This particular group of friends included Heather Clarke, Steve Grimwade, Kathryn Hamman, Jennifer Harrison, Libby Hart, Kris Hemensley, Ray Liversidge. There were several apologies; in addition as many other people prefer to be in email contact. My report is going out to this variety of friends of Collected Works Bookshop. In addition it will be posted on the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook Page and my Poetry & Ideas blog. (Touch all bases!) Please feel free to send it on.
The non-exclusive nature of this group was reiterated. We consider you all good friends of Collected Works Bookshop. Long may this remain!
Lots of water under the bridge since the initial rallying to the cause in October, November, December '10.
For one thing, John Hunter's creation of the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook Page has proved an invaluable means of communication, especially for publicising the book launches & readings at the Shop. It's also a reflection of the Shop's tone & colour. Readers, writers interacting with the Shop around events, books & ideas.
And the huge success of the pre-Christmas shopping/raffle/auction/benefit (8th December, '10) is still resonating; e.g., although there wasnt & isnt a debt involved, the sum raised on that glorious night allowed us to begin the new year in a better financial position than for some while past.
The higher rent has now kicked in, so whilst the very necessary restocking of the shelves continues we are keeping an eye on the higher outgoings.
The 8th December event reminded us that in the '80s & '90s, Collected Works Bookshop used to hold a Christmas Party. In recent times we have served Xmas Cake (Sheila Anderson's to begin with, Clementa O'Brien's more recently) & Port in the last couple of weeks of December; but we feel an actual event should return to our calendar! This is an 'action' for which we're all enthusiastic & will now begin to plan it.
An idea fielded at the initial Friends meeting, at Jenny Harrison's house on the 21st November, '10, was that of a "Big Read". Philip Salom & Jenny were its proponents, endorsed by the rest of us. Since then, Ian McBryde has made the same suggestion. We well remember the event organized by Ian & Ken Smeaton, summer 2003, which celebrated the Shop's successful move from 256 Flinders Street to the Nicholas Building. (It was one of two important community initiatives : the other being the very deep hat Barry Hill sent around to colleagues which was to offset the Shop's removal costs. And how! Barry's original petition graces the Shop notice-board.) At the big read ('read a poem, buy a book') a multitude of poets, across the poetry community, read for their supper, everyone bought a book, & the Shop catered. It was a great event and might yet be a model again. (Photos of many of the contributors to the event are permanently on view in the Shop.)
The thinking behind holding such an event acknowledges the ever vulnerable economic reality of such an enterprise as Collected Works Bookshop. It also offers a very simple remedy. As Steve Grimwade reasoned, the $$ figures we're talking about are relatively small. We trust to the average cash-flow continuing, but the injection of a few thousand dollars (via one or two events a year) goes a long way to ensuring the Shop's viability. Naturally we're all aware of the Borders/A & R crash & its reverberations.
At yesterday's (19th March) meeting I was at pains to define & re-present our project. The point about Collected Works is that it isnt just another bookshop (although at a rude survival level it is)!
Collected Works Bookshop survives & thrives today as the expression of an idea articulated in the early 1980s, by a group of Melbourne writers, editors & small publishers, on behalf of & enrolling the support of the writing community, to establish a bookshop which would stock local Melbourne & Australian literature (especially poetry) in a context of world literature. Kathryn Hamman & Libby Hart's specific reference to the current bookshop as reflective of (the) community & important to it, is gratifyingly consonant with Collected Works' original impetus.
It has always been a writers & readers interjection into the mainstream book trade. The Shop, therefore, is the space where these particular interactions occur : writers with each other (for information & exchange), writers with readers, the small press with the commercial mainstream, local literature with the world.
Collected Works is a special place. Steve asked me what it was Collected Works sought from its organizational colleagues (as it were). Fair question : it's common knowledge now that we were graciously & generously invited to consider relocating to the Wheeler Centre, but declined. Independence is an issue for Collected Works notwithstanding the fact that all of the Wheeler Centre's residents are independent. For Collected Works, though, a geographical independence is necessary. As supportive as we are of the Centre for Books & Writing, & for that matter, of the City of Literature, Collected Works believes in locational & logistical diversity. Collected Works is its own eccentric self but also a friend, even a potential satellite of & for larger entities like the Victorian Writes Centre, Australian Poetry, Wheeler, MWF et al.
So what we seek is support for the continuing existence of the bookshop assuming the acknowledgment of our historical status & continuing value as a writers' & readers' space. Although it's a fact that Collected Works is mentioned in the UNESCO City of Literature document & referred to in accounts of the contemporary Australian poetry scene, history is often dismissed or forgotten. Believing we're still relevant in this day & age, we'll endeavour to keep Collected Works in mind & in view!
The Shop hasnt had as busy a calendar of launchings & readings for many years as now. Some of this is the result of presses & individuals identifying with the Shop in its hour of need, & some the serendipity of a normal year. There are three events to come in March, more in May, June, July... (In April I plan to visit family & friends in the UK for a couple of weeks; Retta will keep the Shop open.)
The meetings in future will be occur on a needs basis. Obviously, this can be triggered by the Shop or the community. However, email, telephone & personal contact is expected & invited.
Thank you to everyone for your support hitherto & ongoing commitment.
Love & best wishes, on behalf of Collected Works,
Kris Hemensley
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
THE CHARLES BUCKMASTER MISCELLANY
(A continuing series of poems, papers, articles, notes, letters dedicated to the memory of Charles Buckmaster, 1951-1972)
Part 1 :
Article, Larry Schwartz (1990)
Poem, Kris Hemensley (1968)
Poem, James Hamilton (2011)
______________________________________________________
LARRY SCHWARTZ
DEATH OF A POET
"Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward"
--found written on a loose sheet among Charles Buckmaster's books.
A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting.
There is the farm house and attached bungalow in which a mother found the shotgun the following morning beside the body of her beloved youngest son. That was 26 November 1972, just over four years after the youth, stifled by the idyll of the tiny community, left for the city, wearing a new suit and clutching a suitcase and a handful of poems.
A diagnosed schitzophrenic, Charles Buckmaster was to finaly succumb to the agonising mental illness when he re-enacted the suicide of an older brother, taking his own life with his brother's gun, at just 21.
"There was a lot of pain and there still is a lot of pain," says a relative of the dead poet. "You put it away and you deal with it but you never forget."
The fifth child (youngest by eight years) of a taciturn farmer who worked at his cherry and peach orchards, Buckmaster wrote of "silent / desperation / waiting for life to descend".
He finally turned his back on the farming community established by his Swiss forbears, quitting school mid-way through the matriculation year in 1968 rather than heed an instruction to cut his hair. Eric Penfold, a teacher at Lilydale High school at the time, remembers Buckmaster as "a bit of a wild boy." "I don't think Charles was a real conformist," he said.
"When I was young, people thought me a strange and moody kid," Buckmaster once said. "Often I felt myself a stranger among people I'd known all my life ... my wanting to get out, which I wanted desperately, was something my parents knew they couldn't fight."
But the lure of Gruyere was strong. Buckmaster, who travelled extensively around Australia, was to return home often, sometimes accompanied by friends for fruit-picking, and his childhood surroundings featured prominently in the poetry of the young rebel some said bore a strong physical resemblance to the ill-fated Jim Morrison of The Doors.
As the forests were cleared for subdivisions, he agonised over the vulnerability of small farmers, such as his parents, to land developers and Gruyere's future as the city sprawled outwards. "The cities will merge, " he warned in a poem called An End to Myth. "Gruyere is dying ... The green walls dissolve." It was there he returned to end his life.
"He seemed to be a prodigy, sprung from the ground!" the poet and close friend, Kris Hemensley, wrote in the last issue of The Age Monthly Review.
"No one believed he really hailed from a place called Gruyere. And no one believed Gruyere existed ..." Melbourne's young writers of the time had thought he might be a hoax "to Ern Malley their movement", Hemensley said, alluding to the fictional poet at the centre of the now-famous literary hoax created to embarrass the editors of the Angry Penguins magazine decades earlier.
Hemensley's wife, Retta, remembers the scepticism she and Kris shared after reading the "terrible scrawl" of a first letter from a high school student called Charles Buckmaster. A newspaper report on writer and poet Michael Dugan had alerted the country schoolboy to the fresh literary activity in the city. The Hemensleys corresponded with him only after being assured by Dugan both Buckmaster and Gruyere were "for real".
Despite early scepticism and that scrawl, Buckmaster, whose earliest influences included Donne, Blake and Owen, was quick to impress. He has left his mark on Australian letters despite his brief career and even though he burned much of his work, including the manuscript for a novel and poems said to be good as good as his best, before he died. His early death robbed the country of one of its most promising literary figures.
He is remembered as a poet of considerable talent who wrote several exceptional poems, his potential for major literary achievement frustrated because his death came when his career was in its infancy.
Though Charles Buckmaster left behind a small body of poetry, his work had "the best urgency of the new poetry", the poet Thomas Shapcott has said.
"...He produced a core of work quite remarkable for so young a poet..." Michael Dugan wrote in the most recent issue of Overland. "What he might have achieved if he had not been cut down by the cruel disease of schizophrenia can only be guessed at."
Now, almost 20 years after his death, the recent publication of his collected works and extensive articles in literary publications Overland and The Age Monthly Review , have highlighted his place in Australian literature and impact of the generation of writers he epitomised.
The case for Buckmaster is perhaps most forcibly put by a friend and writer, John Jenkins, who believes that had the collected poems appeared sooner it would have "put on the map" not only his own work but a stream within Australian poetry that emerged during the tumultuous transition from the conservatism of the '50s.
Jenkins says during the 1970s and much of the '80s Australian literature had been dominated by conservative elements. Only now that it was not "too hot to handle" could a collection by Buckmaster, published late last year, be released.
He sees the work as still "very contemporary". particularly in the preoccupation with the environment and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
While few of the known poems have been widely anthologised and despite two slim volumes of his poems published when he was alive, much remained out of print until publication of the University of Queensland Press collection, part of a series which includes another ill-fated poet of that era, Michael Dransfield. The publishers say though poetry is generally a poor seller, both Dransfield's and Buckmaster's collections were selling better than expected, the latter less so but heartening at up to 500 of the 1500 printed.
The book's editor, Simon McDonald, also a friend of Buckmaster, cited financial and other constraints including the difficulty in obtaining poems scattered among friends around the country, for the delay in publication. He said he had taken upon himself the task of editing because of his strong feeling for his friend and had at one stage even set up an independent publishing company to release it. He said he now felt he had at last done his duty to his friend.
Buckmaster's book with its many previously unpublished poems, has helped friends in Melbourne literary circles finally come to terms with his death. The family kept the funeral private and some close friends did not know he had died until after his cremation. They have long planned to get together to remember him and the times they shared.
"We cried in December 1972 when the news of Charles Buckmaster's suicide was telephoned through -- but the tears hardly constituted a wake," Kris Hemensley wrote. "Only now, it seems to me, with the Collected Poems in hand, can he return to us in his life and death, our youngest poet, our dear and youngest friend."
His friends remember the good times -- his humor and warmth -- along with the bad of a vigorous young man dragged down by his demons, fighting for survival all the way. Michael Dugan describes the change from "sunny personality" to manic highs and lows, bouts of self-destructiveness, severe depression. So that the Collected Poems "remind us of the essential beauty and value of a friend destroyed by circumstances beyond his control".
"He was in such pain," said Buckmaster's girlfriend, Kate Veitch, "such emotional and mental pain. I could understand absolutely why he did it. Absolutely. this guy was being destroyed from the inside. It was agony to watch. Absolute agony."
Buckmaster was a "skyrocket" which exploded, John Jenkins said. The lifestyle he chose epitomised an era to such an extent he became one of the icons. "He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of it."
The young poet's death coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary creativity among younger writers in Melbourne, railing against a perceived literary stagnation and general conservatism.
The late 1960s had seen a frenzy of poetry in roneod poetry magazines and readings centred on what came to be known as the La Mama Poetry Workshop by a new generation of writers, influenced by the innovations of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.
"There was terrific excitement," said Retta Hemensley, who. with Kris, organised the first readings at La Mama. "Something was happening in the city that had been dead for so long".
Retta Hemensley smiles mischievously when she recalls running off copies of the magazine, Our Glass, edited by Kris, while doing secretarial work for Laurie Carmichael at the then Amalgamated Engineering Union.
It was a time of strong opposition to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, a vigorous counterculture challenge to conservatism, an optimism that youth culture could change the world for the better, a naive belief in the effectiveness of "mind-expanding" drugs and a shared joy in rock music. The poetry of this era was strongly influenced by literary movements in response to the frigidity of Cold War America.
Country boy Charles Buckmaster arrived in the city, finding a first job as laboratory assistant, at a time when bonds between young Australians were strengthened by lame resistance from their elders. Retta Hemensley recalls the cries of "cut your hair, Moses" her husband endured on the streets of Melbourne. it was a time of clumsy censorship, raids on theatres with controversial plays. She recalls acting in a play at a local theatre which was interrupted at each performance by a member of the vice squad in the audience threatening to declare the theatre a "bawdy house".
For Buckmaster and his friends, Faraday Street, Carlton, where the first reading at La Mama on 3 September 1968 attracted 17 people, was a focal point for budding writers.
Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called Croscurrents, remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps, a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if he were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.
Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution.
It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beefheart's harsh Trout Mask Replica or the Songs of the Humpback Whale in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.
And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for breakfast", Buckmaster recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, The Great Auk. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claiming he could control the effect of the drug.
He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia he'd sit up in bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's Drunken Boat the other.
His close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during the last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed.
Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop. He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him cary it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player. Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors.
There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favourite painting titled 'Self Portrait', by a 13 year-old boy.
Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson. "I came home one evening and Charles was in my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible... grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of him".
"His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of it. And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to do. And he was really upset because it hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought "Ohhhh, I don't want this, I do not want this'."
Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to do crazy things". She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone...
Retta Hemensley is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the lights". Did this encourage his destructive urge?
In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge / yet cannot understand / the nature / of this fear", of "ice, brooding above me". He wrote also that "all the dark hints / were not, as I had expected, / a part of this game... "
The poem, called Willochra, showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.
Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful girl", just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love; he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at la Mama in march 1970, before he had even bothered to ask her name. And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship.
She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack.
When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will. He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said.
Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered his room with his mother. Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favourites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said.
It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time. Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room.
"For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said."There was a jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue. His mother opened a drawer in his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors."
Michael Dugan, remarked in his recent article in Overland that the poet was "tidying up" in his last months, "preparing to leave nothing behind". He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost.
While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.
John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed earmarked for disaster," he said."He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time."
Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days. he was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right slot".
According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructiveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behaviour.
Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him. The first time I went to see him I just rolled up unannounced and got directions to the ward he was in.
"I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.
"He was walking down the corridor between these two ... classic great hulking chaps in white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did."
She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge. "I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all."
She said she was elated when she left. After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside."
Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a Jerusalem Bible Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.
She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was just after she had bailed him out of Pentridge. "He was out of his mind ... God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally. I said 'Charles, you don't just walk into guys' offices like this, Charles, you haven't got any shoes on'.
"I said 'you can't go in there like this. You will get thrown out. He went in, he turned around to me and said 'you don't have to come in, man, you're so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: 'arsehole, you are not worth it. I don't care how clever you are. I don't care how talented you are. I don't care how beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth it.' And I just walked off."
Charles Buckmaster was given a good behavior bond at his trial on condition he returned to his parents' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll leave nothing behind," he had once told John Jenkins. He spent the last few months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment he might finally escape his hell.
[This the text of Larry Schwartz's feature article as published in The Sunday Age (Agenda), 5th August, 1990, with minute editing & deletion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY
GRUYERE : THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED
(for Charles Buckmaster)
1
who stayed only becos they couldnt
find their way out again ( your poem
about them )
: swiss
people.
around 1840.
& the people who are still there now
in Gruyere
you could practically call it
Buckmaster country -
at least one part of it
( yr houses at four points
spanning cherry orchards
the dam with frogs
surrounded by green flora
& brown earth
in view of Mount St Leonard
2
on the outskirts of the water :
a cows carcass
already substantially returned
to the ground
the dead cow
bones turned up / great eye cavities
where 'things' have burrowed into its cranium
its legs become part of the earth
beside the dam.
the roar of the frogs
roar enuf
to drown
out
the Ruston Lincoln
diesel pump ( we
sheltered in its shed from
the rain )
listening to bell birds
piping -
one
grey as the gum
pretended
it
was
just
a
tree
its belly softer grey than its wing.
the clouted earth / broken bracken / grey weathered
grey watered / grey forest . thataway ..
3
you know
the cicada walks right out of its shell
abandons
himself ( the husks
crustate the wooden boards
around
the diesel pump.
stationary -
fixed treadle )
& flies out & over
the patches of black slime
bearing frogs eggs ( ten-
nis balls )
amongst the reeds
& weed
spreading under the surface
end to end
dragon flies
hovering horizontally
hanging
on breezes
making it their own
eery way
4
a tungle croft
of unusual constellations
of floating forests
of sheep following their leaders from
one spot in the field
suddenly
to another part
all of them . .
it pays to look up your stars
( THIS GUN
WAS CAPTURED FROM THE
GERMANS
BY THE 41st BATTALION A.I.F.
IN BELGIUM 1918
AND PRESENTED TO THE RESIDENTS OF
SOUTH GRUYERE )
collecting
sprigs of bacon & egg ( rust &
yellow ) flower
making
garlands to wear round yr neck
: you ancient !
look up the stars .
the familiar spots / stones
you know by heart -
bush fires
some badns
thru the kitchen window
( original oil paintings
on the wall )
going back ( father
& sons )
30 years.
120 years.
30000 years
in one long sweep / of
brown
green
&
the blu of the sky.
5
climbing
over barbed wire
under branches
around thorns
dropping
deeper thru trees
some with
rough brown bark hanging a strip
grey gums
prickly wattle
tea tree
wild heath
creeper
& vines.
treading over centuries of decomposition &
regrowth.
dog
following possum to their tree nests
another cow carcass
head propped on its shoulder
bones.
its left foreleg a
few yards away
hacked off & gnawed clean.
its hide
taut across the backbone &
ribcage
you could bounce on it.
