OCTOBER & NOVEMBER 2017 TIMELINE WRITINGS, SAVED FROM OBLIVION

‪Nov, '17
TO STEPHEN ELLIS
"Hi Stephen, In a message to him I'd described ex-Sydney poet Alan Jefferies' poem about the late John Forbes (in Spence's mag Oz Burp) as a play between transparency [plain speech] & syncopation [linear & spatial rhythms], and same idea came up reading yours --all youve been posting here, remarkably every day it seems -- that certain relation ('sort of', 'kind of') so not certain at all! --uncertain relation then --the double binds which move at the centre of the poem, as tho the gist, --the political, for example, "not to blame" --allied to history, grandparents as prophecy, immemorial time kept by every generation's ancients --and not to blame for ever further binds, for example smart's real limitation, re- your recent warning, so here "unaware // of the grain that the creative / advance of our / intelligent steps have crushed" --and, as you may intuit, i (holding against the debunking of imagery) simultaneously hear the complaint while rising on the music , for example, "I am my own grief" and, "walking / through wide grasslands / of paradise" ... Thanks for the good read. ‪Kris Hemensley‬"

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A week ago I'd seen Robert Podgurski's wonderful mountain photo shared on Stephen Ellis's Timeline, & messaged him abt it and the accompanying Pound quotation, "Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise" , noting the coincidence with the words of John Thorpe i'd sent to Stephen re- "what's possible is the wind…it's not wind, but the human sound of it" & etc… Robert graciously replied explaining his mountain experience, "Listening to the elements more carefully; they deserve a great amount of attention. But it takes time. Learning to just sit and be with them." I was reminded strongly of exchanges with the late John Anderson (d, 1997), recalling that "I offered once, after conversation, that if one was still enough, before the mountain, then the mountain would dance!"


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Something always seems to happen on a Friday --late morning, midday --‪Denis Smith‬ on his way back from market or art shop, ‪Pete Spence‬ into town & delivering mags or his 'lending library' of very special books (eg the large Collom, a slim Heliczer), & then other people drop in too, thus the impromptu nature of these launches & celebrations! Nice to see ‪Alan Jefferies‬ today, discussing the performance scene vis a vis the writing-writers but more importantly how we maintain our own volition through a long life in poetry... But, CORNELIS VLEESKINS : wondrous example of a constant & voluminous practice! Celebrating today Pete's friendship/collaboration with him as much as anything else...


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THE MELBOURNE CUP, 2017
November 7th
Beaten by a bloody head!! Ray in my ear as we watched it on the overhead tv at the Great Yorkshire Stingo this a/noon, the race that stops a nation (a holiday for a horse race? nah! really!!! only in Oz) --how could we not put a few bob on Johannes Vermeer! I'm so happy i scored again, every year i seem to do it, me! who knows nothing abt the noble sport! Well, Loretta & i caught the train down the line to North Richmond, then walked back up Hoddle to the appointed rendezvous... Ray & Terri were there, and Ken, and not too long afterwards the Harleys. John & Heather... an hour & a half of bonhomie and then the RACE! I punted $3 win & $2 place for six horses, one of whom, Johannes Vermeer, was beaten oh so close, into 2nd place... I collected eight bucks! but keeping up my record of a win or a place every Melbourne Cup... Terri won the trifecta but that's another story! The Harleys friend Trish, whom i thought might have been Lou Risdale, won too! Poets around their little table, talking about? --: recent poetry gigs, mention of Tina G and so cheers Tina! --talking about Mike Castro, Bede Griffiths, social / gender attitudes in the late 60s eg- Betty Burstall saying to Loretta that she'd be supporting the poet husband wldnt she? while he concentrated on his art... Haha! was funny then, crazy now! Counter culture evidently only went so far, i mean we were 21 and Betty another decade older, but she was talking out of an older perspective, elitist (no problem with that..) wherein writer/artist was to be supported... (my axiom, that art/literature scene is hierarchical but supremely democratic at point of entry... meaning anyone (everyone) an artist, poet, but one enters history, and should, one encounters immense world of merit, poets (note "poets' not poetry), meritable veritable poets) --but was woman artist supported by man at that time? not sure, i bet not!... admired Betty but surprised her when we said that wasnt our situation, the both of us had to get the rent in! --ah Betty Burstall, what a great thing you did with your junk shop/cafe/theatre in Faraday Street, Carlton, inspired by New York's off off off little theatre (Ellen Terry?)... hmm, what else we talked about, Ken mentions Kazantzakis as buddhist? didnt know that! --buddhist to travel to Moscow i guess! --beginning of Zorba recalls Heart of Darkness, sitting around in a hut waiting for a boat, waiting for weather to settle...

