KEROUAC'S BIRTHDAY(--BIRTHDAY?

On the 21st October, anniversary of Kerouac's birthday (--birthday? --his death day dammit! though any of us who've known deep loss begin at some time to confuse the birth & death dates-- a memorial conflation, both happy & sad, forever fused),  I'm reading Lee Kofman's article Muses on Fire, excerpted from Kill Your Darlings magazine, reprinted in The Victorian Writer, April '15 issue, which I'd missed having been back home in England when it arrived and not seen till now. The iconic photograph of Cassady & Kerouac on full facing page catches my eye, apt even synchronous that it should crop up at this moment what with our HOWL 60th event of the 10th October still buzzing! Nothing like an anniversary to twig period, person, place. At every switched-on turn right now there's Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti et al. On Dave Moore's Jack Kerouac group's Facebook page I see Duane Potosky's drawing of Neal, no hands cigarette between his lips. There's Kerouac too, and on the artist's page sketches of his own stars of film, music, literature. Reading Lee Kofman and  thinking of Karl Gallagher, who's been in my mind since Dave Ellison rang to tell me that our friend, painter, poet, on-line publisher of Fitzroy Dreaming, is in hospital, bearing up, in a good frame of mind he says, being well looked after. I mean to say, Karl Gallagher! --first candidate for what we've named the D M, that zone of heaven & earth where the desperate mystics disport, --desperate only as Lee Kofman has quoted Kerouac, "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow candles…" --this "now legendary sentence" she calls it…

Digress here (--as though all or any of this isn't! --this hold-all prose --parenthetical --dervish-turning to reach the essence of the impulse to begin --and begin one must-- starting out with a few accessories, literary equivalents of apple, chocolate, pen-knife --thanks Boy's Own Dad for that! --thus Kerouac, Kofman, Gallagher shoring up the expedition) : found an email from Paul & Ann Smith recording same news of Karl plus a phone-number to call, which I do today, 24th October, reporting to H.Q., touching base. Kerouac's birthday I say, not yet aware of my mistake. Is it? he says. Fancy that. And how was the Howl reading? Kerouac running around with the jugs of wine, did you do that? Hah! Helped ourselves! And who read Howl? Several poets, I say, male & female voices reprising & renovating the original. Organised by George Mouratides, who's one of the four younger scholars who edited the Scroll version of On the Road --I suggested or recruited a few readers, David Pepperell, Ken Trimble, Larry Schwartz. I was Mr Rexroth as MC, joking & kindly growling --and Ken Trimble… Ah, he's the real thing isn't he, Karl says… he read the McClure poems, I said --he's off on his world tour next year with new book of poems --Melbourne, Kyneton, & New Mexico with… Begin to pronounce "Joe Bottone" but swallow what could have spun into another Beat/God saga, though every reason to extol Joe's new poems, billowing sumptuous as the refrain of the Nick Cave song Into My Arms, which Ken's current poems coincidentally chime, and judging from his Facebook, Merton & Bede fulsomely in the wings… Image in mind now of Joe's monastery, Camaldoli, often quoted by Ken following his visit to Big Sur, and of Father Bede's Shantivanam, similarly experienced --also, sudden glinting, Bede Griffiths' Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire preceding Dom Sylvester Houedard --hah! hardly believe it! --comes to me out of the blue --sad to say out of the nowhere the British counter-culture's largely consigned to --Dom Sylvester as various as Merton, monk & poet of that era, Sixties & Seventies increasingly incredible as one's own momentum turns full circle effecting belated consideration & remembering… And then of image of Meherabad as shown me over the years by Dave Elison, but most recently illustrating one of Paul Smith's verse memoirs from his own New Humanity Books,  inscribed in my mind from Karl's postings of his pilgrimages, with Phil Motherwell too, among fellow Baba lovers, amidst less Indian cliche dust & petals than fertile Maharashtra lawn & grove…

