July 3 / 14
re Bonny Cassidy's FINAL THEORY (Giramondo) launch by Lisa Gorton
Thank you, Lisa, for your (important) part in Bonny's great launch last night at Collected Works Bookshop. Wld love to read your speech, but came away (wrongly perhaps) with the question about lyrical frame-of-mind's encounter with a something-else --along lines of a discussion I saw on F/book some months ago re- 'non fiction poem', to wch Kate Middleton responded contra a kind of knee-jerk rejection by several others (like, huh? 'facts' more 'truthful' than fiction?). Closer perhaps wld be preferring 'world' to person (Yeats, Pound) wch Ive been thinking abt again after nibbling at Robin Blaser as it happens, wch is beside the point of course! The second thought growing in me as I write this is that Bonny mixes it up, poetically (or poetistically) neither [not] this or [not] that!
Further to the above : The poem is very much a narrative and therefore what might be 'flat' as per lyrical persona is actually delightfully all over the place as 'fiction'! (All these terms begged, naturally.) Yday & today began seriously reading, exchanging some thoughts this morning abt it with Sam Moginie...
oOo
July 5 / 14
[after correspondence with Natalle Irene Wood]
Ive been reading a bunch of contemporary Irish poets, published by the fabulous Gallery Press (County Meath), leant to me by Libby Hart, and including Dermot Healy's A FOOL'S ERRAND (2010). The loan came out of an enthusiastic Irish poetry conversation plied with Guinness! But the other day I heard from Libby herself just phoned up by friends from Ireland that Dermot Healy had died suddenly. Ive been enjoying A Fool's Errand --if it's not the barnacle geese then it's funerals & music... The book's a sonnet variation, 2x2, 3x2, 2x2 --I'd been wondering abt the composition and suddenly that jumped out of me from the page...
Anticipating a little Melbourne wake here is a posting from Ireland.
From Terry McDonagh : "Dermot was unique and his star will rise and rise. I'd like to say a few words about his legacy as a person...his books can be read by one and all...
It was strange to see such a vibrant person lying in the coffin. I didn't know him all that well, but I met him many times...he read at a festival in Kiltimagh that I directed and, as always, he made a huge impression on the audience. At his wake on Wednesday, his wife, Helen, reminded me that he'd enjoyed himself at our little festival to such an extent that when he'd left the town to return home, he suddenly asked her to turn the car and come back again for no particular reason other than the fact that he'd enjoyed himself.
His support for budding writers was special. He is remembered fondly by many he'd published in Force 12...a magazine he'd edited. His years as Director (and escapades) of Force 12...later Force 10 festival in Belmullet County Mayo are legendary.
Last autumn he read at Westport festival with the poet, Ger Reidy...I felt he looked a bit tired and not quite himself, but his reading from his novel, Long Time No See, gave me special insight into his message and style."
oOo
July 21 / 14
In case anyone's in the vicinity of the Yarra Hotel in Johnston Street between 6 & 8, The Family will be raising a glass or two and remembering Tim [Hemensley]...
Last night's cold brings back that terrible event. How interesting, though, his corpse was warmer than I was kneeling on the backyard path with him. Poor Loretta crazy crying in the house, me crazy talking to him in the cold night. And as the ambulance took him away, Cathy [O'Brien] arrived in her car to be with us.
Jamesons then for days & days!
Wish I could find the poem I wrote afterwards. Typically I cant find any of my stuff when I want it!
The catastrophe alleviated by friends' love. Thus The Family.
Ive been playing Time Wounds All Heels at Collected Works Bookshop all morning and now Loretta's arrived with the whiskey!
Marvelling at the sound of that band. And the voice. And the words. And the colour of the music. And the drive.
"...was i scared? no not at all..."
Tim H, a continuing tragedy and, simultaneously, an inspiration.
Thanks for the messages. Love from us to all Tim's rock n roll friends & followers, including of course those others who've perished along the way.
oOo
[Via Robert Lloyd]
ROBERT CREELEY
from LINDA WAGNER: AN INTERVIEW
WITH ROBERT CREELEY
. . . I’ve come in the past few months at least––whether from fatigue or from a kind
of ultimately necessary conservatism––to feel that there can be at least one kind of primary measure for the activity of poetry; and perhaps this statement will seem oblique, but in any case what really sticks in my head through the years as a measure of literature is a pair of statements made by Pound––years ago, I would think. One is, simply, "Only emotion endures." And the other is, "Nothing matters save the quality of affection." Now these offer to me two precise terms of measure for the possibility of a poem. I feel that what the poem says in a didactic or a semantic sense––although this fact may be very important indeed––is not what a poem is about primarily; I think this is not its primary fact. I believe, rather, that it is that complex of emotion evident by means of the poem, or by the response offered in that emotion so experienced, that is the most signal characteristic that a poem possesses. So, the measure of poetry is that emotion which it offers, and further, the quality of the articulation of that emotion––how it felt, the fineness of its articulation. . . . Last fall Basil Bunting told me that his own grasp of what poetry might be for him was first gained when he recognized that the sounds occurring in a poem could carry the emotional content of the poem as ably as anything "said." That is, the modifications of sounds––and the modulations––could carry this emotional content. He said, further, that, while the lyric gives an inclusive and intense singularity, usually, to each word that is used . . . there’s an accumulation that can occur much more gradually so that sounds are built up in sustaining passages and do not, say, receive an individual presence but accumulate that presence as a totality. So that one is not aware, let us say, that the word the is carrying its particular content; but as that e sound or the sound accumulates, it begins to exert an emotional effect that is gained not by any insistence on itself as singular word but as accumulation. To quote Pound again, "Prosody consists of the total articulation of the sound in a poem"––that’s what I’m really talking about.
[Robert Creeley. "Linda Wagner: An Interview with Robert Creeley," originally in Minnesota Review, copyright © 1965, and Contents of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971, copyright © 1973 by Robert Creeley and the Four Seasons Foundation.]
One used to teach 'sound & sense', and 'emotional rhythm'.... my poor old Adult Education classes (1975 to '87)! Some areas of poetry wouldnt at all agree with Creeley as speaking for them though... Of course it speaks for him, helps explicate his practice but not theirs... I remember listening to a radio piece by Robert Ashley, perhaps it was called The Park, not sure, late 70s, early 80s --in wch the author's/actor's/speaker's accent & intonation produced for me a totally & explicitly emotional text & experience... but the semantic content wasnt especially 'emotional' at all, rather the opposite, --lets not say banal but entirely normal, undramatic, occasional particulars... It was the accumulation of propositions wch delivered a narrative, and the accent of the telling wch endowed it with emotional colour... Creeley Ive liked very much though not much thought about for some years... I imagine youre reading this, Robert, from perspective of songster (poet with guitar in hand) or art-music composer...?
oOo
August 21 / 14
Thank you everyone for last night's reading : and it was a great room as they say! David Morley was wonderful to MY ear, because all of a sudden that hurdy gurdy spin of particular English country (imagination & evocation of country) within the argument John Clare & Wisdom Smith [The Poet & the Gypsy, Carcanet/UK] are made to carry, thus as I offered DM, possession & dispossession... the rich dialectic of the romantic trope... politics & sensibility etc... suddenly it was there in our room! 'and desert was paradise enow', words' world... Perfect foils for David in Will Eaves & Gig Ryan.... each one demanded an ear... Gig Ryan's classical Greek readings, and what appeared to be a new mss of poems, and her offering of a Martin Johnston sonnet... Will's larrikin Larkin (did he say?)!... Waking up to this morning after, still brimfull of delight in the poetry of the event let alone first class wine & company... Cdnt help myself interjecting Beowulf (after Will's translation)/Hopkins/Bunting/Thomas to hold David M's performance...
Oh me o my, much much much more to 'unpack' as they say!
oOo
August 23 / 14
Stephen Burt : "We're all going to die --and poems can help us live with that."
Ive read Stephen Burt but not seen or heard him before... Re- "we're all going to die... poems can help..." : Round age of 32 it was writing a story abt visitation of angel of death (who promised to spare me the dread of death --consciousness of time passing/G Stein --if I pledged to receive the angel (& the anxiety) twice more, at each doubling of my age... I situated the first encounter at age 16, so the second at 32, the third at 64... The story was a cure or coincided with the lifting of that anxiety... My education was completed when I lay on ground with Tim's body July 2003, --the image of death as edifice entirely dissolved, and via Tim appreciated it as the achievement of a moment, a passing away (Tim's passing)... no big deal, one dies... I'm probably in more than two minds abt Stephen Burt's lecture, which I enjoyed listening to by the way... Thanks Paula [Caine], my dear, for sending it...
oOo
August 24 / 14
Thanks Bernard Hemensley. for telling me about the Berlin family exhibition. Envy your visit to the Bridport Art Gallery to see the show. Important to me because, although Billy Fisher doesnt remember me (according to email exchange couple of years or more ago, and he something of an hero for me, a dream figure for my poetry), meeting his stepfather Sven Berlin at Emery Down in the New Forest (Hampshire) that Whitsun long weekend in 1964, when Billy invited some fellow students up to help bring in the hay, was momentous! Forever etched in mind & heart! Wonderful, too, exchanging email messages with Greta Berlin same time as Billy's no-go.
oOo
August 28 / 14
As Peter Robinson writes on his F/b page, "Carol Rumens has chosen 'The Book' by F. T. Prince as her Guardian Poem of the Week. Reading it with the argument of John Donne's 'The Sun Rising' in mind helps, I think, with any of the trickier bits ..."
I hadnt thought of FTP as undervalued these days but that's a consequence of living in my head and in Oz! But I'm delighted to read further that Peter R & Will May are "editing a couple of chapbooks of uncollected FTP poems for Perdika Press..." , including Keats Country...
Great news! It was Lee Harwood suggested I contact FTP back in 1970 when I'd returned to Southampton after three years in Melbourne. How can you live in Southampton and not see Frank Prince? he said. We saw each other regularly, and corresponded after I returned to Melbourne late '72. Most visits to England until a few years before he died I'd visit. I describe some of this in the piece I wrote for Geraldine Monk's CUSP anthology a few years ago. And that Keats poem he published himself after missing deadline for the official Keats anniversary collection he told me. I wonder if his translations of St John of the Cross are available? Maybe they've been collected? Dont have my Prince volume to hand. He sent me a copy but stressed it was not for republication! But your news makes my day --for FTP legacy but also the FTP that's part of me, if you know what I mean! All the lives which possess & animate one... Thanks for your good work here...
oOo
September 3 / 14
Thank you Juan, Ive heard of the Turnrow anthology but not stocked here yet. Our social-political situations are so different, impacting so differently upon our roles as poet and the poems we might write. Here are some lines from my Midnight Interrogation series, ca 73/4, from A Mile From Poetry (Island Press, 1979) : "The Poem is the barricade which ought to be realized by the people who take the poems, even their poems, to the barricades. // The Poem is a halo. It is the endowment of sovereignty. It gives voice its independence. The Poem is voice's reward. The Poem is the voice abroad, But abroad is no poem of yours, boy. // The Poem is an expression of the dignity of each voice's difference. Blood tends to confuse, stain & clog. Neither poem nor blood clarify the issues. Each is the issue of itself. Red is not always the colour of the equation." and so on. I must reread Nicanor Parra and bring his books back to the shelf! Best wishes, K
Juan Garrido :
Talking with Nicanor Parra in Santiago in 1981
Young poets/say whatever you want.
Pick your own style/ much blood has gone under the bridge
To still believe-I believe/ that there’s only one way to cross the road:
You can do anything in poetry. Nicanor Parra
I remember
When we arrived at your home in la Reina.
The dogs barking at us..
After a few minutes you appeared
Like a ghost in the afternoon.
Mr Anti-poeta
I was born in the Barros Lucos’
Hospital.
I never went to the University.
However, I swing between two oceans.
I translate poetry in English into Spanish,
As a creative pathway (Puente)
Between two different cultures and lands.
Here I am
Listening to a Chinese-Australian poet
Listening to an Iraq poet
Listening to Aboriginal poets
Reading with my mind Australian poetry.
I agree with you
The style doesn’t come from a creative writing course.
My style comes from reading other poets, from passion
and learning the rhythm of the bird in a tree.
Learning how to plant seeds; preparing the plot, watering,
Looking after them everyday.
I agree again with you
Mr. when you say
Much blood has gone under the bridge.
Most of my poets are dead. Some of them
Have been killed or have suicide.
Essenin, Roque Dalton, Neruda, Vallejo..
Only Huidobro was a poet of the bourgeois-revolution.
Ernesto Cardenal survived the Pope’s sin against the Revolution
as well as the collapse of the Sandinista revolution.
