So, the poem, the fifth of a proposed sequence of ten, is done! --in spite of itself. Let me explain. There was no through-line at all, no momentum. What I had was the dream I'd woken on and its affect on me, thus the initial scribbles. There was a wish to recognize concealment or at least abstain from the superficial hail & heartiness which logic places upon affable humanity; and this could be characterized as "monster" (the persona raised thereon), which figure was consonant with the most obvious aspect of The Midsummer Night's Dream (twisting my peculiar way the enchantment ruling its characters), that being the formal source of the poem(s). It's not giving too much away to offer that the first words of each poem are : "More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante". Literally, bit by bit, from 31st January, '012 to just the other day, 16th February, the poem was constructed.
Big deal! But as I consider it now, making the poem (making it more than writing it, where, for me, writing holds natural fluency) I experienced certain truths of composition which in my more-or-less spontaneous approach had slipped from consciousness. For example, that one doesnt know where the poem is going or how to get it going ought not disqualify the process. I confess, and against the way I used to teach back in the '70s & '80s, I was ready to scrub the poem several times because it wasnt immediately working! There is a psychology to the "work in progress" : one must relax & have faith... And so I did --a word here or there, a phrase, rejigging the order, but not knowing how it would or if it should coalesce. And then it did --how many days & drafts? --the words & lines came together as a poem! I was amazed!
Because I'm writing a fixed line & syllable type of poem for many years now, and also imagine series or sequences rather than individual poems [see my chapbook, EXILE TRIPTYCH (Vagabond Press, 2011) for most recent published example], the spontaneity is qualified, but even so it better describes me to myself than ever construction could. Which isnt at all to say I dont work & re-work lines, relishing the redrafting, counting, sounding out. I plainly do. I should also note there's always prose on the go (journals, journalesque criticism & review, chronicle, fiction), which means I either work simultaneously on poems & prose, or I let one go entirely for the duration of the prior commitment. Obviously, my experience of prose is free of this stop-go construction : no narrative, no prose. But maybe that's similar to the type of poetry I write --always referring to the theme or working it out. 'On song' & 'on subject' in this process are essentially adjacent.
--17/23, February, 012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
THE MERRI CREEK : Poems & Pieces, #26, New Year Issue, 2012
DAVE ELLISON
LADY UNIVERSE
(For a dear lady)
In a burst of longing
Dawn grows through darkness
The heart love gives
Breathes time into us
This is the everyday
Hard work and heartache
We gain our sight
All by one sky
In a moment of light
Observe the way
Paths cross our town
Clouds parade into view
We approach night
Face the same midnight
With our candles and carols
For the child in everything
In the court of the moon
With magic of starshine
The street wind sings
May we gather a feeling
Live the new life
As great trees in our midst
And noble towers
Bow to holy night
[12 Jan. 2012]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY/KEN TRIMBLE
"the pilgrim piece"
*
(October 7/2011)
Dear Kris,
I hope you enjoyed 'Shores' [Shores of American Memory, Littlefox Press, '11). I read that poem on your site about the Albion. [David Pepperell's The Albion Jukebox Murder 1972 ] Yeah I can totally relate to that. There are so many or so few depending on how you look at Facebook where I can call a person friend. In you I feel totally at home & although distant, meaning we move in different circles & distance is hard, I regard you as a friend..................cheers Ken
oOo
Dear Ken,
Yes, of course! Very much so! Book, friendship, the lot! I'd been reading it from the beginning then today began from the end! You're very much the 'silent witness', kind of imperturbable. You dont get in the way of the poem/the perception. Laudable.
By the way, I have s/one coming in next week for a copy of the new collection, and hope that another acquaintance will also be interested!
Loretta just told me she was at the Rainbow wake you write about [Nights at the Rainbow, p1]. Small world!
We'll talk again soon!
Best wishes, Kris
oOo
(October 8/2011)
Dear Kris,
Thanks for words. I was a regular at the Rainbow for some years. I used to see the Paul Williamson Hammond Combo on a Monday night. And the Grand Whazoo, and on a Sunday afternoon. Chic was a very personable fellow who had the ability to treat everyone as a friend. By accident I hadn't heard that he died. A mate who ran the Rob Roy told me that Chic had this amazing funeral so I just imagined it. While pubs can be destructive they can also be great community gatherings like a family. In the poem 'Shores Of American Memory' the section on O'Reilly's is a case in point. I met a guy who told me to go to that pub on a Monday night because they have an Irish jam session in North Beach. He sent an email to the owner Myles that I would be coming down and that I was a poet. Anyway Myles happens to love Australians. That night I met Myles and for the whole night I didn't buy a beer. He even sang And The Band Played Waltzing Matlida for me. People came up to me and said, you're that Australian. There I met a fellow who sang with Rambling Jack Elliot, & the great grandson of Gurdjieff the philosopher. It was if I was being honoured. I guess places like the Rainbow & O'Reilly's make you feel special for no specific reason, it makes you feel as if yes there is a family and life is good..........cheers Ken
oOo
(October 8/2011)
Dear Ken,
Your evocative, inspiring reply re- the Rainbow has me thinking that we could attempt the"conversation" by email? How about it?!!! (This was to be a conversation abt this & that, especially the pilgrimage aspect of both poetry and yr journey to the US, Merton , Jeffers etc)
I salute your energy & openness, I mean that you can be there in such a way as the O'Reilly's scene opened up to you! And those connections are astonishing...
Better get back to the Shop!
All best, Kris
oOo
(8/10/11)
Dear Kris,
Sure thing, that would be great. Do you mean explore more avenues of the pilgrim experience or in relation to my America trip? Because pilgrim travelling can open up a whole new world to everyone, artists, poets, anyone who is open to the journey. Personally, Joe Campbell's books on myth had a great influence. One has to cast off or shed your old skin and believe in the path. Even if a thousand people say you're crazy you have stick at it and believe in yourself. And there are times when you go 3 steps back & 1 step forward but the point is you have to get up. I am no angel and I sort of liked what St. Augustine said, 'Lord make me perfect but not just now', or something like that haha! It was like going to the monastery and meeting the gardener Joseph Bottone who turned out to be a mate of Creeley. He had a hermitage on the grounds overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One time he invited me over for a joint and a couple of shots of rum. Certainly we played up but it was great! And the whole thing becomes infectious, the pilgrimage. Suddenly not only poetry but also the monastic along the Big Sur coast became a powerful adventure for me. Because you know that Robinson Jeffers' home is in Carmel, and a few kilometres from the monastery is the Henry Miller Library and you're riding over the Bixby Bridge where Kerouac stumbled and hooped & hollered in the foggy night. That below the bridge somewhere is Ferlinghetti's cabin. You become sort of tuned into the poetry of the land. You know that Ansel Adams & Ed Weston two of America's great photographers had homes there as well so it becomes a symphony. Even New Orleans I got to know the stories of Johnny Whites Bar. A fellow by the name of Paddy told me that when hurricane Katrina rolled through, the only bar open in the whole town was this one. So I checked it out, it runs off Bourbon Street almost opposite The New Orleans Preservation Jazz Hall. A tiny bar where twenty would be a crowd and I'm having a drink while watching Germany kick our arse in the World Cup! You get immersed in the moment & because I studied photography when I was young I became a good watcher. And the whole idea of watching takes you into another world. A lot of people travel but never see or they only see postcards & that isn't travelling.............cheers Ken
oOo
(8/10/11)
Dear Kris,
More reflections on Thomas Merton this time. You know he went to Columbia University just a few years before Kerouac and others. In fact he published a novel (not sure of name) at same publishing house as Kerouac's first novel Town & City, Harcourt and Brace. His mentor & friend was Mark Van Doren who also taught Kerouac. Merton was a few years earlier than the 'Beats' but he was interested in the jazz scene, drank and smoked and had his way with women. Yet Merton was called to be a monastic and lived that way for twenty odd years. I am attracted to him because he struggled nearly every day he was in the order. Yet he stayed true. When he wrote his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, from his Trappist Monastery in Kentucky, people in America went crazy about it. It came out just after the war and I guess people were dealing with that sense of loss that war brings & so they found a prophet in Merton who spoke their language. The irony is he went in the monastery to deny his writing talent but the church had other ideas. They wanted him to utilise his talents so he could be of use in getting converts etc. Another irony and I didn't know it at the time, Merton wanted to leave the order of the Trappists and become a Camaldolse. That is the order I am in. It is more hermit whereas the Trappists are more community. You know, when he went in the church was far more restrictive than it is today after Vatican 2. The time he went in the church was convinced that it was their way or the highway as the saying goes. Meaning they had no time for other faiths and his order were very strict. There was no talking except only with meetings with the Abbot about spiritual direction with either him or a Director. Life was lived by sign language. And life was hard work. Most monasteries are run like farms. You get up early work in the fields, pray, read, eat, sleep then repeat. In fact it is a hard life. Some work in the kitchen, others may be allocated to cleaning guest house accommodation and in Merton's case he was told to write. There was tremendous tension with Merton I think because on the one hand he wanted to deny his writing talent & on the other he loved the celebrity. Even not being allowed out of his monastery he still had this aura that people craved. People like Huxley corresponded along with Joan Baez and many others. When Merton was finally allowed to attend a conference in Thailand in the 1960's he went to India & Sri Lanka. At a place called Polonnaruwa there is a giant stone Buddha reclining on his side. In his book, Asian Journals, he tells of this One Moment or unitive experience. The writing is sublime. From there after all those years in the monastery and his epiphany in Sri Lanka he is having a shower, and after he's finished he begins to shave, and is electrocuted. I reckon wow what a perfect death. So Merton in a strange way was the fore-runner of Kerouac and Jack devoured Merton but sadly couldn't grasp him...............regards Ken
oOo
(October 9/2011)
Dear Kris,
[re KH birthday greetings to KT] Facebook have it a bit early. I have it on the 12th, the same day as Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. Actually my father has the same day as well and mother is on the 12th June & my brother the 13th December, the 12th month.
Began reading Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. It is a fine book.
My friend and spiritual head of the Australian part of the Camaldolese has just returned from his own pilgrimage. He went to Italy where they have a General Chapter once every few years. He is an interesting fellow. He went to India in the Eighties and stayed with Bede Griffiths & was initiated into sanyassa. Now I went through a similar process but as a bramachari student. Am I right to say you stayed at the monastery in Kentucky where Merton lived then went onto Sri Lanka and later Thailand? If so wow. Did you see Polonnaruwa? Michael (priest friend above) is taking me out for a curry meal for my birthday. Lastly thinking about putting book in for awards. Who knows if I don't give it a go? The only thing is I get mixed up with their enrollment dates. Like the John Bray award you have to put your form in about 6 months before award is given. The only thing I worry about is that people think I am writing it as an American poetry by proxy. From my point of view it isn't, instead I wanted it to be a pilgrim piece if you will. Anyway that's the way I wrote it and that's that. Thanks for birthday greetings....................kind regards Ken
oOo
(Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:36 PM)
Dear Kris,
Any further news on that interview on pilgrimage?..................kind regards Ken
oOo
(Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 12:37 AM)
Dear Ken,
just back an hour or so after cleaning up the shop following [Owen Richardson's] launch for Gig Ryan [New & Selected Poems, published by Giramondo] ... very big affair, exhausting, and heaps of fun!
Re- the pilgrimage i/vw, --yes, will look at it again on Thursday (my day off)...
