PAUL HARPER
THREE POEMS
*
apps
history teaches us
to walk to paris on a fishing boat
with mercury retrograde
recipes for ice so rarely include
a detailed analysis of the advantages
to miniscule machines in bike path gridlock
or descriptions of that hill
where morning is first measured
& any linkage to rachmaninovs recent status
is to our minds self evidently spurious
we suggest a working party
a petition
an online survey
at very least a stern letter to the editor
perhaps a new chef
perhaps sunset over the oasis
idols revelling in the luxuriant garlands
of arrested early childhood development
oOo
local or general
we will always have the irreducible complexity
of weddings on a paddle steamer
the interminable wait for a new suit
beneath the glistening slate roof of the fossilised house
the ironing
the unclaimed spliff in the breast pocket of a blue shirt
discussion of bourgeois economics insinuating itself into a gleaming
aluminium egg
a sculpture partially eclipsed by snow from a mind known for its disinterest
not only in central european but also & perhaps particularly
alpine democracy
we will always have the emergent properties
of one day cricket in a convent
the rush of late wickets
the terror of a lost limb
the night out that ends with poetry
our backs toward the ocean in a hermit kingdom
little red riding hood botoxed for the mysterious woodsman
enthusiasts trusting a high school crush on the girl who can tie herself
through a wall with her own golden tresses
is based at least in part on the benevolent fallacy her blue echo
arrives last monday
oOo
another day on earth
venture with us to a land of sunshine
behind the waterfalls sparkling curtain
a simple rope trick
& we leave that sheepish mask
at the bottom of the stairs
in a drear grotto
with as much time as we need
to find that bowl
of very specific
if unspecified shape
in some quarters this is known as keeping a lid on things
in others two chairs
or mountains mountains mountains
before the space race
it was not uncommon to flit from one thing to the other
scanners riled parlours & dinner parties
with their erudite contributions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHILLIP KANLIDIS
THREE POEMS
*
1
Talking about the immense scope of the universe
And the length and depth of the world
Of the lifespan of huge trees,
And typically apologising profusely -
I told Virginia about the ants by the freeway
She had seen the dying bees
And how the ants were acknowledged
As being , as entities
Rare living things
Beautiful cosmos
She agreed
And said , write a poem , we'll talk about it.
It was Christmas time and everyone was thinking deeply
The weather was warm and people were celebrating
Virginia was playing the temptress in a passion play
In front of 3000 people
And taking counselling, sorting out experiences.
Virginia , tall as the sky
Unique , bold and valiant
Infinitely worldly and wise
A modern day Saint with long brown hair and jeans
On a personal quest
Dealing with contradictions
Guided by the deep impulse of light
Steadfast in her pursuit of well being
Who does not suffer fools , let alone me
And she passionately strums her guitar
Singing songs of hope and inspiration
Let it be better , in the future
It can only get better , once the plan is in place.
In the city somewhere , Lee was sleeping on cardboard
Barefoot with rags over her head
Drinking cheap wine and thinking sad stories
With 20 dollars in her pocket , a gift from a friend
Whom she hugged and kissed in desperation.
I confirmed Alex's deep strong aura
Almost an overpowering silent presence
And likened hers to sea currents
I was concerned for all , hoping for individual success en masse
In a determined attempt for psychic alignment
For a better domination and overall effect
Where emotions are thoughts
And atomic molecules can be volitionally directed
When white matter expands and flowers
With wishful evolving neuroplasticity
Aiming for holistic geometrical harmony
Against all odds , trauma and despair
Without losing any sleep
Where some parts of the world were collapsing
While in others there was hope
And some special places were mysteriously shining
With an inspired contentment aglow with warm brilliance and peace
My legs were stronger but I was going in for the chop
Another one of those guided near death experiences
"You're shouting into the phone...", Virginia said quietly , wary of my excess
I tried to control my nervous volume
And gulped for breath.
oOo
2/
On Christmas Eve , the gargoyle busker acting like a stone sculpture
Entranced a crowd with his antics on Swanston Street.
I rolled by and caught his still eye and tipped my hat
He acknowledged with a wry smile and salute.
On Christmas Day
Mum found a small brown bird in the yard
Its leg was injured , and couldn't fly
Others birds were picking at it.
She took it in and fed it porridge
Put it in a basket to rest
And later put it outside again,
But it kept coming to her,
From around the front
Onto her shoulder.
Mum saved it
She said , "I am its mother."
oOo
3/
On the day before New Year's Eve
When it was bright and hot
I got off the bus
With a rolled up film poster of Enter The Void in my bag
And went by the path next to the freeway.
A large, scrawny , scraggly rat
Came out of the long grass and followed the footpath
At a leisurely pace in front of me
To the ramp road
It waited for traffic to pass
Then crossed onto a grassy patch on a traffic island.
I followed , on my way home.
The rat was wobbling sideways but kept up pace
I followed it around the grass
then it impatiently crossed the busy wide road
I was concerned for this wily rat
As it made its way across three lanes of tarmac
But in the last dreadful lane
Got clipped by the spinning wheel of an accelerating car
And lay there writhing , tail flickering
This was the worst I could imagine
I was helpless
then another car suddenly squashed it completely
that was the end of the adventurous grey rat
Who had travelled so far
Where was it going?
There was still another four lanes of traffic to go
And beyond that more concrete.
I was sad for this unlikely little creature
Though bush rats in the city are out of favour
I considered an untimely fatal accident
Of one of the smaller things
And the terrible road
What a way to see out the end of the year
With a poor squashed rodent
Amongst the merciless turning
Relentless charging noisy traffic
An unforeseen death one day before New Year
The word rat in Greek is arooraeo
*
[2010]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRASER MACKAY
Three Poems
*
sahasrara
yellow pollen edges the spring pools
enjoying the interval
unravelling theandric threads
the universe's great joke;
hey you!
can you hold this for a minute?
ah the poignancy of failure
a bitter little dessert
with a twist of Rumi
but to linger a while longer
in your fine company
o press me closer
to your voice
to hear again
your rippling arpeggios
and relieve this hard rock
that weighs on my tongue
oOo
snaking home
word-shedding
the well chronicled
minutiae of addiction
in the usual font
dream hands reach out
but my attentive heart advises
you've been gone now
a tidy week
across the doona
a harvest moon
drapes its casual arm
tomorrow you'll be here
approximately
avoiding heart-spaces
our life slipping
with every relocation.
under a black hill
the future leans
precariously skyward
plunged deep in arrhythmia
I lurch around this broken mind
another skulking fox night to endure
wide awake imagining your headlights
snaking through the pines.
oOo
the tangled orchard
coffee-pot, pain-cracked enamel
shadows dance the river stones
in the tangled orchard
a woman scatters grain
the hens scratch and scrabble
stepping backward for a look
worlds fall from her skin
a twinkle still in the ashen sky
knowing attachment
will inevitably bring loss
storm birds rise -- wheeling south
over Black Hill.
*
[these poems are from the collection New Skin (Greendoor Publishing), 2010]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS
PAUL HARPER's poems appeared in Poems & Pieces # 21
PHILLIP KANLIDIS is a visual artist & filmmaker, lives in Melbourne.
FRASER MACKAY lives in Central Victoria; a music/spoken-word performer. Link to fraser@greendoorpublishing.com. See www.greendoorpublishing.com. Published by Deakin Literary Society, Going Down Swinging.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
THE DORSET JOURNEY, 2011 : A CONVERSATION WITH THE STINGY ARTIST
KRIS & BERNARD HEMENSLEY
[20 April, 2011]
K.H. : So what is the 'Abbey' part of 'Goldy Abbey'?
B.H. : It's gone... it's the 'Hermitage' now.
K.H. : 'Goldy' of course is self-explanatory...
B.H. : From 'Goldcroft Road', plus 'gold' is a nice metaphor.
K.H. : What is the hermitage?
B.H. : It's just my place... people always equated my place with wherever I was working...
K.H. : Is this where the hermit lives?
B.H. : it's where a hermit lives, where he would like to live, he's still on the path –maybe he's an Anchorite! --I've always thought of that –I don't think it'll ever happen now : a self-limiting definition which suited the agoraphobic I was –just practice & meditate & see where that led...
K.H. : I always liked the conceit of the 'Abbot of Goldy'... I was interested in the possibilities of a certain kind of fantasy... like, to take on a role or image which did express a sense of who one was or would like to be?
B.H. : Yes, of course. You & Robin [Hemensley] dubbed me the Abbot because of my meditation practice –at one time it was three hours a day –on & off since 1970. You grow into who you're meant to be, both by the way people see you & how you see yourself. And now I feel I've got the life I always wanted & dreamt about. I'm 'busy' for up to 20 hours every day.
K.H. : So, what is this house?
B.H. : One concept derived from Robin's description of 'art houses' in Belgium, when he lived there in recent years : people would visit a house, the whole of which was an exhibition. My idea was that anything & everything in the house was for sale, including the house! Apart from that it's a place for quietness & contemplation, no longer following any one tradition but with its roots in Buddhism & Zen.
K.H. : The whole house is a living gallery –no dedicated exhibition or shop space?
B.H. : Yes, the whole house as home & studio...
K.H. : Regarding the Buddhism & et cetera : from the look of it –the vast library of contemporary & mostly American & Japanese literature –the tradition you refer to must also be based in the themes & practice of the poets, I suppose the West Coast poets?
B.H. : Not totally –I'm still interested in the New Englanders : Ted Enslin, William Bronk, Cid Corman, Larry Eigner, Wendell Berry. Otherwise it was West Coast, Japanese. The first book to get me going was Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones –my copy is the 1961 Anchor Books p/b edition –bought in the mid to late '60s. The reason for getting it was probably the influence of Dad's collection of of Yoga & esoteric books –also the Master Theiron magazines!
K.H. : Yes, and that's a whole other story!
B.H. : Yes, still very interesting. Dad was ahead of his time –auras, colours, diet –all of the New Age interests predated by Master Theiron!
K.H. : What would you like to happen in this house?
B.H. : I'd like it to bring into focus my interests, in the company of other people.
K.H. : So, is it a kind of b & b for esoterics?
B.H. : Only in a very private way –not open slather. It's not business! By invitation only --via family or my own connections...
K.H. : The obvious connections between literature –or let's say poetry --& Buddhism, say, appear to me, as I look around the house, to be Gary Snyder, the Beats –which aint exactly what you'd expect in an English country garden?!
B.H. : It's not what any other local expects either. My nearest English 'collaborator' is Owen Davis, who lives in Bournemouth, 30 miles away, who's into Bukowski, Kerouac, Patchen, Snyder, jazz... He seems to be following another direction now though these are still references in his head.
K.H. : Yes, I remember interviewing Owen in 1987, at Cemetery Lodge just down the road when you lived there. I had an old tape-recorder & a kind of commission from John Tranter, then with the ABC, to record some interviews with English poets to offer a picture of the contemporary situation in the UK. Pretty eccentric though : Owen Davis, Paul Buck, F.T. Prince! Nothing came of it! Actually, I'm a bit confused about the date, because I also interviewed Nicholas Johnson. Perhaps it was Owen & Paul in '87, and Frank & Nicholas in 1990? We sold a copy of Owen's Che Hamzah's Monkey, which you published (Stingy Artist, '88), at Collected Works recently-- nice poems –
B.H. : Yes, Catherine [O'Brien] thought so too –she bought some copies for I : Cat Gallery (in Vientiane). Also Cralan Kelder, on the phone recently from Amsterdam, said he was very taken by those poems...
K.H. : Ah yes, Cralan Kelder [his collection Give Some Word, from Shearsman, UK, 2010] –he'd contacted me via email having found the Poetry & Ideas blog –he's interested in Franco Beltrametti and read references to Franco in my article on Cornelis Vleeskens. And I put him in touch with you as immense stockist of Black Sparrow / Bukowski titles & everything else. And so you were able to send him the two publications of Franco you've produced...
B.H. : Yes –Three for Nado (Stingy Artist / Last Straw Press, UK, 1992) & Two Letters to Nado (Stingy Artist Editions, 2010). Nado was my nickname and in Japanese means “et cetera, et cetera” (as described in one of the Franco letters.
K.H. : It doesnt refer at all, then, to Franco's character Nadamas, in his novel of that name, a section of which I published in my mag, Earth Ship, back in '71 or '72?
B.H. : I didnt think of that --I dont know...
[Break for lunch : bottle of Old Thumper, Bernard's home baked bread, spring onions, cheddar cheese, hommous.
