I. M. CORNELIS VLEESKENS

Poems & pieces gathered by Pete Spence including collaborations with Cornelis Vleeskens & reminiscences from Hendrik Kolenberg & Rob Kars.

Edited by Kris Hemensley, 2012/2013.


ooOoo


PETE SPENCE



Cornelis Vleeskens.


Curvature of the mind
Ornate beyond straight thought
Rallies over a Dutch mass like
Noctiluca  effervescing over an
Evening beverage that would spoil
Latte specialists or transient
Inertia plagued by
Solar encroachment

Verily the candescence
Leans like an oblique sheen
Emerging at pace without
Effort or so it
Seems as you take another
Keen lope into the marbled
Entropic margin
New each moment
Sails brightly aloft




ooOoo



Cornelis Vleeskens : list of publications

This list is not in order of publication its in the order i
picked each title up from the pile some chapbooks
have no publishing name noted in list as "no publishing
title" the rest are by EarthDance Cornelis'
publishing title after Fling there are some by DnD
done in Fitzroy around the early to mid 90's dates of
publication only where it is stated on the publication
and i have rarely described any book they take
up 3 main styles Poetry/Visual Poetry/Ink Brush works.
all books by Cornelis Vleeskens any collaborations will
be noted as "with". and finally this list is surely not complete
pete spence




The Departure Lounge. Post Neo Publications. Melbourne. 1987.
Set Pieces. Mighty Thin Books. Ocean Grove. 1998.
Foreshore. Mighty Thin Books. Ocean Grove. 1998.
50/50. Mighty Thin Books. Ocean Grove.1998.
Garween Heron Songs. Mighty Thin Books. O.G. 1998.
Summer House. Mighty Thin Books. O.G. 1999.
Homage. Mighty Thin Books. O.G. 1998.
Catch. Mighty Thin Books. O.G. 1998.
Salmon Wind. with pete spence. Mighty Thin BOOKS. O.G.  1999.
Big Jolt Funk. Mighty Thin Books. 1998.
Manifesto. Mighty Thin Books. 1999.
A HA. Red Fox Press. Ireland. 2011.
Divertimenti. EarthDance. 2010. Glen Innes.
Sand and Sun Waking. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Gedraag je als een aap in het landschap. with Paul Ritt. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Poissons Savages. with Tim Gaze. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
4 GE( )ICHTEN. No Publishing Title. c. late 1980's.
INKT. No Publishing Title. Cape Paterson.
Candied Eye. with pete spence. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Four Winds. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Naked Dreams. Dutch Poetry in Translation. Post Neo. St.Kilda. 1980's.
Fragments. Earthdance. Glen Innes.
"On the Street Where you Live"/"Rondom de Straten waer ick Liep". No Publishing Title.
De Noorder Wind. (In Dutch) No Publishing Title.
Point Blank. with pete spence. EarthDance.
No Holds Barred. Dutch Poetry. EarthDance. Glen Innes. 2009.
Suite 4 pete. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Field(Flide). EarthDance. 1999?
Ten Years After. CV 23 Nov. 98.
Four Short Fictions. Fling Poetry 1988.
Oblad. with Dirk de Bruyn. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
For a Song. No Publishing Title.
(2X4) Poems (Visual Poems). EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Earth my Faith. EarthDance. Melbourne. 1993.
1970-1980. Open Hand Press. Geelong.
(S)HIVER. 1999.
Papercut. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Stinging Nettles. EarthDance. Glen Innes. 2011.
Improper Sonnets. for Paul Burns. EarthDance. Glen Innes. 2011.
Tete a Tete. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Alpha-Cartography, South by South. with pete spence. Runnawayspoon Press. USA. 2001.
Portal. (Vis/Po). EarthDance. Cape Paterson 1998.
De Ontdekking van Niew Holland. No Publishing Title.
Beyond the Frame. EarthDance. Melbourne. 1993.
Het Gedrang van de Leegte/ The Overwhelming Emptiness. Fling. Melbourne. 1987.
Double Dutch. with Paul Ritt. Fling Poetry. (Edition of 25 copies.)
Night After Night. (Edition of 25.) 1991.
Talen Vervallen. Fling. Edition of 50. 1991.
Ochre Dancer. EarthDance. Cape Paterson. 1999.
Rembrandt's Windmill. EarthDance. Glen Innes. 2011.
"A". EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Please Add Too!!!. Various Collaborators. Open Hand Press. Geelong. 1999.
Echos. No Publishing Title. Cape Paterson.
Score. DnD Press. 2001.
Collapoems. EarthDance.
No Synchro in First. No Publishing Title.
MarketPlace. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Eftal. Artist Book. Edition of 25.
HeatWave. Cape Paterson.
The Sense we Have Left. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Sketches. with Jenni Mitchell. Fling. 1982.
The Final Chapter. Fling Poetry. Melbourne. 1988.
The Huntsman. Joker Press. Cape Paterson (?)
Iommer. Oerdans. (Earthdance)
Cubist Cigars. Cape Paterson.
Triple Bypass. with Tim Gaze & John Crouse. Annabasis/EarthDance. 2003.
Descending a Staircase. No Publishing Title.
Soiled Litigants. with Tim Gaze. DnD Press. 2002.
Musee. No Publishing Title.
Haiku (calligraphy) No Publishing Title.
Tien Gedichen/Ten Poems (Dutch/English) Fling. 1984/5.
PostDuiven. No Publishing Title.
Senses Ajar (Pamphlet) No Publishing Title.
JJA. EarthDance.
Red Dust. No Publishing Title.
Klad-Werk (corrections copy) No Publishing Title.
Spring Rains. EarthDance.
For Love. (Typographic Poem). EarthDance.
+ A.   No Publishing Title.
These Text(D)ualities. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Fancy Free Flight. with Tim Gaze. EarthDance.
Cape Haiku. EarthDance. Cape Paterson. 1997.
Snakes of Fire Rivers of Sand. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
SWASH. No Publishing Title.
Brush Poems. EarthDance.
Utterances. EarthDance. Glen Innes. 2011.
Reindeer Dreaming. EarthDance. 1994.
The EarthDance Summer Collaborations. with Greg Stephens/
      Pul Ritt/ Suzy Kepert/Dirk de Bruyn/ Sharon Hodgson/
      Patrick Alexander/ pete spence.  EarthDance. 1999.
Another Slim Volume. Fling. 1984.
Eagles Nest. with Sharon Hodgson. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
(Narration) for Henri M. & Chr. D.  EarthDance. Glen Innes.
Pause and Effect. with Sharon Hodgson. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
East-SouthEast.  Ars Publications.
Des Formes. No Publishing Title.
Triplets. with Tim Gaze & John Crouse. Telepathine Press. 2004.
Mon.07.08.00. with Tim Gaze. No Publishing Title.
L'Espirit. EarthDance.
10. A selection of Artist Books by Cornelis Vleeskens. Curated by pete spence.
Orange Blizzard. QLD. Community Press. 1981.
Orange Blizzard. (reprint) EarthDance. Glen Innes. 2005.
Air Conditioned Gypsy. (The Tokyo Notebooks). Fling Poetry. 1992.
Salted Herring. Fling Poetry. 1980.
HongKong Suicide. Gargoyle Poets 20. Makar Press. 1976.
CV. PressPress. 2009.
Tree Frog Dreaming. Fling Poetry. 1990.
Een Oogopslag. (handmade hand written) Edition of 1 (?).
Broken Lines. (Images by Paul Ritt) Fling Poetry. Edition of 50.
Through the Eye of the Scissors. J. Elberg. (Translation). Open Hand Press. Geelong. 1999.
Fine White Lines. with Tim Gaze & Michael Basinski. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
Unconscious at Cape Paterson. with Tim Gaze. Annabasis/Xtant. 2002.
On 2 Walkabout. EarthDance.
Learc. No Press Title.
I  E  A  O  U. EarthDance. Cape Paterson.
X<>Bar Gazing. Open Hand Press. Geelong. 1999.
Whoroo-Turn. Cape Paterson.
Olympiad. Cape Paterson. 2000. Edition of 1 (?) Signed.
Jia. (Loose Folder) Issue No. 3 of 5.
Unconscious at Cape Paterson. (2nd printing) Coromandel Valley Books.
T( )T. (Handmade) No.15 of 24. Signed. 1998.
Images. (Handmade) (penciled in in colour) No. 13 of 15. 1991. signed.
Meridies. with pete spence. Look!! Poetry!! Ocean Grove 1998.
Dutch- Australian Broadsheets No.4 Fling Poetry. 1989. Nos. 1/2/3
    in print ready form in pete spence's Archive.
The Wider Canvas. EarthDance. 1996.
Nothing Kept. Brunswick Hill Press. 1986.
The Day The River. UQP.
Sittings For a Family Portrait. Post Neo 1988
15 Various handmade with hand painted covers (1 offs)
Silent Music. A Suite for Theo Kuijpers. EarthDance.
      hand painted covers in Dutch & English. Glen Innes.
South Africa. for Rob Kars. hand painted front cover. Glen Innes.
The Exotic Other. The Portrayal of Aboriginal Culture on
      Australian Postage Stamps & related Philatelic products.
      EarthDance. Cape Paterson. 1999.
INKT. (Set of Artist proofs in covers for the chapbook INKT listed earlier.
Full Moon Over Lumpine Park. Fling Poets 2. 1982.
Sweet Penguin- Linked Verse by Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime
   ink brush work throughout the publication by Cornelis Vleeskens
   chapbook printed August 2000 unknown publisher.









oOo














HENDRIK KOLENBERG



Cornelis


The last time I saw him was October 2011. He was thinner than when I had seen him previously, two years earlier – he seemed somewhat fragile, but looked well enough to me. He made the long journey to Sydney with 2 bars of silver, payment for some of his tachist-calligraphic drawings and collages. He cashed them in with a dealer in the city and came away with about twelve hundred dollars. So Cornelis, a friend of mine Rob Kars and I spent that day, a Friday, in the city.

We walked to the AGNSW where we looked at Bram Bogart’s Day-break together, had a late takeaway lunch/early dinner at Circular Quay and watched Werner Herzog’s Cave of forgotten dreams in a cinema nearby. He noted that Rob and I fell asleep every so often, even though we were both otherwise absorbed by the film. Afterwards we walked from Circular Quay to Central, where Cornelis was staying in a hotel overnight. That evening George Street was like Mammon’s feast with nubile barely dressed young women dashing about. All three of us, well into our 60s, took note of that!

Cornelis had come to Sydney at my suggestion to meet Rob, my closest Dutch friend. Rob had come to stay for about 4 weeks. I had introduced them on the telephone three years before – Cornelis from my place in Sydney, Rob Kars from his in Weert in the southern province of Limburg, Netherlands. It worked a treat. They got on well by phone and soon after were sending one another hand-made cards by post. Meeting up was the next step. Rob had come halfway round the world via China, so it seemed fair to ask Cornelis to make the journey to Sydney. Glen Innes seems further than Holland to me, though Rob would have been up for it, especially after the journey he’d just made.

