online New Writing from In this Issue Western Australia Dennis Haskell IM Fay Zwicky Essays Marcella Polain Poetry John Kinsella Lucy Dougan ‘Winged’ Marcella Polain Do we really meet people through their writing? If so then, like many, that’s how I first met Fay. Westerly Online Special Issue 5, New Writing from ‘IM Fay Zwicky’, 2017 online Western Australia Notice of Intention Publisher Poetry Westerly has converted the full backfile of Westerly Centre, The University of Western Australia, Australia IM Fay Zwicky Essays Westerly (1956–) to electronic text, available Guest Editor to readers and researchers on the Westerly Dennis Haskell website, www.westerlymag.com.au. This work has been supported by a grant from General Editor the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Catherine Noske Limited. Associate Editor All creative works, articles and reviews Josephine Taylor converted to electronic format will be correctly Editorial Advisors attributed and will appear as published. Cassandra Atherton (poetry) Copyright will remain with the authors, and the Rachel Robertson (prose) material cannot be further republished without Elfie Shiosaki (Indigenous writing) authorial permission. Westerly will honour any requests to withdraw material from electronic Editorial Consultants Westerly publication. If any author does not wish their Delys Bird (The University of Western Australia) work to appear in this format, please contact Barbara Bynder Westerly immediately and your material will Caterina Colomba (Università del Salento) be withdrawn. Tanya Dalziell (The University of Western Australia) Paul Genoni (Curtin University) Contact: [email protected] Guest editor: Dennis Haskell (The University of Western Australia) John Kinsella (Curtin University) Westerly acknowledges all Aboriginal and Dennis Haskell Ambelin Kwaymullina (The University of Western Australia) Torres Strait Islander peoples as First Susan Lever (Hon. Associate, The University of Sydney) Australians. We celebrate the continuous John Mateer living cultures of Indigenous people and their Tracy Ryan (The University of Western Australia) vital contributions within Australian society. Andrew Taylor (Edith Cowan University) Westerly’s office, at the University of Western Corey Wakeling (Kobe College, Japan) Australia, is located on Whadjak Noongar David Whish-Wilson (Curtin University) land. We recognise the Noongar people as the Terri-ann White (The University of Western Australia Publishing) spiritual and cultural custodians of this land. Administrator Asha Ryan

Commissioning Editor Lucy Dougan

Web Editor Chris Arnold

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Front cover: Photograph of Fay provided with permission of Karl Zwicky and Anna Quick.

All academic work published in Westerly is peer-reviewed. Copyright of each piece belongs to the author; copyright of This project has also been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the the collection belongs to the Westerly Centre. Republication is Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. permitted on request to author and editor. Westerly is published biannually with assistance from the State Government of WA by an investment in this project through the Department of Culture and the Arts and from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. The opinions expressed in Westerly are those of individual contributors and not of the Editors or Editorial Advisors. From the Editor

From the Editor 7

Poetry John Kinsella This issue of Westerly provides a remembrance of, and testament to, Fay Graphology Endgame 101 10 Zwicky (4 July 1933 – 2 July 2017). It is far from attempting to be a rounded Dennis Haskell festschrift—time did not allow that, and we are sure that her creative and Days without end 25 critical work will continue to attract attention in the years to come. Lucy Dougan Fay was a poet, short story writer, literary essayist, and editor of a Crouch End, July 2, 2017 56 number of poetry anthologies. She was a long-time lecturer at The University of Western Australia and for many years the Poetry Editor of Westerly. It is as a poet and essayist that she is best-known, since these Essays Marcella Polain were her principal interests, and she wrote poems and critical articles Winged 13 throughout her life. The poems and essays in this issue of Westerly come Morgan Yasbincek from people who knew her, to varying degrees, and they make little The Opposite of Death 17 attempt to pursue professionally detached literary criticism. Now that this Dennis Haskell author is dead, they provide appreciations of the person as well as of her Fay Zwicky and ‘the riddle of the work. I am quite sure that Fay would have been somewhat embarrassed self’s existence’ 27 but heartened by their writing. Paul Hetherington Fay’s appreciation would have been heightened by the issue’s contra­ Learning to Read 37 diction of her self-perception as a largely forgotten outsider. This David McCooey self-consciousness is common enough amongst Australian writers, On the Side of Cheerfulness 40 especially amongst poets, and persisted with Fay despite the awards she Nicholas Birns won (most notably the Patrick White Award) and the many friendships So Touch Nothing 53 she maintained. Long retired from the University, in her last few years she often expressed a sense of loneliness in poems and in conversation. She had outlived close literary friends such as A. D. Hope, Dorothy Hewett, Submissions 58 Rosemary Dobson and Gwen Harwood, and she greatly missed her Subscriptions 59 husband, Karl Zwicky, who had died in 1985. Fay conducted an extensive correspondence (she never used email, or, for that matter, a computer), particularly with Gwen Harwood, who could be as intellectually feisty as Fay herself. Ever aware of the perils of a public self, she has chosen to

7 | Dennis Haskell keep this correspondence private: her papers, held in the National Library invited her over for morning tea. She rebuked him for smoking, and said of Australia, are closed for many years to come. that he had just not had a big enough fright! Later, back in Perth, Fay had That decision, not made known to anyone during her lifetime except resumed smoking, and defended it at—my memory is hazy—what must the Library, reflects the emotional vulnerability that often made life have been her 70th birthday party, proclaiming that smokers were the difficult for her but which provides strength to her rigorously enquiring modern lepers. On one of my visits early in 2017 she remarked that she poetry right up to the end. As long ago as 1994, The Oxford Companion to knew she was paying the penalty for a lifetime of smoking. I reminded Australian Literature described her as writing ‘an individual, emotionally her of how she had said that she couldn’t write without it. ‘Ahhh,’ she direct and densely textured poetry which is concerned with division, declared, ‘that was probably just an excuse!’ conflict and dispossession…’ (833). Fay had a ‘love of writers vulnerable to With the surname ‘Zwicky’ (her married name—she was born Julia experience’ (Lyre 5) and she was certainly a writer of this kind herself. Her Fay Rosefield) she was always last on a list of Australian writers, and poetry in particular pursues a ‘knotty struggle for personal awareness’ hers is the last entry in the Oxford Companion. I think that this suited her (Lyre 91). Although she claimed that Australia was ‘a country where you Outsider’s sensibility. But to those who knew her, she was very much an can re-invent yourself over and over again’ (‘Border Crossings’ 13), her insider to creative and critical thought and language. I never heard her own aim, it seems to me, was self-discovery, not self-invention, and she give a talk that wasn’t intelligent and incisive, and this seems an accurate pursued it with sincerity and tenacity. Often critical of others, she was description of all her essays—many of which express views I disagree even more critical of herself, but such writing was a way of ‘keeping afloat, with. You could disagree with Fay, in conversation or in print, but I never keeping one’s spiritual stamina intact, even in hell’ (‘Border Crossings’ 25). found her disagreeable. She was fascinating, and this issue of Westerly is Fay relished the role of outsider, even though she often seemed less a tribute to both her, and her work. of an étranger to others than to herself. When young, she recalled, ‘my sympathies [were] always directed to the noble despised figure of the Dennis Haskell, December 2017 One who was Different in both life and literature’ (‘Border Crossings’ 19). This sympathy partly derived from her intense musical training and skills—her first profession was as a concert pianist—and partly from her Works Cited family being Jewish, although her link with Judaism she described as Dougan, Lucy & Tim Dolin. ‘Border Crossings’, in The Collected Poems of Fay ‘remote’ (‘Border Crossings’ 15), and it is easily exaggerated. Fay was an Zwicky, eds. Lucy Dougan & Tim Dolin. Crawley: University of Western Australia Outsider by temperament, and this is no doubt one reason she was drawn Publishing, 2017. to American Literature (her academic specialisation) and particularly to Wilde, William H. et al. (eds.) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 2nd ed. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994. Walt Whitman. (Being born on the 4th of July might have been another!) Zwicky, Fay. The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival 1974–1984. Fay no doubt knew that her poetry did not suit all tastes. During her Nedlands: University of Western Australia Publishing, 1986. last months she told me of a letter that she had kept which she greatly appreciated; it came from James McAuley at the end of his poetry editorship of Quadrant. Fay had sent various poems there and he had rejected all of them; McAuley wrote to apologise, saying that only now did he understand what she was attempting. I had the feeling that Fay enjoyed the rejections plus letter more than she would have enjoyed being published. During these months when she was suffering from lung cancer, and increasingly dependent on oxygen supplies, Fay was remarkably calm and accepting, and kept up her sometimes terrifying honesty. I had first met her at Sydney University in the early 1980s, when she was Writer in Residence at Macquarie University. Geoffrey Little, a mutual friend,

8 | Westerly online 9 | Dennis Haskell Graphology Endgame 101 John Kinsella’s most recent to discuss Wordsworth, now part of our family myth. books of poetry include IM Fay Zwicky All of this now, like the forgotten art of developing photos, Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016) and her words on poetry, poet for whom being a poet John Kinsella and Graphology Poems 1995– 2015 (Five Islands Press, 2016). was an affirmation and mystery and a trial against A recent book of short stories the bleak forces of the state and the callousness is Old Growth (Transit Lounge, of isms. In which reading was more than refuge, 2017). He is Professor of Literature and Sustainability at it was liberation. But now, thinking over all this and over Curtin University, and a Fellow Fay’s poems written for friends who had passed away, of Churchill College, Cambridge I am watching a pallid cuckoo following brown honeyeaters University. He lives and works at Jam Tree Gully in the Western whose nests when nesting time comes will be high Australian wheatbelt. on its agenda for usurping, for egg-replacing, as the fantailed cuckoos will deceive the splendid blue fairy wrens that have moved here recently—entering Fay’s funeral is in half-an-hour and I can’t be there— their dome-shaped nests, while their pallid relatives I am deep in the country awaiting the delivery go for cup nests. These are the details of my absence of a load of drinking water: there have been bursts from your funeral, Fay, the words that will see you of rain but it’s a dry winter. When I spoke to Fay take leave of a contradictory world for ambiguities on the phone for the last time, I think I mentioned you revealed in subtexts and allusions, those ancestors in passing the dryness, and now I think of those words you came to later, wondering over youth and ageing, and I think of the dry and pall of smoke in her poems the nests we weave and the images we nurture of hospice care, her attempts at connection that don’t always fit our desires, or troubled dreams, with those who were closing off, or were hanging on, or allusion or friendships that fade in and out of focus. or would or could only let fragments of others through The cuckoos don’t really fit with this, but they’re the doors of their lives. Fred, who thought her foreign! here, now, hanging around the edges of songbird activity. Her humility and grace, her wry humour that told I locate the descant, I pull out the stops, I listen to Bach me to keep on going in the face of negatives. Generous and Mozart. I say to a friend, one of your closest friends, that I’ll moment that left me with something from a friendship be there in spirit. And I am—the nests yet to be woven, that had a long silence, decades of incidental encounter the eggs laid, and the cuckoo planning its entry but that had rhizomes in my childhood, through youth. into the text of other lives. I have no place I told her as a young man as I walked past in your afterlife as I had none in the earthly life that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever you left with humility and comprehension. encountered, went to her office when Kaddish But your words of sharing and support, was published and told her it was the greatest poem your selflessness and irony, I had ever read. She invited my mother in as her student

10 | Westerly online 11 | John Kinsella your satirical edge with empathy, Winged Marcella Polain writes poetry are woven here for the future. And cuckoos— Marcella Polain and narrative fiction. She is you were not one and no conceit will make you one— Senior Lecturer in Writing at Edith Cowan University, Perth. you knocked out no other poets’ poems, and your own did the work themselves, but with allusion and portals through millennia of voices. One of the fantailed cuckoos here has had most of its tail feathers plucked by a bird of prey—it sits close to the house, its partner pursuing thornbills, making mental maps for future reference. They are all about what will come— ‘They [poems] / had a way of telling / the truth and believing / and the damaged tail is accommodated in the prospectus. himself alone in the / storm he heard / none of it.’ (‘The poet And here, as you are sung, this offering of mixed metaphors— puts it away’, Kaddish) soon the water will arrive and be transferred into the tank I suspect Fay would wave her hand and say she doesn’t like all this fuss. If on the upper tier, to be gravity-fed to the house, domesticity. she did say that, I’m not sure it would be all she felt about it. Do we really meet people through their writing? If so then, like many, that’s how I first met Fay. Some years later, we met in person, and were still getting to know one another when she died: a handful of conversations—lengthy, invigorating, memorable—separated by long periods without contact. A regret. Sometimes we meet others with whom we feel immediate affinity. For me, Fay was one of those people. That first face-to-face meeting was in the Green Room at the Perth Writers Festival, at the University of Western Australia, in the mid 1990s. From memory, she was a guest on a poetry panel I was facilitating. I no longer recall the identity of the woman who kindly accompanied me across campus and introduced us, but as we walked she hesitated. ‘Fay can be… difficult.’ I glanced at her; she widened her eyes a little, gave a small sigh. I recalled the difficult women of my childhood and smiled. ‘That’s fine,’ I replied. Or something like that. The Green Room was crowded, noisy. I sat opposite Fay and watched her glance about, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else. I leaned in with my best smile and asked her a question. I don’t remember precisely what it was. Something about how she was feeling, I think. She looked at me. Her face lit up as she answered. And there it was: mellifluous voice, eloquence, charm, smile, directness. I liked her instantly. I got the feeling she also liked me. As we sometimes do. She was not quite like the difficult women I had known.