Bread : organic almost 100% wholemeal flours consisting of kamut, wheat, barley, molasses, barley malt, sunflower seeds, fennel seeds, salt, dried yeast, warm water, olive-oil, oat flakes decoration.
Beer : Ringwood Brewery's Old Thumper --”A Beast of a beer” --wonderful picture of boar on label, full frontal & tusked. Alc., 5.6% vol.
“Hampshire's New Forest was historically the hunting ground of legendary fierce wild boar, the prize kill of many an English king. Ringwood Brewery celebrated this heritage with a real beast of a beer in 'Old Thumper'. It delivers a deep brown strong ale with a spicy fruity hop aroma and a warming nutty finish. The distinctive taste has made it a champion Beer of Britain, popular at home and abroad.”]
oOo
[via telephone & email, 1st of May, 2011]
B.H. : Coming from a background of residential social care-work, I naturally tend towards providing a nurturing environment at Goldy. How necessary do you think that might be for writers & artists?
K.H. : I'd like to pull your question into a slightly different discussion, namely the kind of therapeutic occasion such a residence might enhance and whether the making of art, the writing of poetry, benefits from nurture! The thing is, you are making an environment at Goldy, which includes its whole house library of poetry & related literature, and, importantly, or important to you, the food you provide & its informing philosophy. You are simply but thoroughly the host. The environment itself is what will or wont nurture your guest or guests. Being a host to such visitors is not social work in the way your professional background understood it. As you say, the house is where you'll “bring into focus [my] interests, in the company of other people.”
B.H. : It's a resource for writers & artists containing an extensive Zen & Buddhist library. And I'd like to offer a healthy, mainly plant based diet. I have also imagined a Zen sitting group. And do you think a structured environment is necessary?
K.H. : Your artist & writer guests (I'm sure you include readers in that swag) might not of course be Zennists or Buddhists, but they'd be accepting of such as the accent of the place. Fundamentally for visitors it'll be a rather special pied a terre. I wonder if you ever came across the term “eco-monastery”? It was used by John Martin & others in the early '80s here, to describe places which tried to live up to (Deep) ecological principals and to be a combination of retreat & sanctuary. The structure youre wondering about is surely more a general environment or ambiance than a workshop with curriculum!
I actually feel there's a connection between your place in Weymouth, Catherine [O'Brien]'s I : Cat Gallery in Vientiane, Laos, and our Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne. Cathy told me today that she's been congratulated on her gallery's “independence”. I think that means she just gets on with it : providing a space for poetry, art, film events, and a guest-room, for which she takes the responsibility. She's not waiting on other people or organizations' say-so. I:Cat is becoming known in Vientiane but not at the cost of her personal freedom. This her life, her contribution to the creative life where she lives & works. As you say for Goldy, it's not a business! The same at Collected Works : we are a bookshop in the marketplace, but our economics are about surviving & maintaining a particular kind of creative, literary space, not being a commercial success per se.
B.H. : Based on what youve seen of Goldy on your visit, do you think rapprochement between local & international is possible?
K.H. : Well, without being cute, the existence of your house in Weymouth is that rapprochement in practice! And the contradiction of terms, local & international, is only formal; that is to say, it's not mutually exclusive, nor ever was (as if, as said elsewhere, the Ecole du Paris wasnt local)! If you mean, how will you connect with the local when what you've experienced of the local (Weymouth, Dorset, England et al) doesnt connect with you? --then you have to expand your physical/social ambit as well as your definition, otherwise wither on the vine of mutual exclusivity!
When I've asked the question, most recently in context of our Dharma Bum correspondence (elsewhere in this blog), I only ever thought in terms of connections. At the same time, Weymouth isnt Melbourne, Vientiane, California or Japan in its external forms & expressions, but must be connected as yet another place in the world with the potential for authentic encounter & practice!
[Stop, for walking in one hemisphere, sleeping in the other.]
oOo
(edited Kris Hemensley, Melbourne)
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #22, April, 2011
C. D. BARRON
3 POEMS & A LETTER
oOo
THE PALM
"Nevertheless the truth that is in the intellect, some is simple and some is complex."
Joseph Delmedigo, 1629
A star-fish
suckered with hope
as a garden postponed
A helmet of shady thoughts
for an artist's hand splayed
brittle as bread-sticks
A hallowed mountain
feathered with eyelashes
as a lost piece of puzzle
A fragment of moss
on which sits an angel
waving a periwinkle
A sealed fountain self-effaced
a broken bell upturned
holding seventy paradoxes
A palm at the end of the mind
beyond bitter waters
and a desert of moon
[2009/11]
oOo
NEW MOON/Aspasia of the Archway
Self reflection
is the praxis of hypostatic unity
trinity in foil
res before convexity
finding your arche become
more knowing than epochal being
Beautiful you say
now shut up
and let the order begin
in wirkel
in gedichte
in principium
Only without principle can we properly live
self complacency our best hope
syllogisms full of bellis and systematic abuse
bending in haecceity catoptric for life
luteo scorpio this iron stillness is like hell
father fear the enemy in dwelling
[9/1/00/11]
oOo
POSHLOST
"before us the future looms dark, and that we can scarcely...."
Gogol, Dead Souls
Birds
fly through water
like silver
in transaction
whether this be deep
or the half life
is not the question
A half moon
like horns on the head
makes for better sacrifice
than the horizon of Marduk
his slavish destruction of chaos
causes us to forget cuppeity
and the filial tussle with quintessence
[2/'11]
oOo
CORRESPONDENCE :
Thoughts arising from a reading of Kris Hemensley article on Grossinger: -
Basically I hold to the anarchist's tenet, that we are best not to be overly-concerned with endings as to do so is to be purloined by "means". Rather concentrate on the paradoxes and interactions of our times beyond solution. Perhaps the Homeric encounter with Calypso speaks best, where one sought, whether reasonably or unreasonably, release from specific mystification for a better journeying. Interestingly, the release was only made possible by Hermes, the mercurial one. For some the vessel of journey may itself bear the veiling name, as with Cousteau, the deep sea explorer: for for some there is no release, life is forever mystery, as with a mirroring sea. In contrast the seduction of the portal accepts some pre-existant framing which may or may not prove useful. Indeed a port-hole as opposed to a starboard hole, would surely have direct linkage with left brain/right brain posturing, which is where I come undone.
Goethe's "gross natural array" has long been seen as obdurate, and it may or may not have something to do with politics. I haven't read Williams' "Kora in Hell" but would be most interested, as formative work usually holds some germ that is enlightening. The present re-appraisal of Goethe's criticisms of Newton I find fascinating. But God forbid some elected or unelected ecclesia have power to declare one or other invalid. We would do well to preserve the Manichees and their unmediated black and white, at the same time, wisely and yet with relish, explore outside possibilities while we have the chance. Why should one exclude the other? Thank goodness for pamphlets and blogs which give rise to dialogue, to disclose, to explore, to express unwillingness to have wool pulled over our eyes, however charmingly . Yet the poet is not always sooth-sayer. I believe, perhaps you think wrongly, that his training should be sufficient to allow him to express untruth with positive outcome. This may be to launch again the good ship Calypso, and furthermore to pit poetry against reason for yet another season. It may possibly even force the composers of music into their diatonic vs chromatic camps again.
[22-1-11]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VERA DI CAMPLI SAN VITO
3 Poems
oOo
Burnley Oval
An orange halo wavers around the streetlight –
a gelatinous moon.
Walk past the children's playground, into the middle.
Let your eyes adjust to the dark.
Now you’re exposed like the whitewashed wooden posts.
Listen to the boom gates clang, train rumble past.
Continue on, away from the houses and the street, where it's darker still.
Beside the tracks looms the stump of the corroboree tree.
Circle it once.
Sense the warmth of its fire-blackened trunk, the didgeridoos, the chanting.
Turn one-eighty degrees to see the moon risen
and ready to burst over the city's skyline.
You could almost howl.
oOo
Heptonstall
Up a steep cobblestoned lane, flies suck
the sun-withered corpses of black slugs.
Gaping ruins of a thirteenth century church
overlook a yard of fallen slabs.
Through an iron gate into a high-walled field
half-filled with graves, only you
the trees and the tombstones are standing.
Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.
The wind picks up a heap of clouds
shoves them across the sun and cools your sweat.
You shiver and start back down.
oOo
Blackberries
“They don’t break ‘em like they used to,”
Mother said, picking blackberries at noon.
We’d gone to the edge of the cliff
where the brambles were thick.
“In those days we kept killer goats, ate anything,
chomped these bushes down to the ground.”
I pictured their cast-iron guts.
Mother licked blackberry juice from her fingers,
her voice as bitter as the juice was sweet:
“Afterwards we’d stamp on what was left with bare feet.”
----------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
The Tassajara Way or Refrigerator No.5
I had my first heart attack at nineteen. I was making bread in a narrow kitchen that faced west. The louvres were closed so that everything hot in an Adelaide summer Saturday, everything compressed and still in the quiet of the inner city block, could build in the room. So the yeast could get cracking.
I was working with scholarly diligence from the Tassajara Bread Book, making a bread sponge - that slurry of yeast, warm water and flour that has nothing in it to inhibit the yeast’s multiplication. The Tassajara Bread Book promised me this would be an investment in gluten development. I wish I still had this book, with its paper bag brown cover, Moorish font, and thick pages that almost had the texture of a dense sourdough. It persuasively explained a system for the care and nurturing of bread that everyone should read, and the chapter on sour dough was excellent.
I was by myself for the weekend, my first term in a new university and a new city. Don’t ask why I was there, nineteen, no friends and no money, living in a semi with a lover who was conspicuously absent and a friend of his trying to make the most of this.
Emeric lived next door, in the ‘mirror’ semi – number 22. Canadian, he said was a geologist, and perhaps he was. What he was definitely, was hunting for company. Anytime someone called in to visit at 22A, he’d slouch over to give his long Canadian vowels a run. At fifty or more, he was in the process of realising he had been jilted by his much younger girlfriend. Maybe she had figured out that the gris eminis and convivial conversation, boiled down to the unforgivably boring much quicker than they should have. I had the idea that he lived on money sent to him from his mother who had a cherry orchard in Canada. Whatever work had bought him to Adelaide, the vicarious grip on youth that prolonged his stay had trailed off to something asymptotically flat. Eventually his mother paid for his ticket home and he announced that was returning to Canada, like he was doing her a favour. In this circumstance, where I could see the end of him in sight, and that he had promised I could have his fridge when he left in 2 weeks, I didn’t mind when he appeared at the back door asking for a cup of tea.
I still have the drop side table he had his elbow on as he sat drinking the tea in the kitchen. The bread sponge was working up at a great rate and I watched it seethe upwards in the bowl as I drank my tea, my back jammed against the makeshift kitchen bench that swayed like a boat and flaked off flat shards of slate.
I can’t remember anything specific Emeric said on that day, until he said It’s very hot in here and I don’t feel so well. He didn’t look well. A fine beading of sweat was starting to slide down his forehead. I suggested in an off-hand manner that he sit in the front room for a while. It was dark and cool in there, in the way of a south facing room with front verandah that had not seen a beam of sunlight since the roof was put on in 1890. And I could get on making bread without his expert commentary.
Emeric went to cool down. I turned my attention back to converting the sponge to dough. It was rye bread, a putty grey coloured flecked with brown. It was a true gaseous mass and the spoon made slurpy belching noises as it broke through pockets of carbon dioxide. The gluten had come into itself and the dough followed the spoon’s progress like fond glue. It smelt sour, and fecund: productive. It was a pity to overwhelm it with oil, salt and more flour but the way ahead was the Tassajara path and I was on the road to bread.
Emeric reappeared in the kitchen. I was interested to see that people really did go grey and he was now one of them. Some distant part of my brain caste a clinical eye on his greyness, the funny hunched way he was standing and I suggested that he take 2 or 3 aspirin straight away. In hindsight this was excellent advice, if a little spooky in its unconscious choice of the need for something to thin the blood. Emeric went home.
A little while later while I was pummelling one load of dough, with another great mass growing like an opera chorus in its bowl, I heard Emeric singing. He sang quite a bit and very badly. My reflex was to turn a deaf ear. But this song had an odd rhythm and after a bit, I made myself listen to the words. Rather, the word, for it was just the one word repeated in rising scale. HELP.