The next day Cornelis joined us for lunch at home on our back verandah, with my wife and a couple of other friends  – John Philippides and Willemina Villari, both artists. John is a masterly draughtsman, an Alexandrian Greek, who divides his time between his home/studio in the Blue Mountains and his home/studio in his birthplace, Alexandria. Willemina is a sculptor and painter/draughtswoman, born in Holland and married to an Italian. I think he felt at home.

Cornelis had a particular way of looking at you, or so it seemed to me – around rather than through or over his glasses and almost shyly, or was it slyly, with a hint of a smile – amusement, contentment perhaps, or was it his undoubted but idiosyncratic wisdom? That hint of a smile remained somewhat unnervingly in place, whether he was talking or not. He wasn’t given to babbling. It was as if he waited for the right moment to speak, or catch you out. He smoked, drank red wine, took part in conversation, made a number of drawings he gave to everyone and left before dark to catch the train to Central and early next morning, back to Glen Innes.

We again reverted to emailing. His were from Glen Innes public library, a good half hour walk from his small weatherboard house on the outskirts of town. His email address was cvphobia, which suited him perfectly. His letters or emails were distilled and ordered into poems, short and to the point.

Our first contact had also been by telephone, early in 2008. There were numerous telephone conversations before we met some months later in October at his house in Glen Innes. Our friendship grew out of his translations of Dutch poetry – Jan Elburg, Koos Schuur, Bert Schierbeek, Lucebert, Simon Vinkenoog, Karel Appel and others, all major figures in the renewal of Dutch culture post World War 2 – for the catalogue to an exhibition of post-war Dutch art at the AGNSW, Intensely Dutch. His translations seemed effortless, almost spontaneous and entirely convincing. I soon admired him for more than his translations. He was singular in person and poetry. Often his poetry is autobiographical. At times details about his life – words, phrases, entire poems – are in Dutch (his first language and mine) flowing freely into and around his use of English. I have collected whatever I can find of what he has written and he sent me whatever he could spare, including anything new. Before he left that Saturday evening last October, he typed all of Trivial pursuits into my computer, his parting gift, something I value even more now.

[26 May 2012]




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



ROB KARS




The three of us, “young” men of precariously advanced age, are walking through East Sydney. It is our fate to be immigrant offspring to the end of our days. We are at peace with that. Better still, for years now, we have worn the label “Dutchy” as an honorary nickname. HK, who is an excellent painter, curator, and writer, walks ahead of us. He has to do that. Everywhere and always he is going at his own stiff unbeatable pace to work, even when on holiday. CV and I, RK, lag way behind him. CV, the handicapped beatnik, “excellent retired poet/dadaist from up north”, despite the fact that he left Holland at the tender age of ten, is smoking a dutch style selfrolled fag. He drags his feet a little. His shoes are too big, worn out. But he is a happy man these days. An old lady-friend has bought five of his collage works and paid him in silver bars (which she had unexpectedly inherited). And the first thing he will do once the silver has been cashed, is buy a new decent pair of boots. Me, reasonably capable, lyrical abstract painter from Weert, Netherlands, look at the ground. I like doing that in places I do not visit often. Actually, I do that everywhere, all the time. The most beautiful things, in fact, are mostly just lying around for the taking. Meanwhile CV and I are having a discussion. About zen. Of which we don’t know very much.

“All creatures are as they are, and find their mutual connection” (Zhuang Zi)

I linger to take a photograph of a traffic sign painted on the pavement. It is the internationally renowned man-with-a-hat holding the little pig-tailed girl by the hand. CV waits patiently. H is
higher up the road at the crossroads, also waiting. He looks a little guilty, one hand above his eyes, against the fierce sun. We notice a brightly coloured piece of paper lying on the ground, a magnificent street jewel. “Yes, that’s beautiful, says CV. And then, when I have picked it up and put it in my bag, “but not anymore now. Now we shall have to wait and see what comes of it...”.

Rob Kars 13/6/2012


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



PETE SPENCE


Days and Nights in Glen Innes for Cornelis Vleeskens.


is Glen Innes Time really recyclable?
you wake up and its morning again
the same clouds nested at the compass points
a platter of blue overhead that sometimes lasts
even though you wake at any part of the morning
even after noon has trotted by apace with the wind
you wake nonetheless and don't look at the clock

should we have concern for clocks?
how are they fed? are they too wound up by our noise?
they're everywhere! no matter how many none will
ever make time! its never on hand when you want it
its unknown if it even heeds itself!

and if we saved them from the rust of laziness
in this damp mobile air would we save time
or waste time? there's no time to save i think
i think you should let it go


oOo



PETE SPENCE & CORNELIS VLEESKENS


Collaborations





oOo

  

Salmon Wind


monosyllabic
                     celibacy!
sounds Cyrillic!
            even at this hour!
                                      but!
your overspeak
is a plague!
yet nature is my period!
HAH!
as if the 80's
was like making
a herbal tea
among the plankton
and the RUSH!
or were we both
RUSHing somewhere else!
an else like pursed lips!
can you excuse me
if i throw a forest
a kiss!    even
from the distance
you proffer
given now
it is further
than it now
might be!



[from an issue of  Mighty Thin Books]



oOo






Everyone's Biro.

everyone's biro
has a point!
how else explain
this enormous
amount of exclamation
marking the decease
of "plain song"?

i've just
been isolated
by a plinth!

here a bit of coral
might interfere
but walking into
a bit of marble

sure bruises
interuptus!




oOo



For Guido.

i'd die willingly
for an avacado!
mango mango
ah! a guitarist
without a jube!
a tube minus a tub
a tub without water
and these strings
these strings
are untuned
sing sweetly low chariot
this ride this peace
is everlasting



oOo



If This.


if this is how
our treatment
is metered out
in the broad nuance
of a block of ice
under the weather
like a cloud
hailing a taxi
in a Bangkok breeze
then the Yangtze
Bridge Club begs
for Jenni to add
a line! where's
Jenni? what good year
was that? iced over
with coffee grounds
trimmed by
a caring gardener
and a wayward
shard on an English
crisis amid
the fair mud

flapping like a stiff...
o! just like Jenni (in brief!)

and bulging eyed eyeing
the distant horizontal clouds
eyeing full eyed
in a bloated distance
mister potato stuck
with pin pricks eyes
the colloidal musk



oOo




[notes :
On Sunday, May 27, 2012 at 3:13 pm
Kris : i found these 3 today from the Cape Paterson days
+

Guido is Guido Vermeulin a dude we both knew in Brussels
when i went into his flat the first thing i saw was
a flyer for a reading in Amsterdam by Cornelis!!]

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

Kris Hemensley note :

A few years ago the artist Kevin Lincoln asked me if I knew of any Dutch speakers &/or poets he might be able to suggest to his curator/art historian friend, Hendrik Kolenberg, who was both generally interested but specifically hoping for assistance with translation. I offered the name of Cornelis Vleeskens; Kevin bought a couple of his collections to send to Hendrik. The rest is history : Cornelis worked on the translation of texts & poems by the COBRA poets & artists which are included in Hendrik Kolenberg's catalogue for that major exhibition. He self-published a chapbook with some of the translations; NO HOLDS BARRED (2009). 

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


--Westgarth, Oz, March 24th, 2013.

ON THE RUN

ON THE RUN : as though a journal : posts retrieved from Facebook

   December 2, 2012

    I.M. Charles Buckmaster, 40th anniversary of that terrible day, 26th November, 1972. Tonight i share a paragraph from my December 1972 journal, a page following report on Gough Whitlam's momentous federal election victory :

    "[3rd December,'72] The suicide of Charles Buckmaster was the sad news forwarded to us from 2 different sources last week. Michael Dugan phoned one evening --& Margaret Taylor on the Thursday evening we were out (visiting Betty Burstall & later Paul Adler & Ena in Carlton). It was not unexpected. Margaret sd that he had seen 'top consultants' & that he was 'doomed'. We are told that there is a family history of this... Charles was 21. So young. & yet --the poem he published in The Age 2 years ago --which i hadnt seen until Judy Duffy [Loretta's sister] showed it to us a couple of weeks or so ago-- was astonishingly authoritative & mature. [The Age poem was 'Starting Out', beginning, "That the changes have been swift / and uninvited. // That their year tore by, your holy face / matures like the dawn: centering / on some great simplicity / of right living. // I can't know you at all..."]] In retrospect all the poems appear to be suicide notes (Mark Hyatt [English poet] was another such case) --but 2 poems in particular --The Age poem, & 'Seed' which i published in Earth Ship #7 --the most moving epistles. i wrote a piece of prose for/to Charles three evenings ago....

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

January 7th, 2013

Turn on the telly and who should be on the screen but Silka Genovese being interviewed by Jane Edmondson (from Gardening Australia and 3AW's Big Back Yard) about the w/ful horticultural history of an Italian family's hectare in Brunswick, ultimately gifted to CERES (for whom Silka works). If that wasnt sufficient fame to absorb, turn the telly back on for the doco on Twiggy (England in the 60s via Carnaby Street, King's Road, Chelsea et al) and there's Jeremy Reed, sociologically erudite, sharp as a pin and dressed to the nines (as befitted the subject).
 It was nice to catch up with Silka at George G's book launching at Collected Works late November, but havent seen Jeremy for ten years? Last time was with John Robinson driving us to & fro Marc Almond's book launch at Borders in Brighton; stuck in central London grid lock (wch we werent to know was consequence of Brixton bombing), and then all that tea at the Grand Hotel finally catching up with us : hilarious attempt to relieve bladders in a side street wch John brilliantly discovered but only to be lit up like rabbits when the apartment block's security lights turned night into day! I'll be tuning in for tonight's trysting with celebrities with baited breath!


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

  January 17th, 2013

    A great night, kicking off our Summer in the City series (next is the Yeats Poetry Prize committee's lunchtime session to celebrate another Yeats anniversary, 29th January --cdnt have it on the official date, wch is Australia Day & a holiday) : Pam Brown lead in by Corey Wakeling, Duncan Hose & Ann Vickery. A full house --thanks everyone for turning out.
    A distinctive feature of the reading was its curator's introduction & mini-critique of each of her guests, ie, what & why Gig Ryan [poet & poetry editor at The Age, Melbourne] appreciated in their poetry & poetics. I think that was valuable in itself. The 'proof of the pudding' beside the point...
    During the a/noon had another conversation with Alan Pose abt the way we think of & listen to contemporary (any) music --i've been enjoying Chris Dench & Diana Burrell CDs, recent purchases. But i was unaware of any connection between the two until Alan told me of Chris Dench appreciation of her. Excuse the long-windedness of this comment but to an extent the conversation [in my mind, that is : Alan is hereby excused any responsibility!] turned upon the adequacy or validity of the pictorial/representational vs abstract categorisations often fielded. All too obvious that there's no clear or absolute distinction : envisaged space (landscape eg) & aural or phonic space (music) occupy a continuum. I could say that it's governed by perception rather than description (seen/scene/seen)...Listening to the reading i felt beautifully prepared by that discussion (as well as the music)! Pam Brown (& what a great long last poem she read --vernacular's sleight-of-hand, the diary meta-poem) described the Melbourne posse as fellow experimenters --i guess she meant poets who're seriously engaged with the late modernist english-language poetry, all new yorky even when it aint!
It is invidious here to call preferences because the reading was very much a conversation or collective demonstration of shared mode at the heart of wch was a 'golden laughter'...

