The Beach Report : 11/1/14, from the Elwood Beach kiosk
We're done, mid-morning, as the colour of the day (cloud-grey & white) begins to change. There's the feel of blue sky & sun --skin registers warmth, obviously, but i'm tempted to invoke the 'intelligence of the day' as though environment actually is innate. And even an hour after the dip there arent any other swimmers, only a temporarily capsized sailboard in the water.
*
Thank Heavens for Betty Ryan & the bottle of white wine she shared for our Henry's getting to Greece --her evocations, notwithstanding Henry's saying she wasnt a storyteller, in addition to the correspondence from "my friend Lawrence Durrell, who had practically made Corfu his home." I thank Henry for the Greek experience too, never having gone though many I've known did & do. But reading The Colossus of Maroussi (the 1950 white blocked purple covered--'Travel', 'Complete Unabridged'-- paperback issue) in Australia, winter through to summer '66/'67, performed the transmogrification whereby my Elwood exile (--oh yes, there's an awful & heavy tale attached but not for telling here), living in Thackaray Street, one of the poets' roads (exact mirror of Thornhill/Southampton's topography, Down Under's not so secret meaning), became my Greece, -- swimming off the rocks (industrial detritus), recovering breath spent battling the riffs & unexpected depths, propped between stone & concrete in a nest of sand, driftwood, dried seaweed, with best friend satchel containing biro & notebook, novel, poetry, tobacco/papers/matches, supporting me forever...
*
You see, it happens every time I'm here, between Elwood & Point Ormond --every summer as first the elements & then the literary & cultural memories work me over. Remembering as I re-live it, the Beat life of sun, sand & sea...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[via David Caddy / Tears in the Fence]
Posted on January 10, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) 1934-2014
When Le Roi Jones’s volume of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, appeared from Totem / Corinth in 1961 it had a Basil King drawing on the cover and it had a poem titled ‘Way Out West’ half way through it.
As simple an act
as opening the eyes. Merely
coming into things by degrees.
Basil King was over here in England at the end of last year and he talked and read, along with his wife Martha, at Kent University amongst many other places. Basil had also worked alongside Le Roi Jones in the late 1950s when he provided the covers for the magazine which Le Roi edited along with Hettie Cohen, Yugen. Yugen closed down in 1962 after number 8 but not before the starting up of The Floating Bear, a newsletter, edited by Jones and Diane di Prima. The Addenda to that issue number 8 of Yugen gives its readers the following information:
The newsletter, The Floating Bear, and its editors, Le Roi Jones and Diane di Prima, were cleared in April of obscenity charges stemming from their publication of a section of Jones’ System of Dante’s Hell and William Burroughs’ satire, The Routine.
That little note at the end also gives an update on what Le Roi Jones was upto, including editing Corinth’s fiction anthology, Avant Garde American Fiction, ‘which will include such prose writers as Fielding Dawson, Burroughs, Kerouac, Rumaker, Selby, Creeley, Douglas Woolf, Irving Rosenthal, Herbert Huncke, Paul Metcalfe, Diane Di Prima, and others’.
Had he had lived Amiri Baraka was due to come over to London this year to attend the University of Canterbury’s one-day conference, Baraka at 80, to be held at the ICA on 12th April.
The very last sentence in that last Yugen issue is:
‘At all other places they cremate them; Here we bury them alive’.
Farewell to a most important poet, dramatist, short-story writer, editor and major figure throughout the past fifty years.
*
(c) Ian Brinton ;
oOo
Kris Hemensley
Mourn both Le Roi Jones & Amiri Baraka. Complex within itself/himself, impossible for one such as I, to neatly unravel after 50 years of development. Poetry, politics... May as well throw this in even if a poignant contemplation more appropriate than a thesis at this sad time. So : The change of his name from Le Roi Jones to Amiri Baraka emblematic (paradigmatic?) of this time of changes (1960s to date). Well recall seeing the shocking pic in Village Voice in '68 of Jones/Baraka : bloodied head coshed in middle of Newark riot. Remember thinking this is the beginning of something else, --a something else agglomeration of all the radical ideologies any one of which one might have sat & mulled or stood toe to toe & argued, but tossed up now with race relations, black revolution, --and where was poet in that calamity out of which insurrection was suddenly spun? --reversal of the judgement of skin colour in the urgency of solidarity --educational indeed for white boy to experience the boot on the other foot even if thousands of miles away in Melbourne/Oz from Newark --psychically & imaginatively empathizing, responding --the Vietnam War already the actual ground of could-be would-be refuse-to-be conscripted the daily '60s life --suddenly absent when landing back in England, late '69 --a whole other &, notwithstanding the Irish troubles, relaxed English vibe. It's been my American friends, Duncan McNaughton particularly in my head now, who've articulated the necessary hybridization/cosmopolitanism in name of the Real, --American as African & Spanish. Poetry, politics... And you know what Ive said about the warts & all as the truth of my situation, that is against perfection (as if politics could ever be pure)... And how revolted ive been by ahistorical that is hysterical conspiratorial leftist politics, in wch this or that erstwhile minority is no more than ideological canon fodder... in this minute i'm putting it back together, the Humpty Dumpty of me, of poet amongst poets, --hailing here Leroi/Baraka, the poet, the playwright, the editor publisher anthologist, Hettie's other half --and RIP...
