THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 11, June, 2009; PART 2

MICHAEL FITZGERALD-CLARKE

Two poems from SOFDOLREADIC MEDITATIONS ON THE PSALMS

PSALM 40


He now has a new song to sing--
The ambient fire that blinded him
Is no longer part of his memory.

God is making a cup of tea
But he has no sugar.
Other things are there, too numerous
To list: grey clouds, engines,
Secret codes - such things
Trouble list compilers, but
Where is the sugar?

God goes into the goldmine,
And when he re-surfaces to heaven
He leaves behind our planet's
Blind copulation in the dark
Nights bereft of love.

A thousand bibles on street corners,
Ten thousand bibles in schools.
Jim Morrison no longer breaks
Wind, no longer fears needles.

Elvis and Oscar Wilde look
At the fort. They have exchanged
Their greying hair for haloes,
Bad habits for certainty, for hope.
God is good, and his unfailing love
And faithfulness work miracles.
Several cubes of sugar have
Ben conjured up.

All those premature ejaculators who say,
"Aha! We've got him now!" are really
At heart, decent souls who would benefit
From the serenity of a day's fishing. Their wives
And girlfriends cook muffins in the colder months,
And their recourse to blonde tints and streaks
Isn't disgraceful, but it is a bit sad.

The delay in ending this poem has to do with
Reverence, and sincerity. I am a committed
Believer in the Father, Jesus, the Holy ghost, and
Jim Morrison, Elvis, and Oscar Wilde. My
Premature ejaculations drip over an army of
Ants, and yes, I am neither poor, nor
Needy, but rather warm in my bedroom. Finis.


*

PSALM 46


Welshmen deliver milk as mountains become pebbles--
In the laboratory quarks sing their strangeness like divas,
And Poseidon and God play scrabble,
Both claiming unquestionable as the longest
Seven letter word imaginable. And so
The oceans roar and foam, and so a small,
Costumed boy throws pebbles into the sea.

Go to a river bank to seek refuge from eternity--
See how the city's water supply is polluted
By ghosts of Welsh shepherds who can ethereally
Tip muck in from earthenware jars. Philadelphia
Is where God has his east coast base, and
All the baseball bats in all the houses
Cannot destroy it. A native American offers
A passer-by a sweet thing on a stick--
God is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.

Two vagrants set fire to a rubbish bin.
This is destruction equivalent to the loss
Of love at twenty-two, the dim bestiality
Of our planet. As John Lennon
Said, "Perfection is counted only by tossers,"
And God has fire extinguishers aplenty.

A wax sculpture of a butterfly is placed
Near the exit of the Gallery. It hardly moves.

A native American offers a passer-by a
Sweet thing on a stick - God
Is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.


*

[NOTE: In essence, Sofdolreadic Meditations on the Psalms involves writing a poem for each of the 150 Psalms in the Holy Bible. I have begun writing in the order that I pull slips of paper out of a box, believing as I do in the purposeful nature of chance. Number 46 was the first slip of paper I drew out, so two poems written and 148 to go. Though I'm still way behind William Shakespeare in this respect, since 1989 I have coined some words, and sofdolreadic is my latest. The dictionary entry will go as follows:

sofdolreadic / sof'dol'reed'ic/ a. poetically unique

The etymology of the word is: "sof" from The Doors song The Soft Parade,arguably Jim Morrison's finest moment; "dol" from 'dolmen', a megalithic tomb (nothing can be poetically unique without it being cognisant of its past); and "readic" from 'read' (a little less esoteric).

27/4/09]


________________________________________________________________


CHRIS GRIERSON


BACKYARD PASTORAL


a broken computer rotting
under jasmine
graffiti stains the fence
the neighbour's cat
descends a tree branch
the barbecue rusted
like a hulk long washed up
weeds press their claim
possums and rats
along the fence after dark
saturday night goths
drop a port bottle
from the laneway alongside
the dog three doors down
barks like a chainsaw
choking to start
an old concrete bench
protects a patch of grass
like a doting mother
last year's tomatoes
hunched like tumbleweeds
yet to be set free
a metal pipe wedges
the Hills Hoist upright
a cracked path
leads its way
out on fold-up chairs
the knee high grass
tickles our calves
drinking beer
the mosquitos moving in