So they killed the poets amongst the struggling people.
I have been on the path of the struggle, in prison,
Being tortured by the Chilean secret police.
When I went to your home
You welcomed us.
In this time I was an invisible poet with a few poems in my heart.
Victor Hugo Romo talked to you.
You showed us yours rooms,
frames on the walls with newspaper headlines,
as great paintings.
Your cat was like a prince in the poet’s palace.
You were happy to read your poems at the concert
That we organized in tribute to Violeta Parra.
After more than twenty years
I am sure you remember me very well
If I say my name to you:
I am Juan
My nickname was el Negro.
I worked in Nuestro Canto’s office 1980
With Miguel Dagvanino and John Smith.
I wrote a book
Variantes de la Libertad Definitiva
By Samuel Lafferte,
Published by Hondero Entusiasta Press.
Yes I remember you very well.
Your house
With pictures from newspapers on the walls
Replacing the painting of Picasso, Miro or Dali.
By the way
Could you tell me how to find the way out of this conversation?
Nicanor Parra say:
You can do anything in poetry.
You can do anything in poetry.
You can
do anything
in
poetry.
by Juan Garrido-Salgado
Happy Birthday Anti poeta!!!!!
[This poem appears at "The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry"
editor John Kinsella &Jack Heflin and William Ryan Series Editors (US)]
oOo
September 12 / 14
Home from excellent evening i/f Daniel White's book-launch at Collected Works Bookshop. Impassioned & informed younger generation 21C Labor visions, Republic Earth quoting Buckminster Fuller! Hey, thats OUR language baby! Very interesting. "Democracy our greatest achievement" : yes, wch means no gun at head whatever politics faith colour of citizens. The global ambition stops me but lots to consider. Wdnt it be fun to be around to see how it all pans out! Lovely chatting to David & Mary White. Congratulations the White bros for their project!
"Republic Earth is an educational, social, political, economic and technological ideology that aims at the establishment of a full global democracy that values all aspects of humanity around the world. Republic Earth primarily aims to build a global online democracy using the technology of the digital revolution, as soon everyone on Earth will be connected if they wish to be...." from Daniel's book. Web address is, www.republicearth.org
My feeling is that the 'digital revolution' aspect is the goer and even there asserting only the most positive assumptions of the technology... RE- 'democracy', I realize from Daniel's definition (wherein republic is its only legit. manifestation) that I, like most others, have a common usage appreciation of the concept, so the greatest diversity of types coexist. Re- the monarch, there've been several occasions during the past decades when the neutral authority has prevented coup or civil war (Spain, Thailand...)... Additionally ours is a constitutional monarchy.... How Oz Labor can re-present the Republic debate with any chance of success is the question. Of course it's an Australian decision. Once again I'm the visitor... And not at all sure how I'd respond in the English context.
oOo
September 20 , 14
[to Grant Macracken, re- the Scottish Referendum]
I'd love to see demographic analysis of the vote : I wdnt be surprised if young people (how define that? let's say 30 and under) were a majority for Yes... The safest position to stay with the status quo, and admittedly there wld have been a great deal of political economic readjustment between Scotland & the UK, but independence is a worthy emotion & project... Imagine what a referendum for Britain to exit the EEC would be be like? I remember twentyfive years ago big discussion around the table at Charnwood with Cathy & Des & Jurate, maybe also Robert Kenny, about the Baltic states and their dire struggle with the Soviet Union. Jurate argued passionately for independence there & then, whatever the cost. I thought independence was eventually inevitable but didnt realize how fast the wheels were turning.... Incredible courage of the Lithuanians... This has been in my mind with the Scots... At the same time I'm no longer a unilateralist nuclear disarmer, especially when the Yes position would have maintained the umbrella but pushed the missiles out of its domain... But all v interesting... And, Grant, the campaign in Scotland has drawn propositions for a rather different UK in the near future... Slainte!
[21/9/14]
Around
70/71, Andrew Crozier sent to me packet of materials he'd received from
Allen Van Newkirk (in Nova Scotia?). As far as I recall he was part of the
Olson network. Intriguing man. (And what happened to him?) One paper he
enclosed concerned the 'break up nations',
and Cornwall & Brittany were among these. And it felt convincing to
me, almost like a contrary energy to the 3rd World defined as the rise
of new nations, --this 4th World, the break up of old nations especially
when equally old cultures had been absorbed/subjugated. Thus the age
old Basque struggle, the Irish, et al. I suppose the outsider's fear
(mine) at time of the Baltic states uprising against the Soviets was
that the small communities would be destroyed. Nothing like that in the
UK of course. Nor will be.
oOo
September 25 / 14
Emerging from the Delphi [Continental Cakes] in N/cote with Ken Trimble after accidental meeting, we pass a sign in window of one of the Northcote second handers, "20% discount for Teachers". Decide to put sign up at Collected Works Bookshop, "30% discount for gurus". For some reason Ken & I think this is enormously funny, and that's before we get to the Peacock for a pot! I'll be hitting the road soon enough to set up the evening's gig for Libby Hart's WILD (Pitt Street Poetry) book launching we're presenting with John & Linsay Knight. In fact better go now! See you all later...
oOo
October 8 / 14
Ian Brinton's notification re- Lee Harwood, not to mention his review of his book, tugs heartstrings... on which theme, email from Edward Mycue similarly affecting : thus,
"Writers here on Saturday Oct 11 at lpm --come with your scraps and scrolls that are diamonds pulled from your minds' caves
we have been doing this monthly a small round-robin for a couple of hours
many can't come but i ask anyway for ald ang syne (SP?) -- jerry flemming's in paris, jules mann in london years now, kris is in melbourne and has never been here except in my heart, jeanne bryan in Sacramento, Helen Sventitsky-Rother near Munich, Carl Ginsburg nr Vienna I think, Carla Bertola and Alberto Vitacchio in Turin, Anny Ballardini in Bozen on the east side of those Italian northern mountains, Bryan Monte in Zeisst, The Netherlands, Ruth Fainlight/ London who has never been here except in spirit (she has a beautiful poem about her mother's purse and the smell of the coty powder) & so it goes. I usually forget somebodies & usually those closest (!) because i just punch in the names and know that someday i will have to make some sort of "list" in the computer (but where is the fun in that!) -- and if I ever do that will be the end of the 45 years of person to person (remembering now that on one of those person to person 'connections' in the group many many years ago there was a BIG fight between harold norse and jack gilbert -- and then after that we changes locations and so now it is and has been on my little turf for tufts of years all gone patchy now (as myhair once became before it emerged as a pate smooth as a baby's bottom some have concluded)
To wch I reply,
"Hi Ed, What a surprise to be included because of course "never been" nor could ever except, as you remind me, in your heart, and mine too -- so many as I could also call their names as you do warmly here...
Thank you... Hope it goes well..
Kris in Melbourne, Spring morning, minutes away from hurrying up to Clifton Hill station for the train into the City and another day at my lovely bookshop!
Hope youre very well... saw pic of you & Richard I'm assuming on holiday..."
Ed Mycue : "Thanks, Kris. What a lone history we have since I think it was the early 1970's and of the time when you were the poetry editor of the iconic Meanjin [Quarterly] and you published all the new gals and guys that made it so exciting to read -- you kickstarted that venerable institution back to life when you were hellming (yeah helming w 2 'L's) and ever since then have remained a force from 'down under' with your bookstore and your magazines and publishing and writing(s) of all kinds. I doubt you will ever be a grand old man to yourself, but you seem from this distance to me to be a world force in poetry in the English language(s). What once seemed experimental and wild even have earned emeralds in value."
oOo
October 8 / 14
[Re- Morris Lurie]
Colin Tad Talbot :
i was sitting with David N [Pepperell], making his day much brighter as usual over a caffe late, when he took a phonecall which stopped him...a dear friend had disappeared into the blessed state of non-being. It's not my place to give the details but I imagine Dr Pepper will, when he feels okay to post. All I'll say is that his good friend (also a friend of mine) was a great man and will be remembered well.
K H : Sorry to hear of this Colin... Met him [Morris Lurie] several times over the years via the Shop or literary events... Commiserations to David Pepperell and all his friends here... On several occasions he almost bought a book from us, but always found a reason (the cover, the size, the price, the first sentences, his opinion of a previous title by the author etc etc) for returning it to the shelf... The architect at the Nicholas Building, Ken Edelstein, was a great friend of Morris... No doubt he'll come by some time and tell me some more stories... RIP, M Lurie
oOo
October 8 / 14
[Re- aniversary of the Gallery 6 Reading in San Francisco, 1955]
Thanks for the memories, Brian! Wonderful date memorial! Ive been reading Rip Rap again (50th anniv ed) last few days... Also the Snyder/W Berry correspondence, Distant Friends... good pun... Also, working something out abt G S, looked him up in Peter Cayote's memoir... My philosophy or attitude is 'warts & all' so it's all good as they say! That is, points of difference are what they are, --i do my best to contextualise o/wise carps they'll remain, somehow mean... However... On with the Show! Best wishes, Kris
Oh and Allen Ginsberg and all & all... But what about Rexroth? Ive never really u/stood his omission from The New American Poetry anthology, unless he himself declined? I'm not talking abt fights & spites but from the point of view of the poetry... First read him in an old Perspectives magazine, his poem Starting out from San Francisco (I think it was)... 1965, Isle of Wight holiday at my g/mothers, I was back in the South West after working a few months on British Rail, shortly before going to Europe again and then early '66 it was Australia! But, the question's still in my head...
oOo
October 12 / 14
Just happened, last Thursday, to be cutting through Block Arcade en route Bourke, when I saw the display of portraits, the Lord Mayor's [small business] Commendations for 2014... took a closer look in case i recognized anyone and up they popped! SAFF! that is, Saverio Fazio of Saff's Hairdressing in the Pt Phillip Arcade, where I get shorn every couple of months or so! A silver gong! Good stuff! And then PAUL CAINE our cousins, Caine Real Estate, a bronze! And then FIONA SWEETMAN fellow tenant at the Nicholas Building whose Hidden Secret Tours was the first to steer visitors Collected Works Bookshop's way! Great little booklet available from City of Melbourne with all the pics & captions. Our Town ay?!
oOo
October 19 /14
At the the Heidelberg garden centre sitting on bench opposite myrtle in bed of Snow Maiden (raphiolepis) & Heuchera Berry Smoothie in the one arc of shadow of otherwise full sun courtyard, turning around in my mind funny old term "smashing", long gone from the common vocab, as in smashing day and most of all the mural along & around farthest extent of enclosed display sheds, so large & detailed one's literally The Man Who Entered Pictures as of Opal L Nations' surreal prose pieces, published in the English little poetry magazines of the early '70s ("I like these without reservations," Andrew Crozier remarked; "What have you got against Indians?" Opal responded) --Walk around wonderful domestic perimeter of original colonial horticulture prospect, beginning at the house & garden, espaliered grape-vine, down gradient to the laid out plots beneath the purview of the hills, this romantic perspective including tromp l'oeil shadows of ghost gums angling across the painted tree trunk of same, or falling away from the leafy crowns --A stage set, the whole thing, first-rung experience where potential fuses with imagination, for a moment what the garden at home could be --Back in my room what I actually dig up is the Postscript from The Poem of the Clear Eye, and transplant it here, weeding as I type the errata & silly mistakes from 40 years ago :
"The mural on the walls of the fried-fish & chips shop is idyllic. the brothers over the gas-rings with scoops & mesh-buckets occasionally glance at the bay painted around the L of the walls. both brothers cannot be the isolate island fishermen. one must be elsewhere. or drowned. the fisherman hauls in his baubled line. a basket of fish beside his thigh. seagulls hang in the sky over the tallest palm-tree. the island's air is the same as the shop's of course. which explains why the fisherman has his back to the counter & the fryer brothers glance out often to the mural sea. i queue for coconuts though i order scallops & chips. the brothers merge in the imagination of the island fisherman. he has his back against it all right --what with turbulent winds & man-eating sharks. he dreams his escape. along the same passage of delivery the three men pause as they pass the unsung fourth. he resembles me apart from age & girth. a slender twenty year-old. ambitious for the gold of the future. they shudder & slide on in their various directions. i pay the bill --pennies flung into the blue swell. the fryer brothers pull in the coins adept as fishermen. they glance at the seagull on the wind's meander over the heads of their customers. the queue maintains its claim on their conscious attention. they miss nothing however of the mural's intentions. we know what we know.
[1972-3, 1974; Melbourne.]"
