LAUNCHING SPEECH for John Mateer's ELSEWHERE (Salt, UK, 2008), at Collected Works Bookshop, Melbourne, Wednesday,April 2nd, 2008.
I'll begin by congratulating John on his new book -- [APPLAUSE]
It's his fifteenth all up --books & chapbooks, commercially published &/or privately circulated --and it's adding up to his work, to the John Mateer oeuvre, so to speak .
Notwithstanding certain ironies & paradoxes, on the social surface as well as deeply inscribed within his poetry, he writes & publishes with a regularity one could call prolific. As far as publishing is concerned, he is out there --out & about. I wish I had now some of that zest for the writing & publishing life --
I have written at some length recently on John's book, Southern Barbarians (published by Zero Press, South Africa, 2007), and dont want to repeat myself here. Actually, when John told me he'd read my long blog I was intrigued he wanted me to launch this new book! But, whatever our differences, I welcome at least a couple of important things -- One, is John's essayistic line --not always employed of course, but often enough to have impressed me into feeling that his was a sustained alternative to the imagistic or expressionistic phrase composition abundant elsewhere! I mean, misusing a comment about a poet I like a lot, namely Robert Creeley, John could never be described as an asthmatic poet! So, I've enjoyed the sense of a whole sentence --of space for the poet to walk & talk & think in --and congratulate him for this essayistic, discoursive poetry.
Secondly, he has something to say --issues he needs to explore --and in that way is political. And he, necessarily, invites us to react. So I praise him for enabling thought & discussion. Agreeing or disagreeing is one's own privilege --but being enabled to think & discuss is everyone's.
*
The postcolonial --whatever it is to be called, although it seems now to have changed from adjective to noun, become the place where the end of the "hegemony of the West" is assumed --and for literature that means the repositioning of the so-called Western Canon, often its side-lining if not repudiation -- : this "postcolonial" appears to be where John Mateer is at -- : as the blurb, he may or may not have written himself, states, "one person's poetic & moral accounting of the past 500 years of Western colonization" [INTERJECTION, John Mateer : "And why not?"]
Yes, indeed, that's your prerogative, just as there are, of course, different positions held & espoused in this place --and I guarantee that the readers of John's book will find their own thoughts & feelings reacting to the --and I struggle for the word --the sensation-ism? the vibrancy? the vivacity? the visually seductive & authoritative language of Elsewhere --indeed, of all his work hitherto. The reader cant fail to rise to the intimacy each poem invites. By the same token, the palpability of the poet's scenes of life are accompanied or informed by the identity questions which assuredly course their author's being. And because of John Mateer's place of birth, in South Africa, his Western genealogy & its dramatic face-off with the risen African heritage in the new South Africa & in this place of the postcolonial everywhere, these matters of identity are conduits of revelation -- : of the conventional personal type & of the person-as-body-of-the-political (--a trope well known to even dilettante browsers of Continental philosophy or theory!) -- : they are unpredictable --and this I think is a strength, despite an occasional howler or let's call it a John Lennonism, -- this unpredictability is a strength of a writing which often elsewhere is an exercise in control, from first line to last. For many "political" poets, the poem is basically therapy & political opinion (as of George Oppen's famous comment) and not one of consciousness and the perception which flows from acute consciousness, from nerves-on-end attention to what is given --
To be sure, John is often riven --his heart aches. At this level of pain he doubts the efficacy of communicable language even as he plays his hand in poetry's compulsive and, indeed, required game. Because he is a "poet", isnt he?
I'm reminded of my New Left / Counter Culture youth, coming across this comment by John Dewey, and whether I've misquoted him or not this is what I've always remembered : "community is defined by the ability to communicate what is held in common." What a delicious spanner to be thrown into the works, mid 60s, when "community", "communication" & "commonality" were assumed by so many to be as natural as the flowers in one's hair?!
You may recall this poem, which I'll read, Dark Horse (for J M Coetzee), from the Calyx anthology published in 2000 -- : Calyx, 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (--and John's also been in a new South African poets anthology --the more the merrier, perhaps, in the postcolonial?!) --
DARK HORSE
As I write this line it is in a foreign language.
As I think What does this mean? I remember a sentence
by the allegorical novelist who is said not to speak.
He was a linguist, and his wife is said to interrupt party conversations
by saying : "John has something to say." Can I say,
I oppose all civilization, without being in a city under siege,
without being a Trojan horse?
As I write these words,
the sentence I DO NOT SPEAK MY OWN LANGUAGE is in my head
like the line of an ascending aeroplane piercing through cloud.
But I must tell (who?) --
Beware of those bearing grief in comprehensible words.
Beware of your mouths.
--in a way, this is the John Mateer poem par excellence. It carries a vulnerability, a tentativeness --but it reads to me didactically. Yet it is also lyrical --slightly mysterious despite the strength of its closing words. It is candid of the poet --it admits his vulnerability and relinquishes the usual control of the didactic author. It refers to the famous novelist but as tho the narrator were also at the party --he's made the information an essential piece of gossip (as Robert Duncan might have said)! He admits the vulnerability at his core and makes it his strength --"I DO NOT SPEAK MY OWN LANGUAGE" -- : he might be talking about Dutch-South African, he might be talking about the Mateer version of the pure poetry which the 19thCentury & into the 20thCentury French & others aspired to; he might be alluding to political shackles & burdens and their psychological corollaries --think of Paul Celan for an awful moment --the Paul Celan who is one of the very, very few Western poets referenced in any of John Mateer's writing --but that's for an academic paper, not for this book launching!
*
From the blurb, "Elsewhere is an exciting introduction to a poet whose work has been receiving international attention for the past decade." I imagine this means an introduction to the British readership in the first instance, for whom John Kinsella's Salt is one of the big three poetry publishers alongside Neil Astley's Bloodaxe & Michael Schmidt's Carcanet, or four when you add Tony Frazer's Shearsman, from Exeter. Shearsman, by the way, have begun publishing a complete edition of Pessoa who just happens to be a key reference in John Mateer's previous book, Southern Barbarians --the Pessoa he quotes at the head of that book, "I write to forget"; and the Pessoa John addresses in a poem, "You are my self captured in this photograph / And I am your sole surviving heteronym."
It would be deeply ironic, tho very Mateerish, if one were introducing John to an Australian or, specifically, Melbourne readership! He's lived & published here extensively after all --
But he's the peripatetic poet --never happier, perhaps, than when on the move, which could cast him as Romanticism's iconic subject, the other half of the exoticist, the adventurer, the traveller, namely the Stranger, a stranger on the earth, stranger to society --and maybe there is some of that in the postcolonialism I've given him here.
He'll often quote expressions of negativity, e.g., heading The Ancient Capital of Images in the new book is the Japanese poet, Tamura Ryuichi, "because there is no answer but emptiness."
*
I'll close on that theme (--the academic paper if anyone here wants to write it will be called something like "John Mateer's Azanian Poetics of Negativity"!) and read the poem on page 77,
DEAD LEAVES OF TOKYO
--an aquarelle series by Eugene Carchesio
Whether collected from the gardens or temples
fallen leaves are an undoing of substance,
a subtle melancholia, an almost unheard of music.
Bell-solid and a whispering, little deaths and the Chinese whimperings of memory,
those leaves under intense light on a city desk, observed
by a miniaturist's eye or a composer's ear, prove existence
as in the mind they are perpetuated in aquarelle,
each life-size on a page large and white and void.
A chronicle, a diary?
The poet's mouth opens slowly, releasing the leaves and the wind
that these words are.
--I declare this book, Elsewhere, launched --and invite John to speak & read to you.
_______________________
Kris Hemensley, April 2nd, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960
"MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960; Masterworks from the Australian & New Zealand Collections"; November 15,2007 to February 24,2008, at the National Gallery of Victoria (International), Melbourne; or "THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD"
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
12
21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
13
Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
12
21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
13
Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
Saturday, January 19, 2008
ON JOHN MATEER'S SOUTHERN BARBARIANS
Such presence in John Mateer's Southern Barbarians (Zero Press, Johannesburg, 2007), bolstered by plenty of first person and maybe that's the reason it's so pleasurable to read --first person & present tense & what I'll record as whole sentences. Post-colonialism or Mateer's post-colonialist reflex is part & parcel of this book as it has always been in his oeuvre, and I'm not sorry to say that it irks me politically & poetically! Naturally, ideas & narratives are interwoven here as with every writing, so it's almost passe to say that ultimately "attitude" doesnt reduce the collection's pleasure, and what provokes thought & reaction, as Mateer's writing does, should be music to one's ears...
Regarding whole sentences --what a relief after contemporary poetry's inexhaustible anthology of fragment & discontinuity! I dont, of course, mean the single words & phrases, rhythmic explosions or embellishments, abundant in poetry, guaranteed to either shake up patter or create another timbre. More so, the attenuation of thought & address in favour of the flatly annotated inventory which has overseen a relegation of the very discoursive language John Mateer resourcefully indulges. Sometimes what one wants is a narrator and not a breathless reporter --sentences to breathe in and to hear poet hold breath, that is nerve, as narrator.
Southern Barbarians is another of Mateer's non-commercial books from Zero, the collectively run South African little press, the second since The Ancient Capital of Images (FACP, 2005), which in turn was his fifth major collection.
Ten, fifteen years since I first met him & his work. A double emigrant, as I was also, in a way --he, young South African living in Western Australia, exiled to the extent that the Apartheid republic was an impossible homeland and the new South Africa no less difficult, come to Melbourne in what seemed a steady flow of West Australians to our seemingly greener fields --Philip Salom, Marion Campbell, Micheal Heald amongst others. And I, half English in England after infancy in Egypt, then English migrant to Melbourne. Apart from the Alexandrian heritage through my mother, I had South African Huguenot (grandmother Rose Waterina de Vaal) on my father's side. We've talked about this as some kind of actual basis for an outsiderness we may share as poets in Australia --agreeing about the need for an international perspective, sharing enthusiasms for art & artists, disagreeing about the status of American poetry & poets, courteous about one's politics & religious beliefs!
*
"What is another English word, he mused, that rhymes with sadness?" (p11, Southern Barbarians) The protagonist is Xanana, probably the first president & now prime minister of the independent East Timor... Another English word? Gladness? Badness? Madness? Depends how strong you want the rhyme. Plenty to echo "ess" --"less", for example. But that would be an odd word for this poet of baroque expansion, of a conceptual & verbal density that makes the most of every morsel of the matter that comes to hand.
John Mateer is the poet behind that hand. One'd like to say, the Noh-actor's fan-fluttering hand or as thief passing on the gen, shading mouth with quicksilver fingers, or the spy, happy to be identified as either of the others --except that Mateer's already given us as disquieting a narrative as could hang on an image in The Ancient Capital of Images : he comes to us as the poet of the grotesque white hand...
