Showing posts with label Charles Buckmaster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Buckmaster. Show all posts
Friday, January 5, 2018
TOPOGRAPHY
[---> Elwood
1/1/18
10.05's allowed to be late any time missus
if it means ma & pa kettle
can stumble up to Clifton Hill terminus
from the 'Garth
& catch it at ten past ten --
long runs of clear traffic on New Year's Day
deserted roads no one aboard the bus --
after first fusillade of midnight fireworks
hit the hay (a la Heaney "I dreamt we slept in a moss
in Donegal / On turf banks under blankets"
misremembered always from P. Gebhardt's
rare edition of Glanmore Sonnet number ten
"laid down my head on a square of turf" --Peter ay?
last post cuts through all the crap right here --as Retta
in '73 upon waking --of Buckmaster
"the dead come back to us / like clear water
in a dream" --how to deal with this
unannounced convocation
Seamus --Peter -- Charles?)
slept like a --like the proverbial --
cop cars & ambulance pass bus unhurriedly --
dance of cirrus across pure azure --
down Punt Road's gentle hill & icons
Bill Nuttall's Niagara Gallery the cricket ground & no parking
park --the Cricketers pub & the topless barmaids other one --
thirty years since "The Last Gardens" preoccupied me --
Judith Rodriguez at Penguin Books when was that?
late '80s '90? wrote despite this or that part
it was "intractable" ( i.e. didn't give a shit
for 'readers'?) --both Nick Johnson & John Kinsella
read & liked it but it got lost
& then i lost the yen for publishing it!
mystical milieu of my poem all around the Royal Botanical --
& the river --
South Yarra's posh European tone --
like Gauloises wafting Italian equivalent --
tonal mist the gist of it --
scuffing past the fine houses --
does periphery qualify as stuff of history?
invisible at the edges Poet's remit
though Poetry itself another element
amidst the powers that be!
down down now into the hip hop of St Kilda Junction
the massive dial --
fifty years ago another configuration
pre-motorway historic shops & housing
old world's demolition --
ritzy then as now --Kings Cross's little Melbourne
cousin --same vibe now as before on
Fitzroy Street --recognize the "bums
beatniks & bastards"from pre-Oz Emigration manuscript --
anticipated in Southampton
holding out for another world --
after library & gallery the general cemetery
far preferable for mooning teenage artist
to our village bloated by housing boom
into anonymous nowhere's-ville
every summer's destination ELWOOD --hollowed from
sea's reverberation heard on late afternoon's approach
escaped from City "Gone Fishing" the notice
pinned on bookshop door --
a sense of pre-fabs among the grand olds
extending from St Kilda --the ephemeral straggle
DHL identified Sydney to Thirroul
that "next wind might blow away" --
Elwood's beach house encampment
emigres' struggles resolved within cooee
of beach & water --pre-de luxe marina
& walking paths era --
rough & ready 'off the rocks'
at year's turn 1966 --
closest ever came to Greece --Miller's Colossus
fomented idée fixe --free at last
& subject only to sand & sea & wave-slapped rocks
beneath great southern sun --
Greek idyll dreamt of in
Southampton parks laid in
fully clothed in summer
huddled in winter
Old Dart's natural season --
ten minutes stroll from Thackeray Street
over the Beach Road & rugged landfill to the sea --
lodging with Penny Poynton in her little house
whose mercy delivered me from the calamity
across town in Ascot Vale --
how could love come undone so?
not love but its ambivalent rhetoric --
young & old tied in knots by it --
much vaunted home of free-spirits
free-love FREEDOM contorted into haunted house --
ghosts of suicide & murder spooking art-of-life's
studio --as tho (& no flippant reference
as my ideal reader could guess)
Dostoevsky's darkest direst testament
had obliterated Khalil Gibran's enlightenment --
overnight! --
curses threats desperate sex --
death's door off the latch & not the half of it!
last January fifty years ago
took new met girl there to greet
could say fellow exiles part-
Bohemian part-suburban
in the almost sweet Peace of Penny's house
by the sea ("the sea! the sea!") --
after Ascot Vale such equanimity
a kind of blasphemy they might have said --
and the Peace lasted --
for a while --
and can only smile now
by the sea
the sea
[1-5 January, 2018]
Saturday, October 29, 2016
21st October: On this day in 1969, Jack Kerouac died...
"21st October: On this day in 1969 Jack Kerouac died. The Lonesome Traveller. Among friends & allies here in Heaven." Our notice up on the wall at Collected Works Bookshop, 21-X-16.
[Facebook post: On that day, the day after, the morning after? the Hemensleys were visiting George Dowden in Brighton, up from Southampton for a couple of days. I'd begun corresponding with George as editor of little mag, Our Glass, in Melbourne, '69. Found his Letters to English Poets in Mike Dugan's collection in '68, which gave me a postal address. What more does a boy in the sticks require?! Anyway, cut to the chase Hemensley! George took us around the corner from his fine apartment to meet Bill Butler, fellow American, at Bill's Unicorn Bookshop. Bill was fetching us a cuppa or finding a book to show, something like that, but he returned with the newspaper, New York Times, the Herald Tribune? Oh my, he was saying, have you seen this, Jack Kerouac died. Took the wind out of our sails.
George burrowed into his shoulder bag, fetched out a note book. Ive got a new notebook, he said. This'll be the first entry I make in it. Bill Butler kind of drew himself even taller than us and said, cuttingly, I always thought one only wrote small things in small notebooks.
Ye-es. Hmmm.
On the subject of Kerouac... infinite. On the subject of Bill Butler, great little shop, nice catalogues, central to the Brighton scene. I liked him, his Americana poems. Not everyone did. I recall Andrew Crozier generally congratulating the particular issue of my English mag. Earth Ship, in '70 or so, but particularly objecting to Bill's poems. (I'll take this opportunity to reread him now; I mean Bill. Andrew's a constant though wasnt always for me...) And on the subject of George... what happened to George? Bibliographer of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s, prolific on the little mag scene. I shared poems he sent to Melbourne with other little mags. He corresponded with Charley Buckmaster; Charles hoped to get across to England. I have some poetry on this in the book Kent MacCarter's publishing soon...
Yep! This has to be Heaven!
*
re- John Thorpe
John Thorpe is always ''descending from history''. He brings one back --to Pound (Canto II, "…Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "), that is to say, to the poetry able to listen &, whatismore, hear. He brings one back to the instant which is always local --to logography ("is the language of changing yr mind. It was not discovered by Pound (who called it ideogram) or Olson, etc it's so primary only kids & a very few writers have been able to equal -- 'english' being full of alphabetic, syllabic & prosodic reflexes."), that is to say, to writing as a way of being human, which realises & manifests nature, extending the possibility of life, enhancing the precondition, never setting out to be 'literary'.
John Thorpe is always descending from history into the present, the instant, the local, which really is the opposite of making the local etc. historical. What does he mean, "changing yr mind"? : "I make space-time. IT is not making it. (….) If i describe a condition, it changes. Or i hope to hell it does. If it didn't I'd be in trouble & I have been."
*
re- George Dowden
From This Is the Land of the Dead, The island of the Blessed, published by Hapt (Bournemouth, UK), 1970,
This is the Land of the Dead, the Island
of the Blessed
There is no Ship of Death - no where
to go but here
Here are the sweet-smelling trees, the gems
of the Earth are flowers, stones, a palace
is in the center - it is you, it is I,
that's all to know for beginning
*
Dowden's Ship of Death is a companion of John Thorpe's "Stranger in Paradise" --from Matter, or giving (Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, N.Y., '75), "we came here on the 'Stranger in Paradise.' These were americans searching ease in the orient, never leaving Paradise, their ideological capitol, to look at the earth."
Literature is their prehistory. They swear that no more will they be led astray. (Though one wonders what's happened to that resolution in Dowden's most recent publication (three works by Kaviraj [George Dowden], published as loot 1 : 3, 1979, UK), praise poems for Muktananda, which are sopping wet with sub-Beat adoration.)
*
At the beginning, Dowden was one of the poets I found in Michael Dugan's treasure-trove of English little magazines. Or, at the beginning, in Melbourne, there was Michael Dugan, with his treasure-trove of English little-magazines, through which I rummaged at his home in Canterbury… Or, at the beginning, I was in Melbourne, putting my first little mag, Our Glass, together, when Ken Taylor, in some excitement, told me about & then showed me another little magazine, Crosscurrents, emanating from completely outside of our La Mama cafe-theatre circuitry. It was produced by Michael Dugan from his home in Wentworth Street, Canterbury. For at the beginning I was an English poet in Melbourne, who reconnected with the English scene through fortuitous meeting with Michael Dugan, whose treasure-trove of English little-magazines had inspired him to publish his own, Crosscurrents, & confirmed me in my own Roneo style direction!
George Dowden's poems in an issue of Ambit had caught my eye. I found his address somewhere amongst Michael's things. I wrote to him (& to Jeff Nuttall, & Simon Cutts). He replied, with poems, "(…) from my current 'set' called EARTH INCANTATIONS (Body Chants) - Blake, "O Earth, O Earth, return!" Etc. These have been my work through 1968-69, and are proving of interest to editors in a number of countries, underground papers as well as poetry magazines. I hope you will be able to get them into papers or mags or your own roneo series there. (….) Hope this catches you before you sail [back to England via French Polynesia, the Panama, Martinique, Madeira, Marseilles, departing Sydney August, '69]. Good luck to your group, and on your trip…" (27,VII.69)
At my farewell party, given by Betty Burstall, July '69, I distributed poems by George Dowden, & Michael, similarly, poems by Jim Burns. We were four La Mama poet-editors, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Ian Robertson & myself. Buckmaster corresponded then with Dowden. Dowden negotiated an Australian issue of the English magazine, The Curiously Strong, to be edited by Buckmaster. Dowden sent copies of his books to Ken Taylor (at the ABC, the 'safest' address!) for distribution 'for everybody'. And so on…
It seemed to me, in '69, '70, that Dowden's poetry, his Blake/Ginsberg epistles, could be a stimulus & elevation in the level of political-poetic address then being attempted in Melbourne by such poets as Charles Buckmaster, Paul Adler, & Geoff Eggleston. Both Ian Robertson & Buckmaster were enthusiastic to publish him. Dowden (an American living in England, teaching, writing Ginsberg's bibliography for New Directions) was closer to the Melbourne aspiration, was more accessible than Michael McClure for example.
*
George Dowden to K.H., "Had weird letter from GREAT AUK Chas. Buckmaster. I got Fred Buck to do an Aussie issue of THE CURIOUSLY STRONG, sent a couple of samples to Chas, told him choose 3 or 4 poets there and make up (edit) the whole thing as per the way it's laid out. Said a few words I thought were encouraging, like poetry should be really strong, dangerous, etc., things I thought they were after and were finding in my poems they were praising -- he took it all wrong, thought I was trying to tell him what to write, but was only trying to impress on him the idea of making a really strong issue in his editing (what else?). It must have been that I honestly told him I didn't care for a few little poems he included in letter, wanting me to get published for him --I told him to make them better in THE CUR. STRONG. Oh, well, sensitivity and all that. I explained that 'known' poets when asked for criticism/opinion can only give it from what they want and are doing -- the younger takes it or leaves it (same as in my LETTERS TO ENGLISH POETS, 1967, where I say that they are firstly for me, and only secondly for anyone else who wants to listen). Forget it. Nothing serious. But must be understood: when one is asked for opinion, he does the younger poet no good by lying…." (30. I. 70)
"Yes, overemphasis on description in aussies -- must be a nice place to describe, physically, Pacific, the sun, greenery. But hoping that can be fused with saying something vital -- will be in best, always is (where Pound is so good so often)…." (7. II. 70)
----------------------------
Quoted from Being Here, the draft of its first part, Interference, published in the Being Here issue of H/EAR #7, 1985.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
TO BE AN INNOCENT
To be an innocent just hit town, walking down Flinders Lane from the Nicholas Building toward Elizabeth Street, and cross paths with loping, lunging, grimacing, gesturing man, waving bleeding hand & shouting This is Hell, demanding of the figures to the left & right of him or even in the air since his gaze is there, Cant you see? ---Imagine dreamy kid, any summer since "Flowers In Our Hair" but haywire Spring 2014 which one day'll have that handle to it, as beginnings are memorialised as must be, the mystical angle anyone brings to the resonant years ---Innocent as Charles Buckmaster summoned from tunnel of 42 years only yesterday by Barry Dickins who puffed out relief & smile that at last he'd found the Bookshop & myself in residence, a long time he'd been looking for or thinking of or wishing it ---I met Charles Buckmaster once, he said, at his bookshop, The Source, & invited him to come to my show of paintings at the Athenaeum, and took him there right then & opened up the gallery for him, put the lights on, and he looked at the paintings but didn't say much ---Barry says Charles' father was a painter, beautiful chocolate-box landscapist, Ernest Buckmaster---Um, uncle I say, ---and we drank some wine, and I liked him Barry says ---and saw him another time ---and then heard he'd shot himself --same as his brother, same gun I say ---same as Hemingway he says ---Barry right then eyes lowered from the postered wall and my face, down to the counter level, stopped in his tracks by our naming of suicide ---And I'm not sure whether Barry isn't the more likely figure of the innocence I've retained for Charles via memory of the knowing of him in 1968-'69, corresponding with the schoolboy for weeks before we physically met, and then after leaving Melbourne for England '69-'72 receiving his hopeful epistles, returning to Melbourne then but not to see him, put off by mutual friends that he was in a deeply anti-social phase ---Could be that I was being protected by them from the total deshabille of a fallen angel given my language had fashioned a Melbourne family of poets, Melbourne's Black Mountain (& read commune for college) if you will, whose collective love & genius was poetry's carapace, impregnable whatever politics' & personalities' tumult ---And they'd known of our correspondence, the teaching & nurturing, the expectation of most joyous restoration upon long awaited return ---as Black Mountain's mysterium had transferred to the West's hinterland & coast so now, after England, the bush & beach, mountains & sea of Australia promised similar extension---partly fulfilled but maintained thereafter in & as the Dream ---To be protected from the reality of addiction & its degradation, similarly depression, the dissolution of dreams, the letting it all go, everyone's failing? ---Ken Taylor's Nothing Could Be Done echoed by the others, Michael, John, Ian, Garrie et al ---so strong the investment in 'our' & 'us', poetry scene & poem-making as togetherness, Charles' death was a mortal blow ---Despite the three years of Whitlam-Cairns Australia, hippiedom's Indian Summer, whatever-it-was was over ---Innocent as I seem to have been, innocent as Barry himself appreciating the humour & absurdity of our daily lives but constantly amazed by the cruelties, incredulous that the heaven on earth should or could be undermined, each long sentence of his stories ending with a sigh ---A long long lane it is though, irregularly spaced by drops of the troubled soul's blood upon the pavement, like tears or big raindrops on hot dusty road, tracking his lurch all the way back to the Elizabeth Street crossing ---Innocent at start of this tale would have passed the man who crouches in the alley, eyes averted, chain-smoking, all day every day, burrowing into the flagstones from which he may have emerged --And the Middle-eastern belly-dancer whom I've picked for an exhibitionist, arms above his close-cropped head, revolving pelvis to the music percolating from his little amp, but then brings hand to face & produces impish peek-a-boo, and suddenly it's a performance, his nasty grin, tiny steps, abdominal gyration a species of theatre, sacred transvestite albeit unshaven in couldnt-care-less grey trackies & sandals ---My point is that it's all to be interpreted as Amazing World ---Now innocent's all eyes for queues outside of new coffee-shop (which once housed ancestor bookseller Ross Reading's final store), & tourist group following guide's description of historic architecture, & buskers in-between sets sitting on milk-crates, & students of all ages in & out the CAE, & hairdressing trainees in white uniforms lighting-up, & lame & elderly's discombombulated snail-pace overtaken by the determined blind, & skateboarders, & young corporates without ties, & travellers carrying mountains of equipment departing backpacker hostel for airport Skybus, & slow prams, & fast pushchairs, & bikes ridden or wheeled or padlocked to racks, knocked flat by passers by or awkwardly parking truck ---And within the innocence described another feeling or gleaning which makes of this present cavalcade a match for the culture's previous great change ---It's as if we've returned to the Sixties or that the Sixties never disappeared, that is to say on this particular strip & on this day, its signature is reinstated in the strolling, ambling, eating, drinking, everyday Sunday Market's perpetual pedestrian traffic surrounded by the city's music, daily festival of Flinders Lane including though not every day Ross Hannaford's quintessential jazz & blues, every whichway guitar with tablas mate alongside, scruffly toughly duo, real class for not so fast passers by, remembering something? ---Same flowers & hair of once-upon-a-time Right Here…
[November, 2014]
Monday, April 14, 2014
I.M. KEN TAYLOR, 1930-2014
THE NEWS
[Kris Hemensley :
Facebook post, April 3, 2014
Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.