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Hilarious pre-Melbourne Cup day at Collected Works Bookshop y'day, the traditional standing at the large window end of the hall overlooking Swanston Street for the Cup Parade around midday, --no Beads & Trims Mary this year, interstate holiday but an hour or so before then Ken had visited, on the heels of Richard Murphet, tho Richard not here for Cup stuff, our chat about life after cessation of the 9 to 5 paradigm, my vision of the Uncollected Works bookshop in treetop in 2019! --but we open the Talisker and the day starts! --joined at the window by Jen & mum Claire, Retrostar friends, wave down at the famous horses, trainers, from the recent past, and the you-beauty Cup itself, the bagpipes, the open roofed cars, the kids on rocking horses, roller skates, the reps & flags of all the countries represented --Australia, England, Ireland, Hong Kong, France, UAE, and what's that one? Turkey? says Ken --no , Lebanon says Jen's mum (we share Middle eastern connections), --ah, Lebanon, they may have beaten France in the Rugby League World Cup the other day? Rugby? says Jen's mum, they dont win at rugby, they win at war!-- and Sophia from Brown & Bunting bookshop in Northcote visits, books not horse race conversation! --i think we're alternating the Glenlivit & the Talisker ("Made by the sea", great pun) --and a woman who's popped in says Talisker's her favourite and she's from near the Isle of Skye, and i say Mckelvie brought us this one and he's from Dundee! --she wont have one but will consider a flutter on Nakeeta the Scottish horse ive mentioned, she's going to Oaks Day on Thursday, well timed Melbourne holiday & doesn't mind this weather compared to Scotland right now, constant reminder it's all relative! -- So now it's today, THE day, we've actually had a spell of sun, but clouds are moving in again, we'll be inside anyway so doesn't really matter, coldest Cup day for a decade they say --horses on my mind, including the philosophical ethical political issue of humans & animals, my bottom line is everyone & everything is someone & something else's meat, a thought wch may have risen in a piece on Inst of Further Studies newsletter early 70s, early 80s, carumba! where does the time go except back into immense sea of mind, --all the more reason for compassion, that is the only reason for compassion, no other context for it but vale of pain, suffering, through wch no choice but to walk, gently as possible whatever the rest of 'em do --drink to that --huge wad of races' information in the newspaper, thank God for the Cup lift-out --my glory day in 2015 when my 100 to 1, Prince of Penzance with Michelle Payne in the saddle, and won me $238 for a few dollars each way! --i think ive won a little last few years -- best win would have been back in 1965 last time the Hemensleys holidayed en famille, on the Isle of Wight, ancestral Tangley Lodge grandmother's house --for me just back from British Railways booking clerk job in London, the younger sibs still at school, Bernard at the Tech or just leaving, --i'd got into the habit of having a bet with booking clerk friends at the Ladbrokes or whichever betting shop around the corner from the booking office at Watford Junction --never won, but i think my friend Nick Buck did, --he's 'Nick York' for obvious reason in my Peter Which Way novel (unpublished & somewhat scattered now) and Fred Clarke the chief clerk, in locus parentis, kind eye on all the younger staff benevolent even when i made a mess of my acting station master duties at Bricket Wood on the St Albans to Watford loop line, gave us overtime for weeks after you left Nick told me! --but one rainy afternoon of that summer holiday, last one before i hitch-hiked in Europe then went to sea and then April 66 emigrated to Melbourne! --so forgive the luminosity i attach to that Isle of Wight holiday --raining, as i say, and horse-racing on the tv, we're sitting Bernard & i and the younger brother & sister, --a great horse-woman herself, great lover of horses, as close to family as family she'd agree, --drinking beer Bernard has bought from nearest off license, and we're watching the races, and just for fun we made selections, and UNBELIEVABLY my first one wins, and then i go for a double, and that wins, and then the treble, and that wins too! --incredible-- and we'd been talking about going down to a betting shop but the rain and all the other cowardly teenager excuses! --that would have been a HUGE win! --
Sunshine again as i sit here --Melbourne Cup at Westgarth, years past, as Loretta says no one did it in those years, no one we knew anyway, --after her mother Stella's death, she'd invite her father, Jim Garvey from the typical Irish-Australian family --had horses in County Clare says Rett --grandfather, uncles --Great Uncle Michael the big punter --the 'Michael' of Tim Hemensley's name after him, Timothy Michael Hemensley --dreamt of him last night --he'd borrowed my computer wch Loretta didn't immediately tell me as i sat at desk trying to understand how the ridiculous machine before me actually worked --what is this? i demanded --it'll work she says --but this isn't my machine?!! --no, Tim's got it --whaaaaaat? --I go out to the back, shout up to him, upstairs in the loft, where he's sitting having breakfast with friends including Joel & a Matthew who i don't think is Matty Whittle --and i say to him, you could have asked! --and a bit more kindness & grace wouldn't go astray etc --ah well --but Tim would be with us on those Melbourne Cups, 80s? certainly through the 90s, --Robert K, Stella Glorie, Gay Hawkes once or twice, Frank Bren, other visitors, --we'd have lunch, snacks, wine, then all haul up the road to the nearest pub with betting facilities --the Normandy on Queens Parade? --place our bets, then hurry back to watch the race on telly --quite a crowd of us --the beginning of our tradition…
Last several years it's been at the Stingo on Hoddle in Colingwood, where we'll be again in a couple of hours! --with John, Heather Mac, and now Ray, Ken, other friends --up for it whatever it is! Here's a shaft of sun again -- Better get myself together! Ring Clementa O'Brien in Bendigo, ask her for a tip, the best tipster she is --we'll exchange news abt Catherine far far away in Vientiane but i'll have pen & paper ready for Clementa's race wisdom! --and so --Tally Ho! see youse all there!

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[from Sharon Thesen : Hi Chris, Was reading some Jack Collom (Collum?) poems today online and thought of your work...very sim'lar, in deep ways!]


‪Kris Hemensley‬ Me darlin ‪Sharon‬ (irish) (double take-- german?) Just back from the Melbourne Cup session at the Great Yorkshire Stingo in Collingwood, melb'n... real punters, us poets, and other bibs & bobs turning up including brilliant natural girl called Trish who'd seen Midnight Oil gig last night somewhere in town, the Myer Music Bowl? but i spun silly irriot story that Peter Garrett wld do his discombobulated dance at cabinet meetings, when he was the minister in the Labor govt..,etc... i did apologise to her later... just a joke i said... she'd won pretty big i think, had shouted (aussie parlance) a plate of this & that on adjacent table... Anyway--- Jack Collom : i have on loan RED CAR GOES BY  from ‪Pete Spence‬ Jack's big selected (1955-2000) and am jumping in & out of it... What can i say, and on such (Melbourne Cup) on such a day! Love youse all, especially you xxx K

‪Stephen Ellis‬ I love Jack Collom. There's an interesting interview with him in that anthology Anselm Berrigan edited, called, 'What is poetry? (Just kidding, I know you know). And then, of course, there's one of my all-time favorite poems dedicated to Collom, by Duncan McNaughton, 'Little A and the Imperials' . . .

‪  K H :Hi Stephen , thanks for that... and parallel to the poetry i'm forever moved by the relations of poets, like here you refer me to Duncan McNaughton and i begin imagining a world spinning about him & Jack Collom... i'll look through his collections later today when i get back from the Shop, will be propitious to reread even if i dont have the actual poem... I dont know about the Anselm Berrigan anthology, have just looked it up on the Ingram catalogue and it's there from Wave Books, so i'll immediately order! Sounds excellent. Ta for the tip.

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Nov 9, '17

[from Topography, 'Levertov', 3rd section]

preceding Rexroth & Williams in 1967

Penguin Modern Poets number 9 --
whom historically she followed --

forever that troika proclaimed

on Alan Spain's photogram sun-bloodied-
fired cover-design

as if feather trees & grasses back-lit by sunrise

sunset green-flecked in world's black

vortex or aflame (Creeley flits in-between

fitful as theirs must be 
poets at world's behest

fists full of world emptying like dust in

wind's rush everything falling away day in

day out but

mystically
'lost' 
is not the end-
product (pace Olson

to be found with Eliot &
Pound hob-nailed

to ground relentlessly digging

down down down

to the centre of the truth

the before & before & before

whose after's ever now! (Duncan

jumping at shadows as though natural

positives & negatives

were the shades

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Back from the Delphi, clean up the typos of the 3rd part (above), continue on the 4th (relating Levertov & ‪Joanne Kyger‬).... Beautiful day... wash clothes & hang out to dry i think! --rather like poetry on Timeline! Thanks friends for liking the 3rd --it's another of the "---> going nowhere" Topographies, what i've been doing when i'm not on an actual journey somewhere!

‪Philip Harvey‬ : Recent piece on Denise Levertov by ‪Carol O'Connor‬ given last year at the ‪The Carmelite Library‬ in Middle Park; ‪http://thecarmelitelibrary.blogspot.com.au/.../Denise...‬

K H : Thanks for sending me Carol's paper --ive read through it but will require another slow digest! Hah! Yes --it's all there, so many formal contradictions to 'play' with through a long life, wch Carol describes... Needless to say D L was a favourite when i was a young poet... my 'Levertov' deals with that --deals with it as a piece of bioboplicity (as Mike Castro described a previous rave, on ‪Lew Welch‬)... so my vanity is part of the arraignment! Thanks again!

‪Carol O'Connor‬ : Levertov is one of the very few women poets to make it into those early Penguin Modern Poets, I think.