If I can get away on Saturday for your reading at Federation Square I will!Good luck!
talk soon, k
oOo
(15/10/11)
Dear Ken,
I managed to get away from the Shop around three p.m., and DID catch half of the reading at Fed Square... Was disappointed that I'd probably missed your set; heard several of Robert Lloyd's poems & couple of songs, then all of Michael Heald and then, a small miracle, you were returned to the stage for one poem! Was very interested in yr reading voice; it reminded me of Robt Lloyd's singing voice! Probably the most resonant poem I heard this a/noon! Well done! Can only guess at how you felt (reluctant?) but you sounded swell! I had to hurry off straightaway afterwards and anyway i cld see you guys closing in on one another so better (I thought) to drop you quick line than to cut in. Time for me to recouperate now. Will see what I can get together for you around yr splendid Pilgrimage responses, and will send before too long.
cheers, Kris
oOo
(15 Oct/11)
Dear Kris,
Didn't see you sadly, I was in another zone haha! Glad you liked my voice hope poem was good too. Not sure where the voice comes from but it helps with the delivery or spell of poem. Robert & I thinking of doing something together more duets in future. I really like him, he's a real nice guy. I really appreciate you coming, and when pilgrim thing is right for you I'll be here. Just got home, now 9pm, had to walk half up a mountain pitch black. Now settling in at home with a good red.....Youre the best..............Ken
oOo
Kris Hemensley
End-piece, 1
Mine have mostly been head & book journeys, Ken, though I did follow in Merton's footsteps to the King's Palace in Bangkok in 2005. Loved the Ramayana murals there but afterwards, when I checked Merton's own response in my brother Bernard's copy of Asian Journals (--I was in Bangkok en route the UK-- ) realized that Merton had only qualified appreciation (Disney kitsch etc). But yes, was well aware of Merton's Bangkok story, and so to that extent it was a kind of pilgrimage in itself. But Gethsemane in Kentucky only in my reading, for example via Merton's book. The Sign of Jonas (I have the 1953 1st British edition, Hollis & Carter, London), and appreciated immediately the tough rigour of that practice. (Penultimate paragraph in the Prologue is a beauty & somewhat a propos of even our correspondence : "A monk can always legitimately and significantly compare himself to a prophet, because the monks are the heirs of the prophets. The prophet is a man whose whole life is a living witness of the providential action of God in the world. Every prophet is a sign and a witness of Christ. Every monk, in whom Christ lives, and in whom all the prophecies are therefore fulfilled, is a witness and a sign of the Kingdom of God. Even our mistakes are eloquent, more than we know.")
Regarding Sri Lanka : I went ashore in Colombo as a 19 year old, working on the Fairstar (the Sitmar line's flagship), latter part of 1965. I only did a taxi round-trip with workmates but absorbed massive sensation & inspiration from my one & only Ceylon experience. For example, classic deja-vu on a river bank when, leaving my colleagues to the display of working elephants, I wandered off by myself, towards the cries & laughter of kids diving into the water, and suddenly realized I knew the place, that is I recognized it from a dream which I'd had in Southampton before the voyage... the colours, the heat, the angle of embankment to water, the screams of the children, the splash of water et cetera. I was shocked & amazed, walked away from it probably because called by colleagues to resume our taxi tour. But could have stood there forever, in wonderment, trying to understand what it meant!
[16th January, '012]
*
End-piece, 2
A Note on Shores of American Memory
It's as though sentiment (one's disposition towards the world) might parallel insight : the personal simultaneously a universal. But Ken Trimble isnt Khalil Gibran! Dont intend unkindness or ingratitude for what was a consolation & stimulation at age twenty, but the person walking around in these poems is no spiritual cipher. By way of contrast, David Ellison & I often refer to one or another example or exemplar of the school of Desperate Mysticism. No doubt at all that this poet's a seeker, one who doesnt shy from either big Metaphor or Reference, and the imprint of the world is all over him. It's audible like the Charlie Parker & Sonny Rollins, the Hank Williams & Bob Dylan who pop up in the poetry --visible like the place names, the brand names of daily consumables, let alone the influential books & authors (Kazantzakis, Jeffers, Rimbaud, Bukowski, Hamsun, Kerouac, Whitman, Ginsberg, Micheline, Kaufmann, Shelton Lee et al) which glue his soul-scape together. Not half bad for a "beggar poet nothing more, nothing less" (p. 44, 'Sixty-Seven Cents'), --which in the Post-Literature era, as I call it (and I'm not sure I dont 'simply' mean Post-Modernism) is a pretty good manifesto. "I cannot dazzle with verse, rhyme or rhythm" the poem goes, --G M Hopkins ? (but who can after The Windhover ?)!
"Just stories of what I've seen / And what I've done. / I walk the streets of the world a homeless drifter / Australian my heritage the planet my home / Listening to stories, writing them down"...
(16th January, '012)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALICIA BEE
Jack Kerouac’s Holiday House
Jack Kerouac built a holiday house for Beat poetry,
Mountain climbing Matterhorn in Mill Valley California,
He took Gary Snyder from the road and made a summary,
Jack Kerouac normally lived with his (sick old) mother in Florida.
The traveller never had a daughter till taking the blood test,
“You can’t fall off a mountain” in the height of beat mania,
He wrote some good freeflow haiku - history composed the rest.
He never read every book in the Buddhism (text) library,
His confusing stream of consciousness was typing from the chest,
Rehabilitation became spirituality,
Jack Kerouac would hit the road again when he drank alcohol.
(2010)
----------------------------------------------
CECILIA WHITE
breath
i don't recall the arrival
or having left. the point
of departure is the same
as the plosive of the asterisk
on a map, monosyllabic arrow
saying 'you are here'. contexted,
antiquarian, rigidly published.
spinal-tapped into parts of speech.
i am grammatically unscathed,
unbound on page or board
detectable only in the drawing
of breath, erasure of exclamation.
in the swoop of transitive verbage
a haunting space
lifts from the flatlands. never mind that
dislocation is in the reading.
i pick at threads of frontier
with my left-handed thinking. in the torn
apparel of second language
i remove full stops from islands
of air, listing under the salt
of problematics, participles
and suitcases. i am otherly compassed,
declining rite of passage and needle.
every place was once
somewhere else. meaning unsilts
ragged settlement, indexes
the gravel of logic.
stone and ink chapter memory
under weight of light, creasing
the eye, slubbing the tongue,
less engraved, i dissolve
sediment of interpretation,
inhaling contours,
landing at the point of it all.
(2011)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PAUL HARPER
assertive with grace & charm
counter intuitive as it may seem
grow a beard before train travel
& be accosted less by evangelists
particularly if your destination
is a small commune of musicians
across cow paddocks
from a bed & breakfast haunted
by freshly retired footballers
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
acquire a butterfly
some barbed wire or a tall ship
but when the toaster decides
an intricate mishmash
of marvel characters
fire & brimstone
& your topless girlfriend as a centaur
may assist two marathon runners
with their mission to negotiate peace
among rival factions
the black suits & the grey suits
in a breeding ground for ibis
not noticing can be highly functional
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
----------------------------------------------------------
ALBERT ROTSTEIN
vermeer
* * *
* * * *
everything porcelain
except the milk jug
which
spills endlessly
light * (oO enters
from the left
photons (o* exacted
by craft into
radiant iguazuae fall
*o)*O*(o
* oO * *
Oo(o)Oo ***
* * * o *
sunbeams
*o)O(o*******
gleam)"around the house
carried
on hogshair
plasma ):''''(((whooo***
sublimed
wave ((((from *
particle to
painters article
annealed and calcined
onto the days
matter
unuttered to forever
a box of quanta
through
the imprimatur of hand
through a fashioned utensil
the brush not the pencil
and thence and thus
the documenta
this alchemy will not defraud
fall from
the board
nor be marauded
by a god of love
*
-----------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
TOAST TO LEONORA CARRINGTON
From the newspaper, I didn't know I was on the way
to a wake. When the white horse appeared
I rode so long that I forgot
the gold star'd cloak I didn't wear
on the way here. Regret of what
she could have told our new lives
made old. Sphinxes? sure.
No state yet certain, the reddened head
glows in seeming fire. Tent in an orb
of alleyway dreaming. Seems I lost
my white horse amongst her images
maybe dreams are only an imagined "snake clock"
Here then is our cloak of stars
the cloak we take to night, to love.
A grin beneath clouded hair
levels a demon, empties a stare
of the always familiar coral skied
or basalt eyed. The kind of minotaur
that floats above knowing children,
hooded. Greenpool shade of light
which drifts above our horseless wake,
floating sound of glowing eyes, one dead star
in our mouths. Now we ride back on our blanket
of colours, life now at "the house opposite"
in the shudder-hum of art. We return to the country
we never knew, but now with her silent hall of maps
in our eyes. Nothing starts to burn. Seated at our table,
the real news fresh on the page, concealed ocean high and low
We raise our glasses to the cartographer
of "Down Below"
[Melbourne, 28th May 2011]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FINOLA MOORHEAD
REGARDING LEONORA CARRINGTON
[NOTE : I'd remembered Finola's mention of her "painter cousin" but was astounded when I came across her name in Paul Ray's The Surrealist Movement in England (Cornel University Press, 1971), & later in Breton's Painting & Surrealism. Her book, Down Below, was praised by Pierre Mabille & Maurice Blanchot; & in 1946, Claude Serbanne described her as the "greatest English surrealist poet, and, without any argument, one of the four or five greatest poets of surrealist tendency on the international scene." Her paintings were included in all the Surrealist exhibitions since 1937, & occupied a prominent place at the 1960 Surrealist exhibition in New York. --August, 1981; Kris Hemensley]
Nth Fitzroy,
Summer/1980
Dear Kristo --,
I'm terrified of my cousin Leonora Carrington & I'm not terrified of many people but when she is drunk & I am too, our ability to get on is positively genetic. And you have gotten the very correct word for her P R I V A T E. Her play Penelope (I think) written when she was 17 was produced 1st in something like 1966. The Hearing Trumpet written for her friends in 1954, or something, was first published in English in 1975, and so the story goes, her writing is her own and whoever wrested the mss from her to publish them must have approached her personally, got her drunk, got her respect then said Please....do it for me, go on etc. etc. I spent six weeks in Mexico with her husband, Chiqui Weicz, for whom The Stone Door was written in 1947 or something. During the war, she was put in an Asylum in Spain because she wanted to save her previous lover, Max Ernst, from the Nazis & there is an account of her time there, which is a brilliant merging of the alchemical & the surreal (truths) in the subjective (misunderstood necessarily) in booklet form, called Down Below. On the other hand her painting is public, famous in Mexico City, N Y & Paris (little bit London) & those people here who really know the Surrealists (and there are apparently FEW) of course know her work well. Periodically she'll have an exhibition in one of those Madison Ave commercial galleries which sell out --she's constantly fighting with her agent as she feels she has to KEEP her 3 men, who are those narrow-fingered aesthete demi-jewish Europeans --two sons and husband; the older son, my age, Gaby is in theatre, Pablo in medicine. She is notoriously a non-letter writer, has friends like Larry, Trotsky's son, and Luis (Bunuel) & is herself one of the big expatriot names in Mexico City where there are lots... too shy and multilingual... Chiqui was telling me of when Antonin Artaud came to stay & find out the secrets of the Shamans, pre-pre-Castaneda, & wrote that crazy book The Peyote Dance. I stayed in her house in Cuernavaca which is under the same volcano as Malcolm Lowry's. To ask me about Leonora Carrington is to ask me to explain the mysteries of my own DNA. It's queer that locked in my gaol of English Language & bonny Aussie enthusiasm I should meet or have the possibility of meeting such names so closely ... for to be the prima de Leonora Carringtom is almost to be her when she is absent, 'cos family is all-hallowed when your language is Latinate. But my ignorance beneath the enthusiasm & the awe is it, for I could only approach on the personal ... not the professional, or careerish, so I don't know really what to say. I've gathered that I should respect the private, as I know how much mail arrives to be ignored or laughed off in the Calle Chihuahua. None of them write letters, but your best bet is Gaby --Gabriel Weicz-Carringtom, Calle Chihuahua 194, Mexico City, Zona 7, for information, opinion about living surrealism, or an approach to his mother, or possibly a copy of Down Below.