*


EXCLUDE THE ASPIRANTS


A new Michael Ondaatje hardback
is something to savour
like a good op shop
rarer these days
seconds a boutique
elegantly squeezed
like a council sapling
edged in concrete
you skirt around
like a bruise
commerce doubles up
like birthday cards
stood up next to the tele
chiming media doctrine
my hawaiian shirt
wilts off the line
a page one rendezvous
scores the next decade



________________________________________________________________



NATHAN SHEPHERDSON


THREE POEMS



frypan


he stands over the fire
cooking souls in a frypan
prodding them with a knife

an attempt to discover their names


*


thought


a thought has been found

a philosopher will be called in
to determine the cause of its death


*


paddock


a white horse rests in a paddock
wet green safely coloured in around him
accompanying grey sheets squeeze from discarded eyes

a white horse is resting in a paddock
as far away from George Stubbs as he can get



________________________________________________________________


ANN SHENFIELD


FROM OUT OF NOWHERE


I won't think about where it all begins or ends
each grain of sand, blade of grass, drop of rain

I'll disregard the minutiae, even though it all starts
with a single gene, cell, idea -- on the molecular

level it's all waves anyway, all interconnected,
therefore I'll let myself forget the singular

blade, grain, drop, besides these days no one
much remembers rain, so I let go of rainy days,

even months when it must have poured
I'll allow them all to subside,

only this momentary pause--
where experience might endure beyond itself

instead I'll just accept my limitations
and let one stand for each and every

like that day walking back from the park
when I misjudged the weather, a mother

with her two children, both overshadow her now--
but then that rain, it came from out of nowhere

heavy drenching rain, with children running
sopping, running, laughing, soaking, laughing

as though nothing existed, but us and that rain,
that would stand for each and every drop.



_______________________________________________________________

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

MICHAEL FITZGERALD-CLARKE, born in England, lived in Melbourne (where he participated in Poor Tom's street poetry a couple of decades ago), & for many years in Canberra. Has published two chapbooks of poetry, S-h-h-hidelplonk (Pudding House, USA, '02), & Deep Wings (White Heron Press, USA, '04). Numerous poems have appeared in magazines here & overseas including Blast, Hobo, The Adirondack Review, The Wormwood Review. Has written poetry since he was "captivated as a teenager by a biography of John Keats", & also includes Shelley, Rilke, Lorca, Bunting, Dransfield & Olds amongst his influences.
CHRIS GRIERSON, lives in Melbourne. Has written songs, poems, short-stories & novels, some of which have been published, won awards, been performed. Publisher of poetry chapbook series, Soup, in the 1990s, whose authors included Kierran Carroll, Claire Gaskin & Cassie Lewis. Currently working on a long piece based on the life & times of Melbourne gangster, Squizzy Taylor.
ANN SHENFIELD, lives in Melbourne, recent residency at Varuna (Blue Mountains); see Poems & Pieces #8, and Poems & Pieces #2 for previous contributions.
NATHAN SHEPHERDSON, lives in the Glass House Mountains in Queensland. The son of painter Gordon Shepherdson, he is a poet & writer on visual art. Has published Sweeping the Light Back Into the Mirror (UQP, '06); What Marian Drew Never Told Me About Light (Small Change Press, Qld.,'08). Has won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize twice, in 2004 & '06, & same year won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. When not scooping prizes he follows the cricket.
________________________________________________________________


CORRESPONDENCE


FRANCES YULE

It's been a fascinating leg of the journey... finding your blogspot and having contact with old mates from the Melbourne push... and what a buzz to see our poems/freeverse published....! What I envisage as a worthy project would be to gather absolutely everything still accessible from that time... the broadsheets, mags, posters, pics, etc., and bring it all together in one magnificent book... paintings, sculptures... I won't do it... but putting the idea out there might spark someone else... You've started something... how do we broadcast your blogspot to a larger audience? John Yule (not a relly), John Tranter, Geoff Eggleston, Adrian Rawlins, all have references on the net... that's a start... and some of the living may still have memorabilia...