------------------------------------
[January 21, 2013
By MelbourneArtNetwork
Lecture | ‘Broken Pastoral and the English Folk’ Professor Tim Barringer
 Paul Mellon Professor of Art History, Yale University

This paper examines the revived interest in folk culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, exploring the relationships between ethnography, musicology and the study of historical arts and crafts.

It places within this matrix the work of photographers, painters and composers, who derived both motifs and models for avant-garde artistic identity from the study of the rural poor. Professor Tim Barringer contends that the aesthetic potency of visual and musical compositions drawing on folk sources lay in the widespread acknowledgement of the imminent disappearance of folk culture in the face of modernity and mechanized warfare.

Under consideration are the photographer P.H. Emerson, painters George Clausen, Henry Herbert La Thangue and Augustus John, the gardener and writer Gertrude Jekyll, ethnographer E.B. Tylor, and composers Sir Hubert Parry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger.]

The art & music we've come to know, love, and fundamentally refer to, elicited by yesteryear's avant-garde from "the rural poor" (according to the abstract above) has surely became an optic for the general culture's celebration of the non-metropolitan, sourced in the country & ex-urban environments. What did i see on F/book the other day? : oh yes, a lovely painting by Eric Ravilious matched to a photograph of the actual village & landscape... nothing earth-shattering abt that but simply a tiny example of the way art reflects life reflects art : creativity's essential dynamic! What i dont want to hear at the lecture is cliches abt elitist exploitation, wayward nostalgia & etc! But, yes, sounds good!

*

Furthermore (yes! ive been sitting in the front room/library, thinking), a great resource for this discussion is Alexandra Harris's brilliantly researched & exceptionally readable book, Romantic Moderns : English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (T&H, 2010). Reflecting upon Benjamin Britten's cynicism abt the relationship of the folk movement to the English Musical Renaissance, she says, "He was certainly right(...) : folk song had not played much part in musical life for centuries. [But] The point of the revival was to close over the gap, asserting by sheer force of will that the vital rhythms of English music had been continuous across the ages. Where the folk revival was potentially limiting, the closely related return to Renaissance court music offered both patriotic appeal and more scope for complex experiment. Britten turned to the 'discordant harmonies' of Purcell, taking inspiration from his fusion of the familiar and the strange. Extensive scholarship on 16th & 17th C music, pioneered by Arnold Dolmetsch and gathering momentum all through the 1920s and 1930s, opened new possibilities for composition. Just as medieval stained glass suggested to John Piper ways of understanding the abstractions of Leger, early music offered English composers new perspectives on the modern. it is characteristic of this generation that Peter Warlock, whose 1926 book The English Ayre recovered a whole corpus of early songs, was also the first Englishman to write a substantial appreciation of Arnold Schoenberg." I doffs me cap and rests me case!!!

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

    January 28th, 2013

    Hemensleys down to the sea again this morning, and once on the beach, altho no one else in the water, just had to go in! Coldish but quickly adapted. Beach & Bay report classified Elwood as Good and believe me the sea was clear, gentle waves, no burning sun, totally acceptable. Float on back, dog paddle, stick head under water & look around, the whole biz! (No, didnt actually swim hard or far!) How many more beach days does this summer hold? After drying/changing on the grass banking, breakfasted at the little kiosque and once more made short work of the toasted cheese & tomato s/wiches! Washed down with tea/coffee. Continued my latest note on Ivor Gurney in notebook. Dawned on me i was sitting in the particular way with the very expression Dad adopted when the aggregate of an occasion's pleasure suffused like a blush. He'd have liked this, i said. In his prime. Hopefully i'm still in mine!
   
-----------------------------

January 30th, 2013


 One can but note & mourn the passing of the men & women of one's time. Anselm Hollo (1934-2013) a little older than us lot. His UK class would include Edwin Brock (1927-97), Tarn (b.'28), Alan Brownjohn (b.'31), Geoffrey Hill (b.'32), Jeff Nuttall (1933-04), B S Johnson (1933-73), Harry Fainlight (1935-82), Michael Horowitz (b '35)... Come to think of it, same era as Peter Porter & Chris Wallace-Crabbe... Different kinds of poets, all mortal... I think Hollo went to the US ahead of Tarn, had only been in London a few years. I loved the image of him as per a review in the English papers ca '65/66, the Venusian from Helsinki or was it the Finn from Venus?!! RIP, indeed.
 Of course, most of the above well behind him as he became an American poet. Many lives indeed. An interesting paper wld be abt those who left the UK for the US & other places. Whether they commuted (like many of the Irish, feet firmly in both) or cast off old world like previous skin. You hear my own song in that, hopefully not a wail!


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


February 9th, 2013

Tim Barringer's lecture last night worth its weight in gold if only for the audio-visual illustrations, the singing of the great Joseph Taylor for example. I suppose the prof was running the gauntlet between latterday 'everything's a construct' cynicism & erstwhile 'the real thing' nostalgia. Like the good thing he evidently is, Barringer resolved the 'argument' with that hybrid which close-reading encourages. The extension of his presentation would, I hope, throw it all into another spin as 'tradition' & 'avant garde' exchange positions through the years! I'm on the run this morning so more later! Excellent support for the lecture.

*

 I wish you'd all been there! I wonder if papers from the conference (Tim B's talk was a keynote) are up on the web anywhere? Naturally one brings one's own box & dice to any such presentation, for example my long standing belief that the sincere response (in this case to the pastoral) is a meeting with and extension of that source. It is manipulation on technical/techique level but not distortion or falsification in ethical or moral sense --Vaughn Williams, Delius, Percy Grainger were surely proceeding from the folk songs, riffing in favour of their own music. In the case of the Joseph Taylor recording which the prof played, the singer's distinctive trill in Brig Fair is actually quoted or retained in the modern version. Pure magic to my ears! So yes, i had a number of "yes but"s in my notebook at lecture's end, which didnt in any way diminish my respect for the presentation & quality of research & suggestive insight. The William Barnes example was one such. I loved his reference to Barnes but disagreed totally that V Williams' Linden Lea sanitized the dialect, as if (my point) Barnes were some peasant-innocent and not the grammarian & linguist he was, who wrote in Standard English as well as Dialect. Etc etc etc Most stimulating as i hope you appreciate. Washed down with a pint of cider at Percy's (most appropriate) in company of Alan Pose!
(Tim B told us at the start that he'd spent the day at the Grainger Museum in Parkville and what he'd gleaned had affected his own thesis! Local boy makes good on one level ('we love you Melbourne') but pretty interesting...)



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

February 12th, 2013

Letter to Ted Reilly, re- 50th Anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death

 Hi Ted, wish i had been given Plath at school but it was all too new then! I loved Lawrence, disliked Hardy, got Spender but struggled with Hopkins & McNiece. That was in 1963, unaware of contemporary poets, wch also might mean the teacher was too; or she stuck to the GCE syllabus so as not to distract us. Southampton Tech College, 1962-64. I was writing vastly more prose than poems, dropped out the next year, didnt really encounter Plath (& it was Plath & co, that is Lowell & co) til Xmas '66, in Oz by now, when i was given the The New Poetry anthology, edited by Alvarez, masquerading beneath Jackson Pollock cover. I say 'masquerading' deliberately because i didnt find the "new" i desperately wanted to encounter... I'd taken to Williams in '65, and Ginsberg, Snyder, Levertov & the Beats followed. Not much room for Plath... I recall hating Lowell in that anthology, but liking Berryman (still a poet i read)! And Nat Tarn's essay World Wide Open, published in International Times in '67, gave me the excuse for my avoidance & ideological repudiations : Tarn's quip, 'we cannot afford madness' (that is in this politically apocalyptic time)... as though it were a choice... I preferred Bly, & older poets like Jeffers, and Pound NOT Eliot... you get the picture Ted!!! I guess it wasnt really until i was a (still) young poet & teaching at the Council of Adult Education in Melbourne, mid '70s, through the '80s, that i allowed myself to read the other side (as it felt), if only to join my students in their reading tastes. So Hopkins, Eliot, & Plath... The teacher taught by his students! That is, the openness i was encouraging (Olson & Duncan my mentors) opened my ears & eyes to the poems themselves, free from partisan distraction & fashion! Letting the words (the poems) enflame, not the lives of the poets! Or, not merely the misleading lives...Thanks for yr words Ted... Are you still teaching?


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

February 14th, 2013

 My best sense of Robert Bly admittedly from a long time ago, 60s, The Light Around the Body etc I wrote to him ca 1967 when he donated his Pulitzer (or Nat Bk Award?) money to a draft resister. Also sent him copy of my little mag, Our Glass, wch had published translations from contemporary Swedish poets by Peter Adams (student of Marianne Berregren in Swedish Dept at Melb University). Mr Bly endorsed them!
 His 'Leaping Poetry' essay was important i think. And 'Deep Image' out of Lorca, Rilke et al brilliant contradiction to A-A-A-American localism (itself attractive --WCW, Olson etc)... Iron John was fun but so too the Great Mother he thought to supplant... His Mirabai wonderful... CONGRATULATIONS!

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

February 21st, 2013

I hadnt thought too much abt Richard Alpert (+ Timothy Leary) after the '60s, but mid '80s when i began re-thinking & rereading philosophical, political & literary positions, i came upon Baba Ram Dass --probably via Transpersonal Psychology journal, and that via wonderful lecture at the 1984 Deep Ecology conference in Melbourne given by Warwick Fox. And then, Cathy O'Brien said she'd always had this copy of Be Here Now by Ram Dass, since the 70s at least...!

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

February 21st, 2013

To Pamela Robertson-Pearce re- Graeme Miles' Recurrence (John Leonard Press, Melbourne,2012)

Graeme Miles' Recurrence is one of the best of the recent crop (and it's a veritable Aussie harvest these days)... Elizabeth Campbell's discussion could have been described as "the status of myth in post-modernity"!  Naturally her respect & enthusiasm for the poems ultimately had Graeme's unique collection centre stage. I wonder if there's a discussion to be had around the highly individual accomplishment of a number of ex-West Australian poets in recent times? Michael Heald, Phil Salom, Mal McKimmie, & Marion May Campbell also spring to mind. By individual i mean determinedly out-of-left-field works... and heady without sacrificing the palpable. Something like that!

