Nº5 1999 ISSN 1328-2107 pc o e to r y &r p od e t i ci s rt e v i ee w

JANICE PAUL Giraffe Lady Felicity Holland on Ted Hughes New Section on Performance Poetry

INSIDE: Ken Bolton & Pam Brown look back on the ‘70s • David Prater on Mallarmé in Melbourne • Jennifer Compton on Walcott’s OMEROS & Murray’s FREDY NEPTUNE • Mal Morgan and Peter Skrzynecki on cancer • Todd Swift $ on Slam Poetry. . . 5 2 CORDITE

ESSAYS & REVIEWS CORDITE Jennifer Compton Not a review Poetry and Poetics Review Derek Walcott’s Omeros & A review of Australian poetry Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune 10 Editor Adrian Wiggins Felicity Holland Laureate Ted and The Big Striptease Performance Editor Phil Norton Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath 3 Review Editor Dominic Fitzsimmons Wednesday Kennedy Trials and Collaborations 15 Interview Editor Bruce Williams David Prater The Mallarmé Writer’s Event 8 Picture Editor Sue Bower Todd Swift The Hungry Art of the Slam Poet 14 Contributing Editor David Prater Assistant Editors Britta Deuschle, Margie Cronin Michelle Carter WEDNESDAY KENNEDY Post Romantic 23 Special Thanks Rowena Lennox, Tricia Dearborn CATHERINE BATESON The Vigilant Heart 17 Arabella Lee

Brian Henry JAMES TATE Shroud of the Gnome 20 Founding Editors Adrian Wiggins, Peter Minter, 1997 Charlotte Jones JEAN KENT The Satin Bowerbird 21 Production Adrian Wiggins Rebecca Jones PETER BAKOWSKI The Heart at 3am 21 Printer Marrickville Newspapers 18–22 Murray St, Marrickville NSW 2204 David Kelly IAN MCBRYDE Flank 16 Publisher CORDITE PRESS INC Geraldine McKenzie FRANK KUPPNER Second Best Moments in Chinese History 21 Subscription You can receive four issues of CORDITE at Phil Norton ALISTAIR STEWART Frankston 281 22 only $19 for humans or $40 for institu- Pi O Going Down Swinging, Hobo, &, tions. Send a cheque or money order payable to CORDITE PRESS INC. Red Lamp, Textbase, rHino, Spur 23 Contribution Brian Purcell FOOTLOOSE PRODUCTIONS So Be It 18 Contributions should include a short bio- graphical note, and can be sent to: Michelle Taylor JUDY JOHNSON Wing Corrections 19 The Editors CORDITE POEMS PO Box A273 Sydney South NSW 1235 Emily Ballou Enter 4 AUSTRALIA Mary Jo Bang When the Weather Changes to Warm, We can only respond to materials that are the Boys Drive Shirtless 16 accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope. Simultaneous submissions or Woman in a Street Stall Judith Beveridge 19 previously published material will not be Ken Bolton Happy Accidents 12 accepted. Alain Bosquet In a sex shop 6 Minimum Payment —translated by Rae Sexton Scene in a town 6 Poems $50 Illustrations, photographs $50 Pam Brown At the Ian Burn show 11 Articles, essays, reviews $50 In Surry Hills 17 Contributors will also receive a compli- In Ultimo in ‘98 11 mentary copy of the issue of CO R D I T E i n which their work appears. Kathielyn Job Change 22 Copyright August Kleinzahler Someone Named Gutierrez: Copyright of each work published in A Dream, A Western 3 CORDITE reverts to its author upon publi- Stephen J Lacey revolving restaurant 16 cation. Except for the purposes of fair deal- ing and research no part of this publication Deb Matthews Red 5 may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by Mal Morgan I’ll Leave a Poem or Two 18 any means without the prior permission of The Man in a Poem 18 the author and the publisher. The Verb Mourir 19 Disclaimer

Michelle Morgan So let me get this straight 14 Reviews and articles published in CORDITE Pi O Everything Poem, part 4 7 are accepted for publication on the under- standing that they do not necessarily reflect Dorothy Porter Disaster 21 the opinions of the editors or the pubisher David Prater Xanana’s Dog 10 unless otherwise stated, and on the under- standing that they represent and promote Patricia Prime Pregnant Woman in Red 5 fair discussion and commentary on Australian poetry. Matthew Rohrer Dreamocracy 9 Precision German Craftsmanship 9 Philip Salom Acupuncturist; Under the Needles 20 Peter Skryznecki Day Stay 17 Elizabeth Treadwell Pro Model Tells Story 6 Dara Weir Apology for and Further Explanation of an Attempt to Divert Accusations of Equivocation 10 Jane Williams the lodger 18 Mijanou Zigane Yesterday’s Solution 5