-----------------------------------------------------------
[January 7, 2014]
[via Monique Chester, Weymouth/UK]
SIRENS HAVE SOUNDED
The following SEVERE Flood Warnings will remain in force from 19:00 on 06.01.2014 until 02:00 on 07/01/2014 including the times of high tide. Peak water levels and waves are expected between 21:00 and midnight. Flooding may already be affecting properties, low lying areas and roads. The Causeway between Portland and Wyke Regis may be impassable and may be closed as a precaution. Dangerous wave overtopping including shingle is possible. The time and date of the forecast high waters for which this Flood Warning is in force are 21:45 (Local time) on 06/01/2014 (21:45 GMT) Please listen for the sound of the Flood Warning sirens which will be sounded IF wave overtopping occurs at Chiswell. The forecast wind direction is South West The forecast wind strengths is Force 7
*
B H : A river passed by my door during the night...
K H : how dyou mean B? A river on Goldcroft Road? But youre on a rise or coming off a rise? Used to be rivers down Flinders Street and when I was a sailor on shore leave in Singapore once upon a time the monsoon broke around me as I sheltered and the road became a river. Only thing was, before the inundation occurred it was an ordinary road with open sewers/gutters but after the rain there was only water to be waded through to the slightly higher part in the middle of the road. With my whites rolled up, my shoes in my hands above my head, I stepped into the torrent (had to get back to the boat y'see) and down I went, into the sewer!!! The locals laughed at me then helped me up. But I'd gashed my toe on the way down. Back at the Fairstar I stuck a plaster on the wound. A day & night of increasing throbbing pain later the ship doctor operated on my toe. Local anaesthetic. Cut off half the nail then scooped out the flesh. You could have lost the toe he said, another day the leg!!!! Did this flood come out of the blue for you or has it been developing last day or so? And watch out for your toes old boy!
Jo Harris : didn't know you were a sailor...did you run away to sea?
K H : regarding sailor boy --yes, I guess I did run away to sea Jo! Went down to the Labour exchange with brother B, asked for unusual job, and hey presto! 1965...
J H : those sailors pants...bell bottoms with a flap...sooo sexy..maybe that helped you decide
K H : Blue uniform for the northern part of the voyage, whites for the tropics... I just had to get-a get-a get-a get away! I couldnt wait another day ay ay!!! And yes, Jo, always liked the look, the whites not the blues... With my post-op foot I could wear a sandal instead of white shoe, but the good foot had the shoe still! I worked in the Ship Shop with the photographers (German)
and the hairdressers (English, Scottish, Italian). I also had hold
duties. I cannot tie knots so my tying & hauling of packages was
a nightly ordeal for me and a huge laugh for the others. Shared cabin
at first with the photographers but they complained that I snored --I
think they said I snorkled. They were believed. I was moved to an
Italian purser's cabin. He slept during the day when I was at work,
& v-versa. One or two funny if not scandalous incidents. In
retrospect of course e/thing is hilarious, vast comedy of life. Even at
the time I was watching over my own shoulder so to speak --being a
writer you see and my Nobel prize not too far away...
--------------------------------------------------------------
January 7, '14
The more I think about KILL YOUR DARLINGS the more I like it... truth is you have to check things out yrself however persuasive friends & critics!
I've been thinking about the historical settings & references : The World at WAR, so the film is its gigantic footnote? thus 'existentialism'... The War crucial threshold of change... not necessarily refusing the call to arms but simultaneously accepting the call to LIFE, and of one's own order... the wackier the better! that is, backing yr own call...
*
January 6, '14
Well, whaddayaknow! Saw Kill Your Darlings at the Nova in Carlton this afternoon and was captivated. Intriguing story. Contrary to what Ive heard around the traps, mostly re- the inadequacy of Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, found the film psychologically coherent, soundly based in the literature. For my money, Kerouac's The Sea Is My Brother corroborates the merchant marine signing-up scene, tho Lucian [Carr] is the extra dimension contributed by the film. Still thinking it through. Yep, excellent.
I accepted the characterizations, the actors melded with originals... Dane DeHaan's Lucian Carr as beautiful memerising boy, pent with desire & imagining, recalls for me people I met along our young way (let's say younger way since it's not done with yet --and not just the tearing, waring manuscripts of up to fifty years ago but the impulses, the heart & soul within) --which is the mark of --what? --the memorable --the mythic --template or archetype of life/of lives understood that way...
I saw Charles Buckmaster in Radcliffe's Ginsberg --imagine 17 years old --up to the big city --nervous, expectant, sensitive to all & everything --dear Charles in good suit, jacket, partly for employment, partly because he was poet embarking at last on adult career... Et cetera... A heartbreaking film from several vantages : Ginsberg & mother, Jennifer Jason Leigh's pathetically superb Naomi, "don't ever leave me"; even Michael Hall's David Kammerer, not at all one dimensional villain, but knew him in my own once-upon-a-time, the contradictory authoritarian & libertarian behaviour (to be the author, the director of the freedom : recipe for disaster if not to oneself then to others)... Much much more!
--------------------------------
Ralph Hadden's 2013 Bests prompts me again towards my own. Flicking through my journals for books, music, films, events. Just as it comes then, not distinguishing between first & re- reads.
Melvin Bragg's Francis Bacon interview/doco.
Diane Burrell & Chris Dench discs.
Incredible String Band movie (c/o Dave Ellison)
On the Road movie.
Ben Sidran discs.
Ian Hamilton Finlay selections (U of California press) introd Alec Finlay.
Lisa Gorton's Hotel Hyperion.
Sun Ra & His Arkestra.
The Rodriguez movie (c/o Cathy O').
David Caddy's Cycling after [Edward] Thomas and England.
Paul Blackburn's Pierre Vidal translations (c/o B H's library).
Ted And I : A Brother's Memoir by Gerald Hughes.
Ernest Hemingway By-Line : selected articles & dispatches.
Fiona Hile's Novelties.
Claire Potter's Swallow.
Lou Reed.
Shirley Clarke's Robert Frost documentary.
The African Queen.
Marion Taylor's Colmer's Hill [Dorset] : One Artist's Obsession (c/o B H gift).