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

March 6th, 2013

Thinking y'day about my own change of mind re- Thos Hardy, wrote in my journal : "When Eric Mottram described my poems [Poem of the Clear Eye?] as the opposite of 'Hardyesque modesties', i felt vindicated --ambition in terms of subject & form being my register --& for many years -- Ah well, the wheel turns -- Ancient Chinese & medieval Japanese (current reading) hardly modest in the way i was opposing when i was younger --but if Hardy has a place for me now it's within the equanimity established by them (the T'ang ancients)..."
This still in my mind as i listened to Lyn McCredden's brilliant encapsulation of Chris Wallace-Crabbe's body of work, that (if i remember correctly) despite the 'thing itself' yielding to the facts of the day (& everyday), his doggedness & stoicism, his wit to see & respond, there were the darker edges, deep sadnesses...
Not sure as i write this how the two states of mind coalesce! Still thinking this through...
Maybe it's the Hardy of "he was a man who remembered such things" (--the poem i'd disliked when young but came around to understanding later) i'm relating to CWC...

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

March 9th, 2013

Preparing for my next trip to England. Consult Vivienne Light's great compendium, Circles & Tangents : Art in the shadow of Cranbourne Chase (Canterton Books, 2011). I remember conversation with Bernard H years ago : he'd written his Cemetery Lodge Poems and we envisaged ever widening circle, thus the Thomas Hardy Poems, and further, further... Vivienne Light explains, "The 'circles' of the title are of interconnected artists, though 'loose networks' might describe them better, for they are rarely neat or circular. The 'tangents' of the title are those in which I, as author, have spun off in pursuit of some theme or connection in the life or work of an artist, often travelling far beyond the bounds of Cranbourne Chase. As Virginia Woolf once put it: 'smooth narrative can't be right. Things don't happen like that'."
She describes Cranbourne Chase, "a landscape of bare-bone beauty and for many has offered a place of retreat. Its dramatic landscape and sense of remoteness (though now under two hours from london), have been its foremost attractions. Spanning Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, it was originally established by William the Conqueror as a royal hunting ground, with the rivers Avon, Allen, Stout, Fontnell and Nadder as its boundaries. Its physical geography is both demanding and spectacular, nurturing and isolating, consisting of high, exposed rolling downland, steep escarpments, winterbourne chalk streams and vertiginous valleys, as well as old broad-leaf woodland, shadow-flickering coppices, junipers, hedgerow yews, and bird-nesting hawthorn thickets. The Chase is an ancient landscape."
And then Vivienne Light quotes H J Massingham. My Massingham! Wow! That was an obsession late 80s, 90s, Must look at him again too.


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

THIS WRITING LIFE, #2

1.

The series I'm currently working on isnt a sequential narrative; that is, the poems arent episodes of a continuing story. It is a sequence though, and contains narrative. Thinking aloud : what kind of a step between 'series' & 'serial' and, by the same token, between 'sequence', 'series' & 'serial'?

In this series, each poem stands alone but gains value from the overall gathering. The opening gambit ("More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante") is a constant. It registers the sound of the poem & marks its place, both tonal & topographical. It's the crucial refrain. Resonances obtain, but apart from the major references, Midsummer Night's Dream & Dante's Inferno (principally the 1st canto's famous beginning), it isnt a meta-poem (that is, a poem about poetry or the writing of poetry).

Autobiographical material occurs spontaneously, memories arising as riffs off the Shakespeare & the Dante. Astonishing to me when the characters or situations seemingly echo Shakespeare & Dante; as though, for example, the women in the poems are mediating Beatrice! And then it occurs to me that the Shakespeare & Dante, important as they were in their time as literature & language, a kind of mnemonic for the entire tradition, are archetypal by nature and stand now amongst our very own ur-texts.

As writer I'm interested in what poem & series will deliver, and being the writer doesnt preclude any such revelation. I look forward to what each poem will make of itself even as I write it. This species of authority is rather like W.S. Graham (from the third of his series The Dark Dialogues) : "I speak as well as I can / Trying to teach my ears / To learn to use their eyes / Even only maybe / In the end to observe / The behaviour of silence." Not it exactly but Graham is always a propos, even in broad daylight.

2.

Still early in the education (firstly via Allen & Creeley's The New Writing in the USA, which I bought in Melbourne in the winter of 1967, when it was published, & secondly, a little later, via Allen's The New American Poetry, published seven years before, but at long last in my hands) one encountered Jack Spicer, though not yet his imprimatur for serialism. Actually, serial composition back then was well & truly in contemporary music's domain, and not even from the Schoenbergian source initially but reading John Cage & hearing Keith Humble lecture! (Isnt it always the case : 'knowing' more than one's yet experienced, that is thinking one knows!) With ginormous benefit of hindsight, Spicer's nine part Love Poems, in The New Writing in the USA volume, does resemble a certain type of serial music's recombinatory technique, as he recalls a line or phrase from another part (for example, "for you I would build a whole new universe") without compromising the integrity of its various renditions. And though one read Billy the Kid (the New Writers' Press edition) in Dublin at the turn of '69/'70 (which Michael Smith published at the urging of their man in San Francisco, Pearse Hutchinson) and around a year later, After Lorca (another pirate, this time from Allen Fisher's Aloes Books in London, except that copyright wasnt an issue then given Spicer's largess), I didnt have the poet's own word on practice until I read the wonderful Spicer issue of Clayton Eshleman's Caterpillar magazine (#12, July, 1970, bought of course from Nick Kimberley's indispensable poetry section of Compendium Bookshop in London). Yet the transcription there of Spicer's contributions to the Vancouver Conference of '65 doesnt actually include Spicer's spelling it out as appears in the statement for the anthology, The Poetics of the New American Poetry (ed Don Allen & Warren Tallman, Grove, 1973) :

"A serial poem, in the first place, has the book as its unit as an individual poem has the poem as its unit, the actual poem that you write at the actual time, the single poem. And there is a dictation of form as well as a dictation of the individual form of the individual poem. And you have to go into a serial poem not knowing what the hell you're doing. (....) What I'm saying is you have a unit, one unit the poem, which is taken by dictation, and another unit, the book, which is a more structured thing. But it should be structured by dictation and not by the poet. (....)" (p233)

3.

I'm tweaked like a deja-vu as I reread the first pages of Earth Ship (the magazine I published in England, 1970-72), # 4/5 (September, '71). It was intended to be an Olson issue, committed as I was to reviewing The Archaeologist of Morning (good to be reminded that this labour of love was coedited by George Butterick, Albert Glover & Peter Riley), sent to me by Tom Maschler at Cape Golliard, to whom I'd written on Nathaniel Tarn's recommendation. I was particularly pleased to publish there a letter from John Thorpe to Ken Irby (tho unsure now whether Thorpe or Irby sent it to me, or perhaps even Riley or Andrew Crozier), for it included part of a J H Prynne missive to Olson (containing the epochal line, "Singleness is emphatically not to line up as showing the individual at the helm...").

Apart from anything else that letter illustrates the disparity between my enthusiasm & their learning --how much of a school-kid in the heavy-duty classroom I must have seemed! Olson's Projective Verse essay was one thing, The Human Universe & other essays something else but that English Olson-language entirely otherwise! At least I could open my mouth in the Olson discussion with such colleagues as John Hall, David Chaloner, Allen Fisher, Paul Buck, Tim Longville & John Riley. True to say, though, the English discourse was always more cerebral than what I'd known around the Melbourne/La Mama (cafe theatre) poets, ca 67-69, particularly that fraction one had in mind as 'Cambridge' (Prynne, Crozier, Peter Riley & others, John James, Doug Oliver & John Temple), exemplars of a perspective one had only begun to nibble at (convolutions of the 'land & language' equation Hall had offered me). Even now, forty years on, reading Peter Riley's latest collection, The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet, 2011), encountering the line (almost a quip?), "I am entitled to make elisions / between geological and moral structures.", the authenticity of that particular perspective with its special vocabulary is clear.

Around that time, Nick Kimberley related to me John James' comment (refering, I think, to a poem I'd published in Nick's little mag, high on Ed Dorn as it happens and not at all a send-up), that "he knows not the ground whereon he stands." If he meant the English scene I'd recently joined he was right --I was happily enrolled in the second English education I'd promised myself when I set sail from Australia for the UK in late '69. However, I never thought I required excuse or permission for my own interaction with the New American Poetry, which was surely the basis for all of our expeditions. The new poetry as, for example, demonstrated in the pages of The English Intelligencer (a great bundle of which John Hall had presented me), was more readily approachable than that very particular Cambridge poetry, and in its diversity not unlike the new poetry movement Down Under...

I'd hoped for more Olson related materials than the handful I presented in the 35 Roneod full-scap pages of Earth Ship, #4/5, but there were adjacent pieces. Rereading it the mag feels like a typical late '60s, early '70s log of the Trans-Atlantic correspondence, which will always lead a reader to the "Anglo-American" sobriquet, correcting the cliche of mutually exclusive (British, American) domains : Gael Turnbull on Cid Corman, my brother Bernard on Larry Eigner, the Snyderesque topographies of Jeremy Hilton, the (possibly Ginsbergean) diaristic passions of Nathaniel Tarn & David Tipton...

I'd retrieved the mag from the trunk because I remembered Tim Longville's poem there, SNOW MAN : A Poem Begun The Day Charles Olson Died, for him and for Jack Spicer, but until it was in my hand again didnt recall the lines I'd quoted from Spicer's A Poem to the reader of the poem at the head of my Olson review. It's a misquotation actually since "The eagle was / God or Charles Olson" doesnt follow the opening salvo, "I threw a naked eagle in your throat / I dreamed last night / That I was wrestling with you on the mountainside". Truer to the tone & sense had I continued the proposition, "The eagle was men wrestling naked / without the hope of men wrestling naked. / The eagle was a wet dream." --after all, Spicer's poem is a many-sided quandary and the quote, reflecting my callow mind-set, supposed the categorical.

Crucially Peter Riley's 'essays' on Olson, Duncan, & Spicer had slipped my mind. I quote the last :

Jack Spicer. An Essay.

1. No, not a voice in the night.
Which leads to the supposition, there is nothing
to be done.
Which leads to masochism and chauvinistic moans.

2. Indians, Esquimos and the dead East in general,
help keep alive the Aristotelian flame in various
outposts, San Francisco, e.g.

3. Fortunately, such men do not often rationalize.
Only in teaching situations.
Some of which got called "poems".

4. Well, it's a difficult place to live in, Vertigo.

Reading Spicer's Textbook of Poetry in that issue of Caterpillar, I'm tempted by the resemblance of Riley's 'essays' to Spicer's enigmatic sections despite the poets' different intentions. It's that final line of Riley's essay which pings the keenest right now, especially as W.S. Graham reenters my thinking. A Spicer/Graham connection has been tickling me throughout just as a few years ago I was want to proffer John Berryman as proximate to Graham in dexterity & idiosyncrasy despite the different stages for their soliloquies. And no vertigo without Paul Celan, --and for Celan eternal indebtedness to Walter Billeter --his translation of The Meridian (I think the first in English; Paul Celan : Prose Writings & Selected Poems, published by Paper Castle, Melbourne, 1977 ) --thus Buchner's Lenz. Says Paul Celan in his Buchner Prize speech, "Who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, ---who walks on his head, has the sky as precipice beneath him."