We know what we know.
oOo
October 19 / 14
Good to catch up yday, Denis, at the Fed Square for Robert Lloyd's Dylan Thomas celebration... BUT, thanks for the clip of Freddie & the Dreamers! As I was telling you the other day, Freddie & the Dreamers shot a promo film or advert at Bricket Wood station, on the St Albans to Watford Junction loop, in 1965, c/o of myself, Kris Hemensley, grade 4 booking offfice clerk but temporarily Acting Station Master of Bricket Wood, owing to the Station Master being transferred to Watford Junction (my home station) as Inspector of Platforms, --I'd given Freddie's manager permission to shoot film! Couldnt think of anything better! Freddie & the Dreamers! Never occurred to me seek permission from British Rail! Bloody anarchist! Anyway, I met everyone, and very soon they were cavorting all over the station & the track and on the little bridge into the estate. And they ate at the pub on the village side of the station, as I did, --i probably told them they cld get fantastic bread & cheese & corned-beef rolls & pork pies & etc! End of first day of filming the Station Master returned from Watford Junction, asked me what the trucks were parked outside and who were these people milling around. Were they passengers etc? Theyre Freddie & the Dreamers, I began to explain. He was a bit like Blakey in On the Buses! He almost exploded! I told him theyd be gone by the end of the following day. I think they were. This & other unorthodox behaviour didnt endear me to British Rail, yet it was I who eventually resigned and not BR sacking me! A wonderful few months. As for Freddie Garrity, I still have soft spot for his hits, You Were Made for Me, I'm Telling You Now, If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody, etc But have to confess I dont remember Do The Freddie!!!
oOo
October 26 / 14
This is for Dave & Ricky Rogers, our Southampton near neighbors late '69 to late '72, our very first new English friends after returning there from Melbourne. Loretta & I make their acquaintance at La Sainte Union one night where we're all attending performance by Bob Cobbing, concrete & sound poet down from London. Incredible! This is what I'd call music I say, recognising the layering & polyphony from the ISCM concerts attended in Melbourne couple of years before, organised by Keith Humble, back in Oz from Paris & musique concrete. Wonderful serendipity : La Sainte Union is also where the father of my tech College friend from '62-'64, Nick Buck, is the English prof. Catching up with Nick comes later, nowt to do wi' this tale! So, thick as thieves with Dave & Ricky. It's summertime 1970. We're all interested in dropping acid for the first time. One of Dave's friends can help us. Dave describes the guy to us. Nero, friend from Art College or on the scene made by the Art College students. Nero... And Dave imitates his way of talking: How fantastic this or that batch or crop was. His hand gestures : part drumming, part slashing : thaaaat good! Nero's wanted Dave to come & see how he's redecorated his place, Dave being a painter, with eye & technique, graduate from the Art College where one of his teachers is Amanda Wade, close friend of Lee Harwood, a poet I'd love to meet, encountered in the little mags I've read at Mike Dugan's place in Melbourne '68-'69. And she arranges a meeting one Sunday afternoon at her place. Lee puts me on to F T Prince, another Southampton neighbor, and that is definitely another story! Dave & I walk around the block. Nero has a brother. They look & talk the same. Artists, musicians? At any rate, heads. One or other of them lets us in. We step into the house and immediately into the freshly painted living room. It's white, all over. Gleaming white. And Nero is wearing white. White pants and loose top. This is my WHITE ROOM, he says, and giggles in that give-away head's way. Spells it out, W- H- I- T- E. R- O- O- M. And giggle-cackles again. Can I please have Cream playing full blast in Nero's house in this reminiscence? Full blast. "In the white room with black curtains near the station / Blackroof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings / Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes / Dawnlight smiles on you leaving, my contentment / I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines". Jack Bruce & pop poet Pete Brown. "In the white room…" "In the white room…" "In the white room…"
Showing posts with label Creeley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creeley. Show all posts
Friday, October 31, 2014
Sunday, August 30, 2009
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #12, August, 2009
KRIS HEMENSLEY
MAINLINE TO THE HEART AND OTHER POEMS by Clive Matson, published by Regent Press (Berkeley, California), 2009
1.
Before the reader can get to Clive Matson's poems, Mainline to the Heart (which first saw light of day in 1966 & is republished now by Regent Press, Berkeley, with as many more poems of the period as the original collection contained), there are several bridges (hurdles?) to be crossed.
Firstly, Erin Matson's cover drawing (--and she's the lover named in the poems, e.g. in Talk About Love, "she rings my neck using / fingers she oints with
arsenic"; stereotypical femme fatale/object of desire) which departs from the Indianised, Beardsley figures within the book to a cartoon of male devil, assisted by female angel, impaling the hapless, falling man with bayonet-like needle. So the stage is set, the drama proclaimed. Secondly, the five pages of praises for the book from such supporters of his work as Al Young, Jack Foley, Steve Kowit, whose testimonials comprise a psychological & cultural as well as literary purview. And thirdly, the late John Wieners' original introduction.
2.
Diane di Prima & Alan Marlowe published Mainline to the Heart in '66 with their Poets Press in the Bowery. Di Prima recalls in her afterward, A Few Words (written in 2004) that it was the 6th book they'd produced --previous publications included her own Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin, a bilingual edition of a poem by Jean Genet, & Herbert Huncke's Journal. "It was an enchanted time," she says.
History doesnt always oblige one that way, but poetry scene, printing press & happy family just before Vietnam really cranked up, & a full twenty years before Gay Sunshine became the nightmare of AIDS; that period when heroin was cool enough to know its casualties as martyrs to mission & muse, & before the addiction & ODs became commonplace as the carnage on the roads; I guess it might well qualify as enchantment!
The poet whom Clive Matson was in the Sixties cant help himself : "I love drugs : / cocaine and heroin today for speed and warmth, / grass for spice." Why not? Spirituality can be just as amenable, & sex (--sex, junk, God : three-headed version of one Beat deity) --no fuss, & no mess until much later...
3.
In terms of reclamation, then, Mainline to the Heart presents Clive Matson in full flight, as Sixties as they come, that is to say sex to jazz's backbeat, guys & gals, drugs, the Beat merging with the Hippy thing. It contains or assumes the bits of attitude which'd one day declare as Punk --if the love/hate ambivalence defines something of it, not to mention the explicit sexual narrative of one poem & the peppering of its detail elsewhere. No doubt the era's Liberation spiel, before & after Ginsberg, informed him, as it did everyone, though reading him out of context his text also resounds the male chauvenism the squares would always have judged it to be. And not because of the sexual subject-matter but the gluttonous objectification of the body & the act. But if sex --sexual love one should say --is merely "one more war" (& I'm quoting Tim Hemensley's refrain, exorcised as one of the Powder Monkeys songs in the '90s), even male chauvenism is beside the point --and Matson's lovers more like warriors. Probably, also, as John Wieners explains, drugs, & heroin in particular, has everything to do with it : "One wonders about the nature of love in these poems. Are they vicious or not? Has the author sacrificed anything or everything to arrive at the toughness he celebrates. It seems he has. It is not angelhood any longer. It is not nature, springing up in the woods at twilight. It is heroin and the blood he draws. It is not peace."
Wieners' introduction cues in his own gift --and one doesnt require the younger man's gaucherie for the elder to shine. Reminds one too of the remorseless passing of time. Isnt Wieners one of the new poets (as of Donald Allen's "new")?! New, young. . . as he was, of course, in 1966, in his early 30s, seven years older than Clive Matson. The New in these recent decades hardly settles before other species arise. 'Forever young' indeed...
Wieners' An Introduction to Clive Matson's Poems sitting with Diane di Prima in the twilight on a country road, diverts me to his own books... Rereading him I'm even moved to prefer him, of the poets in the eddies of Pound & William Carlos Williams, to both Olson & Creeley, his great friends, mentors, companions. Prefer him this minute, that is, given that he's a poet of the minute, a poet of presence par excellence. Certainly one might now differentiate his originality from theirs. No matter the angle or, later, the circumlocution, Wieners invariably turns towards the world (& the worldly) and is actually the opposite of Olson, the sum of whose voluminous parts suggests a mind continually courting the abstraction one assumed he opposed. J H Prynne once offered that Olson's poetry pursued the 'condition of the whole'; if it does it seems too often in flight from that palpable world celebrated by his erstwhile student. Wieners' elicitation from turn of phrase of something like a revelation is also, ultimately, not Creeley's way, as though the latter's nuancing of squint & quip guaranteed the wisdom of the everyday... Not for a moment would I avoid Olson & Creeley, but now Wieners is restored!
4.
The introductions for di Prima's series "were meant to introduce a new poet by someone from his own lineage -- to 'locate' him or her for the reader." The Wieners of this role is strung between The Hotel Wentley Poems & Pressed Wafer, his 4th & 5th collections. By then he's made it sufficiently to perform at Spoleto with Olson & meet Ezra Pound ("I felt I was in the presence of a Chinese mandarin."). Up the (Black) mountain but never left the (Beat) street. Where's an even younger poet in that? 'Post' & 'neo' this & that (--recall Pete Spence's small Melbourne press of the mid-80s, hilariously tagged Post Neo, implying every year of the Late Age's style but another inflection of belatedness) --so, Matson's neo- or post-Beat epistles & communiques... A natural reporter, and the cliches (represented in the book's testimonials) are true : raw, naked, honest etc.
Matson implies a certain reserve about republication. "Many of the poet's friends, especially Gail Ford, offered patient understanding while the poet struggled to accept the value of the persona expressed in these poems." A reluctant second coming? What's at stake in this reclamation (to republish one's first book)? Try to imagine myself here : I couldnt, wouldnt publish mine --lacking the commitment to my first collection though sometimes imagining a current selection of early poems, the forty, fifty years old young-writing. Perhaps it's the ageless character of such poems, that is, that they are young forever; lyrics that they are, song & dance of the diary of those nights & days --available still, elixir of youth for youth-prolonging seniors! On the other hand, very little of my early 20s poetry is as fulfilled as Matson's confessions. Where he trusts his own experience & language, & pushes right on through his confidence, I would allow fancy & style (aka other poets' voices) to waylay me.
First I heard of Clive Matson since the late '60s/'70s was in a poem in Nigel Roberts' collection Steps for Astaire (Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983), which good-naturedly satirised American culture. "Clive Matson's Poetry Workshop shares verse / of all kinds with appreciation & insight / providing the feedback you want, whether it be / tough criticism or careful encouragement.." I'm not sure that Roberts was gunning for the poet so much as the stereotypical creative-writing tutor, worthy therefore of the general contempt our Sydney troubadour leveled at all "shortcuts to enlightenment" (to quote one of the "New Age Listings" in Steps...), all & any duping of the muse... I recall wondering at the time how Matson regarded his own journey --from dope- & sex-fiend to creative writing tutor, desperado to counselor...
5.
Recapitulate then : Reading Matson I'm hearing & remembering the Sixties. I sympathize, identify with aspects of his testimony even as I squirm! Alive in that Peace & Love time it's obvious, as Wieners cant fail to state, that Clive Matson doesnt sing its song. In a way he's old fashioned --e.g., "jealousy is a function of love and / so is possessiveness" --but laying it out there so graphically is Sixties too. "Why does fucking mean so much?" he asks --no pose; plain prose of that cocksman tradition, Miller to Cassady spiced by Sixties' promiscuity, gay laced. And it's there that a bluer quality occurs, a quality of pain to off-set the young male & often het boasting. With heroin in the mix one can say that in Matson's poems, love is subsumed within the longueurs of mutual dependence : "I'm addicted to heroin and want a habit / so bad it'll break the deathgrip / of love's terminal habit..." (Talk About Love.) Forget about 'sedative' in the light of that...
Attempting longer poems, the young Matson continues howling long after the authentic poem's done --lyric dissipates into un-poem/note-to-self. That's my serious formal gripe. However, shorter poems and those others' better halves contain the riffs & insights this genre's meant to deliver.
The first poem in the book, Teardrop In My Eye, is addressed to Herbert Huncke who, as any Beat & Counter-Culture freak knows, needs no introduction. "Fuck you, Huncke" it begins, dead giveaway for love's infernal minstrelsy --same particulars as Wieners' life & line had marked earlier ("Knowing no other god than this: / the man who places on your mouth / a kiss. Keep no mystery / but his who whispers memory...", For Huncke). Matson reaches through Huncke to all the company of that anti-bourgeois syncopation... "Fuck you, Huncke. / Leave me / hung up for junk, waiting // alone in a dark room candles / you lit burn down in. / They unwind curls of smoke / like incense I remember we offered / weeks ago. / It is Nostalgia. // I treat you mean / and I get what's coming / down on lonely Street. / I walk amid cold winds, / leaves / rustle / while I blow. / No one to hold my hand."
