash
around my neck &
when Leonard
yanks it
I blurt out
a Shard.
No talk of
my playing
harmonica,
but if things
work out well
there's an
off chance
of our
cutting a
record together:
Leonard & John,
Looking Back
Thru the
Ages.
My friends
tell me
this is
the chance of
a lifetime,
but I'm a
little uneasy
about the
dunce cap &
leash.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
GLENN COOPER
BLOWING IN THE WIND
If you join the dots on
that famous polka-dot shirt,
they form a picture
of a man as lost
in the wind as all
the answers
he once
coveted.
This thought came to me just now
as I sat in the sun and watched
the wind suddenly fill
the sleeves of my old, flannel shirt,
pegged on the line, making
a man of me at last.
ooo
DYLANHAIKU
Hotel room -
guitar on the bed
woman on the floor.
*
No direction home -
then, now
and forever.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
ANDREW FRANKS
WEEP
SINCE THERE ARE no more poets
and the MUSICIANS HAVE FLED the stage
packing pens in oak trunks/TEA CHESTS
BURYING THEIR INSTRUMENTS in the snow
since all the artists have GIN BLOSSOMING
UP TO OUR NECKS in SHIT & blood
Since beauty and DESIRE STOLE OUR last can
Dle and left us in the da
rk since the gaunt got garr
otted and fled SINCE ALL TYPOGR
aphical THINGS GO AGAINST ME since all the
sun BEACHED BLEACHED WHO
RES DECIDEd to hang thems
Elves, since HIS PULSE SLOWED DO
WN and my rage filled to OVERF
lowing, since venus AND ALL HER MAT
Es stopped DRINKING IN OUR BAR the O
NLY THINg left is to
WEEP.
ooo
As I rounded the corner
I saw him
in a white Alfa Romeo
red leather seats
on Broadwick Street
gold ring, gold watch,
white shirt, blue with white polka dot tie
dark blue mohair suit
quality shades, Gerry Mulligan crew cut
black Italian loafers
In the background
John Coltrane was easing
into the midday sun
I saw the past and my future
blurring into one
ooo
On Seeing Slim Gaillard in London three days before he died
He strode through Golden Square
shrouded in a huge woolen coat, scarf, beret, beard and a scowl.
I walked by him and as I did so
He turned his weary old head and looked me in the eye.
"Oroonie"
and then he was gone.
Over and Vout!
------
[these poems from SCRATCHED IN THE STARS, SPRAWLED IN THE SAND
(pub. Soul Bay Press (Sussex,UK, '09); see www.soulbaypress.com]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
An Orchestra's Day Off!
string section
the thoughtless strings resonate
down an endless hallway
looking for a score!
horn section
the horns eat abalone alone
in a brightly lit restaurant!
the percussion section
are rapping on an avenue of doors
where no one is pretending
to be at home!
if the wind section
comes in from that quarter
for 3 days it'll rain!
conductor
when struck by lightning
the orchestra members
showed no spark of enthusiasm
for the gesture
being well acquainted
with the piece at hand!
the parts
are blowing in the wind!
ooo
Birthday
1.
its your birthday
but you won't hear
Siegfried Idyll live
from the bathroom!!
what will
the dogs
and parrots do
now that
Wagner's out??
though vegetarianism
is not so passe
non-violence
as an industry
is total drama!!
here's hoping
for an opera
with acne!
maybe we
can count
all the spots
before Lunch!!
2.
apart from Hasse's
La Serva Scaltra
the whole year
can be spielfrei!!
who needs
a ringside seat
in Beyrouth?
i'd rather
be a trainspotter
in Birdland
(is that "peace
from delusion")
than a member
of the Cameroon
Wagner Society
taking a nap
in the garden
at Wahnfried!!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
WARREN BURT / KRIS HEMENSLEY
Warren Burt
Wed, Oct 7, 2009
Hi Kris!
Continuing our discussion of months ago, when I was in the shop, you asked about why people (these days) would use non-personal processes (for lack of a better term, and I'm sure there are lots of them) to make work. I found this quote from Herbert Brun the other day. Brun (1918-2000) was a composer, writer, computer pioneer, and political activist. Born in Germany, and riding out WWII in Palestine, he taught from 1963 at the University of Illinois, and a list of his students is a who's who of composers, writer, cyberneticians, and activists. In fact, for the past few years, students of his have been the controlling faction on the Urbana, Illinois, city council, making that city a model of Green politics in the USA. He was one for the bottom-up approach in pretty much all things, and whereas I was saying that one might use "non-personal processes" (how to encapsulate a world of extremely different ideas and techniques in a sound byte???) as a medium of discovery, Brun expresses it much more politically:
"It is one thing to search for events that will produce the sound one wants, and quite another to discover the sound of the events one wants. In the first case the wanted sound renders desirable the necessary events; in the second the wanted events are the standard for the desirability of the resulting sound. These are not only two different approaches to the composition of music, but also two different political attitudes."
Substitute words for sound, poetry for music, or whatever medium one is dealing with, and the quote may be more or less applicable.....
Brun, by the way, was one of the idols of Mr. Mann - whenever Chris was in the US, he would make a beeline for Urbana to have a cup of tea and "good old Berlin Jews arguing" with Herbert.
I liked seeing your early 70s poem-portraits on the CW web-thing the other day, by the way. It occurs to me that whatever styles we work in, even when we know each other, the work itself remains often inaccessible. Which reminds me - I promised myself that October would be the month I got my website and source of materials up and running, and here we are 7 days into it, and I haven't even started yet!
Hope you're well, and cheers,
Warren
ooOOoo
Kris Hemensley
Thu, Oct 8, 2009
Dear Warren, Thank you for yours... Yes, it was a good little
discussion that day at the Shop, an impromptu seminar! And Alan [Pose]
recalling La Trobe University days & mutual tutors, colleagues,
friends in your music department... We were talking abt computer
generated language programmes, and the criticism I'd heard of John
Tranter : not that he was employing a particular programme but that he
then edited or corrected the results. My acquaintances must be closet
dadaists! I have problems with both the computer generation and the
criticism made of Tranter's correction!
Interesting what you say about Herbert Brun; firstly, because of the
tantalising adjacency of poetry & music regarding composition &
especially where any degree of abstraction is involved (& perhaps it
is always involved!); secondly, for the distinction Brun finds
between the 'wanted sound' & 'wanted events'... I'm reminded of the
Wallace Stevens I've been (mis)quoting for donkeys years; his response
to the "but what does it mean?" question : Mean? says Stevens : It
means nothing but the heavens full of colours & the constellations of
sound (or vice-versa --and that vice-versa is a funny one too! --what
status any proposition that can be so immediately reversible?)!