Simon Warner's Text, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll (Bloomsbury).
Pete Spence's Kynetonbury Tales.
Valli Poole's A Box of Humming Birds.
Glenn Cooper's The Proportions of a Man.
Robert Kenny's Gardens of Fire (UWA press).
Simon Armitage's Walking Home : Travels with a Troubadoor On the Pennine Way.
John Kinsella's The Vision of Error (FIP).
Paul Summers' Primitive Cartography (Walleah Press).
Pine Torch by Ainslee Meredith.
Claire Gaskin's Paperweight.
David Morley's The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet).
Ken Trimble's Barking Mad Poems.
John Ashbery's Quick Sentences.
Jordie Albiston's Book of Ethel.
Christopher Heathcote's splendid articles on art & artists in Quadrant magazine.
I Thank You : Celebrating Tim Hemensley & the Powder Monkeys, at the Tote, Yarra Music Festival (21/7/13), cast of thousands including the Spazzies, Joel Silbersher, TJ, John Nolan, Adalita, Power Line Sneakers, Roman Tucker...
The Cherry Fest in AC/DC Lane (24/11/14) Powder Monkeys & guests, Hoss, The BellRays, Chris Wilson et al
and that's [not] all folks.....!
___________________________________________
December 23, 2013
Watched concluding episode of Scorsese's Living In The Material World doco on George Harrison this evening. Quite a journey and reflective of many of our own generation's I suspect. Spiritual/metaphysical teasers like GH's concern as to how one "left this body". His (double?) sadness therefore at John Lennon's murder. Very interesting to me was the commentary from racing driver Jackie Stewart. Ditto, Eric Idle. The epitome of the "material world" --racing cars, films, music industry --intersecting with otherness --that old conceit of materiality exceeding itself, not that spiritual life doesnt have its own forms... GH on the mantra effect of My Sweet Lord, as though hypnotic repetitions... Great to see Shankar & the other Indian musicians... GH's commitment to almost everything, whatever the ostensible contradictions. I think we must all have drunk the same water!!! We'll play some Harrison & Shankar et al tomorrow... Anyone else catch this?
---------------------------------------------------
December 9, 2013
Great dream the other night : Sitting in train carriage with Tom Clark, couple of his friends, & Robert Kenny. He still looks very young ("still looks"? how would I know! --we ALL look very young whilst being who we are as of now!)-- I'm telling him how wonderful AND maddening it was to see his pic in Paris Review, his & Tom Pickard's, when we were teenagers, 20, inspiring for a 20 year old in gob-smacking way! We're having marvellous rave together when Robert says that he's aware the two people at other end of shared carriage-table arent saying anything, are excluded from the conversation. Theyre ok, man, says Tom, and I tend to agree-- Robert asks if anyone has a copy of Kant (any Kant? the Complete? Pure Reason?) --wants to open up the conversation so that others can join in! Tom says, this is getting heavy man --I say, putting a hand on Robert's arm & on Tom Clark's, look, we're serious people, Robert's the Australian PM's History prize winner & poet, and Tom as we know is past poetry editor of Paris Review and poet & biographer of Charles Olson etc, --of course we can be serious, but let's not get heavy, and Tom's right, I say to Robert, let's not get uptight --Which seems to help! That's right Tom says, let's loosen up! And we do!
-------------------------------------------------------
December 5, 2013
A great pleasure to host Venie Holmgren this afternoon at the Collected Works Bookshop. The early (5pm) start, the unsettled weather, clash with other events (eg, Jenny Harrison at the Dax Centre), & the old out-of-towner hoodoo combined to restrict attendance. But bless Ricky Tanaka for transporting Venie down from Hepburn Springs & chaperoning her across town, and Ken Smeaton for enthusiastically introducing the poet & launching her book, The Tea House Poems. Ken recalled 1970s street poetry in Melbourne with Poor Thom & Venie, the living & literary importance of both of these to him. Venie corrected the SMH's attribution of 93 years to herself --she's only 91! I remember F T Prince telling me in the early '90s that he was probably England's oldest publishing poet --he was around 80 something at the time. He also said it got physically harder to write a poem let alone a book. Venie suggested this was her last book & last launching. One never knows though... She would have been welcome to read her entire little book; she probably did half. Lovely things, Japanese (haiku / tanka) style. We have a few copies now in stock. THANK YOU everyone who came for supporting a unique event.
----------------------------------------------------------
November 5, 2013
Beautiful day for the Melbourne Cup. Yday Collected Works Bookshop & Mary's Maria's Beads and Trims (Formerly Maria George Pty Ltd) set up a table at top end of the hallway, overlooking Swanston Street. Champagne, cheese + biscuits, tzatziki dip, cup cakes. Watched the Cup Eve parade of champions (& their connections as they're fond of saying) in between popping back into respective shops for phone calls, customers. Today I think I'm heading down Abbotsford way, to the Yarra Hotel to imbibe the excitement amongst the rock'n'rollers. Place a bet en route. Nice chat with Ali Alizadeh , during y'day's toing & froing, in wch my champagne lubricated tongue wound its way around the tale of young Kris H's migrant's 1966 dinkum aussie Melbourne, via all the non-Anglo exiles of Europe needless to say, introduced to Moonee Valley & Olympic Park (dogs) in that Bohemian open house I'd landed up in, that surreal fearful amazing first season Down Under! Ali doesnt share my horse racing or indeed any other sporting delight but we did agree abt the magnificence of the horses! Hurrah & huzzah to all!
oooOOOooo
[typed up & published, 11th January, 2014]
Showing posts with label Duncan McNaughton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duncan McNaughton. Show all posts
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
JOHN KINSELLA'S "THE VISION OF ERROR : A Sextet of Activist Poems"
LAUNCH SPEECH for John Kinsella's THE VISION OF ERROR : A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press, Melbourne), given November 20th, 2013, Visual Cultures Resources Centre, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne
[The italicised section below was conceived &/or drafted but omitted from the speech]
oOo
The words & thoughts in my head, when I began this take on John Kinsella's new collection, The Vision of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press), included such things as a line by Jack Clarke (one of Olson's students & friends, from the Institute of Further Studies in upstate New York) : "I want all my learning to go into this one" --a classic temptation!