A day later : yes Gaby would be more approachable & possibly a more rewarding correspondent as Leonora is at the moment incommunicado in N Y city & some Tibetan Buddhist retreat, rehashing her whole life & for her these things are passed, whereas for Gaby to put it into perspective would be good (they are muy mucho close). Perhaps you could think up some inspired questions & suggest publishing what he has to say & show him the Merri [The Merri Creek,Or Nero was Earth Ship magazine's 3rd series, & in turn presented H/EAR, eight issues, 1981-85] --whatever, it's not as though he's not a writer himself. And they're all deeply in the Anarchist tradition, so the Merri should stand on its own merits. My meetings with Leonora are/were too personal & as yet out of historical perspective to make any sort of a piece at the moment ... still haven't decided whether to use the ticket I have for Nov. 7th to return.
Wish for myself the secret of the freedom of the surrealists, for my writing I mean, but don't have it, can understand more what the Bauhaus was about, even that quite newly & to do with my own experiment [the work in progress which would become Remember the Tarantella, 1987, -ed.]...
(.....)
with love,
Finola
oOo
NOTE (1) :
After the issue was published, Finola sent an urgent note, "I have not read everything yet in H/EAR ye'll understand that. One thing I read & if you've not sent all away, fix it : I am LA PRIMA DE LEONORA, not her PRANA ((that's embarrassing for PRANA is the magical Life Force that invades orange juice & fresh air & so on and PRIMA is only 1st cousin feminine))" The correction is made in the above.
NOTE (2):
When James Hamilton told me he'd recently written a poem for/about Leonora Carrington, having read the newspaper obituary, I responded with my story of Finola's family connection and my publishing her reminiscence 20 years ago in H/EAR. We thought it would be great to publish the texts together! I sought Finola's permission to reprint her letter here. I have reinserted a couple of passages omitted from the 1981 publication. As Finola & I have agreed, publish & be damned!
----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS:
DAVE ELLISON,KEN TRIMBLE,
ALICIA BEE is a freelance journalist & blogger; has published 2 collections of poems, Bathers On The Beach, & The Book Of The Dead And Wounded, both from Good Look Books (Brunswick, Vic.). Her webpage is, http://misspiggyjournalist.wordpress.com/
CECILIA WHITE, artist, photographer, poet; first met when she performed Vicki Viidikas jazz poem at the MOK Anniversary event at Collected Works couple of years ago. Studied in Germany ('80s) & presently in New South Wales. Winner of inaugural national Cricket Poem Prize. Current project is Breathing Space.
ALBERT ROTSTEIN stalwart of boho Melbourne city & country art & poetry scenes over the decades. His poems most recently appear in Pete Spence's irregular pressings, more publicly & regularly in Pi O's Unusual Work magazine.
FINOLA MOORHEAD , poet, novelist, playwright. Books include Quilt ('85); A Handwritten Modern Classic (Post-Neo, '87); Remember the Tarantella ('87, reissued by Spinifex in '011); Still Murder ('91); My Voice ('06). Fiction editor with A A Phillips on Meanjin Quarterly in the '70s, illustrious member of the Rushall Crescent Avant-Garde in the '70s/80s.
LADY UNIVERSE
(For a dear lady)
In a burst of longing
Dawn grows through darkness
The heart love gives
Breathes time into us
This is the everyday
Hard work and heartache
We gain our sight
All by one sky
In a moment of light
Observe the way
Paths cross our town
Clouds parade into view
We approach night
Face the same midnight
With our candles and carols
For the child in everything
In the court of the moon
With magic of starshine
The street wind sings
May we gather a feeling
Live the new life
As great trees in our midst
And noble towers
Bow to holy night
[12 Jan. 2012]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY/KEN TRIMBLE
"the pilgrim piece"
*
(October 7/2011)
Dear Kris,
I hope you enjoyed 'Shores' [Shores of American Memory, Littlefox Press, '11). I read that poem on your site about the Albion. [David Pepperell's The Albion Jukebox Murder 1972 ] Yeah I can totally relate to that. There are so many or so few depending on how you look at Facebook where I can call a person friend. In you I feel totally at home & although distant, meaning we move in different circles & distance is hard, I regard you as a friend..................cheers Ken
oOo
Dear Ken,
Yes, of course! Very much so! Book, friendship, the lot! I'd been reading it from the beginning then today began from the end! You're very much the 'silent witness', kind of imperturbable. You dont get in the way of the poem/the perception. Laudable.
By the way, I have s/one coming in next week for a copy of the new collection, and hope that another acquaintance will also be interested!
Loretta just told me she was at the Rainbow wake you write about [Nights at the Rainbow, p1]. Small world!
We'll talk again soon!
Best wishes, Kris
oOo
(October 8/2011)
Dear Kris,
Thanks for words. I was a regular at the Rainbow for some years. I used to see the Paul Williamson Hammond Combo on a Monday night. And the Grand Whazoo, and on a Sunday afternoon. Chic was a very personable fellow who had the ability to treat everyone as a friend. By accident I hadn't heard that he died. A mate who ran the Rob Roy told me that Chic had this amazing funeral so I just imagined it. While pubs can be destructive they can also be great community gatherings like a family. In the poem 'Shores Of American Memory' the section on O'Reilly's is a case in point. I met a guy who told me to go to that pub on a Monday night because they have an Irish jam session in North Beach. He sent an email to the owner Myles that I would be coming down and that I was a poet. Anyway Myles happens to love Australians. That night I met Myles and for the whole night I didn't buy a beer. He even sang And The Band Played Waltzing Matlida for me. People came up to me and said, you're that Australian. There I met a fellow who sang with Rambling Jack Elliot, & the great grandson of Gurdjieff the philosopher. It was if I was being honoured. I guess places like the Rainbow & O'Reilly's make you feel special for no specific reason, it makes you feel as if yes there is a family and life is good..........cheers Ken
oOo
(October 8/2011)
Dear Ken,
Your evocative, inspiring reply re- the Rainbow has me thinking that we could attempt the"conversation" by email? How about it?!!! (This was to be a conversation abt this & that, especially the pilgrimage aspect of both poetry and yr journey to the US, Merton , Jeffers etc)
I salute your energy & openness, I mean that you can be there in such a way as the O'Reilly's scene opened up to you! And those connections are astonishing...
Better get back to the Shop!
All best, Kris
oOo
(8/10/11)
Dear Kris,
Sure thing, that would be great. Do you mean explore more avenues of the pilgrim experience or in relation to my America trip? Because pilgrim travelling can open up a whole new world to everyone, artists, poets, anyone who is open to the journey. Personally, Joe Campbell's books on myth had a great influence. One has to cast off or shed your old skin and believe in the path. Even if a thousand people say you're crazy you have stick at it and believe in yourself. And there are times when you go 3 steps back & 1 step forward but the point is you have to get up. I am no angel and I sort of liked what St. Augustine said, 'Lord make me perfect but not just now', or something like that haha! It was like going to the monastery and meeting the gardener Joseph Bottone who turned out to be a mate of Creeley. He had a hermitage on the grounds overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One time he invited me over for a joint and a couple of shots of rum. Certainly we played up but it was great! And the whole thing becomes infectious, the pilgrimage. Suddenly not only poetry but also the monastic along the Big Sur coast became a powerful adventure for me. Because you know that Robinson Jeffers' home is in Carmel, and a few kilometres from the monastery is the Henry Miller Library and you're riding over the Bixby Bridge where Kerouac stumbled and hooped & hollered in the foggy night. That below the bridge somewhere is Ferlinghetti's cabin. You become sort of tuned into the poetry of the land. You know that Ansel Adams & Ed Weston two of America's great photographers had homes there as well so it becomes a symphony. Even New Orleans I got to know the stories of Johnny Whites Bar. A fellow by the name of Paddy told me that when hurricane Katrina rolled through, the only bar open in the whole town was this one. So I checked it out, it runs off Bourbon Street almost opposite The New Orleans Preservation Jazz Hall. A tiny bar where twenty would be a crowd and I'm having a drink while watching Germany kick our arse in the World Cup! You get immersed in the moment & because I studied photography when I was young I became a good watcher. And the whole idea of watching takes you into another world. A lot of people travel but never see or they only see postcards & that isn't travelling.............cheers Ken
oOo
(8/10/11)
Dear Kris,
More reflections on Thomas Merton this time. You know he went to Columbia University just a few years before Kerouac and others. In fact he published a novel (not sure of name) at same publishing house as Kerouac's first novel Town & City, Harcourt and Brace. His mentor & friend was Mark Van Doren who also taught Kerouac. Merton was a few years earlier than the 'Beats' but he was interested in the jazz scene, drank and smoked and had his way with women. Yet Merton was called to be a monastic and lived that way for twenty odd years. I am attracted to him because he struggled nearly every day he was in the order. Yet he stayed true. When he wrote his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, from his Trappist Monastery in Kentucky, people in America went crazy about it. It came out just after the war and I guess people were dealing with that sense of loss that war brings & so they found a prophet in Merton who spoke their language. The irony is he went in the monastery to deny his writing talent but the church had other ideas. They wanted him to utilise his talents so he could be of use in getting converts etc. Another irony and I didn't know it at the time, Merton wanted to leave the order of the Trappists and become a Camaldolse. That is the order I am in. It is more hermit whereas the Trappists are more community. You know, when he went in the church was far more restrictive than it is today after Vatican 2. The time he went in the church was convinced that it was their way or the highway as the saying goes. Meaning they had no time for other faiths and his order were very strict. There was no talking except only with meetings with the Abbot about spiritual direction with either him or a Director. Life was lived by sign language. And life was hard work. Most monasteries are run like farms. You get up early work in the fields, pray, read, eat, sleep then repeat. In fact it is a hard life. Some work in the kitchen, others may be allocated to cleaning guest house accommodation and in Merton's case he was told to write. There was tremendous tension with Merton I think because on the one hand he wanted to deny his writing talent & on the other he loved the celebrity. Even not being allowed out of his monastery he still had this aura that people craved. People like Huxley corresponded along with Joan Baez and many others. When Merton was finally allowed to attend a conference in Thailand in the 1960's he went to India & Sri Lanka. At a place called Polonnaruwa there is a giant stone Buddha reclining on his side. In his book, Asian Journals, he tells of this One Moment or unitive experience. The writing is sublime. From there after all those years in the monastery and his epiphany in Sri Lanka he is having a shower, and after he's finished he begins to shave, and is electrocuted. I reckon wow what a perfect death. So Merton in a strange way was the fore-runner of Kerouac and Jack devoured Merton but sadly couldn't grasp him...............regards Ken
oOo
(October 9/2011)
Dear Kris,
[re KH birthday greetings to KT] Facebook have it a bit early. I have it on the 12th, the same day as Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. Actually my father has the same day as well and mother is on the 12th June & my brother the 13th December, the 12th month.