The evidence that been churlishly, unconsciously collecting about Emeric’s bodily state seemed to rush with me as I did the loop out of my back door, around the fence, up the path and into his house. One look at Emeric flat on his bed with blue lips was enough to consolidate my suspicions. I said Emeric I think you’re having a heart attack. No, he said, he had pains, pins and needles in his arms. Sounded more and more like a heart attack. I said I would run to the phone box and call an ambulance. The idea that he needed oxygen, with its suggestion of mouth to mouth, shot me out of the room.
As I ran out of his door I realized my bread dough would need punching down, so I ran back into my kitchen and thumped the hell out of it, turned and ran out again, heading for phone booth a couple of blocks away. I didn’t have far to go, as I capitalized on fellow in the next block who was watering his garden, and begged the use of his phone. With the ambulance on its way I ran back to Emeric’s house.
The ambulance came very quickly, I had opened Emeric’s front door so they charged in like a movie. They asked him if he had had heart attack before. No, No he was saying as if to save himself. They had Emeric on the trolley and out the door while I was still loitering in his filthy kitchen. There was an unpleasant stale smell of dirty socks and sauerkraut.
There is an almost macabre fascination, standing in the kitchen of person who has been taken away by a wailing ambulance. I looked around in an interrogating way, at the dregs in coffee cups, then I opened the fridge. There was not much in it, jars of cheap red fish roe, sauerkraut, a bottle of milk that was mine, beer, mustard, wilted vegetables. A cold chop on a plate, much greyer than Emeric. Emeric did a line in damp dog-eared third hand books, with wrinkled corners and cracked paper spines, that would put most people off reading for life. On a kitchen shelf next to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was a cookbook that caught my eye. The title of it went along the lines “How to Cook so you don’t have another heart attack”. I scrutinized the shelves more closely, this was the only cook book there. It seemed a bit of a giveaway to me. Was this his second heart attack? Was it vanity or some dreadful denial that had prompted Emeric to whisper emphatically to the ambulance officers that he had never had a heart attack. Perhaps he had experienced twinges and the cookbook was some sort of cut-rate insurance.
I thought about cleaning up, but decided against it. I went back to my place and the bread dough.
It turned out that Emeric’s heart attack might have been fatal. He spent a week in intensive care, before graduating to a ward. I got a message from his ex-girlfriend, who came with her friends to clean up his house, that he would have to delay his flight to Canada for six weeks. It would be weeks before he got out of hospital. I was annoyed, this meant that my two week wait for the fridge would slide into six week wait. But then I figured if he was in hospital he didn’t need a fridge. It was a heavy old lumbering fridge and I got my boyfriend and his mate, who was getting more desperate, to move it. It always smelt faintly like stale sauerkraut. But a fridge is a useful thing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS :
C D BARRON & CAROL JENKINS have been this way before [see the name index for appearances in previous issues]. Chris is surely due for a book soon, and Carol, if she can spare the time from her River Road Press [Australian poets on CD] publishing, due for a second. VERA DI CAMPLI SAN VITO has been on the edges since it began and at last tips into it. Before returning to Australia a few years ago, she worked at the Poetry Cafe in London. Why did I think she was an assistant at the Poetry Library on South Bank? Occasionally publishes & reads on the Melbourne circuit.
--Now I have a 'plane to catch!
K.H., ed--
April 6th, 2011.
3 POEMS & A LETTER
oOo
THE PALM
"Nevertheless the truth that is in the intellect, some is simple and some is complex."
Joseph Delmedigo, 1629
A star-fish
suckered with hope
as a garden postponed
A helmet of shady thoughts
for an artist's hand splayed
brittle as bread-sticks
A hallowed mountain
feathered with eyelashes
as a lost piece of puzzle
A fragment of moss
on which sits an angel
waving a periwinkle
A sealed fountain self-effaced
a broken bell upturned
holding seventy paradoxes
A palm at the end of the mind
beyond bitter waters
and a desert of moon
[2009/11]
oOo
NEW MOON/Aspasia of the Archway
Self reflection
is the praxis of hypostatic unity
trinity in foil
res before convexity
finding your arche become
more knowing than epochal being
Beautiful you say
now shut up
and let the order begin
in wirkel
in gedichte
in principium
Only without principle can we properly live
self complacency our best hope
syllogisms full of bellis and systematic abuse
bending in haecceity catoptric for life
luteo scorpio this iron stillness is like hell
father fear the enemy in dwelling
[9/1/00/11]
oOo
POSHLOST
"before us the future looms dark, and that we can scarcely...."
Gogol, Dead Souls
Birds
fly through water
like silver
in transaction
whether this be deep
or the half life
is not the question
A half moon
like horns on the head
makes for better sacrifice
than the horizon of Marduk
his slavish destruction of chaos
causes us to forget cuppeity
and the filial tussle with quintessence
[2/'11]
oOo
CORRESPONDENCE :
Thoughts arising from a reading of Kris Hemensley article on Grossinger: -
Basically I hold to the anarchist's tenet, that we are best not to be overly-concerned with endings as to do so is to be purloined by "means". Rather concentrate on the paradoxes and interactions of our times beyond solution. Perhaps the Homeric encounter with Calypso speaks best, where one sought, whether reasonably or unreasonably, release from specific mystification for a better journeying. Interestingly, the release was only made possible by Hermes, the mercurial one. For some the vessel of journey may itself bear the veiling name, as with Cousteau, the deep sea explorer: for for some there is no release, life is forever mystery, as with a mirroring sea. In contrast the seduction of the portal accepts some pre-existant framing which may or may not prove useful. Indeed a port-hole as opposed to a starboard hole, would surely have direct linkage with left brain/right brain posturing, which is where I come undone.
Goethe's "gross natural array" has long been seen as obdurate, and it may or may not have something to do with politics. I haven't read Williams' "Kora in Hell" but would be most interested, as formative work usually holds some germ that is enlightening. The present re-appraisal of Goethe's criticisms of Newton I find fascinating. But God forbid some elected or unelected ecclesia have power to declare one or other invalid. We would do well to preserve the Manichees and their unmediated black and white, at the same time, wisely and yet with relish, explore outside possibilities while we have the chance. Why should one exclude the other? Thank goodness for pamphlets and blogs which give rise to dialogue, to disclose, to explore, to express unwillingness to have wool pulled over our eyes, however charmingly . Yet the poet is not always sooth-sayer. I believe, perhaps you think wrongly, that his training should be sufficient to allow him to express untruth with positive outcome. This may be to launch again the good ship Calypso, and furthermore to pit poetry against reason for yet another season. It may possibly even force the composers of music into their diatonic vs chromatic camps again.
[22-1-11]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VERA DI CAMPLI SAN VITO
3 Poems
oOo
Burnley Oval
An orange halo wavers around the streetlight –
a gelatinous moon.
Walk past the children's playground, into the middle.
Let your eyes adjust to the dark.
Now you’re exposed like the whitewashed wooden posts.
Listen to the boom gates clang, train rumble past.
Continue on, away from the houses and the street, where it's darker still.
Beside the tracks looms the stump of the corroboree tree.
Circle it once.
Sense the warmth of its fire-blackened trunk, the didgeridoos, the chanting.
Turn one-eighty degrees to see the moon risen
and ready to burst over the city's skyline.
You could almost howl.
oOo
Heptonstall
Up a steep cobblestoned lane, flies suck
the sun-withered corpses of black slugs.
Gaping ruins of a thirteenth century church
overlook a yard of fallen slabs.
Through an iron gate into a high-walled field
half-filled with graves, only you
the trees and the tombstones are standing.
Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.
The wind picks up a heap of clouds
shoves them across the sun and cools your sweat.
You shiver and start back down.
oOo
Blackberries
“They don’t break ‘em like they used to,”
Mother said, picking blackberries at noon.
We’d gone to the edge of the cliff
where the brambles were thick.
“In those days we kept killer goats, ate anything,
chomped these bushes down to the ground.”
I pictured their cast-iron guts.
Mother licked blackberry juice from her fingers,
her voice as bitter as the juice was sweet:
“Afterwards we’d stamp on what was left with bare feet.”
----------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
The Tassajara Way or Refrigerator No.5
I had my first heart attack at nineteen. I was making bread in a narrow kitchen that faced west. The louvres were closed so that everything hot in an Adelaide summer Saturday, everything compressed and still in the quiet of the inner city block, could build in the room. So the yeast could get cracking.
I was working with scholarly diligence from the Tassajara Bread Book, making a bread sponge - that slurry of yeast, warm water and flour that has nothing in it to inhibit the yeast’s multiplication. The Tassajara Bread Book promised me this would be an investment in gluten development. I wish I still had this book, with its paper bag brown cover, Moorish font, and thick pages that almost had the texture of a dense sourdough. It persuasively explained a system for the care and nurturing of bread that everyone should read, and the chapter on sour dough was excellent.
I was by myself for the weekend, my first term in a new university and a new city. Don’t ask why I was there, nineteen, no friends and no money, living in a semi with a lover who was conspicuously absent and a friend of his trying to make the most of this.
Emeric lived next door, in the ‘mirror’ semi – number 22. Canadian, he said was a geologist, and perhaps he was. What he was definitely, was hunting for company. Anytime someone called in to visit at 22A, he’d slouch over to give his long Canadian vowels a run. At fifty or more, he was in the process of realising he had been jilted by his much younger girlfriend. Maybe she had figured out that the gris eminis and convivial conversation, boiled down to the unforgivably boring much quicker than they should have. I had the idea that he lived on money sent to him from his mother who had a cherry orchard in Canada. Whatever work had bought him to Adelaide, the vicarious grip on youth that prolonged his stay had trailed off to something asymptotically flat. Eventually his mother paid for his ticket home and he announced that was returning to Canada, like he was doing her a favour. In this circumstance, where I could see the end of him in sight, and that he had promised I could have his fridge when he left in 2 weeks, I didn’t mind when he appeared at the back door asking for a cup of tea.
I still have the drop side table he had his elbow on as he sat drinking the tea in the kitchen. The bread sponge was working up at a great rate and I watched it seethe upwards in the bowl as I drank my tea, my back jammed against the makeshift kitchen bench that swayed like a boat and flaked off flat shards of slate.
I can’t remember anything specific Emeric said on that day, until he said It’s very hot in here and I don’t feel so well. He didn’t look well. A fine beading of sweat was starting to slide down his forehead. I suggested in an off-hand manner that he sit in the front room for a while. It was dark and cool in there, in the way of a south facing room with front verandah that had not seen a beam of sunlight since the roof was put on in 1890. And I could get on making bread without his expert commentary.
Emeric went to cool down. I turned my attention back to converting the sponge to dough. It was rye bread, a putty grey coloured flecked with brown. It was a true gaseous mass and the spoon made slurpy belching noises as it broke through pockets of carbon dioxide. The gluten had come into itself and the dough followed the spoon’s progress like fond glue. It smelt sour, and fecund: productive. It was a pity to overwhelm it with oil, salt and more flour but the way ahead was the Tassajara path and I was on the road to bread.
Emeric reappeared in the kitchen. I was interested to see that people really did go grey and he was now one of them. Some distant part of my brain caste a clinical eye on his greyness, the funny hunched way he was standing and I suggested that he take 2 or 3 aspirin straight away. In hindsight this was excellent advice, if a little spooky in its unconscious choice of the need for something to thin the blood. Emeric went home.
A little while later while I was pummelling one load of dough, with another great mass growing like an opera chorus in its bowl, I heard Emeric singing. He sang quite a bit and very badly. My reflex was to turn a deaf ear. But this song had an odd rhythm and after a bit, I made myself listen to the words. Rather, the word, for it was just the one word repeated in rising scale. HELP.
The evidence that been churlishly, unconsciously collecting about Emeric’s bodily state seemed to rush with me as I did the loop out of my back door, around the fence, up the path and into his house. One look at Emeric flat on his bed with blue lips was enough to consolidate my suspicions. I said Emeric I think you’re having a heart attack. No, he said, he had pains, pins and needles in his arms. Sounded more and more like a heart attack. I said I would run to the phone box and call an ambulance. The idea that he needed oxygen, with its suggestion of mouth to mouth, shot me out of the room.
As I ran out of his door I realized my bread dough would need punching down, so I ran back into my kitchen and thumped the hell out of it, turned and ran out again, heading for phone booth a couple of blocks away. I didn’t have far to go, as I capitalized on fellow in the next block who was watering his garden, and begged the use of his phone. With the ambulance on its way I ran back to Emeric’s house.
The ambulance came very quickly, I had opened Emeric’s front door so they charged in like a movie. They asked him if he had had heart attack before. No, No he was saying as if to save himself. They had Emeric on the trolley and out the door while I was still loitering in his filthy kitchen. There was an unpleasant stale smell of dirty socks and sauerkraut.
