CATHERINE O'BRIEN
Two Pieces, 2008
*
……."at the gates of a labyrinth, ready to lose myself in the city and this story."
Sophie Calle.
Back in VienChan red leaves falling, falling through the shadow’s night… into the everlasting season… riding my bicycle along the dusty streets; the poetry book in my basket is a tenuous thread which connects me to that other city, another home: Melbourne… MAKING LISTS FOR FRANCES HODGKINS (Aukland University Press, 2007) by Paula Green; placed in my hand when I leave Collected Works Bookshop. I am inspired by this New Zealand poet who names artists I have been reading about (and sometimes viewing their work) while I have been in Victoria….. Frances Hodgkins, painter ( at Modern Britain, NGV) Sophie Calle, performance photographer, Anne Hamilton, installation artist. Reading REPOSITIONINGS by Frederick Garber, the essay on Sophie Calle. The title of her photographic, performance piece, Suite Vienna, I read as Suite Vientienne… Who is following who? ...I imagine Sophie Calle following me about the quiet, and at night the very quiet, streets of Vientienne…..clicking her camera……
I ride down and around a lane to locate an art gallery after I see a new sign. Houses enclose the narrow dirt path. Children play. People watch me from their doorways. Saturday afternoon clear sky blue quiet. Khamsouk Gallery 1; the work of one “Senior Artist”, Khamsouk Keomingmuang. The subject, Lao people, Lao culture, in a style best described as impressionist, a popular form here. A gallery for one artist; a life time of paintings, sketches, hand held images on mulberry paper. I am the only visitor. Lone Gallery hideaway …riding away, retracing my path I meet another cyclist where the lane turns….I wonder if he is the senior artist! Late afternoon dreamy light reflects back the rust red colours of the laneway houses……the cyclist turns his head to watch me disappear as I ride out of the lane.
Early morning light I notice a wall graffiti, the first I have ever seen here...in other cities called Graffiti Art! I stop and try to read the muted text of green and yellow embellishments on peeling plaster over brick. The artists sign off in a blue cloud….floating away… Mack, Rip, Abfa, Awnsk…is crew; Toronto , Canada..from the rose, red, white, blue I can only decipher ASK THE QUESTION. So silent in this morning air, clear white, writing in my notebook, I am aware someone is standing by Ong Teu Temple wall, watching.
The thread unwinding all the way from Melbourne to Vientienne...me riding around wondering about the interconnectedness of cultures...looking for connections… Paula Green writes for Anne Hamilton, "the words that wound off as a continuous line to be rewound"….. the more I unwind………another new sign : prefaced with the phrase, oriental bookshop…a Lao bookshop appropriating the language of the colonialists.
The old police station I liked as it always was from when I first arrived in this city; a shutter- windowed, faded curtained, faded charm has succumbed to the Vientienne building construction site mania... now reduced to a rubble of concrete blocks…sculptural blocks... a Rachel Whitehead building imprint….
At the Monument Bookshop yet another photographer portraying another version of “ethnic" adhering to the exotic…. I have tried to take in all these exhibitions...recording the photographers' names in my note book...but this day when I see yet again the nameless portraits of faces staring out...I decide to not even register the photographer’s name…..(in taking time to photograph these portraits why do they not ask for the subject's name?)... the photographers mesh into one...the faces into one.... Walking away...behind me the camera clicks....
Riding on into the sunlit colours of the dust, walls….absorbing the sun…age old sun on age old doors, windows, bricks and palm trees near the temple….. My head in Victoria, Melbourne…I make the threads as I wind back into this place.....….
0O0
The art of luminous night fire flying fairy lights along the Mekong….
I live on the last stretch of bumpy, pot-holed, muddy, dirt, dark at night road along the Mekong River, which is only a fast twelve minute walk from the ‘city centre’ of Vientienne. A rare patch of riverside vegetation it is also one of the remaining habitats (endangered) for fireflies. When I step out of my gate in the evening, the nearby Mongol Riverside Hotel and restaurant, beyond my patch of dark, seems to be even more festooned with tiny fairy lights, and the acoustic singing, coming from the restaurant balancing over the river, seems even more romantic …being some type of off shoot of the local Issan/Mor lan music which can be narrative, fast, at times almost hysterical but more than often a romantic, lilting, longing song from far away in time as voices across water…. Before I reach the corner where the Mongol is and all the fairy lights, I pass through the darkness by the vegetation on one side which skirts the river's edge and the other side a silent, empty house with a scrambled abandoned garden and an even more abandoned spirit house. It is while walking through this dark patch, dodging pot holes and bumps, and sometimes stepping into a muddy puddle, in the midst of this darkness, I see the first firefly...then another...and another..in and out of the abandoned garden, along the river's edge… The fairy lights form a beacon towards which I walk... One night, walking along this stretch, I heard a most exquisite voice coming from the blackness of that garden. A voice that seemed to have fallen out of a Mor lan music song, a lost voice…but in that moment an ancient song from across the water. Once I heard a recording of Lao voices, songs which had been collected in the 60’s by David Fanshawe; he had heard these voices singing one night down by the river… It was a faraway sound…and here was this one voice...an opera voice, Mor lan style…with the fireflies… When I later described the voice to my Lao neighbours they said they were feeling shivers down their spine and assured me that it could only be a ghost.....
[NOTE:
"Mor lan music is essentially flexible melodies tailored to the tones of words. Traditionally the tone was developed by the performer as an interpretation of poems and accompanied by Khaen instruments (bamboo pipes)." from article in The Vientiane Times, August, 2009.]
__________________________________________________________________
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, # 11, July, 2009
January 13th, 2009
Melbourne
Dear Bernard,
Can I take you back a few weeks to a telephone conversation we had? I'd rung you after watching the particularly inspiring Lakes District episode of Griff Rhys-Jones' Mountains BBC-tv series. Griff was in top form --he's literary, intelligent, very amusing & enviably fit! He emulated Coleridge's leaps down precipices, albeit assisted by ropes & pulleys & professional climbers --one certainly wasnt going to follow him in that --and he walked in the footsteps of one of your (I almost say 'holy') men, Alfred Wainwright. It was at that point --my head full of the Romantic poets & Wainwright's pleasant & seemingly accessible walking trails --that the question presented itself : What is the British context for the 'Dharma Bum'? The immediate answer might be : poetry, walking (hills, moors, woods, coasts), art, pottery & craft, photography, traditional & contemporary religious practice... You responded with a laugh : That's my life you're describing (health & opportunity permitting)!
Staying with this British angle, a word around & about Jim Burns, inspired not so much by his book, Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals (edited & introduced by John Freeman, Trent Editions, UK, 2000), but what I hoped it contained when i returned to it this past winter. Old amigo John Freeman's introduction sets the scene, accurately claiming that "Burns' criticism is a one-man crusade against the star system in literature", since "he is interested in the whole picture, to which the bit players and technical staff also make essential contributions." It's a "crusade on behalf of the forgotten" Freeman says --or those who'd be forgotten were it not for the certain kind of literature in which Kerouac's project, for example, is also found.
I too feel a nostalgia for that era of American Bohemians & progressive writers of whom Burns is so fond. It was a model of creative non-conformity & the confluence of life & art. The time I encountered it in my reading I was similarly defined. I'm nostalgic because I've changed/life's changed... I remember some years ago confiding to Alan Pose that to a great extent I'd "lost History" because of massive & cumulative disenchantment with left-wing politics, but experiencing the concerts of Martin Carthy & The Watersons, & Roy Bailey & others, in the'90s had returned History to me. At least initially (--recall exploding in disbelief last year at a Brunswick Folk Festival concert when Alistair Hewlett invoked Hugo Chavez as first of the 21stCentury's saviours; Dave Swarbrick continued tuning his fiddle)... Raising roses out of the rubble (a la Allen Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra?!) is one, & an abiding, thing, but rabble-rousing is too much of the blood & fury of the something-else I no longer believe.
You'll recognize some of my early favourites in Jim Burns' roll-call --Erskine Caldwell for example, Kenneth Patchen, & the writers identified with 1920s Greenwich village. And then there are the Beats themselves --particularly John Montgomery & Lew Welch, & Seymour Krim as a devoted commentator. At one time many of us drew from the same source. There's a larger story here about life in the English provinces predisposing one to an American counter-culture which had, one felt, reacted to a similar impoverishment & saved its soul. However, the wheel turns.
It was an article Alan pose showed me, by Iain Sinclair (Man in a MacIntosh, published in The Guardian, 30-8-08), essentially discussing forgotten English novelists --Londoners of course; Sinclair's eternal & apparently infinite patch --the import of which, at least for me, is the constant fecundity of the local and the necessity to know & celebrate its particulars & exemplars. England, it seems to me --I remember exclaiming to Alan --owns a cultural density enabling constant rediscovery & reevaluation of people & their scenes & times. Much more than in Melbourne, I said. But no sooner made the claim than retracted it --: even with the thinner history of settler Australia, forgetfulness is endemic! I'd begun my own reclamation project in the 1980s, publishing my 1960s diaries & notes concerning La Mama & the emerging new poetry scene, and then pushing back to the '50s & '40s for roots, and intending then to bring the whole thing back to the present. But I shelved it all the moment I stopped producing H/EAR magazine in 1985. (I've been thinking of re-asembling it within the magazine space of my blog recently --the blog might now be the best medium for my concept of the 'active archive'.)
And so, returning to Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals, I was disappointed not to find anything local. Jim Burns says that his 1967 article, The American Influence, "has dated in the sense that some of the facts have changed." --but he doesnt repudiate his original statement : "I suppose I am, in a way, an exile in my own country. (...) In fact, I can't honestly say I feel very much part of English life in general. I'm probably in a position similar to the American expatriates in paris in the 1920s, moving around the areas i know best, ignored by most of the locals, and in touch with a few literary acquaintances by mail, and a few local friends because of our interest in jazz and drink." What I hoped I'd find in Burns' collection was something else on British '50s & '60s predecessors --though, predecessors of whom & what? Without the dharma, who & what are these (notional) bums?!
It's forty-odd years since the Sixties, and boxed sets to prove it! And there are fiftieth anniversary editions of the seminal Beats, not to mention "The Original Scroll", before us. Are Griff's mountains --Lakes District, Wales, Scotland --the closest our English selves will get to Taoist & Buddhist Asia, not to mention the Beats' Tamalpais & etc?
Happy New Year!
Love, Kris
***
Weymouth/Dorset, UK
19 April-16 July,'09
Dear Kris,
I'm floored by your question in the last letter and by my life's current events. To touch upon the latter : earlier this year it was realized that Mum had Alzheimer's. Her short-term memory-loss impacts on life here sharply. In some ways we have a normal life given she's coming up 85, but to cap it off she's had a fall in town and fractured her hip. Looks like she'll be in hospital quite a while. Anyway, it's some respite for me to write if I can get into gear.
As to your question -- "What is the British context for the Dharma Bums?" -- hmmm? To me Dharma Bums seems an essentially American trait. Americans are so 'open'. They 'let go' and 'go for it'. Put their all into things. Not that the British don't. They're eccentrics, their trait is eccentricity -- people of the ilk of Griff Rhys-Jones whom you mention. But they don't seem able to accommodate the spiritual. That is, the artists don't. Dharma Bum for me says 'Buddhist', 'artist', 'Bohemian', 'poet', 'free spirit'... a merging of all these. I don't aspire to be an English Dharma Bum! Have never felt English English. As an Egyptian said to Mum, "But you're not Egyptian Egyptian." Anyway, the British don't do it for me. Just isolated pockets here and there I relate to. But as I said, I'm not English English. Am I labouring the point?
Poetry : I look to Chinese, Japanese and American models. Jazz : Americans (I mean, Courtney Pine, for instance, is not a great musician -- innovative but not great). And there's no U.K. Buddhist magazine with the profile of Tricycle, Buddha Dharma or Shambala Sun, tho' I 'enjoy' the Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. But that is a dedicated Soto Zen publication.
There is no hint of Dharma Bummery in Rhys-Jones or his Mountains t.v. series, though I do like it. And I've been watching Julia Bradbury in the footsteps of Alfred Wainwright (A. W.). I watch all the walking programmes. I don't think Dharma Bum comes into it. One of two Brits I have regard for and makes me think 'Dharma Bum' is Bill Wyatt. (I don't know if Bill Wyatt and Ken Jones relate to being Dharma Dums. Both are poets and Buddhists.) Wyatt's latest is Gleamings from the Throssel's Nest (Longread Publishing, 2005). 'Throssel's Nest' refers to Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey up in Northumberland, where Wyatt goes for retreats. Initially Jiya Kennett forsook her native England for the U.S. There was antipathy from the British Buddhist establishment on her return from Japan. The U.S., as usual, was more accommodating.
The other, Ken Jones, I'm tempted to also call a Dharma Bum, but wonder if he's more the 'Pilgrim Fox' of his self-styled persona? See Pilgrim Foxes : Haiku & Haiku Prose by Ken Jones, James Norton & Sean O'Connor, published by Pilgrim Press, 2001. From the blurb, "These three writers are on a spiritual quest. They are foxy pilgrims. But fox is a trickster, a shape-shifter. And this quest about how to make sense -- or nonsense -- of our lives is far from straightforward." So, it is a spiritual quest not dissimilar to being a Dharma Bum. But I don't think they identify with what is essentially an American manifestation. Jones is the pick of the three. Also, his Stallion's Crag : Haiku & Haibun (Iron Press, 2003), and Arrows of Stones : Haibun (British Haiku Society, 2002) are top notch. Jones is well known and respected on the British Buddhist scene, and widely published.
Beyond these two I haven't found anything to get excited about in respect of Dharma Bums in Britain. In any case, activity is all very well, but what about mind? Walking in itself doesn't make a Dharma Bum. As Arthur Braverman writes, "Most of the foreigners in Kyoto in the early Seventies were wanderers and bearers of an exciting new consciousness. we would strike up conversation with each other on trains or in coffee-shops. These people don't look like dharma bums. But there again, neither do I. Are they exchange students, businessmen, or simply tourists?" (Living and Dying in Zazen, Weatherhill, 2003.)
On the bus back from Dorchester hospital this afternoon, after visiting Mum, I started reading A Blue Hand by Deborah Baker (Penguin, 2009). It's "The Tragicomic, Mind-Altering Odyssey of Allen Ginsberg, a Holy Fool, a Rebel Muse, a Dharma Bum and His Prickly Bride in India." This is the real deal for me! The Americans have it!
So, who's to know? Dharma Bum aint visible in U.K., but things do go on.
Your aspiring Dharma Bum of a brother,
Bernard
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Melbourne
Dear Bernard,
Can I take you back a few weeks to a telephone conversation we had? I'd rung you after watching the particularly inspiring Lakes District episode of Griff Rhys-Jones' Mountains BBC-tv series. Griff was in top form --he's literary, intelligent, very amusing & enviably fit! He emulated Coleridge's leaps down precipices, albeit assisted by ropes & pulleys & professional climbers --one certainly wasnt going to follow him in that --and he walked in the footsteps of one of your (I almost say 'holy') men, Alfred Wainwright. It was at that point --my head full of the Romantic poets & Wainwright's pleasant & seemingly accessible walking trails --that the question presented itself : What is the British context for the 'Dharma Bum'? The immediate answer might be : poetry, walking (hills, moors, woods, coasts), art, pottery & craft, photography, traditional & contemporary religious practice... You responded with a laugh : That's my life you're describing (health & opportunity permitting)!
Staying with this British angle, a word around & about Jim Burns, inspired not so much by his book, Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals (edited & introduced by John Freeman, Trent Editions, UK, 2000), but what I hoped it contained when i returned to it this past winter. Old amigo John Freeman's introduction sets the scene, accurately claiming that "Burns' criticism is a one-man crusade against the star system in literature", since "he is interested in the whole picture, to which the bit players and technical staff also make essential contributions." It's a "crusade on behalf of the forgotten" Freeman says --or those who'd be forgotten were it not for the certain kind of literature in which Kerouac's project, for example, is also found.