Began reading Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. It is a fine book.
My friend and spiritual head of the Australian part of the Camaldolese has just returned from his own pilgrimage. He went to Italy where they have a General Chapter once every few years. He is an interesting fellow. He went to India in the Eighties and stayed with Bede Griffiths & was initiated into sanyassa. Now I went through a similar process but as a bramachari student. Am I right to say you stayed at the monastery in Kentucky where Merton lived then went onto Sri Lanka and later Thailand? If so wow. Did you see Polonnaruwa? Michael (priest friend above) is taking me out for a curry meal for my birthday. Lastly thinking about putting book in for awards. Who knows if I don't give it a go? The only thing is I get mixed up with their enrollment dates. Like the John Bray award you have to put your form in about 6 months before award is given. The only thing I worry about is that people think I am writing it as an American poetry by proxy. From my point of view it isn't, instead I wanted it to be a pilgrim piece if you will. Anyway that's the way I wrote it and that's that. Thanks for birthday greetings....................kind regards Ken
oOo
(Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:36 PM)
Dear Kris,
Any further news on that interview on pilgrimage?..................kind regards Ken
oOo
(Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 12:37 AM)
Dear Ken,
just back an hour or so after cleaning up the shop following [Owen Richardson's] launch for Gig Ryan [New & Selected Poems, published by Giramondo] ... very big affair, exhausting, and heaps of fun!
Re- the pilgrimage i/vw, --yes, will look at it again on Thursday (my day off)...
If I can get away on Saturday for your reading at Federation Square I will!Good luck!
talk soon, k
oOo
(15/10/11)
Dear Ken,
I managed to get away from the Shop around three p.m., and DID catch half of the reading at Fed Square... Was disappointed that I'd probably missed your set; heard several of Robert Lloyd's poems & couple of songs, then all of Michael Heald and then, a small miracle, you were returned to the stage for one poem! Was very interested in yr reading voice; it reminded me of Robt Lloyd's singing voice! Probably the most resonant poem I heard this a/noon! Well done! Can only guess at how you felt (reluctant?) but you sounded swell! I had to hurry off straightaway afterwards and anyway i cld see you guys closing in on one another so better (I thought) to drop you quick line than to cut in. Time for me to recouperate now. Will see what I can get together for you around yr splendid Pilgrimage responses, and will send before too long.
cheers, Kris
oOo
(15 Oct/11)
Dear Kris,
Didn't see you sadly, I was in another zone haha! Glad you liked my voice hope poem was good too. Not sure where the voice comes from but it helps with the delivery or spell of poem. Robert & I thinking of doing something together more duets in future. I really like him, he's a real nice guy. I really appreciate you coming, and when pilgrim thing is right for you I'll be here. Just got home, now 9pm, had to walk half up a mountain pitch black. Now settling in at home with a good red.....Youre the best..............Ken
oOo
Kris Hemensley
End-piece, 1
Mine have mostly been head & book journeys, Ken, though I did follow in Merton's footsteps to the King's Palace in Bangkok in 2005. Loved the Ramayana murals there but afterwards, when I checked Merton's own response in my brother Bernard's copy of Asian Journals (--I was in Bangkok en route the UK-- ) realized that Merton had only qualified appreciation (Disney kitsch etc). But yes, was well aware of Merton's Bangkok story, and so to that extent it was a kind of pilgrimage in itself. But Gethsemane in Kentucky only in my reading, for example via Merton's book. The Sign of Jonas (I have the 1953 1st British edition, Hollis & Carter, London), and appreciated immediately the tough rigour of that practice. (Penultimate paragraph in the Prologue is a beauty & somewhat a propos of even our correspondence : "A monk can always legitimately and significantly compare himself to a prophet, because the monks are the heirs of the prophets. The prophet is a man whose whole life is a living witness of the providential action of God in the world. Every prophet is a sign and a witness of Christ. Every monk, in whom Christ lives, and in whom all the prophecies are therefore fulfilled, is a witness and a sign of the Kingdom of God. Even our mistakes are eloquent, more than we know.")
Regarding Sri Lanka : I went ashore in Colombo as a 19 year old, working on the Fairstar (the Sitmar line's flagship), latter part of 1965. I only did a taxi round-trip with workmates but absorbed massive sensation & inspiration from my one & only Ceylon experience. For example, classic deja-vu on a river bank when, leaving my colleagues to the display of working elephants, I wandered off by myself, towards the cries & laughter of kids diving into the water, and suddenly realized I knew the place, that is I recognized it from a dream which I'd had in Southampton before the voyage... the colours, the heat, the angle of embankment to water, the screams of the children, the splash of water et cetera. I was shocked & amazed, walked away from it probably because called by colleagues to resume our taxi tour. But could have stood there forever, in wonderment, trying to understand what it meant!
[16th January, '012]
*
End-piece, 2
A Note on Shores of American Memory
It's as though sentiment (one's disposition towards the world) might parallel insight : the personal simultaneously a universal. But Ken Trimble isnt Khalil Gibran! Dont intend unkindness or ingratitude for what was a consolation & stimulation at age twenty, but the person walking around in these poems is no spiritual cipher. By way of contrast, David Ellison & I often refer to one or another example or exemplar of the school of Desperate Mysticism. No doubt at all that this poet's a seeker, one who doesnt shy from either big Metaphor or Reference, and the imprint of the world is all over him. It's audible like the Charlie Parker & Sonny Rollins, the Hank Williams & Bob Dylan who pop up in the poetry --visible like the place names, the brand names of daily consumables, let alone the influential books & authors (Kazantzakis, Jeffers, Rimbaud, Bukowski, Hamsun, Kerouac, Whitman, Ginsberg, Micheline, Kaufmann, Shelton Lee et al) which glue his soul-scape together. Not half bad for a "beggar poet nothing more, nothing less" (p. 44, 'Sixty-Seven Cents'), --which in the Post-Literature era, as I call it (and I'm not sure I dont 'simply' mean Post-Modernism) is a pretty good manifesto. "I cannot dazzle with verse, rhyme or rhythm" the poem goes, --G M Hopkins ? (but who can after The Windhover ?)!
"Just stories of what I've seen / And what I've done. / I walk the streets of the world a homeless drifter / Australian my heritage the planet my home / Listening to stories, writing them down"...
(16th January, '012)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALICIA BEE
Jack Kerouac’s Holiday House
Jack Kerouac built a holiday house for Beat poetry,
Mountain climbing Matterhorn in Mill Valley California,
He took Gary Snyder from the road and made a summary,
Jack Kerouac normally lived with his (sick old) mother in Florida.
The traveller never had a daughter till taking the blood test,
“You can’t fall off a mountain” in the height of beat mania,
He wrote some good freeflow haiku - history composed the rest.
He never read every book in the Buddhism (text) library,
His confusing stream of consciousness was typing from the chest,
Rehabilitation became spirituality,
Jack Kerouac would hit the road again when he drank alcohol.
(2010)
----------------------------------------------
CECILIA WHITE
breath
i don't recall the arrival
or having left. the point
of departure is the same
as the plosive of the asterisk
on a map, monosyllabic arrow
saying 'you are here'. contexted,
antiquarian, rigidly published.
spinal-tapped into parts of speech.
i am grammatically unscathed,
unbound on page or board
detectable only in the drawing
of breath, erasure of exclamation.
in the swoop of transitive verbage
a haunting space
lifts from the flatlands. never mind that
dislocation is in the reading.
i pick at threads of frontier
with my left-handed thinking. in the torn
apparel of second language
i remove full stops from islands
of air, listing under the salt
of problematics, participles
and suitcases. i am otherly compassed,
declining rite of passage and needle.
every place was once
somewhere else. meaning unsilts
ragged settlement, indexes
the gravel of logic.
stone and ink chapter memory
under weight of light, creasing
the eye, slubbing the tongue,
less engraved, i dissolve
sediment of interpretation,
inhaling contours,
landing at the point of it all.
(2011)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PAUL HARPER
assertive with grace & charm
counter intuitive as it may seem
grow a beard before train travel
& be accosted less by evangelists
particularly if your destination
is a small commune of musicians
across cow paddocks
from a bed & breakfast haunted
by freshly retired footballers
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
acquire a butterfly
some barbed wire or a tall ship
but when the toaster decides
an intricate mishmash
of marvel characters
fire & brimstone
& your topless girlfriend as a centaur
may assist two marathon runners
with their mission to negotiate peace
among rival factions
the black suits & the grey suits
in a breeding ground for ibis
not noticing can be highly functional
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
----------------------------------------------------------
ALBERT ROTSTEIN
vermeer
* * *
* * * *
everything porcelain
except the milk jug
which
spills endlessly
light * (oO enters
from the left
photons (o* exacted
by craft into
radiant iguazuae fall
*o)*O*(o
* oO * *
Oo(o)Oo ***
* * * o *
sunbeams
*o)O(o*******
gleam)"around the house
carried
on hogshair
plasma ):''''(((whooo***
sublimed
wave ((((from *
particle to
painters article
annealed and calcined
onto the days
matter
unuttered to forever
a box of quanta
through
the imprimatur of hand
through a fashioned utensil
the brush not the pencil
and thence and thus
the documenta
this alchemy will not defraud
fall from
the board
nor be marauded
by a god of love
*
-----------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
TOAST TO LEONORA CARRINGTON
From the newspaper, I didn't know I was on the way
to a wake. When the white horse appeared
I rode so long that I forgot
the gold star'd cloak I didn't wear
on the way here. Regret of what
she could have told our new lives
made old. Sphinxes? sure.
No state yet certain, the reddened head
glows in seeming fire. Tent in an orb
of alleyway dreaming. Seems I lost
my white horse amongst her images
maybe dreams are only an imagined "snake clock"
Here then is our cloak of stars
the cloak we take to night, to love.
