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please contact Barbara Bynder Westerly immediately and your material will Caterina Colomba (Università del Salento) be withdrawn.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 Production Design: Chil3 Typesetting: Lasertype Print: UniPrint, The University of Western Australia 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.