[And I thought of Kinsella as similar to Richard Grossinger, introduced as prodigy to the yet kicking New American Poetry by Robert Duncan ca 1970, and whose one man band attracted & awed 40 years ago as he virtually created his own curriculum…
And thinking of JK as an international poet/figure, I serendipitously came upon the references to him from Harold Bloom & Paul Kane in Cassandra Atherton's In So Many Words : Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals (ASP, '13); one of only a handful of Australian writers recognised overseas…
The Political Imagination issue of Southerly magazine (Vol 73, #1, '13), which had already fired me up, seemed a relevant context for JK; paradoxically, given my objections to the former how explain my accepting the brief to usher into the world his new collection? Incidentally, despite appearing to be a prime candidate for such a context, Kinsella's not included in that symposium...
Shirley Clarke's portrait of Robert Frost, made in 1962, seen during the Shirley Clarke season of documentaries at ACMI in Melbourne, October '13, was also strongly in mind regarding the discussion of the public if not political role of the poet in, more or less, our time…]
And from a first flick through the book in hand, p114, in the Hero section,
Our four-year-old, in the delirium
of fever, said: 'Dad, write a poem
to make them stop, to stop
them tearing down the tree'.
He has more faith in poetry
and people than I have,
though I'd like to honour his wish.
Finally, regarding his version of Milton's Comus, JK offered that this work is "tormented by its own celebration --the tension is in the need for constraint, a fear that the darkness of humanity will overwhelm the telling of the tale." --ditto, this collection too (perhaps). ]
So I started doodling, noodling, reading here & there--for example, Harsh Hakea (p9) --
This morning, to fire the day, a large golden fox
sprinted the fenceline along the reserve. Watched
by me, perched on the largest granites. Left be.
Instead of the natural or conventional observational authority, whereby "I" would have watched the fox --how would it go? -- : "This morning, to fire the day, a large golden fox / sprinted the fenceline along the reserve. Perched / on the largest granites, I watched it. Left it be." --And nothing wrong with that at all as poem. But instead of that, Kinsella has it : "Watched / by me, perched on the largest granites. Left be." --which maintains fox as arbiter --after all it is the golden fox that 'fires the day' --even though one understands the human watcher mediates it, --but so gently --sublimates normal authority to the fox's activity, as though fox & day is the superior relationship. The syntax facilitates the lovely rhyme (as rhyme can be lovely) --"by me" at the beginning of the line & "left be" at the end. Given Kinsella's philosophy, this begs the question as to whether "watching" isn't of the same terrible order of things an anarchist (& poet as natural anarchist) could also indict. And this is a book of many indictments.
Change tack.
I recall a conversation with Tasmanian poet James Charlton at Collected Works Bookshop, in the '90s. We were discussing other poets, as poets always do. It transpired neither of us were, or were any longer, ruffled by the supposed sins attributed to our more newsworthy friends & colleagues, and didn't particularly care for the kind of mischievous commentary that does the rounds --knocking off the 'tall poppies', older figures like Murray, Tranter, Gray, Adamson & younger ones --John Kinsella criticised for prolific writing & publishing --too young, too much, that sort of thing --And Anthony Lawrence for something or other --swank & swagger? --I cant remember. And after we'd shared memories of meetings &/or dealings with either of them, James said : Well, you look after John & I'll look after Anthony! Heaven forbid gross patronage & egotism be attributed since we only meant that we, who'd come of age in the '60s & '70s, could hold & critically embrace those young tyros only born around that time. (Such 'looking after' relates to one's sense of nurturing in the literary culture; a nurturing which of course includes resistance…)
Now it is true that John Kinsella has published forty-odd books --indeed it would have been perfect if this collection from Five islands Press, The Vision of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems were his fiftieth --his fiftieth book in his fiftieth year! Even greater symmetry : Englishman in Australia launches Australian in England's fiftieth book in the poet's fiftieth year! But further to the 'writing too much' problem : I remember how screamingly funny we found Gilbert Sorrentino's description, in his novel The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, of the rampantly fecund Robert Kelly writing a novel in his bath before breakfast! --funny because without wanting to side with Blake's 'destroyers' one's beholden to the restrained if not repressed psychology &, therefore, culture, which many of us were schooled in, thus the occurrence of over-careful & even timid attitude & style. Yet most creative practitioners would love to have the publishers queuing up, as indeed they seem to do for JK's writings. If it was a single & simply defined audience, there'd be more point to the criticism Kinsella receives. But that's not, or is no longer, the case. John Kinsella's publishers & publications are literally all over the place --different types of writing, different kinds of publication.
Five Islands Press's author's bio notes Armour (published by Picador) & Jam Tree Gully (Norton) as recent publications. But as or more recent is his collaboration with Niall Lucy (the co-dedicatee, with Tracy Ryan, of this book) in The Ballad of Moon Dyne Joe (FACP), & the collaboration with Forest Gander, Redstart : An Ecological Poetics (published by University of Iowa Press). Now, Redstart is particularly apropos for both essayistic style & content & for its caveats, for example from Kinsella's Note on Ecopoetics (which might yet characterise The Vision of Error) : "I have grave doubts that an 'ecopoetics' can be anything but personal. And a luxury that few have…" / "In reaching a desire to record one's own coordinates in a damaged ecology, an ecology trying to cope, I realise how much of the data of background is contrary to any idea of 'nature'. There's some grim stuff in there. Most of our own biographies have grim stuff. Place is about event as much as location. place is interstice. Place is also a reckoning of intrusion and damage and the labeling of forces (greed, security, self and communal empowerment, spiritual materialism) that seem adverse to the health of a biodiversity…" Redstart in its register might be the reflective half of the project which bursts into the rattier, testier, aktion of The Vision of Error ("activist poems" after all)!
