(continued from BTDNSTN, #1)
[RUSKIN SPEAR, Mervyn Levy; Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986]
The pictures are a right & proper distraction from the text... Hard to resist the temptations of the drawing of his old man; the oil of Muriel Belcher (--I assume is the subject of A Night Out for Muriel, tho maybe not at all); the somehow obscene & fantastic Strawberry Mousse; the Barnett Newman satire ("Vermillion is a very expensive colour --the painting is seven feet high and four feet wide --and if it had not been for a friend who provided me with some large cans of Painters & Decorators red, the picture would have cost me a fortune! Curiously, poor old Newman died soon after I completed the painting, and I was warmly complimented by one or two protagonists of the great man [whose work Spear considered ludicrous] for my alacrity in producing such a speedy tribute!"); the curiously two-dimensioned & imposing Carel Weight (classically precise head & shoulders against the cartoony fluidity of a peopled park, which may of course be one of his sitter's own paintings); and so many more.
Levy's opening remark that "English painters have a distinct flair for descriptive art (...) ranging from the satire and humour of Hogarth and Gillray to the frankly eccentric vision of LS Lowry", situates Spear appropriately. The Seventeenth-Century Dutch as well as Sickert & the Camden Town Group, expands the reference.
Levy/Spear resumes a discussion which has always interested me, about the verity of a work whether realism or satire, portrait or cartoon. One's talking about a represented object, that is an object vis a vis both subject & manner of representation. Mulling this over here, images of Anthony Green's family chronicle occur to me. My main reference, in the absence of having seen much of his work in galleries, is (good & obvious pun) a green part of the world (Thames & Hudson, 1984), an illustrated memoir by this, supposedly, very private person. In my mind is not one of the mister & missus cameos, in flagrante, love-making around their well appointed house, with supporting cast of family members occasionally in the wings, but Pictures of Our Garden (1979), Lucy's Artichoke Patch (1978), & The Enchanted Garden : Twentieth Wedding Anniversary (1981)... In my mind, over the years, they've collapsed into a kaleidoscope, and so prosperous is it that I think it supports every aspect of the nostalgia securing for me an English village- or suburban-childhood, all of it devolved upon the bonfire & its plume & drift of smoke, the borders of lavender, rows of lettuces, cabbages, small sheds, beens on their poles, the swing, the lawn, paving, shrubs, flowers.. It is literally! symbolically! the truth! It's a quality of truth I invest in the painting(s), and correspondence with the painting dynamises that truth!
To return to Ruskin Spear, for example his picture of Betjeman. If it's satire then it's of an entirely different order to his Barnett Newman where that painting is nothing more than cheeky conjunction of artist & signature style. The Betjeman, though, tells a story which may or may not have occurred (the poet rowing a boat on the river) but casts a cultural clothing about the historical person that's composed of the very Englishness the man would have identified & celebrated, that has become synonymous over the decades with his name. It's also a pun : Betjeman, as ever, rowing his own boat...
Levy describes Ruskin Spear as "one of England's most influential teachers. At the RCA, between 1947 & '75, his colleagues included Carel Weight, Rodrigo Moynihan, Robert Buhler, Johnny Minton, Leonard Rosoman. regarding his association there with Weight, Levy writes, "These two remarkable men --both highly distinctive artists -- fostered the generation of Peter Blake, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Ron Kitaj and Allen Jones (...) It is unlikely that the system of art teaching which operated in Britain before the 1960s could have actively participated in the fostering of such rare talents." And regarding the freeing up of the system, under the RCA's principal, Robert Darwin, Levy notes, "Ruskin Spear was perfectly in accord with the mood of the early Sixties : partly iconoclastic, partly seeking the security of new directions." Of course, the emancipating tutors had come up through the old school now criticised as mechanistic, and perhaps that's the paradoxical lesson; no liberation without tradition. Except that Spear appears dramatically arse-about as quoted by Levy (p106), "Since [the students] usually arrived at the College well satisfied with their ability to produce proficient drawings of the figure,I argued that painting should come first and that one should learn to draw by exploring and resolving some of the problems of painting. After all, painting is drawing, if not in the linear sense..."
To me, Ruskin Spear's strength & charm lies in his adoption of the local, whether following Sickert's Camden with his own Hammersmith or making art of the nominally accessible &/or popular subject. Mervyn Levy could have sub-titled his monograph, From Sickert to Pop-Art. The Sixties' egalitarianism didnt cancel the erstwhile elite patronage (Sutherland's upper-crust commissions for example) but the celebrities of several social domains were now simultaneously acceptable. Almost beside the point from the Australian viewpoint but significant in Britain still. Spear's portraits --for example, Harold Wilson the pipe-smoking PM, George Brown & Barbara Castle from his cabinet, Sid James on the telly (on top of everyone's cabinet), Fred Trueman, sartorially challenged, on the cricket field --and his r&r snaps make him the perfect generational bridge & chronicler of the time.
Needless to say, a valuable addition to this sentimental reader's modern British art shelf.
--July/August, 14,'08
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
JOHN KINSELLA & JUDITH BISHOP : GLITTERING PRIZES!
2007 National Literary Awards, conducted by the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Victoria), announced March, 2008
Congratulations, of course, to every prize winner, including Marjorie Ward (for the John Shaw Neilson, sponsored by Collected Works Bookshop), but pride of place, here, to Judith Bishop (for the Anne Elder [first book award], sponsored by the Anne Elder Trust ), & John Kinsella (for the Christopher Brennan, honouring "work of sustained quality & distinction", sponsored by Sally Dugan). The awards were announced in Melbourne in March, 2008.
The FAW's arms-length policy ensures secrecy of the winning work in respect of the various award sponsors, thus the winners of the John Shaw Neilson were unknown to me until I saw the Results programme well after the event. I havent read the poems either, but at least recognized Anne Gleeson's & Leah Kaminsky's names in the commendeds. Marjorie Ward wrote to say she used to frequent the Shop years ago, during what must have been our Flinders Lane era (1987-99). Our judge, Garth Madsen, noted it had taken him several readings of her poem, The Last Picnic, "to trace how the poet traveled from one [gentility] to the other [brutality] through a succession of perspectives on death - the cosmic, the divine, the economic and the ecological..."
Judges Connie Barber & Phil Ilton noted the high quality of writing in this year's Anne Elder. The winner, Judith Bishop (Event, published by Salt , UK) and the two commendeds I'm most familiar with, Elizabeth Campbell (Letters to the Tremulous Hand, pub. John Leonard Press) & Petra White (The Incoming Tide, also John Leonard Press) --the other collections mentioned were Sarah French's (Songs Orphans Sing, Five Islands Press, & Hal Judge's Someone Forgot To Tell the Fish (Interactive Publications)-- certainly resonate with that description. Strikes me that it'll be seen as a rather special year in retrospect,at least in Melbourne circles, with Bishop pipping Campbell & White, three exponents of a fastidiously constructed & polished lyricism current now in new Australian poetry (Lucy Holt undoubtedly another). Although there's just a smidgin of the a la mode to Judith Bishop's collection --the concrete proposition leading into the tantalisingly oblique elaboration-- it cannot, at this stage be read as anything but her own conceptually & verbally exciting way, an original poet's signature. Event is a great choice! For the others, specifically Campbell & White, disappointment must have been tempered by appreciation of commensurate brilliance.
Event opens with After the Elements, a valedictory for Gustaf Sobin (d 2005), which immediately signals the particular American orientation of a new Australian poet --a new Australian poetics one might also say, confirming the whole world which nowadays constitutes a locale : the several-ways' traffic of poets, Australia, Europe, the States, via research, travel, internet. Judith Bishop has Jordie Albiston's gift for redeeming contemporaneity for something as antique as incantation or spell. "You and I, we are too far / from fire now: the chimney-pots / have driven out their smoke, / and stood alert for its return" the poem begins, cueing the reader for the alchemical order, fire, water, earth, air, whose predictability affords renewed pleasure in the old wonder. A marvellous construction, sensuous in its metaphysics. This applies to much of the rest of the book.
The Dona Marina first-person character poems (she was the indispensable translator, interpreter & mistress of Cortez we're told) beg performance. Of course, poetry always is theatre for the inner ear but in a formal sense the sequence is drama, a choral work. In my opinion they're taxed as poems when spliced into the collection. The best of Event are stand-alone poems where Bishop's almost Hopkins'-like anthropomorphism facilitates highly lyrical investigations of being & perception, of human being via nature. I couldnt help reading the poems against a memory of Hopkins in general, D H Lawrence (following her apt quotation, "Not I, but the wind that blows through me! " --which has spoken for my life & writing too as it happens), and serendipitously, Edwin Muir's The Animals.
Muir's poem turns upon a definition of world as the humanly known & therefore named, and consequential upon the conditioning of time & space. Animals or the non-human are otherwise : "From birth to death hurled / no word do they have, not one / were never in any place." They are beyond language's salvation, then, and cannot be "Snatched from deceiving death / by the articulate breath." But Muir's conventional dualism was already overridden by Lawrence's time, and Bishop's co-originary impulse, probably found in pantheism, noted by Peter Porter in his blurb, as in today's Buddhistic ecologism & Bachelardian phenomenology, applies the coup de grace. Her rejoinder to Muir might be this immaculate passage : "The heart, arrested muscle, is the end and in each. Birds / articulate death better, // worlded by their wings and song. They never see death coming : / it observes from their eyes // as they knit, faultlessly, the cumulus to mud."
Her question from von Herder --"Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling...are aligned in their entire performance for a giving out toward other creatures." --perfectly describes the empathy compelling anthropomorphism to the extent that reading Bishop the language coined seems to be that in which all nature is found!
The many superb poems in Event confirm the honour of her Anne Elder. Three cheers!
*
I wonder if the definition of the Christopher Brennan needs to be tweaked? Some of us have always taken it to be a lifetime achievement award. Perhaps "writing of sustained quality & distinction" opens too much of a door to the shorter-term success (how define 'sustained'?) --whatever, John Kinsella has been an enlivener of debate in Australia, Britain & the USA; a proselytiser for Australian poetry in amongst contemporary poetry & poetics around the world, never more so than as the publisher of Salt Books (Cambridge,UK); and a prolific poet in his own right across a range of styles whose subject is almost always post-Edenic calamity.
Reviewing his latest collection, Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (FACP, '08), in Australian Book Review (number 302, June, 2008), Nicholas Birns spurns the shenanigans recently embroiling Kinsella --it's the poetry he wants not the celebrity & notoriety, though JK might not himself so clearly distinguish one persona from another given his volition as a militant for causes (--as he also says of biography in Fast, Loose Beginnings, "I am not really interested in biography, but in the residual nature of friendship and even indifference." --by which he might mean he's interested in dynamics, interactions, contexts of engagement rather than relationship as certain or settled, thus drama & not history, episodes not epics, reports & reportage not judgments & the sagely).
Whereas the brilliant raves in Shades (the long breath single sentence poems of Textures of the Wheatbelt, Sounds of the Wheatbelt, & Smells of the Wheatbelt, for example, ironically recalling for me some of the memorable, & formally composed poems in The Silo from ten or so years ago) amply demonstrate Kinsella's poetic gift for me rather than his rangier pastoral/anti-pastoral sorties, Birns is convinced of the latter's verity.Though he has his finger right where mine is regarding "sketchiness", his has the positive conclusion.
I'll quote the final paragraph of the ABR review : "In the soaring 'Lover's Leap', Kinsella quotes [Edmund] Burke as finding, in unfinished sketches, 'something which pleased me beyond the best finishing'. Kinsella's poems are not incomplete because of their sketchiness but because of their plurality, yet they also shimmer with unfinished potential. They demonstrate how poetry can parade a lack of plenitude, how privation can nonetheless 'fixate' transcendence." Marvelous ideas! I'd love to say I was similarly moved but that wasnt my first impression; however, Birns does cause me to think long & hard about the form & nature of poetry (he describes the hinge, really, of a discussion about contemporary 'open' & 'closed' poetries) and has cued me to return to JK's latest excursus.
Birns' favourable review & David Caddy's posting on Kinsella in his encyclopaedic British poetry blog (davidcaddy.blogspot.com), which includes a potted history of the pastoral from Virgilian antiquity to the postmodernist reformulation, retrieve JK from scuttlebutt for serious consideration.
The revelations & confessions, particularly concerning Bob Adamson & Anthony Lawrence, in Kinsella's Fast, Loose Beginnings : A Memoir of Intoxications (Melbourne University Press, 2006) are hardly great scandals --diverting, amusing yet neither here nor there in this big, bad & wonderful world! But one passage stuck in my head. Almost in passing (pp. 70-71) JK observed, "Anthony [Lawrence] loves the sound of words and is really a shamanic bard. In his work, Dylan Thomas, G M Hopkins, and other musical poets, blur with contemporary songsters like Leonard Cohen (a romantic seduction device), Billy Bragg (an absorbable social commentary), and Van Morrison ... There's an obviousness, a romanticism, in all this, but the 'warp' in Anthony makes him unique and possibly a great poet." He refers then to Lawrence's disregard for Language Poetry & his depoliticised relation to language : "Even when he 'says' something political, the language seems separated off from a consciousness of its potential cause and effect. On the surface, he is entirely composed of stock epithets (like, 'at the height of his powers'), but underneath he is full of fear and predation -- the combination drives a socio-pathology in his poetry that makes it get under the skin." The passage hooked me even as it begged important questions.