There is an almost macabre fascination, standing in the kitchen of person who has been taken away by a wailing ambulance. I looked around in an interrogating way, at the dregs in coffee cups, then I opened the fridge. There was not much in it, jars of cheap red fish roe, sauerkraut, a bottle of milk that was mine, beer, mustard, wilted vegetables. A cold chop on a plate, much greyer than Emeric. Emeric did a line in damp dog-eared third hand books, with wrinkled corners and cracked paper spines, that would put most people off reading for life. On a kitchen shelf next to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was a cookbook that caught my eye. The title of it went along the lines “How to Cook so you don’t have another heart attack”. I scrutinized the shelves more closely, this was the only cook book there. It seemed a bit of a giveaway to me. Was this his second heart attack? Was it vanity or some dreadful denial that had prompted Emeric to whisper emphatically to the ambulance officers that he had never had a heart attack. Perhaps he had experienced twinges and the cookbook was some sort of cut-rate insurance.
I thought about cleaning up, but decided against it. I went back to my place and the bread dough.
It turned out that Emeric’s heart attack might have been fatal. He spent a week in intensive care, before graduating to a ward. I got a message from his ex-girlfriend, who came with her friends to clean up his house, that he would have to delay his flight to Canada for six weeks. It would be weeks before he got out of hospital. I was annoyed, this meant that my two week wait for the fridge would slide into six week wait. But then I figured if he was in hospital he didn’t need a fridge. It was a heavy old lumbering fridge and I got my boyfriend and his mate, who was getting more desperate, to move it. It always smelt faintly like stale sauerkraut. But a fridge is a useful thing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS :
C D BARRON & CAROL JENKINS have been this way before [see the name index for appearances in previous issues]. Chris is surely due for a book soon, and Carol, if she can spare the time from her River Road Press [Australian poets on CD] publishing, due for a second. VERA DI CAMPLI SAN VITO has been on the edges since it began and at last tips into it. Before returning to Australia a few years ago, she worked at the Poetry Cafe in London. Why did I think she was an assistant at the Poetry Library on South Bank? Occasionally publishes & reads on the Melbourne circuit.
--Now I have a 'plane to catch!
K.H., ed--
April 6th, 2011.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
REPORT OF COLLECTED WORKS 'REFERENCE GROUP' MEETING, March 19th, 2011)
This particular group of friends included Heather Clarke, Steve Grimwade, Kathryn Hamman, Jennifer Harrison, Libby Hart, Kris Hemensley, Ray Liversidge. There were several apologies; in addition as many other people prefer to be in email contact. My report is going out to this variety of friends of Collected Works Bookshop. In addition it will be posted on the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook Page and my Poetry & Ideas blog. (Touch all bases!) Please feel free to send it on.
The non-exclusive nature of this group was reiterated. We consider you all good friends of Collected Works Bookshop. Long may this remain!
Lots of water under the bridge since the initial rallying to the cause in October, November, December '10.
For one thing, John Hunter's creation of the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook Page has proved an invaluable means of communication, especially for publicising the book launches & readings at the Shop. It's also a reflection of the Shop's tone & colour. Readers, writers interacting with the Shop around events, books & ideas.
And the huge success of the pre-Christmas shopping/raffle/auction/benefit (8th December, '10) is still resonating; e.g., although there wasnt & isnt a debt involved, the sum raised on that glorious night allowed us to begin the new year in a better financial position than for some while past.
The higher rent has now kicked in, so whilst the very necessary restocking of the shelves continues we are keeping an eye on the higher outgoings.
The 8th December event reminded us that in the '80s & '90s, Collected Works Bookshop used to hold a Christmas Party. In recent times we have served Xmas Cake (Sheila Anderson's to begin with, Clementa O'Brien's more recently) & Port in the last couple of weeks of December; but we feel an actual event should return to our calendar! This is an 'action' for which we're all enthusiastic & will now begin to plan it.
An idea fielded at the initial Friends meeting, at Jenny Harrison's house on the 21st November, '10, was that of a "Big Read". Philip Salom & Jenny were its proponents, endorsed by the rest of us. Since then, Ian McBryde has made the same suggestion. We well remember the event organized by Ian & Ken Smeaton, summer 2003, which celebrated the Shop's successful move from 256 Flinders Street to the Nicholas Building. (It was one of two important community initiatives : the other being the very deep hat Barry Hill sent around to colleagues which was to offset the Shop's removal costs. And how! Barry's original petition graces the Shop notice-board.) At the big read ('read a poem, buy a book') a multitude of poets, across the poetry community, read for their supper, everyone bought a book, & the Shop catered. It was a great event and might yet be a model again. (Photos of many of the contributors to the event are permanently on view in the Shop.)
The thinking behind holding such an event acknowledges the ever vulnerable economic reality of such an enterprise as Collected Works Bookshop. It also offers a very simple remedy. As Steve Grimwade reasoned, the $$ figures we're talking about are relatively small. We trust to the average cash-flow continuing, but the injection of a few thousand dollars (via one or two events a year) goes a long way to ensuring the Shop's viability. Naturally we're all aware of the Borders/A & R crash & its reverberations.
At yesterday's (19th March) meeting I was at pains to define & re-present our project. The point about Collected Works is that it isnt just another bookshop (although at a rude survival level it is)!
Collected Works Bookshop survives & thrives today as the expression of an idea articulated in the early 1980s, by a group of Melbourne writers, editors & small publishers, on behalf of & enrolling the support of the writing community, to establish a bookshop which would stock local Melbourne & Australian literature (especially poetry) in a context of world literature. Kathryn Hamman & Libby Hart's specific reference to the current bookshop as reflective of (the) community & important to it, is gratifyingly consonant with Collected Works' original impetus.
It has always been a writers & readers interjection into the mainstream book trade. The Shop, therefore, is the space where these particular interactions occur : writers with each other (for information & exchange), writers with readers, the small press with the commercial mainstream, local literature with the world.
Collected Works is a special place. Steve asked me what it was Collected Works sought from its organizational colleagues (as it were). Fair question : it's common knowledge now that we were graciously & generously invited to consider relocating to the Wheeler Centre, but declined. Independence is an issue for Collected Works notwithstanding the fact that all of the Wheeler Centre's residents are independent. For Collected Works, though, a geographical independence is necessary. As supportive as we are of the Centre for Books & Writing, & for that matter, of the City of Literature, Collected Works believes in locational & logistical diversity. Collected Works is its own eccentric self but also a friend, even a potential satellite of & for larger entities like the Victorian Writes Centre, Australian Poetry, Wheeler, MWF et al.
So what we seek is support for the continuing existence of the bookshop assuming the acknowledgment of our historical status & continuing value as a writers' & readers' space. Although it's a fact that Collected Works is mentioned in the UNESCO City of Literature document & referred to in accounts of the contemporary Australian poetry scene, history is often dismissed or forgotten. Believing we're still relevant in this day & age, we'll endeavour to keep Collected Works in mind & in view!
The Shop hasnt had as busy a calendar of launchings & readings for many years as now. Some of this is the result of presses & individuals identifying with the Shop in its hour of need, & some the serendipity of a normal year. There are three events to come in March, more in May, June, July... (In April I plan to visit family & friends in the UK for a couple of weeks; Retta will keep the Shop open.)
The meetings in future will be occur on a needs basis. Obviously, this can be triggered by the Shop or the community. However, email, telephone & personal contact is expected & invited.
Thank you to everyone for your support hitherto & ongoing commitment.
Love & best wishes, on behalf of Collected Works,
Kris Hemensley
The non-exclusive nature of this group was reiterated. We consider you all good friends of Collected Works Bookshop. Long may this remain!
Lots of water under the bridge since the initial rallying to the cause in October, November, December '10.
For one thing, John Hunter's creation of the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook Page has proved an invaluable means of communication, especially for publicising the book launches & readings at the Shop. It's also a reflection of the Shop's tone & colour. Readers, writers interacting with the Shop around events, books & ideas.
And the huge success of the pre-Christmas shopping/raffle/auction/benefit (8th December, '10) is still resonating; e.g., although there wasnt & isnt a debt involved, the sum raised on that glorious night allowed us to begin the new year in a better financial position than for some while past.
The higher rent has now kicked in, so whilst the very necessary restocking of the shelves continues we are keeping an eye on the higher outgoings.
The 8th December event reminded us that in the '80s & '90s, Collected Works Bookshop used to hold a Christmas Party. In recent times we have served Xmas Cake (Sheila Anderson's to begin with, Clementa O'Brien's more recently) & Port in the last couple of weeks of December; but we feel an actual event should return to our calendar! This is an 'action' for which we're all enthusiastic & will now begin to plan it.
An idea fielded at the initial Friends meeting, at Jenny Harrison's house on the 21st November, '10, was that of a "Big Read". Philip Salom & Jenny were its proponents, endorsed by the rest of us. Since then, Ian McBryde has made the same suggestion. We well remember the event organized by Ian & Ken Smeaton, summer 2003, which celebrated the Shop's successful move from 256 Flinders Street to the Nicholas Building. (It was one of two important community initiatives : the other being the very deep hat Barry Hill sent around to colleagues which was to offset the Shop's removal costs. And how! Barry's original petition graces the Shop notice-board.) At the big read ('read a poem, buy a book') a multitude of poets, across the poetry community, read for their supper, everyone bought a book, & the Shop catered. It was a great event and might yet be a model again. (Photos of many of the contributors to the event are permanently on view in the Shop.)
The thinking behind holding such an event acknowledges the ever vulnerable economic reality of such an enterprise as Collected Works Bookshop. It also offers a very simple remedy. As Steve Grimwade reasoned, the $$ figures we're talking about are relatively small. We trust to the average cash-flow continuing, but the injection of a few thousand dollars (via one or two events a year) goes a long way to ensuring the Shop's viability. Naturally we're all aware of the Borders/A & R crash & its reverberations.
At yesterday's (19th March) meeting I was at pains to define & re-present our project. The point about Collected Works is that it isnt just another bookshop (although at a rude survival level it is)!
Collected Works Bookshop survives & thrives today as the expression of an idea articulated in the early 1980s, by a group of Melbourne writers, editors & small publishers, on behalf of & enrolling the support of the writing community, to establish a bookshop which would stock local Melbourne & Australian literature (especially poetry) in a context of world literature. Kathryn Hamman & Libby Hart's specific reference to the current bookshop as reflective of (the) community & important to it, is gratifyingly consonant with Collected Works' original impetus.
It has always been a writers & readers interjection into the mainstream book trade. The Shop, therefore, is the space where these particular interactions occur : writers with each other (for information & exchange), writers with readers, the small press with the commercial mainstream, local literature with the world.
Collected Works is a special place. Steve asked me what it was Collected Works sought from its organizational colleagues (as it were). Fair question : it's common knowledge now that we were graciously & generously invited to consider relocating to the Wheeler Centre, but declined. Independence is an issue for Collected Works notwithstanding the fact that all of the Wheeler Centre's residents are independent. For Collected Works, though, a geographical independence is necessary. As supportive as we are of the Centre for Books & Writing, & for that matter, of the City of Literature, Collected Works believes in locational & logistical diversity. Collected Works is its own eccentric self but also a friend, even a potential satellite of & for larger entities like the Victorian Writes Centre, Australian Poetry, Wheeler, MWF et al.
So what we seek is support for the continuing existence of the bookshop assuming the acknowledgment of our historical status & continuing value as a writers' & readers' space. Although it's a fact that Collected Works is mentioned in the UNESCO City of Literature document & referred to in accounts of the contemporary Australian poetry scene, history is often dismissed or forgotten. Believing we're still relevant in this day & age, we'll endeavour to keep Collected Works in mind & in view!
The Shop hasnt had as busy a calendar of launchings & readings for many years as now. Some of this is the result of presses & individuals identifying with the Shop in its hour of need, & some the serendipity of a normal year. There are three events to come in March, more in May, June, July... (In April I plan to visit family & friends in the UK for a couple of weeks; Retta will keep the Shop open.)
The meetings in future will be occur on a needs basis. Obviously, this can be triggered by the Shop or the community. However, email, telephone & personal contact is expected & invited.
Thank you to everyone for your support hitherto & ongoing commitment.