(......)
Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs. ]
oOo
CORRESPONDENCE
Kris Hemensley :
Sad news Terry, and on a continuum with our good talk on Saturday last : I'm sorry to have tell you that Ken Taylor died at the Epworth Hospital on Wednesday night, 2 April, '14. Ive posted abt it on F/book but just now copied it all to my blog : see, www.collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com
Look after yrself, dear poet/gardener who reads Olson & Williams [your biog in Mike Dugan's Crosscurrents where i delightedly found you in 1968]!
best wishes, Kris
*
Terry Gillmore :
Dear Kris
I feel many things with this sad news and one of them is shame. Shame that in 1984 or thereabouts I voluntarily entered the prison of the Commonwealth public service leaving so many behind, and particularly Ken who offered me his life-home at Macedon (I was homeless) and I had moved a few things in and then the fires came, and came again.
When we were at Aragunui for a night long poetry reading under the full moon on the rock: there was a momentous storm and that is when his burning begun. Inarticulate speech of the heart. What a loss of a truly beautiful man, for he was that even though it shames me and is a failure of language. What a heart he had, what generosity accompanied it. Death surrounds me tonight, tomorrow I will visit with a friend who lost a loved one this week. I foolishly thought I could console her. I have lost a long lost brother. Take care dear Kris
Terry
*
K H :
Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too...
You too Terry, look after yrself, good thoughts, very best, kris
T G :
Dear Kris
As you say ""Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too..." Thanks for reminding me that what we are in is the precious, momentary, only game in town.
Solomon said, something about a wise man hiding his shame but use what I have written as you will, if you are to speak you can be the editor of death and use whatever you like from it.
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 3, '14)
John Jenkins :
Hi Kris
Yes, I did hear from Robert. And it's very sad to hear of Ken's death.
Oddly, as I mentioned to Robert, I was reading 'At Valentines' again, just a few days ago, and thinking of KT.
It is such a strong poem in its own right, purely in its own poetic terms, but also a wonderfully specific audit of aspects of Australian cultural history.
Ken and I had our ups and downs over the years, but the last few times I saw him we were on very good terms indeed, like the old days after La Mama. (It's nice to recall that, at this moment. ) And we had a vague idea of me seeing him at Mt Macedon, but that final meeting never eventuated.
I can access Facebook, and will read what you have posted after sending this email.
Yes, commiserations...!
Best wishes, John
oOo
Laurie Duggan :
[April 4, '14]
Kris,
thanks for sending this. I didn't know about Ken T. I'll post something soon on the blog. I have a couple of his books, At Valentines and Africa but I missed the middle one (through being in the wrong place at the right time or whatever). I didn't ever meet Ken or hear him read for similar reasons. But I've always liked what I've seen of the work.
It's strange to think back to the La Mama years. In one sense us Monash types were your adversaries, yet a lot of the separation simply had to do with the fact that La Mama was twelve miles away. It seems ridiculous now (esp. given my own peregrinations) but twelve miles seemed a long way - once. When I started coming in to Carlton on my own it seemed an adventure. So I never met Ken (and I didn't meet Charles Buckmaster either though he may well have sold me books at Whole Earth [Bookshop]). My loss.
*
K H :
L D :
LEAVES was a strange publication. It was only half laid out, so there are a handful of pages that look ok then the rest is terrible. My co-editor added some not very good poems and in our innocence we used a press that then filled most of the mag with adverts. But I was pleased to have gotten Dennis to do the La Mama piece. I don't know that I'd want to republish it but I certainly wouldn't have any objections to pieces within being republished somewhere.
(April 5)
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 5th, '14]
Hi Barry, thanks for ringing, good to hear you, you spoke wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially "Africa" tonight.... Therell be a service followed by public memorial on the Thursday... will manage the Church not sure abt the Yacht club, but maybe too...
*
Barry Hill :
[April 5th]
Well done Kris, for I squibbed the sea today, can’t say why, just did not feel like the cold wind beforehand.
And I have been caught up in words again today: a poem partly arising from Ken, and more fiddles with PEACEMONGER as Tess Morris Suzuki, Prof of Japanese History at ANU is going to read the straight history bits, and now you and blog.
*
It was good to get yr feedback to our chat about Ken. I needed the chat because I had my sorrow to myself, hardly knowing any other poet who knew him. On hearing the sad but inevitable news I had to pour at least one whiskey in his honour. Not that I ever really drank with him: we met only ten years ago, and we had both started to slow up. Still, in the grog shop before he came to dinner at our place in Queenscliff, he had his credit card out wanting to stock our top shelf, the debit sheet notwithstanding. Same, on that day, his wanting to pit into the hat I had began to pass around to cover some of the costs of your moving shop. The point is he had his eye and mind on what he thought mattered most: conviviality and art, money be dammed. I met him through the family: he went to school with my wife’s father, a skilled farmer, and a man who was more patient with arty self-indulgences than you might think. He stuck with Ken, sensing his unique talent, which I was struck by as soon as he put Africa into my hands. I told him it would win a prize, and it did, of course. His pleasure at that remained understated, as if he knew it would happen. I had dipped into At Valentines a long time ago and was most struck by its cultural ambience: the period here that I had missed while living in London. But there was the ease you write about in yr blog, where you start out on other poets (who I don’t know): the graphic precision, the naturalness of the unfolding, a flow like the water up there at Erskine Falls, below which it all happened in those day, evidently, garlic and wine and dope on everyone’s breath. But the lines were better than culturally expressive. They struck the bell of a clear inner self, one clarified by self interest and a kind of aristocratic sense of entitlement. Of course, he was, in a way, simulating Ammons, that was clear. Yankee ease. But much more than that, as I was also trying to get to say when we were on the phone.
Africa lay in the palm of my hand like a lover’s hand. It was a book that kind of fell out into the hand, from one hand to the other, Ken was so grateful to be gifted with the love of a beautiful and younger woman at that stage in his life. Her about 30 him about 70. Picasso could eat his heart out. When I met her, and found myself in their bedroom because he insisted I go in and look at his drawings of her, leaning against the wall not far from the underwear she had scatted near the unmade bed, I felt almost as transgressional as when a guide to Frieda and Lawrence’s house at Taormina said I should go upstairs to their bedroom. This I did, because I could not not but I did it with a silent plea that Lawrence would understand my lack of prurience. The thing about Africa, with its body heat and candor, is that Ken is more Matisse than Picasso: his aesthetic is as cool as it is hot, his designs are created standing back, their colours are perfect detachments. His lines, ravishing though they can be, hold themselves just a little away from the swoon. And I am saying lines here with his wonderful paintings and drawings in mind, thinking mainly of the Xmas cards some of us were lucky to get. Collectors items in their own right, of course. Perfect lines, and a colour spectrum as perfect as the patterns on a bird. After a few years of getting these beauties in the post it struck me that they were the direct counterpart of his most skillfully joyous poems.
After our talk you wrote back to me saying you enjoyed my remarks (words to the effect that I'd spoken "wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially Africa tonight…."). That's good, as I have never spoken them before, as I say: had no need to. And I think I added that he was, really, a classicist. Oh his stream gushed forth as romantically as anything, that was what you seem be calling the urgency of his lines and reading. But their control, to me, was the thing, the balances of their form, their measure, their grace, I suppose we might say. It was with a pure grace, it seemed to me, that he saw his lover off into her next and necessary relationship with a younger man, one she would marry. I know that various people have their stories about Ken’s excesses, but this part of his story, its expression of respect and tact, struck me as a wonderful poem in life. As selfless as his perfectly pitched lyrics.
Ken was the first poet I have met who made me feel, on first reading him, that he was the most natural of poets. Back home, in some shed of his on that mountain, he may have toiled for such a natural perfection. We know the poets who do. I don’t know if he did or he didn’t. And don’t much care, really, such was his success so often on the page. Africa made me want to set off to Africa even though Africa was never mentioned, if you know what I mean.
This poem I have come to dedicate to him began as a rough draft to a cat. It was its grace of movement in and out of sunlight which triggered it. Then, after our conversation about line and movement through spaces in Ken’s work, I found myself wondering if he would like what I was doing with the cat’s presence. If I was trying to do a Xmas card like his, I would want the cat to be in it as he did flowers, or the sea in their limpid movements.
Anyway, have a look at the poem and see what you think. Not that I need to talk about the poem. Its just good to put something down that I would have been happy to read to Ken as we drank whiskey.
All best in life and art!
B
*
Under the Wisteria
I.M. Ken Taylor
Rumi
our cat with the Chinese markings
sniffs the morning
all nostrils and twitch—
a whiskered breath-quiver of ears.
The Chinese character for listening
has two ears
one above the other
beside dish over heart.
Then he’s stalking, slow-mo
in and out
of sunlight:
willowy patches, pond-shadows.
He crosses the lawn.
He pads, like some rich kid, on bare earth
beneath the Loess-coloured wisteria.
Not a sound on the way
to the door of the room
with the rosewood floor.
He regards the sheen that becomes him.
He senses the unwelcome table
laden with dictionaries.
No sign, as yet
of his plans to vanish
for the night.
(Autumn, 2014)
*
K H :
"The most natural of poets" --yes. From the first (& I heard him Winter 67 before we met, and he had that same breathless, short-of-breath), his poems sounded like him! And because I was fascinated by the physical poetics of Olson & Creeley, I heard Ken as doing precisely what they asked for, even tho he wdnt have studied them. (I suppose another way to that wld be to investigate whether any of it is in Ammons? I mean formally but also, with Ammons, innately --ie his own & not out of the big O's thigh!)
And I like your poem, touched by the dedication of course. Its title almost sounds like a Ken Taylor title! And love your cat! That graphic first stanza description! And the easy crossing into the Chinese. Yep. Very good.
So, all in all, you deserve a drink now! The writing's great reward for a deep & heavy week --the shock, the sadness, the thought, the talk, the poem... Well done that man!
All best,
K
*
B H :
yes, his forms were different to Ammons, he was more open than A I suppose, less affected in his openness also, somehow.
He did not need to create a lower case world, hey.
And I realised today why the Orientalism of the poem felt right. Ken had an important connection to Kyoto; he had clearly peered long and hard at those brilliantly inked Japanese woodcut prints.
oOo
Ian Robertson :
[6 April '14]
Hello Kris
it is sad news and thanks for letting me know... we never did catch up, though came close some years ago when Robert used to have his birthday gatherings at Redesdale.
Thinking of Ken immediately transports me back to the house in Parkville, the way Ken & Margaret welcomed everyone in. I see the living room and the steps down into the kitchen where food and drink and conversation flowed in an atmosphere of living intelligence, warmth, acceptance and conviviality such as I had never experienced... serious and searching conversation was mixed with stories and hearty laughter, a great humanity at a warmly human scale... to a 19/20 year-old, Ken seemed an almost giant figure but there was no distance, no separation about him at all... he was immediate, disarming, inclusive and engaging... it was surprising and so encouraging to be not just accepted into this atmosphere, but also, amazingly/apparently, to be appreciated... I remember thinking, so this is how life could be...
oOo
Susan Fealy :
[April 13th, '14]
REFERENCES & SOURCES
Terry Gillmore's reference to Araganui [near Bega, NSW; Mimosa Beach National Park] returns me to the correspondence from Alexandra Seddon, published in the HEART issue of H/EAR magazine, #5, Summer 1983/4.
30.1.83
Araganui
Kris,
so in this place I must write to you. Terry Gillmore here, John Anderson, Geoff Eggleston, Ken Taylor, Leigh Stokes, & Dorothy Swoope (near Wollongong), Simon Macdonald, Cornelis Vleeskens & Jenny Mitchell, Frank (?), plus many others. A lot of my students. Trish from the Mornya Womens House with her lover, Kathy, my friends Angela Koch, Venie Holmgren. Lots of people on the rock last night, reading by hurricane lamp & fire. We (Angela & I & 2 German girls who are staying at farm) had arrived a bit late. Terry & others helped us across to the island -- the tide having risen quite high. The climb up the rock was not easy. It was amazing that so many people managed to reach that remote place. The reading did go on for most of the night, then we came back to camp & sleep for 2 hours till dawn.
What can I tell you? The atmosphere of the reading was sea, fire, wind, night -- wonderful. At about 1 o'clock when I read for the first part, I felt impelled to read Owen's Mantra -- just the first part. Although I knew it to be unwise, it seemed necessary. Terry & Ken felt it went over well. I had no way of judging. It was like switching back to a time when one lacked any confidence in the writing. Geoff's reading was alright, a bit turgid. Ken read clearly, laying things out to be seen. Cornelis read some family portraits -- excellent, precise gestures, colours, framed. Very good for reading aloud. And also some pieces where he & Jenny Mitchell read alternately, sometimes whole poems, sometimes lines. She chanting "Manna Gum" between his lines at one point. She is a painter. John Anderson's reading was wonderful -- like seeing the movie after reading the book, & being totally satisfied by it. Leigh Stokes did some strange operatic chanting in the midst of a poem for which he had made peculiarly arrogant apologies. Dorothy Swoope reminded me of Marilyn Kitchell [ex Rhode Island poet & publisher of Salt Works Press with Tom Bridwell, last heard of late '80s when she was in Mississippi]-- that fabric of things was very apparent -- clear deliberate reading. I remembered her from Wollongong. Terry read with warmth -- a sort of gentle communication. Tonight we will read again, this time not on the rock but in the tamer camping ground. There is an old thin wallaby close by. Simon Macdonald is feeding him. Terry is talking of reading your 'Being Here'. And I feel that you should be made present more obviously, perhaps in that way.