*


KARL GALLAGHER

6th May,'09
It bowled me over that you would devote an issue to devotional/beat poets of Melbourne and Meher Baba, it just seemed so out of the blue, a left field sort of thing. I was also impressed with the 40 year thing, because 40 is a significant number in Sufi tradition. Hafiz especially mentions 40 in connection with a couple of significant events in his life. I have a strong feeling about this year because it's 40 years since Baba dropped His body.
But when I thought about it, the devotional or spiritual aspect was very strong with the Beats, it was obvious. And it was what attracted me to Kerouac et al all those years ago...before I got connected to Baba. But the way you have focussed on that characteristic of the Beats strikes me as something not really stated by other writers. But Kerouac, Cassady & the others were very drawn to the spiritual/sacred...despite all their character defects...

12th May, '09
(....) I'm sure it has been said by others [spiritual/religious characteristics of the Beats, ed] but I don't recall that it was given more than a passing notation...it was other things about the Beat characters & writers that were given more significance. But a large part of Kerouac's alcoholism was due to disenchantment, disillusionment with the world...his path through existentialism, drugs, Buddhism, and return to Catholic (mysticism) faith of childhood, and of course his withdrawal from his old friends and social network, and his own statement prefacing last publication about being lonely, solitary, Catholic mystic madman.
And of course Neal was wired bigtime for the connection to God... "now we know TIME man"... and was in the habit of prayer and meditative reflection... His karma was also high wired to the physical domain and driven sexually and drugs too...sort of complicated things a bit. But then that's the hero's path aint it, strewn with obstacles, challenges, failures, tragedy. I think they were both tragic figures.

________________________________________________________________

Finally published this partly sunny now nippy but dry Melbourne winter's day, June 28th, 2009
--KRIS HEMENSLEY.

COLLECTED WORKS BOOKSHOP EVENTS, August 2008

VIVE LE CONNECTIONS!

Following the launches, in late July, of Famous Reporter magazine (#37,'08) & Lorin Ford's A Wattle Seedpod [see the blog posting for the launch-speech on this site], Collected Works Bookshop hosted two events on Friday, 8th of August, in the Overload Poetry Festival, namely, a lunch-time reading by Pi O from his new book, Big Numbers (Collective Effort, '08), & a reading to show-case three books from Small Change Press (Queensland), featuring Matt Hetherington (I think We Have), David Stavanger (And the Ringmaster Said) & Nathan Shepherdson (What Marian Drew Never Told Me About the Light).

Crowded itineraries, Melbourne's late-winter cold snap, who knows what explains small attendances? No shortage of interest & (poetical) issues-arising though. For example, Pi O's work (& reading) in the continuing echo of the brief exchange we had years ago, down in our Flinders Street basement-shop, late 90s, early 2000s --at a reading by one of the American visitors of that year, Andrew Zawacki, which I think did attract a decent crowd (--and I recall objecting to Zawacki's statement that although the poems, of a particular sequence he was reading to us, referred to 'Scotland' --written there perhaps-- they told us nothing, he said, of 'Scotland'... At the very least I heard this as a pooh-poohing of the particularities of place and a begging the question of 'place' where 'particularity' per se might be just such a defining impress as will register 'place'... "Of course, that's the postmodernist heresy!" I interjected, having in mind the spurning of the Real in the fashionable name of the 'construct', as though the ever more sophisticated apprehension of 'representation' had excused one's existential burden & expression, rendered it passe --and I said something about 'voice' & its duel with 'text', their essential & complimentary parts in writing, and emphasised the eccentric aspect of 'voice' as the vital motor of poetry! Sounds like a speech in retrospect! --it wasnt, just the interjection & a blurted version of the foregoing --to which, I'm always amused to remember, Kevin Hart, beside me, observed genially, "that's a bold call, Kris!" He quoted some Blanchot on the relation of & distinction between Art & World; I responded saying it was never mutually exclusive; and Andrew Zawacki resumed his reading!) --At the end of formalities, Pi O told me he'd disagreed with my comments, contending that poetry depended upon 'editing', not 'voice'. I think he quoted Olson's practice, his interpretation of which I then disputed. I remain unconvinced, or rather I remain convinced of 'voice'! At some stage I'd like to think this through again, --and my thoughts on the 'saying' / 'singing' distinction offered in my recent discussion of John Kinsella [see my blog, John Kinsella & Judith Bishop's Glittering Prizes], might be a start...
The lunchtime reading confirmed for me that Pi O's 'voice' is both distinctive & essential in for, example, his Fitzroy local-history poems; no matter that he's quoting the speech around him, it's the wonderful unpredictability of voice, making & residing in very particular narratives, that informs, sustains & distinguishes his poetry. His penchant for absurd &/or ironic juxtaposition of newspaper reports & gathered statistics might be his idea of 'editing', but they're hardly unspoken, that is to say, there is a pattern to the humour or chagrin or whatever the aggregate effect might be, and in pattern there is identity, and in identity there is voice! The collage is shaped by the pattern of its elements; its shape is its voice!

