21st October: On this day in 1969, Jack Kerouac died...

"21st October: On this day in 1969 Jack Kerouac died. The Lonesome Traveller. Among friends & allies here in Heaven." Our notice up on the wall at Collected Works Bookshop, 21-X-16.

[Facebook post: On that day, the day after, the morning after? the Hemensleys were visiting George Dowden in Brighton, up from Southampton for a couple of days. I'd begun corresponding with George as editor of little mag, Our Glass, in Melbourne, '69. Found his Letters to English Poets in Mike Dugan's collection in '68, which gave me a postal address. What more does a boy in the sticks require?! Anyway, cut to the chase Hemensley! George took us around the corner from his fine apartment to meet Bill Butler, fellow American, at Bill's Unicorn Bookshop. Bill was fetching us a cuppa or finding a book to show, something like that, but he returned with the newspaper, New York Times, the Herald Tribune? Oh my, he was saying, have you seen this, Jack Kerouac died. Took the wind out of our sails.
George burrowed into his shoulder bag, fetched out a note book. Ive got a new notebook, he said. This'll be the first entry I make in it. Bill Butler kind of drew himself even taller than us and said, cuttingly, I always thought one only wrote small things in small notebooks.
Ye-es. Hmmm.
On the subject of Kerouac... infinite. On the subject of Bill Butler, great little shop, nice catalogues, central to the Brighton scene. I liked him, his Americana poems. Not everyone did. I recall Andrew Crozier generally congratulating the particular issue of my English mag. Earth Ship, in '70 or so, but particularly objecting to Bill's poems. (I'll take this opportunity to reread him now; I mean Bill. Andrew's a constant though wasnt always for me...) And on the subject of George... what happened to George? Bibliographer of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s, prolific on the little mag scene. I shared poems he sent to Melbourne with other little mags. He corresponded with Charley Buckmaster; Charles hoped to get across to England.  I have some poetry on this in the book Kent MacCarter's publishing soon...
Yep! This has to be Heaven!


*

re- John Thorpe

John Thorpe is always ''descending from history''. He brings one back --to Pound (Canto II, "…Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "), that is to say, to the poetry able to listen &, whatismore, hear. He brings one back to the instant which is always local --to logography ("is the language of changing yr mind. It was not discovered by Pound (who called it ideogram) or Olson, etc it's so primary only kids & a very few writers have been able to equal -- 'english' being full of alphabetic, syllabic & prosodic reflexes."), that is to say, to writing as a way of being human, which realises & manifests nature, extending the possibility of life, enhancing the precondition, never setting out to be 'literary'.

John Thorpe is always descending from history into the present, the instant, the local, which really is the opposite of making the local etc. historical. What does he mean, "changing yr mind"? : "I make space-time. IT is not making it. (….) If i describe a condition, it changes. Or i hope to hell it does. If it didn't I'd be in trouble & I have been."

*

re- George Dowden

From This Is the Land of the Dead, The island of the Blessed, published by Hapt (Bournemouth, UK), 1970,

This is the Land of the Dead, the Island
of the Blessed

There is no Ship of Death - no where
to go but here

Here are the sweet-smelling trees, the gems
of the Earth are flowers, stones, a palace
is in the center - it is you, it is I,
that's all to know for beginning

*

Dowden's Ship of Death is a companion of John Thorpe's "Stranger in Paradise" --from Matter, or giving (Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, N.Y., '75), "we came here on the 'Stranger in Paradise.' These were americans searching ease in the orient, never leaving Paradise, their ideological capitol, to look at the earth."

Literature is their prehistory. They swear that no more will they be led astray. (Though one wonders what's happened to that resolution in Dowden's most recent publication (three works by Kaviraj [George Dowden], published as loot 1 : 3, 1979, UK), praise poems for Muktananda, which are sopping wet with sub-Beat adoration.)

*

At the beginning, Dowden was one of the poets I found in Michael Dugan's treasure-trove of English little magazines. Or, at the beginning, in Melbourne, there was Michael Dugan, with his treasure-trove of English little-magazines, through which I rummaged at his home in Canterbury… Or, at the beginning, I was in Melbourne, putting my first little mag, Our Glass, together, when Ken Taylor, in some excitement, told me about & then showed me another little magazine, Crosscurrents, emanating from completely outside of our La Mama cafe-theatre circuitry. It was produced by Michael Dugan from his home in Wentworth Street, Canterbury. For at the beginning I was an English poet in Melbourne, who reconnected with the English scene through fortuitous meeting with Michael Dugan, whose treasure-trove of English little-magazines had inspired him to publish his own, Crosscurrents, & confirmed me in my own Roneo style direction!
George Dowden's poems in an issue of Ambit had caught my eye. I found his address somewhere amongst Michael's things. I wrote to him (& to Jeff Nuttall, & Simon Cutts). He replied, with poems, "(…) from my current 'set' called EARTH INCANTATIONS (Body Chants) - Blake, "O Earth, O Earth, return!" Etc. These have been my work through 1968-69, and are proving of interest to editors in a number of countries, underground papers as well as poetry magazines. I hope you will be able to get them into papers or mags or your own roneo series there. (….) Hope this catches you before you sail [back to England via French Polynesia, the Panama, Martinique, Madeira, Marseilles, departing Sydney August, '69]. Good luck to your group, and on your trip…" (27,VII.69)

At my farewell party, given by Betty Burstall, July '69, I distributed poems by George Dowden, & Michael, similarly, poems by Jim Burns. We were four La Mama poet-editors, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Ian Robertson & myself. Buckmaster corresponded then with Dowden. Dowden negotiated an Australian issue of the English magazine, The Curiously Strong, to be edited by Buckmaster. Dowden sent copies of his books to Ken Taylor (at the ABC, the 'safest' address!) for distribution 'for everybody'. And so on…

It seemed to me, in '69, '70, that Dowden's poetry, his Blake/Ginsberg epistles, could be a stimulus & elevation in the level of political-poetic address then being attempted in Melbourne by such poets as Charles Buckmaster, Paul Adler, & Geoff Eggleston. Both Ian Robertson & Buckmaster were enthusiastic to publish him. Dowden (an American living in England, teaching, writing Ginsberg's bibliography for New Directions) was closer to the Melbourne aspiration, was more accessible than Michael McClure for example.

*

George Dowden to K.H., "Had weird letter from GREAT AUK Chas. Buckmaster. I got Fred Buck to do an Aussie issue of THE CURIOUSLY STRONG, sent a couple of samples to Chas, told him choose 3 or 4 poets there and make up (edit) the whole thing as per the way it's laid out. Said a few words I thought were encouraging, like poetry should be really strong, dangerous, etc., things I thought they were after and were finding in my poems they were praising -- he took it all wrong, thought I was trying to tell him what to write, but was only trying to impress on him the idea of making a really strong issue in his editing (what else?). It must have been that I honestly told him I didn't care for a few little poems he included in letter, wanting me to get published for him --I told him to make them better in THE CUR. STRONG. Oh, well, sensitivity and all that. I explained that 'known' poets when asked for criticism/opinion can only give it from what they want and are doing -- the younger takes it or leaves it (same as in my LETTERS TO ENGLISH POETS, 1967, where I say that they are firstly for me, and only secondly for anyone else who wants to listen). Forget it. Nothing serious. But must be understood: when one is asked for opinion, he does the younger poet no good by lying…." (30. I. 70)

"Yes, overemphasis on description in aussies -- must be a nice place to describe, physically, Pacific, the sun, greenery. But hoping that can be fused with saying something vital -- will be in best, always is (where Pound is so good so often)…." (7. II. 70)


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

Quoted from Being Here, the draft of its first part, Interference, published in the Being Here issue of H/EAR #7, 1985.

THE BEACH REPORT : Third Season, 2015-16

13-9-15


Now I'm one of the old men with thin legs in long shorts by the sea…


[Journal :

I had in mind to write a paragraph about the old men, which would then refer to Bill Downing as the oldest of them as per his visit to the Shop a few days ago*. Ive been thinking about him as one of the many characters around La Mama (the place and, importantly, the Poets Workshop, the poetry sheets, little mags, poetry readings, meetings) ca '68/'69. For example, have begun piece about Paul Smith describing our dispute about self-immolation political protest, wch i'd mocked in poem & he'd responded, rebuked me. May well refer to Garrie Hutchinson's reconnoiter of Vietnam War era in his book from '99 wch ive  picked up again recently. Ive described Michael Dugan in the Paul Smith piece --Michael being our reporter from the Melbourne front during '68 when we met, filling us in on all the history other side of Loretta's red flagging & Eltham lore i'd learnt through '67, thus Geoff Eggleston, Paul, Meher Baba, home grown mysticism, Beats etc… Michael prime candidate for retrieval, certainly as a character (a figure) and surely a place for his poetry as well…
Time doesn't stand still when one's youthful/active. It does later --a chance to recuperate, retrieve, right the wrongs…

*Saturday, 5-9-15
Bill Downing dropped in & then without goodbye shuffled out. Returned a few minutes later to ask me how he cld use his mobile phone to get money! I wouldn't have a clue of course so i took him to see Mary Farrugia next door. Introduced him to Mary & explained the problem and she & her customers said we shld go to the 7Eleven!  Down in the lift we went, luckily no one in their shop & they were able to explain Bill needed 'sim card' & ID & etc. Said we shld find Vodaphone shop in Bourke Street… I suggested to well & truly baffled Bill it was too complicated & that we shld now ring his wife who might then be able to come to the City? Upstairs at the Shop again i rang her (Bill knew how to locate her phone number on his mobile), explained the situation, and she said he wld have to return home & she'd help him from there! So off Bill went to catch the train. Loretta said i'm 'very kind'. Let's hope people are as kind when we're old i said. Which is the truth of it…]


oOo


Sunday, October 4th, '15


The third season begins.
Corp on cell behind me, appropriately disembodied voice : "Harry? Harry? You're dropping out. I cant hear you." But I can amigo!
God help us!
OK, it's behind me, literally. Focus instead upon the white sand & placid sea & cloudless blue sky from umbrella-less chair & table on the esplanade.
First weekend in October's pre-summer heat wraps around old bones like The Past --the past, as aggregate of equanimity that is --as --as just this, --this sea-side, --this sea-side note-book jotting, as though all perfect unbounded Mind. Then, across the sand, down to the sea and first immersion!
Cold, predictably, but not like some occasions previous summer's end. It's approaching midday & I'm the only bod in the sea, old or young. Old or young same difference in swimming togs in the sea.
Head under the water, can claim real swim now. Kick legs behind me, eyes wide open dead man's float.
Tread around small rocks on pleasantest gradation, seaweeds bobbing.
Then sudden return to the sand and stand for blissful minutes in comparative tropics --hah! --as it always was for English migrant, remember first Melbourne autumn & winter, 1966, --such cold as English made summer of…
Now ah & ah…

I.M. BETTY BURSTALL, 1926-2013

I'm looking at Nicole Emanuel's photograph of Betty Burstall from 2005, reproduced for Sonia Harford's valedictory article in The Age (June 18, '13), "Melbourne mourns 'La Mama' of contemporary theatre scene". The photo's taken from low down, looking up into Betty's sunny face, artfully juxtaposed with a Charles Blackman girl on the nearside wall, suggesting perhaps that Child is judge of Age, its grave beauty, coursing the years, secure finally in the septuagenarian bloom. Inset in the frame is a pic of Betty sitting at one of the original La Mama cafe-theatre's signature small  tables, candle in bottle & steaming coffee before her, this from the first flush of La Mama news worthiness…

Another : Betty in her twenties, sitting on bush grass & wild flowers beside sprawled Tim in the cover-photograph of Memoirs of a Young Bastard : The Diaries of Tim Burstall, November 1953 to December 1954, the superbly produced Miegunyah Press volume, published in 2012 ('introduced & annotated by Hilary McPhee with Ann Standish'), and though it's a mid '50s pic I'm struck  that she looks exactly as I remember her in the '60s --same curly brown hair, head-scarf, bursting with vitality, and a mixture of querulousness & determination in her eye --that thinking, critical, intelligent eye on the world. Ditto the '70s when we met up again after the Hemensleys' years in England, --& the '80s when she was en route to Greece or returning, trading in Greek textiles. A painter now, the artist she'd probably always been --recall the set of earthenware mugs she presented to us for our wedding in '68 (included in the huge trunk of mostly poetry books we took to England with us, on the long voyage late '69 on the French cargo-boat through New Caledonia, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Panama, Martinique, Madeira, to Marseilles & home)-- supplying us, at Collected Works bookshop, with postcard reproductions of her own town & country Australian & Greek-island paintings…

One day at the Shop (in Smith Street, Collingwood), mid '80s, catching sight of an issue of my mag, H/EAR, Betty asked about its production (silk-screen cover, mimeographed A-4 pages, filled with poetry, commentary, correspondence) & straightaway decided it was important & required sponsorship! She invited me to her Palmerston Street, Carlton  house for breakfast with Arthur Boyd. Evidently in the interim she'd shown him the mag. When I called on her, a little coyly I must say, Arthur was already there & casting his eye over Betty's paintings, praising & encouraging. I told him I'd been to his house in Highgate around 1970/71, invited by Garrie Hutchinson, one of the 1969 La Mama alumni, who'd house-sat while Arthur was in Portugal overseeing the production of tapestries based on his paintings. I vividly remembered the tapestries hanging over the bannister all the way upstairs. Fifteen years later here we were meeting! Arthur asked me about my magazine's form & direction, particularly interested in the art & poetry interaction and the historical chronicling. Reaching into his jacket pocket he peeled off a wad of notes & pressed them into my hand, wishing the mag & I the best of luck. The arrival of Betty's daughter-in-law, Sigrid Thornton, signalled the end of breakfast.