6 (i)
the fording point
too deep -
the centre of the log bridge
covered by the stream.
when cows trespass ( you told us )
others properties
you cant chase them back.
you have to wait til the
owner comes & collects.
& if the trespasser
eats off yr land or tramples
the entire farm under foot
you still have to wait.
( the cows owner pays damages of course! )
(ii)
tasting the sap
dribbling down
a tree -
brown toffee
& a flavor which hardens the entire
palate
coating the tongue with
something worse than detol
"youre not sposed to eat it..."
came
too late !
but what did they live on
before the swiss
say
centuries before
1840 ?
berries. grass. some varieties
of snake,
frogs.
possum.
& bury their dead in the forest ?
making signs
for the deliverance of obstinate
earthly trappings
bury them down the gradient
in the centre
of the thickest bush
bury them maybe
in mass graves
on the down slope towards
the river.
(iii)
one massive skull
the head larger than a cow or
horse
must be an ox
huge molars
the jaws loosened by
the wet
the teeth planted in soil
prettied with moss . .
& the legs of the monster
to the right
of the head
folded casually.
7 (i)
the comings & goings
the mainroad to Lilydale to
the City
- the way 'home' -
cars bumper to bumper
which go right on by
oblivious of the
"barbecue down the road :
if the rain holds out"
of the living
made for 30 years
off the land
amongst cherry trees
with bridesmaids veils ( in
blossom )
(ii)
behaviour patterns of country folk
whether they forecast rainstorms
by rheumatic twinges
the
incidence of various common
& obscure
neuroses
the facts & figures of sociological reports
- apply
as much to the people who go
as the people who stay
8
in the middle of the earth
does anything change substantially ?
Gruyere :
a day in a life.
the visit.
the place exists
thru memories
nothing is more certain than
the recalled materials. the composition of ground :
yr bread & eard.
nothing is deader
than when it is forgotten.
Gruyere.
(September/October 29, 1968)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
CHARLES BUCKMASTER'S MOTORCYCLE
It is strange, the places
where he rides. The spokes whir
a silver churning, a fuel gauge
where something might be written.
An absent roar the sound
of pages burning, a tank or fuselage
scrapped or kept in a dark garage,
shadow heaped on knowing metal.
I have pages creased in folders
but not the rush of their trajectory,
phantom destinations written
on worn rubber. The one lamp
dull in an old night, tracing names
of towns bypassed by the highway.
A yellow lamp lit up
in a reckless notebook,
youth's windshield. Stored away
the words wait to ride, a poem
on the mechanical horseback
of remembering.
(2011)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
Larry Schwartz wrote for the Age & the Sunday Age for many years before going freelance. His poems have occasionally appear, for example in Bob Adamson's Ulitarra magazine in the mid '90s.
James Hamilton whilst not studying at La Trobe University, pursues his own research of the life & times of Charles Buckmaster & the La Mama poets of the late 60s.
Part 1 :
Article, Larry Schwartz (1990)
Poem, Kris Hemensley (1968)
Poem, James Hamilton (2011)
______________________________________________________
LARRY SCHWARTZ
DEATH OF A POET
"Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward"
--found written on a loose sheet among Charles Buckmaster's books.
A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting.
There is the farm house and attached bungalow in which a mother found the shotgun the following morning beside the body of her beloved youngest son. That was 26 November 1972, just over four years after the youth, stifled by the idyll of the tiny community, left for the city, wearing a new suit and clutching a suitcase and a handful of poems.
A diagnosed schitzophrenic, Charles Buckmaster was to finaly succumb to the agonising mental illness when he re-enacted the suicide of an older brother, taking his own life with his brother's gun, at just 21.
"There was a lot of pain and there still is a lot of pain," says a relative of the dead poet. "You put it away and you deal with it but you never forget."
The fifth child (youngest by eight years) of a taciturn farmer who worked at his cherry and peach orchards, Buckmaster wrote of "silent / desperation / waiting for life to descend".
He finally turned his back on the farming community established by his Swiss forbears, quitting school mid-way through the matriculation year in 1968 rather than heed an instruction to cut his hair. Eric Penfold, a teacher at Lilydale High school at the time, remembers Buckmaster as "a bit of a wild boy." "I don't think Charles was a real conformist," he said.
"When I was young, people thought me a strange and moody kid," Buckmaster once said. "Often I felt myself a stranger among people I'd known all my life ... my wanting to get out, which I wanted desperately, was something my parents knew they couldn't fight."
But the lure of Gruyere was strong. Buckmaster, who travelled extensively around Australia, was to return home often, sometimes accompanied by friends for fruit-picking, and his childhood surroundings featured prominently in the poetry of the young rebel some said bore a strong physical resemblance to the ill-fated Jim Morrison of The Doors.
As the forests were cleared for subdivisions, he agonised over the vulnerability of small farmers, such as his parents, to land developers and Gruyere's future as the city sprawled outwards. "The cities will merge, " he warned in a poem called An End to Myth. "Gruyere is dying ... The green walls dissolve." It was there he returned to end his life.
"He seemed to be a prodigy, sprung from the ground!" the poet and close friend, Kris Hemensley, wrote in the last issue of The Age Monthly Review.
"No one believed he really hailed from a place called Gruyere. And no one believed Gruyere existed ..." Melbourne's young writers of the time had thought he might be a hoax "to Ern Malley their movement", Hemensley said, alluding to the fictional poet at the centre of the now-famous literary hoax created to embarrass the editors of the Angry Penguins magazine decades earlier.
Hemensley's wife, Retta, remembers the scepticism she and Kris shared after reading the "terrible scrawl" of a first letter from a high school student called Charles Buckmaster. A newspaper report on writer and poet Michael Dugan had alerted the country schoolboy to the fresh literary activity in the city. The Hemensleys corresponded with him only after being assured by Dugan both Buckmaster and Gruyere were "for real".
Despite early scepticism and that scrawl, Buckmaster, whose earliest influences included Donne, Blake and Owen, was quick to impress. He has left his mark on Australian letters despite his brief career and even though he burned much of his work, including the manuscript for a novel and poems said to be good as good as his best, before he died. His early death robbed the country of one of its most promising literary figures.
He is remembered as a poet of considerable talent who wrote several exceptional poems, his potential for major literary achievement frustrated because his death came when his career was in its infancy.
Though Charles Buckmaster left behind a small body of poetry, his work had "the best urgency of the new poetry", the poet Thomas Shapcott has said.
"...He produced a core of work quite remarkable for so young a poet..." Michael Dugan wrote in the most recent issue of Overland. "What he might have achieved if he had not been cut down by the cruel disease of schizophrenia can only be guessed at."
Now, almost 20 years after his death, the recent publication of his collected works and extensive articles in literary publications Overland and The Age Monthly Review , have highlighted his place in Australian literature and impact of the generation of writers he epitomised.
The case for Buckmaster is perhaps most forcibly put by a friend and writer, John Jenkins, who believes that had the collected poems appeared sooner it would have "put on the map" not only his own work but a stream within Australian poetry that emerged during the tumultuous transition from the conservatism of the '50s.
Jenkins says during the 1970s and much of the '80s Australian literature had been dominated by conservative elements. Only now that it was not "too hot to handle" could a collection by Buckmaster, published late last year, be released.
He sees the work as still "very contemporary". particularly in the preoccupation with the environment and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
While few of the known poems have been widely anthologised and despite two slim volumes of his poems published when he was alive, much remained out of print until publication of the University of Queensland Press collection, part of a series which includes another ill-fated poet of that era, Michael Dransfield. The publishers say though poetry is generally a poor seller, both Dransfield's and Buckmaster's collections were selling better than expected, the latter less so but heartening at up to 500 of the 1500 printed.
The book's editor, Simon McDonald, also a friend of Buckmaster, cited financial and other constraints including the difficulty in obtaining poems scattered among friends around the country, for the delay in publication. He said he had taken upon himself the task of editing because of his strong feeling for his friend and had at one stage even set up an independent publishing company to release it. He said he now felt he had at last done his duty to his friend.
Buckmaster's book with its many previously unpublished poems, has helped friends in Melbourne literary circles finally come to terms with his death. The family kept the funeral private and some close friends did not know he had died until after his cremation. They have long planned to get together to remember him and the times they shared.
"We cried in December 1972 when the news of Charles Buckmaster's suicide was telephoned through -- but the tears hardly constituted a wake," Kris Hemensley wrote. "Only now, it seems to me, with the Collected Poems in hand, can he return to us in his life and death, our youngest poet, our dear and youngest friend."
His friends remember the good times -- his humor and warmth -- along with the bad of a vigorous young man dragged down by his demons, fighting for survival all the way. Michael Dugan describes the change from "sunny personality" to manic highs and lows, bouts of self-destructiveness, severe depression. So that the Collected Poems "remind us of the essential beauty and value of a friend destroyed by circumstances beyond his control".
"He was in such pain," said Buckmaster's girlfriend, Kate Veitch, "such emotional and mental pain. I could understand absolutely why he did it. Absolutely. this guy was being destroyed from the inside. It was agony to watch. Absolute agony."
Buckmaster was a "skyrocket" which exploded, John Jenkins said. The lifestyle he chose epitomised an era to such an extent he became one of the icons. "He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of it."
The young poet's death coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary creativity among younger writers in Melbourne, railing against a perceived literary stagnation and general conservatism.
The late 1960s had seen a frenzy of poetry in roneod poetry magazines and readings centred on what came to be known as the La Mama Poetry Workshop by a new generation of writers, influenced by the innovations of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.
"There was terrific excitement," said Retta Hemensley, who. with Kris, organised the first readings at La Mama. "Something was happening in the city that had been dead for so long".
Retta Hemensley smiles mischievously when she recalls running off copies of the magazine, Our Glass, edited by Kris, while doing secretarial work for Laurie Carmichael at the then Amalgamated Engineering Union.
It was a time of strong opposition to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, a vigorous counterculture challenge to conservatism, an optimism that youth culture could change the world for the better, a naive belief in the effectiveness of "mind-expanding" drugs and a shared joy in rock music. The poetry of this era was strongly influenced by literary movements in response to the frigidity of Cold War America.
Country boy Charles Buckmaster arrived in the city, finding a first job as laboratory assistant, at a time when bonds between young Australians were strengthened by lame resistance from their elders. Retta Hemensley recalls the cries of "cut your hair, Moses" her husband endured on the streets of Melbourne. it was a time of clumsy censorship, raids on theatres with controversial plays. She recalls acting in a play at a local theatre which was interrupted at each performance by a member of the vice squad in the audience threatening to declare the theatre a "bawdy house".
For Buckmaster and his friends, Faraday Street, Carlton, where the first reading at La Mama on 3 September 1968 attracted 17 people, was a focal point for budding writers.
Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called Croscurrents, remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps, a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if he were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.
Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution.
It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beefheart's harsh Trout Mask Replica or the Songs of the Humpback Whale in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.
And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for breakfast", Buckmaster recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, The Great Auk. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claiming he could control the effect of the drug.
He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia he'd sit up in bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's Drunken Boat the other.
His close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during the last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed.
Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop. He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him cary it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player. Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors.
There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favourite painting titled 'Self Portrait', by a 13 year-old boy.
Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson. "I came home one evening and Charles was in my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible... grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of him".
"His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of it. And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to do. And he was really upset because it hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought "Ohhhh, I don't want this, I do not want this'."
Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to do crazy things". She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone...
Retta Hemensley is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the lights". Did this encourage his destructive urge?
In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge / yet cannot understand / the nature / of this fear", of "ice, brooding above me". He wrote also that "all the dark hints / were not, as I had expected, / a part of this game... "
The poem, called Willochra, showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.
Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful girl", just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love; he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at la Mama in march 1970, before he had even bothered to ask her name. And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship.
She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack.
When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will. He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said.
Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered his room with his mother. Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favourites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said.
It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time. Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room.
"For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said."There was a jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue. His mother opened a drawer in his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors."
Michael Dugan, remarked in his recent article in Overland that the poet was "tidying up" in his last months, "preparing to leave nothing behind". He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost.
While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.
John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed earmarked for disaster," he said."He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time."
Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days. he was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right slot".
According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructiveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behaviour.
Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him. The first time I went to see him I just rolled up unannounced and got directions to the ward he was in.
"I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.
"He was walking down the corridor between these two ... classic great hulking chaps in white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did."
She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge. "I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all."
She said she was elated when she left. After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside."
Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a Jerusalem Bible Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.
She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was just after she had bailed him out of Pentridge. "He was out of his mind ... God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally. I said 'Charles, you don't just walk into guys' offices like this, Charles, you haven't got any shoes on'.
"I said 'you can't go in there like this. You will get thrown out. He went in, he turned around to me and said 'you don't have to come in, man, you're so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: 'arsehole, you are not worth it. I don't care how clever you are. I don't care how talented you are. I don't care how beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth it.' And I just walked off."
Charles Buckmaster was given a good behavior bond at his trial on condition he returned to his parents' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll leave nothing behind," he had once told John Jenkins. He spent the last few months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment he might finally escape his hell.
[This the text of Larry Schwartz's feature article as published in The Sunday Age (Agenda), 5th August, 1990, with minute editing & deletion]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KRIS HEMENSLEY
GRUYERE : THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED
(for Charles Buckmaster)
1
who stayed only becos they couldnt
find their way out again ( your poem
about them )
: swiss
people.
around 1840.
& the people who are still there now
in Gruyere
you could practically call it
Buckmaster country -
at least one part of it
( yr houses at four points
spanning cherry orchards
the dam with frogs
surrounded by green flora
& brown earth
in view of Mount St Leonard
2
on the outskirts of the water :
a cows carcass
already substantially returned
to the ground
the dead cow
bones turned up / great eye cavities
where 'things' have burrowed into its cranium
its legs become part of the earth
beside the dam.
the roar of the frogs
roar enuf
to drown
out
the Ruston Lincoln
diesel pump ( we
sheltered in its shed from
the rain )
listening to bell birds
piping -
one
grey as the gum
pretended
it
was
just
a
tree
its belly softer grey than its wing.
the clouted earth / broken bracken / grey weathered
grey watered / grey forest . thataway ..
3
you know
the cicada walks right out of its shell
abandons
himself ( the husks
crustate the wooden boards
around
the diesel pump.
stationary -
fixed treadle )
& flies out & over
the patches of black slime
bearing frogs eggs ( ten-
nis balls )
amongst the reeds
& weed
spreading under the surface
end to end
dragon flies
hovering horizontally
hanging
on breezes
making it their own
eery way
4
a tungle croft
of unusual constellations
of floating forests
of sheep following their leaders from
one spot in the field
suddenly
to another part
all of them . .
it pays to look up your stars
( THIS GUN
WAS CAPTURED FROM THE
GERMANS
BY THE 41st BATTALION A.I.F.
IN BELGIUM 1918
AND PRESENTED TO THE RESIDENTS OF
SOUTH GRUYERE )
collecting
sprigs of bacon & egg ( rust &
yellow ) flower
making
garlands to wear round yr neck
: you ancient !
look up the stars .
the familiar spots / stones
you know by heart -
bush fires
some badns
thru the kitchen window
( original oil paintings
on the wall )
going back ( father
& sons )
30 years.
120 years.
30000 years
in one long sweep / of
brown
green
&
the blu of the sky.
5
climbing
over barbed wire
under branches
around thorns
dropping
deeper thru trees
some with
rough brown bark hanging a strip
grey gums
prickly wattle
tea tree
wild heath
creeper
& vines.
treading over centuries of decomposition &
regrowth.
dog
following possum to their tree nests
another cow carcass
head propped on its shoulder
bones.
its left foreleg a
few yards away
hacked off & gnawed clean.
its hide
taut across the backbone &
ribcage
you could bounce on it.
6 (i)
the fording point
too deep -
the centre of the log bridge
covered by the stream.
when cows trespass ( you told us )
others properties
you cant chase them back.
you have to wait til the
owner comes & collects.
& if the trespasser
eats off yr land or tramples
the entire farm under foot
you still have to wait.
( the cows owner pays damages of course! )
(ii)
tasting the sap
dribbling down
a tree -
brown toffee
& a flavor which hardens the entire
palate
coating the tongue with
something worse than detol
"youre not sposed to eat it..."
came
too late !
but what did they live on
before the swiss
say
centuries before
1840 ?
berries. grass. some varieties
of snake,
frogs.
possum.
& bury their dead in the forest ?
making signs
for the deliverance of obstinate
earthly trappings
bury them down the gradient
in the centre
of the thickest bush
bury them maybe
in mass graves
on the down slope towards
the river.
(iii)
one massive skull
the head larger than a cow or
horse
must be an ox
huge molars
the jaws loosened by
the wet
the teeth planted in soil
prettied with moss . .
& the legs of the monster
to the right
of the head
folded casually.
7 (i)
the comings & goings
the mainroad to Lilydale to
the City
- the way 'home' -
cars bumper to bumper
which go right on by
oblivious of the
"barbecue down the road :
if the rain holds out"
of the living
made for 30 years
off the land
amongst cherry trees
with bridesmaids veils ( in
blossom )
(ii)
behaviour patterns of country folk
whether they forecast rainstorms
by rheumatic twinges
the
incidence of various common
& obscure
neuroses
the facts & figures of sociological reports
- apply
as much to the people who go
as the people who stay
8
in the middle of the earth
does anything change substantially ?
Gruyere :
a day in a life.
the visit.
the place exists
thru memories
nothing is more certain than
the recalled materials. the composition of ground :
yr bread & eard.
nothing is deader
than when it is forgotten.
Gruyere.
(September/October 29, 1968)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JAMES HAMILTON
CHARLES BUCKMASTER'S MOTORCYCLE
It is strange, the places
where he rides. The spokes whir
a silver churning, a fuel gauge
where something might be written.
An absent roar the sound
of pages burning, a tank or fuselage
scrapped or kept in a dark garage,
shadow heaped on knowing metal.