Love & best wishes, on behalf of Collected Works,
Kris Hemensley
Sunday, February 20, 2011
THE CHARLES BUCKMASTER MISCELLANY
(A continuing series of poems, papers, articles, notes, letters dedicated to the memory of Charles Buckmaster, 1951-1972)
Part 1 :
Article, Larry Schwartz (1990)
Poem, Kris Hemensley (1968)
Poem, James Hamilton (2011)
______________________________________________________
LARRY SCHWARTZ
DEATH OF A POET
"Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward"
--found written on a loose sheet among Charles Buckmaster's books.
A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting.
There is the farm house and attached bungalow in which a mother found the shotgun the following morning beside the body of her beloved youngest son. That was 26 November 1972, just over four years after the youth, stifled by the idyll of the tiny community, left for the city, wearing a new suit and clutching a suitcase and a handful of poems.
A diagnosed schitzophrenic, Charles Buckmaster was to finaly succumb to the agonising mental illness when he re-enacted the suicide of an older brother, taking his own life with his brother's gun, at just 21.
"There was a lot of pain and there still is a lot of pain," says a relative of the dead poet. "You put it away and you deal with it but you never forget."
The fifth child (youngest by eight years) of a taciturn farmer who worked at his cherry and peach orchards, Buckmaster wrote of "silent / desperation / waiting for life to descend".
He finally turned his back on the farming community established by his Swiss forbears, quitting school mid-way through the matriculation year in 1968 rather than heed an instruction to cut his hair. Eric Penfold, a teacher at Lilydale High school at the time, remembers Buckmaster as "a bit of a wild boy." "I don't think Charles was a real conformist," he said.
"When I was young, people thought me a strange and moody kid," Buckmaster once said. "Often I felt myself a stranger among people I'd known all my life ... my wanting to get out, which I wanted desperately, was something my parents knew they couldn't fight."
But the lure of Gruyere was strong. Buckmaster, who travelled extensively around Australia, was to return home often, sometimes accompanied by friends for fruit-picking, and his childhood surroundings featured prominently in the poetry of the young rebel some said bore a strong physical resemblance to the ill-fated Jim Morrison of The Doors.
As the forests were cleared for subdivisions, he agonised over the vulnerability of small farmers, such as his parents, to land developers and Gruyere's future as the city sprawled outwards. "The cities will merge, " he warned in a poem called An End to Myth. "Gruyere is dying ... The green walls dissolve." It was there he returned to end his life.
"He seemed to be a prodigy, sprung from the ground!" the poet and close friend, Kris Hemensley, wrote in the last issue of The Age Monthly Review.
"No one believed he really hailed from a place called Gruyere. And no one believed Gruyere existed ..." Melbourne's young writers of the time had thought he might be a hoax "to Ern Malley their movement", Hemensley said, alluding to the fictional poet at the centre of the now-famous literary hoax created to embarrass the editors of the Angry Penguins magazine decades earlier.
Hemensley's wife, Retta, remembers the scepticism she and Kris shared after reading the "terrible scrawl" of a first letter from a high school student called Charles Buckmaster. A newspaper report on writer and poet Michael Dugan had alerted the country schoolboy to the fresh literary activity in the city. The Hemensleys corresponded with him only after being assured by Dugan both Buckmaster and Gruyere were "for real".
Despite early scepticism and that scrawl, Buckmaster, whose earliest influences included Donne, Blake and Owen, was quick to impress. He has left his mark on Australian letters despite his brief career and even though he burned much of his work, including the manuscript for a novel and poems said to be good as good as his best, before he died. His early death robbed the country of one of its most promising literary figures.
He is remembered as a poet of considerable talent who wrote several exceptional poems, his potential for major literary achievement frustrated because his death came when his career was in its infancy.
Though Charles Buckmaster left behind a small body of poetry, his work had "the best urgency of the new poetry", the poet Thomas Shapcott has said.
"...He produced a core of work quite remarkable for so young a poet..." Michael Dugan wrote in the most recent issue of Overland. "What he might have achieved if he had not been cut down by the cruel disease of schizophrenia can only be guessed at."
Now, almost 20 years after his death, the recent publication of his collected works and extensive articles in literary publications Overland and The Age Monthly Review , have highlighted his place in Australian literature and impact of the generation of writers he epitomised.
The case for Buckmaster is perhaps most forcibly put by a friend and writer, John Jenkins, who believes that had the collected poems appeared sooner it would have "put on the map" not only his own work but a stream within Australian poetry that emerged during the tumultuous transition from the conservatism of the '50s.
Jenkins says during the 1970s and much of the '80s Australian literature had been dominated by conservative elements. Only now that it was not "too hot to handle" could a collection by Buckmaster, published late last year, be released.
He sees the work as still "very contemporary". particularly in the preoccupation with the environment and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
While few of the known poems have been widely anthologised and despite two slim volumes of his poems published when he was alive, much remained out of print until publication of the University of Queensland Press collection, part of a series which includes another ill-fated poet of that era, Michael Dransfield. The publishers say though poetry is generally a poor seller, both Dransfield's and Buckmaster's collections were selling better than expected, the latter less so but heartening at up to 500 of the 1500 printed.
The book's editor, Simon McDonald, also a friend of Buckmaster, cited financial and other constraints including the difficulty in obtaining poems scattered among friends around the country, for the delay in publication. He said he had taken upon himself the task of editing because of his strong feeling for his friend and had at one stage even set up an independent publishing company to release it. He said he now felt he had at last done his duty to his friend.
Buckmaster's book with its many previously unpublished poems, has helped friends in Melbourne literary circles finally come to terms with his death. The family kept the funeral private and some close friends did not know he had died until after his cremation. They have long planned to get together to remember him and the times they shared.
"We cried in December 1972 when the news of Charles Buckmaster's suicide was telephoned through -- but the tears hardly constituted a wake," Kris Hemensley wrote. "Only now, it seems to me, with the Collected Poems in hand, can he return to us in his life and death, our youngest poet, our dear and youngest friend."
His friends remember the good times -- his humor and warmth -- along with the bad of a vigorous young man dragged down by his demons, fighting for survival all the way. Michael Dugan describes the change from "sunny personality" to manic highs and lows, bouts of self-destructiveness, severe depression. So that the Collected Poems "remind us of the essential beauty and value of a friend destroyed by circumstances beyond his control".
"He was in such pain," said Buckmaster's girlfriend, Kate Veitch, "such emotional and mental pain. I could understand absolutely why he did it. Absolutely. this guy was being destroyed from the inside. It was agony to watch. Absolute agony."
Buckmaster was a "skyrocket" which exploded, John Jenkins said. The lifestyle he chose epitomised an era to such an extent he became one of the icons. "He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of it."
The young poet's death coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary creativity among younger writers in Melbourne, railing against a perceived literary stagnation and general conservatism.
The late 1960s had seen a frenzy of poetry in roneod poetry magazines and readings centred on what came to be known as the La Mama Poetry Workshop by a new generation of writers, influenced by the innovations of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.
"There was terrific excitement," said Retta Hemensley, who. with Kris, organised the first readings at La Mama. "Something was happening in the city that had been dead for so long".
Retta Hemensley smiles mischievously when she recalls running off copies of the magazine, Our Glass, edited by Kris, while doing secretarial work for Laurie Carmichael at the then Amalgamated Engineering Union.
It was a time of strong opposition to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, a vigorous counterculture challenge to conservatism, an optimism that youth culture could change the world for the better, a naive belief in the effectiveness of "mind-expanding" drugs and a shared joy in rock music. The poetry of this era was strongly influenced by literary movements in response to the frigidity of Cold War America.
Country boy Charles Buckmaster arrived in the city, finding a first job as laboratory assistant, at a time when bonds between young Australians were strengthened by lame resistance from their elders. Retta Hemensley recalls the cries of "cut your hair, Moses" her husband endured on the streets of Melbourne. it was a time of clumsy censorship, raids on theatres with controversial plays. She recalls acting in a play at a local theatre which was interrupted at each performance by a member of the vice squad in the audience threatening to declare the theatre a "bawdy house".
For Buckmaster and his friends, Faraday Street, Carlton, where the first reading at La Mama on 3 September 1968 attracted 17 people, was a focal point for budding writers.
Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called Croscurrents, remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps, a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if he were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.
Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution.
It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beefheart's harsh Trout Mask Replica or the Songs of the Humpback Whale in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.
And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for breakfast", Buckmaster recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, The Great Auk. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claiming he could control the effect of the drug.
He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia he'd sit up in bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's Drunken Boat the other.
His close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during the last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed.
Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop. He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him cary it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player. Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors.
There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favourite painting titled 'Self Portrait', by a 13 year-old boy.
Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson. "I came home one evening and Charles was in my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible... grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of him".
"His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of it. And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to do. And he was really upset because it hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought "Ohhhh, I don't want this, I do not want this'."
Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to do crazy things". She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone...
Retta Hemensley is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the lights". Did this encourage his destructive urge?
In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge / yet cannot understand / the nature / of this fear", of "ice, brooding above me". He wrote also that "all the dark hints / were not, as I had expected, / a part of this game... "
The poem, called Willochra, showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.
Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful girl", just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love; he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at la Mama in march 1970, before he had even bothered to ask her name. And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship.
She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack.
When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will. He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said.
Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered his room with his mother. Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favourites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said.
It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time. Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room.
"For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said."There was a jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue. His mother opened a drawer in his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors."
Michael Dugan, remarked in his recent article in Overland that the poet was "tidying up" in his last months, "preparing to leave nothing behind". He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost.
While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.
John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed earmarked for disaster," he said."He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time."
Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days. he was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right slot".
According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructiveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behaviour.
Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him. The first time I went to see him I just rolled up unannounced and got directions to the ward he was in.
"I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.
"He was walking down the corridor between these two ... classic great hulking chaps in white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did."
She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge. "I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all."
She said she was elated when she left. After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside."
Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a Jerusalem Bible Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.
She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was just after she had bailed him out of Pentridge. "He was out of his mind ... God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally. I said 'Charles, you don't just walk into guys' offices like this, Charles, you haven't got any shoes on'.
"I said 'you can't go in there like this. You will get thrown out. He went in, he turned around to me and said 'you don't have to come in, man, you're so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: 'arsehole, you are not worth it. I don't care how clever you are. I don't care how talented you are. I don't care how beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth it.' And I just walked off."
Charles Buckmaster was given a good behavior bond at his trial on condition he returned to his parents' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll leave nothing behind," he had once told John Jenkins. He spent the last few months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment he might finally escape his hell.
[This the text of Larry Schwartz's feature article as published in The Sunday Age (Agenda), 5th August, 1990, with minute editing & deletion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY
GRUYERE : THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED
(for Charles Buckmaster)
1
who stayed only becos they couldnt
find their way out again ( your poem
about them )
: swiss
people.
around 1840.
& the people who are still there now
in Gruyere
you could practically call it
Buckmaster country -
at least one part of it
( yr houses at four points
spanning cherry orchards
the dam with frogs
surrounded by green flora
& brown earth
in view of Mount St Leonard
2
on the outskirts of the water :
a cows carcass
already substantially returned
to the ground
the dead cow
bones turned up / great eye cavities
where 'things' have burrowed into its cranium
its legs become part of the earth
beside the dam.
the roar of the frogs
roar enuf
to drown
out
the Ruston Lincoln
diesel pump ( we
sheltered in its shed from
the rain )
listening to bell birds
piping -
one
grey as the gum
pretended
it
was
just
a
tree
its belly softer grey than its wing.
the clouted earth / broken bracken / grey weathered
grey watered / grey forest . thataway ..
3
you know
the cicada walks right out of its shell
abandons
himself ( the husks
crustate the wooden boards
around
the diesel pump.
stationary -
fixed treadle )
& flies out & over
the patches of black slime
bearing frogs eggs ( ten-
nis balls )
amongst the reeds
& weed
spreading under the surface
end to end
dragon flies
hovering horizontally
hanging
on breezes
making it their own
eery way
4
a tungle croft
of unusual constellations
of floating forests
of sheep following their leaders from
one spot in the field
suddenly
to another part
all of them . .
it pays to look up your stars
( THIS GUN
WAS CAPTURED FROM THE
GERMANS
BY THE 41st BATTALION A.I.F.
IN BELGIUM 1918
AND PRESENTED TO THE RESIDENTS OF
SOUTH GRUYERE )
collecting
sprigs of bacon & egg ( rust &
yellow ) flower
making
garlands to wear round yr neck
: you ancient !
look up the stars .
the familiar spots / stones
you know by heart -
bush fires
some badns
thru the kitchen window
( original oil paintings
on the wall )
going back ( father
& sons )
30 years.
120 years.