Thinking all this or about this, I was suddenly reminded of Olson's Projective Verse essay, which one read in the '60s, in Melbourne, before the super highway to Buffalo or San Francisco or Cambridge,UK for that matter --and not the typewriter as stave or the head, ear, syllable / heart, breath, line passages but this from the essay's second part, how the human "conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl he shall find little to sing but himself [we understand : nudge, nudge Walt Whitman]… But if he stays within himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share [this is predicated upon Olson's understanding of objectivism, "the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject' and his 'soul'" etc] --Olson continues, "For a man's problem the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature…"
An aside : that the basic difference between the Olson poetic & Kinsella, or between Kinsella & any number of others, is political, philosophical, and might all reduce to the fact that War is not his father (after Heraclitus) --he doesn't seem to politically accept the life & death cycle he's caught in for he suffers for want of equanimity but will not, like Robinson Jeffers, "go down the dinosaurs' way" before trying all possible alternatives…
Addressing The Vision of Error one cant help but address the poet as per his accumulated production, his massive & multivalent project, and his international reputation current as he is in Australia, the British Isles & the USA. Do we read it or read John Kinsella in it? --tracking him, as apparently one can do with a wrist-banded felon, a micro-chipped dolphin or Tasmanian devil or an English badger?
The Vision of Error may have begun its adventure as the inversion, The Error of Vision --second-guessing the common assumption that 'seeing' is most of the poet's calling --from Whitmanesque journalism to anything from the portmanteau of soothsaying, that which'll always 'walk beside you'… And 'seeing' might be named the apparent --the 'apparent' only ever what seems to be so --and the real, the harder quality which coagulates as quantity… Poet in this space (this head-space &/or physical environment) committed to a speaking which flies in the face of the assumptions. But The Vision of Error it is, and poet here will call the shots --will catalogue crime & calumny --weave it into a hair-shirt, knot it into a cat o'nine tails…
On p19, state-of-the-world diatribe, "Try living / here, you collaborating wankers / who vox populi niche markets, / stereotypical beatings of prisoners, / the bullies who make / semi-useful foot soldiers." is juxtaposed (grand simile) with esoteric lit-crit cum biog : "Please place on my grave, "he resisted , / and wasn't hoodwinked by the lyric or its digressions, remouthings / or retextings. Not by epics, / nor damned elegies." --Kinsella here, the postmodernist hussar whose juxtaposition clearly elides all human acts within the pessimistic register of the Fall. Poet therefore (& there's poetry aplenty in these poems --beautiful alliterative & onomatopoeic runs, wild & wacky imagery) --whose ability to articulate outrage cannot for a second earn favour or furlough. Po-mo mix & match : bellicose pamphleteering and exquisite permutating of sound & sense --same difference within world's valedictory. No wonder James Joyce is inscribed very early in the piece : (p11) "HARSH hake // what blossom coveted by spikes / whose calling? Flower/blossoms, / I know no Anna nor fallings into line / cause precedent matters sublime river pocks / bonding drain and gutter, though round rain sounds / anna anna anna falling into a bright new tank, we / will drink a river, we will gurgle our puns, / giraffe;…" Again on p61, "And so, I turn to St Augustine's Confessions / and the isles of the I declaimed through ontology / and a singular perfection manifest as core / of Western self-narrative, as Baby Tuckoo / or the resplendent self-damnation of Rousseau…"
What we read in The Vision of Error is the eternal if not infernal battle of the citizen, advocate, political-activist and the witness, artist, poet --and their ameliorations understood; the eternal battle between the urges of graffiti and the surges of literature --and their ameliorations understood; the eternal battle of action & reflection, of mortal living & immortal art, of infinite imagination & limited body-world --and their ameliorations understood…
I declare The Vison of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems hereby launched!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES, ADDITIONS, DELETIONS
*The mesostic, a la John Cage, on p31, spelling SOLVENCY IS MUTE, probably not the poet's/poem's secret habitat or even the secret to habitat, though it could be!
I recently heard 'solvent' mentioned on a news report about a variety of the drug GBH, and also know it as a term in the world of corporate finance. But the book does carry secrets if one accepts FIP's promo that "John Kinsella lays down his vision of an urgent and uncompromising poetics and politics of land…"
For instance, let's follow his God trail :
(p17) "maybe it's only the shape, choreography / of praying we're interested in;"
(pp35) "I need to participate, / I need the risk of being struck, / burnt to a crisp / by lightning, this devotion that forgets God / in the rush…"
(p36) "I pray compulsively, / always just before sleep and again if I wake during the night / in case I forgot before sleep"
(p65) "God is fable is duty"
(p75) "Religion is a technology"
And family :
several invocations of his son Tim;
wife (p37) "it's not order I look for in Tracy's eyes"
brother Stephen (p54);
(pp55/56) "Tracy locates the vanquished house's ache / by the fruit tree stubs, introduced like water towers, / tarred seams opening - Gleneagle, alongside / Kinsella Road, where sixty-year-old pines / were recently harvested and new plantings inculcated"
And language :
(p9) Jumping from died-and-reborn York gums to "The dead have been gathering. / And, to be frank, accruing. / They are phenomenally heavy, / like self-doubt or self-belief "
(p14) another grand simile : "Mispronunciation is a joy as great as fog / and fog lifting in tears…"
(p19) "You see, there's no getting away from sentences / all places visited, been, occupied, / even / passed /thru. // Says something about reading. / Maps and diaries not kept. / / Artifacts are not something / I need to create."