I too feel a nostalgia for that era of American Bohemians & progressive writers of whom Burns is so fond. It was a model of creative non-conformity & the confluence of life & art. The time I encountered it in my reading I was similarly defined. I'm nostalgic because I've changed/life's changed... I remember some years ago confiding to Alan Pose that to a great extent I'd "lost History" because of massive & cumulative disenchantment with left-wing politics, but experiencing the concerts of Martin Carthy & The Watersons, & Roy Bailey & others, in the'90s had returned History to me. At least initially (--recall exploding in disbelief last year at a Brunswick Folk Festival concert when Alistair Hewlett invoked Hugo Chavez as first of the 21stCentury's saviours; Dave Swarbrick continued tuning his fiddle)... Raising roses out of the rubble (a la Allen Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra?!) is one, & an abiding, thing, but rabble-rousing is too much of the blood & fury of the something-else I no longer believe.
You'll recognize some of my early favourites in Jim Burns' roll-call --Erskine Caldwell for example, Kenneth Patchen, & the writers identified with 1920s Greenwich village. And then there are the Beats themselves --particularly John Montgomery & Lew Welch, & Seymour Krim as a devoted commentator. At one time many of us drew from the same source. There's a larger story here about life in the English provinces predisposing one to an American counter-culture which had, one felt, reacted to a similar impoverishment & saved its soul. However, the wheel turns.
It was an article Alan pose showed me, by Iain Sinclair (Man in a MacIntosh, published in The Guardian, 30-8-08), essentially discussing forgotten English novelists --Londoners of course; Sinclair's eternal & apparently infinite patch --the import of which, at least for me, is the constant fecundity of the local and the necessity to know & celebrate its particulars & exemplars. England, it seems to me --I remember exclaiming to Alan --owns a cultural density enabling constant rediscovery & reevaluation of people & their scenes & times. Much more than in Melbourne, I said. But no sooner made the claim than retracted it --: even with the thinner history of settler Australia, forgetfulness is endemic! I'd begun my own reclamation project in the 1980s, publishing my 1960s diaries & notes concerning La Mama & the emerging new poetry scene, and then pushing back to the '50s & '40s for roots, and intending then to bring the whole thing back to the present. But I shelved it all the moment I stopped producing H/EAR magazine in 1985. (I've been thinking of re-asembling it within the magazine space of my blog recently --the blog might now be the best medium for my concept of the 'active archive'.)
And so, returning to Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals, I was disappointed not to find anything local. Jim Burns says that his 1967 article, The American Influence, "has dated in the sense that some of the facts have changed." --but he doesnt repudiate his original statement : "I suppose I am, in a way, an exile in my own country. (...) In fact, I can't honestly say I feel very much part of English life in general. I'm probably in a position similar to the American expatriates in paris in the 1920s, moving around the areas i know best, ignored by most of the locals, and in touch with a few literary acquaintances by mail, and a few local friends because of our interest in jazz and drink." What I hoped I'd find in Burns' collection was something else on British '50s & '60s predecessors --though, predecessors of whom & what? Without the dharma, who & what are these (notional) bums?!
It's forty-odd years since the Sixties, and boxed sets to prove it! And there are fiftieth anniversary editions of the seminal Beats, not to mention "The Original Scroll", before us. Are Griff's mountains --Lakes District, Wales, Scotland --the closest our English selves will get to Taoist & Buddhist Asia, not to mention the Beats' Tamalpais & etc?
Happy New Year!
Love, Kris
***
Weymouth/Dorset, UK
19 April-16 July,'09
Dear Kris,
I'm floored by your question in the last letter and by my life's current events. To touch upon the latter : earlier this year it was realized that Mum had Alzheimer's. Her short-term memory-loss impacts on life here sharply. In some ways we have a normal life given she's coming up 85, but to cap it off she's had a fall in town and fractured her hip. Looks like she'll be in hospital quite a while. Anyway, it's some respite for me to write if I can get into gear.
As to your question -- "What is the British context for the Dharma Bums?" -- hmmm? To me Dharma Bums seems an essentially American trait. Americans are so 'open'. They 'let go' and 'go for it'. Put their all into things. Not that the British don't. They're eccentrics, their trait is eccentricity -- people of the ilk of Griff Rhys-Jones whom you mention. But they don't seem able to accommodate the spiritual. That is, the artists don't. Dharma Bum for me says 'Buddhist', 'artist', 'Bohemian', 'poet', 'free spirit'... a merging of all these. I don't aspire to be an English Dharma Bum! Have never felt English English. As an Egyptian said to Mum, "But you're not Egyptian Egyptian." Anyway, the British don't do it for me. Just isolated pockets here and there I relate to. But as I said, I'm not English English. Am I labouring the point?
Poetry : I look to Chinese, Japanese and American models. Jazz : Americans (I mean, Courtney Pine, for instance, is not a great musician -- innovative but not great). And there's no U.K. Buddhist magazine with the profile of Tricycle, Buddha Dharma or Shambala Sun, tho' I 'enjoy' the Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. But that is a dedicated Soto Zen publication.
There is no hint of Dharma Bummery in Rhys-Jones or his Mountains t.v. series, though I do like it. And I've been watching Julia Bradbury in the footsteps of Alfred Wainwright (A. W.). I watch all the walking programmes. I don't think Dharma Bum comes into it. One of two Brits I have regard for and makes me think 'Dharma Bum' is Bill Wyatt. (I don't know if Bill Wyatt and Ken Jones relate to being Dharma Dums. Both are poets and Buddhists.) Wyatt's latest is Gleamings from the Throssel's Nest (Longread Publishing, 2005). 'Throssel's Nest' refers to Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey up in Northumberland, where Wyatt goes for retreats. Initially Jiya Kennett forsook her native England for the U.S. There was antipathy from the British Buddhist establishment on her return from Japan. The U.S., as usual, was more accommodating.
The other, Ken Jones, I'm tempted to also call a Dharma Bum, but wonder if he's more the 'Pilgrim Fox' of his self-styled persona? See Pilgrim Foxes : Haiku & Haiku Prose by Ken Jones, James Norton & Sean O'Connor, published by Pilgrim Press, 2001. From the blurb, "These three writers are on a spiritual quest. They are foxy pilgrims. But fox is a trickster, a shape-shifter. And this quest about how to make sense -- or nonsense -- of our lives is far from straightforward." So, it is a spiritual quest not dissimilar to being a Dharma Bum. But I don't think they identify with what is essentially an American manifestation. Jones is the pick of the three. Also, his Stallion's Crag : Haiku & Haibun (Iron Press, 2003), and Arrows of Stones : Haibun (British Haiku Society, 2002) are top notch. Jones is well known and respected on the British Buddhist scene, and widely published.
Beyond these two I haven't found anything to get excited about in respect of Dharma Bums in Britain. In any case, activity is all very well, but what about mind? Walking in itself doesn't make a Dharma Bum. As Arthur Braverman writes, "Most of the foreigners in Kyoto in the early Seventies were wanderers and bearers of an exciting new consciousness. we would strike up conversation with each other on trains or in coffee-shops. These people don't look like dharma bums. But there again, neither do I. Are they exchange students, businessmen, or simply tourists?" (Living and Dying in Zazen, Weatherhill, 2003.)
On the bus back from Dorchester hospital this afternoon, after visiting Mum, I started reading A Blue Hand by Deborah Baker (Penguin, 2009). It's "The Tragicomic, Mind-Altering Odyssey of Allen Ginsberg, a Holy Fool, a Rebel Muse, a Dharma Bum and His Prickly Bride in India." This is the real deal for me! The Americans have it!
So, who's to know? Dharma Bum aint visible in U.K., but things do go on.
Your aspiring Dharma Bum of a brother,
Bernard
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
THE LIFE AND POETRY OF SHELTON LEA
COLIN TALBOT
SHELTON, PRINCE OF FITZROY
(a review of Delinquent Angel, the biography of Shelton Lea by Diana Georgeff, published Random House, Australia, 2007.)
romantic |rōˈmantik; rə-|
adjective
1 inclined toward or suggestive of the feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love : a romantic candlelit dinner.
• relating to love, esp. in a sentimental or idealized way : a romantic comedy.
See note at sentimental .
2 . of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality : a romantic attitude toward the past | some romantic dream of country peace.
3 (usu. Romantic) of, relating to, or denoting the artistic and literary movement of Romanticism : the Romantic tradition.
noun
a person with romantic beliefs or attitudes : I am an incurable romantic.
• (usu. Romantic) a writer or artist of the Romantic movement.
DERIVATIVES
romantically |-ik(ə)lē| |roʊˈmøn(t)ək(ə)li| adverb
ORIGIN mid 17th cent. (referring to the characteristics of romance in a narrative): from archaic romaunt [tale of chivalry,] from an Old French variant of romanz (see romance ).
When I heard there was a biography of Shelton coming out, it was a bag of mixed emotions. Good that the enfant terrible was to be noted, celebrated probably, by the machine which loves to punish poets in the worst way – that is, to ignore and to not publish. And emotions from a darker zone because I had not been consulted for biographical data. I coulda been a contender, I could have been somebody in that biography.
Okay…To be sure to be sure, I was but a minor player in just the B Role of Shelley’s (I was gonna say ‘braggadocio’ life. But I don’t mean that in a rude way, I think I mean ‘shining’, or ‘romantic’) life. But like all of us who knew him, I felt that I knew him.
There had been one line which only Shelton, a policewoman, a quite comatose drunk and I were witness to. Reading the book, as I have now done, I can see that the comment by Shelton to the ‘jack’ really was made for this book. It was perfect as a window into his way, into the journey and moral righteousness that was this knockabout poet. Shelley was a lover. A lover of life. Abide with me while I regail:
Spinning out of the Albion Hotel *one night, Shelton and I were headed Christ Knows Where(* the Albion was on the corner of Lygon and Faraday in Carlton, now replaced by a frock shop and in the early seventies, chockerblock with artists/panhandlers/pricks/ponces/partygoers/poets/physicists/novelists/Pram Factory etc etc plus the odd murderer) when he spots a policewoman with a divvy van (we used to call them the Black Maria back in South Australia—or my Scots grandmother did, and maybe it is so in Victoria too) loading a bloke in to the lock-up.
Shelton is outraged at the spectacle and confronts the uniformed woman with a snarled (and I quote verbatim because of the strong impression of the moment…) "Any man who turns the key on another man is a dog!”
I got him out of there, as I didn’t want to see us in the divvy van too, and the copper was glad to see the back of us.
The title of the book about Shelton – Delinquent Angel – is a just title. It is perfect for the boy. And I do like the book. With reservations. It has been researched up the keister, apart from missing out on a few essential spectators to the Romantic life that Shelton lead.
A friend of ours, Billy Baker (not a poet, not a published poet, but a face from the Albion and the times) ran with Shelton in the teenage years. Billy knew a lot, a real lot about Shelton in those years. The author did speak to Billy on the phone but I suspect she missed a lot of pure gold to be had by an afternoon with Bill talking of Shelley.
That said, the book has many (though not a daunting amount of) pages and reads well and full. Like all great persons, Shelton lead a life that could serve to fill the pages of more than one biography, and each would be worthy…well here I’m in truly hypothetical space, so I’ll say potentially worthy.
I first met Shelton when I wrote for a counter-culture newspaper named The Digger. IT was a great paper, a broadsheet and acknowledged worldwide in the alternative scene as being a class act. Names like (well, actually and in fact) Helen Garner, Virginia Frazer, Phillip Fraser (I think the ‘s’ and ‘z’ are where they ought be), Garrie Hutchinson, Bill Garner, Jenny Brown (now Jenjewel), Ponch Hawkes etc etc worked for the rag.
I had reviewed a book by Shelton and I think the collection included a poem with a line about hammering a dog to death, and I reacted to it. Also Shelton sometimes was a trifle majestic with his language and I being not a great fan of the prosaic. … though some might contend otherwise… anyway, the review I gave was ‘mixed’.
And by chance a few days after publication of the review, at The Albion, someone said that Shelton Lea, I didn’t yet know him, was there. I went up and introduced myself. I said I had written the review. Shelton said he'd read it. Now Shelton wasn’t built like a brick shithouse and his fighting skills were never formalised, as far as I know, and he had no karate belts or martial arts gradings. I was taller and weighed in a division or two heavier. But he could summon the hard eye of a bloke who’ll happily go in. Especially when the honour of someone has been tarnished. In this case, his.
But he said, not in these exact words but near enough…that he respected honesty, as in my equivocating review, and he appreciated that I had faced up to him. Shelley had dash, and he admired it in others, even if, as in my case, the dash was fleeting and minor.
I immediately liked him, and not just because he had no plans to deck me.
Shelton was the true spirit of poetry. The wanderer, you might catch him at a hippy poetry reading here, a library ladies luncheon reading there, or jumping up on the bar of a rough pub somewhere inland to read his work, and almost beggin’ for a punch in the gob.
Over the years I can’t remember a time when to run into Shelton was not an uplifting moment…well, maybe the odd time when he was too pissed to perambulate, or too stoned to dig into his pocket and share what was making him fly.
Hard Time One: He was really angry when the publishing company I was a founding member of –Outback Press – stuffed up the publishing of his poetry collection, The Palatine Madonna, misspelling the cover to make ‘Palantine’.
Of course there is always the obligation of the writer to proofread (you the writer of the book are the one who cares most and knows most, and the chance will never comer again) but…the publisher must wear it. I said to Shelley that I too thought it was shabby and then made it clear that I had been cleaned out of Outback Press (with Mark Gillespie) and that Fred Milgrom and Morrie Schwartz, who had tipped out Mark and me, were the responsible ones. But I won’t venture further down this memory lane, that dark time is not for this review.
Hard Time Two: And the only other time was when somehow he ended up with what I thought was a rare copy of a theosophy book by Madam Blavatsky that had started out that day being owned by me…he didn’t nick it, I gave it to him, but I suspect there was so me sort of hypnosis thing happening. And really, madam Blavatsky wasn’t all that important. Actually I’m just saying that, I wouldn’t know either way.
Speaking of Times: The last time I saw Shelton was at Shelton and (his partner in life) Lee’s place for dinner, a few months before he left this world for parts unknown, or left in parts and unknown, when he invited me and my friend Liz, and a handful of poets, to celebrate the launch of Raffaella Torresan’s book of photography of poets reading live around Melbourne.
Shelton had acted as publisher, and I had written the cover notes. There was, at the dinner party, unfortunately, a moment were voices were raised over an issue (an issue I took seriously), things got a bit testy and Shelton watched from the sidelines. He didn’t jump in and up hold the honor of the situation, as I just assumed (but was not encouraging or wanting or hoping for) would happen. And I guess that’s when I felt something was up with his state…more than just the crook ankle that the walking cane and the slow release morphine started. For normally Shelley would have been front and square.
I don’t mean for this to sound like I think I was a close friend or that I knew Shelley well. Many others knew him better for longer and in a more real way. But I was a close friend and knew him well. (That’s the sort of statement Socrates could make I reckon.)
When he had his bookshop up in North Fitzroy called Dehavillands (the significance is mentioned in the biography I think), I had a book I’d written called The Zen Detective (it was totally unpublicised by the publisher so you’d never know it had been released) and I placed a few in his shop. Sometimes I got cash from a sale (but I kept sales records, I hasten to mention), sometimes, if he was short, I’d swap my sale for a book or two in his shop, and more often than I wished, the invoice had sort of slipped behind a cabinet and we didn’t know what had sold or what he held…After a while, I realised that it didn’t really matter. It was simply a reason to visit, a transaction to have while Shell sat in the back room smoking tobacco lacerated dope, drinking mild grog and swallowing slow-acting morphine (for a broken foot).
It wasn’t as if I thought his poetry was the greatest – but apart from John Forbes and Kris Hemensley and a couple of others, Judith Wright, Slessor, CJ Dennis, I dunno… okay there are heaps of good ones, I dunno…I am not a massive unquestioning fan of modern poetry anymore– but his presence as a poet was perfect. He was poetry. Now that sounds a wee naff, but I dunno how else to say it. Errol Flynn, Lord Byron, Rimbaud, oh yeah,
Shelley…
But back to the book. And I liked the book,to read it is to get a feeling for the regard in which Shelton was held. Is to understand a little of why the title Delinquent Angel is just right. How the wee Shelton was abused, and it is awful to read of this abuse. That poetry saved his life from much much more crime and sorrow is just true.
That poetry gave a grand focus for the rough diamond light blazing from his soul is beyond dispute.
Now there is an episode in the book where Shelton is at a poets' pub in Sydney, I think it was the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle, called the three weeds by locals and poets – I see Wales didn’t get a look-in, I dunno what their national flower is– at a poetry night and Shelton emptied his bladder on a row of Hell’s Angels' Harleys (I think they were Harleys).