12 | Westerly online 13 | Marcella Polain ‘We eat and die. / Your eye burns a dark / Angelic arc into my and time?—but I had recognised, I believe, a great deal about her. Not frightened fur.’ (‘Lemur’, Kaddish) quite like my difficult women, no, but not unlike them, either. To the end, she observed and commented, puzzled and questioned, In one of our last conversations, on a winter afternoon a couple of weeks was full of longing, was humbled and surprised by how many people cared before she died, we gazed through the window of her room. Beyond a for her, visited her. She waved some things away—the fuss of food but also corrugated roof was a stretch of the Swan River; above it, a huge sky of the fuss of love. ‘Everyone wants to come now,’ she said in that final room fading blue peppered with cloud. I said, ‘Look at that.’ Fay said, ‘Aren’t we with the view to river and sky. She was watching her hands smooth her lucky to have it.’ bedspread. ‘But I’ve said no, don’t come, it’s too much trouble.’ She said the food was very good where she was. She insisted I try the Oh, Fay. Wave your hand. They came anyway. Of course they did. tea cake. She also said, with a wave of her hand, that people make far too Because they loved you. And you them. much fuss about food. She asked, ‘Do you enjoy teaching?’ I hesitated. I love my job but, in truth, I have recently come to realise ‘I learned a gesture / From you, a slight / Turning away, a that I once loved it more. I shrugged. ‘Yes. But less and less.’ retreat / So little you’d hardly / Believe I noticed. // But it ‘Hmm.’ She looked away. ‘I can understand that.’ grew in me / Turned strong. / I had force / Unknown before, / Maybe for evil. // It worked so well / You’d hardly believe / Another time, I speculated that living was difficult for someone I knew. The woman I grew to be / Watching you / Turning away’ (‘The ‘Like me,’ she said, quietly, and glanced away, as she sometimes did. Gatekeeper’s Wife’, The Gatekeeper’s Wife) During an unexpected stay in a general hospital ward, she said her first ‘Yes, there is Bread / and I am where I am, / Winged, decorous, night there had been the most abject of her life. Many of us have endured stony-hearted captive judge; / Nobody dare befriend me.’ E&A nights; we know how uncomfortable they are, and how weird. I (‘Emily Dickinson Judges the Bread Division At the Amherst nodded, but I couldn’t help thinking: if that were true—and I’ve no reason Cattle Show, 1858’, Isaac Babel’s Fiddle) to believe otherwise—she had been fortunate, indeed. Fay and I were astonished to discover that she and my parents may have A nurse came into Fay’s room in that general hospital ward; she asked met in the small expatriate community of colonial Singapore into which how Fay was feeling. So Fay told her: tired; unhappy; hadn’t slept. The I was born, that perhaps she and I had even seen one another—she in the nurse, with a smile, called her ‘grumpy’. I looked from the nurse’s face to height of her youth, me in infancy. The unexpected connections of the Fay’s, watched Fay’s glance slide away as she acquiesced. In that moment, world. Once I realised this odd, oblique, particular historical connection, I was surprised. By both of them. I looked back to the nurse, reminded our conversations made a new sense. myself of the difficulties of that profession. But still I felt the sentences In The Lyre in the Pawnshop, Fay wrote that she knew she had a bubbling on the tip of my tongue: Have you read her file? Do you know reputation as a curmudgeon. She was right, and I had heard it often. But she is being transferred to palliative care? Do you know you are speaking this is what I saw: fierceness, uncompromising intelligence, eloquence, to a State living treasure? (I know, I know, she said she hated that title.) clear-sighted analysis, genuine curiosity, contradiction, impatience, Do you really think complaining about opening your eyes to see strange outrage, sociability. The gorgeous woman who refused to play gorgeous. men in your doorway, about having to tell them repeatedly to get out, is The tough-mind so often disdained in women. An unwillingness to keep grumpiness? quiet and look good. Her mistake, if mistake it was: to make the foolishness At the time, I kept my mouth shut, kept those sentences to myself. I of others quite clear; to disagree, and loudly. thought Fay more than capable of speaking for herself. I forgot about Refreshing. Glorious. how many times she had been called such things, and how much she was In that Green Room, of course I hadn’t recognised her personally—how aware of it. I wish I hadn’t kept quiet. could I, even if we had once met, having been a baby in that colonial place

14 | Westerly online 15 | Marcella Polain A little later, a different female voice, loud, from just outside Fay’s door. The Opposite of Death Morgan Yasbincek is an ‘You’ll have to go back to your room.’ Morgan Yasbincek awarded Western Australian A male voice replied, steady, well modulated. ‘Well, that’s the thing, poet and novelist. She has published three collections of you see. I go round and round and wherever I am it’s never where I am poetry; the most recent is White meant to be.’ Camel by John Leonard Press. We looked at one another. We laughed. Fay shrugged. ‘Writers don’t have to make anything up. We just have to listen. The world gives us everything and all we have to do is write it down.’ And, so, Fay, I do: that ‘mysterious act of writing’ (The Lyre in the Pawnshop, p. 3).

When I think of you, I remember a fleeting dream. Someone I know but whose face I can’t quite see, someone whose identity I can’t quite place, My friendship with Fay was very like so many between women who hold stands in front of me. They are saying, ‘Look.’ I follow the direction of their each other in high regard, who would like to know each other at more outstretched finger; it points a little way ahead. I know that, just below the depth, between whom meeting is delightful, generous, but the meetings surface of the earth, is a rich vein. I want to follow it. themselves are sparse across time for the common reasons we hear in conversations around us every day—no time, distance, responsibilities, ‘Forget the tellers. Remember the tale / and the frail ghosts work… So I am sorry I have no claim to saying I knew Fay well, though I of our passing flowers.’ (‘Groundswell for Ginsberg’, The would have liked to. The context of what I write here is that I visited Fay Gatekeeper’s Wife) regularly in the last six months of her life. During a visit after she’d come out of hospital I asked if she would like me to keep in touch and possibly visit regularly and she said ‘Yes’—simply that. Two features of that last period stand out. Firstly, the Fay who was before me on these visits was just living completely as who she was and all of whom she was offered, right there on her sofa. I am confident in saying that it would have been there as much for the person who’d come to check her meter or the Silver Chain nurses. The second factor is that we were both poets, and a couple of times, when Marcella Polain visited with me, we were lucky enough to be three poets. Without adding romantically at all, I have come to know that the too rare hours of time spent with fellow women poets over many different years in different contexts has been akin to the relief of finding a stone or sand underfoot after a long period of treading water. The connection is effortless, there is a sense of orientation and exhilaration in what we can reflect for one another and celebrate in life; they remain among my most meaningful experiences. In my experience this is not only limited to women poets, but there seems to be less restraint, more effortless flow… It may seem strange that this was the foremost understanding of my experiences with Fay, who was in the last months of her life, dying of lung cancer. She was on oxygen, often breathless, increasingly confined, all of which one might expect. But each time I left her, I found myself marvelling

16 | Westerly online 17 | Morgan Yasbincek because Fay was not in any kind of passive state. She was sifting through with the vulnerability of being inadequate to the task, is oppressed by her 83 years, hunting out memories, winkling out slugs of unease, curious the phrase, which admits itself superiorly into her interior life, paralysing unresolved events, an array of touchstones, whatever it was under the expression: scrutiny of the poet’s eye. so you don’t write a poem On my first visit Fay talked a lot about her mother. It’s well known that you line up words in prose her mother was a monumental force in her life. When Fay showed me a inside a journal trapped photograph of her I felt my own pause at meeting the challenge of the like a scorpion in a locked gaze. ‘Oh yes,’ said Fay, ‘Formidable all right!’ There was a story about Fay drawer to be opened needing glasses and her mother, having decided her daughter wasn’t going by your children let go to wear glasses, refused to allow it. Another visit—Fay’s twelfth birthday. after lived life and all the time Her mother had organised a picnic. Fay’s friends were all taken in a horse- a great wave bursting drawn cart into the countryside. Fay was beside herself with excitement, it howls and rears and was a marvellous day but for the consequence of everyone coming down with a gastric bug after drinking water from the Yarra river. We talked on you have to let go about lives of women at different times, the limitations, mothering… Fay or you’re gone you’re concluded that her mother had done her best and on this birthday she’d gone gasping you been creative in giving to her daughter in a big way, even as the demands let go on Fay were heavily proportioned also. After that, talk of Fay’s mother till the next wave subsided, we were onto other things. Of the period in her life of making towers crumbles and growing family—the years of getting children to school, through shreds you to lace— adolescence, the upheaval of moving a family overseas for research When you wake sabbaticals. ‘Like being in the military,’ Fay said—‘you had to go, you had no your spine is twisted choice, the whole family was uprooted…’ It was a sober moment when Fay, like a sea-bird several decades on, going over this period, said emphatically, ‘I look back inspecting the sky, now and I realise we didn’t know a thing, we didn’t have a clue!’ Her words stripped by lightning. penetrated all the years of effort. Though I am of a different generation, The poem testifies to the damage. The narrator tries to comply with an it’s really not that different. The reverberations rippled through my own apparently simple wisdom, but it’s an unsupported one. She is not actually life. Visiting Fay was like taking a seat in one of her poems, you, she and culturally supported or equipped, in fact she is silenced and isolated; a every part of every scene were subject to its poetic truth. fathomless movement equal to years of loving and sharing a home with ‘Truth’ is a word increasingly impossible to isolate in any final terms children becomes a breaking force, and the question is now implicit: Do but a poetic truth is not just a matter of asserting how things are, it is we really let go, or are we living through something else, a violence of the portal through which the way things are assert themselves. A poetic visceral consequence? truth sits outside of time, its implications are transpersonal, it is felt by Fay was the first person to come to mind when planning a joint Perth all in the room of its knowing and is also apparently felt by the inanimate launch for White Camel and Marcella Polain’s Therapy Like Fish. Fay was and elemental worlds. It is the mystery reached by resilient poetry and a wonderful analyst of a work. If you attended a book launch by Fay you it is the most precious comfort because it is one thing that can be truly were sure to be given the best introduction to the work and an exacting shared. Fay was a great and fearless friend of this kind of truth; she openly overview, hewn by the sharpest of intellects. She was always very took the risk of appearing to be ungenerous toward popular sensibilities. gracious, a warm and encouraging mentor. At the launch of Picnic, before reading her poem ‘Letting go’, she said, I tried to keep the visits to a maximum of a couple of hours, not wanting ‘People are always talking about letting go these days, saying you have to tire Fay too much. Sometimes she was not well enough for a visit and she to let go—well, I don’t like letting go’. The narrator in the poem wrestles