The particular issue of the mag enabled by his patronage happened to contain my interview with Pete Spence mainly about art, particularly Pete's hostility to what he contended was Nolan, Boyd & co's monopoly of Australian critical attention -- Pete's critique was consistent with the opinion & interest of many of us in favour of the marginalised practice in all the arts. Although aware I was biting the hand that feeds, I couldn't censor the interview. Dutifully I sent copies of the issue to Betty & Arthur but never heard back from either… Apart from passing in the street, perhaps the last time I saw Betty was with Tim Burstall (and of course we'd met Tim & their boys back in the day) at Collected Works for the launching of Rudi Krausmann & Andrew Sibley's (poems & drawings) collaboration, ca 2003 --the smallest return for her unrivalled hospitality at La Mama…

Memories of Betty Burstall are inseparable from the La Mama cafe-theatre on Faraday Street in Carlton where we met around about this time 46 years ago. Winter 1967 : small tables & chairs downstairs, bric-a-brac, junk/furniture upstairs. One-act plays performed beside & amongst the coffee-drinkers. Log fire in wall grate; coffee urn bubbling. A poetry reading organised by the folk-singer Glen Thomasetti, well-known from the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, that featured or happened to include a poet, in his late thirties (being 21 or so an older poet one had to have perceived), leg in plaster &/or balancing on crutches, jacket, shirt, beard trimmed to cheek : Charles Kenneth Taylor (called Ken by some, Charles by others), working in the talks department at the ABC. As far as I was concerned, the reading was momentous. His reading voice accurately describing his poems' pace & lineation, and his references to Ashbery & Snyder sheer music to my ears for though well acquainted with such poetry I hadn't yet heard it even cited in Melbourne. All this is inscribed in other histories or should be! Suffice to say here that I celebrated Ken Taylor's reading with a poem, Poem For Ken Taylor (first published in the 1968 chapbook, Two Poets [Ken Taylor & Kris Hemensley], with its our glass motif silk-screen cover by Mike Hudson), which I read later in '67 at one of Glen's readings, word of which got back to Ken --probably Betty told him (the Burstalls & the Taylors & the Wallace-Crabbes had all been in New York around 1965/6 via Harkness Fellowships). She introduced us, and that was the origin of the Melbourne chapter of the New Australian Poetry (as I conceived it) --true to say, and I say it as I think it, the contemporary continues its particular & timely articulation in & from that occasion's significant swing…

Betty Burstall had returned to Melbourne from New York inspired by alternative theatre in the Village, especially Ellen Stewart's La Ma Ma Experimental Theatre Club (founded in 1961).  Just as Ken Taylor returned on a mission --to establish the Australian extension to John Gill & Earle Birney's New American & Canadian Poetry (magazine & books), out of Trumansburg in up-state New York , so Betty sought to emulate New York's La Ma Ma : theatre presented outside of the normal performance settings in Melbourne, amateur or commercial. Betty's vision was for a space  to hold all the arts --theatre, poetry, music, film. Upstairs & downstairs it became a regular hang-out for some of us in 67/8 --Frank Bren, Bill Beard, Michael Hudson, Gary Petersen, Elaine Rushbrooke, Sid Clayton et al… Having experienced the productions of Jack Hibberd's playlets, I'd reported back to the New Theatre, of which Loretta Garvey, Frank & Bill were younger stalwarts, that the real new theatre, innovative & politically aware, was occurring at La Mama :  if we really believed New Theatre's manifestos then La Mama was where we should also be. Minus the Communist Party bit of course --easier to negotiate in 67/8 with the alternative presence of the New Left than before I suspect. And so we came across the road to Betty Burstall's La Mama without abandoning the New Theatre although, naturally, that was how our expedition was viewed by some…

Betty & theatre : The New Australian Theatre, in its Melbourne manifestation, depends upon the particular place & space of La Mama for its origin & subsequent development…

Betty & the poets : The New Australian Poetry, in its Melbourne manifestation, depends upon that particular place & space for its origin & subsequent development…

Betty the hostess of fabulous dinners in the cafe-theatre where she conscientiously set about bridging the personalities & generations, the different tribes & their territories via Bohemian bonhomie & a wholesome menu of wine, platters of hard & soft cheeses, bread, olives, sausage, salad… I see Betty setting me down at a table with Keith Harrison, the Australian poet visiting from the States, & Philip Martin, poet & younger academic from Monash. Perfect example of her mix & match, not that she foresaw Philip taking the liberty of introducing me to Keith & describing me as a representative of the new Melbourne poetry's Wordsworthian tendency! I hit the roof : Wordsworth? Our poets were Pound, Williams, the Beats, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York et al with Liverpool Scene, Tarn, MacDiarmid, Bunting, Turnbull & other British thrown in. Our politics collaged Berkeley, Paris, Berlin, London, Che & Ho Chi Minh! Betty flew to my side to tamp down the anger! Amazing to me, Keith knew my poetry references & pouring out the good wine ameliorated the argument : it was Wordsworth the erstwhile sympathiser of the French Revolution whom Philip had in mind he interceded, while Olson & Co & all the bards of hippiedom were a rather different kettle of fish, ill-fitting Philip's equation. I left La Mama that night excited by the older generation ex-pat's broad mindedness, wishing he lived & taught in Melbourne instead of the US, wishing Australia could have held him and, despite the rising of the New, already suspecting why it mightnt… At another dinner, recall being called over by John Perceval, whom I'd already met in out-of-the-city, leafy Canterbury, introduced by Mike Dugan whose neighbour he was, to join him in polishing off a carafe… Tony Murphett, wearing ostentatious necklace-broach he claimed once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empress, careered  around the tables… The wonder of being an English immigrant youth, plucked out of the obscurity of nowhere Southampton & sub-Bohemian Melbourne, into proximity of the locally celebrated art & literature, still tickles me nearly half a century on… I think Betty understood her role as medium, moderator, provider, proselytiser : I wouldn't be alone in saying she was La Mama… 

One day, summer '68, she asked me to go around the corner from the cafe-theatre to a terrace house in Elgin Street and, virtually, save a poet! His name is Shelton Lea, she said, --he needs to know about La Mama, he needs to meet other poets, he's isolated, desperate, in need of nurture, connection et cetera. So I strolled around. Shelton was tall, slender, high cheeked, Roman-like, trembling with intensity. He immediately stated his contempt for that modern poetry which eschewed regular rhyme & metre & demanded from me the rationale for free verse. He enthused about Countee Cullen (whom I misheard as Cunty Cullen), unknown to me but evidently Shelton's example of a great poet. I spoke about the emergent new Melbourne poetry and our, mostly, American references. I remember saying that poems don't have to rhyme though the rhythm of speech & mind was a given. In my mind he's smoking, juggling a baby, another tripping around his feet, with his dark eyed, long haired, similarly slender actress wife in & out of the room with coffee. He said he'd try to come to La Mama but was flat out struggling to exist…

Around this time, impressed by the popularity of the curtain-raiser poetry performances I provided for Mike Hudson's versions of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre, Betty invited me to take on a regular poetry evening. She proposed we go 50/50 on the door, and so long as I could pay the rent would be part of La Mama's permanent programme. We planned but didn't bite the bullet until September '68 when the inaugural reading of what I named the La Mama Poets Workshop began with its boast "Tuesday nights forever!" By August '69 the Hemensleys were off to Europe, leaving the Workshop in the hands of Mike Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Bill Beard, Ian Robertson, Geoff Eggleston, Garrie Hutchinson & others, until sometime in 1970 they moved on to the Melbourne Arts Co-Op (another history yet to be analysed & written). Betty threw a going-away party for us in her Eltham house, wished us all the best but insisted we return to Melbourne & La Mama. Late '72 we did, but though she invited me start up poetry at La Mama again one had obviously moved on. 'Breakthrough' politics & poetics had grown, after the 1970-72 English infusion, into the 'international' perspective --that is, Melbourne & Australian poetry in the world of poetry. Ten years later Val Kirwin had a go, on Betty's successors, Maureen Hartley & Liz Jones' instigation, & invited me to read with her at the well-attended first salon, but it wasn't until Mal Morgan, whom I'd put on the bill back in 68/9, began his La Mama Poetica a few years later that the La Mama tradition resumed. It continues to this day…

Betty's generosity to the new playwrights & actors (Hibberd, Blundell, Davies, Romeril & co) is legend, to the extent of warping the actual history of performance (of new music & film as well as theatre) at La Mama, especially in the first couple of years. After the resident group suddenly abandoned La Mama, hurting & shocking her to the core, she came to see it as an opportunity for ever greater variety of the new & experimental.  Her devotion to the theatre was equalled by her support of the poets. Tim Burstall, in contrast, could be critical & dismissive of the La Mama poets. I recall Betty once more keeping the peace & explaining that Tim was a poet himself once. Her own children also had inclinations to write --I think it was young Tom who hung around the barely older Charles Buckmaster, which may have exacerbated Burstall senior's inter-generational irritation… 

In the three years I was away ('69-'72), Betty had me sending her playscripts for which she found directors, mounting a succession of productions of my plays at La Mama. From the day in late '67 when she recruited Malcolm Robertson (moonlighting from the MTC under the pseudonym 'Garibaldi') to direct my first La Mama play, The Blind, she was my greatest advocate. Our last collaboration was in 1973 when she invited me to join herself & Wilfrid Last as the La Mama/Australian Performance Group's contribution to the Independent Schools' Drama Conference in Canberra. Among the other presenters were Roger Pulvers & (the late) Solrun Haas. The play I wrote for the event, The Grand Centenary Cricket Match, was performed by dozens of students & directed (choreographed) by Wilfrid. Betty & I led discussion of contemporary theatre, critiquing short plays by the school groups. Unqualified academically, we'd become a reference for Australian theatre through experience & enthusiasm. Precisely what Ken Taylor meant when he said that with the inception of the La Mama poetry readings, a poet no longer required a license from the English department of Melbourne University!

If Betty Burstall's Memorial in the forecourt of La Mama in Faraday Street, Carlton was her final performance, where she was hailed by friends & colleagues traversing the 46 years since her creation of that theatre --with mostly theatre people speaking, which both Ken Taylor, down from Mount Macedon for the event, & I anticipated --La Mama's poets & poetry sidelined by the actors (--we're here for Betty & that's all that matters, he said --this is where she introduced us & how it all began) -- it's another performance, in which she serendipitously featured, which  leaps out of my memory… Sometime in 1969, one of Sid Clayton's marvellous & inscrutable events --that poet-composer's magical theatre, part meticulous composition, part happening --for the crux of which he'd directed the audience to become participants in a ritual procession around a table, onto which Betty had unexpectedly hopped up & now lay supine! We were to circle clock-wise --though I remember rebelling against that  expectation, circling the other way. Ironically, Sid attempted to shepherd me back into the orthodox circle. Betty was taken over by the 'ceremony'. Bill Beard equally enthusiastic (as was his nature). Recorded music or percussion played ever louder around us. It was dark apart from candle-light. And it only finished when we left off. Betty was the last. From the sidelines we saw her slide off the table, flushed cheeks, exhilarated…


[18/19-6 // 27-7  // 15-9-2013] 

THE CHARLES BUCKMASTER MISCELLANY

(A continuing series of poems, papers, articles, notes, letters dedicated to the memory of Charles Buckmaster, 1951-1972)

Part 1 :

Article, Larry Schwartz (1990)
Poem, Kris Hemensley (1968)
Poem, James Hamilton (2011)


______________________________________________________



LARRY SCHWARTZ


DEATH OF A POET

"Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward"
--found written on a loose sheet among Charles Buckmaster's books.