I think that's the kind of 'talent' Corso had in mind praising Kerouac while keeping the 'divine' for Shelley!
6.
John Wieners introduction to Matson's poems seems to want to distinguish between transcendence & realism, & worries for both poet & poem to this conclusion : "Form is not of the question here. // Jazz, and its mainline to the heart. // Is it worth it, when the furry head is lost beside on the pillow? // When deaths congregate and nothing else. // Death is part of nature sure and something else in the spring. / Spirit. And yellow flowers on the mountainside. Opium? yes."
My Love Returned begins beautifully (& another echo of Wieners) : "The Moon rises / ass heavy: on the wane. / Wish it was full." Then the poem begins to swing : "I dream & / a huge bat wing arcs over skeleton buildings / and dips to touch ruby pinprick traffic lights / on the street's horizon in mute salute, // when I take in another block / the black wing blacks out the lights / and I know it is the Vampire, / my love returned / in the city calling me to bed / with faint irresistible siren / over the cool line of telepathic desire / or echoing 'could be' to my need..."
The poem's conjuring of vampire imagery is perfect patch for junky lyricist's emotional & conceptual chaos. "How the seasons change / and my veins hold new blood for her to suck now, / new blood I can bleed // over the white untried bed / and my teeth are white and sharp to eat with. / Now I brim over with come to shoot in her. / I flap my jaw / and smile goofy at strangers / in the fullness of it." Yes, I wince at the scatological & Burroughsian excess, so bare as it is in a poem, yet it's clear that the lyric shapes it, in a sense saves the soul within the poem, saves the soul of the poet too.
(July 27/August 30, 2009)
[Regent Press, 2747 Regent Street, Berkeley, Cal. 94705]
www.regentpress.net
________________________________________________________________
KRIS HEMENSLEY & MICHAEL TENCER
WIENERS & CO
Kris Hemensley : It felt like synchronicity when you plonked the John Wieners poems down on the Collected Works counter the other day. My head has been jumping with Wieners this last little while on account of a review I'm writing of the re-publication of '60s poet Clive Matson's Mainline to the Heart, which includes Wieners' original introduction... that is to say, reading the introduction had me return to his books on my own shelf and to relish his cadence, whatever his themes, all over again... And you have me intrigued with your reference to Jeremy Prynne to whom you referred as giving a great reading of Wieners' poem, Cocaine, on You Tube. Tell me more! What is your connection to or interest in Wieners, Prynne, English poetry, poetry in Melbourne?
Michael Tencer : Right! I'd better clear up the howler first, before your readers go searching for Prynne videos...
J.H. Prynne read John Wieners' poem 'Cocaine' in a short (1 minute 40 second) sound recording in 2004. The poem itself was originally in the book Ace of Pentacles, published by James F. Carr & Robert A. Wilson in 1964, & currently is collected in Wieners' Selected Poems 1958-1984, published by Black Sparrow Press. Prynne's recording appears on the CD-R 'Low Bleb Score', the third of four poetry-related CD-R's produced by Quid magazine, compiled, edited & distributed by Keston Sutherland & Andrea Brady through their brilliant Barque Press (www.barquepress.com). Prynne's recording is also available for free on Andrea Brady's website www.archiveofthenow.org .
For those readers unfamiliar with Prynne, & hence wondering what all the fuss is about over a short sound recording, let me briefly sum up the situation by saying that Prynne has been the most influential, intelligently experimental & reclusive British poet, bar none, for the past 40-plus years. In that time, he has done ONE public interview for radio (which has all but vanished), & has allowed his picture to be printed on perhaps three or four occasions. The fact that he was throughout that time College Lecturer & Director of Studies in English at Cambridge's Gonville & Caius College, as well as the College Librarian at Cambridge's Cockerell Library (as well as at the previous library, & during the Cockerell construction), made his reclusiveness all the more notable. His early studies with American poets during his travels included friendships with Charles Olson & Ed Dorn (Prynne's contribution to Dorn's 1976 Bean News, as 'Erasmus W. Darwin', is a particularly wild read -- the full issue of Bean News has been reprinted & is included as a supplement to Vol 15 Number 3 of Sagetrieb (Winter 1996)); & his generosity with his time & criticism for students & other poets, most clearly exhibited in his critical essays & copious letters, is legendary. All of this is quite beside the point that the actual poetry, now widely available in-near-toto in the Bloodaxe Press Poems book, has set the new standard for English poets of high modernism.
My association with Prynne is slight, though treasured. I first learned of his work through the Zappologist critic & poet Ben Watson (aka Out to Lunch), who attended Prynne's lectures at Cambridge & maintained contact with him, mentor-to-student-like, ever since. Through Ben I also met Keston Sutherland, editor/publisher/poet of Barque Press & the editor of Prynne's forthcoming & much-anticipated Complete Critical Prose. With Prynne I have had e-mail & postal contact, securing permission to publish his letter/critique of our shared friend Stuart Calton's poetry in the perennially-forthcoming Gruntwork magazine (Gruntwork or Dogfood, as the first issue shall catchily be called, is to be edited & published by Ben Watson & me). Quite generously, Prynne has sent along several books gratis, including his extraordinary full-length studies of a single Shakespeare sonnet (They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94), & Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper' (Field Notes: 'The Solitary Reaper' and others); & an extended telephone conversation with Prynne, touching on poetically peripheral points -- linguistics, other languages, word-processing & libraries -- proved inordinately delightful.
Aside from Prynne's aforementioned John Wieners reading, it's worth noting that Prynne seems to have become more comfortable with public appearances in recent years. He has, in his capacities as Visiting Foreign Expert & Guest Professor in the People's Republic of China, even gone so far as to read his own poetry on camera (available on the DVD River Pearls, from Barque Press); & his recent lectures & readings in England & the States have, I understand from word of mouth, been warmly received.
Unfortunately, word of mouth is all I can tell you as an American living in Melbourne, having been perplexingly refused entry to England on two separate occasions! Should it prove feasible in the next several years, my fiancée & I hope to travel there & gain some firsthand experience of the British poetic universe beyond the e-mails & postal dispatches, but until then I remain regrettably peripheral & decidedly blog-gossipy round that particular hub.
For those who wish to know, there's an excellent, albeit incomplete, bibliography of Prynne online at
www.ndorward.com/poetry/articles_etc/prynne_checklist.htm , compiled by Nate Dorward. It misses out on the reprint of The Oval Window, designed by Ian Friend & published in Brisbane, Australia, as well as some more obscure older texts & some not-so-obscure recent texts, but it remains the touchstone of Prynniana at the present.
Regarding my own poetry & associations, very little of what I do could be recognisably linked to Prynne's work, or to any of the American poets, John Wieners included. My work comes from primarily musical influences -- Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Edgard Var̬se, Anton Webern, Conlon Nancarrow, Howlin' Wolf -- all of whom had far more impact on my concept of poetry than any on-the-page poets. The international poetic worlds that matter to me tend to be, at least on the surface, impossibly varied: Prynne & the Cambridge school, jwcurry's Canadian concrete poetry & environs (for a good time write to: ROOM 302 BOOKS, #302 Р880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa, Canada K1R 6R7), the still-active Surrealist Group led by the Rosemonts in Chicago (www.surrealistmovement-usa.org -- though any reader of this blog should already have this site bookmarked!). I am directly part of the movement initiated by Ben Watson, known as the Esemplasm, from a coinage by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see www.militantesthetix.co.uk for more info), &, on learning of the death of the great Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont, I co-initiated the New Zealand Surrealist Group in Wellington, for the continuing production & dissemination of freedom through desire.
My pursuit of knowledge with regard to poetic traditions has been a posteriori rather than imposed; having avoided creative writing & poetry classes like the plague, my poetic ideas & my tactile sense of what constitutes good poetry were formed outside the influence of poets-on-the-page almost entirely, with the possible exceptions of cummings, Pound & Joyce. This has proven, as we discussed in the store, a great boon to me, as I've been able to learn & decide for myself poetic traditions of my choice without feeling beholden to any particular pre-made path. Thus, I greatly admire Prynne's work, though I'm clearly out of place among his epigones; I savour the works of William Burroughs but care little for Jack Kerouac & the verbal diarrhoea school of Beat production; I devour anything of Surrealism & dada, anything revolutionary & modernist, & remain open to anything truly alive, but, while reading & learning as much as I can about as much as I can, I remain critical, exert the primacy of my own taste & subjectivity, & stand firmly against the anything goes, everything-is-relative ideology of post-modernism & its -ism ilk.
I can't say much about Melbourne poetry, since all I've experienced here so far was the Doris Leadbetter Melbourne Poetry Cup on Saturday, & that was drop dead dreadful. Then again, it's a rare performance poetry event that's any different, whether in New York, London, Brisbane or Wellington, so for now I won't judge the bubbly by the dregs. The only Australian poet I've read with pleasure so far is Nathan Shepherdson: I like his rubble-in-the-silence lyricism, it has some of the twisted alchemy & weighted space of Paul Celan or Malcolm de Chazal.
With that, I think I'll wrap up the rant -- what kind of desperate reader would possibly devote this much time & interest to an unknown seppo? I do recommend, though, for anyone who can appreciate the seemingly effortless work of John Wieners, his unerring ability to capture thought in motion & what his urban ballads have done to the poète maudit lyric, the British poet Sean Bonney is an excellent extension & distillation of this impulse into the 21st century. From his typographic 'translations' of Baudelaire to his orgone-popping poetry readings, Bonney takes all the sharpest edges & gooiest innards of Bob Cobbing, Tom Raworth & Barry MacSweeney & agglutinates them into a pulsing anti-capitalist subjectivity shorn of sentiment. Sean Bonney gets my vote for the best performing poet alive today (though perhaps if J.H. Prynne let out a few more recordings, he might indeed put up some competition...)
Thanks a million, Kris!
Keep up the good word work.
K H : OK, You Tube's been spared! When I mentioned it yesterday to
Alan Pose, who'd come in to the Shop as we were talking the other day, he suggested I'd got that wrong...! Of course, 'getting it wrong' is how I suspect my radical colleagues characterise me, and for many years now. Keeping the conversation going, though, is what I've set out to do, probably
since I edited my mag Earth Ship in Southampton, 1970-72, and all its Australian incarnations til 1985 when I stopped --my hands had fallen off! Remember, roneo stencils and manual typewriters?! I'm usually square peg in round hole of whatever conversation I find myself in. The English poets I was friends with in the UK at that time included Colin & Frances Symes, John Hall, John Riley & Tim Longville, Allen Fisher, Paul Buck, John Robinson, Jacqui Benson, Lee Harwood, Frank Prince, Andrew Crozier, John Freeman, Jeremy Hilton, Martin Wright, David Chaloner,Gael Turnbull,George Dowden, Nathanial Tarn, David Tipton et al...and by correspondence Peter Riley, Douglas Oliver, Peter Finch,Veronica Forrest-Thomson & many, many more. All over the shot! Deliberately. Driven by curiosity I suppose and incredibly contradictory literary fancies. And so it has been all the way. Nowadays I'm picking up all the loose ends --in fact they're all loose ends! And I must be the "happy man" I once wrote to ask Peter Riley about ... I'm not sure Peter quite understood the nature of my enquiry ('happiness' to mean ease with the human life that has death all about it and inevitably at the end of it whenever that happens! Is there a way to be, a way out of mortal fear etc? --could have been that kind of 20 year old's question)! Peter said I should ask John Zorn**, "he seems to be a happy man!" Hmm. I dont know Sean Bonney. I must investigate; though "anti-capitalist subjectivity shorn of sentiment" has me staggering in search of a stiff drink! Mention of Barry MacSweeney recalls the sadness of his recent death --I've always enjoyed some of his poetry (tho' it's also true that I didnt understand what either he or Elaine Randell were writing in 1972 when I wrote to them --I rejected their submissions, and ditto, in another direction, Penelope Shuttle --of course I know better now!) --I maintain an as yet unfulfilled pledge to read him in toto, for myself. As for 'sentiment' --the word's probably closer to me than it is to you and your circle! As Kerouac is --you'll detect from the Dharma Bum(s) correspondence with my brother Bernard on the blog... On which note, I'll close and with much pleasure and many thanks for your sparkling, brilliant response!