18 | Westerly online 19 | Morgan Yasbincek would tell me not to come. At other times she seemed miraculously well. from gastro to dementia. She was right at the end of the ward in a tiny Once, our conversations swallowed a lot of time, but Fay was enlivened room that relied on a curtain for one wall and she said she’d had people and keen to continue. I kept asking if she was getting tired. I was amazed wandering in and out throughout the night. From her window, the tower when I left to realise I’d been there for four hours. I was very late for a of University of Western Australia, where Fay had worked for many years, meeting with my sister and a friend and, when I apologised and explained was visible. why, my friend shoved me in the arm and said, ‘Get out! Fay Zwicky? I was This was all a very big deal because Fay was coming to terms with just thinking about her recently. She was my tutor for lit. Best tutor I ever the fact that she would not be returning home. She had wondered about had—passionate and brilliant, I loved everything about her, I can still see the when and how and here it was—chaotic, shambolic, a shock, a day her, her clothes, her hair tied in a ponytail, the way she just let it go grey.’ suddenly more uncertain than the day before. It seems trite to say that This friend went on to become a teacher herself, to follow a vocation of she was good humoured, but she absolutely saw the humour. (I should deep dedication. Fay had many hundreds of students; suddenly her reach add here that Fay was moved to a hospice and in the best of care as soon palmed a multitude. as possible.) We had brought poems, she wanted to hear them. It was this I pondered what to take Fay. ‘Rockmelon,’ she said—‘Not too much sharing of poetry that really did bring the opposite of death into the room. and maybe a few grapes.’ There was her absolute favourite: squid salad Two of the poems we read: from a little outlet in Mosman Park. I took soup a couple of times, and the art of divining water poetry because if I was dying that’s what I would want to have as much of as possible. In her introduction to Julia Darling’s collected poems, sunday afternoon, and Jackie Kay says that Julia deals with ‘…death’s opposite’. Julia Darling we stand on the escarpment was a novelist, playwright and poet. She was passionate about bringing overlooking our city and its wide, tidal river, poetry into the hospital room. She was a cancer patient herself for many our eyes like cameras, our years, ran workshops for doctors and patients focussing on things like hair driven back by the force of appropriate metaphors for pain, and poetics as an enabler of expression, the wind coming all the way from the sea, communication as healing. She co-edited the anthology The Poetry Cure. and for a while we are silence, words stolen Julia died in April 2005. by air and light. Fay had made clear decisions about her treatment and she accepted from below, the hum of cars snakes up the hill the terms and limitations as her illness advanced. I can only express awe like the first note of a song that, over and over, at just how diamond-like her courage and openness were. She expressed dries in our throat. anxiety, frustration, and bewilderment at the uncertainties which, the art of divining water is not in the rod but the hands, naturally, began to mount as her illness progressed. More than once she not in the bones or the muscles but in the blood said she felt ready. She was grateful for her life, humbled by its many gifts, tangy, delicious and drawn to its loving, wet familiar and felt she’d lived a very good life. She was sorry for all that her loss full and hidden in the veins of the damp subterranean. would mean for her beloved family. She started to get a lot of visitors, we are a tic in the eye of time that, we are told, seemed glad about that, got busy with the final work for her book, grateful no longer flows like river but holds us in its palm and to all involved in helping her bring it to fruition. closes over us its soft fist. One Saturday she called me to say I’d have to visit her in hospital. She’d look, I say, one finger pointing, the way the sun stabs the collapsed at home and been taken to hospital. Marcella and I drove to the river’s skin. hospital and found ourselves in a surreal labyrinth of emptiness—empty all around us, trees continue; corridors, cafes, a reception desk with shutters closed. We were informed birds shout, their wings rising. of the likely place where Fay might be from a doctor who was buying you do not speak. you chips from a vending machine—seventh floor, next building, he said. We take my hand, your fingers trembling and damp. eventually found Fay in a ward that seemed to be for all kinds of illnesses Marcella Polain

20 | Westerly online 21 | Morgan Yasbincek Rose of Wilyabrup after the spring concert On one of my last visits, also with Marcella, Fay was finding it difficult to stay awake. It was therefore very brief, but before leaving we had her glass sits under her face, its bowl catches her words—she noticed an image from the cover of her book on her notice board. We is saying she doesn’t know what it was that knocked her off remarked how beautiful she was. ‘Oh, that’s not me,’ she said. ‘I don’t look her pedestal but her flamenco is brilliant—and you can see like that. I’m old and finished, just an old battle axe …’, and, speaking softly her twining in this way, she faded back into sleep. I wanted then to say how beautiful under the call of her castanets, as she stamps all the way into I had found her to be—a treasure of depths, nothing surface—Fay really her hips, turning had no surface: she was all or nothing. Her beauty was complex and below snaking hands on drumming feet richly articulated and ageless. I didn’t say anything because the time had rains have come late, bumped into the next passed and she was sleeping. It remains the one thing I wish I’d had the season, so now seems the time to taste the spring in a opportunity to say—the one argument I would like to have had with Fay. wine the colour of a late summer twilight The rest remains in the realm of the opposite of death, held in a timeless place. Fay will always remain vivid. We will hear her voice; experience in the stormy light she is somehow lit by this tincture, its her strength—through her poetry and memory. When I read Fay’s poem, colour ‘Growing Up’ I was struck by how perfectly she’d described herself at the nothing like the mixing of red and white, a cordial but not a end of her life: plasma, an ethereal pink that floats over the sea at the close of a forty three degree day When I grow up (I’m only fifty-five) I want to be as mountainous and wise my youngest, grown too soon into a swan as Marguerite Yourcenar. floats on pointe, her feet silk-ribboned into this same colour A big stone sphinx as her arms lift the tips of her fingers onto the shelf of flight, silent as a shadow. she spins through The perfect balance between girlhood with six others and with necks craning, faces to the grace and power. sky, they beat their wings against it and beatific, hatch themselves one by On my last visit with Fay I only took one poem. I chose the poem because it one was short and simple and, I hoped, relevant. I had written the poem a long time before I had started visiting Fay and it was a piece that just seemed my friend has swapped ballet for flamenco, keeps not to quite find its place. I read it to Fay, left it for her, and now feel it wishbones on her window sill, each holding a wish between belongs with her. its thighs to be snapped free, as long as two are willing to take the risk in the end of letting it fly we kneel, pour out all we have collected, we all to the other have to empty our pockets Morgan Yasbincek then we stand to look around, joining the horizon More than once Fay said that poetry is such a private art form. She into a circle specifically used that term and it puzzles me—solitary, yes, as practice. Yet here we were, experiencing the opposite of death, which might in turn be will you dance then in that place, expressed as being outside time, as somehow connecting with everything holding the instrument you have learnt to play? the moment can hold. It was a sharing in a room which could be described will you call your dog to follow—or wait for the as the opposite of private. We were together as writers, readers, women, company of stars? empathetic to the deep patience it takes to bring poetry to fruition.

22 | Westerly online 23 | Morgan Yasbincek you will be utterly alone, the only human, before the quiet Days without end Dennis Haskell is the author draws Dennis Haskell of seven collections of poetry, you forward once more, so that in the beginning you will and author or editor of fourteen volumes of literary scholarship collect your balance from the waters, rise up to standing, walk and criticism. He is the recipient looking for the sun, while your world dances around you of the Western Australia Premier’s Prize for Poetry, and in 2015 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia. Dennis Works Cited was co-editor of Westerly Darling, Julia. Indelible, Miraculous. Todmorden, UK: Arc Publications, 2015. Magazine (1985–2011) and is Darling, Julia & Fuller, Cynthia (eds.). The Poetry Cure. Newcastle Upon Tyne: currently a member of the Bloodaxe Books, 2005. Management Committee of the Polain, Marcella. Therapy Like Fish: New and Selected Poems. Melbourne: John Westerly Centre. Leonard Press, 2008. ——. ‘the art of divining water’, Oír ese Río: Antología poética de los cinco continentes (Hear that River: Anthology of the five continents), 2017. Fay Zwicky …your Yasbincek, Morgan. White Camel. Melbourne: John Leonard Press, 2009. days without end are numbered. ——. ‘Rose of Wilyabrup after the spring concert’, Cullen Wines Poetry Collection. Witchcliffe, WA: Margaret River Press, 2014. Zwicky, Fay. Picnic. Aranmore NSW: Giramondo Publishing Company, 2006. ——. The Collected Works of Fay Zwicky. Perth, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2017. In rain I went this afternoon to visit you as I have every week and a half or so clutching bright bunches of Asian orchids, their long stalked bells excited you so much: the first time I brought them they tolled you back so many, many years: a young woman Perdjodohan— happy in Indonesia, words foreign on your tongue exhilarating and intriguing, growing even snappier the more years swerved past. Down the empty corridor I went, and met that unnerving hospital sight: an empty room, empty of people that is, too calm, too tidy—empty of you. When I turned back towards the desk, lost flowers in hand, two young nurses stopped to say you ‘passed’ yesterday—passed ‘on’, passed ‘away’, they avoided the words, but did declare you happy and chatty to the end, though breath loped from your lungs, gift for a lifetime’s smoking.

24 | Westerly online 25 | Dennis Haskell I brought the orchids home—what else to do? Fay Zwicky and ‘the riddle of Now they stare from the vase, standing in for you. the self’s existence’ Another funeral last week. The people I taught with Dennis Haskell have now really started to go. I am getting older. Increasingly the world I see is not the world I know.

Perdjodohan – Indonesian for ‘wedding’

Fay Zwicky’s powerful collection of essays, The Lyre in the Pawnshop, from which the quotation in my title is taken (199), is subtitled ‘Essays on Literature and Survival 1974–1984’. It is a subtitle which sounds surprisingly dramatic for someone who was living in Perth’s relatively affluent western suburbs and lecturing at The University of Western Australia. Nevertheless, in the ‘Introduction’ Zwicky declares that ‘the use of the word “survival” in the book’s title was not lightly chosen’ (13). The essays were written ‘troubled by the progressive decline in humanist values and the current metaphysic of relativism and uncertainty’ (13). Despite this last phrase, a few pages earlier she claims that ‘our perspectives on human nature [are] distorted by unquestioning optimism’ (4). Intelligent and incisive as Zwicky’s essays are, she can be very given to rhetoric, and many of her sweeping generalisations say as much about her as about her ostensible subject, especially when that subject is contemporary Australian society. However, no-one who knew Fay would ever say that she was given to ‘unquestioning optimism’. In ‘the knotty struggle for personal awareness’ (Lyre 91), she was relentlessly pessimistic, at least outwardly. Her first book of poems, Isaac Babel’s Fiddle, characteristically speaks of ‘Spirit disjunct’,* ‘currents of estrangement’ in ‘black rain’ (75) and ‘Heart’s death’ (30). In my experience, a conversation with Fay could amusingly resemble a conversation with Hanrahan, the theme of ‘we’ll all be rooned’ recurrent. In her published writing, especially in essays, this theme is more seriously insistent. Despite her family and her many friendships she felt that she lacked ‘a sense of community … in the Australian context’ (Lyre 91), and thought that for ‘the human being to feel in the teeth of the computerised blankness of twentieth century existence’ would be a ‘triumph’ (Lyre 102). Fay Zwicky asserted that Australian society proclaimed ‘a taboo on tenderness’ (Lyre 135) and that ‘Living and growing up in this country has