I have pages creased in folders
but not the rush of their trajectory,
phantom destinations written
on worn rubber. The one lamp
dull in an old night, tracing names
of towns bypassed by the highway.
A yellow lamp lit up
in a reckless notebook,
youth's windshield. Stored away
the words wait to ride, a poem
on the mechanical horseback
of remembering.
(2011)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
Larry Schwartz wrote for the Age & the Sunday Age for many years before going freelance. His poems have occasionally appear, for example in Bob Adamson's Ulitarra magazine in the mid '90s.
James Hamilton whilst not studying at La Trobe University, pursues his own research of the life & times of Charles Buckmaster & the La Mama poets of the late 60s.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
COLLECTED WORKS BOOKSHOP EVENTS CALENDAR
For friends who arent Facebook friends --given that the Collected Works Bookshop's Facebook page has in recent weeks become our information board --herewith the February, 2011 Calendar:
Saturday, 12th February, '011, from 2pm; Paroxysm Press presents annual Adelaide/Melbourne connection. Featuring launch of Teri Louise Kelly's 4th book, TheAmerican Blow Job, with readings from Jenny Toune, Kerryn Tredrea, Hop Dac, Kristy Love, Shane Jesse Christmass. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City, (enqu., Kris , 9654-8873) ALL WELCOME
Monday, 14th February (yes, it's St Valentine's with a difference), 4.30 for 5pm; Anne Elvey's chapbook, Claimed by Country (from Chris Mansell's Press Press), launched by Kate Rigby, with special guest Betty Pike. RSVP, aelvey@tpg.com.au; enqu. Kris, 9654-8873. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City. ALL WELCOME
Saturday, 26th February, from 2pm; Ray Liversidge launches Tasmania's famous Famous Reporter (# 42), the latest issue of Ralph Wessman's unique magazine of poetry, review, poetry commentary, news. Readers to be announced. If you're not heading out of town to the mag's Guildford event please catch it previous day at Collected Works, lvl 1. 37 Swanston St ., City. ALL WELCOME. (enqu,, Kris , 9654-8873)
oOo
Previously mentioned event featuring Mark Tredinnick book launch & reading is probably going to take place at the end of May. Watch out for announcement.
The March calendar of events is taking shape, and may have three events. At this stage the one definite gig will feature Robert Lloyd, reading poems, singing songs, on Wednesday the 23rd.
We're hoping also for a June or July reading & possible launching (if we can get copies of the book) by Kevin Hart.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
And check out the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook page...
Saturday, 12th February, '011, from 2pm; Paroxysm Press presents annual Adelaide/Melbourne connection. Featuring launch of Teri Louise Kelly's 4th book, TheAmerican Blow Job, with readings from Jenny Toune, Kerryn Tredrea, Hop Dac, Kristy Love, Shane Jesse Christmass. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City, (enqu., Kris , 9654-8873) ALL WELCOME
Monday, 14th February (yes, it's St Valentine's with a difference), 4.30 for 5pm; Anne Elvey's chapbook, Claimed by Country (from Chris Mansell's Press Press), launched by Kate Rigby, with special guest Betty Pike. RSVP, aelvey@tpg.com.au; enqu. Kris, 9654-8873. At Collected Works Bookshop, lvl 1, 37 Swanston Street, City. ALL WELCOME
Saturday, 26th February, from 2pm; Ray Liversidge launches Tasmania's famous Famous Reporter (# 42), the latest issue of Ralph Wessman's unique magazine of poetry, review, poetry commentary, news. Readers to be announced. If you're not heading out of town to the mag's Guildford event please catch it previous day at Collected Works, lvl 1. 37 Swanston St ., City. ALL WELCOME. (enqu,, Kris , 9654-8873)
oOo
Previously mentioned event featuring Mark Tredinnick book launch & reading is probably going to take place at the end of May. Watch out for announcement.
The March calendar of events is taking shape, and may have three events. At this stage the one definite gig will feature Robert Lloyd, reading poems, singing songs, on Wednesday the 23rd.
We're hoping also for a June or July reading & possible launching (if we can get copies of the book) by Kevin Hart.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
And check out the Collected Works Bookshop Facebook page...
Thursday, January 27, 2011
READING JOHN RILEY'S "PROSE PIECES" AGAIN : Remembering him on the thirty-second anniversary of his murder (October 27th, 1978)...
Where does one piece end & another begin? With the exception of the three short series of aphorisms called How To, John Riley's Prose Pieces (Grosseteste Review Books, #14; 1974; Stafforshire, UK) are seamless. A piece begins; the poet (I wont call him anything else) proceeds, & when the writing's finished the text ends. (And this isnt quite self-evident!) It has nothing to do with plot or character, although characters, including the narrator, are easily elicited. It's simply (perhaps 'simply' isnt the right word --simple things are accounted for but it's hardly a simple mind informing the telling) the stop-start style of it, the natural run.
I've always imbued a comment Riley made in his prose work, Correspondences (pub., The Human Constitution, London, 1970), with something like a rationale : " 'Authorship will gradually cease. Future generations ought to set up offices in which every person, at a certain age, should hand in a truthful biography, which could provide material for a real science of human beings, if such were needed.' A certain pondering over that little remark of Strindberg's probably set me to planning this as yet roughly mapped-out series(...) If it were merely an autobiography, none of us would be interested. What engaged my attention is the attempt to make a series of truthful biographies, which, either singly or considered together, may not be without a certain significance. (....)"
I dont think he'd have taken kindly to anything compulsory! 'Offices' & 'at a certain age' --bah! Still, I imagine him embarking with good intentions, but soon enough the statement he was compiling would go skew-whiff --in the name of honesty --a semantic honesty at least & not evasion. Avoidance of narrative cliches would be deliberate.
Against criticism's usual (& often proper) caution that art's product isnt life, I actually hear & see the man in & behind the prose-pieces, if not transparently then lucidly. No stranger, our man, adherent to Russian Orthodoxy, to artefact's palpably divine perspective : why would John Riley abandon his writing, of all things, to materialist one-dimensionality?
Riley is a man by whose thinking he's supposed. His thinking aloud, that is --as though thinking aloud must jump around and thinking in silence be continuous (modern prose vs the Nineteenth Century's).
"If you could set yourself altogether to music, would you? Choose your instruments, your form; take your time, your rhythm." (p24)
Riley's style is unhurried even as he bobs in & out of stories, ideas, like the arch-agent of discontinuity (recall its modishness in the '60s & '70s).
"Deja vu and pre vu : I badly need a theory of time to put this in. Not a circle not an ellipse not an escalation of universes, not not not, but a complexity so precise that it leads by poetic right to that I know about." (p25)
Yorkshire is his rejoinder to anything high-minded. He resorts to Yorkshire to undercut capital 'l' literature and though poems occasionally rise out of the text, a line or two, a verse, his vernacular quips disperse abstraction even as the sound which is the poem speaking. Paradoxically, this is usually the freedom sought by the poet dissatisfied with the occasional --as though Doc Williams hankered after Wallace Stevens or Buk hell-bent on William Bronk!
Prose is where John Riley can be himself --poet keeping tabs on the literally adjacent. It's the frame afforded by ordinary vantage, principally, one feels, the pub. Perfect for hearsay; dictum : "If you could record all the stories round you, and only do it simply enough. Like the man who said to me : 'Ah but the sweetness of the first kiss.' And it was his story." (p23) Relish the hops'-drowze one might dream-write in --slide into pew, surreptitious pen at the ready, and drop into the middle of it.
But this isnt the style of Living In, which is a crafted piece of writing or sets out to be. The "Every holiday I go to my cottage" (p7) paragraphs contrast with those beginning "Every holiday I do not"(p8). The poet-philosopher sounds a little like Rilke or Kafka, whose reverie is located in the actual world from which the narrator is cocooned by desire & despair --desire for the divine or corporeal beloved; despair at his powerlessness &, except for writing, enervation. It contains the existential conundrum, "Who wants to die? Or more accurately, who does not want to die?" Compared to other, no less interesting, pieces it's a construction despite the ad-libs.
The Pig And Whistle Section begins, "And then what we start to do when we have realised all that." (p21) In my mother's Alexandrian family they'd say "and then?" --to induce conversation or to cap it. John Riley's "And then" points also to 'the literature of exhaustion', ca. 1970s, --that is, how to proceed the literary project when it's thought everything's been said --literature after the end of or death of literature.
"And then what we start to do" regales his life as well as his writing (the modern heart laid bare implying no story without bruised & bloodied testament).
Down By the River Side combines all the Riley traits & gambits. The high & the low --thoughts, turn of phrase --standard (even poetic) English & Yorkshire, esoteric & common subjects. As we've appreciated, Yorkshire will always be his stock-in-trade come-uppance.
After the philosophy of the first paragraph ("Always this atheistical 'chance'; which nevertheless alters nothing, salvation or damnation no nearer." (p37)), ships are introduced or, let's say, the sea is. Boats, sailors, flags... "Ships come in and out of the harbour, either under their own power, or towed in by the tug." His registry of ships as evocative as an index of flora, but not a simple list because of the way it commits &, similarly, escapes. Quintessential Riley :
"In Spring rain a seagull cruises with curved-down wing tips. And then the rain clears. The very familiarity of the scene.
Caleyo, Simon, Soviet Mariner, Pelikan, Navigare, Wakenitz, Aramil, Grada westers, Outokumpu, Wega, Tourmaline, Ocean Blue, Harald Bles, Nogat, Valle de Orozco, Madaleine, Jastarnia, Bleikvassli, Poolster. Hasewint, Noblesse, Sota, Emmalies Funk, Ivan Bolotnikov, vaterland, and, I suppose, Dynocontainer I, Dynocontainer II. And certainly the Gribbin head.
This stream is a river big enough to float 3,000 tons.
A forest path through the forest : analogous to setting out to read a history of the Byzantine State, a clean white page, an impetus to restoration." (p38)
Popped into the jump-cut of the narrative is schoolroom & pub slice-of-life.
"You want a good stingy cane and hit 'em across the ballocks. That'll do it. You can hit 'em round the head as much as you like, go all day, break your hand. Get the buggers round the ballocks." (p41)
Often wonder which is the counterpoint : aphoristic musing --"Freedom as a state is creation, which is timeless" --or the one about "a wanked out lad of a painter's mate who'd dropped his bottle of linseed oil"?
John Riley's self-definition isnt over & against nothing, as they say, though figures of nothing might spook him ("memory patterns of almost unsubtle tyranny : an exact repetition of the meaningless." (p40)). He's more gnostic than nihilist ("Our wreckage / is too obvious, the pause between performances too long. / Why else should we speak of that world there / and this one here as if there were a gulf there to be bridged / by senses or ideas? / There is no cure for similes, / or none I know of." (p40)). Good reason there must be for apparent misanthropy --"There are people who wear their bodies comfortably; to be there when needed. And very relaxing they are too for a time. At the other end madness, in various outbreaks or permanencies. There are those denials." (p33)
No disqualification in my mind that these words are from Mary's African Buttenhole Co., a parody, as I recall him impishly confiding, of writing published in a little magazine, (Richard Downing & Andy Wachtel's Sesheta?) possibly by Mary Ferrarri & other New Yorkers. Or for that matter, the nods elsewhere, positively, to Flann O'Brien, Basho, Stevens, Holderlin...
Perhaps all of the pieces turn around the relationship of language to the world's objects & events. Not much doubt attaches to his feelings though plenty to his sense of the living (language) enterprise.
Allow the full circle then : Riley's always the poet writing this prose --the prose, mind you, of thinking aloud, musing, amusing himself, letting himself go just a little off the taut leash. The taught leash? --steeped of course in the language --various languages --Russian, German, French --think only of Riley's unique Mandelshtam & Holderlin versions... How (or did he?) come to rest in English?
"Words are words, man. And a fat belly is a fat belly." (p33)
oOo
[7/11/10 to 10/12/10; cleaned up & typed, 27/01/2011]
I've always imbued a comment Riley made in his prose work, Correspondences (pub., The Human Constitution, London, 1970), with something like a rationale : " 'Authorship will gradually cease. Future generations ought to set up offices in which every person, at a certain age, should hand in a truthful biography, which could provide material for a real science of human beings, if such were needed.' A certain pondering over that little remark of Strindberg's probably set me to planning this as yet roughly mapped-out series(...) If it were merely an autobiography, none of us would be interested. What engaged my attention is the attempt to make a series of truthful biographies, which, either singly or considered together, may not be without a certain significance. (....)"
I dont think he'd have taken kindly to anything compulsory! 'Offices' & 'at a certain age' --bah! Still, I imagine him embarking with good intentions, but soon enough the statement he was compiling would go skew-whiff --in the name of honesty --a semantic honesty at least & not evasion. Avoidance of narrative cliches would be deliberate.
Against criticism's usual (& often proper) caution that art's product isnt life, I actually hear & see the man in & behind the prose-pieces, if not transparently then lucidly. No stranger, our man, adherent to Russian Orthodoxy, to artefact's palpably divine perspective : why would John Riley abandon his writing, of all things, to materialist one-dimensionality?
Riley is a man by whose thinking he's supposed. His thinking aloud, that is --as though thinking aloud must jump around and thinking in silence be continuous (modern prose vs the Nineteenth Century's).
"If you could set yourself altogether to music, would you? Choose your instruments, your form; take your time, your rhythm." (p24)
Riley's style is unhurried even as he bobs in & out of stories, ideas, like the arch-agent of discontinuity (recall its modishness in the '60s & '70s).
"Deja vu and pre vu : I badly need a theory of time to put this in. Not a circle not an ellipse not an escalation of universes, not not not, but a complexity so precise that it leads by poetic right to that I know about." (p25)
Yorkshire is his rejoinder to anything high-minded. He resorts to Yorkshire to undercut capital 'l' literature and though poems occasionally rise out of the text, a line or two, a verse, his vernacular quips disperse abstraction even as the sound which is the poem speaking. Paradoxically, this is usually the freedom sought by the poet dissatisfied with the occasional --as though Doc Williams hankered after Wallace Stevens or Buk hell-bent on William Bronk!
Prose is where John Riley can be himself --poet keeping tabs on the literally adjacent. It's the frame afforded by ordinary vantage, principally, one feels, the pub. Perfect for hearsay; dictum : "If you could record all the stories round you, and only do it simply enough. Like the man who said to me : 'Ah but the sweetness of the first kiss.' And it was his story." (p23) Relish the hops'-drowze one might dream-write in --slide into pew, surreptitious pen at the ready, and drop into the middle of it.
But this isnt the style of Living In, which is a crafted piece of writing or sets out to be. The "Every holiday I go to my cottage" (p7) paragraphs contrast with those beginning "Every holiday I do not"(p8). The poet-philosopher sounds a little like Rilke or Kafka, whose reverie is located in the actual world from which the narrator is cocooned by desire & despair --desire for the divine or corporeal beloved; despair at his powerlessness &, except for writing, enervation. It contains the existential conundrum, "Who wants to die? Or more accurately, who does not want to die?" Compared to other, no less interesting, pieces it's a construction despite the ad-libs.
The Pig And Whistle Section begins, "And then what we start to do when we have realised all that." (p21) In my mother's Alexandrian family they'd say "and then?" --to induce conversation or to cap it. John Riley's "And then" points also to 'the literature of exhaustion', ca. 1970s, --that is, how to proceed the literary project when it's thought everything's been said --literature after the end of or death of literature.
"And then what we start to do" regales his life as well as his writing (the modern heart laid bare implying no story without bruised & bloodied testament).
Down By the River Side combines all the Riley traits & gambits. The high & the low --thoughts, turn of phrase --standard (even poetic) English & Yorkshire, esoteric & common subjects. As we've appreciated, Yorkshire will always be his stock-in-trade come-uppance.
After the philosophy of the first paragraph ("Always this atheistical 'chance'; which nevertheless alters nothing, salvation or damnation no nearer." (p37)), ships are introduced or, let's say, the sea is. Boats, sailors, flags... "Ships come in and out of the harbour, either under their own power, or towed in by the tug." His registry of ships as evocative as an index of flora, but not a simple list because of the way it commits &, similarly, escapes. Quintessential Riley :
"In Spring rain a seagull cruises with curved-down wing tips. And then the rain clears. The very familiarity of the scene.
Caleyo, Simon, Soviet Mariner, Pelikan, Navigare, Wakenitz, Aramil, Grada westers, Outokumpu, Wega, Tourmaline, Ocean Blue, Harald Bles, Nogat, Valle de Orozco, Madaleine, Jastarnia, Bleikvassli, Poolster. Hasewint, Noblesse, Sota, Emmalies Funk, Ivan Bolotnikov, vaterland, and, I suppose, Dynocontainer I, Dynocontainer II. And certainly the Gribbin head.
This stream is a river big enough to float 3,000 tons.
A forest path through the forest : analogous to setting out to read a history of the Byzantine State, a clean white page, an impetus to restoration." (p38)
Popped into the jump-cut of the narrative is schoolroom & pub slice-of-life.
"You want a good stingy cane and hit 'em across the ballocks. That'll do it. You can hit 'em round the head as much as you like, go all day, break your hand. Get the buggers round the ballocks." (p41)
Often wonder which is the counterpoint : aphoristic musing --"Freedom as a state is creation, which is timeless" --or the one about "a wanked out lad of a painter's mate who'd dropped his bottle of linseed oil"?
John Riley's self-definition isnt over & against nothing, as they say, though figures of nothing might spook him ("memory patterns of almost unsubtle tyranny : an exact repetition of the meaningless." (p40)). He's more gnostic than nihilist ("Our wreckage / is too obvious, the pause between performances too long. / Why else should we speak of that world there / and this one here as if there were a gulf there to be bridged / by senses or ideas? / There is no cure for similes, / or none I know of." (p40)). Good reason there must be for apparent misanthropy --"There are people who wear their bodies comfortably; to be there when needed. And very relaxing they are too for a time. At the other end madness, in various outbreaks or permanencies. There are those denials." (p33)
No disqualification in my mind that these words are from Mary's African Buttenhole Co., a parody, as I recall him impishly confiding, of writing published in a little magazine, (Richard Downing & Andy Wachtel's Sesheta?) possibly by Mary Ferrarri & other New Yorkers. Or for that matter, the nods elsewhere, positively, to Flann O'Brien, Basho, Stevens, Holderlin...