A grin beneath clouded hair
levels a demon, empties a stare
of the always familiar coral skied
or basalt eyed. The kind of minotaur
that floats above knowing children,
hooded. Greenpool shade of light
which drifts above our horseless wake,
floating sound of glowing eyes, one dead star
in our mouths. Now we ride back on our blanket
of colours, life now at "the house opposite"
in the shudder-hum of art. We return to the country
we never knew, but now with her silent hall of maps
in our eyes. Nothing starts to burn. Seated at our table,
the real news fresh on the page, concealed ocean high and low
We raise our glasses to the cartographer
of "Down Below"
[Melbourne, 28th May 2011]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FINOLA MOORHEAD
REGARDING LEONORA CARRINGTON
[NOTE : I'd remembered Finola's mention of her "painter cousin" but was astounded when I came across her name in Paul Ray's The Surrealist Movement in England (Cornel University Press, 1971), & later in Breton's Painting & Surrealism. Her book, Down Below, was praised by Pierre Mabille & Maurice Blanchot; & in 1946, Claude Serbanne described her as the "greatest English surrealist poet, and, without any argument, one of the four or five greatest poets of surrealist tendency on the international scene." Her paintings were included in all the Surrealist exhibitions since 1937, & occupied a prominent place at the 1960 Surrealist exhibition in New York. --August, 1981; Kris Hemensley]
Nth Fitzroy,
Summer/1980
Dear Kristo --,
I'm terrified of my cousin Leonora Carrington & I'm not terrified of many people but when she is drunk & I am too, our ability to get on is positively genetic. And you have gotten the very correct word for her P R I V A T E. Her play Penelope (I think) written when she was 17 was produced 1st in something like 1966. The Hearing Trumpet written for her friends in 1954, or something, was first published in English in 1975, and so the story goes, her writing is her own and whoever wrested the mss from her to publish them must have approached her personally, got her drunk, got her respect then said Please....do it for me, go on etc. etc. I spent six weeks in Mexico with her husband, Chiqui Weicz, for whom The Stone Door was written in 1947 or something. During the war, she was put in an Asylum in Spain because she wanted to save her previous lover, Max Ernst, from the Nazis & there is an account of her time there, which is a brilliant merging of the alchemical & the surreal (truths) in the subjective (misunderstood necessarily) in booklet form, called Down Below. On the other hand her painting is public, famous in Mexico City, N Y & Paris (little bit London) & those people here who really know the Surrealists (and there are apparently FEW) of course know her work well. Periodically she'll have an exhibition in one of those Madison Ave commercial galleries which sell out --she's constantly fighting with her agent as she feels she has to KEEP her 3 men, who are those narrow-fingered aesthete demi-jewish Europeans --two sons and husband; the older son, my age, Gaby is in theatre, Pablo in medicine. She is notoriously a non-letter writer, has friends like Larry, Trotsky's son, and Luis (Bunuel) & is herself one of the big expatriot names in Mexico City where there are lots... too shy and multilingual... Chiqui was telling me of when Antonin Artaud came to stay & find out the secrets of the Shamans, pre-pre-Castaneda, & wrote that crazy book The Peyote Dance. I stayed in her house in Cuernavaca which is under the same volcano as Malcolm Lowry's. To ask me about Leonora Carrington is to ask me to explain the mysteries of my own DNA. It's queer that locked in my gaol of English Language & bonny Aussie enthusiasm I should meet or have the possibility of meeting such names so closely ... for to be the prima de Leonora Carringtom is almost to be her when she is absent, 'cos family is all-hallowed when your language is Latinate. But my ignorance beneath the enthusiasm & the awe is it, for I could only approach on the personal ... not the professional, or careerish, so I don't know really what to say. I've gathered that I should respect the private, as I know how much mail arrives to be ignored or laughed off in the Calle Chihuahua. None of them write letters, but your best bet is Gaby --Gabriel Weicz-Carringtom, Calle Chihuahua 194, Mexico City, Zona 7, for information, opinion about living surrealism, or an approach to his mother, or possibly a copy of Down Below.
A day later : yes Gaby would be more approachable & possibly a more rewarding correspondent as Leonora is at the moment incommunicado in N Y city & some Tibetan Buddhist retreat, rehashing her whole life & for her these things are passed, whereas for Gaby to put it into perspective would be good (they are muy mucho close). Perhaps you could think up some inspired questions & suggest publishing what he has to say & show him the Merri [The Merri Creek,Or Nero was Earth Ship magazine's 3rd series, & in turn presented H/EAR, eight issues, 1981-85] --whatever, it's not as though he's not a writer himself. And they're all deeply in the Anarchist tradition, so the Merri should stand on its own merits. My meetings with Leonora are/were too personal & as yet out of historical perspective to make any sort of a piece at the moment ... still haven't decided whether to use the ticket I have for Nov. 7th to return.
Wish for myself the secret of the freedom of the surrealists, for my writing I mean, but don't have it, can understand more what the Bauhaus was about, even that quite newly & to do with my own experiment [the work in progress which would become Remember the Tarantella, 1987, -ed.]...
(.....)
with love,
Finola
oOo
NOTE (1) :
After the issue was published, Finola sent an urgent note, "I have not read everything yet in H/EAR ye'll understand that. One thing I read & if you've not sent all away, fix it : I am LA PRIMA DE LEONORA, not her PRANA ((that's embarrassing for PRANA is the magical Life Force that invades orange juice & fresh air & so on and PRIMA is only 1st cousin feminine))" The correction is made in the above.
NOTE (2):
When James Hamilton told me he'd recently written a poem for/about Leonora Carrington, having read the newspaper obituary, I responded with my story of Finola's family connection and my publishing her reminiscence 20 years ago in H/EAR. We thought it would be great to publish the texts together! I sought Finola's permission to reprint her letter here. I have reinserted a couple of passages omitted from the 1981 publication. As Finola & I have agreed, publish & be damned!
----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS:
DAVE ELLISON,KEN TRIMBLE,
CECILIA WHITE, artist, photographer, poet; first met when she performed Vicki Viidikas jazz poem at the MOK Anniversary event at Collected Works couple of years ago. Studied in Germany ('80s) & presently in New South Wales. Winner of inaugural national Cricket Poem Prize. Current project is Breathing Space.
ALBERT ROTSTEIN stalwart of boho Melbourne city & country art & poetry scenes over the decades. His poems most recently appear in Pete Spence's irregular pressings, more publicly & regularly in Pi O's Unusual Work magazine.
FINOLA MOORHEAD , poet, novelist, playwright. Books include Quilt ('85); A Handwritten Modern Classic (Post-Neo, '87); Remember the Tarantella ('87, reissued by Spinifex in '011); Still Murder ('91); My Voice ('06). Fiction editor with A A Phillips on Meanjin Quarterly in the '70s, illustrious member of the Rushall Crescent Avant-Garde in the '70s/80s.
Monday, October 3, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 25;October, 2011
KRIS HEMENSLEY
Launch speech for Pete Spence's PERRIER FEVER (Grand Parade, '11)
Here is a poem of mine, written by Pete Spence; it is also a poem in the Ashbery / O'Hara / Schuyler mode written by a generation of English poets & their American cousins... It is a Pete Spence poem & an Australian poem, and I think it is a beautiful poem : "there is a mountain of solitude on the hill / occasionally it comes to us in a moment of eagerness / we find little peace under the avalanche / and would like to push it all upward / away from the pressing urgency of noise / the grit we bathe in // and then one day perhaps / through pumice suds / frosted obsidian windows ajar / the panel of sky / the chalky turmoil / we call "the light of day" / we see / THIS WAY UP / stenciled / near the summit of the hill!" [p68, PF]
*
Pete Spence is an old friend & colleague; a member of our Collected Works Bookshop collective in the mid to late '80s, (which included such luminaries as Robert Kenny, Jurate Sasnaitis, Des Cowley, Ted Hopkins, Rob Finlayson, amongst many others); a fellow little mag editor (who'll ever forget Post Neo?), gallery buff, international traveller.
He was first mentioned to me by the late Geoff Eggleston as a poet friend he'd like me to meet --circa '82, '83... Ah Geoff : author of this memorable couplet, "No man is an island / and no woman is a clipper-ship" -- I still dont quite know what it means! Likewise, Pete's line always in my head : "relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po" --the entire verse is, "a parenthesis ladles the tune / relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po / under some amended weather / tumbling sunshine"...
*
James Schuyler said you'd never get New York poetry until you realized the gallons of paint flowing through it --painting & painters. Following that thought, Pete's book abounds in names (Pam, Ken, John, Corny et al), references to painting, to poetry & to poets, & to music, composers --as though a record is always playing --a symphony, perhaps, he shares with Alan Wearne, his friend & publisher.
Spence is a poet of fraternity --which includes conviviality & melancholy... No wonder his recent poem in progress is called The Kynetonbury Tales, and a delight it's been to read via e-mail.
And, therefore, what a coup that Alan Wearne has pinned this pilgrim down long enough to make a cohesive book out of a vast & errant production --this book out of many possible compilations.
And Alan is to be heartily congratulated on his Grand Parade Poets publishing project, & this particular volume.
It's such a good looker... Designed & set by Christopher Edwards, -- who shares with Pete similar 'adventures in poetry', --the chance & play --the relishing of words as though a different species of artist --painter, sculptor, composer.
And Alan himself along this track, whose Otis Redding poem way back in Public Relations (published by Gargoyle Poets in 1973), advances his share of Pete's kind of fun : "Redding, Redding, remorse will smash any epilogue chance, / any sweat-liturgy you sang and I might have attempted / once I walked in the rain until one once / to shout O, 'tis (forever!) Redding" ...
*
So, a poet of fraternity --which tag can deal with correspondence & address (the given social world a poet inhabits) and the matter of influence. And if I can use the French 'chez', thus "with" (which Paul Buck gave me decades ago) : "with" in preference to "after" with its misleading implication of "imitation" --, then we can say Pete Spence's poems stay with the effects of his long lasting affections... He revisits them, he calls upon them --they are become motifs --they are his muses, they are his amusements --elegy, ode, sonnet, City, Landscape, Weather, the Sun, the Sky...
*
I opened his book at random the other day, on page 105, --the poem entitled Shop : "i thought the shop / was called SLIDE / until i walked into the door!"
I'm still visualizing a kind of Jacques Tati cartoon, or Charlie Chaplin, or Rowan Atkinson. The jokeyness transmutes or elevates from ha-ha to Surrealist smile in the poem Drawing : "i muscled in / all the angles / crosshatched in / the shadows / only to realise / i'd drawn / a horse without / neck or head / and its tail / was a cloud / in the sky" --
*
Perhaps this collection, Perrier Fever (and I reiterate, one possible selection of many --notwithstanding the attrition, the loss & destruction of poems along the way, allusion to which I recall from conversation 25 or 30 years ago), perhaps it is his humourous selected poems (different kinds of humour)... But even so it's informed by the totality of his poetry. Remember, Pete is no Spring-chicken. A different personality would have seen him vying for volumes & anthologies many times over.
*
Pete Spence's poetry has all the exclamations of the New Yorkers, all the happenstance & hutzpah --which is another way of saying all the spontaneity & presence --which is another way of saying that more often than not the Pete Spence poem is both written in an ideal space, called the poem, and enacts the ideal poem, a doing that's simultaneously done --which is another way of saying that whatever happens in the poem is the poem, informed or inspired by the insight that anything might enter the poem --because it can and because it is the poem... What does your poem mean, Mr Stevens? asks the earnest correspondent. Stevens replies : Mean? Mean? The poem means nothing more than the (--and we can interpolate, nothing less) than the heavens full of colours & the constellations of sound! Which is another way of saying that Spence, like Wallace Stevens, can be poet as painter, poet as musician, poet as inventor & conjurer of effects --of sensations which course the mind, tickle the tongue...
*
But who is Pete Spence?
As scholarship, let alone the insatiable curiosity of the reader like Pete himself, as it expands its purview, so outsiders are claimed for the vast continuum; so peripherals are identified, brought in from the cold, --not that the cold isnt a legitimate or even desirable place to be.
Alan's told us a little about Pete. Pete's written a little about himself here in his book. I'd like to add one story to the biography.
It's the story of a possible history, had a manuscript for an anthology around 1971, actually transpired. In 1973 I was given custody of the mss. of Dark Ages Journal. In 1984, in my H/EAR magazine, dedicated to a '40s/'60s/'80s chronicle of the 'New', I described that anthology's perspective. It was a Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, New Zealand compendium. Its editors had included Charles Buckmaster, probably Garrie Hutchinson & either Richard Tipping or Rob Tillett.
Students of the '68-'71 or so period will recognize many of the names --Michael Dransfield, Charles Buckmaster, Terry Gillmore, John Jenkins, Vicki Viidikas, Garrie Hutchinson, Frances Yule, Ian Robertson; New Zealanders like Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Gary Langford. But the unusual Melbourne names are Walter Billeter, Robert Kenny, David Miller, Robert Harris & Pete Spence.