The scenario is fraught : "The poet, a New South African, holds his fist out to me. / I extend mine to meet his, our knuckles snug as in a knuckle-duster. / "Welcome home," he says, swaying his fist back to his chest, his heart. / I do likewise, but feebly, and mutter, "This is strange..." // Earlier he'd told of when they'd razed his grandmother's house with her inside. / In the interrogation he'd been asked, "What do you think of your comrades now?" / And he had shouted back: "Every revolution has its casualties!" / But when in gaol, alone, he wept for her for the first time. // I look at my hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing. / Why without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?" ("Ethekweni, #1, The Poet", p 11)
The black fighter's belated tears hardly expiate the immorality of the revolutionary modus operandi. (I also squirm, recalling the justifications one uttered, as an anti-Vietnam War activist, for a similar level of atrocity.) But the white poet's mae culpa --and the poem of & as mae culpa-- is dishonoured in that degree of self-abnegation. Political guilt has become pathology. Fair enough, as they say, it's only a line in a poem in one of the three recent books and, of course, its author is the brilliant maker of the fictions stimulating one here, but this colour consciousness, so candidly expressed, is the failure of person that distorted logic always produces. The mis-perception --typical of John Mateer's candor --mocks the intelligence one's want to trust of the visionary poet, where the quality of perception is the measure of truth. Mateer's rhetorical question might well be truth to the person which poem forms, but only transiently like a thought best let pass, as Buddhists would have it. Existence is not a contortion, nor is its poetry. And self-excoriation is not humility...
*
John Mateer is the author of this book of questions even as he is one of its characters. It is a Portuguese book of questions necessarily skirting the adopted & natal countries previously encountered in his work. However both Australia & South Africa continue to be impugned in a serious & lyrical interrogation of the first person & several personae.
Mention Portuguese and English-language readers will pronounce the name Pessoa. And Pessoa meets us in the epigraph ("I write to forget") & every so often in the book. Southern Barbarians (and who are they? Australians? South Africans? 16th Century Portuguese?) is a Pessoan book if the slipping in & out of legal & imagined selves is a further meaning of the increasingly invoked 20th Century European master --a quality one identified in all things Borges too in the ever so recent past. But fantasy it isnt since spectral shivers & metaphysical speculations arent Mateer's purpose. Rather, it's history & politics, the burden of knowledge, in the already full rucksack of our peripatetic existentialist --as though doomed to wandering as the price of revelation. History & politics not so much counterpointed by the erotic as punctuated by it --a chapter in itself in the eventual Mateer monograph. (Regarding eroticism in its explicitly sexual form, it's instructive that one poem here, "Heard in a geijin-house in Kyoto" (p48), isnt about the contrast between fucking & masturbation, which would be juvenile to say the least , but its receipt as language; thus the difference for this poet between Japanese --a traveller's "gagged whispers" --& Brasilian --"the woman's urging in that tongue / I love, of slurs and growls and lisping" --requiring eroticism's necessary conclusion in what should be the poet's rhetorical question, "Is that what makes of my listening a poetry?")
And history & politics also feeds his fine topographical lyricism...
Compelling, marvellous, but that irk will not leave me as sympathy for the poems leads me closer than I like to the post-colonial attitude I almost always find wearisome as polemic & gratuitous as poetry (either the only point of the poem or an unwieldy embellishment)... Much more of it in Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost (Zero Press, 2006) than the present collection, and particularly annoying because of the juxtaposition of the mellifluously insightful and the stridently pat. "Composition of Unease" (p15) a perfect example : "With the deceptive ease that the Dutch / swapped Manhattan for a now forgotten isle laden with cloves, / the biochemistry in my brain catalyzes / the enormity of ice-blue sky between downtown skyscrapers / into a sensationism of memories and concepts, / the question of the composition of this unease: / For what may Ground Zero be exchanged?"
Whoa!... For what may Ground Zero be exchanged? How about the Twin Towers & three thousand lives? How about Bin Laden's head? What is Mateer's question but naive poeticism, a quirk of the brain of the poet's biochemistry? It could simply be pure contempt for the USA, for the West --in which case, why not dance on the monster's grave and spare us the tease? (Sometimes a poet must surely overcome the compulsion to write another poem!) Gripped by the narrative finesse of the opening line; gnashing my teeth at the last!
The 2006 chapbook wears post-colonialist stripes on its globe-trotting narrator's combat-jacket! The Aussie-South African's "I,being Americanized" ("Empire", p9) is the manner in which the subject problematizes the conventional first person, yet it's also the means by which subject is let off the hook, seduced by rhetoric (Gold Coast bikini'd chherleaders, astroturf, moon flag)... In "The College Girl as Cypher", she's code for America, obviously ("bountiful college girl among bored nations"), and owns sufficient particularity ("bounding along in your new sneakers, / your wit openly declared on your t-shirt") for the cliche to work --but "Desire / streamlined, sans memory" is cliche colluding with cant. Recalls Gertrude Stein's quip, possibly riposte for that earlier era's European tub-thumping, that one ought not forget America is the oldest country of the modern world, a comment stronger now with the conflation of America & global modernity. Mateer's "Americanization" is as quaint as post WW2's "coca-cola-ization" in this time of the world wide web & the satellite-dish. Arguably, his earnest, rather than zealous, post-colonialism delivers as recherche a sensibility as its other side, the unselfconscious colonial, the unabashed imperial, and is as emphatically upstaged by history as Malcolm Lowry's tragic, dipso consul in Under the Volcano, and for all his perspicacity, any protagonist of Graham Greene's, whose foreign correspondences might be as hummable now as Noel Coward!
Irony, of course, that the erstwhile Developing World (--oh yes, developing into modernity, which is the psychology behind "everyone wants to be an American", thus Ed Dorn, the first of the Anglo-American New Poetry's post-colonials, calling the shots in The North Atlantic Turbine (1967)) doesnt distinguish between one American (Australian, British, South African, European...) & another. Indisputable too that Chinese & Indian have joined Japanese & Korean et al in modernity's new imperial order, who're recognized for what they are everywhere in the "developing world" despite the non-white camouflage... Doesnt John Mateer wonder how it could be that post-colonialist poet & friend are greeted "Hey snowflakes..." ("Salutation Heard up in Harlem", p17)? Isnt Harlem's 'greeting' the racial underpinning of that recently surpassed epoch (post-colonialism) which might henceforth be applied to the entire motley of perceived & attributed trespass? Of course, the pungency's retained either side of the snipe but the Great Wheel keeps spinning and the arguments flap dizzy as 16th Century Portuguese circumnavigator's sailcloth in each qualitatively different sphere.
Yet, "First Person"(p12) tenders Mateer's identity question's classiest pun. "Barns and schools and houses hovered over the harvested fields / as he spoke, hesitant parenthesis around his words, / that Mesquakie telling of what was before the Americans." Poem reports rather than bewailing or heavying the message. Poet is the listener whose heart & mind the reader is trusted to understand, and so the first line's imagery guilessly combines environment & occasion of vital communication & political sentiment. One's given the crucial contradiction of the collection : listener & teller. "I have inadvertently been born as karaoke." ("Thoughts of Employment", p27) : the paradox at the heart of lyrical poetry.
*
So...Southern Barbarians is John Mateer's Portuguese book. I cant remember another collection where he has been as enlivened. Traveling always has this affect upon him, 'grounding' his rootlessness, but Portugal & the Portuguese is more than ambient here (--in the previous collection, "metaphysics funked-up by a black college band / on a corner of Michigan Avenue where the whole of Chicago is musical theatre", no more than travel-writer's tic-tac, and there's some of that in Southern Barbarians too) : it's what home often is --the place from which to resist, the mind-set with which to resist & re-engage with the questions of the world.
If Pessoa is the Portuguese book's predictable node, guarantor of the plural identity, implying its own negation ("I am your own surviving heteronym", p17), then Luis de Camoens (Camoes) as the figure of the once glorious Portuguese Empire, glorifier of the great mariner, Vasco da Gama, in his epic poem, The Lusiads, is our own wanderer's barely known (like all our classics) guiding star... And Portugal is where the racial & ethnic stereotypes besetting the poet are lost in a new tempo. Portugal, only two or three decades beyond its own fascist dictatorship at home, its colonialism in Africa & Timor, is an aroma, a taste, & a tongue from which he has created fantastical wings. In this Portugal, Mateer can securely be a native, in his case African; that is, where the contortion meted upon the poet's soul by politics & psychology can conjure paradise of weirdest paradox. Portugal, where he's confrere to the Mozambicans & Angolans, who doubtless suffered at the hands of these same Portuguese, who jib the Afrikaaner on his father's sins...
From the beginning John Mateer has spoken as an emissary of African writing. I remember him telling me about the prodigious Tatamkhulu Africa -- the equal of Senghor & Cesaire & a school text in England now. "I am reliving Uncle's poems -- They people the streets / with slaves named by the hinterland, Afrikas ..." ("Uit Mantra", p7; The Ancient Capital of Images) --Tatamkhulu, the "grandfather" of the new South Africa's African poetry... Fully realizing now the complexity of Tatamkhula's ethnicity & personality, I can perceive Mateer in a self-creation that recalls Tatamkhula as a reflecting mirror. And what a complexity : Egyptian boy whose parents were Arab & Turk, fostered at age two by a Christian family in South Africa after parents death, who appeals his "white" status at age thirty and chooses "coloured", and in later life, whilst involved in the guerilla war against the apartheid regime, adopts Islam as an Arabic-Afrikaans Chan dialect speaker.
If that incredible pot-pourri can be African then surely the African John Mateer can be Australian or Mexican (Spanish or Indian) (see the "That I Might be Mexican" section, p21-32, Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost) or Japanese (where I suspect his Zen yen has taken him) or Portuguese as seen in the new book.
Of course, born of the complex, through complexity the only way to go...The problematised subject may always be John Mateer's self-representation although the defining language will surely change. The Post-colonial with its anti-Western reflex has provided the poet with a ticket to negotiate the complexity, but evidently so does his immersion in palpable life, all around the world, which is how & where I feel his gift will continue to prosper. And I wonder if he'd agree that ultimately Tatamkhulu's dictum is better than all the isms strung together : "Poetry must stem from the self, not outside the self. Indeed, it records the landscape of the heart, not the mind."
--Kris Hemensley,
November, December 2007/ January 2008
Regarding whole sentences --what a relief after contemporary poetry's inexhaustible anthology of fragment & discontinuity! I dont, of course, mean the single words & phrases, rhythmic explosions or embellishments, abundant in poetry, guaranteed to either shake up patter or create another timbre. More so, the attenuation of thought & address in favour of the flatly annotated inventory which has overseen a relegation of the very discoursive language John Mateer resourcefully indulges. Sometimes what one wants is a narrator and not a breathless reporter --sentences to breathe in and to hear poet hold breath, that is nerve, as narrator.
Southern Barbarians is another of Mateer's non-commercial books from Zero, the collectively run South African little press, the second since The Ancient Capital of Images (FACP, 2005), which in turn was his fifth major collection.
Ten, fifteen years since I first met him & his work. A double emigrant, as I was also, in a way --he, young South African living in Western Australia, exiled to the extent that the Apartheid republic was an impossible homeland and the new South Africa no less difficult, come to Melbourne in what seemed a steady flow of West Australians to our seemingly greener fields --Philip Salom, Marion Campbell, Micheal Heald amongst others. And I, half English in England after infancy in Egypt, then English migrant to Melbourne. Apart from the Alexandrian heritage through my mother, I had South African Huguenot (grandmother Rose Waterina de Vaal) on my father's side. We've talked about this as some kind of actual basis for an outsiderness we may share as poets in Australia --agreeing about the need for an international perspective, sharing enthusiasms for art & artists, disagreeing about the status of American poetry & poets, courteous about one's politics & religious beliefs!
*
"What is another English word, he mused, that rhymes with sadness?" (p11, Southern Barbarians) The protagonist is Xanana, probably the first president & now prime minister of the independent East Timor... Another English word? Gladness? Badness? Madness? Depends how strong you want the rhyme. Plenty to echo "ess" --"less", for example. But that would be an odd word for this poet of baroque expansion, of a conceptual & verbal density that makes the most of every morsel of the matter that comes to hand.