Creeley's quip "form is never more than an extension of content",
though liberating was always problematic. Could the Brun's proposition
be understood as politically desired & approved content guaranteeing a
work irrespective of its language --which to me is often recipe for
sentimentality or as George Oppen said about political intent,
therapy; And not what the poetry might be on about!
Best wishes, Kris
ooOOoo
Warren Burt
Hi Kris!
Forgive me for treating you like a telephone book, but do you have an email for Walter Billeter? Sorry to do that, but you're the first person who comes to mind who might. I want to tell him about the radio show about Paul Celan that just came on Radio National. He might be interested.
A very good insight about Brun's statement! I think the reply would be that if one brings about desired political conditions, and then proceeds to write sentimental theraputic work in the same old way (think of Stalin Odes as the most extreme example), then the "desired political conditions" haven't gone far enough, or one hasn't really changed oneself enough. But I think what he was talking about there was more the use of processes to generate material and then the observing of the results of those processes. That is, to make a musical analogy - if one writes a program to generate a melody, and then listens to that melody with the same criteria one would judge a, say, Bach melody by, then the criticism would be that one is not listening to the melody with an open-minded enough set of ears, so that one can discover the inner-structure of the machine produced melody, and find out what the program one wrote was really doing, on the deepest level.
This doesn't mean that one creates processes uncritically, or listens to/observes the results of the process uncritically. The famous example (at least I tell everyone about it) is the tell-all interview that John Cage gave to Stephen Montague in the late 1970s, where Cage discusses his "random" composing methods, with especial reference to his orchestra and chorus piece "Apartment House 1776." Cage recounts that the piece went through seven complete rewrites before he "got it right." Each time before that, the process was producing results that even by Cage's Buddhistic "listen to everything for it's own interest" standards, were just dead boring. It was only on the 7th attempt, that the de-composition / re-composition process (he was using American colonial tunes and hymns by the 18th century maverick composer William Billings) he was trying to make finally produced results that made Billings work come to (a contemporary) life in a way that pleased him. You've probably never written an orchestra piece, but you've written books, so you have some idea of the amount of work involved in seven complete rewrites of a major work. Astounding! This was also a period in Cage's work where he was re-examining the idea of harmony, which he'd given up on after 2 years of Arnold Schoenberg's harmony bootcamp in the 1930s (apparently Cage was brilliant at the counterpoint exercises, but they meant nothing to him emotionally - he said he had absolutely no "feeling for harmony.") At this period Cage was talking a lot with James Tenney, who was re-evaluating harmony in terms of the microtonal practices of the ancient Greeks (we were all doing that in the 70s - me too! someday someone will have to write a paper about the Ptolemaic-Archytan revival in Western classical music of the 1970s!), and the eventual results of that thinking were, among other things, Cage's last series of works from the 1980s & early 1990s "the number pieces," where his choices of pitches to randomly order in time are just exquisitely sensitive.
So back to Brun - he was concerned with an attitude to politics that wasn't just one party or another, but one which changed the individual (very much like Ghandi - "democracy is not so much about self-rule and self-transformation" or something like that). And knowing him, I know he was absolutely opposed to mind control or processes of change imposed from the top-down (or peer pressure processes imposed from both sides!).
Anyway, this could go on, but I've got to finish up a review for a Brazilian webmag, and continue celebrating my 60th birthday, young pup that I am!
Cheers,
Warren
-------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
'DEVA' DAVE ELLISON
November, 2009
Kris, I feel privileged to read Tim Sheppard's marvellous writing [see TIM SHEPPARD, blog 8/11/09]. A writer can do no more with the dark and light of words on a page, and on the screen of creation. Here is the form and the content. Everything is here. Tim's writing spans the dreaming universe. Time and space fade inside the moment of poetic clarity. In such moments, the reader can sense their true self, within and without. The true self is boundless.
--------------------------------------------------------------
TIM SHEPPARD
INTERVAL
Light penetrating
the early morning stillness
seeking its own within each new
form of life,
each giving to the other
a strength and purpose vital
to its own being -
admired for its own sake - - - - - while
colour and tone acting with incredible
playfulness
play havoc on the grass
each shaded by its own perfection of loveliness.
----------------------------------------------------------------
KENNETH TRIMBLE
BIRDLAND
There is a tree
I know, that talks to me at dusk
Yellow light falling
falling
I walk past you
and hear the ringing
of church bells.
Oh but I was mistaken
It's a symphony
playing Birdland.
ooo
WHITE MOON
White moon sits
on a black canvas night
Come home.
ooo
RED MOUNTAIN
Under the barren red mountain
I had come for Shiva's night.
A festival of fire
to the un-manifested
becoming manifested
as the sun dissolves into
You.
Ten thousand strong
with the moon
in their eyes
and fire in their hearts.
we waited for the Brahmin Priests
to light the ghee.
An ancient cry of O shiva, O shiva
as a wild woman came
with snake apparitions in here eyes
ablaze with the madness of love
to Arunachala.
ooo
THE HERMIT
Silent waters
yellow moon,
mountain mist,
and deer on the run.
Prayer mat and beer
which will I have first?
Drifting silence and wet afternoons
I think I'll read Kerouac,
perhaps St. Augustine
the black.
Lonely sun
tired days,
friends come around.
-----------------------------
[these poems are published in Clouds on Hanover Street, published by Littlefox Press, 159 Brunswick St., Fitzroy, Vic. 3056; www.littlefoxpublishing.com]
-----------------------------------------------------------
MAX RYAN
Allen Ginsberg, the real story
I slept all afternoon and when I awoke it was morning; I didn’t know where I was — I had no name for India. — Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals
Where to begin? Firstly, dear reader, in my story Allen Ginsberg is but one of many players but I did meet him (sort of) and even exchanged words with the Great Man. It was 1980 in Vienna and winter was starting to dig in its bitter heels in more ways than one. The reason I was there, and still the only one that now or then makes any sense, was the enchanting Eva. We’d met at a Buddhist retreat in the south of England, had a sweet love in the summer sun time together and then she’d gone back to Wien to finish her medical studies. When I’d rung from London she’d told me it wasn’t a good time to come, she was studying for her finals etc but still I went.