A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting.
There is the farm house and attached bungalow in which a mother found the shotgun the following morning beside the body of her beloved youngest son. That was 26 November 1972, just over four years after the youth, stifled by the idyll of the tiny community, left for the city, wearing a new suit and clutching a suitcase and a handful of poems.
A diagnosed schitzophrenic, Charles Buckmaster was to finaly succumb to the agonising mental illness when he re-enacted the suicide of an older brother, taking his own life with his brother's gun, at just 21.
"There was a lot of pain and there still is a lot of pain," says a relative of the dead poet. "You put it away and you deal with it but you never forget."
The fifth child (youngest by eight years) of a taciturn farmer who worked at his cherry and peach orchards, Buckmaster wrote of "silent / desperation / waiting for life to descend".
He finally turned his back on the farming community established by his Swiss forbears, quitting school mid-way through the matriculation year in 1968 rather than heed an instruction to cut his hair. Eric Penfold, a teacher at Lilydale High school at the time, remembers Buckmaster as "a bit of a wild boy." "I don't think Charles was a real conformist," he said.
"When I was young, people thought me a strange and moody kid," Buckmaster once said. "Often I felt myself a stranger among people I'd known all my life ... my wanting to get out, which I wanted desperately, was something my parents knew they couldn't fight."
But the lure of Gruyere was strong. Buckmaster, who travelled extensively around Australia, was to return home often, sometimes accompanied by friends for fruit-picking, and his childhood surroundings featured prominently in the poetry of the young rebel some said bore a strong physical resemblance to the ill-fated Jim Morrison of The Doors.
As the forests were cleared for subdivisions, he agonised over the vulnerability of small farmers, such as his parents, to land developers and Gruyere's future as the city sprawled outwards. "The cities will merge, " he warned in a poem called An End to Myth. "Gruyere is dying ... The green walls dissolve." It was there he returned to end his life.
"He seemed to be a prodigy, sprung from the ground!" the poet and close friend, Kris Hemensley, wrote in the last issue of The Age Monthly Review.
"No one believed he really hailed from a place called Gruyere. And no one believed Gruyere existed ..." Melbourne's young writers of the time had thought he might be a hoax "to Ern Malley their movement", Hemensley said, alluding to the fictional poet at the centre of the now-famous literary hoax created to embarrass the editors of the Angry Penguins magazine decades earlier.
Hemensley's wife, Retta, remembers the scepticism she and Kris shared after reading the "terrible scrawl" of a first letter from a high school student called Charles Buckmaster. A newspaper report on writer and poet Michael Dugan had alerted the country schoolboy to the fresh literary activity in the city. The Hemensleys corresponded with him only after being assured by Dugan both Buckmaster and Gruyere were "for real".

Despite early scepticism and that scrawl, Buckmaster, whose earliest influences included Donne, Blake and Owen, was quick to impress. He has left his mark on Australian letters despite his brief career and even though he burned much of his work, including the manuscript for a novel and poems said to be good as good as his best, before he died. His early death robbed the country of one of its most promising literary figures.
He is remembered as a poet of considerable talent who wrote several exceptional poems, his potential for major literary achievement frustrated because his death came when his career was in its infancy.
Though Charles Buckmaster left behind a small body of poetry, his work had "the best urgency of the new poetry", the poet Thomas Shapcott has said.
"...He produced a core of work quite remarkable for so young a poet..." Michael Dugan wrote in the most recent issue of Overland. "What he might have achieved if he had not been cut down by the cruel disease of schizophrenia can only be guessed at."
Now, almost 20 years after his death, the recent publication of his collected works and extensive articles in literary publications Overland and The Age Monthly Review , have highlighted his place in Australian literature and impact of the generation of writers he epitomised.
The case for Buckmaster is perhaps most forcibly put by a friend and writer, John Jenkins, who believes that had the collected poems appeared sooner it would have "put on the map" not only his own work but a stream within Australian poetry that emerged during the tumultuous transition from the conservatism of the '50s.
Jenkins says during the 1970s and much of the '80s Australian literature had been dominated by conservative elements. Only now that it was not "too hot to handle" could a collection by Buckmaster, published late last year, be released.
He sees the work as still "very contemporary". particularly in the preoccupation with the environment and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
While few of the known poems have been widely anthologised and despite two slim volumes of his poems published when he was alive, much remained out of print until publication of the University of Queensland Press collection, part of a series which includes another ill-fated poet of that era, Michael Dransfield. The publishers say though poetry is generally a poor seller, both Dransfield's and Buckmaster's collections were selling better than expected, the latter less so but heartening at up to 500 of the 1500 printed.
The book's editor, Simon McDonald, also a friend of Buckmaster, cited financial and other constraints including the difficulty in obtaining poems scattered among friends around the country, for the delay in publication. He said he had taken upon himself the task of editing because of his strong feeling for his friend and had at one stage even set up an independent publishing company to release it. He said he now felt he had at last done his duty to his friend.

Buckmaster's book with its many previously unpublished poems, has helped friends in Melbourne literary circles finally come to terms with his death. The family kept the funeral private and some close friends did not know he had died until after his cremation. They have long planned to get together to remember him and the times they shared.
"We cried in December 1972 when the news of Charles Buckmaster's suicide was telephoned through -- but the tears hardly constituted a wake," Kris Hemensley wrote. "Only now, it seems to me, with the Collected Poems in hand, can he return to us in his life and death, our youngest poet, our dear and youngest friend."
His friends remember the good times -- his humor and warmth -- along with the bad of a vigorous young man dragged down by his demons, fighting for survival all the way. Michael Dugan describes the change from "sunny personality" to manic highs and lows, bouts of self-destructiveness, severe depression. So that the Collected Poems "remind us of the essential beauty and value of a friend destroyed by circumstances beyond his control".
"He was in such pain," said Buckmaster's girlfriend, Kate Veitch, "such emotional and mental pain. I could understand absolutely why he did it. Absolutely. this guy was being destroyed from the inside. It was agony to watch. Absolute agony."
Buckmaster was a "skyrocket" which exploded, John Jenkins said. The lifestyle he chose epitomised an era to such an extent he became one of the icons. "He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of it."
The young poet's death coincided with the end of a period of extraordinary creativity among younger writers in Melbourne, railing against a perceived literary stagnation and general conservatism.
The late 1960s had seen a frenzy of poetry in roneod poetry magazines and readings centred on what came to be known as the La Mama Poetry Workshop by a new generation of writers, influenced by the innovations of American poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.
"There was terrific excitement," said Retta Hemensley, who. with Kris, organised the first readings at La Mama. "Something was happening in the city that had been dead for so long".
Retta Hemensley smiles mischievously when she recalls running off copies of the magazine, Our Glass, edited by Kris, while doing secretarial work for Laurie Carmichael at the then Amalgamated Engineering Union.
It was a time of strong opposition to Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, a vigorous counterculture challenge to conservatism, an optimism that youth culture could change the world for the better, a naive belief in the effectiveness of "mind-expanding" drugs and a shared joy in rock music. The poetry of this era was strongly influenced by literary movements in response to the frigidity of Cold War America.
Country boy Charles Buckmaster arrived in the city, finding a first job as laboratory assistant, at a time when bonds between young Australians were strengthened by lame resistance from their elders. Retta Hemensley recalls the cries of "cut your hair, Moses" her husband endured on the streets of Melbourne. it was a time of clumsy censorship, raids on theatres with controversial plays. She recalls acting in a play at a local theatre which was interrupted at each performance by a member of the vice squad in the audience threatening to declare the theatre a "bawdy house".

For Buckmaster and his friends, Faraday Street, Carlton, where the first reading at La Mama on 3 September 1968 attracted 17 people, was a focal point for budding writers.
Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called Croscurrents, remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps, a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if he were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.
Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution.
It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beefheart's harsh Trout Mask Replica or the Songs of the Humpback Whale in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.
And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for breakfast", Buckmaster recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, The Great Auk. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claiming he could control the effect of the drug.
He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia he'd sit up in bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's Drunken Boat the other.

His close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during the last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed.
Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop. He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him cary it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player. Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors.
There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favourite painting titled 'Self Portrait', by a 13 year-old boy.
Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson. "I came home one evening and Charles was in my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible... grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of him".
"His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of it. And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to do. And he was really upset because it hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought "Ohhhh, I don't want this, I do not want this'."
Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to do crazy things". She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone...
Retta Hemensley is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the lights". Did this encourage his destructive urge?
In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge / yet cannot understand / the nature / of this fear", of "ice, brooding above me". He wrote also that "all the dark hints / were not, as I had expected, / a part of this game... "
The poem, called Willochra, showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.
Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful girl", just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love; he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at la Mama in march 1970, before he had even bothered to ask her name. And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship.
She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack.
When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will. He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said.
Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered his room with his mother. Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favourites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said.
It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time. Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room.
"For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said."There was a jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue. His mother opened a drawer in his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors."

Michael Dugan, remarked in his recent article in Overland that the poet was "tidying up" in his last months, "preparing to leave nothing behind". He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost.
While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.
John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed earmarked for disaster," he said."He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time."
Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days. he was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right slot".
According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructiveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behaviour.
Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him. The first time I went to see him I just rolled up unannounced and got directions to the ward he was in.
"I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.
"He was walking down the corridor between these two ... classic great hulking chaps in white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did."
She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge. "I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all."
She said she was elated when she left. After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside."
Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a Jerusalem Bible Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.
She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was just after she had bailed him out of Pentridge. "He was out of his mind ... God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally. I said 'Charles, you don't just walk into guys' offices like this, Charles, you haven't got any shoes on'.
"I said 'you can't go in there like this. You will get thrown out. He went in, he turned around to me and said 'you don't have to come in, man, you're so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: 'arsehole, you are not worth it. I don't care how clever you are. I don't care how talented you are. I don't care how beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth it.' And I just walked off."

Charles Buckmaster was given a good behavior bond at his trial on condition he returned to his parents' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll leave nothing behind," he had once told John Jenkins. He spent the last few months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment he might finally escape his hell.


[This the text of Larry Schwartz's feature article as published in The Sunday Age (Agenda), 5th August, 1990, with minute editing & deletion]



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


KRIS HEMENSLEY


GRUYERE : THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED
(for Charles Buckmaster)


1

who stayed only becos they couldnt
find their way out again ( your poem
about them )
: swiss
people.
around 1840.

& the people who are still there now
in Gruyere

you could practically call it
Buckmaster country -
at least one part of it
( yr houses at four points
spanning cherry orchards
the dam with frogs

surrounded by green flora
& brown earth

in view of Mount St Leonard


2

on the outskirts of the water :
a cows carcass

already substantially returned
to the ground

the dead cow
bones turned up / great eye cavities
where 'things' have burrowed into its cranium

its legs become part of the earth
beside the dam.

the roar of the frogs
roar enuf
to drown
out

the Ruston Lincoln
diesel pump ( we

sheltered in its shed from
the rain )

listening to bell birds
piping -
one
grey as the gum
pretended
it
was
just
a
tree

its belly softer grey than its wing.

the clouted earth / broken bracken / grey weathered
grey watered / grey forest . thataway ..


3

you know
the cicada walks right out of its shell
abandons
himself ( the husks

crustate the wooden boards
around

the diesel pump.
stationary -
fixed treadle )

& flies out & over
the patches of black slime
bearing frogs eggs ( ten-
nis balls )
amongst the reeds
& weed
spreading under the surface
end to end

dragon flies
hovering horizontally
hanging
on breezes
making it their own
eery way


4

a tungle croft
of unusual constellations

of floating forests
of sheep following their leaders from
one spot in the field

suddenly

to another part

all of them . .

it pays to look up your stars

( THIS GUN
WAS CAPTURED FROM THE
GERMANS
BY THE 41st BATTALION A.I.F.
IN BELGIUM 1918
AND PRESENTED TO THE RESIDENTS OF
SOUTH GRUYERE )

collecting
sprigs of bacon & egg ( rust &
yellow ) flower

making
garlands to wear round yr neck
: you ancient !

look up the stars .
the familiar spots / stones

you know by heart -
bush fires
some badns

thru the kitchen window
( original oil paintings
on the wall )

going back ( father
& sons )
30 years.

120 years.

30000 years
in one long sweep / of

brown
green
&

the blu of the sky.


5

climbing
over barbed wire
under branches
around thorns

dropping

deeper thru trees
some with
rough brown bark hanging a strip

grey gums
prickly wattle
tea tree

wild heath
creeper
& vines.

treading over centuries of decomposition &
regrowth.

dog
following possum to their tree nests
another cow carcass
head propped on its shoulder
bones.

its left foreleg a
few yards away

hacked off & gnawed clean.

its hide
taut across the backbone &
ribcage

you could bounce on it.


6 (i)

the fording point
too deep -
the centre of the log bridge
covered by the stream.

when cows trespass ( you told us )
others properties
you cant chase them back.

you have to wait til the
owner comes & collects.

& if the trespasser
eats off yr land or tramples
the entire farm under foot

you still have to wait.
( the cows owner pays damages of course! )


(ii)

tasting the sap
dribbling down
a tree -
brown toffee
& a flavor which hardens the entire
palate
coating the tongue with
something worse than detol
"youre not sposed to eat it..."
came
too late !

but what did they live on

before the swiss
say
centuries before
1840 ?

berries. grass. some varieties
of snake,
frogs.
possum.

& bury their dead in the forest ?

making signs
for the deliverance of obstinate
earthly trappings

bury them down the gradient
in the centre
of the thickest bush

bury them maybe
in mass graves
on the down slope towards
the river.


(iii)

one massive skull
the head larger than a cow or
horse

must be an ox
huge molars

the jaws loosened by
the wet

the teeth planted in soil
prettied with moss . .

& the legs of the monster
to the right
of the head
folded casually.


7 (i)

the comings & goings
the mainroad to Lilydale to
the City

- the way 'home' -

cars bumper to bumper

which go right on by
oblivious of the
"barbecue down the road :
if the rain holds out"

of the living
made for 30 years
off the land
amongst cherry trees
with bridesmaids veils ( in
blossom )


(ii)

behaviour patterns of country folk
whether they forecast rainstorms
by rheumatic twinges

the
incidence of various common
& obscure
neuroses

the facts & figures of sociological reports
- apply

as much to the people who go
as the people who stay


8

in the middle of the earth
does anything change substantially ?