Perhaps all of the pieces turn around the relationship of language to the world's objects & events. Not much doubt attaches to his feelings though plenty to his sense of the living (language) enterprise.
Allow the full circle then : Riley's always the poet writing this prose --the prose, mind you, of thinking aloud, musing, amusing himself, letting himself go just a little off the taut leash. The taught leash? --steeped of course in the language --various languages --Russian, German, French --think only of Riley's unique Mandelshtam & Holderlin versions... How (or did he?) come to rest in English?
"Words are words, man. And a fat belly is a fat belly." (p33)
oOo
[7/11/10 to 10/12/10; cleaned up & typed, 27/01/2011]
Thursday, January 20, 2011
AROUND & ABOUT RICHARD GROSSINGER'S 2013 : Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, Cal; 2010)
1.
The last occasion I found myself in Richard Grossinger's vicinity was the mid '80s when the equation I'd coined, Being Here (body : text : world), at last seemed a way of making sense of the sometimes contradictory concerns I'd followed since the 1960s (--e.g., the local & the international -- which at times meant junking one to attend to the other-- the hermetic & expressive notions of the art, and literature vis a vis social & political domains).
My head was full of Deep Ecology then --my lack of activism assuaged by the spiritual & non-instrumental imperatives of this revamped environmentalism. It was initially funded by John Martin's perspective, via The Deep Ecologist (his newsletter from Warracknabeal, Victoria), which also included poetry as a category of its eclectic consciousness-raising. And then came Warwick Fox's mind-blowing lecture at a Deep Ecology conference in Melbourne (ca '86) in which he collided psychology, philosophy & the environment in transpersonalism's headiest mix --all the more remarkable, I felt, for his linking of some authors & ideas I'd 'discovered' for myself amongst the dozens he cited never broached at all! I took up his reading list with alacrity!
Editing the Being Here issue of my magazine H/EAR in 1985 allowed me to recover some key references from the magazine's first series, Earth Ship, ca 1970-72 (Southampton, UK). I named them then as Kenneth Irby, John Thorpe, Richard Grossinger & Carolee Schneemann, and heralded "the reconsideration of Richard Grossinger's work, which is prolific & still accumulating..." Unfortunately I never managed to do it.
This mid '80s' reaching back to the late '60s/early '70s uncovered an interweaving of references involving Richard Grossinger & Clayton Eshleman, and the second bite as exciting as before.
I felt that Grossinger's Io magazine & Eshleman's Caterpillar together contributed "a desperate restatement of visionary poetics", specifically identifying Eshleman's Open Letter to George Stanley, Concerning the State of Our Nation, The American Spiritual Body, Which I first glimpsed in Peru; Schneemann's Notations (1958-66); Robert Duncan's Man's Fulfillment in Order and Strife (which I called "a rich & dramatic argument concerning the orders of poetry, & the Orders of the World, incorporating universal poetical & local political commentary, relating to that reality which is an order born of language other than the political, which contained a magnificent plea for a new language to repulse the slanders of the era." ).
About Grossinger's Io magazine I wrote : "Io was a further shift away from the 'literary', after Olson's example. (The whole import of the 'projective', for instance : that human act which prospered thereafter as one of Nature's things; active concordance, together productive.) Io's interdisciplinism was exciting, exotic yet practical because so evidently resonant of the planetary lot."
Grossinger's shift (explained in his preface to Charles Stein's Poems and Glyphs (Io, # 17, 1973), which I read in '84 via Melbourne poet John Anderson who'd bought it after I named Stein as a reference for his own writing) derived from his sense that the New American Poetry figures "The Beats, the Bay area poets, the Black Mountain people, and our own group are all concerned with matters of consciousness, vision, prophecy, cosmology, geography, etc., few of which are even peripheral to academic poetry in America, which is more involved in description, emotional reality, wit, and political rationalism..."
My own direction was subsequently away from the mutual exclusivity implied in Grossinger's distinction & my endorsement of it. The 'Whole House' idea I came up with in the late '90s, whilst relieving some observers, doesnt do justice to the contenders. But, that's another (& continuing) story...
Richard Grossinger, either held in Olson & co's force-field or that of his own making, always walked with an aura . He saw things, he said things --a bit like one felt about Bob Dylan in the mid '60s --the young seer. (Grossinger's image of flocks of seagulls on city rubbish dumps as evidence of the ocean's depletion has stayed with me from the first --such a thought wasnt common in 1970...)
Every time I encounter him these days I think "long time no see" --yet a year or two ago I had looked at The Bardo of Waking Life (& liked Robert Kelly's compliment to him, "To talk about the world as it happens in your head when you are in it." --which is the mercurial nub of our project), --and years earlier books like Planet Medicine & The Night Sky. It seemed to me that our counter-culture, new-writing buddy was now addressing the world audience that the Sixties' oracles assumed.
But it's as if no time has intervened between then & now --no time since the cyclone which that era submitted as our cultural beginning & whose windfall we might be forever gathering (probably the truth of every beginning so perceived).
Imagined as one of 'our generation', admired as 'one of us' who'd already achieved more than a little of our own ambition (like, for example, 20 year-old Tom Pickard being published in Paris Review!), Grossinger's publication of a book with Black Sparrow Press in addition to his magazine Io (not just a poetry mag but a gathering of all categories of enquiry that a poet of the field, let's say, as of Olson's multidisciplinary curriculum, could naturally come into) was awe-inspiring.
The achievement was celebrated by Robert Duncan (or ratified --such was the connotation of the New American Poetry hierarchy one had accepted --& gratefully, as though it were the ascendancy of Camelot).
I hold again Duncan's pamphlet, Notes on Grossinger's Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, which accompanied the Black Sparrow book, and relive the thrill of it -- truly the older generation blessing the younger. And although, typically, two-thirds of the text doesnt name Grossinger, Duncan's concerned to bear the prodigy up & through the literature --that is, literature as though science or as evidently revelatory (--& instantly I'm pinged by memory of Roland Barthes' reference to Marxism as science, the absurdity of which appeared ever clearer for the time succeeding its brazen assertion : 'science' as authority against poetry, philosophy, religion? --considered speculations or, after Merleau-Ponty, events in language but not of the world? --miscasting objectivity, then, within the most ridiculous binary, misapprehending subjectivity also therefore). Robert Duncan's exemplars --Darwin, Whitehead --distinguish the latter. In this view literature is a portal (to use Grossinger lingo), thus Pound, Williams, &, inevitably, Olson --: through that Literature & into the beyond that the visionary, whom Duncan would take Grossinger to be, always made his here & now.
Now it is we encounter an important problem --and I may as well make this its occasion as another more precisely located : the status of the discrete object in a context of the winningly suggestive & infinitely analogical expanse. I suppose the problem isnt so much with the golden chain (perhaps we'd say 'string' now!) but with the damage such understanding deals the discrete object (poem, person, place). Although Duncan himself had it that the truly 'open' poetics necessarily contained the 'closed', the transformational attitude as regards poetry tends to disqualify (certainly traditional) craft. I've always wondered why avant-garde friends could entertain the poem as performing every possible role, as vehicle &/or vector, except its function as poem. Of course, there's just as much error from the other direction : lifeless, soulless form. Yet, since Language-poetry & other strategic practices, 'lifeless & soulless' could describe an array of both conventional & experimental poetry.
2.
Cut to the chase : In the foreword to Grossinger's book, Daniel Pinchbeck (author of 2012 : The Return of Quetzalcoatl) asks these rhetorical questions : "Is there some other dimension of being that our human species has the capacity to access as our current mistreated world convulses around us? Does the tremendous intelligence and integral efficiency of our biological matrix suggest some deeper wisdom operating in the greater universe with which we can resonate and harmonize?" (And his instant caveat : "My own quandary --it has almost silenced me recently-- is the question of what the writer, the artist, the thinker should practically and actually do in this ruinous era.") [p ix]
The first proposition is actually premised upon the second --a reiteration of a philosophical commonplace that one is within Meaning whatever it may be (thus also the World, the Universe, God, Being et al).
Regarding the New Age excitement around the Mayan prophecy, Grossinger cautions, "But I am not looking for indications of renewal externally and historically. I am looking for a gateway inside --inside consciousness, inside DNA potential, inside the zodiac. My book is not what is going to happen (or not) on December 21st, 2012 or January 1, 2013 but a 2013 context for what is already happening and has been happening since the emergence of our species, the advent of life on Earth, and the creation of this universe --impossibly big venues that cannot be queried but that mark abysses we must explore." [Introduction, pp2/3]
I identify with Grossinger's style of thinking & writing; by no means haphazard but the natural order of an intelligence following the maze of references his experience has endowed. Closer to innocence than magic, one's also been receptive to that internal/external match-up of which Grossinger derives a dramatic concordance. But it's the scale of his table & therefore the ability to exclaim & encompass (literally the same breath, the same perception) that distinguishes him.
Reflecting on his lack of recognition of Jose Arguelles' Mayan thesis at the time he was offered it for publication, Grossinger submits, "My snub became an unconscious throwback to old elitist publishing habits as to what constituted a worthy curriculum, attitudes that I was in the bare beginnings of overcoming and that were still largely unexamined. I was an intellectual snob, with vestiges of Black Mountain literary machismo in my head, and I was pretty much in thrall to the anti-kitsch imperatives of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Kelly and crew." (Introduction, p15) True enough. Which is why, perhaps, the New York Scene is what it is --serious, sincere & hilarious with the junk of the everyday --and not Black Mountain!
I simply havent delved into the authors Grossinger respects as teachers & companions --Richard Hoagland, Arguelles, Terrence McKenna among others. Some I remember from Io magazine & the milieu North Atlantic Books described. I respect that he's done the hard yards (to use an appropriate Australianism) in the mind/body practices either side of orthodoxy.
David Bohm doesnt figure in Grossinger's cavalcade but remembering my '80s reading prompts the hologramic here as relevant to his perspective. And my own sense of the infinite trajectory of pivotal, that is life endowing/defining, events which are always available to intersection & continuation (according to the apprehension one has of any one of them; that is, to reengage with the event's infinite possibility against apparent historical closure; remembering, crucially, that the dynamic is personal), assuredly resonates with Grossinger.
No surprise, really, that Grossinger shivers off association with Ken Wilber --not only because erstwhile comrades criticise him as a "self-aggrandizing, parasitical worm; even worse, a Ken Wilber wannabe" (p 551). He reflects, "Without your accusation, without its gauntlet, my writing is just fancy words, shoplifted at best, restless and hollow, dispensable, a betrayal and a failure of everything they stand for --not even third-rate Ken Wilber, as you duly say. But given what else my work must withstand, the trials coming this way in an ill and binding wind, it must be judged, scoured, and obliterated anyway, and then allowed whatever smidgen of truth and honour, if any, endure. That is the only goal worth striving for, the only reverie that might redeem us both at the final call. What I'm attempting here, consumer-culture drivel albeit, is more interesting to me than what Ken Wilber is attempting, but that is beside the point. He is doing fine at what he's doing and he's not on my radar and I don't wannabe him." (p554).
For my part, what I call the existential imperative, the here & now, flesh & blood vouchsafing of any vision, is what's sacrificed in formalizing & abstracting (whether or not intended) any definition of reality. (In my unschooled mind, totality & the totalitarian conspire.) I seem always to prefer the poet to the logician, the authorial to the theoretical, poetry to the prose of systematization...
3.
One pitfall of history or critical commentary as autobiography is the lack of distinction between the 'gross natural array' (Goethe) & the valued (by attribution or inherent), between the en passant & the gleanings of perception. But Richard Grossinger doesnt want to evade his own fact in the midst of it all. Par for the course in poetry, problematic in prose (because laid bare, unsynthesised).
I give him the benefit of the doubt despite intemperate & wrongheaded political judgments --e.g., what a truly awful analogy here, "In China people who manipulate goods or markets are executed. In the US they are allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains because they are too big to fail and anything else would be class warfare, and, god forbid, socialism..." The context for his comment is an aside on the billionaire swindler, Bernie Madoff, that he wasnt the worst : "The worst are names we will never know, secret bankers behind the global conspiracy and its invisible depositories and exchequers (and maybe even 9/11 and the missing black boxes too)." (p281) Naturally, then, the chic Left conflation with conspiracy theory on Bush, the Clintons, Obama, on Israel, even the Al Qaeda terrorists, monstrously bloated by their New Age appendices.
One's appalled that the American complexion of this politics doesnt cause the embarrassment that might engender a humility and then occasion some worldly reality to the prognostications.
Grossinger's partisan political swipes & snipes --sounding off as a lefty whose profound disappointment with the Democratic Party is matched by the vitriol he would always pour upon the Republicans-- and his rallying to the belated cause of American Pop-music in the wash of the 'the British Invasion', strike me as odd indulgences for a Time Lord. At least, though, he demonstrates fallibility, that is a humanity pursuant on This-world desires & responsibilities.
Can't help thinking that alchemy, homeopathy arent, perhaps, the best analytical tools for This-world politics! Esoteric understanding of the behavior of opposites cannot release us from our solid & historical weight, nor do dreams replace daily discourse. The contrary pertains.
To speak as though one were a player in the Big Scheme, in which game present-day humanity is qualitatitively reduced, smacks of the kind of bad faith which Michael McClure might be compelled to protest (in capital letters) : "I AM A MAMMAL PATRIOT!" Of course it's a conundrum, especially fraught because the transformative impulse, the suite for the new, arises within the breast of unknowing.
We are always in progress, knowledgeable or wise, forever on the way. And no doubt at all Richard Grossinger knows all this & more. He remains tuned in & turned on, abounding in brilliant ideas & memorable expression --loquacious, erudite & gratifyingly flawed.
The 'idiot's guide' to Richard Grossinger's book would instruct that the author doesnt expect anything to happen on December 20th, 2012 or 1st January, 2013. Nothing will necessarily happen except what is always happening. Whatever the Mayan calendar construes is held by DNA & dreamt, as it were, by the consciousness in which humanity is subsumed. Prophecy, it might continue, concentrates the mind. Transformation is inevitable; life in all its forms teleological.
In short, 2013 : Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration is a music of the spheres, and it could only have been written in 2010, in America, on this planet!
-------------------------------------------
[30th September, '10 to the 4th November, '10; cleaned up / typed, January, 2011; Melbourne]
The last occasion I found myself in Richard Grossinger's vicinity was the mid '80s when the equation I'd coined, Being Here (body : text : world), at last seemed a way of making sense of the sometimes contradictory concerns I'd followed since the 1960s (--e.g., the local & the international -- which at times meant junking one to attend to the other-- the hermetic & expressive notions of the art, and literature vis a vis social & political domains).
My head was full of Deep Ecology then --my lack of activism assuaged by the spiritual & non-instrumental imperatives of this revamped environmentalism. It was initially funded by John Martin's perspective, via The Deep Ecologist (his newsletter from Warracknabeal, Victoria), which also included poetry as a category of its eclectic consciousness-raising. And then came Warwick Fox's mind-blowing lecture at a Deep Ecology conference in Melbourne (ca '86) in which he collided psychology, philosophy & the environment in transpersonalism's headiest mix --all the more remarkable, I felt, for his linking of some authors & ideas I'd 'discovered' for myself amongst the dozens he cited never broached at all! I took up his reading list with alacrity!
Editing the Being Here issue of my magazine H/EAR in 1985 allowed me to recover some key references from the magazine's first series, Earth Ship, ca 1970-72 (Southampton, UK). I named them then as Kenneth Irby, John Thorpe, Richard Grossinger & Carolee Schneemann, and heralded "the reconsideration of Richard Grossinger's work, which is prolific & still accumulating..." Unfortunately I never managed to do it.
This mid '80s' reaching back to the late '60s/early '70s uncovered an interweaving of references involving Richard Grossinger & Clayton Eshleman, and the second bite as exciting as before.
I felt that Grossinger's Io magazine & Eshleman's Caterpillar together contributed "a desperate restatement of visionary poetics", specifically identifying Eshleman's Open Letter to George Stanley, Concerning the State of Our Nation, The American Spiritual Body, Which I first glimpsed in Peru; Schneemann's Notations (1958-66); Robert Duncan's Man's Fulfillment in Order and Strife (which I called "a rich & dramatic argument concerning the orders of poetry, & the Orders of the World, incorporating universal poetical & local political commentary, relating to that reality which is an order born of language other than the political, which contained a magnificent plea for a new language to repulse the slanders of the era." ).
About Grossinger's Io magazine I wrote : "Io was a further shift away from the 'literary', after Olson's example. (The whole import of the 'projective', for instance : that human act which prospered thereafter as one of Nature's things; active concordance, together productive.) Io's interdisciplinism was exciting, exotic yet practical because so evidently resonant of the planetary lot."
Grossinger's shift (explained in his preface to Charles Stein's Poems and Glyphs (Io, # 17, 1973), which I read in '84 via Melbourne poet John Anderson who'd bought it after I named Stein as a reference for his own writing) derived from his sense that the New American Poetry figures "The Beats, the Bay area poets, the Black Mountain people, and our own group are all concerned with matters of consciousness, vision, prophecy, cosmology, geography, etc., few of which are even peripheral to academic poetry in America, which is more involved in description, emotional reality, wit, and political rationalism..."
My own direction was subsequently away from the mutual exclusivity implied in Grossinger's distinction & my endorsement of it. The 'Whole House' idea I came up with in the late '90s, whilst relieving some observers, doesnt do justice to the contenders. But, that's another (& continuing) story...
Richard Grossinger, either held in Olson & co's force-field or that of his own making, always walked with an aura . He saw things, he said things --a bit like one felt about Bob Dylan in the mid '60s --the young seer. (Grossinger's image of flocks of seagulls on city rubbish dumps as evidence of the ocean's depletion has stayed with me from the first --such a thought wasnt common in 1970...)