I read in the book that Robert Adamson thought it had to be an accident and someone else thought it was deliberate. The outcome was Shelley was bashed a bit by the bikies when they came out.
Well, friends, it was deliberate because I was there, beggin him (well, begging is a bit strong, let’s say trying to appeal to a drunk Shelton’s reason, when he was already upset at the way the bikies were acting inside the pub – and I have no idea what the problem was, but Shelley felt his honor was besmirched, whatever) not to do what I feared he was about to do.
We’d left the hotel together to do what I can’t recall, he saw the row of bikes, I saw the light in his eyes raise in radiance, and he changed the direction of his minor alcoholic stagger. Then he fumbled with the zip of his fly and I yelled out ‘Shelton, don’t, please' (a few tries) and then ‘Shelley, I’m not going to back you up on this one, Shelley you’re on your own..dont please’ etc etc.
Yeah, I admit it, I never had much dash, and Shelton had it by the wheatbag full—although Shelley’s was coupled with a chaotic edge, often.
So he pissed on the bikes, the bikies came out, true to my word I sat back and watched as half a dozen leather clad blokes knocked Shelley about a bit. I mean, he had just done a pee on their prides n joy. He fought back as best he could.
When they stopped, I probably helped him up, I dunno. He had a split lip. Blood. He was happy. Another stoush when he was five out. So if there’s a second edition of Delinquent Angel, I offer this version as the whole truth of a moment in Shelton’s remarkable life.
Take two: Now after writing the above, as luck would have it, the next day I was at lunch in Windsor with Jen Jewel Brown, who is a poet and was Jenny Brown when she wrote for The Digger so many years ago, and she is also literary executrix for Shelley’s Estate. Jen says that there is not a lot of happiness about the biography. For instance she says there is dispute over the use of Shelley’s poetry in the book (a lot is used) and that there are rights’ issues. Among other issues. I will not here break the privilege Jen’s conversation details with me. But it was necessary to mention the above, I felt. If you want to read one view of his life, the biography exists. Yet there was much more to Shelley’s life, and many more views and angles are yet to be shown the light.
If you want to read his work, go to Shelley’s books of poetry.
And that is where I leave it.
colin talbot st kilda july 2009
-------------------------------------------
Colin Talbot is a self-described "minor Victorian novelist". An ex rock columnist for The Australian and existential columnist for Richard Neville's Living Daylights newspaper, he was a founding director of Outback Press in the '70s. Wrote & directed the feature film Sweethearts from his own novel. Last published novel was The Zen Detective. Web, www.travenworld.com/
SHELTON, PRINCE OF FITZROY
(a review of Delinquent Angel, the biography of Shelton Lea by Diana Georgeff, published Random House, Australia, 2007.)
romantic |rōˈmantik; rə-|
adjective
1 inclined toward or suggestive of the feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love : a romantic candlelit dinner.
• relating to love, esp. in a sentimental or idealized way : a romantic comedy.
See note at sentimental .
2 . of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality : a romantic attitude toward the past | some romantic dream of country peace.
3 (usu. Romantic) of, relating to, or denoting the artistic and literary movement of Romanticism : the Romantic tradition.
noun
a person with romantic beliefs or attitudes : I am an incurable romantic.
• (usu. Romantic) a writer or artist of the Romantic movement.
DERIVATIVES
romantically |-ik(ə)lē| |roʊˈmøn(t)ək(ə)li| adverb
ORIGIN mid 17th cent. (referring to the characteristics of romance in a narrative): from archaic romaunt [tale of chivalry,] from an Old French variant of romanz (see romance ).
When I heard there was a biography of Shelton coming out, it was a bag of mixed emotions. Good that the enfant terrible was to be noted, celebrated probably, by the machine which loves to punish poets in the worst way – that is, to ignore and to not publish. And emotions from a darker zone because I had not been consulted for biographical data. I coulda been a contender, I could have been somebody in that biography.
Okay…To be sure to be sure, I was but a minor player in just the B Role of Shelley’s (I was gonna say ‘braggadocio’ life. But I don’t mean that in a rude way, I think I mean ‘shining’, or ‘romantic’) life. But like all of us who knew him, I felt that I knew him.
There had been one line which only Shelton, a policewoman, a quite comatose drunk and I were witness to. Reading the book, as I have now done, I can see that the comment by Shelton to the ‘jack’ really was made for this book. It was perfect as a window into his way, into the journey and moral righteousness that was this knockabout poet. Shelley was a lover. A lover of life. Abide with me while I regail:
Spinning out of the Albion Hotel *one night, Shelton and I were headed Christ Knows Where(* the Albion was on the corner of Lygon and Faraday in Carlton, now replaced by a frock shop and in the early seventies, chockerblock with artists/panhandlers/pricks/
Shelton is outraged at the spectacle and confronts the uniformed woman with a snarled (and I quote verbatim because of the strong impression of the moment…) "Any man who turns the key on another man is a dog!”
I got him out of there, as I didn’t want to see us in the divvy van too, and the copper was glad to see the back of us.
The title of the book about Shelton – Delinquent Angel – is a just title. It is perfect for the boy. And I do like the book. With reservations. It has been researched up the keister, apart from missing out on a few essential spectators to the Romantic life that Shelton lead.
A friend of ours, Billy Baker (not a poet, not a published poet, but a face from the Albion and the times) ran with Shelton in the teenage years. Billy knew a lot, a real lot about Shelton in those years. The author did speak to Billy on the phone but I suspect she missed a lot of pure gold to be had by an afternoon with Bill talking of Shelley.
That said, the book has many (though not a daunting amount of) pages and reads well and full. Like all great persons, Shelton lead a life that could serve to fill the pages of more than one biography, and each would be worthy…well here I’m in truly hypothetical space, so I’ll say potentially worthy.
I first met Shelton when I wrote for a counter-culture newspaper named The Digger. IT was a great paper, a broadsheet and acknowledged worldwide in the alternative scene as being a class act. Names like (well, actually and in fact) Helen Garner, Virginia Frazer, Phillip Fraser (I think the ‘s’ and ‘z’ are where they ought be), Garrie Hutchinson, Bill Garner, Jenny Brown (now Jenjewel), Ponch Hawkes etc etc worked for the rag.
I had reviewed a book by Shelton and I think the collection included a poem with a line about hammering a dog to death, and I reacted to it. Also Shelton sometimes was a trifle majestic with his language and I being not a great fan of the prosaic. … though some might contend otherwise… anyway, the review I gave was ‘mixed’.
And by chance a few days after publication of the review, at The Albion, someone said that Shelton Lea, I didn’t yet know him, was there. I went up and introduced myself. I said I had written the review. Shelton said he'd read it. Now Shelton wasn’t built like a brick shithouse and his fighting skills were never formalised, as far as I know, and he had no karate belts or martial arts gradings. I was taller and weighed in a division or two heavier. But he could summon the hard eye of a bloke who’ll happily go in. Especially when the honour of someone has been tarnished. In this case, his.
But he said, not in these exact words but near enough…that he respected honesty, as in my equivocating review, and he appreciated that I had faced up to him. Shelley had dash, and he admired it in others, even if, as in my case, the dash was fleeting and minor.
I immediately liked him, and not just because he had no plans to deck me.
Shelton was the true spirit of poetry. The wanderer, you might catch him at a hippy poetry reading here, a library ladies luncheon reading there, or jumping up on the bar of a rough pub somewhere inland to read his work, and almost beggin’ for a punch in the gob.
Over the years I can’t remember a time when to run into Shelton was not an uplifting moment…well, maybe the odd time when he was too pissed to perambulate, or too stoned to dig into his pocket and share what was making him fly.
Hard Time One: He was really angry when the publishing company I was a founding member of –Outback Press – stuffed up the publishing of his poetry collection, The Palatine Madonna, misspelling the cover to make ‘Palantine’.
Of course there is always the obligation of the writer to proofread (you the writer of the book are the one who cares most and knows most, and the chance will never comer again) but…the publisher must wear it. I said to Shelley that I too thought it was shabby and then made it clear that I had been cleaned out of Outback Press (with Mark Gillespie) and that Fred Milgrom and Morrie Schwartz, who had tipped out Mark and me, were the responsible ones. But I won’t venture further down this memory lane, that dark time is not for this review.
Hard Time Two: And the only other time was when somehow he ended up with what I thought was a rare copy of a theosophy book by Madam Blavatsky that had started out that day being owned by me…he didn’t nick it, I gave it to him, but I suspect there was so me sort of hypnosis thing happening. And really, madam Blavatsky wasn’t all that important. Actually I’m just saying that, I wouldn’t know either way.
Speaking of Times: The last time I saw Shelton was at Shelton and (his partner in life) Lee’s place for dinner, a few months before he left this world for parts unknown, or left in parts and unknown, when he invited me and my friend Liz, and a handful of poets, to celebrate the launch of Raffaella Torresan’s book of photography of poets reading live around Melbourne.
Shelton had acted as publisher, and I had written the cover notes. There was, at the dinner party, unfortunately, a moment were voices were raised over an issue (an issue I took seriously), things got a bit testy and Shelton watched from the sidelines. He didn’t jump in and up hold the honor of the situation, as I just assumed (but was not encouraging or wanting or hoping for) would happen. And I guess that’s when I felt something was up with his state…more than just the crook ankle that the walking cane and the slow release morphine started. For normally Shelley would have been front and square.
I don’t mean for this to sound like I think I was a close friend or that I knew Shelley well. Many others knew him better for longer and in a more real way. But I was a close friend and knew him well. (That’s the sort of statement Socrates could make I reckon.)
When he had his bookshop up in North Fitzroy called Dehavillands (the significance is mentioned in the biography I think), I had a book I’d written called The Zen Detective (it was totally unpublicised by the publisher so you’d never know it had been released) and I placed a few in his shop. Sometimes I got cash from a sale (but I kept sales records, I hasten to mention), sometimes, if he was short, I’d swap my sale for a book or two in his shop, and more often than I wished, the invoice had sort of slipped behind a cabinet and we didn’t know what had sold or what he held…After a while, I realised that it didn’t really matter. It was simply a reason to visit, a transaction to have while Shell sat in the back room smoking tobacco lacerated dope, drinking mild grog and swallowing slow-acting morphine (for a broken foot).
It wasn’t as if I thought his poetry was the greatest – but apart from John Forbes and Kris Hemensley and a couple of others, Judith Wright, Slessor, CJ Dennis, I dunno… okay there are heaps of good ones, I dunno…I am not a massive unquestioning fan of modern poetry anymore– but his presence as a poet was perfect. He was poetry. Now that sounds a wee naff, but I dunno how else to say it. Errol Flynn, Lord Byron, Rimbaud, oh yeah,
Shelley…
But back to the book. And I liked the book,to read it is to get a feeling for the regard in which Shelton was held. Is to understand a little of why the title Delinquent Angel is just right. How the wee Shelton was abused, and it is awful to read of this abuse. That poetry saved his life from much much more crime and sorrow is just true.
That poetry gave a grand focus for the rough diamond light blazing from his soul is beyond dispute.
Now there is an episode in the book where Shelton is at a poets' pub in Sydney, I think it was the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle, called the three weeds by locals and poets – I see Wales didn’t get a look-in, I dunno what their national flower is– at a poetry night and Shelton emptied his bladder on a row of Hell’s Angels' Harleys (I think they were Harleys).
I read in the book that Robert Adamson thought it had to be an accident and someone else thought it was deliberate. The outcome was Shelley was bashed a bit by the bikies when they came out.
Well, friends, it was deliberate because I was there, beggin him (well, begging is a bit strong, let’s say trying to appeal to a drunk Shelton’s reason, when he was already upset at the way the bikies were acting inside the pub – and I have no idea what the problem was, but Shelley felt his honor was besmirched, whatever) not to do what I feared he was about to do.
We’d left the hotel together to do what I can’t recall, he saw the row of bikes, I saw the light in his eyes raise in radiance, and he changed the direction of his minor alcoholic stagger. Then he fumbled with the zip of his fly and I yelled out ‘Shelton, don’t, please' (a few tries) and then ‘Shelley, I’m not going to back you up on this one, Shelley you’re on your own..dont please’ etc etc.
Yeah, I admit it, I never had much dash, and Shelton had it by the wheatbag full—although Shelley’s was coupled with a chaotic edge, often.
So he pissed on the bikes, the bikies came out, true to my word I sat back and watched as half a dozen leather clad blokes knocked Shelley about a bit. I mean, he had just done a pee on their prides n joy. He fought back as best he could.
When they stopped, I probably helped him up, I dunno. He had a split lip. Blood. He was happy. Another stoush when he was five out. So if there’s a second edition of Delinquent Angel, I offer this version as the whole truth of a moment in Shelton’s remarkable life.
Take two: Now after writing the above, as luck would have it, the next day I was at lunch in Windsor with Jen Jewel Brown, who is a poet and was Jenny Brown when she wrote for The Digger so many years ago, and she is also literary executrix for Shelley’s Estate. Jen says that there is not a lot of happiness about the biography. For instance she says there is dispute over the use of Shelley’s poetry in the book (a lot is used) and that there are rights’ issues. Among other issues. I will not here break the privilege Jen’s conversation details with me. But it was necessary to mention the above, I felt. If you want to read one view of his life, the biography exists. Yet there was much more to Shelley’s life, and many more views and angles are yet to be shown the light.
If you want to read his work, go to Shelley’s books of poetry.
And that is where I leave it.
colin talbot st kilda july 2009
-------------------------------------------
Colin Talbot is a self-described "minor Victorian novelist". An ex rock columnist for The Australian and existential columnist for Richard Neville's Living Daylights newspaper, he was a founding director of Outback Press in the '70s. Wrote & directed the feature film Sweethearts from his own novel. Last published novel was The Zen Detective. Web, www.travenworld.com/
Sunday, July 5, 2009
TIM HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE, Additions posted July, 2009
A NOTE ON STYLE & AFFINITY
There's an apparent seamlessness to Tim's concerns & style, from his commentaries in PUNK PURGE : TEDDY BOY TALES, in the early '80s, to the late diaries & stand-alone pieces of his last few years (late '90s to 2003). A couple of ways of looking at that : he found his style very early and maintained it for twenty years, or he didnt develop much beyond what the precocious writings reveal. Certainly he was ready for a new stage at the time of his death. In conversations over several years he never disagreed that he had some serious fiction in him as well as music & cultural commentary; obvious, too, that so long as he was playing music he'd be writing lyrics which would have had to transcend the narratives of teenage angst at some time. But who knows? Young deaths suspend everything; one's left with questions forever.
Yet it's clear from the start that he's a cultural commentator & a memoirist (which, coincidentally, recalls a recent conversation with Stella Glorie, about the difference between essay & memoir, especially how autobiography is or may be written). I'm addressing Tim but may as well be explicating myself; my way of recording the history which includes oneself, implicating oneself within the historical, feeling this history course one's own corpuscles... It's clear to me also that at least in the writing there's an affinity which begs the question of authorial distinction, though this might well be what any reader feels of a powerfully resonant text : that one's reading accords with the writing to the extent that it occurs within the pulse of the writing, as though two edges of the same perception. In addition, my son Tim is who I am in his skin & on his scene... The gift for me of this period of transcription is in recognizing another manifestation of the Hemensley writer-chronicler. I feel we are "the Elder" & "the Younger" --name-sakes & inscribers of the very same nuance.