‪Kris Hemensley‬ : Hi Carol, just to say In those days it wasnt an issue or not the issue as can be perceived today --ie we were interested in the New Poetry per se, 'gender' was to be, in hindsight, another generation's issue... a political generation's issue ... the "rights" generation... What did Denise think? Aware of being one of the few women or what? Statistically your point obviously accurate, but only later (the particular PMP vol is 1967) that the general political consciousness inflects/affects the discussion... The women of all the days up to Womens Liberation were first & foremost writers on par with the men of the PARTICULAR writing... the big fight was for the distinctively NEW WRITING.. i remember writing to Germaine for recommendations of new women poets for my magazine Earth Ship, 1970-72, in UK -- she was teaching at Warwick Univ then, -- i had her address from new writer friend, Martin Wright, very interesting prose writer, --she said there were too many to name... etc etc What happened afterwards --W L onwards i mean -- is most definitely within women's ambition & projection, and precisely where it has to be... self determination not 'positive discrimination' & etc , i mean art & literature arent departments of the public service, or what?!

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Nov 5th, '17

Best day for a train trip, Geelong, almost scuttled before we began, had to transfer to another train because of 'police operation', but resettle with coffee, escargot, notebook (for the Topography of course, & going somewhere instead of the bioboplicities -thanks Mike Castro for that title a few weeks ago!- my "going nowhere" sub series riffing the great Americans)... After the buzz of the packed-out Archibald exhibition + considerably quieter Fred Williams You Yangs mostly plein airs --i mean the crowds not the art! --walked around looking for a watering hole and finally --last chance-- found the Workers Club in a lane off Little Mallop --a live music venue with a bar! At last! sat down at bench facing through window large b&w spray painted portrait of androgynous long-hair wearing graffiti addition of green pellet hanging out of left nostril --nice touch! Coopers appeared to young barman to be off, flat as a tack he said, but the club's own Workers Draft was good he said --like a Carlton. Basket of chips with choice of three sauces. 80s bands piped into the bar. Steve Kilby. Other mildly interesting music (no wonder the harder rock returned just then, including our God boys, & Bored! et al). And then it's the Saints, bagpipes & all, Doc Neeson, "will I ever see your face again?". Now here's the thing : my pick for the Archibald is Jun Chen's portrait of Ray Hughes beaten by the Matisse-like Mitch Cairns famously criticised by John Olsen in the press, and John's own portrait by Nicholas Harding a pretty good one too --and Pru Flint's pastel beauty similarly memorable... Back home casually listening to a radio show on 3AW, singer Christa Hughes interview, closes with her "slowed down version" of the Saints song, Will I Ever See Your Face Again --Loretta says, you know that Christa Hughes is art dealer Ray Hughes' daughter? niece? granddaughter? Amazing! I'm the biggest investor in synchronicity but this takes the biscuit! What's going on?


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November 3, '17 at 7:59am ·

A great way into the new day : Denis Smith's cat (--& ive been wondering about the apparent different look of his Japanese cats and whether [if that was so] it rubs off on the style of his Melbourne cats?!) and Norman Finkelstein's lecture (on Vimeo) on the serial poem via Jack Spicer, wch in other words is about narrative or narrating (well, it is & it isnt, for me 'problematising' this & that not the issue it must be elsewhere, 'defusing or decentering the self eg) telling, wherever it may go --an invitation to expanse not really available locally? but ah, much of one's reading has been there, how one gets to here (hear!)... Ive left off listening to the lecture at the point Norman Finkelstein refers to Jerome Rothenberg's Poland 1931 (hello Mark Olival-Bartley, forgive my inconstant correspondence!)... and now gotta get on...

‪Norman Finkelstein‬ : Amazing that the video is still available. How did you come upon it, ‪Kris‬? What isn't indicated in the video is that it was a job talk--I was applying for an endowed chair at ASU (which I didn't get, but that turned out just fine). So interesting that it turns up after all these years...


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28th October, 17
20th anniversary of our friend John Anderson's death... Liz Anderson reminded us mid-winter when she was looking for the recent Puncher & Wattmann anthology which includes her brother... he's also in the Gray/Lehmann book... Twenty years... Often thinking of him, remembering him today... thought of him yday when Melbourne history tour guide & author Meyer Eidelson popped in & was reminiscing about walks & digs on the Merri Creek with Bernie O'Regan (d 1996)... John accompanied Bernie sometimes, tho mostly a solitary walker... walker, dreamer, the poet of the Merri Creek...


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21 October, 17

After the big Ashbery Tribute night, sleeping with it, waking on it, but also the Kerouac anniversary today, and up to the writing desk to begin to type the piece ive been writing around & about Desolation Angels (isnt that funny : cover of my Andre Deutsch 1st ed, '66, by Michael Farrell! --the late Irish artist? i wonder --not our poet tho!) --as i have it in first paragraph/stanza (a la 'Desolation Angels') :---
"1
July August September Melbourne winter spring 1966 spotted DESOLATION ANGELS the silver-covered whopper Andre Deutsch hardback 1st British edition --just published --had to get it, my name on it! --no name in it now as i hold it, first end-papers gone, blotched & stained, damaged survivor of a book --but that's the story to tell
2
saw it in South Yarra bookshop --often looking in the window, not window-shopping but life-saving --penniless often as not --living off the titles, name of author, sight of the book, imagining the contents --KEROUAC! --but a little while before had entered the bookshop, browsed, put aside Lin Yutang volume purchased not long afterwards --the bookshop closer to South Yarra station on Toorak Road than to Punt Road? though image in my mind is more-or-less around the corner from terrace house in Park Street where i boarded, itself a hop & skip from the Botanical gardens, my 'Gardens of Sunlight', refuge from the slings & etc, where i'd lie out all day with inspirational reading & the notebook, writing, drawing, dreaming, longing
..."

I'll type up tonight, several pages, post on blog & link on Timeline.
Yes, thoughts of Kerouac, --& i'm always disagreeing with Dorn's judgement an eternity ago that nothing more to be done in/with that mode, the proto anti-lyric i guess, mid 60s.

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Confirming & reminding : Friday, 20th October, JOHN ASHBERY TRIBUTE, 6 for 6-30 at Collected Works!
Up late last night looking for books & quotes & etc to take with me today so that I can sit pretty polly this evening as one of the panel assembled by Peter Rose for the John Ashbery Tribute at Collected Works Bookshop! In my head the beginning looms large, as beginnings always do! So out of that melange of first reading, and the wonderful coincidence of Ken Taylor (just met Winter 67 at Betty Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre) he also enthusing abt Ashbery, a particular poem & aspects of wch i'd found and revelled in, relished, --and then the Southampton,UK connections via Lee Harwood, & especially F T Prince's take,1970-72, but with FTP thru to the 90s and the years passing, the years the years, attrition, & the luminosity that dearests deaths bestows, --often the aching pleasure of life understood as on-the-run, grabbing what we can (deKooning's 'glimpse' --'glance' as opposed to full frontal model), all along till now : our Ashbery reading & talking tonight...


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Oct 20, '17


Another poignant intriguing prose-piece post from Stephen Spooner on his Timeline today, on Kerouac, see my share below... --my reply, "Thank you Stephen.... approaching that same "death afternoon" with you, 'Desolation Angels' my ride... I'll post on Saturday, finished it today at the Delphi (Greek) cafe my Thursday rostered-day-off pied-a-terre! Like very much your inside-out evocation-intersection with this hero... "The beat bop of phrenology not prediction or predestination" , yes, something to chew on tonight... Fraternally, Kris H"

--Also found this by Stephen D Edington on the Jack Kerouac Group site :--
"For those of you within hailing distance of Lowell (however you may define "hailing distance"), Lowell Celebrates Kerouac is sponsoring a Jack Kerouac Memorial Walk and Gathering this Saturday, October 21. [Jack died on October 21, 1969.] We'll meet at the Lowell Grotto at 6:00 p.m., proceed over to the site of the Moody Street "Watermelon Man" Bridge, and then go down Merrimack Street, making a stop at the St. Jeanne Baptiste Church where JK's funeral was held. We'll end up at The Old Worthen, where we'll toast Jack's memory, share thoughts on his life, etc. LCK will supply food--you purchase your own drinks. The Grotto is on Pawtucket Street just beyond the Archambault Funeral Home where Jack was waked. Hope to see some of you there!"
Thanking Mr Edington for the atmospheric itinerary. Feels like we could be there even from this far away!