John Mateer is the poet behind that hand. One'd like to say, the Noh-actor's fan-fluttering hand or as thief passing on the gen, shading mouth with quicksilver fingers, or the spy, happy to be identified as either of the others --except that Mateer's already given us as disquieting a narrative as could hang on an image in The Ancient Capital of Images : he comes to us as the poet of the grotesque white hand...
The scenario is fraught : "The poet, a New South African, holds his fist out to me. / I extend mine to meet his, our knuckles snug as in a knuckle-duster. / "Welcome home," he says, swaying his fist back to his chest, his heart. / I do likewise, but feebly, and mutter, "This is strange..." // Earlier he'd told of when they'd razed his grandmother's house with her inside. / In the interrogation he'd been asked, "What do you think of your comrades now?" / And he had shouted back: "Every revolution has its casualties!" / But when in gaol, alone, he wept for her for the first time. // I look at my hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing. / Why without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?" ("Ethekweni, #1, The Poet", p 11)
The black fighter's belated tears hardly expiate the immorality of the revolutionary modus operandi. (I also squirm, recalling the justifications one uttered, as an anti-Vietnam War activist, for a similar level of atrocity.) But the white poet's mae culpa --and the poem of & as mae culpa-- is dishonoured in that degree of self-abnegation. Political guilt has become pathology. Fair enough, as they say, it's only a line in a poem in one of the three recent books and, of course, its author is the brilliant maker of the fictions stimulating one here, but this colour consciousness, so candidly expressed, is the failure of person that distorted logic always produces. The mis-perception --typical of John Mateer's candor --mocks the intelligence one's want to trust of the visionary poet, where the quality of perception is the measure of truth. Mateer's rhetorical question might well be truth to the person which poem forms, but only transiently like a thought best let pass, as Buddhists would have it. Existence is not a contortion, nor is its poetry. And self-excoriation is not humility...
*
John Mateer is the author of this book of questions even as he is one of its characters. It is a Portuguese book of questions necessarily skirting the adopted & natal countries previously encountered in his work. However both Australia & South Africa continue to be impugned in a serious & lyrical interrogation of the first person & several personae.
Mention Portuguese and English-language readers will pronounce the name Pessoa. And Pessoa meets us in the epigraph ("I write to forget") & every so often in the book. Southern Barbarians (and who are they? Australians? South Africans? 16th Century Portuguese?) is a Pessoan book if the slipping in & out of legal & imagined selves is a further meaning of the increasingly invoked 20th Century European master --a quality one identified in all things Borges too in the ever so recent past. But fantasy it isnt since spectral shivers & metaphysical speculations arent Mateer's purpose. Rather, it's history & politics, the burden of knowledge, in the already full rucksack of our peripatetic existentialist --as though doomed to wandering as the price of revelation. History & politics not so much counterpointed by the erotic as punctuated by it --a chapter in itself in the eventual Mateer monograph. (Regarding eroticism in its explicitly sexual form, it's instructive that one poem here, "Heard in a geijin-house in Kyoto" (p48), isnt about the contrast between fucking & masturbation, which would be juvenile to say the least , but its receipt as language; thus the difference for this poet between Japanese --a traveller's "gagged whispers" --& Brasilian --"the woman's urging in that tongue / I love, of slurs and growls and lisping" --requiring eroticism's necessary conclusion in what should be the poet's rhetorical question, "Is that what makes of my listening a poetry?")
And history & politics also feeds his fine topographical lyricism...
Compelling, marvellous, but that irk will not leave me as sympathy for the poems leads me closer than I like to the post-colonial attitude I almost always find wearisome as polemic & gratuitous as poetry (either the only point of the poem or an unwieldy embellishment)... Much more of it in Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost (Zero Press, 2006) than the present collection, and particularly annoying because of the juxtaposition of the mellifluously insightful and the stridently pat. "Composition of Unease" (p15) a perfect example : "With the deceptive ease that the Dutch / swapped Manhattan for a now forgotten isle laden with cloves, / the biochemistry in my brain catalyzes / the enormity of ice-blue sky between downtown skyscrapers / into a sensationism of memories and concepts, / the question of the composition of this unease: / For what may Ground Zero be exchanged?"
Whoa!... For what may Ground Zero be exchanged? How about the Twin Towers & three thousand lives? How about Bin Laden's head? What is Mateer's question but naive poeticism, a quirk of the brain of the poet's biochemistry? It could simply be pure contempt for the USA, for the West --in which case, why not dance on the monster's grave and spare us the tease? (Sometimes a poet must surely overcome the compulsion to write another poem!) Gripped by the narrative finesse of the opening line; gnashing my teeth at the last!
The 2006 chapbook wears post-colonialist stripes on its globe-trotting narrator's combat-jacket! The Aussie-South African's "I,being Americanized" ("Empire", p9) is the manner in which the subject problematizes the conventional first person, yet it's also the means by which subject is let off the hook, seduced by rhetoric (Gold Coast bikini'd chherleaders, astroturf, moon flag)... In "The College Girl as Cypher", she's code for America, obviously ("bountiful college girl among bored nations"), and owns sufficient particularity ("bounding along in your new sneakers, / your wit openly declared on your t-shirt") for the cliche to work --but "Desire / streamlined, sans memory" is cliche colluding with cant. Recalls Gertrude Stein's quip, possibly riposte for that earlier era's European tub-thumping, that one ought not forget America is the oldest country of the modern world, a comment stronger now with the conflation of America & global modernity. Mateer's "Americanization" is as quaint as post WW2's "coca-cola-ization" in this time of the world wide web & the satellite-dish. Arguably, his earnest, rather than zealous, post-colonialism delivers as recherche a sensibility as its other side, the unselfconscious colonial, the unabashed imperial, and is as emphatically upstaged by history as Malcolm Lowry's tragic, dipso consul in Under the Volcano, and for all his perspicacity, any protagonist of Graham Greene's, whose foreign correspondences might be as hummable now as Noel Coward!
Irony, of course, that the erstwhile Developing World (--oh yes, developing into modernity, which is the psychology behind "everyone wants to be an American", thus Ed Dorn, the first of the Anglo-American New Poetry's post-colonials, calling the shots in The North Atlantic Turbine (1967)) doesnt distinguish between one American (Australian, British, South African, European...) & another. Indisputable too that Chinese & Indian have joined Japanese & Korean et al in modernity's new imperial order, who're recognized for what they are everywhere in the "developing world" despite the non-white camouflage... Doesnt John Mateer wonder how it could be that post-colonialist poet & friend are greeted "Hey snowflakes..." ("Salutation Heard up in Harlem", p17)? Isnt Harlem's 'greeting' the racial underpinning of that recently surpassed epoch (post-colonialism) which might henceforth be applied to the entire motley of perceived & attributed trespass? Of course, the pungency's retained either side of the snipe but the Great Wheel keeps spinning and the arguments flap dizzy as 16th Century Portuguese circumnavigator's sailcloth in each qualitatively different sphere.
Yet, "First Person"(p12) tenders Mateer's identity question's classiest pun. "Barns and schools and houses hovered over the harvested fields / as he spoke, hesitant parenthesis around his words, / that Mesquakie telling of what was before the Americans." Poem reports rather than bewailing or heavying the message. Poet is the listener whose heart & mind the reader is trusted to understand, and so the first line's imagery guilessly combines environment & occasion of vital communication & political sentiment. One's given the crucial contradiction of the collection : listener & teller. "I have inadvertently been born as karaoke." ("Thoughts of Employment", p27) : the paradox at the heart of lyrical poetry.
*
So...Southern Barbarians is John Mateer's Portuguese book. I cant remember another collection where he has been as enlivened. Traveling always has this affect upon him, 'grounding' his rootlessness, but Portugal & the Portuguese is more than ambient here (--in the previous collection, "metaphysics funked-up by a black college band / on a corner of Michigan Avenue where the whole of Chicago is musical theatre", no more than travel-writer's tic-tac, and there's some of that in Southern Barbarians too) : it's what home often is --the place from which to resist, the mind-set with which to resist & re-engage with the questions of the world.
If Pessoa is the Portuguese book's predictable node, guarantor of the plural identity, implying its own negation ("I am your own surviving heteronym", p17), then Luis de Camoens (Camoes) as the figure of the once glorious Portuguese Empire, glorifier of the great mariner, Vasco da Gama, in his epic poem, The Lusiads, is our own wanderer's barely known (like all our classics) guiding star... And Portugal is where the racial & ethnic stereotypes besetting the poet are lost in a new tempo. Portugal, only two or three decades beyond its own fascist dictatorship at home, its colonialism in Africa & Timor, is an aroma, a taste, & a tongue from which he has created fantastical wings. In this Portugal, Mateer can securely be a native, in his case African; that is, where the contortion meted upon the poet's soul by politics & psychology can conjure paradise of weirdest paradox. Portugal, where he's confrere to the Mozambicans & Angolans, who doubtless suffered at the hands of these same Portuguese, who jib the Afrikaaner on his father's sins...
From the beginning John Mateer has spoken as an emissary of African writing. I remember him telling me about the prodigious Tatamkhulu Africa -- the equal of Senghor & Cesaire & a school text in England now. "I am reliving Uncle's poems -- They people the streets / with slaves named by the hinterland, Afrikas ..." ("Uit Mantra", p7; The Ancient Capital of Images) --Tatamkhulu, the "grandfather" of the new South Africa's African poetry... Fully realizing now the complexity of Tatamkhula's ethnicity & personality, I can perceive Mateer in a self-creation that recalls Tatamkhula as a reflecting mirror. And what a complexity : Egyptian boy whose parents were Arab & Turk, fostered at age two by a Christian family in South Africa after parents death, who appeals his "white" status at age thirty and chooses "coloured", and in later life, whilst involved in the guerilla war against the apartheid regime, adopts Islam as an Arabic-Afrikaans Chan dialect speaker.
If that incredible pot-pourri can be African then surely the African John Mateer can be Australian or Mexican (Spanish or Indian) (see the "That I Might be Mexican" section, p21-32, Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost) or Japanese (where I suspect his Zen yen has taken him) or Portuguese as seen in the new book.
Of course, born of the complex, through complexity the only way to go...The problematised subject may always be John Mateer's self-representation although the defining language will surely change. The Post-colonial with its anti-Western reflex has provided the poet with a ticket to negotiate the complexity, but evidently so does his immersion in palpable life, all around the world, which is how & where I feel his gift will continue to prosper. And I wonder if he'd agree that ultimately Tatamkhulu's dictum is better than all the isms strung together : "Poetry must stem from the self, not outside the self. Indeed, it records the landscape of the heart, not the mind."