30000 years
in one long sweep / of
brown
green
&
the blu of the sky.
5
climbing
over barbed wire
under branches
around thorns
dropping
deeper thru trees
some with
rough brown bark hanging a strip
grey gums
prickly wattle
tea tree
wild heath
creeper
& vines.
treading over centuries of decomposition &
regrowth.
dog
following possum to their tree nests
another cow carcass
head propped on its shoulder
bones.
its left foreleg a
few yards away
hacked off & gnawed clean.
its hide
taut across the backbone &
ribcage
you could bounce on it.
6 (i)
the fording point
too deep -
the centre of the log bridge
covered by the stream.
when cows trespass ( you told us )
others properties
you cant chase them back.
you have to wait til the
owner comes & collects.
& if the trespasser
eats off yr land or tramples
the entire farm under foot
you still have to wait.
( the cows owner pays damages of course! )
(ii)
tasting the sap
dribbling down
a tree -
brown toffee
& a flavor which hardens the entire
palate
coating the tongue with
something worse than detol
"youre not sposed to eat it..."
came
too late !
but what did they live on
before the swiss
say
centuries before
1840 ?
berries. grass. some varieties
of snake,
frogs.
possum.
& bury their dead in the forest ?
making signs
for the deliverance of obstinate
earthly trappings
bury them down the gradient
in the centre
of the thickest bush
bury them maybe
in mass graves
on the down slope towards
the river.
(iii)
one massive skull
the head larger than a cow or
horse
must be an ox
huge molars
the jaws loosened by
the wet
the teeth planted in soil
prettied with moss . .
& the legs of the monster
to the right
of the head
folded casually.
7 (i)
the comings & goings
the mainroad to Lilydale to
the City
- the way 'home' -
cars bumper to bumper
which go right on by
oblivious of the
"barbecue down the road :
if the rain holds out"
of the living
made for 30 years
off the land
amongst cherry trees
with bridesmaids veils ( in
blossom )
(ii)
behaviour patterns of country folk
whether they forecast rainstorms
by rheumatic twinges
the
incidence of various common
& obscure
neuroses
the facts & figures of sociological reports
- apply
as much to the people who go
as the people who stay
8
in the middle of the earth
does anything change substantially ?
Gruyere :
a day in a life.
the visit.
the place exists
thru memories
nothing is more certain than
the recalled materials. the composition of ground :
yr bread & eard.
nothing is deader
than when it is forgotten.
Gruyere.
(September/October 29, 1968)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
CHARLES BUCKMASTER'S MOTORCYCLE
It is strange, the places
where he rides. The spokes whir
a silver churning, a fuel gauge
where something might be written.
An absent roar the sound
of pages burning, a tank or fuselage
scrapped or kept in a dark garage,
shadow heaped on knowing metal.
I have pages creased in folders
but not the rush of their trajectory,
phantom destinations written
on worn rubber. The one lamp
dull in an old night, tracing names
of towns bypassed by the highway.
A yellow lamp lit up
in a reckless notebook,
youth's windshield. Stored away
the words wait to ride, a poem
on the mechanical horseback
of remembering.
(2011)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
Larry Schwartz wrote for the Age & the Sunday Age for many years before going freelance. His poems have occasionally appear, for example in Bob Adamson's Ulitarra magazine in the mid '90s.
James Hamilton whilst not studying at La Trobe University, pursues his own research of the life & times of Charles Buckmaster & the La Mama poets of the late 60s.
Part 1 :
Article, Larry Schwartz (1990)
Poem, Kris Hemensley (1968)
Poem, James Hamilton (2011)
______________________________________________________
LARRY SCHWARTZ
DEATH OF A POET
"Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward"
--found written on a loose sheet among Charles Buckmaster's books.
A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting.
There is the farm house and attached bungalow in which a mother found the shotgun the following morning beside the body of her beloved youngest son. That was 26 November 1972, just over four years after the youth, stifled by the idyll of the tiny community, left for the city, wearing a new suit and clutching a suitcase and a handful of poems.
A diagnosed schitzophrenic, Charles Buckmaster was to finaly succumb to the agonising mental illness when he re-enacted the suicide of an older brother, taking his own life with his brother's gun, at just 21.
"There was a lot of pain and there still is a lot of pain," says a relative of the dead poet. "You put it away and you deal with it but you never forget."
The fifth child (youngest by eight years) of a taciturn farmer who worked at his cherry and peach orchards, Buckmaster wrote of "silent / desperation / waiting for life to descend".
He finally turned his back on the farming community established by his Swiss forbears, quitting school mid-way through the matriculation year in 1968 rather than heed an instruction to cut his hair. Eric Penfold, a teacher at Lilydale High school at the time, remembers Buckmaster as "a bit of a wild boy." "I don't think Charles was a real conformist," he said.
"When I was young, people thought me a strange and moody kid," Buckmaster once said. "Often I felt myself a stranger among people I'd known all my life ... my wanting to get out, which I wanted desperately, was something my parents knew they couldn't fight."
But the lure of Gruyere was strong. Buckmaster, who travelled extensively around Australia, was to return home often, sometimes accompanied by friends for fruit-picking, and his childhood surroundings featured prominently in the poetry of the young rebel some said bore a strong physical resemblance to the ill-fated Jim Morrison of The Doors.
As the forests were cleared for subdivisions, he agonised over the vulnerability of small farmers, such as his parents, to land developers and Gruyere's future as the city sprawled outwards. "The cities will merge, " he warned in a poem called An End to Myth. "Gruyere is dying ... The green walls dissolve." It was there he returned to end his life.
"He seemed to be a prodigy, sprung from the ground!" the poet and close friend, Kris Hemensley, wrote in the last issue of The Age Monthly Review.
"No one believed he really hailed from a place called Gruyere. And no one believed Gruyere existed ..." Melbourne's young writers of the time had thought he might be a hoax "to Ern Malley their movement", Hemensley said, alluding to the fictional poet at the centre of the now-famous literary hoax created to embarrass the editors of the Angry Penguins magazine decades earlier.
Hemensley's wife, Retta, remembers the scepticism she and Kris shared after reading the "terrible scrawl" of a first letter from a high school student called Charles Buckmaster. A newspaper report on writer and poet Michael Dugan had alerted the country schoolboy to the fresh literary activity in the city. The Hemensleys corresponded with him only after being assured by Dugan both Buckmaster and Gruyere were "for real".
Despite early scepticism and that scrawl, Buckmaster, whose earliest influences included Donne, Blake and Owen, was quick to impress. He has left his mark on Australian letters despite his brief career and even though he burned much of his work, including the manuscript for a novel and poems said to be good as good as his best, before he died. His early death robbed the country of one of its most promising literary figures.
He is remembered as a poet of considerable talent who wrote several exceptional poems, his potential for major literary achievement frustrated because his death came when his career was in its infancy.
Though Charles Buckmaster left behind a small body of poetry, his work had "the best urgency of the new poetry", the poet Thomas Shapcott has said.
"...He produced a core of work quite remarkable for so young a poet..." Michael Dugan wrote in the most recent issue of Overland. "What he might have achieved if he had not been cut down by the cruel disease of schizophrenia can only be guessed at."
Now, almost 20 years after his death, the recent publication of his collected works and extensive articles in literary publications Overland and The Age Monthly Review , have highlighted his place in Australian literature and impact of the generation of writers he epitomised.
The case for Buckmaster is perhaps most forcibly put by a friend and writer, John Jenkins, who believes that had the collected poems appeared sooner it would have "put on the map" not only his own work but a stream within Australian poetry that emerged during the tumultuous transition from the conservatism of the '50s.
Jenkins says during the 1970s and much of the '80s Australian literature had been dominated by conservative elements. Only now that it was not "too hot to handle" could a collection by Buckmaster, published late last year, be released.
He sees the work as still "very contemporary". particularly in the preoccupation with the environment and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
While few of the known poems have been widely anthologised and despite two slim volumes of his poems published when he was alive, much remained out of print until publication of the University of Queensland Press collection, part of a series which includes another ill-fated poet of that era, Michael Dransfield. The publishers say though poetry is generally a poor seller, both Dransfield's and Buckmaster's collections were selling better than expected, the latter less so but heartening at up to 500 of the 1500 printed.
The book's editor, Simon McDonald, also a friend of Buckmaster, cited financial and other constraints including the difficulty in obtaining poems scattered among friends around the country, for the delay in publication. He said he had taken upon himself the task of editing because of his strong feeling for his friend and had at one stage even set up an independent publishing company to release it. He said he now felt he had at last done his duty to his friend.
Buckmaster's book with its many previously unpublished poems, has helped friends in Melbourne literary circles finally come to terms with his death. The family kept the funeral private and some close friends did not know he had died until after his cremation. They have long planned to get together to remember him and the times they shared.
"We cried in December 1972 when the news of Charles Buckmaster's suicide was telephoned through -- but the tears hardly constituted a wake," Kris Hemensley wrote. "Only now, it seems to me, with the Collected Poems in hand, can he return to us in his life and death, our youngest poet, our dear and youngest friend."
His friends remember the good times -- his humor and warmth -- along with the bad of a vigorous young man dragged down by his demons, fighting for survival all the way. Michael Dugan describes the change from "sunny personality" to manic highs and lows, bouts of self-destructiveness, severe depression. So that the Collected Poems "remind us of the essential beauty and value of a friend destroyed by circumstances beyond his control".
"He was in such pain," said Buckmaster's girlfriend, Kate Veitch, "such emotional and mental pain. I could understand absolutely why he did it. Absolutely. this guy was being destroyed from the inside. It was agony to watch. Absolute agony."
Buckmaster was a "skyrocket" which exploded, John Jenkins said. The lifestyle he chose epitomised an era to such an extent he became one of the icons. "He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of it."
The young poet's death coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary creativity among younger writers in Melbourne, railing against a perceived literary stagnation and general conservatism.
The late 1960s had seen a frenzy of poetry in roneod poetry magazines and readings centred on what came to be known as the La Mama Poetry Workshop by a new generation of writers, influenced by the innovations of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.
"There was terrific excitement," said Retta Hemensley, who. with Kris, organised the first readings at La Mama. "Something was happening in the city that had been dead for so long".
Retta Hemensley smiles mischievously when she recalls running off copies of the magazine, Our Glass, edited by Kris, while doing secretarial work for Laurie Carmichael at the then Amalgamated Engineering Union.
It was a time of strong opposition to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, a vigorous counterculture challenge to conservatism, an optimism that youth culture could change the world for the better, a naive belief in the effectiveness of "mind-expanding" drugs and a shared joy in rock music. The poetry of this era was strongly influenced by literary movements in response to the frigidity of Cold War America.
Country boy Charles Buckmaster arrived in the city, finding a first job as laboratory assistant, at a time when bonds between young Australians were strengthened by lame resistance from their elders. Retta Hemensley recalls the cries of "cut your hair, Moses" her husband endured on the streets of Melbourne. it was a time of clumsy censorship, raids on theatres with controversial plays. She recalls acting in a play at a local theatre which was interrupted at each performance by a member of the vice squad in the audience threatening to declare the theatre a "bawdy house".
For Buckmaster and his friends, Faraday Street, Carlton, where the first reading at La Mama on 3 September 1968 attracted 17 people, was a focal point for budding writers.
Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called Croscurrents, remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps, a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if he were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.
Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution.
It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beefheart's harsh Trout Mask Replica or the Songs of the Humpback Whale in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.
And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for breakfast", Buckmaster recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, The Great Auk. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claiming he could control the effect of the drug.
He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia he'd sit up in bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's Drunken Boat the other.
His close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during the last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed.
Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop. He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him cary it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player. Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors.
There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favourite painting titled 'Self Portrait', by a 13 year-old boy.
Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson. "I came home one evening and Charles was in my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible... grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of him".
"His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of it. And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to do. And he was really upset because it hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought "Ohhhh, I don't want this, I do not want this'."
Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to do crazy things". She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone...
Retta Hemensley is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the lights". Did this encourage his destructive urge?
In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge / yet cannot understand / the nature / of this fear", of "ice, brooding above me". He wrote also that "all the dark hints / were not, as I had expected, / a part of this game... "
The poem, called Willochra, showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.
Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful girl", just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love; he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at la Mama in march 1970, before he had even bothered to ask her name. And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship.
She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack.
When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will. He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said.
Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered his room with his mother. Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favourites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said.
It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time. Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room.
"For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said."There was a jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue. His mother opened a drawer in his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors."