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Today, Sunday 15th October, '17
 from the Cathedral to Irish Murphy's Sturt St, Ballarat, en route the Gallery... settle at table in the beautiful public bar, wall notice beside us, "Live Craic, This Weekend, Irish Folk & More! The O'Dowds 2-30 / 5-30"... Must be them by the stage... abandon their grub, begin tuning up, pipe & guitar, hybrid Celtic & country... "Bewitched" on the bar's high on the wall t.v., and then "Little Big Shots" --would the O'Dowds qualify? Big Little Shots? Little Bog Shites? Biggles Short Legs? ...First Guinness for an eternity, maybe not since previous visit to Ballarat --the huge Kevin Lincoln retrospective, winter, 2015? No, dont be daft... last Bloomsday of course! The O'Dowds, she's on piano now, Conway Twitty, belt out a Ballarat version of 'Dirty Old Town', where he met his missus... Nathan Curnow photo on poster in town for November poetry reading (N C + Geoffrey Williams)... Nathan's familiar face like the Pogues' Christmas song the O'Dowds may be ending their sound-check with. Nope --a little thing by Cindy Lauper, he announces. Yep! "Time After (bloody) Time"! Guinness drank, garlic bread eaten, time to go...


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October 10, '17 ·

Giona B. reminds us last day or so that it wld have been Franco's 80th b/day... yes... the usual exclamations, happy/sad amazement etc (And Giona Beltramettis own birthday on his dad's heels...) Saw this morning comment from Louise Landes Levi, with whom briefly corresponded some years ago, --"I think same as ever miss him, of course, reread Han Shan, brought up his name at a Beat Conference in Paris, his brilliant translation of Gary's work, then reread the whole, translator named RED PINE......x" --beautiful connection, so apt for Franco...


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October 4, '17 ·

For all of bookselling's rubs there's always the good chance of very special meetings with readers, authors, fellow poets, publishers et al... Yesterday met Jim McCue at the Shop, & quickly found out he's the coeditor, with Christopher Ricks, of the Annotated Eliot currently winning praises & prizes! Didnt know him from Adam of course so first words were his enquiring what music i was playing on poor old stereo --Hayden or late Mozart? he asked. The 'Surprise', i said. Next he said something abt the Faber edition of Eliot and we were in! into it! Wonderful crisscrossing : the Laurence Whistler glass engravings at Salisbury Cathedral --i knew the beautiful illustrations of the Eliot, but cdnt recall the etched globe he described. I'd picked up a couple of L Whistler poems along the way, also taken by Rex Whistler's paintings. L W the inventor of glass engraving as we know it, Jim enthused. I accept that completely! Enthusing about the Whistlers in a Melbourne bookshop? How good is that?!!! He mentioned Bernard Stone's bookshop in Kensington, the late Bernard Stone he said. Ah yes. My walk around town with Andrew Crozier one time, Jeremy Prynne's Brass had just been published, Andrew was 'distributing'! Talk then about the recent late poets, & Cambridge. Prynne my teacher at Cambridge he said; also Christopher Rix. But, the changing shape of universities... Hmmm... And the changing shape of cities, his London, our Melbourne (my rhetorical question --"when is enough enough?"-- gaining sympathetic hearing). I'm rarely in London these years, prefer the country for all the obvious reasons. For work, galleries, the theatre it's still his abode but less & less liveable. Hmmm. Melbourne world's most liveable city? The Metro Tunnel building site continues to grow around us, though in comparison Melbourne by far the better bet Jim reckoned. I mentioned my friendship with Frank Prince in Southampton, active from 1970 to the 90s, and Frank a protege of TS Eliot. Quoted Frank's comment, "Eliot was the better poet, what? but Pound made one want to be a poet!" wch Jim took up; the mad passions of poets, mad poets & their politics --communism, fascism, 'social credit' (--'universal wage' Jim added) etc etc. Nowt to do with left or right, i offered, --it's any & all alternative in time of crisis, all & anything imagined... I say, Henry Williamson walks from Dover to to Devon on WW1 demob, "never again" not just a slogan, it's in his bones, is compelled to alternatives (how not?)... R Jeffers, 'try all ways, dont go down the dinosaur's way... He asked after New Zealand poets, & New Zealand a place i'd like to visit, --you must he said, South Island is beautiful... If it werent for the awful price of the Eliot of course we'd be stocking it... but that's another story. He had to go to Kay Craddock's up Collins Street then. I guess if this had been earlier era Charring Cross Road then i could have closed up for half an hour and gone for a sandwich... Ah & ah....
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Jim McCue‬ : Thanks Kris: it was great to meet you and to see such an amazing stock of poetry from all over and from so many small presses. I haven't figured out the Aussie poetry scene, but it was good to see this shop-window. I went on to check out the stock at Kay Craddock, Douglas Stewart and Peter Arnold, and the (rather disappointing) *Art on the Page* exhibition at Melb U., so it was a busy day -- but I'm sorry you weren't free for that lunch.


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October 1, '17 ·

Great time this morning with the two big NGV print shows, the Jim Dine yet again and the Hokusai (wch finishes soon, --Simon Schiavoni told me y'day he'd just seen it & that was the hury-up we required). Simply want to say that Hokusai's wood block the Red Fuji had me scurrying in two directions. The first, Jim Dine's Untersberger series ----i literally mean that i could go up three flights & look at Dine's print to confirm my intuition --in particular the second of the triptych with the disembodied red beard glowing, palpitating like a sacred heart in the body of the mountain --and, simultaneously, Paul Nash's Summer Solstice there on the 2nd floor, and the Nash recalling Spencer Gore's magnificent Icknield Way painting (viewed many times during the Modern Britain show at the NGV in 2007) --Gore's sky-full-heart of sun, blood radiant over quintessential English countryside… Hokusai's picture infusing the factual mountain, albeit physically imposing, with the mystical inheritance of mythical Mt Horai…

A week or so ago at the bookshop i took advantage of Pete Spence's chatting on phone long-distance to Alan Wearne to write down the poem by Jim Dine found as i flicked through the large Collected Poems of Jim Dine --the beautiful book published by Cuneiform Press, 2015, ed by Vincent Katz, Spence had recently acquired-- poem called The Untersberger Gift, as follows :

I had spoken 
to the emperor many times,

before I saw Untersberg

Untersberg seemed to me to be the body

waiting to be opened to reveal the self

(hopefully).

'Are you courageous?' asked the Emperor.

'No, ' I said, 'but I am dazzled by beauty.'

Nature gives me the courage to persist

in my quest for the fabulous treasure inside.

Barbarossa asks me to sing for him.

The mountain opens.

His long red beard encircles me.

I have returned to silver.

I touch the red stone.