Day one: I’m in Wien, staying with E (in her spare bedroom) and we’re at her folks’ place for lunch. After the meal, E’s dad who’s a doctor and, it turns out, an ex-Nazi, gets out his scrapbook of the War. There’s a comic-book type picture of Russian soldiers being blown up by Panzer tanks. (There’s also a black and white photo of him as a cavalry officer posing next to his horse in the snow, which is somehow touching). I say something about how killing all those Russians wasn’t very good to which he retorts: You Australians, you know nossing!
Well, in this case, he was probably right. We end up in her brother’s room where he proceeds to assail us with, to my ears, some fairly disturbing music. He also whips out a joint from which Eva takes a toke and I, in true biblical style, inhale (right in) too. By now the music has grown more disturbing and I say something like, could we have some Donovan or something and he just laughs, sneers is more the word. Was E sneering too? I can’t remember but already I know this boy from Newcastle is way out of his depth. Please remember, dear reader, that until my time in the meditation centre in England, I’d been almost five years in India, meditating, living for lengthy periods in the Himalayas with a few fellow seekers amidst goats and sheep. We end up at a party across town where I feel like I’m in a scene from a Hermann Hesse novel. There’s a band playing some fairly smarmy jazz and I’m sitting on a blanket on the floor. I’m wearing, in classic nerd, a tweed jacket someone in England’s given me, corduroy (beige) trousers and a scarf of many colours about ten feet long that I found in an op-shop in Cambridge. Suddenly I hear the cry Achtung Achtung! but already my scarf, which seems to be following me around the room, has knocked over someone’s glass of wine. By then E, I can see, is starting to wonder where she could have found me.
Not long after I decide to withdraw the forces for the evening. Some of E’s friends can let me off (without her) at her place. Auf wiedersehen, I say clambering out of their car and I wave as I walk to her place and pull the heavy wooden door (Vienna’s apartments are like medieval forts) behind me. But it isn’t her place and through the fog I realise I’m locked in. Oh well go up the stairs and ask some kindly burgher to please just press the ‘open’ button. Only no one wants to know me. Nein Nein is all I get when I gently knock on each door and burble: ‘scuse me kind sir…really sorry and all but I’m locked in… from Australia you see just arrived in your fair city. Finally I press a button. Almost immediately, it seems, the ground-floor door bursts open and four young guys in navy blue uniform rush in carrying machine guns. I’m strangely unperturbed as I walk down the stairs to greet them.
Sorry man, wrong door didn’t mean to disturb anyone, just arrived, you know, errr…
They can see I’m harmless, let me out and I’m back just behind E who treats my lapse as another sign of my total imbecility.
So this is the background to my stay although by now I’m starting to get out and about including to a chanting group where I get to play harmonium and sing bhajans and a classical Indian music performance by the Dagar Brothers (one of the many versions), held in some rich guy’s chateau just out of town. He’s got a world-famous collection of erotic art in a huge private gallery which looks bizarre after hearing such sublime music. But Allen Ginsberg is coming to town, turns out he’s a follower of the Tibetan Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa. E knows some people in town who are also disciples and they’re involved in organising Ginsberg’s reading at the university.
I can’t remember there being too many at the reading (50, 60?), pretty well a standard crowd for a poetry event anywhere. Peter Orlovsky, I remember, did a lively enactment of a poem about fucking a woman outside on the grass and a marvellous one about recycling human shit to make vegetables and flowers grow (music to my ears after weeks in a very intense Wien). I can’t remember much about Ginsberg’s offering except that many of his poems were performed on a portable harmonium and accompanied by a young guy, Steven Taylor, on guitar. (I’d studied Indian music in India and learnt to play simple ragas on harmonium and when a friend sent me Ginsberg’s First Blues Rags, Ballads And Harmonium Songs, I’d started playing chords and doing some of the pieces such as Father Death Blues.) The highlight was when Ginsberg closed the evening with Blake’s The Nurse’s Song, turning the last line ‘And all the hills echoed’ (with emphasis on the final syllable) into a powerful mantra. The small lecture room almost shook as everyone joined in. It’s still one of the most powerful performances of poetry I’ve seen.
We all end up in some basement cafe downtown, a gathering of local poets and Trungpa devotees. I remember talking to Orlovsky about India and his telling me how he’d love to go back one day. Everyone is gathered round a long table. I’m sitting across from the great man but end up talking to Steven Taylor about music and Bob Dylan whom he sometimes hangs out with back home. Ginsberg is in a dark suit and tie (part of Trungpa’s teaching about the necessity of living in the world) and he’s polishing off a steak and a few beers (also, I’m told, part of the practice of engagement with worldly life) and ends up picking his teeth and holding court to a retinue of local poets, even drawing up lists of essential reading of Central European poets for them. Ginsberg doesn’t seem overly interested in me. I seem to remember saying something slightly inane earlier about how he could come back to E’s and we could play some records or something, to which he says something like it sounding like a lot of hippy shit etc, so I’ve pretty well decided to cease any further dialogue. (Why didn’t I mention I played some of his songs, had read (several times) Indian Journals, was a big fan etc? Maybe I’d fallen into the role of playing the buffoon from the bush and couldn’t stop.) A young Viennese poet whom I’d met before is telling me how I should visit Venice in winter when all the tourists are gone and there’s fog over the water and the walls are covered in moss. He also says something I’ve never forgotten and which at the time perfectly describes my sense of the city I’m marooned in: Ze valls are tsickar (thicker) here in Wien.
Dear reader (are you still there?), the one scene that stays with me now is Ginsberg having what looks like a very taut conversation with a young local poet who’s all in black and is festooned with gold chains (what you now might call bling). Suddenly Bling stands up, steps back a few paces and calls out to Ginsberg: What? You mean you don’t like me or somezing? Ginsberg, still seated and picking his teeth, looks at the guy for what seems like a minute or so then slowly answers: No, not really…pride…too much pride. Soon it’s time to go. Ginsberg wants to visit the large Breughel collection at the City Gallery in the morning and we’re invited.
Outside Bling walks along with E and me or should I say, with E, and me coming along. He’s telling her of his accomplishments and how he writes poems for all occasions and makes a good living at it. Fortunately he leaves us after a few blocks. Then it’s just E and me walking along in the almost deserted streets. We walk for miles not saying much but it’s a ritual I’ve come to enjoy with her. I decide not to join the Breughel tour in the morning. An idea starts to build in my head: I’ll get back to my friends in Rome, find a cheap ticket to Sri Lanka and take the ferry across to southern India then travel through to Varanasi. There’s a blind singer I heard singing at a house-concert down an alleyway there. I’ll find where he is and study classical vocals with him. As Eve and I cross a footbridge, I can see the Danube under the streetlight. There’s ice on its banks and it’s moving swift and strong through the night.