I licked my lips relishing the different history this coincidence promoted back then. The La Mama [Poets Workshop] '60s style become conventional even as it was being hailed in the anthology edited by Tom Shapcott, Australian Poetry Now, suddenly had the possibility of rejuvination! I like it very much that Spence is part of that potential history. As he is now in the present day.
Without further ado, in launching Perrier Fever, may I introduce to you : Pete Spence...
oOo
[delivered at the "Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium", at the Bella Union, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton; part of the Grand Parade launch; Thursday, 7th July, 2011]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID N. PEPPERELL
Two Poems + Haiku
*
THE ALBION JUKEBOX MURDER 1972
I could hear their voices from where I sat
drinking by myself on a cold night
"THAT FUCKING MUSIC'S DRIVING ME NUTS!"
"forget it, it's your shot"
"I CANT PLAY WITH THAT FUCKING NOISE!"
"it doesnt bother me"
"WHO GIVES A FUCK WHAT BOTHERS YOU?"
"just leave it, OK?"
"GET FUCKED, I'M TURNING IT OFF!"
"dont do it"
"JUST WATCH ME, DICKHEAD!"
he walked over to the jukebox
and reached behind it
the sound disappeared
he turned around, the smile
dying on his lips as the
knife went into his heart
he fell to the floor his
pool cue falling beside him
they carried him out
covered by a sheet
his killer stumbled behind him
handcuffed to a couple of cops
who took him away in the wagon
I put my beer down on the bar
and walked out into the
prussian blue night
that sure killed the albion for me
I never drank there again
I dont think anybody else did it either.
[1991]
oOo
CARLTON BUSTOP INCIDENT
in lygon street carlton dreamscape
i'm stuck in past loneliness of memories
over there coffee on saturday mornings at tamanis
john deep in the australian with a flat white
now gone to a fast lane end in a thai bamboo compound
mary gone too bottle of pills & no goodbye
lennie still around making the world safe for crime
what hope for him in a new world order?
tony could be anywhere maybe making moomba floats
and still pursuing the red revolution
dave now has new wife, new allegiances, new house with lawn
same face though, same laugh, same glass
where is the bus to take me away from all this?
ghosts gather in my thoughts
the dead fight with the living for space and time
hold me to your heart sweet yesterday
tomorrow just lost another traveller
[1991]
oOo
MORNING COFFEE HAIKU
franklin cafe
8.30 a.m.
hot flat white
spoonful of sugar
splash!
*
boy in blue
muddy fake reboks
freckled face
falls off chair
crash!
*
man with tongs
iced apple cake
brown paper bag
ringer on register
cash!
*
franklin cafe
9.05 a.m.
hand on briefcase
its late must
dash.
[1991]
---------------------------------------------------------------
GRANT CALDWELL
4 NEW YORK HAIKU
*
sleeping in new york
to the sound of falling rain -
air-conditioning
*
manhattan subway
every race in the world
going home
*
why new york is the
centre of the universe -
nine-eleven
*
the subway busker
plays boogie-woogie piano -
the trains run all night
[2011]
---------------------------------------------------------
JAKE CORE
4 POEMS
*
COLLOQUIAL BELLBIRDS
Leora Bell broke her wrist
last week when the rain was here.
She was drunk again with Blake Fielder
and fell off a swing.
At first she didn't even realize
it was broken.
She just said, 'my wrist feels kinda
funny,'
and laughed like a strange bird.
oOo
ULURU
With a warm beer
beneath the setting sun
I overhear a man say
to his wife :
'There's a palace of ice
south of Tasmania
that no one has ever seen.
I can take you there,
I have a map.
It's bigger than Uluru.'
oOo
SUITORS
In the twilight of a love song
amorous Europeans descend staircases,
legless, and blowing
invisible kisses to impossible suitors
down the hall, where memories
can be found
turning endlessly in on themselves
like whirlpools on holiday.
oOo
TELEPHONE SHADOWS, LEAN AGAINST THE FRUIT BOWL
I see you by the water.
Your name is not Bravado,
Jane, or Solitude.
There is nothing in the distance
except a space reserved
for ghost ships.
Your face is turned away
from a great number
of things.
Your hair is nearly down
to your hips.
There is no telling how far back
a story goes.
I see you by the water.
Your name is not Momentum,
Eliza, or Sleep.
--------------------------------------------------------
ANGELA GARDNER
TWO PROSE PIECES
*
A SHADOW LEAVING It won’t be the right thing for you: there is
the circular plot, and one or other leaving – some bloody battle. But I
wish you safe road, I wish that to you. Trundle the gods from their
museums, stand with them at crossroads and they’ll be freed from
obligations to warn of death, though not of how close others will come
to us. Them in a Limbo of not arriving, a nowhere advanced by
technology and our tiredness. And all the while the money sparks,
still sparks, changes hands. It makes us close-touched, adorned,
volatile, with our stepped hands, our stepped words. What is it to be
intact? Ignore it, don’t fret it back, we have the gods! Shadows hold
us with unremembered promises that we are tranced by: while
yesterday’s tomorrows pile up all tarnished and unaccountable. The
gods try comfort, warn of emptiness without them. I want to turn on my
borrowed heel, though then I’ll never know what I did, or what is sold
on the streets until each exhausted dawn. The unsheathed flesh of
flowers pours from glassy throats. I’m moved, truly. Slowed to silence
in the physical downpour of the morning rain, the fabric of the sky.
It frees me. The gods gave little comfort. They were crudely fashioned.
I may travel. There are many directions, a border country where words
change in meaning. Should we blame the gods. Or angels? We were
defiant, and wanton, worked to free ourselves from our desire for their
monstrous shadows, their mechanical animals. We had believed the
shadow-play but insisted they leave the shelter we found for them.
Stood by at the crossroads. No question, I’m pared back without them.
I am like something else...
oOo
TRANCE Primitive fairground amusements judder around us under
human force and disco. Unskilled in the ways of petrol: flame
throws out its spurts. He rolls his eyes and wipes his mouth on an old
cloth, while the women sing, or fail to, telling us nothing as it happens.
Our ring of faces is merely curious. Arse in a barrel straining to get away
from whip lashes that are aimed from the cruelty of youth. Who can we
blame for this? We are rumour and shadow, as he spits unburnt petrol
into the not yet midnight. We breathe like him through shallow shoals
of traffic and a pall of cardboard cinders that fall from fireworks.
Masked, old rope tail, tee-shirt stained with petrol dribbles as music
with uneven lyrics, many parts despair some joy, plays over us like
pollution. And all the while the puppet master jokes with the orchestra.
---------------------------------------------------------
FRANCESCA JURATE SASNAITIS
Amed! Ah!
I have been covered in black sand,
the fine ground progeny of laval rock and glittering mica,
the work of millennial waves and winds
beating beating at these wasted cliffs,
dust dry on this island once haled a tropical paradise.
I have swum with schools of darting fishes
the speed and green of lightning bolts,
fish the colour of sun playing in wavelets over rocks
and fish the black of the shadows underneath.
I have seen fish striped the yellow of young leaves.
I have tasted of paradise, and reek of it—
pungent garlic and slivers of onion fried,
the leaf of the blingbing tree, turmeric, chilli,
red red rice, green papaya and galangal—
the poetry of flavour.
I have developed a taste for Arak.
Kue dadar pisang! pancake wrapped
and spidered in coconut, the red banana . . .
my mouth aches in anticipation!
A frangipani graces every dish.
[Bali, 2011]
---------------------------------------------------------
CATHERINE O'BRIEN
-------------------------shooting at the sky
...the way I ride my bike along a lane that takes me by
one of the many temples in Vientiane...plaster casts on
the wall depict a young boy with his bow and arrow...
shooting at the sky...angels hover above him...as they
ascend wings detach and float on the white...feathers
fall...embedded into the wall memory shadows where once
there were more boys with arrows...shooting at angels...
floating wings...falling feathers...the symmetry undisturbed
by the erosion of time...daily I ride again into this story and
see it unfold...every day the lane and the wall divide my day into
remembered and forgotten...pierced by shooting arrows!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS :
David N Pepperell was co-proprietor of legendary Melbourne record shop, Archie & Jughead back in the day. In the mid '90s he ran Dr. Pepper's Jazz Junction in the Port Philip Arcade ("from trad to bop - from free to acid - all the jazz that's fit to stock!"). Song-writer & music journalist. Books include Raphael Alias (1976), East Gate, West Gate (1991), Letters to a Friend [correspondence with Anais Nin] ('92), both from Nosukumo press.
Grant Caldwell edited the now defunct Blue Dog magazine (from the Australian Poetry Centre, Melbourne). Of his 7 collections to date his most recent are Dreaming of Robert de Niro (2003) & Glass Clouds (2010), both from Five Islands Press. His novel Malabata ('91) is something of a classic.
Jake Core is an itinerant poet & musician. The poems here are published in his little book, The Goose Puddle (Brierfield Flood Press, 2010).
Angela Gardner, poet & artist. Edits poetry e-zine, foam:e. see, http://www.foame.org Her collection, Parts of Speech (UQP, 2007), was the winner of the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Views of the Hudson was published by Shearsman, UK, in 2009.
Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, an original member of Collected Works bookshop, ran the distinguished independent store, Greville Street Bookstore for 20 years. Nosukumo published her prose-pieces, Sketches, in 1989. In the last year she's published 2 exquisite chapbooks, Gravelly Views & Thirteen Seasons (in one day) with her own imprint, Ratas.
Cathy O'Brien lives & works in Vientiane, where her little i:cat gallery stages art & photography exhibitions, poetry readings, & film showings. Her most recent publications are the card book Word Sculptures, and a poem card collaboration with Kris & Bernard Hemensley (published by Stingy Artist, UK, 2011).
Pete Spence's Perrier Fever is published by Alan Wearne's Grand Parade, & is available at all good bookstores including Collected Works Bookshop.
--that's all folks!--
October 4th, 2011
Launch speech for Pete Spence's PERRIER FEVER (Grand Parade, '11)
Here is a poem of mine, written by Pete Spence; it is also a poem in the Ashbery / O'Hara / Schuyler mode written by a generation of English poets & their American cousins... It is a Pete Spence poem & an Australian poem, and I think it is a beautiful poem : "there is a mountain of solitude on the hill / occasionally it comes to us in a moment of eagerness / we find little peace under the avalanche / and would like to push it all upward / away from the pressing urgency of noise / the grit we bathe in // and then one day perhaps / through pumice suds / frosted obsidian windows ajar / the panel of sky / the chalky turmoil / we call "the light of day" / we see / THIS WAY UP / stenciled / near the summit of the hill!" [p68, PF]
*
Pete Spence is an old friend & colleague; a member of our Collected Works Bookshop collective in the mid to late '80s, (which included such luminaries as Robert Kenny, Jurate Sasnaitis, Des Cowley, Ted Hopkins, Rob Finlayson, amongst many others); a fellow little mag editor (who'll ever forget Post Neo?), gallery buff, international traveller.
He was first mentioned to me by the late Geoff Eggleston as a poet friend he'd like me to meet --circa '82, '83... Ah Geoff : author of this memorable couplet, "No man is an island / and no woman is a clipper-ship" -- I still dont quite know what it means! Likewise, Pete's line always in my head : "relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po" --the entire verse is, "a parenthesis ladles the tune / relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po / under some amended weather / tumbling sunshine"...