Kris
[August 18/19, 2009]
--------------------------
[**CORRECTION! Just now discovered! In midst of conversation with Warren Burt & Alan Pose at ye olde shoppe this afternoon, Warren mentioned Jon Rose, and suddenly I realized my mistake. The "happy man" suggested to me by Peter Riley was not John Zorn (hardly out of high school, Alan had remarked at the time of my reminiscence) but Jon Rose. Most appropriate that it was another composer who invoked Jon Rose. Apologies in case I've misled any reader. --Kris Hemensley. September 8th, '09] ________________________________________________________________
KARL GALLAGHER
TWO POEMS
Dharma for Joan Sedorkin
Five years ago she came to the art class I ran
with five different groups over four years
Joan came to the first and stayed till the last
it was two years before she told me she’d read
‘On The Road’ in 1958 and with a girlfriend hitched
north from Sydney stopped at Cairns
met and married a Russian fisherman
made a home raised a family buried a husband.
Then aged seventy-eight she left Cairns
with two suitcases to get away
from demands of family ‘to find her self’
moved into a rooming-house in Brisbane
started to paint and write haiku.
We had both lived a life knee-capped
by low self-esteem non existent self confidence
but over the years I’d learned how
to change that handicap learned how to dismantle
its power
bit by bit I showed her how to do it.
Later I found out she was blind
in one eye sight failing in the other
no wonder she couldn’t draw details
then an Indian doctor and laser surgery
restored the sight in her good eye
enter a king-tide of colour like a sudden burst
of wild parrots among a crush of blossoms.
I watched her discover a sense of her Self
And become a terrific painter
she drew with an intoxicating fragile line
self-confident
admiring of her own work
no longer putting it down.
Her death a few months ago affected me
more than I would have thought.
Dharma Bums was her favourite Kerouac book
for her I later wrote of the silent encounter
I’d had with Gary Snyder
her favourite poet
in a bar in Melbourne
in the later years of my alcoholism.
oOo
Going Home to Ballachulish
Someone passed him a joint
'No thanks, not something I do much these days.
I can't handle it anymore, it takes me apart
and any sense of what's left of my identity.'
said to Stanley who may or may not have been
the one passing the joint.
'It gets me like a death-adder fanging into me
feel like I'm walking around sort of queer
legs rubbery dragging a serpent attached to my ankle
and I have to keep on functioning in company
as if nothing is out of the ordinary.'
'Oh is that so' he heard Stanley say
looking at him with those bug eyes
his lips moving speaking who knew what
as nothing filled the air.
Then he felt himself going under
looking over at Guido their eyes connected
as Guido's face began to fade
felt himself going down - as if tied to weights
a thickness closed over him
cutting off what moments ago he could see
in the dusk and soft night and last light of the day
taking him back to his childhood in Scotland
its long summer twilight bird calls
smell of coal smoke the scent of pine
he knew then that he was dying.
[2000]
________________________________________________________________
JENNI MITCHELL
Geoffrey Eggleston,
Memorial, Sunday 21 December 2008
This is a personal tribute of my friendship with Geoffrey.
Geoffrey Eggleston was an enigma who not only touched many people’s lives but influenced them deeply. On reflecting upon Geoffrey I realised he had been in my life for over thirty years in varying degrees. I first him when Siri Omberg was renting my old cottage in Fordhams road, a stone's throw down the hill from Montsalvat. At the time I was working with computers in the city and spending weekends in Eltham prior to travelling overseas. Geoffrey would turn up any time of the day or night. When I returned from my year overseas I stayed in Eltham and renovated my father’s shed on the same property and Siri stayed in the house. Later, when Siri left and I moved back into my cottage, Geoffrey continued to visit stating ‘he came with the house’. And so he did for the next thirty odd years – even when we pulled down the old cottage and built a mud brick house on the site. He was extraordinary - not in the ‘extra ordinary’ sense but in being connected to a multi dimensional world. I would sense his imminent arrival by an image of a serpent in my mind – and sooner or later he would appear; via my mother’s garden facing the main road which he would say was a short cut to Montsalvat from the station or a lift he had hitched from the city. I failed to understand how our hill was shorter.
Geoffrey was the greatest of net workers; a walking hub and repository for artists, musicians, poets, performers and 'want ta bees’ He connected people and brought artists and writers to the dinner table. He created circles of like minded people and loved nothing more than to be amidst a group of his creative friends eating, drinking and smoking his small pipe. His talents and interests were many and included his work as a poet, musician, painter, printmaker and philosopher. I spent many days with Geoffrey painting around Christmas Hills and for a short time we shared a studio near Greensborough at Green Hills.
As I was saying earlier – Geoffrey not only touched lives but influenced them too. I don’t know how my life would be shaped if it were not for knowing Geoffrey. It was Geoffrey who first introduced me to poetry all those years ago when he began running the Montsalvat poetry festival. My cottage down the hill was perfect for Geoffrey to billet poets out from interstate. I didn’t have to have much say at the time – he would ‘send’ me poets to house for the weekend (or week) and bring a box of food to turn into soup. We would have a stream of poets walking down the hill from Montsalvat, through the cemetery fence and up the gravel road to my cottage. Poets would sleep on the floors around the cottage and even in the bathroom! Every festival was Geoffrey’s party.
That was in the early 1980s. The portrait under glass of Geoffrey was the beginning of my series of poets’ portraits. Today there are 118 paintings of more than 100 poets and the collection continues to grow. Along with my landscape and ice paintings and photographs the poets' portraits have become one of my life projects. The second portrait of Geoffrey was painted after he had commented that Nigel Roberts' and Terry Gillmore’s portraits being on canvas and larger than his... and my final portrait of Geoffrey was painted recently during his illness.
In 1982 Alec Hope was invited to the Montsalvat Poetry Festival as Feature Poet – and I was asked to put him up for a few days. Alec by now was an old man and had had enough of festivals and didn’t feel up to ‘hanging’ around Montsalvat for what was then a three day event. Not knowing what to do with him I asked him to sit for a portrait in my studio and began what became three portraits and an important life friendship. Alec subsequently introduced me to the poets in Canberra including Judith Wright, Mark O’Connor, Rosemary Dobson and Alan Gould; all of whom sat for a portrait. Through this project I came to know and make friendships with many famous and less known poets and each year Montsalvat was the perfect event to invite an interstate poet to spend a day or two in my studio sitting for a portrait. Among those who came to sit in my studio were Gwen Harwood and Tim Thorne from Tasmania, Rebecca Edwards from Queensland and Fay Zwicky from Western Australia and Les Murray, Chris Mansell and Cornelis Vleeskens from New South Wales. As the series grew began to travel interstate to paint the poets who did not make it to Montsalvat. I am grateful to Geoffrey for the introduction to poetry and some of the best minds our country has produced.
That was the thing about Geoffrey – his web spread across Australia with threads linking every state and he was proud of the fact he could travel between Melbourne and Sydney, Brisbane or Adelaide and get a bed for the night at someone’s place. He even managed to bring Gary Snyder from the United States to a Montsalvat Poetry festival one year and we had Gary and entourage planting trees in Wingrove Park.
Geoffrey spent many Christmas dinners with us – he admired my mother Grace’s organic garden and wonderful cooking. Sometimes we would have an array of poets still here as an overflow from the festival. Geoffrey was at home wherever he went.
Geoffrey was a passionate, compulsive, obsessive person who felt deeply and was terrier like in his pursuit of projects. He did so much with so little. If not for his at times infuriating demanding and aggressive manner any events and festivals may not have happened. He did not take no lightly for an answer. In fact the word NO was a red rag to this bull who would then pursue whatever it was with words and letters and banter until he got his own way. We can only wonder what he could have achieved if he had had the grants and assistance he so wanted and was denied so often.
Geoffrey was particularly proud of his two children Ninianne and Nathanial; they were quite young when he first brought them to visit. I haven’t seen much of them these past years but would hear about the wonderful things they were doing and the creative careers they are perusing. Three weeks ago when Nathanial came to let us know that Geoffrey had died he stayed for dinner and I could not help but notice how much he has become his father's son – his passionate talk of organising festivals of musicians and the use of the internet to achieve his networking. Geoffrey lives on through Nathaniel.
Bringing people together was his passion and I thank him for being Geoffrey and an influence in part of my world.
[Eltham]
__________________________________________________________________
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
MICHAEL TENCER, currently residing & studying in Melbourne. Other bio in his comments on Prynne & et cetera above.
KARL GALLAGHER, has poems & correspondence in previous issues of The Merri Creek : Poems & Pieces. See #11; & Addendum to The Divine Issue.
JENNI MITCHELL, artist up Eltham way. Edited with Cornelis Vleeskens the poetry mag, Fling, in the '80s. Other bio contained in her eulogy for Geoff Eggleston, above and on www.jennimitchell.com.au
__________________________________________________________________
[-- Phew! All done this Sunday, 30th August, 2009, at the desk in the little Westgarth weatherboard, which Jeff Nuttall called a 'cottage' back in the early 80s when he visited though I didnt know then that it was!--
Kris Hemensley]
MAINLINE TO THE HEART AND OTHER POEMS by Clive Matson, published by Regent Press (Berkeley, California), 2009
1.
Before the reader can get to Clive Matson's poems, Mainline to the Heart (which first saw light of day in 1966 & is republished now by Regent Press, Berkeley, with as many more poems of the period as the original collection contained), there are several bridges (hurdles?) to be crossed.
Firstly, Erin Matson's cover drawing (--and she's the lover named in the poems, e.g. in Talk About Love, "she rings my neck using / fingers she oints with
arsenic"; stereotypical femme fatale/object of desire) which departs from the Indianised, Beardsley figures within the book to a cartoon of male devil, assisted by female angel, impaling the hapless, falling man with bayonet-like needle. So the stage is set, the drama proclaimed. Secondly, the five pages of praises for the book from such supporters of his work as Al Young, Jack Foley, Steve Kowit, whose testimonials comprise a psychological & cultural as well as literary purview. And thirdly, the late John Wieners' original introduction.
2.
Diane di Prima & Alan Marlowe published Mainline to the Heart in '66 with their Poets Press in the Bowery. Di Prima recalls in her afterward, A Few Words (written in 2004) that it was the 6th book they'd produced --previous publications included her own Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin, a bilingual edition of a poem by Jean Genet, & Herbert Huncke's Journal. "It was an enchanted time," she says.
History doesnt always oblige one that way, but poetry scene, printing press & happy family just before Vietnam really cranked up, & a full twenty years before Gay Sunshine became the nightmare of AIDS; that period when heroin was cool enough to know its casualties as martyrs to mission & muse, & before the addiction & ODs became commonplace as the carnage on the roads; I guess it might well qualify as enchantment!
The poet whom Clive Matson was in the Sixties cant help himself : "I love drugs : / cocaine and heroin today for speed and warmth, / grass for spice." Why not? Spirituality can be just as amenable, & sex (--sex, junk, God : three-headed version of one Beat deity) --no fuss, & no mess until much later...
3.
In terms of reclamation, then, Mainline to the Heart presents Clive Matson in full flight, as Sixties as they come, that is to say sex to jazz's backbeat, guys & gals, drugs, the Beat merging with the Hippy thing. It contains or assumes the bits of attitude which'd one day declare as Punk --if the love/hate ambivalence defines something of it, not to mention the explicit sexual narrative of one poem & the peppering of its detail elsewhere. No doubt the era's Liberation spiel, before & after Ginsberg, informed him, as it did everyone, though reading him out of context his text also resounds the male chauvenism the squares would always have judged it to be. And not because of the sexual subject-matter but the gluttonous objectification of the body & the act. But if sex --sexual love one should say --is merely "one more war" (& I'm quoting Tim Hemensley's refrain, exorcised as one of the Powder Monkeys songs in the '90s), even male chauvenism is beside the point --and Matson's lovers more like warriors. Probably, also, as John Wieners explains, drugs, & heroin in particular, has everything to do with it : "One wonders about the nature of love in these poems. Are they vicious or not? Has the author sacrificed anything or everything to arrive at the toughness he celebrates. It seems he has. It is not angelhood any longer. It is not nature, springing up in the woods at twilight. It is heroin and the blood he draws. It is not peace."
Wieners' introduction cues in his own gift --and one doesnt require the younger man's gaucherie for the elder to shine. Reminds one too of the remorseless passing of time. Isnt Wieners one of the new poets (as of Donald Allen's "new")?! New, young. . . as he was, of course, in 1966, in his early 30s, seven years older than Clive Matson. The New in these recent decades hardly settles before other species arise. 'Forever young' indeed...