--Kris Hemensley,
November, December 2007/ January 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
AUCTION IN FAVOUR OF THE INTEMPERATE SIKH PROVIDER FOR NINE
Now where were we? Contemplating the staging of an auction, the proceeds of which will be forwarded to the most poignant subject of comrade Roebuck's Epistle to the Barbarians (aka, the Tuesday Tirade), namely the "irritating" Young Mr Singh (aka, the "Intemperate Sikh warrior")... Oh Rowboat, Rowboat, you tugged my heart strings (almost said hugged my tart strings, whatever that means)... "head of a family and responsible for raising NINE people..." Oh, Lordy, Lordy... I mean, what could we do? We gotta do something... Evidently the Maharajahs havent been pulling their weight... Nine people... Well, there's my collection of rare pith helmets (or did I already hock them for the divine Pedro Ximenez Sherry?)... Excuse me, excuse moi, MOI! Bottles, bottles everywhere... might be worth a bob or two... lovely labels... Otter Bright (Henry Williamson eat your heart out)... Ripon Jewel, Old Speckled Hen, Badger Champion, Marston's Owd Rodger... What am I bid? Come on, what'll we open with? Gawd elp us... I dunno... Gently up the stream, merrily, merrily, life is... Life is what? He knows about dogs though, I'll give him that...wont PAY him that, every cent towards the Fund remember... I'll GIVE him that..."a pack of wild dogs"... He's travelled... That dog in Panama City in 1969 smelt me out... that mongrel knew I wasnt a local... Smelt the white in me, you bet he did... mongrel... As my old mum would say, He knows, he KNOWS...Backrow that is, he knows, he knows where it's at, he knows... keen as any Panama City mongrel, he can smell a wrong'un, oh yes... Pater Buckroar... and then he lets fly... bellows he does, sack em all he says, now, this minute, yesterday, 2005, twenty years ago, sack em all, in perpetuity... How dare they claim to have won the Sydney Test Match let alone the last sixteen... Gor blimey... Well, it's getting late, the heat's still on us, next door's bloody air con sounds like the Great Southern Stand growling in unison as Dennis & Jeff rev up... But what else could I offer to this auction then? My first edition Fowler's Modern English Usage? My cricketing memoirs? But they arent written yet missus, oh some, yes, bits & pieces, dribs & drabs... I'll sleep on it... metaphorically! No sleeping tonight mates, not a bloody wink (AND THAT'S AN ORDER)!
Phew!
Ever yours, The Armchair Cricket
Phew!
Ever yours, The Armchair Cricket
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
THE ARMCHAIR CRICKET
First of all it was the ex-coach suggesting the Australians should share their talents around the globe to ensure sporting contests...allow Aussies to qualify for other countries to even up the competition..."something has to be done!" What what what? And why why why? As though the national team were just another club side, and even if it was could you imagine a football club (any code) sharing its players around in order to have a "fairer" game? It's preposterous! A load of rubbish. Well, I dont need to repeat what Chapelli & Warnie have already expressed. Buchanan's musings are one thing, after all he retired with a great record as coach, but the approving chorus (including Tim Lane? I forget) amazed me... Seemed to me then that the world was tilting rather oddly, and it wasnt the malt or the port responsible. Why the unease with victory, with pride in victory? Why was it OK for the Windies to be truly invincible in their time but not the Aussies now? Who are the fans who'd exchange loss for victory? I dont get it...
And now we have the controversy of the 2nd Australia vs India test match which has got the lot : technology second-guessing & showing up umpires' decisions,the issue of sportsmanship regarding catches taken or spilt, walking or standing ground, the perennial sledging, the racial vilification allegations and, indeed, match referee Procter's judgement on the issue, Harbhajan Singh's suspension... and then all hell breaks loose with Peter Roebuck's opinion piece in The Age newspaper taking the biscuit, that is the cinder... Gawd elp me, gawd elp us all...
Time to go to work... Oh yes missus, I do work... I have a train to catch... I'd love to stay here tippling amongst my books, traipsing around memory lane... But I promise to resume later, maybe tonight when I'll have something to say about Roebuck, Roebuck & his New Australian boater sporting Kevin 07 stripes, so to speak, Roebuck as the sillier spruiker of a dizzy postcolonialism.... Oh yes, I'm just getting warmed up, and still not a malt or a port in sight...
Ever yours, The Armchair Cricket
And now we have the controversy of the 2nd Australia vs India test match which has got the lot : technology second-guessing & showing up umpires' decisions,the issue of sportsmanship regarding catches taken or spilt, walking or standing ground, the perennial sledging, the racial vilification allegations and, indeed, match referee Procter's judgement on the issue, Harbhajan Singh's suspension... and then all hell breaks loose with Peter Roebuck's opinion piece in The Age newspaper taking the biscuit, that is the cinder... Gawd elp me, gawd elp us all...
Time to go to work... Oh yes missus, I do work... I have a train to catch... I'd love to stay here tippling amongst my books, traipsing around memory lane... But I promise to resume later, maybe tonight when I'll have something to say about Roebuck, Roebuck & his New Australian boater sporting Kevin 07 stripes, so to speak, Roebuck as the sillier spruiker of a dizzy postcolonialism.... Oh yes, I'm just getting warmed up, and still not a malt or a port in sight...
Ever yours, The Armchair Cricket
Saturday, January 5, 2008
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #9
Melbourne
October 16th-30th, '07
Dear Bernard,
Back in the Shop, at the counter (my "desk") --journal, note-book, papers, your letter before me --I'm jet-lagged & more or less content.
I'm pleased you've committed some of your Stingy Artist Press history to paper, especially your relationship, as a book-maker/poetry publisher, to Salt Works & other American fine presses. I took the opportunity, while visiting you in Weymouth recently, to handle some of the lovely things stored in your shed (and what a pity they're not on display & available for purchase) --for example Cid Corman's tiny books, from Elizabeth Press & his own Origin press, with one or two word titles, haiku sequences, and one of Michael Tarachow's, an oblong-shaped book with a medieval manuscript feel to it... That's the craft, isnt it? One probably spends more time admiring the cover, the pages, the type, the sewing, the design than one does the text! One of your Stingy Artist editions is within reach of me as I write this : Franco Beltrametti's Three for Nado (1992), number 3 of a numbered edition of 175. It's one of your most elegant & tiny books : eight pages, endpapers, three of Franco's Trip Trap-like poems --constructions, throwaways, what you will --and your nick-name, Nado, which I've always spelt Naado, in the book's title (and didnt you tell me Franco liked the pun on nado / nothing?)...
Poor Franco, a Dharma Bum if ever there was, already dead 12 years. Searching for Dale Pendell a few months ago (following up on his Burning Man book, which I'd also sent to you), I reread Franco's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology (published by our great amigos, Tim Longville & John Riley, as a Grosseteste Review book, back in 1975), and then the Sperlonga Manhattan Express anthology (Scorribanda Productions, 1980), which got me thinking of Franco Beltrametti as a key European friend of the Beat idea if not also the Beats themselves. I found the website dedicated to him and read his autobiographical account there --as peripatetic an inventory as could be (enviably?) imagined! Poet, artist, traveller, --and I can hear you say "back-woodsman" in the 60s, 70s sense of do-it-yrself, build your own, well out of the work-consume-die rat-race.
Since returning to Melbourne from my 20 days with you & Mum in our dear old England (--the England I perpetually reinvent, not living there as you do, though how you do interests me given our migrant family upbringing in England following infancy in Egypt, thus English-half English childhood & beyond, until the time we must have decided to identify as English rather than exotic half this, half that), I've nibbled at Franco's legend some more. The other day the web took me to the blog of Pierre Joris --he'd posted that bonny photo of hirsute Franco with the comment that this August, Franco would have celebrated his 70th birthday. Doesnt that get you thinking? "Forever young" maybe but not Spring chickens either, any of us!
I sent an e-mail to Pierre then, greeting him after what might be thirty years (the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival, '75, in the company of Paige Mitchell, Allen Fisher?). I thanked him for remembering Franco and told him we'd been talking & thinking of Franco too, not that we'd ever met outside of correspondence & small-press publishing. I directed him to our correspondence on this blog --he replied the following day. While we're writing about Japhy & Co, he's "been teaching Japhy Ryder, his poetry & essays, & Kerouac's novel in my Ecopoetics course this Fall, also talking about Franco to my students --the crisscrossing is endless." Dont you love these synchronicities!
I was elated you didnt already own the Issa translations by Nanao Sakaki I brought to you. I'd ordered what was available of Issa in my wholesaler catalogue --Sam Hamill's Spring of My life, Lucian Stryk's The Dumpling Field, & the Sakaki of which I'd been ignorant. (I must interpolate here that since my return I've dug out some of your poetry including the beautifully made book, Cemetery Lodge Poems (Stingy Artist,1996), and was charmed by the 5th poem of the sequence : "the crying / of crickets / according to Issa / is like the / chirping of men - / easy to imagine / autumn's last song / in this place". I wonder which Issa translation you had read?)
I thought the cover drawing of the snail was also by Sakaki but it's John Brandi's. Like Sakaki's snail translation which you quote, the drawing crystalizes for me the Buddhist attitude (I'd say Zen but Issa is Pure Land I see) --it's humble & hilarious! We're invited into the snail's perspective --its relation to mountain, clouds, sky, universe --ludicrously incongruous yet no truer way of describing all living creatures', including the human, condition.
In his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, Sakaki is asked about another snail poem ''just as he is / he goes to bed and gets up / the snail" --
Brandi : Did the snail show Issa how simple life can be in the middle of all our complications & things we need?
Sakaki : I guess so. That's a great understanding. He feels jealousy, ah yeah (laughs) "I must think about money & human relations, but the snail doesn't care, just goes to sleep, just walk around, eat . . . uh-oh, But not me, why? Why?" That is his point. Why is important, why is snail that way, why I'm this way. . . strange! why? Why are we, why is the sky so shiny, why trees so green?
Bryan : It's all beautiful, why am I so uptight?
Sakaki : Yeah, the surprisement, that is haiku.
Bryan : We laugh, but at the same time we get something.
Sakaki : Yes, something comes suddenly - wisdom! (laughs)
It's a beautiful little book; designed by Jeff Bryan, Sakaki's calligraphy --the Japanese characters & English haiku translation -- and the printed line of phoneticised Japanese adds another dimension. Sakaki talks like a medium, an inheritor & promulgator : "Many beings come to me, from me, many rivers going down, running down, -- sure."
The book brings us Issa & Sakaki and makes me hungry for a large volume of the latter. If still alive he's 83 (75 at the time of Inch By Inch's publication). I hope he is --forever young!
*
A NOTE ON SAKAKI et al
(22nd September,'07, en route Hong Kong from Melbourne)
Reading Nanao Sakaki's Inch By Inch : 45 Haiku by Issa (La Almeda Press, New Mexico, 1992), confirms one's long held idea of him as the "real thing" (--and I confess, vis a vis Gary Snyder whose name preceded him like sun & shower a rainbow --and having "missed" Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti on their 1970 Australian tour, being back in England at that time, I was more than ready for my appointment with the holy poets of the reading & imagining of my late youth --"Japhy Ryder" of course, after Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghett, Corso --one of the elect --and I'm suddenly remembering that flash of recognition, Japhy Ryder = Gary Snyder, very early 1966, and the poem I wrote to him, sitting with the College of Technology mates at the Red Lion pub in downtown Southampton --I'll have to retrieve it from the back pages of the particular exercise-book ["16.2.66 / I read my first Gary Snyder & Phil / Whalen & Michael McClure / its a night of history / historic night / man! wait til i tell colin t symes / about it / that ive read them / bhikku / means / buddhist monk / snyder who is in kerouacs / books im sure (japhy ryder?) / and michael mcclure & whalen / tho i dont know where exactly / its funny they talk & refer to so many / of their mates & acquaintances in their / poetry : which makes it beat / which makes the established schools / have acid indigestion / because just as whitman was buried / for writing I IN BIG broad / letters / so are these bringing back I & the / experience / of I as the centre & basis of poetry / the world now seems to be accepting / them / THEM / BEAT / its a pity! society licking their arses / bloody society - / but dont we know society DOESNT / WANT U?"] --O exercise-book of the era of exercise-books, hardly realizing outside of the school issue lined pages & blue covers how blessed one was, & how blessed was that time! (--and doesnt that sound like Aunty Lydia? --as though she knew much more than the platitude, the closest to that demon, Time, of all our relatives) --: Gary Snyder & Nanao Sakaki at Montsalvat, December,'81 --and for the hell of it (no, the full reference of it, being a fool for that sort of thing) I'll quote later from the report I published in my magazine, H/EAR, of that memorable Montsalvat Poetry Festival event, one glorious evening photo of which, by Bernie O'Regan, captures their souls for me and so it will be for the rest of my time! --: So, Sakaki, Sakaki's Issa : is it quirkily simplified or is it Issa's simplicity?
