THIS WRITING LIFE

Introducing novelists Colin Talbot & Shane Maloney at Collected Works Bookshop recently, for the former's book launch on December 9th, '16, I described a potential customer's enquiry as to whether we stocked any "amusing travel books"… Jules Verne? I wondered to our audience. Joseph Conrad? Malcolm Lowry? B Traven? Traven Collins aka Colin Talbot?

Long captivated by the splicing of author & character(s) in novels, I'm led to ask the question What is "fiction"? --what is fiction for Colin Talbot, for example, who's first to confess that his form of detective fiction isn't concerned with serial killers! He'll say it's his vehicle for writing, writing per se. There'll be another opportunity to discuss Talbot's work, but since mentioning Lowry that night the latter has been in my mind, and only yesterday did I select Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place as my travelling companion to & fro' the sea on the 246 bus, & whose author was then quoted into my Christmas Day "Beach Report" largely written in situ (posted on F/book & the Poetry & Ideas blog).

Thinking about Malcolm Lowry and reading the collection's first couple of stories, The Bravest Boat & Through the Panama, moved to say that it's a writing laden with 'the art of'. Author's investment in novel as if mythology --concurrent levels of the revelatory fiction. Author here symbolist but not psycho-analyst whatever the volition of his time. He is artist projecting own system of significance but intuits there's no interpretation ahead of the experience which, for consummate writer, is doubly recollected --by & as intense memory & intense invention, & remembered again & again.

Imagine Lowry --poet, poetic intellectual, novelist in age of realism become more-or-less reportage --Bellow, for example, in the '40s, memorably exploiting one of Joyce's tricks without concomitant commitment to larger scheme or idea --story-telling entirely within rhythm of the colloquial, sounding out 'as we think & speak' which was called, when we were young, "contemporary", meaning, I think, post-literary --H E Bates for example, as present-time D H Lawrence one thought then, having cut to the vernacular chase, as earthy & corporeal as DHL but novelistically one-dimensional… Imagine Lowry seeking something else, perhaps as something-else's conduit… Doesn't he let it all slip there on p27 of the paperback collection (leapt when I read it)? "The further point is that the novel is about a character who becomes enmeshed in the plot of the novel he has written, as I did in Mexico. But now I am becoming enmeshed in the plot of a novel I have scarcely begun. Idea is not new, at least so far as enmeshment with characters is concerned. Goethe, Wilhelm von Scholz, 'The Race with a Shadow.' Pirandello, etc. But did these people ever have it happen to them?
Turn this into triumph : the furies into mercies.
-- The inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are; the billows of inexhaustible anguish haunted by the insatiable albatross of self."

Philosophical complexity of 'having no right' allows practical translation at least as no ease with conventional relations, that is regarding definition of the story & story-telling, where elegance & efficacy congeal, & the edges refined, the bumps & whorls of perception's plenitude eliminated…

26-12-16

THE BEACH REPORT, Christmas Day, 2016

Malcolm Lowry's Hemensley is no Old Man of the Sea --how could he be? so grounded (Lowry & Hemensley both) in --in his books -- so enfolded in ground, exactly like the longed-for earth after weeks at sea on one's sole working voyage --Perth wasn't it? maniacal drive with the Ship Shop's manager & deputy --Fremantle to Perth --is that possible? -- t'other end of which kicking a football around on the dewy lawn of house of Shop manager's Australian mate --one starlit night on the Earth in 1965 --& heaven on earth after the constant heave of ocean --yet that billowing, sometimes bellowing push & pull of sea is solid ground's eternal counterpoint  --and the rest of it, fierce wind, rain-like spray, errant waves, from which any Crew Only door's an escape but full roar & only man on deck's the opportunity usually experienced in books, best written when author's unhooked from feather-down suburbia -- bliss though in quiet room in quiet street, reading, writing…

"…in the park of the seaport…" our Lowry will write --understanding, like his Hemensley, that even the terrestrial accoutrement is suffused with sea --for example, that bunch of men in the parcels section of the Post Office, Southampton, Christmas '65 & again in 1970 --one of those forever available jobs, you'd simply turn up & apply, last years of the industrial age --a bunch of men in-between ships, best bets for unflagging labour, night shift --of course they were sailors but their camaraderie & gusto surely inspired the landlubber casuals, transformed the parcels room into ship's hold, the parcels into slithering fish, the parcel sacks into overflowing fishing nets--

"…in the park of the  seaport…" --first sight of Elwood's grassed & shrubbed foreshore, before the sand & the bay of blue sea, the entirely blue sky…