--Kris Hemensley
March 16-18,'09--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TIM HEMENSLEY
THE "KILLAYONI" SCENE
i thought i'd use this last page [of Punk Purge, #5, ed] to remember a club called The Killayoni Club, one of the best non-pub venues for new music (new wave or rock, not strictly commercial) in the last 3 years. when i was interviewed on the "Behind the Shelter Sheds" (a programme for kids on Radio 3CR, what else could it be!), i named the club as one of 2 places kids (under 15s) could get to see live new wave or punk. a few months alter The Killayoni Club was gone, and the bands scattered to other places far and wide. The Killayoni Club was located in Flinders Lane [Melbourne], and bands such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, Plays With Marionettes, 3 Toed Sloths, Daughters of Charity, and Voix would be the night's entertainment. the first time i went there was new year's eve, 1981. meeting Kathy Buck (manageress) at the door was a surprise (as i thought it was a Polish night-club)! and later on actually meting the performers was something rare, and something which probably hasn't happened since the demise of the 1st wave of punk in this country in 1980. let me point out that the club was NOT strictly a punk club. this 'zine isn't strictly just a punk 'zine. i am a punk, punk is the music i love and therefore i give considerable coverage to punk. but the music and bands who perform at The Killayoni Club hardly ever get any mention in the rock press, & most of the gigs they do are publicised by word of mouth, so there should be some 'zine or magazine that talks about them. one of the bands who (to me, anyway) represents the true KILLAYONI sound was 2D. they played very sixtiesish garage band post-punk rock, very heavy, very psychedelic (ie, garage psychedelia like late Pretty Things, Masters Apprentices, Shadows of Night, Kingsmen etc), very good. even though 2D are gone now and Ifs, Buts & Maybes have taken their place, the energy etc still remains. THE band of the club was The Incredibly Strange Creatures... who were thoroughly improvisational and seemed to alienate most of their audience rather than attract them. Kathy Buck lying on the stage screaming and Jim Buck monotonously saying "she says / she says / she says" while other 'musicians' have arguments through saxophones, was hardly 'fun' or a 'good night out'! punk was supposed to be anti-music-music but the person who said that would probably be choking on their words when they saw The Incredibly Strange Creatures! another band who sometimes appeared there was Three Toed Sloths, consisting of Jim Buck on heavily distorted guitar, and Terry Shannon on bass. with "songs" (ihn th' greyest C'n'W tradischon!) such as 'i'm gonna bust yer ass, you son of a bitch!", Johnny Cash's "angel from vegas" and "i wanna be a worm". of course, no history of The Killayoni Club would be complete without mentioning Royal Flush (plug!!!), who played the club on the "FINAL FLING KILLAYONI THING", final night. oh, i don't know what to say now!! alas, poor Killayoni, i knew it well! P.S. : watch out for the album, "Killayoni Rag", with Royal Flush, The Three Toed Sloth, Ania Walwicz, et al!
(Xmas Eve, 1982)
[NOTE: Melbourne's Missing Link record shop also published a transcription from Punk Purge of the same review in their newsletter, August issue, 2003. Their memorial for Tim Hemensley can be read at missinglink.net.au/newsletter.php?issue=aug0301 ________________________________________________________________
SELF MOTIVATIONAL THERAPY SPEECH
i walk tall. i walk proud. i create the footprints that the stars walk in. i've seen it all, i've seen the aura of many a holy and disturbed man shatter under the strain of a broken ego. i sit on the left hand of god. i share martinis with the living buddha. the virgin mary cooks my meals and moses does my laundry. i never sleep. i'm awake 35 hours a day, 365 days a week. let's get serious : it's 4 a.m. in fitzroy st. and i'm hanging out with the famous and sleazy. the degenerates, the scuz, the scum, i love 'em all. y'see, i'm a high flyer -- live fast. the fast lane is the only lane there is. 200 m.p.h., adrenalin fling thru' my body, running on empty, my head in full throttle. i'll never die. so, 4 a.m., my t-shirt covered in pizza stains, blood, sweat and beer, and i feel good. yeah. GOOD. i'm out of my mind, out of my head, completely whacked, i wanna die, but i wanna live. YEAH. i'm a full blown crazy, a real live one. the undercover cops know me and stay out of my way. the hell's angels guard my front door. the mafia sends me free siccilian lasagna samples. i look down on everything, the world looks up at me. i need nothing, i want everything. i'm on a natural high, helped along by vast quantities of drugs. i'm a loaded, explosive, armed and dangerous mass of manhood.
(1988)
[Note : "Creative Writing Semester 1, 1988. Well oh wondrous one, let me bask in your aura. Great stuff -- very funny -- excellent use of words -- great juxtaposition of ideas -- great use of cliche as a means of self-deprecating humour, you 'armed and dangerous mass of manhood'! --Graeme Smith, teacher at Ardoch College, Melbourne.]
________________________________________________________________
DEAR KEITH
Dear Keith,
what's happenin' man? You don't know me, but i'm in a band called GOD, we've got some records comin' out on Au Go Go Records. (You've heard of us?) We're doin' a lot of gigs at the moment, 'cept we keep gettin' banned or barred or kicked out of a lotta places, but that's life when you're a young, exciting rock'n'roll band. Anyway, the purpose of this letter is : i'm getting a band together with some of my favourite players, it'll be called SLIM KILLERS, it's nothing serious, just a few gigs here and there, doing lots of my fave songs of all time, maybe write some stuff for the thing? It'll just be good sweaty fun. Mind you, we'll be playing smaller venues than what yr used to, but we'll try for some open-air gigs if the crowds are TOO big!! Anyay, pass the word around, 'cos i want the BEST!! Ask Ronnie Wood. Hey : it'd be coool if youse could both come on down?!
Alright. Anyway, get yrself a copy of "My Pal", the GOD single, and look out for our 12" "PHALLICA" 8 track e.p. Hey, i'll even put your name on the door next time yr in Melbourne, O.K.?
O.K. Take care,
Tim Hemensley
MEAT CLEAVER BOY
(ca, '87-88)
________________________________________________________________
THE FIRST DREAM
The first dream occurred in late 1983 or early 1984. Unable to sleep or relax throughout the nite, breaking into a nervous, shaking sweat around dawn.
A gradual feeling of powerlessness, lifelessness, blood being drained from arteries and organs, a sickening buzz in the ears becoming progressively louder, a sense of suffocation and impending doom. Then a voice, talking not in words but images and feelings
"YOU WILL NEVER FLY IN A PLANE OVER BERMUDA. ONLY DEATH AWAITS YOU THERE. THE SKY OVER BERMUDA TURNS PURPLE. JESUS ON A CROSS. THIS IS THE TERRIBLE SECRET. THIS IS WHY SO MANY DISAPPEAR.
HERE IS A MAP. YOU HAVE NO CONTROL. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST OF MANY VISITATIONS."
awakening with a scream as bodily sensation and brain blood flow was returned.
First dream / first death,
First blood / first fuck,
from now on, all would be tainted with the stench of premonition.
oOo
December 1983. The knife was green after being used to stir up paint.
It hurt as i slid it across my left wrist.
Unable to slice through flesh, grinding my veins into a mangled pulp, the blood sprayed as the result of friction.
Blood and skin clung to the paint. Tears ran down my face and the knife turned orange. A small scar the size of a freckle stains my wrist to remind me forever.
oOo
In June 1982 i stepped onstage with my school friends Roman and Simon at an inner city rock'n'roll venue and played Punk Rock for one hour without ever having held a bass guitar in my life. Two girls with short skirts and long blonde hair danced in front of the stage and yelled for more when we finished the set.
After the gig i met Jack Bloom (Feedback Jack) who told me it was the best thing he'd seen in 5 years. He took my number and booked us for two gigs, neither of which we played.
Most of the assorted parents and relatives who had gathered to see us were utterly disgusted by the band, the club, the scene. I felt ecstatic, excited, moved. The serpent gave me the apple and i consumed the whole tree.
I am lustful and greedy. My appetite has never been satiated.
oOo
The end of another drunken weekend -- bruised, battered and bloodshot.
Xmas Eve '89.
They took our only lord and murdered him so society could breathe easy.
In his name we take up the gun / the guitar -- the weapons of god.
The streets of every city will run with blood --
the sky over Bermuda will glow purple.
(Xmas Eve, 1989)
________________________________________________________________
"GIALLO" : ITALIAN FOR MURDER
1
It's a cold, dark nite in early '70s Rome. As David Hemmings walks home from a rehearsal of his Jazz combo, the heavens open & it begins to rain with a vengeance. Just as suddenly, the tense semi-silence is shattered by the sound of a Woman's screaming; Hemmings looks up in time to witness her murder... Through the window of an apartment on the second story of the building opposite him, a figure can be sen staggering, clutching at the deep knife wounds in her chest & side, then collapsing to the floor. Dropping his clarinet case, Hemmings runs into the building, up the stairs & through the open door of the apartment. The flat appears to be empty, except for the blood-soaked woman, & she is dead. A state of uncomprehending shock grips Hemmings as he crouches over the corpse, & he decides to run to the nearby Police Station to seek help. But as he leaves the apartment, Hemmings focusses on one detail : a framed Photograph of a composed yet fearsome looking Male face on the adjacent wall to the dead woman. Returning to the crime scene with the Police, Hemmings is unsettled by the sensation that SOMETHING has been altered here in his absence. While the bloodied form of the woman & the flat's general disarray is as it was, SOMETHING is missing... While describing the events of the murder (as he saw it) to the Police, Hemmings remembers the framed Photograph. He searches around in vain, but it is no longer there. An investigating officer suggests that the killer may've hidden from Hemmings, then removed the Photo (& himself) when Hemmings left the room. Furthermore, that this suggests the picture holds some clue to the crime. Later, Hemmings returns to the apartment alone & while snooping around for 'clues', he's jarred by a terrifying discovery: on the adjacent wall to where he'd stood over the dead woman, hangs a framed glass MIRROR. What he'd taken, at first glance, to be a Photograph was in fact a reflection of the killer himself, staring cooly back at Hemmings from the wall...
2
The above description of a scene from "Profundo Rosso", Dario Argento's most masterfully-realised early film, perfectly embodies the quality of the "Giallo" movie: essentially an Italian "Who-dunnit", with all the trade-marks of that genre (cops, killers, red-herrings & a gradually unfolding murder mystery). The wound is 'salted', if you will, by the uniquely European double-whammy of the "Giallo"; the intended 'effect' is Terror, achieved by utilising plot-premisses & action most commonly found in the conventions of Horror cinema. "Giallo" movies are Who-dunnits occurring in a Horror-movie context, yet "Giallo" is more than a 'genre'. It's more accurately represented as an ATMOSPHERE, an attitude & aesthetic approach to Film-making, achieved by photographic technique, lighting, music & plot-line perversity. Unlike the colour suggested by the word, "Giallo" movies are dark, brooding & cold-blooded. Far from sunny, gay Yellow, the rightful colours of these films are dark blue, black & the Deep Red of their more unfortunate characters' blood & grue. Put simply, "Giallo" is Italian for Murder.
(ca late '90s)
________________________________________________________________
[NOTE:
Transcription from hand- & type-written manuscript follows Tim's syntax, capitalization, & grammar except for typos & mistakes that would ordinarily have been picked up editorially.
--Kris Hemensley,
July 5th, 2009]
There's an apparent seamlessness to Tim's concerns & style, from his commentaries in PUNK PURGE : TEDDY BOY TALES, in the early '80s, to the late diaries & stand-alone pieces of his last few years (late '90s to 2003). A couple of ways of looking at that : he found his style very early and maintained it for twenty years, or he didnt develop much beyond what the precocious writings reveal. Certainly he was ready for a new stage at the time of his death. In conversations over several years he never disagreed that he had some serious fiction in him as well as music & cultural commentary; obvious, too, that so long as he was playing music he'd be writing lyrics which would have had to transcend the narratives of teenage angst at some time. But who knows? Young deaths suspend everything; one's left with questions forever.
Yet it's clear from the start that he's a cultural commentator & a memoirist (which, coincidentally, recalls a recent conversation with Stella Glorie, about the difference between essay & memoir, especially how autobiography is or may be written). I'm addressing Tim but may as well be explicating myself; my way of recording the history which includes oneself, implicating oneself within the historical, feeling this history course one's own corpuscles... It's clear to me also that at least in the writing there's an affinity which begs the question of authorial distinction, though this might well be what any reader feels of a powerfully resonant text : that one's reading accords with the writing to the extent that it occurs within the pulse of the writing, as though two edges of the same perception. In addition, my son Tim is who I am in his skin & on his scene... The gift for me of this period of transcription is in recognizing another manifestation of the Hemensley writer-chronicler. I feel we are "the Elder" & "the Younger" --name-sakes & inscribers of the very same nuance.
--Kris Hemensley
March 16-18,'09--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TIM HEMENSLEY
THE "KILLAYONI" SCENE
i thought i'd use this last page [of Punk Purge, #5, ed] to remember a club called The Killayoni Club, one of the best non-pub venues for new music (new wave or rock, not strictly commercial) in the last 3 years. when i was interviewed on the "Behind the Shelter Sheds" (a programme for kids on Radio 3CR, what else could it be!), i named the club as one of 2 places kids (under 15s) could get to see live new wave or punk. a few months alter The Killayoni Club was gone, and the bands scattered to other places far and wide. The Killayoni Club was located in Flinders Lane [Melbourne], and bands such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, Plays With Marionettes, 3 Toed Sloths, Daughters of Charity, and Voix would be the night's entertainment. the first time i went there was new year's eve, 1981. meeting Kathy Buck (manageress) at the door was a surprise (as i thought it was a Polish night-club)! and later on actually meting the performers was something rare, and something which probably hasn't happened since the demise of the 1st wave of punk in this country in 1980. let me point out that the club was NOT strictly a punk club. this 'zine isn't strictly just a punk 'zine. i am a punk, punk is the music i love and therefore i give considerable coverage to punk. but the music and bands who perform at The Killayoni Club hardly ever get any mention in the rock press, & most of the gigs they do are publicised by word of mouth, so there should be some 'zine or magazine that talks about them. one of the bands who (to me, anyway) represents the true KILLAYONI sound was 2D. they played very sixtiesish garage band post-punk rock, very heavy, very psychedelic (ie, garage psychedelia like late Pretty Things, Masters Apprentices, Shadows of Night, Kingsmen etc), very good. even though 2D are gone now and Ifs, Buts & Maybes have taken their place, the energy etc still remains. THE band of the club was The Incredibly Strange Creatures... who were thoroughly improvisational and seemed to alienate most of their audience rather than attract them. Kathy Buck lying on the stage screaming and Jim Buck monotonously saying "she says / she says / she says" while other 'musicians' have arguments through saxophones, was hardly 'fun' or a 'good night out'! punk was supposed to be anti-music-music but the person who said that would probably be choking on their words when they saw The Incredibly Strange Creatures! another band who sometimes appeared there was Three Toed Sloths, consisting of Jim Buck on heavily distorted guitar, and Terry Shannon on bass. with "songs" (ihn th' greyest C'n'W tradischon!) such as 'i'm gonna bust yer ass, you son of a bitch!", Johnny Cash's "angel from vegas" and "i wanna be a worm". of course, no history of The Killayoni Club would be complete without mentioning Royal Flush (plug!!!), who played the club on the "FINAL FLING KILLAYONI THING", final night. oh, i don't know what to say now!! alas, poor Killayoni, i knew it well! P.S. : watch out for the album, "Killayoni Rag", with Royal Flush, The Three Toed Sloth, Ania Walwicz, et al!
(Xmas Eve, 1982)
[NOTE: Melbourne's Missing Link record shop also published a transcription from Punk Purge of the same review in their newsletter, August issue, 2003. Their memorial for Tim Hemensley can be read at missinglink.net.au/newsletter.php?issue=aug0301 ________________________________________________________________
SELF MOTIVATIONAL THERAPY SPEECH
i walk tall. i walk proud. i create the footprints that the stars walk in. i've seen it all, i've seen the aura of many a holy and disturbed man shatter under the strain of a broken ego. i sit on the left hand of god. i share martinis with the living buddha. the virgin mary cooks my meals and moses does my laundry. i never sleep. i'm awake 35 hours a day, 365 days a week. let's get serious : it's 4 a.m. in fitzroy st. and i'm hanging out with the famous and sleazy. the degenerates, the scuz, the scum, i love 'em all. y'see, i'm a high flyer -- live fast. the fast lane is the only lane there is. 200 m.p.h., adrenalin fling thru' my body, running on empty, my head in full throttle. i'll never die. so, 4 a.m., my t-shirt covered in pizza stains, blood, sweat and beer, and i feel good. yeah. GOOD. i'm out of my mind, out of my head, completely whacked, i wanna die, but i wanna live. YEAH. i'm a full blown crazy, a real live one. the undercover cops know me and stay out of my way. the hell's angels guard my front door. the mafia sends me free siccilian lasagna samples. i look down on everything, the world looks up at me. i need nothing, i want everything. i'm on a natural high, helped along by vast quantities of drugs. i'm a loaded, explosive, armed and dangerous mass of manhood.