Superb, shimmering poem! In turn dazzled by beauty! (Interesting to think on that equation, courage, nature, persistence, beauty... Ah, Nash, Hokusai, Dine… Add to this our following on Facebook of Denis Smith's Japanese journey, loving his daily drawings of cats of course but also that set of photos of the little harbour overlooked by mountain…! As exhilarating as it is ominous…


_____________________________________


JEROME ROTHENBERG

I imagined introducing our Rothenberg Meet & Greet with definition of Jerome the original ethnopoetics anthologist (a move joined by Tedlock, & Tarn, & Antin & many others) , & presently the exemplary figure of the non-exclusive, --as he's observed somewhere or other that for better or for worse we're all in it together now… I interpolate : all part of global, human material; and one's ethics & politics must follow the fact of historical connection & dispersal, grievous or not, & we all have to make the best of it… Simultaneously there's Jerome the poet as well who insists a particular personal, ancestral, cultural story wch may well beg the question of same…?  But i didn't take the opportunity! John Hawke was the man for that moment… In his totally reliable account, Hawke has Rothenberg updating Pound's prospectus, & reconfiguring the modernist canon… an inspiration… yes!

Ah, Rothenberg, Rothenberg, Rothenberg, Rothenberg : a Miracle…!
As Pete Spence remarked, an historic event --most unlikely it'll be repeated, Jerome aged 85 now & Australia a long way from home, --Dianne told me she was same age (a few months difference) --i told her i knew her name well from the co-editing of Symposium of the Whole --other things as well, she said, the Picasso translation…

Collected Works bookshop a good room for the poet who made the most of it in obviously practiced way. A chronological reading, poems from the 50s,60s through the decades to now, but same template… i heard elements of Ginsberg's Howl & Kaddish in Rothenberg's Poland 1931 --that repetition, invocation, chant, emphatic intonation. Major difference would be Rothenberg's explicit humour --Rabelaisian could say, the grotesque & the absurd, so not the ironic humour around social issues which is Ginsberg's marriage of  personal & public in essentially political story, ditto Ferlinghetti & others. DADA obviously dear to Rothenberg even apart from his wonderful performance of the Hugo Ball classic sound poem, "Karawane", and the whistling whirring orange-tube number.

Stand outs of the reading were Poland 1931, the Hugo Ball, the late 80s Holocaust poems. His Beaver poem, after the Native-American, recalled Jack Collom's Blue Heron poem recently reread… He read a poem carrying dedication to Collom (if only i had the reference) at mention of wch i didn't restrain "oh dear" recognition which he immediately picked up on --who's just died, he said looking sideways to me & raised his glass which i followed, "to Jack",  --i looked  behind me where Spence was standing, caught his eye, a fan too… Jack was much more involved in ecology, said Rothenberg. --in fact i'm hardly at all, --city life not Nature --almost goes without saying, Rothenberg urban, historical, a different place to erstwhile comrades Snyder, McClure et al. He & Pierre Joris, therefore, explicating contemporary modernist practice (the post & the neo --hi there Pete!) & not principally the Ancient & the Traditional per se, honoured of course within the vis-a-vis, which i described to him as some of the big difference of opinion with Eric Mottram & English friends (Allen Fisher, Pierre…) in London, i think it was '75, after the Cambridge Poetry Festival… Two-fold disagreement : my quoting Frank Prince's "who's doing anything now [1970s] aside of John Ashbery?" wch had Eric spluttering angrily, proof (he declared) of FTP's marginality now! 'Out of touch' & 'say no more' the better version of 'moronic' & 'idiotic' which the temper of the New would naturally inveigh & construe. I spoke as square peg in round hole, still do, --experimenter as of Field, the Open, the Projective, yet couldn't & wouldn't block my ear to older music & the consequence of such sympathy, --shape, therefore, syntax, sound…
Rothenberg nodded from some way away from such recherche argument, called elsewhere then by his chaperones & new friends, --time for dinner with Australian supporters not for reprising the 60s & 70s with some Pommy bastard!
[Melbourne, 29/30-July, 2017]

*

Hm, yes, --Alan Wearne circling the subject (Jerome Rothenberg's reading, Collected Works Bookshop, 28 July, '17). Not exactly where he's at he suggests, but, ah, yes, any number of them (the New Americans) he didn't mind, could take or leave, --except, probably, Duncan, found him unapproachable… Duncan could certainly talk, i said, --talked all day when he came for lunch in Westgarth in '76 (--point out the photograph taken by the late Bernie O'Regan [d 1996], wch hangs to the side of the American shelves top my left where i'm invariably standing at the counter…Alan says he heard Rothenberg in London in 1973 --ah, the American conference there, convened by Eric Mottram --i was back in Oz by then, was it '73 or '74, --or both? two conferences? --Bernie O'Regan sent me cassette-tapes of the sessions he attended, recorded on his lap from where he was sitting, London Polytechnic? Particularly interesting to me the conversation between Duncan & George Oppen, parts of wch i transcribed for my own use, --for example, Oppen's distinguishing between political, therapeutic writing & poetry, "I do not write what I know…", how better beg the fundamental question --another line wch stuck, "I believe in consciousness, but consciousness of what?"

Alan said he recalls Robert Bly 'gatecrashing' the readings, they put him on the programme because he was there. Alan said Bly was wearing --a dress>-- no, a kaftan kind of thing! Ah, he would have, yes. Beautiful poem on or after Mirabai --but also recall Berrigan, probably following Bly to the stage, gagging to the audience, about Bly --and all in casual, first-name mode --that is, i didn't detect electricity of malice in the air --ah, says Alan, hmm, --well, i add, obviously the ideological lines were clearly known, drawn, understood, but… Ted says of Robert, man with big head hangs hat in small closet…! something like that! --maybe, man hangs big hat in small closet… I forget… and the audience laughs good naturedly. It's all on the tape. Bernie sent them from London, i played them to our old & new friends --Robert Kenny, Mike Dugan, Phil Edmonds, John Jenkins, Jim Duke, Walter Billeter, others… Other tapes i had too --Ed Dorn, Larry Eigner (he'd made for me, as a letter, reading & commenting on some of mine, his own…), Ulli McCarthy, Tim Longville ("this is fast poetry reading, folks!") --&, wch is entirely a propos, the wonderful multi-media version of Poland 1931 by Jerome Rothenberg, on the cassette-tape Black Box magazine, sound & text montage, a la John Cage's Roarotorio (after Joyce's Finnegans Wake), wch Walter Billeter copied for me, a favourite for us both --but haunted forever after by Rothenberg's rabbi-radio-klezma-muzak accompaniment of his reading --to the line & its turning, a la Olson, Duncan, Kelly et al, -- impressing his own story the while, the embellishment & run-on, all to the poem's glory! And Chris Mann asked for a lend & gave me tape of Sun Ra as insurance, but i never got my Rothenberg back! And years later Tim Hemensley stole the Sun Ra, when he was in his teens, making his own music by then! Hah!