Wieners' An Introduction to Clive Matson's Poems sitting with Diane di Prima in the twilight on a country road, diverts me to his own books... Rereading him I'm even moved to prefer him, of the poets in the eddies of Pound & William Carlos Williams, to both Olson & Creeley, his great friends, mentors, companions. Prefer him this minute, that is, given that he's a poet of the minute, a poet of presence par excellence. Certainly one might now differentiate his originality from theirs. No matter the angle or, later, the circumlocution, Wieners invariably turns towards the world (& the worldly) and is actually the opposite of Olson, the sum of whose voluminous parts suggests a mind continually courting the abstraction one assumed he opposed. J H Prynne once offered that Olson's poetry pursued the 'condition of the whole'; if it does it seems too often in flight from that palpable world celebrated by his erstwhile student. Wieners' elicitation from turn of phrase of something like a revelation is also, ultimately, not Creeley's way, as though the latter's nuancing of squint & quip guaranteed the wisdom of the everyday... Not for a moment would I avoid Olson & Creeley, but now Wieners is restored!
4.
The introductions for di Prima's series "were meant to introduce a new poet by someone from his own lineage -- to 'locate' him or her for the reader." The Wieners of this role is strung between The Hotel Wentley Poems & Pressed Wafer, his 4th & 5th collections. By then he's made it sufficiently to perform at Spoleto with Olson & meet Ezra Pound ("I felt I was in the presence of a Chinese mandarin."). Up the (Black) mountain but never left the (Beat) street. Where's an even younger poet in that? 'Post' & 'neo' this & that (--recall Pete Spence's small Melbourne press of the mid-80s, hilariously tagged Post Neo, implying every year of the Late Age's style but another inflection of belatedness) --so, Matson's neo- or post-Beat epistles & communiques... A natural reporter, and the cliches (represented in the book's testimonials) are true : raw, naked, honest etc.
Matson implies a certain reserve about republication. "Many of the poet's friends, especially Gail Ford, offered patient understanding while the poet struggled to accept the value of the persona expressed in these poems." A reluctant second coming? What's at stake in this reclamation (to republish one's first book)? Try to imagine myself here : I couldnt, wouldnt publish mine --lacking the commitment to my first collection though sometimes imagining a current selection of early poems, the forty, fifty years old young-writing. Perhaps it's the ageless character of such poems, that is, that they are young forever; lyrics that they are, song & dance of the diary of those nights & days --available still, elixir of youth for youth-prolonging seniors! On the other hand, very little of my early 20s poetry is as fulfilled as Matson's confessions. Where he trusts his own experience & language, & pushes right on through his confidence, I would allow fancy & style (aka other poets' voices) to waylay me.
First I heard of Clive Matson since the late '60s/'70s was in a poem in Nigel Roberts' collection Steps for Astaire (Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983), which good-naturedly satirised American culture. "Clive Matson's Poetry Workshop shares verse / of all kinds with appreciation & insight / providing the feedback you want, whether it be / tough criticism or careful encouragement.." I'm not sure that Roberts was gunning for the poet so much as the stereotypical creative-writing tutor, worthy therefore of the general contempt our Sydney troubadour leveled at all "shortcuts to enlightenment" (to quote one of the "New Age Listings" in Steps...), all & any duping of the muse... I recall wondering at the time how Matson regarded his own journey --from dope- & sex-fiend to creative writing tutor, desperado to counselor...
5.
Recapitulate then : Reading Matson I'm hearing & remembering the Sixties. I sympathize, identify with aspects of his testimony even as I squirm! Alive in that Peace & Love time it's obvious, as Wieners cant fail to state, that Clive Matson doesnt sing its song. In a way he's old fashioned --e.g., "jealousy is a function of love and / so is possessiveness" --but laying it out there so graphically is Sixties too. "Why does fucking mean so much?" he asks --no pose; plain prose of that cocksman tradition, Miller to Cassady spiced by Sixties' promiscuity, gay laced. And it's there that a bluer quality occurs, a quality of pain to off-set the young male & often het boasting. With heroin in the mix one can say that in Matson's poems, love is subsumed within the longueurs of mutual dependence : "I'm addicted to heroin and want a habit / so bad it'll break the deathgrip / of love's terminal habit..." (Talk About Love.) Forget about 'sedative' in the light of that...
Attempting longer poems, the young Matson continues howling long after the authentic poem's done --lyric dissipates into un-poem/note-to-self. That's my serious formal gripe. However, shorter poems and those others' better halves contain the riffs & insights this genre's meant to deliver.
The first poem in the book, Teardrop In My Eye, is addressed to Herbert Huncke who, as any Beat & Counter-Culture freak knows, needs no introduction. "Fuck you, Huncke" it begins, dead giveaway for love's infernal minstrelsy --same particulars as Wieners' life & line had marked earlier ("Knowing no other god than this: / the man who places on your mouth / a kiss. Keep no mystery / but his who whispers memory...", For Huncke). Matson reaches through Huncke to all the company of that anti-bourgeois syncopation... "Fuck you, Huncke. / Leave me / hung up for junk, waiting // alone in a dark room candles / you lit burn down in. / They unwind curls of smoke / like incense I remember we offered / weeks ago. / It is Nostalgia. // I treat you mean / and I get what's coming / down on lonely Street. / I walk amid cold winds, / leaves / rustle / while I blow. / No one to hold my hand."
I think that's the kind of 'talent' Corso had in mind praising Kerouac while keeping the 'divine' for Shelley!
6.
John Wieners introduction to Matson's poems seems to want to distinguish between transcendence & realism, & worries for both poet & poem to this conclusion : "Form is not of the question here. // Jazz, and its mainline to the heart. // Is it worth it, when the furry head is lost beside on the pillow? // When deaths congregate and nothing else. // Death is part of nature sure and something else in the spring. / Spirit. And yellow flowers on the mountainside. Opium? yes."
My Love Returned begins beautifully (& another echo of Wieners) : "The Moon rises / ass heavy: on the wane. / Wish it was full." Then the poem begins to swing : "I dream & / a huge bat wing arcs over skeleton buildings / and dips to touch ruby pinprick traffic lights / on the street's horizon in mute salute, // when I take in another block / the black wing blacks out the lights / and I know it is the Vampire, / my love returned / in the city calling me to bed / with faint irresistible siren / over the cool line of telepathic desire / or echoing 'could be' to my need..."
The poem's conjuring of vampire imagery is perfect patch for junky lyricist's emotional & conceptual chaos. "How the seasons change / and my veins hold new blood for her to suck now, / new blood I can bleed // over the white untried bed / and my teeth are white and sharp to eat with. / Now I brim over with come to shoot in her. / I flap my jaw / and smile goofy at strangers / in the fullness of it." Yes, I wince at the scatological & Burroughsian excess, so bare as it is in a poem, yet it's clear that the lyric shapes it, in a sense saves the soul within the poem, saves the soul of the poet too.
(July 27/August 30, 2009)
[Regent Press, 2747 Regent Street, Berkeley, Cal. 94705]
www.regentpress.net
________________________________________________________________
KRIS HEMENSLEY & MICHAEL TENCER
WIENERS & CO
Kris Hemensley : It felt like synchronicity when you plonked the John Wieners poems down on the Collected Works counter the other day. My head has been jumping with Wieners this last little while on account of a review I'm writing of the re-publication of '60s poet Clive Matson's Mainline to the Heart, which includes Wieners' original introduction... that is to say, reading the introduction had me return to his books on my own shelf and to relish his cadence, whatever his themes, all over again... And you have me intrigued with your reference to Jeremy Prynne to whom you referred as giving a great reading of Wieners' poem, Cocaine, on You Tube. Tell me more! What is your connection to or interest in Wieners, Prynne, English poetry, poetry in Melbourne?
Michael Tencer : Right! I'd better clear up the howler first, before your readers go searching for Prynne videos...
J.H. Prynne read John Wieners' poem 'Cocaine' in a short (1 minute 40 second) sound recording in 2004. The poem itself was originally in the book Ace of Pentacles, published by James F. Carr & Robert A. Wilson in 1964, & currently is collected in Wieners' Selected Poems 1958-1984, published by Black Sparrow Press. Prynne's recording appears on the CD-R 'Low Bleb Score', the third of four poetry-related CD-R's produced by Quid magazine, compiled, edited & distributed by Keston Sutherland & Andrea Brady through their brilliant Barque Press (www.barquepress.com). Prynne's recording is also available for free on Andrea Brady's website www.archiveofthenow.org .
For those readers unfamiliar with Prynne, & hence wondering what all the fuss is about over a short sound recording, let me briefly sum up the situation by saying that Prynne has been the most influential, intelligently experimental & reclusive British poet, bar none, for the past 40-plus years. In that time, he has done ONE public interview for radio (which has all but vanished), & has allowed his picture to be printed on perhaps three or four occasions. The fact that he was throughout that time College Lecturer & Director of Studies in English at Cambridge's Gonville & Caius College, as well as the College Librarian at Cambridge's Cockerell Library (as well as at the previous library, & during the Cockerell construction), made his reclusiveness all the more notable. His early studies with American poets during his travels included friendships with Charles Olson & Ed Dorn (Prynne's contribution to Dorn's 1976 Bean News, as 'Erasmus W. Darwin', is a particularly wild read -- the full issue of Bean News has been reprinted & is included as a supplement to Vol 15 Number 3 of Sagetrieb (Winter 1996)); & his generosity with his time & criticism for students & other poets, most clearly exhibited in his critical essays & copious letters, is legendary. All of this is quite beside the point that the actual poetry, now widely available in-near-toto in the Bloodaxe Press Poems book, has set the new standard for English poets of high modernism.
My association with Prynne is slight, though treasured. I first learned of his work through the Zappologist critic & poet Ben Watson (aka Out to Lunch), who attended Prynne's lectures at Cambridge & maintained contact with him, mentor-to-student-like, ever since. Through Ben I also met Keston Sutherland, editor/publisher/poet of Barque Press & the editor of Prynne's forthcoming & much-anticipated Complete Critical Prose. With Prynne I have had e-mail & postal contact, securing permission to publish his letter/critique of our shared friend Stuart Calton's poetry in the perennially-forthcoming Gruntwork magazine (Gruntwork or Dogfood, as the first issue shall catchily be called, is to be edited & published by Ben Watson & me). Quite generously, Prynne has sent along several books gratis, including his extraordinary full-length studies of a single Shakespeare sonnet (They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94), & Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper' (Field Notes: 'The Solitary Reaper' and others); & an extended telephone conversation with Prynne, touching on poetically peripheral points -- linguistics, other languages, word-processing & libraries -- proved inordinately delightful.
Aside from Prynne's aforementioned John Wieners reading, it's worth noting that Prynne seems to have become more comfortable with public appearances in recent years. He has, in his capacities as Visiting Foreign Expert & Guest Professor in the People's Republic of China, even gone so far as to read his own poetry on camera (available on the DVD River Pearls, from Barque Press); & his recent lectures & readings in England & the States have, I understand from word of mouth, been warmly received.
Unfortunately, word of mouth is all I can tell you as an American living in Melbourne, having been perplexingly refused entry to England on two separate occasions! Should it prove feasible in the next several years, my fiancée & I hope to travel there & gain some firsthand experience of the British poetic universe beyond the e-mails & postal dispatches, but until then I remain regrettably peripheral & decidedly blog-gossipy round that particular hub.
For those who wish to know, there's an excellent, albeit incomplete, bibliography of Prynne online at
www.ndorward.com/poetry/articles_etc/prynne_checklist.htm , compiled by Nate Dorward. It misses out on the reprint of The Oval Window, designed by Ian Friend & published in Brisbane, Australia, as well as some more obscure older texts & some not-so-obscure recent texts, but it remains the touchstone of Prynniana at the present.
Regarding my own poetry & associations, very little of what I do could be recognisably linked to Prynne's work, or to any of the American poets, John Wieners included. My work comes from primarily musical influences -- Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Edgard Var̬se, Anton Webern, Conlon Nancarrow, Howlin' Wolf -- all of whom had far more impact on my concept of poetry than any on-the-page poets. The international poetic worlds that matter to me tend to be, at least on the surface, impossibly varied: Prynne & the Cambridge school, jwcurry's Canadian concrete poetry & environs (for a good time write to: ROOM 302 BOOKS, #302 Р880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa, Canada K1R 6R7), the still-active Surrealist Group led by the Rosemonts in Chicago (www.surrealistmovement-usa.org -- though any reader of this blog should already have this site bookmarked!). I am directly part of the movement initiated by Ben Watson, known as the Esemplasm, from a coinage by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see www.militantesthetix.co.uk for more info), &, on learning of the death of the great Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont, I co-initiated the New Zealand Surrealist Group in Wellington, for the continuing production & dissemination of freedom through desire.