Celan, or Beckett, or any writing, sick of the replete-sentence assumptions of author, the spectrum of omniscience which cant help but relegate the language/the words as both carriage & frame --as per Spicer's conjunction, "Language is a complex system which involves word, gesture and all of that sort of thing and it's a higher abstraction than words. (....) Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else's head, just like memories are (....) Now, language is a more complicated thing, but at the same time it's a structure..." (Vancouver Lecture, June 13,1965, published in Caterpiller #12, p204).

And I say this despite simultaneous queasiness at the opposite end of practice, that accumulation of sophistication, against which my Inner Peasant rises up, suing for a rough & ready transparency --"lost land", "last hand" --also vertiginous, --the forever thinking through of such natural contradiction.

[April/June 7, 2012]



oOo

THIS WRITING LIFE

So, the poem, the fifth of a proposed sequence of ten, is done! --in spite of itself. Let me explain. There was no through-line at all, no momentum. What I had was the dream I'd woken on and its affect on me, thus the initial scribbles. There was a wish to recognize concealment or at least abstain from the superficial hail & heartiness which logic places upon affable humanity; and this could be characterized as "monster" (the persona raised thereon), which figure was consonant with the most obvious aspect of The Midsummer Night's Dream (twisting my peculiar way the enchantment ruling its characters), that being the formal source of the poem(s). It's not giving too much away to offer that the first words of each poem are : "More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante". Literally, bit by bit, from 31st January, '012 to just the other day, 16th February, the poem was constructed.

Big deal! But as I consider it now, making the poem (making it more than writing it, where, for me, writing holds natural fluency) I experienced certain truths of composition which in my more-or-less spontaneous approach had slipped from consciousness. For example, that one doesnt know where the poem is going or how to get it going ought not disqualify the process. I confess, and against the way I used to teach back in the '70s & '80s, I was ready to scrub the poem several times because it wasnt immediately working! There is a psychology to the "work in progress" : one must relax & have faith... And so I did --a word here or there, a phrase, rejigging the order, but not knowing how it would or if it should coalesce. And then it did --how many days & drafts? --the words & lines came together as a poem! I was amazed!

Because I'm writing a fixed line & syllable type of poem for many years now, and also imagine series or sequences rather than individual poems [see my chapbook, EXILE TRIPTYCH (Vagabond Press, 2011) for most recent published example], the spontaneity is qualified, but even so it better describes me to myself than ever construction could. Which isnt at all to say I dont work & re-work lines, relishing the redrafting, counting, sounding out. I plainly do. I should also note there's always prose on the go (journals, journalesque criticism & review, chronicle, fiction), which means I either work simultaneously on poems & prose, or I let one go entirely for the duration of the prior commitment. Obviously, my experience of prose is free of this stop-go construction : no narrative, no prose. But maybe that's similar to the type of poetry I write --always referring to the theme or working it out. 'On song' & 'on subject' in this process are essentially adjacent.

--17/23, February, 012

THE MERRI CREEK : Poems & Pieces, #26, New Year Issue, 2012

DAVE ELLISON



LADY UNIVERSE

(For a dear lady)



In a burst of longing

Dawn grows through darkness

The heart love gives

Breathes time into us

This is the everyday

Hard work and heartache

We gain our sight

All by one sky



In a moment of light

Observe the way

Paths cross our town

Clouds parade into view

We approach night

Face the same midnight

With our candles and carols

For the child in everything



In the court of the moon

With magic of starshine

The street wind sings

May we gather a feeling

Live the new life

As great trees in our midst

And noble towers

Bow to holy night



[12 Jan. 2012]


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


KRIS HEMENSLEY/KEN TRIMBLE


"the pilgrim piece"


*


(October 7/2011)

Dear Kris,
I hope you enjoyed 'Shores' [Shores of American Memory, Littlefox Press, '11). I read that poem on your site about the Albion. [David Pepperell's The Albion Jukebox Murder 1972 ] Yeah I can totally relate to that. There are so many or so few depending on how you look at Facebook where I can call a person friend. In you I feel totally at home & although distant, meaning we move in different circles & distance is hard, I regard you as a friend..................cheers Ken


oOo


Dear Ken,
Yes, of course! Very much so! Book, friendship, the lot! I'd been reading it from the beginning then today began from the end! You're very much the 'silent witness', kind of imperturbable. You dont get in the way of the poem/the perception. Laudable.
By the way, I have s/one coming in next week for a copy of the new collection, and hope that another acquaintance will also be interested!
Loretta just told me she was at the Rainbow wake you write about [Nights at the Rainbow, p1]. Small world!
We'll talk again soon!
Best wishes, Kris


oOo



(October 8/2011)

Dear Kris,
Thanks for words. I was a regular at the Rainbow for some years. I used to see the Paul Williamson Hammond Combo on a Monday night. And the Grand Whazoo, and on a Sunday afternoon. Chic was a very personable fellow who had the ability to treat everyone as a friend. By accident I hadn't heard that he died. A mate who ran the Rob Roy told me that Chic had this amazing funeral so I just imagined it. While pubs can be destructive they can also be great community gatherings like a family. In the poem 'Shores Of American Memory' the section on O'Reilly's is a case in point. I met a guy who told me to go to that pub on a Monday night because they have an Irish jam session in North Beach. He sent an email to the owner Myles that I would be coming down and that I was a poet. Anyway Myles happens to love Australians. That night I met Myles and for the whole night I didn't buy a beer. He even sang And The Band Played Waltzing Matlida for me. People came up to me and said, you're that Australian. There I met a fellow who sang with Rambling Jack Elliot, & the great grandson of Gurdjieff the philosopher. It was if I was being honoured. I guess places like the Rainbow & O'Reilly's make you feel special for no specific reason, it makes you feel as if yes there is a family and life is good..........cheers Ken


oOo

(October 8/2011)

Dear Ken,
Your evocative, inspiring reply re- the Rainbow has me thinking that we could attempt the"conversation" by email? How about it?!!! (This was to be a conversation abt this & that, especially the pilgrimage aspect of both poetry and yr journey to the US, Merton , Jeffers etc)
I salute your energy & openness, I mean that you can be there in such a way as the O'Reilly's scene opened up to you! And those connections are astonishing...
Better get back to the Shop!
All best, Kris


oOo



(8/10/11)

Dear Kris,
Sure thing, that would be great. Do you mean explore more avenues of the pilgrim experience or in relation to my America trip? Because pilgrim travelling can open up a whole new world to everyone, artists, poets, anyone who is open to the journey. Personally, Joe Campbell's books on myth had a great influence. One has to cast off or shed your old skin and believe in the path. Even if a thousand people say you're crazy you have stick at it and believe in yourself. And there are times when you go 3 steps back & 1 step forward but the point is you have to get up. I am no angel and I sort of liked what St. Augustine said, 'Lord make me perfect but not just now', or something like that haha! It was like going to the monastery and meeting the gardener Joseph Bottone who turned out to be a mate of Creeley. He had a hermitage on the grounds overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One time he invited me over for a joint and a couple of shots of rum. Certainly we played up but it was great! And the whole thing becomes infectious, the pilgrimage. Suddenly not only poetry but also the monastic along the Big Sur coast became a powerful adventure for me. Because you know that Robinson Jeffers' home is in Carmel, and a few kilometres from the monastery is the Henry Miller Library and you're riding over the Bixby Bridge where Kerouac stumbled and hooped & hollered in the foggy night. That below the bridge somewhere is Ferlinghetti's cabin. You become sort of tuned into the poetry of the land. You know that Ansel Adams & Ed Weston two of America's great photographers had homes there as well so it becomes a symphony. Even New Orleans I got to know the stories of Johnny Whites Bar. A fellow by the name of Paddy told me that when hurricane Katrina rolled through, the only bar open in the whole town was this one. So I checked it out, it runs off Bourbon Street almost opposite The New Orleans Preservation Jazz Hall. A tiny bar where twenty would be a crowd and I'm having a drink while watching Germany kick our arse in the World Cup! You get immersed in the moment & because I studied photography when I was young I became a good watcher. And the whole idea of watching takes you into another world. A lot of people travel but never see or they only see postcards & that isn't travelling.............cheers Ken


oOo

(8/10/11)

Dear Kris,
More reflections on Thomas Merton this time. You know he went to Columbia University just a few years before Kerouac and others. In fact he published a novel (not sure of name) at same publishing house as Kerouac's first novel Town & City, Harcourt and Brace. His mentor & friend was Mark Van Doren who also taught Kerouac. Merton was a few years earlier than the 'Beats' but he was interested in the jazz scene, drank and smoked and had his way with women. Yet Merton was called to be a monastic and lived that way for twenty odd years. I am attracted to him because he struggled nearly every day he was in the order. Yet he stayed true. When he wrote his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, from his Trappist Monastery in Kentucky, people in America went crazy about it. It came out just after the war and I guess people were dealing with that sense of loss that war brings & so they found a prophet in Merton who spoke their language. The irony is he went in the monastery to deny his writing talent but the church had other ideas. They wanted him to utilise his talents so he could be of use in getting converts etc. Another irony and I didn't know it at the time, Merton wanted to leave the order of the Trappists and become a Camaldolse. That is the order I am in. It is more hermit whereas the Trappists are more community. You know, when he went in the church was far more restrictive than it is today after Vatican 2. The time he went in the church was convinced that it was their way or the highway as the saying goes. Meaning they had no time for other faiths and his order were very strict. There was no talking except only with meetings with the Abbot about spiritual direction with either him or a Director. Life was lived by sign language. And life was hard work. Most monasteries are run like farms. You get up early work in the fields, pray, read, eat, sleep then repeat. In fact it is a hard life. Some work in the kitchen, others may be allocated to cleaning guest house accommodation and in Merton's case he was told to write. There was tremendous tension with Merton I think because on the one hand he wanted to deny his writing talent & on the other he loved the celebrity. Even not being allowed out of his monastery he still had this aura that people craved. People like Huxley corresponded along with Joan Baez and many others. When Merton was finally allowed to attend a conference in Thailand in the 1960's he went to India & Sri Lanka. At a place called Polonnaruwa there is a giant stone Buddha reclining on his side. In his book, Asian Journals, he tells of this One Moment or unitive experience. The writing is sublime. From there after all those years in the monastery and his epiphany in Sri Lanka he is having a shower, and after he's finished he begins to shave, and is electrocuted. I reckon wow what a perfect death. So Merton in a strange way was the fore-runner of Kerouac and Jack devoured Merton but sadly couldn't grasp him...............regards Ken


oOo

(October 9/2011)