26 | Westerly online 27 | Dennis Haskell been an exercise in repression’ (Lyre 92). In fact she was, I think, as she born / we’re all astray’ (111); until her last months Fay always had, in my said of Henry Handel Richardson, ‘an exile by temperament’ (Lyre 164); experience, an adversarial attitude to life. she had a ‘sense of being a stranger’ (‘Border Crossings’ 15) to her Fay Zwicky’s father seems to have been a gentler soul and she certainly own culture. felt more gentle towards him. In the poem ‘Afloat’ she recounts how as a If the source of this embattled sense of self, fighting for survival was child she waited for him to drive ‘towards a / grey-green Melbourne sea’ not Australian society, or not just Australian society, what could it be? (218) and home. The child Fay would jump on the car’s ‘running board / Zwicky’s published and private writings, in poetry and prose, suggest to ride that little strip of freedom / called “our drive” before our mother / that its origins lay in her childhood. She came, she said, ‘from a home of collared us to silence’. This non-adversarial poem ends, some turbulence’ (‘Border Crossings’ 18), and the turbulent figure in the Would it disturb you now household was her mother, ‘her wrath … indistinguishable from God’s’ […] (‘Border Crossings’ 16). In Zwicky’s poem ‘The Caller’, about Der Rufer, […] to tell you how, each day, the statue outside the Art Gallery of Western Australia, she imagines I wait that day’s-end glimpse that this ‘Bronze brother’ is mouthing ‘pain of a God unsighted / sightless of the whispering sea? in this land of garish failure’; and she asks, ‘where is childhood’s strict That concluding sea image seems more poignant with awareness that and wrathful judge?’ (253). ‘What is required of me, long foiled…?’ she Fay’s father died at sea, a point made explicit in one epigraph of ‘Kaddish’ questions, ‘Obedient and rebellious to what end?’ (254). ‘Breathing (91). She wrote that ‘His death brought me up against my ignorance of Exercises’ is a scathing poem which begins, ‘Have you ever tried to give just about everything’ (‘Border Crossings’ 14) and that the poem is ‘a long your mother breath?’ and observes that ‘Desolation keeps you both in elegy’ written ‘to make amends to him’ (‘Border Crossings’ 14)—although check’ (217). ‘All you want to do is breathe’ but ‘Gagged, you can’t move’. she later learnt that the traditional Jewish Kaddish is not meant to be The awareness of never avoiding her mother’s strictures is lifelong: elegiac but ‘a hymn of praise to God’ and ‘a celebration of all creation’ ‘Sentence has been passed / without words. / There are no bonds for good (‘Border Crossings’ 13). The poem has been praised and seen as one of behaviour’. One section of Fay’s journal published by her in Axon recalled her most important, including I think by Fay herself. This doesn’t seem ‘the grandeur of something tragic and submerged with my mother to me an accurate judgement. Behind the poem lies Ginsberg’s ragged, herself—her strange long fingers, the rolled up hair, the severe lines of her self-promoting ‘Kaddish’, and behind that Pound’s Cantos, with their grab- face, the eyes that never cried but which darted and flashed and missed bag of whatever came to Pound’s hand at the time tossed in arbitrarily. nothing’ (610). In an interview with Hazel de Berg in 1976 Zwicky said Zwicky’s poem is much less random than that, but various lines that that going to university provided ‘the first freedom I ever had in my life’. sound important could be read in almost any order; they never cohere She said, ‘It was a revelation … to meet people who didn’t judge you, … and never sound personally felt. The Old Testament tone of address is who enjoyed your company… suddenly I found friends, encouragement, a hard to make work in a contemporary elegy, and the poem’s ending is warmth which I’d never had before’ (8). derivatively ‘Ecclesiastes’ and T. S. Eliot. Ivor Indyk, in the best article Nevertheless, Zwicky recognised a lot of her mother in herself. In an written on Fay Zwicky’s work to date, praises her poetry but notes a unpublished section of her journal she wrote that as a young woman ‘I tendency to ‘rhetorical inflation’ (specifically in ‘Mrs Noah Speaks’), ‘a had some mysterious vitality, almost diabolical… I had my mother’s snap self-aggrandisement in the speaking’ (42) and sometimes a ‘theatrical and sparkle. I was not gentle. Now … I realize she was probably mad from stance’ (50). He sees, accurately, that ‘in her poetry … her attitude is far time to time’ (603). Elsewhere in the journal she portrays herself as ‘a from reverential’ (34) but I find ‘Kaddish’ too self-consciously reverential, difficult nature, as my mother used to say. Difficult for her to understand, its ostentation making it a less powerful poem than the much less difficult to contain, to be with, to live alongside’ (608). In ‘China Poems noticed ‘Afloat’. 1988’ she notes ‘I am a Rooster. / Honest, frank, obliging, difficult / to I differ from Indyk when he claims, ‘It is a notable fact about Zwicky’s live with’ (141). It is not surprising then that Fay comments in her ‘Border poetry, and her most memorable essays, that when she speaks most Crossings’ essay that ‘my own writing seems to have depended for a long powerfully, she speaks in a voice that is not her own’ (36). This accords time on remaining adversarial’ (21). Mrs Noah declares, ‘As soon as we’re

28 | Westerly online 29 | Dennis Haskell with many of Zwicky’s own comments, and is, I believe, entirely wrong. In This relative plainness is the language, and voice, of her most an interview with David McCooey in 1996 she said that ‘the assumption of affecting, memorable poems, and they are particularly to be found in masks came naturally. It was a great way to say what you wanted to say in The Gatekeeper’s Wife, especially in the poems about her first husband safety’. In a 1993 journal entry, published in Southerly, she wrote: Karl Zwicky and their early married life. The Lyre in the Pawnshop is dedicated ‘In memory, K.T.Z., 1926–1985’; like The Gatekeeper’s Wife, it Visibility is an illusory trap… Each ‘I’ [of her poems] is different, was published after their marriage had ended and after his death. Thus an impersonation, a dramatisation of diverse personae. the notes struck in the poems about their relationship are hauntingly There’s no self, no graspable centre (28). tender; the poems declare and evoke love, loss, guilt, and something much She saw herself as one of ‘those who depend for survival on disguise’ more fierce than nostalgia. They cohere with Zwicky’s comment to David (Journal, Southerly 28). I believe that Zwicky’s strongest poems are McCooey, in 1996, ‘I still see marriage as sacramental’. precisely those poems where the ‘I’ is her without disguise or rhetorical The title poem for The Gatekeeper’s Wife is made up of twenty sections drama, where she is clearly ‘visible’. but all of them are short and each of the individual lines seems gentle Notable in this last journal comment is the repetition of that word and unforced. Section 14 describes its method: ‘The steps of these poems ‘survive’. The reason for this desperate need for masking and disguise is / Are very small, your footprints / In my mind’ (242). It is the most given in the late poem ‘The Age of Aquarius’: personal of her poems, openly vulnerable and ‘Always listening’. ‘I call to you awake, / Asleep, still waiting / For an answer’. The poem is agnostic Today’s my mother’s birthday, and unknowing, her grief so great that her hopes are ‘Severed from the a 1907 Aquarian of the self- possible’ (which is the nature of deep grief). This simply expressed poem denying kind, ‘never say “I” ’ her motto. might convey a sense of wonder but for the elegiac tone, overwhelmed by She had me nailed for years (340). guilt and grief. There is no need for a mask but equally no ‘clamouring for In her ‘Border Crossings’ essay, Zwicky notes that her judgemental attention’ (Meanjin). ‘I should have been / What we seemed’ she perhaps upbringing, and her Australian education, were ‘hard on the imaginative life unfairly accuses herself; but regardless, ‘Like an old familiar tree / I’m still and the notion of spontaneous utterance’ (21). She is indeed more a poet of here, your branches / Tangled in mine’. memory and reflection than of spontaneous reaction but the progression Anyone whose spouse has died knows about ‘the guilt of survival’ in her work from the anonymous, authoritative, impersonal voice of Isaac (Southerly 29), but in Zwicky’s case that guilt was heightened by the Babel’s Fiddle to the quieter, plainer, more questioning and personal speech marriage’s ending—even though she and Karl were married for over of her later work is a sign of increasing poetic authority, not of less. She twenty years. The later poem ‘Letting Go’, from Picnic, is self-accusatory came to argue that ‘gorgeous language lies’ (‘Portrait’, Collected Poems in another way: 257) and worked her way towards a plainer speech. In one of her journal so you don’t write a poem entries she declares: ‘Yes, “bare English” [quoting a friend], that’s the ideal. you line up words in prose No fakery, no poeticisms, nothing but the most honest words’ and ‘reined in inside a Journal trapped behind … ordinariness … a well of feeling’ (Unpublished journal 605). In one like a scorpion in a locked of her now published journal entries, quoting Time magazine, she declares, drawer… (332) ‘ “lucidity, probity and calm are still the virtues of the art of painting”. I’d say they are equally those of literature’ (Westerly 23). In a poem from her In fact, Zwicky published sections from her journal in Southerly and last book, ‘Push or Knock’, she tries to explain to a visiting Chinese scholar Westerly, and gave a copy of it to poet and friend, Lucy Dougan, to do that the poem she’s working on is ‘fighting decorative / scrolls, rhetoric’s something more with it once Zwicky became ill with cancer. Some fancy needlework’, that ‘The lyric voice is struggling with the ordinary’ sections of the journal are scarifying in their self-accusation and a (335). She was, she said in her journal, ‘trying to come as close to natural sorrow close to despair, and should be kept private; but one draft of a speech as possible’ (Axon 636–37), but she recognised that ‘plain speech, never finished poem is confessional and powerful, and has an immediate like playing Mozart, is the hardest to come by’ (Axon 719). concern with the issue of personal voice versus masks.

30 | Westerly online 31 | Dennis Haskell It comes after Zwicky has thought about King Lear and his guilt. The husband for four hours. I married him because he whistled Bach very poem follows the comment, ‘The greater the error, the more calamitous well’ (6). She describes it as ‘a very theatrical gesture’ (6). ‘Theatrical’ its consequences. Remember this when you think you’re absolved’ (601). sounds right but the four hours a slight exaggeration; it is her daughter Zwicky’s poem makes it clear that she did not think she was absolved; the Anna’s understanding that her father ‘was lodging with a Dutch family’ instruction would serve as a good title for the poem, which comprises a while teaching Zoology at university and that her mother was ‘given dark dialogue with the self: accommodation with the same family, which was how they met’ (Anna Quick, 30 July). Zwicky’s stay with the family was brief, just one or two It all happened so long ago. Must I tell it? days, since her visa ran out at the end of her concert tour. She then went She asked the dark weight on her heart to Malaya for a month until she could return and marry Karl. She told her Yes, you must tell it, came the answer. daughter that ‘the local Bandung newspaper carried the headline ‘Courted And must I bear the pain? and Wed in 48 Hours’’ (Anna Quick, 24 September). Julia Fay Rosefield Yes, you must. and Karl Zwicky married on 19 March 1957 in a Registry Office in Bandung. […] The wedding is humorously and lovingly recounted in the poem […] Some will deny the ‘Perdjodohan’: reality. It doesn’t matter. You have to tell it and only then will I cease to be a dark Newly married! Newly married! weight on your heart. You will be free of sang the motor bike to dust me, whoever or whatever I am, and you will puffs rising from our dash. have earned some rest. But not until you’ve […] told the long story, confronted its dark passageways. White ribbon just in place when But I’m still living back in the dark… Mr Pronk van Hoogeveen stepped close […] […] On the edge of silence you have to find the words. You’re going to ruin your life he said. But the words of this story don’t seem to The jasmine-scented air closed in. belong in English. They would sound truer in a European language. French for example. I tugged the ribbon tighter Il y avait une fois un jeun homme Suisse qui est allé […] en Indonésie. Là, il a rencontre une jeune fille And leaning to the mirror laughed de l’Australie qui jouait au piano pour le gouvernement like one possessed of something Hollandais— not yet owned or named (280). No you must tell it in your own language. Deeply personal—no masks, no posturing, no rhetoric. In her essays You can’t escape by that actor’s trick. Once Zwicky writes of love as ‘self-sacrifice, or “meaning” as submission to you inhabit a foreign skin you’re extinguished (601–02). a higher loyalty’ (4), as a ‘passionate meeting between man and woman’ The entry continues in prose. In her interview with Hazel de Berg, (35). She comments that ‘There is a whole way of being in the world that Zwicky gave a detailed account of her travel to Indonesia and her is best described by the word “reverence” which accords life meaning marriage to Karl. She later provided a poetic version of the original in terms of debt to something’ (13). Fay’s poems about her marriage voyage ‘on a trampy old Dutch steamer’ in the poem ‘Makassar, 1956’ and about the young Karl, ‘the disciplined line / of your back / slanted (305). In the interview, Zwicky recounts how ‘I went on a concert tour, towards hope’ (‘Peminangan’ 278), are suffused with this feeling. As with playing for the Dutch Government, touring Indonesia. I also toured what Thomas Hardy’s great poems about his first wife, the sense of debt and was then Malaya and Singapore for the British Council. I met my husband of reverence is heightened by memory and by loss. The poem ‘Akibat’ on that tour…’ (6). Zwicky claims to have ‘married after only knowing my begins, ‘I said I can’t imagine life without you’, recalls ‘I said I’d stay with