I wondered if JK's somewhat parodic description of Lawrence mightnt describe a line in the sand concerning contemporary poetics. I sensed something there of Justin Clemens' pejorative use of 'romanticism' in support of Michael Farrell & a self-consciously new writing, against all the rest, in his a raider's guide launching speech a couple of months ago. I really should have read JK's text closer & earlier than I had and maybe heard then JC echoing JK that night! Not that JC has necessarily read Fast, Loose Beginnings, but perhaps there's a Kinsellian position more or less predicated upon Language School which Clemens & others share? And yes I know, it's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the political versus the literary --and eek! wasnt that a disposition circa late Sixties, early Seventies I'd also picked up?! --the radical disavowal of Art & Literature in favour of various species of The Real? --only resumed when the 'political', including the repositionings of the 'avant-garde', predominately presented itself as the figure of estrangement, out of sorts with most of the forms of the world, thus reducing the ambit of its address & correspondence --the previous contradiction, therefore, ameliorating in the Tradition's necessary renovation...
I'm certain Kinsella's book isnt written in anticipation of substantial debate --I even feel my objections are beside the point because of the book's running-commentary style obliged by racy reportage & celeb portraiture. Be-that-as-it-may... In my book a poet's love of the sound of words is definitive; sound & sense are the prerequisites of poetry even as each property is transmuted by the other; "sound & sense" is the essential equation of poetry. Yet the tone of JK's reference to sound & music followed by his italicising of 'says', has me doubting we're on the same page!
I guess 'musical poet' is one for whom sound is foregrounded at the cost of sense and where the composition is an artifice far from speech, yet even Louis Zukofsky (I'm thinking of the influential poets of our own era, though why not quote Shakespeare & classics before & after the Elizabethans?) with his wonderfully crazy Latin derivations, for example, which dont diverge much from his general practice, is teeming with 'sense' & saying --and Bunting ditto, the famous opening of Briggflats for example, "Brag sweet tenor bull / Sing descant on Rawthey's madrigal", is the most perfect Northumbrian trill & steeped in meaning! In the Poundian provenance, music is both a particular quality & the whole biz. Olson's "like, tune into the music!" might well dub the Sixties --acid, New Age & all --but also represents a political & ecstatic construction upon music's traditional trope.
In Kinsella's critique of Anthony Lawrence, the coupling of 'sound of words' & 'shamanic bard' is probably shorthand but could be a misleading instruction. The point about the shamanic is its belief in the co-origination of words & things, thus every thing has its word & every word its thing (in nature, in the world). The bard is historian & magician and not merely, though also importantly, songster. The shamanic legacy, therefore, even to this day, resides in the 'magic' of word combinations, which is to say the describing & making of worlds. Anthony Lawrence, like Adamson, Beveridge, Murray, Anderson, Judith Bishop now, amongst many, many Australians, are poets of revelation via identification & invention, and share the magical legacy with all original coiners.
Regarding Language Poetry (as though it were homogenous, which it isnt) : I always agreed with David Bromige's distinction between the tendency & the party! --the potential of the former always preferable to the latter's template for us (--the "us" Bromige recruited me into in his recapitulation to me, late 80s of where & what Poetry was at, although I hazard to say that for many years now my experimentation hasnt sounded within his cooee!). Language Poetry's aesthetical & political connection is of two domains and in full regard, it seems to me, a poet or reader can disport in one or the other, in one & the other.
"All poetry is political" is more significant for the poet for whom political action is imperative but a bland generalisation otherwise. Ducking the difference between the application of politics to almost anything and the inherently political, one reiterates the obvious : Kinsella is a politically radical poet who can turn the lyrical on (can turn on to the lyrical), & Lawrence, more Kinsella's contrary than bete noir, is a traditional poet within contemporary lyricism. The former's practice summons the post-literary; the latter's carries its literary inheritance through whatever & wherever the radicals say we are. Ironically, Language Poetry isnt the last word for Kinsella as it never was or could be for Lawrence.
Regarding "warp" : good word for what defines the poet's individual signature, attached, therefore, as far as poet is concerned, to how the poem ultimately comes out. "Sociopathology" (as per JK's charge) isnt warp's distinction, rather warp is that accent which is languaged as voice. Warp is voice, original & inimitable; it is the life as spoken & sung.
How does this relate to what I suspect is JK's distinction between singing & saying? In the midst of Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful, in a poem written as though dead, Kinsella confides, "I am thinking on the run here", which I translate as thinking aloud, trusting to the run of thought (expression) without any other measure of composition --a writing that resembles transcription, hoping it will be trusted as these days' oral history --problematic though piquant investment such as that form is. I'm reminded of the late John Clarke, of Buffalo, & his confiding in his poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension (March, 1971), "I want all of my learning to go into / this one" : a poetry of knowledge, of reading as saying... Olsonish this poetry then? Olsonish, Whitmanish --but the leaking of biography is a kind of short to the system --JK's saying, in my opinion, sputtering, a discount on poetry's flare. The more I think on it, the 'saying' worth distinguishing from 'singing' is declamatory, & what Adamson decades ago, from out of his bower of song, called 'subject-dominated' (consistent with the conversation we were all having early '70s, Melbourne & Sydney, that time's eclectic anti-literalist perspective, intuitively hybridizing pure poetry's axioms & modernism's naturalist or objectivist overcoming of symbolism); otherwise it collapses into the purported opposite.
So, all in all, what can one say but, in praising his energies, following his project(s), joining the myriad discussion he invites, warmly congratulate John Kinsella on his Christopher Brennan Award.
--Kris Hemensley,
4th June-10th August 2008
Congratulations, of course, to every prize winner, including Marjorie Ward (for the John Shaw Neilson, sponsored by Collected Works Bookshop), but pride of place, here, to Judith Bishop (for the Anne Elder [first book award], sponsored by the Anne Elder Trust ), & John Kinsella (for the Christopher Brennan, honouring "work of sustained quality & distinction", sponsored by Sally Dugan). The awards were announced in Melbourne in March, 2008.
The FAW's arms-length policy ensures secrecy of the winning work in respect of the various award sponsors, thus the winners of the John Shaw Neilson were unknown to me until I saw the Results programme well after the event. I havent read the poems either, but at least recognized Anne Gleeson's & Leah Kaminsky's names in the commendeds. Marjorie Ward wrote to say she used to frequent the Shop years ago, during what must have been our Flinders Lane era (1987-99). Our judge, Garth Madsen, noted it had taken him several readings of her poem, The Last Picnic, "to trace how the poet traveled from one [gentility] to the other [brutality] through a succession of perspectives on death - the cosmic, the divine, the economic and the ecological..."
Judges Connie Barber & Phil Ilton noted the high quality of writing in this year's Anne Elder. The winner, Judith Bishop (Event, published by Salt , UK) and the two commendeds I'm most familiar with, Elizabeth Campbell (Letters to the Tremulous Hand, pub. John Leonard Press) & Petra White (The Incoming Tide, also John Leonard Press) --the other collections mentioned were Sarah French's (Songs Orphans Sing, Five Islands Press, & Hal Judge's Someone Forgot To Tell the Fish (Interactive Publications)-- certainly resonate with that description. Strikes me that it'll be seen as a rather special year in retrospect,at least in Melbourne circles, with Bishop pipping Campbell & White, three exponents of a fastidiously constructed & polished lyricism current now in new Australian poetry (Lucy Holt undoubtedly another). Although there's just a smidgin of the a la mode to Judith Bishop's collection --the concrete proposition leading into the tantalisingly oblique elaboration-- it cannot, at this stage be read as anything but her own conceptually & verbally exciting way, an original poet's signature. Event is a great choice! For the others, specifically Campbell & White, disappointment must have been tempered by appreciation of commensurate brilliance.
Event opens with After the Elements, a valedictory for Gustaf Sobin (d 2005), which immediately signals the particular American orientation of a new Australian poet --a new Australian poetics one might also say, confirming the whole world which nowadays constitutes a locale : the several-ways' traffic of poets, Australia, Europe, the States, via research, travel, internet. Judith Bishop has Jordie Albiston's gift for redeeming contemporaneity for something as antique as incantation or spell. "You and I, we are too far / from fire now: the chimney-pots / have driven out their smoke, / and stood alert for its return" the poem begins, cueing the reader for the alchemical order, fire, water, earth, air, whose predictability affords renewed pleasure in the old wonder. A marvellous construction, sensuous in its metaphysics. This applies to much of the rest of the book.
The Dona Marina first-person character poems (she was the indispensable translator, interpreter & mistress of Cortez we're told) beg performance. Of course, poetry always is theatre for the inner ear but in a formal sense the sequence is drama, a choral work. In my opinion they're taxed as poems when spliced into the collection. The best of Event are stand-alone poems where Bishop's almost Hopkins'-like anthropomorphism facilitates highly lyrical investigations of being & perception, of human being via nature. I couldnt help reading the poems against a memory of Hopkins in general, D H Lawrence (following her apt quotation, "Not I, but the wind that blows through me! " --which has spoken for my life & writing too as it happens), and serendipitously, Edwin Muir's The Animals.
Muir's poem turns upon a definition of world as the humanly known & therefore named, and consequential upon the conditioning of time & space. Animals or the non-human are otherwise : "From birth to death hurled / no word do they have, not one / were never in any place." They are beyond language's salvation, then, and cannot be "Snatched from deceiving death / by the articulate breath." But Muir's conventional dualism was already overridden by Lawrence's time, and Bishop's co-originary impulse, probably found in pantheism, noted by Peter Porter in his blurb, as in today's Buddhistic ecologism & Bachelardian phenomenology, applies the coup de grace. Her rejoinder to Muir might be this immaculate passage : "The heart, arrested muscle, is the end and in each. Birds / articulate death better, // worlded by their wings and song. They never see death coming : / it observes from their eyes // as they knit, faultlessly, the cumulus to mud."
Her question from von Herder --"Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling...are aligned in their entire performance for a giving out toward other creatures." --perfectly describes the empathy compelling anthropomorphism to the extent that reading Bishop the language coined seems to be that in which all nature is found!
The many superb poems in Event confirm the honour of her Anne Elder. Three cheers!
*
I wonder if the definition of the Christopher Brennan needs to be tweaked? Some of us have always taken it to be a lifetime achievement award. Perhaps "writing of sustained quality & distinction" opens too much of a door to the shorter-term success (how define 'sustained'?) --whatever, John Kinsella has been an enlivener of debate in Australia, Britain & the USA; a proselytiser for Australian poetry in amongst contemporary poetry & poetics around the world, never more so than as the publisher of Salt Books (Cambridge,UK); and a prolific poet in his own right across a range of styles whose subject is almost always post-Edenic calamity.
Reviewing his latest collection, Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (FACP, '08), in Australian Book Review (number 302, June, 2008), Nicholas Birns spurns the shenanigans recently embroiling Kinsella --it's the poetry he wants not the celebrity & notoriety, though JK might not himself so clearly distinguish one persona from another given his volition as a militant for causes (--as he also says of biography in Fast, Loose Beginnings, "I am not really interested in biography, but in the residual nature of friendship and even indifference." --by which he might mean he's interested in dynamics, interactions, contexts of engagement rather than relationship as certain or settled, thus drama & not history, episodes not epics, reports & reportage not judgments & the sagely).
Whereas the brilliant raves in Shades (the long breath single sentence poems of Textures of the Wheatbelt, Sounds of the Wheatbelt, & Smells of the Wheatbelt, for example, ironically recalling for me some of the memorable, & formally composed poems in The Silo from ten or so years ago) amply demonstrate Kinsella's poetic gift for me rather than his rangier pastoral/anti-pastoral sorties, Birns is convinced of the latter's verity.Though he has his finger right where mine is regarding "sketchiness", his has the positive conclusion.
I'll quote the final paragraph of the ABR review : "In the soaring 'Lover's Leap', Kinsella quotes [Edmund] Burke as finding, in unfinished sketches, 'something which pleased me beyond the best finishing'. Kinsella's poems are not incomplete because of their sketchiness but because of their plurality, yet they also shimmer with unfinished potential. They demonstrate how poetry can parade a lack of plenitude, how privation can nonetheless 'fixate' transcendence." Marvelous ideas! I'd love to say I was similarly moved but that wasnt my first impression; however, Birns does cause me to think long & hard about the form & nature of poetry (he describes the hinge, really, of a discussion about contemporary 'open' & 'closed' poetries) and has cued me to return to JK's latest excursus.