And I am trying so hard to be here. I am not planted yet, flittering at the edges, trying to grasp or enter the being here. I cannot find the words to frame anything. I am struggling with the words more than ever. I want to give you the feel, the flavour of being here but I cannot find it clearly.
There are tents set up more or less in a circle -- a table in the middle. Modest food, tea, coffee. The talk surging, going around, people wandering off to the bush or to swim. A lot of cigarettes, fires. John standing loosely by the table. He has come now to sit beside me & tell me dreams of Candelo & a radiant face in a tree -- an Aboriginal face & he is reading now from the note book which Retta gave me. He says he would like to come to the farm. I feel chastened by his gentleness & careful words. I feel chastened too by Ken Taylor's silence & speech -- both -- his economy of words...
(......)
*
[According to Mr Google, ca 2013 :
The idea of Cowsnest was to set up a community farm where anyone could come and contribute their skill and labour even if they had no money to buy land.
Out of Cowsnest, in 1985, grew the Candelo Arts Society, which continues to flourish.
There is also a 57 acre feral-animal-proof Sanctuary at Cowsnest, a half-way house for injured and orphaned native animals who are on their way to soft release.
In 1996 Alexandra initiated the Waterbird Sanctuary in Pambula, which has become Panboola, Pambula Wetlands and Heritage Project (over 200 acres right in Pambula).
In 2000 she began the Pambula Flying Fox Hospital and Conservation Area (34 acres protected by Voluntary Conservation Agreement).
And on September 25th, 2006, a senescent Yellow Pinch Wildlife Park was bought, and slowly rejuvenated to become Potoroo Palace, Native Animal Educational Sanctuary.]
oOo
Re- Laurie Duggan's LEAVES magazine... The La Mama poets' segment gathered by Dennis Douglas, who was teaching at Monash then & editing poetry at The Age, quotes as its title K H's line, to be a poet amongst poets / not to be THE poet.
The segment begins with my letter (of October 25th '68) to Dennis, reproduced in the original typewriter script, from which the following paragraphs :
"(......) andy jack [correct spelling jach] another local poet wrote me the other day saying do you have to write american to make poetry today?? no. but the american influence is undeniable & one can only be enriched by it - the american [poetry] experience takes in every important writer of the postwar world - the british poets macdiarmid & bunting / the younguns pickard/liverpool/nottingham/london poets/ are all following the open way of poetry....tho this is not the only way for me and for many others...obscurity [obscurantism?] is the the thing that has been demolished!
How about doing an article on the new [La Mama, Melbourne] poets? we cd help you with the field work! wed have a ball!! [Ken] taylor/[John] romeril/[Bill] beard/[Charles] buckmaster/ [Mal] morgan/ [Geoff] eggleston /[Elaine] rushbrooke/ [Andy] jack [Jach]/[Michael] dugan/[Ian] robertson/ and i bet there's a score & more!!! interstate a free mag has started emanating from terry gillmore in sydney "free grass" [actually not! --Free Grass was John Tranter's superb hoax; Free Poetry was the real magazine, edited by Gillmore, Nigel Roberts & Johnny Goodall --I'd enthusiastically conflated fact & fiction!] - gillmore/thomson/heaslop/ from nsw - this is a sizable number [of new poets] - at la mama ive had 26 different poets read /invited &/or from the audience!.... for me its the culmination of an ambition to have a poetry workshop - there has to be a new basis for [ poetry &] society - it has to "among" instead of "sole" :-- to be a poet amongst poets/not to be THE poet.
(......)
The letter is followed by Denis Douglas's description of the new poets.
THE MEETING IN THE PARK
Who were in the park [Exhibition Gardens opposite Queensbury Street, Carlton, where the Hemensleys, invited by the actor Frank Bren, lived in the terrace house at number 21] that day? Kris Hemensley, stocky, bearded, expatriate Englishman in his early twenties, Loretta, his wife, who helped produce the magazine Our Glass, which was printed on a fordigraph duplicator purchased by Kris in the expectation that with Our Glass and other poetry jobs it would pay for itself, Bill Beard, a small, wiry, smiling fugitive from the RAAF - he had conducted a one-man non violent campaign of protest against its involvement in the Vietnam war from within the Air Force and eventually been discharged - studying philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Charles Buckmaster, who had been sent home from an upcountry high school to get his hair cut and instead of getting it cut had come to Melbourne to work as laboratory assistant and produce a poetry magazine The Great Auk, Michael Dugan, former member of a fruit picking commune, former book salesman, former publishing editor, former children's writer, former rocker, who was to do it all again (except for returning to the commune).
Who was not in the park that day? Geoffrey Eggleston, burly, aggressive artist-designer much given to the poetic exploitation of obscenity, Ken Taylor, ABC producer, who had used some of the new poetry on radio programs and written well himself in a style influenced by Whitman, Williams, and Charles Olson, Nigel Roberts and Terry Gillmore, who were living in Sydney and producing a magazine called Free Poetry, Richard Tipping and Rob Tillett, who were producing a magazine in Adelaide called Mok, Sweeney Reed, who regarded himself as the manager of a poet called Russell Deeble, and was at that time regarded by the "free magazine" editors as a trendy dilettante, although they later settled their differences (It was Sweeney who had first suggested that I get in touch with the group, remarking that no poet under thirty regarded the established literary magazines as anything but a self-enclosed and self-perpetuating middle-aged clique, utterly indifferent to anything written overseas since 1960 - Terry Gillmore was later to tell me that the mini-mags broke down the resistance to the newer verse forms within two years, suggesting almost that they were instruments used in a campaign to establish communication with an older generation, or to be able to compete with them on even terms).
(......)
Dennis Douglas's survey/celebration continues with quotations from the editorials of the little mags, & culminates with the segment, WHERE HAVE ALL THE POETS GONE?
Although the law of diminishing returns turned their minds to other things, Mike's to a rock-poetry combination, Ian's to India, Charles's to becoming the nth replacement editor for a Penguin anthology of the new poetry [for which Ken Taylor & K H had initially been solicited by John Hooker but after much debate declined because of the political & philosophical compromises anticipated] which never appeared, Sweeney's to the Tolarno Galleries - and the amount of bread and energy that was lavished on the broadsheets should not be underestimated - although Tom Shapcott's Sun Books anthology and Poetry Magazine led the shift in critical forms that encouraged their acceptance, so that "establishment" outlets became available - although a new generation of poetry readers altered the atmosphere of the readings now held at the Arts Co-operative - although some people got busted and others got careers - although the "new thing" was no longer new - although Kris returned to England and Ken started making TV films about birds and Bill went beach-combing, there are still readings and a newer crop of magazines, and rumours of a great new well-produced publication are circulating [Dark Ages Journal, which didnt proceed beyond the manuscript], connected with rumours of Kris Hemensley's return.
What happened was not greatly different from the forging of other poetry schools in the forties and fifties - the attempts the new poets made to gain acceptance for their poetic were no more outrageous or ill-mannered than the tactics of other literary pressure groups - they generated no more antagonism - they excited no more sympathy - which is to say, they were outrageous, ill-mannered, generated much antagonism, excited much sympathy. The differences stemmed from the differences in the world the new poets inhabited, a dangerous, competitive, and hence more communally-minded world. Like other vital schools, they produced much that was ephemeral as well as much that was forceful and effective, and they made themselves known at an earlier age than most Australian groups of poets.
The main point they made was that creative forces can be channeled into the communal life of a large group of people and function there as a positive, enlightening, life-generating impulse. Perhaps the poetry of the future will be made by a by-product of the inner life of societies and less a simulacrum of some kind of collective public address system than the poetry of the past.
oOo
[edited & typed by Kris Hemensley,
April 12th/14th, 2014
Westgarth, Oz]
[Kris Hemensley :
Facebook post, April 3, 2014
Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.
(......)
Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs. ]
oOo
CORRESPONDENCE
Kris Hemensley :
Sad news Terry, and on a continuum with our good talk on Saturday last : I'm sorry to have tell you that Ken Taylor died at the Epworth Hospital on Wednesday night, 2 April, '14. Ive posted abt it on F/book but just now copied it all to my blog : see, www.collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com
Look after yrself, dear poet/gardener who reads Olson & Williams [your biog in Mike Dugan's Crosscurrents where i delightedly found you in 1968]!
best wishes, Kris
*
Terry Gillmore :
Dear Kris
I feel many things with this sad news and one of them is shame. Shame that in 1984 or thereabouts I voluntarily entered the prison of the Commonwealth public service leaving so many behind, and particularly Ken who offered me his life-home at Macedon (I was homeless) and I had moved a few things in and then the fires came, and came again.
When we were at Aragunui for a night long poetry reading under the full moon on the rock: there was a momentous storm and that is when his burning begun. Inarticulate speech of the heart. What a loss of a truly beautiful man, for he was that even though it shames me and is a failure of language. What a heart he had, what generosity accompanied it. Death surrounds me tonight, tomorrow I will visit with a friend who lost a loved one this week. I foolishly thought I could console her. I have lost a long lost brother. Take care dear Kris
Terry
*
K H :
Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too...
You too Terry, look after yrself, good thoughts, very best, kris
T G :
Dear Kris
As you say ""Death surrounds" as you say, but the depth of life it arouses, thank God for that too..." Thanks for reminding me that what we are in is the precious, momentary, only game in town.
Solomon said, something about a wise man hiding his shame but use what I have written as you will, if you are to speak you can be the editor of death and use whatever you like from it.
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 3, '14)
Hi John,
Youve probably heard? from Robert K? Sad news that
Ken died last night, at the Epworth... Ive posted something on F/book,
can copy & paste for you if you like?
Commiserations to share.John Jenkins :
Hi Kris
Yes, I did hear from Robert. And it's very sad to hear of Ken's death.
Oddly, as I mentioned to Robert, I was reading 'At Valentines' again, just a few days ago, and thinking of KT.
It is such a strong poem in its own right, purely in its own poetic terms, but also a wonderfully specific audit of aspects of Australian cultural history.
Ken and I had our ups and downs over the years, but the last few times I saw him we were on very good terms indeed, like the old days after La Mama. (It's nice to recall that, at this moment. ) And we had a vague idea of me seeing him at Mt Macedon, but that final meeting never eventuated.
I can access Facebook, and will read what you have posted after sending this email.
Yes, commiserations...!
Best wishes, John
oOo
Laurie Duggan :
[April 4, '14]
Kris,
thanks for sending this. I didn't know about Ken T. I'll post something soon on the blog. I have a couple of his books, At Valentines and Africa but I missed the middle one (through being in the wrong place at the right time or whatever). I didn't ever meet Ken or hear him read for similar reasons. But I've always liked what I've seen of the work.
It's strange to think back to the La Mama years. In one sense us Monash types were your adversaries, yet a lot of the separation simply had to do with the fact that La Mama was twelve miles away. It seems ridiculous now (esp. given my own peregrinations) but twelve miles seemed a long way - once. When I started coming in to Carlton on my own it seemed an adventure. So I never met Ken (and I didn't meet Charles Buckmaster either though he may well have sold me books at Whole Earth [Bookshop]). My loss.
*
K H :
Hi Laurie, good to have yours... By
the way ive been reading yr edition of LEAVES [Monash University magazine, ed Philip Chubb & Laurie Duggan, 1970] wch has my play [Stephany, directed & performed by Malcolm Robertson at La Mama] in it but
also fascinating document gathered by Dennis Douglas &/or you of
the La Mama poets... Certainly brings it back... Could/should be republished
as part of the documentation/recapitulation of the period... wch never
ended!!!
L D :
LEAVES was a strange publication. It was only half laid out, so there are a handful of pages that look ok then the rest is terrible. My co-editor added some not very good poems and in our innocence we used a press that then filled most of the mag with adverts. But I was pleased to have gotten Dennis to do the La Mama piece. I don't know that I'd want to republish it but I certainly wouldn't have any objections to pieces within being republished somewhere.
(April 5)
oOo
Kris Hemensley :
[April 5th, '14]
Hi Barry, thanks for ringing, good to hear you, you spoke wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially "Africa" tonight.... Therell be a service followed by public memorial on the Thursday... will manage the Church not sure abt the Yacht club, but maybe too...
*
Barry Hill :
[April 5th]
Well done Kris, for I squibbed the sea today, can’t say why, just did not feel like the cold wind beforehand.
And I have been caught up in words again today: a poem partly arising from Ken, and more fiddles with PEACEMONGER as Tess Morris Suzuki, Prof of Japanese History at ANU is going to read the straight history bits, and now you and blog.
*
It was good to get yr feedback to our chat about Ken. I needed the chat because I had my sorrow to myself, hardly knowing any other poet who knew him. On hearing the sad but inevitable news I had to pour at least one whiskey in his honour. Not that I ever really drank with him: we met only ten years ago, and we had both started to slow up. Still, in the grog shop before he came to dinner at our place in Queenscliff, he had his credit card out wanting to stock our top shelf, the debit sheet notwithstanding. Same, on that day, his wanting to pit into the hat I had began to pass around to cover some of the costs of your moving shop. The point is he had his eye and mind on what he thought mattered most: conviviality and art, money be dammed. I met him through the family: he went to school with my wife’s father, a skilled farmer, and a man who was more patient with arty self-indulgences than you might think. He stuck with Ken, sensing his unique talent, which I was struck by as soon as he put Africa into my hands. I told him it would win a prize, and it did, of course. His pleasure at that remained understated, as if he knew it would happen. I had dipped into At Valentines a long time ago and was most struck by its cultural ambience: the period here that I had missed while living in London. But there was the ease you write about in yr blog, where you start out on other poets (who I don’t know): the graphic precision, the naturalness of the unfolding, a flow like the water up there at Erskine Falls, below which it all happened in those day, evidently, garlic and wine and dope on everyone’s breath. But the lines were better than culturally expressive. They struck the bell of a clear inner self, one clarified by self interest and a kind of aristocratic sense of entitlement. Of course, he was, in a way, simulating Ammons, that was clear. Yankee ease. But much more than that, as I was also trying to get to say when we were on the phone.