I told this to Jerome as he stood at the counter at end of the Meet & Greet event --Chris Mann? Ah, yes, he said, remembering something, smiling.
The Shop, house of spirits as it is, as every house is, when truly lived in, concentration of living, like a poem's energies inhering after the intense deposit that writing is, available therefore to similarly intense excavation, exhumation, that is reading, --writing written into & across time by sheer intensity… --"this fabled place" Jerome said when he rose to speak after John Hawke's talk & Joan Fleming's poems, --'fabled' because fellow poets know the Shop & mention it, like Mark Olival-Bartley in the American Poetry Institute in Munich, who urged Rothenberg to visit if ever he came to Melbourne --maybe others, ---Joris? --if they're still connected (after the Millennium anthologies why wouldn't they be?) --Joris reminded of us here by English friends Paul Buck, Glenda George?


[August 1st, 2017, Melbourne]

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, Number 12, September, 2010

Melbourne
16 November/ 30 December, 2009

Dear Bernard,

I've begun watching the DVD of Richard Lerner's What happened to Kerouac? --such an inspiration when I saw it on the big screen in 1987. You remember the story --Retta & Tim caught it in Sydney, on their holiday with Anna Couani, same time as I saw it in Melbourne, and we all loved it --in my case, literally bounding the few miles home from the Valhalla cinema in Richmond --for the relief of it as much as anything --that the Beat life & literature had survived despite the tragic rise & fall of the chief protagonist, and was even now inspiring. I confess, though, the monster fan I'd been in the Sixties had taken a political hit from Kerouac's own, apparently reactionary, mouth in '69 when I read Vanity of Duluoz in Melbourne, and then received an aesthetic broadside in England, after reading Ed Dorn's comment in New American Story (Grove, 1965, bought from one of George Dowden's sales), that "Kerouac took care of all of what the informal range of the personal ruminator can do with our material. He continues to do so. I value his writing very much. But it is only partly satisfying. His syntax is quite dull. It allows the use of the 'I' only one device(...) But the limited presence is perhaps our greatest problem." (1963)
But, back to the film, what a buzz! I was totally energized, like Ray Smith emulating Japhy, running down the mountain --the method we learnt ourselves from Dad, as kids, --Isle of Wight summer holidays --to trust the momentum, without thought &, therefore, self-consciousness & fear! (And years passed before I tried that again --around Port Campbell (S.W. Victoria), goat-footed down the rocks & gullies, early '90s with Cathy. Must be time again for another such descent --which is a bit like saying, time I had another flying dream!)
Young acquaintance James Hamilton leant me the DVD --and it occurs to me he may be thinking of just such a project regarding the Melbourne '60s La Mama poetry scene --like, "What happened to Buckmaster (& Co.)?" The scope could & should be expanded, though the earlier one goes the less likely the subjects will be alive. This was underlined for me recently with the death of Alan Murphy. I'd hoped to conduct a formal (publishable) interview with him, informed by numerous chats we had when he visited the Shop --we'd reconnoitre his memories of WW2 & after, the '50s & '60s Melbourne scene, which I delightedly realized connected to my own forays, since the '80s, into alternative histories.

*
One of the gifts of What happened's second viewing is John Clellon Holmes' conception of Kerouac as "a prose experimenter of consequence who can be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce." The context for Kerouac's originality, says Holmes, is "The interaction of imagination & reality [which] is the source of all literature (perhaps not the Goncourt Brothers or those Realists, Naturalists, whom no one reads) in which the personality of the author, the consciousness of the author, the point of view of the author, never gets into the book."
No shock of the new when it's enjoyed or suffered half a century of amelioration! One needs, therefore, this kind of literary reminder of Kerouac's stylistic novelty. Even I tend to normalize the style as 'talk-write', familiar now in the contemporary practice of both literature & the variety of non-fiction. But when Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied on piano by Steve Allen, you hear the jazz of it --and it's the music of his language, as tho' poetry, which impresses --the texture resembling the process of remembering as well, perhaps, as the way jazz is constructed.
None of that in Bukowski whose talking-writing is more or less as-it-comes but, to use blog-lingo, he's always 'on topic'. Bukowski's facility is that ear-&-tongue craft which knows & trusts to the natural succession, succinctly deployed. No associational runs or fields, nor need there be for the writer narrator he is --just what is, what happened, what happened then, & then...

*
I'm reminded of Bukowski's great little piece on Neal Cassady as I watch the footage of Cassady & Ginsberg at City Lights Bookstore in 1965. "his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo-bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade." (Notes of a Dirty Old Man; City Lights, '69.)
In the footage, Ginsberg's stoned silly, wanting to ameliorate his friend's hostility to the young counter-culture audience. They're in front of a camera amongst a crowd you'd bet were its subscribers. Cassady ("where's the fee?" he says, as though to provoke any hippy anarchists present) can't settle. He's awkward, agitated, speedy, as if compelled to be on show --nervous as one's read of Ken Kesey or Kerouac himself come to that --nervous to express opinion. He resorts to what sounds like parody of Burroughs & Kerouac paranoia & cynicism : "All the extremists, all the civil rights, all the kids, anybody on any side(...) this is all hindsight what we're talking about --it's already too late --the Pentagon's taking care of all... they're killing us all deliberately..."
Ginsberg burbles : "Well, that's the point -- I have no idea who's running the country..." (It's only the point if running the show's important --our holy man's political shadow or his share of politics' own shadow.) As for Cassady --never an easy place to speak outside & think against the consensus. Much reason, therefore, to be jumpy.
Bukowski perceives Cassady as Kerouac's boy : "you liked him even though you didn't want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn't Neal's mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise."
Now what a can of worms that is. Off the top of my head : the ethics of attribution however complicit or acquiescent the assignee; the double edge of exemplarity; the downside of fulfilling the mythic life however transformative its promise...

*
I'll close on an entirely optimistic & beautiful note --namely, the letter from Henry Miller to Kerouac's publisher at Viking, written October 5th, 1958, reproduced in the 50th Anniversary (American) edition of The Dharma Bums (Viking, '08), which Karl Gallagher, another Dharma Bum I assure you, recently showed me. (As I understand it, your British edition has Ann Douglas's introductory essay but no letter from Miller, which is a pity.)
The line we always felt existed, as far-flung readers & enthusiasts, between Henry Miller & the Beats --though aspects of Miller also obviously resonate in Bukowski : the pariah-worker novels --Miller's Molloch, for example, a first cousin of Post Office , Ham on Rye, etc. --is here joyously underlined.
The Dharma Bums was the first Kerouac novel Miller read. His letter ripples with praise with praise & enthusiasm. He's led to say that Kerouac "is the first American writer who makes me feel optimistic about the future of American letters. Whether he is a liberated individual I don't know, but he certainly is a liberated writer. No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline." After many similar compliments, Miller concludes, "Others run out of 'material' sooner or later. Kerouac can't. He's all there is, because he's identified himself with everything, material or non-material, and with the silence and the space between. We've had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac. He doesn't throw dust in your eyes... he sings. "God, I love." Take hope, you lost ones --Jack's here!"