Dear Kris,
[re KH birthday greetings to KT] Facebook have it a bit early. I have it on the 12th, the same day as Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. Actually my father has the same day as well and mother is on the 12th June & my brother the 13th December, the 12th month.
Began reading Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. It is a fine book.
My friend and spiritual head of the Australian part of the Camaldolese has just returned from his own pilgrimage. He went to Italy where they have a General Chapter once every few years. He is an interesting fellow. He went to India in the Eighties and stayed with Bede Griffiths & was initiated into sanyassa. Now I went through a similar process but as a bramachari student. Am I right to say you stayed at the monastery in Kentucky where Merton lived then went onto Sri Lanka and later Thailand? If so wow. Did you see Polonnaruwa? Michael (priest friend above) is taking me out for a curry meal for my birthday. Lastly thinking about putting book in for awards. Who knows if I don't give it a go? The only thing is I get mixed up with their enrollment dates. Like the John Bray award you have to put your form in about 6 months before award is given. The only thing I worry about is that people think I am writing it as an American poetry by proxy. From my point of view it isn't, instead I wanted it to be a pilgrim piece if you will. Anyway that's the way I wrote it and that's that. Thanks for birthday greetings....................kind regards Ken


oOo

(Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:36 PM)

Dear Kris,
Any further news on that interview on pilgrimage?..................kind regards Ken


oOo


(Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 12:37 AM)

Dear Ken,
just back an hour or so after cleaning up the shop following [Owen Richardson's] launch for Gig Ryan [New & Selected Poems, published by Giramondo] ... very big affair, exhausting, and heaps of fun!
Re- the pilgrimage i/vw, --yes, will look at it again on Thursday (my day off)...
If I can get away on Saturday for your reading at Federation Square I will!Good luck!
talk soon, k


oOo


(15/10/11)

Dear Ken,
I managed to get away from the Shop around three p.m., and DID catch half of the reading at Fed Square... Was disappointed that I'd probably missed your set; heard several of Robert Lloyd's poems & couple of songs, then all of Michael Heald and then, a small miracle, you were returned to the stage for one poem! Was very interested in yr reading voice; it reminded me of Robt Lloyd's singing voice! Probably the most resonant poem I heard this a/noon! Well done! Can only guess at how you felt (reluctant?) but you sounded swell! I had to hurry off straightaway afterwards and anyway i cld see you guys closing in on one another so better (I thought) to drop you quick line than to cut in. Time for me to recouperate now. Will see what I can get together for you around yr splendid Pilgrimage responses, and will send before too long.
cheers, Kris


oOo


(15 Oct/11)

Dear Kris,
Didn't see you sadly, I was in another zone haha! Glad you liked my voice hope poem was good too. Not sure where the voice comes from but it helps with the delivery or spell of poem. Robert & I thinking of doing something together more duets in future. I really like him, he's a real nice guy. I really appreciate you coming, and when pilgrim thing is right for you I'll be here. Just got home, now 9pm, had to walk half up a mountain pitch black. Now settling in at home with a good red.....Youre the best..............Ken


oOo

Kris Hemensley
End-piece, 1

Mine have mostly been head & book journeys, Ken, though I did follow in Merton's footsteps to the King's Palace in Bangkok in 2005. Loved the Ramayana murals there but afterwards, when I checked Merton's own response in my brother Bernard's copy of Asian Journals (--I was in Bangkok en route the UK-- ) realized that Merton had only qualified appreciation (Disney kitsch etc). But yes, was well aware of Merton's Bangkok story, and so to that extent it was a kind of pilgrimage in itself. But Gethsemane in Kentucky only in my reading, for example via Merton's book. The Sign of Jonas (I have the 1953 1st British edition, Hollis & Carter, London), and appreciated immediately the tough rigour of that practice. (Penultimate paragraph in the Prologue is a beauty & somewhat a propos of even our correspondence : "A monk can always legitimately and significantly compare himself to a prophet, because the monks are the heirs of the prophets. The prophet is a man whose whole life is a living witness of the providential action of God in the world. Every prophet is a sign and a witness of Christ. Every monk, in whom Christ lives, and in whom all the prophecies are therefore fulfilled, is a witness and a sign of the Kingdom of God. Even our mistakes are eloquent, more than we know.")
Regarding Sri Lanka : I went ashore in Colombo as a 19 year old, working on the Fairstar (the Sitmar line's flagship), latter part of 1965. I only did a taxi round-trip with workmates but absorbed massive sensation & inspiration from my one & only Ceylon experience. For example, classic deja-vu on a river bank when, leaving my colleagues to the display of working elephants, I wandered off by myself, towards the cries & laughter of kids diving into the water, and suddenly realized I knew the place, that is I recognized it from a dream which I'd had in Southampton before the voyage... the colours, the heat, the angle of embankment to water, the screams of the children, the splash of water et cetera. I was shocked & amazed, walked away from it probably because called by colleagues to resume our taxi tour. But could have stood there forever, in wonderment, trying to understand what it meant!

[16th January, '012]

*

End-piece, 2

A Note on Shores of American Memory

It's as though sentiment (one's disposition towards the world) might parallel insight : the personal simultaneously a universal. But Ken Trimble isnt Khalil Gibran! Dont intend unkindness or ingratitude for what was a consolation & stimulation at age twenty, but the person walking around in these poems is no spiritual cipher. By way of contrast, David Ellison & I often refer to one or another example or exemplar of the school of Desperate Mysticism. No doubt at all that this poet's a seeker, one who doesnt shy from either big Metaphor or Reference, and the imprint of the world is all over him. It's audible like the Charlie Parker & Sonny Rollins, the Hank Williams & Bob Dylan who pop up in the poetry --visible like the place names, the brand names of daily consumables, let alone the influential books & authors (Kazantzakis, Jeffers, Rimbaud, Bukowski, Hamsun, Kerouac, Whitman, Ginsberg, Micheline, Kaufmann, Shelton Lee et al) which glue his soul-scape together. Not half bad for a "beggar poet nothing more, nothing less" (p. 44, 'Sixty-Seven Cents'), --which in the Post-Literature era, as I call it (and I'm not sure I dont 'simply' mean Post-Modernism) is a pretty good manifesto. "I cannot dazzle with verse, rhyme or rhythm" the poem goes, --G M Hopkins ? (but who can after The Windhover ?)!
"Just stories of what I've seen / And what I've done. / I walk the streets of the world a homeless drifter / Australian my heritage the planet my home / Listening to stories, writing them down"...
(16th January, '012)

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

ALICIA BEE


Jack Kerouac’s Holiday House


Jack Kerouac built a holiday house for Beat poetry,

Mountain climbing Matterhorn in Mill Valley California,

He took Gary Snyder from the road and made a summary,

Jack Kerouac normally lived with his (sick old) mother in Florida.

The traveller never had a daughter till taking the blood test,

“You can’t fall off a mountain” in the height of beat mania,

He wrote some good freeflow haiku - history composed the rest.

He never read every book in the Buddhism (text) library,

His confusing stream of consciousness was typing from the chest,

Rehabilitation became spirituality,

Jack Kerouac would hit the road again when he drank alcohol.


(2010)

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

CECILIA WHITE


breath


i don't recall the arrival
or having left. the point
of departure is the same
as the plosive of the asterisk
on a map, monosyllabic arrow
saying 'you are here'. contexted,
antiquarian, rigidly published.
spinal-tapped into parts of speech.
i am grammatically unscathed,
unbound on page or board
detectable only in the drawing
of breath, erasure of exclamation.

in the swoop of transitive verbage
a haunting space
lifts from the flatlands. never mind that
dislocation is in the reading.
i pick at threads of frontier
with my left-handed thinking. in the torn
apparel of second language
i remove full stops from islands
of air, listing under the salt
of problematics, participles
and suitcases. i am otherly compassed,
declining rite of passage and needle.

every place was once
somewhere else. meaning unsilts
ragged settlement, indexes
the gravel of logic.
stone and ink chapter memory
under weight of light, creasing
the eye, slubbing the tongue,
less engraved, i dissolve
sediment of interpretation,
inhaling contours,
landing at the point of it all.

(2011)


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


PAUL HARPER


assertive with grace & charm


counter intuitive as it may seem
grow a beard before train travel
& be accosted less by evangelists
particularly if your destination
is a small commune of musicians
across cow paddocks
from a bed & breakfast haunted
by freshly retired footballers

if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now
if you have a fly buys card please scan now

acquire a butterfly
some barbed wire or a tall ship
but when the toaster decides
an intricate mishmash
of marvel characters
fire & brimstone
& your topless girlfriend as a centaur
may assist two marathon runners
with their mission to negotiate peace
among rival factions
the black suits & the grey suits
in a breeding ground for ibis
not noticing can be highly functional

if you have a fly buys card please scan now

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

ALBERT ROTSTEIN


vermeer


* * *
* * * *
everything porcelain
except the milk jug
which
spills endlessly

light * (oO enters
from the left
photons (o* exacted
by craft into
radiant iguazuae fall
*o)*O*(o
* oO * *
Oo(o)Oo ***
* * * o *
sunbeams
*o)O(o*******
gleam)"around the house
carried
on hogshair
plasma ):''''(((whooo***
sublimed
wave ((((from *
particle to
painters article
annealed and calcined
onto the days
matter
unuttered to forever

a box of quanta
through
the imprimatur of hand
through a fashioned utensil
the brush not the pencil
and thence and thus
the documenta

this alchemy will not defraud
fall from
the board
nor be marauded
by a god of love


*

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


JAMES HAMILTON


TOAST TO LEONORA CARRINGTON


From the newspaper, I didn't know I was on the way
to a wake. When the white horse appeared
I rode so long that I forgot
the gold star'd cloak I didn't wear

on the way here. Regret of what
she could have told our new lives
made old. Sphinxes? sure.
No state yet certain, the reddened head

glows in seeming fire. Tent in an orb
of alleyway dreaming. Seems I lost
my white horse amongst her images
maybe dreams are only an imagined "snake clock"

Here then is our cloak of stars
the cloak we take to night, to love.
A grin beneath clouded hair
levels a demon, empties a stare

of the always familiar coral skied
or basalt eyed. The kind of minotaur
that floats above knowing children,
hooded. Greenpool shade of light

which drifts above our horseless wake,
floating sound of glowing eyes, one dead star
in our mouths. Now we ride back on our blanket
of colours, life now at "the house opposite"

in the shudder-hum of art. We return to the country
we never knew, but now with her silent hall of maps
in our eyes. Nothing starts to burn. Seated at our table,
the real news fresh on the page, concealed ocean high and low

We raise our glasses to the cartographer
of "Down Below"


[Melbourne, 28th May 2011]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FINOLA MOORHEAD


REGARDING LEONORA CARRINGTON

[NOTE : I'd remembered Finola's mention of her "painter cousin" but was astounded when I came across her name in Paul Ray's The Surrealist Movement in England (Cornel University Press, 1971), & later in Breton's Painting & Surrealism. Her book, Down Below, was praised by Pierre Mabille & Maurice Blanchot; & in 1946, Claude Serbanne described her as the "greatest English surrealist poet, and, without any argument, one of the four or five greatest poets of surrealist tendency on the international scene." Her paintings were included in all the Surrealist exhibitions since 1937, & occupied a prominent place at the 1960 Surrealist exhibition in New York. --August, 1981; Kris Hemensley]