Gruyere :

a day in a life.
the visit.

the place exists
thru memories
nothing is more certain than

the recalled materials. the composition of ground :
yr bread & eard.

nothing is deader
than when it is forgotten.

Gruyere.


(September/October 29, 1968)



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


JAMES HAMILTON


CHARLES BUCKMASTER'S MOTORCYCLE


It is strange, the places
where he rides. The spokes whir
a silver churning, a fuel gauge
where something might be written.
An absent roar the sound
of pages burning, a tank or fuselage
scrapped or kept in a dark garage,
shadow heaped on knowing metal.
I have pages creased in folders
but not the rush of their trajectory,
phantom destinations written
on worn rubber. The one lamp
dull in an old night, tracing names
of towns bypassed by the highway.
A yellow lamp lit up
in a reckless notebook,
youth's windshield. Stored away
the words wait to ride, a poem
on the mechanical horseback
of remembering.


(2011)



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

References:

Larry Schwartz wrote for the Age & the Sunday Age for many years before going freelance. His poems have occasionally appear, for example in Bob Adamson's Ulitarra magazine in the mid '90s.

James Hamilton whilst not studying at La Trobe University, pursues his own research of the life & times of Charles Buckmaster & the La Mama poets of the late 60s.

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 13, September, 2009

KRIS HEMENSLEY

FIVE PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE


MIKE

He makes no man his enemy.
he is not many men.
he is himself.
he helps himself.
his enemy is not many men.
he stands amongst many men.
he is himself amongst many men.

GEOFF

He comes from nowhere & says something.
he goes somewhere with nothing.
he says somewhere is nowhere & nothing is something.
he comes & goes.
he says he is somewhere you havent been.
he says you are somewhere else.
he is something for nothing.

TERRY

He is never seen.
he is still away.
he is sometimes very still.
he arrived unannounced.
he is still unannounced.
he is never far away from stillness.
he sees the announcer.

NIGEL

He is the man who knows who sd it.
he is the man who says he knows.
he is the man who stays awake.
he knows the man.
he says the man doesnt know.
he is the man who does.
he is the man who doesnt.

BILL

He is the stranger who smiles.
he smiles at strangers.
he is strangely strong.
he has the strangest of smiles.
he has found a string.
he smells a rat.
he strings along.


[Southampton/UK, 1971;
first published in Mal Morgan's Parachute Poems, Melbourne, 1972]

Note:
The portraits are of Michael Dugan, Geoffrey Eggleston, Terry Gillmore, Nigel Roberts & Bill Beard.


________________________________________________________________

TERRY GILLMORE

CORRESPONDENCE

[14/09/09]
Dear Kris

I guess this is the ‘unutterable news that comes out of silence’ – the dead and the dying – Geoffrey is dead/Alison is dead; there is a meaningless private synchronicity in this coupling, for me.

Yesterday, I spent my lunchtime in a bookshop and sped-read Shelton’s biography, and afterwards searched his name in Google, and found your archive; I can’t bring myself to use the ‘b’ word. I am out-of-date since poetry in my poor fella country turned into a farce, or just seemed that way to me.

I thought I should write to you because I have always been ‘soft’ for you, and I think you are, and have always appeared to be, so non-judgemental, so inclusive.

Beyond that, you are spot-on about ‘The Crimson Jargon’. It was such a labour of love for Alison and even though I don’t have a copy, her images and Baldessin’s are inscribed in my neurons – nearly 40 years later. Also inscribed is the confrontation with the executive of RMIT that were trying to censor the publication. The only good thing about that is George Orwell’s (I am reading the thousand pages of his Essays etc in the ‘Everyman’ edition) central thesis that the only thing that separates the capitalist democracies from the totalitarian states is the principle, and passage, of free speech. The word, the word…

I still write poetry, and write (supposedly) for a living; although it’s time I was on the road again.

Anyway as Alison was dying I was writing this – I sent it to our son, that night. So for the record this is what was happening with me.


"Dearest Jerome

After four stubbies of Cooper's Pale Ale, I'm moved to send you what I wrote around 10am this morning. I know that it is not, expressly, particular to your mother but I was writing it at the time of her passing.


It is relevant because of her quality of soul. She perceived so much, as you know, through this opening. I should hope that we could speak more about this when we next meet.


Forgive the tone of what follows but I was writing it for common debate in a 'style' that I hoped could be in the public domain.


My son I cannot touch your grief or that of Ian and his sisters. However, I sincerely believe, that the sentiments expressed are something that she would have had 'some' sympathy for.


Your father

ooOOoo

Whatever happened to the Holy Ghost? In my lifetime, which takes in more than half of last century, Jesus Christ and, to a lesser extent, God have had their names in 12pt. While the 'Ghost' seems to have been lurking, slinking in the footnotes, at best masquerading as the glue that holds that Trinity together. Why this pecking order when the Trinity is paradoxically and theologically inseparably separable? Is it because that now ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ and the sneerers etc have decided for eternity that the soul does not exist, that God is dead even though the sun shines most days in this drought riven land. It appears that Jesus Christ is certainly dead despite resurrection rumours that he is cohabiting with Osiris in another universe. But is he really dead – I cannot resile from the reality that in the beginning there was the ‘word’, and in the end there will be the death of the ‘word’, and we’re not there, yet, even though we’re moving toward it with unseemly haste. I remember that my paternal grandmother had an embroidered plaque on her lounge room wall that said ‘God is Love’. At four, just able to read, it seemed so simple that I dared not ask what it meant and because, as I know now, it was of that class of knowledge that once known, seems to have been always known. I knew what it meant but cannot, even now, begin to articulate the full meaning of this artless, Blake-like profundity. It was as if its meaning was inscribed in its simplicity. What is this Ghost? On my reckoning it is love, is compassion, is the 2nd commandment which more than complements the 1st. It is what speaks to our poor lonely souls which do exist – it is a question of thirst, of listening, of being able to hear and feel, and be overcome and comforted.

ooOOoo

And Jerome here is a little poem I wrote two days ago:



‘the Holy Ghost draweth with His love’[1]

I faced the full moon rising in the east
And the Ghost was in me.

I know that this was the ‘love’
I sought in the wasted years.

[1] Meister Eckhart's Sermons / translated into English by Claud Field

ooOOoo

Anyway dear Kris, I will send this in all its callow crassness, already regretting it. We rarely speak as we would like, and mostly hold our silence with the dead. The above stems from being swept away recently by Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home’ and ‘Gilead’. She is a ‘great’ writer, if there is such a beast.

Love

Terry


ooOOoo

[15/09/09]
Dear Terry, heart felt condolences regarding Alison... A shock and continuing sadness... Ironic for me that I was reading all around her as I wrote that piece (The Divine Issue followed up with the Addendum, wch you saw)... And we spoke after I'd published the first piece. She said she too had been thinking of those times & people and wd look the piece up & read it & get back to me... Life so relentlessly busy that tho I knew she hadnt been back in a while it was as it always was... often months if not a year will go by between her visits to the bookshop... Ah well... As you say, Geoffrey, Alison, too many... Shelton, Michael Dugan... THANK YOU though for sending me your message to Jerome and the poem... It wd be good to catch up, as of course youve begun here... Re- my "b." --it's an archive/running commentary/magazine, obviously not the 'hi ya' kind of caper... Here in the old Melbourne I run the Bookshop with Retta's help... she's receiving radiation treatment at moment for breast cancer... After our son's death Retta's attitude and mine has been that the worst that cd happen HAS happened...so we get on with it, and happily...All very best to you, with good thoughts for the old days and now, and blessings for Alison,
As ever, Kris


ooOOoo

[15/09/09]
Dear Kris

Thanks for your reply and your thoughts. It seems of late that I am surrounded by death - well, I am 65. I didn't know about your son's death or Michael's. As you probably know, I know about children dying before their time, and your's and Retta's response that the worst that could happen - has happened, however after thirty years, new but unwanted things subsume the grief, and the butter falling out of the fridge does drive you crazy. Give Retta my regards and my deep wish for her recovery. I am so sorry about your son, don't let me pick at the wound. You're right as Dylan said 'keep on keeping on / like a bird that flew / tangled up in blue (blew). It is a miracle, the whole shebang...I am frequently reminded of Afterman's poem - I think it was called Pieta - the essence that I took from it was that it is a wonder that we are not daily on our knees praying at the pity, the sadness of it all. On the other hand why are we not dancing daily at the miracle, the wonder and beauty of it all on this remote outpost/backwater of the multiverses?

with affection

Terry


ooOOoo


Going inside



What is inside

Is not as temporary

As what is outside.



My being’s soul

Is that of my child


ooOOoo



Essentially, eternally

I am you, am him.



Your birth my birth

Everything is born.


_______________________________________________________________


KARL GALLAGHER


CORRESPONDENCE
[August,'09]


Dave Ellison et al; are without any pretension beat, among other things,

and in an un self-conscious way as writers, not in a negative way,

but simply being oneself in a creative way naturally; culturally influenced by diverse

streams of humanity and themselves as historical players, with identity;

that I am somehow or other out of touch with modern times and the younger generation is probably due to age difference and experience and memories of times gone by

and as an old man remembering those who are gone

now I am looking at modern times through bifocals, deaf in right ear, hearing aid in the left, chronic back and neck pain et al, looking at seventy I’m 66, part time socially active, still smoke .

I always find that a book of poems will never let me down no matter what -- poetry a spiritual world that anyone can enter and that I enter – the beauty of modern times -- I can get that way. The knowing that it can happen, is that memory, of an identity from an old dream? of ghosts Neal and Jack and the women that they, and that we all knew, in many ways a more innocent time amidst post war changes.

I don’t recall Kerouac ever express anything political, I mean, he said almost nothing of world war two yet he was a merchant seaman – when much later, as an alcoholic he appeared on a now infamous televised debate with a student activist –

he was focussed only on the cultural and liberating, I mean how clean is politics – no dharma there.

He said he was a ’yes’ man, being for and not a ‘no’ man and being against, anyway he had said the same thing years before in ‘On the Road’

it was what attracted him to Neal and vice versa, they were young and crazy to burn to talk to talk, to go somewhere to Harlem or Birdland to hear Miles or someone else on Bleaker St or the Cedar Bar where Pollock and others be there, and those musicians all knew him and liked and respected him and had a drink or chat with him, they dug him, they knew that he dug and knew their art, like Neal he understood and loved the music, Kerouac personally knew a lot of jazz/ bop players.

Dave Ellison and the others are prime examples of the living spirit of the hip dharma bums of modern times, in any location in the world – the planetary village’s writers and the normalising globalising of beat - and other influences, past present cultural and spiritual influences, that are always part of who we are, how ever we are,

as writers and of course as human individuals with a personal social life. To write is to dream.


oo00oo


HOLY BARBARIANS
[7th/August,'09]


Kris,

did you ever come across a book called ‘The Holy Barbarians’ Published 1959? I was given a throw away copy in early 1965 and it put me ‘on to’ all that followed regarding the beats, voluntary poverty, Buddhism, etc. it made a major impact on me and what happened thereafter. At the time I was an art student, nights, at RMIT and just meeting some of the local beat types, i.e. Alison Hill, and Nigel Roberts among others on a visit from Syd at Maisy’s hotel in South Yarra, one of the hangouts, a 100metres from ‘The Fat Black Pussycat’. It’s been out of print for years. It was one of the first books that I asked Geoff Eggleston ‘have you read this book?’ the Holy Barbarians was my measure, if you had read that one, then ok lets talk. And of course the title is very suggestive. Lipton spelled it out clearly, that is was a spiritual awakening - (just preceding the explosion of the counter culture). That was just what I was looking for – a major change of attitude and lifestyle, spiritual in character – as a way out of gang culture.



From that book, I bought The Way of Zen, On the Road, Howl, Henry Miller, et al. And I picked up in a second-hand bookstore in Russell St two LPs one Kerouac reading with sax backing, and Dylan Thomas recorded in NY (on his 33rd or 34th birthday) he was dead a month later. Both LPs went missing early. I had new friends. Some who didn’t have the same standards regarding stealing from friends as my previous network - the Melbourne docks and underworld.