*
James Schuyler said you'd never get New York poetry until you realized the gallons of paint flowing through it --painting & painters. Following that thought, Pete's book abounds in names (Pam, Ken, John, Corny et al), references to painting, to poetry & to poets, & to music, composers --as though a record is always playing --a symphony, perhaps, he shares with Alan Wearne, his friend & publisher.
Spence is a poet of fraternity --which includes conviviality & melancholy... No wonder his recent poem in progress is called The Kynetonbury Tales, and a delight it's been to read via e-mail.
And, therefore, what a coup that Alan Wearne has pinned this pilgrim down long enough to make a cohesive book out of a vast & errant production --this book out of many possible compilations.
And Alan is to be heartily congratulated on his Grand Parade Poets publishing project, & this particular volume.
It's such a good looker... Designed & set by Christopher Edwards, -- who shares with Pete similar 'adventures in poetry', --the chance & play --the relishing of words as though a different species of artist --painter, sculptor, composer.
And Alan himself along this track, whose Otis Redding poem way back in Public Relations (published by Gargoyle Poets in 1973), advances his share of Pete's kind of fun : "Redding, Redding, remorse will smash any epilogue chance, / any sweat-liturgy you sang and I might have attempted / once I walked in the rain until one once / to shout O, 'tis (forever!) Redding" ...
*
So, a poet of fraternity --which tag can deal with correspondence & address (the given social world a poet inhabits) and the matter of influence. And if I can use the French 'chez', thus "with" (which Paul Buck gave me decades ago) : "with" in preference to "after" with its misleading implication of "imitation" --, then we can say Pete Spence's poems stay with the effects of his long lasting affections... He revisits them, he calls upon them --they are become motifs --they are his muses, they are his amusements --elegy, ode, sonnet, City, Landscape, Weather, the Sun, the Sky...
*
I opened his book at random the other day, on page 105, --the poem entitled Shop : "i thought the shop / was called SLIDE / until i walked into the door!"
I'm still visualizing a kind of Jacques Tati cartoon, or Charlie Chaplin, or Rowan Atkinson. The jokeyness transmutes or elevates from ha-ha to Surrealist smile in the poem Drawing : "i muscled in / all the angles / crosshatched in / the shadows / only to realise / i'd drawn / a horse without / neck or head / and its tail / was a cloud / in the sky" --
*
Perhaps this collection, Perrier Fever (and I reiterate, one possible selection of many --notwithstanding the attrition, the loss & destruction of poems along the way, allusion to which I recall from conversation 25 or 30 years ago), perhaps it is his humourous selected poems (different kinds of humour)... But even so it's informed by the totality of his poetry. Remember, Pete is no Spring-chicken. A different personality would have seen him vying for volumes & anthologies many times over.
*
Pete Spence's poetry has all the exclamations of the New Yorkers, all the happenstance & hutzpah --which is another way of saying all the spontaneity & presence --which is another way of saying that more often than not the Pete Spence poem is both written in an ideal space, called the poem, and enacts the ideal poem, a doing that's simultaneously done --which is another way of saying that whatever happens in the poem is the poem, informed or inspired by the insight that anything might enter the poem --because it can and because it is the poem... What does your poem mean, Mr Stevens? asks the earnest correspondent. Stevens replies : Mean? Mean? The poem means nothing more than the (--and we can interpolate, nothing less) than the heavens full of colours & the constellations of sound! Which is another way of saying that Spence, like Wallace Stevens, can be poet as painter, poet as musician, poet as inventor & conjurer of effects --of sensations which course the mind, tickle the tongue...
*
But who is Pete Spence?
As scholarship, let alone the insatiable curiosity of the reader like Pete himself, as it expands its purview, so outsiders are claimed for the vast continuum; so peripherals are identified, brought in from the cold, --not that the cold isnt a legitimate or even desirable place to be.
Alan's told us a little about Pete. Pete's written a little about himself here in his book. I'd like to add one story to the biography.
It's the story of a possible history, had a manuscript for an anthology around 1971, actually transpired. In 1973 I was given custody of the mss. of Dark Ages Journal. In 1984, in my H/EAR magazine, dedicated to a '40s/'60s/'80s chronicle of the 'New', I described that anthology's perspective. It was a Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, New Zealand compendium. Its editors had included Charles Buckmaster, probably Garrie Hutchinson & either Richard Tipping or Rob Tillett.
Students of the '68-'71 or so period will recognize many of the names --Michael Dransfield, Charles Buckmaster, Terry Gillmore, John Jenkins, Vicki Viidikas, Garrie Hutchinson, Frances Yule, Ian Robertson; New Zealanders like Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Gary Langford. But the unusual Melbourne names are Walter Billeter, Robert Kenny, David Miller, Robert Harris & Pete Spence.
I licked my lips relishing the different history this coincidence promoted back then. The La Mama [Poets Workshop] '60s style become conventional even as it was being hailed in the anthology edited by Tom Shapcott, Australian Poetry Now, suddenly had the possibility of rejuvination! I like it very much that Spence is part of that potential history. As he is now in the present day.
Without further ado, in launching Perrier Fever, may I introduce to you : Pete Spence...
oOo
[delivered at the "Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium", at the Bella Union, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton; part of the Grand Parade launch; Thursday, 7th July, 2011]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID N. PEPPERELL
Two Poems + Haiku
*
THE ALBION JUKEBOX MURDER 1972
I could hear their voices from where I sat
drinking by myself on a cold night
"THAT FUCKING MUSIC'S DRIVING ME NUTS!"
"forget it, it's your shot"
"I CANT PLAY WITH THAT FUCKING NOISE!"
"it doesnt bother me"
"WHO GIVES A FUCK WHAT BOTHERS YOU?"
"just leave it, OK?"
"GET FUCKED, I'M TURNING IT OFF!"
"dont do it"
"JUST WATCH ME, DICKHEAD!"
he walked over to the jukebox
and reached behind it
the sound disappeared
he turned around, the smile
dying on his lips as the
knife went into his heart
he fell to the floor his
pool cue falling beside him
they carried him out
covered by a sheet
his killer stumbled behind him
handcuffed to a couple of cops
who took him away in the wagon
I put my beer down on the bar
and walked out into the
prussian blue night
that sure killed the albion for me
I never drank there again
I dont think anybody else did it either.
[1991]
oOo
CARLTON BUSTOP INCIDENT
in lygon street carlton dreamscape
i'm stuck in past loneliness of memories
over there coffee on saturday mornings at tamanis
john deep in the australian with a flat white
now gone to a fast lane end in a thai bamboo compound
mary gone too bottle of pills & no goodbye
lennie still around making the world safe for crime
what hope for him in a new world order?
tony could be anywhere maybe making moomba floats
and still pursuing the red revolution
dave now has new wife, new allegiances, new house with lawn
same face though, same laugh, same glass
where is the bus to take me away from all this?
ghosts gather in my thoughts
the dead fight with the living for space and time
hold me to your heart sweet yesterday
tomorrow just lost another traveller
[1991]
oOo
MORNING COFFEE HAIKU
franklin cafe
8.30 a.m.
hot flat white
spoonful of sugar
splash!
*
boy in blue
muddy fake reboks
freckled face
falls off chair
crash!
*
man with tongs
iced apple cake
brown paper bag
ringer on register
cash!
*
franklin cafe
9.05 a.m.
hand on briefcase
its late must
dash.
[1991]
---------------------------------------------------------------
GRANT CALDWELL
4 NEW YORK HAIKU
*
sleeping in new york
to the sound of falling rain -
air-conditioning
*
manhattan subway
every race in the world
going home
*
why new york is the
centre of the universe -
nine-eleven
*
the subway busker
plays boogie-woogie piano -
the trains run all night
[2011]
---------------------------------------------------------
JAKE CORE
4 POEMS
*
COLLOQUIAL BELLBIRDS
Leora Bell broke her wrist
last week when the rain was here.
She was drunk again with Blake Fielder
and fell off a swing.
At first she didn't even realize
it was broken.
She just said, 'my wrist feels kinda
funny,'
and laughed like a strange bird.
oOo
ULURU
With a warm beer
beneath the setting sun
I overhear a man say
to his wife :
'There's a palace of ice
south of Tasmania
that no one has ever seen.
I can take you there,
I have a map.
It's bigger than Uluru.'
oOo
SUITORS
In the twilight of a love song
amorous Europeans descend staircases,
legless, and blowing
invisible kisses to impossible suitors
down the hall, where memories
can be found
turning endlessly in on themselves
like whirlpools on holiday.
oOo
TELEPHONE SHADOWS, LEAN AGAINST THE FRUIT BOWL
I see you by the water.
Your name is not Bravado,
Jane, or Solitude.
There is nothing in the distance
except a space reserved
for ghost ships.
Your face is turned away
from a great number
of things.
Your hair is nearly down
to your hips.
There is no telling how far back
a story goes.
I see you by the water.
Your name is not Momentum,
Eliza, or Sleep.
--------------------------------------------------------
ANGELA GARDNER
TWO PROSE PIECES
*
A SHADOW LEAVING It won’t be the right thing for you: there is
the circular plot, and one or other leaving – some bloody battle. But I
wish you safe road, I wish that to you. Trundle the gods from their
museums, stand with them at crossroads and they’ll be freed from
obligations to warn of death, though not of how close others will come
to us. Them in a Limbo of not arriving, a nowhere advanced by
technology and our tiredness. And all the while the money sparks,
still sparks, changes hands. It makes us close-touched, adorned,
volatile, with our stepped hands, our stepped words. What is it to be
intact? Ignore it, don’t fret it back, we have the gods! Shadows hold
us with unremembered promises that we are tranced by: while
yesterday’s tomorrows pile up all tarnished and unaccountable. The
gods try comfort, warn of emptiness without them. I want to turn on my
borrowed heel, though then I’ll never know what I did, or what is sold
on the streets until each exhausted dawn. The unsheathed flesh of
flowers pours from glassy throats. I’m moved, truly. Slowed to silence
in the physical downpour of the morning rain, the fabric of the sky.
It frees me. The gods gave little comfort. They were crudely fashioned.
I may travel. There are many directions, a border country where words
change in meaning. Should we blame the gods. Or angels? We were
defiant, and wanton, worked to free ourselves from our desire for their
monstrous shadows, their mechanical animals. We had believed the
shadow-play but insisted they leave the shelter we found for them.
Stood by at the crossroads. No question, I’m pared back without them.
I am like something else...
oOo
TRANCE Primitive fairground amusements judder around us under
human force and disco. Unskilled in the ways of petrol: flame
throws out its spurts. He rolls his eyes and wipes his mouth on an old
cloth, while the women sing, or fail to, telling us nothing as it happens.
Our ring of faces is merely curious. Arse in a barrel straining to get away
from whip lashes that are aimed from the cruelty of youth. Who can we
blame for this? We are rumour and shadow, as he spits unburnt petrol
into the not yet midnight. We breathe like him through shallow shoals
of traffic and a pall of cardboard cinders that fall from fireworks.
Masked, old rope tail, tee-shirt stained with petrol dribbles as music
with uneven lyrics, many parts despair some joy, plays over us like
pollution. And all the while the puppet master jokes with the orchestra.
---------------------------------------------------------
FRANCESCA JURATE SASNAITIS
Amed! Ah!