Birns' favourable review & David Caddy's posting on Kinsella in his encyclopaedic British poetry blog (davidcaddy.blogspot.com), which includes a potted history of the pastoral from Virgilian antiquity to the postmodernist reformulation, retrieve JK from scuttlebutt for serious consideration.
The revelations & confessions, particularly concerning Bob Adamson & Anthony Lawrence, in Kinsella's Fast, Loose Beginnings : A Memoir of Intoxications (Melbourne University Press, 2006) are hardly great scandals --diverting, amusing yet neither here nor there in this big, bad & wonderful world! But one passage stuck in my head. Almost in passing (pp. 70-71) JK observed, "Anthony [Lawrence] loves the sound of words and is really a shamanic bard. In his work, Dylan Thomas, G M Hopkins, and other musical poets, blur with contemporary songsters like Leonard Cohen (a romantic seduction device), Billy Bragg (an absorbable social commentary), and Van Morrison ... There's an obviousness, a romanticism, in all this, but the 'warp' in Anthony makes him unique and possibly a great poet." He refers then to Lawrence's disregard for Language Poetry & his depoliticised relation to language : "Even when he 'says' something political, the language seems separated off from a consciousness of its potential cause and effect. On the surface, he is entirely composed of stock epithets (like, 'at the height of his powers'), but underneath he is full of fear and predation -- the combination drives a socio-pathology in his poetry that makes it get under the skin." The passage hooked me even as it begged important questions.
I wondered if JK's somewhat parodic description of Lawrence mightnt describe a line in the sand concerning contemporary poetics. I sensed something there of Justin Clemens' pejorative use of 'romanticism' in support of Michael Farrell & a self-consciously new writing, against all the rest, in his a raider's guide launching speech a couple of months ago. I really should have read JK's text closer & earlier than I had and maybe heard then JC echoing JK that night! Not that JC has necessarily read Fast, Loose Beginnings, but perhaps there's a Kinsellian position more or less predicated upon Language School which Clemens & others share? And yes I know, it's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the political versus the literary --and eek! wasnt that a disposition circa late Sixties, early Seventies I'd also picked up?! --the radical disavowal of Art & Literature in favour of various species of The Real? --only resumed when the 'political', including the repositionings of the 'avant-garde', predominately presented itself as the figure of estrangement, out of sorts with most of the forms of the world, thus reducing the ambit of its address & correspondence --the previous contradiction, therefore, ameliorating in the Tradition's necessary renovation...
I'm certain Kinsella's book isnt written in anticipation of substantial debate --I even feel my objections are beside the point because of the book's running-commentary style obliged by racy reportage & celeb portraiture. Be-that-as-it-may... In my book a poet's love of the sound of words is definitive; sound & sense are the prerequisites of poetry even as each property is transmuted by the other; "sound & sense" is the essential equation of poetry. Yet the tone of JK's reference to sound & music followed by his italicising of 'says', has me doubting we're on the same page!
I guess 'musical poet' is one for whom sound is foregrounded at the cost of sense and where the composition is an artifice far from speech, yet even Louis Zukofsky (I'm thinking of the influential poets of our own era, though why not quote Shakespeare & classics before & after the Elizabethans?) with his wonderfully crazy Latin derivations, for example, which dont diverge much from his general practice, is teeming with 'sense' & saying --and Bunting ditto, the famous opening of Briggflats for example, "Brag sweet tenor bull / Sing descant on Rawthey's madrigal", is the most perfect Northumbrian trill & steeped in meaning! In the Poundian provenance, music is both a particular quality & the whole biz. Olson's "like, tune into the music!" might well dub the Sixties --acid, New Age & all --but also represents a political & ecstatic construction upon music's traditional trope.
In Kinsella's critique of Anthony Lawrence, the coupling of 'sound of words' & 'shamanic bard' is probably shorthand but could be a misleading instruction. The point about the shamanic is its belief in the co-origination of words & things, thus every thing has its word & every word its thing (in nature, in the world). The bard is historian & magician and not merely, though also importantly, songster. The shamanic legacy, therefore, even to this day, resides in the 'magic' of word combinations, which is to say the describing & making of worlds. Anthony Lawrence, like Adamson, Beveridge, Murray, Anderson, Judith Bishop now, amongst many, many Australians, are poets of revelation via identification & invention, and share the magical legacy with all original coiners.
Regarding Language Poetry (as though it were homogenous, which it isnt) : I always agreed with David Bromige's distinction between the tendency & the party! --the potential of the former always preferable to the latter's template for us (--the "us" Bromige recruited me into in his recapitulation to me, late 80s of where & what Poetry was at, although I hazard to say that for many years now my experimentation hasnt sounded within his cooee!). Language Poetry's aesthetical & political connection is of two domains and in full regard, it seems to me, a poet or reader can disport in one or the other, in one & the other.
"All poetry is political" is more significant for the poet for whom political action is imperative but a bland generalisation otherwise. Ducking the difference between the application of politics to almost anything and the inherently political, one reiterates the obvious : Kinsella is a politically radical poet who can turn the lyrical on (can turn on to the lyrical), & Lawrence, more Kinsella's contrary than bete noir, is a traditional poet within contemporary lyricism. The former's practice summons the post-literary; the latter's carries its literary inheritance through whatever & wherever the radicals say we are. Ironically, Language Poetry isnt the last word for Kinsella as it never was or could be for Lawrence.
Regarding "warp" : good word for what defines the poet's individual signature, attached, therefore, as far as poet is concerned, to how the poem ultimately comes out. "Sociopathology" (as per JK's charge) isnt warp's distinction, rather warp is that accent which is languaged as voice. Warp is voice, original & inimitable; it is the life as spoken & sung.
How does this relate to what I suspect is JK's distinction between singing & saying? In the midst of Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful, in a poem written as though dead, Kinsella confides, "I am thinking on the run here", which I translate as thinking aloud, trusting to the run of thought (expression) without any other measure of composition --a writing that resembles transcription, hoping it will be trusted as these days' oral history --problematic though piquant investment such as that form is. I'm reminded of the late John Clarke, of Buffalo, & his confiding in his poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension (March, 1971), "I want all of my learning to go into / this one" : a poetry of knowledge, of reading as saying... Olsonish this poetry then? Olsonish, Whitmanish --but the leaking of biography is a kind of short to the system --JK's saying, in my opinion, sputtering, a discount on poetry's flare. The more I think on it, the 'saying' worth distinguishing from 'singing' is declamatory, & what Adamson decades ago, from out of his bower of song, called 'subject-dominated' (consistent with the conversation we were all having early '70s, Melbourne & Sydney, that time's eclectic anti-literalist perspective, intuitively hybridizing pure poetry's axioms & modernism's naturalist or objectivist overcoming of symbolism); otherwise it collapses into the purported opposite.
So, all in all, what can one say but, in praising his energies, following his project(s), joining the myriad discussion he invites, warmly congratulate John Kinsella on his Christopher Brennan Award.
--Kris Hemensley,
4th June-10th August 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 19
LAUNCHING OF LORIN FORD'S A WATTLE SEEDPOD (published by POSTPRESSED, Queensland, 2008), at Collected Works Bookshop, 25th July, 2008
Thank you Lorin for asking me to launch your little book tonight. Poetry & the little book, poetry & the small press, are inseparable. At Collected Works Bookshop we're partial to little books -- although I do recall Bill Butler, ex-pat American poet, replying to the very excited George Dowden, ditto, in Bill's celebrated Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, UK --and it was the day that Jack Kerouac's death was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, October,1969, and a shocked Bill Butler had pointed it out to us --and George showed off his new pocket-sized note-book and said he'd write a poem in it, straightaway, about Kerouac's death --Bill said, coldly, I've always thought only small poems get written in small books! George was Ginsberg's bibliographer at the time and even more earnest & expansive in his confessions than his master --but that's another story entirely!
Lorin's isnt a small book in that sense, but perfectly efficacious & elegant within the constraints of its production --and the moments it contains are infinite in their extent.
*
As ever, an occasion like this book-launching is an intersection of lives & stories. I hope you'll permit me to range around & about book, person & poetry.
*
We do go back a long way, as they say. Lorin was the daughter of the house I boarded in, back in 1966, in Park Street, South Yarra, around the corner from the Botanical Gardens which she may know I called The Gardens of Sunlight in my personal myth & writings of that first Melbourne winter of my Australian emigration. We became acquainted in the pre-hippy Bohemian Melbourne and from there the trail takes in the La Mama poetry scene of the late '60s, and the counter-culture '70s, and our respective baby sons & their irregular schooling, and our different vantages in the education system... From youth's dream of poets & poetry to the grim & glorious actuality! -- of which A Wattle Seedpod is a shining example... And so into the dream once again...
*
Thirty-odd years ago, Jim Davidson asked me to write a survey of the new Australian poetry, to introduce my poetry editorship of Meanjin Quarterly. Every few years I have a peek at it as I did the other day. On this occasion I've been embarrassed by my carping & cleaving & general belabouring! I sound like the "wrathful deity", which is how my Buddhist & haiku enthusiast brother Bernard characterizes me when I'm aroused!
In retrospect I've come to realize that militantly pushing a literary programme, a la Pound & Wyndham Lewis, Olson, the Language School et cetera, as I did myself in the '60s & '70s & into the '80s, doesnt necessarily serve poetry well, if at all.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because included in my poetry review of 1976 was comment on some Australian haiku, which might be interesting to recall now.
Having earlier in the article berated Peter Porter & Graham Rowlands, and railed at Richard Tipping & Tom Shapcott, I turned to, or upon, Robert Gray's Creekwater Journal. To quote, "Though the direction is valid [by which I meant the embrace of Japanese but in Robert's case also a Chinese sensibility concerning human affairs & landscape] the contents are lacklustre." I continued, "The motor of the collection is three sets of three-liners [I dont even call them haiku] (...) which instead of firing rather enervate the entire book, ranging in tone from soft to silly, so cliched are some of the subjects and surrounding sentiments. It is these wee ones' failings that explains the demise of the long poems."
Next, I approvingly held up the "meagrely published Gerard Smith" for comparison; and then commented on Janice Bostok's haiku collection, Walking Into the Sun : "though naive and nowhere near as loaded as Gray or Smith," I wrote, "[it] is palpable : 'in summer meadow / this bird silence' is its most exciting and resonant instance. Six words with which to launch a world. Which is the requirement of the forms Gray attempts. Even when you have enough words, they must be the right words" I finger-wagged..
In the years since 1976, I've re-thought & revised my general literary position. I realize, for example, how wrong i was about Robert Gray's haiku & certainly the longer poems. He's said to me that I probably had a point back then, but I think he's being gracious (as befits his name), & possibly facetious too!
Gerard Smith died young, without a book as such. His friend Janice Bostok, who's especially thanked by Lorin in her book, is now a major force in the Australian haiku world.
By 1976, the Sixties' generation of La Mama poets, amongst whom Lorin once numbered, had long dispersed, but their individual paths continued & the spirit carried over elsewhere.
*
For all this time we've lived in the magnitude of modern poetry. Even in its provinces, ancient Chinese & Japanese approaches (for example, the representation of nature to include human lives, particularly manifest as haiku) have never been too far away. And that's because it was brought out of the exoticised, but crucial, 19th Century interest & into our time by moderns like Englishman Arthur Waley & American Ezra Pound. And so it flows through the Poundian practice, particularly in the US --and it underscores the Objectivists (think of Oppen, Lorine Niedecker), Cid Corman, so also the Beats, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and then the contemporary legions.
And translation of the ancients continues in the wake of Pound by numerous hands --Bill Porter & Sam Hamill amongst the best today. And then there's the Formalist revival, or revival of forms, from the '80s to the present. And coincident with this new formalism, haiku has proliferated as an English-language form. Poetry schools have aided & abetted the process. If pantoums, sestinas, sonnets & villanelles why not haiku, tanka & et cetera? Anyone for ghazals?!
*
Lorin has been an astonishingly active poet in the past few years of the English-language haiku phenomenon. It's rare not to see her haiku published somewhere in Melbourne, in Australia. She's equally well published in overseas' haiku magazines & anthologies. There seems to me to be something of the Welsh Eistedfott about the haiku scene if only in their competition for prizes & titles..! Lorin's been in the thick of that! She's published a couple of hundred haiku in print & internet magazines, and that spells tenacity & possibly addiction for the form & perhaps the comraderie too!
And at last she has a book! I am surprised something didnt come out earlier --but that's life, as many of us will attest...
A Wattle Seedpod is published by PostPressed in Queensland. John Bird, one of Australian haiku's stalwarts, contributes an instructive forward which contains Lorin's thoughts on haiku, describing her progress from the "so what?" we've all experienced to the "ah ha!" we long for. She refers to the "physical quiver of recognition" upon hearing a particular haiku : "It made me realize," she writes, "that haiku are meant to be 'seen through' by us as readers, to our own experiences in the world."