(p22) "Psychedelia is my trap. I watched wooden / finches fly and hid from spiders in a nun's / closet --that's my biography told by the / outside myself self."
--diaristic, solipsistic (not that there's anything wrong with that), poet talking to himself…
(p89) "Maybe you need to know [Paul] Goodman precedes with 'Language /
is behaviour' …
*
Regarding headspace & physical environment : Imagine Husserl ("perception is environment") & Jung ("mind is matter"), tapping their white canes around the poet's tripping feet…
*
(p17) "I will learn to block out my shifts in body chemistry and reception theory / that undo the way I see" : as if natural seeing & telling were his standpoint rather than political shirt-fronting finessed with science --'objectivity' sufficient to render the lyrical porous if not specious. But I'm not convinced --undoing seeing, a la John Berger, is the blinder Kinsella seeks to play here, despite categorical anxieties, --politics & philosophy's tectonic plates squeezing, squashing, ructioning poetry…
*
I had thought Jack Clarke's line [quoted in launch speech above] was "I want all my knowledge to go into this one" and that it occurred in one of the sonnets, The End of This Side (Black Book, Ohio, 1979). However, I've found it isnt one of the sonnets at all but the poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension, published in the John Clarke issue of Duncan McNaughton's Fathar magazine (Buffalo, NY, June '71). And the key word is 'learning' not 'knowledge', notwithstanding a certain convergence of the reader & doer, library & world within that practice. And so it all comes back --the era of poetry & research on the wing of Olson, --and Olson dying in 1970, then George Butterick in '88, five months after Robert Duncan, & then Jack Clarke himself (1992) --of which I heard with a shock, ditto Butterick --poets I'd corresponded with, published --felt all over again as I googled for information… And what then of John Thorpe & Duncan McNaughton? Where are they now? Too many years spent in other circles, I'm embarrassed by my absence but, because of the focus upon John Kinsella, am serendipitously returned!
I quote Jack's poem here :
THE STANCE WE INHABIT PREDISPOSES OUR DIMENSION
as the sun coincides with the heart
I want all my learning to go into
this one & leaps across the Pacific
at a known spot just North of the
Solomons I am reminded it was I who
refused to believe you would join
me in the Rose garden & was wanting
proof of that Future which never
thus comes being thrust deeper into
the past which is its burden to
overcome the moment I saw that I'd
never be a True Scientist until
I believed absolutely you had not gone over
to the King of Death but had stayed
to feed me raisons and grains and
black strap molasses for iron for
energy to combat Depression so that
the only cold I had all winter was
this one from Friday to Sunday the
Day of the Equinox
(3-21-71)
oOo
[Typed up 21/27 November, '13
Kris Hemensley]
[The italicised section below was conceived &/or drafted but omitted from the speech]
oOo
The words & thoughts in my head, when I began this take on John Kinsella's new collection, The Vision of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press), included such things as a line by Jack Clarke (one of Olson's students & friends, from the Institute of Further Studies in upstate New York) : "I want all my learning to go into this one" --a classic temptation!
[And I thought of Kinsella as similar to Richard Grossinger, introduced as prodigy to the yet kicking New American Poetry by Robert Duncan ca 1970, and whose one man band attracted & awed 40 years ago as he virtually created his own curriculum…
And thinking of JK as an international poet/figure, I serendipitously came upon the references to him from Harold Bloom & Paul Kane in Cassandra Atherton's In So Many Words : Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals (ASP, '13); one of only a handful of Australian writers recognised overseas…
The Political Imagination issue of Southerly magazine (Vol 73, #1, '13), which had already fired me up, seemed a relevant context for JK; paradoxically, given my objections to the former how explain my accepting the brief to usher into the world his new collection? Incidentally, despite appearing to be a prime candidate for such a context, Kinsella's not included in that symposium...
Shirley Clarke's portrait of Robert Frost, made in 1962, seen during the Shirley Clarke season of documentaries at ACMI in Melbourne, October '13, was also strongly in mind regarding the discussion of the public if not political role of the poet in, more or less, our time…]
And from a first flick through the book in hand, p114, in the Hero section,
Our four-year-old, in the delirium
of fever, said: 'Dad, write a poem
to make them stop, to stop
them tearing down the tree'.
He has more faith in poetry
and people than I have,
though I'd like to honour his wish.
Finally, regarding his version of Milton's Comus, JK offered that this work is "tormented by its own celebration --the tension is in the need for constraint, a fear that the darkness of humanity will overwhelm the telling of the tale." --ditto, this collection too (perhaps). ]
So I started doodling, noodling, reading here & there--for example, Harsh Hakea (p9) --
This morning, to fire the day, a large golden fox
sprinted the fenceline along the reserve. Watched
by me, perched on the largest granites. Left be.
Instead of the natural or conventional observational authority, whereby "I" would have watched the fox --how would it go? -- : "This morning, to fire the day, a large golden fox / sprinted the fenceline along the reserve. Perched / on the largest granites, I watched it. Left it be." --And nothing wrong with that at all as poem. But instead of that, Kinsella has it : "Watched / by me, perched on the largest granites. Left be." --which maintains fox as arbiter --after all it is the golden fox that 'fires the day' --even though one understands the human watcher mediates it, --but so gently --sublimates normal authority to the fox's activity, as though fox & day is the superior relationship. The syntax facilitates the lovely rhyme (as rhyme can be lovely) --"by me" at the beginning of the line & "left be" at the end. Given Kinsella's philosophy, this begs the question as to whether "watching" isn't of the same terrible order of things an anarchist (& poet as natural anarchist) could also indict. And this is a book of many indictments.