MEETING MARK OLIVAL-BARTLEY

A great pleasure to have met Mark Olival-Bartley over the last week. Could hardly not feel well-disposed to a man who makes the following observation, "Collected Works Bookshop, a literary haven and quite possibility the best antiquarian poetry bookshop in the world." I dont know about that; if it's anywhere near so then my world is reducing. English-speaking world one wld have to qualify.
From Hawaii & living in Munich ("presently reappraising the sonnets of E A Robinson for his dissertation at Amerika-Institut of Ludwing-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen"), Mark was poet-in-residence at the recent international Eco-Health Alliance conference in Melbourne.
First question he asked when he walked into the Shop was whether we had any Edgar Arlington Robinson. Turns out he might be our time's expert on Robinson! We did of course have Robinson in the Boydell series of Arthurian poets, also Yvor Winters' little guide and a 1st edition Robinson, Matthias at the Door. Proves that every book has its reader and obscurity a relative concept.
We've talked long & variously about poets & poetry, including the scene in Hawaii which I experienced in 1990 for a week when I was there as a guest of Kiki Davis & EWEB/University of Hawaii Press.
We bandy about the word 'form' in Melbourne, but chatting with Mark it's obvious we're largely on a different page. In my own case, the forms were available once free verse ceased to be the exciting adventure of my beginnings. Late 80s early 90s I was extricating from avant garde cul-de-sac. Not a formalist but happy to experiment with the forms. Sonnet sequences, for example, and latterly syllable counts. Not a formalist but happy as poet to restore to my reading what free verse had junked.
We spent a little while on Wednesday a/noon reading & discussing Mark's possibly favourite poem of all, Robinson's "Eros Turannos". It aroused a thought in my mind about the relationship of the form & the story --seemed to me, on the spur, that a couple of verses stood alone as beautiful constructions whereas the form felt a little strained as the story pushed through in the poem. I'll be rereading it of course. (Mark points us to Robert Pinsky's discussion of the poem available on the web in Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.)
And thanks to the web we'll stay in touch!

[Melbourne, 8th December, '16]

THIS WRITING LIFE

Listening to the British Library's British Poets CD, which Robert Mitchell kindly gave me the other day because, disappointingly, it was a dud: his expectations of disc 3's WS Graham, Amis, Edwin Morgan, G. Mackay Brown et al, dashed upon the rock'n'roll of Ferlinghetti, Bukowski, Ginsberg, --the American disc slipped incorrectly into the British box-set. And it is a shock on the ear let alone sensibility; the speak easy vs the elocution lesson… The contrast's the greater because one's probably missing Whitman's introduction, from whence the long century of a determined modern cultivation, mostly all free one imagines, even as Ashbery's sestina or Sexton's parables, the colloquial messing up the old poetical.

On the 2nd English disc, Dylan Thomas follows George Barker, and it's his dramatic  diddledy-di which upsets the decorous continuum, as far as annunciation's concerned, from C Day-Lewis through John Betjeman (full of fun, a poetry that sticks in the ear, history recorded via nostalgia and as true as comedy allows), Spender, Auden. Sorley MacLean is different & not only due to the Gaelic (that is, the Gaelic's thoroughly not-Englishness); and R S Thomas in another way. But Dylan Thomas is something else, the strong & continuous flowing, the rhymes & rhythms, the repetitious or better said, the apparent circularity of image & rhyme; in the spirit of Hopkins & Yeats, accessible to their great spirits.

The British disc is an entire lesson, whether or not in the largely bypassed diction --a lesson in the old craft by its late practitioners, the mid 20th Century's sages & stars who were the main men on the shelf when I was beginning, hardly beginning, early '60s ℅ Southampton's public libraries. I got into my own stride by rejecting the lot of them. I was looking for W C Williams not Charles on the poetry shelf!