(1988)
[Note : "Creative Writing Semester 1, 1988. Well oh wondrous one, let me bask in your aura. Great stuff -- very funny -- excellent use of words -- great juxtaposition of ideas -- great use of cliche as a means of self-deprecating humour, you 'armed and dangerous mass of manhood'! --Graeme Smith, teacher at Ardoch College, Melbourne.]
________________________________________________________________
DEAR KEITH
Dear Keith,
what's happenin' man? You don't know me, but i'm in a band called GOD, we've got some records comin' out on Au Go Go Records. (You've heard of us?) We're doin' a lot of gigs at the moment, 'cept we keep gettin' banned or barred or kicked out of a lotta places, but that's life when you're a young, exciting rock'n'roll band. Anyway, the purpose of this letter is : i'm getting a band together with some of my favourite players, it'll be called SLIM KILLERS, it's nothing serious, just a few gigs here and there, doing lots of my fave songs of all time, maybe write some stuff for the thing? It'll just be good sweaty fun. Mind you, we'll be playing smaller venues than what yr used to, but we'll try for some open-air gigs if the crowds are TOO big!! Anyay, pass the word around, 'cos i want the BEST!! Ask Ronnie Wood. Hey : it'd be coool if youse could both come on down?!
Alright. Anyway, get yrself a copy of "My Pal", the GOD single, and look out for our 12" "PHALLICA" 8 track e.p. Hey, i'll even put your name on the door next time yr in Melbourne, O.K.?
O.K. Take care,
Tim Hemensley
MEAT CLEAVER BOY
(ca, '87-88)
________________________________________________________________
THE FIRST DREAM
The first dream occurred in late 1983 or early 1984. Unable to sleep or relax throughout the nite, breaking into a nervous, shaking sweat around dawn.
A gradual feeling of powerlessness, lifelessness, blood being drained from arteries and organs, a sickening buzz in the ears becoming progressively louder, a sense of suffocation and impending doom. Then a voice, talking not in words but images and feelings
"YOU WILL NEVER FLY IN A PLANE OVER BERMUDA. ONLY DEATH AWAITS YOU THERE. THE SKY OVER BERMUDA TURNS PURPLE. JESUS ON A CROSS. THIS IS THE TERRIBLE SECRET. THIS IS WHY SO MANY DISAPPEAR.
HERE IS A MAP. YOU HAVE NO CONTROL. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST OF MANY VISITATIONS."
awakening with a scream as bodily sensation and brain blood flow was returned.
First dream / first death,
First blood / first fuck,
from now on, all would be tainted with the stench of premonition.
oOo
December 1983. The knife was green after being used to stir up paint.
It hurt as i slid it across my left wrist.
Unable to slice through flesh, grinding my veins into a mangled pulp, the blood sprayed as the result of friction.
Blood and skin clung to the paint. Tears ran down my face and the knife turned orange. A small scar the size of a freckle stains my wrist to remind me forever.
oOo
In June 1982 i stepped onstage with my school friends Roman and Simon at an inner city rock'n'roll venue and played Punk Rock for one hour without ever having held a bass guitar in my life. Two girls with short skirts and long blonde hair danced in front of the stage and yelled for more when we finished the set.
After the gig i met Jack Bloom (Feedback Jack) who told me it was the best thing he'd seen in 5 years. He took my number and booked us for two gigs, neither of which we played.
Most of the assorted parents and relatives who had gathered to see us were utterly disgusted by the band, the club, the scene. I felt ecstatic, excited, moved. The serpent gave me the apple and i consumed the whole tree.
I am lustful and greedy. My appetite has never been satiated.
oOo
The end of another drunken weekend -- bruised, battered and bloodshot.
Xmas Eve '89.
They took our only lord and murdered him so society could breathe easy.
In his name we take up the gun / the guitar -- the weapons of god.
The streets of every city will run with blood --
the sky over Bermuda will glow purple.
(Xmas Eve, 1989)
________________________________________________________________
"GIALLO" : ITALIAN FOR MURDER
1
It's a cold, dark nite in early '70s Rome. As David Hemmings walks home from a rehearsal of his Jazz combo, the heavens open & it begins to rain with a vengeance. Just as suddenly, the tense semi-silence is shattered by the sound of a Woman's screaming; Hemmings looks up in time to witness her murder... Through the window of an apartment on the second story of the building opposite him, a figure can be sen staggering, clutching at the deep knife wounds in her chest & side, then collapsing to the floor. Dropping his clarinet case, Hemmings runs into the building, up the stairs & through the open door of the apartment. The flat appears to be empty, except for the blood-soaked woman, & she is dead. A state of uncomprehending shock grips Hemmings as he crouches over the corpse, & he decides to run to the nearby Police Station to seek help. But as he leaves the apartment, Hemmings focusses on one detail : a framed Photograph of a composed yet fearsome looking Male face on the adjacent wall to the dead woman. Returning to the crime scene with the Police, Hemmings is unsettled by the sensation that SOMETHING has been altered here in his absence. While the bloodied form of the woman & the flat's general disarray is as it was, SOMETHING is missing... While describing the events of the murder (as he saw it) to the Police, Hemmings remembers the framed Photograph. He searches around in vain, but it is no longer there. An investigating officer suggests that the killer may've hidden from Hemmings, then removed the Photo (& himself) when Hemmings left the room. Furthermore, that this suggests the picture holds some clue to the crime. Later, Hemmings returns to the apartment alone & while snooping around for 'clues', he's jarred by a terrifying discovery: on the adjacent wall to where he'd stood over the dead woman, hangs a framed glass MIRROR. What he'd taken, at first glance, to be a Photograph was in fact a reflection of the killer himself, staring cooly back at Hemmings from the wall...
2
The above description of a scene from "Profundo Rosso", Dario Argento's most masterfully-realised early film, perfectly embodies the quality of the "Giallo" movie: essentially an Italian "Who-dunnit", with all the trade-marks of that genre (cops, killers, red-herrings & a gradually unfolding murder mystery). The wound is 'salted', if you will, by the uniquely European double-whammy of the "Giallo"; the intended 'effect' is Terror, achieved by utilising plot-premisses & action most commonly found in the conventions of Horror cinema. "Giallo" movies are Who-dunnits occurring in a Horror-movie context, yet "Giallo" is more than a 'genre'. It's more accurately represented as an ATMOSPHERE, an attitude & aesthetic approach to Film-making, achieved by photographic technique, lighting, music & plot-line perversity. Unlike the colour suggested by the word, "Giallo" movies are dark, brooding & cold-blooded. Far from sunny, gay Yellow, the rightful colours of these films are dark blue, black & the Deep Red of their more unfortunate characters' blood & grue. Put simply, "Giallo" is Italian for Murder.
(ca late '90s)
________________________________________________________________
[NOTE:
Transcription from hand- & type-written manuscript follows Tim's syntax, capitalization, & grammar except for typos & mistakes that would ordinarily have been picked up editorially.
--Kris Hemensley,
July 5th, 2009]
Sunday, June 28, 2009
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 11, June, 2009; PART 2
MICHAEL FITZGERALD-CLARKE
Two poems from SOFDOLREADIC MEDITATIONS ON THE PSALMS
PSALM 40
He now has a new song to sing--
The ambient fire that blinded him
Is no longer part of his memory.
God is making a cup of tea
But he has no sugar.
Other things are there, too numerous
To list: grey clouds, engines,
Secret codes - such things
Trouble list compilers, but
Where is the sugar?
God goes into the goldmine,
And when he re-surfaces to heaven
He leaves behind our planet's
Blind copulation in the dark
Nights bereft of love.
A thousand bibles on street corners,
Ten thousand bibles in schools.
Jim Morrison no longer breaks
Wind, no longer fears needles.
Elvis and Oscar Wilde look
At the fort. They have exchanged
Their greying hair for haloes,
Bad habits for certainty, for hope.
God is good, and his unfailing love
And faithfulness work miracles.
Several cubes of sugar have
Ben conjured up.
All those premature ejaculators who say,
"Aha! We've got him now!" are really
At heart, decent souls who would benefit
From the serenity of a day's fishing. Their wives
And girlfriends cook muffins in the colder months,
And their recourse to blonde tints and streaks
Isn't disgraceful, but it is a bit sad.
The delay in ending this poem has to do with
Reverence, and sincerity. I am a committed
Believer in the Father, Jesus, the Holy ghost, and
Jim Morrison, Elvis, and Oscar Wilde. My
Premature ejaculations drip over an army of
Ants, and yes, I am neither poor, nor
Needy, but rather warm in my bedroom. Finis.
*
PSALM 46
Welshmen deliver milk as mountains become pebbles--
In the laboratory quarks sing their strangeness like divas,
And Poseidon and God play scrabble,
Both claiming unquestionable as the longest
Seven letter word imaginable. And so
The oceans roar and foam, and so a small,
Costumed boy throws pebbles into the sea.
Go to a river bank to seek refuge from eternity--
See how the city's water supply is polluted
By ghosts of Welsh shepherds who can ethereally
Tip muck in from earthenware jars. Philadelphia
Is where God has his east coast base, and
All the baseball bats in all the houses
Cannot destroy it. A native American offers
A passer-by a sweet thing on a stick--
God is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.
Two vagrants set fire to a rubbish bin.
This is destruction equivalent to the loss
Of love at twenty-two, the dim bestiality
Of our planet. As John Lennon
Said, "Perfection is counted only by tossers,"
And God has fire extinguishers aplenty.
A wax sculpture of a butterfly is placed
Near the exit of the Gallery. It hardly moves.
A native American offers a passer-by a
Sweet thing on a stick - God
Is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.
*
[NOTE: In essence, Sofdolreadic Meditations on the Psalms involves writing a poem for each of the 150 Psalms in the Holy Bible. I have begun writing in the order that I pull slips of paper out of a box, believing as I do in the purposeful nature of chance. Number 46 was the first slip of paper I drew out, so two poems written and 148 to go. Though I'm still way behind William Shakespeare in this respect, since 1989 I have coined some words, and sofdolreadic is my latest. The dictionary entry will go as follows:
sofdolreadic / sof'dol'reed'ic/ a. poetically unique
The etymology of the word is: "sof" from The Doors song The Soft Parade,arguably Jim Morrison's finest moment; "dol" from 'dolmen', a megalithic tomb (nothing can be poetically unique without it being cognisant of its past); and "readic" from 'read' (a little less esoteric).
27/4/09]
________________________________________________________________
CHRIS GRIERSON
BACKYARD PASTORAL
a broken computer rotting
under jasmine
graffiti stains the fence
the neighbour's cat
descends a tree branch
the barbecue rusted
like a hulk long washed up
weeds press their claim
possums and rats
along the fence after dark
saturday night goths
drop a port bottle
from the laneway alongside
the dog three doors down
barks like a chainsaw
choking to start
an old concrete bench
protects a patch of grass
like a doting mother
last year's tomatoes
hunched like tumbleweeds
yet to be set free
a metal pipe wedges
the Hills Hoist upright
a cracked path
leads its way
out on fold-up chairs
the knee high grass
tickles our calves
drinking beer
the mosquitos moving in
*
EXCLUDE THE ASPIRANTS
A new Michael Ondaatje hardback
is something to savour
like a good op shop
rarer these days
seconds a boutique
elegantly squeezed
like a council sapling
edged in concrete
you skirt around
like a bruise
commerce doubles up
like birthday cards
stood up next to the tele
chiming media doctrine
my hawaiian shirt
wilts off the line
a page one rendezvous
scores the next decade
________________________________________________________________
NATHAN SHEPHERDSON
THREE POEMS
frypan
he stands over the fire
cooking souls in a frypan
prodding them with a knife
an attempt to discover their names
*
thought
a thought has been found
a philosopher will be called in
to determine the cause of its death
*
paddock
a white horse rests in a paddock
wet green safely coloured in around him
accompanying grey sheets squeeze from discarded eyes
a white horse is resting in a paddock
as far away from George Stubbs as he can get
________________________________________________________________
ANN SHENFIELD
FROM OUT OF NOWHERE
I won't think about where it all begins or ends
each grain of sand, blade of grass, drop of rain
I'll disregard the minutiae, even though it all starts
with a single gene, cell, idea -- on the molecular
level it's all waves anyway, all interconnected,
therefore I'll let myself forget the singular
blade, grain, drop, besides these days no one
much remembers rain, so I let go of rainy days,
even months when it must have poured
I'll allow them all to subside,
only this momentary pause--
where experience might endure beyond itself
instead I'll just accept my limitations
and let one stand for each and every
like that day walking back from the park
when I misjudged the weather, a mother
with her two children, both overshadow her now--
but then that rain, it came from out of nowhere
heavy drenching rain, with children running
sopping, running, laughing, soaking, laughing
as though nothing existed, but us and that rain,
that would stand for each and every drop.
_______________________________________________________________
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
MICHAEL FITZGERALD-CLARKE, born in England, lived in Melbourne (where he participated in Poor Tom's street poetry a couple of decades ago), & for many years in Canberra. Has published two chapbooks of poetry, S-h-h-hidelplonk (Pudding House, USA, '02), & Deep Wings (White Heron Press, USA, '04). Numerous poems have appeared in magazines here & overseas including Blast, Hobo, The Adirondack Review, The Wormwood Review. Has written poetry since he was "captivated as a teenager by a biography of John Keats", & also includes Shelley, Rilke, Lorca, Bunting, Dransfield & Olds amongst his influences.
CHRIS GRIERSON, lives in Melbourne. Has written songs, poems, short-stories & novels, some of which have been published, won awards, been performed. Publisher of poetry chapbook series, Soup, in the 1990s, whose authors included Kierran Carroll, Claire Gaskin & Cassie Lewis. Currently working on a long piece based on the life & times of Melbourne gangster, Squizzy Taylor.
ANN SHENFIELD, lives in Melbourne, recent residency at Varuna (Blue Mountains); see Poems & Pieces #8, and Poems & Pieces #2 for previous contributions.
NATHAN SHEPHERDSON, lives in the Glass House Mountains in Queensland. The son of painter Gordon Shepherdson, he is a poet & writer on visual art. Has published Sweeping the Light Back Into the Mirror (UQP, '06); What Marian Drew Never Told Me About Light (Small Change Press, Qld.,'08). Has won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize twice, in 2004 & '06, & same year won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. When not scooping prizes he follows the cricket.
________________________________________________________________
CORRESPONDENCE
FRANCES YULE
It's been a fascinating leg of the journey... finding your blogspot and having contact with old mates from the Melbourne push... and what a buzz to see our poems/freeverse published....! What I envisage as a worthy project would be to gather absolutely everything still accessible from that time... the broadsheets, mags, posters, pics, etc., and bring it all together in one magnificent book... paintings, sculptures... I won't do it... but putting the idea out there might spark someone else... You've started something... how do we broadcast your blogspot to a larger audience? John Yule (not a relly), John Tranter, Geoff Eggleston, Adrian Rawlins, all have references on the net... that's a start... and some of the living may still have memorabilia...
*
KARL GALLAGHER
6th May,'09
It bowled me over that you would devote an issue to devotional/beat poets of Melbourne and Meher Baba, it just seemed so out of the blue, a left field sort of thing. I was also impressed with the 40 year thing, because 40 is a significant number in Sufi tradition. Hafiz especially mentions 40 in connection with a couple of significant events in his life. I have a strong feeling about this year because it's 40 years since Baba dropped His body.
But when I thought about it, the devotional or spiritual aspect was very strong with the Beats, it was obvious. And it was what attracted me to Kerouac et al all those years ago...before I got connected to Baba. But the way you have focussed on that characteristic of the Beats strikes me as something not really stated by other writers. But Kerouac, Cassady & the others were very drawn to the spiritual/sacred...despite all their character defects...
12th May, '09
(....) I'm sure it has been said by others [spiritual/religious characteristics of the Beats, ed] but I don't recall that it was given more than a passing notation...it was other things about the Beat characters & writers that were given more significance. But a large part of Kerouac's alcoholism was due to disenchantment, disillusionment with the world...his path through existentialism, drugs, Buddhism, and return to Catholic (mysticism) faith of childhood, and of course his withdrawal from his old friends and social network, and his own statement prefacing last publication about being lonely, solitary, Catholic mystic madman.
And of course Neal was wired bigtime for the connection to God... "now we know TIME man"... and was in the habit of prayer and meditative reflection... His karma was also high wired to the physical domain and driven sexually and drugs too...sort of complicated things a bit. But then that's the hero's path aint it, strewn with obstacles, challenges, failures, tragedy. I think they were both tragic figures.