Michael Dugan, remarked in his recent article in Overland that the poet was "tidying up" in his last months, "preparing to leave nothing behind". He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost.
While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.
John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed earmarked for disaster," he said."He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time."
Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days. he was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right slot".
According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructiveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behaviour.
Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him. The first time I went to see him I just rolled up unannounced and got directions to the ward he was in.
"I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.
"He was walking down the corridor between these two ... classic great hulking chaps in white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did."
She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge. "I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all."
She said she was elated when she left. After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside."
Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a Jerusalem Bible Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.
She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was just after she had bailed him out of Pentridge. "He was out of his mind ... God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally. I said 'Charles, you don't just walk into guys' offices like this, Charles, you haven't got any shoes on'.
"I said 'you can't go in there like this. You will get thrown out. He went in, he turned around to me and said 'you don't have to come in, man, you're so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: 'arsehole, you are not worth it. I don't care how clever you are. I don't care how talented you are. I don't care how beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth it.' And I just walked off."
Charles Buckmaster was given a good behavior bond at his trial on condition he returned to his parents' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll leave nothing behind," he had once told John Jenkins. He spent the last few months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment he might finally escape his hell.
[This the text of Larry Schwartz's feature article as published in The Sunday Age (Agenda), 5th August, 1990, with minute editing & deletion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY
GRUYERE : THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED
(for Charles Buckmaster)
1
who stayed only becos they couldnt
find their way out again ( your poem
about them )
: swiss
people.
around 1840.
& the people who are still there now
in Gruyere
you could practically call it
Buckmaster country -
at least one part of it
( yr houses at four points
spanning cherry orchards
the dam with frogs
surrounded by green flora
& brown earth
in view of Mount St Leonard
2
on the outskirts of the water :
a cows carcass
already substantially returned
to the ground
the dead cow
bones turned up / great eye cavities
where 'things' have burrowed into its cranium
its legs become part of the earth
beside the dam.
the roar of the frogs
roar enuf
to drown
out
the Ruston Lincoln
diesel pump ( we
sheltered in its shed from
the rain )
listening to bell birds
piping -
one
grey as the gum
pretended
it
was
just
a
tree
its belly softer grey than its wing.
the clouted earth / broken bracken / grey weathered
grey watered / grey forest . thataway ..
3
you know
the cicada walks right out of its shell
abandons
himself ( the husks
crustate the wooden boards
around
the diesel pump.
stationary -
fixed treadle )
& flies out & over
the patches of black slime
bearing frogs eggs ( ten-
nis balls )
amongst the reeds
& weed
spreading under the surface
end to end
dragon flies
hovering horizontally
hanging
on breezes
making it their own
eery way
4
a tungle croft
of unusual constellations
of floating forests
of sheep following their leaders from
one spot in the field
suddenly
to another part
all of them . .
it pays to look up your stars
( THIS GUN
WAS CAPTURED FROM THE
GERMANS
BY THE 41st BATTALION A.I.F.
IN BELGIUM 1918
AND PRESENTED TO THE RESIDENTS OF
SOUTH GRUYERE )
collecting
sprigs of bacon & egg ( rust &
yellow ) flower
making
garlands to wear round yr neck
: you ancient !
look up the stars .
the familiar spots / stones
you know by heart -
bush fires
some badns
thru the kitchen window
( original oil paintings
on the wall )
going back ( father
& sons )
30 years.
120 years.
30000 years
in one long sweep / of
brown
green
&
the blu of the sky.
5
climbing
over barbed wire
under branches
around thorns
dropping
deeper thru trees
some with
rough brown bark hanging a strip
grey gums
prickly wattle
tea tree
wild heath
creeper
& vines.
treading over centuries of decomposition &
regrowth.
dog
following possum to their tree nests
another cow carcass
head propped on its shoulder
bones.
its left foreleg a
few yards away
hacked off & gnawed clean.
its hide
taut across the backbone &
ribcage
you could bounce on it.
6 (i)
the fording point
too deep -
the centre of the log bridge
covered by the stream.
when cows trespass ( you told us )
others properties
you cant chase them back.
you have to wait til the
owner comes & collects.
& if the trespasser
eats off yr land or tramples
the entire farm under foot
you still have to wait.
( the cows owner pays damages of course! )
(ii)
tasting the sap
dribbling down
a tree -
brown toffee
& a flavor which hardens the entire
palate
coating the tongue with
something worse than detol
"youre not sposed to eat it..."
came
too late !
but what did they live on
before the swiss
say
centuries before
1840 ?
berries. grass. some varieties
of snake,
frogs.
possum.
& bury their dead in the forest ?
making signs
for the deliverance of obstinate
earthly trappings
bury them down the gradient
in the centre
of the thickest bush
bury them maybe
in mass graves
on the down slope towards
the river.
(iii)
one massive skull
the head larger than a cow or
horse
must be an ox
huge molars
the jaws loosened by
the wet
the teeth planted in soil
prettied with moss . .
& the legs of the monster
to the right
of the head
folded casually.
7 (i)
the comings & goings
the mainroad to Lilydale to
the City
- the way 'home' -
cars bumper to bumper
which go right on by
oblivious of the
"barbecue down the road :
if the rain holds out"
of the living
made for 30 years
off the land
amongst cherry trees
with bridesmaids veils ( in
blossom )
(ii)
behaviour patterns of country folk
whether they forecast rainstorms
by rheumatic twinges
the
incidence of various common
& obscure
neuroses
the facts & figures of sociological reports
- apply
as much to the people who go
as the people who stay
8
in the middle of the earth
does anything change substantially ?
Gruyere :
a day in a life.
the visit.
the place exists
thru memories
nothing is more certain than
the recalled materials. the composition of ground :
yr bread & eard.
nothing is deader
than when it is forgotten.
Gruyere.
(September/October 29, 1968)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
CHARLES BUCKMASTER'S MOTORCYCLE
It is strange, the places
where he rides. The spokes whir
a silver churning, a fuel gauge
where something might be written.
An absent roar the sound
of pages burning, a tank or fuselage
scrapped or kept in a dark garage,
shadow heaped on knowing metal.
I have pages creased in folders
but not the rush of their trajectory,
phantom destinations written
on worn rubber. The one lamp
dull in an old night, tracing names
of towns bypassed by the highway.
A yellow lamp lit up
in a reckless notebook,
youth's windshield. Stored away
the words wait to ride, a poem
on the mechanical horseback
of remembering.
(2011)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
Larry Schwartz wrote for the Age & the Sunday Age for many years before going freelance. His poems have occasionally appear, for example in Bob Adamson's Ulitarra magazine in the mid '90s.
James Hamilton whilst not studying at La Trobe University, pursues his own research of the life & times of Charles Buckmaster & the La Mama poets of the late 60s.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
COLLECTED WORKS BOOKSHOP EVENTS CALENDAR
For friends who arent Facebook friends --given that the Collected Works Bookshop's Facebook page has in recent weeks become our information board --herewith the February, 2011 Calendar:
Saturday, 12th February, '011, from 2pm; Paroxysm Press presents annual Adelaide/Melbourne connection. Featuring launch of Teri Louise Kelly's 4th book, TheAmerican Blow Job, with readings from Jenny Toune, Kerryn Tredrea, Hop Dac, Kristy Love, Shane Jesse Christmass. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City, (enqu., Kris , 9654-8873) ALL WELCOME
Monday, 14th February (yes, it's St Valentine's with a difference), 4.30 for 5pm; Anne Elvey's chapbook, Claimed by Country (from Chris Mansell's Press Press), launched by Kate Rigby, with special guest Betty Pike. RSVP, aelvey@tpg.com.au; enqu. Kris, 9654-8873. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City. ALL WELCOME
Saturday, 26th February, from 2pm; Ray Liversidge launches Tasmania's famous Famous Reporter (# 42), the latest issue of Ralph Wessman's unique magazine of poetry, review, poetry commentary, news. Readers to be announced. If you're not heading out of town to the mag's Guildford event please catch it previous day at Collected Works, lvl 1. 37 Swanston St ., City. ALL WELCOME. (enqu,, Kris , 9654-8873)
oOo
Previously mentioned event featuring Mark Tredinnick book launch & reading is probably going to take place at the end of May. Watch out for announcement.
The March calendar of events is taking shape, and may have three events. At this stage the one definite gig will feature Robert Lloyd, reading poems, singing songs, on Wednesday the 23rd.
We're hoping also for a June or July reading & possible launching (if we can get copies of the book) by Kevin Hart.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
And check out the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook page...
Saturday, 12th February, '011, from 2pm; Paroxysm Press presents annual Adelaide/Melbourne connection. Featuring launch of Teri Louise Kelly's 4th book, TheAmerican Blow Job, with readings from Jenny Toune, Kerryn Tredrea, Hop Dac, Kristy Love, Shane Jesse Christmass. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City, (enqu., Kris , 9654-8873) ALL WELCOME
Monday, 14th February (yes, it's St Valentine's with a difference), 4.30 for 5pm; Anne Elvey's chapbook, Claimed by Country (from Chris Mansell's Press Press), launched by Kate Rigby, with special guest Betty Pike. RSVP, aelvey@tpg.com.au; enqu. Kris, 9654-8873. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City. ALL WELCOME
Saturday, 26th February, from 2pm; Ray Liversidge launches Tasmania's famous Famous Reporter (# 42), the latest issue of Ralph Wessman's unique magazine of poetry, review, poetry commentary, news. Readers to be announced. If you're not heading out of town to the mag's Guildford event please catch it previous day at Collected Works, lvl 1. 37 Swanston St ., City. ALL WELCOME. (enqu,, Kris , 9654-8873)
oOo
Previously mentioned event featuring Mark Tredinnick book launch & reading is probably going to take place at the end of May. Watch out for announcement.
The March calendar of events is taking shape, and may have three events. At this stage the one definite gig will feature Robert Lloyd, reading poems, singing songs, on Wednesday the 23rd.
We're hoping also for a June or July reading & possible launching (if we can get copies of the book) by Kevin Hart.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
And check out the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook page...
Thursday, January 27, 2011
READING JOHN RILEY'S "PROSE PIECES" AGAIN : Remembering him on the thirty-second anniversary of his murder (October 27th, 1978)...
Where does one piece end & another begin? With the exception of the three short series of aphorisms called How To, John Riley's Prose Pieces (Grosseteste Review Books, #14; 1974; Stafforshire, UK) are seamless. A piece begins; the poet (I wont call him anything else) proceeds, & when the writing's finished the text ends. (And this isnt quite self-evident!) It has nothing to do with plot or character, although characters, including the narrator, are easily elicited. It's simply (perhaps 'simply' isnt the right word --simple things are accounted for but it's hardly a simple mind informing the telling) the stop-start style of it, the natural run.
I've always imbued a comment Riley made in his prose work, Correspondences (pub., The Human Constitution, London, 1970), with something like a rationale : " 'Authorship will gradually cease. Future generations ought to set up offices in which every person, at a certain age, should hand in a truthful biography, which could provide material for a real science of human beings, if such were needed.' A certain pondering over that little remark of Strindberg's probably set me to planning this as yet roughly mapped-out series(...) If it were merely an autobiography, none of us would be interested. What engaged my attention is the attempt to make a series of truthful biographies, which, either singly or considered together, may not be without a certain significance. (....)"
I dont think he'd have taken kindly to anything compulsory! 'Offices' & 'at a certain age' --bah! Still, I imagine him embarking with good intentions, but soon enough the statement he was compiling would go skew-whiff --in the name of honesty --a semantic honesty at least & not evasion. Avoidance of narrative cliches would be deliberate.
Against criticism's usual (& often proper) caution that art's product isnt life, I actually hear & see the man in & behind the prose-pieces, if not transparently then lucidly. No stranger, our man, adherent to Russian Orthodoxy, to artefact's palpably divine perspective : why would John Riley abandon his writing, of all things, to materialist one-dimensionality?
Riley is a man by whose thinking he's supposed. His thinking aloud, that is --as though thinking aloud must jump around and thinking in silence be continuous (modern prose vs the Nineteenth Century's).
"If you could set yourself altogether to music, would you? Choose your instruments, your form; take your time, your rhythm." (p24)
Riley's style is unhurried even as he bobs in & out of stories, ideas, like the arch-agent of discontinuity (recall its modishness in the '60s & '70s).