Listening to the American disc, I can imagine the converse surprise of the American poetry buff, the  horror listening to Larkin or Hughes instead of John Ashbery or Le Roi Jones… And I can hear how Adrienne Rich connects with Anne Sexton & I'm sure Sylvia Plath too. Incantation by which didactic is kept sweet to the lyric. Question : How remain individual (retain eccentric personality) in the vortex of the topical (perhaps the involuntary generality)? How save individual in the maelstrom of the everyday (one's 'particular narrowness' as per Celan)? How prevent the signature American poetry (the declasse vernacular to which all accents adhere, Walt's 'democratic idiom') convoluting to artless prose? My questions, only mine, never finally put away…

(December, 8th, '16)

BARRY HUMPHRIES ASKS FOR WILLIAM PLOMER

Barry Humphries enters the Shop through the bead curtain. 'ello, I say, casual London style I've taken on this morning. He knows the Shop of course, began visiting during our Flinders Way Arcade years. His friend Neil Munro introduced him. Every year or so he pops in. One time in the Nicholas Building he was accompanied by a film-crew; photos & article duly appeared in the paper. He sat in the black painted bamboo chair, fitted with Cathy O'Brien's embroidered green cushions (--the chair the late Dr Norman Saffin always sat in, commandeered it --one time totally put out when, as a joke, Kris Coad saw him coming up the corridor & beat him to it! --poor Dr Saffin stood at the door non-plussed, had to be convinced to enter & take up his usual position), --the famous chair, therefore, which Barry pulled away from the eccentric & eclectic 'Shire' shelf over to the Irish section that suited the photographer far better. Next visit he enquired whether we'd benefited from his plug for the Shop, and we had. Funnily enough, on this occasion I'm not entirely sure it is him! As he shuffles the chapbooks in front of me at the counter, I formulate a comment which'll confirm one way or t'other : I saw you recently in Ballarat, I say. Oh? he says, what was I doing? You were hanging, I said (Louise Hearman's 2016 winning Archibald Prize portrait).  Oh yes, and he chuckles, they're touring me around now!
He asks for William Plomer. Would I have anything? I look; we have Celebrations, a first edition. South African you know, he says. Yes, I enjoyed his memoir… I had a South African friend too, I say, the poet Frank Prince, lived in Southampton… Don't know him, Barry says. Died a few years ago, aged 92. Everyone's dying, he said. Frank's famous WW2 poem was Soldiers Bathing… Oh yes, I know, he says --speculatively…
Taking the Plomer down from its high shelf I also remove Ruth Pitter. Ah, he says, Ruth Pitter --I spoke to her on the phone just before she died… Flicking through the Plomer he says, read The Planes of Bedford Square --beautiful poem --note the internal rhymes, brilliant. "Never were the plane trees loftier, leafier, / the planes of Bedford Square, / and of all that summer foliage motionless / not one leaf / had fallen yet, one afternoon / warm in the last world-peace before / the First World War."
Anna Wickham, he plucks out of the air… Same generation I say (Prince, Plomer, Pitter, Ridler et al)… Do you have any? No, but you know there's a collected Wickham due next year from the University of West Australia Press… young chap Nathaniel O'Reilly's scholarship. Because of the Australian connection, Barry muses, she published two collections in Australia you know… He wonders whether any of these older poets is remembered now? What can one say? To oneself, "that's our job".
At the counter again, before leaving, he looks around him. It's good to be back, he says, back in an older Melbourne… I like old, he says. We're not really a part of that, I say, not historically --the Shop's only existed since 1984 though I personally remember mid '60s Melbourne.... but temperamentally of course... How old were you when you arrived? 19 as a sailor in '65, 20 as a migrant the next year…
A couple of times you've been here & I've had English classics on the stereo, and I've asked you to guess who… one time not Rubbra or Bax or Howells or Finzi… Finzi, Barry echoes… none of them --it was E G Moeran! Oh yes, he says, smiling. Glazed look, peering through the maze of memory? We shake hands, say goodbye till next time. His companion has the Plomer in a paper bag. Their voices trail away en route the lifts.

[from Journal, 19th November, '16]

"

ADDITIONAL to "On this day..."

K H :
Hi Tim, I posted some thoughts about John Thorpe & others on my blog y'day, usual memoir/intersection style of thang...

Cheers for now,
Kris


oOo


TIM WRIGHT :
 I hadn't heard of John Thorpe - but will remember the name now. The
quotes were interesting to me - particularly that connection between
what Pound was getting at with the ideogram and that ease that kids
have in writing (painting) and later generally lose - "the language of
changing yr mind" I like.  You lost me a bit on the opposition between
history -> present/present -> history but maybe I need to read some of
Thorpe's writing to catch your drift here.


oOo


K H :
Now then, re- the history thing. Me too have to get head back into whatever it was, out of Thorpe and then my own riff...
Maybe I mean that the --rephrase, maybe I meant back in 1985! --maybe in the context where the value is in the 'making it historical', because obviously history such a loaded category, such a phenomenal vector. But to fall out of history into the local, the local as all-that-we-have, I mean the 'that's all folks!' versus endless semantic aggregation (data, symbolism et al) , maybe that's the difference I was feeling... And because I was tapping "being here" at that time and, I recall, distinguishing between 'here' & Heideggerian 'there"... Any lack of clarity is because of that focus, an ecstasy of thinking & feeling & writing I remember inhabiting at that time!