All best wishes for the New Year!
love,
Kris

oOo


Weymouth,
25th August, 2010

Dear Kris, Yer 'tis -- the letter that's been so long coming. I think you'll understand that I was absolutely swamped by family events. It was so difficult coping with looking after Mum as she declined following her fall last July (2009) and fracturing her left hip -- which impeded her mobility -- wheel-chair, zimmer frame and stair-lift. And then her Alzheimers.
Everything passes she said. And now she has -- April 3rd. And slowly, slowly I emerged. She released me from her for the second time. It was truly cathartic. Now I'm flowing and blossoming like never before. And I'm ready, and up for getting back to being a Dharma bum.
Having said that, I'm curtailing this correspondence for now. It certainly sustained me. Your letters kept the light flickering within me. I did tell you that it hadn't gone -- that it was still there! But now I fully understand things in my heart instead of in my head -- that poetry can save you, And what is working for me at the moment is the new initiative with my publishing. Stingy Artist Editions lives.
I've not had the head or feeling to publish anything since 1996 --14 years --& now everything --including the publishing --is flowing again. It started with my poems for Mum in July (4 Poems, i. m. Berthe Tawa). And because of that I thought of two further projects. One, for Franco Beltrametti -- a folded broadside -- two of his letters to me -- facsimile -- & two poems I'd written for him. The other publication is for dear friend Marilyn Kitchell --I wonder where she is? --a similar thing --but a folded card. In total I've got plans for a dozen or so publications between now & the end of next year. I'll be ready for 2012!
Big Dharma explosion? Where will the Bums take us? Reminds me of Franco's poem, Crucial Matters (to Robert Creeley), in Three for Nado, by Franco, which I published in 1992 :

come here
see it in print
keep it together
give me a break
and never be done
with all of it

hummingbird
on snapdragon

(?. VI.89)

We'll never be done with any of it! Anyway, Dharma brothers forever!

Love,
Bernard

________________________________________________

ON JOHN MATEER'S SOUTHERN BARBARIANS

Such presence in John Mateer's Southern Barbarians (Zero Press, Johannesburg, 2007), bolstered by plenty of first person and maybe that's the reason it's so pleasurable to read --first person & present tense & what I'll record as whole sentences. Post-colonialism or Mateer's post-colonialist reflex is part & parcel of this book as it has always been in his oeuvre, and I'm not sorry to say that it irks me politically & poetically! Naturally, ideas & narratives are interwoven here as with every writing, so it's almost passe to say that ultimately "attitude" doesnt reduce the collection's pleasure, and what provokes thought & reaction, as Mateer's writing does, should be music to one's ears...
Regarding whole sentences --what a relief after contemporary poetry's inexhaustible anthology of fragment & discontinuity! I dont, of course, mean the single words & phrases, rhythmic explosions or embellishments, abundant in poetry, guaranteed to either shake up patter or create another timbre. More so, the attenuation of thought & address in favour of the flatly annotated inventory which has overseen a relegation of the very discoursive language John Mateer resourcefully indulges. Sometimes what one wants is a narrator and not a breathless reporter --sentences to breathe in and to hear poet hold breath, that is nerve, as narrator.
Southern Barbarians is another of Mateer's non-commercial books from Zero, the collectively run South African little press, the second since The Ancient Capital of Images (FACP, 2005), which in turn was his fifth major collection.
Ten, fifteen years since I first met him & his work. A double emigrant, as I was also, in a way --he, young South African living in Western Australia, exiled to the extent that the Apartheid republic was an impossible homeland and the new South Africa no less difficult, come to Melbourne in what seemed a steady flow of West Australians to our seemingly greener fields --Philip Salom, Marion Campbell, Micheal Heald amongst others. And I, half English in England after infancy in Egypt, then English migrant to Melbourne. Apart from the Alexandrian heritage through my mother, I had South African Huguenot (grandmother Rose Waterina de Vaal) on my father's side. We've talked about this as some kind of actual basis for an outsiderness we may share as poets in Australia --agreeing about the need for an international perspective, sharing enthusiasms for art & artists, disagreeing about the status of American poetry & poets, courteous about one's politics & religious beliefs!

*

"What is another English word, he mused, that rhymes with sadness?" (p11, Southern Barbarians) The protagonist is Xanana, probably the first president & now prime minister of the independent East Timor... Another English word? Gladness? Badness? Madness? Depends how strong you want the rhyme. Plenty to echo "ess" --"less", for example. But that would be an odd word for this poet of baroque expansion, of a conceptual & verbal density that makes the most of every morsel of the matter that comes to hand.
John Mateer is the poet behind that hand. One'd like to say, the Noh-actor's fan-fluttering hand or as thief passing on the gen, shading mouth with quicksilver fingers, or the spy, happy to be identified as either of the others --except that Mateer's already given us as disquieting a narrative as could hang on an image in The Ancient Capital of Images : he comes to us as the poet of the grotesque white hand...
The scenario is fraught : "The poet, a New South African, holds his fist out to me. / I extend mine to meet his, our knuckles snug as in a knuckle-duster. / "Welcome home," he says, swaying his fist back to his chest, his heart. / I do likewise, but feebly, and mutter, "This is strange..." // Earlier he'd told of when they'd razed his grandmother's house with her inside. / In the interrogation he'd been asked, "What do you think of your comrades now?" / And he had shouted back: "Every revolution has its casualties!" / But when in gaol, alone, he wept for her for the first time. // I look at my hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing. / Why without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?" ("Ethekweni, #1, The Poet", p 11)
The black fighter's belated tears hardly expiate the immorality of the revolutionary modus operandi. (I also squirm, recalling the justifications one uttered, as an anti-Vietnam War activist, for a similar level of atrocity.) But the white poet's mae culpa --and the poem of & as mae culpa-- is dishonoured in that degree of self-abnegation. Political guilt has become pathology. Fair enough, as they say, it's only a line in a poem in one of the three recent books and, of course, its author is the brilliant maker of the fictions stimulating one here, but this colour consciousness, so candidly expressed, is the failure of person that distorted logic always produces. The mis-perception --typical of John Mateer's candor --mocks the intelligence one's want to trust of the visionary poet, where the quality of perception is the measure of truth. Mateer's rhetorical question might well be truth to the person which poem forms, but only transiently like a thought best let pass, as Buddhists would have it. Existence is not a contortion, nor is its poetry. And self-excoriation is not humility...