Every time I encounter him these days I think "long time no see" --yet a year or two ago I had looked at The Bardo of Waking Life (& liked Robert Kelly's compliment to him, "To talk about the world as it happens in your head when you are in it." --which is the mercurial nub of our project), --and years earlier books like Planet Medicine & The Night Sky. It seemed to me that our counter-culture, new-writing buddy was now addressing the world audience that the Sixties' oracles assumed.
But it's as if no time has intervened between then & now --no time since the cyclone which that era submitted as our cultural beginning & whose windfall we might be forever gathering (probably the truth of every beginning so perceived).
Imagined as one of 'our generation', admired as 'one of us' who'd already achieved more than a little of our own ambition (like, for example, 20 year-old Tom Pickard being published in Paris Review!), Grossinger's publication of a book with Black Sparrow Press in addition to his magazine Io (not just a poetry mag but a gathering of all categories of enquiry that a poet of the field, let's say, as of Olson's multidisciplinary curriculum, could naturally come into) was awe-inspiring.
The achievement was celebrated by Robert Duncan (or ratified --such was the connotation of the New American Poetry hierarchy one had accepted --& gratefully, as though it were the ascendancy of Camelot).
I hold again Duncan's pamphlet, Notes on Grossinger's Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, which accompanied the Black Sparrow book, and relive the thrill of it -- truly the older generation blessing the younger. And although, typically, two-thirds of the text doesnt name Grossinger, Duncan's concerned to bear the prodigy up & through the literature --that is, literature as though science or as evidently revelatory (--& instantly I'm pinged by memory of Roland Barthes' reference to Marxism as science, the absurdity of which appeared ever clearer for the time succeeding its brazen assertion : 'science' as authority against poetry, philosophy, religion? --considered speculations or, after Merleau-Ponty, events in language but not of the world? --miscasting objectivity, then, within the most ridiculous binary, misapprehending subjectivity also therefore). Robert Duncan's exemplars --Darwin, Whitehead --distinguish the latter. In this view literature is a portal (to use Grossinger lingo), thus Pound, Williams, &, inevitably, Olson --: through that Literature & into the beyond that the visionary, whom Duncan would take Grossinger to be, always made his here & now.
Now it is we encounter an important problem --and I may as well make this its occasion as another more precisely located : the status of the discrete object in a context of the winningly suggestive & infinitely analogical expanse. I suppose the problem isnt so much with the golden chain (perhaps we'd say 'string' now!) but with the damage such understanding deals the discrete object (poem, person, place). Although Duncan himself had it that the truly 'open' poetics necessarily contained the 'closed', the transformational attitude as regards poetry tends to disqualify (certainly traditional) craft. I've always wondered why avant-garde friends could entertain the poem as performing every possible role, as vehicle &/or vector, except its function as poem. Of course, there's just as much error from the other direction : lifeless, soulless form. Yet, since Language-poetry & other strategic practices, 'lifeless & soulless' could describe an array of both conventional & experimental poetry.
2.
Cut to the chase : In the foreword to Grossinger's book, Daniel Pinchbeck (author of 2012 : The Return of Quetzalcoatl) asks these rhetorical questions : "Is there some other dimension of being that our human species has the capacity to access as our current mistreated world convulses around us? Does the tremendous intelligence and integral efficiency of our biological matrix suggest some deeper wisdom operating in the greater universe with which we can resonate and harmonize?" (And his instant caveat : "My own quandary --it has almost silenced me recently-- is the question of what the writer, the artist, the thinker should practically and actually do in this ruinous era.") [p ix]
The first proposition is actually premised upon the second --a reiteration of a philosophical commonplace that one is within Meaning whatever it may be (thus also the World, the Universe, God, Being et al).
Regarding the New Age excitement around the Mayan prophecy, Grossinger cautions, "But I am not looking for indications of renewal externally and historically. I am looking for a gateway inside --inside consciousness, inside DNA potential, inside the zodiac. My book is not what is going to happen (or not) on December 21st, 2012 or January 1, 2013 but a 2013 context for what is already happening and has been happening since the emergence of our species, the advent of life on Earth, and the creation of this universe --impossibly big venues that cannot be queried but that mark abysses we must explore." [Introduction, pp2/3]
I identify with Grossinger's style of thinking & writing; by no means haphazard but the natural order of an intelligence following the maze of references his experience has endowed. Closer to innocence than magic, one's also been receptive to that internal/external match-up of which Grossinger derives a dramatic concordance. But it's the scale of his table & therefore the ability to exclaim & encompass (literally the same breath, the same perception) that distinguishes him.
Reflecting on his lack of recognition of Jose Arguelles' Mayan thesis at the time he was offered it for publication, Grossinger submits, "My snub became an unconscious throwback to old elitist publishing habits as to what constituted a worthy curriculum, attitudes that I was in the bare beginnings of overcoming and that were still largely unexamined. I was an intellectual snob, with vestiges of Black Mountain literary machismo in my head, and I was pretty much in thrall to the anti-kitsch imperatives of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Kelly and crew." (Introduction, p15) True enough. Which is why, perhaps, the New York Scene is what it is --serious, sincere & hilarious with the junk of the everyday --and not Black Mountain!
I simply havent delved into the authors Grossinger respects as teachers & companions --Richard Hoagland, Arguelles, Terrence McKenna among others. Some I remember from Io magazine & the milieu North Atlantic Books described. I respect that he's done the hard yards (to use an appropriate Australianism) in the mind/body practices either side of orthodoxy.
David Bohm doesnt figure in Grossinger's cavalcade but remembering my '80s reading prompts the hologramic here as relevant to his perspective. And my own sense of the infinite trajectory of pivotal, that is life endowing/defining, events which are always available to intersection & continuation (according to the apprehension one has of any one of them; that is, to reengage with the event's infinite possibility against apparent historical closure; remembering, crucially, that the dynamic is personal), assuredly resonates with Grossinger.
No surprise, really, that Grossinger shivers off association with Ken Wilber --not only because erstwhile comrades criticise him as a "self-aggrandizing, parasitical worm; even worse, a Ken Wilber wannabe" (p 551). He reflects, "Without your accusation, without its gauntlet, my writing is just fancy words, shoplifted at best, restless and hollow, dispensable, a betrayal and a failure of everything they stand for --not even third-rate Ken Wilber, as you duly say. But given what else my work must withstand, the trials coming this way in an ill and binding wind, it must be judged, scoured, and obliterated anyway, and then allowed whatever smidgen of truth and honour, if any, endure. That is the only goal worth striving for, the only reverie that might redeem us both at the final call. What I'm attempting here, consumer-culture drivel albeit, is more interesting to me than what Ken Wilber is attempting, but that is beside the point. He is doing fine at what he's doing and he's not on my radar and I don't wannabe him." (p554).
For my part, what I call the existential imperative, the here & now, flesh & blood vouchsafing of any vision, is what's sacrificed in formalizing & abstracting (whether or not intended) any definition of reality. (In my unschooled mind, totality & the totalitarian conspire.) I seem always to prefer the poet to the logician, the authorial to the theoretical, poetry to the prose of systematization...
3.
One pitfall of history or critical commentary as autobiography is the lack of distinction between the 'gross natural array' (Goethe) & the valued (by attribution or inherent), between the en passant & the gleanings of perception. But Richard Grossinger doesnt want to evade his own fact in the midst of it all. Par for the course in poetry, problematic in prose (because laid bare, unsynthesised).
I give him the benefit of the doubt despite intemperate & wrongheaded political judgments --e.g., what a truly awful analogy here, "In China people who manipulate goods or markets are executed. In the US they are allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains because they are too big to fail and anything else would be class warfare, and, god forbid, socialism..." The context for his comment is an aside on the billionaire swindler, Bernie Madoff, that he wasnt the worst : "The worst are names we will never know, secret bankers behind the global conspiracy and its invisible depositories and exchequers (and maybe even 9/11 and the missing black boxes too)." (p281) Naturally, then, the chic Left conflation with conspiracy theory on Bush, the Clintons, Obama, on Israel, even the Al Qaeda terrorists, monstrously bloated by their New Age appendices.
One's appalled that the American complexion of this politics doesnt cause the embarrassment that might engender a humility and then occasion some worldly reality to the prognostications.
Grossinger's partisan political swipes & snipes --sounding off as a lefty whose profound disappointment with the Democratic Party is matched by the vitriol he would always pour upon the Republicans-- and his rallying to the belated cause of American Pop-music in the wash of the 'the British Invasion', strike me as odd indulgences for a Time Lord. At least, though, he demonstrates fallibility, that is a humanity pursuant on This-world desires & responsibilities.
Can't help thinking that alchemy, homeopathy arent, perhaps, the best analytical tools for This-world politics! Esoteric understanding of the behavior of opposites cannot release us from our solid & historical weight, nor do dreams replace daily discourse. The contrary pertains.
To speak as though one were a player in the Big Scheme, in which game present-day humanity is qualitatitively reduced, smacks of the kind of bad faith which Michael McClure might be compelled to protest (in capital letters) : "I AM A MAMMAL PATRIOT!" Of course it's a conundrum, especially fraught because the transformative impulse, the suite for the new, arises within the breast of unknowing.
We are always in progress, knowledgeable or wise, forever on the way. And no doubt at all Richard Grossinger knows all this & more. He remains tuned in & turned on, abounding in brilliant ideas & memorable expression --loquacious, erudite & gratifyingly flawed.
The 'idiot's guide' to Richard Grossinger's book would instruct that the author doesnt expect anything to happen on December 20th, 2012 or 1st January, 2013. Nothing will necessarily happen except what is always happening. Whatever the Mayan calendar construes is held by DNA & dreamt, as it were, by the consciousness in which humanity is subsumed. Prophecy, it might continue, concentrates the mind. Transformation is inevitable; life in all its forms teleological.
In short, 2013 : Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration is a music of the spheres, and it could only have been written in 2010, in America, on this planet!
-------------------------------------------
[30th September, '10 to the 4th November, '10; cleaned up / typed, January, 2011; Melbourne]
Monday, January 3, 2011
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #21, NEW YEAR 2011 ISSUE
PAUL HARPER
TWO POEMS
*
country life
every evening the same story in silence at the windmill
no more poultry
until the officials bow to the river
on a morning the colour of train tracks
near the stadium where we had that mix up with the tickets
laughter in those twin cavities in a kitchen wall
& a shared taste in literature resolve so much
a watering can reminds us of summer holidays
small ferns beside a fence
concrete cool in a place of scant sunlight
mystery & solitude fusing with the smell of green
thunder or fireworks
on a sunday we can scarcely tell
transcription of the protocol proceeds languidly
for each stroke the lustre of banana leaves & the bouyance of balloons released
oOo
heist
in response to an official notice
a blue hound may be reconfigured as a playful black cat
letter about a coral tree may be classified
unlikely to be assistance
& the eight eccentrics encouraged to no longer linger in the undergrowth at dusk
marvelling at fighter jets
the centre does
however
recognise the attraction of such machines
their velocity
their silhouettes
black against evenings sapphire
in her classic of the inner landscape
our village elder speaks harshly of our recently acquired painting
our latest cargo plane escapes comment
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
TWO POEMS
*
10-XII-2010
CANDLE FLAMES
GUTTERING
AS IF FANNED
OR IN
GENTLE BREEZE
SHETLAND'S AIRES
IN THE ROOM
HARP PIPE & FIDDLE ETC.
AH!
IT'S THE BREATH
THAT STIRS
oOo
14.XI.2010
CRACKED WINDOWS
RELEASE STEAM &
CONDENSATION.
CAULIFLOWER PICKLES
IN MORNING CHILL.
INSTANT MISO
AND STOVE
FOR WARMTH
WHILE POT SIMMERS
FOR HOURS.
B'FAST RICE CREAM
HEALS.
NO SALTED PLUMS.
SCALLIONS TO GARNISH
LATER ON.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNIE O'REGAN [1938-1996]
POEM FOR KRIS HEMENSLEY
Every day you wait for the mail
some times it comes late
ten years late
or never
just "one man's opinion of moonlight"
Retta is silent
you are talking
we go to the galleries
we look for delight
in front of Melbourne university
we wonder if we are getting old
oOo
[Jude Telford sent me this poem ages ago, typewritten on water stained A-4 page; salvaged from Bernie's papers, aftermath of his sad demise.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NICK POWELL
TWO POEMS
*
MAAILMA
You say you 'love the song of currawongs
when they strike up their orchestra'.
Everything is tendrils, special tendrils.
Song is growth; no we are not spared
sentimental formulas
of minimalist photosynth-pop
and acorn percussion. What pomp,
twirling a pencil in the humble world,
or twirling the self, effortlessly.
Perfume on the pencil. Whose?
The future and the frond fan outward.
Maailma: World
Maa (dirt), ilma (air).
Marry me, broadly speaking.
oOo
KUMILY TO COCHIN
In the bus from the highland to the sea
garlands of bougainvillia and marigold
offered to Our Lady of the Highway
glow and swing through fields of tea.
as tired eyes yield to sleep of dream
of gentle scenes more puzzling than art,
so our bodies relax and are vivified
by faith in the invisible and unforeseen.
Looking back, many details are lost,
fine layers of experience shaded,
so that a scene in a life is reduced
to bas-relief: a road, foliage, a bus.
Smoke and mist in the ancient valleys,
your smile on seeing the wide white smile
of the Kerelan girl in the turquoise dress,
or the nun travelling alone. I find my keys
to the many sections of that hasppiness
overlap like clouds, everything touching.
oOo
[from the pamphlet, The True Maps;
horsedrawnpress@yahoo.com.au]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROB SCHACKNE
THREE POEMS
*
TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF BEING HERE
for Will Knox
First, the tunnel metaphor will smile on you too
If the desperate sides be avoided, estrangement
From all that we were never invited to understand;
A sometimes unstately progress through not by
The myriad reasons we have for not being here.
Then, unwelcome, untie that hurt from our own hurt;
There is no minor skirmish that is worth the battle
That lost the war. Anyhow, we’re survivors, not soldiers.
Leave all battles internecine and your self unscathed
As you choose your way carefully through the night.
Then, untouched by insult, chicanery, and deceit
We will at last emerge to daylight on the other side
And looking back…but no, we will never look back
At the unhappiness we did not cause, nor the pain
We did not stop to answer. We were not saints.
(2008)
oOo
IN THE YEAR 2666
for Roberto Bolano
After three wrong turns, a tractor and a flat
You're at The House Of Vanished Writers
After all, that was always your destination
You park your unreviewed car and go right in
Sitting and waiting, smoking and watching
Joe, the Indian, who never could get started
Sophia, who once was beautiful, great shorts
No power to stay long enough on the page
Fred, whose fiction fried like a skillet, killed it
And you, who are merely visiting, get a key
A towel and the schedule of daily readings
Who are these happy people you are thinking
Why do they look at me like that? One part pen
One part the next event, one part is wind
Where did all the vanished writers go?
When did they write their perfect poems
Who said they'd had enough and could leave?
Your room has a limited view of the forest
It is possible the birds will sing there again
Second seating meal is vegetable soup with bread
Dessert is an autumn ice cream you don't remember
Afterwards the word games and the music upset you.
(2010)
oOo
EXILES
It took seven years to build the box
From discarded paper and dreams
As deep as it is wide, at times you forget
Exactly how you decided its dimensions
No candy store, no Chinese restaurants
Many a stained-glass window at the top
Everything is blue when the sun pours in
Deli, record store, a massage parlour
Open all night, oddly buzzing, no customers
There's a very good small library
Of books you always meant to study
Furniture copied from another tidy book
A fireplace that heats but doesn't burn
A few students were allowed in once
They dusted off their prints and fled
On the inside an ornate exit with a sign
That reads Don't Leave Till You're Ready
Next to it a fire axe, a cheap suit on a hook
Today that box is almost empty
Outside is a sunset and birds.
( 2010)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
A GO BY, for Jack Collom
ute with 2 dogs
out back goes by
blue ute
with roll bars
2 birds go by
sans ute!
car does u turn
white car
white car
white car
flaming red flash!
turquoise station wagon
through the trees
the trees aren't moved!
floods in central N.S.W.
roads closed ac/dc!
how many ways
can you close a road?
Jack Collom goes by
looking for the elusive
red car!
oOo
PETE SPENCE/CORNELIS VLEESKENS
from The Glen Innes Collaborations
*
LADY DAY OR A MASS IN MORRIS MAJOR
no!
i don't
think i've met
Agnes Day!
but i know
her mum!
Doris.
didn't she
have a sister
Gloria?
G-l-o-r-i-a
no!
that's a burger
playing Tesla!
Kyrie & Kyrie!
is you lisping?
no!
ahhh! amen
to that!
oOo
THE JACK
figs can fly!
flush!
that's straight!
i have five
sad forests!
i'll raise you
ten matchsticks
must be a pyro hand?
C U
that's a soft bet
chips of down!
fold!
oOo
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
4 Poems
*
LETTER TO VINCENT
for Billy Jones
tiger tiger
old stone house
creeping vines
stony rises
floaters belch
keep those sheep
off the road Velsen!!
Livingstone stumbles
into the Stanley camp
grass orchids
open to the sky
as we cross
Mary Smokes Creek
a blue iris goes by
oOo
THE 98 FLOOD
blue heron out of his depth
egret pale and wan
weeks now and no let up
road closed
moorhen clings to her nest
as it bobs and eddies
(as in whirlpool)
ochre waters rage
road closed (bis)
high and dry
on the verandah
a cheese platter
dolmades avocado
a Chemin des Papes
red cedar floats by
dead cow dead cow
bloated sheep
oOo
JACK'S POEM
the kitchen midden
shows the remains
of a great feast
blood drips
from the seabird's beak
red cargo goes by
the ancestors smile
oOo
QUIET IN MY HAT
line dangling from my big toe
misty mooring dry red
blue whale goes by
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN
Launch speech for Lee Fuhler's We Pale Inhabitants (Earthdance, 13 Jones St., Brunswick, Vic. 3056),
at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010.
