MICHAEL FARRELL
Launch-speech for GIRLERY by Melinda Bufton (Inken Publisch, 2014), at Collected Works Bookshop, March 1st, 2014
First, some thanks. I’m not even sure who I owe thanks to, but definitely to Ann Vickery for feedback, and to Melbourne poetry editors Gig Ryan, Jessica Wilkinson and Pete Spence for publishing some of the poems, and of course Greg Taylor the book. And maybe Duncan Hose as an example of Boyery. But mostly I – we – have to thank Melinda Bufton for being the person who can write poems like this. Free verse isn’t a waste of time. I already knew that really, but Girlery’s a reminder. It’s a fresh book: 2 parts Tyra Banks and 3 parts country girl. The first poem ‘Goddesses, the Bomb’ is a declaration that the poems will be as literary as fuck, but they won’t groan about their own weight. Hooray! [Optional signing of punctuation with your finger.] Bufton’s lines are like planks that shift about a treehouse, like you’re playing an electronic xylophone with your feet-eyes. You can tell why she’s had so many office jobs too: she makes it sexy. ‘Lessons learned’ manages to be light-hearted and feminist while integrating an under-emphasised activity of country life: a lot of TV. Pop stars seem to already have everything, but ‘Lapel’ shows us the work involved, the subversive-sounding complexities of online shopping, perhaps suggesting that the Marc Jacobs dress was rescued from the store. Clothing is a medium for Bufton, the way feminism or cricket is for other poets: it is its own romance. The voices can be something like a fairy godmother entering with her lines of advice but who then starts talking about her own life while nudging the princess bassinet away with her foot. And really, princesses have had enough attention. There’s something like Frank O’Hara in Melinda’s vignettes of a Girl-about-town – like Colette out of bed – and the way she can get out of a poem like the narrator getting out of the lift in ‘Like a fingerprint’, part good-humoured don’t-need-a-man-today, part Warholian blank intrigue. The variably light tone allows for throwaway brilliance in verb and adjective, such as alice (a verb) and carethrift (an adjective) in ‘Pincushion’. Girlery abjures earnest diction, while showing how deft the playful can be: ‘Bunnies of yore my gate to the wallop’, from the church of WTF, or the devastating ‘Sonnety’, for example, which not only does the sonnet but puts it in its place, both by giving it a one-word volte (‘divot’), and concluding with a summary that’s a meta-psychological-ethical complex. A question for reviewers is how a daggy version of punk comes off as stylish? The answer’s here as plain as Paris, however: study and practice (and did I mention ‘tuneliness’?) Letter cases go up and down like heels or collars coming off, just to check your attention. Bufton knows that work can be dreary and tiring, but – and perhaps there’s a fallacy that names this – the poems don’t have to be. You can call it Romanticism, putting a nice edging on your view of the world and its working dairy, or you can call it synecdoche, citing the sweetspot that makes life worth living. A quote from ‘Bumper book for girls’:
Never mind whose territory. We had all reason to
shudder when seeing texts flung about, aimed by the
lipless to pelt us on fishnet hip, or worse,
in the soul. Look here my satin-doubters
I have never looked better than this costume
allows, there is no evidence it kills my healthy sponge
brain cells. I read theory faster in heels.
Australian poetry can risk being a bit more chick literate, ie Girlery is for boys too: a unique book in the Victorian Grain, I give you Melinda Bufton and Girlery, the bomb. [Exit as you will]
*
[Michael Farrell sent his text from Rome; it was read for him in Melbourne by Fiona Hile.]
oOo
BERNARD HEMENSLEY
[uploaded from the Alive and Well and Living in Dorset blog, stingyartistindorset.blogspot.com/]
Saturday, 10 March 2012
A DORSET TROUBADOUR WOULD SING OF PAUL BLACKBURN
Written IN Weymouth & environs - ON buses or ON coffee-house tables - ON my laptop, IN a notebook, or ON my lap - here, there & in various PREMISES - but essentially @ home @ Golden GOJI Hermitage, drinking IN & out of poetry - ingesting this or that - and THAT is what drew me to Paul Blackburn many moons ago = ALE HOUSE POEMS, BAKERY POEMS, THE PROVENCAL TROUBADOUR POETS.....earthiness & classicism. BUT what does this Great Fool, w/out a passport to his name, know of such a wor(l)d ? Albeit that his mother came from Alexandria, and gestated sons who loved books and great libraries !
#1) My brother in Oz, prodded me to write about P.B., following my quirky, previous blog-post on here, which referred to Paul Blackburn. i dismissed the idea w/out even considering that i write anything = just not up to such things (?)....less than 24 hours later, i found myself working, as if on benzedrine, on this essay/blog-post. And it is work. And it is a practice...s'thing i had never accepted 100%, as i had the practice of zazen. Just sitting, was all that mattered = SHIKANTAZA = the practice of DOGEN. Katagiri Roshi's remark to Nathalie Goldberg, that WRITING should be her LIFE-PRACTICE, never quite accorded. After-all, for Dogen, ZAZEN WAS BUDDHISM. Likewise, when Franco Beltrametti told me in the 80's, that he practiced WALKING MEDITATION, i thought - not the real thing. i had not matured by a mile. Slowly, more teachings percolated into the mind of this great fool. THICH NHAT HANH talked of WASHING-UP MEDITATION.....life itself is the great practice, life and death, THE GREAT MATTER.
#2) Could not, for the life-of-me, find Paul Blackburn's books when i wanted'em. Searched the library in vain. Then, sidetracked by rearranging some BLACK SPARROWs in studio/conservatory, i find "THE JOURNALS" under my hand & gaze. i flick thru, happy to have found s'thing. i knew Blackburn had died "young" - but OH! - only 45! (1926-1971) and realised, in that moment, that when i first read him, he was already dead. Robert Kelly writes, as editor of this book - "The last writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September, 1971."
What i "liked" about Paul Blackburn was the "open form" and his ease with contemporary NEW YORK city & translating from the Spanish eg. LORCA. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship...etc...To quote Robert Kelly, once more - "In New York which was most his home and center, he could find the sunlight on a wall not different from Barcelona."
#3) It has been so long now, since my readings of the 70's that, as i sit in "COSTA COFFEE",(decaff.espresso & soya milk), with "THE CITIES" before me & to hand, it strikes me, that these poems are "new"/still fresh. @ 45, Blackburn was still "young enough" to have gone on and worked & practiced, for many, many years. i think of Bob Dylan's refrain = "may we be forever young"...but not in this way, to not have gone on...And there are many...THE POETS OF THE GREAT WAR, JIM MORRISON, HEATH LEDGER...and in "our" family, TIM HEMENSLEY (of the POWDER MONKEYS) - i blub into my coffee. No one notices.
#4) "THE CITIES", (Blackburn's "first, extensive collection of verse" -(Grove Press - 1967)) the Author's Note reads - "Every man's stand be his own. Finally, it is a construct, out of my own isolations, eyes, ears, nose and breath.." ....i hear an echo of CHARLES OLSON in that ="No such thing as mass, as much as, many people, each with eyes in their heads, to be looked out of." Do i misquote ? That is what i have as my memory of it. i do not want to rise from my place and search it out...do not even really know where to look...Human Universe essay ? Do not wish to interrupt this flowing of "mountains walking"...?....? BUT, maybe i will...SUDDENLY, i feel i have written enough in this first draft/ this blog-post...appropriately, it is young/ still fresh...ready to be played with in this warm and early spring of ours in Weymouth, where the cherry blossom, out front, has passed full-bloom, and is falling to the ground, even as i write.....i will wait, stay my hand, and WAIT and see if it PROVES, like the bread-dough in tins, waiting for the heat of the oven.....i will soon make my way into the world - to find some fresh, young heirs (pun intended)...."The air sweeps out the odor of love from rooms / the air we love, we weep, we read, sing.."(from "The First Round", Paul Blackburn - AGAINST THE SILENCES - Permanent Press - 1980).
#5) I'm going to THE KING'S ARMS on the harbour. Not a drinker as such - i like a good taste - a good taste of real ale, home-baked bread and poetry....a half-pint will do me. & a packet of s'thing salty....just a half-pint to keep me hand in!!....How else to encounter the world ?/ this world. It is the friction / our continually rubbing-up against / this buffering away, that will reveal the new in which we are moment by moment, breath by breath, being reborn...and it is in this, that those who are no longer visible are held in our hearts. This is all we have and it is the whole created world. It is enough....
*
[finished @ 17.30 hours,10 / march / 2012.]
Kris Hemensley's COMMENT
(collectedworks10 March 2012 18:06)
Evidently youll be continuing from yr favourite spot in the Kings Arms, perhaps the higher bar, looking out onto the Old Harbour... So,you have your Blackburn in place, you have him as poet of 'being-in-place' rather than the distinctions of any particular place? Or it seems i might, which is ironic given the inventory, the wardrobe he sits up in, peers out of! Similar search as you (where are my Blackburns?!) find first of all his poem in Allen de Loach's INTREPID magazine, #18/19 , '71, one poem's kind of ho-hum (Windsound), mere sketch, the other's HUMMM-HO, justifying the triumphant claim "All of it sung." Last line, is psycho-topography, genealogical geography, the roll-call of his place that whiskey'd moment, glass in hand saluting Olson, Julio (is that Cortazar?), Ginsberg, Snyder, and most of all Pound --memorable snapshot, "Ez's eye fixes the machine from under his neat / Alpine hat, the clean raincoat . fierce & friendly to / the mustache bristle, beard-jut, but the eye questions / the other end of this gondola, where do the steps lead? / The oarsman ferries him across to / wrap a death with windows...." etc.