SITES Contributors 24 CO R D I T E PR E S S IN C acknowledges the Editorial 7 assistance of the Australia Council for the Arts in the form of a Foundation Grant, Letters 7 and the New South Wales Government Performance 14 Ministry for the Arts for funding to pay Reviews 16 contributors. CORDITE 3 Felicity Holland Laureate Ted and The Big Striptease

The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see August Kleinzahler

Them unwrap me hand and foot – Someone Named Gutierrez: The big strip tease. A Dream, A Western —Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’ Outside the cantina with you in the backseat of a ruined DeSoto, n January this year, a lavishly produced torn upholstery,vinyl mange collection of poems by British poet and the big old radio’s static frying l a u reate Ted Hughes was publ i s h e d . I what could only be a Dixie Cups tune. BI RT H DAY LE T T E R S’ confessional poem Things had gone terribly bad, sequence charts the meeting, marriage and and Slim, who drove us the whole long way separation of Hughes and Sylvia Plath.The through the chaparral and dust, publication of the sequence followed, or so was in there now,with them, the myth goes, nearly thirt y - f ive ye a rs ’ asking for the money he had no right to, silence on Hughes’ p a rt , about Plath and had no right to even ten years back his marriage to her. Despite the near-pro- when the fire was, or so he says. They nearly killed him then, hibitive $36 price tag, a peanut-crunching, the fool, the braggart, the Suicide Kid, p o e t ry - reading crowd of unpre c e d e n t e d just itching after a good old-timey size shoved in to purchase this collection, late afternoon cowboy send-off, which has so far sold over 100,000 copies blood and gold and glinting side arms, in Britain alone. What sort of literary voyeurism does this involve? with us stuck back there yet, hove-to Earlier in the year, in my capacity as a ‘Plath schol- in the back seat like two kids ar’ I was interviewed on radio ABC 2CN for my waiting for Dad. views on the book. When I suggested that no When you touched me, account contains a full truth, and that it was no eas- ier nor more morally appropriate to comment on the lightest of touches, the most unforeseen, the Hughes/Plath marriage than it was to offer any carelessly along the wrist. definitive comment on our friends’ relationships, I I nearly came unglued. knew that I was regarded as something of a disap- I mean, I knew about Ramone, pointment—the academic equivalent of a stripper who won’t get the gear off. The script and role I that lovely boy—and for so long, imagine I was meant to inhabit was that tired old the two of you. I cherish that photo still, clown-suit, inflated with vitriol, the caricature- your white tam-o’-shanter, his red TransAm. feminist’s rage against the patriarchal machine, Then I became water. Hughes, which destroyed the fragile Plath. Yet how that enfeebles Plath, and grasps backwards into Then, from what had once been my chest, the defunct literary critical model which seeks a plant made of light effloresced. solace from the wiliness and fire of a text in the safe Thus, our adventure began, our slow-motion arms of authorial intention. What other responses free-fall through the vapours and oils. are there to BIRTHDAY LETTERS? How appropriate is Plath’s own prophetic metaphor of the strip tease I stammered at your white flesh. to describe the readerly, and possibly writerly, And that, impulses at work here? that’s when the shooting began. 4 CORDITE tance of this. Yet though the impulse may be sequence TH E FL O O R O F HE A V E N, the narrative Holland on Hughes. . . admirable, to what extent is the desire to state one’s drive and pulse in BIRTHDAY LETTERS is strong, and case so finally an illusory and impossible goal? ‘It is’ like those two similar weddings of the short story Ted Hughes died in Devon as I was grappling with after all, ‘only a story’, the speaker of ‘Visit’ reminds and poetry, it is interesting for its hybridity and for BIRTHDAY LETTERS for this article. It’s easy to see in himself, his reader, and the ‘you’ to whom the what it demands in terms of reading. There are retrospect the drive for completion which runs poems are addressed, ‘Your story. My story.’ counterpointing poetic energies at work in each case: through this collection: the sense of taking an oppor- the velocity born of linearity, clarity and narrative, Part of the answer to this question about the reason tunity to put one’s case. Before Hughes’ death, and and the slow kaleidoscopic effects of the lyric’s hon- for this poetic ‘story’ lies in an examination of the before public knowledge of the fact that he has been ing in on details, and its compatibility with impres- lineage from which this texts springs. The collection suffering from cancer for the last eighteen months, sionistic portraiture. In each cases a narrative is built reminds me, in structural terms, of Dorothy Porter’s the question of the text’s timing was puzzling. Its from shards of light and illuminated moments, which TH E MO N K E Y’S MA S K—self-contained lyric poems abandonment and clarity make sense in the light of in each case function also as ‘clues’. the writer’s understanding of his impending death, marching together to pound out a fast story. As in and the freeing up that attends a courageous accep- TH E MO N K E Y’S MA S K and John Tranter’s poem It interests me that Porter’s shifting of the lesbian detective novel genre into the arena of poetry involves her focusing on the search for a young woman’s killer, and a literal and psychological foren- Emily Ballou sics aimed at locating those slippery animals: respon- sibility, guilt and innocence. To some extent, a rela- Enter tively occluded version of these detective and foren- sic impulses occurs in Hughes’ work. There is a sense You will find the house with a bee for a heart, of evidence being garnered and scrutinised, and there a sprinkle of stars on the leaves, my bees, a confetti is a sense in which the reader, like the reader of a detective story, becomes the judge of the assembled of light that swarms the hot honeycomb on the picket fence, clues. There is also a sense of forensic inquiry, as the the stems of purple dahlias strewn with damp hay. mythologised figure of Sylvia Plath is exhumed for the scrutiny of the poems’ ‘I’, and for the reader’s Pull the dusk after you, leave your clouds behind. interest. All of this makes Plath’s famous dramatic monologue, ‘Lady Lazarus’ oddly prophetic, with its dramatised return from the dead of a speaker who Chase away the crimson dark, the cold, the alone with fire. wryly observes that “Dying | is an art, like every- Split gum tree stacked along the mossy wall, inside thing else.| I do it exceptionally well.” The piece logs tumble from the stove, ash and flame can be read as a cautionary tale for biographers, espe- cially in the light of its mantric repetition of the sin- dancing the Tibetan prayer-flags that hang gle word ‘beware’, and perhaps Hughes might have over the cracked mantle, scorching the bricks with black chalk. considered the speaker’s warning that all endeavours to reconstruct her after death will prove futile: Blue buckets, charred with smoke, waxy buttons Ash, ash – You poke and stir. mapping the wooden table, the history of darkness Flesh, bone, there is nothing there – draining hot like rain to the floor. A cake of soap, A wedding ring, The room is yellow.It has to be. A gold filling. The closest model for Hughes’ sequence, though, is Three candles and you can write. Barely. probably found in that first great birth in what was to Four candles to read. One candle to illuminate become the confessional tradition, Robert Lowell’s LI F E ST U D I E S. Like LI F E ST U D I E S, BI R T H D A Y a fraction of what you need to see, to live by. LE T T E R S entails a sort of stream-of-consciousness grappling with key concerns. The discourses of con- Clutches of old trees in your hair. fessionalism and psychotherapy are often melded, and The possums send them through