One of my many distinctions in the literary world is to be the first to publish a poem of Lee Fuhler's. That was in about 1993 when I was bringing out a folded double sided A3 of poems called Poetry on Paper. There were fewer readings then but with bigger attendances and I always thought they doubled as drinking clubs. Less so these days. Much has changed, many people alive then are now dead. Or not so dead but remembered and incorporated into our work, sometimes without our knowledge or permission.
I think Lee was off the sauce by then -- there was something about the intent with which he read -- so I approached him and, I think this is the technical term, solicited a poem from him.
I've brought it today to give back to him -- kind of like the completion of a circle but in a bigger
circle. Before the poems in this book, or most of them, Lee didn't write for some years. So you can get better, but it doesn't get any easier.
You wonder what happens to poets when they go home -- if they get to their desks -- how they drive their minds -- if they can reach into their hearts -- what they can face -- what they can't -- nights alone -- reading poems out of a book -- or dreaming at an empty window -- it's so slow and the notes are so far apart.
The first line of the first poem Lee gave me was : "your heart it is a thief". The final line of one of the poems in this book is "we're only poor tenants and here for a while". I did like that first line but these days he writes fuller, with more depth like the stones are watching. With these poems you can read a line and see how strong everything is, what things are invested with -- you can see everything in the light of a huge apricot -- the man who's wrestled with his blues can split the wind
-- everything is burning -- we're losing it all
what can we do but sing.
[at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010. Other poets supporting Lee Fuhler, reading from his new collection, were Ian McBryde, Lyn Boughton, & Lish Skec (who also read for Kerry Scuffins who couldnt attend).]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CYRIL WONG
Excerpts from Satori Blues
*
What fails to be reined in
pushes out, freezes, breaks off—crashes.
No telling who might place a chunk
in their mouth. (Who wouldn’t pay to watch them
taste it?) Some protrusions merge with air, but
not before melting a little, flowing everywhere
within the self, hardening in places it never
meant to make a home.
oOo
Fields of emptiness between the wild arc
of electrons and every atom—a vacuum not
nothing after all, but the purest form
of something like compulsion that fixes
us into being, stopping the self from
coming, no, flying everywhere apart.
oOo
What we talk about when we talk about loss
are the catastrophes: walls collapsing
and the terrible flood. What we forget is what
we fail to detect: the line opening like an eye
from one end of a dam to another;
a startled look and the averted vision
at a wrong word at yet another wrong time.
Loss is an ever-growing thing. The same
is true of how we win.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Typed-up the 2nd & 3rd January, 2011. NOT the Boy's Own Edition of Poems & Pieces, simply how the pieces fell together at this time! --so saith yr holidaying ed!]
oOo
CONTRIBUTORS :
PAUL HARPER, a friend of Collected Works Bookshop, has poems recently in Roomers magazine (Melbourne).
BERNARD HEMENSLEY, previously published here; has revived his Stingy Artist small press (85, Goldcroft Road, Weymouth, Dorset, DT4 OEA, UK) after many years hibernation. Hot off the press are a bunch of ephemera including a Franco Beltrametti fold-out. Welcome back bro!
BERNIE O'REGAN, fourteen years since the photographer/super 8 filmmaker/poet died in Melbourne. See index for Archive of Miscellaneous Critical Writings #11 (7/4/07) re- K.H.'s Introduction to the Archive of Enigma screening of B O'R's films (June 15,'98); also Archive, #10 (24/6/07) re- K.H.'s Words for Bernie : Eulogy... (15/11/96)
NICK POWELL is living in Brisbane after some years overseas, mainly Finland. In 2007 his chapbook Of Fallen Myth was published by the Poets Union (Sydney). The poems here are from The True Maps (Horse Drawn Press,'10), mostly written in Finland.
ROB SCHACKNE born in New York, came to Australia in 1971. We made his acquaintance via the Bookshop in the 90s. In China for a decade, currently Shanghai, where he's published a couple of collections; Snake Wine ('06), Where Sound Goes When It's Done ('10). His self-portrait reveals, "He listens to The Grateful Dead. He claims that he can read Shakespeare in the original. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao." His blog is The Tao That Can Be Named, www.borisknack.blogspot.com
PETE SPENCE & CORNELIS VLEESKENS have appeared in Poems & Pieces before (see the index). They're both active in the Mail Art internationale. Their most recent publications are (P.S.) Sonnets (Footura press, Germany) & (C.V.) Divertimenti (Earthdance, Glen Innes).
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN is one of the Melbourne scene's true gentlemen. Co-edited with Rex Buckingham, From the Rochester Castle anthology (1988), and his own Poetry on Paper (1989-93). Included in Raffaella Torresan's Literary Creatures anthology (Hybrid Press, 2009).
CYRIL WONG lives in Singapore where he edits Soft Blow poetry journal. One of a group of Singaporean poets who've made substantial connections with Australia over the past 10 years. Has published 8 poetry collections & 1 book of tales. Co-authored with Terry Jaensch, Excess Baggage & Claim (Transit Lounge, Melbourne, '07). Satori Blues, from which the poems here are taken, is published by Soft Blow (2011). Website, http://www.cyrilwong.org
TWO POEMS
*
country life
every evening the same story in silence at the windmill
no more poultry
until the officials bow to the river
on a morning the colour of train tracks
near the stadium where we had that mix up with the tickets
laughter in those twin cavities in a kitchen wall
& a shared taste in literature resolve so much
a watering can reminds us of summer holidays
small ferns beside a fence
concrete cool in a place of scant sunlight
mystery & solitude fusing with the smell of green
thunder or fireworks
on a sunday we can scarcely tell
transcription of the protocol proceeds languidly
for each stroke the lustre of banana leaves & the bouyance of balloons released
oOo
heist
in response to an official notice
a blue hound may be reconfigured as a playful black cat
letter about a coral tree may be classified
unlikely to be assistance
& the eight eccentrics encouraged to no longer linger in the undergrowth at dusk
marvelling at fighter jets
the centre does
however
recognise the attraction of such machines
their velocity
their silhouettes
black against evenings sapphire
in her classic of the inner landscape
our village elder speaks harshly of our recently acquired painting
our latest cargo plane escapes comment
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
TWO POEMS
*
10-XII-2010
CANDLE FLAMES
GUTTERING
AS IF FANNED
OR IN
GENTLE BREEZE
SHETLAND'S AIRES
IN THE ROOM
HARP PIPE & FIDDLE ETC.
AH!
IT'S THE BREATH
THAT STIRS
oOo
14.XI.2010
CRACKED WINDOWS
RELEASE STEAM &
CONDENSATION.
CAULIFLOWER PICKLES
IN MORNING CHILL.
INSTANT MISO
AND STOVE
FOR WARMTH
WHILE POT SIMMERS
FOR HOURS.
B'FAST RICE CREAM
HEALS.
NO SALTED PLUMS.
SCALLIONS TO GARNISH
LATER ON.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BERNIE O'REGAN [1938-1996]
POEM FOR KRIS HEMENSLEY
Every day you wait for the mail
some times it comes late
ten years late
or never
just "one man's opinion of moonlight"
Retta is silent
you are talking
we go to the galleries
we look for delight
in front of Melbourne university
we wonder if we are getting old
oOo
[Jude Telford sent me this poem ages ago, typewritten on water stained A-4 page; salvaged from Bernie's papers, aftermath of his sad demise.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NICK POWELL
TWO POEMS
*
MAAILMA
You say you 'love the song of currawongs
when they strike up their orchestra'.
Everything is tendrils, special tendrils.
Song is growth; no we are not spared
sentimental formulas
of minimalist photosynth-pop
and acorn percussion. What pomp,
twirling a pencil in the humble world,
or twirling the self, effortlessly.
Perfume on the pencil. Whose?
The future and the frond fan outward.
Maailma: World
Maa (dirt), ilma (air).
Marry me, broadly speaking.
oOo
KUMILY TO COCHIN
In the bus from the highland to the sea
garlands of bougainvillia and marigold
offered to Our Lady of the Highway
glow and swing through fields of tea.
as tired eyes yield to sleep of dream
of gentle scenes more puzzling than art,
so our bodies relax and are vivified
by faith in the invisible and unforeseen.
Looking back, many details are lost,
fine layers of experience shaded,
so that a scene in a life is reduced
to bas-relief: a road, foliage, a bus.
Smoke and mist in the ancient valleys,
your smile on seeing the wide white smile
of the Kerelan girl in the turquoise dress,
or the nun travelling alone. I find my keys
to the many sections of that hasppiness
overlap like clouds, everything touching.
oOo
[from the pamphlet, The True Maps;
horsedrawnpress@yahoo.com.au]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROB SCHACKNE
THREE POEMS
*
TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF BEING HERE
for Will Knox
First, the tunnel metaphor will smile on you too
If the desperate sides be avoided, estrangement
From all that we were never invited to understand;
A sometimes unstately progress through not by
The myriad reasons we have for not being here.
Then, unwelcome, untie that hurt from our own hurt;
There is no minor skirmish that is worth the battle
That lost the war. Anyhow, we’re survivors, not soldiers.
Leave all battles internecine and your self unscathed
As you choose your way carefully through the night.
Then, untouched by insult, chicanery, and deceit
We will at last emerge to daylight on the other side
And looking back…but no, we will never look back
At the unhappiness we did not cause, nor the pain
We did not stop to answer. We were not saints.
(2008)
oOo
IN THE YEAR 2666
for Roberto Bolano
After three wrong turns, a tractor and a flat
You're at The House Of Vanished Writers
After all, that was always your destination
You park your unreviewed car and go right in
Sitting and waiting, smoking and watching
Joe, the Indian, who never could get started
Sophia, who once was beautiful, great shorts
No power to stay long enough on the page
Fred, whose fiction fried like a skillet, killed it
And you, who are merely visiting, get a key
A towel and the schedule of daily readings
Who are these happy people you are thinking
Why do they look at me like that? One part pen
One part the next event, one part is wind
Where did all the vanished writers go?
When did they write their perfect poems
Who said they'd had enough and could leave?
Your room has a limited view of the forest
It is possible the birds will sing there again
Second seating meal is vegetable soup with bread
Dessert is an autumn ice cream you don't remember
Afterwards the word games and the music upset you.
(2010)
oOo
EXILES
It took seven years to build the box
From discarded paper and dreams
As deep as it is wide, at times you forget
Exactly how you decided its dimensions
No candy store, no Chinese restaurants
Many a stained-glass window at the top
Everything is blue when the sun pours in
Deli, record store, a massage parlour
Open all night, oddly buzzing, no customers
There's a very good small library
Of books you always meant to study
Furniture copied from another tidy book
A fireplace that heats but doesn't burn
A few students were allowed in once
They dusted off their prints and fled
On the inside an ornate exit with a sign
That reads Don't Leave Till You're Ready
Next to it a fire axe, a cheap suit on a hook
Today that box is almost empty
Outside is a sunset and birds.
( 2010)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETE SPENCE
A GO BY, for Jack Collom
ute with 2 dogs
out back goes by
blue ute
with roll bars
2 birds go by
sans ute!
car does u turn
white car
white car
white car
flaming red flash!
turquoise station wagon
through the trees
the trees aren't moved!
floods in central N.S.W.
roads closed ac/dc!
how many ways
can you close a road?
Jack Collom goes by
looking for the elusive
red car!
oOo
PETE SPENCE/CORNELIS VLEESKENS
from The Glen Innes Collaborations
*
LADY DAY OR A MASS IN MORRIS MAJOR
no!
i don't
think i've met
Agnes Day!
but i know
her mum!
Doris.
didn't she
have a sister
Gloria?
G-l-o-r-i-a
no!
that's a burger
playing Tesla!
Kyrie & Kyrie!
is you lisping?
no!
ahhh! amen
to that!
oOo
THE JACK
figs can fly!
flush!
that's straight!
i have five
sad forests!
i'll raise you
ten matchsticks
must be a pyro hand?
C U
that's a soft bet
chips of down!
fold!
oOo
CORNELIS VLEESKENS
4 Poems
*
LETTER TO VINCENT
for Billy Jones
tiger tiger
old stone house
creeping vines
stony rises
floaters belch
keep those sheep
off the road Velsen!!
Livingstone stumbles
into the Stanley camp
grass orchids
open to the sky
as we cross
Mary Smokes Creek
a blue iris goes by
oOo
THE 98 FLOOD
blue heron out of his depth
egret pale and wan
weeks now and no let up
road closed
moorhen clings to her nest
as it bobs and eddies
(as in whirlpool)
ochre waters rage
road closed (bis)
high and dry
on the verandah
a cheese platter
dolmades avocado
a Chemin des Papes
red cedar floats by
dead cow dead cow
bloated sheep
oOo
JACK'S POEM
the kitchen midden
shows the remains
of a great feast
blood drips
from the seabird's beak
red cargo goes by
the ancestors smile
oOo
QUIET IN MY HAT
line dangling from my big toe
misty mooring dry red
blue whale goes by
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN
Launch speech for Lee Fuhler's We Pale Inhabitants (Earthdance, 13 Jones St., Brunswick, Vic. 3056),
at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010.
One of my many distinctions in the literary world is to be the first to publish a poem of Lee Fuhler's. That was in about 1993 when I was bringing out a folded double sided A3 of poems called Poetry on Paper. There were fewer readings then but with bigger attendances and I always thought they doubled as drinking clubs. Less so these days. Much has changed, many people alive then are now dead. Or not so dead but remembered and incorporated into our work, sometimes without our knowledge or permission.
I think Lee was off the sauce by then -- there was something about the intent with which he read -- so I approached him and, I think this is the technical term, solicited a poem from him.
I've brought it today to give back to him -- kind of like the completion of a circle but in a bigger
circle. Before the poems in this book, or most of them, Lee didn't write for some years. So you can get better, but it doesn't get any easier.
You wonder what happens to poets when they go home -- if they get to their desks -- how they drive their minds -- if they can reach into their hearts -- what they can face -- what they can't -- nights alone -- reading poems out of a book -- or dreaming at an empty window -- it's so slow and the notes are so far apart.
The first line of the first poem Lee gave me was : "your heart it is a thief". The final line of one of the poems in this book is "we're only poor tenants and here for a while". I did like that first line but these days he writes fuller, with more depth like the stones are watching. With these poems you can read a line and see how strong everything is, what things are invested with -- you can see everything in the light of a huge apricot -- the man who's wrestled with his blues can split the wind
-- everything is burning -- we're losing it all
what can we do but sing.
[at Collected Works Bookshop, December 15th, 2010. Other poets supporting Lee Fuhler, reading from his new collection, were Ian McBryde, Lyn Boughton, & Lish Skec (who also read for Kerry Scuffins who couldnt attend).]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CYRIL WONG
Excerpts from Satori Blues
*
What fails to be reined in
pushes out, freezes, breaks off—crashes.
No telling who might place a chunk
in their mouth. (Who wouldn’t pay to watch them
taste it?) Some protrusions merge with air, but
not before melting a little, flowing everywhere
within the self, hardening in places it never
meant to make a home.
oOo
Fields of emptiness between the wild arc
of electrons and every atom—a vacuum not
nothing after all, but the purest form
of something like compulsion that fixes
us into being, stopping the self from
coming, no, flying everywhere apart.
oOo
What we talk about when we talk about loss
are the catastrophes: walls collapsing
and the terrible flood. What we forget is what
we fail to detect: the line opening like an eye
from one end of a dam to another;
a startled look and the averted vision
at a wrong word at yet another wrong time.
Loss is an ever-growing thing. The same
is true of how we win.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Typed-up the 2nd & 3rd January, 2011. NOT the Boy's Own Edition of Poems & Pieces, simply how the pieces fell together at this time! --so saith yr holidaying ed!]
oOo
CONTRIBUTORS :
PAUL HARPER, a friend of Collected Works Bookshop, has poems recently in Roomers magazine (Melbourne).
BERNARD HEMENSLEY, previously published here; has revived his Stingy Artist small press (85, Goldcroft Road, Weymouth, Dorset, DT4 OEA, UK) after many years hibernation. Hot off the press are a bunch of ephemera including a Franco Beltrametti fold-out. Welcome back bro!
BERNIE O'REGAN, fourteen years since the photographer/super 8 filmmaker/poet died in Melbourne. See index for Archive of Miscellaneous Critical Writings #11 (7/4/07) re- K.H.'s Introduction to the Archive of Enigma screening of B O'R's films (June 15,'98); also Archive, #10 (24/6/07) re- K.H.'s Words for Bernie : Eulogy... (15/11/96)
NICK POWELL is living in Brisbane after some years overseas, mainly Finland. In 2007 his chapbook Of Fallen Myth was published by the Poets Union (Sydney). The poems here are from The True Maps (Horse Drawn Press,'10), mostly written in Finland.
ROB SCHACKNE born in New York, came to Australia in 1971. We made his acquaintance via the Bookshop in the 90s. In China for a decade, currently Shanghai, where he's published a couple of collections; Snake Wine ('06), Where Sound Goes When It's Done ('10). His self-portrait reveals, "He listens to The Grateful Dead. He claims that he can read Shakespeare in the original. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao." His blog is The Tao That Can Be Named, www.borisknack.blogspot.com
PETE SPENCE & CORNELIS VLEESKENS have appeared in Poems & Pieces before (see the index). They're both active in the Mail Art internationale. Their most recent publications are (P.S.) Sonnets (Footura press, Germany) & (C.V.) Divertimenti (Earthdance, Glen Innes).
PETER (FREDDY) TIERNAN is one of the Melbourne scene's true gentlemen. Co-edited with Rex Buckingham, From the Rochester Castle anthology (1988), and his own Poetry on Paper (1989-93). Included in Raffaella Torresan's Literary Creatures anthology (Hybrid Press, 2009).
CYRIL WONG lives in Singapore where he edits Soft Blow poetry journal. One of a group of Singaporean poets who've made substantial connections with Australia over the past 10 years. Has published 8 poetry collections & 1 book of tales. Co-authored with Terry Jaensch, Excess Baggage & Claim (Transit Lounge, Melbourne, '07). Satori Blues, from which the poems here are taken, is published by Soft Blow (2011). Website, http://www.cyrilwong.org
Friday, December 31, 2010
"...AND THE REST IS HISTORY..."