Africa lay in the palm of my hand like a lover’s hand. It was a book that kind of fell out into the hand, from one hand to the other, Ken was so grateful to be gifted with the love of a beautiful and younger woman at that stage in his life. Her about 30 him about 70. Picasso could eat his heart out. When I met her, and found myself in their bedroom because he insisted I go in and look at his drawings of her, leaning against the wall not far from the underwear she had scatted near the unmade bed, I felt almost as transgressional as when a guide to Frieda and Lawrence’s house at Taormina said I should go upstairs to their bedroom. This I did, because I could not not but I did it with a silent plea that Lawrence would understand my lack of prurience. The thing about Africa, with its body heat and candor, is that Ken is more Matisse than Picasso: his aesthetic is as cool as it is hot, his designs are created standing back, their colours are perfect detachments. His lines, ravishing though they can be, hold themselves just a little away from the swoon. And I am saying lines here with his wonderful paintings and drawings in mind, thinking mainly of the Xmas cards some of us were lucky to get. Collectors items in their own right, of course. Perfect lines, and a colour spectrum as perfect as the patterns on a bird. After a few years of getting these beauties in the post it struck me that they were the direct counterpart of his most skillfully joyous poems.
After our talk you wrote back to me saying you enjoyed my remarks (words to the effect that I'd spoken "wonderfully clearly incisively perceptively abt Ken & especially Africa tonight…."). That's good, as I have never spoken them before, as I say: had no need to. And I think I added that he was, really, a classicist. Oh his stream gushed forth as romantically as anything, that was what you seem be calling the urgency of his lines and reading. But their control, to me, was the thing, the balances of their form, their measure, their grace, I suppose we might say. It was with a pure grace, it seemed to me, that he saw his lover off into her next and necessary relationship with a younger man, one she would marry. I know that various people have their stories about Ken’s excesses, but this part of his story, its expression of respect and tact, struck me as a wonderful poem in life. As selfless as his perfectly pitched lyrics.
Ken was the first poet I have met who made me feel, on first reading him, that he was the most natural of poets. Back home, in some shed of his on that mountain, he may have toiled for such a natural perfection. We know the poets who do. I don’t know if he did or he didn’t. And don’t much care, really, such was his success so often on the page. Africa made me want to set off to Africa even though Africa was never mentioned, if you know what I mean.
This poem I have come to dedicate to him began as a rough draft to a cat. It was its grace of movement in and out of sunlight which triggered it. Then, after our conversation about line and movement through spaces in Ken’s work, I found myself wondering if he would like what I was doing with the cat’s presence. If I was trying to do a Xmas card like his, I would want the cat to be in it as he did flowers, or the sea in their limpid movements.
Anyway, have a look at the poem and see what you think. Not that I need to talk about the poem. Its just good to put something down that I would have been happy to read to Ken as we drank whiskey.
All best in life and art!
B
*
Under the Wisteria
I.M. Ken Taylor
Rumi
our cat with the Chinese markings
sniffs the morning
all nostrils and twitch—
a whiskered breath-quiver of ears.
The Chinese character for listening
has two ears
one above the other
beside dish over heart.
Then he’s stalking, slow-mo
in and out
of sunlight:
willowy patches, pond-shadows.
He crosses the lawn.
He pads, like some rich kid, on bare earth
beneath the Loess-coloured wisteria.
Not a sound on the way
to the door of the room
with the rosewood floor.
He regards the sheen that becomes him.
He senses the unwelcome table
laden with dictionaries.
No sign, as yet
of his plans to vanish
for the night.
(Autumn, 2014)
*
K H :
"The most natural of poets" --yes. From the first (& I heard him Winter 67 before we met, and he had that same breathless, short-of-breath), his poems sounded like him! And because I was fascinated by the physical poetics of Olson & Creeley, I heard Ken as doing precisely what they asked for, even tho he wdnt have studied them. (I suppose another way to that wld be to investigate whether any of it is in Ammons? I mean formally but also, with Ammons, innately --ie his own & not out of the big O's thigh!)
And I like your poem, touched by the dedication of course. Its title almost sounds like a Ken Taylor title! And love your cat! That graphic first stanza description! And the easy crossing into the Chinese. Yep. Very good.
So, all in all, you deserve a drink now! The writing's great reward for a deep & heavy week --the shock, the sadness, the thought, the talk, the poem... Well done that man!
All best,
K
*
B H :
yes, his forms were different to Ammons, he was more open than A I suppose, less affected in his openness also, somehow.
He did not need to create a lower case world, hey.
And I realised today why the Orientalism of the poem felt right. Ken had an important connection to Kyoto; he had clearly peered long and hard at those brilliantly inked Japanese woodcut prints.
oOo
Ian Robertson :
[6 April '14]
Hello Kris
it is sad news and thanks for letting me know... we never did catch up, though came close some years ago when Robert used to have his birthday gatherings at Redesdale.
Thinking of Ken immediately transports me back to the house in Parkville, the way Ken & Margaret welcomed everyone in. I see the living room and the steps down into the kitchen where food and drink and conversation flowed in an atmosphere of living intelligence, warmth, acceptance and conviviality such as I had never experienced... serious and searching conversation was mixed with stories and hearty laughter, a great humanity at a warmly human scale... to a 19/20 year-old, Ken seemed an almost giant figure but there was no distance, no separation about him at all... he was immediate, disarming, inclusive and engaging... it was surprising and so encouraging to be not just accepted into this atmosphere, but also, amazingly/apparently, to be appreciated... I remember thinking, so this is how life could be...
oOo
Susan Fealy :
[April 13th, '14]
| ||||
| ||||
Visit to Ken Taylor with Ron Pretty. Monday, October 20, 2008.
(Ken, Ron and I had attended the Glenfern Salon on Sunday, 19th : feature poets Kris Hemensley and Peter Porter.)
His
home rides over an ocean of forget-me-nots and bluebells. Huge trees
on the ridges, low stonewalls and paths lead to secret ponds, closer
to home, a rustic tower, a garden shed.
Ron
and I sat in his kitchen after a walk around about (he’d left the
door open) and began to wonder if we had mixed up the arrangements. Then
we saw his black beret and figured he would be back to get his hat and
he was! He arrived with his mate Steve and brought some supplies for
lunch. He wore a thin black jumper over white, white trousers .White
beard, grey face. He’d laughed and said he could not believe that he
had travelled around France and the only man to be found wearing a beret
was his own reflection in a shop window.
From the window, in the middle of the courtyard a snow drop
neighboured the rusted brazier. It tossed out its green leaves like a
fountain, they shone in the afternoon sun, infant grass sprinkled the
bricks.
Outside
the window: bright blue-green, delicate, almost feathery leaves and
old old wood, shining in the afternoon sun, outside his kitchen. What
kind of tree is that? It’s a Yew Tree he said. There are more on the
hill. Steeply above the house, but not far away.. a row of yew trees
above a stone wall.
Ken
said that his own paintings on the walls were reference points for
him.Crab, sea, octopus..seals, I said border dwellers? Then he said
sharks. I said sharks are not border dwellers and then we decided
that maybe they are. That pure aggression ( jn us), Ken said, you see it
when you arise from the sea after a swim in Brittany And it is disturbing
because you see the gun slits in the wall where the guns would have
killed you. We chatted about the Kris Hemensley and Peter Porter event
that had happened the day prior. Ken had disliked violence used as a
trope in some of Peter’s poems, said Kris’s work spoke to him more.
As
he discussed the prose he was developing into a book, he said some
sentences are waiting for him to turn them into drawings. We looked at
his water colours, some set on the large tables, often of marine
creatures. He said when I draw it is almost always from a photograph as
there is so much information. We agreed that you have to find the line.
We
talked about proportion, and his friend Steve suddenly formed
Leonardo’s proportion of man with his outstretched arms and legs and
it felt like all four of us found a magic proportion in that moment
inside his large studio. I asked Ken about the sculpture scattered
around his property : he said some had been left there by sculptors,
and had yet to be collected by them. Ken said sculptors are on different
time , maybe they will come back in seven years… they have to listen to
nature.
He
let me run up the hill to collect some Lily of the Valley. He said,
get as near to the earth as you can and pull straight up : it unmoors
itself. I found it under the bright red Camellia tree. Tiny flames of
green, green fire on the hill, tiny pearls. I said, it smells like
frangipani a bit but it is not. No, he said , (somewhat sternly) it is
Lily of the Valley.
oOo
oOo
REFERENCES & SOURCES
Terry Gillmore's reference to Araganui [near Bega, NSW; Mimosa Beach National Park] returns me to the correspondence from Alexandra Seddon, published in the HEART issue of H/EAR magazine, #5, Summer 1983/4.
30.1.83
Araganui
Kris,
so in this place I must write to you. Terry Gillmore here, John Anderson, Geoff Eggleston, Ken Taylor, Leigh Stokes, & Dorothy Swoope (near Wollongong), Simon Macdonald, Cornelis Vleeskens & Jenny Mitchell, Frank (?), plus many others. A lot of my students. Trish from the Mornya Womens House with her lover, Kathy, my friends Angela Koch, Venie Holmgren. Lots of people on the rock last night, reading by hurricane lamp & fire. We (Angela & I & 2 German girls who are staying at farm) had arrived a bit late. Terry & others helped us across to the island -- the tide having risen quite high. The climb up the rock was not easy. It was amazing that so many people managed to reach that remote place. The reading did go on for most of the night, then we came back to camp & sleep for 2 hours till dawn.
What can I tell you? The atmosphere of the reading was sea, fire, wind, night -- wonderful. At about 1 o'clock when I read for the first part, I felt impelled to read Owen's Mantra -- just the first part. Although I knew it to be unwise, it seemed necessary. Terry & Ken felt it went over well. I had no way of judging. It was like switching back to a time when one lacked any confidence in the writing. Geoff's reading was alright, a bit turgid. Ken read clearly, laying things out to be seen. Cornelis read some family portraits -- excellent, precise gestures, colours, framed. Very good for reading aloud. And also some pieces where he & Jenny Mitchell read alternately, sometimes whole poems, sometimes lines. She chanting "Manna Gum" between his lines at one point. She is a painter. John Anderson's reading was wonderful -- like seeing the movie after reading the book, & being totally satisfied by it. Leigh Stokes did some strange operatic chanting in the midst of a poem for which he had made peculiarly arrogant apologies. Dorothy Swoope reminded me of Marilyn Kitchell [ex Rhode Island poet & publisher of Salt Works Press with Tom Bridwell, last heard of late '80s when she was in Mississippi]-- that fabric of things was very apparent -- clear deliberate reading. I remembered her from Wollongong. Terry read with warmth -- a sort of gentle communication. Tonight we will read again, this time not on the rock but in the tamer camping ground. There is an old thin wallaby close by. Simon Macdonald is feeding him. Terry is talking of reading your 'Being Here'. And I feel that you should be made present more obviously, perhaps in that way.
And I am trying so hard to be here. I am not planted yet, flittering at the edges, trying to grasp or enter the being here. I cannot find the words to frame anything. I am struggling with the words more than ever. I want to give you the feel, the flavour of being here but I cannot find it clearly.
There are tents set up more or less in a circle -- a table in the middle. Modest food, tea, coffee. The talk surging, going around, people wandering off to the bush or to swim. A lot of cigarettes, fires. John standing loosely by the table. He has come now to sit beside me & tell me dreams of Candelo & a radiant face in a tree -- an Aboriginal face & he is reading now from the note book which Retta gave me. He says he would like to come to the farm. I feel chastened by his gentleness & careful words. I feel chastened too by Ken Taylor's silence & speech -- both -- his economy of words...
(......)
*
[According to Mr Google, ca 2013 :
Alexandra Seddon, the founder and patron of Potoroo Palace, has a background of community, conservation, education, farming and the arts.
She came to the Bega Valley in 1975 from Papua New Guinea, where she had been working with PNG teachers, mostly in drama and creative writing. She began farming with her brother in Candelo, and so Cowsnest Community Farm came into being, with a kibbutz type structure: to each according to his/her need, from each according to his/her ability.The idea of Cowsnest was to set up a community farm where anyone could come and contribute their skill and labour even if they had no money to buy land.
Out of Cowsnest, in 1985, grew the Candelo Arts Society, which continues to flourish.
There is also a 57 acre feral-animal-proof Sanctuary at Cowsnest, a half-way house for injured and orphaned native animals who are on their way to soft release.
In 1996 Alexandra initiated the Waterbird Sanctuary in Pambula, which has become Panboola, Pambula Wetlands and Heritage Project (over 200 acres right in Pambula).
In 2000 she began the Pambula Flying Fox Hospital and Conservation Area (34 acres protected by Voluntary Conservation Agreement).
And on September 25th, 2006, a senescent Yellow Pinch Wildlife Park was bought, and slowly rejuvenated to become Potoroo Palace, Native Animal Educational Sanctuary.]
oOo
Re- Laurie Duggan's LEAVES magazine... The La Mama poets' segment gathered by Dennis Douglas, who was teaching at Monash then & editing poetry at The Age, quotes as its title K H's line, to be a poet amongst poets / not to be THE poet.
The segment begins with my letter (of October 25th '68) to Dennis, reproduced in the original typewriter script, from which the following paragraphs :
"(......) andy jack [correct spelling jach] another local poet wrote me the other day saying do you have to write american to make poetry today?? no. but the american influence is undeniable & one can only be enriched by it - the american [poetry] experience takes in every important writer of the postwar world - the british poets macdiarmid & bunting / the younguns pickard/liverpool/nottingham/london poets/ are all following the open way of poetry....tho this is not the only way for me and for many others...obscurity [obscurantism?] is the the thing that has been demolished!
How about doing an article on the new [La Mama, Melbourne] poets? we cd help you with the field work! wed have a ball!! [Ken] taylor/[John] romeril/[Bill] beard/[Charles] buckmaster/ [Mal] morgan/ [Geoff] eggleston /[Elaine] rushbrooke/ [Andy] jack [Jach]/[Michael] dugan/[Ian] robertson/ and i bet there's a score & more!!! interstate a free mag has started emanating from terry gillmore in sydney "free grass" [actually not! --Free Grass was John Tranter's superb hoax; Free Poetry was the real magazine, edited by Gillmore, Nigel Roberts & Johnny Goodall --I'd enthusiastically conflated fact & fiction!] - gillmore/thomson/heaslop/ from nsw - this is a sizable number [of new poets] - at la mama ive had 26 different poets read /invited &/or from the audience!.... for me its the culmination of an ambition to have a poetry workshop - there has to be a new basis for [ poetry &] society - it has to "among" instead of "sole" :-- to be a poet amongst poets/not to be THE poet.
(......)
The letter is followed by Denis Douglas's description of the new poets.
THE MEETING IN THE PARK
Who were in the park [Exhibition Gardens opposite Queensbury Street, Carlton, where the Hemensleys, invited by the actor Frank Bren, lived in the terrace house at number 21] that day? Kris Hemensley, stocky, bearded, expatriate Englishman in his early twenties, Loretta, his wife, who helped produce the magazine Our Glass, which was printed on a fordigraph duplicator purchased by Kris in the expectation that with Our Glass and other poetry jobs it would pay for itself, Bill Beard, a small, wiry, smiling fugitive from the RAAF - he had conducted a one-man non violent campaign of protest against its involvement in the Vietnam war from within the Air Force and eventually been discharged - studying philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Charles Buckmaster, who had been sent home from an upcountry high school to get his hair cut and instead of getting it cut had come to Melbourne to work as laboratory assistant and produce a poetry magazine The Great Auk, Michael Dugan, former member of a fruit picking commune, former book salesman, former publishing editor, former children's writer, former rocker, who was to do it all again (except for returning to the commune).