32 | Westerly online 33 | Dennis Haskell you forever’ and that ‘Outside the window the kebong’s twig broom / wraps’ (264). But at times in her last years even poetry could leave Fay whispered over gravel like a blessing’ (283). The raw honesty of the poem feeling powerless. No-one could say seems undeniable in its closing couplet: why your poems stall in scavenged diction, Ashamed for outliving you, I can’t forget stick contraptions held by string and glue. a long way from that house, that window. Or why our nights are long and black and sleepless and your In her journal Fay writes to herself, ‘I feel so invisible, so plagued by days without end are numbered (301). memory’, and unfairly castigates herself for ‘never sitting down to write what ought to be written, … afraid all the time’ (604). She remembers that It is well to remember that this ‘standing, / stumped’ (342) after trailing ‘after Karl died, I knew I’d lost more than half of myself’ (604). This sense ‘across the knives of memory’ (338) was not a constant state of mind. of loss is heightened by self-laceration: Visiting Fay in the last few months of her life she seemed to me calmer and more quietly accepting of things than in almost all the time I had Was I so incomprehensible to him? Why do these questions known her. In her work as a whole there is a lot of wonderful humour, as still shoot up like arrows in the mind today? Will I never be when a bushie rings the English poet Charles Causley (who had visited free of the need to ask why? […] Did he love me? He took care WA) from the Outback (191) or ‘Miss Short Instructs Her Latin Class…’ of us. Isn’t this love? But why was I so lonely, so needing of (211); she did jaunty folk rhythms very well, as in ‘The Ballad of the Pretty words? I can’t reconcile myself to all the unfinished stuff of Young Wife’ (202); she wrote many powerful epigrammatic lines: ‘Dreams our shredded life. (606) are the suicides of the well-behaved’ (148), ‘The air is frozen with theory’ These guilt-ridden questions underlie the sad last lines in her Collected (149), ‘Darkness has secrets that / light never owns’ (172). Moreover, Poems: ‘We only ever yield to love / when someone’s dead or gone’ (388). she sometimes found uncertainty a positive, a force that set her afloat They also underlie the title poem of her last published collection, Picnic. on ‘imagination’s tide’ (352), noting that ‘It’s what you can’t trim down to Picnicking in Kings Park with a group of Afghani refugees makes her manageable that / seeds the poem’ (356). She could also be a poet of joy remember ‘my own young wifehood / as a stranger’ (298) in Zurich, where in simplicities. Penelope in ‘A Tale of the Great Smokies’ is she and Karl went in 1958 and lived for a year. She reflects that ‘What Silenced by joy, weighs the heart must / sit it out till nightfall for release / once everyone’s the colour, smell and sound asleep. / And even then…’ (298, ellipsis in the original). of everything answer The questions come more savagely to the fore in the next poem, any question I have ‘Close-up’, where she echoes the journal: ‘So “why not say what hap­ ever asked (180). pened?” ’ Age, however, has yielded only uncertainties: In her own voice she remembers how as a child sometimes ‘Just to be would What makes you think we’d know? do’ on a ‘fine / spring morning’, how ‘Just to be was something’ (325–26). Know thyself? A bad Socratic joke… (300). Of course she was too much a restless intelligence for relishing No-one can ‘help at crunch-time’ and ‘tell you why your life is skewed’. In sensory awareness to be enough. Even in this poem, ‘Coming and ‘Border Crossings’, Zwicky wrote, ‘I loved words, their sound, their weight, Going’, the ghosts line up ‘like huntsmen’ spiders and she had to leave their capacity to open new worlds. I wanted to use them effectively for childhood comfort in order ‘to learn what I could bear’ (326). The shift they seemed to be my first defence against powerlessness’ (17). In ‘Border from innocence to experience in later years kept Karl alive to her: in a Crossings’, she declared, ‘Poetry has always seemed to me a source of poem tellingly titled ‘Orpheus’, ‘Keeping the pen on the move / keeps hope … a place for the dissenting imagination’ (24). Poetry at times you somewhere near’ (244). Her sense of self depended on him: ‘So long seemed like the ark for Mrs Noah, ‘one small “Yes” / afloat on a vast “No” ’ as there is a you / there is a me’ (244). In the next poem, ‘Losing Track’, (113). The autobiographical teacher of ‘Learning’, referencing Yeats, says she wonders ‘how long can human memory stand / an absence trapped that ‘The emperor’s / metronomic nightingale kept nightmare under / in strange geography’ (245). She laments, ‘I’m losing track of your face

34 | Westerly online 35 | Dennis Haskell in sleep, don’t / know where you are’. Her ‘memories are refugees’ but Learning to Read Paul Hetherington has memory also provides a hope: published 12 volumes of poetry. Paul Hetherington He is head of the International Somewhere out there is a land, forgotten, promised. Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) No, neither promised nor forgotten but hovering in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. like a half-remembered voice in eerie stillness He won the 2014 Western between dream and waking (246). Australian Premier’s Book Awards (poetry). Her poems and her journal reveal a great deal of regret and of haunted self-questioning; it is no doubt easier for us as readers than for her to recognise that even these excursions into darkness and her own metaphysic of uncertainty were undoubtedly expressions of love. 1. Works Cited: It is 1976 or ’77. I am eighteen or nineteen, an undergraduate studying English Literature at the University of Western Australia. In the large, Indyk, Ivor. ‘Fay Zwicky: The Poet as Moralist’, Southerly, 54. 3 (Sept 1994): 33–50. raked theatre a dark-haired woman of middle height and graceful posture McCooey, David. ’Just Very Basic: An Interview with Fay Zwicky’, Meanjin, 55.4 (1996): 674–687. http://search.informit.com.au/, accessed 4 August 2017. lectures about W. B. Yeats and his poetry. She stands and moves with a Quick, Anna. Emails to Dennis Haskell, 30 July 2017 and 24 September 2017. simultaneous air of shyness and assertive self-possession. There is Zwicky, Fay. The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival 1974–1984. muted yellow sunshine at the high windows and dust motes climbing. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1986. ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre.’ Words such as these gather ——. The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, eds. Lucy Dougan & Tim Dolin. Nedlands: themselves and I am entranced. I have read some of Yeats’ poems, but University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017; all poetry references are to this edition. only superficially. Until now I haven’t understood what his poetry says ——. ‘Border Crossings’, Best Australian Essays 2000, ed. Peter Craven. Melbourne; about Romanticism and the human crisis in the twentieth century. I have Black Inc, 2000; rpt in The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky: 13–25. All references to had no real appreciation of Yeats’ musical cadences and daring use of the essay are to this reprinting. language. But, here, his poetry begins to speak eloquently in the theatre’s ——. Unpublished Journal. 13 vols, continuously paginated. I am grateful to Lucy dry air. Fay Zwicky discusses Yeats and his ideas as if they are close to all Dougan for making relevant pages from the Journal available to me. ——. ‘Extracts from Journal’, Southerly, 54. 3 (Sept 1994). of us and of a pressing relevance. Her timbre in reading his work invests ——. ‘Plain Speech: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journals’, ed. Lucy Dougan. Axon, No. 9. it with intensity and a husky immediacy. I realise I have a lot to learn. ——. ‘Ambushed by Hope: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journal (Notebook XIII, August 2012)’, ed. Lucy Dougan. Westerly, 62.1 (2017): 19–27. 2. ——. Interview with Hazel de Berg, 1976, transcript; National Library of Australia, Fay is my tutor for Romanticism and American Literature. I am self- Tape 915. absorbed and preoccupied. She usually sits behind her desk in a manner that partly protects her, facing the tutorial group but a little turned I am grateful to the National Library for making the interview transcript available to me. away too, as if cultivating her own space. She is attentive and engaged, demonstrating an effortless familiarity with the works we discuss. She * The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky 78; all poetry references are to this edition. reveals an incisive mind, steeped in the best American critics of the 1950s and ’60s—as well as in a wide range of other literature—and explores the writings of Shelley, Keats and other authors in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. This pricks my self-absorption and I begin to read more deeply. Fay often examines texts with a practitioner’s scrupulousness, and I begin to think more carefully about what makes poetry function well;

36 | Westerly online 37 | Paul Hetherington how so much poetic language is simultaneously sinewy, direct, oblique fiercely loyal to those she admires, such as Gwen Harwood. She’s often and delicate. She is always generous and rigorous, and her encouragement congenial, ironic and good-humoured, but always casts a sceptical eye on has a salutary quality. She frequently indicates that art isn’t easy. the world. She tells me that she can’t give up smoking because it enables her to make it through the long hours that writing demands. She says that 3. writing remains what she most wants to do, but that she finds it tortuous. My first transformative encounter with Emily Dickinson’s poetry takes place in the Sunken Gardens in the university’s grounds. A musically 6. gifted student with a guitar somehow assembles a few student poets After Fay dies I read her Collected Poems and think of her gifts of teaching and lyricists in a search for a writer for her songs. She is disappointed and making, and how intertwined they were. I read her work fondly, with what we have to offer and says that she wants ‘something like remembering what she taught me, which is impossible to summarise, this’, after which she recites Dickinson’s great poem, ‘After great pain’. centred on how passionately one may think about words and literature. I am momentarily silenced by the power and beauty of the work. But There was something ineffable about her, even when she was down- the student departs and it is Fay who, subsequently, begins to explain to-earth. She carried a sense of always looking towards the inimitable Dickinson’s poetry in the American literature class. The miraculous writers, composers and visual artists whom she so unambiguously encounter in the Gardens becomes a quotidian engagement about the admired. Her introversion was often turned outwards in company with meaning and transformative energy of literary works—and, in explicating them, searching the inexpressible. Dickinson’s poetry, Fay ushers me into a significant part of my future. I learn to love Dickinson’s work, not only for its bravura brilliance but for its complex ideas and idiosyncratic techniques. Fay discusses Dickinson’s capacity to think in startling ways, and to express herself in astonishing phrases. She emphasises Dickinson’s metaphysical complexity. She understands the Puritan idealism that Dickinson quizzes in much of her writing. This is one of Fay’s important gifts. She approaches the work of others as if it matters now, in the present, even as she speaks. Literature in her mouth resonates with flesh and blood issues. Even novels like The Scarlet Letter become contemporary as she discusses them.

4. I meet Fay at various social gatherings over a number of years, often at the houses of mutual friends. She is sometimes relaxed, often anxious, and always an acute and stimulating companion. One day, during lunch, I mention that I am going to the football that afternoon. She asks why a poet would go to a football game.