(2009)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
KAREL APPEL
translated by Cornelis Vleeskens
THE HUNGER WINTER
I wish I were a bird
and flew with them above the fields
where no farmers sowed
and no horses ploughed
and the people sighed in the camps
while the birds flew free
I wish I were a bird
and not the rabbit I waylaid
to ease my hunger
when the people put on their uniforms
they were no longer people
they no longer had faces
but the birds flew free
the crow and the blackbird
(but not the rabbit)
I wish I were a bird
-------
[included in NO HOLDS BARRED : Dutch Poetry in the Post War Years, published for the exhibition & catalogue, intensely dutch (Art Gallery of NSW; 5 June -23 August,2009)]
ooOOoo
FOUR POEMS
*
Now that New York
WHIRLS
finger-wagging
and tut-tutting
through a 60s-style romance
spurred by an impetuous remark
about the Parisian prettiness
of hardworking security guards
and a misfit's adventure
Who could
coax a 60 year old fountain
to SUCH
prime cuts?
*****
A cut above the visuals
the painted ladies
CHASE
their own
unconventional
fish and chip shop farce
through neutral territory
And while
well-placed brushstrokes help
barefoot thespians
ANGLE fragrance-free
forget grosting
for no other reason
than a climatic one
*****
Euphoria's bimbo talk
makes the media
saddle up her mother
for skewed angles
and HEAD SPINNING
high heels
Le puriste
attracts
new long lasting
physicality
And musical and literary figures
POST cartoon-style topless babes
in Swiss organic cheese
*****
It may look
SPIRITED
but a far-flung
tiger packing a punch
in l'espace lumierre
GOES GLOBAL
And you encouraged him
with style and humour
coming on vertically
insensitive to
the horror
and anguish
suffered
in this squatter's rest
As the economy lifts off
your RIDER has gone home
and a new language is
brewing in the auction rooms
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ANDREW BURKE
SHOPPING CENTRE GENIUS
"the nothingness of human matters" --de Man quoting Rousseau
How many suburban shopping centres
have I walked, only to see you
in the eyes of the man
who wanders rootless by himself,
torn summer t-shirt and hooded
winter jacket. He isn't you
yet I see you in his faulty step
forward, hear you in his every phrase,
a patois of too many pills
and sleepless nights. Bored,
security guards name him
The Professor, then offer him
the door, bowing, mock courteous
in their security.
They let you out yet locked you in,
didn't they. Now your day begins
in a chemical blur through
shrubbery in manicured gardens where
once you debated the de Man question.
ooo
ON CHAPMAN HILL
Let's walk to get the city out
of our bones. I'll show you red gums,
xanthorrhoea with spears, flame-tailed
black cockatoos - no strangers here
unless you hear the protea's accent
on the evening breeze.
See, kangaroos' paws break
the tractor tread marks, while
off that story corner a body rusts,
wings and bonnets, flat trays
and drive shafts, welded
wildly by the elements.
Tonight, you'll hear boobooks
stretch silence horizon to horizon
in the bright moonlight. It sends
Pancho into a barking frenzy,
shouting down the ghost in the trees -
attack his best line of defence.
Sure as day follows night, there's
growth in decay. This land, once
Noongar, is now plotted and pieced. By
the water tank, old Buddha stands silent,
eyes hooded among raindrops sparkling
on gum leaves in sudden sunlight.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Edited & typed 21 October/20 something, November, '09, come heatwave, deluge, & thunderstorm!--
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
JOHN BENNETT, San Francisco poet & musician, Beat & underground affiliated, his poems once compared to Kenneth Patchen. Recent books include Firestorm (Pudding House Press), & Cobras & Butterflies. JB is on Facebook where this poem (he calls them shards)first appeared.
GLENN COOPER, long-time correspondent of Collected Works Bookshop, lives in country NSW, & has recently published Tryin' To Get To Heaven : Poems about, to & inspired by Bob Dylan (Blind Dog Press, USA, '08).
ANDREW FRANKS, born in Sussex, commutes between the UK and Sydney. Scratched in the stars, sprawled on the sand (Soul Bay, '09) is his first collection of poems.
PETE SPENCE, poet (forty years since his debut in Makar,Queensland) & international mail-art high roller (since the '80s). See previous issues (#14, #10)
DAVE ELLISON, poet, Melbourne muso & holy-roller. See previous issues, (#10)
The late TIM SHEPPARD (1955-2009), see selection of poems on previous blog post for 8-11-09
MAX RYAN, poet & musician, lives in Byron Bay/NSW. Rainswayed Night (pub. Dangerously Poetic, Byron Bay, '05) won the Anne Elder Award (Vic) for best 1st collection.
CORNELIS VLEESKENS, born in Holland, '48, lived in Australia since '58. Edited poetry mag, Fling, with artist Jenni Mitchell way back when; Earthdance is his little press (PO Box, 465, Glen Innes, NSW, 2370). Books include The Day the River (UQP,'84), Nothing Kept (Brunswick Hill,'86), The Wider Canvas : A retrospective (Earthdance, '96). Poet, artist, translator from the Dutch.
KENNETH TRIMBLE, much travelled in Europe & Asia, including to Bede Griffiths' ashram in Shantivanam, India. Lives out of town. His first book, Clouds on Hanover Street, pub. Littlefox Press, Melbourne, '09 (contains illuminating biographical note).
WARREN BURT, born in Baltimore, '49, in Australia since 1975; lived in Melbourne until 2004, thereafter Wollongong, backwards & forwards to Europe & the USA. Prolific composer, performer, writer et al; numerous publications, recordings, concerts, events, films etc. His website (www.warrenburt.com/), "gives some idea of what I've been up to".
ANDREW BURKE, a veteran of the 60s Australian New Poetry's Perth chapter, where he edited Thrust with Ken Hudson. His books include Let's Face the Music & Dance ('75), On the Tip of My Tongue ('83), Pushing at Silence ('96), Whispering Gallery (2001), & most recently, Beyond City Limits (Edith Cowan University, '09).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
--all done, 28 November, 2009!--
K.H.
________________________________________
JOHN BENNETT
LOOKING BACK
I heard
back from
Leonard Cohen.
He wants me
to join
his tour.