Second thing i find is Pierre Joris's excellent Blackburn issue of Sixpack, (Spring/Summer, '74), indispensable really, i bet you have it under a mountain of health mags! --wch has in it this contra note, from Barry Alpert (edited the splendid Vort in that era, and who popped up on F/book recently!), whose comment puts in a nutshell not only Blackburn's situation but a larger gauging of poems/poetry... For, despite PB's obvious relish in Lorca's idea of duende, 'the straight fight with the creator on the edge of the well' (Alpert's source dramatically clearer than P's paraphrase) --& despite one knows that's the whole point of the daily witness poem, --yet in Blackburn acc. to Alpert, "most of his published poems uphold his self-abnegating conception of himself as street poet, bar room poet, occasional poet..."
That is to say, the huge risk of so-what/ery in that type of stance (i joked in my classes 40+ years ago, "I came, i saw, i wrote a poem!"), the loss of distinction or the memorable in the apparently ancient Chinese humble happenstance.
Very good to read you here!
Cheers bro!
As Blackburn has it in that instructive poem for (& against?) Ed Dorn, Pre-Lenten Gestures,"Thank God one tone or / one set of decibels is / not all there is."
oOo
KRIS HEMENSLEY
INTRODUCING JOHN MATEER; Notes, March 25th, 2014
Welcome to Collected Works Bookshop for this reading by John Mateer.
I have a few copies of Emptiness : Asian poems, 1998-2012, just published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and some of the previously published but still recent Unbelievers or 'The Moor', from Giramondo. So, although this isnt a formal launch, it is a celebration of John & his practically concurrent new books.
*
Yesterday was the Seminar at the university ["LIFE IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE : Taking his own work as example, poet John Mateer present an argument about the origins and strategies of his last four books – Ex-White: South African Poems, The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009, Southern Barbarians and Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ – and will read and reflect on his relationship between history, poesis, translation and self-hood. He will discuss the circumstances of Afrikaans as national language in South Africa, the problem caused by Aboriginal language or its absense for a grounded poetics in Australia, and the possibilities presented by reconsidering the cultural formations of East and West through imagining the colonial effects of Portugal and Spain in this part of the world. "]-- Today, here at the bookshop, it's the Reading. Not having participated in a seminar for a very long time, I'm not sure how different a poet is in the one situation from the other. I guess this evening the poetry is expected to stand up by & for itself --which I'm sure it will have every opportunity to do!
*
For introduction to the well published & travelled John Mateer, perhaps an anecdote instead of interminable CV --I don't mean John's CV is interminable but CV per se!
I remember the judging of the Victorian Premiers Prize back --when? --late '90s, early 2000s? --in the company of Doris Brett & Kevin Hart. Our deliberations had come down to a debate about the merits of collections by Bob Adamson & John Mateer amongst others --I cant remember --Tranter, Gray, Rowland, Ryan?-- all good names anyway. We'd read the books, discussed, ticked & crossed, totted up our little columns of scores on pieces of paper --crass & brutal but there it is! A competition with only one winner! The decision was made easier by the technical requirement for the majority of a collection to be "new". And so Kevin regretfully let his man, or men, slip. Adamson, Gray… At least I think so, I think that's who & what it was! I'm sure it's in my diary of the time but confess I don't quite know where that is!
In retrospect --in this possible/ retrospect --it's fair to say we found the young Mateer's poetry quite unlike anyone & anything else in that particular Premier's Prize season-- And I wonder now whether the matter of 'location' came up-- If, for instance, we were attracted by Adamson's (if it was him) --his Hawkesbury River (and perhaps the book was Juno Gemes' beautiful photo anthology, the Language of Oysters and not the Mulberry Leaves as I've been thinking? --late '90s & not early 2000s then?) --Adamson's Hawkesbury & Mateer's --what? --what & where would it have been? W A salt & wheat? A South African elsewhere? The Non-White African's elsewhere? (Tutuola's My life in the Bush of Ghosts?) Already then the awareness of John's neither here nor there --the no place or no where (which sounds like Paul Celan) --and the possible Japanese pun, the Noh where!--
Ah well --
Absence & presence
as though each other's
alias
And so, John, to quote & misquote you from a poem in your latest book, --"dear poet, close your eyes, this brothel is the only world, and we are the bhodisattvas!" -- Please welcome John Mateer...
----------------------------------------
[April 5th, 2014, Westgarth by the Sea]
Showing posts with label Robert Adamson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Adamson. Show all posts
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Sunday, August 10, 2008
JOHN KINSELLA & JUDITH BISHOP : GLITTERING PRIZES!
2007 National Literary Awards, conducted by the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Victoria), announced March, 2008
Congratulations, of course, to every prize winner, including Marjorie Ward (for the John Shaw Neilson, sponsored by Collected Works Bookshop), but pride of place, here, to Judith Bishop (for the Anne Elder [first book award], sponsored by the Anne Elder Trust ), & John Kinsella (for the Christopher Brennan, honouring "work of sustained quality & distinction", sponsored by Sally Dugan). The awards were announced in Melbourne in March, 2008.
The FAW's arms-length policy ensures secrecy of the winning work in respect of the various award sponsors, thus the winners of the John Shaw Neilson were unknown to me until I saw the Results programme well after the event. I havent read the poems either, but at least recognized Anne Gleeson's & Leah Kaminsky's names in the commendeds. Marjorie Ward wrote to say she used to frequent the Shop years ago, during what must have been our Flinders Lane era (1987-99). Our judge, Garth Madsen, noted it had taken him several readings of her poem, The Last Picnic, "to trace how the poet traveled from one [gentility] to the other [brutality] through a succession of perspectives on death - the cosmic, the divine, the economic and the ecological..."
Judges Connie Barber & Phil Ilton noted the high quality of writing in this year's Anne Elder. The winner, Judith Bishop (Event, published by Salt , UK) and the two commendeds I'm most familiar with, Elizabeth Campbell (Letters to the Tremulous Hand, pub. John Leonard Press) & Petra White (The Incoming Tide, also John Leonard Press) --the other collections mentioned were Sarah French's (Songs Orphans Sing, Five Islands Press, & Hal Judge's Someone Forgot To Tell the Fish (Interactive Publications)-- certainly resonate with that description. Strikes me that it'll be seen as a rather special year in retrospect,at least in Melbourne circles, with Bishop pipping Campbell & White, three exponents of a fastidiously constructed & polished lyricism current now in new Australian poetry (Lucy Holt undoubtedly another). Although there's just a smidgin of the a la mode to Judith Bishop's collection --the concrete proposition leading into the tantalisingly oblique elaboration-- it cannot, at this stage be read as anything but her own conceptually & verbally exciting way, an original poet's signature. Event is a great choice! For the others, specifically Campbell & White, disappointment must have been tempered by appreciation of commensurate brilliance.
Event opens with After the Elements, a valedictory for Gustaf Sobin (d 2005), which immediately signals the particular American orientation of a new Australian poet --a new Australian poetics one might also say, confirming the whole world which nowadays constitutes a locale : the several-ways' traffic of poets, Australia, Europe, the States, via research, travel, internet. Judith Bishop has Jordie Albiston's gift for redeeming contemporaneity for something as antique as incantation or spell. "You and I, we are too far / from fire now: the chimney-pots / have driven out their smoke, / and stood alert for its return" the poem begins, cueing the reader for the alchemical order, fire, water, earth, air, whose predictability affords renewed pleasure in the old wonder. A marvellous construction, sensuous in its metaphysics. This applies to much of the rest of the book.
The Dona Marina first-person character poems (she was the indispensable translator, interpreter & mistress of Cortez we're told) beg performance. Of course, poetry always is theatre for the inner ear but in a formal sense the sequence is drama, a choral work. In my opinion they're taxed as poems when spliced into the collection. The best of Event are stand-alone poems where Bishop's almost Hopkins'-like anthropomorphism facilitates highly lyrical investigations of being & perception, of human being via nature. I couldnt help reading the poems against a memory of Hopkins in general, D H Lawrence (following her apt quotation, "Not I, but the wind that blows through me! " --which has spoken for my life & writing too as it happens), and serendipitously, Edwin Muir's The Animals.
Muir's poem turns upon a definition of world as the humanly known & therefore named, and consequential upon the conditioning of time & space. Animals or the non-human are otherwise : "From birth to death hurled / no word do they have, not one / were never in any place." They are beyond language's salvation, then, and cannot be "Snatched from deceiving death / by the articulate breath." But Muir's conventional dualism was already overridden by Lawrence's time, and Bishop's co-originary impulse, probably found in pantheism, noted by Peter Porter in his blurb, as in today's Buddhistic ecologism & Bachelardian phenomenology, applies the coup de grace. Her rejoinder to Muir might be this immaculate passage : "The heart, arrested muscle, is the end and in each. Birds / articulate death better, // worlded by their wings and song. They never see death coming : / it observes from their eyes // as they knit, faultlessly, the cumulus to mud."
Her question from von Herder --"Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling...are aligned in their entire performance for a giving out toward other creatures." --perfectly describes the empathy compelling anthropomorphism to the extent that reading Bishop the language coined seems to be that in which all nature is found!
The many superb poems in Event confirm the honour of her Anne Elder. Three cheers!
*
I wonder if the definition of the Christopher Brennan needs to be tweaked? Some of us have always taken it to be a lifetime achievement award. Perhaps "writing of sustained quality & distinction" opens too much of a door to the shorter-term success (how define 'sustained'?) --whatever, John Kinsella has been an enlivener of debate in Australia, Britain & the USA; a proselytiser for Australian poetry in amongst contemporary poetry & poetics around the world, never more so than as the publisher of Salt Books (Cambridge,UK); and a prolific poet in his own right across a range of styles whose subject is almost always post-Edenic calamity.