If you don’t know the book, or haven’t had a copy in years then:

The full text is available here:



http://www.archive.org/stream/holybarbarians000549mbp/holybarbarians000549mbp_djvu.txt



or here too:



http://www.archive.org/details/holybarbarians000549mbp

karl



________________________________________________________________


EDWARD MYCUE



[local pieces part history and part gratitude]

JUSTINE JONES FIXEL & HER KIND SAN FRANCISCO



she was from bingham canyon and salt lake city in utah & she loved the name (of a younger cousin) jersey justine, justine being the name given to girls all down the generations. her



mom's & dad's folks were breakaway mormans. a justine said to be the youngest of joseph smith's “six” wives taken in by brigham young to the Promised Land of utah when smith was



murdered in illinois . justine came to san francisco at 21 with a b.a. from the catholic women's college in salt lake city .. her dad had a bar in bingham canyon (that city no longer exists because of the copper mines tunnelled underneath) & later in salt lake city and there would be poker games in their salt lake city house late into the night. her brother kendell jones ten years older had come earlier to the university in berkeley . justine went into social work, but i don't recall it



that was her first job. when the war began she became a WAVE and lived with 3 others—jean broadbent, winifred lair, cecelia hurwich (“92 stairs”, says cecel, to get to their apt penthouse at 1230B washington st bet. jones & taylor in ‘the casbah” on telegraph hill). farwell taylor (for



whom mingus wrote “farewell, farewell”) also lived in the casbah and did that painting of justine & cecel the lifetime best pals. her palship w/ bari rolfe, mime and mime teacher, goes back to bari’s & marcel marceau years together (in the 50’s or 60’s). & warren anderson who played a beautiful piano and became kendell’s lifelong partner. after the war following an interval of modeling & partying & before getting her masters from the social welfare school, uc-berkeley,



justine was a social worker, & around that time worked for Canon Kip program, still going, of the Episcopal church (canon kip was a san francisco hero of 1906 earthquake days). i recall her stories of spending nights with kids rescued, & before they were able to be placed, in the loft of the old bldg on l9th avenue and ortega that later became for decades the san francisco music conservatory (before its recent move to oak/van ness/market). therapist wings. academic articles.



met larry by or in 1950's. they'd been married before (she to keith). (larry a daughter kate frankel in los angeles--granddaughter adrian & grandson joshua.). stayed married. larry died in 2003.



justine got a fulbright to italy to consult on changing their social work system at univ level etc, had extensions twice—rare, 3 years in rome 1960-63. while larry wrote. came back a year &



headed for mexico for another year (looking for george price larry's best bud, & to see if they could find a way to support/live there. later learned they'd crossed w/george returning to sf where



george a writing professor at sf state had returned via los angeles where he met zdena berger (price). zdena wrote TELL ME ANOTHER MORNING publ 1961 recently 2007 republd by

paris press as a refound woman hero writer--abt surviving camps --she was from prague &

of her wide family she, an aunt, a cousin survived world war 2.). justine when i first knew her in



1970 was teaching at uc-berkeley in the school of social work and practicing as a founding member of the family therapy center in sf (then a pioneering approach). she had a long productive life. larry used to complain that justine was a great source of misinformation, which



mostly amused her because maybe only larry could be teased that way and i heard it as



"mixedinformation". in her practice, justine’s “sand tray” therapy, its development and her



teaching its use lead back to her work as a painter of oil on canvas to her incorporations, assemblings, environments with miniature figures, furniture, the natural world & symbols



including her last great achievement “the white house”, her Venetian paintings, a series of frieze-like sculptures suffused with Jungian themes, & household objects combined into a mixed conglomeration arranged into painted autobiography and family history (much of this documented on film by al leveton). memories of justine, of larry, names that drift up, constellate



& swim, a history, pantheon, honorable people. I thought of ruth witt-diamant again last night (justine & larry’s neighbor and friend who began the poetry center as san francisco state) & thanked her for all her kindnesses; oldest friend george & mary oppen through whom I met lawrence & justine fixel in 1970; of florence hegi, oldest of the family therapy group of friends



& colleagues (al, eva, bob hovering over her to the very end) that justine belonged to: eva & al leveton w/ ben handleman the prime founders,& virginia belfort, sue eldredge; roz parenti, bob



cantor, michael geis. neighbors too in those early days: lois and roy steinberg & julian, then 5, now a photographer; mark citret (ansel adams’ last student, then 22-- eminent now); of al and minnie (a founding member of the california communist party, related to my sister jane by marriage) and daughter laura bock down high willard street; judy pollatsek and her kids josh & jessica; the wolfe’s on farnsworth steps; al palavin; the jaeks, a nice couple w/ kids goldsworths



(he at uc-sf & judy) next to ruth witt’s; & memories of anais nin when she was lodged uphill in a cottage ruth found for her; the then taos-bound dorothy kethler; & in taos, bob eliot, who built



said justine the ideal house; jo lander; florida & angela who worked for the un’s fao in rome; bill



minshew first met in rome; george hitchcock; cass humble; edouard roditi who often returned from france--an old schoolmate of ruth’s at uc berkeley in the 30’s; james broughton; justine van gundy who taught at sf state; her san diego cousin dianne cawood, soprano; diane scott her therapist; tom, stephanie, dante sanchez; always cecelia (“cecel”, “cese”) & b.j., lynn, rudy



hurwich; larry’s nephew robbie berkelman; & “old jack” (w.w.. lyman, jr.) of bayles mill—born there in napa valley 1885--ruth brought me over to meet (‘the oldest living poet’ she’d drive up to bring down to san francisco . i was her gardener & the then young poet, 35, she wanted him to connect with, his wife helen hoyt an esteemed poet who’d been asst editor to harriet monroe at poetry magazine in chicago dead a decade or more by then)(his three volumes of typed memoirs--he lived to1983 leaving a son amos hoyt at bayles mill--are in st. helena, ca public library’s



locked room); & others who make their entries but who’s names now escape me but will possibly come tomorrow; folks we met, knew together--panjandrum press & poetry flash crowds & dennis

koran; richard steger; lennart & sonia bruce; exemplary pals william dickey & adrianne marcus ;shirley kaufman & jack gilbert; laura ulewicz; anthony rudolf; jo-anne rosen; laura beausoleil; david & judy gascoyne ; sybil wood/cooper; sharon coleman; gerald fleming; carl rakosi & marilyn kane. many gone before justine & so many more left because this was a woman



who knew people & was interested in them: remembering her is to consider friends you make in life, who contributed to who you became, you’ve helped, who’ve helped you. final days,weeks, months, years, close were naomi schwartz , josephine moore, gail lubin, christina fisher, toby damon, andrea rubin, marsha trainer, al & eva leveton, ken meacham & pearl, wendy rosado-



berkelman (larry’s sister pearl fixel berkelman’s daughter), her daughter sunya; tom sanchez; cecilia london (justine’s student at uc-berkeley who who returned to justine in those four years after larry’s death as justine’s guide/ social worker), & always stephanie sanchez, bob cantor, naomi, al & eva, george & zdena, cecel & don (ross)—friends, colleagues, confidantes.

accretion. attrition. vale.


[11 OCTOBER 2007]


ooOOoo


[for Justine Jones Fixel (Sept. 5, 1920-Aug. 5, 2007)]

A SEA CHANGE



Fish in a net, old salts,

as the wheels keep turning,

a spinning plate half-dipping

into the Pacific Ocean here

you and I are at Land’s End



on this tilting/raked stage

where great ships foundered.

Their sentences of life, death

are unfinished symphonies;

a future out there our audience



who’ve sailed-in to watch

a sea change, diminishing star

dust a gusher pinkening milky

sunrise, sunset in the gloaming

thickening light a sea scar as



roses silt down the sea to sleep.

The wheel is round; life pushes;

photography winds over time,

westering, voicing the mind’s

brown shale for it will take, it



took a lifetime to flower, to fly,

to sail this sea this widening

light where I hear voices under

the surface of consciousness:

harmony’s memory rising up.


ooOOoo


WHEN JUSTINE FIXEL DIED AUG 5, 2007 JUST ONE MONTH SHORT OF HER 87th BIRTHDAY



when justine jones fixel died aug 5, 2007 just one month short of her 87th birthday. i was brokenhearted. her husband lawrence fixel had been my best friend from the time i came back to san francisco to live. george oppen had introduced us. he was sure we would be great for each other. and justine also became a great friend, and mentor. larry died 4 years ago. she had been very ill, but i just didn't want to have her forgotten. she was at the center of the cultural/literary life of this san francisco area. and she was a great and professional jungian therapist & teacher who also was a painter and artist of assembleges. after she died, i wrote and expanded and corrected the piece on her, the one you have being the one beginning the growing versions that ended with the nov.5 piece of now 4 pages titled GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY: JUSTINE JONES FIXEL AND HER KIND SAN FRANCISCO.

I sent many copies of each developing version w/some as submissions and some probably just information copies to spread the work about the end of a time when justine and larry and their friends george oppen, rosalie moore, carl rakosi, josephine miles, and a zillion others lent their intellects and sound moral floor to so many of us then and now so many less alive now. the coda poem "fish in a net" that ended the first group. with george price's help (larry's oldest friend--he was writing professor at sf state) i cut the poem by a third and retitled it "a sea change" from the shakespeare line already in the first poem. in the beginning the piece was more memoir/biography. then i began to see it at cultural history and thus appropriated heinrich boll's GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY a novel of 40 years ago and that for me referenced his THE CLOWN as well (portrait of the artist) and also reference to christopher isherwood's CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND.

i worked on it 4 months never needing to thinking of publication because i continually corrected it and altered it. no doubt some of this might come under a rubric of "grieving".

at 70 i have lost many kin and many more kith, especially during the aids crisis in the 1980's up through the 1990's primarily. now they are almost all gone.



i just call it cultural history. i am no sociologist, no intellectual, no historian. it hasn't pleased me as writing but it has given me relief to write it--to write it and honor my friends seeing them in such a rosy glow again as if from the beginning.


________________________________________________________________


CONTRIBUTORS NOTES
TERRY GILLMORE, part of the Free Poetry (Sydney) crew of the late '60s (with Nigel Roberts, Johnny Goodall & co). Two published collections, Further, Poems 1966-76 (New Poetry, Sydney, 1977), Surviving the Shadow (Paper Bark Press, Sydney, 1990). Robert Harris wrote of the latter poems, "Love, friendship and poetry have each become more, rather than less, substantial to Terry Gillmore, but differently contoured and wracked on human realities...[he] is, in our time, an Australian Orpheus, and like Orpheus, he is the singer of urgent and neglected knowledge."
KARL GALLAGHER see previous numbers of Poems & Pieces for bio; most recently is represented on the new Meher Baba poets & artists website, http://mehermelb.jimdo.com/
EDWARD MYCUE, San Francisco poet, goes back a long time and with the Australian & English connection (which includes The Merri Creek Or Nero & H/EAR magazines). Has published around 17 books & chapbooks, most recently his selected poems, Mindwalking, 1937-2007 (Philos Press, '08). Other books include Damage Within the Community (Panjandrum, '73), Route, Route & Range : The Song Returns (published by Walter Billeter's Paper Castle, Melbourne, '79), The Singing Man My Father Gave Me (Menard Press,UK, '80), Pink Gardens/Brown Trees (Bernard Hemensley's Stingy Artist/Last Straw Press, UK, '90). Forthcoming is The San Francisco Poems, from Paul Green's Spectacular Diseases Press,UK.

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

-That's all folks! -done on a wet & blustery Melbourne Sunday afternoon, 27th September, 2009-
Kris Hemensley

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #10, March/April 2009

THE DIVINE ISSUE
[EASTER, 2009]

KRIS HEMENSLEY

Sitting at small table in what I call hole-in-the-wall coffee place in Elizabeth Street, above the staircase of City Basement Books, and like the manager, whom I've named The Guy, once-upon-a-time Pasolini ragazzi or Caravaggio naughty-boy, I'm relaxed into survey of the street, totally acquiescent to the way the world passes by, as though just meant to be, a frame of the world's movie or a novel called The Day (not Joyce's but equally inventorial) or even This Minute (Warholean then?) --for example, that group of back-packer girls, raucous with the telling of previous night's adventures, leggy, goldened by holidaying sun, setting out from the hostel across the street whose upstairs balcony- bar's being hosed or vacuumed by its manager, a similar do-everything guy like my guy, and The Guy adjusts his posture as though to wave to the other guy, implying their perennial conversation about the takings, the punters, the street, the girls...

But I've brought monstrous news to my table, front page of Thursday, 15th of January's Age, headline "Schizophrenic set alight in Rosebud arson horror" and a series of photos in which the innocent man, variegated by tubes & bandages, propped up in hospital bed, is juxtaposed with five teens & twenties, gormless cherubim, dolts & drongoes, perpetrators of what one defence counsel described as "a cruel & nasty prank that's gone horribly wrong" (--which brings to mind Graham Greene's story, The Destructors, studied at secondary school in the UK, in an anthology which included Katherine Mansfield, D H Lawrence & Saki amongst others, in which Greene's even younger pranksters were in no doubt at all about the goal of their game, recounted as the same type of evil as this latterday but real life campaign) --and what makes it even worse in the reading is the name of the victim, Richard Plotkin. In the paper Steve Butcher reports, "A bright boy, young Richard had won poetry prizes, excelled at writing and played musical instruments at Wesley College. It was, says his sister, a 'middle-class, educated background'. Their father,Irving Samuel Plotkin, was a solicitor, Melbourne city councillor and ALP member until his death in 1976, Labor leader Arthur Calwell had been a family friend..." --indeed, it's the very same Richard Plotkin who was Michael Dugan's friend and whom, I'm pretty sure, I met --I'd need my diaries or, better, an assistant to read through them for mentions of Michael & accounts of his conversation which surely contained references to Plotkin, What's in my head is the Plotkin known to Michael since their Wesley schooldays, part of his myth, --poet & dreamer to whose place in the country Michael'd repair, for wild times or respite? --certainly author of a line, quoted by Michael at the head of his own Finished Poem (published in his collection Clouds, Outback Press, 1975) , "An unfinished poem is like a dead child." And Plotkin is probably to be counted amongst the devotees of Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Brennan & Blake in his poem, worshippers of "the supposed madness of genius / until identification becomes reality, / till success / and the love of your friends / becomes hollow mockery, and you turn / to spit in their faces, then cry alone." The figure in the first stanza ("The woods spit forth their child, / scribbler across city walls") seems to me that of Charles Buckmaster, "Poet of gentle images / whose nightmares slash at the hearts / of friends, and turn his own brain / to perpetual fear of its own visions." --but such aspects might well have enrolled Richard & Michael too...