Connections, coincidences, acausal parallelisms, are, if not the stuff of life then its efflorescence.The other day, for instance, about to take up pen to write a note on the Small Change Press reading --specifically to mention one or two people in the room who added an international dimension to the event (--there were the Italians, about whom something anon, & Ahmed Hashim, the first of the Iraqui poets we've come to meet in Melbourne over the past few years), in fact, Ahmed was in my head (--perhaps because I'd recently managed to open the file he'd sent me with the latest epistle in our letter-poem exchange and told him at the reading how I had it now & liked it, especially the bit about Henry Miller : "suddenly, Henry Miller knocks on my door / he was surprised, couldn't believe modern life in 2008 / doesn't respect millionaires, must be a billionaire!") when Cathy O'Brien rang me from Vientiane, not with an update about the Mekong's flooding, which had been worrying me despite her typically stoical & amused attitude to her own security, sand-bagging with her community as the river's level rose just across the street from their homes, but to tell me that the husband of one of her teacher colleagues (they'd lived in New Zealand & were now in Lao PDR) was an Iraqui poet with several books published, --Mr Furat! Cathy hasnt met a poet there in five years so she was tickled pink at the prospect!
A quick Google gave me a potted biography & an essay by Mark Pirrie (editor of Headworx, published by Salt & various NZ presses, also met some years ago in the Shop), available at www.Jehat.com. Basim Furat, born in 1967, had escaped from Iraq in '96, under threat from the Saddam regime for certain poems he'd written; came to New Zealand via Jordan in '97 and "has emerged as one of his adopted country's most gifted new poets," according to Pirrie --two books in translation, Here and There, & The Moon that Excels in Nothing but Waiting...
Next link in the chain, I thought, will be to ask Ahmed if he knows Basim! But then it dawned on me : I've actually met Basim Furat! Perhaps even introduced by Ahmed! I looked in my library and found that indeed I do have his miniature book, The Moon..., which he signed for me in the Shop in January, 2006! What a small world!
Regarding the Italians, two Maxes as it happens, one, Massimiliano Mandorlo, had found the Shop earlier in the week & so learnt of the reading. The Melbourne literary scene couldnt have been a total mystery since Simon West, whom I mentioned to Max as a reader of Zanzotto, was also known to him. On the night, Matt Hetherington, having been introduced, welcomed them to the reading with his recitation, in Italian, & from memory, of an exquisite little poem by Ungaretti, corrected for pronunciation only once by the visitors! Mandorlo had given us copies of the Italian literary journal, clanDestino (from Rimini), now in its 21st year, of which he told us he was a current collaborator. Pleasant to talk to him as the first Italian poet to visit home or shop since Adriano Spatola & Giulia Niccolai thirty years ago (--I'd described the occasion in a swan-song piece for Meanjin Quarterly that year)... Spatola, I prompted him, youngest of the Novissimi, oldest of the Gruppo 63 --and yes, he knew of him but not well. I said he had died, and remembered Adriano & Giulia as big smokers & drinkers. They were friends of the Swiss-Italian poet & artist, Franco Beltrametti, also dead now, with whom we'd corresponded in the'70s --the great connection between the experimental American & European poets of that era, perfectly reflected in the title of his anthology, The Sperlonga Manhattan Express... Mandorlo was travelling soon to Brisbane so it was especially fortuitous for him to attend the Queensland press's reading and make the aquaintance of Nathan Shepherdson & David Stavanger! I believe he's also interested in translating Shepherdson into Italian...
All of this, of course, in the wings of the Small Change poets' reading : Hetherington's aphoristic poems nailing what sounds like traditional wisdom to surrealistic masts; Stavanger's hilarious & surreal narratives, for example Letters to Your Anus & the delightfully ironic & instructive Old Poet to Young Poet; Shepherdson's unravellings of perception's daily register (in this sequence interacting with photography), lyrical & poignant in their search for meaning...


Vive le connections!

--Kris Hemensley