Who was not in the park that day? Geoffrey Eggleston, burly, aggressive artist-designer much given to the poetic exploitation of obscenity, Ken Taylor, ABC producer, who had used some of the new poetry on radio programs and written well himself in a style influenced by Whitman, Williams, and Charles Olson, Nigel Roberts and Terry Gillmore, who were living in Sydney and producing a magazine called Free Poetry, Richard Tipping and Rob Tillett, who were producing a magazine in Adelaide called Mok, Sweeney Reed, who regarded himself as the manager of a poet called Russell Deeble, and was at that time regarded by the "free magazine" editors as a trendy dilettante, although they later settled their differences (It was Sweeney who had first suggested that I get in touch with the group, remarking that no poet under thirty regarded the established literary magazines as anything but a self-enclosed and self-perpetuating middle-aged clique, utterly indifferent to anything written overseas since 1960 - Terry Gillmore was later to tell me that the mini-mags broke down the resistance to the newer verse forms within two years, suggesting almost that they were instruments used in a campaign to establish communication with an older generation, or to be able to compete with them on even terms).
(......)
Dennis Douglas's survey/celebration continues with quotations from the editorials of the little mags, & culminates with the segment, WHERE HAVE ALL THE POETS GONE?
Although the law of diminishing returns turned their minds to other things, Mike's to a rock-poetry combination, Ian's to India, Charles's to becoming the nth replacement editor for a Penguin anthology of the new poetry [for which Ken Taylor & K H had initially been solicited by John Hooker but after much debate declined because of the political & philosophical compromises anticipated] which never appeared, Sweeney's to the Tolarno Galleries - and the amount of bread and energy that was lavished on the broadsheets should not be underestimated - although Tom Shapcott's Sun Books anthology and Poetry Magazine led the shift in critical forms that encouraged their acceptance, so that "establishment" outlets became available - although a new generation of poetry readers altered the atmosphere of the readings now held at the Arts Co-operative - although some people got busted and others got careers - although the "new thing" was no longer new - although Kris returned to England and Ken started making TV films about birds and Bill went beach-combing, there are still readings and a newer crop of magazines, and rumours of a great new well-produced publication are circulating [Dark Ages Journal, which didnt proceed beyond the manuscript], connected with rumours of Kris Hemensley's return.
What happened was not greatly different from the forging of other poetry schools in the forties and fifties - the attempts the new poets made to gain acceptance for their poetic were no more outrageous or ill-mannered than the tactics of other literary pressure groups - they generated no more antagonism - they excited no more sympathy - which is to say, they were outrageous, ill-mannered, generated much antagonism, excited much sympathy. The differences stemmed from the differences in the world the new poets inhabited, a dangerous, competitive, and hence more communally-minded world. Like other vital schools, they produced much that was ephemeral as well as much that was forceful and effective, and they made themselves known at an earlier age than most Australian groups of poets.
The main point they made was that creative forces can be channeled into the communal life of a large group of people and function there as a positive, enlightening, life-generating impulse. Perhaps the poetry of the future will be made by a by-product of the inner life of societies and less a simulacrum of some kind of collective public address system than the poetry of the past.
oOo
[edited & typed by Kris Hemensley,
April 12th/14th, 2014
Westgarth, Oz]
Thursday, April 3, 2014
KEN TAYLOR, 1930-April 2nd, 2014
[These posts retrieved from Facebook.]
oOo
Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.
oOo
I want to mention John Bartlett's blog, which has republished his interview with Ken which appeared in Meanjin in 2003. The address is :
http://beyondtheestuary.com/?p=2800
Thanks for contacting me John.
Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs.
I should have mentioned John Jenkins in my first post of course --& have an idea he went up to Macedon with James Hamilton when James was getting into his Charles Buckmaster & 60s-poetry research, a couple of years ago? I'm sure there are many others who've seen Ken in recent times. Sad & ruminative, I should also have added : in fact the consolation for us who survive the death of friends (& I'm particularly thinking about fellow poets) is the work (to the extent it's intact) --the poems themselves-- & the large estate of memories. We're all in that circle of living/dying in any case (as per John Donne). And for us literary lot, history & biography's our version of immortality. Dear Ken... a life which included poetry, never an academic or a pro... A life lived large & in his own way... I wont be alone in thinking & writing on Ken in the reflective & celebratory period beginning now...
Ive been reading Ken's letter to me, published in The Ear In a Wheatfield, #16, 1975, and the piece I sent from England in June, '75, to Robert Kenny, For the Launching of Ken Taylor's Book, "At Valentines" (published by Contempa). In his letter, Ken writes that working on the book with Robert he "begin[s] to feel another chance -- the second go." And also, "I agree with you completely about writing being a dictation, however before that comes an exercise or two. This is where I must begin again, still in the landscape, but "once more at the cutting edge", the counting again and saddled with the need to change..."
And this paragraph from the piece I sent to the '75 launching, which, interestingly, reflects the mood I'm in right now : "I am as moved to write about Ken Taylor for this event as I am to dwell in the house of poetry itself. For it is all particular, & personal, all of the heart's notation when you know it as a sweetheart, realizing it at the swell of its condition, grasping it as doers of any thorough thing, say, as lovers do, as here we do as writers & readers, & thus consigned we take it on."
[April 3rd, 2014]
oOo
Sad tho' not unexpected news told me by Loretta who had heard from Robert Kenny : our friend & colleague from the Sixties, fellow poet Ken Taylor, died last night at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, Melbourne, where he'd been rushed some days ago. He's been in & out of hospitals & emergencies latterly. His friends from the poetry world in recent years have been, in addition to Robert, Ron Pretty, Michael Sharkey, Jennifer Harrison, the late Alan Murphy amongst others... Ken was 83 or 84 years of age, and a boy at heart. Will write more later. A sad day.
oOo
I want to mention John Bartlett's blog, which has republished his interview with Ken which appeared in Meanjin in 2003. The address is :
http://beyondtheestuary.com/?p=2800
Thanks for contacting me John.
Last Saturday, Terry Gillmore came by, out of the blue, no better way as the decades pass, with the words from imagined conversations the main sharing, --the constant turning over in mind & imagination of the time(s) of our lives, in lieu of the social. A wonderful hour it was, recalling our dead & living friends, setting me off on another spin in & through time! As Ken had it, "the brothers & sisters of La Mama", --reconvened, actors & augurs.
I should have mentioned John Jenkins in my first post of course --& have an idea he went up to Macedon with James Hamilton when James was getting into his Charles Buckmaster & 60s-poetry research, a couple of years ago? I'm sure there are many others who've seen Ken in recent times. Sad & ruminative, I should also have added : in fact the consolation for us who survive the death of friends (& I'm particularly thinking about fellow poets) is the work (to the extent it's intact) --the poems themselves-- & the large estate of memories. We're all in that circle of living/dying in any case (as per John Donne). And for us literary lot, history & biography's our version of immortality. Dear Ken... a life which included poetry, never an academic or a pro... A life lived large & in his own way... I wont be alone in thinking & writing on Ken in the reflective & celebratory period beginning now...
Ive been reading Ken's letter to me, published in The Ear In a Wheatfield, #16, 1975, and the piece I sent from England in June, '75, to Robert Kenny, For the Launching of Ken Taylor's Book, "At Valentines" (published by Contempa). In his letter, Ken writes that working on the book with Robert he "begin[s] to feel another chance -- the second go." And also, "I agree with you completely about writing being a dictation, however before that comes an exercise or two. This is where I must begin again, still in the landscape, but "once more at the cutting edge", the counting again and saddled with the need to change..."
And this paragraph from the piece I sent to the '75 launching, which, interestingly, reflects the mood I'm in right now : "I am as moved to write about Ken Taylor for this event as I am to dwell in the house of poetry itself. For it is all particular, & personal, all of the heart's notation when you know it as a sweetheart, realizing it at the swell of its condition, grasping it as doers of any thorough thing, say, as lovers do, as here we do as writers & readers, & thus consigned we take it on."
[April 3rd, 2014]
Saturday, January 11, 2014
THE BEACH REPORT : Posts Retrieved from Facebook, Late 2013, early 2014
The Beach Report : 11/1/14, from the Elwood Beach kiosk
We're done, mid-morning, as the colour of the day (cloud-grey & white) begins to change. There's the feel of blue sky & sun --skin registers warmth, obviously, but i'm tempted to invoke the 'intelligence of the day' as though environment actually is innate. And even an hour after the dip there arent any other swimmers, only a temporarily capsized sailboard in the water.
*
Thank Heavens for Betty Ryan & the bottle of white wine she shared for our Henry's getting to Greece --her evocations, notwithstanding Henry's saying she wasnt a storyteller, in addition to the correspondence from "my friend Lawrence Durrell, who had practically made Corfu his home." I thank Henry for the Greek experience too, never having gone though many I've known did & do. But reading The Colossus of Maroussi (the 1950 white blocked purple covered--'Travel', 'Complete Unabridged'-- paperback issue) in Australia, winter through to summer '66/'67, performed the transmogrification whereby my Elwood exile (--oh yes, there's an awful & heavy tale attached but not for telling here), living in Thackaray Street, one of the poets' roads (exact mirror of Thornhill/Southampton's topography, Down Under's not so secret meaning), became my Greece, -- swimming off the rocks (industrial detritus), recovering breath spent battling the riffs & unexpected depths, propped between stone & concrete in a nest of sand, driftwood, dried seaweed, with best friend satchel containing biro & notebook, novel, poetry, tobacco/papers/matches, supporting me forever...
*
You see, it happens every time I'm here, between Elwood & Point Ormond --every summer as first the elements & then the literary & cultural memories work me over. Remembering as I re-live it, the Beat life of sun, sand & sea...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[via David Caddy / Tears in the Fence]
Posted on January 10, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) 1934-2014
When Le Roi Jones’s volume of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, appeared from Totem / Corinth in 1961 it had a Basil King drawing on the cover and it had a poem titled ‘Way Out West’ half way through it.
As simple an act
as opening the eyes. Merely
coming into things by degrees.
Basil King was over here in England at the end of last year and he talked and read, along with his wife Martha, at Kent University amongst many other places. Basil had also worked alongside Le Roi Jones in the late 1950s when he provided the covers for the magazine which Le Roi edited along with Hettie Cohen, Yugen. Yugen closed down in 1962 after number 8 but not before the starting up of The Floating Bear, a newsletter, edited by Jones and Diane di Prima. The Addenda to that issue number 8 of Yugen gives its readers the following information:
The newsletter, The Floating Bear, and its editors, Le Roi Jones and Diane di Prima, were cleared in April of obscenity charges stemming from their publication of a section of Jones’ System of Dante’s Hell and William Burroughs’ satire, The Routine.
That little note at the end also gives an update on what Le Roi Jones was upto, including editing Corinth’s fiction anthology, Avant Garde American Fiction, ‘which will include such prose writers as Fielding Dawson, Burroughs, Kerouac, Rumaker, Selby, Creeley, Douglas Woolf, Irving Rosenthal, Herbert Huncke, Paul Metcalfe, Diane Di Prima, and others’.
Had he had lived Amiri Baraka was due to come over to London this year to attend the University of Canterbury’s one-day conference, Baraka at 80, to be held at the ICA on 12th April.
The very last sentence in that last Yugen issue is:
‘At all other places they cremate them; Here we bury them alive’.
Farewell to a most important poet, dramatist, short-story writer, editor and major figure throughout the past fifty years.
*
(c) Ian Brinton ;
oOo
Kris Hemensley
Mourn both Le Roi Jones & Amiri Baraka. Complex within itself/himself, impossible for one such as I, to neatly unravel after 50 years of development. Poetry, politics... May as well throw this in even if a poignant contemplation more appropriate than a thesis at this sad time. So : The change of his name from Le Roi Jones to Amiri Baraka emblematic (paradigmatic?) of this time of changes (1960s to date). Well recall seeing the shocking pic in Village Voice in '68 of Jones/Baraka : bloodied head coshed in middle of Newark riot. Remember thinking this is the beginning of something else, --a something else agglomeration of all the radical ideologies any one of which one might have sat & mulled or stood toe to toe & argued, but tossed up now with race relations, black revolution, --and where was poet in that calamity out of which insurrection was suddenly spun? --reversal of the judgement of skin colour in the urgency of solidarity --educational indeed for white boy to experience the boot on the other foot even if thousands of miles away in Melbourne/Oz from Newark --psychically & imaginatively empathizing, responding --the Vietnam War already the actual ground of could-be would-be refuse-to-be conscripted the daily '60s life --suddenly absent when landing back in England, late '69 --a whole other &, notwithstanding the Irish troubles, relaxed English vibe. It's been my American friends, Duncan McNaughton particularly in my head now, who've articulated the necessary hybridization/cosmopolitanism in name of the Real, --American as African & Spanish. Poetry, politics... And you know what Ive said about the warts & all as the truth of my situation, that is against perfection (as if politics could ever be pure)... And how revolted ive been by ahistorical that is hysterical conspiratorial leftist politics, in wch this or that erstwhile minority is no more than ideological canon fodder... in this minute i'm putting it back together, the Humpty Dumpty of me, of poet amongst poets, --hailing here Leroi/Baraka, the poet, the playwright, the editor publisher anthologist, Hettie's other half --and RIP...
-----------------------------------------------------------
[January 7, 2014]
[via Monique Chester, Weymouth/UK]
SIRENS HAVE SOUNDED
The following SEVERE Flood Warnings will remain in force from 19:00 on 06.01.2014 until 02:00 on 07/01/2014 including the times of high tide. Peak water levels and waves are expected between 21:00 and midnight. Flooding may already be affecting properties, low lying areas and roads. The Causeway between Portland and Wyke Regis may be impassable and may be closed as a precaution. Dangerous wave overtopping including shingle is possible. The time and date of the forecast high waters for which this Flood Warning is in force are 21:45 (Local time) on 06/01/2014 (21:45 GMT) Please listen for the sound of the Flood Warning sirens which will be sounded IF wave overtopping occurs at Chiswell. The forecast wind direction is South West The forecast wind strengths is Force 7
*
B H : A river passed by my door during the night...
K H : how dyou mean B? A river on Goldcroft Road? But youre on a rise or coming off a rise? Used to be rivers down Flinders Street and when I was a sailor on shore leave in Singapore once upon a time the monsoon broke around me as I sheltered and the road became a river. Only thing was, before the inundation occurred it was an ordinary road with open sewers/gutters but after the rain there was only water to be waded through to the slightly higher part in the middle of the road. With my whites rolled up, my shoes in my hands above my head, I stepped into the torrent (had to get back to the boat y'see) and down I went, into the sewer!!! The locals laughed at me then helped me up. But I'd gashed my toe on the way down. Back at the Fairstar I stuck a plaster on the wound. A day & night of increasing throbbing pain later the ship doctor operated on my toe. Local anaesthetic. Cut off half the nail then scooped out the flesh. You could have lost the toe he said, another day the leg!!!! Did this flood come out of the blue for you or has it been developing last day or so? And watch out for your toes old boy!