the roof with their scratching. the analogy strikes me as appropriate for the dogged worrying – in both senses – that provides, in each Pools of lemon-scented gum leaves are their beds above you, case, with any luck, some sort of epiphany and all night their teeth chew at your dreams, the dust insight. BI R T H D A Y LE T T E R S is not Hughes’ first washing over the tepee of your silk bed the dog gets tangled in. attempt in this mode, though, contrary to the puffery of ‘stunning departure’ and ‘radical innovation’ sur- rounding its publication. Hughes’ collection CROW is When it storms, the old house cracks its bones another such sequence, perhaps not recognised as beneath you.You know you would not live such since the figure of ‘crow’ eclipses – or gives the if they broke, but that does not stop you from living there, appearance of eclipsing – any confessional illusion of in the butter-light, in the tea-dust, in the cosmos blood, in the blue access to an ‘I’. CROW contains an element of alle- gorical autotherapy, yet its ventriloquism through flame under the teapot, the soap by the sink the ragged and wild body of crow seeks to disabuse pink and edge-laced with teeth. Some nights the mice readers of any belief in, or search for an authorial manage to carry it away altogether, nights when the rooms shudder presence. Yet Hughes, whose poetic reputation rests with all the restless life you cannot see. heavily on his depiction of the animal kingdom, is no mere sketcher of beasties for beasties’ – or for sketching’s – sake. His oeuvre is often more ani- Wake up touched by rain. maled than it is peopled, but these animals are myth- Travel back the way you came, by puddle, by ladder, ic embodiments of traits and attitudes, rather than you almost fell once, boot slipping through the rung slavishly observed natural subjects. Thought fox, for example, is the protagonist in a myth about making, the fast wax like sticky tape wound around your hand. and about inspiration, and hawk’s nobility and inde- Peel it off. It is like skin. pendence suggests an idealised projection of aspects of an ‘I’.

You do the same when you come in, and when you go. In BI R T H D A Y LE T T E R S there is certainly an ‘I’, and one which seems, like the avenging phoenix in Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ to seek justice through the My house of honey. revelation of the truth in all its nakedness and fearful- For a bead of this I would guard the entrance, ness. Yet throughout Hughes’ sequence, far more I would mend the light. powerful is the poems’ ‘you’, Sylvia Plath, and we CORDITE 5 Mijanou Zigane Patricia Prime Yesterday’s Solution Pregnant Woman in Red

ACROSS: 1 Teardrop, 7 lady,8 Flamingo, 9 Unison, 10 Gyrate, —Egon Schiele 11 eye, 12 lease, 14 Yeast,16 set, 18 bandit, 20 Option, 22 Apostles, 23 Most of the flesh a harsh red, Ewer, 24 Asbestos. DOWN: 1 trainee, 2 Abyss, 3 Define, 4 Orange, 5, 15, heightening the expressiveness light showers, 6 Fierce, 13 Sadism, 15 see 5, 16 stylus, 17 tousle, 19 Apple, of the figure with its black 21 Treat, 25 Burn, 26 Finish. outlines and setting it off against the background colour of the paper. according to the lemon-mouthed Anne Stevenson) Holland on Hughes. . . to hagiographical. Some are dogged, others the work of biographers who have fallen in love with their The woman’s mask-like, see far more of ‘you’ than we do of ‘I’, who seems subject (witness the jacket image of biographer Paul raised face appears as an afterthought. to skulk in the shadows just beyond the dazzling Alexander, posing as courtly lover/ Byronic hero in Far more important is the shape (American) brightness of ‘you’. ‘You’ is a discon- billowy white shirt.). There are enough ways of certing word to be pelted with, as a reader.”