Re- John Thorpe himself, several books of poems, proses, commentary. In my piece I refer to his booklet, MATTER, or giving, wch was part of the inspiring series published by the late John Clarke, out of Buffalo. I was in touch with those people once upon a time, a brilliant time, and  actually to an extent recovered by meetings in February & March '16 in Melbourne, separately, with our two North American visitors, Sharon Thesen & Stephen Ellis...


oOo


TIM WRIGHT :
I guess my comment was just an inclination
or tendency to think (or try to think) of those two ..vectors.. as
somehow the same, if oppositional, which may or may not be different
to your take - I'll have to read over your email below again. Reading the
blog again I also like his 'I make space-time. IT is not making it (….)
If i describe a condition, it changes' which seems a completely sensible
position, in that any poem will articulate a time-sense of some kind,
when heard/read by others...

[Email conversation, Sunday, 30th October, '16]

21st October: On this day in 1969, Jack Kerouac died...

"21st October: On this day in 1969 Jack Kerouac died. The Lonesome Traveller. Among friends & allies here in Heaven." Our notice up on the wall at Collected Works Bookshop, 21-X-16.

[Facebook post: On that day, the day after, the morning after? the Hemensleys were visiting George Dowden in Brighton, up from Southampton for a couple of days. I'd begun corresponding with George as editor of little mag, Our Glass, in Melbourne, '69. Found his Letters to English Poets in Mike Dugan's collection in '68, which gave me a postal address. What more does a boy in the sticks require?! Anyway, cut to the chase Hemensley! George took us around the corner from his fine apartment to meet Bill Butler, fellow American, at Bill's Unicorn Bookshop. Bill was fetching us a cuppa or finding a book to show, something like that, but he returned with the newspaper, New York Times, the Herald Tribune? Oh my, he was saying, have you seen this, Jack Kerouac died. Took the wind out of our sails.
George burrowed into his shoulder bag, fetched out a note book. Ive got a new notebook, he said. This'll be the first entry I make in it. Bill Butler kind of drew himself even taller than us and said, cuttingly, I always thought one only wrote small things in small notebooks.
Ye-es. Hmmm.
On the subject of Kerouac... infinite. On the subject of Bill Butler, great little shop, nice catalogues, central to the Brighton scene. I liked him, his Americana poems. Not everyone did. I recall Andrew Crozier generally congratulating the particular issue of my English mag. Earth Ship, in '70 or so, but particularly objecting to Bill's poems. (I'll take this opportunity to reread him now; I mean Bill. Andrew's a constant though wasnt always for me...) And on the subject of George... what happened to George? Bibliographer of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s, prolific on the little mag scene. I shared poems he sent to Melbourne with other little mags. He corresponded with Charley Buckmaster; Charles hoped to get across to England.  I have some poetry on this in the book Kent MacCarter's publishing soon...
Yep! This has to be Heaven!


*

re- John Thorpe

John Thorpe is always ''descending from history''. He brings one back --to Pound (Canto II, "…Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "), that is to say, to the poetry able to listen &, whatismore, hear. He brings one back to the instant which is always local --to logography ("is the language of changing yr mind. It was not discovered by Pound (who called it ideogram) or Olson, etc it's so primary only kids & a very few writers have been able to equal -- 'english' being full of alphabetic, syllabic & prosodic reflexes."), that is to say, to writing as a way of being human, which realises & manifests nature, extending the possibility of life, enhancing the precondition, never setting out to be 'literary'.

John Thorpe is always descending from history into the present, the instant, the local, which really is the opposite of making the local etc. historical. What does he mean, "changing yr mind"? : "I make space-time. IT is not making it. (….) If i describe a condition, it changes. Or i hope to hell it does. If it didn't I'd be in trouble & I have been."

*

re- George Dowden

From This Is the Land of the Dead, The island of the Blessed, published by Hapt (Bournemouth, UK), 1970,

This is the Land of the Dead, the Island
of the Blessed

There is no Ship of Death - no where
to go but here

Here are the sweet-smelling trees, the gems
of the Earth are flowers, stones, a palace
is in the center - it is you, it is I,
that's all to know for beginning

*

Dowden's Ship of Death is a companion of John Thorpe's "Stranger in Paradise" --from Matter, or giving (Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, N.Y., '75), "we came here on the 'Stranger in Paradise.' These were americans searching ease in the orient, never leaving Paradise, their ideological capitol, to look at the earth."