Nth Fitzroy,
Summer/1980

Dear Kristo --,

I'm terrified of my cousin Leonora Carrington & I'm not terrified of many people but when she is drunk & I am too, our ability to get on is positively genetic. And you have gotten the very correct word for her P R I V A T E. Her play Penelope (I think) written when she was 17 was produced 1st in something like 1966. The Hearing Trumpet written for her friends in 1954, or something, was first published in English in 1975, and so the story goes, her writing is her own and whoever wrested the mss from her to publish them must have approached her personally, got her drunk, got her respect then said Please....do it for me, go on etc. etc. I spent six weeks in Mexico with her husband, Chiqui Weicz, for whom The Stone Door was written in 1947 or something. During the war, she was put in an Asylum in Spain because she wanted to save her previous lover, Max Ernst, from the Nazis & there is an account of her time there, which is a brilliant merging of the alchemical & the surreal (truths) in the subjective (misunderstood necessarily) in booklet form, called Down Below. On the other hand her painting is public, famous in Mexico City, N Y & Paris (little bit London) & those people here who really know the Surrealists (and there are apparently FEW) of course know her work well. Periodically she'll have an exhibition in one of those Madison Ave commercial galleries which sell out --she's constantly fighting with her agent as she feels she has to KEEP her 3 men, who are those narrow-fingered aesthete demi-jewish Europeans --two sons and husband; the older son, my age, Gaby is in theatre, Pablo in medicine. She is notoriously a non-letter writer, has friends like Larry, Trotsky's son, and Luis (Bunuel) & is herself one of the big expatriot names in Mexico City where there are lots... too shy and multilingual... Chiqui was telling me of when Antonin Artaud came to stay & find out the secrets of the Shamans, pre-pre-Castaneda, & wrote that crazy book The Peyote Dance. I stayed in her house in Cuernavaca which is under the same volcano as Malcolm Lowry's. To ask me about Leonora Carrington is to ask me to explain the mysteries of my own DNA. It's queer that locked in my gaol of English Language & bonny Aussie enthusiasm I should meet or have the possibility of meeting such names so closely ... for to be the prima de Leonora Carringtom is almost to be her when she is absent, 'cos family is all-hallowed when your language is Latinate. But my ignorance beneath the enthusiasm & the awe is it, for I could only approach on the personal ... not the professional, or careerish, so I don't know really what to say. I've gathered that I should respect the private, as I know how much mail arrives to be ignored or laughed off in the Calle Chihuahua. None of them write letters, but your best bet is Gaby --Gabriel Weicz-Carringtom, Calle Chihuahua 194, Mexico City, Zona 7, for information, opinion about living surrealism, or an approach to his mother, or possibly a copy of Down Below.

A day later : yes Gaby would be more approachable & possibly a more rewarding correspondent as Leonora is at the moment incommunicado in N Y city & some Tibetan Buddhist retreat, rehashing her whole life & for her these things are passed, whereas for Gaby to put it into perspective would be good (they are muy mucho close). Perhaps you could think up some inspired questions & suggest publishing what he has to say & show him the Merri [The Merri Creek,Or Nero was Earth Ship magazine's 3rd series, & in turn presented H/EAR, eight issues, 1981-85] --whatever, it's not as though he's not a writer himself. And they're all deeply in the Anarchist tradition, so the Merri should stand on its own merits. My meetings with Leonora are/were too personal & as yet out of historical perspective to make any sort of a piece at the moment ... still haven't decided whether to use the ticket I have for Nov. 7th to return.
Wish for myself the secret of the freedom of the surrealists, for my writing I mean, but don't have it, can understand more what the Bauhaus was about, even that quite newly & to do with my own experiment [the work in progress which would become Remember the Tarantella, 1987, -ed.]...

(.....)
with love,
Finola


oOo

NOTE (1) :
After the issue was published, Finola sent an urgent note, "I have not read everything yet in H/EAR ye'll understand that. One thing I read & if you've not sent all away, fix it : I am LA PRIMA DE LEONORA, not her PRANA ((that's embarrassing for PRANA is the magical Life Force that invades orange juice & fresh air & so on and PRIMA is only 1st cousin feminine))" The correction is made in the above.

NOTE (2):
When James Hamilton told me he'd recently written a poem for/about Leonora Carrington, having read the newspaper obituary, I responded with my story of Finola's family connection and my publishing her reminiscence 20 years ago in H/EAR. We thought it would be great to publish the texts together! I sought Finola's permission to reprint her letter here. I have reinserted a couple of passages omitted from the 1981 publication. As Finola & I have agreed, publish & be damned!

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

CONTRIBUTORS:

DAVE ELLISON,KEN TRIMBLE, PAUL HARPER & JAMES HAMILTON have appeared in previous issues [see name index]. They're all active in Melbourne, outside of the mainstream, wholly tuned in to the music...
ALICIA BEE is a freelance journalist & blogger; has published 2 collections of poems, Bathers On The Beach, & The Book Of The Dead And Wounded, both from Good Look Books (Brunswick, Vic.). Her webpage is, http://misspiggyjournalist.wordpress.com/
CECILIA WHITE, artist, photographer, poet; first met when she performed Vicki Viidikas jazz poem at the MOK Anniversary event at Collected Works couple of years ago. Studied in Germany ('80s) & presently in New South Wales. Winner of inaugural national Cricket Poem Prize. Current project is Breathing Space.
ALBERT ROTSTEIN stalwart of boho Melbourne city & country art & poetry scenes over the decades. His poems most recently appear in Pete Spence's irregular pressings, more publicly & regularly in Pi O's Unusual Work magazine.
FINOLA MOORHEAD , poet, novelist, playwright. Books include Quilt ('85); A Handwritten Modern Classic (Post-Neo, '87); Remember the Tarantella ('87, reissued by Spinifex in '011); Still Murder ('91); My Voice ('06). Fiction editor with A A Phillips on Meanjin Quarterly in the '70s, illustrious member of the Rushall Crescent Avant-Garde in the '70s/80s.

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 25;October, 2011

KRIS HEMENSLEY

Launch speech for Pete Spence's PERRIER FEVER (Grand Parade, '11)


Here is a poem of mine, written by Pete Spence; it is also a poem in the Ashbery / O'Hara / Schuyler mode written by a generation of English poets & their American cousins... It is a Pete Spence poem & an Australian poem, and I think it is a beautiful poem : "there is a mountain of solitude on the hill / occasionally it comes to us in a moment of eagerness / we find little peace under the avalanche / and would like to push it all upward / away from the pressing urgency of noise / the grit we bathe in // and then one day perhaps / through pumice suds / frosted obsidian windows ajar / the panel of sky / the chalky turmoil / we call "the light of day" / we see / THIS WAY UP / stenciled / near the summit of the hill!" [p68, PF]

*

Pete Spence is an old friend & colleague; a member of our Collected Works Bookshop collective in the mid to late '80s, (which included such luminaries as Robert Kenny, Jurate Sasnaitis, Des Cowley, Ted Hopkins, Rob Finlayson, amongst many others); a fellow little mag editor (who'll ever forget Post Neo?), gallery buff, international traveller.
He was first mentioned to me by the late Geoff Eggleston as a poet friend he'd like me to meet --circa '82, '83... Ah Geoff : author of this memorable couplet, "No man is an island / and no woman is a clipper-ship" -- I still dont quite know what it means! Likewise, Pete's line always in my head : "relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po" --the entire verse is, "a parenthesis ladles the tune / relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po / under some amended weather / tumbling sunshine"...

*

James Schuyler said you'd never get New York poetry until you realized the gallons of paint flowing through it --painting & painters. Following that thought, Pete's book abounds in names (Pam, Ken, John, Corny et al), references to painting, to poetry & to poets, & to music, composers --as though a record is always playing --a symphony, perhaps, he shares with Alan Wearne, his friend & publisher.
Spence is a poet of fraternity --which includes conviviality & melancholy... No wonder his recent poem in progress is called The Kynetonbury Tales, and a delight it's been to read via e-mail.
And, therefore, what a coup that Alan Wearne has pinned this pilgrim down long enough to make a cohesive book out of a vast & errant production --this book out of many possible compilations.
And Alan is to be heartily congratulated on his Grand Parade Poets publishing project, & this particular volume.
It's such a good looker... Designed & set by Christopher Edwards, -- who shares with Pete similar 'adventures in poetry', --the chance & play --the relishing of words as though a different species of artist --painter, sculptor, composer.
And Alan himself along this track, whose Otis Redding poem way back in Public Relations (published by Gargoyle Poets in 1973), advances his share of Pete's kind of fun : "Redding, Redding, remorse will smash any epilogue chance, / any sweat-liturgy you sang and I might have attempted / once I walked in the rain until one once / to shout O, 'tis (forever!) Redding" ...

*

So, a poet of fraternity --which tag can deal with correspondence & address (the given social world a poet inhabits) and the matter of influence. And if I can use the French 'chez', thus "with" (which Paul Buck gave me decades ago) : "with" in preference to "after" with its misleading implication of "imitation" --, then we can say Pete Spence's poems stay with the effects of his long lasting affections... He revisits them, he calls upon them --they are become motifs --they are his muses, they are his amusements --elegy, ode, sonnet, City, Landscape, Weather, the Sun, the Sky...

*

I opened his book at random the other day, on page 105, --the poem entitled Shop : "i thought the shop / was called SLIDE / until i walked into the door!"
I'm still visualizing a kind of Jacques Tati cartoon, or Charlie Chaplin, or Rowan Atkinson. The jokeyness transmutes or elevates from ha-ha to Surrealist smile in the poem Drawing : "i muscled in / all the angles / crosshatched in / the shadows / only to realise / i'd drawn / a horse without / neck or head / and its tail / was a cloud / in the sky" --

*

Perhaps this collection, Perrier Fever (and I reiterate, one possible selection of many --notwithstanding the attrition, the loss & destruction of poems along the way, allusion to which I recall from conversation 25 or 30 years ago), perhaps it is his humourous selected poems (different kinds of humour)... But even so it's informed by the totality of his poetry. Remember, Pete is no Spring-chicken. A different personality would have seen him vying for volumes & anthologies many times over.

*

Pete Spence's poetry has all the exclamations of the New Yorkers, all the happenstance & hutzpah --which is another way of saying all the spontaneity & presence --which is another way of saying that more often than not the Pete Spence poem is both written in an ideal space, called the poem, and enacts the ideal poem, a doing that's simultaneously done --which is another way of saying that whatever happens in the poem is the poem, informed or inspired by the insight that anything might enter the poem --because it can and because it is the poem... What does your poem mean, Mr Stevens? asks the earnest correspondent. Stevens replies : Mean? Mean? The poem means nothing more than the (--and we can interpolate, nothing less) than the heavens full of colours & the constellations of sound! Which is another way of saying that Spence, like Wallace Stevens, can be poet as painter, poet as musician, poet as inventor & conjurer of effects --of sensations which course the mind, tickle the tongue...