‘You telling the story of any life, arguably, to fill the space of her body—the hefty thighs bowed at your desk and you wep”’ (‘The God’); of innumerable biographies, and indeed enough dif- and the swollen belly—round “You took root, you flourished” (‘Remission’); “I ferent stories in any person’s life to construct quite as an apple. walked beside you | As if seeing you for the first different versions of the same ‘self’. time” (‘Moonwalk’); poems entitled ‘You hated Spain’, ‘Your Paris’ and ‘The Dogs are Eating Your BI R T H D A Y LE T T E R S is in some ways yet another Her distended body,thigh, and arm biography of Plath, at least as far as the life charted is Mother’. Virginia Woolf brilliantly illustrates the are altogether believable.The left half dangers of ‘I’ in ‘A Room of One’s Own’: linked with Hughes’ own. in ‘Visit’ we see ‘I‘ meet- ing ‘you’: “Not knowing I was being auditioned | is less convincing, for here only after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed For the male lead in your drama”, then in ‘A Pink to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, an outline is provided, then Wool Knitted Dress’ we inhabit an oddly anaes- a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One filled in with a brush thetised ‘I’ marrying ‘you’: began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse to match the other arm. of the landscape behind it... why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it The artist has omitted 1 casts within its shade. Deb Matthews the table or chair supporting the figure: The ‘I’ of the Birthday Letters poems seems well Red aware of these traps, and might say of itself what the pregnant woman one of the speakers in Plath’s ‘Three Women’ The day her boyfriend came home from gaol on an elevated surface does: “And I have no face... I have wanted to hangs in space. efface myself”. The ‘you’ in Hughes’ poems, on She spilled out onto the quiet street the other hand, is omnipresent: perhaps never In a sheer red dress before has ‘you’ appeared in writing in all its toxic- Which showed her flattened breasts, ity and power. Her bones. You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean It might seem likely that to write a sequence all And the mad edge of her laughter about ‘you’ must at some level be a sort of imagi- depth Brimming with God. native homage. Yet the portrait which emerges Held itself to the neighbour’s throats. You said you saw the heavens open here is in no way hagiographical, or even especially And slow riches, ready to drop on us. loving. In ‘Caryatids (2)’ ‘I’ mentions doing some- They wished she would go back inside— Levitated beside you, I stood subjected thing “More to reach you | Than to reproach Lie on her bed with a bottle of gin; To a strange tense: the future spellbound. you”, and this may provide some insight into the poems’ rationale. In the mythology which runs Sit, in a haze, on the lounge-room floor ‘You’ and ‘I’ go on a Spanish honeymoon (‘You through Plath’s own writing, death becomes a Flicking her lighter at a pack of burning cards. Hated Spain’), have tiffs during car trips to the uterine space in which new selves can create them- coast: “You refused to get out. | You sat behind selves. Poetry is the vital source pouring itself out: The street could not contain your mask, inaccessible— | Staring towards the “the blood jet is poetry” (‘Kindness’), creating ocean that had failed you” (‘The Beach’); recon- through cataclysm, destroying false selves and living The riot of her voice; cile sufficiently to produce babies and poems: dolls, sloughing off ‘dead hands, dead stringencies’ Her stumbling red shape; “You were weeping | Your biggest, purest joy” (‘Ariel’) to enable the emergence of some more Her bare white feet on their bitumen road. (‘The Afterbirth’). ‘I’ seems to have terrible glorious identity. Hughes’ Poetry is as eroticised a trouble with ‘you’, whose flaws are crystallised in figure as Plath’s Death. In ‘Flounders’ she is the a recurrent metonymy: America as ‘you’. One dark sister, wicked and indulgent, of a good god- They preferred the hysteria of her screams early example of this is also on of the collection’s dess who warns the poem’s subjects off Poetry: Bouncing off inner walls least wonderful moments: “It seemed your long,