Reviewing his latest collection, Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (FACP, '08), in Australian Book Review (number 302, June, 2008), Nicholas Birns spurns the shenanigans recently embroiling Kinsella --it's the poetry he wants not the celebrity & notoriety, though JK might not himself so clearly distinguish one persona from another given his volition as a militant for causes (--as he also says of biography in Fast, Loose Beginnings, "I am not really interested in biography, but in the residual nature of friendship and even indifference." --by which he might mean he's interested in dynamics, interactions, contexts of engagement rather than relationship as certain or settled, thus drama & not history, episodes not epics, reports & reportage not judgments & the sagely).
Whereas the brilliant raves in Shades (the long breath single sentence poems of Textures of the Wheatbelt, Sounds of the Wheatbelt, & Smells of the Wheatbelt, for example, ironically recalling for me some of the memorable, & formally composed poems in The Silo from ten or so years ago) amply demonstrate Kinsella's poetic gift for me rather than his rangier pastoral/anti-pastoral sorties, Birns is convinced of the latter's verity.Though he has his finger right where mine is regarding "sketchiness", his has the positive conclusion.
I'll quote the final paragraph of the ABR review : "In the soaring 'Lover's Leap', Kinsella quotes [Edmund] Burke as finding, in unfinished sketches, 'something which pleased me beyond the best finishing'. Kinsella's poems are not incomplete because of their sketchiness but because of their plurality, yet they also shimmer with unfinished potential. They demonstrate how poetry can parade a lack of plenitude, how privation can nonetheless 'fixate' transcendence." Marvelous ideas! I'd love to say I was similarly moved but that wasnt my first impression; however, Birns does cause me to think long & hard about the form & nature of poetry (he describes the hinge, really, of a discussion about contemporary 'open' & 'closed' poetries) and has cued me to return to JK's latest excursus.
Birns' favourable review & David Caddy's posting on Kinsella in his encyclopaedic British poetry blog (davidcaddy.blogspot.com), which includes a potted history of the pastoral from Virgilian antiquity to the postmodernist reformulation, retrieve JK from scuttlebutt for serious consideration.
The revelations & confessions, particularly concerning Bob Adamson & Anthony Lawrence, in Kinsella's Fast, Loose Beginnings : A Memoir of Intoxications (Melbourne University Press, 2006) are hardly great scandals --diverting, amusing yet neither here nor there in this big, bad & wonderful world! But one passage stuck in my head. Almost in passing (pp. 70-71) JK observed, "Anthony [Lawrence] loves the sound of words and is really a shamanic bard. In his work, Dylan Thomas, G M Hopkins, and other musical poets, blur with contemporary songsters like Leonard Cohen (a romantic seduction device), Billy Bragg (an absorbable social commentary), and Van Morrison ... There's an obviousness, a romanticism, in all this, but the 'warp' in Anthony makes him unique and possibly a great poet." He refers then to Lawrence's disregard for Language Poetry & his depoliticised relation to language : "Even when he 'says' something political, the language seems separated off from a consciousness of its potential cause and effect. On the surface, he is entirely composed of stock epithets (like, 'at the height of his powers'), but underneath he is full of fear and predation -- the combination drives a socio-pathology in his poetry that makes it get under the skin." The passage hooked me even as it begged important questions.
I wondered if JK's somewhat parodic description of Lawrence mightnt describe a line in the sand concerning contemporary poetics. I sensed something there of Justin Clemens' pejorative use of 'romanticism' in support of Michael Farrell & a self-consciously new writing, against all the rest, in his a raider's guide launching speech a couple of months ago. I really should have read JK's text closer & earlier than I had and maybe heard then JC echoing JK that night! Not that JC has necessarily read Fast, Loose Beginnings, but perhaps there's a Kinsellian position more or less predicated upon Language School which Clemens & others share? And yes I know, it's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the political versus the literary --and eek! wasnt that a disposition circa late Sixties, early Seventies I'd also picked up?! --the radical disavowal of Art & Literature in favour of various species of The Real? --only resumed when the 'political', including the repositionings of the 'avant-garde', predominately presented itself as the figure of estrangement, out of sorts with most of the forms of the world, thus reducing the ambit of its address & correspondence --the previous contradiction, therefore, ameliorating in the Tradition's necessary renovation...
I'm certain Kinsella's book isnt written in anticipation of substantial debate --I even feel my objections are beside the point because of the book's running-commentary style obliged by racy reportage & celeb portraiture. Be-that-as-it-may... In my book a poet's love of the sound of words is definitive; sound & sense are the prerequisites of poetry even as each property is transmuted by the other; "sound & sense" is the essential equation of poetry. Yet the tone of JK's reference to sound & music followed by his italicising of 'says', has me doubting we're on the same page!
I guess 'musical poet' is one for whom sound is foregrounded at the cost of sense and where the composition is an artifice far from speech, yet even Louis Zukofsky (I'm thinking of the influential poets of our own era, though why not quote Shakespeare & classics before & after the Elizabethans?) with his wonderfully crazy Latin derivations, for example, which dont diverge much from his general practice, is teeming with 'sense' & saying --and Bunting ditto, the famous opening of Briggflats for example, "Brag sweet tenor bull / Sing descant on Rawthey's madrigal", is the most perfect Northumbrian trill & steeped in meaning! In the Poundian provenance, music is both a particular quality & the whole biz. Olson's "like, tune into the music!" might well dub the Sixties --acid, New Age & all --but also represents a political & ecstatic construction upon music's traditional trope.
In Kinsella's critique of Anthony Lawrence, the coupling of 'sound of words' & 'shamanic bard' is probably shorthand but could be a misleading instruction. The point about the shamanic is its belief in the co-origination of words & things, thus every thing has its word & every word its thing (in nature, in the world). The bard is historian & magician and not merely, though also importantly, songster. The shamanic legacy, therefore, even to this day, resides in the 'magic' of word combinations, which is to say the describing & making of worlds. Anthony Lawrence, like Adamson, Beveridge, Murray, Anderson, Judith Bishop now, amongst many, many Australians, are poets of revelation via identification & invention, and share the magical legacy with all original coiners.
Regarding Language Poetry (as though it were homogenous, which it isnt) : I always agreed with David Bromige's distinction between the tendency & the party! --the potential of the former always preferable to the latter's template for us (--the "us" Bromige recruited me into in his recapitulation to me, late 80s of where & what Poetry was at, although I hazard to say that for many years now my experimentation hasnt sounded within his cooee!). Language Poetry's aesthetical & political connection is of two domains and in full regard, it seems to me, a poet or reader can disport in one or the other, in one & the other.
"All poetry is political" is more significant for the poet for whom political action is imperative but a bland generalisation otherwise. Ducking the difference between the application of politics to almost anything and the inherently political, one reiterates the obvious : Kinsella is a politically radical poet who can turn the lyrical on (can turn on to the lyrical), & Lawrence, more Kinsella's contrary than bete noir, is a traditional poet within contemporary lyricism. The former's practice summons the post-literary; the latter's carries its literary inheritance through whatever & wherever the radicals say we are. Ironically, Language Poetry isnt the last word for Kinsella as it never was or could be for Lawrence.
Regarding "warp" : good word for what defines the poet's individual signature, attached, therefore, as far as poet is concerned, to how the poem ultimately comes out. "Sociopathology" (as per JK's charge) isnt warp's distinction, rather warp is that accent which is languaged as voice. Warp is voice, original & inimitable; it is the life as spoken & sung.
How does this relate to what I suspect is JK's distinction between singing & saying? In the midst of Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful, in a poem written as though dead, Kinsella confides, "I am thinking on the run here", which I translate as thinking aloud, trusting to the run of thought (expression) without any other measure of composition --a writing that resembles transcription, hoping it will be trusted as these days' oral history --problematic though piquant investment such as that form is. I'm reminded of the late John Clarke, of Buffalo, & his confiding in his poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension (March, 1971), "I want all of my learning to go into / this one" : a poetry of knowledge, of reading as saying... Olsonish this poetry then? Olsonish, Whitmanish --but the leaking of biography is a kind of short to the system --JK's saying, in my opinion, sputtering, a discount on poetry's flare. The more I think on it, the 'saying' worth distinguishing from 'singing' is declamatory, & what Adamson decades ago, from out of his bower of song, called 'subject-dominated' (consistent with the conversation we were all having early '70s, Melbourne & Sydney, that time's eclectic anti-literalist perspective, intuitively hybridizing pure poetry's axioms & modernism's naturalist or objectivist overcoming of symbolism); otherwise it collapses into the purported opposite.
So, all in all, what can one say but, in praising his energies, following his project(s), joining the myriad discussion he invites, warmly congratulate John Kinsella on his Christopher Brennan Award.
--Kris Hemensley,
4th June-10th August 2008
Congratulations, of course, to every prize winner, including Marjorie Ward (for the John Shaw Neilson, sponsored by Collected Works Bookshop), but pride of place, here, to Judith Bishop (for the Anne Elder [first book award], sponsored by the Anne Elder Trust ), & John Kinsella (for the Christopher Brennan, honouring "work of sustained quality & distinction", sponsored by Sally Dugan). The awards were announced in Melbourne in March, 2008.
The FAW's arms-length policy ensures secrecy of the winning work in respect of the various award sponsors, thus the winners of the John Shaw Neilson were unknown to me until I saw the Results programme well after the event. I havent read the poems either, but at least recognized Anne Gleeson's & Leah Kaminsky's names in the commendeds. Marjorie Ward wrote to say she used to frequent the Shop years ago, during what must have been our Flinders Lane era (1987-99). Our judge, Garth Madsen, noted it had taken him several readings of her poem, The Last Picnic, "to trace how the poet traveled from one [gentility] to the other [brutality] through a succession of perspectives on death - the cosmic, the divine, the economic and the ecological..."