RECENT GOINGS ON AT COLLECTED WORKS BOOKSHOP
On the 31st October I posted the following email on the Overloadnation site:
"My Fellow Australians... We will fight them on the beaches... no, start again! Dear Overload friends, We've had to consider out future in light of the expected rent rise for our bookshop, to take effect 1st January 11... And, though it may be an extension of the same folly which had us open up in the first place, we will continue! The prospect of moving elsewhere was as awful as that of closing! But the price of the new 4 year lease will hurt, unless I can generate more sales and support. The point about the Shop is that though it is a little company, in the market place, it's never been profit oriented. Most of the receipts go into stock. The wages are minimal. Rent and stock are the major outgoings. The purpose of the Shop has always been to support writing, especially poetry, --Australian Poetry and literature within an international literary context. That's the rationale which makes the bookshop unique (certainly in Australia and New Zealand, possibly further afield). We obviously have sufficient support to be mentioned in the City of Literature document, but for all sorts of reasons support through the bead curtain is less than it might be. The recent rent hike squeezes us even more! The question remains, is there a place for an actual bookshop in this time of online purchasing, the ebook and other new technologies? A rhetorical question for me : the bookshop is a home for readers and writers of poetry and prose, a home for little presses, a venue for launches and readings, as it has been for 25 years or so. In a word, we're there for cultural as well as bookselling reasons. Our acceptance of the new lease will probably be sent this week! It will be a great encouragement to know if you support us! Perhaps a start might be making a new "friends of Collected Works" address list (email), for Melbourne and Australia generally. If you're interested please do write or phone or visit us! Cheers, Kris Hemensley"
The response was immediate & I can now say continuous. Invidious to recall some & not all but as a very partial index of the initial response, simply reading off the names of authors of emails, the list includes Michelle Leber, John Kinsella, Earl Livings, Patricia Sykes, Lyndon Walker, Melissa Watts, Leah Kaminsky, Josephine Rowe, Andrew Lindsay, Chris Grierson, Penny Gibson, Bron Thomasson, Kerryn Tredrea, Joan Kerr, Lyn Chatham, Anthony Lynch, Gregory Day, Ted Reilly, Paul Ashton, Caroline Williamson, Libby Hart, Ray Liversidge, Cyril Wong, Jennifer Harrison, Geelong Writers group, the VWC, Steve Grimwade, Mike Ladd, the APC, Paul Kane, Walter Struve...
Then we come to Facebook... The following is copied from the initial message :
"• Kris Hemensley • Time to grasp the nettle! Will we/wont we stay in business at present address as rent is considerably raised and receipts dwindle? After a week of deliberation & advice from friends we've just about decided to sign up for another 4 years! Any constructive thoughts are welcome! An exquisite moment : status of the book, the bookshop, the booktrade. All up for grabs! • October 29 at 10:35pm · LikeUnlike · Comment · Share
• • Jen Jewel Brown, Jennifer Compton, Nici Lindsay and 2 others like this.
• • Kris Hemensley I might need to sell a couple of valuable things to raise some security kitty! And wd love to know abt the on-line caper. Masterclasses gratefully received! • October 29 at 10:39pm · LikeUnlike
•
• Nicholas Pounder Kris, it is probably folly, but I would do the same if I had your reputation and record. And let's face it, a tradition to defend. • October 29 at 10:44pm · LikeUnlike · 1 personLoading...
• • Pamela Robertson-Pearce Kris I am with you in this. I was so inspired by your place/space that I opened up a bookshop/art gallery upon my return from OZ in the Northeast of the UK and it is not easy. I never thought it would be...however. I have planned more events, serve tea, regular sales...I knew a bookshop alone could not make it here and an art gallery alone could not either so I combined them. I will keep you updated AND I wish you all the best! Diversify is my two cents. • October 29 at 10:45pm · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley If you cld give me a clue abt the couple of books we discussed before wd be good Nick; and i DIDNT know Pamela abt your enterprise! What's it called ? Open All Hours? It was great having you & neil visit but wdnt have guessed i was sowing seeds! Thanks for morale boost! I guess ive sat on hands a little bit. Time to get up going again. Reinvest the 'business'... etc... • October 29 at 10:52pm · LikeUnlike
• • Pamela Robertson-Pearce Mine is called DJANG the art of life! Djang being an aboriginal word which you probably know already. Open all hours indeed!!! Ha ha almost impossible to do. No I bring work to do so I can use the time better at DJANG when it is slow. I am glad to hear you persevere! You are a beacon Kris! • October 29 at 11:15pm · LikeUnlike
• • John Fox Agree about the record and tradition, but feel v selfish about it; great for the rest of us to have Collected Works still there, but I hope it isn't at the cost of your approaching retirement in penury. • October 29 at 11:37pm · LikeUnlike · 2 peopleLoading...
• • Justin Clemens Yes best bookstore in Australia. • October 30 at 12:46am · LikeUnlike
• • Jennifer Compton i must visit more often and i must buy more often • October 30 at 1:11am · LikeUnlike
• • Cassie Lewis-Getman Thank you for keeping up the wonderful work, Kris, but do take care of yourself too! Online sales seem like a good way to go as a supplement, or even email sales- Ken Bolton sends out an email newsletter of books recently in at the EAF, something like this would be a cheap and immediate way to go. A facebook page talking about the history and purpose of the store is another idea that is low cost. For ideas you could look at the City Lights page see http://www.facebook.com/CityLightsBooks • October 30 at 1:15am · LikeUnlike · 1 personLoading...
• • Kris Hemensley hey justin! good luck for yr crack of dawn seminar tomorrow! Tina alerted me. And youll be pleased to know the college came good with their cheque yday! see you soon, K • October 30 at 1:36am · LikeUnlike
• • Catherine O'Brien • What to say Kris; take the risk and don't count the money each day....remember one time you had a fund raiser reading. Maybe that is a great idea to bring the situation to the attention of those who would support you but don't know. Online ...cannot work for you as you have no computer at the shop so you would be doubling your work by having to transcribe the books at the shop and then spend time at home on the computer. • Funny my 'hardly ever open" i:cat gallery in Vientianne has now more books than art and it is not really a bookshop...i feel like I am an out post of collected works..how to support you from here??????See More • October 30 at 2:30am · LikeUnlike
• • Judith Buckrich I am delighted that you've decided to stay and will make more of an effort to send people your way - maybe PEN can do something with you - I will ask at the next meeting • October 30 at 7:12am · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley • Thank you cathy and judith --'counting the money...", come on, that's not my style! I think it's the gradual switch to new technology, new cultural orientation etc --The city, the society more in flux now than when we started --But if i can... have a $$safety net then we can still be the meeting place, the news exchange, the infinite forum on poetry and ideas that is really our stock in trade --The equation of altruism & survival, the esoteric & the commercial --as ever! As i sd to Chrissie & Michael a year ago, after Dylan, you can be in our loop if i can be in your loop! So your thought, j, is pertinent... Now let's enjoy the races and the rain!!!See More • October 30 at 9:47am · LikeUnlike
• • Elizabeth Campbell Kris, I know you don't like gimmicks, but have you ever thought of a fundraiser/mailing list campaign like Salt did - buy one book to save the shop. I know so many people who would respond ps will be in today for two books! • October 30 at 9:57am · LikeUnlike · 1 personLoading...
• • David Wheatley I'd support that. Remember Chris Hamilton-Emery's 'just one book' campaign (though why stop at just the one). PS Elizabeth -- I owe you a book! • October 30 at 9:59am · LikeUnlike
• • Susan Fealy Dear Kris • • Four more years of Collected Works would be four more years of soft sunshine for the soul. • • XSusan • October 30 at 10:09am · LikeUnlike
• • Viki Mealings that's terrible that they've hiked up the rent so much • October 30 at 11:23am · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley Oh dear, what hath thou unleashed upon thy head and those of thine... um... I think it's much more a matter of getting with it in terms of the on-line biz, events, and reminding institutions who're in need of let's say australian poetry (but hey! the world's our oyster) that we can supply! The rent is inevitable, the commercial reality when i look at it calmly... After yday's excellent discussion with Ellen i feel heartened & resolved! Thanks everybody! • October 30 at 11:35am · LikeUnlike
• • Susan Hawthorne The book business is a tricky one right now. Like you Kris we halve trembled on the edge several times. But we're still here and I have some optimism for the future. • October 30 at 12:40pm · LikeUnlike
• • Philip Salom Kris, I have to agree with Elizabeth. There are multitudes of us and if we want you to stay on (and we do) we should (yes, I'm happy with should) do something to contribute. One book each? Easy. Maybe even have annual subscriptions of some sort? Many of us would be in it. • October 30 at 12:44pm · LikeUnlike
• • Elizabeth Gertsakis Hard one Kris; you represent a special place, but also need to take care of yourself. I would support the idea of all supporters/readers coming in to buy a book. Will come in to see you soon. • October 30 at 3:11pm · LikeUnlike
• • Brendan Ryan Kris, • I'd be happy to buy a poetry book as well. Collected Works is a special place. • October 30 at 3:34pm · LikeUnlike
• • Catherine Bateson I really like Philip's idea of an annual subscription - like a poetry club. In knitting circles there are indie spinners and dyers offering three month/six month sock clubs - you sign up and receive fibre/yarn, a sock pattern and often a small treat....fair trade coffee beans, a stitch counter. Six random months of poetry books - sounds great! • October 30 at 4:21pm · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley Thank you everybody... As it happens, this half day session at the Shop was reasonable what with races and rain... Carol Jenkins was visiting and also people from Perth and the continental perspective/reach of the Shop was so apparent... Interested in Philip's & Batherine B's club suggestion. I can be quite dense abt things so do email me for tips on how this cd work! • October 30 at 6:46pm · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley Batherine B? who she? I mean catherine Bateson of course! • October 30 at 6:47pm · LikeUnlike • •
Philip Salom Some sub. your customers - call us fans! - are happy to pay out each year. Maybe some discount deal as Catherine suggested, and/or just some 'privilege' from the shop. It can guarantee a sum each year for your budget, but on top of our and everybody else's purchases. We are direct beneficiaries of CW and this shouldn't be at your expense. • October 30 at 7:55pm · LikeUnlike
• • Catherine Bateson • No, I didn't mean at Collected Works expense - you'd sign up for three months - a book a month - what would that be? Average it out at $30.00 a book + postage - say $100.00, or $200.00 for six months and then Kris would choose three or six ...books to send out to the lucky person. These might come with a special subscribers newsletter - maybe with a couple of poetry reviews. It's actually not a discount deal at all - the sock clubs are part of how indie dyers/spinners make an artisan living out of pursuing their craft. The point is really in the element of surprise - you don't know what yarn you'll receive. Ditto with the books. But CW would be guaranteed of how many sales for that period. Naturally, being greedy little consumers we'd want to feel special - hence the newsletter or whatever it was - maybe an exclusive invite to a poetry club party....obviously you'd need to do the figures - and equally obviously this would be evened out - a $20.00 book one month, a $35.00 the next...I have no idea if it would work for books, but I've joined sock clubs! (Oh, and the other thing that the sock clubs often do is work around a theme - which would be possible for poetry, too.See More • October 30 at 8:28pm · LikeUnlike
• • Leah Kaminsky Sign me up for a subscription Kris! I also like the idea of all us poets getting together for a fundraiser for Collected Works, which is truly a Melbourne icon... it could be a HUGE event!! • October 30 at 9:11pm · UnlikeLike · 2 peopleLoading...
• • Sam Byfield I'd be up for a subscription Kris and for attending/participating in a fundraising event- anything to help out. I also wouldn't mind getting occasional emails with updates- recent books, things that have caught your attention, events coming up at the bookstore and poems on the blog- all things i'm interested in (and other people) but don't always have the chance to be as engaged and up to date as i'd like to be. • October 30 at 9:24pm · UnlikeLike · 1 personLoading...
• • Philip Salom Sorry, Catherine, I wasn't suggesting you meant that. Just that _whatever_ scheme comes up should have the balance of expenses in mind. I would be quite happy to pay a sub (with no special return, or maybe just a piss-up and reading get-together!) just to know that CW was safe. • October 30 at 9:51pm · LikeUnlike
• • Tina Giannoukos Any way I can help with will do; the shop is a community: refuge; ideas centre; meeting place; singular in every way yet plural. • October 30 at 11:20pm · UnlikeLike · 1 personLoading...
• • Jen Jewel Brown • dear Kris, you and R run a precious and highly respected resource. Wonder if you could link onto/affiliate with APC so that they publicise every book launch going on at Collected Works with their website, and in rerturn you cross-promote th...eir books and events on your blog by providing links and blurbs about their writers/events from time to time. As the sole bookshop in Melbourne which specialises in and stocks large amounts of poetry, especially Australian poetry, it's vital for Australian poets that you can go on, and your presence benefits the APC by helping poetry remain on sale. I also support the idea of buy one book.See More • October 30 at 11:53pm · UnlikeLike · 1 personLoading...
• • Rosemary Nissen-Wade Now that I live elsewhere, I would love it if you had an online list of your stock to help me shop there! • October 31 at 1:41am · LikeUnlike
• • Christopher Barnett kris & retta • • wish you both & the bookshop only the best but we live in a age of great barbarism • • avec force et tendresse • October 31 at 10:27am · LikeUnlike
• • Jennifer Compton a fundraiser - great idea - with a raffle etc • October 31 at 11:50am · LikeUnlike
• • Jennifer Compton • can i suggest a (small) book crossing shelf I saw this at a bookshop in rome and was delighted! when peop[le come in to liberate their books into the wild and see if there is anything they want on the shelf - then because they have a free b...ook they look about me and think, well i have saved money, i will buy a book too • at least that is the way i think it could workSee More • October 31 at 12:55pm · LikeUnlike
• • Rosemary Nissen-Wade The 'buy one book' idea is a real winner, too. • October 31 at 8:13pm · LikeUnlike
• • Natalie Davey Just have to add my note of deep support for what ever you do!! Plan to be in more often to allow my lovely shelves to groan with the delight of your Collected Works amore amore books! • Natalie xx • November 1 at 11:10pm
-----------------------------------------
I dont think I'm exaggerating to describe this as an avalanche of support! John Hunter conjured up the Collected Works Facebook Page one day. "What you need..." he said. I'm eternally grateful. This page has become the prime distributor of bookshop information. Early November, the following message from Robyn Rowland appeared :
"Dear Book Lovers
As you can see from Kris Hemensley’s public letter below, this icon of Australian Literature is struggling a bit in this climate. Remember the Salt appeal a couple of years ago, when Salt decided to ask every supporter to buy a book? It saved the press ...for now. Please do all you can to support Kris and Retta to keep this wonderful and rich bookshop going. It is a cultural landmark and deserves our wholehearted loving kindness ... And cash!! Over the years we have all benefited from the books we can peruse there and buy, but also for the support K and R have given through conversations and knowledge. Just passing on this info which you can find also on overloadnation.
All the best
Robyn"
This also elicited many responses including a suggestion from Alan Loney for a meeting at earliest opportunity. On the 12th November, Jenny Harrison wrote the following letter on the Overload site:
"Dear Friends of Collected Works
We've recently (and belatedly) become aware that the most significant poetry bookshop in Australia needs our support. We are forming a Friends of Collected Works, and we invite you to the inaugural meeting to discuss collaborative plans to support the bookshop (whose current directors are Catherine O'Brien, Kris Hemensley and Retta Hemensley) in its iconic literary vision. Many of us have already offered our support and we are interested in planning a series of events into the future. We intend to meet several times until we're assured that Collected Works continues the sure footing the principals have maintained alone for twenty years in the stead of the inaugural group of 1985. I imagine that future meetings would best be sited at a central point such as at the APC or VWC, but you are all invited to join us at Jennifer Harrison's place at 36 Upton Road, Prahran, on Sunday 21st November from 2 pm to 4 pm, to begin planning.
Warm regards
Jennifer Harrison"
At the meeting, attended by Elaine Lewis & Judith Buckrich (in their own right & representing PEN), Libby Hart, Ray Liversidge, Heather Clarke, Jennifer Harrison, Bob Morrow & Philip Salom, various questions were discussed. I quote the Aims & Objectives (discussion of ideas) from the agenda : "Why do we need a Friends of Collected Works? What do we want to achieve? Wider perspective : what kind of arts scene do we want to see? Short term: what help does Collected Works need now? Long term: imagining Collected Works in 5 years/ 10 years. How will we know we have been successful? (NB we need to remain sensitive to the boundary between Collected Works business practice and the role of Friends of Collected Works)"
As it transpired it was agreed that a formally constituted body wasnt the way to go, after all Collected Works is anti-bureaucratic & informal in its nature & modus-operandi. However a 'reference group' was happily accepted.
In my report to the meeting I mentioned an important earlier meeting with Ellen Koshland who counseled against approaches to the well known trusts & agencies, encouraging us to promote the Shop as the service provider it has always been in respect of poetry in Melbourne &, indeed, Australia, --thus the relevance of subscriptions, mail-order & web-site, & more in-house literary activities...
I pointed to the spontaneous action of 'friends', endorsed by the Bookshop (e.g. the jig-sawing of Libby Hart's twilight shopping event + raffle with Heather Clarke's idea of a promoted pre-Xmas shopping week), as the natural way of proceeding.
At this stage initiatives & ideas were flowing from all directions! Collaborations mooted between Collected Works & organizations like Australian Poetry, the VWC, the MWF, the MPU, PEN et al were especially encouraging.
What it all represented was a reactivation of the community support the Shop enjoyed back in 1985. It felt like a rebirth (a second honeymoon?)!
I did also say to the group that of itself none of this remarkable response had changed the fragile commercial reality but it had changed my attitude to it.
The event of December 8th at the Shop was astonishing ("historic" as Alex Skovron suggested).
There must have been in the vicinity of 150 people over the space of 4 or so hours in & out of the Shop. Many stayed for the duration despite the sauna type conditions! This event contributed significantly to the Shop enjoying its best trading month ever in 25 years...
And the rest is history!