Unlike the
other members of
the troupe
who wear
snappy little hats,
I'm to wear
a dunce cap.
There'll be a
gold leash
around my neck &
when Leonard
yanks it
I blurt out
a Shard.
No talk of
my playing
harmonica,
but if things
work out well
there's an
off chance
of our
cutting a
record together:
Leonard & John,
Looking Back
Thru the
Ages.
My friends
tell me
this is
the chance of
a lifetime,
but I'm a
little uneasy
about the
dunce cap &
leash.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
GLENN COOPER
BLOWING IN THE WIND
If you join the dots on
that famous polka-dot shirt,
they form a picture
of a man as lost
in the wind as all
the answers
he once
coveted.
This thought came to me just now
as I sat in the sun and watched
the wind suddenly fill
the sleeves of my old, flannel shirt,
pegged on the line, making
a man of me at last.
ooo
DYLANHAIKU
Hotel room -
guitar on the bed
woman on the floor.
*
No direction home -
then, now
and forever.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
ANDREW FRANKS
WEEP
SINCE THERE ARE no more poets
and the MUSICIANS HAVE FLED the stage
packing pens in oak trunks/TEA CHESTS
BURYING THEIR INSTRUMENTS in the snow
since all the artists have GIN BLOSSOMING
UP TO OUR NECKS in SHIT & blood
Since beauty and DESIRE STOLE OUR last can
Dle and left us in the da
rk since the gaunt got garr
otted and fled SINCE ALL TYPOGR
aphical THINGS GO AGAINST ME since all the
sun BEACHED BLEACHED WHO
RES DECIDEd to hang thems
Elves, since HIS PULSE SLOWED DO
WN and my rage filled to OVERF
lowing, since venus AND ALL HER MAT
Es stopped DRINKING IN OUR BAR the O
NLY THINg left is to
WEEP.
ooo
As I rounded the corner
I saw him
in a white Alfa Romeo
red leather seats
on Broadwick Street
gold ring, gold watch,
white shirt, blue with white polka dot tie
dark blue mohair suit
quality shades, Gerry Mulligan crew cut
black Italian loafers
In the background
John Coltrane was easing
into the midday sun
I saw the past and my future
blurring into one
ooo
On Seeing Slim Gaillard in London three days before he died
He strode through Golden Square
shrouded in a huge woolen coat, scarf, beret, beard and a scowl.
I walked by him and as I did so
He turned his weary old head and looked me in the eye.
"Oroonie"
and then he was gone.
Over and Vout!
------
[these poems from SCRATCHED IN THE STARS, SPRAWLED IN THE SAND
(pub. Soul Bay Press (Sussex,UK, '09); see www.soulbaypress.com]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
An Orchestra's Day Off!
string section
the thoughtless strings resonate
down an endless hallway
looking for a score!
horn section
the horns eat abalone alone
in a brightly lit restaurant!
the percussion section
are rapping on an avenue of doors
where no one is pretending
to be at home!
if the wind section
comes in from that quarter
for 3 days it'll rain!
conductor
when struck by lightning
the orchestra members
showed no spark of enthusiasm
for the gesture
being well acquainted
with the piece at hand!
the parts
are blowing in the wind!
ooo
Birthday
1.
its your birthday
but you won't hear
Siegfried Idyll live
from the bathroom!!
what will
the dogs
and parrots do
now that
Wagner's out??
though vegetarianism
is not so passe
non-violence
as an industry
is total drama!!
here's hoping
for an opera
with acne!
maybe we
can count
all the spots
before Lunch!!
2.
apart from Hasse's
La Serva Scaltra
the whole year
can be spielfrei!!
who needs
a ringside seat
in Beyrouth?
i'd rather
be a trainspotter
in Birdland
(is that "peace
from delusion")
than a member
of the Cameroon
Wagner Society
taking a nap
in the garden
at Wahnfried!!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
WARREN BURT / KRIS HEMENSLEY
Warren Burt
Wed, Oct 7, 2009
Hi Kris!
Continuing our discussion of months ago, when I was in the shop, you asked about why people (these days) would use non-personal processes (for lack of a better term, and I'm sure there are lots of them) to make work. I found this quote from Herbert Brun the other day. Brun (1918-2000) was a composer, writer, computer pioneer, and political activist. Born in Germany, and riding out WWII in Palestine, he taught from 1963 at the University of Illinois, and a list of his students is a who's who of composers, writer, cyberneticians, and activists. In fact, for the past few years, students of his have been the controlling faction on the Urbana, Illinois, city council, making that city a model of Green politics in the USA. He was one for the bottom-up approach in pretty much all things, and whereas I was saying that one might use "non-personal processes" (how to encapsulate a world of extremely different ideas and techniques in a sound byte???) as a medium of discovery, Brun expresses it much more politically:
"It is one thing to search for events that will produce the sound one wants, and quite another to discover the sound of the events one wants. In the first case the wanted sound renders desirable the necessary events; in the second the wanted events are the standard for the desirability of the resulting sound. These are not only two different approaches to the composition of music, but also two different political attitudes."
Substitute words for sound, poetry for music, or whatever medium one is dealing with, and the quote may be more or less applicable.....
Brun, by the way, was one of the idols of Mr. Mann - whenever Chris was in the US, he would make a beeline for Urbana to have a cup of tea and "good old Berlin Jews arguing" with Herbert.
I liked seeing your early 70s poem-portraits on the CW web-thing the other day, by the way. It occurs to me that whatever styles we work in, even when we know each other, the work itself remains often inaccessible. Which reminds me - I promised myself that October would be the month I got my website and source of materials up and running, and here we are 7 days into it, and I haven't even started yet!
Hope you're well, and cheers,
Warren
ooOOoo
Kris Hemensley
Thu, Oct 8, 2009
Dear Warren, Thank you for yours... Yes, it was a good little
discussion that day at the Shop, an impromptu seminar! And Alan [Pose]
recalling La Trobe University days & mutual tutors, colleagues,
friends in your music department... We were talking abt computer
generated language programmes, and the criticism I'd heard of John
Tranter : not that he was employing a particular programme but that he
then edited or corrected the results. My acquaintances must be closet
dadaists! I have problems with both the computer generation and the
criticism made of Tranter's correction!