It was a visit from the goddess, the beauty Of crushed and shattered plasterboard. perfect, American legs | Simply went on up” Who was poetry’s sister—she had come There a fist or two, (‘St Bodolph’s). Early in the collection, America is celebrated for a moment, in full colonising fer- To tell poetry she was spoiling us. There the crater of a skull. Poetry listened, maybe, but we heard nothing vour: “You were a new world. My new world. And poetry did not tell us. And we A whole panel gone | So this is America. I marvelled. | Beautiful, Only did what poetry told us to do. Where her pushed her body through. beautiful America”’ (‘18 Rugby Street’). Soon the celebration becomes ambivalent. ‘You’ is From a dangerous liaison with poetry might be laughed at by a taxi driver, amazed to see “an born a new self. If this is true of BI R T H D A Y Their ecstasy lasted a day or two. American girl being so American” (‘Fate LE T T E R S, and the title’s intertextual rhyme with Playing’). Things get worse, with ‘you’ morph- Plath’s death-and-resurrection sequence Poem For Then, at night, ing rapidly into someone “Alien to me as a win- A Birthday tends to reinforce this suggestion, the They howled in the yard dow model, | American, airport-hopping super- ‘you’ who emerges is a Plath who is surely ‘more product” (‘The Chipmunk’) and “Empty, horri- terrible than she ever was’ (Plath, ‘Stings’). This is Like a pair of ill-matched cats ble, archaic – America” (‘The Badlands’). not a new experience for the posthumously written Tearing at cloth; at hair; at skin, ‘I’ starts to exhibit a delicious and ambivalent Plath, who has been the subject of six full biogra- Drawing each other’s animal blood. phies which reel from demonising (Plath had to fear of the occult nature of ‘you’ and of “Vast, embrace the ‘bitch goddess’ within, according to bristling darkness | Of America” (‘The 59th Edward Butscher; she was a talentless shrew Bear’). This poem re-writes one of Plath’s sto- 6 CORDITE If I had paid that pound and turned back Alain Bosquet To you, with that armful of fox – Elizabeth Treadwell translated by Rae Sexton If I had grasped that whatever comes with a Pro Model Tells Story fox In a sex shop Is what tests a marriage and proves it a mar- it’s not like i’m attached riage – to all these camel- The assistant, surrounded by obscene photos, I would not have failed the test. Would you is no less romantic for it. A phallus have failed it?But I failed. Our marriage had coats, long, short & failed. has a fair chance of menacing her— floppy (big buttons), with its blue mushroom featured on the poster. The fox is proleptic: soon ‘our marriage’ short & tight (big meets another test, embodied in a crea- buttons): i mean i would give them just ture also described through a discourse She dreams of chaste kisses in the shade give them of the wild and exotic, which culmi- to any girl off the bus, of an orchard.The devouring vaginas opening nates in extraordinary ambivalence: stairs tar black corduroy on the walls don’t know how to corrupt her: She sat there, in her soot-wet mascara, and the driver, her relaxed for her spirit is virgin, unmoved by these sperm, In flame-orange silks, in gold bracelets, Slightly filthy with erotic mystery – hair, wide-wheels through left A German turn signals in deep, slovenly these testicles, these clients who lose Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon their spectacles under her skirt. Heartily she laughs Between curtains of black Mongolian hair. rain, i’d give her one. —‘Dreamers’ while offering spare anuses, chokers it’s just when i get stuck across The fox starts to look decidedly unde- or magical pomade. She waits, an innocent manding and pleasant, in the face of the town in the rain by that fish despite so much ugliness—even dispersed efforts of this smutty alien, the ‘she’ shop overlooking the ocean, who appears solely responsible for punc- whole rows of these by her—for some prince lacking genital organs. turing the dialogue of ‘you’ and ‘I’, and fish shops and it’s raining,then fatally triangulating the marriage, after “sniffing us out”. It is ‘you’ who courts i do need a coat as i wait like her: “Warily you cultivated her”. The my pig-tailed chewing lips debated next