My pursuit of knowledge with regard to poetic traditions has been a posteriori rather than imposed; having avoided creative writing & poetry classes like the plague, my poetic ideas & my tactile sense of what constitutes good poetry were formed outside the influence of poets-on-the-page almost entirely, with the possible exceptions of cummings, Pound & Joyce. This has proven, as we discussed in the store, a great boon to me, as I've been able to learn & decide for myself poetic traditions of my choice without feeling beholden to any particular pre-made path. Thus, I greatly admire Prynne's work, though I'm clearly out of place among his epigones; I savour the works of William Burroughs but care little for Jack Kerouac & the verbal diarrhoea school of Beat production; I devour anything of Surrealism & dada, anything revolutionary & modernist, & remain open to anything truly alive, but, while reading & learning as much as I can about as much as I can, I remain critical, exert the primacy of my own taste & subjectivity, & stand firmly against the anything goes, everything-is-relative ideology of post-modernism & its -ism ilk.
I can't say much about Melbourne poetry, since all I've experienced here so far was the Doris Leadbetter Melbourne Poetry Cup on Saturday, & that was drop dead dreadful. Then again, it's a rare performance poetry event that's any different, whether in New York, London, Brisbane or Wellington, so for now I won't judge the bubbly by the dregs. The only Australian poet I've read with pleasure so far is Nathan Shepherdson: I like his rubble-in-the-silence lyricism, it has some of the twisted alchemy & weighted space of Paul Celan or Malcolm de Chazal.
With that, I think I'll wrap up the rant -- what kind of desperate reader would possibly devote this much time & interest to an unknown seppo? I do recommend, though, for anyone who can appreciate the seemingly effortless work of John Wieners, his unerring ability to capture thought in motion & what his urban ballads have done to the poète maudit lyric, the British poet Sean Bonney is an excellent extension & distillation of this impulse into the 21st century. From his typographic 'translations' of Baudelaire to his orgone-popping poetry readings, Bonney takes all the sharpest edges & gooiest innards of Bob Cobbing, Tom Raworth & Barry MacSweeney & agglutinates them into a pulsing anti-capitalist subjectivity shorn of sentiment. Sean Bonney gets my vote for the best performing poet alive today (though perhaps if J.H. Prynne let out a few more recordings, he might indeed put up some competition...)
Thanks a million, Kris!
Keep up the good word work.
K H : OK, You Tube's been spared! When I mentioned it yesterday to
Alan Pose, who'd come in to the Shop as we were talking the other day, he suggested I'd got that wrong...! Of course, 'getting it wrong' is how I suspect my radical colleagues characterise me, and for many years now. Keeping the conversation going, though, is what I've set out to do, probably
since I edited my mag Earth Ship in Southampton, 1970-72, and all its Australian incarnations til 1985 when I stopped --my hands had fallen off! Remember, roneo stencils and manual typewriters?! I'm usually square peg in round hole of whatever conversation I find myself in. The English poets I was friends with in the UK at that time included Colin & Frances Symes, John Hall, John Riley & Tim Longville, Allen Fisher, Paul Buck, John Robinson, Jacqui Benson, Lee Harwood, Frank Prince, Andrew Crozier, John Freeman, Jeremy Hilton, Martin Wright, David Chaloner,Gael Turnbull,George Dowden, Nathanial Tarn, David Tipton et al...and by correspondence Peter Riley, Douglas Oliver, Peter Finch,Veronica Forrest-Thomson & many, many more. All over the shot! Deliberately. Driven by curiosity I suppose and incredibly contradictory literary fancies. And so it has been all the way. Nowadays I'm picking up all the loose ends --in fact they're all loose ends! And I must be the "happy man" I once wrote to ask Peter Riley about ... I'm not sure Peter quite understood the nature of my enquiry ('happiness' to mean ease with the human life that has death all about it and inevitably at the end of it whenever that happens! Is there a way to be, a way out of mortal fear etc? --could have been that kind of 20 year old's question)! Peter said I should ask John Zorn**, "he seems to be a happy man!" Hmm. I dont know Sean Bonney. I must investigate; though "anti-capitalist subjectivity shorn of sentiment" has me staggering in search of a stiff drink! Mention of Barry MacSweeney recalls the sadness of his recent death --I've always enjoyed some of his poetry (tho' it's also true that I didnt understand what either he or Elaine Randell were writing in 1972 when I wrote to them --I rejected their submissions, and ditto, in another direction, Penelope Shuttle --of course I know better now!) --I maintain an as yet unfulfilled pledge to read him in toto, for myself. As for 'sentiment' --the word's probably closer to me than it is to you and your circle! As Kerouac is --you'll detect from the Dharma Bum(s) correspondence with my brother Bernard on the blog... On which note, I'll close and with much pleasure and many thanks for your sparkling, brilliant response!
Kris
[August 18/19, 2009]
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[**CORRECTION! Just now discovered! In midst of conversation with Warren Burt & Alan Pose at ye olde shoppe this afternoon, Warren mentioned Jon Rose, and suddenly I realized my mistake. The "happy man" suggested to me by Peter Riley was not John Zorn (hardly out of high school, Alan had remarked at the time of my reminiscence) but Jon Rose. Most appropriate that it was another composer who invoked Jon Rose. Apologies in case I've misled any reader. --Kris Hemensley. September 8th, '09] ________________________________________________________________
KARL GALLAGHER
TWO POEMS
Dharma for Joan Sedorkin
Five years ago she came to the art class I ran
with five different groups over four years
Joan came to the first and stayed till the last
it was two years before she told me she’d read
‘On The Road’ in 1958 and with a girlfriend hitched
north from Sydney stopped at Cairns
met and married a Russian fisherman
made a home raised a family buried a husband.
Then aged seventy-eight she left Cairns
with two suitcases to get away
from demands of family ‘to find her self’
moved into a rooming-house in Brisbane
started to paint and write haiku.
We had both lived a life knee-capped
by low self-esteem non existent self confidence
but over the years I’d learned how
to change that handicap learned how to dismantle
its power
bit by bit I showed her how to do it.
Later I found out she was blind
in one eye sight failing in the other
no wonder she couldn’t draw details
then an Indian doctor and laser surgery
restored the sight in her good eye
enter a king-tide of colour like a sudden burst
of wild parrots among a crush of blossoms.
I watched her discover a sense of her Self
And become a terrific painter
she drew with an intoxicating fragile line
self-confident
admiring of her own work
no longer putting it down.
Her death a few months ago affected me
more than I would have thought.
Dharma Bums was her favourite Kerouac book
for her I later wrote of the silent encounter
I’d had with Gary Snyder
her favourite poet
in a bar in Melbourne
in the later years of my alcoholism.
oOo
Going Home to Ballachulish
Someone passed him a joint
'No thanks, not something I do much these days.
I can't handle it anymore, it takes me apart
and any sense of what's left of my identity.'
said to Stanley who may or may not have been
the one passing the joint.
'It gets me like a death-adder fanging into me
feel like I'm walking around sort of queer
legs rubbery dragging a serpent attached to my ankle
and I have to keep on functioning in company
as if nothing is out of the ordinary.'
'Oh is that so' he heard Stanley say
looking at him with those bug eyes
his lips moving speaking who knew what
as nothing filled the air.
Then he felt himself going under
looking over at Guido their eyes connected
as Guido's face began to fade
felt himself going down - as if tied to weights
a thickness closed over him
cutting off what moments ago he could see
in the dusk and soft night and last light of the day
taking him back to his childhood in Scotland
its long summer twilight bird calls
smell of coal smoke the scent of pine
he knew then that he was dying.
[2000]
________________________________________________________________
JENNI MITCHELL
Memorial, Sunday 21 December 2008
This is a personal tribute of my friendship with Geoffrey.
Geoffrey Eggleston was an enigma who not only touched many people’s lives but influenced them deeply. On reflecting upon Geoffrey I realised he had been in my life for over thirty years in varying degrees. I first him when Siri Omberg was renting my old cottage in Fordhams road, a stone's throw down the hill from Montsalvat. At the time I was working with computers in the city and spending weekends in Eltham prior to travelling overseas. Geoffrey would turn up any time of the day or night. When I returned from my year overseas I stayed in Eltham and renovated my father’s shed on the same property and Siri stayed in the house. Later, when Siri left and I moved back into my cottage, Geoffrey continued to visit stating ‘he came with the house’. And so he did for the next thirty odd years – even when we pulled down the old cottage and built a mud brick house on the site. He was extraordinary - not in the ‘extra ordinary’ sense but in being connected to a multi dimensional world. I would sense his imminent arrival by an image of a serpent in my mind – and sooner or later he would appear; via my mother’s garden facing the main road which he would say was a short cut to Montsalvat from the station or a lift he had hitched from the city. I failed to understand how our hill was shorter.
Geoffrey was the greatest of net workers; a walking hub and repository for artists, musicians, poets, performers and 'want ta bees’ He connected people and brought artists and writers to the dinner table. He created circles of like minded people and loved nothing more than to be amidst a group of his creative friends eating, drinking and smoking his small pipe. His talents and interests were many and included his work as a poet, musician, painter, printmaker and philosopher. I spent many days with Geoffrey painting around Christmas Hills and for a short time we shared a studio near Greensborough at Green Hills.
As I was saying earlier – Geoffrey not only touched lives but influenced them too. I don’t know how my life would be shaped if it were not for knowing Geoffrey. It was Geoffrey who first introduced me to poetry all those years ago when he began running the Montsalvat poetry festival. My cottage down the hill was perfect for Geoffrey to billet poets out from interstate. I didn’t have to have much say at the time – he would ‘send’ me poets to house for the weekend (or week) and bring a box of food to turn into soup. We would have a stream of poets walking down the hill from Montsalvat, through the cemetery fence and up the gravel road to my cottage. Poets would sleep on the floors around the cottage and even in the bathroom! Every festival was Geoffrey’s party.
That was in the early 1980s. The portrait under glass of Geoffrey was the beginning of my series of poets’ portraits. Today there are 118 paintings of more than 100 poets and the collection continues to grow. Along with my landscape and ice paintings and photographs the poets' portraits have become one of my life projects. The second portrait of Geoffrey was painted after he had commented that Nigel Roberts' and Terry Gillmore’s portraits being on canvas and larger than his... and my final portrait of Geoffrey was painted recently during his illness.
In 1982 Alec Hope was invited to the Montsalvat Poetry Festival as Feature Poet – and I was asked to put him up for a few days. Alec by now was an old man and had had enough of festivals and didn’t feel up to ‘hanging’ around Montsalvat for what was then a three day event. Not knowing what to do with him I asked him to sit for a portrait in my studio and began what became three portraits and an important life friendship. Alec subsequently introduced me to the poets in Canberra including Judith Wright, Mark O’Connor, Rosemary Dobson and Alan Gould; all of whom sat for a portrait. Through this project I came to know and make friendships with many famous and less known poets and each year Montsalvat was the perfect event to invite an interstate poet to spend a day or two in my studio sitting for a portrait. Among those who came to sit in my studio were Gwen Harwood and Tim Thorne from Tasmania, Rebecca Edwards from Queensland and Fay Zwicky from Western Australia and Les Murray, Chris Mansell and Cornelis Vleeskens from New South Wales. As the series grew began to travel interstate to paint the poets who did not make it to Montsalvat. I am grateful to Geoffrey for the introduction to poetry and some of the best minds our country has produced.
That was the thing about Geoffrey – his web spread across Australia with threads linking every state and he was proud of the fact he could travel between Melbourne and Sydney, Brisbane or Adelaide and get a bed for the night at someone’s place. He even managed to bring Gary Snyder from the United States to a Montsalvat Poetry festival one year and we had Gary and entourage planting trees in Wingrove Park.
Geoffrey spent many Christmas dinners with us – he admired my mother Grace’s organic garden and wonderful cooking. Sometimes we would have an array of poets still here as an overflow from the festival. Geoffrey was at home wherever he went.
Geoffrey was a passionate, compulsive, obsessive person who felt deeply and was terrier like in his pursuit of projects. He did so much with so little. If not for his at times infuriating demanding and aggressive manner any events and festivals may not have happened. He did not take no lightly for an answer. In fact the word NO was a red rag to this bull who would then pursue whatever it was with words and letters and banter until he got his own way. We can only wonder what he could have achieved if he had had the grants and assistance he so wanted and was denied so often.
Geoffrey was particularly proud of his two children Ninianne and Nathanial; they were quite young when he first brought them to visit. I haven’t seen much of them these past years but would hear about the wonderful things they were doing and the creative careers they are perusing. Three weeks ago when Nathanial came to let us know that Geoffrey had died he stayed for dinner and I could not help but notice how much he has become his father's son – his passionate talk of organising festivals of musicians and the use of the internet to achieve his networking. Geoffrey lives on through Nathaniel.