Sakaki's comparison of Issa & Basho begs the question, again, of the literary or learned as positive or negative influence upon poetry --Sakaki's certainty that the peasant is a better poet bespeaks a definition of poetry that would valorize testament, doubt the literary. Who has nothing & knows nothing (take note Mr Podhoretz!) is closer to the earth and can, therefore, sing the song of its elements & creatures, Sakaki implies.
If the poems arent tonic enough, there is his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, jumping with mischief, witty & self-abnegating. He appears to relish denying his would-be explicators' Buddhist understandings, insisting naturalness against the esoteric (--no, he says, Pure Land explains nothing of Issa's poetics...). The repudiations are Zen-like. Appreciating the man, his New Mexican hosts accept his "no" for the answer every time.
*
(Hong Kong to London, 23/09/07) Is it the difference (Snyder in himself, Sakaki contrasted with Snyder) between the man when he's in the field, literally doing it, and the pundit who might not even realize a particular shot is ethically cheap?
Critics bemoan the Beats' allegedly suspended adolescence --they may well have a point but part of the debate would be the imperative of maintaining the capacity for adventure & the resulting joy in the encounter with the world --"in & out of the cities" as well as the "mountains & rivers without end"! --and how does that translate in English terms? --which is the jolliest question of all for us --pivotal --since we werent turned-on by the English things of those years of our coming out (--I called it "breakthru" after Ken Geering's mimeod mag of that name, which might even have published me? --I'd left Southampton for Oz just as I submitted poems to him --but a great concept despite oodles of poets probably & appropriately still-born) --and tho Wendy Mulford called me on that in 1970 [she wrote, "How do you mean, people here are afraid to speak? I think they speak like bells (...) When I speak of a syntax of survival , it's a personal metaphor. I have this conscious sense of being english inescapably (...) I want the energy you speak of alright, but for me it thrills as well through Blake or Cowper, Browning or Clare or Byron or Christina Rossetti or or or for example..."], even that advocacy was on the coat-tails of the make-it-new biff and all of that coming-through Sixties modernity --must have been, surely? --Ginsberg's Blake, Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan's Metaphysicals not to mention his Shakespeare, Purcell, and why is O'Hara in my head with the "Elizabethan Rose"? --all variations and not the pretence, however virtuous, of seamless tradition --
*
(29-10-07) Allow me to quote from my piece,Festivals of the Oppressed : An Account of the 1981 Montsalvat Poetry Festival, & the Foundation Meeting of People for Nuclear Disarmourment (both October, 1981), published in The Merri Creek, Or Nero #7, tHEAtRe issue, Winter, 1983.
"(....)Snyder's first reading, in the festival's first evening session, was distinguished by the theme of planetary being, aided by Thoreau-ian accounting & Pound/Olson historicising. He shared top-billing with the Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki. Snyder's was the scholar-adept's response to Sakai's "natural" earthliness. Snyder was truly Sakaki's sidekick in terms of langauge/being. They're exemplary comrades. Sakaki stole the show. There was more "meaning" in a single warble of Sakaki's rendition of a traditional Japanese boatman's song, for example, than in the entire festival's parade of buskers. Perhaps Ania Walwicz's riffs went some of the way with his non-sense, with his marvellous sound. Sakaki's awareness of the nuance of occasion (literary, linguistic & social) was admirable. In contrast, so many of the "performers" that followed were just there to do their bit... From Snyder to the least performance-poet, there was struck a consensus : that language was more or less the generalizing rather than the individualizing stamp of the poet; that this generalizing langauge afforded an externalization bereft of the slightest problematic; that the language was to deliver its predetermined load then & there. This attitude dominated the 1981 festival.
.
Snyder would dearly love to have been born one of those, to quote him, who are blessed with "looser, easier walk & gaze...They are Tibetans, American-Indians, Polynesians, 'Real People'..." I wonder why this should be? As white, American, Buddhist, he's heir to a New Age cosmopolitanism that relates him closer than most to most of the world. I wonder about this reverse racism : I sense the myth of perfect genes behind the transcultural sentimentality (....)
.
Snyder's second reading, on the afternoon of the second day, tended towards recollection of the Beat ethos. His brilliant reading of the long Route 99 hiking poem is comparable to the text of Kerouac's On The Road, albeit condensed & intensified. At both of his readings Snyder referred to Lew Welch. The thought struck me that Snyder is haunted by the ultimate asceticism of the other poet --that Welch's suicide (or, at the very least, his disappearance) pointed him out, accusing him of fellow-travelling, show-biz. Welch's Turkey Buzzard poem, one of the last he wrote before his end, in 1971, contains a Will & Testament, to wit, "on a marked rock, following his orders, / place my meat(...) With proper ceremony disembowel what I / no longer need, that it might more quickly / rot & tempt // my new form" --: a 10th anniversary siren's song for such a sailor as Gary Snyder."
*
A NOTE ON DALE PENDELL'S INSPIRED MADNESS : The Gifts of Burning Man (Frog Ltd., 2006)
(30.7.07-11.8.07) The rep shows me his list --a grab-bag of smaller Australasian & overseas presses including Bob Adamson's Paper Bark (prestigious Australian poets like Adamson himself, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Maiden, Martin Harrison), New Falcon (Crowlie, Regardie, Leary? et al), & North Atlantic --ring a bell? Remember Richard Grossinger's press? The wunderkind of our own time, born in that confluence of New American Poetry & the Counter Culture, with (reputedly) hotel-chain dollars at his disposal to support the wonderful Io magazine --not as literary as Stony Brook (I remember your copies, Bernard) but how exciting! Ecology, homeopathy, astrology, sci-fi, dream, baseball & poetry!
Every now & then something jumps out of the title-sheets, e.g., Tom Clarke's gripping biography of Ed Dorn (particularly for the English years in which Clarke also partook). I'm writing this as introduction to Dale Pendell's book published by Frog Ltd. / North Atlantic --there it was in the rep's checklist --Dale Pendell whom I instantly remembered as poet associated with Gary Snyder, possibly published in Eshleman's Caterpiller magazine?
As we've both since ascertained, Pendell isnt there (maybe Sulpher?) though he is in Jim Koller's Coyote Review & in Franco Beltrametti's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology, alongside Will Staple, Steve Stansfield, Peter Coyote & co. And Peter Coyote & Snyder claim him in blurbs for this book.
It's a rollicking story (no, this isnt Belloc's Four Men! --though quest it is however constituted) --an update on The Dharma Bums offering one outcome of Japhy's rucksack revolution : the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert --celebratory, sensory, sensual, ecstatic, never mind-dulling, nothing to do with getting on, some of the best of the 60s, 70s "alternative" scene...
Can one be nostalgic for a life one only peripherally experienced or be inspired by description of events & activities one'll not necessarily emulate? Same questions as posed by our enthusiasm for the subjects of our correspondence I think...
Dale Pendell's major reference is to Norman O. Brown, the mere mention of whom recalls our 1960s, full feathers & bells! And while not dreaming its reinstatement, Pendell is obliged by its revelation. Personal experience doesnt imply social process, indeed the chimerical is where eccentric reality might be happily held, suspended from time & social consequence. The historical faces-off the chimerical in Pendell's field-report of the Burning Man Festival. I'm sure he doesnt conceive an every day of the year/ every year of one's life festival a la Burning Man, but I do think he endorses its periodic eruption as crucial political & psychological benefice. Programmatic revolution & its totalitarian wellspring far less providential than democracy & the free market for, yes it's true, rock'n'roll does save your immortal soul!
Pendell, p78, "Living with some risk makes me feel more alive. I'm not saying that I'm against safety, or even security, or that I want more risk. There is already plenty of risk. But the attempt to eliminate all risk usually destroys what it was you were trying to protect in the first place."
p79, " In Brown's system, risk is Dionysus. Dionysian energy has its own violence --it's transgressive by nature --and Brown was against the attempt of many to sanitize Dionysian energy. But he was steadfast that the suppression of the Dionysian influence is far more tragic than the wreckage characteristic of the passage of the young god himself. For the rites of Dionysius, waste, fire, licentiousness, risk and drug-induced madness, are seemly. Burning Man is an experiment in healing, and it should be considered one of our current national treasures."
p.90, "Brown recognizes that in the era of HCE ("Here Comes Everybody"), the outcome depends on whether or not the masses settle for vicarious enetertainment,
Blake's "spectral enjoyment." Spectator. Here, watch the gladiator shed blood, right on your television. "The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy. The Dionysian bets the Grand Inquisitor is wrong." (Brown,1996). Brown follows Blake, that the violence of Dionysius is preferable to the violence of Mars. That, following Euripides, the suppression of Dionysius leads to the sacrifice of children. And that, following the most ancient threads of religious and magical belief, the rites of Dionysius are prophylactic. Blake wrote : "I will not cease from Mental Fight."
For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the
Court, and the University : who would, if
they could, forever depress Mental and
prolong Corporeal War.
Blake, "Milton".
Naturally, the body of the book describes, indeed it witnesses, the Burning Man festival. The point of it, though, is cultural-political critique, so no matter how out-of-it the experience Pendell describes, it's always significant --the reporter always mindfully out of his mind!
p99, "Hope. It gives me hope. That tolerance and self-reliance have a chance in a world that seems headed in the opposite direction. Hope against idolatry, in all of its forms. Hope against bigotry, against all the false consciousness that says it can't be done, against all the false gods of modesty, taste, moderation and morality. That there can still be, in the twenty-first century, a Feast of Fools, a backwards day of love and heresy, a day for the god named...no, lets just call him the god of the potlatch. His alternative worship is war."
Wonderful red flag of a declaration, one that speaks for large parts of my formative years, teens & twenties, thirties, but whose implications now pin me to what feels like a fundamental contradiction. In a nutshell, how can one support a war, military action, this or that country's or people's sovereignty, this or that set of conventions, be it Law or Tradition, while simultaneously subscribing to the libertarian agenda? At this very time I often feel I'm America's only friend in the poetry world! --the only poet who doesnt froth at the mouth when, for example, personalities or policies of the Australian federal government are mentioned or, more seriously, Israel discussed.
You told me years ago, after the first two or three of my second era of regular visits to England, that Dad had commented, "Kris has mellowed!" Well, we certainly discovered that we agreed about the propriety of the Gulf War --the first contemporary aggression I'd supported, believing there'd be a repeat of the Czeckoslovakian appeasement of 1938, and Israel in the firing-line not to mention Arab opponents of Saddam, were we not to defend Kuwait. We welcomed the end of the Cold War, happy that Britain & Europe in particular, the rest of the world in general, were delivered from the nuclear-war nightmare, and sure that the collapse of the Soviet Union & the anti-communist revolutions in the Baltics & Eastern & Central Europe proved, once & for all, that Communism was the Russian Empire's vicious counterfeit. Dad's anti-communist instinct was correct, my communist utopianism utter crap! Dad was probably surprised by the comprehensivity of my concession. And then came Yugoslavia, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq...