You'll observe with me that this transparency is in direct contradiction to the Western literary attitude, whether or not fully born out in practice. Poem as existential mirror is a wonderful challenge to the self-conscious postmodern manner, for instance. Of course, in practice, things are never so black & white, but the dichotomy bears thinking about.
*
"This poet," John Bird says, "does not live in Haikuland. She may well become a haijin who helps move English-langauge haiku closer to poetry." John Bird seems to be suggesting that there's a deficit between Haikuland practitioners & Poetry...
To be sure, Lorin is an otherwise formed poet who has taken up & taken to the haiku. And yet she does endorse haiku's traditional imperatives & their Western evolution.
*
I'll bring my remarks to a close by opening Lorin's little book upon a couple of my favourites in this first collection.
How poignant is this, for example :
"River sunrise
a girl's shadow
swims from my ankles"
What a beautiful allusion to the 'consciousness of the passing of time' (if I might misquote Gertrude Stein) --the chaste expression grants equanimity even as wistfulness presses on the heart...
Then there's the synaesthesia of :
"clear water --
a magpie's song drops
into the pond"
Simultaneously one sees, hears & feels the event.
And then there's the perfect one-liner :
"on a bare twig rain beads what light there is"
which is, I think, in the vicinity of what Judith Bishop often attains --not Nature Poetry pure & simple but how phenomena is apprehended; a poetry, therefore, of conscious & perceiving being.
*
And so, I'm pleased to declare this little book published, and now invite Lorin to speak to us &, hopefully, read.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley, July, 2008.
Thank you Lorin for asking me to launch your little book tonight. Poetry & the little book, poetry & the small press, are inseparable. At Collected Works Bookshop we're partial to little books -- although I do recall Bill Butler, ex-pat American poet, replying to the very excited George Dowden, ditto, in Bill's celebrated Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, UK --and it was the day that Jack Kerouac's death was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, October,1969, and a shocked Bill Butler had pointed it out to us --and George showed off his new pocket-sized note-book and said he'd write a poem in it, straightaway, about Kerouac's death --Bill said, coldly, I've always thought only small poems get written in small books! George was Ginsberg's bibliographer at the time and even more earnest & expansive in his confessions than his master --but that's another story entirely!
Lorin's isnt a small book in that sense, but perfectly efficacious & elegant within the constraints of its production --and the moments it contains are infinite in their extent.
*
As ever, an occasion like this book-launching is an intersection of lives & stories. I hope you'll permit me to range around & about book, person & poetry.
*
We do go back a long way, as they say. Lorin was the daughter of the house I boarded in, back in 1966, in Park Street, South Yarra, around the corner from the Botanical Gardens which she may know I called The Gardens of Sunlight in my personal myth & writings of that first Melbourne winter of my Australian emigration. We became acquainted in the pre-hippy Bohemian Melbourne and from there the trail takes in the La Mama poetry scene of the late '60s, and the counter-culture '70s, and our respective baby sons & their irregular schooling, and our different vantages in the education system... From youth's dream of poets & poetry to the grim & glorious actuality! -- of which A Wattle Seedpod is a shining example... And so into the dream once again...
*
Thirty-odd years ago, Jim Davidson asked me to write a survey of the new Australian poetry, to introduce my poetry editorship of Meanjin Quarterly. Every few years I have a peek at it as I did the other day. On this occasion I've been embarrassed by my carping & cleaving & general belabouring! I sound like the "wrathful deity", which is how my Buddhist & haiku enthusiast brother Bernard characterizes me when I'm aroused!
In retrospect I've come to realize that militantly pushing a literary programme, a la Pound & Wyndham Lewis, Olson, the Language School et cetera, as I did myself in the '60s & '70s & into the '80s, doesnt necessarily serve poetry well, if at all.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because included in my poetry review of 1976 was comment on some Australian haiku, which might be interesting to recall now.
Having earlier in the article berated Peter Porter & Graham Rowlands, and railed at Richard Tipping & Tom Shapcott, I turned to, or upon, Robert Gray's Creekwater Journal. To quote, "Though the direction is valid [by which I meant the embrace of Japanese but in Robert's case also a Chinese sensibility concerning human affairs & landscape] the contents are lacklustre." I continued, "The motor of the collection is three sets of three-liners [I dont even call them haiku] (...) which instead of firing rather enervate the entire book, ranging in tone from soft to silly, so cliched are some of the subjects and surrounding sentiments. It is these wee ones' failings that explains the demise of the long poems."
Next, I approvingly held up the "meagrely published Gerard Smith" for comparison; and then commented on Janice Bostok's haiku collection, Walking Into the Sun : "though naive and nowhere near as loaded as Gray or Smith," I wrote, "[it] is palpable : 'in summer meadow / this bird silence' is its most exciting and resonant instance. Six words with which to launch a world. Which is the requirement of the forms Gray attempts. Even when you have enough words, they must be the right words" I finger-wagged..
In the years since 1976, I've re-thought & revised my general literary position. I realize, for example, how wrong i was about Robert Gray's haiku & certainly the longer poems. He's said to me that I probably had a point back then, but I think he's being gracious (as befits his name), & possibly facetious too!
Gerard Smith died young, without a book as such. His friend Janice Bostok, who's especially thanked by Lorin in her book, is now a major force in the Australian haiku world.
By 1976, the Sixties' generation of La Mama poets, amongst whom Lorin once numbered, had long dispersed, but their individual paths continued & the spirit carried over elsewhere.
*
For all this time we've lived in the magnitude of modern poetry. Even in its provinces, ancient Chinese & Japanese approaches (for example, the representation of nature to include human lives, particularly manifest as haiku) have never been too far away. And that's because it was brought out of the exoticised, but crucial, 19th Century interest & into our time by moderns like Englishman Arthur Waley & American Ezra Pound. And so it flows through the Poundian practice, particularly in the US --and it underscores the Objectivists (think of Oppen, Lorine Niedecker), Cid Corman, so also the Beats, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and then the contemporary legions.
And translation of the ancients continues in the wake of Pound by numerous hands --Bill Porter & Sam Hamill amongst the best today. And then there's the Formalist revival, or revival of forms, from the '80s to the present. And coincident with this new formalism, haiku has proliferated as an English-language form. Poetry schools have aided & abetted the process. If pantoums, sestinas, sonnets & villanelles why not haiku, tanka & et cetera? Anyone for ghazals?!
*
Lorin has been an astonishingly active poet in the past few years of the English-language haiku phenomenon. It's rare not to see her haiku published somewhere in Melbourne, in Australia. She's equally well published in overseas' haiku magazines & anthologies. There seems to me to be something of the Welsh Eistedfott about the haiku scene if only in their competition for prizes & titles..! Lorin's been in the thick of that! She's published a couple of hundred haiku in print & internet magazines, and that spells tenacity & possibly addiction for the form & perhaps the comraderie too!
And at last she has a book! I am surprised something didnt come out earlier --but that's life, as many of us will attest...
A Wattle Seedpod is published by PostPressed in Queensland. John Bird, one of Australian haiku's stalwarts, contributes an instructive forward which contains Lorin's thoughts on haiku, describing her progress from the "so what?" we've all experienced to the "ah ha!" we long for. She refers to the "physical quiver of recognition" upon hearing a particular haiku : "It made me realize," she writes, "that haiku are meant to be 'seen through' by us as readers, to our own experiences in the world."
You'll observe with me that this transparency is in direct contradiction to the Western literary attitude, whether or not fully born out in practice. Poem as existential mirror is a wonderful challenge to the self-conscious postmodern manner, for instance. Of course, in practice, things are never so black & white, but the dichotomy bears thinking about.
*
"This poet," John Bird says, "does not live in Haikuland. She may well become a haijin who helps move English-langauge haiku closer to poetry." John Bird seems to be suggesting that there's a deficit between Haikuland practitioners & Poetry...
To be sure, Lorin is an otherwise formed poet who has taken up & taken to the haiku. And yet she does endorse haiku's traditional imperatives & their Western evolution.
*
I'll bring my remarks to a close by opening Lorin's little book upon a couple of my favourites in this first collection.
How poignant is this, for example :
"River sunrise
a girl's shadow
swims from my ankles"
What a beautiful allusion to the 'consciousness of the passing of time' (if I might misquote Gertrude Stein) --the chaste expression grants equanimity even as wistfulness presses on the heart...
Then there's the synaesthesia of :
"clear water --
a magpie's song drops
into the pond"
Simultaneously one sees, hears & feels the event.
And then there's the perfect one-liner :
"on a bare twig rain beads what light there is"
which is, I think, in the vicinity of what Judith Bishop often attains --not Nature Poetry pure & simple but how phenomena is apprehended; a poetry, therefore, of conscious & perceiving being.
*
And so, I'm pleased to declare this little book published, and now invite Lorin to speak to us &, hopefully, read.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley, July, 2008.
Monday, August 4, 2008
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #4, July/August, 2008
JENNIFER HARRISON
TEA LEAVES
A man and woman disappear
where the light flows up hill
where an archetypal table has unlaid
its cutlery, emptied the decanters
and seated an absent guest at the head
of the country's upturned table.
We've drawn new flags of crayoned dunes
and bothered the stars with deeper blues.
A rear-vision mirror distracts those
who gaze amazed at the shadows, yet scalded
by our lack of rain, farms lie in the dust
thirsting towards an unguent sun.
Our Tarot cards, transparent,
predict we are unchanged in our changing.
The future is cracked porcelain.
And tea cups, if left to tell their fable
might speak of black stars in a white night,
carcasses scattered across salt pan draught,
snow melting from Antarctic rock,
words disorganising into fear & flight.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN HART
FEBRUARY
There is a weariness that finds a home at last
Inside your bones as winter bites its third thin month,
As though a death were leaning on you all the day
And weighed a shadow more than any man, two men,
Your father's death perhaps that must come very soon,
Grandfather's death that's been and gone yet hangs around;
And then there's a weariness older than the dust,
That spinifex will tell you all about, and more,
One quite at home inside those shattered, simple rocks
You find out west in Queensland when old roads give out,
And in those words you whisper to yourself at night,
Words with dark rooms that open onto darker rooms;
And there's a weariness that's vaguely young, that runs
Its bony fingers through the fringes of your thoughts
And blunts their edge : louche angel of death, your own
Perhaps, though one still hanging loose and at a loss.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
NO LONGER YOUR POEM : TO MICHAEL SHARKEY
No longer am I your poem, your breath has left me,
I am grafted to this page. Go, from now on I keep
verbs to myself, you can no longer tamper
with my pronouns. Punctuate someone else.
I divorce myself from you, disown you
and your pencil thin prerogatives.
I am a postulate, traveling, camping out,
a poem of independent memes.
You remember me as this static page,
your lazy snapshot memory that erases
my early life, my permutations, and later travels.
Are we each a single dose to each other?
I am no longer yours, it is my breath
that holds up the spaces on this page.
I keep your word? You do not.
I am now thou to thee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
Two sequences of cinquain*
treason
and weasel words
crank tangent creeds
a welter of display performs
two-up
flight paths
and soft landings
dad brings his trade song....
Valderie, echoes down Collins
and home
Gusto
and festivals
Japan tailors English
with blossoms springing liaisons
take out
bouquets
and avenues
connive books and burnings
spirit barrels hunger incense
and thirst
households
endure rebuke
table grace pots the word
mum rattles kids scolding water
rations
-----
cool eyes
and assignments
jostle lovers drabness
mistaken paring off hones lost
design
cryptic
and rotten flicks
turns tolerant offense
to advents bending in takeoff
runway
manners
stun tarred silence
goading egotists spray
while camber tarps the revelry
poolside
the scrub
after the fires
cools earthen ceramics
ravages putter turning points
in kiln
film scores
and pot boilers
ghostly lairs surrender
crisp flavors succeed shared outlook
release
--------
[Note : Cinquain, a five line stanza that can simply be a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. In the first sequence, Valderie is the famous song, "I love to go a-wandering along a mountain track"; Collins is Collins Street in Melbourne; Gusto is the name of a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX LEWIS
THREE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SPANISH
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO (1864-1936)
from In the Cemetery of a Castilian Place
Flocks of the dead, among poor walls
are shifting to their common clay.
Poor flocks - the scythe has been put down.
This cross above an empty field
is your only emblem now.
By these walls the sheep have shelter
from the shocks of northern wind,
while history's vain rumours
break up these walls like waves.
Shining like an island in June,
you swim amid a windy sea
of golden grain, while over you
the lark sings its harvester's song.
[The word "barro'' means "clay" in Spanish, but is sometimes used in biblical translation rather than "polvo", "dust". It carries the same biblical associations that "dust" carries in English.]
*
FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1899-1936)
RIDER'S SONG
Cordoba is distant.
And lonely.