Judges Connie Barber & Phil Ilton noted the high quality of writing in this year's Anne Elder. The winner, Judith Bishop (Event, published by Salt , UK) and the two commendeds I'm most familiar with, Elizabeth Campbell (Letters to the Tremulous Hand, pub. John Leonard Press) & Petra White (The Incoming Tide, also John Leonard Press) --the other collections mentioned were Sarah French's (Songs Orphans Sing, Five Islands Press, & Hal Judge's Someone Forgot To Tell the Fish (Interactive Publications)-- certainly resonate with that description. Strikes me that it'll be seen as a rather special year in retrospect,at least in Melbourne circles, with Bishop pipping Campbell & White, three exponents of a fastidiously constructed & polished lyricism current now in new Australian poetry (Lucy Holt undoubtedly another). Although there's just a smidgin of the a la mode to Judith Bishop's collection --the concrete proposition leading into the tantalisingly oblique elaboration-- it cannot, at this stage be read as anything but her own conceptually & verbally exciting way, an original poet's signature. Event is a great choice! For the others, specifically Campbell & White, disappointment must have been tempered by appreciation of commensurate brilliance.
Event opens with After the Elements, a valedictory for Gustaf Sobin (d 2005), which immediately signals the particular American orientation of a new Australian poet --a new Australian poetics one might also say, confirming the whole world which nowadays constitutes a locale : the several-ways' traffic of poets, Australia, Europe, the States, via research, travel, internet. Judith Bishop has Jordie Albiston's gift for redeeming contemporaneity for something as antique as incantation or spell. "You and I, we are too far / from fire now: the chimney-pots / have driven out their smoke, / and stood alert for its return" the poem begins, cueing the reader for the alchemical order, fire, water, earth, air, whose predictability affords renewed pleasure in the old wonder. A marvellous construction, sensuous in its metaphysics. This applies to much of the rest of the book.
The Dona Marina first-person character poems (she was the indispensable translator, interpreter & mistress of Cortez we're told) beg performance. Of course, poetry always is theatre for the inner ear but in a formal sense the sequence is drama, a choral work. In my opinion they're taxed as poems when spliced into the collection. The best of Event are stand-alone poems where Bishop's almost Hopkins'-like anthropomorphism facilitates highly lyrical investigations of being & perception, of human being via nature. I couldnt help reading the poems against a memory of Hopkins in general, D H Lawrence (following her apt quotation, "Not I, but the wind that blows through me! " --which has spoken for my life & writing too as it happens), and serendipitously, Edwin Muir's The Animals.
Muir's poem turns upon a definition of world as the humanly known & therefore named, and consequential upon the conditioning of time & space. Animals or the non-human are otherwise : "From birth to death hurled / no word do they have, not one / were never in any place." They are beyond language's salvation, then, and cannot be "Snatched from deceiving death / by the articulate breath." But Muir's conventional dualism was already overridden by Lawrence's time, and Bishop's co-originary impulse, probably found in pantheism, noted by Peter Porter in his blurb, as in today's Buddhistic ecologism & Bachelardian phenomenology, applies the coup de grace. Her rejoinder to Muir might be this immaculate passage : "The heart, arrested muscle, is the end and in each. Birds / articulate death better, // worlded by their wings and song. They never see death coming : / it observes from their eyes // as they knit, faultlessly, the cumulus to mud."
Her question from von Herder --"Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling...are aligned in their entire performance for a giving out toward other creatures." --perfectly describes the empathy compelling anthropomorphism to the extent that reading Bishop the language coined seems to be that in which all nature is found!
The many superb poems in Event confirm the honour of her Anne Elder. Three cheers!
*
I wonder if the definition of the Christopher Brennan needs to be tweaked? Some of us have always taken it to be a lifetime achievement award. Perhaps "writing of sustained quality & distinction" opens too much of a door to the shorter-term success (how define 'sustained'?) --whatever, John Kinsella has been an enlivener of debate in Australia, Britain & the USA; a proselytiser for Australian poetry in amongst contemporary poetry & poetics around the world, never more so than as the publisher of Salt Books (Cambridge,UK); and a prolific poet in his own right across a range of styles whose subject is almost always post-Edenic calamity.
Reviewing his latest collection, Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (FACP, '08), in Australian Book Review (number 302, June, 2008), Nicholas Birns spurns the shenanigans recently embroiling Kinsella --it's the poetry he wants not the celebrity & notoriety, though JK might not himself so clearly distinguish one persona from another given his volition as a militant for causes (--as he also says of biography in Fast, Loose Beginnings, "I am not really interested in biography, but in the residual nature of friendship and even indifference." --by which he might mean he's interested in dynamics, interactions, contexts of engagement rather than relationship as certain or settled, thus drama & not history, episodes not epics, reports & reportage not judgments & the sagely).
Whereas the brilliant raves in Shades (the long breath single sentence poems of Textures of the Wheatbelt, Sounds of the Wheatbelt, & Smells of the Wheatbelt, for example, ironically recalling for me some of the memorable, & formally composed poems in The Silo from ten or so years ago) amply demonstrate Kinsella's poetic gift for me rather than his rangier pastoral/anti-pastoral sorties, Birns is convinced of the latter's verity.Though he has his finger right where mine is regarding "sketchiness", his has the positive conclusion.
I'll quote the final paragraph of the ABR review : "In the soaring 'Lover's Leap', Kinsella quotes [Edmund] Burke as finding, in unfinished sketches, 'something which pleased me beyond the best finishing'. Kinsella's poems are not incomplete because of their sketchiness but because of their plurality, yet they also shimmer with unfinished potential. They demonstrate how poetry can parade a lack of plenitude, how privation can nonetheless 'fixate' transcendence." Marvelous ideas! I'd love to say I was similarly moved but that wasnt my first impression; however, Birns does cause me to think long & hard about the form & nature of poetry (he describes the hinge, really, of a discussion about contemporary 'open' & 'closed' poetries) and has cued me to return to JK's latest excursus.
Birns' favourable review & David Caddy's posting on Kinsella in his encyclopaedic British poetry blog (davidcaddy.blogspot.com), which includes a potted history of the pastoral from Virgilian antiquity to the postmodernist reformulation, retrieve JK from scuttlebutt for serious consideration.
The revelations & confessions, particularly concerning Bob Adamson & Anthony Lawrence, in Kinsella's Fast, Loose Beginnings : A Memoir of Intoxications (Melbourne University Press, 2006) are hardly great scandals --diverting, amusing yet neither here nor there in this big, bad & wonderful world! But one passage stuck in my head. Almost in passing (pp. 70-71) JK observed, "Anthony [Lawrence] loves the sound of words and is really a shamanic bard. In his work, Dylan Thomas, G M Hopkins, and other musical poets, blur with contemporary songsters like Leonard Cohen (a romantic seduction device), Billy Bragg (an absorbable social commentary), and Van Morrison ... There's an obviousness, a romanticism, in all this, but the 'warp' in Anthony makes him unique and possibly a great poet." He refers then to Lawrence's disregard for Language Poetry & his depoliticised relation to language : "Even when he 'says' something political, the language seems separated off from a consciousness of its potential cause and effect. On the surface, he is entirely composed of stock epithets (like, 'at the height of his powers'), but underneath he is full of fear and predation -- the combination drives a socio-pathology in his poetry that makes it get under the skin." The passage hooked me even as it begged important questions.
I wondered if JK's somewhat parodic description of Lawrence mightnt describe a line in the sand concerning contemporary poetics. I sensed something there of Justin Clemens' pejorative use of 'romanticism' in support of Michael Farrell & a self-consciously new writing, against all the rest, in his a raider's guide launching speech a couple of months ago. I really should have read JK's text closer & earlier than I had and maybe heard then JC echoing JK that night! Not that JC has necessarily read Fast, Loose Beginnings, but perhaps there's a Kinsellian position more or less predicated upon Language School which Clemens & others share? And yes I know, it's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the political versus the literary --and eek! wasnt that a disposition circa late Sixties, early Seventies I'd also picked up?! --the radical disavowal of Art & Literature in favour of various species of The Real? --only resumed when the 'political', including the repositionings of the 'avant-garde', predominately presented itself as the figure of estrangement, out of sorts with most of the forms of the world, thus reducing the ambit of its address & correspondence --the previous contradiction, therefore, ameliorating in the Tradition's necessary renovation...
I'm certain Kinsella's book isnt written in anticipation of substantial debate --I even feel my objections are beside the point because of the book's running-commentary style obliged by racy reportage & celeb portraiture. Be-that-as-it-may... In my book a poet's love of the sound of words is definitive; sound & sense are the prerequisites of poetry even as each property is transmuted by the other; "sound & sense" is the essential equation of poetry. Yet the tone of JK's reference to sound & music followed by his italicising of 'says', has me doubting we're on the same page!
I guess 'musical poet' is one for whom sound is foregrounded at the cost of sense and where the composition is an artifice far from speech, yet even Louis Zukofsky (I'm thinking of the influential poets of our own era, though why not quote Shakespeare & classics before & after the Elizabethans?) with his wonderfully crazy Latin derivations, for example, which dont diverge much from his general practice, is teeming with 'sense' & saying --and Bunting ditto, the famous opening of Briggflats for example, "Brag sweet tenor bull / Sing descant on Rawthey's madrigal", is the most perfect Northumbrian trill & steeped in meaning! In the Poundian provenance, music is both a particular quality & the whole biz. Olson's "like, tune into the music!" might well dub the Sixties --acid, New Age & all --but also represents a political & ecstatic construction upon music's traditional trope.