Interesting what you say about Herbert Brun; firstly, because of the
tantalising adjacency of poetry & music regarding composition &
especially where any degree of abstraction is involved (& perhaps it
is always involved!); secondly, for the distinction Brun finds
between the 'wanted sound' & 'wanted events'... I'm reminded of the
Wallace Stevens I've been (mis)quoting for donkeys years; his response
to the "but what does it mean?" question : Mean? says Stevens : It
means nothing but the heavens full of colours & the constellations of
sound (or vice-versa --and that vice-versa is a funny one too! --what
status any proposition that can be so immediately reversible?)!
Creeley's quip "form is never more than an extension of content",
though liberating was always problematic. Could the Brun's proposition
be understood as politically desired & approved content guaranteeing a
work irrespective of its language --which to me is often recipe for
sentimentality or as George Oppen said about political intent,
therapy; And not what the poetry might be on about!
Best wishes, Kris
ooOOoo
Warren Burt
Hi Kris!
Forgive me for treating you like a telephone book, but do you have an email for Walter Billeter? Sorry to do that, but you're the first person who comes to mind who might. I want to tell him about the radio show about Paul Celan that just came on Radio National. He might be interested.
A very good insight about Brun's statement! I think the reply would be that if one brings about desired political conditions, and then proceeds to write sentimental theraputic work in the same old way (think of Stalin Odes as the most extreme example), then the "desired political conditions" haven't gone far enough, or one hasn't really changed oneself enough. But I think what he was talking about there was more the use of processes to generate material and then the observing of the results of those processes. That is, to make a musical analogy - if one writes a program to generate a melody, and then listens to that melody with the same criteria one would judge a, say, Bach melody by, then the criticism would be that one is not listening to the melody with an open-minded enough set of ears, so that one can discover the inner-structure of the machine produced melody, and find out what the program one wrote was really doing, on the deepest level.
This doesn't mean that one creates processes uncritically, or listens to/observes the results of the process uncritically. The famous example (at least I tell everyone about it) is the tell-all interview that John Cage gave to Stephen Montague in the late 1970s, where Cage discusses his "random" composing methods, with especial reference to his orchestra and chorus piece "Apartment House 1776." Cage recounts that the piece went through seven complete rewrites before he "got it right." Each time before that, the process was producing results that even by Cage's Buddhistic "listen to everything for it's own interest" standards, were just dead boring. It was only on the 7th attempt, that the de-composition / re-composition process (he was using American colonial tunes and hymns by the 18th century maverick composer William Billings) he was trying to make finally produced results that made Billings work come to (a contemporary) life in a way that pleased him. You've probably never written an orchestra piece, but you've written books, so you have some idea of the amount of work involved in seven complete rewrites of a major work. Astounding! This was also a period in Cage's work where he was re-examining the idea of harmony, which he'd given up on after 2 years of Arnold Schoenberg's harmony bootcamp in the 1930s (apparently Cage was brilliant at the counterpoint exercises, but they meant nothing to him emotionally - he said he had absolutely no "feeling for harmony.") At this period Cage was talking a lot with James Tenney, who was re-evaluating harmony in terms of the microtonal practices of the ancient Greeks (we were all doing that in the 70s - me too! someday someone will have to write a paper about the Ptolemaic-Archytan revival in Western classical music of the 1970s!), and the eventual results of that thinking were, among other things, Cage's last series of works from the 1980s & early 1990s "the number pieces," where his choices of pitches to randomly order in time are just exquisitely sensitive.
So back to Brun - he was concerned with an attitude to politics that wasn't just one party or another, but one which changed the individual (very much like Ghandi - "democracy is not so much about self-rule and self-transformation" or something like that). And knowing him, I know he was absolutely opposed to mind control or processes of change imposed from the top-down (or peer pressure processes imposed from both sides!).
Anyway, this could go on, but I've got to finish up a review for a Brazilian webmag, and continue celebrating my 60th birthday, young pup that I am!
Cheers,
Warren
-------------------------------------------------------------------
CORRESPONDENCE
'DEVA' DAVE ELLISON
November, 2009
Kris, I feel privileged to read Tim Sheppard's marvellous writing [see TIM SHEPPARD, blog 8/11/09]. A writer can do no more with the dark and light of words on a page, and on the screen of creation. Here is the form and the content. Everything is here. Tim's writing spans the dreaming universe. Time and space fade inside the moment of poetic clarity. In such moments, the reader can sense their true self, within and without. The true self is boundless.
--------------------------------------------------------------
TIM SHEPPARD
INTERVAL
Light penetrating
the early morning stillness
seeking its own within each new
form of life,
each giving to the other
a strength and purpose vital
to its own being -
admired for its own sake - - - - - while
colour and tone acting with incredible
playfulness
play havoc on the grass
each shaded by its own perfection of loveliness.
----------------------------------------------------------------
KENNETH TRIMBLE
BIRDLAND
There is a tree
I know, that talks to me at dusk
Yellow light falling
falling
I walk past you
and hear the ringing
of church bells.
Oh but I was mistaken
It's a symphony
playing Birdland.
ooo
WHITE MOON
White moon sits
on a black canvas night
Come home.
ooo
RED MOUNTAIN
Under the barren red mountain
I had come for Shiva's night.
A festival of fire
to the un-manifested
becoming manifested
as the sun dissolves into
You.
Ten thousand strong
with the moon
in their eyes
and fire in their hearts.
we waited for the Brahmin Priests
to light the ghee.
An ancient cry of O shiva, O shiva
as a wild woman came
with snake apparitions in here eyes
ablaze with the madness of love
to Arunachala.
ooo
THE HERMIT
Silent waters
yellow moon,
mountain mist,
and deer on the run.
Prayer mat and beer
which will I have first?
Drifting silence and wet afternoons
I think I'll read Kerouac,
perhaps St. Augustine
the black.
Lonely sun
tired days,
friends come around.
-----------------------------
[these poems are published in Clouds on Hanover Street, published by Littlefox Press, 159 Brunswick St., Fitzroy, Vic. 3056; www.littlefoxpublishing.com]
-----------------------------------------------------------
MAX RYAN
Allen Ginsberg, the real story
I slept all afternoon and when I awoke it was morning; I didn’t know where I was — I had no name for India. — Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals
Where to begin? Firstly, dear reader, in my story Allen Ginsberg is but one of many players but I did meet him (sort of) and even exchanged words with the Great Man. It was 1980 in Vienna and winter was starting to dig in its bitter heels in more ways than one. The reason I was there, and still the only one that now or then makes any sense, was the enchanting Eva. We’d met at a Buddhist retreat in the south of England, had a sweet love in the summer sun time together and then she’d gone back to Wien to finish her medical studies. When I’d rung from London she’d told me it wasn’t a good time to come, she was studying for her finals etc but still I went.