Black nag, big moon,
and olives in my saddle bag.
And though I know these roads
I shall not make Cordoba.
Over the plain and through the wind,
black nag, blood moon.
And death is watching me
from the towers of Cordoba.
*
PEDRO GIMFERRER (1945-)
HOMAGE TO JOHANNES SEBASTIAN BACH
In the forest they give chase to Jesus and to elks
With dark sweet diamonds with lilies in their mouths
Silence the steps of Autumn in the villages
Heaven like a name pronounced in a low voice
Jesus Jesus the rifles sounding through Spring
The belly of a naked girl over the sea petal and cloud
The belly of a girl torn open by mastiffs
o my God
*
[ Note : I have tried to make versions that are readable as English poems, and to this end have taken many liberties with the literal texts. Lorca's Cancion de Jinette is rightly famous. Pedro Gimferrer is a prominent Spanish poet born in 1945 who has translated widely from the French & English, including TS Eliot, Beckett & de Sade. De Unamuno, b 1864, was a leading member of the 'Generation of '98'; revered as sage, essayist & novelist who explored existential themes, & also wrote a considerable body of poetry. ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Ian Campbell lives in Sydney. Biographical information contained within his detailed correspondence published in this issue.
Jennifer Harrison [Sydney's loss & Melbourne's gain] is the author of four collections, the most recent of which, Folly & Grief, was published by Black Pepper Press (Melbourne) in 2oo6. A volume of New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Black Pepper in 2009. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Australian women's poetry. Her contact is j.har@bigpond.com
Kevin Hart [Australia's loss & America's gain] left Melbourne in 2001 to take up a position at University of Notre Dame and is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. He has eleven poetry collections (books & chapbooks) including Wicked Heat ('99) & Flame Tree ('02). His several books of literary & philosophical criticism include The Trespass of the Sign; Postmodernism : A Beginner's Guide; The Dark Gaze : Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. A new collection, Young Rain, is due soon from Giramondo (Sydney).
Carol Jenkins continues to record & publish the River Road CD series of Australian poets from her Sydney pad. See Poems & Pieces #1 for more bio. Her first collection of poems is due soon from Puncher & Wattman.
Robert Jordan after a sojourn in Japan, lives in Melbourne's West, thus a Bulldogs supporter. A Guinness & green tea drinker. Once upon a time a painter of icons within the Orthodox community, an exhibiting artist, a tram-conductor, ESL teacher, & always a note-taker. Now, a writer of cinquain. His contact is tahongo@yahoo.com
Alex Lewis lives in Melbourne. Published a collection of prose fiction in 2007 in the wake of his winning the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition. Recently returned from his Grand Tour which included Spain.
Earl Livings lives in Melbourne, heading up the Box Hill creative writing programme and editing Divan, which was Australia's first on-line poetry journal. His collection, Further than Night (Bystander Press) published in 2000. His contact is e.livings@bhtafe.edu.au
TEA LEAVES
A man and woman disappear
where the light flows up hill
where an archetypal table has unlaid
its cutlery, emptied the decanters
and seated an absent guest at the head
of the country's upturned table.
We've drawn new flags of crayoned dunes
and bothered the stars with deeper blues.
A rear-vision mirror distracts those
who gaze amazed at the shadows, yet scalded
by our lack of rain, farms lie in the dust
thirsting towards an unguent sun.
Our Tarot cards, transparent,
predict we are unchanged in our changing.
The future is cracked porcelain.
And tea cups, if left to tell their fable
might speak of black stars in a white night,
carcasses scattered across salt pan draught,
snow melting from Antarctic rock,
words disorganising into fear & flight.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN HART
FEBRUARY
There is a weariness that finds a home at last
Inside your bones as winter bites its third thin month,
As though a death were leaning on you all the day
And weighed a shadow more than any man, two men,
Your father's death perhaps that must come very soon,
Grandfather's death that's been and gone yet hangs around;
And then there's a weariness older than the dust,
That spinifex will tell you all about, and more,
One quite at home inside those shattered, simple rocks
You find out west in Queensland when old roads give out,
And in those words you whisper to yourself at night,
Words with dark rooms that open onto darker rooms;
And there's a weariness that's vaguely young, that runs
Its bony fingers through the fringes of your thoughts
And blunts their edge : louche angel of death, your own
Perhaps, though one still hanging loose and at a loss.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
NO LONGER YOUR POEM : TO MICHAEL SHARKEY
No longer am I your poem, your breath has left me,
I am grafted to this page. Go, from now on I keep
verbs to myself, you can no longer tamper
with my pronouns. Punctuate someone else.
I divorce myself from you, disown you
and your pencil thin prerogatives.
I am a postulate, traveling, camping out,
a poem of independent memes.
You remember me as this static page,
your lazy snapshot memory that erases
my early life, my permutations, and later travels.
Are we each a single dose to each other?
I am no longer yours, it is my breath
that holds up the spaces on this page.
I keep your word? You do not.
I am now thou to thee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
Two sequences of cinquain*
treason
and weasel words
crank tangent creeds
a welter of display performs
two-up
flight paths
and soft landings
dad brings his trade song....
Valderie, echoes down Collins
and home
Gusto
and festivals
Japan tailors English
with blossoms springing liaisons
take out
bouquets
and avenues
connive books and burnings
spirit barrels hunger incense
and thirst
households
endure rebuke
table grace pots the word
mum rattles kids scolding water
rations
-----
cool eyes
and assignments
jostle lovers drabness
mistaken paring off hones lost
design
cryptic
and rotten flicks
turns tolerant offense
to advents bending in takeoff
runway
manners
stun tarred silence
goading egotists spray
while camber tarps the revelry
poolside
the scrub
after the fires
cools earthen ceramics
ravages putter turning points
in kiln
film scores
and pot boilers
ghostly lairs surrender
crisp flavors succeed shared outlook
release
--------
[Note : Cinquain, a five line stanza that can simply be a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. In the first sequence, Valderie is the famous song, "I love to go a-wandering along a mountain track"; Collins is Collins Street in Melbourne; Gusto is the name of a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX LEWIS
THREE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SPANISH
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO (1864-1936)
from In the Cemetery of a Castilian Place
Flocks of the dead, among poor walls
are shifting to their common clay.
Poor flocks - the scythe has been put down.
This cross above an empty field
is your only emblem now.
By these walls the sheep have shelter
from the shocks of northern wind,
while history's vain rumours
break up these walls like waves.
Shining like an island in June,
you swim amid a windy sea
of golden grain, while over you
the lark sings its harvester's song.
[The word "barro'' means "clay" in Spanish, but is sometimes used in biblical translation rather than "polvo", "dust". It carries the same biblical associations that "dust" carries in English.]
*
FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1899-1936)
RIDER'S SONG
Cordoba is distant.
And lonely.
Black nag, big moon,
and olives in my saddle bag.
And though I know these roads
I shall not make Cordoba.
Over the plain and through the wind,
black nag, blood moon.
And death is watching me
from the towers of Cordoba.
*
PEDRO GIMFERRER (1945-)
HOMAGE TO JOHANNES SEBASTIAN BACH
In the forest they give chase to Jesus and to elks
With dark sweet diamonds with lilies in their mouths
Silence the steps of Autumn in the villages
Heaven like a name pronounced in a low voice
Jesus Jesus the rifles sounding through Spring
The belly of a naked girl over the sea petal and cloud
The belly of a girl torn open by mastiffs
o my God
*
[ Note : I have tried to make versions that are readable as English poems, and to this end have taken many liberties with the literal texts. Lorca's Cancion de Jinette is rightly famous. Pedro Gimferrer is a prominent Spanish poet born in 1945 who has translated widely from the French & English, including TS Eliot, Beckett & de Sade. De Unamuno, b 1864, was a leading member of the 'Generation of '98'; revered as sage, essayist & novelist who explored existential themes, & also wrote a considerable body of poetry. ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Ian Campbell lives in Sydney. Biographical information contained within his detailed correspondence published in this issue.
Jennifer Harrison [Sydney's loss & Melbourne's gain] is the author of four collections, the most recent of which, Folly & Grief, was published by Black Pepper Press (Melbourne) in 2oo6. A volume of New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Black Pepper in 2009. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Australian women's poetry. Her contact is j.har@bigpond.com
Kevin Hart [Australia's loss & America's gain] left Melbourne in 2001 to take up a position at University of Notre Dame and is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. He has eleven poetry collections (books & chapbooks) including Wicked Heat ('99) & Flame Tree ('02). His several books of literary & philosophical criticism include The Trespass of the Sign; Postmodernism : A Beginner's Guide; The Dark Gaze : Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. A new collection, Young Rain, is due soon from Giramondo (Sydney).
Carol Jenkins continues to record & publish the River Road CD series of Australian poets from her Sydney pad. See Poems & Pieces #1 for more bio. Her first collection of poems is due soon from Puncher & Wattman.
Robert Jordan after a sojourn in Japan, lives in Melbourne's West, thus a Bulldogs supporter. A Guinness & green tea drinker. Once upon a time a painter of icons within the Orthodox community, an exhibiting artist, a tram-conductor, ESL teacher, & always a note-taker. Now, a writer of cinquain. His contact is tahongo@yahoo.com
Alex Lewis lives in Melbourne. Published a collection of prose fiction in 2007 in the wake of his winning the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition. Recently returned from his Grand Tour which included Spain.
Earl Livings lives in Melbourne, heading up the Box Hill creative writing programme and editing Divan, which was Australia's first on-line poetry journal. His collection, Further than Night (Bystander Press) published in 2000. His contact is e.livings@bhtafe.edu.au
POEMS & PIECES, #4, July/August, 2008 : Correspondence
IAN CAMPBELL
Notes from Sydney
I returned to Sydney after attending most of the splendid 'Poetry and the Trace' conference, convened by Monash University, and involving the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies together with the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research. It was a pioneering conference, in so many ways, and all credit is due to the convenors, and more generally, Monash University, for sponsoring it. As one who takes a keen interest in aspects of 20th century English modernist poetry, as well as our own 'Australian story', it nevertheless did highlight for me the relative lack of knowledge amongst our younger generation of poets about developments in our Asia-Pacific region. Perhaps this could be the focus of another conference at a later time.
As one who has followed some of these developments in recent years, it may interest readers to learn of some of my recent publications in the field of contemporary Indonesian poetry, following research at Sydney University. The book Contemporary Indonesian Language Poetry from West Java: National Literature, Regional Manifestations (VDM-Verlag, Germany, May 2008, ISBN: 978-3-639-00952-1) maps out aspects of developments in contemporary Indonesian language poetry in West Java. While there have been various studies undertaken concerning the development of modern Indonesian literature, paradoxically relatively few have focused on the regional setting of the modern Indonesian literature story. Those that have taken account of regional developments have tended to examine literature in the Indonesian regional languages themselves, such as Javanese and Sundanese. Following research over the years 2002-2006, I show how a number of contemporary poets in West Java have considered their local environmental settings and developed creative literary responses that cross boundaries into the realms of mystery and the mystical, of allusion or hard-edged realism. A feature of this book is the large number of English language translations of work of some prominent poets from West Java. A national literature, in its regional manifestations, explained in English, with Indonesian language original and source material. For those not wishing to source the work in book form, most of the material covered can also be accessed at: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/1219
I have also completed two self-standing journal articles which explore the work of two poets from West Java - Nenden Lilis Aisyah and Acep Zamzam Noor. In 'Mystery, Allusion and Realism: Beyond the Local in the Indonesian language poetry of Nenden Lilis Aisyah' (Orientierungen - Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens, Bonn, Vol. 19, No 1, 1/2007, pp. 47-83), I suggest that one of the challenges facing contemporary 'regional' poets writing in Indonesian today is how to achieve a balance between poetry that draws upon the strengths engendered by allusions to aspects of the local, often rural, environment whilst at the same time producing a poetry that has potentially universal appeal beyong the local geographical context.That article examined some of the dominant characteristics and themes taken up in her Indonesian language poetry by Nenden Lilis Aisyah, born in Malangbong, Garut, West Java in 1971. I also suggest that Nenden's approach to poetry writing represents a distinctive style of verse in the Indonesian pantheon of contemporary writing by women - the balance between 'mystery' and 'exploitation' which is at the heart of her poetry.