*

But who is Pete Spence?
As scholarship, let alone the insatiable curiosity of the reader like Pete himself, as it expands its purview, so outsiders are claimed for the vast continuum; so peripherals are identified, brought in from the cold, --not that the cold isnt a legitimate or even desirable place to be.
Alan's told us a little about Pete. Pete's written a little about himself here in his book. I'd like to add one story to the biography.
It's the story of a possible history, had a manuscript for an anthology around 1971, actually transpired. In 1973 I was given custody of the mss. of Dark Ages Journal. In 1984, in my H/EAR magazine, dedicated to a '40s/'60s/'80s chronicle of the 'New', I described that anthology's perspective. It was a Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, New Zealand compendium. Its editors had included Charles Buckmaster, probably Garrie Hutchinson & either Richard Tipping or Rob Tillett.
Students of the '68-'71 or so period will recognize many of the names --Michael Dransfield, Charles Buckmaster, Terry Gillmore, John Jenkins, Vicki Viidikas, Garrie Hutchinson, Frances Yule, Ian Robertson; New Zealanders like Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Gary Langford. But the unusual Melbourne names are Walter Billeter, Robert Kenny, David Miller, Robert Harris & Pete Spence.
I licked my lips relishing the different history this coincidence promoted back then. The La Mama [Poets Workshop] '60s style become conventional even as it was being hailed in the anthology edited by Tom Shapcott, Australian Poetry Now, suddenly had the possibility of rejuvination! I like it very much that Spence is part of that potential history. As he is now in the present day.
Without further ado, in launching Perrier Fever, may I introduce to you : Pete Spence...


oOo

[delivered at the "Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium", at the Bella Union, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton; part of the Grand Parade launch; Thursday, 7th July, 2011]


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

DAVID N. PEPPERELL


Two Poems + Haiku


*


THE ALBION JUKEBOX MURDER 1972


I could hear their voices from where I sat
drinking by myself on a cold night
"THAT FUCKING MUSIC'S DRIVING ME NUTS!"
"forget it, it's your shot"
"I CANT PLAY WITH THAT FUCKING NOISE!"
"it doesnt bother me"
"WHO GIVES A FUCK WHAT BOTHERS YOU?"
"just leave it, OK?"
"GET FUCKED, I'M TURNING IT OFF!"
"dont do it"
"JUST WATCH ME, DICKHEAD!"

he walked over to the jukebox
and reached behind it
the sound disappeared
he turned around, the smile
dying on his lips as the
knife went into his heart
he fell to the floor his
pool cue falling beside him

they carried him out
covered by a sheet
his killer stumbled behind him
handcuffed to a couple of cops
who took him away in the wagon

I put my beer down on the bar
and walked out into the
prussian blue night
that sure killed the albion for me
I never drank there again
I dont think anybody else did it either.

[1991]


oOo

CARLTON BUSTOP INCIDENT


in lygon street carlton dreamscape
i'm stuck in past loneliness of memories
over there coffee on saturday mornings at tamanis
john deep in the australian with a flat white
now gone to a fast lane end in a thai bamboo compound
mary gone too bottle of pills & no goodbye
lennie still around making the world safe for crime
what hope for him in a new world order?
tony could be anywhere maybe making moomba floats
and still pursuing the red revolution
dave now has new wife, new allegiances, new house with lawn
same face though, same laugh, same glass
where is the bus to take me away from all this?
ghosts gather in my thoughts
the dead fight with the living for space and time
hold me to your heart sweet yesterday
tomorrow just lost another traveller

[1991]


oOo


MORNING COFFEE HAIKU


franklin cafe

8.30 a.m.

hot flat white

spoonful of sugar

splash!


*

boy in blue

muddy fake reboks

freckled face

falls off chair

crash!


*

man with tongs

iced apple cake

brown paper bag

ringer on register

cash!


*

franklin cafe

9.05 a.m.

hand on briefcase

its late must

dash.


[1991]


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


GRANT CALDWELL


4 NEW YORK HAIKU

*


sleeping in new york

to the sound of falling rain -

air-conditioning


*

manhattan subway

every race in the world

going home


*

why new york is the

centre of the universe -

nine-eleven


*

the subway busker

plays boogie-woogie piano -

the trains run all night


[2011]



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

JAKE CORE


4 POEMS


*

COLLOQUIAL BELLBIRDS


Leora Bell broke her wrist
last week when the rain was here.
She was drunk again with Blake Fielder
and fell off a swing.
At first she didn't even realize
it was broken.
She just said, 'my wrist feels kinda
funny,'
and laughed like a strange bird.


oOo


ULURU


With a warm beer
beneath the setting sun
I overhear a man say
to his wife :

'There's a palace of ice
south of Tasmania
that no one has ever seen.

I can take you there,
I have a map.

It's bigger than Uluru.'


oOo


SUITORS

In the twilight of a love song
amorous Europeans descend staircases,

legless, and blowing
invisible kisses to impossible suitors

down the hall, where memories
can be found

turning endlessly in on themselves
like whirlpools on holiday.


oOo


TELEPHONE SHADOWS, LEAN AGAINST THE FRUIT BOWL


I see you by the water.

Your name is not Bravado,
Jane, or Solitude.

There is nothing in the distance
except a space reserved
for ghost ships.

Your face is turned away
from a great number
of things.

Your hair is nearly down
to your hips.

There is no telling how far back
a story goes.

I see you by the water.

Your name is not Momentum,
Eliza, or Sleep.

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


ANGELA GARDNER


TWO PROSE PIECES

*

A SHADOW LEAVING It won’t be the right thing for you: there is
the circular plot, and one or other leaving – some bloody battle. But I
wish you safe road, I wish that to you. Trundle the gods from their
museums, stand with them at crossroads and they’ll be freed from
obligations to warn of death, though not of how close others will come
to us. Them in a Limbo of not arriving, a nowhere advanced by
technology and our tiredness. And all the while the money sparks,
still sparks, changes hands. It makes us close-touched, adorned,
volatile, with our stepped hands, our stepped words. What is it to be
intact? Ignore it, don’t fret it back, we have the gods! Shadows hold
us with unremembered promises that we are tranced by: while
yesterday’s tomorrows pile up all tarnished and unaccountable. The
gods try comfort, warn of emptiness without them. I want to turn on my
borrowed heel, though then I’ll never know what I did, or what is sold
on the streets until each exhausted dawn. The unsheathed flesh of
flowers pours from glassy throats. I’m moved, truly. Slowed to silence
in the physical downpour of the morning rain, the fabric of the sky.
It frees me. The gods gave little comfort. They were crudely fashioned.
I may travel. There are many directions, a border country where words
change in meaning. Should we blame the gods. Or angels? We were
defiant, and wanton, worked to free ourselves from our desire for their
monstrous shadows, their mechanical animals. We had believed the
shadow-play but insisted they leave the shelter we found for them.
Stood by at the crossroads. No question, I’m pared back without them.
I am like something else...


oOo

TRANCE Primitive fairground amusements judder around us under
human force and disco. Unskilled in the ways of petrol: flame
throws out its spurts. He rolls his eyes and wipes his mouth on an old
cloth, while the women sing, or fail to, telling us nothing as it happens.
Our ring of faces is merely curious. Arse in a barrel straining to get away
from whip lashes that are aimed from the cruelty of youth. Who can we
blame for this? We are rumour and shadow, as he spits unburnt petrol
into the not yet midnight. We breathe like him through shallow shoals
of traffic and a pall of cardboard cinders that fall from fireworks.
Masked, old rope tail, tee-shirt stained with petrol dribbles as music
with uneven lyrics, many parts despair some joy, plays over us like
pollution. And all the while the puppet master jokes with the orchestra.



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


FRANCESCA JURATE SASNAITIS

Amed! Ah!

I have been covered in black sand,
the fine ground progeny of laval rock and glittering mica,
the work of millennial waves and winds
beating beating at these wasted cliffs,
dust dry on this island once haled a tropical paradise.

I have swum with schools of darting fishes
the speed and green of lightning bolts,
fish the colour of sun playing in wavelets over rocks
and fish the black of the shadows underneath.
I have seen fish striped the yellow of young leaves.

I have tasted of paradise, and reek of it—
pungent garlic and slivers of onion fried,
the leaf of the blingbing tree, turmeric, chilli,
red red rice, green papaya and galangal—
the poetry of flavour.

I have developed a taste for Arak.
Kue dadar pisang! pancake wrapped
and spidered in coconut, the red banana . . .
my mouth aches in anticipation!
A frangipani graces every dish.



[Bali, 2011]



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

CATHERINE O'BRIEN


-------------------------shooting at the sky


...the way I ride my bike along a lane that takes me by
one of the many temples in Vientiane...plaster casts on
the wall depict a young boy with his bow and arrow...
shooting at the sky...angels hover above him...as they
ascend wings detach and float on the white...feathers
fall...embedded into the wall memory shadows where once
there were more boys with arrows...shooting at angels...
floating wings...falling feathers...the symmetry undisturbed
by the erosion of time...daily I ride again into this story and
see it unfold...every day the lane and the wall divide my day into
remembered and forgotten...pierced by shooting arrows!


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

CONTRIBUTORS :

David N Pepperell was co-proprietor of legendary Melbourne record shop, Archie & Jughead back in the day. In the mid '90s he ran Dr. Pepper's Jazz Junction in the Port Philip Arcade ("from trad to bop - from free to acid - all the jazz that's fit to stock!"). Song-writer & music journalist. Books include Raphael Alias (1976), East Gate, West Gate (1991), Letters to a Friend [correspondence with Anais Nin] ('92), both from Nosukumo press.

Grant Caldwell edited the now defunct Blue Dog magazine (from the Australian Poetry Centre, Melbourne). Of his 7 collections to date his most recent are Dreaming of Robert de Niro (2003) & Glass Clouds (2010), both from Five Islands Press. His novel Malabata ('91) is something of a classic.

Jake Core is an itinerant poet & musician. The poems here are published in his little book, The Goose Puddle (Brierfield Flood Press, 2010).

Angela Gardner, poet & artist. Edits poetry e-zine, foam:e. see, http://www.foame.org Her collection, Parts of Speech (UQP, 2007), was the winner of the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Views of the Hudson was published by Shearsman, UK, in 2009.

Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, an original member of Collected Works bookshop, ran the distinguished independent store, Greville Street Bookstore for 20 years. Nosukumo published her prose-pieces, Sketches, in 1989. In the last year she's published 2 exquisite chapbooks, Gravelly Views & Thirteen Seasons (in one day) with her own imprint, Ratas.

Cathy O'Brien lives & works in Vientiane, where her little i:cat gallery stages art & photography exhibitions, poetry readings, & film showings. Her most recent publications are the card book Word Sculptures, and a poem card collaboration with Kris & Bernard Hemensley (published by Stingy Artist, UK, 2011).

Pete Spence's Perrier Fever is published by Alan Wearne's Grand Parade, & is available at all good bookstores including Collected Works Bookshop.

--that's all folks!--
October 4th, 2011