I finish hot chocolate & fruit toast, brush off crumbs far easier than the atrocious story, trot downstairs into the bookshop on a mission, inspired by Carol Jenkins's email, to find Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, so to discuss an idea about poetry or a question asked of poetry by prose (what did I think, she asked, of McEwan's proposition in the book, "Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling."?) --but it seems there's a McEwan famine in Melbourne! Almost immediately, though, I've scored two compensatory gems, out of the blue as they always are --Helen Adam's San Francisco Burning : A Ballad Opera [Book by Helen & Pat Adam, lyrics by Helen, additional lyrics by Pat, music by Al Carmines, &, my o my, drawings by Jess] (Hanging Loose, pb, 1985), and an inscribed copy of Louis Johnson's Bread and a Pension : Selected Poems (Pegasus Press, New Zealand, 1964).

The Helen Adam (--Robert Duncan's poem to her, an angelic letter as he described them, recently in my mind : "An imaginary woman reads by her lamplight, inclining her head slightly, listening to the words as I write them : we are there, as the poem comes into existence -- she and I -- losing ourselves in the otherness of what is written. I too then am imaginary..." [ Letters :Poems 1953-56, republished by Flood Editions, 2003]) --mysterious outside of concentric circles of San Francisco (though more of her history than I'd ever read before appeared in Sydney magazine Boxkite a few years ago --to be expected? --Scottish editor James Taylor, teenage prodigy here in the 60s, publishes his Scotch lady, as she would describe herself, in Australia, as the ripples of the Magic Workshop found their furthest shore) feels to me like a blessing after the reading of Richard Plotkin's diabolical saga & the sad associations it throws up regarding Mike Dugan...

The Louis Johnson instantly recalls Nigel Roberts's recommendation at the Free Poetry magazine reading, as I recall it, at La Mama cafe-theatre, mid '69, when I introduced to our crowd Nigel, Terry Gilmore, possibly Johnny Goodall & Martyn Sanderson too? & Allison Hill with Terry by then? "You ask me what's happening in Sydney and here we are at La Mama?!" Nigel exclaimed. He talked as a New Zealander as much as a Sydney poet, praising Louis Johnson, who seemed from his description to have been a Kiwi connection with the wider poetry world, mentioning Bruce Beaver & his own contemporaries, and the Americans Wantling and Blazek too...

And so it's Nigel in my head now, rarely seen in Melbourne for years but here for two funerals recently --well, one, because Shelton Lea's event wasnt a funeral but the book-launching, a week before he died : a life-thumping fist in the eye of death if anything, with Dorothy Porter, only the other day dreadfully snatched from the poets herself, leading the defiance that night with her rousing speech in favour of Shelton's selected poems, Nebuchadnezzar (Black Pepper Press, 2007), which would have given him wings. Dorothy's words & Shelton's so-stately final fling inspired the loudest & most sustained cheering I've ever experienced at a literary do. Nigel was snapping away --first I saw of him that incredible night was on top of a table, wedged above the throng to my left, just through the doorway of the inner bar at the Rochester, looking down & along the tops of bobbing heads. Later, after Shelton & his helpers had left the stage, I noticed the line a group of us made along the wall, the serendipity of myself, Nigel, John Jenkins, Robert Kenny, Michael Dugan --& Geoff Eggleston too? --perhaps Geoffrey was in the public bar, with Michael Hudson, or au solitaire... I exclaimed that this would make a rather special photograph, especially if Ken Taylor were to join us (he was stuck in even thicker scrum a wide arc to the right)... Did Nigel snap us for the posterity that's even now closing in? He had his digital at Montsalvat for Geoff Eggleston's memorial service in December '08, & was showing around an album of historical photos --era of the younger Bob Adamson, John Tranter, John Forbes, Rudi Krausmann, Vicki Viidikas, Bill Beard, Richard Tipping, Rae Jones, Ken Bolton et al... Like that first conversation, 40 years ago, he brought as much New Zealand as Sydney news, for example the plaintive story of poet David Mitchell's current plight ... A drink, a smoke, then off to the airport for his flight.

2

A year or so ago I wrote --wrote? but certainly spoke with John Jenkins about Geoffrey Eggleston in the context of gathering up as much history as one could from our own friends & colleagues, specifically the La Mama era poets, before they forgot everything or didnt care or died. Geoffrey was fighting for his life, either before or after entering hospital for cancer --the ideological decision he had to make between natural healing & general medicine's drugs, radiation & surgery. I mentioned to John the valuable job it would be to get a tape-recorder and to reminisce between ourselves, perhaps include Geoffrey, Lorin, Ken Taylor, Garrie Hutchinson & doubtless others. JJ responded positively --we'd remind one another. And soon. But it hasnt happened yet, and Geoffrey, for one, is another sadly gone. Historians in the midst of ever demanding life --perhaps that's a nuance of Olson's comment concerning the difficulty of being both poet & historian...

The occasion of the particular conversation with JJ was the launching of Lorin Ford's haiku chapbook at Collected Works bookshop (July,'08)--an event Geoff had said he'd of course attend, agreeing she could count on the support of the friends from the La Mama days. He didnt. Should have realized then things werent well. He'd popped into the Shop not so long before, almost on closing-time and stayed an hour. Unlike previous visits, when he was dining out on the truly amazing circumstance surrounding his ultimately successful operation, happy with recovery, thanking his lucky stars & the world around him (--it was a visiting specialist who just happened to be the husband of one of Geoff's Eltham friends, who recognized our patient's name on his round & immediately adopted him) --on this occasion it was his shadow, rueful, dismissive, insisting the show was over, all gone & pointless. I said I was sorry to receive him so dejected, but the fact remained, good prognosis or bad, that as long as one was alive, the poet-artist or anyone with spirit had life to live --no point in brooding --only time now, more than ever before, to do what you like & have to do : write, draw, read, meet friends, have a smoke & drink a whiskey... Surely? And so we talked, and Geoffrey got into the pleasure of the conversation during which of course he mentioned Montsalvat in its highs & lows --his love & simultaneous anger with its principals, the derrogation of the original dream-- and about other possible festivals & meets he was going to organise or have others organise in his stead. He spoke about the possibilities of the internet --the networking he had promoted as the core of the culture, the web-site he wanted to develop for news & historical archive...

And suddenly in my mind a memory of a letter from Geoffrey to me in England, around 1970, --"we're learning to use the microphone", as of Melbourne Arts Co-Op programmes, the poets tripping over the rock'n'rollers' leads, as it were --or maybe that wasnt Geoff but wunderkind Paul Adler? The only La Mama poets' precedent I can think of is Andrew Jach, who directed the readings for the few weeks the Hemensleys were grape-picking in Mildura, February/March '69 --remember returning to the Tuesday night fixture to find Andy perched on a ceiling-high platform the current play's actors had built, with his girl-friend Deirdre Kesteven, performing poems with a microphone, amplified & distorted, not at all the La Mama style! --Andy's performance probably only appreciated by Michael Dugan of the inner circle, perhaps due to shared Pop enthusiasms --Dugan led his own King Hippo Poetry Band at the Melbourne Arts Co-Op & the legendary T F Much Ballroom & other venues, all gone I fear but for brief footage on Corinne & Arthur Cantrill's film, The Skin of the Eye... The point of this aside merely to note Geoff's intention always to be right where It was and often succeeding!

Geoffrey left the Shop, his swag over his shoulder, containing heaven knows what mass of papers --poems, handbills, correspondences with the powers-that-be at local, state, federal & who knows international level, concerning housing rezonings, forests, arts funding, all or any of his issues. I needed that, he said --I know what I've got to do, I'm back on track now... That was the last time I saw him, hauling his load down the stairs of the Nicholas Building as I shut the landing's doors for the night...


3

In a recent letter to Bernard Hemensley, in the context of discussing the English side of the Beats, I asked/joked what kind of Bums could there be without the Dharma (especially if the devotional be part of that term)? When one reviews the 1960s New in Melbourne or from a Melbourne point of view, it's obvious that Eastern inspired (say Chinese & Japanese) poetry, & the devotional attitude, looms large. For example, the second issue of Crosscurrents magazine could be said to have featured the inside-cover drawing of Meher Baba by Karl Gallagher as well as introduced poems by Paul Smith & Geoffrey Eggleston, all three of whom were Baba followers. At the time what would an English blow-in like me know or make of this? Michael it was who first told me about Baba & the Australian group. I think I understood Baba as a kind of guru-saint situated between the faiths --Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism. Baba, I gleaned, was the teacher who hadnt spoken at all for years, and whose best-known Australian followers were the older generation poet Francis Brabazon, the somewhat younger Adrian Rawlins & younger still Paul Smith... Like my brother Bernard, I'd inherited our father's interest in Paul Brunton, Theos Bernard, & the Master Theiron, from whence we'd found our own way to Suzuki, Alan Watts, the Beats. By those late Sixties, however, what had been the 'mysticism' of Dad's appreciation was now a generation's lingua-franca, for example the Maharishi's TM halo around the music-&-drugs nurtured youth culture. But years would pass before 'god-realization' reentered the prospectus, in my case via studies in transpersonal psychology, theology, Buddhism et al, my mid-1980s "enlightenment reading"! --and more or less where I am today...

Could be said that right in the middle of one's consideration of the question in respect of '60s, '70s Melbourne is Paul Smith. But such is the ignorance --the cultural forgetfulness that characterizes the kind of society we have become, and due to what : mere mass of population & media, simple diversity & density, burying if not destroying a specific identity as the acme of history & place? --the wherewithal of which defines all one's ever been about as remembering what is so quickly forgotten -- one could be tempted into full scale Lives of the Poets (which is partly where I think the Kerouacian project is situated, the secret history, but through no omission of its players, --secret because personal & forgotten, which requires its poet & chronicler now to tell it and not at all to the exclusion of non-poets but to include in & as that epic telling everyone & everything , --and in Paul's case where better beginning than "bookseller poet" --which was, surprisingly, not his biographical note in Crosscurrents number one (April, '68) --"22 years old, lives at Eltham (Vic.) with his wife, dog and cat.", but typical of his modesty. Some great bio, though, in the clarion opening para of Geoff Eggleston's rave in the first issue of the Whole Earth Sun Moon Review (ca1973), entitled (echoing Mailer), Advertisement for Ourselves or further Notes to Understand the New Humanity; or we were rough and ready guys but oh how we could humanize. Thus, "As youths Paul Smith went to a Catholic school and I attended a nearby Protestant one. A friend across the road from Paul became my friend, during my last year at Secondary school. So Paul and I became friends. But 'Micks and Prodos' were discouraged from fraternising so we became rebels. We argued a lot but it is the same argument we have been having for over 10 years, so we refine it, a continuing dialectic. We (at 17 years) read Rimbaud, Verlaine, Huxley, Orwell and all about the Beat Generation. We listened to Jazz...New Orleans, Modern, Bop and the Blues and Folk Music. And we concerned ourselves in chasing some strange quality found in the fastest spaces called Zen."

Returning to 1967/8, doing one's own thing, reading & writing, surviving, and always on the look-out for a scene! Imagine finding & reading in Dugan's little mag the contributor's notes for Eggleston & Terry Gillmore! I quote, "TERRY GILLMORE, born 1944, working towards open universe. Poetic influences - Pound, W.C.Williams, Olson, et al. Wandering poet/gardener. Rest should be in the poems." "GEOFFREY EGGLESTON, born Springvale, 1944, studied commercial art before doing the 'On The Road' Sydney/Adelaide/Melbourne circuit. Worked at the printing industry and in 25 hang up jobs. Now works in ceramic industry, studies pottery and studies at the National Gallery Art School. Writes for something else to do, hopes to make poems with a movie camera. Hopes to make his Old Man Poem a total environmental soil sculpture called a garden."

How brilliant were these? I for one was home at last and it was paradise after all! A secret sign in them thar dark ages --viz., Al Alvarez to the Melbourne University extension lecture audience one night, 1967, "W C Williams is a blind spot of mine!" : our esteemed English visitor, champion of the trans-atlantic confessionals & the Iron Curtain poets, lecturing on Robert Lowell, discounting his valorised subject's own appreciations. Worse than Alvarez's peremptory dispatch of Williams & the allied poetics was the (self)congratulatory chuckle from the lecture theatre's front row! Bill muttered that this disdain was just what one would expect of the English Department! Ah well, so much water under the bridge though this retrospect momentarily renews my interest : the know-what-you-mean'ers sharing Alvarez's not-getting Lowell's regard for the Doc presumably including poets & academics one's since met halfway in this city. Who knows... Many moods in the department since, and what was the department almost gone... Bill Beard, AWOL from the RAAF, an actor at the New Theatre in Melbourne with Retta Garvey, introduced by me to the genuinely new theatre possibilities of Betti Burstall's just-beginning La Mama cafe-theatre was, as far as the University knew, a cleaner then, who occasionally sat in, illicitly, on classes. He'd interjected comments about Olson & the Black Mountain poets & John Cage, et al, on one occasion, much to the puzzlement of the lecturer, so extra-curricular were these references --where are you getting this stuff? he enquired. At La Mama, Bill apparently replied --as though it were the only real university in town!