In 'Mysticism, aestheticism and activism : Towards the universal in the Indonesian language poetry of Acep Zamzam Noor', in Orientierungen - Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens, Bonn, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1/2008, pp. 109-147, I refer to Secrets Need Words, the landmark 2001 survey by Harry Aveling of Indonesian language poetry written between 1966 and 1998.Aveling employed the term 'new Sufism' to describe the emergence onto the Indonesian literary scene of a number of pesantren-linked poets, such as Emha Ainun Nadjib, Ahmadun Yosi Herfanda and Acep Zamzam Noor. This article examines some of the Indonesian language poetry of Acep Zamzam Noor, born in Tasikmalaya, West Java, in 1960. It explores some of the poems described by Aveling under the 'new Sufist' rubric, but suggests that there are a number of additional characteristics in Acep's verse. Poetry written by Acep whilst in Europe in the 1990s can also be considered as evidencing the centrality of the poet's ideas about the 'aesthetic experience', even if many of the poems from this period also bear traces of what might be termed a 'Sufist imprint'. Such poems also seem to be greatly influenced by the fact that Acep is not solely a poet but a painter of some note too. In other more localised poetry, aspects of the environment in rural West Java enter into his poetry as metaphors for life and existence, per se. Yet there is also a sharp satirical edge to range of poems written by this poet-activist as he grapples with ideas about the responsibilities of the artist in contemporary Indonesia. In addition to the many translations into English of a selection of Acep's poetry within the journal article, the article (in English) is also accompanied by a series of translations of Acep's poems into German by German Indonesianist and literary translator, Berthold Damshauser.
Quite apart from my literary research, in recent years I have been writing poetry in Indonesian and in 2004 and 2007 I undertook a series of literary visits to Indonesia with readings of my Indonesian language poetry in West Java and Bali (2004) and West Java (2007) in conjunction with local literary and other associations. Some background information on my interest in writing in Indonesian is set out at: www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2005/oct05/article5.html A collection of twenty five of these poems was published in February 2008 at:http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/568/558 (Indonesian)
and http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/rt/metadata/568/0 ) (English). In the collection, titled Selatan-Sur-South and published in Indonesian in the UTS ejournal, PORTAL, in February 2008, I traverse sites in Australia, Indonesia and Latin America from the standpoint of one interested in exploring what it means to be ' a poet from the South'.
Whilst in Melbourne in July I also attended two other conferences, also sponsored by Monash University!! For these conferences I did present session papers. The theme of the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, convened by Dr Marika Vicziany, Director, Monash Asia Institute, with others at Monash, was the question: 'Is this the Asian Century', with keynote speakers from the People's Republic of China, with various perspectives, and other speakers from the Indian Subcontinent. Lively discussion ensued derived from the current focus in Australian public affairs on the roles of China and also India and Pakistan, in particular, with the issues of human rights always a recurring theme. Given my academic background in the literature of contemporary Indonesia, especially contemporary Indonesian language poetry, a session strand of particular interest to me at the conference was that organized by Dr Julian Millie, Monash Asia Institute, on 'Reading Nusantara Writing'. Sixteen session papers explored aspects of the texts and writings of the Malay world, of contemporary Indonesian poetry and of Javanese, Buginese and Balinese texts and performance genres. My own paper: 'Neruda's Asia: Interpreting aspects of the life and poetry of Chilean Poet, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), and the reception of his poetry into contemporary Indonesian literature' represents, in part, an attempt to look at new material - about Neruda's life in Burma, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies from 1927-1931. Much useful information is now becoming available from works in Spanish, such as Hernan Loyola's 2006 book Neruda: La biografia literaria, which covers the period 1904-1932 of Neruda's life. A highlight of the session was a first-ever reading I did of Harry Aveling's English language co-translation of a poem by contemporary Indonesian poet, Cecep Syamsul Hari, titled "Molto Allegro", which takes Neruda's 1933 poem, "Walking Around", as a point of departure. It was pleasing that the co-translator was able to hear a rendering of the English translation of one of the very fine poems from this contemporary Indonesian poet whose work has recently been included in the new (April 2008) Norton anthology of poetry, Language for a new Century: Contemporary poetry from the Middle East, Asia and beyond(ed.Tina Chang et al.)
The theme of the Biennial Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia convened by Stewart King and others at Monash University was: 'The Popular in Spain, Portugal and Latin America'. In my session paper: 'Popular reactions to the death of Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006): Aspects of the Chilean experience of 2006', I looked at the events that occurred in Santiago de Chile in December 2006 when Pinochet died, and drew upon some of the satirical coverage which appeared in December 2006 in the Chilean broadsheet review, The Clinic. This Spanish language bi-weekly, established in 1998, has set new standards in satire and topical cultural comment and is a part of the 'new wave' of Chilean writing and publishing that has emerged in Chile since 1998 when Pinochet finally left the post of Armed Forces Commander. As one with an academic specialisation in Indonesian Studies - who just happened to be in Chile in December 2006 when Pinochet died - I was struck by the many similarities between the Chilean experiences (with Pinochet), and those in Indonesia (with Soeharto).
Notes from Sydney
I returned to Sydney after attending most of the splendid 'Poetry and the Trace' conference, convened by Monash University, and involving the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies together with the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research. It was a pioneering conference, in so many ways, and all credit is due to the convenors, and more generally, Monash University, for sponsoring it. As one who takes a keen interest in aspects of 20th century English modernist poetry, as well as our own 'Australian story', it nevertheless did highlight for me the relative lack of knowledge amongst our younger generation of poets about developments in our Asia-Pacific region. Perhaps this could be the focus of another conference at a later time.
As one who has followed some of these developments in recent years, it may interest readers to learn of some of my recent publications in the field of contemporary Indonesian poetry, following research at Sydney University. The book Contemporary Indonesian Language Poetry from West Java: National Literature, Regional Manifestations (VDM-Verlag, Germany, May 2008, ISBN: 978-3-639-00952-1) maps out aspects of developments in contemporary Indonesian language poetry in West Java. While there have been various studies undertaken concerning the development of modern Indonesian literature, paradoxically relatively few have focused on the regional setting of the modern Indonesian literature story. Those that have taken account of regional developments have tended to examine literature in the Indonesian regional languages themselves, such as Javanese and Sundanese. Following research over the years 2002-2006, I show how a number of contemporary poets in West Java have considered their local environmental settings and developed creative literary responses that cross boundaries into the realms of mystery and the mystical, of allusion or hard-edged realism. A feature of this book is the large number of English language translations of work of some prominent poets from West Java. A national literature, in its regional manifestations, explained in English, with Indonesian language original and source material. For those not wishing to source the work in book form, most of the material covered can also be accessed at: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/1219
I have also completed two self-standing journal articles which explore the work of two poets from West Java - Nenden Lilis Aisyah and Acep Zamzam Noor. In 'Mystery, Allusion and Realism: Beyond the Local in the Indonesian language poetry of Nenden Lilis Aisyah' (Orientierungen - Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens, Bonn, Vol. 19, No 1, 1/2007, pp. 47-83), I suggest that one of the challenges facing contemporary 'regional' poets writing in Indonesian today is how to achieve a balance between poetry that draws upon the strengths engendered by allusions to aspects of the local, often rural, environment whilst at the same time producing a poetry that has potentially universal appeal beyong the local geographical context.That article examined some of the dominant characteristics and themes taken up in her Indonesian language poetry by Nenden Lilis Aisyah, born in Malangbong, Garut, West Java in 1971. I also suggest that Nenden's approach to poetry writing represents a distinctive style of verse in the Indonesian pantheon of contemporary writing by women - the balance between 'mystery' and 'exploitation' which is at the heart of her poetry.
In 'Mysticism, aestheticism and activism : Towards the universal in the Indonesian language poetry of Acep Zamzam Noor', in Orientierungen - Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens, Bonn, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1/2008, pp. 109-147, I refer to Secrets Need Words, the landmark 2001 survey by Harry Aveling of Indonesian language poetry written between 1966 and 1998.Aveling employed the term 'new Sufism' to describe the emergence onto the Indonesian literary scene of a number of pesantren-linked poets, such as Emha Ainun Nadjib, Ahmadun Yosi Herfanda and Acep Zamzam Noor. This article examines some of the Indonesian language poetry of Acep Zamzam Noor, born in Tasikmalaya, West Java, in 1960. It explores some of the poems described by Aveling under the 'new Sufist' rubric, but suggests that there are a number of additional characteristics in Acep's verse. Poetry written by Acep whilst in Europe in the 1990s can also be considered as evidencing the centrality of the poet's ideas about the 'aesthetic experience', even if many of the poems from this period also bear traces of what might be termed a 'Sufist imprint'. Such poems also seem to be greatly influenced by the fact that Acep is not solely a poet but a painter of some note too. In other more localised poetry, aspects of the environment in rural West Java enter into his poetry as metaphors for life and existence, per se. Yet there is also a sharp satirical edge to range of poems written by this poet-activist as he grapples with ideas about the responsibilities of the artist in contemporary Indonesia. In addition to the many translations into English of a selection of Acep's poetry within the journal article, the article (in English) is also accompanied by a series of translations of Acep's poems into German by German Indonesianist and literary translator, Berthold Damshauser.
Quite apart from my literary research, in recent years I have been writing poetry in Indonesian and in 2004 and 2007 I undertook a series of literary visits to Indonesia with readings of my Indonesian language poetry in West Java and Bali (2004) and West Java (2007) in conjunction with local literary and other associations. Some background information on my interest in writing in Indonesian is set out at: www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2005/oct05/article5.html A collection of twenty five of these poems was published in February 2008 at:http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/568/558 (Indonesian)
and http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/rt/metadata/568/0 ) (English). In the collection, titled Selatan-Sur-South and published in Indonesian in the UTS ejournal, PORTAL, in February 2008, I traverse sites in Australia, Indonesia and Latin America from the standpoint of one interested in exploring what it means to be ' a poet from the South'.
Whilst in Melbourne in July I also attended two other conferences, also sponsored by Monash University!! For these conferences I did present session papers. The theme of the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, convened by Dr Marika Vicziany, Director, Monash Asia Institute, with others at Monash, was the question: 'Is this the Asian Century', with keynote speakers from the People's Republic of China, with various perspectives, and other speakers from the Indian Subcontinent. Lively discussion ensued derived from the current focus in Australian public affairs on the roles of China and also India and Pakistan, in particular, with the issues of human rights always a recurring theme. Given my academic background in the literature of contemporary Indonesia, especially contemporary Indonesian language poetry, a session strand of particular interest to me at the conference was that organized by Dr Julian Millie, Monash Asia Institute, on 'Reading Nusantara Writing'. Sixteen session papers explored aspects of the texts and writings of the Malay world, of contemporary Indonesian poetry and of Javanese, Buginese and Balinese texts and performance genres. My own paper: 'Neruda's Asia: Interpreting aspects of the life and poetry of Chilean Poet, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), and the reception of his poetry into contemporary Indonesian literature' represents, in part, an attempt to look at new material - about Neruda's life in Burma, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies from 1927-1931. Much useful information is now becoming available from works in Spanish, such as Hernan Loyola's 2006 book Neruda: La biografia literaria, which covers the period 1904-1932 of Neruda's life. A highlight of the session was a first-ever reading I did of Harry Aveling's English language co-translation of a poem by contemporary Indonesian poet, Cecep Syamsul Hari, titled "Molto Allegro", which takes Neruda's 1933 poem, "Walking Around", as a point of departure. It was pleasing that the co-translator was able to hear a rendering of the English translation of one of the very fine poems from this contemporary Indonesian poet whose work has recently been included in the new (April 2008) Norton anthology of poetry, Language for a new Century: Contemporary poetry from the Middle East, Asia and beyond(ed.Tina Chang et al.)
The theme of the Biennial Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia convened by Stewart King and others at Monash University was: 'The Popular in Spain, Portugal and Latin America'. In my session paper: 'Popular reactions to the death of Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006): Aspects of the Chilean experience of 2006', I looked at the events that occurred in Santiago de Chile in December 2006 when Pinochet died, and drew upon some of the satirical coverage which appeared in December 2006 in the Chilean broadsheet review, The Clinic. This Spanish language bi-weekly, established in 1998, has set new standards in satire and topical cultural comment and is a part of the 'new wave' of Chilean writing and publishing that has emerged in Chile since 1998 when Pinochet finally left the post of Armed Forces Commander. As one with an academic specialisation in Indonesian Studies - who just happened to be in Chile in December 2006 when Pinochet died - I was struck by the many similarities between the Chilean experiences (with Pinochet), and those in Indonesia (with Soeharto).
POEMS & PIECES, #4, July/August,2008 : In Memorium, Kathleen Raine
EARL LIVINGS
KATHLEEN RAINE: AN APPRECIATION
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Kathleen Raine, the English visionary poet and scholar. In 1991 Britain’s Royal Society of Literature named Raine one of the 10 greatest living writers and the following year she received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Raine’s reputation extended beyond her native country, with her poetry, autobiographies and studies of William Blake and W B Yeats read from Sweden to Spain to India and the USA. In 2000 she was awarded the Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was honoured as a Commander of the British Empire. Raine died in London in July 2003, having seen a new Collected Poems published in 2000 and her 1968 classic study of William Blake, Blake and Tradition, reprinted in 2002. She was a remarkable woman who devoted her life to poetry.