________________________________________________________________
Finally published this partly sunny now nippy but dry Melbourne winter's day, June 28th, 2009
--KRIS HEMENSLEY.
Two poems from SOFDOLREADIC MEDITATIONS ON THE PSALMS
PSALM 40
He now has a new song to sing--
The ambient fire that blinded him
Is no longer part of his memory.
God is making a cup of tea
But he has no sugar.
Other things are there, too numerous
To list: grey clouds, engines,
Secret codes - such things
Trouble list compilers, but
Where is the sugar?
God goes into the goldmine,
And when he re-surfaces to heaven
He leaves behind our planet's
Blind copulation in the dark
Nights bereft of love.
A thousand bibles on street corners,
Ten thousand bibles in schools.
Jim Morrison no longer breaks
Wind, no longer fears needles.
Elvis and Oscar Wilde look
At the fort. They have exchanged
Their greying hair for haloes,
Bad habits for certainty, for hope.
God is good, and his unfailing love
And faithfulness work miracles.
Several cubes of sugar have
Ben conjured up.
All those premature ejaculators who say,
"Aha! We've got him now!" are really
At heart, decent souls who would benefit
From the serenity of a day's fishing. Their wives
And girlfriends cook muffins in the colder months,
And their recourse to blonde tints and streaks
Isn't disgraceful, but it is a bit sad.
The delay in ending this poem has to do with
Reverence, and sincerity. I am a committed
Believer in the Father, Jesus, the Holy ghost, and
Jim Morrison, Elvis, and Oscar Wilde. My
Premature ejaculations drip over an army of
Ants, and yes, I am neither poor, nor
Needy, but rather warm in my bedroom. Finis.
*
PSALM 46
Welshmen deliver milk as mountains become pebbles--
In the laboratory quarks sing their strangeness like divas,
And Poseidon and God play scrabble,
Both claiming unquestionable as the longest
Seven letter word imaginable. And so
The oceans roar and foam, and so a small,
Costumed boy throws pebbles into the sea.
Go to a river bank to seek refuge from eternity--
See how the city's water supply is polluted
By ghosts of Welsh shepherds who can ethereally
Tip muck in from earthenware jars. Philadelphia
Is where God has his east coast base, and
All the baseball bats in all the houses
Cannot destroy it. A native American offers
A passer-by a sweet thing on a stick--
God is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.
Two vagrants set fire to a rubbish bin.
This is destruction equivalent to the loss
Of love at twenty-two, the dim bestiality
Of our planet. As John Lennon
Said, "Perfection is counted only by tossers,"
And God has fire extinguishers aplenty.
A wax sculpture of a butterfly is placed
Near the exit of the Gallery. It hardly moves.
A native American offers a passer-by a
Sweet thing on a stick - God
Is our fortress, no matter what Zeus and Cronus say.
*
[NOTE: In essence, Sofdolreadic Meditations on the Psalms involves writing a poem for each of the 150 Psalms in the Holy Bible. I have begun writing in the order that I pull slips of paper out of a box, believing as I do in the purposeful nature of chance. Number 46 was the first slip of paper I drew out, so two poems written and 148 to go. Though I'm still way behind William Shakespeare in this respect, since 1989 I have coined some words, and sofdolreadic is my latest. The dictionary entry will go as follows:
sofdolreadic / sof'dol'reed'ic/ a. poetically unique
The etymology of the word is: "sof" from The Doors song The Soft Parade,arguably Jim Morrison's finest moment; "dol" from 'dolmen', a megalithic tomb (nothing can be poetically unique without it being cognisant of its past); and "readic" from 'read' (a little less esoteric).
27/4/09]
________________________________________________________________
CHRIS GRIERSON
BACKYARD PASTORAL
a broken computer rotting
under jasmine
graffiti stains the fence
the neighbour's cat
descends a tree branch
the barbecue rusted
like a hulk long washed up
weeds press their claim
possums and rats
along the fence after dark
saturday night goths
drop a port bottle
from the laneway alongside
the dog three doors down
barks like a chainsaw
choking to start
an old concrete bench
protects a patch of grass
like a doting mother
last year's tomatoes
hunched like tumbleweeds
yet to be set free
a metal pipe wedges
the Hills Hoist upright
a cracked path
leads its way
out on fold-up chairs
the knee high grass
tickles our calves
drinking beer
the mosquitos moving in
*
EXCLUDE THE ASPIRANTS
A new Michael Ondaatje hardback
is something to savour
like a good op shop
rarer these days
seconds a boutique
elegantly squeezed
like a council sapling
edged in concrete
you skirt around
like a bruise
commerce doubles up
like birthday cards
stood up next to the tele
chiming media doctrine
my hawaiian shirt
wilts off the line
a page one rendezvous
scores the next decade
________________________________________________________________
NATHAN SHEPHERDSON
THREE POEMS
frypan
he stands over the fire
cooking souls in a frypan
prodding them with a knife
an attempt to discover their names
*
thought
a thought has been found
a philosopher will be called in
to determine the cause of its death
*
paddock
a white horse rests in a paddock
wet green safely coloured in around him
accompanying grey sheets squeeze from discarded eyes
a white horse is resting in a paddock
as far away from George Stubbs as he can get
________________________________________________________________
ANN SHENFIELD
FROM OUT OF NOWHERE
I won't think about where it all begins or ends
each grain of sand, blade of grass, drop of rain
I'll disregard the minutiae, even though it all starts
with a single gene, cell, idea -- on the molecular
level it's all waves anyway, all interconnected,
therefore I'll let myself forget the singular
blade, grain, drop, besides these days no one
much remembers rain, so I let go of rainy days,
even months when it must have poured
I'll allow them all to subside,
only this momentary pause--
where experience might endure beyond itself
instead I'll just accept my limitations
and let one stand for each and every
like that day walking back from the park
when I misjudged the weather, a mother
with her two children, both overshadow her now--
but then that rain, it came from out of nowhere
heavy drenching rain, with children running
sopping, running, laughing, soaking, laughing
as though nothing existed, but us and that rain,
that would stand for each and every drop.
_______________________________________________________________
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
MICHAEL FITZGERALD-CLARKE, born in England, lived in Melbourne (where he participated in Poor Tom's street poetry a couple of decades ago), & for many years in Canberra. Has published two chapbooks of poetry, S-h-h-hidelplonk (Pudding House, USA, '02), & Deep Wings (White Heron Press, USA, '04). Numerous poems have appeared in magazines here & overseas including Blast, Hobo, The Adirondack Review, The Wormwood Review. Has written poetry since he was "captivated as a teenager by a biography of John Keats", & also includes Shelley, Rilke, Lorca, Bunting, Dransfield & Olds amongst his influences.
CHRIS GRIERSON, lives in Melbourne. Has written songs, poems, short-stories & novels, some of which have been published, won awards, been performed. Publisher of poetry chapbook series, Soup, in the 1990s, whose authors included Kierran Carroll, Claire Gaskin & Cassie Lewis. Currently working on a long piece based on the life & times of Melbourne gangster, Squizzy Taylor.
ANN SHENFIELD, lives in Melbourne, recent residency at Varuna (Blue Mountains); see Poems & Pieces #8, and Poems & Pieces #2 for previous contributions.
NATHAN SHEPHERDSON, lives in the Glass House Mountains in Queensland. The son of painter Gordon Shepherdson, he is a poet & writer on visual art. Has published Sweeping the Light Back Into the Mirror (UQP, '06); What Marian Drew Never Told Me About Light (Small Change Press, Qld.,'08). Has won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize twice, in 2004 & '06, & same year won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. When not scooping prizes he follows the cricket.
________________________________________________________________
CORRESPONDENCE
FRANCES YULE
It's been a fascinating leg of the journey... finding your blogspot and having contact with old mates from the Melbourne push... and what a buzz to see our poems/freeverse published....! What I envisage as a worthy project would be to gather absolutely everything still accessible from that time... the broadsheets, mags, posters, pics, etc., and bring it all together in one magnificent book... paintings, sculptures... I won't do it... but putting the idea out there might spark someone else... You've started something... how do we broadcast your blogspot to a larger audience? John Yule (not a relly), John Tranter, Geoff Eggleston, Adrian Rawlins, all have references on the net... that's a start... and some of the living may still have memorabilia...
*
KARL GALLAGHER
6th May,'09
It bowled me over that you would devote an issue to devotional/beat poets of Melbourne and Meher Baba, it just seemed so out of the blue, a left field sort of thing. I was also impressed with the 40 year thing, because 40 is a significant number in Sufi tradition. Hafiz especially mentions 40 in connection with a couple of significant events in his life. I have a strong feeling about this year because it's 40 years since Baba dropped His body.
But when I thought about it, the devotional or spiritual aspect was very strong with the Beats, it was obvious. And it was what attracted me to Kerouac et al all those years ago...before I got connected to Baba. But the way you have focussed on that characteristic of the Beats strikes me as something not really stated by other writers. But Kerouac, Cassady & the others were very drawn to the spiritual/sacred...despite all their character defects...
12th May, '09
(....) I'm sure it has been said by others [spiritual/religious characteristics of the Beats, ed] but I don't recall that it was given more than a passing notation...it was other things about the Beat characters & writers that were given more significance. But a large part of Kerouac's alcoholism was due to disenchantment, disillusionment with the world...his path through existentialism, drugs, Buddhism, and return to Catholic (mysticism) faith of childhood, and of course his withdrawal from his old friends and social network, and his own statement prefacing last publication about being lonely, solitary, Catholic mystic madman.
And of course Neal was wired bigtime for the connection to God... "now we know TIME man"... and was in the habit of prayer and meditative reflection... His karma was also high wired to the physical domain and driven sexually and drugs too...sort of complicated things a bit. But then that's the hero's path aint it, strewn with obstacles, challenges, failures, tragedy. I think they were both tragic figures.
________________________________________________________________
Finally published this partly sunny now nippy but dry Melbourne winter's day, June 28th, 2009
--KRIS HEMENSLEY.
Monday, June 8, 2009
ADDENDUM TO THE DIVINE ISSUE + Part 1, THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #11
In the wake of the publication of The Divine Issue & Dave Ellison's spreading the word, I've enjoyed a wave of correspondence with some of the figures recalled there, one email leading to another --Karl Gallagher, Frances Yule & Paul Smith.
The characters & poets of that time are living treasures, gold mines of the history they embody, further chapters of our story. I'm heartened --not that I thought or think it'll all be lost, for there'll always be a younger & later generation with a yen for research & the inkling of vital connection & the ability to bring it to life once more. Rather, I'm heartened that some figures of the time we're calling ours, are as charmed as I am, tickled from normal inertia back into the quick of it as the wheel turns again (I'm anticipating Frances Yule whose poem/riposte appears anon).
Bringing me up to date with his own activities, Paul Smith has reminded me of his large 2nd hand book-store, Book Heaven, at Campbells Creek outside of Castlemaine at 47, Main Road, and refers us to his web-site which fully describes his prolific writing, translation & scholarship. (See www.shirazbooks.com .)
Out of the blue, a week or so ago, Ross Keating popped in. I told him we'd been in touch with Paul Smith recently & restocked some of his New Humanity publications, for example translations of Hafiz, Omar Khayam, Kabir, & Francis Brabazon's Stay With God. We got talking about Brabazon. He asked me if I shared his good opinion of the poet. I said I remembered thinking how like Allen Ginsberg & Bob Dylan I thought some of Brabazon's poetry was when I first read it : surprisingly hip, for an Australian back in the 50s! Ah, he said : the Beats! And he wondered whether Australia ever had a Beat generation? I said that although it had never been formalised or announced, there definitely was a body of work which qualified as Beat, attending to the same variety of subject & style as distinguished the North Americans. Oh what a project that would be for a young scholar! No wonder I'm feeling the house is jumpin'!
*
I want to think aloud around & about Alison Hill, who was much more than an en passant name in TDI's roll call. For many of us who encountered her in the late 60s, early 70s scene, she was one of the stars, if only for the effect of her first riveting reading of a poem/manifesto, Reach Out (eventually published in the first number of Mal Morgan's mag, Parachute Poems, c 1972) --something of its charge is there on the page but truly you had to have been there as they say!
She was rightly included in Thomas Shapcott's anthology, Australian Poetry Now (Sun Books, Melbourne, 1970), alongside other La Mama/Melbourne 'new poetry' luminaries such as Geoff Eggleston, Michael Dugan, Garrie Hutchinson, John Jenkins, Ian Robertson & Charles Buckmaster. Her biographical statement notes marriage to Terry Gillmore as his includes her. I thought of it then as a Melbourne/Sydney union, as though we really were making a family! La Mama's Sydney confreres included Nigel Roberts, John Tranter, Bob Adamson, Michael Dransfield & Vicki Viidikas; from Adelaide Frank Starrs, Rob Tillett & Richard Tipping, & American-Queenslander Billy Jones.
Shapcott noted in his preface that, "There are a few omissions which I regret : a few writers actively involved in the Melbourne experimental scene either did not reply to personal invitations to contribute, or advised that they were suspicious of the validity of anthologies." (p xi) Those writers were myself, Ken Taylor & Bill Beard. Only Bill has continued to absent himself from anthologies & publishing per se. Taylor & I have been in a couple of others but in recent years I seem to have reverted to that original reluctant type!
Having been invited by John Hooker at Penguin Books to edit an anthology of new Australian poetry in '69 and rejected the proposal, Ken & I were in no frame of mind to contribute to Tom's anthology. If as editors we feared impossible compromises in selection or packaging for our own anthology, we were hardly going to be acquiescent contributors for someone else's.
I was living in England when Mike Dugan sent me a copy of the anthology early in 1971. Distance hadnt made me regret my decision though it did soften my opinions. In my U.K. mag, Earth Ship (#4/5 September,'71), I wrote that Australian Poetry Now, "includes good work from some of the new poets (ie post-68 Australian poetry 'renaissance') whose activity was the reason for the book tho their subsequent placement in the anthology & the editorial qualifications render them harmless -- their own innocent vanities painfully bared! Ce la vie! However -- notwithstanding the omissions of certain poets (on ideological grounds!) from the anthology & the excesses of many who were included there is still the work of eg. Nigel Roberts Terry Gillmore & Garrie Hutchinson to savour."
It's obvious to me now that the efficacy of Tom Shapcott's anthology was determined across much wider perspectives than my localist, avant-gardist, counter-cultural imperatives allowed me to see then. Though it might be true that one of the editor's objectives was amelioration in which a slightly older generation, only recently projected as the New Impulses poets (1967), would redeem its share of the spirit of the 'new' raucously claimed by a slightly younger generation as its own, a move that could justifiably be politically critiqued as I for one did, it's also true that the anthology achieved what the little mags couldnt, and that is the distribution to the poetry readership of a large swathe of Australian poetry rising to the time's acute sense of contemporaneity irrespective of age or publishing history.
Apropos The Divine Issue, it's Alison Hill's edition of Jargon, the 32nd annual of the RMIT student body, Summer 1968/69, which she entitled A Crimson Jargon (the cover tells why), that demands attention here.
Designed as a double-header, it contains the student/tutor writings & articles the journal would ordinarily have been defined by (articles on marijuana, Jean Luc Godard, writings by Jeff Edmunds & Damian Coleridge, whom I specifically name for also participating in the La Mama readings, & et cetera), but, like the Trojan Horse, it also carries the cohort of the out-of-school alternative. For instance, the virtuoso rave by Adrian Rawlins, Image & Entity : J.S. Ostoja Kotkowski's electronic images in the micro macrocosmic field of the Now Culture Situation, in which he cartwheels from one high art reference to another, apparently celebrating the liberation of consciousness from culture's old categories...
Alison's edition promotes the emerging new poets (Buckmaster, Beard, Gillmore, Roberts, Tranter, herself) and also showcases Meher Baba & some of his 'lovers'. Adrian Rawlins, Jim Miskias & Denis Smith constructed a portrait of Baba from his published words, and David Pepperell, whom I assume was a Baba-lover then, published a surrealist tour de force, For All My Seasons. The entire issue of Jargon may well be dedicated to Meher Baba : "Postscript : Present Indicative" describes his death, more or less coinciding with the journal's publication --"On Friday, 31 January, 1969, Merwan Sheriar Irani called 'Meher Baba' and revered by millions as a Divine Incarnation or Avatar, shed his physical body to 'live eternally in the hearts of His lovers everywhere'.'"