Change tack.
I recall a conversation with Tasmanian poet James Charlton at Collected Works Bookshop, in the '90s. We were discussing other poets, as poets always do. It transpired neither of us were, or were any longer, ruffled by the supposed sins attributed to our more newsworthy friends & colleagues, and didn't particularly care for the kind of mischievous commentary that does the rounds --knocking off the 'tall poppies', older figures like Murray, Tranter, Gray, Adamson & younger ones --John Kinsella criticised for prolific writing & publishing --too young, too much, that sort of thing --And Anthony Lawrence for something or other --swank & swagger? --I cant remember. And after we'd shared memories of meetings &/or dealings with either of them, James said : Well, you look after John & I'll look after Anthony! Heaven forbid gross patronage & egotism be attributed since we only meant that we, who'd come of age in the '60s & '70s, could hold & critically embrace those young tyros only born around that time. (Such 'looking after' relates to one's sense of nurturing in the literary culture; a nurturing which of course includes resistance…)
Now it is true that John Kinsella has published forty-odd books --indeed it would have been perfect if this collection from Five islands Press, The Vision of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems were his fiftieth --his fiftieth book in his fiftieth year! Even greater symmetry : Englishman in Australia launches Australian in England's fiftieth book in the poet's fiftieth year! But further to the 'writing too much' problem : I remember how screamingly funny we found Gilbert Sorrentino's description, in his novel The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, of the rampantly fecund Robert Kelly writing a novel in his bath before breakfast! --funny because without wanting to side with Blake's 'destroyers' one's beholden to the restrained if not repressed psychology &, therefore, culture, which many of us were schooled in, thus the occurrence of over-careful & even timid attitude & style. Yet most creative practitioners would love to have the publishers queuing up, as indeed they seem to do for JK's writings. If it was a single & simply defined audience, there'd be more point to the criticism Kinsella receives. But that's not, or is no longer, the case. John Kinsella's publishers & publications are literally all over the place --different types of writing, different kinds of publication.
Five Islands Press's author's bio notes Armour (published by Picador) & Jam Tree Gully (Norton) as recent publications. But as or more recent is his collaboration with Niall Lucy (the co-dedicatee, with Tracy Ryan, of this book) in The Ballad of Moon Dyne Joe (FACP), & the collaboration with Forest Gander, Redstart : An Ecological Poetics (published by University of Iowa Press). Now, Redstart is particularly apropos for both essayistic style & content & for its caveats, for example from Kinsella's Note on Ecopoetics (which might yet characterise The Vision of Error) : "I have grave doubts that an 'ecopoetics' can be anything but personal. And a luxury that few have…" / "In reaching a desire to record one's own coordinates in a damaged ecology, an ecology trying to cope, I realise how much of the data of background is contrary to any idea of 'nature'. There's some grim stuff in there. Most of our own biographies have grim stuff. Place is about event as much as location. place is interstice. Place is also a reckoning of intrusion and damage and the labeling of forces (greed, security, self and communal empowerment, spiritual materialism) that seem adverse to the health of a biodiversity…" Redstart in its register might be the reflective half of the project which bursts into the rattier, testier, aktion of The Vision of Error ("activist poems" after all)!
Thinking all this or about this, I was suddenly reminded of Olson's Projective Verse essay, which one read in the '60s, in Melbourne, before the super highway to Buffalo or San Francisco or Cambridge,UK for that matter --and not the typewriter as stave or the head, ear, syllable / heart, breath, line passages but this from the essay's second part, how the human "conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl he shall find little to sing but himself [we understand : nudge, nudge Walt Whitman]… But if he stays within himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share [this is predicated upon Olson's understanding of objectivism, "the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject' and his 'soul'" etc] --Olson continues, "For a man's problem the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature…"
An aside : that the basic difference between the Olson poetic & Kinsella, or between Kinsella & any number of others, is political, philosophical, and might all reduce to the fact that War is not his father (after Heraclitus) --he doesn't seem to politically accept the life & death cycle he's caught in for he suffers for want of equanimity but will not, like Robinson Jeffers, "go down the dinosaurs' way" before trying all possible alternatives…
Addressing The Vision of Error one cant help but address the poet as per his accumulated production, his massive & multivalent project, and his international reputation current as he is in Australia, the British Isles & the USA. Do we read it or read John Kinsella in it? --tracking him, as apparently one can do with a wrist-banded felon, a micro-chipped dolphin or Tasmanian devil or an English badger?