Jo Harris : didn't know you were a sailor...did you run away to sea?
K H : regarding sailor boy --yes, I guess I did run away to sea Jo! Went down to the Labour exchange with brother B, asked for unusual job, and hey presto! 1965...
J H : those sailors pants...bell bottoms with a flap...sooo sexy..maybe that helped you decide
K H : Blue uniform for the northern part of the voyage, whites for the tropics... I just had to get-a get-a get-a get away! I couldnt wait another day ay ay!!! And yes, Jo, always liked the look, the whites not the blues... With my post-op foot I could wear a sandal instead of white shoe, but the good foot had the shoe still! I worked in the Ship Shop with the photographers (German) and the hairdressers (English, Scottish, Italian). I also had hold duties. I cannot tie knots so my tying & hauling of packages was a nightly ordeal for me and a huge laugh for the others. Shared cabin at first with the photographers but they complained that I snored --I think they said I snorkled. They were believed. I was moved to an Italian purser's cabin. He slept during the day when I was at work, & v-versa. One or two funny if not scandalous incidents. In retrospect of course e/thing is hilarious, vast comedy of life. Even at the time I was watching over my own shoulder so to speak --being a writer you see and my Nobel prize not too far away...
--------------------------------------------------------------
January 7, '14
The more I think about KILL YOUR DARLINGS the more I like it... truth is you have to check things out yrself however persuasive friends & critics!
I've been thinking about the historical settings & references : The World at WAR, so the film is its gigantic footnote? thus 'existentialism'... The War crucial threshold of change... not necessarily refusing the call to arms but simultaneously accepting the call to LIFE, and of one's own order... the wackier the better! that is, backing yr own call...
*
January 6, '14
Well, whaddayaknow! Saw Kill Your Darlings at the Nova in Carlton this afternoon and was captivated. Intriguing story. Contrary to what Ive heard around the traps, mostly re- the inadequacy of Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, found the film psychologically coherent, soundly based in the literature. For my money, Kerouac's The Sea Is My Brother corroborates the merchant marine signing-up scene, tho Lucian [Carr] is the extra dimension contributed by the film. Still thinking it through. Yep, excellent.
I accepted the characterizations, the actors melded with originals... Dane DeHaan's Lucian Carr as beautiful memerising boy, pent with desire & imagining, recalls for me people I met along our young way (let's say younger way since it's not done with yet --and not just the tearing, waring manuscripts of up to fifty years ago but the impulses, the heart & soul within) --which is the mark of --what? --the memorable --the mythic --template or archetype of life/of lives understood that way...
I saw Charles Buckmaster in Radcliffe's Ginsberg --imagine 17 years old --up to the big city --nervous, expectant, sensitive to all & everything --dear Charles in good suit, jacket, partly for employment, partly because he was poet embarking at last on adult career... Et cetera... A heartbreaking film from several vantages : Ginsberg & mother, Jennifer Jason Leigh's pathetically superb Naomi, "don't ever leave me"; even Michael Hall's David Kammerer, not at all one dimensional villain, but knew him in my own once-upon-a-time, the contradictory authoritarian & libertarian behaviour (to be the author, the director of the freedom : recipe for disaster if not to oneself then to others)... Much much more!
--------------------------------
Ralph Hadden's 2013 Bests prompts me again towards my own. Flicking through my journals for books, music, films, events. Just as it comes then, not distinguishing between first & re- reads.
Melvin Bragg's Francis Bacon interview/doco.
Diane Burrell & Chris Dench discs.
Incredible String Band movie (c/o Dave Ellison)
On the Road movie.
Ben Sidran discs.
Ian Hamilton Finlay selections (U of California press) introd Alec Finlay.
Lisa Gorton's Hotel Hyperion.
Sun Ra & His Arkestra.
The Rodriguez movie (c/o Cathy O').
David Caddy's Cycling after [Edward] Thomas and England.
Paul Blackburn's Pierre Vidal translations (c/o B H's library).
Ted And I : A Brother's Memoir by Gerald Hughes.
Ernest Hemingway By-Line : selected articles & dispatches.
Fiona Hile's Novelties.
Claire Potter's Swallow.
Lou Reed.
Shirley Clarke's Robert Frost documentary.
The African Queen.
Marion Taylor's Colmer's Hill [Dorset] : One Artist's Obsession (c/o B H gift).
Simon Warner's Text, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll (Bloomsbury).
Pete Spence's Kynetonbury Tales.
Valli Poole's A Box of Humming Birds.
Glenn Cooper's The Proportions of a Man.
Robert Kenny's Gardens of Fire (UWA press).
Simon Armitage's Walking Home : Travels with a Troubadoor On the Pennine Way.
John Kinsella's The Vision of Error (FIP).
Paul Summers' Primitive Cartography (Walleah Press).
Pine Torch by Ainslee Meredith.
Claire Gaskin's Paperweight.
David Morley's The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet).
Ken Trimble's Barking Mad Poems.
John Ashbery's Quick Sentences.
Jordie Albiston's Book of Ethel.
Christopher Heathcote's splendid articles on art & artists in Quadrant magazine.
I Thank You : Celebrating Tim Hemensley & the Powder Monkeys, at the Tote, Yarra Music Festival (21/7/13), cast of thousands including the Spazzies, Joel Silbersher, TJ, John Nolan, Adalita, Power Line Sneakers, Roman Tucker...
The Cherry Fest in AC/DC Lane (24/11/14) Powder Monkeys & guests, Hoss, The BellRays, Chris Wilson et al
and that's [not] all folks.....!
___________________________________________
December 23, 2013
Watched concluding episode of Scorsese's Living In The Material World doco on George Harrison this evening. Quite a journey and reflective of many of our own generation's I suspect. Spiritual/metaphysical teasers like GH's concern as to how one "left this body". His (double?) sadness therefore at John Lennon's murder. Very interesting to me was the commentary from racing driver Jackie Stewart. Ditto, Eric Idle. The epitome of the "material world" --racing cars, films, music industry --intersecting with otherness --that old conceit of materiality exceeding itself, not that spiritual life doesnt have its own forms... GH on the mantra effect of My Sweet Lord, as though hypnotic repetitions... Great to see Shankar & the other Indian musicians... GH's commitment to almost everything, whatever the ostensible contradictions. I think we must all have drunk the same water!!! We'll play some Harrison & Shankar et al tomorrow... Anyone else catch this?
---------------------------------------------------
December 9, 2013
Great dream the other night : Sitting in train carriage with Tom Clark, couple of his friends, & Robert Kenny. He still looks very young ("still looks"? how would I know! --we ALL look very young whilst being who we are as of now!)-- I'm telling him how wonderful AND maddening it was to see his pic in Paris Review, his & Tom Pickard's, when we were teenagers, 20, inspiring for a 20 year old in gob-smacking way! We're having marvellous rave together when Robert says that he's aware the two people at other end of shared carriage-table arent saying anything, are excluded from the conversation. Theyre ok, man, says Tom, and I tend to agree-- Robert asks if anyone has a copy of Kant (any Kant? the Complete? Pure Reason?) --wants to open up the conversation so that others can join in! Tom says, this is getting heavy man --I say, putting a hand on Robert's arm & on Tom Clark's, look, we're serious people, Robert's the Australian PM's History prize winner & poet, and Tom as we know is past poetry editor of Paris Review and poet & biographer of Charles Olson etc, --of course we can be serious, but let's not get heavy, and Tom's right, I say to Robert, let's not get uptight --Which seems to help! That's right Tom says, let's loosen up! And we do!
-------------------------------------------------------
December 5, 2013
A great pleasure to host Venie Holmgren this afternoon at the Collected Works Bookshop. The early (5pm) start, the unsettled weather, clash with other events (eg, Jenny Harrison at the Dax Centre), & the old out-of-towner hoodoo combined to restrict attendance. But bless Ricky Tanaka for transporting Venie down from Hepburn Springs & chaperoning her across town, and Ken Smeaton for enthusiastically introducing the poet & launching her book, The Tea House Poems. Ken recalled 1970s street poetry in Melbourne with Poor Thom & Venie, the living & literary importance of both of these to him. Venie corrected the SMH's attribution of 93 years to herself --she's only 91! I remember F T Prince telling me in the early '90s that he was probably England's oldest publishing poet --he was around 80 something at the time. He also said it got physically harder to write a poem let alone a book. Venie suggested this was her last book & last launching. One never knows though... She would have been welcome to read her entire little book; she probably did half. Lovely things, Japanese (haiku / tanka) style. We have a few copies now in stock. THANK YOU everyone who came for supporting a unique event.
----------------------------------------------------------
November 5, 2013
Beautiful day for the Melbourne Cup. Yday Collected Works Bookshop & Mary's Maria's Beads and Trims (Formerly Maria George Pty Ltd) set up a table at top end of the hallway, overlooking Swanston Street. Champagne, cheese + biscuits, tzatziki dip, cup cakes. Watched the Cup Eve parade of champions (& their connections as they're fond of saying) in between popping back into respective shops for phone calls, customers. Today I think I'm heading down Abbotsford way, to the Yarra Hotel to imbibe the excitement amongst the rock'n'rollers. Place a bet en route. Nice chat with Ali Alizadeh , during y'day's toing & froing, in wch my champagne lubricated tongue wound its way around the tale of young Kris H's migrant's 1966 dinkum aussie Melbourne, via all the non-Anglo exiles of Europe needless to say, introduced to Moonee Valley & Olympic Park (dogs) in that Bohemian open house I'd landed up in, that surreal fearful amazing first season Down Under! Ali doesnt share my horse racing or indeed any other sporting delight but we did agree abt the magnificence of the horses! Hurrah & huzzah to all!
oooOOOooo
[typed up & published, 11th January, 2014]
We're done, mid-morning, as the colour of the day (cloud-grey & white) begins to change. There's the feel of blue sky & sun --skin registers warmth, obviously, but i'm tempted to invoke the 'intelligence of the day' as though environment actually is innate. And even an hour after the dip there arent any other swimmers, only a temporarily capsized sailboard in the water.
*
Thank Heavens for Betty Ryan & the bottle of white wine she shared for our Henry's getting to Greece --her evocations, notwithstanding Henry's saying she wasnt a storyteller, in addition to the correspondence from "my friend Lawrence Durrell, who had practically made Corfu his home." I thank Henry for the Greek experience too, never having gone though many I've known did & do. But reading The Colossus of Maroussi (the 1950 white blocked purple covered--'Travel', 'Complete Unabridged'-- paperback issue) in Australia, winter through to summer '66/'67, performed the transmogrification whereby my Elwood exile (--oh yes, there's an awful & heavy tale attached but not for telling here), living in Thackaray Street, one of the poets' roads (exact mirror of Thornhill/Southampton's topography, Down Under's not so secret meaning), became my Greece, -- swimming off the rocks (industrial detritus), recovering breath spent battling the riffs & unexpected depths, propped between stone & concrete in a nest of sand, driftwood, dried seaweed, with best friend satchel containing biro & notebook, novel, poetry, tobacco/papers/matches, supporting me forever...
*
You see, it happens every time I'm here, between Elwood & Point Ormond --every summer as first the elements & then the literary & cultural memories work me over. Remembering as I re-live it, the Beat life of sun, sand & sea...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[via David Caddy / Tears in the Fence]
Posted on January 10, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) 1934-2014
When Le Roi Jones’s volume of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, appeared from Totem / Corinth in 1961 it had a Basil King drawing on the cover and it had a poem titled ‘Way Out West’ half way through it.
As simple an act
as opening the eyes. Merely
coming into things by degrees.
Basil King was over here in England at the end of last year and he talked and read, along with his wife Martha, at Kent University amongst many other places. Basil had also worked alongside Le Roi Jones in the late 1950s when he provided the covers for the magazine which Le Roi edited along with Hettie Cohen, Yugen. Yugen closed down in 1962 after number 8 but not before the starting up of The Floating Bear, a newsletter, edited by Jones and Diane di Prima. The Addenda to that issue number 8 of Yugen gives its readers the following information:
The newsletter, The Floating Bear, and its editors, Le Roi Jones and Diane di Prima, were cleared in April of obscenity charges stemming from their publication of a section of Jones’ System of Dante’s Hell and William Burroughs’ satire, The Routine.
That little note at the end also gives an update on what Le Roi Jones was upto, including editing Corinth’s fiction anthology, Avant Garde American Fiction, ‘which will include such prose writers as Fielding Dawson, Burroughs, Kerouac, Rumaker, Selby, Creeley, Douglas Woolf, Irving Rosenthal, Herbert Huncke, Paul Metcalfe, Diane Di Prima, and others’.
Had he had lived Amiri Baraka was due to come over to London this year to attend the University of Canterbury’s one-day conference, Baraka at 80, to be held at the ICA on 12th April.
The very last sentence in that last Yugen issue is:
‘At all other places they cremate them; Here we bury them alive’.
Farewell to a most important poet, dramatist, short-story writer, editor and major figure throughout the past fifty years.
*
(c) Ian Brinton ;
oOo
Kris Hemensley
Mourn both Le Roi Jones & Amiri Baraka. Complex within itself/himself, impossible for one such as I, to neatly unravel after 50 years of development. Poetry, politics... May as well throw this in even if a poignant contemplation more appropriate than a thesis at this sad time. So : The change of his name from Le Roi Jones to Amiri Baraka emblematic (paradigmatic?) of this time of changes (1960s to date). Well recall seeing the shocking pic in Village Voice in '68 of Jones/Baraka : bloodied head coshed in middle of Newark riot. Remember thinking this is the beginning of something else, --a something else agglomeration of all the radical ideologies any one of which one might have sat & mulled or stood toe to toe & argued, but tossed up now with race relations, black revolution, --and where was poet in that calamity out of which insurrection was suddenly spun? --reversal of the judgement of skin colour in the urgency of solidarity --educational indeed for white boy to experience the boot on the other foot even if thousands of miles away in Melbourne/Oz from Newark --psychically & imaginatively empathizing, responding --the Vietnam War already the actual ground of could-be would-be refuse-to-be conscripted the daily '60s life --suddenly absent when landing back in England, late '69 --a whole other &, notwithstanding the Irish troubles, relaxed English vibe. It's been my American friends, Duncan McNaughton particularly in my head now, who've articulated the necessary hybridization/cosmopolitanism in name of the Real, --American as African & Spanish. Poetry, politics... And you know what Ive said about the warts & all as the truth of my situation, that is against perfection (as if politics could ever be pure)... And how revolted ive been by ahistorical that is hysterical conspiratorial leftist politics, in wch this or that erstwhile minority is no more than ideological canon fodder... in this minute i'm putting it back together, the Humpty Dumpty of me, of poet amongst poets, --hailing here Leroi/Baraka, the poet, the playwright, the editor publisher anthologist, Hettie's other half --and RIP...