The journal included graphics by George Baldessin who taught at the RMIT, which reminds me that Baldessin created the original La Mama poster template for Betti Burstall's cafe-theatre & designed the poster for my play Stephany (at La Mama, September,'68). Looking at his "personages"(heads) in A Crimson Jargon, I'm struck again by the floating finesse which distinguished his style as well as shock for his early death --of which I was blissfully unaware until a Hemensley family trip to the NGV happened upon the large & brilliant retrospective of the apparently recently deceased artist. Where was I to have missed it?
1972/73, out of the country for three years, I experienced a second migration rather than a simple return. There was no picking up where I had left off. I was now beholden to an internationalism garnered from the English perspective; I was involved in Anglo-American new poetry on which I grafted the new Australian work. Notwithstanding the Australian push at that time for the international context, to which I naturally contributed, I was diverted from the depth & breadth of the local (as though 'elsewhere' is always ultimately abstract, when abstraction is not what one thinks one's about). So, by the beginning of the new decade I wanted to recommit myself to a 'being here' in which the local would not be waylaid by the international. I wanted to be present in & to the life of the time, here & there. I entitled a new series of my Earth Ship mag, H/EAR --deriving a double plea from its pun : "us here now / hear us now". I stuck "1980" postcards received from Paul Vangelisti (editor of Invisible City, San Francisco) on my walls. In that era of the Super-powers' stand off & of nuclear war fears, I felt a new urgency to attend to what was literally at hand --in amongst the international correspondence, a recommitment to the local, to Melbourne. I described my project then as an "active archive", as good a tag as any for the immanence it's probably always about, dependent upon the flash one causes as active principal, flesh & blood, here & now : history with a palpable halo!
The title of Baldessin's wonderful sculpture, Banquet For No Eating, perfect metaphor for the above. What a feast was that exhibition of George Baldessin's graphics & sculpture, but posthumous, posthumous : 'Art' now when I'd love to have had Baldessin himself alive at the table, indeed the whole city would. Thirty years on and still an awful loss...
It's been an even longer mourning for Charles Buckmaster who perished in 1972, aged 21. The publication in A Crimson Jargon of his long poem all up along 1984 times, gave him a lay-out no mimeographed mag of the period could have matched. There it was, poem-as-score, poem as graph-of-the-mind, poem as spontaneous but accurate apprehension of the moment. Whatismore, photos of the poet with partying friends are superimposed on the poem. How strange & consoling to have his image, play-acting in the Melbourne Cemetery for Robert Adai Westfield's camera --chess & tea-party on a grave-stone, cups & saucers spread over the Australian flag, Charles & friends sprawled around. --and one of Charles by himself, standing tall in sun-haze beside an obelisk, as though peering through the mist of eternity... Incidentally, I assume the photographer is same man whose Web reference as Robert Adair Westfield records a year's study at the RMIT before training with Newton & Talbot? If so, he's a commercial photographer himself now, currently living at & serving the Shiva Ashram in Mount Eliza (founded by Shankarananda, an initiate of the Saraswati order of Kashmir Shaivism)...
Forty years on, attrition's to be expected --Buckmaster, Baldessin, Rawlins, Eggleston, all gone; "shed their bodies"...
Alison Hill is still around. Late 80s, I think it was, South Yarra library, she greeted me at an evening dedicated to Charles Buckmaster & Jennifer Rankin, upon whom Judith Rodriguez & I gave lectures. First time I'd seen her in years. In the 90s she was contributing to the anthologies produced by the Aardvarkers poetry group (the most recent of which, Melting Clocks, published in 2000, has her Dali-esque painting on its cover). Last time I saw her we talked about the rereading I'd undertaken of the 60s, 70s poets, and hoped to keep that conversation going.
The poets of our time, "eternally in our hearts"...
Kris Hemensley
23 May/8 June,2009
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KARL GALLAGHER
A GHOST BETWEEN US (for Joan Sedorkin)
Around 1980, aged 37 I was standing
at the bar of the Albion in Carlton
taking notice of nobody
watching life passing by the window
in the early afternoon drinking alone
although several friends were around
I was away with my own thoughts
so long as I had a drink in front of me
and one on the way
that's all i really cared about.
Jukebox sounds came from the back bar
I was lightly swaying to the music
friends passed by saying hallo
smiling generously I replied
feeling good man feeling good
but I was disinterested
interested only in myself
listening to some hidden beat
some universal soul
alone in a crowded bar.
A voice I hadn't heard in years said
'Hey Karlos how are you man.'
I turn and face Nigel a sydney poet who's
grinning grabbing my arm telling me he's
here for the poetry festival
talking loud he says
'Why don't you say hallo to Gary Snyder, over there.'
which I don't believe but look anyway
I see two guys nearby leaning against the wall
drinks in hand watching me
one I recognise from photos as Snyder
it dawns on me that
they have been there for some time
have they been watching me, for how long?
I've been at the bar for maybe an hour and half.
We are about eight feet apart
and for a few seconds our eyes lock
and suddenly I feel ashamed to be seen
getting drunk
alone in a crowded bar
oblivious of the company of others.
I felt the ghost of Kerouac pass between us
Snyder takes it all in
sees a well liked energised guy
sees that I am on the same greased slide
of alcoholism
that took Jack down
the path of bitter loneliness
the scrambled brains
the mindless bad mouth
the deep disconnection
I didn't go over and say hallo
we both knew what we had seen
I turned back to the bar
picked up my drink, downed it
and ordered another.
[13/10/00]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRANCES YULE
BACK THEN
in between the passing
of joints
talking about God
drinking
fucking
anti-war protests
poetry raves
gigs
performing plays
dancing
creating art
exhibiting
drinking coffee
eating Turkish, Greek, Italian
moving from one house to another
working briefly in shit jobs
playing pool
popping pills at parties
and hallucinogenic experiences
we were the nuts and bolts
the spokes the oil
of the 60s revolution
we were cogs in the wheel
of the revolving wheel
the wheel still turning
[May 19, 2009]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The characters & poets of that time are living treasures, gold mines of the history they embody, further chapters of our story. I'm heartened --not that I thought or think it'll all be lost, for there'll always be a younger & later generation with a yen for research & the inkling of vital connection & the ability to bring it to life once more. Rather, I'm heartened that some figures of the time we're calling ours, are as charmed as I am, tickled from normal inertia back into the quick of it as the wheel turns again (I'm anticipating Frances Yule whose poem/riposte appears anon).
Bringing me up to date with his own activities, Paul Smith has reminded me of his large 2nd hand book-store, Book Heaven, at Campbells Creek outside of Castlemaine at 47, Main Road, and refers us to his web-site which fully describes his prolific writing, translation & scholarship. (See www.shirazbooks.com .)
Out of the blue, a week or so ago, Ross Keating popped in. I told him we'd been in touch with Paul Smith recently & restocked some of his New Humanity publications, for example translations of Hafiz, Omar Khayam, Kabir, & Francis Brabazon's Stay With God. We got talking about Brabazon. He asked me if I shared his good opinion of the poet. I said I remembered thinking how like Allen Ginsberg & Bob Dylan I thought some of Brabazon's poetry was when I first read it : surprisingly hip, for an Australian back in the 50s! Ah, he said : the Beats! And he wondered whether Australia ever had a Beat generation? I said that although it had never been formalised or announced, there definitely was a body of work which qualified as Beat, attending to the same variety of subject & style as distinguished the North Americans. Oh what a project that would be for a young scholar! No wonder I'm feeling the house is jumpin'!
*
I want to think aloud around & about Alison Hill, who was much more than an en passant name in TDI's roll call. For many of us who encountered her in the late 60s, early 70s scene, she was one of the stars, if only for the effect of her first riveting reading of a poem/manifesto, Reach Out (eventually published in the first number of Mal Morgan's mag, Parachute Poems, c 1972) --something of its charge is there on the page but truly you had to have been there as they say!
She was rightly included in Thomas Shapcott's anthology, Australian Poetry Now (Sun Books, Melbourne, 1970), alongside other La Mama/Melbourne 'new poetry' luminaries such as Geoff Eggleston, Michael Dugan, Garrie Hutchinson, John Jenkins, Ian Robertson & Charles Buckmaster. Her biographical statement notes marriage to Terry Gillmore as his includes her. I thought of it then as a Melbourne/Sydney union, as though we really were making a family! La Mama's Sydney confreres included Nigel Roberts, John Tranter, Bob Adamson, Michael Dransfield & Vicki Viidikas; from Adelaide Frank Starrs, Rob Tillett & Richard Tipping, & American-Queenslander Billy Jones.
Shapcott noted in his preface that, "There are a few omissions which I regret : a few writers actively involved in the Melbourne experimental scene either did not reply to personal invitations to contribute, or advised that they were suspicious of the validity of anthologies." (p xi) Those writers were myself, Ken Taylor & Bill Beard. Only Bill has continued to absent himself from anthologies & publishing per se. Taylor & I have been in a couple of others but in recent years I seem to have reverted to that original reluctant type!
Having been invited by John Hooker at Penguin Books to edit an anthology of new Australian poetry in '69 and rejected the proposal, Ken & I were in no frame of mind to contribute to Tom's anthology. If as editors we feared impossible compromises in selection or packaging for our own anthology, we were hardly going to be acquiescent contributors for someone else's.
I was living in England when Mike Dugan sent me a copy of the anthology early in 1971. Distance hadnt made me regret my decision though it did soften my opinions. In my U.K. mag, Earth Ship (#4/5 September,'71), I wrote that Australian Poetry Now, "includes good work from some of the new poets (ie post-68 Australian poetry 'renaissance') whose activity was the reason for the book tho their subsequent placement in the anthology & the editorial qualifications render them harmless -- their own innocent vanities painfully bared! Ce la vie! However -- notwithstanding the omissions of certain poets (on ideological grounds!) from the anthology & the excesses of many who were included there is still the work of eg. Nigel Roberts Terry Gillmore & Garrie Hutchinson to savour."
It's obvious to me now that the efficacy of Tom Shapcott's anthology was determined across much wider perspectives than my localist, avant-gardist, counter-cultural imperatives allowed me to see then. Though it might be true that one of the editor's objectives was amelioration in which a slightly older generation, only recently projected as the New Impulses poets (1967), would redeem its share of the spirit of the 'new' raucously claimed by a slightly younger generation as its own, a move that could justifiably be politically critiqued as I for one did, it's also true that the anthology achieved what the little mags couldnt, and that is the distribution to the poetry readership of a large swathe of Australian poetry rising to the time's acute sense of contemporaneity irrespective of age or publishing history.
Apropos The Divine Issue, it's Alison Hill's edition of Jargon, the 32nd annual of the RMIT student body, Summer 1968/69, which she entitled A Crimson Jargon (the cover tells why), that demands attention here.
Designed as a double-header, it contains the student/tutor writings & articles the journal would ordinarily have been defined by (articles on marijuana, Jean Luc Godard, writings by Jeff Edmunds & Damian Coleridge, whom I specifically name for also participating in the La Mama readings, & et cetera), but, like the Trojan Horse, it also carries the cohort of the out-of-school alternative. For instance, the virtuoso rave by Adrian Rawlins, Image & Entity : J.S. Ostoja Kotkowski's electronic images in the micro macrocosmic field of the Now Culture Situation, in which he cartwheels from one high art reference to another, apparently celebrating the liberation of consciousness from culture's old categories...
Alison's edition promotes the emerging new poets (Buckmaster, Beard, Gillmore, Roberts, Tranter, herself) and also showcases Meher Baba & some of his 'lovers'. Adrian Rawlins, Jim Miskias & Denis Smith constructed a portrait of Baba from his published words, and David Pepperell, whom I assume was a Baba-lover then, published a surrealist tour de force, For All My Seasons. The entire issue of Jargon may well be dedicated to Meher Baba : "Postscript : Present Indicative" describes his death, more or less coinciding with the journal's publication --"On Friday, 31 January, 1969, Merwan Sheriar Irani called 'Meher Baba' and revered by millions as a Divine Incarnation or Avatar, shed his physical body to 'live eternally in the hearts of His lovers everywhere'.'"
The journal included graphics by George Baldessin who taught at the RMIT, which reminds me that Baldessin created the original La Mama poster template for Betti Burstall's cafe-theatre & designed the poster for my play Stephany (at La Mama, September,'68). Looking at his "personages"(heads) in A Crimson Jargon, I'm struck again by the floating finesse which distinguished his style as well as shock for his early death --of which I was blissfully unaware until a Hemensley family trip to the NGV happened upon the large & brilliant retrospective of the apparently recently deceased artist. Where was I to have missed it?
1972/73, out of the country for three years, I experienced a second migration rather than a simple return. There was no picking up where I had left off. I was now beholden to an internationalism garnered from the English perspective; I was involved in Anglo-American new poetry on which I grafted the new Australian work. Notwithstanding the Australian push at that time for the international context, to which I naturally contributed, I was diverted from the depth & breadth of the local (as though 'elsewhere' is always ultimately abstract, when abstraction is not what one thinks one's about). So, by the beginning of the new decade I wanted to recommit myself to a 'being here' in which the local would not be waylaid by the international. I wanted to be present in & to the life of the time, here & there. I entitled a new series of my Earth Ship mag, H/EAR --deriving a double plea from its pun : "us here now / hear us now". I stuck "1980" postcards received from Paul Vangelisti (editor of Invisible City, San Francisco) on my walls. In that era of the Super-powers' stand off & of nuclear war fears, I felt a new urgency to attend to what was literally at hand --in amongst the international correspondence, a recommitment to the local, to Melbourne. I described my project then as an "active archive", as good a tag as any for the immanence it's probably always about, dependent upon the flash one causes as active principal, flesh & blood, here & now : history with a palpable halo!
The title of Baldessin's wonderful sculpture, Banquet For No Eating, perfect metaphor for the above. What a feast was that exhibition of George Baldessin's graphics & sculpture, but posthumous, posthumous : 'Art' now when I'd love to have had Baldessin himself alive at the table, indeed the whole city would. Thirty years on and still an awful loss...
It's been an even longer mourning for Charles Buckmaster who perished in 1972, aged 21. The publication in A Crimson Jargon of his long poem all up along 1984 times, gave him a lay-out no mimeographed mag of the period could have matched. There it was, poem-as-score, poem as graph-of-the-mind, poem as spontaneous but accurate apprehension of the moment. Whatismore, photos of the poet with partying friends are superimposed on the poem. How strange & consoling to have his image, play-acting in the Melbourne Cemetery for Robert Adai Westfield's camera --chess & tea-party on a grave-stone, cups & saucers spread over the Australian flag, Charles & friends sprawled around. --and one of Charles by himself, standing tall in sun-haze beside an obelisk, as though peering through the mist of eternity... Incidentally, I assume the photographer is same man whose Web reference as Robert Adair Westfield records a year's study at the RMIT before training with Newton & Talbot? If so, he's a commercial photographer himself now, currently living at & serving the Shiva Ashram in Mount Eliza (founded by Shankarananda, an initiate of the Saraswati order of Kashmir Shaivism)...
Forty years on, attrition's to be expected --Buckmaster, Baldessin, Rawlins, Eggleston, all gone; "shed their bodies"...
Alison Hill is still around. Late 80s, I think it was, South Yarra library, she greeted me at an evening dedicated to Charles Buckmaster & Jennifer Rankin, upon whom Judith Rodriguez & I gave lectures. First time I'd seen her in years. In the 90s she was contributing to the anthologies produced by the Aardvarkers poetry group (the most recent of which, Melting Clocks, published in 2000, has her Dali-esque painting on its cover). Last time I saw her we talked about the rereading I'd undertaken of the 60s, 70s poets, and hoped to keep that conversation going.
The poets of our time, "eternally in our hearts"...
Kris Hemensley
23 May/8 June,2009
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KARL GALLAGHER
A GHOST BETWEEN US (for Joan Sedorkin)
Around 1980, aged 37 I was standing
at the bar of the Albion in Carlton
taking notice of nobody
watching life passing by the window
in the early afternoon drinking alone
although several friends were around
I was away with my own thoughts
so long as I had a drink in front of me
and one on the way
that's all i really cared about.
Jukebox sounds came from the back bar
I was lightly swaying to the music
friends passed by saying hallo
smiling generously I replied
feeling good man feeling good
but I was disinterested
interested only in myself
listening to some hidden beat
some universal soul
alone in a crowded bar.