The Vision of Error may have begun its adventure as the inversion, The Error of Vision --second-guessing the common assumption that 'seeing' is most of the poet's calling --from Whitmanesque journalism to anything from the portmanteau of soothsaying, that which'll always 'walk beside you'… And 'seeing' might be named the apparent --the 'apparent' only ever what seems to be so --and the real, the harder quality which coagulates as quantity… Poet in this space (this head-space &/or physical environment) committed to a speaking which flies in the face of the assumptions. But The Vision of Error it is, and poet here will call the shots --will catalogue crime & calumny --weave it into a hair-shirt, knot it into a cat o'nine tails…
On p19, state-of-the-world diatribe, "Try living / here, you collaborating wankers / who vox populi niche markets, / stereotypical beatings of prisoners, / the bullies who make / semi-useful foot soldiers." is juxtaposed (grand simile) with esoteric lit-crit cum biog : "Please place on my grave, "he resisted , / and wasn't hoodwinked by the lyric or its digressions, remouthings / or retextings. Not by epics, / nor damned elegies." --Kinsella here, the postmodernist hussar whose juxtaposition clearly elides all human acts within the pessimistic register of the Fall. Poet therefore (& there's poetry aplenty in these poems --beautiful alliterative & onomatopoeic runs, wild & wacky imagery) --whose ability to articulate outrage cannot for a second earn favour or furlough. Po-mo mix & match : bellicose pamphleteering and exquisite permutating of sound & sense --same difference within world's valedictory. No wonder James Joyce is inscribed very early in the piece : (p11) "HARSH hake // what blossom coveted by spikes / whose calling? Flower/blossoms, / I know no Anna nor fallings into line / cause precedent matters sublime river pocks / bonding drain and gutter, though round rain sounds / anna anna anna falling into a bright new tank, we / will drink a river, we will gurgle our puns, / giraffe;…" Again on p61, "And so, I turn to St Augustine's Confessions / and the isles of the I declaimed through ontology / and a singular perfection manifest as core / of Western self-narrative, as Baby Tuckoo / or the resplendent self-damnation of Rousseau…"
What we read in The Vision of Error is the eternal if not infernal battle of the citizen, advocate, political-activist and the witness, artist, poet --and their ameliorations understood; the eternal battle between the urges of graffiti and the surges of literature --and their ameliorations understood; the eternal battle of action & reflection, of mortal living & immortal art, of infinite imagination & limited body-world --and their ameliorations understood…
I declare The Vison of Error : A Sextet of Activist Poems hereby launched!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES, ADDITIONS, DELETIONS
*The mesostic, a la John Cage, on p31, spelling SOLVENCY IS MUTE, probably not the poet's/poem's secret habitat or even the secret to habitat, though it could be!
I recently heard 'solvent' mentioned on a news report about a variety of the drug GBH, and also know it as a term in the world of corporate finance. But the book does carry secrets if one accepts FIP's promo that "John Kinsella lays down his vision of an urgent and uncompromising poetics and politics of land…"
For instance, let's follow his God trail :
(p17) "maybe it's only the shape, choreography / of praying we're interested in;"
(pp35) "I need to participate, / I need the risk of being struck, / burnt to a crisp / by lightning, this devotion that forgets God / in the rush…"
(p36) "I pray compulsively, / always just before sleep and again if I wake during the night / in case I forgot before sleep"
(p65) "God is fable is duty"
(p75) "Religion is a technology"
And family :
several invocations of his son Tim;
wife (p37) "it's not order I look for in Tracy's eyes"
brother Stephen (p54);
(pp55/56) "Tracy locates the vanquished house's ache / by the fruit tree stubs, introduced like water towers, / tarred seams opening - Gleneagle, alongside / Kinsella Road, where sixty-year-old pines / were recently harvested and new plantings inculcated"
And language :
(p9) Jumping from died-and-reborn York gums to "The dead have been gathering. / And, to be frank, accruing. / They are phenomenally heavy, / like self-doubt or self-belief "
(p14) another grand simile : "Mispronunciation is a joy as great as fog / and fog lifting in tears…"
(p19) "You see, there's no getting away from sentences / all places visited, been, occupied, / even / passed /thru. // Says something about reading. / Maps and diaries not kept. / / Artifacts are not something / I need to create."
(p22) "Psychedelia is my trap. I watched wooden / finches fly and hid from spiders in a nun's / closet --that's my biography told by the / outside myself self."
--diaristic, solipsistic (not that there's anything wrong with that), poet talking to himself…
(p89) "Maybe you need to know [Paul] Goodman precedes with 'Language /
is behaviour' …
*
Regarding headspace & physical environment : Imagine Husserl ("perception is environment") & Jung ("mind is matter"), tapping their white canes around the poet's tripping feet…
*
(p17) "I will learn to block out my shifts in body chemistry and reception theory / that undo the way I see" : as if natural seeing & telling were his standpoint rather than political shirt-fronting finessed with science --'objectivity' sufficient to render the lyrical porous if not specious. But I'm not convinced --undoing seeing, a la John Berger, is the blinder Kinsella seeks to play here, despite categorical anxieties, --politics & philosophy's tectonic plates squeezing, squashing, ructioning poetry…
*
I had thought Jack Clarke's line [quoted in launch speech above] was "I want all my knowledge to go into this one" and that it occurred in one of the sonnets, The End of This Side (Black Book, Ohio, 1979). However, I've found it isnt one of the sonnets at all but the poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension, published in the John Clarke issue of Duncan McNaughton's Fathar magazine (Buffalo, NY, June '71). And the key word is 'learning' not 'knowledge', notwithstanding a certain convergence of the reader & doer, library & world within that practice. And so it all comes back --the era of poetry & research on the wing of Olson, --and Olson dying in 1970, then George Butterick in '88, five months after Robert Duncan, & then Jack Clarke himself (1992) --of which I heard with a shock, ditto Butterick --poets I'd corresponded with, published --felt all over again as I googled for information… And what then of John Thorpe & Duncan McNaughton? Where are they now? Too many years spent in other circles, I'm embarrassed by my absence but, because of the focus upon John Kinsella, am serendipitously returned!
I quote Jack's poem here :
THE STANCE WE INHABIT PREDISPOSES OUR DIMENSION
as the sun coincides with the heart
I want all my learning to go into
this one & leaps across the Pacific
at a known spot just North of the
Solomons I am reminded it was I who
refused to believe you would join
me in the Rose garden & was wanting
proof of that Future which never
thus comes being thrust deeper into
the past which is its burden to
overcome the moment I saw that I'd
never be a True Scientist until
I believed absolutely you had not gone over
to the King of Death but had stayed
to feed me raisons and grains and
black strap molasses for iron for
energy to combat Depression so that
the only cold I had all winter was
this one from Friday to Sunday the
Day of the Equinox
(3-21-71)
oOo
[Typed up 21/27 November, '13
Kris Hemensley]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)