A simple example of the younger poets' sensibility which the older generation's authorities seemed not to get, is a little thing by Terry Gillmore. The Sydney poet Gillmore's poems, recruited by Geoff Eggleston for the early issues of Crosscurrents, whilst resembling William Carlos Williams, are something else again. Like WCW, the visual observations & spoken thoughts appear as objects, found or chiseled. They're also like some of the ancient Chinese, infused with or informed by day's & world's god-givenness. For example, one of his untitled poems from the 60s : "people do stare / for long periods / of / time / resisting / the orange white / rose"... [collected in Further, Poems 1966-1976, published New Poetry, '77] When one reads the Sixties back into Williams and then moves the whole thing forward again, the way any era encounters &/or creates its lineage, there's a sense of each word's loading, psychedelic perhaps, comporting the poem as tho' it's rune read as writ. I think this is an extension of the Williams' jewel! I'm wont to say that with the Sixties any such poem was also beneficiary of a glorious eclecticism in which the works of prophets & poets effected the same resonance. The Gita & Blake, Hafiz & Yeats and et cetera, now appeared to be the natural threshold of this fraction of the New. One of that poetry's, not to say sensibility's, numerous Melbourne successors is Dave Ellison; for glorious example, "Raindrops / In sunlight / Hang the bare tree / With jewels / Brighter / Than diamonds" [from the chapbook, Full Moon, King Tide, 1997]...

To return to Paul Smith & the 'bookseller-poet' ascription : there's a fascinating Melbourne bookshop history could be told, if only in terms of bookshop as workplace of poets & artists, another surrogate college... Before ever I arrived in Melbourne, the legendary bookseller Jack Bradstreet was at Hall's in Prahran, with James Crouch, Robert Rooney & others, including the young poet David Miller (in England for many decades), working there under his wing. Michael Dugan, in 1968 my guide to the local history, putting names to the faces I'd seen at Cheshires basement bookshop, amongst whom were Paul Smith & James Crouch (--whose sister Margaret I'd met during 1966, my first winter Down Under, at Lorin Ford's father's terrace boarding-house in South Yarra, a writer herself who leant me her typewriter for the days & hours she was at her job whilst I was once more happily unemployed in my room, compiling the story of my up & down days, and never knew of her brother til the La Mama times --in fact she brought him, or he brought her? to the Marcel Duchamp Memorial Event I'd organized at La Mama, October '67, the posters for which Paul & James displayed at Cheshires for me --saw them sitting there, the years since I'd seen her might as well have been an aeon in experience & consciousness!)... But this isnt even a footnote to that bookseller history, just a context for Paul... A more crucial encounter with him was at a La Mama poetry reading, sometime before or after the Duchamp event, perhaps before, when he objected, and properly tho' it wasnt clear to me then, to one of my poems, received by the 'committed' audience with approval I recall, in which I portrayed the Buddhist prayer-wheel as impersonal, escapist, pseudo-practice and the self-immolations of monks as hollow gestures in the face of such a crisis as the war in Vietnam. Paul strenuously contradicted me : the monks, he said, were in the forefront of resistance, the fiery immolations were the ultimate personal sacrifice. Indeed, indeed. But this was the thick of Sixties' radical political activism, which one's come to see is the literal at the complete expense of the symbolic, necessarily an obliteration of the subtlety you'd expect a poet to respect as well as of the spiritual plane upon which the other life plays out. One can only now plead teens & twenties, not yet learnt in the Sixties to bite tongue on words better thought through than expressed, to say nothing of acts...

I'm sure Paul Smith would say his major work was his translation/edition of the complete ghazals of Hafiz (central to the Baba ethos & mythos), and I wouldnt disagree; but a monument to that time's spiritually invested poetry & art and to his own place within it, is the massive compendium PIE (Whole Earth Catalogue Publications, '74). One can still find the odd copy in a second-hander on a shelf designed for outsized books. It's a gem --in terms of small-press & counter-culture book production and as a cross-section of the life of an era, for some contributors their first-stirrings, for others as articulate as they & their concerns would ever be. The 628 page anthology (configured alphabetically as a divan), with covers by Dale Hickey & John Adam, Oswald Hall's broad-brush swirling "Aum" visual introduction to the book, and drawings by artists including Mirka Mora, Karl Gallagher, Andre Sollier (sumi-e), also features an issue of Mal Morgan's Parachute Poems, the editorial of which perfectly dovetails with PIE's forward. Paul Smith's paraphrase of the philosophia perennis would have it that, "Art, when inspired with love leads to higher realms. When the artist is involved in the act of painting, poetry, dance etc... his ego diminishes, Love appears... and when love appears... God is approached. Art is divine. Through it... the artist meets God within himself, mankind sees God within itself." Mal Morgan's poet "is the waking Prophet in this cities concrete that I address -- the Burning Phoenix, Christ, Clown, Anarchist, Egocentric, Buffoon -- all of these and more(.....)Through him is the Returning. He gives back to you that which is yours. He bears that which you were forced to relinquish, your sacrifice on his shoulders -- his shoulders pinned, hinged to the door of a gaping dream..."

A mystical rather than political appreciation of the Tradition contextualizes PIE, and thirty-five years on holds more life for me, even as fascination, than the progressive precepts & politics of the time now do... Rosemary Adam's interpretation of Fabre D'Olivet's Cosmogony of Moses; Meher Baba's & Dr Munsiff's versions & commentaries on Hafiz; Paul Smith's article on Baba, Hafiz & others; Oswald Hall's poems including The Brood of Exile (written in 1951) & his essay The Source of Styles (A Primer on the Soul of Western Culture) which wouldnt have been out of place in Temenos, Kathleen Raine & friends' magazine in the UK, a decade or so later; Francis Brabazon's A Dream of Wet Pavements; Leo Kelly (--one of Geoff Eggleston's heroes from the realm of the great unsung, ultimately what all of this is about : his claims for Kelly corroborated years later when Carmel Kelly, whom we'd known via Anna Couani's Sea Cruise Books (Sydney), which published her prose-pieces The Waters of Vanuatu (1985), visited the Bookshop and related a daughter's version of Geoffrey's legendary man & poet), whose long poem In Memorium addresses Danillo Vassilief (--typical invocation of the perspective PIE illustrates --Melbourne's Russian as easily missed when all the lights are on Nolan & Boyd, which isnt to doubt their genius at all, as proletarians are when it's all la-dee-da, or mystics when realism rules the roost, or the real & true when textuality's the thing --from the fashionable point of view may as well have never existed); --all these comprise an older arc of the New Age prospectus against which a portion of the variety of the counter-culture, alive & well in the mid '70s, abuts.

From this memo's perspective, the sets of poems by Paul Smith, Geoff Eggleston & Mal Morgan are as priceless as the company they keep. Of names we'd recall today one might list Alan Afterman (who returned to the US, achieving acclaim for his studies in the kabbalah, alas dead now), Eric Beach, Charles Buckmaster (whose chapbook Deep Blue & Green, published by Crosscurrents, is reproduced, perhaps as memorial to Charles, three years gone by PIE's publication), Mike Dugan, Jas Duke, Billy Jones, Phil Motherwell, Ian Mudie, Peter Murphy, Pi O, Shelton Lea, Terry Harrington, John Jenkins, Barbara Giles, Poor Tom, Andrew Donald, David Pepperell. Less heard of on these days' poetry scene would be Alison Hill,Ross Bennett, Ron Eden, Gundel (apparently a niece of Herman Hesse I seem to remember?), Ian Hill, John Levy, Marc Radzyner, Tim Doyle, Karl Gallagher, Frances Yule... As David Pepperell recalls Paul Smith spruiking : send me something, all of Melbourne's in it! Even a single entry like John Tranter's Aum poem, whether it's parody or an instructive peculiarity (--whose last two enigmatic lines are "From darkness God is born the Word / And as the Word I greet it."), speaks the reams jumping around my head, which could & should be written sometime by someone, somewhere!

Reminded by Ross Keating in his book Francis Brabazon : Poet of the Silent Word -- A Modern Hafiz (World Axis Press,NSW, '02), that Brabazon was invited to read at the Montsalvat Poetry Festival by Eggleston & friends in 1979, which would have been the 10th anniversary of Meher Baba's death as it happens. Keating describes Brabazon's reaction : "In a letter to the organizers he wrote, in part, that he was very pleased to receive the invitation, that he would like to attend, but he would not be able to personally read his poetry. It seems, by this stage, that Brabazon had lost confidence in his ability to speak in public : '...I am an old man with forty years of work behind me; and although still intensely creative cuts a rather foolish figure when he takes to the platform. (The old man for reflection, the young men for battle.)' "

The old men & women were, of course, essential to Geoffrey's scheme. No matter the irreverent language at times, he honoured what he regarded as theTradition & its exemplars --his old men included Alec Hope & Frank Kellaway, his old women Barbara Giles, Joyce Lea, Connie Barber, Gwen Harwood... For Geoff, such people had both survived the years & carried its history and were poets besides. Into this company Ken Taylor eventually stepped (--tho' Geoff had dubbed Ken & I the elder brothers in his early-70s Whole Earth Catalogue piece recapitulating on beginnings & directions), and, it must be said, Geoff did too, as our entire generation ticked off the epochal numbers --into our sixties, the Sixties in its sixties, our seventies beckoning...


[January/April,2009]

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


KRIS HEMENSLEY & JOHN TRANTER


AN INSTANT INTERVIEW

March 28th, '09

Dear John,

In the course of a comprehensive rereading of the new poetry mags of the 1960s & '70s --a historically informed nostalgia should the latter occur to you as my sole motivation! --I've been impressed by the strong devotional current running through what was, definitively, that counter-culture era, and nowhere so strongly as in Paul Smith's gi-normous compendium, PIE (from 1974). As would be expected with any of Paul's projects, Meher Baba is a major presence there, in amongst that new age's psychedelic evangelism. And there you are too, represented by your poem Aum, the most formal poem in the 628 page anthology, and even if there's some literary mischief afoot, seems to me, in retrospect, to achieve a little magic. Paul, of course, you published in your own mag of the '60s, Transit... You once joked that your mag was the missing end of the Melbourne/Sydney axis : did you also share in any of the devotions?

Best wishes,
Kris


OoO

March 29th, '09

Hi, Kris.

I had forgotten that poem: could you send me a copy?

I was interested in Chinese poetry and Buddhist philosophy from the age of about seventeen to about twenty-six, and did quite a lot of reading in Zen, the Tao Te Ching, and some meditating during those years. I did write one or two poems along these lines in those early days, but dualism (in the illusory and beautiful and horrible world of Maya), where the energies of dualist conflict got the poem moving. ("Without contraries is no progression..." Blake.) A truly enlightened poem would be silent.

Here's a more recent meeting with Aum:
http://johntranter.com/prose/ny-diary-2003.shtml

Keep well,
John


OoO


March 29th, '09

Dear John,

Here is the poem from PIE (p561).


AUM


"...in the beginning
was the Word..."

Break your neck you see
The blood that's in it, otherwise unseen.
Crack the apple's heart the seed
Drops to earth to break it,
Grows down, thinks, and comes up green.
Thus does death forsake it.

Plant the pulsing deep
And light that's on it deep within the sea's
Echo in the eye. The sleeping
Bone shall then awaken,
Grow up, burst, become a tree.
Thus is death forsaken.

Sing your song you hear
The death that made it, otherwise unheard.
Cry the dying sun the air
Leaps the heart to meet it.
From darkness God is born the Word
and as the Word I greet it.



OoO


March 29th, '09

Thanks for that poem, Kris. Jesus Christ! What was I trying to do...impress James McAuley? Outdo Les Murray in devotional verse?

That's what reading Dylan Thomas does to you: turns you into a babbling, rhyming rhetorician. Oh, well, I wrote it, so I can't really disown it, though I don't have any idea what I meant by the word "God" in that poem. I mean, I had no idea then, and less today.

Best,
John



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

GEOFFREY EGGLESTON


THE SON IS FATHER TO THE MAN.
as I observed my son's heartbreak
as his sweetheart
sailed away.

And I remember
the amazing sadness
poignancy of
love flowering,
the garden of
innocence fades
and 17 years
of age loses
its charm.

THESE HALCYON DAYS... 1984
devotions to Isis or Kali


Be patient my son
There is much terror
In this place terra firma.

How firm is this earth
Once a ball of fire?
Its shadow is still with us:
All things in flux.

Let me say to you
Who believe your mother's words,
The sea is of our blood
And there is little treasure
Found beneath the waves,
The pearls of the teeth, the storm.