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[January 7, 2014]
[via Monique Chester, Weymouth/UK]
SIRENS HAVE SOUNDED
The following SEVERE Flood Warnings will remain in force from 19:00 on 06.01.2014 until 02:00 on 07/01/2014 including the times of high tide. Peak water levels and waves are expected between 21:00 and midnight. Flooding may already be affecting properties, low lying areas and roads. The Causeway between Portland and Wyke Regis may be impassable and may be closed as a precaution. Dangerous wave overtopping including shingle is possible. The time and date of the forecast high waters for which this Flood Warning is in force are 21:45 (Local time) on 06/01/2014 (21:45 GMT) Please listen for the sound of the Flood Warning sirens which will be sounded IF wave overtopping occurs at Chiswell. The forecast wind direction is South West The forecast wind strengths is Force 7
*
B H : A river passed by my door during the night...
K H : how dyou mean B? A river on Goldcroft Road? But youre on a rise or coming off a rise? Used to be rivers down Flinders Street and when I was a sailor on shore leave in Singapore once upon a time the monsoon broke around me as I sheltered and the road became a river. Only thing was, before the inundation occurred it was an ordinary road with open sewers/gutters but after the rain there was only water to be waded through to the slightly higher part in the middle of the road. With my whites rolled up, my shoes in my hands above my head, I stepped into the torrent (had to get back to the boat y'see) and down I went, into the sewer!!! The locals laughed at me then helped me up. But I'd gashed my toe on the way down. Back at the Fairstar I stuck a plaster on the wound. A day & night of increasing throbbing pain later the ship doctor operated on my toe. Local anaesthetic. Cut off half the nail then scooped out the flesh. You could have lost the toe he said, another day the leg!!!! Did this flood come out of the blue for you or has it been developing last day or so? And watch out for your toes old boy!
Jo Harris : didn't know you were a sailor...did you run away to sea?
K H : regarding sailor boy --yes, I guess I did run away to sea Jo! Went down to the Labour exchange with brother B, asked for unusual job, and hey presto! 1965...
J H : those sailors pants...bell bottoms with a flap...sooo sexy..maybe that helped you decide
K H : Blue uniform for the northern part of the voyage, whites for the tropics... I just had to get-a get-a get-a get away! I couldnt wait another day ay ay!!! And yes, Jo, always liked the look, the whites not the blues... With my post-op foot I could wear a sandal instead of white shoe, but the good foot had the shoe still! I worked in the Ship Shop with the photographers (German) and the hairdressers (English, Scottish, Italian). I also had hold duties. I cannot tie knots so my tying & hauling of packages was a nightly ordeal for me and a huge laugh for the others. Shared cabin at first with the photographers but they complained that I snored --I think they said I snorkled. They were believed. I was moved to an Italian purser's cabin. He slept during the day when I was at work, & v-versa. One or two funny if not scandalous incidents. In retrospect of course e/thing is hilarious, vast comedy of life. Even at the time I was watching over my own shoulder so to speak --being a writer you see and my Nobel prize not too far away...
--------------------------------------------------------------
January 7, '14
The more I think about KILL YOUR DARLINGS the more I like it... truth is you have to check things out yrself however persuasive friends & critics!
I've been thinking about the historical settings & references : The World at WAR, so the film is its gigantic footnote? thus 'existentialism'... The War crucial threshold of change... not necessarily refusing the call to arms but simultaneously accepting the call to LIFE, and of one's own order... the wackier the better! that is, backing yr own call...
*
January 6, '14
Well, whaddayaknow! Saw Kill Your Darlings at the Nova in Carlton this afternoon and was captivated. Intriguing story. Contrary to what Ive heard around the traps, mostly re- the inadequacy of Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, found the film psychologically coherent, soundly based in the literature. For my money, Kerouac's The Sea Is My Brother corroborates the merchant marine signing-up scene, tho Lucian [Carr] is the extra dimension contributed by the film. Still thinking it through. Yep, excellent.
I accepted the characterizations, the actors melded with originals... Dane DeHaan's Lucian Carr as beautiful memerising boy, pent with desire & imagining, recalls for me people I met along our young way (let's say younger way since it's not done with yet --and not just the tearing, waring manuscripts of up to fifty years ago but the impulses, the heart & soul within) --which is the mark of --what? --the memorable --the mythic --template or archetype of life/of lives understood that way...
I saw Charles Buckmaster in Radcliffe's Ginsberg --imagine 17 years old --up to the big city --nervous, expectant, sensitive to all & everything --dear Charles in good suit, jacket, partly for employment, partly because he was poet embarking at last on adult career... Et cetera... A heartbreaking film from several vantages : Ginsberg & mother, Jennifer Jason Leigh's pathetically superb Naomi, "don't ever leave me"; even Michael Hall's David Kammerer, not at all one dimensional villain, but knew him in my own once-upon-a-time, the contradictory authoritarian & libertarian behaviour (to be the author, the director of the freedom : recipe for disaster if not to oneself then to others)... Much much more!
--------------------------------
Ralph Hadden's 2013 Bests prompts me again towards my own. Flicking through my journals for books, music, films, events. Just as it comes then, not distinguishing between first & re- reads.
Melvin Bragg's Francis Bacon interview/doco.
Diane Burrell & Chris Dench discs.
Incredible String Band movie (c/o Dave Ellison)
On the Road movie.
Ben Sidran discs.
Ian Hamilton Finlay selections (U of California press) introd Alec Finlay.
Lisa Gorton's Hotel Hyperion.
Sun Ra & His Arkestra.
The Rodriguez movie (c/o Cathy O').
David Caddy's Cycling after [Edward] Thomas and England.
Paul Blackburn's Pierre Vidal translations (c/o B H's library).
Ted And I : A Brother's Memoir by Gerald Hughes.
Ernest Hemingway By-Line : selected articles & dispatches.
Fiona Hile's Novelties.
Claire Potter's Swallow.
Lou Reed.
Shirley Clarke's Robert Frost documentary.
The African Queen.
Marion Taylor's Colmer's Hill [Dorset] : One Artist's Obsession (c/o B H gift).
Simon Warner's Text, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll (Bloomsbury).
Pete Spence's Kynetonbury Tales.
Valli Poole's A Box of Humming Birds.
Glenn Cooper's The Proportions of a Man.
Robert Kenny's Gardens of Fire (UWA press).
Simon Armitage's Walking Home : Travels with a Troubadoor On the Pennine Way.
John Kinsella's The Vision of Error (FIP).
Paul Summers' Primitive Cartography (Walleah Press).
Pine Torch by Ainslee Meredith.
Claire Gaskin's Paperweight.
David Morley's The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet).
Ken Trimble's Barking Mad Poems.
John Ashbery's Quick Sentences.
Jordie Albiston's Book of Ethel.
Christopher Heathcote's splendid articles on art & artists in Quadrant magazine.
I Thank You : Celebrating Tim Hemensley & the Powder Monkeys, at the Tote, Yarra Music Festival (21/7/13), cast of thousands including the Spazzies, Joel Silbersher, TJ, John Nolan, Adalita, Power Line Sneakers, Roman Tucker...
The Cherry Fest in AC/DC Lane (24/11/14) Powder Monkeys & guests, Hoss, The BellRays, Chris Wilson et al
and that's [not] all folks.....!
___________________________________________
December 23, 2013
Watched concluding episode of Scorsese's Living In The Material World doco on George Harrison this evening. Quite a journey and reflective of many of our own generation's I suspect. Spiritual/metaphysical teasers like GH's concern as to how one "left this body". His (double?) sadness therefore at John Lennon's murder. Very interesting to me was the commentary from racing driver Jackie Stewart. Ditto, Eric Idle. The epitome of the "material world" --racing cars, films, music industry --intersecting with otherness --that old conceit of materiality exceeding itself, not that spiritual life doesnt have its own forms... GH on the mantra effect of My Sweet Lord, as though hypnotic repetitions... Great to see Shankar & the other Indian musicians... GH's commitment to almost everything, whatever the ostensible contradictions. I think we must all have drunk the same water!!! We'll play some Harrison & Shankar et al tomorrow... Anyone else catch this?
---------------------------------------------------
December 9, 2013
Great dream the other night : Sitting in train carriage with Tom Clark, couple of his friends, & Robert Kenny. He still looks very young ("still looks"? how would I know! --we ALL look very young whilst being who we are as of now!)-- I'm telling him how wonderful AND maddening it was to see his pic in Paris Review, his & Tom Pickard's, when we were teenagers, 20, inspiring for a 20 year old in gob-smacking way! We're having marvellous rave together when Robert says that he's aware the two people at other end of shared carriage-table arent saying anything, are excluded from the conversation. Theyre ok, man, says Tom, and I tend to agree-- Robert asks if anyone has a copy of Kant (any Kant? the Complete? Pure Reason?) --wants to open up the conversation so that others can join in! Tom says, this is getting heavy man --I say, putting a hand on Robert's arm & on Tom Clark's, look, we're serious people, Robert's the Australian PM's History prize winner & poet, and Tom as we know is past poetry editor of Paris Review and poet & biographer of Charles Olson etc, --of course we can be serious, but let's not get heavy, and Tom's right, I say to Robert, let's not get uptight --Which seems to help! That's right Tom says, let's loosen up! And we do!
-------------------------------------------------------
December 5, 2013
A great pleasure to host Venie Holmgren this afternoon at the Collected Works Bookshop. The early (5pm) start, the unsettled weather, clash with other events (eg, Jenny Harrison at the Dax Centre), & the old out-of-towner hoodoo combined to restrict attendance. But bless Ricky Tanaka for transporting Venie down from Hepburn Springs & chaperoning her across town, and Ken Smeaton for enthusiastically introducing the poet & launching her book, The Tea House Poems. Ken recalled 1970s street poetry in Melbourne with Poor Thom & Venie, the living & literary importance of both of these to him. Venie corrected the SMH's attribution of 93 years to herself --she's only 91! I remember F T Prince telling me in the early '90s that he was probably England's oldest publishing poet --he was around 80 something at the time. He also said it got physically harder to write a poem let alone a book. Venie suggested this was her last book & last launching. One never knows though... She would have been welcome to read her entire little book; she probably did half. Lovely things, Japanese (haiku / tanka) style. We have a few copies now in stock. THANK YOU everyone who came for supporting a unique event.
----------------------------------------------------------
November 5, 2013
Beautiful day for the Melbourne Cup. Yday Collected Works Bookshop & Mary's Maria's Beads and Trims (Formerly Maria George Pty Ltd) set up a table at top end of the hallway, overlooking Swanston Street. Champagne, cheese + biscuits, tzatziki dip, cup cakes. Watched the Cup Eve parade of champions (& their connections as they're fond of saying) in between popping back into respective shops for phone calls, customers. Today I think I'm heading down Abbotsford way, to the Yarra Hotel to imbibe the excitement amongst the rock'n'rollers. Place a bet en route. Nice chat with Ali Alizadeh , during y'day's toing & froing, in wch my champagne lubricated tongue wound its way around the tale of young Kris H's migrant's 1966 dinkum aussie Melbourne, via all the non-Anglo exiles of Europe needless to say, introduced to Moonee Valley & Olympic Park (dogs) in that Bohemian open house I'd landed up in, that surreal fearful amazing first season Down Under! Ali doesnt share my horse racing or indeed any other sporting delight but we did agree abt the magnificence of the horses! Hurrah & huzzah to all!
oooOOOooo
[typed up & published, 11th January, 2014]
Sunday, November 10, 2013
THANKING MICHAEL FARRELL
Much to thank Michael Farrell for in his article, An 'Infinitely Flexible' Space; Reading Michael Dransfield's 'Courland Penders' poems through the New Baroque and Dobrez's theory of 'the Pouch', published in The Political Imagination issue of Southerly (2013), and not least for what seems to me a rare acknowledgement of the approach & research of Livio & Patricia Dobrez. Why LD's Parnassus Mad Ward : Michael Dransfield & the New Australian Poetry (UQP, 1990) & PD's Michael Dransfield's Lives : A Sixties' Biography (Melbourne University Press, 1999) aren't better known & utilised beats me. One might also add, similarly, that after years of not so much neglect as disdain, Michael Dransfield, the true subject of Farrell's article, is circulating again as poetry & reference. I note the online appearance of the Dransfield Appreciation Society [http://www.facebook.com/groups/6075328475/] over the past year and the recent daily publications on Facebook of Dransfield poems (Justin Lowe's month long homage & Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke's seven days) which, in a perfect world, with readers constantly requesting Dransfield's poetry, might just affect the weather around St Lucia where UQP has obstinately refused to return to print its Dransfield editions, including John Kinsella's selection of 2002. Farrell's foundational debt is to Martin Harrison (after Edward Said)'s 'affiliative' approach which opposed Oz Lit's predictable 'genetic' procedures; however they're not necessarily mutually exclusive (mutual exclusivity itself a conventional deadweight trapping both traditional & apparently radical modes). The Harrison 'affiliative'/Farrell 'neobaroque' ought definitely not be regarded as antithetical to the historical-cultural-biographical strand of understandings.
I say Dransfield is the true subject of Farrell's article because, due to what I assume is his obligation to the theoretical imperatives of his profession, Dransfield as poet & oeuvre is crabbed here by emphasis upon the 'neobaroque' as a stratagem in competition with the postcolonial, colonial, avant-garde, neoromantic, postmodern & others as the most efficacious critical tool. I'm obviously not saying that Farrell's neobaroque, drafted from Latin American criticism as he describes, isn't a nifty explicator for Michael Dransfield & contemporary Australian poetry; and of course one understands the context of the article, originally presented as a paper at the Political Imagination : Postcolonialism & Diaspora in Contemporary Australian Poetry conference at Deakin University, April 2012, --but thank heavens one's beyond the academy's reach in one's own discourses.