Our greatest agreement revolved about the despicable nature of terrorism, and the moral & political bankruptcy of its use to justify struggle for ethnic, religious or national freedom. For me this repugnance extended to the plethora of anti-globalist militancy around the world which seemed to me an echo of Cold War anti-westernism and whose language indulged a degree of self-righteousness which effectively released it from history & above humanity whilst purportedly acting in its name...
Ah well, Dale Pendell may or may not be "anti-globalist" & all that entails. But his approving quotation from (Situationist) Rene Riesel tickles me, especially this : "Radicalism means, literally, 'grasping things by their roots,' not rejuvinating a peremptory anti-capitalism adorned by cliches from Bourdieu." I'd punch the air & yell Right On were it not for thinking for many years now that whilst politics might be most people's best means of understanding & influencing the world, it isnt the only one.
Finding political agreement with Dad in the 1990s didnt mean I'd junked all my 1960s opinions & actions. Some of course; for example I'd now assumed a Churchillian view of the Second World War having realised the folly informing a statement like "Hitler was wrong but the Allies werent correct either". That was a comment I'd read by '60s poet Dan Georgakis somewhere --Margaret Randall's El Corno Emplumado or in something George Dowden had sent me? Have cake & eat it too --typical all across the radical board. What Dad called "antiism" though he neither understood or accepted our generation's sense of suppression & grasping for "freedom"... I'd also outgrown, by the late 1980s, the idea that the State owed me, as poet/artist, a living... Grants & the like are best thought of as a lottery; one should avoid becoming a creature of the State, a voluntary or involuntary dependent.
On which note I'll close,
Love, Kris
*
Weymouth
Mid-November, 2007
Dear Kris,
Oh wow! What a monster letter from you! A surfeit of candy -- spoiled for choice! Like my reaction to long poems (" a poem can't be short enough" -- predilection for haiku etc), I'll have to adjust my thinking!
The Michael Tarachow/Pentagram Press book you mention must've been Potterwoman by Barbara Moraff. I wrote to her years ago, sending her one of Simon Drew's cards -- a picture of the Dalai Lama with horns, entitled 'The Origins of Phrases' -- it read, "To be caught on the horns of a Dalai Lama." --there's a fish caught on his horns. I hope her Tibetan Buddhist sensibilities weren't offended! She never answered my letter!
As I said, too much candy... I haven't read the Dale Pendell book yet -- Inspired Madness. I know of the Burning Man festival through one of my 'girlfriends' -- Justine Shapiro (she's great) on Lonely Planet documentary.
The alternative scene, as with you, always beckoned -- but I passed, unlike you and the other sibs.
Not attending too closely to poetry at the moment because of my obsession with health & nutrition -- macrobiotics-McDougall meets Vegan-raw food diet. My favourite books right now areThe Great Life Diet, Danny Waxman (Pegasus Books, 2007); My Beautiful Life, Mina Dobic (Square One, 2007); The Miso Book, John & Jan Bellame (Square One, 2004); Japanese Foods That Heal (Tuttle, 2007). And I'm eating plenty of raw garlic. It helps with reducing cholesterol, blood pressure and blood viscosity.
But I do have Mad Dogs of Trieste : New & Selected Poems by Janine Pommy Vega (Black Sparrow, 2000) beside me as well. And a whole pile of other things including Thomas Merton...I've been meaning to have a good read of the Vega for a long time, and it's come to hand whilst sorting my books...
Janine Pommy Vega is definitely a traveller and seeker. I get the sense Beat but not Buddhist. Would she be a Dharma Bum? Seeker of the truth, no matter what tradition. Travelled through Israel & Europe in the early '60s, then South America in early '70s. All documented in her book, Tracking the Serpent (City Lights, 1997). At high school she "had been reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road. All the characters seemed to move with an intensity that was missing in my life. A magazine article about the Beats mentioned the Cedar Bar in New York City. We decided to check it out." (Tracking the Serpent, p2)
She met with Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Jack Kerouac and other writers... "All that winter and into the spring I read. Emily Dickinson, Christopher Smart, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Catullus, John Weiners : anything anyone else was reading. This was my education."
Our friend Bob Arnold pops up in the dedication to that book : "for Bob, Susan & Carson Arnold and all fellow travellers." As I said, traveller -- from Glastonbury to Nepal. I'll have to read it again. Get some clues, maybe, for the journey. For my journey,
*
"Once delusion is extinguished your wisdom naturally arises and you don't differentiate suffering and joy. Actually, this joy and suffering -- they are the same." So starts the film I have on DVD. "Amongst White Clouds", film-maker, Edward A. Burger. Went to China on the strength of Bill Porter's book, Road to Heaven (Rider, 1994) -- decided to make a film on Chinese hermits. Not extinguished by Mao. Amazing that they're still there. He found a master with whom he's been studying for more than five years now. That would be something : to go to China.
But I've found a couple of gems. Firstly, an acupuncturist & healer called Sue Branch, here in Weymouth. And a Zen teacher in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives living in Aberwystwyth, Wales. As you always reproach me -- you don't have to go anywhere exotic. It's all around you wherever you are. Circumnambulate Radipole Lake. Everywhere/everything is sacred.
Rev. Master Myoho Harris has been very kindly in her(?) letters from Aberwystwyth in regard to my questions about practice. Very encouraging. "Just wanting to meditate is training. It will lead you forward. Help flows to meet us in many ways. Keep offering yourself to the boundless heart of the Buddha and, most importantly of all, listening deeply to what your own body and mind tells you." (Letter, 13th August, '07)
And Sue Branch has been offering Bu Qi -- acupuncture healing without needles as i had bad reaction to needles. Too sensitive. I'm looking forward to some tai chi training too.
Anyway, all for now. Too many Xmas letters to write.
Love,
Bernard
October 16th-30th, '07
Dear Bernard,
Back in the Shop, at the counter (my "desk") --journal, note-book, papers, your letter before me --I'm jet-lagged & more or less content.
I'm pleased you've committed some of your Stingy Artist Press history to paper, especially your relationship, as a book-maker/poetry publisher, to Salt Works & other American fine presses. I took the opportunity, while visiting you in Weymouth recently, to handle some of the lovely things stored in your shed (and what a pity they're not on display & available for purchase) --for example Cid Corman's tiny books, from Elizabeth Press & his own Origin press, with one or two word titles, haiku sequences, and one of Michael Tarachow's, an oblong-shaped book with a medieval manuscript feel to it... That's the craft, isnt it? One probably spends more time admiring the cover, the pages, the type, the sewing, the design than one does the text! One of your Stingy Artist editions is within reach of me as I write this : Franco Beltrametti's Three for Nado (1992), number 3 of a numbered edition of 175. It's one of your most elegant & tiny books : eight pages, endpapers, three of Franco's Trip Trap-like poems --constructions, throwaways, what you will --and your nick-name, Nado, which I've always spelt Naado, in the book's title (and didnt you tell me Franco liked the pun on nado / nothing?)...
Poor Franco, a Dharma Bum if ever there was, already dead 12 years. Searching for Dale Pendell a few months ago (following up on his Burning Man book, which I'd also sent to you), I reread Franco's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology (published by our great amigos, Tim Longville & John Riley, as a Grosseteste Review book, back in 1975), and then the Sperlonga Manhattan Express anthology (Scorribanda Productions, 1980), which got me thinking of Franco Beltrametti as a key European friend of the Beat idea if not also the Beats themselves. I found the website dedicated to him and read his autobiographical account there --as peripatetic an inventory as could be (enviably?) imagined! Poet, artist, traveller, --and I can hear you say "back-woodsman" in the 60s, 70s sense of do-it-yrself, build your own, well out of the work-consume-die rat-race.
Since returning to Melbourne from my 20 days with you & Mum in our dear old England (--the England I perpetually reinvent, not living there as you do, though how you do interests me given our migrant family upbringing in England following infancy in Egypt, thus English-half English childhood & beyond, until the time we must have decided to identify as English rather than exotic half this, half that), I've nibbled at Franco's legend some more. The other day the web took me to the blog of Pierre Joris --he'd posted that bonny photo of hirsute Franco with the comment that this August, Franco would have celebrated his 70th birthday. Doesnt that get you thinking? "Forever young" maybe but not Spring chickens either, any of us!
I sent an e-mail to Pierre then, greeting him after what might be thirty years (the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival, '75, in the company of Paige Mitchell, Allen Fisher?). I thanked him for remembering Franco and told him we'd been talking & thinking of Franco too, not that we'd ever met outside of correspondence & small-press publishing. I directed him to our correspondence on this blog --he replied the following day. While we're writing about Japhy & Co, he's "been teaching Japhy Ryder, his poetry & essays, & Kerouac's novel in my Ecopoetics course this Fall, also talking about Franco to my students --the crisscrossing is endless." Dont you love these synchronicities!
I was elated you didnt already own the Issa translations by Nanao Sakaki I brought to you. I'd ordered what was available of Issa in my wholesaler catalogue --Sam Hamill's Spring of My life, Lucian Stryk's The Dumpling Field, & the Sakaki of which I'd been ignorant. (I must interpolate here that since my return I've dug out some of your poetry including the beautifully made book, Cemetery Lodge Poems (Stingy Artist,1996), and was charmed by the 5th poem of the sequence : "the crying / of crickets / according to Issa / is like the / chirping of men - / easy to imagine / autumn's last song / in this place". I wonder which Issa translation you had read?)
I thought the cover drawing of the snail was also by Sakaki but it's John Brandi's. Like Sakaki's snail translation which you quote, the drawing crystalizes for me the Buddhist attitude (I'd say Zen but Issa is Pure Land I see) --it's humble & hilarious! We're invited into the snail's perspective --its relation to mountain, clouds, sky, universe --ludicrously incongruous yet no truer way of describing all living creatures', including the human, condition.
In his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, Sakaki is asked about another snail poem ''just as he is / he goes to bed and gets up / the snail" --
Brandi : Did the snail show Issa how simple life can be in the middle of all our complications & things we need?
Sakaki : I guess so. That's a great understanding. He feels jealousy, ah yeah (laughs) "I must think about money & human relations, but the snail doesn't care, just goes to sleep, just walk around, eat . . . uh-oh, But not me, why? Why?" That is his point. Why is important, why is snail that way, why I'm this way. . . strange! why? Why are we, why is the sky so shiny, why trees so green?
Bryan : It's all beautiful, why am I so uptight?
Sakaki : Yeah, the surprisement, that is haiku.
Bryan : We laugh, but at the same time we get something.
Sakaki : Yes, something comes suddenly - wisdom! (laughs)
It's a beautiful little book; designed by Jeff Bryan, Sakaki's calligraphy --the Japanese characters & English haiku translation -- and the printed line of phoneticised Japanese adds another dimension. Sakaki talks like a medium, an inheritor & promulgator : "Many beings come to me, from me, many rivers going down, running down, -- sure."
The book brings us Issa & Sakaki and makes me hungry for a large volume of the latter. If still alive he's 83 (75 at the time of Inch By Inch's publication). I hope he is --forever young!