5. During social events Fay is sometimes argumentative in a way that belongs more to a European intellectual tradition than the Australian tradition. She vigorously pursues and teases out issues; she challenges others to keep up with her; she is staunch in maintaining her favourite ideas. For her, literature is hard-won. She’s impatient with many contemporary poets, believing that they lack complexity of thought and feeling. Yet she’s

38 | Westerly online 39 | Paul Hetherington On the Side of Cheerfulness David McCooey is a professor of Voice writing and literature at Deakin Fay Zwicky and Her Poetry Before seeing her at the Perth Writers Festival, I knew Fay Zwicky from University in Geelong, where he when I was an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia’s David McCooey lives. He is a prize-winning poet, English Department, where she was a senior lecturer. (She retired in critic, and editor. His latest poetry collection, Star Struck, 1987, when I was in my third year there.) She was never my tutor, but was published by UWA I benefitted from the excellent lectures that she gave in some of the Publishing in 2016. subjects I took. She was a compelling lecturer, in part because of her distinctive voice. In the lecture theatre, too, there was a tension in her self-presentation: intensely serious about her subject, she could also be playful, even joking, in her lecturing style. As Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin note in their introduction to her Collected Poems (2017), Zwicky was not only a ‘brilliant, passionate teacher of literature’, but also Public & Private her practice as a poet and her career in the classroom were She knew how to cut a dramatic figure. One of my defining memories of mutually informing. Her poems often have pedagogical Fay Zwicky is seeing her at the Perth Writers Festival in 1989, sitting alone settings as leaping off points (see, for instance, ‘Learning’ and and wearing large, dark sunglasses. She was like an actor—or perhaps an ‘Charon’), suggesting the importance of her own educational actor comically playing a spy—trying to be incognito, but simply drawing experiences in her artistic formation and her love of teacher- attention to herself. It is possible, of course, that she was genuinely trying poets such as D. H. Lawrence, who learn in the tutorial room to avoid attention from the festival audience. As she says in Jenny Digby’s to ‘see the other’s reality as it exists, regardless of one’s own A Woman’s Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets (1995), ‘I recently interests, needs and fears’ (Lyre [1986] 7). asked another poet how she coped with conferences and writers’ festivals and she said that she could block off. I can’t do that. I actually take on the As her poems on pedagogical themes suggest, Zwicky was highly aware of marks of everybody. That’s why life is so damn difficult. Things impinge the continuity between teacher and performer, and, more generally, the very, very acutely as if you have one skin too few’ (99–100). relationship between education and theatre. In the late poem ‘Charon’ A tension between the theatrical and the factitious, and the personal (2013), for instance, the aged poet remembers ‘the lines I spoke as Charon and authentic is present throughout Zwicky’s poetry. Zwicky’s / in our Latin class’s play, circa 1942’ (380)2. An unlikely role for a girl, theatricality can be seen in her use of personae and dramatic monologue, Charon is the ferryman in Ancient Greek myth who requires payment to while a plain-speaking autobiographical element is particularly ferry the dead across the Styx to the underworld. Despite the apparent evident in her later work. But one could go beyond characterising such disjunction (the poet’s mother ‘preferred a prettier role for me /… competing impulses as ‘tension’, with its suggestion of things held in Persephone at least’, 381), playing the role of Charon prefigures Zwicky’s balance. Ambivalence, multivocality, and (self-)contradiction all feature poetic vocation, via her predilection for masks and her abiding concern in Zwicky’s work. Her public statements in interviews, essays, and the with the power and limits of verbal expression: ‘Behind the mask / I spoke published extracts of her journal1 all highlight this. Conflicting impulses with a flourish, nothing forgotten, / nothing grasped between this world are particularly evident in her statements about community. As she said / and the next’ (381). in her interview with me, ‘Although I’ve resisted community, I’ve also In ‘Lear, Class ’71’ (from Zwicky’s 1975 debut collection, Isaac Babel’s wanted it’ (McCooey, 678). In the most recent published extract of her Fiddle), we again see the complex, perhaps surprising, relationship journal, Zwicky expresses this conflict as a common condition of being a between teaching, learning, theatricality, and death. The poem opens writer: ‘Most writers seem to follow this pattern—courting attention while with the image of the poet’s female students as ‘Trendy misses / In your simultaneously rejecting it. Like the cave dweller metaphor I once used: gypsy dresses / Combing down your / Images of death’ (47). Zwicky’s hiding away while craving recognition. It’s common enough, and makes use of multisyllabic rhyme for comic or ironic effect is characteristic, for a very difficult life full of misunderstanding’ (2017a, 22). but the poem cannot be mistaken for ‘mere’ satire. Rather, the poem,

40 | Westerly online 41 | David McCooey in its oblique way, delineates the difference between the world of the forthrightness. When I visited her, she was exceptionally welcoming classroom and the world of Shakespeare’s play. That the former is ‘real’ and generous. And while she did indeed have strong opinions, she could and the latter ‘virtual’ does not undermine the point being made about the also be touchingly hesitant at times. (I found this to be the case many students’ (and possibly the poet’s) lack of ‘ripeness’ (48), a word that not years later, when she and I were in contact during my brief tenure as only suggests maturity, but also mortality. The ultimate lesson, and the Poetry Editor of Australian Book Review, regarding ‘Charon’ and a prose foundation of creative play, both these poems suggest, is death. reflection that I had asked her to write on the poem.) In writing these few Trying to explicate Zwicky’s poems, to summarise them, makes one memories, I feel hesitant myself. I talked with Fay only a handful of times, realise their complexity, their mobility and unexpected twists. (Martin and, while each time was memorable, countless other people can speak Duwell [2007], in his review of Zwicky’s Picnic [2006], notes how her of her with far greater authority. I mention these memories here out of poems often move ‘in unpredictable directions’.) Another theme in both deep respect, and because my memories of Fay have inevitably coloured ‘Lear, Class ’71’ and ‘Charon’ is that of power. In ‘Charon’ the memory of the way I read her poetry. an unsympathetic Latin teacher gives rise to the observation that ‘The Others have also noted the importance of voice in Zwicky’s poetry. language of oppression / sticks forever’ (380). ‘Lear, Class ’71’ presents the Voices and the concept of voice are everywhere apparent in her work. But similarly epigrammatic idea that ‘To be powerless / Invites / Attack’. The while her work has a recognisable quiddity, it does not represent a poetic relationship between knowledge and power, the source of what we might ‘voice’ in the facile sense of a repeating style or set of poetic procedures. term the pedagogical anxiety in Zwicky’s poems, exists in a paradoxical Zwicky’s poetry, as others have also noted, is marked by its multivocality, tension throughout her poetry. The enabling power of education and the its variety. And like a spoken voice, it takes on disparate inflections and expressive power of poetry (and literature more generally) are repeatedly tones, and, as noted, is extremely mobile. Zwicky’s work is also various in shadowed by the oppressive powers of religion and ideology. terms of style and form. Her Collected Poems include satires and elegies, But, as is characteristic of Zwicky’s openness to ambiguity and dramatic monologues, occasional poems, political poems, narrative complexity, the categories of culture and power are recognised as poems, dream poems, ekphrastic poems, autopathography, and so on. As profoundly imbricated. As Joan Kirkby writes, ‘While highly conscious of she says to Jenny Digby, ‘I write all sorts of poems’ (96). the maleness of culture in Australia Zwicky is yet ambiguously regretful This variety might be related to her musical background. (Zwicky of the passing of the old patriarchal structures which in spite of their was a concert pianist until the mid 1960s.) Musical variety is perhaps exclusions provided continuity…’ (177–78). This ambiguous regret, more immediately apparent than literary variety. One gets the sense as Zwicky’s transnational interests illustrate, is not confined to the that Zwicky, like many composers, was keen to programmatically ‘try Australian context. Zwicky’s literary touchstones are typically masculine, out’ different forms. One also gets the sense that, like many composers, and her religious references are inevitably patriarchal. In response, as Zwicky was not scared to allow the ‘voices’ of her predecessors to inhabit Kirkby points out, in trying ‘to find a voice within this tradition [Zwicky] her own work. This form of multivocality is a key feature of Zwicky’s argues and quarrels, sometimes violently, with it’ (178). We see this work. It can be seen in the late modernist intertextuality of her ‘Kaddish’, repeatedly in Zwicky’s work, though perhaps most pointedly in ‘The a poem that threads together the Haggadah with ‘The House that Jack Stone Dolphin’ (the first of ‘Three Songs of Love & Hate’, fromKaddish , Built’ and other works. Zwicky’s multivocality can also be seen in the way 1982): ‘The language of tyranny had to be / learnt if anything were to she often quotes or alludes to poetry without attribution. be said’ (105). In ‘Portrait’ (a self-portrait on the occasion of the poet’s Zwicky’s allusiveness can be disarmingly complex. For instance, in ‘A portrait being drawn), Zwicky writes that she knows ‘that the oppressor’s Small Variant on Intelligence’, which appeared in the chapbook A Touch tongue can lure, seduce, / that art is a compulsion to mastery’ (257). This of Ginger (1992), the poet refers to her ‘furrowed brow’ (which some ‘quarrelsomeness’ with traditions that Zwicky cannot reject is a feature unnamed authority claims is a sign of ‘limited intelligence’): of her work that subsequent critics have often noted. My brow is furrowed deep. There was nothing quarrelsome about Zwicky when I at last met her I thought it was myopic strain in childhood, ‘properly’ in 1995, visiting her at home to record the interview that was memory’s cold puzzles, great ideas. published in Meanjin the following year. People often talk of Zwicky’s

42 | Westerly online 43 | David McCooey I couldn’t see to read. direct representation of the eponymous event (the violent suppression I couldn’t see to see. (366) of students protesting for democracy in China). Beginning with a vision of Karl Marx (via his headstone in London’s Highgate Cemetery), the This last quoted line evokes the final line of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I Heard poem laments the repetitive and violent tragedy that is history, and poses a Fly Buzz–When I Died’ (‘I could not see to see’), in which the poem’s the question ‘What shall I tell my grandchildren?’ (149). Her answer is speaker impossibly narrates the moment of her own death. ‘Reasons stoically resolute on the moral imperative of witnessing/voicing: for Play’ (2010) is another poem that begins with the poet defensively responding to (presumably masculine) authority by smuggling in the Don’t turn your back, I’ll say. alternative authority of poetic tradition. The poem begins with the charge Look hard. that the poet has ‘never learnt to play’ (378). Of her status as an eldest Move into that frozen swarming screen. (female) child she writes that How far can you run with a bullet in your brain? Eldest girls don’t play early or And forgive, if you can, the safety of a poem lightly. Clamped by mysterious sharpened on a grieving night. (150) authority requiring lineaments ‘Aceh, December 2004’ concerns a natural, rather than political, of gratified desire, they look disaster: the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million obsessed and condescending, people in landmasses bordering the Indian Ocean. The title of Zwicky’s but are negatively capable. (379) poem refers to the region (in Indonesia) that was most devastated by the Quoting William Blake (‘lineaments / of gratified desire’) and satirically tsunami. In observing that it is ‘Not a time for poems’ and that ‘True grief transforming John Keats’s ‘negative capability’ to ‘negatively capable’, the is tongueless / at the site of desolation’ (303), the poem paradoxically poem playfully undermines the assertion that the poet cannot play. But voices that silence of those bereaved survivors in Aceh. The poem was the poem is characteristically ‘double’ in its articulation. The comic and commissioned for, and read at, the Perth International Arts Festival in (self) satirical elements inhabit a poem, and a world, that includes ‘Hitler, 2005 (Dougan & Zwicky). For a public poem commemorating loss, it Stalin, and / war’s fires’ (379). offers little, or no, consolation. Instead, it allows those distant from the The use of other poets’ voices is observable in Zwicky’s numerous disaster—the audience at its performance and its subsequent readers—to meta-poetic works. ‘Poems and Things’, from The Gatekeeper’s Wife imaginatively occupy the space of those who search for lost loved ones. (1997), represents the poet in Jerusalem, musing on poetics via the The poem paradoxically lets ‘silence speak’, but also urges us to not forget eleventh-century Chinese poet Wei T’ai. ‘Be precise, said wise Wei T’ai, those left amid such unimaginable disaster. / about the thing / but reticent / about the feeling’ (247). Such poetic More recently, Zwicky’s ‘Boat Song’ (originally published in The West self-reflexivity verges on mise-en-abyme in ‘Close-up’ (also from The Australian in 2014), uses parody—a form of ‘re-voicing’—to offer witness Gatekeeper’s Wife), in which—vis-à-vis the more ambiguous master of to the human cost of successive Australian governments’ policies toward Robert Lowell—the poet sees her and her peers’ future as, in part, lashing maritime asylum seekers. A parody of ‘The Skye Boat Song’ (a Scottish ‘ourselves / in poems about writing poems’ (300). folk tune with nineteenth-century words concerning the escape by boat Voice is also central to another key element of Zwicky’s poetics: by ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ after the Battle of Culloden in 1746), Zwicky’s the need to ‘give voice’ or to act as a witness. Topical poems such as poem is both satire and lament for those seeking asylum in Australia: ‘And ‘Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989’ (from Ask Me, 1990) and ‘Aceh, December we turned them away, yes we turned them away / As we went out to play’ 2004’ (from Picnic), are more urgently self-reflexive, questioning how (385). Like the earlier poems, there is no consolation at the end of ‘Boat poetry can speak of large-scale traumatic events. In both poems, Zwicky’s Song’, simply the elegiac image of ‘Mountains of flowers upon flowers self-reflexivity is continuous with the sense of poetry as a form of voicing upon / Flowers upon flowers’—the silent tokens of support left by those or witnessing things that fundamentally challenge human expression. protesting against the treatment of those seeking asylum in Australia. ‘Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989’ is a ‘witness poem’ that pointedly resists