I have been covered in black sand,
the fine ground progeny of laval rock and glittering mica,
the work of millennial waves and winds
beating beating at these wasted cliffs,
dust dry on this island once haled a tropical paradise.
I have swum with schools of darting fishes
the speed and green of lightning bolts,
fish the colour of sun playing in wavelets over rocks
and fish the black of the shadows underneath.
I have seen fish striped the yellow of young leaves.
I have tasted of paradise, and reek of it—
pungent garlic and slivers of onion fried,
the leaf of the blingbing tree, turmeric, chilli,
red red rice, green papaya and galangal—
the poetry of flavour.
I have developed a taste for Arak.
Kue dadar pisang! pancake wrapped
and spidered in coconut, the red banana . . .
my mouth aches in anticipation!
A frangipani graces every dish.
[Bali, 2011]
---------------------------------------------------------
CATHERINE O'BRIEN
-------------------------shooting at the sky
...the way I ride my bike along a lane that takes me by
one of the many temples in Vientiane...plaster casts on
the wall depict a young boy with his bow and arrow...
shooting at the sky...angels hover above him...as they
ascend wings detach and float on the white...feathers
fall...embedded into the wall memory shadows where once
there were more boys with arrows...shooting at angels...
floating wings...falling feathers...the symmetry undisturbed
by the erosion of time...daily I ride again into this story and
see it unfold...every day the lane and the wall divide my day into
remembered and forgotten...pierced by shooting arrows!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS :
David N Pepperell was co-proprietor of legendary Melbourne record shop, Archie & Jughead back in the day. In the mid '90s he ran Dr. Pepper's Jazz Junction in the Port Philip Arcade ("from trad to bop - from free to acid - all the jazz that's fit to stock!"). Song-writer & music journalist. Books include Raphael Alias (1976), East Gate, West Gate (1991), Letters to a Friend [correspondence with Anais Nin] ('92), both from Nosukumo press.
Grant Caldwell edited the now defunct Blue Dog magazine (from the Australian Poetry Centre, Melbourne). Of his 7 collections to date his most recent are Dreaming of Robert de Niro (2003) & Glass Clouds (2010), both from Five Islands Press. His novel Malabata ('91) is something of a classic.
Jake Core is an itinerant poet & musician. The poems here are published in his little book, The Goose Puddle (Brierfield Flood Press, 2010).
Angela Gardner, poet & artist. Edits poetry e-zine, foam:e. see, http://www.foame.org Her collection, Parts of Speech (UQP, 2007), was the winner of the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Views of the Hudson was published by Shearsman, UK, in 2009.
Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, an original member of Collected Works bookshop, ran the distinguished independent store, Greville Street Bookstore for 20 years. Nosukumo published her prose-pieces, Sketches, in 1989. In the last year she's published 2 exquisite chapbooks, Gravelly Views & Thirteen Seasons (in one day) with her own imprint, Ratas.
Cathy O'Brien lives & works in Vientiane, where her little i:cat gallery stages art & photography exhibitions, poetry readings, & film showings. Her most recent publications are the card book Word Sculptures, and a poem card collaboration with Kris & Bernard Hemensley (published by Stingy Artist, UK, 2011).
Pete Spence's Perrier Fever is published by Alan Wearne's Grand Parade, & is available at all good bookstores including Collected Works Bookshop.
--that's all folks!--
October 4th, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
THE BIG READ : August 19th,'11
Dear Friends, A year ago Collected Works Bookshop was faced with an uncertain future as we digested implication of the large rent rise (unforeseen as we sought new 4 year lease). The support we received from our poetry community (writers & readers) was fantastic! The Christmas Benefit (December, '10), organized by Friends of Collected Works, was a huge & positive interjection (dollars & cents, morale, energy). Our programme of book launchings + readings have sustained this momentum. But a new problem, or a new context for the problem, has emerged. Turning around the public perception of the collapse of bricks & mortar book trade in the wake of the Borders/A & R crash is the new challenge. It is fortuitous, therefore, that the McBryde/Harrison/Smeaton "BIG READ" is just around the corner. Please see here first announcement of the programme:
You are Cordially Invited to
A Poets’ Benefit Event for Collected Works Bookshop
featuring
jordieALBISTON, connieBARBER, tonyBIRCH, lynBOUGHTON,
eddyBURGER, m.a.CARTER, jenniferCOMPTON, alisonCROGGON, danDISNEY, megDUNN, michaelFARRELL, susanFEALY, wendyFLEMING, leeFUHLER, claireGASKIN,
luisGONZALEZ SERRANO, timHAMILTON, libbyHART, lynHATHERLY, susanHAWTHORNE, kristinHENRY, andyJACKSON, KOMNINOS, michelleLEBER, geoffLEMON,
LISH, rayLIVERSIDGE, earlLIVINGS, kerryLOUGHREY, myronLYSENKO, bronwynMANGER, emilyMANGER, felixNOBIS, anthonyO’SULLIVAN, k.f.PEARSON, PI O, judithRODRIGUEZ, josephineROWE, robynROWLAND, gigRYAN, kerrySCUFFINS, tomSHAPCOTT, steveSMART, jennySTRAUSS, fionaSTUART, peterTIERNAN, lyndonWALKER, chrisWALLACE-CRABBE, ceciliaWHITE, petraWHITE, laurenWILLIAMS
plus
jenniferHARRISON (reading dorothyPORTER)
kenSMEATON (reading malMORGAN)
ianMcBRYDE (reading barbaraGILES)
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19th, 6:30 for 7 pm
__________________________________
at Collected Works Bookshop,
1st Floor, The Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St., Melbourne
(corner Swanston St. and Flinders Lane)
Free Admission for all, the only prerequisite asked is to please buy a book or three to keep Collected Works thriving and alive!
Complimentary Wine & Nibbles Provided Inquiries : Collected Works 9654 8873
-------------------------------------------------------------
You are Cordially Invited to
A Poets’ Benefit Event for Collected Works Bookshop
featuring
jordieALBISTON, connieBARBER, tonyBIRCH, lynBOUGHTON,
eddyBURGER, m.a.CARTER, jenniferCOMPTON, alisonCROGGON, danDISNEY, megDUNN, michaelFARRELL, susanFEALY, wendyFLEMING, leeFUHLER, claireGASKIN,
luisGONZALEZ SERRANO, timHAMILTON, libbyHART, lynHATHERLY, susanHAWTHORNE, kristinHENRY, andyJACKSON, KOMNINOS, michelleLEBER, geoffLEMON,
LISH, rayLIVERSIDGE, earlLIVINGS, kerryLOUGHREY, myronLYSENKO, bronwynMANGER, emilyMANGER, felixNOBIS, anthonyO’SULLIVAN, k.f.PEARSON, PI O, judithRODRIGUEZ, josephineROWE, robynROWLAND, gigRYAN, kerrySCUFFINS, tomSHAPCOTT, steveSMART, jennySTRAUSS, fionaSTUART, peterTIERNAN, lyndonWALKER, chrisWALLACE-CRABBE, ceciliaWHITE, petraWHITE, laurenWILLIAMS
plus
jenniferHARRISON (reading dorothyPORTER)
kenSMEATON (reading malMORGAN)
ianMcBRYDE (reading barbaraGILES)
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19th, 6:30 for 7 pm
__________________________________
at Collected Works Bookshop,
1st Floor, The Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St., Melbourne
(corner Swanston St. and Flinders Lane)
Free Admission for all, the only prerequisite asked is to please buy a book or three to keep Collected Works thriving and alive!
Complimentary Wine & Nibbles Provided Inquiries : Collected Works 9654 8873
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Sunday, July 3, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 24, July 2011
GREGORY DAY
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
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KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
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CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)
I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.
This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.
The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.
It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.
Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.
And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.
But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’
Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.
What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.
In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….
And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’
That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.
So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.
Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.
---------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART
"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*
KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...
LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...
KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...
LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.
How like
And I am wondering about your face,
how it alters when a mood takes hold.
Such a changeling
like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,
higher and higher up into the tree.
Like a breath by cold night,
the crispest revelation breaking ice.
What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.
How like a stretched metaphor you are,
how like broken branches from an apple tree.
Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.
How like a mystery,
entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.
How like an endless path of thought.
How like a mesmeriser
with the power of foresight.
How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.
How like the concept of the wheel,
of the science of silence.
How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.
How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.
How like the moon in all of its tiredness,
of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.
*
During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.
KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!
*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?
LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.
KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...
LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.
The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.
*
Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy
I’ve been sweating and weeping
against the bridge of days like a mute,
singing only to dogs.
If nothing else, they come to me
with their wet noses
snorting around,
digging up my very soul.
Let me speak
for it has been so long
since I’ve let my voice shine.
Give no mind to that mad wind
too full of itself. Listen only to me.
Catch my intentions in your hands,
grab them from that whistle-soaked air.
Don’t move away
let my words be heard,
it’s been too long in the waiting.
*
Figure at window – Portrush
The red tail lights of cars
move away from the town.
They leave in twos like devils’ eyes
down and down the cliff.
Looking north,
all this allegorical darkness.
It’s full and full-blown,
hiding those Portrush clouds.
What is it that the old man said?
That the north is where the devil lurks
catching the unwary in their tracks.
The small door in the church
was kept open for him.
It swung with a groan so fresh
like a child just home from school.
And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle
black and white in their pairs
with only the street light to guide them.
Small animated bodies
windblown by the Atlantic
with their man hunched over,
a cigarette in hand.
They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,
with those devils’ eyes so close behind.
*
Dog
I look up
at the nostrils of him,
wide with in-breathing.
His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.
An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.
Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,
swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.
Hard and soft, and hard again,
pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.
It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.
*
KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...
*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?
LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.
*
The other woman
The weather is like a ghost tonight
embracing all things,
yet our breath covers distance.
And breath is touch.
It comes like storm, full with lightning
full with high cloud cramming the sky.
And this breath comes like wave,
rolling over and into this room
like a king tide sinking the night.
This breath is like moonlight,
falling across my cheek, and then onto lips
in all its elucidation.
And this breath speaks,
this breath that finds me in the darkness.
This breath that falls and is fallen.
*
Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.
*
Man in pub – Strabane
These are love’s borders.
And here is a hand.
It becomes a thought
too full of going forward.
*
Woman responds
Desire is on his mind
when these fingers talk.
Love is on my mind
when I reach out to hold their words.
I become a murmur
not meant for translation
as his fingers curl
into the very heart of things.
*
As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.
*
Tourist – Limerick
The cry of a gull from God-knows-where
And the church bells
And the cars forever passing
And the girl screaming at the stopped car
And the horns tooting
And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is
And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off
And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny
And the smell of coal-smoke
And the cheap hotel room
where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls
And the broken tiles in the shower
And the chenille bedspreads
And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke
And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way
And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine
And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems
And the presence of a lack of presence
(and all that is left is desperation)
Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls
against the roof of a pram
There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making
*
Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:
Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon
My thoughts are with you tonight,
they belong where your feet walk.
They go down to the river
its bend, the curve of serpent
slunk beneath.
Body of water,
a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.
Her belly swollen and swallowing,
sinking down with a swish of tail.
Blubbing and lugging
this weighted island-world,
a push of girth
netting our own wet bodies
of muscle and tide,
the heart-thump of land
unanchored below feet.
This island of the ocean,
how it sways us to sleep
with its breath of undertow,
its guardians of storm above our heads.
Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,
near-words reach me.
*
The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.
I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.
Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.
oOo
[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]
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CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com
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