Kathleen Raine was born 14 June 1908 in Ilford, Essex, to a Scottish mother who sang border ballads to her and a Durham father who was an English teacher and a Methodist lay preacher. From an early age Raine was convinced she would be a poet and this led to her to Cambridge, where she trained in the Natural Sciences and Psychology. This conviction also led her to a lifelong exploration of the Romantic poets and the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions, as well as Gnosticsm, Hermeticism, Alchemy and the Kabbala. Nurtured in memory and imagination by her childhood Northumbrian countryside, Raine constantly followed what she called her Daimon, her creative and intuitive principle, to the point she decided she would never engage in paid work unless the activity was one she would gladly do for free. Raine’s life became a vigorous exploration of poetry as ‘the language of the human soul, through which the spirit speaks’.
In a letter to the Indian poet and Aurobindo devotee K D Sethna, Raine stated that the task of the visionary poet is to reveal the ‘daily miracle and mystery’ of Being. She worked at this task, producing, what Philip Larkin noted in his review of her 1956 Collected Poems, poetry of the ‘vatic and the universal’. Here are some sample lines:
From ‘The Hyacinth’:
Time opens in a flower of bells
The mysteries of its hidden bed,
The altar of the ageless cells
Whose generations never have been dead.
And from ‘The Poet Answers the Accuser’:
A note struck from the stars I am,
A memory-trace of sun and moon and moving waters,
A voice of the unnumbered dead, fleeting as they—
What matter who I am?
In her autobiographies she gave an account of who she was and had become, and of her growth towards the perennial tradition that would inform her writing and her activities for many decades. As a scholar she wrote a large number of books tracing the ‘golden string’ of that tradition and exploring its manifestations in the works of Yeats and her acknowledged master, William Blake. And as a champion for this tradition during its conflict, its Great Battle, with a secular materialist age, she helped establish the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies and edited the journals Temenos and Temenos Academy Review, the goals of these institutions being the preservation and presentation of what she came to call ‘the learning of the Imagination’. The following lines can be seen as a summation of her life and the theme of her writings:
From ‘Soliloquies’
To make the imperfect perfect
It is enough to love it.
Contrary to Raine, I came to the vocation of poetry quite late. Before this, I had studied higher order mathematics at university, played guitar in a band, and practised martial arts. I was looking for my authentic creative outlet, and I eventually discovered a direction when I started writing speculative fiction, which I had been reading since a child. I had also dabbled in teenage love poetry and song lyrics, but had never thought of poetry as a way of life until I met a practising poet. I fell in love with poetry and went back to university to study English Literature. One day I was walking down an aisle of the Borchardt Library at La Trobe University, idly running my fingers along the spines of books, when the gold lettering on burgundy background of a title caught me: Defending Ancient Springs. The book, published by Raine in 1967, was a collection of essays about symbols, the Beautiful, the mythological, about the influence of Blake on Yeats, and about the life and works of poets such as Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins. I took it home and read it non-stop. Here was what I was looking for, the poetics I needed for my true work.
When Raine mentions in her essay ‘On the Symbol’ that ‘poetry in the full sense is symbolic discourse’ and that the symbol has ‘as its primary purpose the evocation of one plane in terms of another’, that one plane being of a reality and consciousness ‘other than that of the sensible world’, then, even though I had once been a scientist of sorts, with interests in the laws of the physical universe and in the power of reason, I took notice. I too felt that poetry was more than, as she said, the ‘description of sense impressions or personal emotions, or the evocation of group emotions’. I could understand the assessment given in her essay ‘The Use of the Beautiful’:
Imaginative poetry alone has a real function to perform; for the pseudo-arts of realism perform no function beyond that of endlessly reporting on the physical world...true poetry has the power of transforming consciousness itself by holding before us icons, images of forms only partially and superficially realized in ‘ordinary life’.
Raine’s book was a revelation. It was as if I had suddenly found the overlapping terrain of all my experiences in mathematics, music and the martial arts, of my reading of Eastern philosophies and the practice of meditation, and of my shift in interests from the rational to the emotional to the spiritual. I had found a tradition in which I could feel comfortable, enthused and inspired, that of the Perennial Philosophy, which holds ‘that not matter but mind—consciousness—is the ground of reality as we experience it’. Here was a tradition that had an enabling power for my poetry writing and for my quest for wisdom:
Imaginative knowledge is immediate knowledge, like a tree, or a rose or a waterfall or sun or stars…Imagination as understood by the Romantic poets is nothing less than the fundamental ground of knowledge.
I read everything of Raine’s I could find, and was led to many poets, philosophers and practitioners for whom ‘True imaginative learning is a search for truth and reality, not for information as such or in the service of some theory or ideology’. My poetry became even more metaphysical and mythological. I was able to complete a book project I had been contemplating for almost 20 years, a metaphysical verse novel of over 8,000 lines, which formed the major part of my PhD. I joined the Temenos Academy and appeared in the journal.
After I published my first book of poetry, I sent a copy to Kathleen Raine, along with my thanks for her influence and inspiration. Her reply I will always cherish. In it she said:
It seems to me that Australia is experiencing a renaissance—or perhaps a naissance—of the arts of the Imagination. You have already produced Patrick White and Sydney Nolan, and the fine poetry of Judith Wright...I also think of your musician Nigel Butterley...Not to mention the wonderful art of your Aboriginal people...It is a spirit that moves through many...
This spirit she invoked and expressed in numerous poems, for example, ‘Storm-Stayed’:
Holy, holy, holy is the light of day
The grey cloud, the storm wind, the cold sea,
Holy, holy the snow in the mountain,
Holy the stone, the dry heather, the stunted tree,
Holy the heron and the hoodie, holy
The leaf and the rain,
The cold wind and the cold wave, cold light of day
And the turning of earth from night into morning,
Holy this place where I am,
The last house, it may be,
Before the wind, the shelterless sky, the unbounded sea.
And this spirit that moved through her moved others. Because of her I found a tradition and a community. Because of her I found a framework for my own intuitions and experiences of the sacred. Because of her I came to understand a little of that dynamic she calls, following AE (George Russell, that mystic friend of Yeats), the politics of Time and the politics of Eternity. Because of her I began to understand the power of such images and symbols as the ‘world-tree and its fruits, the birds of the soul, sun, moon, river, loom, dragon, gate, and dark tower’. Because of her I became more acquainted with Imagination, with Divine Vision, that power, that one thing, as Blake says, that makes a poet. Through her I found my place in the thread that unites the entire European tradition of imaginative poetry:
Yeats and Shelley, Blake and Milton, Dante, Virgil, Ovid, Spenser, and Coleridge all speak with the same symbolic language and discourse of the immemorial world of the imagination.
And, like her, I am content to play my part in keeping, as she once said, quoting Blake, ‘the Divine Vision in time of trouble’.
In the Forward to her Collected Poems, Kathleen Raine stated she wished her work to be judged in the light of the perennial wisdom she had discovered through the works of Blake and Yeats: ‘Better to be a little fish in the great ocean than to be a big fish in some literary rock pool’. She may have thought of herself as a little fish, but the significance of her works and endeavours are considerable. Even in Australia there is much interest in her activities, as shown by the establishment in 1997 of The Barbara Blackman Temenos Foundation, which annually brings Temenos speakers on a lecture tour of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. And of course there are those poets and scholars who continue to explore and express ‘the learning of the Imagination’, that ‘great ocean’ of the soul.
Below is a poem I wrote after her death. It is called, naturally enough,
Defending Ancient Springs
i.m. Kathleen Raine
If she had never crossed
From Eternity through water
With ache to reveal our Eden
Always everywhere, in storm,
Colour of wild hills, skeins
Of bird song, each flower’s
Benediction to sun, the genius
Of spirals in rock pools.
If she had never explored
The learning of the Imagination
Through vision, through rendition
Of other pioneers of presence
And return, cave, loom, tiger,
Rose and gyre, fourfold holy cities,
Open secret to all who listen
Past the mechanics of bird’s flight.
And if I like others had never
Stopped in a library aisle, fingers
Tracing her defence of symbol
And light upon the spine—
No deep recall of kinship,
No wisdom fountaining of grace.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[An earlier version of this paper formed the basis of a talk given to celebrate the life and works of Kathleen Raine, at Evensong, Christ Church Anglican Church, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, 2 March 2008.]
KATHLEEN RAINE: AN APPRECIATION
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Kathleen Raine, the English visionary poet and scholar. In 1991 Britain’s Royal Society of Literature named Raine one of the 10 greatest living writers and the following year she received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Raine’s reputation extended beyond her native country, with her poetry, autobiographies and studies of William Blake and W B Yeats read from Sweden to Spain to India and the USA. In 2000 she was awarded the Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was honoured as a Commander of the British Empire. Raine died in London in July 2003, having seen a new Collected Poems published in 2000 and her 1968 classic study of William Blake, Blake and Tradition, reprinted in 2002. She was a remarkable woman who devoted her life to poetry.
Kathleen Raine was born 14 June 1908 in Ilford, Essex, to a Scottish mother who sang border ballads to her and a Durham father who was an English teacher and a Methodist lay preacher. From an early age Raine was convinced she would be a poet and this led to her to Cambridge, where she trained in the Natural Sciences and Psychology. This conviction also led her to a lifelong exploration of the Romantic poets and the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions, as well as Gnosticsm, Hermeticism, Alchemy and the Kabbala. Nurtured in memory and imagination by her childhood Northumbrian countryside, Raine constantly followed what she called her Daimon, her creative and intuitive principle, to the point she decided she would never engage in paid work unless the activity was one she would gladly do for free. Raine’s life became a vigorous exploration of poetry as ‘the language of the human soul, through which the spirit speaks’.
In a letter to the Indian poet and Aurobindo devotee K D Sethna, Raine stated that the task of the visionary poet is to reveal the ‘daily miracle and mystery’ of Being. She worked at this task, producing, what Philip Larkin noted in his review of her 1956 Collected Poems, poetry of the ‘vatic and the universal’. Here are some sample lines:
From ‘The Hyacinth’:
Time opens in a flower of bells
The mysteries of its hidden bed,
The altar of the ageless cells
Whose generations never have been dead.
And from ‘The Poet Answers the Accuser’:
A note struck from the stars I am,
A memory-trace of sun and moon and moving waters,
A voice of the unnumbered dead, fleeting as they—
What matter who I am?
In her autobiographies she gave an account of who she was and had become, and of her growth towards the perennial tradition that would inform her writing and her activities for many decades. As a scholar she wrote a large number of books tracing the ‘golden string’ of that tradition and exploring its manifestations in the works of Yeats and her acknowledged master, William Blake. And as a champion for this tradition during its conflict, its Great Battle, with a secular materialist age, she helped establish the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies and edited the journals Temenos and Temenos Academy Review, the goals of these institutions being the preservation and presentation of what she came to call ‘the learning of the Imagination’. The following lines can be seen as a summation of her life and the theme of her writings:
From ‘Soliloquies’
To make the imperfect perfect
It is enough to love it.
Contrary to Raine, I came to the vocation of poetry quite late. Before this, I had studied higher order mathematics at university, played guitar in a band, and practised martial arts. I was looking for my authentic creative outlet, and I eventually discovered a direction when I started writing speculative fiction, which I had been reading since a child. I had also dabbled in teenage love poetry and song lyrics, but had never thought of poetry as a way of life until I met a practising poet. I fell in love with poetry and went back to university to study English Literature. One day I was walking down an aisle of the Borchardt Library at La Trobe University, idly running my fingers along the spines of books, when the gold lettering on burgundy background of a title caught me: Defending Ancient Springs. The book, published by Raine in 1967, was a collection of essays about symbols, the Beautiful, the mythological, about the influence of Blake on Yeats, and about the life and works of poets such as Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins. I took it home and read it non-stop. Here was what I was looking for, the poetics I needed for my true work.
When Raine mentions in her essay ‘On the Symbol’ that ‘poetry in the full sense is symbolic discourse’ and that the symbol has ‘as its primary purpose the evocation of one plane in terms of another’, that one plane being of a reality and consciousness ‘other than that of the sensible world’, then, even though I had once been a scientist of sorts, with interests in the laws of the physical universe and in the power of reason, I took notice. I too felt that poetry was more than, as she said, the ‘description of sense impressions or personal emotions, or the evocation of group emotions’. I could understand the assessment given in her essay ‘The Use of the Beautiful’:
Imaginative poetry alone has a real function to perform; for the pseudo-arts of realism perform no function beyond that of endlessly reporting on the physical world...true poetry has the power of transforming consciousness itself by holding before us icons, images of forms only partially and superficially realized in ‘ordinary life’.
Raine’s book was a revelation. It was as if I had suddenly found the overlapping terrain of all my experiences in mathematics, music and the martial arts, of my reading of Eastern philosophies and the practice of meditation, and of my shift in interests from the rational to the emotional to the spiritual. I had found a tradition in which I could feel comfortable, enthused and inspired, that of the Perennial Philosophy, which holds ‘that not matter but mind—consciousness—is the ground of reality as we experience it’. Here was a tradition that had an enabling power for my poetry writing and for my quest for wisdom:
Imaginative knowledge is immediate knowledge, like a tree, or a rose or a waterfall or sun or stars…Imagination as understood by the Romantic poets is nothing less than the fundamental ground of knowledge.