Day one: I’m in Wien, staying with E (in her spare bedroom) and we’re at her folks’ place for lunch. After the meal, E’s dad who’s a doctor and, it turns out, an ex-Nazi, gets out his scrapbook of the War. There’s a comic-book type picture of Russian soldiers being blown up by Panzer tanks. (There’s also a black and white photo of him as a cavalry officer posing next to his horse in the snow, which is somehow touching). I say something about how killing all those Russians wasn’t very good to which he retorts: You Australians, you know nossing!
Well, in this case, he was probably right. We end up in her brother’s room where he proceeds to assail us with, to my ears, some fairly disturbing music. He also whips out a joint from which Eva takes a toke and I, in true biblical style, inhale (right in) too. By now the music has grown more disturbing and I say something like, could we have some Donovan or something and he just laughs, sneers is more the word. Was E sneering too? I can’t remember but already I know this boy from Newcastle is way out of his depth. Please remember, dear reader, that until my time in the meditation centre in England, I’d been almost five years in India, meditating, living for lengthy periods in the Himalayas with a few fellow seekers amidst goats and sheep. We end up at a party across town where I feel like I’m in a scene from a Hermann Hesse novel. There’s a band playing some fairly smarmy jazz and I’m sitting on a blanket on the floor. I’m wearing, in classic nerd, a tweed jacket someone in England’s given me, corduroy (beige) trousers and a scarf of many colours about ten feet long that I found in an op-shop in Cambridge. Suddenly I hear the cry Achtung Achtung! but already my scarf, which seems to be following me around the room, has knocked over someone’s glass of wine. By then E, I can see, is starting to wonder where she could have found me.
Not long after I decide to withdraw the forces for the evening. Some of E’s friends can let me off (without her) at her place. Auf wiedersehen, I say clambering out of their car and I wave as I walk to her place and pull the heavy wooden door (Vienna’s apartments are like medieval forts) behind me. But it isn’t her place and through the fog I realise I’m locked in. Oh well go up the stairs and ask some kindly burgher to please just press the ‘open’ button. Only no one wants to know me. Nein Nein is all I get when I gently knock on each door and burble: ‘scuse me kind sir…really sorry and all but I’m locked in… from Australia you see just arrived in your fair city. Finally I press a button. Almost immediately, it seems, the ground-floor door bursts open and four young guys in navy blue uniform rush in carrying machine guns. I’m strangely unperturbed as I walk down the stairs to greet them.
Sorry man, wrong door didn’t mean to disturb anyone, just arrived, you know, errr…
They can see I’m harmless, let me out and I’m back just behind E who treats my lapse as another sign of my total imbecility.
So this is the background to my stay although by now I’m starting to get out and about including to a chanting group where I get to play harmonium and sing bhajans and a classical Indian music performance by the Dagar Brothers (one of the many versions), held in some rich guy’s chateau just out of town. He’s got a world-famous collection of erotic art in a huge private gallery which looks bizarre after hearing such sublime music. But Allen Ginsberg is coming to town, turns out he’s a follower of the Tibetan Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa. E knows some people in town who are also disciples and they’re involved in organising Ginsberg’s reading at the university.
I can’t remember there being too many at the reading (50, 60?), pretty well a standard crowd for a poetry event anywhere. Peter Orlovsky, I remember, did a lively enactment of a poem about fucking a woman outside on the grass and a marvellous one about recycling human shit to make vegetables and flowers grow (music to my ears after weeks in a very intense Wien). I can’t remember much about Ginsberg’s offering except that many of his poems were performed on a portable harmonium and accompanied by a young guy, Steven Taylor, on guitar. (I’d studied Indian music in India and learnt to play simple ragas on harmonium and when a friend sent me Ginsberg’s First Blues Rags, Ballads And Harmonium Songs, I’d started playing chords and doing some of the pieces such as Father Death Blues.) The highlight was when Ginsberg closed the evening with Blake’s The Nurse’s Song, turning the last line ‘And all the hills echoed’ (with emphasis on the final syllable) into a powerful mantra. The small lecture room almost shook as everyone joined in. It’s still one of the most powerful performances of poetry I’ve seen.
We all end up in some basement cafe downtown, a gathering of local poets and Trungpa devotees. I remember talking to Orlovsky about India and his telling me how he’d love to go back one day. Everyone is gathered round a long table. I’m sitting across from the great man but end up talking to Steven Taylor about music and Bob Dylan whom he sometimes hangs out with back home. Ginsberg is in a dark suit and tie (part of Trungpa’s teaching about the necessity of living in the world) and he’s polishing off a steak and a few beers (also, I’m told, part of the practice of engagement with worldly life) and ends up picking his teeth and holding court to a retinue of local poets, even drawing up lists of essential reading of Central European poets for them. Ginsberg doesn’t seem overly interested in me. I seem to remember saying something slightly inane earlier about how he could come back to E’s and we could play some records or something, to which he says something like it sounding like a lot of hippy shit etc, so I’ve pretty well decided to cease any further dialogue. (Why didn’t I mention I played some of his songs, had read (several times) Indian Journals, was a big fan etc? Maybe I’d fallen into the role of playing the buffoon from the bush and couldn’t stop.) A young Viennese poet whom I’d met before is telling me how I should visit Venice in winter when all the tourists are gone and there’s fog over the water and the walls are covered in moss. He also says something I’ve never forgotten and which at the time perfectly describes my sense of the city I’m marooned in: Ze valls are tsickar (thicker) here in Wien.
Dear reader (are you still there?), the one scene that stays with me now is Ginsberg having what looks like a very taut conversation with a young local poet who’s all in black and is festooned with gold chains (what you now might call bling). Suddenly Bling stands up, steps back a few paces and calls out to Ginsberg: What? You mean you don’t like me or somezing? Ginsberg, still seated and picking his teeth, looks at the guy for what seems like a minute or so then slowly answers: No, not really…pride…too much pride. Soon it’s time to go. Ginsberg wants to visit the large Breughel collection at the City Gallery in the morning and we’re invited.
Outside Bling walks along with E and me or should I say, with E, and me coming along. He’s telling her of his accomplishments and how he writes poems for all occasions and makes a good living at it. Fortunately he leaves us after a few blocks. Then it’s just E and me walking along in the almost deserted streets. We walk for miles not saying much but it’s a ritual I’ve come to enjoy with her. I decide not to join the Breughel tour in the morning. An idea starts to build in my head: I’ll get back to my friends in Rome, find a cheap ticket to Sri Lanka and take the ferry across to southern India then travel through to Varanasi. There’s a blind singer I heard singing at a house-concert down an alleyway there. I’ll find where he is and study classical vocals with him. As Eve and I cross a footbridge, I can see the Danube under the streetlight. There’s ice on its banks and it’s moving swift and strong through the night.