*


John Mateer is the author of this book of questions even as he is one of its characters. It is a Portuguese book of questions necessarily skirting the adopted & natal countries previously encountered in his work. However both Australia & South Africa continue to be impugned in a serious & lyrical interrogation of the first person & several personae.
Mention Portuguese and English-language readers will pronounce the name Pessoa. And Pessoa meets us in the epigraph ("I write to forget") & every so often in the book. Southern Barbarians (and who are they? Australians? South Africans? 16th Century Portuguese?) is a Pessoan book if the slipping in & out of legal & imagined selves is a further meaning of the increasingly invoked 20th Century European master --a quality one identified in all things Borges too in the ever so recent past. But fantasy it isnt since spectral shivers & metaphysical speculations arent Mateer's purpose. Rather, it's history & politics, the burden of knowledge, in the already full rucksack of our peripatetic existentialist --as though doomed to wandering as the price of revelation. History & politics not so much counterpointed by the erotic as punctuated by it --a chapter in itself in the eventual Mateer monograph. (Regarding eroticism in its explicitly sexual form, it's instructive that one poem here, "Heard in a geijin-house in Kyoto" (p48), isnt about the contrast between fucking & masturbation, which would be juvenile to say the least , but its receipt as language; thus the difference for this poet between Japanese --a traveller's "gagged whispers" --& Brasilian --"the woman's urging in that tongue / I love, of slurs and growls and lisping" --requiring eroticism's necessary conclusion in what should be the poet's rhetorical question, "Is that what makes of my listening a poetry?")
And history & politics also feeds his fine topographical lyricism...
Compelling, marvellous, but that irk will not leave me as sympathy for the poems leads me closer than I like to the post-colonial attitude I almost always find wearisome as polemic & gratuitous as poetry (either the only point of the poem or an unwieldy embellishment)... Much more of it in Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost (Zero Press, 2006) than the present collection, and particularly annoying because of the juxtaposition of the mellifluously insightful and the stridently pat. "Composition of Unease" (p15) a perfect example : "With the deceptive ease that the Dutch / swapped Manhattan for a now forgotten isle laden with cloves, / the biochemistry in my brain catalyzes / the enormity of ice-blue sky between downtown skyscrapers / into a sensationism of memories and concepts, / the question of the composition of this unease: / For what may Ground Zero be exchanged?"
Whoa!... For what may Ground Zero be exchanged? How about the Twin Towers & three thousand lives? How about Bin Laden's head? What is Mateer's question but naive poeticism, a quirk of the brain of the poet's biochemistry? It could simply be pure contempt for the USA, for the West --in which case, why not dance on the monster's grave and spare us the tease? (Sometimes a poet must surely overcome the compulsion to write another poem!) Gripped by the narrative finesse of the opening line; gnashing my teeth at the last!
The 2006 chapbook wears post-colonialist stripes on its globe-trotting narrator's combat-jacket! The Aussie-South African's "I,being Americanized" ("Empire", p9) is the manner in which the subject problematizes the conventional first person, yet it's also the means by which subject is let off the hook, seduced by rhetoric (Gold Coast bikini'd chherleaders, astroturf, moon flag)... In "The College Girl as Cypher", she's code for America, obviously ("bountiful college girl among bored nations"), and owns sufficient particularity ("bounding along in your new sneakers, / your wit openly declared on your t-shirt") for the cliche to work --but "Desire / streamlined, sans memory" is cliche colluding with cant. Recalls Gertrude Stein's quip, possibly riposte for that earlier era's European tub-thumping, that one ought not forget America is the oldest country of the modern world, a comment stronger now with the conflation of America & global modernity. Mateer's "Americanization" is as quaint as post WW2's "coca-cola-ization" in this time of the world wide web & the satellite-dish. Arguably, his earnest, rather than zealous, post-colonialism delivers as recherche a sensibility as its other side, the unselfconscious colonial, the unabashed imperial, and is as emphatically upstaged by history as Malcolm Lowry's tragic, dipso consul in Under the Volcano, and for all his perspicacity, any protagonist of Graham Greene's, whose foreign correspondences might be as hummable now as Noel Coward!
Irony, of course, that the erstwhile Developing World (--oh yes, developing into modernity, which is the psychology behind "everyone wants to be an American", thus Ed Dorn, the first of the Anglo-American New Poetry's post-colonials, calling the shots in The North Atlantic Turbine (1967)) doesnt distinguish between one American (Australian, British, South African, European...) & another. Indisputable too that Chinese & Indian have joined Japanese & Korean et al in modernity's new imperial order, who're recognized for what they are everywhere in the "developing world" despite the non-white camouflage... Doesnt John Mateer wonder how it could be that post-colonialist poet & friend are greeted "Hey snowflakes..." ("Salutation Heard up in Harlem", p17)? Isnt Harlem's 'greeting' the racial underpinning of that recently surpassed epoch (post-colonialism) which might henceforth be applied to the entire motley of perceived & attributed trespass? Of course, the pungency's retained either side of the snipe but the Great Wheel keeps spinning and the arguments flap dizzy as 16th Century Portuguese circumnavigator's sailcloth in each qualitatively different sphere.
Yet, "First Person"(p12) tenders Mateer's identity question's classiest pun. "Barns and schools and houses hovered over the harvested fields / as he spoke, hesitant parenthesis around his words, / that Mesquakie telling of what was before the Americans." Poem reports rather than bewailing or heavying the message. Poet is the listener whose heart & mind the reader is trusted to understand, and so the first line's imagery guilessly combines environment & occasion of vital communication & political sentiment. One's given the crucial contradiction of the collection : listener & teller. "I have inadvertently been born as karaoke." ("Thoughts of Employment", p27) : the paradox at the heart of lyrical poetry.

*

So...Southern Barbarians is John Mateer's Portuguese book. I cant remember another collection where he has been as enlivened. Traveling always has this affect upon him, 'grounding' his rootlessness, but Portugal & the Portuguese is more than ambient here (--in the previous collection, "metaphysics funked-up by a black college band / on a corner of Michigan Avenue where the whole of Chicago is musical theatre", no more than travel-writer's tic-tac, and there's some of that in Southern Barbarians too) : it's what home often is --the place from which to resist, the mind-set with which to resist & re-engage with the questions of the world.
If Pessoa is the Portuguese book's predictable node, guarantor of the plural identity, implying its own negation ("I am your own surviving heteronym", p17), then Luis de Camoens (Camoes) as the figure of the once glorious Portuguese Empire, glorifier of the great mariner, Vasco da Gama, in his epic poem, The Lusiads, is our own wanderer's barely known (like all our classics) guiding star... And Portugal is where the racial & ethnic stereotypes besetting the poet are lost in a new tempo. Portugal, only two or three decades beyond its own fascist dictatorship at home, its colonialism in Africa & Timor, is an aroma, a taste, & a tongue from which he has created fantastical wings. In this Portugal, Mateer can securely be a native, in his case African; that is, where the contortion meted upon the poet's soul by politics & psychology can conjure paradise of weirdest paradox. Portugal, where he's confrere to the Mozambicans & Angolans, who doubtless suffered at the hands of these same Portuguese, who jib the Afrikaaner on his father's sins...
From the beginning John Mateer has spoken as an emissary of African writing. I remember him telling me about the prodigious Tatamkhulu Africa -- the equal of Senghor & Cesaire & a school text in England now. "I am reliving Uncle's poems -- They people the streets / with slaves named by the hinterland, Afrikas ..." ("Uit Mantra", p7; The Ancient Capital of Images) --Tatamkhulu, the "grandfather" of the new South Africa's African poetry... Fully realizing now the complexity of Tatamkhula's ethnicity & personality, I can perceive Mateer in a self-creation that recalls Tatamkhula as a reflecting mirror. And what a complexity : Egyptian boy whose parents were Arab & Turk, fostered at age two by a Christian family in South Africa after parents death, who appeals his "white" status at age thirty and chooses "coloured", and in later life, whilst involved in the guerilla war against the apartheid regime, adopts Islam as an Arabic-Afrikaans Chan dialect speaker.
If that incredible pot-pourri can be African then surely the African John Mateer can be Australian or Mexican (Spanish or Indian) (see the "That I Might be Mexican" section, p21-32, Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost) or Japanese (where I suspect his Zen yen has taken him) or Portuguese as seen in the new book.
Of course, born of the complex, through complexity the only way to go...The problematised subject may always be John Mateer's self-representation although the defining language will surely change. The Post-colonial with its anti-Western reflex has provided the poet with a ticket to negotiate the complexity, but evidently so does his immersion in palpable life, all around the world, which is how & where I feel his gift will continue to prosper. And I wonder if he'd agree that ultimately Tatamkhulu's dictum is better than all the isms strung together : "Poetry must stem from the self, not outside the self. Indeed, it records the landscape of the heart, not the mind."


--Kris Hemensley,
November, December 2007/ January 2008