44 | Westerly online 45 | David McCooey Moral Seriousness and Linguistic Play Of all the myriad In his oft-cited essay on Zwicky’s poetry, Ivor Indyk convincingly makes creatures you have made, man is but one, the the case for Zwicky as a moral poet via her conceptualisation of social merest tip of hair upon a stallion’s rump. (112) identity. Zwicky, Indyk argues, understands identity not in terms of ‘rights Mourning that which has been covered by the flood and ‘the old wound’ and responsibilities’ but ‘debts and legacies’ (33). This moral stance is (presumably a reference to the Fall, which was the original division played out especially, Indyk observes, through her early poems, those that between man and woman, human and beast), Mrs Noah ‘cannot thank’ the most explicitly thematise ‘tradition and the ancestral past’. In this context, wrathful God that has caused the Flood. The ark is memorably described Indyk also notes the importance for Zwicky of speaking in another’s as ‘this one small “Yes” afloat on a vast “No”, your watery negative’ (113), an voice. Zwicky, he argues, ‘speaks most powerfully’ when ‘she speaks in image that subverts a logocentric theology (‘and the Word was God’). But a voice that is not her own’ (39). Such ventriloquism is associated with while Mrs Noah’s own words give her an exceptional reality, this reality is a quarrel with the authority that she is engaging with. Kirkby makes a founded on her fragility. While she might be ‘the comic keeper of [Noah’s] similar point, as we have seen, but Indyk adds to this by seeing Zwicky’s house’, her monologue is ultimately concerned with tragic, irreversible quarrelsomeness as theatrical in its articulation: ‘The range of roles loss. Her poem ends with her ‘drawn to the edge’: ‘The drowned folk call adopted by Zwicky in her poetry is very wide—Hewett looks vaudevillian to me: / Deliver us from harm!’ (113). by comparison, and the male poets, Murray say or Tranter, positively Zwicky’s theatricality, then, is comic in its articulation, but the stodgy’ (48). Vis-à-vis this theatricality, Indyk observes that ‘we may comedy is far from unambiguous. In addition, and more fundamentally think of Zwicky’s moral stance as fundamentally comic…’ (49). Zwicky’s perhaps, Zwicky is a poet of linguistic play. In other words, her comedy moral stance is indeed comic, but as with all of her work, such a comic emanates not just from a theatrical use of voice or situation, but from condition is complex and ambivalent, as seen in the poems of public poetics itself—the play of language. The linguistic playfulness of Zwicky’s memorialisation discussed above. morally serious poems is apparent in the tonal complexity of her work. The simultaneously quarrelsome and theatrical moralism can be This is most strikingly observed in the number of apparently ‘light’ or seen in ‘Ark Voices’ (from Kaddish), especially the opening poem of that ‘occasional’ poems (such as ‘Pie in the Sky’, from Ask Me) that turn out to sequence, ‘Mrs Noah Speaks’, in which the eponymous wife of Noah (who be far from inconsequential. does not appear in the Bible) muses and laments upon the circumstances ‘Survival Kit’, the second poem in Isaac Babel’s Fiddle, is a good that she and the other creatures on the ark have been placed in. illustration of how Zwicky brings together linguistic playfulness with These circumstances are caused by an unseen God, referred to as ‘sir’ tonal complexity. A self-portrait, the poem is a kind of self-elegy (or throughout the poem. The poem begins with Mrs Noah’s stoical thoughts anti-elegy) in which the poet satirises herself as eagerly approaching about the cleaning involved: ‘Lord, the cleaning’s nothing. / What’s a pen the age of 40 because she is ‘a / Sucker for precise reckoning’ (30). But or two? / Even if the tapir’s urine / Takes the paint clean off / There’s however hard-nosed she might be (‘nothing has been worth winning’), she nothing easier. // But sir, the care!’ (110). The evocation of mundane is nevertheless one who removes her glasses at the movies, domestic duties in this context is clearly comic, a comedy deepened by Mrs Noah’s observation regarding the help she can expect from her … chickening on violence even at one remove, menfolk: ‘He [Noah] takes it well / and Shem and Ham do help—you can’t Moping with Mahler, weak for my children, lead expect / too much of anyone can you and / Japhet’s still a kid’ (111). But Bleater of Kindertotenlieder, forestalling world’s in typical Zwicky style, these comic complaints entail serious concerns. End on the end of a pin, fraught with quibble and Moral care, Mrs Noah suggests, is more of a burden than physical work. Linguistic tic, pernickety ironic nit-picking ‘Comfort enough I’m not. / To feed and clothe, to bind a scratch I can’ (111). Academic. (This theme reappears in a very different guise in the ‘Hospice Poems’ Bound to admit that I from Ask Me.) Unlike her husband, who is ‘incorruptible and good’ (112), Welcome the end of a world that I am, I rejoice Mrs Noah is assailed by metaphysical speculations: In the worm drinking dew, the lift as the leaf Bursts its bud, gaiety in grief.

46 | Westerly online 47 | David McCooey As well as self-satirising, this is clearly post-Romantic in its evocation function of eldest sons, rather than eldest daughters). As Indyk writes, of nature. Such a poem might evoke Emily Dickinson, a touchstone ‘the poem is an act of remembrance, and hence of obligation—yet it poet for Zwicky and the subject of one of her best-known early is fired with resentment at the imprisoning and deadening effect of poems, ‘Emily Dickinson Judges the Bread Division at the Amherst obligation’ (37). ‘For Jim’ (from Ask Me) is a more tender poem, as one Cattle Show, 1858’ (44–46). Dickinson comes to mind, too, because might expect from an elegy for one who died before reaching the age of the marrying of linguistic playfulness with moral seriousness, and of 40. But here, too, there is the tension between affiliation as choice the associated assertion of a poetic idiolect that is both recognisably and fate, as seen in the subject’s (perhaps now controversial) desire to traditional and conspicuously original. Here we see it through the ‘be black’ (231). Cultural affiliation is seen in the quotation and parody echoic poetic techniques of rhyme, alliteration, and agnomination of Walt Whitman, in the quotation of an African-American folksong (the verbal play of similar sounding words). In English, multisyllabic (probably gleaned from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1942 autobiography, rhyme is generally comic, and we see that here in ‘ironic / Academic’, Dust Tracks on a Road), and the translation of lines from Virgil’s but Zwicky goes further by surrounding that rhyme with a flurry of Eighth Eclogue. These diverse allusions bring together ‘high’ and ‘i’ sounds in ‘Linguistic tic, pernickety ironic nit-picking / Academic’. vernacular culture, European and African-American poetries, and Elsewhere we have the multisyllabic rhymes of ‘reckoning / beckoning’; ancient and modern milieux. Such citations also suggest a possible ‘beginning / winning’; and ‘legitimately / devoutly’. The comedy of the (hidden) affiliation with pastoral elegy, that convention-bound genre rhyming begins to fall off with the half-rhyme of ‘Bleater’ with ‘Kinder’ of lyric poetry. Either way, the poem’s diversity of cultural affiliations and ‘lieder’ in the German complex word, ‘Kindertotenlieder’ (‘songs on is consistent with the poem’s thematisation of memory: ‘Remember, he the death of children’), the name of Mahler’s orchestral song cycle of said. Remember. / Black child, I will. // I do’ (235). 1904. The single monosyllabic full rhyme of ‘leaf / grief’ conspicuously The foundational link between memory and elegy (and the associated brings together life and loss, comedy and tragedy. The poem is notably sense of affiliation) is also found in ‘Charon’, a poem to which I return, alliterative (‘Moping…Mahler’; ‘drinking dew’; ‘lift…leaf’; ‘bursts…bud’ as it is one of Zwicky’s most death-filled poems. As a late poem, it and so on), and there is the use of agnomination in ‘movies / remove’. intriguingly unites Zwicky’s ‘baroque’ early style and the plain-speaking The poem, then, is conspicuously playful in its poetics. As Zwicky says of her later poems. Thematically and generically it brings together key of lines by T. S. Eliot and W. D. Snodgrass, language is ‘being overhauled aspects of Zwicky’s work: death and elegy; memory; pedagogy; tradition with an underlying seriousness of purpose at odds with the playfulness and complaint; parents; frailty; and theatricality and voice. The poem of its conceits’ (1986, 55). ends with a series of images that occupy a liminal space between the material world of the poet and the symbolic world of poetry. Elegiac Affiliations The distant shore blurs, lost in fog. It is notable that Mrs Noah, in ‘Ark Voices’, believes that ‘The drowned There’s water between us, I’m here folk call to me,’ since Zwicky herself is deeply responsive to the calls on the bank getting used to so many of the dead. Elegies are central to Zwicky’s poetry. Two of her chief leaving, ceasing ceasing to be poems—‘Kaddish’ and ‘For Jim’—are elegies clearly concerned with beginning again, rising from where cultural, as well as personal, affiliations. As Zwicky asserts in ‘Rumours the roots began of Mortality: The Poet’s Part’, ‘it is through the act of memory that to face people survive—not by renouncing allegiances, but by retaining them, however painful. This is the reality that the great elegies help us to The array of participles (‘leaving’, ‘ceasing’, ‘beginning’, and ‘rising’) bear’ (1986, 62). But in both ‘Kaddish’ and ‘For Jim’ there is an ambiguity naturally produces a cluster of rhyme, and a sense of action. The complex over how much one’s affiliations are matters of choice and matters of syntax and the stuttering effect of ‘ceasing ceasing to be / beginning circumstance (for want of a better word). ‘Kaddish’, a work that is deeply again’ might initially cause confusion, but its particularity suggests clarity concerned with Zwicky’s Judaism, resists the eponymous mourning on the part of the poet. The lack of a period at the end of the poem is ritual even as it evokes it (since ‘saying Kaddish’ is traditionally a unprecedented in Zwicky’s poetry, suggesting a suspension (again