(2009)
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CORNELIS VLEESKENS
KAREL APPEL
translated by Cornelis Vleeskens
THE HUNGER WINTER
I wish I were a bird
and flew with them above the fields
where no farmers sowed
and no horses ploughed
and the people sighed in the camps
while the birds flew free
I wish I were a bird
and not the rabbit I waylaid
to ease my hunger
when the people put on their uniforms
they were no longer people
they no longer had faces
but the birds flew free
the crow and the blackbird
(but not the rabbit)
I wish I were a bird
-------
[included in NO HOLDS BARRED : Dutch Poetry in the Post War Years, published for the exhibition & catalogue, intensely dutch (Art Gallery of NSW; 5 June -23 August,2009)]
ooOOoo
FOUR POEMS
*
Now that New York
WHIRLS
finger-wagging
and tut-tutting
through a 60s-style romance
spurred by an impetuous remark
about the Parisian prettiness
of hardworking security guards
and a misfit's adventure
Who could
coax a 60 year old fountain
to SUCH
prime cuts?
*****
A cut above the visuals
the painted ladies
CHASE
their own
unconventional
fish and chip shop farce
through neutral territory
And while
well-placed brushstrokes help
barefoot thespians
ANGLE fragrance-free
forget grosting
for no other reason
than a climatic one
*****
Euphoria's bimbo talk
makes the media
saddle up her mother
for skewed angles
and HEAD SPINNING
high heels
Le puriste
attracts
new long lasting
physicality
And musical and literary figures
POST cartoon-style topless babes
in Swiss organic cheese
*****
It may look
SPIRITED
but a far-flung
tiger packing a punch
in l'espace lumierre
GOES GLOBAL
And you encouraged him
with style and humour
coming on vertically
insensitive to
the horror
and anguish
suffered
in this squatter's rest
As the economy lifts off
your RIDER has gone home
and a new language is
brewing in the auction rooms
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ANDREW BURKE
SHOPPING CENTRE GENIUS
"the nothingness of human matters" --de Man quoting Rousseau
How many suburban shopping centres
have I walked, only to see you
in the eyes of the man
who wanders rootless by himself,
torn summer t-shirt and hooded
winter jacket. He isn't you
yet I see you in his faulty step
forward, hear you in his every phrase,
a patois of too many pills
and sleepless nights. Bored,
security guards name him
The Professor, then offer him
the door, bowing, mock courteous
in their security.
They let you out yet locked you in,
didn't they. Now your day begins
in a chemical blur through
shrubbery in manicured gardens where
once you debated the de Man question.
ooo
ON CHAPMAN HILL
Let's walk to get the city out
of our bones. I'll show you red gums,
xanthorrhoea with spears, flame-tailed
black cockatoos - no strangers here
unless you hear the protea's accent
on the evening breeze.
See, kangaroos' paws break
the tractor tread marks, while
off that story corner a body rusts,
wings and bonnets, flat trays
and drive shafts, welded
wildly by the elements.
Tonight, you'll hear boobooks
stretch silence horizon to horizon
in the bright moonlight. It sends
Pancho into a barking frenzy,
shouting down the ghost in the trees -
attack his best line of defence.
Sure as day follows night, there's
growth in decay. This land, once
Noongar, is now plotted and pieced. By
the water tank, old Buddha stands silent,
eyes hooded among raindrops sparkling
on gum leaves in sudden sunlight.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Edited & typed 21 October/20 something, November, '09, come heatwave, deluge, & thunderstorm!--
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
JOHN BENNETT, San Francisco poet & musician, Beat & underground affiliated, his poems once compared to Kenneth Patchen. Recent books include Firestorm (Pudding House Press), & Cobras & Butterflies. JB is on Facebook where this poem (he calls them shards)first appeared.
GLENN COOPER, long-time correspondent of Collected Works Bookshop, lives in country NSW, & has recently published Tryin' To Get To Heaven : Poems about, to & inspired by Bob Dylan (Blind Dog Press, USA, '08).
ANDREW FRANKS, born in Sussex, commutes between the UK and Sydney. Scratched in the stars, sprawled on the sand (Soul Bay, '09) is his first collection of poems.
PETE SPENCE, poet (forty years since his debut in Makar,Queensland) & international mail-art high roller (since the '80s). See previous issues (#14, #10)
DAVE ELLISON, poet, Melbourne muso & holy-roller. See previous issues, (#10)
The late TIM SHEPPARD (1955-2009), see selection of poems on previous blog post for 8-11-09
MAX RYAN, poet & musician, lives in Byron Bay/NSW. Rainswayed Night (pub. Dangerously Poetic, Byron Bay, '05) won the Anne Elder Award (Vic) for best 1st collection.
CORNELIS VLEESKENS, born in Holland, '48, lived in Australia since '58. Edited poetry mag, Fling, with artist Jenni Mitchell way back when; Earthdance is his little press (PO Box, 465, Glen Innes, NSW, 2370). Books include The Day the River (UQP,'84), Nothing Kept (Brunswick Hill,'86), The Wider Canvas : A retrospective (Earthdance, '96). Poet, artist, translator from the Dutch.
KENNETH TRIMBLE, much travelled in Europe & Asia, including to Bede Griffiths' ashram in Shantivanam, India. Lives out of town. His first book, Clouds on Hanover Street, pub. Littlefox Press, Melbourne, '09 (contains illuminating biographical note).
WARREN BURT, born in Baltimore, '49, in Australia since 1975; lived in Melbourne until 2004, thereafter Wollongong, backwards & forwards to Europe & the USA. Prolific composer, performer, writer et al; numerous publications, recordings, concerts, events, films etc. His website (www.warrenburt.com/), "gives some idea of what I've been up to".
ANDREW BURKE, a veteran of the 60s Australian New Poetry's Perth chapter, where he edited Thrust with Ken Hudson. His books include Let's Face the Music & Dance ('75), On the Tip of My Tongue ('83), Pushing at Silence ('96), Whispering Gallery (2001), & most recently, Beyond City Limits (Edith Cowan University, '09).
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--all done, 28 November, 2009!--
K.H.
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