*
A NOTE ON SAKAKI et al
(22nd September,'07, en route Hong Kong from Melbourne)
Reading Nanao Sakaki's Inch By Inch : 45 Haiku by Issa (La Almeda Press, New Mexico, 1992), confirms one's long held idea of him as the "real thing" (--and I confess, vis a vis Gary Snyder whose name preceded him like sun & shower a rainbow --and having "missed" Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti on their 1970 Australian tour, being back in England at that time, I was more than ready for my appointment with the holy poets of the reading & imagining of my late youth --"Japhy Ryder" of course, after Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghett, Corso --one of the elect --and I'm suddenly remembering that flash of recognition, Japhy Ryder = Gary Snyder, very early 1966, and the poem I wrote to him, sitting with the College of Technology mates at the Red Lion pub in downtown Southampton --I'll have to retrieve it from the back pages of the particular exercise-book ["16.2.66 / I read my first Gary Snyder & Phil / Whalen & Michael McClure / its a night of history / historic night / man! wait til i tell colin t symes / about it / that ive read them / bhikku / means / buddhist monk / snyder who is in kerouacs / books im sure (japhy ryder?) / and michael mcclure & whalen / tho i dont know where exactly / its funny they talk & refer to so many / of their mates & acquaintances in their / poetry : which makes it beat / which makes the established schools / have acid indigestion / because just as whitman was buried / for writing I IN BIG broad / letters / so are these bringing back I & the / experience / of I as the centre & basis of poetry / the world now seems to be accepting / them / THEM / BEAT / its a pity! society licking their arses / bloody society - / but dont we know society DOESNT / WANT U?"] --O exercise-book of the era of exercise-books, hardly realizing outside of the school issue lined pages & blue covers how blessed one was, & how blessed was that time! (--and doesnt that sound like Aunty Lydia? --as though she knew much more than the platitude, the closest to that demon, Time, of all our relatives) --: Gary Snyder & Nanao Sakaki at Montsalvat, December,'81 --and for the hell of it (no, the full reference of it, being a fool for that sort of thing) I'll quote later from the report I published in my magazine, H/EAR, of that memorable Montsalvat Poetry Festival event, one glorious evening photo of which, by Bernie O'Regan, captures their souls for me and so it will be for the rest of my time! --: So, Sakaki, Sakaki's Issa : is it quirkily simplified or is it Issa's simplicity?
Sakaki's comparison of Issa & Basho begs the question, again, of the literary or learned as positive or negative influence upon poetry --Sakaki's certainty that the peasant is a better poet bespeaks a definition of poetry that would valorize testament, doubt the literary. Who has nothing & knows nothing (take note Mr Podhoretz!) is closer to the earth and can, therefore, sing the song of its elements & creatures, Sakaki implies.
If the poems arent tonic enough, there is his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, jumping with mischief, witty & self-abnegating. He appears to relish denying his would-be explicators' Buddhist understandings, insisting naturalness against the esoteric (--no, he says, Pure Land explains nothing of Issa's poetics...). The repudiations are Zen-like. Appreciating the man, his New Mexican hosts accept his "no" for the answer every time.
*
(Hong Kong to London, 23/09/07) Is it the difference (Snyder in himself, Sakaki contrasted with Snyder) between the man when he's in the field, literally doing it, and the pundit who might not even realize a particular shot is ethically cheap?
Critics bemoan the Beats' allegedly suspended adolescence --they may well have a point but part of the debate would be the imperative of maintaining the capacity for adventure & the resulting joy in the encounter with the world --"in & out of the cities" as well as the "mountains & rivers without end"! --and how does that translate in English terms? --which is the jolliest question of all for us --pivotal --since we werent turned-on by the English things of those years of our coming out (--I called it "breakthru" after Ken Geering's mimeod mag of that name, which might even have published me? --I'd left Southampton for Oz just as I submitted poems to him --but a great concept despite oodles of poets probably & appropriately still-born) --and tho Wendy Mulford called me on that in 1970 [she wrote, "How do you mean, people here are afraid to speak? I think they speak like bells (...) When I speak of a syntax of survival , it's a personal metaphor. I have this conscious sense of being english inescapably (...) I want the energy you speak of alright, but for me it thrills as well through Blake or Cowper, Browning or Clare or Byron or Christina Rossetti or or or for example..."], even that advocacy was on the coat-tails of the make-it-new biff and all of that coming-through Sixties modernity --must have been, surely? --Ginsberg's Blake, Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan's Metaphysicals not to mention his Shakespeare, Purcell, and why is O'Hara in my head with the "Elizabethan Rose"? --all variations and not the pretence, however virtuous, of seamless tradition --
*
(29-10-07) Allow me to quote from my piece,Festivals of the Oppressed : An Account of the 1981 Montsalvat Poetry Festival, & the Foundation Meeting of People for Nuclear Disarmourment (both October, 1981), published in The Merri Creek, Or Nero #7, tHEAtRe issue, Winter, 1983.
"(....)Snyder's first reading, in the festival's first evening session, was distinguished by the theme of planetary being, aided by Thoreau-ian accounting & Pound/Olson historicising. He shared top-billing with the Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki. Snyder's was the scholar-adept's response to Sakai's "natural" earthliness. Snyder was truly Sakaki's sidekick in terms of langauge/being. They're exemplary comrades. Sakaki stole the show. There was more "meaning" in a single warble of Sakaki's rendition of a traditional Japanese boatman's song, for example, than in the entire festival's parade of buskers. Perhaps Ania Walwicz's riffs went some of the way with his non-sense, with his marvellous sound. Sakaki's awareness of the nuance of occasion (literary, linguistic & social) was admirable. In contrast, so many of the "performers" that followed were just there to do their bit... From Snyder to the least performance-poet, there was struck a consensus : that language was more or less the generalizing rather than the individualizing stamp of the poet; that this generalizing langauge afforded an externalization bereft of the slightest problematic; that the language was to deliver its predetermined load then & there. This attitude dominated the 1981 festival.
.
Snyder would dearly love to have been born one of those, to quote him, who are blessed with "looser, easier walk & gaze...They are Tibetans, American-Indians, Polynesians, 'Real People'..." I wonder why this should be? As white, American, Buddhist, he's heir to a New Age cosmopolitanism that relates him closer than most to most of the world. I wonder about this reverse racism : I sense the myth of perfect genes behind the transcultural sentimentality (....)
.
Snyder's second reading, on the afternoon of the second day, tended towards recollection of the Beat ethos. His brilliant reading of the long Route 99 hiking poem is comparable to the text of Kerouac's On The Road, albeit condensed & intensified. At both of his readings Snyder referred to Lew Welch. The thought struck me that Snyder is haunted by the ultimate asceticism of the other poet --that Welch's suicide (or, at the very least, his disappearance) pointed him out, accusing him of fellow-travelling, show-biz. Welch's Turkey Buzzard poem, one of the last he wrote before his end, in 1971, contains a Will & Testament, to wit, "on a marked rock, following his orders, / place my meat(...) With proper ceremony disembowel what I / no longer need, that it might more quickly / rot & tempt // my new form" --: a 10th anniversary siren's song for such a sailor as Gary Snyder."
*
A NOTE ON DALE PENDELL'S INSPIRED MADNESS : The Gifts of Burning Man (Frog Ltd., 2006)
(30.7.07-11.8.07) The rep shows me his list --a grab-bag of smaller Australasian & overseas presses including Bob Adamson's Paper Bark (prestigious Australian poets like Adamson himself, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Maiden, Martin Harrison), New Falcon (Crowlie, Regardie, Leary? et al), & North Atlantic --ring a bell? Remember Richard Grossinger's press? The wunderkind of our own time, born in that confluence of New American Poetry & the Counter Culture, with (reputedly) hotel-chain dollars at his disposal to support the wonderful Io magazine --not as literary as Stony Brook (I remember your copies, Bernard) but how exciting! Ecology, homeopathy, astrology, sci-fi, dream, baseball & poetry!
Every now & then something jumps out of the title-sheets, e.g., Tom Clarke's gripping biography of Ed Dorn (particularly for the English years in which Clarke also partook). I'm writing this as introduction to Dale Pendell's book published by Frog Ltd. / North Atlantic --there it was in the rep's checklist --Dale Pendell whom I instantly remembered as poet associated with Gary Snyder, possibly published in Eshleman's Caterpiller magazine?
As we've both since ascertained, Pendell isnt there (maybe Sulpher?) though he is in Jim Koller's Coyote Review & in Franco Beltrametti's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology, alongside Will Staple, Steve Stansfield, Peter Coyote & co. And Peter Coyote & Snyder claim him in blurbs for this book.
It's a rollicking story (no, this isnt Belloc's Four Men! --though quest it is however constituted) --an update on The Dharma Bums offering one outcome of Japhy's rucksack revolution : the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert --celebratory, sensory, sensual, ecstatic, never mind-dulling, nothing to do with getting on, some of the best of the 60s, 70s "alternative" scene...
Can one be nostalgic for a life one only peripherally experienced or be inspired by description of events & activities one'll not necessarily emulate? Same questions as posed by our enthusiasm for the subjects of our correspondence I think...
Dale Pendell's major reference is to Norman O. Brown, the mere mention of whom recalls our 1960s, full feathers & bells! And while not dreaming its reinstatement, Pendell is obliged by its revelation. Personal experience doesnt imply social process, indeed the chimerical is where eccentric reality might be happily held, suspended from time & social consequence. The historical faces-off the chimerical in Pendell's field-report of the Burning Man Festival. I'm sure he doesnt conceive an every day of the year/ every year of one's life festival a la Burning Man, but I do think he endorses its periodic eruption as crucial political & psychological benefice. Programmatic revolution & its totalitarian wellspring far less providential than democracy & the free market for, yes it's true, rock'n'roll does save your immortal soul!
Pendell, p78, "Living with some risk makes me feel more alive. I'm not saying that I'm against safety, or even security, or that I want more risk. There is already plenty of risk. But the attempt to eliminate all risk usually destroys what it was you were trying to protect in the first place."
p79, " In Brown's system, risk is Dionysus. Dionysian energy has its own violence --it's transgressive by nature --and Brown was against the attempt of many to sanitize Dionysian energy. But he was steadfast that the suppression of the Dionysian influence is far more tragic than the wreckage characteristic of the passage of the young god himself. For the rites of Dionysius, waste, fire, licentiousness, risk and drug-induced madness, are seemly. Burning Man is an experiment in healing, and it should be considered one of our current national treasures."
p.90, "Brown recognizes that in the era of HCE ("Here Comes Everybody"), the outcome depends on whether or not the masses settle for vicarious enetertainment,
Blake's "spectral enjoyment." Spectator. Here, watch the gladiator shed blood, right on your television. "The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy. The Dionysian bets the Grand Inquisitor is wrong." (Brown,1996). Brown follows Blake, that the violence of Dionysius is preferable to the violence of Mars. That, following Euripides, the suppression of Dionysius leads to the sacrifice of children. And that, following the most ancient threads of religious and magical belief, the rites of Dionysius are prophylactic. Blake wrote : "I will not cease from Mental Fight."
For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the
Court, and the University : who would, if
they could, forever depress Mental and
prolong Corporeal War.
Blake, "Milton".