(Oh brothers & sisters of the 'political imagination', having ploughed through your expositions in that there journal, all I can say is come away, come away! Come away! Come back to poetry, warts & all! Come back to poets, warts & all! Be humble before the wartish facts! Warts so much better agents of understanding & liberation than the contorted vocabularies advancing or within the categories of perfection you have invented in your lofty, lefty follies! And hey! How's this for synchronicity? Flicking at Cassandra Atherton's eminently readable book of interviews, In So Many Words : Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals (Arcadia/ASP, 2013), I find Camille Paglia, ca 2005. From that first "slap in the face [Paglia's defending her book Break, Blow, Burn] of the current poetry establishment and academic circles", fulminating against the idea "that people write poetry to do philosophy", --to which she says "Don't treat poetry as if it was a servant of some other form", thus her criticism of Ashbery (or the way that he is read) & of Jorie Graham, indeed the entire po mo shebang, -- from the first & throughout her interview I'm attracted. I realise Paglia's brush is pretty broad --for example, "Postmodernism has marginalised poetry because postmodernism is a type of cynical nihilism… it defines any reference to the sacred as sentimental. There is a kind of sanctimonious superiority that many postmodernist scholars have, regarding what people believe", & et cetera --And one has to get a handle on her prime belief in a bodily, sensual & sensory poetry against "academic sterility", --And though, as I read & think her propositions through, there are as many nays as yays, and greys in amongst the black & whites, at least I can join her discussion --that is, I care to (a version, as it happens, of the one I have with all my colleagues here, off the cuff more than in print, and over many years), whereas I'm completely disinclined & disenchanted by Southerly's politicos…)
Bethatasitmay; Michael Farrell's most suggestive device, is the pouch, borrowed from the Dobrezes, & not only as supremely subverted Aussie kitsch. He explains "we can see that through the pouch-consciousness of Dransfield's 'infinitely flexible' poetics, of which the Courland Penders poems are exemplary if not unique, Dransfield can "experience reality" without leaving the womb or house…" It seems to me this might, in another paper and from the psycho-literary or, in my terms, the fantastical or dream approach, progress to actually crossing eyes with Michael Dransfield. An encounter, it occurs to me, after Charles Buckmaster via Christopher Brennan, within th' real…
[9/10 November, '13]
Sunday, September 15, 2013
I.M. BETTY BURSTALL, 1926-2013
I'm looking at Nicole Emanuel's photograph of Betty Burstall from 2005, reproduced for Sonia Harford's valedictory article in The Age (June 18, '13), "Melbourne mourns 'La Mama' of contemporary theatre scene". The photo's taken from low down, looking up into Betty's sunny face, artfully juxtaposed with a Charles Blackman girl on the nearside wall, suggesting perhaps that Child is judge of Age, its grave beauty, coursing the years, secure finally in the septuagenarian bloom. Inset in the frame is a pic of Betty sitting at one of the original La Mama cafe-theatre's signature small tables, candle in bottle & steaming coffee before her, this from the first flush of La Mama news worthiness…
Another : Betty in her twenties, sitting on bush grass & wild flowers beside sprawled Tim in the cover-photograph of Memoirs of a Young Bastard : The Diaries of Tim Burstall, November 1953 to December 1954, the superbly produced Miegunyah Press volume, published in 2012 ('introduced & annotated by Hilary McPhee with Ann Standish'), and though it's a mid '50s pic I'm struck that she looks exactly as I remember her in the '60s --same curly brown hair, head-scarf, bursting with vitality, and a mixture of querulousness & determination in her eye --that thinking, critical, intelligent eye on the world. Ditto the '70s when we met up again after the Hemensleys' years in England, --& the '80s when she was en route to Greece or returning, trading in Greek textiles. A painter now, the artist she'd probably always been --recall the set of earthenware mugs she presented to us for our wedding in '68 (included in the huge trunk of mostly poetry books we took to England with us, on the long voyage late '69 on the French cargo-boat through New Caledonia, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Panama, Martinique, Madeira, to Marseilles & home)-- supplying us, at Collected Works bookshop, with postcard reproductions of her own town & country Australian & Greek-island paintings…
One day at the Shop (in Smith Street, Collingwood), mid '80s, catching sight of an issue of my mag, H/EAR, Betty asked about its production (silk-screen cover, mimeographed A-4 pages, filled with poetry, commentary, correspondence) & straightaway decided it was important & required sponsorship! She invited me to her Palmerston Street, Carlton house for breakfast with Arthur Boyd. Evidently in the interim she'd shown him the mag. When I called on her, a little coyly I must say, Arthur was already there & casting his eye over Betty's paintings, praising & encouraging. I told him I'd been to his house in Highgate around 1970/71, invited by Garrie Hutchinson, one of the 1969 La Mama alumni, who'd house-sat while Arthur was in Portugal overseeing the production of tapestries based on his paintings. I vividly remembered the tapestries hanging over the bannister all the way upstairs. Fifteen years later here we were meeting! Arthur asked me about my magazine's form & direction, particularly interested in the art & poetry interaction and the historical chronicling. Reaching into his jacket pocket he peeled off a wad of notes & pressed them into my hand, wishing the mag & I the best of luck. The arrival of Betty's daughter-in-law, Sigrid Thornton, signalled the end of breakfast.
The particular issue of the mag enabled by his patronage happened to contain my interview with Pete Spence mainly about art, particularly Pete's hostility to what he contended was Nolan, Boyd & co's monopoly of Australian critical attention -- Pete's critique was consistent with the opinion & interest of many of us in favour of the marginalised practice in all the arts. Although aware I was biting the hand that feeds, I couldn't censor the interview. Dutifully I sent copies of the issue to Betty & Arthur but never heard back from either… Apart from passing in the street, perhaps the last time I saw Betty was with Tim Burstall (and of course we'd met Tim & their boys back in the day) at Collected Works for the launching of Rudi Krausmann & Andrew Sibley's (poems & drawings) collaboration, ca 2003 --the smallest return for her unrivalled hospitality at La Mama…
Memories of Betty Burstall are inseparable from the La Mama cafe-theatre on Faraday Street in Carlton where we met around about this time 46 years ago. Winter 1967 : small tables & chairs downstairs, bric-a-brac, junk/furniture upstairs. One-act plays performed beside & amongst the coffee-drinkers. Log fire in wall grate; coffee urn bubbling. A poetry reading organised by the folk-singer Glen Thomasetti, well-known from the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, that featured or happened to include a poet, in his late thirties (being 21 or so an older poet one had to have perceived), leg in plaster &/or balancing on crutches, jacket, shirt, beard trimmed to cheek : Charles Kenneth Taylor (called Ken by some, Charles by others), working in the talks department at the ABC. As far as I was concerned, the reading was momentous. His reading voice accurately describing his poems' pace & lineation, and his references to Ashbery & Snyder sheer music to my ears for though well acquainted with such poetry I hadn't yet heard it even cited in Melbourne. All this is inscribed in other histories or should be! Suffice to say here that I celebrated Ken Taylor's reading with a poem, Poem For Ken Taylor (first published in the 1968 chapbook, Two Poets [Ken Taylor & Kris Hemensley], with its our glass motif silk-screen cover by Mike Hudson), which I read later in '67 at one of Glen's readings, word of which got back to Ken --probably Betty told him (the Burstalls & the Taylors & the Wallace-Crabbes had all been in New York around 1965/6 via Harkness Fellowships). She introduced us, and that was the origin of the Melbourne chapter of the New Australian Poetry (as I conceived it) --true to say, and I say it as I think it, the contemporary continues its particular & timely articulation in & from that occasion's significant swing…
Betty Burstall had returned to Melbourne from New York inspired by alternative theatre in the Village, especially Ellen Stewart's La Ma Ma Experimental Theatre Club (founded in 1961). Just as Ken Taylor returned on a mission --to establish the Australian extension to John Gill & Earle Birney's New American & Canadian Poetry (magazine & books), out of Trumansburg in up-state New York , so Betty sought to emulate New York's La Ma Ma : theatre presented outside of the normal performance settings in Melbourne, amateur or commercial. Betty's vision was for a space to hold all the arts --theatre, poetry, music, film. Upstairs & downstairs it became a regular hang-out for some of us in 67/8 --Frank Bren, Bill Beard, Michael Hudson, Gary Petersen, Elaine Rushbrooke, Sid Clayton et al… Having experienced the productions of Jack Hibberd's playlets, I'd reported back to the New Theatre, of which Loretta Garvey, Frank & Bill were younger stalwarts, that the real new theatre, innovative & politically aware, was occurring at La Mama : if we really believed New Theatre's manifestos then La Mama was where we should also be. Minus the Communist Party bit of course --easier to negotiate in 67/8 with the alternative presence of the New Left than before I suspect. And so we came across the road to Betty Burstall's La Mama without abandoning the New Theatre although, naturally, that was how our expedition was viewed by some…
Betty & theatre : The New Australian Theatre, in its Melbourne manifestation, depends upon the particular place & space of La Mama for its origin & subsequent development…
Betty & the poets : The New Australian Poetry, in its Melbourne manifestation, depends upon that particular place & space for its origin & subsequent development…
Betty the hostess of fabulous dinners in the cafe-theatre where she conscientiously set about bridging the personalities & generations, the different tribes & their territories via Bohemian bonhomie & a wholesome menu of wine, platters of hard & soft cheeses, bread, olives, sausage, salad… I see Betty setting me down at a table with Keith Harrison, the Australian poet visiting from the States, & Philip Martin, poet & younger academic from Monash. Perfect example of her mix & match, not that she foresaw Philip taking the liberty of introducing me to Keith & describing me as a representative of the new Melbourne poetry's Wordsworthian tendency! I hit the roof : Wordsworth? Our poets were Pound, Williams, the Beats, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York et al with Liverpool Scene, Tarn, MacDiarmid, Bunting, Turnbull & other British thrown in. Our politics collaged Berkeley, Paris, Berlin, London, Che & Ho Chi Minh! Betty flew to my side to tamp down the anger! Amazing to me, Keith knew my poetry references & pouring out the good wine ameliorated the argument : it was Wordsworth the erstwhile sympathiser of the French Revolution whom Philip had in mind he interceded, while Olson & Co & all the bards of hippiedom were a rather different kettle of fish, ill-fitting Philip's equation. I left La Mama that night excited by the older generation ex-pat's broad mindedness, wishing he lived & taught in Melbourne instead of the US, wishing Australia could have held him and, despite the rising of the New, already suspecting why it mightnt… At another dinner, recall being called over by John Perceval, whom I'd already met in out-of-the-city, leafy Canterbury, introduced by Mike Dugan whose neighbour he was, to join him in polishing off a carafe… Tony Murphett, wearing ostentatious necklace-broach he claimed once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empress, careered around the tables… The wonder of being an English immigrant youth, plucked out of the obscurity of nowhere Southampton & sub-Bohemian Melbourne, into proximity of the locally celebrated art & literature, still tickles me nearly half a century on… I think Betty understood her role as medium, moderator, provider, proselytiser : I wouldn't be alone in saying she was La Mama…
One day, summer '68, she asked me to go around the corner from the cafe-theatre to a terrace house in Elgin Street and, virtually, save a poet! His name is Shelton Lea, she said, --he needs to know about La Mama, he needs to meet other poets, he's isolated, desperate, in need of nurture, connection et cetera. So I strolled around. Shelton was tall, slender, high cheeked, Roman-like, trembling with intensity. He immediately stated his contempt for that modern poetry which eschewed regular rhyme & metre & demanded from me the rationale for free verse. He enthused about Countee Cullen (whom I misheard as Cunty Cullen), unknown to me but evidently Shelton's example of a great poet. I spoke about the emergent new Melbourne poetry and our, mostly, American references. I remember saying that poems don't have to rhyme though the rhythm of speech & mind was a given. In my mind he's smoking, juggling a baby, another tripping around his feet, with his dark eyed, long haired, similarly slender actress wife in & out of the room with coffee. He said he'd try to come to La Mama but was flat out struggling to exist…
Around this time, impressed by the popularity of the curtain-raiser poetry performances I provided for Mike Hudson's versions of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre, Betty invited me to take on a regular poetry evening. She proposed we go 50/50 on the door, and so long as I could pay the rent would be part of La Mama's permanent programme. We planned but didn't bite the bullet until September '68 when the inaugural reading of what I named the La Mama Poets Workshop began with its boast "Tuesday nights forever!" By August '69 the Hemensleys were off to Europe, leaving the Workshop in the hands of Mike Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Bill Beard, Ian Robertson, Geoff Eggleston, Garrie Hutchinson & others, until sometime in 1970 they moved on to the Melbourne Arts Co-Op (another history yet to be analysed & written). Betty threw a going-away party for us in her Eltham house, wished us all the best but insisted we return to Melbourne & La Mama. Late '72 we did, but though she invited me start up poetry at La Mama again one had obviously moved on. 'Breakthrough' politics & poetics had grown, after the 1970-72 English infusion, into the 'international' perspective --that is, Melbourne & Australian poetry in the world of poetry. Ten years later Val Kirwin had a go, on Betty's successors, Maureen Hartley & Liz Jones' instigation, & invited me to read with her at the well-attended first salon, but it wasn't until Mal Morgan, whom I'd put on the bill back in 68/9, began his La Mama Poetica a few years later that the La Mama tradition resumed. It continues to this day…
Betty's generosity to the new playwrights & actors (Hibberd, Blundell, Davies, Romeril & co) is legend, to the extent of warping the actual history of performance (of new music & film as well as theatre) at La Mama, especially in the first couple of years. After the resident group suddenly abandoned La Mama, hurting & shocking her to the core, she came to see it as an opportunity for ever greater variety of the new & experimental. Her devotion to the theatre was equalled by her support of the poets. Tim Burstall, in contrast, could be critical & dismissive of the La Mama poets. I recall Betty once more keeping the peace & explaining that Tim was a poet himself once. Her own children also had inclinations to write --I think it was young Tom who hung around the barely older Charles Buckmaster, which may have exacerbated Burstall senior's inter-generational irritation…
In the three years I was away ('69-'72), Betty had me sending her playscripts for which she found directors, mounting a succession of productions of my plays at La Mama. From the day in late '67 when she recruited Malcolm Robertson (moonlighting from the MTC under the pseudonym 'Garibaldi') to direct my first La Mama play, The Blind, she was my greatest advocate. Our last collaboration was in 1973 when she invited me to join herself & Wilfrid Last as the La Mama/Australian Performance Group's contribution to the Independent Schools' Drama Conference in Canberra. Among the other presenters were Roger Pulvers & (the late) Solrun Haas. The play I wrote for the event, The Grand Centenary Cricket Match, was performed by dozens of students & directed (choreographed) by Wilfrid. Betty & I led discussion of contemporary theatre, critiquing short plays by the school groups. Unqualified academically, we'd become a reference for Australian theatre through experience & enthusiasm. Precisely what Ken Taylor meant when he said that with the inception of the La Mama poetry readings, a poet no longer required a license from the English department of Melbourne University!
If Betty Burstall's Memorial in the forecourt of La Mama in Faraday Street, Carlton was her final performance, where she was hailed by friends & colleagues traversing the 46 years since her creation of that theatre --with mostly theatre people speaking, which both Ken Taylor, down from Mount Macedon for the event, & I anticipated --La Mama's poets & poetry sidelined by the actors (--we're here for Betty & that's all that matters, he said --this is where she introduced us & how it all began) -- it's another performance, in which she serendipitously featured, which leaps out of my memory… Sometime in 1969, one of Sid Clayton's marvellous & inscrutable events --that poet-composer's magical theatre, part meticulous composition, part happening --for the crux of which he'd directed the audience to become participants in a ritual procession around a table, onto which Betty had unexpectedly hopped up & now lay supine! We were to circle clock-wise --though I remember rebelling against that expectation, circling the other way. Ironically, Sid attempted to shepherd me back into the orthodox circle. Betty was taken over by the 'ceremony'. Bill Beard equally enthusiastic (as was his nature). Recorded music or percussion played ever louder around us. It was dark apart from candle-light. And it only finished when we left off. Betty was the last. From the sidelines we saw her slide off the table, flushed cheeks, exhilarated…
[18/19-6 // 27-7 // 15-9-2013]
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