Literature is their prehistory. They swear that no more will they be led astray. (Though one wonders what's happened to that resolution in Dowden's most recent publication (three works by Kaviraj [George Dowden], published as loot 1 : 3, 1979, UK), praise poems for Muktananda, which are sopping wet with sub-Beat adoration.)

*

At the beginning, Dowden was one of the poets I found in Michael Dugan's treasure-trove of English little magazines. Or, at the beginning, in Melbourne, there was Michael Dugan, with his treasure-trove of English little-magazines, through which I rummaged at his home in Canterbury… Or, at the beginning, I was in Melbourne, putting my first little mag, Our Glass, together, when Ken Taylor, in some excitement, told me about & then showed me another little magazine, Crosscurrents, emanating from completely outside of our La Mama cafe-theatre circuitry. It was produced by Michael Dugan from his home in Wentworth Street, Canterbury. For at the beginning I was an English poet in Melbourne, who reconnected with the English scene through fortuitous meeting with Michael Dugan, whose treasure-trove of English little-magazines had inspired him to publish his own, Crosscurrents, & confirmed me in my own Roneo style direction!
George Dowden's poems in an issue of Ambit had caught my eye. I found his address somewhere amongst Michael's things. I wrote to him (& to Jeff Nuttall, & Simon Cutts). He replied, with poems, "(…) from my current 'set' called EARTH INCANTATIONS (Body Chants) - Blake, "O Earth, O Earth, return!" Etc. These have been my work through 1968-69, and are proving of interest to editors in a number of countries, underground papers as well as poetry magazines. I hope you will be able to get them into papers or mags or your own roneo series there. (….) Hope this catches you before you sail [back to England via French Polynesia, the Panama, Martinique, Madeira, Marseilles, departing Sydney August, '69]. Good luck to your group, and on your trip…" (27,VII.69)

At my farewell party, given by Betty Burstall, July '69, I distributed poems by George Dowden, & Michael, similarly, poems by Jim Burns. We were four La Mama poet-editors, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Ian Robertson & myself. Buckmaster corresponded then with Dowden. Dowden negotiated an Australian issue of the English magazine, The Curiously Strong, to be edited by Buckmaster. Dowden sent copies of his books to Ken Taylor (at the ABC, the 'safest' address!) for distribution 'for everybody'. And so on…

It seemed to me, in '69, '70, that Dowden's poetry, his Blake/Ginsberg epistles, could be a stimulus & elevation in the level of political-poetic address then being attempted in Melbourne by such poets as Charles Buckmaster, Paul Adler, & Geoff Eggleston. Both Ian Robertson & Buckmaster were enthusiastic to publish him. Dowden (an American living in England, teaching, writing Ginsberg's bibliography for New Directions) was closer to the Melbourne aspiration, was more accessible than Michael McClure for example.

*

George Dowden to K.H., "Had weird letter from GREAT AUK Chas. Buckmaster. I got Fred Buck to do an Aussie issue of THE CURIOUSLY STRONG, sent a couple of samples to Chas, told him choose 3 or 4 poets there and make up (edit) the whole thing as per the way it's laid out. Said a few words I thought were encouraging, like poetry should be really strong, dangerous, etc., things I thought they were after and were finding in my poems they were praising -- he took it all wrong, thought I was trying to tell him what to write, but was only trying to impress on him the idea of making a really strong issue in his editing (what else?). It must have been that I honestly told him I didn't care for a few little poems he included in letter, wanting me to get published for him --I told him to make them better in THE CUR. STRONG. Oh, well, sensitivity and all that. I explained that 'known' poets when asked for criticism/opinion can only give it from what they want and are doing -- the younger takes it or leaves it (same as in my LETTERS TO ENGLISH POETS, 1967, where I say that they are firstly for me, and only secondly for anyone else who wants to listen). Forget it. Nothing serious. But must be understood: when one is asked for opinion, he does the younger poet no good by lying…." (30. I. 70)

"Yes, overemphasis on description in aussies -- must be a nice place to describe, physically, Pacific, the sun, greenery. But hoping that can be fused with saying something vital -- will be in best, always is (where Pound is so good so often)…." (7. II. 70)


----------------------------

Quoted from Being Here, the draft of its first part, Interference, published in the Being Here issue of H/EAR #7, 1985.