In Kinsella's critique of Anthony Lawrence, the coupling of 'sound of words' & 'shamanic bard' is probably shorthand but could be a misleading instruction. The point about the shamanic is its belief in the co-origination of words & things, thus every thing has its word & every word its thing (in nature, in the world). The bard is historian & magician and not merely, though also importantly, songster. The shamanic legacy, therefore, even to this day, resides in the 'magic' of word combinations, which is to say the describing & making of worlds. Anthony Lawrence, like Adamson, Beveridge, Murray, Anderson, Judith Bishop now, amongst many, many Australians, are poets of revelation via identification & invention, and share the magical legacy with all original coiners.
Regarding Language Poetry (as though it were homogenous, which it isnt) : I always agreed with David Bromige's distinction between the tendency & the party! --the potential of the former always preferable to the latter's template for us (--the "us" Bromige recruited me into in his recapitulation to me, late 80s of where & what Poetry was at, although I hazard to say that for many years now my experimentation hasnt sounded within his cooee!). Language Poetry's aesthetical & political connection is of two domains and in full regard, it seems to me, a poet or reader can disport in one or the other, in one & the other.
"All poetry is political" is more significant for the poet for whom political action is imperative but a bland generalisation otherwise. Ducking the difference between the application of politics to almost anything and the inherently political, one reiterates the obvious : Kinsella is a politically radical poet who can turn the lyrical on (can turn on to the lyrical), & Lawrence, more Kinsella's contrary than bete noir, is a traditional poet within contemporary lyricism. The former's practice summons the post-literary; the latter's carries its literary inheritance through whatever & wherever the radicals say we are. Ironically, Language Poetry isnt the last word for Kinsella as it never was or could be for Lawrence.
Regarding "warp" : good word for what defines the poet's individual signature, attached, therefore, as far as poet is concerned, to how the poem ultimately comes out. "Sociopathology" (as per JK's charge) isnt warp's distinction, rather warp is that accent which is languaged as voice. Warp is voice, original & inimitable; it is the life as spoken & sung.
How does this relate to what I suspect is JK's distinction between singing & saying? In the midst of Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful, in a poem written as though dead, Kinsella confides, "I am thinking on the run here", which I translate as thinking aloud, trusting to the run of thought (expression) without any other measure of composition --a writing that resembles transcription, hoping it will be trusted as these days' oral history --problematic though piquant investment such as that form is. I'm reminded of the late John Clarke, of Buffalo, & his confiding in his poem The Stance We Inhabit Predisposes Our Dimension (March, 1971), "I want all of my learning to go into / this one" : a poetry of knowledge, of reading as saying... Olsonish this poetry then? Olsonish, Whitmanish --but the leaking of biography is a kind of short to the system --JK's saying, in my opinion, sputtering, a discount on poetry's flare. The more I think on it, the 'saying' worth distinguishing from 'singing' is declamatory, & what Adamson decades ago, from out of his bower of song, called 'subject-dominated' (consistent with the conversation we were all having early '70s, Melbourne & Sydney, that time's eclectic anti-literalist perspective, intuitively hybridizing pure poetry's axioms & modernism's naturalist or objectivist overcoming of symbolism); otherwise it collapses into the purported opposite.
So, all in all, what can one say but, in praising his energies, following his project(s), joining the myriad discussion he invites, warmly congratulate John Kinsella on his Christopher Brennan Award.
--Kris Hemensley,
4th June-10th August 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #2, May/June, 2008
DAVID MCCOOEY
(WELDON KEES)
Everything is ominous.
--
Another ordered loneliness.
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The future is fatal.
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Even the open field, a labyrinth.
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The afternoon idly flicks through the pages of itself.
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A list of names : good news, or bad?
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The long silence of rooms.
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History with its morphine headache.
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The anonymous rain falling on motels.
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The atrocities played under flickering streetlights.
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The cars parked under melodramatic weather.
--
Finally, every future is fatal.
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MAURICE MCNAMARA
WHAT A STORY
Was reading Robert Adamson's autobiog. A friend of mine, Johnny Goodall, is on the back cover, wearing a black cowboy hat. He bought a silver dobro, a National, off an old lady in an old folks home, and he really got into that sort of music. Had a sort of country music band in Sydney. Lovely gentle guy, but when he got drinking... I met Mr Adamson once, when Johnny moved back to Balmain, we were all tripping, and Bob said I was the devil, that sort of poetic bullshit fancy stuff. Nigel Roberts, whom I met again at Raff's, a year ago, said Johnny was now re-parked on the North Island, Nzed, drinking the homebrew. He was very influential on me, tho it took me generational change to get around to it.
Too weak and confused and stupid. But I loved that guy. Staying up all night and going round to the early opener, on one of the side streets of the spine of Balmain, alkies hopping up and down, and the wharfies coming in, and by eight o'clock in the morning, smoke in the bar, hey, it's a party! Meeting Vicki Viidikas and Michael Wilding. Ridiculous really. But that can be Sydney for you, going down a lane, a sandstone fence, a jacaranda tree, and over the fence, an ocean-liner sailing stately, blue water. Like sinking your teeth into a mango, soft and pulpy, and warm, and a stone you can't swallow.
But Mr Adamson. A mythologiser perhaps, like Shelton Lea. But what a story. The more I read it, the more I thought it could make a good movie. The dyslexic guy who's into fishing, cars, and getting into trouble. The trip north with his under-age girlfriend, stealing petrol, starving, trying to catch fish, kill a sheep. Back in gaol, raped, turning into a girl for a while, finding Rimbaud. The guy's a pastry cook, winning a prize at the Sydney Show, for his decorated cake, tiny threads of blue against the white. Writing his stuff out over and over. The bravery, the obsession, trying out drugs almost against the grain, like taking a boat out to get fish to sell, and almost drowning. Stabbing against the dark, not like the stylistic youth bo ho, de rigueur, industries sprung up to support it, we get these days.
And then the sidling, wheedling, into the polite, nice poetry twiddley-dee, and taking it over. Palace revolutions. Photos with Brett Whitely. Bad boys made good. What the fuck are you on mate? Prove it. Beautiful women. There's a movie to be made, busting out of this story.
Of course he's mythologising, but still and all, a fantastic fucking story. We don't get enough stories about the Blueys and Joe-Blows remaking themselves. Now we're ordinary intermediate international. Media fills up our mouths before we learn to breathe. We're self-conscious as fuck. Are our poetry heroes capable of kicking a footy, able to make a quid? Can they rebuild an engine, buy a block of land, plant something that grows? I can't, so maybe I'm wailing in a desert of attenuation. But the populace is out there, waiting. There's a movie in there, somewhere.
What sort of person makes a poetry hero?
[5-01-08]
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KATE RIGBY
WHAT IS ECOPOETRY?
Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves are more wonderful than any words about them.
(Mary Oliver)
This statement by Mary Oliver might sound like an admission of defeat, emphasising the limits of what poetry can ever hope to say and do. Mary Oliver is not about to lay down her pen, though, and I am not suggesting that you should either! In my reading, what she does here is actually to provide in a nutshell a theory of ecopoetry. I stress that this is A theory : over the past ten years or so, various theories of ecopoetics have been hotly debated among the growing band of ecocritics (ecologically oriented literary critics) around the world, and I can't possibly cover the whole discussion here. What i should like to do, though, is to share with you my own understanding of ecopoetry as exemplified in the work of some of my favourite writers. In the case of Oliver, I think that much of her poetry does in fact say in a whole host of different ways precisely what she says here it can't say : that is to say, her poetry invites the reader, again and again, to come with her "into the field of sunflowers" (or into the woods, or down to the lake, or just along the road under the open sky...). Oliver knows that we can't take up that invitation literally : writing is "not vibrant life" and the very fact that we are reading it implies that she's not with us in person to take us for a stroll. But neither is it a "docile artifact". For better or for worse, writing has force, inflecting our perceptions and deflecting our attention away from some things and towards others. To the extent that it does not hold us spellbound by its own verbal constructions, luring us into the belief that "vibrant life" really does lurk right there in the text, poetic language has the capacity to turn our gaze to the world beyond the page : and if the world to which it urges us to attend is a more-than-human one of Earth and Sky, then this, I believe, is what qualifies it as properly "ecopoetic".
Having spent several years hunkered down with the Romantics (ok, just their writing), I find Oliver's mini-theory of ecopoetry strongly reminiscent of that articulated by Wordsworth in "The Tables Turned", in which the poet exhorts his bookish friend to "come forth into the light of things". This is an extraordinary line, because you're led to expect the cliched "light of day", but instead Wordsworth (characteristically) trips you up with this utterly unconventional and really quite mysterious image : the light of things. What on earth can this mean? In what sense do things have their own light, as distinct from being illuminated from the outside? I think that the poet gives us a clue later on when he asserts that :
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things :-
We murder to dissect.
Approaching things as objects of scientific enquiry, with a view to finding out merely how they function (and thereby also how they might be altered and utilized) prevents us from entering into the "light of things", namely by allowing them to disclose themselves to us in a situation of open-minded and non-utilitarian embodied encounter :
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves :
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Note the irony here, though : it is precisely by means of such "barren leaves" that Wordsworth issues his invitation to us! Wordsworth knows that in modernizing societies such as his own, it would be necessary to use writing, ironically, for the express purpose of urging readers to lift their eyes from the page.