48 | Westerly online 49 | David McCooey redolent of Dickinson), rather than an ending as such. But this suspension revolutionary powers are real, but one should not unduly emphasise them is ambiguous, implying a moment of open potential, the paradoxically as part of an ideological struggle. As John Kinsella notes with perspicacity ‘endless moment’ of infinity, and/or the instant before annihilation. in his moving review of Zwicky’s Collected Poems, Zwicky’s attraction to Perhaps appropriately, the last poem of Zwicky’s Collected Poems is liberty came with an associated restraint: an elegy: ‘In Memoriam: JB’ (2017). Its final lines—‘We only ever yield To her core she wanted restraint to give liberty, the forms of to love / when someone’s dead or gone’ (388)—are painfully honest, Bach to liberate imagination, and even as her poetry ‘freed up’ characteristically both stark and tender at the same time. But this in line and tonality across the decades, she still maintained melancholy distych should not be taken as a last word on things. As the purpose of poetry, a purpose linked to form, restraint, care Zwicky’s restless poems so brilliantly show us, there is no last word; there and craft, and manners. is only the mind in thought, the self in conversation with the other. As Zwicky writes in ‘Orpheus’ (from The Gatekeeper’s Wife), ‘So long as Zwicky was well aware that the revolutionary powers of play also involve there is a you / there is a me. / I have it in writing’ (244). Beyond that, uncertainty, loss, and the precariousness of play itself, but against those there is the silence that haunts Zwicky’s poems. forces I believe that she was—clear-eyed and compassionate, joking and lamenting—always on the side of cheerfulness. Last Words In a published entry from her 2012 journal, Zwicky quotes, and then comments on, a mordant autobiographical observation by the Hungarian Notes Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor, Imre Kertész: 1 As Lucy Dougan, who has edited the published extracts of Zwicky’s journal, notes, this journal was kept in longhand from 1975, and was ‘a combination of writer’s ‘All in all, I’m on the side of cheerfulness. My error is that I commonplace book, poetry workbook, and personal journal’ (Zwicky 2017a, 19). don’t elicit that feeling in others.’ I know exactly what that 2 All poems are quoted from Zwicky 2017b. means: are we cursed with something that scares other people because we see through all the ruses of convention? I often think that people who retain so much of their untamed Works Cited childishness, so very potent a weapon for the artist, are Digby, Jenny. ‘Fay Zwicky: Now and Again I Write a Poem.’ A Woman’s Voice: destined to scare those who long ago succumbed to society’s Conversations with Australian Poets. UQP, 1995, pp. 86–107. dictates that involved loss of spontaneity, vivacity, energy, Dougan, Lucy & Fay Zwicky. ‘Crawling Across Tram Tracks: Extracts from Volumes and the yielding up of free-will. (2017a, 26) 5 & 6 of Fay Zwicky’s Journal’, Cordite (June 2014). http://cordite.org.au/essays/ crawling-across-tram-tracks/ This is how I like to think of Zwicky, of Fay: spontaneous, vivacious, Duwell, Martin. ‘Fay Zwicky: Picnic’. Australian Poetry Review (1 March energetic, and wilful. The most intense memory I have of my interview 2007). http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/2007/03/ with her in 1995 is a moment near the end of the interview, when Fay fay-zwicky-picnic-artarmon-giramondo-2006-79pp/ Indyk, Ivor. ‘Fay Zwicky: The Poet as Moralist.’ Southerly 54.3 (1994): 33–50. read a section of her journal about giving up cigarettes, something she Kinsella, John. ‘Poet Fay Zwicky was a Rebellious West Australian Voice’, The had recently done after many years of smoking. Reading the transcript, Australian July 22 2017 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/poet-fay- it is clear that we suddenly both become very animated, spontaneously zwicky-was-a-rebellious-west australian-voice/news-story/e23875b281877121e4 offering writing ideas and personal insights. The tape runs out with me 1ee9095721d635 saying ‘But every…’. I like the messiness of the transcript—so different Kirkby, Joan. ‘Finding a Voice in ‘this fiercely fathered and unmothered world’: The Poetry of Fay Zwicky.’ Poetry and Gender: Statements and Essays in Australian from the edited and tidied-up version that appeared in Meanjin—and I Women’s Poetry and Poetics. Ed. David Brooks & Brenda Walker. UQP, 1989, like the lack of ending. I have no idea how my sentence concluded, but pp. 175–93. its incompleteness implies the continuing conversation between us. McCooey, David. ‘Just Very Basic: An Interview with Fay Zwicky.’ Meanjin 55.4 (1996): Zwicky was a poet in touch with the revolutionary powers of play, 674–87. powers that can bring about change in the self and in others. These

50 | Westerly online 51 | David McCooey Zwicky, Fay. ‘Rumours of Mortality: The Poet’s Part.’ The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays So Touch Nothing Nicholas Birns is professor at on Literature and Survival 1974–1984. University of Western Australia Press, 1986, the New School, New York. He is Fay Zwicky in Arcata, California, 1996 pp. 54–62. a leading scholar of Australian ——. ‘ “Ambushed By Hope”: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journal (Notebook XIII, Nicholas Birns literature and editor of Antipodes, August 2012).’ Ed. Lucy Dougan. Westerly 62.1 (2017a), pp. 19–27. the publication of the American ——. The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky. Ed. Lucy Dougan & Tim Dolin. UWA Association of Australasian Publishing, 2017b. Literary Studies.

I met Fay Zwicky only once, at the 1996 conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies held in Arcata, CA. But this occasion turned out to be memorable for me and, in a different way, for her. I already knew her poetry; ‘Soup and Jelly’, a poem I had read a few years before, stuck in my head for its image of a once-vigorous man now in an old-age home, a once proud man reduced to accepting soup and jelly from ‘a dark-faced woman’, an image of white male privilege empathised with but also slightly rebuked. But what really impressed me about the poem was its final stanza, which took a more distanced, wide-lensed view of the situation: Outside the window, clouds are swelling Into growing darkness and there’s a man hard on his knees planting something in the rain. The man on his knees is perhaps the image of the sort of man the now- disabled patient once was; on the other hand, the man is on his knees, in the midst of action and self-assertion but also humbled. The woman’s darkness is transposed to the clouds amid the advancing night; and the general perspective is that of a world larger than the one depicted in the rest of the poem, that makes us see what transpires in the old-age home as what it actually is, but no more, and imparts a sense of decorum, of self-knowing sobriety, to its representation. Fay Zwicky was, along with David Malouf, one of our conference’s guests of honor in 1996. Arcata is the home of Humboldt State University and the conference’s chair, Jack Turner, had earlier warned conferees that it was not necessarily easy to get to Arcata by plane or car; it was a funky, hippie town in far northern California, closer to the Oregon border than to the Golden Gate, in regions where the first white colonisers were Russians, and so out of the way that Thomas Pynchon had allegedly

52 | Westerly online 53 | Nicholas Birns sought sanctuary there to anchor his reclusiveness. Nonetheless, Fay, You sue. David and our conferees made their way up there. Though not raised We really care. in Western Australia, Fay had a distinctly West Australian perspective, This sarcasm, stoic, but not complaining or, beyond a point, mocking, and was very aware, for instance, of the good will Perth had earned is both pungent and admirably impersonal. This typically winsome among ordinary Americans when the city put on its lights for American poem enunciated its surroundings with dry severity. She actually had astronauts orbiting the earth. Considering she lived as far away from New the gumption to read the poem the next day—she had composed the York as geographically possible without herself leaving the planet, Fay, work as the events chronicled in it were happening, writing teachers’ possibly because of her Jewishness, possibly because of her attitudinal dream—in the very hotel whose accouterments she scored. Speaking cosmopolitanism, evoked a jaded, world-weary, yet consummately truth to power, at least on the micro level. Her poetry and her sense of chic Upper West Side divorcée of the 1950s and 1960s, somebody who the poetic, provided very much a bridge between what the world expected might have been a friend of Christina Stead in her New York sojourns of Australian poetry in the 1950s and 1960s—classicising, metrical, of the era—but decidedly not a Marxist. But I also felt classicism in her; learned, allusive-and the colloquial, Americanising tendencies of the a stance towards facing the world that was lyrical and sensitive but also next generation. Her poetry was independent of these movements but tempered and austere, Horatian self-discipline occasioned perhaps half contemporary with both. Zwicky’s savage humour and nuanced verbal by manners, half by vulnerability. texture were animated by her furious (in the root sense of the words) Fay was very bemused by the somewhat spartan nature of our and ferocious temperament, enabled her to bear witness to the follies accommodations of Arcata, an older, threadbare hotel forced into service and dangers of the twentieth century and if our hotel in Arcata was not by the perennial noncoincidence of where tourist centers are found the most urgent of these, her poetic response etched it firmly in—inter and where colleges willing to assume the academic tasks of holding alia—American memory. conference are situated. Her observant and wry response to our hotel is found in her memorable poem, ‘American Safety Valve’: America, you give me poems on a plate. Back in massage-therapy land, they crowd Push, pluck, bend, and swerve at the static Summer self, knocks, break, and batter Down the stiffened neck… The hard, monosyllabic words free the poem from the static passivity unusually incumbent on the writer of travel poems, enabling the poet to give full heft to, it must be admitted, the extreme dolorousness of our hotel in Arcata: Tampering with this radiator Could cause harm or steam burns. Yes and more precise than anything else burns. So touch nothing. Take it from us, we’ve got you On our minds, our hearts You matter. We care You burn,

54 | Westerly online 55 | Nicholas Birns Crouch End, July 2, 2017 Lucy Dougan’s books include White Clay (Giramondo), IM Fay Zwicky Meanderthals (Web del Sol) Lucy Dougan and The Guardians (Giramondo), which won the WA Premier’s Book Award for 2015/16. A past poetry editor of HEAT magazine, she now works for Axon: Creative Explorations. She is Program Director of the China-Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University.

For me your death will always be sealed in these days —I am so far away— walking the abandoned overground clutching cans of gin and elderflower tight, my daughter’s words: she wouldn’t want you to fold. The Green Man you loved ambivalently leers at us from beneath the tunnel and we cry out where all sound is muted, the runners’ panting, cyclists’ whirring clicks. High summer’s buddleia, cow parsley, dog-roses spill out like the children beside the train that same morning (standing room only Oxford to Paddington). It must have been some kind of historical re-enactment so that I felt at probably almost precisely the moment of your death that this is no time and all times. The train kept slowing and the children kept running, almost making their missing connection. Did these bonneted, waistcoated darting lives waving furiously, feel suddenly, like me, that you had become everywhere?

56 | Westerly online ✄

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Subscription rates for two issues each year (includes postage and GST) Westerly publishes fiction and poetry as well as Work published in Westerly is articles. We aim to generate interest in the literature cited in: Abstracts of English Studies, Two-year subscription $80 and culture of Australia and its neighbouring regions. Australian Literary Studies Annual Westerly is published biannually in July and November. Bibliography, Australian National One-year subscription $45 Previously unpublished submissions are invited from Bibliography, Journal of Commonwealth One-year student concession $40 new and established writers living in Australia Literature Annual Bibliography, Arts Overseas one-year subscription AU$55 and overseas. and Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents/Arts & Humanities, The Purchase single copies $24.95 plus $2.50 postage Submission deadline for July edition: 31 March Genuine Article, Modern Language Submission deadline for November edition: 31 August Association of America Bibliography, Personal details Submissions may be sent via post or submitted online. The Year’s Work in English Studies, and Unsolicited manuscripts not accompanied by a is indexed in APAIS: Australian Public NAME stamped self-addressed envelope will not be returned. Affairs Information Service (produced All manuscripts must show the name and address of by the National Library of Australia) ADDRESS the sender and should be typed (double-spaced) on and AUSTLIT, the Australian Literary one side of the paper only. While every care is taken of Online Database. manuscripts, the editors can take no final responsibility for their return; contributors are consequently urged to retain copies of all work submitted. EMAIL TEL Poetry: maximum of 5 poems no longer than 50 lines each. Payment by Credit Card (Mastercard or Visa only) Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction: maximum 3,500 words. Articles and Essays: maximum 5,000 words with minimal footnotes. NAME OR CARDHOLDER Minimum rates paid to contributors: Poems: $120. Stories and essays: $180. Reviews: $100. SIGNATURE EXPIRY / Postal submissions and correspondence to: The Editors, Westerly, English and Cultural Studies, M202 Payment by Cheque AMOUNT The University of Western Australia, Cheques should be in $ Crawley, WA 6009 Australia Australian dollars only, payable to tel: (08) 6488 3403, fax: (08) 6488 1030 The University of Western Australia email: [email protected] www.westerlymag.com.au Send this subscription form with your payment to: Online submissions at westerlymag.com.au should be Administrator, Westerly Magazine, attached as RTF or Word documents. Please include a The University of Western Australia M202 brief biographical note and postal address in the 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley WA 6009 submission form. Australia ‘‘Crouch End, High summer’s buddleia, cow parsley, dog-roses July 2, 2017’’ Lucy Dougan spill out like the children beside the train that same morning (standing room only Oxford to Paddington). It must have been some kind of historical re-enactment so that I felt at probably almost precisely the moment of your death that this is no time and all times.

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