The mother I know is fierce
As a wolf and as beautiful
As the sunrise.

She nourishes me with her songs of pain and birth
And she is the mother we share as all women.

I have watched too many put all aside
And embrace ignorance like a coat of night.

I have known others
Who have climbed on their own pedestals
And postured as they teetered.

Transfixed on their own reflection
In the mundane mirror of everyday
They fake a melodramatic death,
Angry as she whose obituary reads:
"Perished by her own hand"

Or they slowly retire
To the sanatorium of dulled fantasies
The place where impossible dreams
Are cut from the heart and left to shrink
Like bloodclots in the infernal trashcans.

Discursive is not beating around the bush
But proceeding with a logic
Of rambling doom on the installment plan
as human ecology collapses
as we seek the integrals or archetype
In complexity and chaos.

Only fools perceive profundity as turgid
As they pack like little hens
In the garden of Eden
As what they miss sprouts
To regenerate new flowerings.

2

Confusing simple with simplicity
They value their dread of life beyond life
As their sad lights dim,
Bitter in their worship of what is younger than them
The welts of self flagellation
The only roses perceived
Continually crucified by self doubt
Without redemption.

Plundering the monuments of the past
Without oblations due
Is as grotesque as neglecting today for the future
Which is always today.

But remember as the scenery
Is being changed in the global theatre
the scenario or choreography is charted
As a map of the mind's continent
in this fiery dance.

To the Hindu
The Lord Shiva
Dances the world pulse
And times change.

The belle of the masque ball
Is encouraged not to swap her insouciance
For a tea towel and the frump pumps
So stimulation vicarious or actual
Is weighed against the thrill of guilt.


3

The leaden gravity dulls
And again though the judgement
Is like a bowl of blood
For Kali's exquisite thirst
All is possible when done with love,
The only absolution.

Legends are legend
For when a leitmotiv is discovered
Its key opens more than one door.

Fantasy in the playgrounds
And pleasure gardens of love
A folderol of memory
That decorates those raiments
Worn for the streets of desire
Like the crazes and mischief of children
That spread like an epidemic
Desire thrills and chills
as it kisses my earlobe like a butterfly.

Again the wanderer is betrayed
By the confused breath of desire
And the famine that takes life from the bones
Arises fierce and vicious.

Her will like the hounds of hell
Must be felt by the vital breath
Of the hero battling ghosts.

Her smile is death
And as fetid as any monster
Atavistic and regressive
Out of the primordial swamp of revenge
She is as eons of clashing swords.

Some heroes die on her altar
And some she will love insanely
And tell all of the knots
Of sinew and womanly music
For she is the only measure of heroes.


4

All those bloody poems
About fear and lost love
Easy notes plucked
From the pages of others' songs
Urban blues spoken patois
Dumb as a lamp-post
Prosaic as a journalist's perception.

Without lyrics on our lips
We devour the crumbs of a meagre repast
Not the last supper but leftovers
As if two eggs are tits on a plate.

The bare page is no nude descending a staircase
But some sacred cow who ate all the grass and went home.

So we imprint our grubby minds
Our machine is greased
Our palms are sweaty
as the keys fall away from our fingers
the exactitude of ideas and symbols
Merge into infrasound
And reverence flies over the moon.

Is it only the tears of virgins and whores
That purify the tiresome streets of everyday?

But don't weep for me.

I have learnt much
From Her
The Queen of the starry vault of heaven,
And stand inviolate
For my laurels are many
And all the old gods
Metamorphose into the one.

_____________________________
[Note:
Written by Geoff mid to late 80s? Given to me late 80s, 90s in envelope marked "for your perusal (keep it for archives)"... No better archive at present than here...KH]


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


DAVE ELLISON

To the Dreamer of our dreams


***


A SAILOR NEEDS THE SEA


Within the sands of time
My heart continued on
Across those rolling fields
For though I love the earth
A sailor needs the sea

I tramped through welcome towns
Oases in the heat
And never wished to stay

The journey wore me down
Till fevers cleared away
Before a sparkling beach

I danced among the waves
But know my destiny
Is with the deepest calm
For though I love the earth
A sailor needs the sea


***


High Summer
Commands
The heat-haze
To levitate
Our town


***


HINT OF YOUR PERFUME


Unseen hand
Here at home
Flowers pressed in books

Hint of your perfume

Wind-chimes ring
In this love
Keen to be and breathe

Hint of your perfume

Living room
Daydream blue
Closer to the heart



***


The wind
Boxes your ears
For heading
That way
And that way
Was chosen



***

THE COMING OF SILENCE


Earth is veiled in static
Planes circle the avalanche
Sounds of crowded islands
Tears flood the telegraph
Then silence
Come the hush of love

News of unseen planets
Hope drums out on ticker-tape
Young blood prowls the desert
Blues echo a lonely place
Then silence
Come the hush of love

Vows made over wireless
Souls wail through megaphones
Make the talking picture
Read the script where all time unfolds
Then silence
Come the hush of love


***


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


CATHERINE O'BRIEN


from WALKING POEMS


1. Pii Mai Lao : Plain of Jars, Phonsavan


the bombing of heaven

waves sweeping the sky
clouds
falling into jars
a silence
of air
and small
winds
this far up...
mist white
into evening
peering into
pools
of water,
deep inside
the
giant
Guardian
vessels.

abundance of offerings
across
the magnetic plains

I can walk
into the Plain of Jars
1960-1970
trench line
and
through
bowl-shaped
craters
on the
surface
of
Earth.....
where bombs
fell
silent

Shall i tell you the story of the jars?


2. Pii Mai Lao : Luang Prabung


...into the house of red cloth

the young man carries
a crystal bowl...
within
white leaves
floating
on yellow
sweet water
for
washing
the
ashes
of
his ancestors....

...window I pray....
mist wrapped
over
the sacred....
white
upon
white

pouring the
water
where
white stones
bled red...


3. Pii Mao Lau : Um Muang, Champassak


....once there was a forest
now a circle
of trees' bones
white.
someone has
left for the spirits
leaf and twig.
one red thread
from a branch.
shadow and skies
float
in black water
within the rock...
Rudani
face pasted
white on stone
waits....

I place
a fallen
leaf..........

Touch forever... .
Sitting with the clouds... .
Night bats... .
Fireflies... .
Cicadas... .
Darkness... .
Ghosts... .
In and out of the stars... .


[Muong Noi.... June, 2006]


*

[NOTE:
Pii Mai Lao is the Lao New Year festival in April
Rudani is the consort of Shiva
The poems are written in notebooks while walking]



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

JUSTIN LOWE


JOSQUIN


you are given over sometimes
to what perhaps you should admit is your element
the chalky soup of hotel sheets
the stale air forced from a tyre
poet because you have no time
because you were not intended
lately it seems to be this alone that drives you
that wakes you bright and early with the last dying stars
milky as your reckonings, your flaky tablature of slights
what you could not fit quite so snugly into verse
a flint that burns like dying inside you
an arresting but not unpleasant smell
of one who sighs obliquely in supermarket lines
whose eyes are the first to well up in the wind
God, if there is any chance you'll listen still
grant me the strength to outlive this man
to forgive all slights that bind me to him
unwrite the poems that show his hand
kiss the woman goodnight who shuddered at his sense
undo his doings everywhere
like your son with the pungent lepers
so that I too may touch without flinching
without thinking always how pure am I


*


THE WHO


she is the promise of Marlowe
that I will rise tomorrow
a whisper of sweet parting and coffee on the stove
her lipstick kiss on the bathroom mirror
dust motes giggling in the winter sun

the house seems cleaner for her
as though some brick had broken wind
the catches have give again
the rust has left the pipes
my home has grown wings, stone angel

she is that mirror draws men's stomachs in
since she cupped her hands on my kidneys
I have begun catching doors in the wind
traversing lost years with a wink
qualifying no more

for she leaves these bushfire mornings
as though returning were neither
an option or an answer
but as though to a man nursing a riddle
a cat turned ginger in the sun


*
[NOTE:
The Who was published in Justin Lowe's collection, Mistaken for Strangers (Bluepepper, 2008)... These poems are copyright, 2008, 2009.]


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

PETE SPENCE


ACROSTICS

*


VIE D'HENRI BEYLE

Hanging about in Grenoble
Eyeing off the chocolates
Not 'till you've eaten lunch
Riled Dr. Gagnon
I mean it!

Blah thought Henri
Eyeing further delights
You go on and on!
Like it or not I'll keep
Eyeing off the chocolates

*


EN BLANC ET NOIR (LOUISE NEVELSON)

Louvers of square light
Over jet black panels
Usurp daylight through
Insets of space
See how it runs over
Everything in sight

Nowhere is as how
Ever that might be again
Verges that sit
Etched in air
Leanings that trace
Solids that fall
Over space made spare
Never it seems too soon

*


KAREL APPEL

Klash! the blue goat turns
Apricot and like a green
Rebus with an orange wing
Escapes time
Leaping over a camel

Air black and swept
Pours out of the wind
Porcupine yellow
Elopes with the sun
Late in the skin of night


*

PAM BROWN

Pared Down the line is still
Ample and clear
Meandering around space

Beauty attests
Retrogradually itself
Or i am
What i am
No poem sans question!


*

JOHN FORBES

Jokingly Balmain falls
On its feet
Hurries off sporadically
Nikes aware!

Folderols are for the effete
Or anyone with poetic
Rickets or into sun
Bastes! oven fresh
Energy everywhere
Stuns the pullets!


*

REED BYE (JOIN THE PLANETS)

Relish on the blue
Entertainment bubbly
Effervescent and folding
Down along the table

Black coffee after
Your platter of words
Everything is turning to sky


*

KILGORE TROUT

Kallamity with an
Ice-cap equals
Life so it
Goes like an
Orderly diaspora
Reclining before
Error!

Terra! Terror!
Rampantly in
Orbit on skis
Utterly homesick but
Traveling on!


*

GREGORY CORSO (1930-2001)
for Norma

Gregarious might be a sandwich
Resisting hunger...
Each to their own i say
Grinning like a door
Over the skylight
Right above that cloud
Yesterday or the moment before!

Crowds continue to grow
On the shore watching the water
Rise and fall while you snore in
Sync as the tide gathers sand
Over the preceding!


*

TENZIN GYATSO

Tentatively vitality
Emerges in the odd
Nuance of complete
Zeal noisy like an
Inept parrot at
Night (Gottschalk)

Go there and
You stay
Arriving for once
Twice if you try
So many times
Over & over it's ne'er done


*

[NOTE:
Re- Henri Beyle : Stendahl spent his childhood winking in Grenoble
Louise Nevelson : high falutin sculptor lady from New York
Kilgore Trout : Kurt Vonnegut
Reed Bye's book is Join the Planets; blue is perhaps a reference to Wallace Stevens' Blue Guitar]


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CONTRIBUTORS NOTES

KRIS HEMENSLEY your host
JOHN TRANTER edited Transit magazine in Sydney in the late 1960s; thirty years later began the on-line magazine, Jacket, http://jacketmagazine.com/. Numerous publications, including his most recent selection, Urban Myths : 210 Poems : New & Selected (pub, UQP, 'o6). Co-edited the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) which extended from his seminal anthology, The New Australian Poetry (Makar Press, 1979). Website, http://johntranter.com/
GEOFF EGGLESTON (1944-2008), great stalwart of poetry in Melbourne. Directed the Montsalvat Festival of Poetry & Music (Eltham, Vic) for many years. His books first announced in the '70s are still forthcoming. He is mourned.
'DEVA' DAVE ELLISON thanks Kris Hemensley and Vera Di Campli San Vito for bringing light to his contribution here. Dave has lived near the Maribyrnong Rivers since he was newborn in 1953. He's more mystic than poet. Poetry is a shining trail, left by the snail. Francis Brabazon, close personal disciple of Meher Baba, was more poet than mystic. Deva Dave ruminates on this. He is grateful to the devotional poets of Melbourne. They were his real education.
CATHERINE O'BRIEN lives & works in Vientiane (Lao PDR) when she's not in Melbourne or Bendigo. Occasionally publishes poetry (H/ear, Hobo, Small Packages) and shows visual poems, photographs, & textile installations since the '80s. See Catherine O'Brien Archive for more.
JUSTIN LOWE has published 6 books including The Glass Poems, The Great Big Show, Magellenica, & his new collection Mistaken for Strangers (all from Bluepepper Press).[see www.bluepepper.blogspot.com] As well as writing he collaborates with some of Sydney's finest songwriters. Lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
PETE SPENCE first published in the late '60s,early '70s, eg Makar. After a decade's hiatus edited Post Neo magazine and publications in the '80s and began contributing collages & visual poetry in Australia & overseas. More recently has had poems & visual poems published in New London (USA),by Tom Weigel, & in Germany by Karl-Friedrich Hacker. Included in his umpteenth group exhibition in Naples, Futurismo, a homage to Italian Futurism presently touring Italy.

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Finished typing April, '09
[many thanks to Donal Ellis for creating the picture file for Cathy O'Brien's red pillow, and to Carol Jenkins for finally placing it in the text!]
Kris Hemensley