I read everything of Raine’s I could find, and was led to many poets, philosophers and practitioners for whom ‘True imaginative learning is a search for truth and reality, not for information as such or in the service of some theory or ideology’. My poetry became even more metaphysical and mythological. I was able to complete a book project I had been contemplating for almost 20 years, a metaphysical verse novel of over 8,000 lines, which formed the major part of my PhD. I joined the Temenos Academy and appeared in the journal.
After I published my first book of poetry, I sent a copy to Kathleen Raine, along with my thanks for her influence and inspiration. Her reply I will always cherish. In it she said:
It seems to me that Australia is experiencing a renaissance—or perhaps a naissance—of the arts of the Imagination. You have already produced Patrick White and Sydney Nolan, and the fine poetry of Judith Wright...I also think of your musician Nigel Butterley...Not to mention the wonderful art of your Aboriginal people...It is a spirit that moves through many...
This spirit she invoked and expressed in numerous poems, for example, ‘Storm-Stayed’:
Holy, holy, holy is the light of day
The grey cloud, the storm wind, the cold sea,
Holy, holy the snow in the mountain,
Holy the stone, the dry heather, the stunted tree,
Holy the heron and the hoodie, holy
The leaf and the rain,
The cold wind and the cold wave, cold light of day
And the turning of earth from night into morning,
Holy this place where I am,
The last house, it may be,
Before the wind, the shelterless sky, the unbounded sea.
And this spirit that moved through her moved others. Because of her I found a tradition and a community. Because of her I found a framework for my own intuitions and experiences of the sacred. Because of her I came to understand a little of that dynamic she calls, following AE (George Russell, that mystic friend of Yeats), the politics of Time and the politics of Eternity. Because of her I began to understand the power of such images and symbols as the ‘world-tree and its fruits, the birds of the soul, sun, moon, river, loom, dragon, gate, and dark tower’. Because of her I became more acquainted with Imagination, with Divine Vision, that power, that one thing, as Blake says, that makes a poet. Through her I found my place in the thread that unites the entire European tradition of imaginative poetry:
Yeats and Shelley, Blake and Milton, Dante, Virgil, Ovid, Spenser, and Coleridge all speak with the same symbolic language and discourse of the immemorial world of the imagination.
And, like her, I am content to play my part in keeping, as she once said, quoting Blake, ‘the Divine Vision in time of trouble’.
In the Forward to her Collected Poems, Kathleen Raine stated she wished her work to be judged in the light of the perennial wisdom she had discovered through the works of Blake and Yeats: ‘Better to be a little fish in the great ocean than to be a big fish in some literary rock pool’. She may have thought of herself as a little fish, but the significance of her works and endeavours are considerable. Even in Australia there is much interest in her activities, as shown by the establishment in 1997 of The Barbara Blackman Temenos Foundation, which annually brings Temenos speakers on a lecture tour of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. And of course there are those poets and scholars who continue to explore and express ‘the learning of the Imagination’, that ‘great ocean’ of the soul.
Below is a poem I wrote after her death. It is called, naturally enough,
Defending Ancient Springs
i.m. Kathleen Raine
If she had never crossed
From Eternity through water
With ache to reveal our Eden
Always everywhere, in storm,
Colour of wild hills, skeins
Of bird song, each flower’s
Benediction to sun, the genius
Of spirals in rock pools.
If she had never explored
The learning of the Imagination
Through vision, through rendition
Of other pioneers of presence
And return, cave, loom, tiger,
Rose and gyre, fourfold holy cities,
Open secret to all who listen
Past the mechanics of bird’s flight.
And if I like others had never
Stopped in a library aisle, fingers
Tracing her defence of symbol
And light upon the spine—
No deep recall of kinship,
No wisdom fountaining of grace.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[An earlier version of this paper formed the basis of a talk given to celebrate the life and works of Kathleen Raine, at Evensong, Christ Church Anglican Church, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, 2 March 2008.]
Sunday, July 27, 2008
BOOKS THAT DARE NOT SPEAK THEIR NAME
BRITAIN'S ART COLONY BY THE SEA, by Denys Val Baker (pub. George Ronald, London, 1959). What a steal! Mine written all over it tho' it was Alan Pose first spotted it. Told me I'd certainly be interested unless I already owned it. Well, St Ives is a sacred site within one of my key areas of interest. Of course I recalled the title but have never seen the book. Should have been his, then, but he passed. (The article on collecting will be written anon!)
A beautifully made book (missing dustcover? --no matter, leaf-green hard-back), pristine after half a century. Denys Val Baker states that it's "not a book of art criticism" but an "introductory survey" of St Ives art & artists, hoping that "more exhaustive studies may follow". Quite obviously written by such an enthusiast as the ex-editor of the Cornish Review would have to be, no jargon, plenty of reproductions of paintings, sculpture, pottery, & fine photos of the artists in situ (John Wells, paint-spattered Peter Lanyon, Barbara Hepworth in her now famous, tho' scarred with personal tragedy, Trewyn studio, John Pecks, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in dramatic silhouette painting above the bay, Bernard Leach, Sven Berlin sculpting with mallet & chisel outdoors). The black & white plates arent the compromise they'd be in a contemporary publication; black & white is the colour of the historical one could say, and besides, the b & w reproduction is positive as colour, not for a moment denoting its absence.
Although there is a St Ives history & the history that takes one there, just one visit is sufficient to appreciate the rare reflecting-mirror of art & place. It's one of those locations in the world where the iconic pictures recall the place and vice-versa. Therefore there's a continuum and an ever-current expressive potential within the equation of art & place. (Because of Georgia O'Keefe, prime amongst others, Taos & the New Mexico desert would enjoy similar status I guess...) It adds up to tradition by now... The book, by extension, is both historical & current.
The frontispiece photograph is the quintessential evocation of the scene (--altho' morning or afternoon tea isnt quite the St Ives legend; and in whose studio I'd love to know? --could work it out via identification of the paintings in the room, especially the harbour scene on the easel with its sketch behind), after all, whom better to represent St Ives in the Fifties than smart jacketed Peter Lanyon, raising mug of tea to mouth, long skirted Wilhelmina Barns-Graham standing over the low table of teapot & jug & crockery (playing mother perhaps, the Fifties after all, and therefore her studio?), and could be Winter rather than manners, the straps of the skirt over long sleeve jumper, the men dressed warmly (and is that a tall sock over Lanyon's trouser leg or a trick of the light?)... On the other side of the small table is Sven Berlin, in fisherman's beany, Augustus John-gypsyish, with pointed black beard, flamboyantly cut jacket, mug in hand and behind W B-G's elbow is John Wells, hands about his cup (it must be Winter!), the most reserved by expression. They're listening to Guido Morris, mostly hidden by Peter Lanyon... Typical clutter of studio, "Peinture Moderne" poster on wall...
One can never know everything and though a b & w reproduction of an egg tempera, Cornish Scene, cant say it all, I'm as struck by the luminous high terrace & steps overlooking ocean by Stuart Armfield ("traditionalist" Val Baker describes him in long list of same, John Park, Leonard Fuller, Bernard Ninnes et al), --and perhaps it's the wild flowers occupying the right foreground balanced by the large gulls & the scudding clouds--, as I am the familiar Tunnard, Hepworth, Wallis & Jewel... Another name to investigate! The painters, the sculptors, the potters (-- lovely photo, "Bernard Leach discusses the merits of a pot with his son David and apprentices at Leach Pottery"), a late Fifties' snapshot...
Denys Val Baker's book is like a travel guide for artists & art lovers, documenting even as it solicits custom! Personally, I cant wait to get back there --some years now since Bernard & I visited, staying with Kel Bowers & Dooz Storey, renewing acquaintance with Bob Deveraux at the Salt House gallery, etc etc, rolling around heaven all day... Until then, employ book as magic carpet!
In passing, I picked up Mervyn Levy's little monograph on Ruskin Spear (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986; first published W & N, UK, '85) in Bendigo recently. I happened to mention it to George Hartley (the Marvell Press George Hartley, friend & publisher of Larkin) at Collected Works the other day, in the context of wonderful finds in second-hand bookshops. The less famous English artists, he said, that's my interest too. Touche! He said he'd never ever seen anything on Ruskin Spear and would have snapped it up himself! I hadnt realized it was hard to get. I mentioned the frontispiece painting of John Betjeman, Poet Laureate Afloat (c1974, oil) : Larkin had done a television programme with Betjeman, complained about the filming & all in his usual way, but he loved it really, George said. Never got to meet him myself though, he added.
To be continued...
A beautifully made book (missing dustcover? --no matter, leaf-green hard-back), pristine after half a century. Denys Val Baker states that it's "not a book of art criticism" but an "introductory survey" of St Ives art & artists, hoping that "more exhaustive studies may follow". Quite obviously written by such an enthusiast as the ex-editor of the Cornish Review would have to be, no jargon, plenty of reproductions of paintings, sculpture, pottery, & fine photos of the artists in situ (John Wells, paint-spattered Peter Lanyon, Barbara Hepworth in her now famous, tho' scarred with personal tragedy, Trewyn studio, John Pecks, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in dramatic silhouette painting above the bay, Bernard Leach, Sven Berlin sculpting with mallet & chisel outdoors). The black & white plates arent the compromise they'd be in a contemporary publication; black & white is the colour of the historical one could say, and besides, the b & w reproduction is positive as colour, not for a moment denoting its absence.
Although there is a St Ives history & the history that takes one there, just one visit is sufficient to appreciate the rare reflecting-mirror of art & place. It's one of those locations in the world where the iconic pictures recall the place and vice-versa. Therefore there's a continuum and an ever-current expressive potential within the equation of art & place. (Because of Georgia O'Keefe, prime amongst others, Taos & the New Mexico desert would enjoy similar status I guess...) It adds up to tradition by now... The book, by extension, is both historical & current.
The frontispiece photograph is the quintessential evocation of the scene (--altho' morning or afternoon tea isnt quite the St Ives legend; and in whose studio I'd love to know? --could work it out via identification of the paintings in the room, especially the harbour scene on the easel with its sketch behind), after all, whom better to represent St Ives in the Fifties than smart jacketed Peter Lanyon, raising mug of tea to mouth, long skirted Wilhelmina Barns-Graham standing over the low table of teapot & jug & crockery (playing mother perhaps, the Fifties after all, and therefore her studio?), and could be Winter rather than manners, the straps of the skirt over long sleeve jumper, the men dressed warmly (and is that a tall sock over Lanyon's trouser leg or a trick of the light?)... On the other side of the small table is Sven Berlin, in fisherman's beany, Augustus John-gypsyish, with pointed black beard, flamboyantly cut jacket, mug in hand and behind W B-G's elbow is John Wells, hands about his cup (it must be Winter!), the most reserved by expression. They're listening to Guido Morris, mostly hidden by Peter Lanyon... Typical clutter of studio, "Peinture Moderne" poster on wall...
One can never know everything and though a b & w reproduction of an egg tempera, Cornish Scene, cant say it all, I'm as struck by the luminous high terrace & steps overlooking ocean by Stuart Armfield ("traditionalist" Val Baker describes him in long list of same, John Park, Leonard Fuller, Bernard Ninnes et al), --and perhaps it's the wild flowers occupying the right foreground balanced by the large gulls & the scudding clouds--, as I am the familiar Tunnard, Hepworth, Wallis & Jewel... Another name to investigate! The painters, the sculptors, the potters (-- lovely photo, "Bernard Leach discusses the merits of a pot with his son David and apprentices at Leach Pottery"), a late Fifties' snapshot...
Denys Val Baker's book is like a travel guide for artists & art lovers, documenting even as it solicits custom! Personally, I cant wait to get back there --some years now since Bernard & I visited, staying with Kel Bowers & Dooz Storey, renewing acquaintance with Bob Deveraux at the Salt House gallery, etc etc, rolling around heaven all day... Until then, employ book as magic carpet!
In passing, I picked up Mervyn Levy's little monograph on Ruskin Spear (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986; first published W & N, UK, '85) in Bendigo recently. I happened to mention it to George Hartley (the Marvell Press George Hartley, friend & publisher of Larkin) at Collected Works the other day, in the context of wonderful finds in second-hand bookshops. The less famous English artists, he said, that's my interest too. Touche! He said he'd never ever seen anything on Ruskin Spear and would have snapped it up himself! I hadnt realized it was hard to get. I mentioned the frontispiece painting of John Betjeman, Poet Laureate Afloat (c1974, oil) : Larkin had done a television programme with Betjeman, complained about the filming & all in his usual way, but he loved it really, George said. Never got to meet him myself though, he added.
To be continued...
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