A voice I hadn't heard in years said
'Hey Karlos how are you man.'
I turn and face Nigel a sydney poet who's
grinning grabbing my arm telling me he's
here for the poetry festival
talking loud he says
'Why don't you say hallo to Gary Snyder, over there.'
which I don't believe but look anyway
I see two guys nearby leaning against the wall
drinks in hand watching me
one I recognise from photos as Snyder
it dawns on me that
they have been there for some time
have they been watching me, for how long?
I've been at the bar for maybe an hour and half.
We are about eight feet apart
and for a few seconds our eyes lock
and suddenly I feel ashamed to be seen
getting drunk
alone in a crowded bar
oblivious of the company of others.
I felt the ghost of Kerouac pass between us
Snyder takes it all in
sees a well liked energised guy
sees that I am on the same greased slide
of alcoholism
that took Jack down
the path of bitter loneliness
the scrambled brains
the mindless bad mouth
the deep disconnection
I didn't go over and say hallo
we both knew what we had seen
I turned back to the bar
picked up my drink, downed it
and ordered another.
[13/10/00]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRANCES YULE
BACK THEN
in between the passing
of joints
talking about God
drinking
fucking
anti-war protests
poetry raves
gigs
performing plays
dancing
creating art
exhibiting
drinking coffee
eating Turkish, Greek, Italian
moving from one house to another
working briefly in shit jobs
playing pool
popping pills at parties
and hallucinogenic experiences
we were the nuts and bolts
the spokes the oil
of the 60s revolution
we were cogs in the wheel
of the revolving wheel
the wheel still turning
[May 19, 2009]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, June 4, 2009
BLOOMSDAY 2009 + COLLECTED WORKS' AUTUMN REPORT
Farewell Autumn, welcome Winter! April & May have come & gone! We'd better advertise Bloomsday then, the annual June 16th celebration falling this year on the Tuesday, which will be the next event at the Shop. In recent years, the profusion of Bloomsday events elsewhere leads us to concentrate our reading into the lunch period, midday til 2.30 or so. All James Joyce fans welcome!
The Autumn report, begun late March, was put to the side while I composed The Divine Issue (published in April), and though I took up the former again in early May, I was then wonderfully diverted by correspondence flowing from TDI as well as revisiting the same period's literary material, some of which research accrues now as its Addendum.
Had I been better organized I'd have flagged the two May events, namely the launch of Mary Napier's spoken-word CD, Open Thoughts, on the 15th, and the tribute reading for Dorothy Porter on the 28th.
A major distraction has been Loretta's health glitch (--an irregularity detected via breast screening which led to needle biopsy and then surgery for breast cancer; disappointingly this is a continuing story with further though smaller surgery in the offing)... On the day Dorothy's tribute took place at Collected Works, Loretta was having her operation at the Peter Mac. What I called 'exquisite irony', Jenny Harrison (who, with Gig Ryan, curated & catered the Tribute) named a 'symmetry' in which Dorothy was linked to Retta & all women touched by the illness. There was never a thought to cancel the event; Retta would have been appalled. She was certainly at the shop in spirit just as all her well-wishers were with her at the Peter Mac...
Disaster & disease affect everyone; the poets die the same kind of deaths as everyone else. Today I've read a notice posted by Lorin Ford on the Overload Nation poetry site concerning the death of Andrea Sherwood. We catch our breath, then breathe again... Geoff Eggleston, Dorothy Porter --mourned & celebrated by their families & literary communities in December... In February the fires came. Entire hamlets, towns disappeared. Family & friends were burnt out &/or killed. Young poet Ella Holcombe's parents perished in Kinglake. The subsequent memorial service at Montsalvat, attended by Melbourne poets in solidarity with Ella, was also a grieving for that whole community... In Redesdale, Robert Kenny faught for his house for ten minutes before abandoning it to save his own life. His academic work-in-progress was backed-up at La Trobe University but library, archives, art work & studio are all gone... From Berlin the shocking news of artist, print-maker Julia Harman's tragic & untimely death --she was Tim Hemensley's first serious partner, and felt that however separated by distance in life, & then by his death, she was always with him, and now she is I guess... Concentric circles of all whom one considers family. A good friend of the Shop, Tim Sheppard, died on the 11th March after illness. A great devotee of poetry, especially the 1st World War British poets, he also wrote poems although a collection never saw light of day...
For the poets, as I'm fond of saying, t'was always so. All of this in the midst of life. And life goes on (--and it does go on despite the traumatisation of survivors --so well and still do I recall the experience of 6 years ago when the fact of my son's death was like an imposed nakedness upon me -- worse : I felt skinned, scourged of my skin, wearing only the fact of his death, feeling as I stood there in the world that only I knew the catastrophe and no one could see what I was feeling)... Some of the life that goes on, for the poet, involves the readings & launches, gatherings of the clan... For the Melbourne poet these are all around town, constantly, if the handbills or emails I see are any indication.
Collected Works' Autumn season kicked off on the 12th March with the first of two new poetry collections published by Barry Scott's Transit Lounge : Kent McCarter's In the Hungry Middle of Here (--launched by Jenny Lea, whom I dont think I've seen since I dropped in on a Meanjin/Overland cricket match on the Domain Oval in South Yarra --early 90s? --I'm not sure whether she was playing or barracking but we chatted at tea in amongst the trestle tables & eskies --and what a dynamo was Meanjin's skipper, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, clapping for attention, darting hither & thither in the field when he wasnt bowling --but that's another story!), & Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobudur (launched by Tim Lindsey from the Asia Law Centre) on the 20th. Good attendances for both, more local poets at McCarter's, lots of Asian Studies people at Mackenzie's.
It's a truism in the Melbourne writing & performance community now that with the scene's current proliferation there are always going to be new names, poets one hasnt previously encountered. Blurbs from Gig Ryan & CWC for McCarter underlined my ignorance. Conversely, my blurb for Jenny Mackenzie attests a long acquaintance with author & family punctuated for the times she lived in China.
I remember twenty years ago Jennifer thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights as a potential publisher of her Borobudur project. This must have been canvassed around about 1985 since that was when Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books withdrew from the fray, having to decline such new writers as Brian Castro as well as foreclosing what had become a new writing stable including John Scott, Anna Couani, Ken Taylor, Ken Bolton, Chris Barnett, Ania Walwicz, John Anderson, Laurie Duggan, Walter Billeter, Kenny himself & yours truly. Who knows how it might have developed had personal & financial conditions played out differently? Rigmarole might now still have been the major small-press in Australia that one or two publishers in North America survived sufficiently long to become over there. But then again, gaps are inevitably filled and the culture is always changing, implying different aesthetical & political imperatives for different times. Rigmarole in the mid to late 80s would have been a natural home for Borobudur. While congratulating Jenny Mackenzie's tenacity and sighing with her At last, at last, one realizes it was more the case of putting something aside than of battling for twenty years; even so, twenty years is quite a hiatus.
A note now on Tim Lindsey's comments (overwhelmingly in the poet's favour)... Inevitably it was an Asian Studies/Foreign Affairs appreciation of the book as a cultural-political object --that is, Mackenzie's poem was read as a long overdue Australian translation of a classic Javanese story subsuming crucial aspects of that tradition, a belated but worthy act reflecting Australian recognition of the antiquity & authority of an important geopolitical neighbour.
Lindsey's pitch was not uninteresting --indeed, in the context of an exotic literary publication, his political & economic language was an instructive counterpoint. However, as I quipped to him later, I'd contend Indonesian-Australian relations, as with East-West relations in general, are a two-way street. Interesting that Australian ignorance of Javanese epic is supposedly indicative of an Australian know-nothing arrogance which will marginalise us in the future; yet the lay observation of the Asian neighbours' voracious appetite for Western popular forms, from democracy & personal freedoms to t-shirts & rock & roll, is unmentioned. Actually, Western translation of Asian literary & religious classics is the typical form of the Anglo-European interaction with Asia over a very long period, and as fast as we gobble up their elite texts so do they our popular ones.
It also occurred to me last year, after meeting a Singaporean poet & academic, that his expertise in modern British poetry, from Hardy to the present, surely curries our conception of the post-colonial! Furthermore, the considerable East-West collaboration of artists & writers, including Australian & Asian, in my opinion significantly corrects the postcolonial ideological cliche. I offered Tim Lindsey the examples of Sandy Fitts (whose View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press, '08) has won this year's Anne Elder Prize for a first collection) & Jane Gibbian (Ardent is her first full collection, published by Giramondo Press, '08) as Aussie poets redeeming quality collaboration from their trips to Vietnam. I also mentioned to him Cathy O'Brien's description of her meeting in Vientiane, Laos with an Australian colleague's partner, the Iraqui poet Basim Furat, residing there after a spell in New Zealand where, according to Mark Pirie, he had impressed the local scene. They may well collaborate in the future. For me a tiny but interesting example of the hybridization increasingly possible in global culture.
Of course, violent displacement is also increasing & is one obvious explanation of such unlikely crosscurrents. Yet let's recall Ford Madox Ford's witty definition of English culture, against the xenophobia of his day, as the happy result of "successive periods of unrest amongst the Continental peoples".
_________________________________________________________
Kris Hemensley
March/May/June 4 '09
The Autumn report, begun late March, was put to the side while I composed The Divine Issue (published in April), and though I took up the former again in early May, I was then wonderfully diverted by correspondence flowing from TDI as well as revisiting the same period's literary material, some of which research accrues now as its Addendum.
Had I been better organized I'd have flagged the two May events, namely the launch of Mary Napier's spoken-word CD, Open Thoughts, on the 15th, and the tribute reading for Dorothy Porter on the 28th.
A major distraction has been Loretta's health glitch (--an irregularity detected via breast screening which led to needle biopsy and then surgery for breast cancer; disappointingly this is a continuing story with further though smaller surgery in the offing)... On the day Dorothy's tribute took place at Collected Works, Loretta was having her operation at the Peter Mac. What I called 'exquisite irony', Jenny Harrison (who, with Gig Ryan, curated & catered the Tribute) named a 'symmetry' in which Dorothy was linked to Retta & all women touched by the illness. There was never a thought to cancel the event; Retta would have been appalled. She was certainly at the shop in spirit just as all her well-wishers were with her at the Peter Mac...
Disaster & disease affect everyone; the poets die the same kind of deaths as everyone else. Today I've read a notice posted by Lorin Ford on the Overload Nation poetry site concerning the death of Andrea Sherwood. We catch our breath, then breathe again... Geoff Eggleston, Dorothy Porter --mourned & celebrated by their families & literary communities in December... In February the fires came. Entire hamlets, towns disappeared. Family & friends were burnt out &/or killed. Young poet Ella Holcombe's parents perished in Kinglake. The subsequent memorial service at Montsalvat, attended by Melbourne poets in solidarity with Ella, was also a grieving for that whole community... In Redesdale, Robert Kenny faught for his house for ten minutes before abandoning it to save his own life. His academic work-in-progress was backed-up at La Trobe University but library, archives, art work & studio are all gone... From Berlin the shocking news of artist, print-maker Julia Harman's tragic & untimely death --she was Tim Hemensley's first serious partner, and felt that however separated by distance in life, & then by his death, she was always with him, and now she is I guess... Concentric circles of all whom one considers family. A good friend of the Shop, Tim Sheppard, died on the 11th March after illness. A great devotee of poetry, especially the 1st World War British poets, he also wrote poems although a collection never saw light of day...
For the poets, as I'm fond of saying, t'was always so. All of this in the midst of life. And life goes on (--and it does go on despite the traumatisation of survivors --so well and still do I recall the experience of 6 years ago when the fact of my son's death was like an imposed nakedness upon me -- worse : I felt skinned, scourged of my skin, wearing only the fact of his death, feeling as I stood there in the world that only I knew the catastrophe and no one could see what I was feeling)... Some of the life that goes on, for the poet, involves the readings & launches, gatherings of the clan... For the Melbourne poet these are all around town, constantly, if the handbills or emails I see are any indication.
Collected Works' Autumn season kicked off on the 12th March with the first of two new poetry collections published by Barry Scott's Transit Lounge : Kent McCarter's In the Hungry Middle of Here (--launched by Jenny Lea, whom I dont think I've seen since I dropped in on a Meanjin/Overland cricket match on the Domain Oval in South Yarra --early 90s? --I'm not sure whether she was playing or barracking but we chatted at tea in amongst the trestle tables & eskies --and what a dynamo was Meanjin's skipper, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, clapping for attention, darting hither & thither in the field when he wasnt bowling --but that's another story!), & Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobudur (launched by Tim Lindsey from the Asia Law Centre) on the 20th. Good attendances for both, more local poets at McCarter's, lots of Asian Studies people at Mackenzie's.
It's a truism in the Melbourne writing & performance community now that with the scene's current proliferation there are always going to be new names, poets one hasnt previously encountered. Blurbs from Gig Ryan & CWC for McCarter underlined my ignorance. Conversely, my blurb for Jenny Mackenzie attests a long acquaintance with author & family punctuated for the times she lived in China.
I remember twenty years ago Jennifer thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights as a potential publisher of her Borobudur project. This must have been canvassed around about 1985 since that was when Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books withdrew from the fray, having to decline such new writers as Brian Castro as well as foreclosing what had become a new writing stable including John Scott, Anna Couani, Ken Taylor, Ken Bolton, Chris Barnett, Ania Walwicz, John Anderson, Laurie Duggan, Walter Billeter, Kenny himself & yours truly. Who knows how it might have developed had personal & financial conditions played out differently? Rigmarole might now still have been the major small-press in Australia that one or two publishers in North America survived sufficiently long to become over there. But then again, gaps are inevitably filled and the culture is always changing, implying different aesthetical & political imperatives for different times. Rigmarole in the mid to late 80s would have been a natural home for Borobudur. While congratulating Jenny Mackenzie's tenacity and sighing with her At last, at last, one realizes it was more the case of putting something aside than of battling for twenty years; even so, twenty years is quite a hiatus.
A note now on Tim Lindsey's comments (overwhelmingly in the poet's favour)... Inevitably it was an Asian Studies/Foreign Affairs appreciation of the book as a cultural-political object --that is, Mackenzie's poem was read as a long overdue Australian translation of a classic Javanese story subsuming crucial aspects of that tradition, a belated but worthy act reflecting Australian recognition of the antiquity & authority of an important geopolitical neighbour.
Lindsey's pitch was not uninteresting --indeed, in the context of an exotic literary publication, his political & economic language was an instructive counterpoint. However, as I quipped to him later, I'd contend Indonesian-Australian relations, as with East-West relations in general, are a two-way street. Interesting that Australian ignorance of Javanese epic is supposedly indicative of an Australian know-nothing arrogance which will marginalise us in the future; yet the lay observation of the Asian neighbours' voracious appetite for Western popular forms, from democracy & personal freedoms to t-shirts & rock & roll, is unmentioned. Actually, Western translation of Asian literary & religious classics is the typical form of the Anglo-European interaction with Asia over a very long period, and as fast as we gobble up their elite texts so do they our popular ones.
It also occurred to me last year, after meeting a Singaporean poet & academic, that his expertise in modern British poetry, from Hardy to the present, surely curries our conception of the post-colonial! Furthermore, the considerable East-West collaboration of artists & writers, including Australian & Asian, in my opinion significantly corrects the postcolonial ideological cliche. I offered Tim Lindsey the examples of Sandy Fitts (whose View from the Lucky Hotel (Five Islands Press, '08) has won this year's Anne Elder Prize for a first collection) & Jane Gibbian (Ardent is her first full collection, published by Giramondo Press, '08) as Aussie poets redeeming quality collaboration from their trips to Vietnam. I also mentioned to him Cathy O'Brien's description of her meeting in Vientiane, Laos with an Australian colleague's partner, the Iraqui poet Basim Furat, residing there after a spell in New Zealand where, according to Mark Pirie, he had impressed the local scene. They may well collaborate in the future. For me a tiny but interesting example of the hybridization increasingly possible in global culture.
Of course, violent displacement is also increasing & is one obvious explanation of such unlikely crosscurrents. Yet let's recall Ford Madox Ford's witty definition of English culture, against the xenophobia of his day, as the happy result of "successive periods of unrest amongst the Continental peoples".
_________________________________________________________
Kris Hemensley
March/May/June 4 '09
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