------------------
[finished! New Year's Eve, 2010]
On the 31st October I posted the following email on the Overloadnation site:
"My Fellow Australians... We will fight them on the beaches... no, start again! Dear Overload friends, We've had to consider out future in light of the expected rent rise for our bookshop, to take effect 1st January 11... And, though it may be an extension of the same folly which had us open up in the first place, we will continue! The prospect of moving elsewhere was as awful as that of closing! But the price of the new 4 year lease will hurt, unless I can generate more sales and support. The point about the Shop is that though it is a little company, in the market place, it's never been profit oriented. Most of the receipts go into stock. The wages are minimal. Rent and stock are the major outgoings. The purpose of the Shop has always been to support writing, especially poetry, --Australian Poetry and literature within an international literary context. That's the rationale which makes the bookshop unique (certainly in Australia and New Zealand, possibly further afield). We obviously have sufficient support to be mentioned in the City of Literature document, but for all sorts of reasons support through the bead curtain is less than it might be. The recent rent hike squeezes us even more! The question remains, is there a place for an actual bookshop in this time of online purchasing, the ebook and other new technologies? A rhetorical question for me : the bookshop is a home for readers and writers of poetry and prose, a home for little presses, a venue for launches and readings, as it has been for 25 years or so. In a word, we're there for cultural as well as bookselling reasons. Our acceptance of the new lease will probably be sent this week! It will be a great encouragement to know if you support us! Perhaps a start might be making a new "friends of Collected Works" address list (email), for Melbourne and Australia generally. If you're interested please do write or phone or visit us! Cheers, Kris Hemensley"
The response was immediate & I can now say continuous. Invidious to recall some & not all but as a very partial index of the initial response, simply reading off the names of authors of emails, the list includes Michelle Leber, John Kinsella, Earl Livings, Patricia Sykes, Lyndon Walker, Melissa Watts, Leah Kaminsky, Josephine Rowe, Andrew Lindsay, Chris Grierson, Penny Gibson, Bron Thomasson, Kerryn Tredrea, Joan Kerr, Lyn Chatham, Anthony Lynch, Gregory Day, Ted Reilly, Paul Ashton, Caroline Williamson, Libby Hart, Ray Liversidge, Cyril Wong, Jennifer Harrison, Geelong Writers group, the VWC, Steve Grimwade, Mike Ladd, the APC, Paul Kane, Walter Struve...
Then we come to Facebook... The following is copied from the initial message :
"• Kris Hemensley • Time to grasp the nettle! Will we/wont we stay in business at present address as rent is considerably raised and receipts dwindle? After a week of deliberation & advice from friends we've just about decided to sign up for another 4 years! Any constructive thoughts are welcome! An exquisite moment : status of the book, the bookshop, the booktrade. All up for grabs! • October 29 at 10:35pm · LikeUnlike · Comment · Share
• • Jen Jewel Brown, Jennifer Compton, Nici Lindsay and 2 others like this.
• • Kris Hemensley I might need to sell a couple of valuable things to raise some security kitty! And wd love to know abt the on-line caper. Masterclasses gratefully received! • October 29 at 10:39pm · LikeUnlike
•
• Nicholas Pounder Kris, it is probably folly, but I would do the same if I had your reputation and record. And let's face it, a tradition to defend. • October 29 at 10:44pm · LikeUnlike · 1 personLoading...
• • Pamela Robertson-Pearce Kris I am with you in this. I was so inspired by your place/space that I opened up a bookshop/art gallery upon my return from OZ in the Northeast of the UK and it is not easy. I never thought it would be...however. I have planned more events, serve tea, regular sales...I knew a bookshop alone could not make it here and an art gallery alone could not either so I combined them. I will keep you updated AND I wish you all the best! Diversify is my two cents. • October 29 at 10:45pm · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley If you cld give me a clue abt the couple of books we discussed before wd be good Nick; and i DIDNT know Pamela abt your enterprise! What's it called ? Open All Hours? It was great having you & neil visit but wdnt have guessed i was sowing seeds! Thanks for morale boost! I guess ive sat on hands a little bit. Time to get up going again. Reinvest the 'business'... etc... • October 29 at 10:52pm · LikeUnlike
• • Pamela Robertson-Pearce Mine is called DJANG the art of life! Djang being an aboriginal word which you probably know already. Open all hours indeed!!! Ha ha almost impossible to do. No I bring work to do so I can use the time better at DJANG when it is slow. I am glad to hear you persevere! You are a beacon Kris! • October 29 at 11:15pm · LikeUnlike
• • John Fox Agree about the record and tradition, but feel v selfish about it; great for the rest of us to have Collected Works still there, but I hope it isn't at the cost of your approaching retirement in penury. • October 29 at 11:37pm · LikeUnlike · 2 peopleLoading...
• • Justin Clemens Yes best bookstore in Australia. • October 30 at 12:46am · LikeUnlike
• • Jennifer Compton i must visit more often and i must buy more often • October 30 at 1:11am · LikeUnlike
• • Cassie Lewis-Getman Thank you for keeping up the wonderful work, Kris, but do take care of yourself too! Online sales seem like a good way to go as a supplement, or even email sales- Ken Bolton sends out an email newsletter of books recently in at the EAF, something like this would be a cheap and immediate way to go. A facebook page talking about the history and purpose of the store is another idea that is low cost. For ideas you could look at the City Lights page see http://www.facebook.com/CityLightsBooks • October 30 at 1:15am · LikeUnlike · 1 personLoading...
• • Kris Hemensley hey justin! good luck for yr crack of dawn seminar tomorrow! Tina alerted me. And youll be pleased to know the college came good with their cheque yday! see you soon, K • October 30 at 1:36am · LikeUnlike
• • Catherine O'Brien • What to say Kris; take the risk and don't count the money each day....remember one time you had a fund raiser reading. Maybe that is a great idea to bring the situation to the attention of those who would support you but don't know. Online ...cannot work for you as you have no computer at the shop so you would be doubling your work by having to transcribe the books at the shop and then spend time at home on the computer. • Funny my 'hardly ever open" i:cat gallery in Vientianne has now more books than art and it is not really a bookshop...i feel like I am an out post of collected works..how to support you from here??????See More • October 30 at 2:30am · LikeUnlike
• • Judith Buckrich I am delighted that you've decided to stay and will make more of an effort to send people your way - maybe PEN can do something with you - I will ask at the next meeting • October 30 at 7:12am · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley • Thank you cathy and judith --'counting the money...", come on, that's not my style! I think it's the gradual switch to new technology, new cultural orientation etc --The city, the society more in flux now than when we started --But if i can... have a $$safety net then we can still be the meeting place, the news exchange, the infinite forum on poetry and ideas that is really our stock in trade --The equation of altruism & survival, the esoteric & the commercial --as ever! As i sd to Chrissie & Michael a year ago, after Dylan, you can be in our loop if i can be in your loop! So your thought, j, is pertinent... Now let's enjoy the races and the rain!!!See More • October 30 at 9:47am · LikeUnlike
• • Elizabeth Campbell Kris, I know you don't like gimmicks, but have you ever thought of a fundraiser/mailing list campaign like Salt did - buy one book to save the shop. I know so many people who would respond ps will be in today for two books! • October 30 at 9:57am · LikeUnlike · 1 personLoading...
• • David Wheatley I'd support that. Remember Chris Hamilton-Emery's 'just one book' campaign (though why stop at just the one). PS Elizabeth -- I owe you a book! • October 30 at 9:59am · LikeUnlike
• • Susan Fealy Dear Kris • • Four more years of Collected Works would be four more years of soft sunshine for the soul. • • XSusan • October 30 at 10:09am · LikeUnlike
• • Viki Mealings that's terrible that they've hiked up the rent so much • October 30 at 11:23am · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley Oh dear, what hath thou unleashed upon thy head and those of thine... um... I think it's much more a matter of getting with it in terms of the on-line biz, events, and reminding institutions who're in need of let's say australian poetry (but hey! the world's our oyster) that we can supply! The rent is inevitable, the commercial reality when i look at it calmly... After yday's excellent discussion with Ellen i feel heartened & resolved! Thanks everybody! • October 30 at 11:35am · LikeUnlike
• • Susan Hawthorne The book business is a tricky one right now. Like you Kris we halve trembled on the edge several times. But we're still here and I have some optimism for the future. • October 30 at 12:40pm · LikeUnlike
• • Philip Salom Kris, I have to agree with Elizabeth. There are multitudes of us and if we want you to stay on (and we do) we should (yes, I'm happy with should) do something to contribute. One book each? Easy. Maybe even have annual subscriptions of some sort? Many of us would be in it. • October 30 at 12:44pm · LikeUnlike
• • Elizabeth Gertsakis Hard one Kris; you represent a special place, but also need to take care of yourself. I would support the idea of all supporters/readers coming in to buy a book. Will come in to see you soon. • October 30 at 3:11pm · LikeUnlike
• • Brendan Ryan Kris, • I'd be happy to buy a poetry book as well. Collected Works is a special place. • October 30 at 3:34pm · LikeUnlike
• • Catherine Bateson I really like Philip's idea of an annual subscription - like a poetry club. In knitting circles there are indie spinners and dyers offering three month/six month sock clubs - you sign up and receive fibre/yarn, a sock pattern and often a small treat....fair trade coffee beans, a stitch counter. Six random months of poetry books - sounds great! • October 30 at 4:21pm · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley Thank you everybody... As it happens, this half day session at the Shop was reasonable what with races and rain... Carol Jenkins was visiting and also people from Perth and the continental perspective/reach of the Shop was so apparent... Interested in Philip's & Batherine B's club suggestion. I can be quite dense abt things so do email me for tips on how this cd work! • October 30 at 6:46pm · LikeUnlike
• • Kris Hemensley Batherine B? who she? I mean catherine Bateson of course! • October 30 at 6:47pm · LikeUnlike • •
Philip Salom Some sub. your customers - call us fans! - are happy to pay out each year. Maybe some discount deal as Catherine suggested, and/or just some 'privilege' from the shop. It can guarantee a sum each year for your budget, but on top of our and everybody else's purchases. We are direct beneficiaries of CW and this shouldn't be at your expense. • October 30 at 7:55pm · LikeUnlike
• • Catherine Bateson • No, I didn't mean at Collected Works expense - you'd sign up for three months - a book a month - what would that be? Average it out at $30.00 a book + postage - say $100.00, or $200.00 for six months and then Kris would choose three or six ...books to send out to the lucky person. These might come with a special subscribers newsletter - maybe with a couple of poetry reviews. It's actually not a discount deal at all - the sock clubs are part of how indie dyers/spinners make an artisan living out of pursuing their craft. The point is really in the element of surprise - you don't know what yarn you'll receive. Ditto with the books. But CW would be guaranteed of how many sales for that period. Naturally, being greedy little consumers we'd want to feel special - hence the newsletter or whatever it was - maybe an exclusive invite to a poetry club party....obviously you'd need to do the figures - and equally obviously this would be evened out - a $20.00 book one month, a $35.00 the next...I have no idea if it would work for books, but I've joined sock clubs! (Oh, and the other thing that the sock clubs often do is work around a theme - which would be possible for poetry, too.See More • October 30 at 8:28pm · LikeUnlike
• • Leah Kaminsky Sign me up for a subscription Kris! I also like the idea of all us poets getting together for a fundraiser for Collected Works, which is truly a Melbourne icon... it could be a HUGE event!! • October 30 at 9:11pm · UnlikeLike · 2 peopleLoading...
• • Sam Byfield I'd be up for a subscription Kris and for attending/participating in a fundraising event- anything to help out. I also wouldn't mind getting occasional emails with updates- recent books, things that have caught your attention, events coming up at the bookstore and poems on the blog- all things i'm interested in (and other people) but don't always have the chance to be as engaged and up to date as i'd like to be. • October 30 at 9:24pm · UnlikeLike · 1 personLoading...
• • Philip Salom Sorry, Catherine, I wasn't suggesting you meant that. Just that _whatever_ scheme comes up should have the balance of expenses in mind. I would be quite happy to pay a sub (with no special return, or maybe just a piss-up and reading get-together!) just to know that CW was safe. • October 30 at 9:51pm · LikeUnlike
• • Tina Giannoukos Any way I can help with will do; the shop is a community: refuge; ideas centre; meeting place; singular in every way yet plural. • October 30 at 11:20pm · UnlikeLike · 1 personLoading...
• • Jen Jewel Brown • dear Kris, you and R run a precious and highly respected resource. Wonder if you could link onto/affiliate with APC so that they publicise every book launch going on at Collected Works with their website, and in rerturn you cross-promote th...eir books and events on your blog by providing links and blurbs about their writers/events from time to time. As the sole bookshop in Melbourne which specialises in and stocks large amounts of poetry, especially Australian poetry, it's vital for Australian poets that you can go on, and your presence benefits the APC by helping poetry remain on sale. I also support the idea of buy one book.See More • October 30 at 11:53pm · UnlikeLike · 1 personLoading...
• • Rosemary Nissen-Wade Now that I live elsewhere, I would love it if you had an online list of your stock to help me shop there! • October 31 at 1:41am · LikeUnlike
• • Christopher Barnett kris & retta • • wish you both & the bookshop only the best but we live in a age of great barbarism • • avec force et tendresse • October 31 at 10:27am · LikeUnlike
• • Jennifer Compton a fundraiser - great idea - with a raffle etc • October 31 at 11:50am · LikeUnlike
• • Jennifer Compton • can i suggest a (small) book crossing shelf I saw this at a bookshop in rome and was delighted! when peop[le come in to liberate their books into the wild and see if there is anything they want on the shelf - then because they have a free b...ook they look about me and think, well i have saved money, i will buy a book too • at least that is the way i think it could workSee More • October 31 at 12:55pm · LikeUnlike
• • Rosemary Nissen-Wade The 'buy one book' idea is a real winner, too. • October 31 at 8:13pm · LikeUnlike
• • Natalie Davey Just have to add my note of deep support for what ever you do!! Plan to be in more often to allow my lovely shelves to groan with the delight of your Collected Works amore amore books! • Natalie xx • November 1 at 11:10pm
-----------------------------------------
I dont think I'm exaggerating to describe this as an avalanche of support! John Hunter conjured up the Collected Works Facebook Page one day. "What you need..." he said. I'm eternally grateful. This page has become the prime distributor of bookshop information. Early November, the following message from Robyn Rowland appeared :
"Dear Book Lovers
As you can see from Kris Hemensley’s public letter below, this icon of Australian Literature is struggling a bit in this climate. Remember the Salt appeal a couple of years ago, when Salt decided to ask every supporter to buy a book? It saved the press ...for now. Please do all you can to support Kris and Retta to keep this wonderful and rich bookshop going. It is a cultural landmark and deserves our wholehearted loving kindness ... And cash!! Over the years we have all benefited from the books we can peruse there and buy, but also for the support K and R have given through conversations and knowledge. Just passing on this info which you can find also on overloadnation.
All the best
Robyn"
This also elicited many responses including a suggestion from Alan Loney for a meeting at earliest opportunity. On the 12th November, Jenny Harrison wrote the following letter on the Overload site:
"Dear Friends of Collected Works
We've recently (and belatedly) become aware that the most significant poetry bookshop in Australia needs our support. We are forming a Friends of Collected Works, and we invite you to the inaugural meeting to discuss collaborative plans to support the bookshop (whose current directors are Catherine O'Brien, Kris Hemensley and Retta Hemensley) in its iconic literary vision. Many of us have already offered our support and we are interested in planning a series of events into the future. We intend to meet several times until we're assured that Collected Works continues the sure footing the principals have maintained alone for twenty years in the stead of the inaugural group of 1985. I imagine that future meetings would best be sited at a central point such as at the APC or VWC, but you are all invited to join us at Jennifer Harrison's place at 36 Upton Road, Prahran, on Sunday 21st November from 2 pm to 4 pm, to begin planning.
Warm regards
Jennifer Harrison"
At the meeting, attended by Elaine Lewis & Judith Buckrich (in their own right & representing PEN), Libby Hart, Ray Liversidge, Heather Clarke, Jennifer Harrison, Bob Morrow & Philip Salom, various questions were discussed. I quote the Aims & Objectives (discussion of ideas) from the agenda : "Why do we need a Friends of Collected Works? What do we want to achieve? Wider perspective : what kind of arts scene do we want to see? Short term: what help does Collected Works need now? Long term: imagining Collected Works in 5 years/ 10 years. How will we know we have been successful? (NB we need to remain sensitive to the boundary between Collected Works business practice and the role of Friends of Collected Works)"
As it transpired it was agreed that a formally constituted body wasnt the way to go, after all Collected Works is anti-bureaucratic & informal in its nature & modus-operandi. However a 'reference group' was happily accepted.
In my report to the meeting I mentioned an important earlier meeting with Ellen Koshland who counseled against approaches to the well known trusts & agencies, encouraging us to promote the Shop as the service provider it has always been in respect of poetry in Melbourne &, indeed, Australia, --thus the relevance of subscriptions, mail-order & web-site, & more in-house literary activities...
I pointed to the spontaneous action of 'friends', endorsed by the Bookshop (e.g. the jig-sawing of Libby Hart's twilight shopping event + raffle with Heather Clarke's idea of a promoted pre-Xmas shopping week), as the natural way of proceeding.
At this stage initiatives & ideas were flowing from all directions! Collaborations mooted between Collected Works & organizations like Australian Poetry, the VWC, the MWF, the MPU, PEN et al were especially encouraging.
What it all represented was a reactivation of the community support the Shop enjoyed back in 1985. It felt like a rebirth (a second honeymoon?)!
I did also say to the group that of itself none of this remarkable response had changed the fragile commercial reality but it had changed my attitude to it.
The event of December 8th at the Shop was astonishing ("historic" as Alex Skovron suggested).
There must have been in the vicinity of 150 people over the space of 4 or so hours in & out of the Shop. Many stayed for the duration despite the sauna type conditions! This event contributed significantly to the Shop enjoying its best trading month ever in 25 years...
And the rest is history!
------------------
[finished! New Year's Eve, 2010]
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