Naturally, the body of the book describes, indeed it witnesses, the Burning Man festival. The point of it, though, is cultural-political critique, so no matter how out-of-it the experience Pendell describes, it's always significant --the reporter always mindfully out of his mind!
p99, "Hope. It gives me hope. That tolerance and self-reliance have a chance in a world that seems headed in the opposite direction. Hope against idolatry, in all of its forms. Hope against bigotry, against all the false consciousness that says it can't be done, against all the false gods of modesty, taste, moderation and morality. That there can still be, in the twenty-first century, a Feast of Fools, a backwards day of love and heresy, a day for the god named...no, lets just call him the god of the potlatch. His alternative worship is war."
Wonderful red flag of a declaration, one that speaks for large parts of my formative years, teens & twenties, thirties, but whose implications now pin me to what feels like a fundamental contradiction. In a nutshell, how can one support a war, military action, this or that country's or people's sovereignty, this or that set of conventions, be it Law or Tradition, while simultaneously subscribing to the libertarian agenda? At this very time I often feel I'm America's only friend in the poetry world! --the only poet who doesnt froth at the mouth when, for example, personalities or policies of the Australian federal government are mentioned or, more seriously, Israel discussed.
You told me years ago, after the first two or three of my second era of regular visits to England, that Dad had commented, "Kris has mellowed!" Well, we certainly discovered that we agreed about the propriety of the Gulf War --the first contemporary aggression I'd supported, believing there'd be a repeat of the Czeckoslovakian appeasement of 1938, and Israel in the firing-line not to mention Arab opponents of Saddam, were we not to defend Kuwait. We welcomed the end of the Cold War, happy that Britain & Europe in particular, the rest of the world in general, were delivered from the nuclear-war nightmare, and sure that the collapse of the Soviet Union & the anti-communist revolutions in the Baltics & Eastern & Central Europe proved, once & for all, that Communism was the Russian Empire's vicious counterfeit. Dad's anti-communist instinct was correct, my communist utopianism utter crap! Dad was probably surprised by the comprehensivity of my concession. And then came Yugoslavia, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq...
Our greatest agreement revolved about the despicable nature of terrorism, and the moral & political bankruptcy of its use to justify struggle for ethnic, religious or national freedom. For me this repugnance extended to the plethora of anti-globalist militancy around the world which seemed to me an echo of Cold War anti-westernism and whose language indulged a degree of self-righteousness which effectively released it from history & above humanity whilst purportedly acting in its name...
Ah well, Dale Pendell may or may not be "anti-globalist" & all that entails. But his approving quotation from (Situationist) Rene Riesel tickles me, especially this : "Radicalism means, literally, 'grasping things by their roots,' not rejuvinating a peremptory anti-capitalism adorned by cliches from Bourdieu." I'd punch the air & yell Right On were it not for thinking for many years now that whilst politics might be most people's best means of understanding & influencing the world, it isnt the only one.
Finding political agreement with Dad in the 1990s didnt mean I'd junked all my 1960s opinions & actions. Some of course; for example I'd now assumed a Churchillian view of the Second World War having realised the folly informing a statement like "Hitler was wrong but the Allies werent correct either". That was a comment I'd read by '60s poet Dan Georgakis somewhere --Margaret Randall's El Corno Emplumado or in something George Dowden had sent me? Have cake & eat it too --typical all across the radical board. What Dad called "antiism" though he neither understood or accepted our generation's sense of suppression & grasping for "freedom"... I'd also outgrown, by the late 1980s, the idea that the State owed me, as poet/artist, a living... Grants & the like are best thought of as a lottery; one should avoid becoming a creature of the State, a voluntary or involuntary dependent.
On which note I'll close,
Love, Kris
*
Weymouth
Mid-November, 2007
Dear Kris,
Oh wow! What a monster letter from you! A surfeit of candy -- spoiled for choice! Like my reaction to long poems (" a poem can't be short enough" -- predilection for haiku etc), I'll have to adjust my thinking!
The Michael Tarachow/Pentagram Press book you mention must've been Potterwoman by Barbara Moraff. I wrote to her years ago, sending her one of Simon Drew's cards -- a picture of the Dalai Lama with horns, entitled 'The Origins of Phrases' -- it read, "To be caught on the horns of a Dalai Lama." --there's a fish caught on his horns. I hope her Tibetan Buddhist sensibilities weren't offended! She never answered my letter!
As I said, too much candy... I haven't read the Dale Pendell book yet -- Inspired Madness. I know of the Burning Man festival through one of my 'girlfriends' -- Justine Shapiro (she's great) on Lonely Planet documentary.
The alternative scene, as with you, always beckoned -- but I passed, unlike you and the other sibs.
Not attending too closely to poetry at the moment because of my obsession with health & nutrition -- macrobiotics-McDougall meets Vegan-raw food diet. My favourite books right now areThe Great Life Diet, Danny Waxman (Pegasus Books, 2007); My Beautiful Life, Mina Dobic (Square One, 2007); The Miso Book, John & Jan Bellame (Square One, 2004); Japanese Foods That Heal (Tuttle, 2007). And I'm eating plenty of raw garlic. It helps with reducing cholesterol, blood pressure and blood viscosity.
But I do have Mad Dogs of Trieste : New & Selected Poems by Janine Pommy Vega (Black Sparrow, 2000) beside me as well. And a whole pile of other things including Thomas Merton...I've been meaning to have a good read of the Vega for a long time, and it's come to hand whilst sorting my books...
Janine Pommy Vega is definitely a traveller and seeker. I get the sense Beat but not Buddhist. Would she be a Dharma Bum? Seeker of the truth, no matter what tradition. Travelled through Israel & Europe in the early '60s, then South America in early '70s. All documented in her book, Tracking the Serpent (City Lights, 1997). At high school she "had been reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road. All the characters seemed to move with an intensity that was missing in my life. A magazine article about the Beats mentioned the Cedar Bar in New York City. We decided to check it out." (Tracking the Serpent, p2)
She met with Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Jack Kerouac and other writers... "All that winter and into the spring I read. Emily Dickinson, Christopher Smart, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Catullus, John Weiners : anything anyone else was reading. This was my education."
Our friend Bob Arnold pops up in the dedication to that book : "for Bob, Susan & Carson Arnold and all fellow travellers." As I said, traveller -- from Glastonbury to Nepal. I'll have to read it again. Get some clues, maybe, for the journey. For my journey,
*
"Once delusion is extinguished your wisdom naturally arises and you don't differentiate suffering and joy. Actually, this joy and suffering -- they are the same." So starts the film I have on DVD. "Amongst White Clouds", film-maker, Edward A. Burger. Went to China on the strength of Bill Porter's book, Road to Heaven (Rider, 1994) -- decided to make a film on Chinese hermits. Not extinguished by Mao. Amazing that they're still there. He found a master with whom he's been studying for more than five years now. That would be something : to go to China.
But I've found a couple of gems. Firstly, an acupuncturist & healer called Sue Branch, here in Weymouth. And a Zen teacher in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives living in Aberwystwyth, Wales. As you always reproach me -- you don't have to go anywhere exotic. It's all around you wherever you are. Circumnambulate Radipole Lake. Everywhere/everything is sacred.
Rev. Master Myoho Harris has been very kindly in her(?) letters from Aberwystwyth in regard to my questions about practice. Very encouraging. "Just wanting to meditate is training. It will lead you forward. Help flows to meet us in many ways. Keep offering yourself to the boundless heart of the Buddha and, most importantly of all, listening deeply to what your own body and mind tells you." (Letter, 13th August, '07)
And Sue Branch has been offering Bu Qi -- acupuncture healing without needles as i had bad reaction to needles. Too sensitive. I'm looking forward to some tai chi training too.
Anyway, all for now. Too many Xmas letters to write.
Love,
Bernard
Monday, December 10, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) : RESPONSE, Stephen Brock
6th December,'07
Hi Kris,
I'm trying to get hold of a rare poetry book titled Bellyfulls by Nanao Sakaki, translated by Neale Hunter with an introductory note by Gary Snyder, published by Eugene Toad Press, 1966.
Could you let me know if by any chance you have a copy or can track one down for me.
Much appreciated,
Steve Brock
*
[I replied commenting upon the apparent coincidence of his enquiry for Sakaki and Bernard Hemensley & I referring to Sakaki in our OTDB correspondence.]
*
7th December,'07
hi kris,
this is a coincidence --i hadnt seen the reference to sakaki on your blog.
the dharma bums is one of my favourite kerouac books, though i read it some time ago.
my interest in sakaki is actually via neale hunter, who was a close friend of my father's.
i only recently stumbled across bellyfulls online, quite by accident, as neale never mentioned the book (he died about 3 years ago).
neale published a couple of books on the cultural revolution, including shanghai journal, and at one stage travelled through south-east asia with gary snyder.
he spoke a number of languages and was fluent in chinese, however i wasn't aware that he also knew japanese.
his friendship with snyder must have led to collaboration on bellyfulls.
neale also kept up a correspondence with snyder, and sent him a series of self-published poetry books in the last few years of his life that he produced on a photocopier.
you may not recall this, but i came by your bookshop a year or so ago and picked up a copy of edward field's count myself lucky, and we had a brief chat.
since then i've published a short collection, the night is a dying dog, in the friendly st new poets (12) series.
let me know if you can locate a copy of bellyfulls, and in the meantime i'll read up on sakaki.
best,
steve
*
10th December,'07
hi kris
(....) i've enjoyed reading the dharma bums letters.
i picked up a copy of lonesome traveller when i was nineteen or twenty, circa 1990, and read howl around the same time.
the beats were a seminal influence on myself and other friends who wrote, even though we werent "first generation" readers.
neale was lucky enough to meet ginsberg, on a beach in india.
best,
stephen
Hi Kris,
I'm trying to get hold of a rare poetry book titled Bellyfulls by Nanao Sakaki, translated by Neale Hunter with an introductory note by Gary Snyder, published by Eugene Toad Press, 1966.
Could you let me know if by any chance you have a copy or can track one down for me.
Much appreciated,
Steve Brock
*
[I replied commenting upon the apparent coincidence of his enquiry for Sakaki and Bernard Hemensley & I referring to Sakaki in our OTDB correspondence.]
*
7th December,'07
hi kris,
this is a coincidence --i hadnt seen the reference to sakaki on your blog.
the dharma bums is one of my favourite kerouac books, though i read it some time ago.
my interest in sakaki is actually via neale hunter, who was a close friend of my father's.
i only recently stumbled across bellyfulls online, quite by accident, as neale never mentioned the book (he died about 3 years ago).
neale published a couple of books on the cultural revolution, including shanghai journal, and at one stage travelled through south-east asia with gary snyder.
he spoke a number of languages and was fluent in chinese, however i wasn't aware that he also knew japanese.
his friendship with snyder must have led to collaboration on bellyfulls.
neale also kept up a correspondence with snyder, and sent him a series of self-published poetry books in the last few years of his life that he produced on a photocopier.
you may not recall this, but i came by your bookshop a year or so ago and picked up a copy of edward field's count myself lucky, and we had a brief chat.
since then i've published a short collection, the night is a dying dog, in the friendly st new poets (12) series.
let me know if you can locate a copy of bellyfulls, and in the meantime i'll read up on sakaki.
best,
steve
*
10th December,'07
hi kris
(....) i've enjoyed reading the dharma bums letters.
i picked up a copy of lonesome traveller when i was nineteen or twenty, circa 1990, and read howl around the same time.
the beats were a seminal influence on myself and other friends who wrote, even though we werent "first generation" readers.
neale was lucky enough to meet ginsberg, on a beach in india.
best,
stephen
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