"Deja vu and pre vu : I badly need a theory of time to put this in. Not a circle not an ellipse not an escalation of universes, not not not, but a complexity so precise that it leads by poetic right to that I know about." (p25)
Yorkshire is his rejoinder to anything high-minded. He resorts to Yorkshire to undercut capital 'l' literature and though poems occasionally rise out of the text, a line or two, a verse, his vernacular quips disperse abstraction even as the sound which is the poem speaking. Paradoxically, this is usually the freedom sought by the poet dissatisfied with the occasional --as though Doc Williams hankered after Wallace Stevens or Buk hell-bent on William Bronk!
Prose is where John Riley can be himself --poet keeping tabs on the literally adjacent. It's the frame afforded by ordinary vantage, principally, one feels, the pub. Perfect for hearsay; dictum : "If you could record all the stories round you, and only do it simply enough. Like the man who said to me : 'Ah but the sweetness of the first kiss.' And it was his story." (p23) Relish the hops'-drowze one might dream-write in --slide into pew, surreptitious pen at the ready, and drop into the middle of it.
But this isnt the style of Living In, which is a crafted piece of writing or sets out to be. The "Every holiday I go to my cottage" (p7) paragraphs contrast with those beginning "Every holiday I do not"(p8). The poet-philosopher sounds a little like Rilke or Kafka, whose reverie is located in the actual world from which the narrator is cocooned by desire & despair --desire for the divine or corporeal beloved; despair at his powerlessness &, except for writing, enervation. It contains the existential conundrum, "Who wants to die? Or more accurately, who does not want to die?" Compared to other, no less interesting, pieces it's a construction despite the ad-libs.
The Pig And Whistle Section begins, "And then what we start to do when we have realised all that." (p21) In my mother's Alexandrian family they'd say "and then?" --to induce conversation or to cap it. John Riley's "And then" points also to 'the literature of exhaustion', ca. 1970s, --that is, how to proceed the literary project when it's thought everything's been said --literature after the end of or death of literature.
"And then what we start to do" regales his life as well as his writing (the modern heart laid bare implying no story without bruised & bloodied testament).
Down By the River Side combines all the Riley traits & gambits. The high & the low --thoughts, turn of phrase --standard (even poetic) English & Yorkshire, esoteric & common subjects. As we've appreciated, Yorkshire will always be his stock-in-trade come-uppance.
After the philosophy of the first paragraph ("Always this atheistical 'chance'; which nevertheless alters nothing, salvation or damnation no nearer." (p37)), ships are introduced or, let's say, the sea is. Boats, sailors, flags... "Ships come in and out of the harbour, either under their own power, or towed in by the tug." His registry of ships as evocative as an index of flora, but not a simple list because of the way it commits &, similarly, escapes. Quintessential Riley :
"In Spring rain a seagull cruises with curved-down wing tips. And then the rain clears. The very familiarity of the scene.
Caleyo, Simon, Soviet Mariner, Pelikan, Navigare, Wakenitz, Aramil, Grada westers, Outokumpu, Wega, Tourmaline, Ocean Blue, Harald Bles, Nogat, Valle de Orozco, Madaleine, Jastarnia, Bleikvassli, Poolster. Hasewint, Noblesse, Sota, Emmalies Funk, Ivan Bolotnikov, vaterland, and, I suppose, Dynocontainer I, Dynocontainer II. And certainly the Gribbin head.
This stream is a river big enough to float 3,000 tons.
A forest path through the forest : analogous to setting out to read a history of the Byzantine State, a clean white page, an impetus to restoration." (p38)
Popped into the jump-cut of the narrative is schoolroom & pub slice-of-life.
"You want a good stingy cane and hit 'em across the ballocks. That'll do it. You can hit 'em round the head as much as you like, go all day, break your hand. Get the buggers round the ballocks." (p41)
Often wonder which is the counterpoint : aphoristic musing --"Freedom as a state is creation, which is timeless" --or the one about "a wanked out lad of a painter's mate who'd dropped his bottle of linseed oil"?
John Riley's self-definition isnt over & against nothing, as they say, though figures of nothing might spook him ("memory patterns of almost unsubtle tyranny : an exact repetition of the meaningless." (p40)). He's more gnostic than nihilist ("Our wreckage / is too obvious, the pause between performances too long. / Why else should we speak of that world there / and this one here as if there were a gulf there to be bridged / by senses or ideas? / There is no cure for similes, / or none I know of." (p40)). Good reason there must be for apparent misanthropy --"There are people who wear their bodies comfortably; to be there when needed. And very relaxing they are too for a time. At the other end madness, in various outbreaks or permanencies. There are those denials." (p33)
No disqualification in my mind that these words are from Mary's African Buttenhole Co., a parody, as I recall him impishly confiding, of writing published in a little magazine, (Richard Downing & Andy Wachtel's Sesheta?) possibly by Mary Ferrarri & other New Yorkers. Or for that matter, the nods elsewhere, positively, to Flann O'Brien, Basho, Stevens, Holderlin...
Perhaps all of the pieces turn around the relationship of language to the world's objects & events. Not much doubt attaches to his feelings though plenty to his sense of the living (language) enterprise.
Allow the full circle then : Riley's always the poet writing this prose --the prose, mind you, of thinking aloud, musing, amusing himself, letting himself go just a little off the taut leash. The taught leash? --steeped of course in the language --various languages --Russian, German, French --think only of Riley's unique Mandelshtam & Holderlin versions... How (or did he?) come to rest in English?
"Words are words, man. And a fat belly is a fat belly." (p33)
oOo
[7/11/10 to 10/12/10; cleaned up & typed, 27/01/2011]
I've always imbued a comment Riley made in his prose work, Correspondences (pub., The Human Constitution, London, 1970), with something like a rationale : " 'Authorship will gradually cease. Future generations ought to set up offices in which every person, at a certain age, should hand in a truthful biography, which could provide material for a real science of human beings, if such were needed.' A certain pondering over that little remark of Strindberg's probably set me to planning this as yet roughly mapped-out series(...) If it were merely an autobiography, none of us would be interested. What engaged my attention is the attempt to make a series of truthful biographies, which, either singly or considered together, may not be without a certain significance. (....)"
I dont think he'd have taken kindly to anything compulsory! 'Offices' & 'at a certain age' --bah! Still, I imagine him embarking with good intentions, but soon enough the statement he was compiling would go skew-whiff --in the name of honesty --a semantic honesty at least & not evasion. Avoidance of narrative cliches would be deliberate.
Against criticism's usual (& often proper) caution that art's product isnt life, I actually hear & see the man in & behind the prose-pieces, if not transparently then lucidly. No stranger, our man, adherent to Russian Orthodoxy, to artefact's palpably divine perspective : why would John Riley abandon his writing, of all things, to materialist one-dimensionality?
Riley is a man by whose thinking he's supposed. His thinking aloud, that is --as though thinking aloud must jump around and thinking in silence be continuous (modern prose vs the Nineteenth Century's).
"If you could set yourself altogether to music, would you? Choose your instruments, your form; take your time, your rhythm." (p24)
Riley's style is unhurried even as he bobs in & out of stories, ideas, like the arch-agent of discontinuity (recall its modishness in the '60s & '70s).
"Deja vu and pre vu : I badly need a theory of time to put this in. Not a circle not an ellipse not an escalation of universes, not not not, but a complexity so precise that it leads by poetic right to that I know about." (p25)
Yorkshire is his rejoinder to anything high-minded. He resorts to Yorkshire to undercut capital 'l' literature and though poems occasionally rise out of the text, a line or two, a verse, his vernacular quips disperse abstraction even as the sound which is the poem speaking. Paradoxically, this is usually the freedom sought by the poet dissatisfied with the occasional --as though Doc Williams hankered after Wallace Stevens or Buk hell-bent on William Bronk!
Prose is where John Riley can be himself --poet keeping tabs on the literally adjacent. It's the frame afforded by ordinary vantage, principally, one feels, the pub. Perfect for hearsay; dictum : "If you could record all the stories round you, and only do it simply enough. Like the man who said to me : 'Ah but the sweetness of the first kiss.' And it was his story." (p23) Relish the hops'-drowze one might dream-write in --slide into pew, surreptitious pen at the ready, and drop into the middle of it.
But this isnt the style of Living In, which is a crafted piece of writing or sets out to be. The "Every holiday I go to my cottage" (p7) paragraphs contrast with those beginning "Every holiday I do not"(p8). The poet-philosopher sounds a little like Rilke or Kafka, whose reverie is located in the actual world from which the narrator is cocooned by desire & despair --desire for the divine or corporeal beloved; despair at his powerlessness &, except for writing, enervation. It contains the existential conundrum, "Who wants to die? Or more accurately, who does not want to die?" Compared to other, no less interesting, pieces it's a construction despite the ad-libs.
The Pig And Whistle Section begins, "And then what we start to do when we have realised all that." (p21) In my mother's Alexandrian family they'd say "and then?" --to induce conversation or to cap it. John Riley's "And then" points also to 'the literature of exhaustion', ca. 1970s, --that is, how to proceed the literary project when it's thought everything's been said --literature after the end of or death of literature.
"And then what we start to do" regales his life as well as his writing (the modern heart laid bare implying no story without bruised & bloodied testament).
Down By the River Side combines all the Riley traits & gambits. The high & the low --thoughts, turn of phrase --standard (even poetic) English & Yorkshire, esoteric & common subjects. As we've appreciated, Yorkshire will always be his stock-in-trade come-uppance.
After the philosophy of the first paragraph ("Always this atheistical 'chance'; which nevertheless alters nothing, salvation or damnation no nearer." (p37)), ships are introduced or, let's say, the sea is. Boats, sailors, flags... "Ships come in and out of the harbour, either under their own power, or towed in by the tug." His registry of ships as evocative as an index of flora, but not a simple list because of the way it commits &, similarly, escapes. Quintessential Riley :
"In Spring rain a seagull cruises with curved-down wing tips. And then the rain clears. The very familiarity of the scene.
Caleyo, Simon, Soviet Mariner, Pelikan, Navigare, Wakenitz, Aramil, Grada westers, Outokumpu, Wega, Tourmaline, Ocean Blue, Harald Bles, Nogat, Valle de Orozco, Madaleine, Jastarnia, Bleikvassli, Poolster. Hasewint, Noblesse, Sota, Emmalies Funk, Ivan Bolotnikov, vaterland, and, I suppose, Dynocontainer I, Dynocontainer II. And certainly the Gribbin head.
This stream is a river big enough to float 3,000 tons.
A forest path through the forest : analogous to setting out to read a history of the Byzantine State, a clean white page, an impetus to restoration." (p38)
Popped into the jump-cut of the narrative is schoolroom & pub slice-of-life.
"You want a good stingy cane and hit 'em across the ballocks. That'll do it. You can hit 'em round the head as much as you like, go all day, break your hand. Get the buggers round the ballocks." (p41)
Often wonder which is the counterpoint : aphoristic musing --"Freedom as a state is creation, which is timeless" --or the one about "a wanked out lad of a painter's mate who'd dropped his bottle of linseed oil"?
John Riley's self-definition isnt over & against nothing, as they say, though figures of nothing might spook him ("memory patterns of almost unsubtle tyranny : an exact repetition of the meaningless." (p40)). He's more gnostic than nihilist ("Our wreckage / is too obvious, the pause between performances too long. / Why else should we speak of that world there / and this one here as if there were a gulf there to be bridged / by senses or ideas? / There is no cure for similes, / or none I know of." (p40)). Good reason there must be for apparent misanthropy --"There are people who wear their bodies comfortably; to be there when needed. And very relaxing they are too for a time. At the other end madness, in various outbreaks or permanencies. There are those denials." (p33)
No disqualification in my mind that these words are from Mary's African Buttenhole Co., a parody, as I recall him impishly confiding, of writing published in a little magazine, (Richard Downing & Andy Wachtel's Sesheta?) possibly by Mary Ferrarri & other New Yorkers. Or for that matter, the nods elsewhere, positively, to Flann O'Brien, Basho, Stevens, Holderlin...
Perhaps all of the pieces turn around the relationship of language to the world's objects & events. Not much doubt attaches to his feelings though plenty to his sense of the living (language) enterprise.
Allow the full circle then : Riley's always the poet writing this prose --the prose, mind you, of thinking aloud, musing, amusing himself, letting himself go just a little off the taut leash. The taught leash? --steeped of course in the language --various languages --Russian, German, French --think only of Riley's unique Mandelshtam & Holderlin versions... How (or did he?) come to rest in English?
"Words are words, man. And a fat belly is a fat belly." (p33)
oOo
[7/11/10 to 10/12/10; cleaned up & typed, 27/01/2011]
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