Poets in many times and places have celebrated their more-than-human earthly environs as a locus of meaning and value. In Western literature, for example, this, in part, is what the pastoral tradition that reaches right back to Ancient Greece has been about. As Raymond Williams argued in The Country and the City, Romantic writers like Wordsworth link up with this tradition, but take it in a new direction : Romantic neo- or counter-pastoral has an oppositional edge to it, in that it is self-consciously pitched against the increasing objectification, instrumentalisation and commodification of the Earth. Sometimes this manifests as outright protest poetry , as in the case of John Clare's "Lamentations of Round Oak Waters". This begins in the mode of a conventional pastoral elegy with the poet bewailing his personal woes by Round Oak Waters. But his lament is interrupted by the "genius of the brook", who turns his attention to the way in which this place, formerly common land, has been denuded of vegetation following its enclosure as private land destined to produce cash crops : this, then, truly is the lament of Round Oak waters. The poet is also reminded that in his recently deceased friend the brook too had lost a champion, so it is now up to him to take up her cause : not against the "sweating slaves" who did the physical damage, but against the wealthy land-owners and parliamentarians who commanded it. Environmental destruction, Clare reminds us here, is nearly always co-ordinate with social injustice. Not only is human labour regularly exploited in the process : it is generally the poor who first suffer the consequences, without enjoying benefits to the same degree, if at all. In "The Mores", moreover, he suggests that the reduction of the earth to mere private property amounts to the profanation of creation :
Fence now meets fence in little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please [...]
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine.
The voice of ecopolitical protest remains an important one in contemporary ecopoetry. As Jonathan Bate observes in The Song of the Earth with regard to Gary Snyder's "Mother Earth: Her Whales", though, the overt didacticism of some protest poetry risks preaching to the converted. By contrast, Bate points to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" as exemplifying an ecopoetics that shows why we might want to defend the existence of wild animals rather than simply telling us that we ought to do so. Bate theorises this through Martin Heidegger's late philosophy of dwelling, in which the poetic word is conceived as giving voice to the self-disclosure of things in a non-objectifying way. The problem here, in my view, is that if human language is assumed to be a wholly adequate means of responding to the call of Being, as Heidegger puts it, the poet becomes a kind of ventriloquist. Rather than speaking for the Earth, the ecopoet might instead be seen as singing along with it, as Robert Gray suggests at the end of his lyric retracing of a meditative walk along a forestry trail, in which the poet discovers that "all of us are a choir" ("On a Forestry Trail"). For Canadian poet, Tim Lilburn, too, ecopoetry encompasses the acknowledgment that words are only one way of speaking, and that "everything exceeds its name". Lilburn calls for a form of poetic attention that seeks not to appropriate the world, but to stand alongside it, knowing that you are never going to see all that is there or say all that you can see. It is because both our perceptions and our representations fall short of ever perfectly corresponding with reality that, as he puts it in the title of his recent collection, "desire never ends". Ecopoetry can only be effective in putting us back in touch with the more-than-human, glowing, singing --and increasingly imperiled --Earth, if it alerts us to its own inadequacy in mediating "vibrant life" even while seeking out words to speak of it : writing, as Lilburn puts it, is like carrying water in a sieve.
Lilburn's ecopoetics is often rapturous, unsentimentally evincing a sense of ecstatic delight in earthly existence.In the current moment of unprecedented (because humanly engendered) global environmental peril, though, I believe that songs of praise need to be complemented by words of warning. In Australian poetry, some of the most powerful were spoken by Judith Wright in her apocalyptic poem, "Dust". Written in the war-torn, drought-ridden summer of 1943, this is early Wright in full-blown prophetic mode. The idiom might be outdated, but her exhortation remains cogent:
O sighing at the blistered door, darkening the evening star,
the dust accuses. Our dream was the wrong dream,
our strength was the wrong strength.
Weary as we are, we must make a new choice,
a choice more difficult than resignation,
more urgent than our desire of rest at the end of the day.
[...]
Today, globally, it is wild weather that accuses, and nevermore so than when the storms cooked up by we who feed on fossil fuels are visited on the poor of other climes. If ecopoetry can awaken us from that old dream in which the other-than-human world figured solely as a means of wealth-creation, if it can inspire us to make a tough "new choice", then it might yet help to keep open the possibility of a just and sustainable future. As the witness of Wright also reminds us, though, realizing that possibility will require the backing of an effective global ecopolitics : words might open a world, as Heidegger puts it, but it will take more than words to save Earth's vibrant life.
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[A talk delivered to the Melbourne Poets' Union, April 24th, 2008.]
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ALEX SELENITSCH
THE PRINTING OF A MASTERPIECE BY ALAN LONEY (Black Pepper Press, '08)
Peter Downton, who is one of a limited circle of my friends who makes things and thinks about these same things, reported on a conversation he had had with another colleague, Andrea Mina. Andrea wondered out loud whether using two hands, as you do when making something, whether two hands in consort create a different kind of thinking to the kind that is produced while you are using one hand when writing.
I mentioned this to Alan recently, and he told me that he once asked Oliver Sachs whether typing with two hands would ultimately produce something different to the single-handed pen. Sachs thought no -- the brain's language centres are the same no matter how many hands you use. I take this to mean that Sachs thinks of language as a function of brain activity (and that he doesn't use his hands to make things) because the issue is not just a question of the brain, or even language.
One of the best books -- in my opinion, of course, which is the opinion of some-one who makes things so that he can think about them -- one of the best books about this has been Socrates' Ancestor, by Indra Kagis McEwen. This book elaborates a pre-Socratic position in Greek culture: if you make any kind of object, you make a model, which is then a cosmos. You can hear a faint reverberation of this when you speak of making a composition, or claim to have organised something. So some-one who makes a boat makes a cosmos. The same applies for a house, for a garment, for a vase, for a saddle, for a city. And the same applies for a book.
Making a book is not like writing one. It involves both hands, both handsand head, and both hands and head, and heart. In The Printing of a Masterpiece -- and what a modest title that is -- Alan just tells it like it is. Or rather like it was. First he did this, then he did that, then it was time to fix this and so on. From a stack of paper, a tray of type and a tin of ink to a compact, tactile wad of data, to something that speaks to the hands and feels marvellous to the mind.
But, of course, writing a book is also what Alan has done. And it is the contemplation of the technical context, the design and decision-making procedures that, almost by a sleight of hand, turn what could be just a report into the unfolding of a cosmos. Because any book is a complex object, and making it even more so, it is an organization in the sense of an organism with integrated sub-systems. It easily becomes a model, where the decisions and values embodied in its form and materials exhibit relationships than can be applied elsewhere. For instance, Alan writes about "going in from the outside", that is, making decisions based on a teleological vision and contrasts it with his own procedure which is "goes out from the inside", where you proceed with action before all conditions are planned, in faith, and knowing that while creative problems may be ahead, there may be better outcomes later than anything that can be predicted now. This is an old dispute in architecture, pitting the Italians against the English. You might recognize it in politics as the argument between ends and means.
Further, the book Alan has written is about making a book, which could be seen as a microcosmic bit of behaviour. Does the book which is the main character of this narrative actually exist? If it does,I will be disappointed to hear of it; I prefer to think of it as an imaginary object into which all of Alan's printing experience has gone. It's an imaginary book, but not the ethereal "book" of the French School, of Jabes, Blanchot and Derrida, people who separate themselves from matter; people who think with only one hand. This imaginary black book of Alan's is a curious thing when you think about it. Problematic gold ink on black paper, a too-short text about the philosophical issue of "nothing" by Leonardo da Vinci. It's a conglomerate of problems and perhaps deliberately so. What could be more boring than a report on things that have been effortless and smooth? I'm reminded of Maurice Ravel's idea for a book on orchestration, which he was going to fill with examples of faulty orchestration : all the better to learn from than perfections. This is not exactly what Alan has done, but his self-imposed difficulties allow him to branch out from the technical diary, to history, and to the problems of creativity, and art and craft.
The English crafter David Pye, wrote a wonderful book called The Nature of Design. One of its chapters dealt with the uselessness of workmanship. Pye later extended this idea into two other books, but the essence of his argument is that workmanship is unnecessary work for function to be fulfilled, but nevertheless we treasure it. Uselessness, in fact, is a value that allows some overlap between art and craft. Generally, these disciplines are separated by us. The difference between art and craft is that the former gets matter to ask questions by rendering everything semantic, while the latter takes matter and gets it to behave, to keep quiet. In art, function is taken away by mislabelling, alteration, interference -- in my case, for example, by cutting away parts of a book -- but in craft, workmanship removes all traces of faulty human endeavour, and matter becomes eloquent and assertive, outside convention.
Karl Krauss once wrote that no matter how hard you look at language, it always stares back. It's that moment when the book asserts itself as an independent object, which Alan describes in the last chapter of this book under the title of The nonchalance of the master craftsman. In this case, the black book is dazzling to its maker. As a flicker, you can see Adam attracting God's attention. If you make things, you know the feeling : you stand there and wonder whether this object in front of you came through your hands, from you imagination, or were you just the medium IT used so that it could come into existence. At such moments, we are flummoxed and charmed, and often want to do the whole thing over again; this effect is the source of Marcel Duchamp's famous quip that art is a habit-forming drug.
Well, here I am adding to the nothing that Leonardo observed, and I should stop so that something can happen. This something is to announce that The Printing of a Masterpiece has moved from Alan Loney's private imagination to our social imaginary world. I always like to find a material analogue of the imaginary, but I don't believe the windows open in this room and somehow throwing a copy out into the outside space would just mean throwing it onto the footpath -- SO, imagine me throwing a copy into your imagination. I'm sure that the publisher would like you to convert that imaginary event into a material one by buying the book and reading it. I think you should.