Returning to Lee Kofman --she's keenly aware of brilliance's terrible other half, I say to Karl --exemplary of Neal Cassady & June Miller in the article : "while 'burning people' have the gift for making those around them feel fully alive by rendering the everyday into a glittering fairytale, in the process they often burn themselves out".  I'm wary of imposing too long with this hospital phone-call. Though he's been up for it he eventually says he'll probably hang up, but not before hailing Cassady & Kerouac. You know, he says, spiritual guys would go to San Quentin to talk to the prisoners, and they'd sometimes see Cassady, at the back, and he'd be glowing…Yes, and Kerouac, --the hopeless alcoholic, Karl says matter-of-fact.You were onto him quite young too? Yes, heard of him before I first read him… Dropped out of College, '64, desperate for deliverance from the cultureless town, poet & artist I assumed I was, --looking for any way out of it --escape to Paris? --quashed --Wales then, great in some respects but fell out with the mate I'd gone with-- hung out at the wonderful Southampton Art Gallery and the amazing upstairs Reference section of the Central Library --my 'further education'! --found Ihab Hassan writing on the post WW2 Americans, describing Charles Olson, for example, as the 'Dean of the Beats', --the Beats! Read about them, took notes in little fold-over letter-pad --but the first Kerouac I actually read was Big Sur, which was one of the numerous paperbacks I was selling in tiny kiosque aboard Sitmar Line'sFairstar late '65, the job I'd been demoted to after failing to cut it in the big shop according to my managers, --obliged to wear northern waters' blues and tropical whites past the Equator but evidently not really presentable to the passengers, aside from my atrocious attempts tying products in the hold for hoisting up to the main deck! --they were glad to hide me behind that little hatch, selling cigarettes, confectionary, & paperbacks! --and one day I picked it out, BIG SUR : "The story of the crack up of the King of the Beats" --and disbelievingly opened it --but the impact of that first line : "The church is blowing a sad windblown "Kathleen" on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I'd ruined my 'secret return' to San Francisco by getting silly drunk" & et cetera has remained with me these fifty years --I was his boy, once & for all!  Quick thoughts in my head about autobiography as history, and the chronicle poems of my friend Philip Kanlides, and, quite a propos, the celebrated Pi O whose epic, Fitzroy, was launched a week ago. Karl says, Kerouac kills a mouse and he's guilty & sad forever. Reading Kerouac, Karl says, I was knocked out by his honesty… I never heard someone talk about God so openly, he says. We share taking-it-all-in chuckles. Boys or old men, no where else to go.



[--fin, 25th October, '15
Westgarth, Oz--]

DELPHI SCRIBBLE




Crossing from the Northcote Shopping Plaza to the older market section revamped by the Aldi store, I don't immediately recognise the tall man in shades as Andrew Sant but it's him alright, obviously so when he removes the sunglasses. What are you doing here? he says --it's Thursday : shouldn't you be sitting in a cafe near here writing? I'm going there now, I say, --done my shopping… Just doing mine, he says… Ive been in England for a month, I say… I'm going later, he says --how was it? I'm pulling a face, composing a proper reply… You didn't want to come back! he says --adds : I know how you feel, haven't got it as bad as you but I know exactly… I begin explaining & describing :  Got further into the West Country I'm forever dreaming… discovered more people & places & art & beer… you know! He smiles & nods, shakes my hand again, --got to go, he says… One day when we're both in England, he says… Yes! that'll be great!

On the spur of which I speed through the run-down arcade, blocking nostrils to the combined fug of Vietnamese nail repair salon and Greek fast food, onto High Street , cross on the lights & whaddayaknow see Pi O at the tram stop, saluting me I think, so I respond, "hello again" forming on my lips but perhaps it was someone else entirely he'd acknowledged, -- he's turned to the kerb as I pass full-tilt for the Delphi… Two whom I could imagine bumping into are Lloyd & Trimble, locals after all, around & about my own cafe & the Northcote Social Club & the old Town Hall et al --the Village in other words --the Greek village --but oh no, suddenly overcome by the image of the Widow's beating & stoning in Zorba the Greek --Irene Papas --what horror! --and then killed! --first time the other night seeing it again for many years --superstitious, bloody-minded, pre-modern, peasants-- islanders, just like Anne Axenskold was saying, treating me to afternoon tea, the day before I left Weymouth for Australia couple of weeks ago, talking about Portlanders in same tone of voice as we've reconnoitered Thomas Hardy's & JC Powys's weird & wondrous characters, --that other tribe across the Causeway, mysterious & hostile not the half of it…


[7-May, 2015/ 27-28 June, 15 tweeked]



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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