Bringing people together was his passion and I thank him for being Geoffrey and an influence in part of my world.
[Eltham]
__________________________________________________________________
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
MICHAEL TENCER, currently residing & studying in Melbourne. Other bio in his comments on Prynne & et cetera above.
KARL GALLAGHER, has poems & correspondence in previous issues of The Merri Creek : Poems & Pieces. See #11; & Addendum to The Divine Issue.
JENNI MITCHELL, artist up Eltham way. Edited with Cornelis Vleeskens the poetry mag, Fling, in the '80s. Other bio contained in her eulogy for Geoff Eggleston, above and on www.jennimitchell.com.au
__________________________________________________________________
[-- Phew! All done this Sunday, 30th August, 2009, at the desk in the little Westgarth weatherboard, which Jeff Nuttall called a 'cottage' back in the early 80s when he visited though I didnt know then that it was!--
Kris Hemensley]
Sunday, August 5, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 14
LAUNCH SPEECH for SALT-LICK QUARTERLY, volume 4; 13th March,2004 at Dante's Restaurant, Fitzroy, Melbourne.
I dedicate my comments this evening to the memory of Cid Corman. Paul Croucher, one of the founders of Salt-Lick, rang me this afternoon with the sad news that Corman died on 12th March, 6 a.m., Japanese time. For several weeks he's been in & out of coma.
"Death always
reminding
us - a breath
is a breath
The sound and
spirit of
a poet."
[Corman]
Corman was one of the great editors. When the best of his magazine,Origin, was published about 30 years ago as The Gist of Origin, everyone could see what a grand job it had done --providing a platform for the inheritors of the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tendency --chiefly Olson & Creeley, the Black Mountain poets --and their colleagues & successors --all the way down to [contemporary] San Francisco poets like George Evans & our own Clive Faust, who lives quietly in Bendigo...
Corman also published important translations, ancient & modern, from the European languages & Japanese, Chinese. Whilst he supported Olson & co., he stuck by his own tastes & values against their hectoring & egotism --a bit of both of which rubbed off on me!
These days, with my bookseller's hat on, I will say that Salt-Lick is the best purely poetry magazine in Australia. But what would I have said thirty years ago? A magazine which just published poems without a literary or linguistic [poetic] programme? Wasnt that what the "new poetry" & the "new poets" wanted to transcend? Didnt we think of that sort of thing as the merely literary, the journeyman mainstream? I remember --at least I think I do --arguing the point with Michael Dugan in 1969, but I wouldnt these days --not since the '90s! Forgive me Michael...!
A whole lot of water under the bridge since the '60s & '70s. (In 1968 Michael & I published magazines, Our Glass & Crosscurrents, on different sides of the city, and until Ken Taylor told me, ignorant of one another! This event was the beginning of the "mini-mag explosion" --the rest is history!)
What I've learnt, since the '60s, is the limitation of any ideology --or certainly, the limited tenure of any ideology. In my own case, as editor/publisher & poet, I realised that the pursuit of a poetical-aesthetical & literary-political line eventually ran me into a massive cul-de-sac. I needed, personally, to re-think & re-read. I was never happier than in the late '80s, critiquing my philosophical & literary position. I felt re-born in the '90s, and I'm still reaping the benefits.
As far as I was concerned [after that re-think], postmodernism (the catch-cry of the '70s & '80s) meant, at the very least, the re-admission of all the types of poetry which had been reduced or thought to be debased & therefore excluded in the time of the ascendancy of Modernism. This meant my experiments as a poet could now also include the traditional forms & privileges of poetry in addition to all of the gifts of the wonderful adventure of free-verse from Whitman & Rimbaud to the present.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose take on poetry & poetics is pluralist. Whatever is meant by that blurb I've read which describes Salt-Lick as "favouring Australian free-verse", it's clear Salt-Lick actually publishes poets of most tendencies writing today --it publishes poems which stand up as poems in themselves (in the very way Jenny Harrison discussed in her judge's report for the [Melbourne Poets' Union] National Poetry Prize earlier this year), poems which are self-sufficient whatever their formal or experimental entry-point.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose production values are those of the finely printed poetry-book. Poets & poems are treated to elegant design --readers are given the best chance to enjoy the work.
Salt-Lick is a magazine with a Melbourne address. It's our magazine! Melbourne poets or Melbourne-gravitating poets regularly get into it; poets of every type, including the no-type-at-all (who seem to me to be finding form for their spoken, spieling poems)!
Salt-Lick has an e-mail address & a website. Overseas poets, presumably correspondents of the magazine, also publish in Salt-Lick. This throws up another interesting discussion. When I was actively publishing & reviewing, between the late'60s & mid-'80s, I was described as an internationalist. But it's apparent that in the age of the World Wide Web, "international" either goes without saying or "local" includes the www potential wherever one happens to be. Perhaps international, in the sense of anti-parochial, trans-national, is almost beside the point nowadays?
Salt-Lick, then, is quite obviously a Melbourne-based magazine, featuring a great range of the elite, the up & coming and the quite new poets & poetry in Australia. It is local, but it is also in the world --it receives the world into its Melbourne & Australian hospitality.
This fourth issue has changed the colour of its cover, from different shades of grey to bright red, but not the colour of its generous project. The contents page reveals the proverbial embarrassment of riches : Douglas Barbour, Peter Rose, Adrienne Eberhard, Jane Gibian, Peter Boyle, Earl Livings...Lorin Ford again!...Myron Lysenko ("biggest storm / in a hundred years - / i sleep through it" ; "too much beer / i lie in bed / & almost see something") --ah, divine!
We have four contributors to this fourth issue to read today --John Mateer, Sandra Hill [now Fitts], Ross Donlon & Danny Huppatz.
We dont have with us either Margie Cronin or Rae Desmond Jones --amongst many others --who are interstate, overseas, otherwise engaged. I'd like to offer something of these. MTC Cronin's poem, "Inviting Rain, after Tu Fu, for Kris Hemensley", includes words of mine from an e-mail exchange between us : "The man said / he is wearing his dead son / like a cloak of air"... Notwithstanding that [the sad & awful reference as well as the kind acknowledgment to myself], it's an intriguingly complex poem from a prolific & ingenious poet... Rae Desmond Jones' poem has a wonderful colloquial purr, like its subject, Dean Martin. ['"i can stay for one song" he murmurs "then i gotta go." / he turns & crosses lackey street but the kids on their skateboards don't know him. / as he passes the dribbling fountain the drunk on the bench opens one eye & watches / him wander out among the cars whispering inaudible as angels in the darkness."] His contribution allows us to recall his place in the 1970s little-magazine culture, care of the inimitable Your Friendly Fascist [the magazine he edited in Sydney], but that's yet another story...
-------------------------------------------------
[This launching-speech was published in Ralph Wessman et al's Famous Reporter, #29 (June 2004). It caught a few typos, subsequently attended to with elegant correction slip.]
I dedicate my comments this evening to the memory of Cid Corman. Paul Croucher, one of the founders of Salt-Lick, rang me this afternoon with the sad news that Corman died on 12th March, 6 a.m., Japanese time. For several weeks he's been in & out of coma.
"Death always
reminding
us - a breath
is a breath
The sound and
spirit of
a poet."
[Corman]
Corman was one of the great editors. When the best of his magazine,Origin, was published about 30 years ago as The Gist of Origin, everyone could see what a grand job it had done --providing a platform for the inheritors of the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tendency --chiefly Olson & Creeley, the Black Mountain poets --and their colleagues & successors --all the way down to [contemporary] San Francisco poets like George Evans & our own Clive Faust, who lives quietly in Bendigo...
Corman also published important translations, ancient & modern, from the European languages & Japanese, Chinese. Whilst he supported Olson & co., he stuck by his own tastes & values against their hectoring & egotism --a bit of both of which rubbed off on me!
These days, with my bookseller's hat on, I will say that Salt-Lick is the best purely poetry magazine in Australia. But what would I have said thirty years ago? A magazine which just published poems without a literary or linguistic [poetic] programme? Wasnt that what the "new poetry" & the "new poets" wanted to transcend? Didnt we think of that sort of thing as the merely literary, the journeyman mainstream? I remember --at least I think I do --arguing the point with Michael Dugan in 1969, but I wouldnt these days --not since the '90s! Forgive me Michael...!
A whole lot of water under the bridge since the '60s & '70s. (In 1968 Michael & I published magazines, Our Glass & Crosscurrents, on different sides of the city, and until Ken Taylor told me, ignorant of one another! This event was the beginning of the "mini-mag explosion" --the rest is history!)
What I've learnt, since the '60s, is the limitation of any ideology --or certainly, the limited tenure of any ideology. In my own case, as editor/publisher & poet, I realised that the pursuit of a poetical-aesthetical & literary-political line eventually ran me into a massive cul-de-sac. I needed, personally, to re-think & re-read. I was never happier than in the late '80s, critiquing my philosophical & literary position. I felt re-born in the '90s, and I'm still reaping the benefits.
As far as I was concerned [after that re-think], postmodernism (the catch-cry of the '70s & '80s) meant, at the very least, the re-admission of all the types of poetry which had been reduced or thought to be debased & therefore excluded in the time of the ascendancy of Modernism. This meant my experiments as a poet could now also include the traditional forms & privileges of poetry in addition to all of the gifts of the wonderful adventure of free-verse from Whitman & Rimbaud to the present.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose take on poetry & poetics is pluralist. Whatever is meant by that blurb I've read which describes Salt-Lick as "favouring Australian free-verse", it's clear Salt-Lick actually publishes poets of most tendencies writing today --it publishes poems which stand up as poems in themselves (in the very way Jenny Harrison discussed in her judge's report for the [Melbourne Poets' Union] National Poetry Prize earlier this year), poems which are self-sufficient whatever their formal or experimental entry-point.
Salt-Lick is a magazine whose production values are those of the finely printed poetry-book. Poets & poems are treated to elegant design --readers are given the best chance to enjoy the work.
Salt-Lick is a magazine with a Melbourne address. It's our magazine! Melbourne poets or Melbourne-gravitating poets regularly get into it; poets of every type, including the no-type-at-all (who seem to me to be finding form for their spoken, spieling poems)!
Salt-Lick has an e-mail address & a website. Overseas poets, presumably correspondents of the magazine, also publish in Salt-Lick. This throws up another interesting discussion. When I was actively publishing & reviewing, between the late'60s & mid-'80s, I was described as an internationalist. But it's apparent that in the age of the World Wide Web, "international" either goes without saying or "local" includes the www potential wherever one happens to be. Perhaps international, in the sense of anti-parochial, trans-national, is almost beside the point nowadays?
Salt-Lick, then, is quite obviously a Melbourne-based magazine, featuring a great range of the elite, the up & coming and the quite new poets & poetry in Australia. It is local, but it is also in the world --it receives the world into its Melbourne & Australian hospitality.
This fourth issue has changed the colour of its cover, from different shades of grey to bright red, but not the colour of its generous project. The contents page reveals the proverbial embarrassment of riches : Douglas Barbour, Peter Rose, Adrienne Eberhard, Jane Gibian, Peter Boyle, Earl Livings...Lorin Ford again!...Myron Lysenko ("biggest storm / in a hundred years - / i sleep through it" ; "too much beer / i lie in bed / & almost see something") --ah, divine!
We have four contributors to this fourth issue to read today --John Mateer, Sandra Hill [now Fitts], Ross Donlon & Danny Huppatz.
We dont have with us either Margie Cronin or Rae Desmond Jones --amongst many others --who are interstate, overseas, otherwise engaged. I'd like to offer something of these. MTC Cronin's poem, "Inviting Rain, after Tu Fu, for Kris Hemensley", includes words of mine from an e-mail exchange between us : "The man said / he is wearing his dead son / like a cloak of air"... Notwithstanding that [the sad & awful reference as well as the kind acknowledgment to myself], it's an intriguingly complex poem from a prolific & ingenious poet... Rae Desmond Jones' poem has a wonderful colloquial purr, like its subject, Dean Martin. ['"i can stay for one song" he murmurs "then i gotta go." / he turns & crosses lackey street but the kids on their skateboards don't know him. / as he passes the dribbling fountain the drunk on the bench opens one eye & watches / him wander out among the cars whispering inaudible as angels in the darkness."] His contribution allows us to recall his place in the 1970s little-magazine culture, care of the inimitable Your Friendly Fascist [the magazine he edited in Sydney], but that's yet another story...
-------------------------------------------------
[This launching-speech was published in Ralph Wessman et al's Famous Reporter, #29 (June 2004). It caught a few typos, subsequently attended to with elegant correction slip.]
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