__________________________________________________________________
[launch speech delivered at the Leigh Scott Room, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne,
13th May,'08]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
IN THE BACKGROUND
I'd always thought that a noise in the ear
would manifest itself as constant ringing
but the noise my mother hears,
she says, is more like an orchestra
or even a string quartet, I ask her if she recognises
the melody but she says, no it's too faint, too far
in the background, like an ocean liner on the horizon
or the ship that brought them here, an ocean liner
with a dining room and a band playing music
at night, my mother, not yet my mother,
twenty-six, and not in the dining room
but below the deck, an uncomprehending
refugee, with my father whose heart beats
like clockwork which is not yet unwound,
(that is five years hence)
refugees with all that word
connotes and there on board
the future looks hopeful
like a distant light across the ocean
there's even a band playing.
[2008]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
David McCooey is the author of Blister Pack (Salt), which won the 2006 Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for 4 other major awards. He lives in Geelong, where he works at Deakin University.
Maurice McNamara lives in Melbourne. Performer & organiser at many live poetry occasions including Melbourne Poets Union, the Celtic Club, the Overload Poetry Festival. Recently published in Swings & Roundabouts : Poems on Parenthood (ed E. Neale, Godwit/Random House, New Zealand, '08).
Kate Rigby works at Monash University in German Studies, Comparative Literature & Critical Theory. Co-edits PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature) magazine. Most recent book is Topographies of the Sacred : The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (University of Virginia Press, '04). Contact is, Kate.Rigby@arts.monash.edu.au
Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect, and a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne. Contact is, asele@unimelb.edu.au
Ann Shenfield lives in Melbourne and apart from her life in animation-film is a poet who has won the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize in 2007, also that year receiving commendation in the Alec Bolton Manuscript Prize and 2nd prize in the John Shaw Nielson Award. Her children's book, Scribble Sunset, was published by Lothian ('08).
(WELDON KEES)
Everything is ominous.
--
Another ordered loneliness.
--
The future is fatal.
--
Even the open field, a labyrinth.
--
The afternoon idly flicks through the pages of itself.
--
A list of names : good news, or bad?
--
The long silence of rooms.
--
History with its morphine headache.
--
The anonymous rain falling on motels.
--
The atrocities played under flickering streetlights.
--
The cars parked under melodramatic weather.
--
Finally, every future is fatal.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAURICE MCNAMARA
WHAT A STORY
Was reading Robert Adamson's autobiog. A friend of mine, Johnny Goodall, is on the back cover, wearing a black cowboy hat. He bought a silver dobro, a National, off an old lady in an old folks home, and he really got into that sort of music. Had a sort of country music band in Sydney. Lovely gentle guy, but when he got drinking... I met Mr Adamson once, when Johnny moved back to Balmain, we were all tripping, and Bob said I was the devil, that sort of poetic bullshit fancy stuff. Nigel Roberts, whom I met again at Raff's, a year ago, said Johnny was now re-parked on the North Island, Nzed, drinking the homebrew. He was very influential on me, tho it took me generational change to get around to it.
Too weak and confused and stupid. But I loved that guy. Staying up all night and going round to the early opener, on one of the side streets of the spine of Balmain, alkies hopping up and down, and the wharfies coming in, and by eight o'clock in the morning, smoke in the bar, hey, it's a party! Meeting Vicki Viidikas and Michael Wilding. Ridiculous really. But that can be Sydney for you, going down a lane, a sandstone fence, a jacaranda tree, and over the fence, an ocean-liner sailing stately, blue water. Like sinking your teeth into a mango, soft and pulpy, and warm, and a stone you can't swallow.
But Mr Adamson. A mythologiser perhaps, like Shelton Lea. But what a story. The more I read it, the more I thought it could make a good movie. The dyslexic guy who's into fishing, cars, and getting into trouble. The trip north with his under-age girlfriend, stealing petrol, starving, trying to catch fish, kill a sheep. Back in gaol, raped, turning into a girl for a while, finding Rimbaud. The guy's a pastry cook, winning a prize at the Sydney Show, for his decorated cake, tiny threads of blue against the white. Writing his stuff out over and over. The bravery, the obsession, trying out drugs almost against the grain, like taking a boat out to get fish to sell, and almost drowning. Stabbing against the dark, not like the stylistic youth bo ho, de rigueur, industries sprung up to support it, we get these days.
And then the sidling, wheedling, into the polite, nice poetry twiddley-dee, and taking it over. Palace revolutions. Photos with Brett Whitely. Bad boys made good. What the fuck are you on mate? Prove it. Beautiful women. There's a movie to be made, busting out of this story.
Of course he's mythologising, but still and all, a fantastic fucking story. We don't get enough stories about the Blueys and Joe-Blows remaking themselves. Now we're ordinary intermediate international. Media fills up our mouths before we learn to breathe. We're self-conscious as fuck. Are our poetry heroes capable of kicking a footy, able to make a quid? Can they rebuild an engine, buy a block of land, plant something that grows? I can't, so maybe I'm wailing in a desert of attenuation. But the populace is out there, waiting. There's a movie in there, somewhere.
What sort of person makes a poetry hero?
[5-01-08]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KATE RIGBY
WHAT IS ECOPOETRY?
Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves are more wonderful than any words about them.
(Mary Oliver)
This statement by Mary Oliver might sound like an admission of defeat, emphasising the limits of what poetry can ever hope to say and do. Mary Oliver is not about to lay down her pen, though, and I am not suggesting that you should either! In my reading, what she does here is actually to provide in a nutshell a theory of ecopoetry. I stress that this is A theory : over the past ten years or so, various theories of ecopoetics have been hotly debated among the growing band of ecocritics (ecologically oriented literary critics) around the world, and I can't possibly cover the whole discussion here. What i should like to do, though, is to share with you my own understanding of ecopoetry as exemplified in the work of some of my favourite writers. In the case of Oliver, I think that much of her poetry does in fact say in a whole host of different ways precisely what she says here it can't say : that is to say, her poetry invites the reader, again and again, to come with her "into the field of sunflowers" (or into the woods, or down to the lake, or just along the road under the open sky...). Oliver knows that we can't take up that invitation literally : writing is "not vibrant life" and the very fact that we are reading it implies that she's not with us in person to take us for a stroll. But neither is it a "docile artifact". For better or for worse, writing has force, inflecting our perceptions and deflecting our attention away from some things and towards others. To the extent that it does not hold us spellbound by its own verbal constructions, luring us into the belief that "vibrant life" really does lurk right there in the text, poetic language has the capacity to turn our gaze to the world beyond the page : and if the world to which it urges us to attend is a more-than-human one of Earth and Sky, then this, I believe, is what qualifies it as properly "ecopoetic".
Having spent several years hunkered down with the Romantics (ok, just their writing), I find Oliver's mini-theory of ecopoetry strongly reminiscent of that articulated by Wordsworth in "The Tables Turned", in which the poet exhorts his bookish friend to "come forth into the light of things". This is an extraordinary line, because you're led to expect the cliched "light of day", but instead Wordsworth (characteristically) trips you up with this utterly unconventional and really quite mysterious image : the light of things. What on earth can this mean? In what sense do things have their own light, as distinct from being illuminated from the outside? I think that the poet gives us a clue later on when he asserts that :
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things :-
We murder to dissect.
Approaching things as objects of scientific enquiry, with a view to finding out merely how they function (and thereby also how they might be altered and utilized) prevents us from entering into the "light of things", namely by allowing them to disclose themselves to us in a situation of open-minded and non-utilitarian embodied encounter :
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves :
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Note the irony here, though : it is precisely by means of such "barren leaves" that Wordsworth issues his invitation to us! Wordsworth knows that in modernizing societies such as his own, it would be necessary to use writing, ironically, for the express purpose of urging readers to lift their eyes from the page.
Poets in many times and places have celebrated their more-than-human earthly environs as a locus of meaning and value. In Western literature, for example, this, in part, is what the pastoral tradition that reaches right back to Ancient Greece has been about. As Raymond Williams argued in The Country and the City, Romantic writers like Wordsworth link up with this tradition, but take it in a new direction : Romantic neo- or counter-pastoral has an oppositional edge to it, in that it is self-consciously pitched against the increasing objectification, instrumentalisation and commodification of the Earth. Sometimes this manifests as outright protest poetry , as in the case of John Clare's "Lamentations of Round Oak Waters". This begins in the mode of a conventional pastoral elegy with the poet bewailing his personal woes by Round Oak Waters. But his lament is interrupted by the "genius of the brook", who turns his attention to the way in which this place, formerly common land, has been denuded of vegetation following its enclosure as private land destined to produce cash crops : this, then, truly is the lament of Round Oak waters. The poet is also reminded that in his recently deceased friend the brook too had lost a champion, so it is now up to him to take up her cause : not against the "sweating slaves" who did the physical damage, but against the wealthy land-owners and parliamentarians who commanded it. Environmental destruction, Clare reminds us here, is nearly always co-ordinate with social injustice. Not only is human labour regularly exploited in the process : it is generally the poor who first suffer the consequences, without enjoying benefits to the same degree, if at all. In "The Mores", moreover, he suggests that the reduction of the earth to mere private property amounts to the profanation of creation :
Fence now meets fence in little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please [...]
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine.
The voice of ecopolitical protest remains an important one in contemporary ecopoetry. As Jonathan Bate observes in The Song of the Earth with regard to Gary Snyder's "Mother Earth: Her Whales", though, the overt didacticism of some protest poetry risks preaching to the converted. By contrast, Bate points to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" as exemplifying an ecopoetics that shows why we might want to defend the existence of wild animals rather than simply telling us that we ought to do so. Bate theorises this through Martin Heidegger's late philosophy of dwelling, in which the poetic word is conceived as giving voice to the self-disclosure of things in a non-objectifying way. The problem here, in my view, is that if human language is assumed to be a wholly adequate means of responding to the call of Being, as Heidegger puts it, the poet becomes a kind of ventriloquist. Rather than speaking for the Earth, the ecopoet might instead be seen as singing along with it, as Robert Gray suggests at the end of his lyric retracing of a meditative walk along a forestry trail, in which the poet discovers that "all of us are a choir" ("On a Forestry Trail"). For Canadian poet, Tim Lilburn, too, ecopoetry encompasses the acknowledgment that words are only one way of speaking, and that "everything exceeds its name". Lilburn calls for a form of poetic attention that seeks not to appropriate the world, but to stand alongside it, knowing that you are never going to see all that is there or say all that you can see. It is because both our perceptions and our representations fall short of ever perfectly corresponding with reality that, as he puts it in the title of his recent collection, "desire never ends". Ecopoetry can only be effective in putting us back in touch with the more-than-human, glowing, singing --and increasingly imperiled --Earth, if it alerts us to its own inadequacy in mediating "vibrant life" even while seeking out words to speak of it : writing, as Lilburn puts it, is like carrying water in a sieve.
Lilburn's ecopoetics is often rapturous, unsentimentally evincing a sense of ecstatic delight in earthly existence.In the current moment of unprecedented (because humanly engendered) global environmental peril, though, I believe that songs of praise need to be complemented by words of warning. In Australian poetry, some of the most powerful were spoken by Judith Wright in her apocalyptic poem, "Dust". Written in the war-torn, drought-ridden summer of 1943, this is early Wright in full-blown prophetic mode. The idiom might be outdated, but her exhortation remains cogent:
O sighing at the blistered door, darkening the evening star,
the dust accuses. Our dream was the wrong dream,
our strength was the wrong strength.
Weary as we are, we must make a new choice,
a choice more difficult than resignation,
more urgent than our desire of rest at the end of the day.
[...]
Today, globally, it is wild weather that accuses, and nevermore so than when the storms cooked up by we who feed on fossil fuels are visited on the poor of other climes. If ecopoetry can awaken us from that old dream in which the other-than-human world figured solely as a means of wealth-creation, if it can inspire us to make a tough "new choice", then it might yet help to keep open the possibility of a just and sustainable future. As the witness of Wright also reminds us, though, realizing that possibility will require the backing of an effective global ecopolitics : words might open a world, as Heidegger puts it, but it will take more than words to save Earth's vibrant life.
__________________________________________________
[A talk delivered to the Melbourne Poets' Union, April 24th, 2008.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX SELENITSCH
THE PRINTING OF A MASTERPIECE BY ALAN LONEY (Black Pepper Press, '08)
Peter Downton, who is one of a limited circle of my friends who makes things and thinks about these same things, reported on a conversation he had had with another colleague, Andrea Mina. Andrea wondered out loud whether using two hands, as you do when making something, whether two hands in consort create a different kind of thinking to the kind that is produced while you are using one hand when writing.
I mentioned this to Alan recently, and he told me that he once asked Oliver Sachs whether typing with two hands would ultimately produce something different to the single-handed pen. Sachs thought no -- the brain's language centres are the same no matter how many hands you use. I take this to mean that Sachs thinks of language as a function of brain activity (and that he doesn't use his hands to make things) because the issue is not just a question of the brain, or even language.
One of the best books -- in my opinion, of course, which is the opinion of some-one who makes things so that he can think about them -- one of the best books about this has been Socrates' Ancestor, by Indra Kagis McEwen. This book elaborates a pre-Socratic position in Greek culture: if you make any kind of object, you make a model, which is then a cosmos. You can hear a faint reverberation of this when you speak of making a composition, or claim to have organised something. So some-one who makes a boat makes a cosmos. The same applies for a house, for a garment, for a vase, for a saddle, for a city. And the same applies for a book.
Making a book is not like writing one. It involves both hands, both handsand head, and both hands and head, and heart. In The Printing of a Masterpiece -- and what a modest title that is -- Alan just tells it like it is. Or rather like it was. First he did this, then he did that, then it was time to fix this and so on. From a stack of paper, a tray of type and a tin of ink to a compact, tactile wad of data, to something that speaks to the hands and feels marvellous to the mind.
But, of course, writing a book is also what Alan has done. And it is the contemplation of the technical context, the design and decision-making procedures that, almost by a sleight of hand, turn what could be just a report into the unfolding of a cosmos. Because any book is a complex object, and making it even more so, it is an organization in the sense of an organism with integrated sub-systems. It easily becomes a model, where the decisions and values embodied in its form and materials exhibit relationships than can be applied elsewhere. For instance, Alan writes about "going in from the outside", that is, making decisions based on a teleological vision and contrasts it with his own procedure which is "goes out from the inside", where you proceed with action before all conditions are planned, in faith, and knowing that while creative problems may be ahead, there may be better outcomes later than anything that can be predicted now. This is an old dispute in architecture, pitting the Italians against the English. You might recognize it in politics as the argument between ends and means.
Further, the book Alan has written is about making a book, which could be seen as a microcosmic bit of behaviour. Does the book which is the main character of this narrative actually exist? If it does,I will be disappointed to hear of it; I prefer to think of it as an imaginary object into which all of Alan's printing experience has gone. It's an imaginary book, but not the ethereal "book" of the French School, of Jabes, Blanchot and Derrida, people who separate themselves from matter; people who think with only one hand. This imaginary black book of Alan's is a curious thing when you think about it. Problematic gold ink on black paper, a too-short text about the philosophical issue of "nothing" by Leonardo da Vinci. It's a conglomerate of problems and perhaps deliberately so. What could be more boring than a report on things that have been effortless and smooth? I'm reminded of Maurice Ravel's idea for a book on orchestration, which he was going to fill with examples of faulty orchestration : all the better to learn from than perfections. This is not exactly what Alan has done, but his self-imposed difficulties allow him to branch out from the technical diary, to history, and to the problems of creativity, and art and craft.
The English crafter David Pye, wrote a wonderful book called The Nature of Design. One of its chapters dealt with the uselessness of workmanship. Pye later extended this idea into two other books, but the essence of his argument is that workmanship is unnecessary work for function to be fulfilled, but nevertheless we treasure it. Uselessness, in fact, is a value that allows some overlap between art and craft. Generally, these disciplines are separated by us. The difference between art and craft is that the former gets matter to ask questions by rendering everything semantic, while the latter takes matter and gets it to behave, to keep quiet. In art, function is taken away by mislabelling, alteration, interference -- in my case, for example, by cutting away parts of a book -- but in craft, workmanship removes all traces of faulty human endeavour, and matter becomes eloquent and assertive, outside convention.
Karl Krauss once wrote that no matter how hard you look at language, it always stares back. It's that moment when the book asserts itself as an independent object, which Alan describes in the last chapter of this book under the title of The nonchalance of the master craftsman. In this case, the black book is dazzling to its maker. As a flicker, you can see Adam attracting God's attention. If you make things, you know the feeling : you stand there and wonder whether this object in front of you came through your hands, from you imagination, or were you just the medium IT used so that it could come into existence. At such moments, we are flummoxed and charmed, and often want to do the whole thing over again; this effect is the source of Marcel Duchamp's famous quip that art is a habit-forming drug.
Well, here I am adding to the nothing that Leonardo observed, and I should stop so that something can happen. This something is to announce that The Printing of a Masterpiece has moved from Alan Loney's private imagination to our social imaginary world. I always like to find a material analogue of the imaginary, but I don't believe the windows open in this room and somehow throwing a copy out into the outside space would just mean throwing it onto the footpath -- SO, imagine me throwing a copy into your imagination. I'm sure that the publisher would like you to convert that imaginary event into a material one by buying the book and reading it. I think you should.
__________________________________________________________________
[launch speech delivered at the Leigh Scott Room, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne,
13th May,'08]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
IN THE BACKGROUND
I'd always thought that a noise in the ear
would manifest itself as constant ringing
but the noise my mother hears,
she says, is more like an orchestra
or even a string quartet, I ask her if she recognises
the melody but she says, no it's too faint, too far
in the background, like an ocean liner on the horizon
or the ship that brought them here, an ocean liner
with a dining room and a band playing music
at night, my mother, not yet my mother,
twenty-six, and not in the dining room
but below the deck, an uncomprehending
refugee, with my father whose heart beats
like clockwork which is not yet unwound,
(that is five years hence)
refugees with all that word
connotes and there on board
the future looks hopeful
like a distant light across the ocean
there's even a band playing.
[2008]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
David McCooey is the author of Blister Pack (Salt), which won the 2006 Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for 4 other major awards. He lives in Geelong, where he works at Deakin University.
Maurice McNamara lives in Melbourne. Performer & organiser at many live poetry occasions including Melbourne Poets Union, the Celtic Club, the Overload Poetry Festival. Recently published in Swings & Roundabouts : Poems on Parenthood (ed E. Neale, Godwit/Random House, New Zealand, '08).
Kate Rigby works at Monash University in German Studies, Comparative Literature & Critical Theory. Co-edits PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature) magazine. Most recent book is Topographies of the Sacred : The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (University of Virginia Press, '04). Contact is, Kate.Rigby@arts.monash.edu.au
Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect, and a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne. Contact is, asele@unimelb.edu.au
Ann Shenfield lives in Melbourne and apart from her life in animation-film is a poet who has won the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize in 2007, also that year receiving commendation in the Alec Bolton Manuscript Prize and 2nd prize in the John Shaw Nielson Award. Her children's book, Scribble Sunset, was published by Lothian ('08).
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