thing you know, there’s an affair, for mother to pick up but but it’s not between ‘she’ and ‘I’, or even between it’s so far away and there’s Holland on Hughes... ‘she’ and ‘you’. It’s between ‘you’ and a death- beholden hungry Ogre: “You went off, a flare of nothing worse than your ries, in which a couple camping in a national park hair and a plunge | Into the abyss. | Every night. teenager having some are hunted by a bear. Hughes’ bear breaks into the Your Ogre lover... You cried out | Your love-sick- job where you hafta go car belonging to ‘you’, and rummages through ness for that Ogre, | Your groaning appeal” (‘Fairy fetch her half across everything. ‘You’ responds with terror, as though Tale’). the bear metaphorises some evaded aspect of the self, ‘You’ is by now pretty well stark naked. In her book while ‘I’ feels “a strange pride | To have been so but when you get a large green TH E SI L E N T WO M A N: SY L V I A PL A T H A N D TE D chosen and ego-raked | By the deliberations of that HU G H E S, Janet Malcolm defines as voyeuristic the newsmelly plush, well you still beast” (‘The 59th Bear’), though this is not untinged desire to read biographies. She handles metaphors of don’t want to be at the by a frisson of terror. ‘I’ feels some affinity with the biographer as burglar and biographer as Peeping bear, as he does later with the fox in ‘Epiphany’. In beck-&-call of some teenage Tom in her examination of the basis of biography this poem, someone wants to sell ‘I’, the new father, writing and reading: a baby fox, for a pound. ‘I’ wonders “What would & your progeny’s buying a little sportscar we do with an unpredictable, | Powerful, bounding The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biographies are obscured by an appa- like a girl in a film, even a fox? | The long-mouthed, flashing temperament” ratus of scholarship designed to give the whole enter- with its “vast hunger for everything beyond us”. Not prise an appearance of almost banklike blandness and European buying the fox, he thinks: solidity... & she just wonders, mother The transgressive nature of biography is rarely ...If I had paid, acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for the biography’s status as a popular genre... a Victoria, oh Victoria!—the map of kind of collusion [exists] between [the reader] and the biographer in an excitingly- where i was, forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the please Alain Bosquet corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the translated by Rae Sexton 2 keyhole. He gave narrative, tenderness, If BI R T H D A Y LE T T E R S can be read as a solicitude & doubt. photos of the two Scene in a Town life study in the confessional tradition: a poem sequence biography and domestic of us labelled everywhere. I walk through The skull is split on the footpath: red currants history, the reader and ‘I’ can be read as shelves and streets of or blood? Against the wall a lip has slid Malcolm’s busybodies, colluding in the like an old snail.The pulse of each brick transgression of the peep show through the keyhole of the bedroom of ‘you’. a bit of blood”. Readers of BI R T H D A Y LE T T E R S i n has begun to beat with fury.It was necessary Yet if ‘you’, as I have argued, unfailingly their stampeding charge, their fix of voyeuristic gives the reader a jolt, as though we energy, and their implication on the crimes the text’s were being addressed at some level, then to torture, one by one, the dozen streetlights, narrative charts, are indeed very much part of the are we peeping through the keyhole of accomplices in the murder.This evening inexorable charge which is part of the myth of Sylvia our own bedrooms? If the ‘big strip Plath. the kidneys of the statue are blocked. In the metro tease’ is ‘you’, where do you look? In they’ve found an island of blind lemon-trees. the text’s innovative melding of psy- References chotherapeutic quest, detective genre 1 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, (Oxford: World’s The vagabond moon has broken its jaw. and life study, the reader is implicated in Classics, 1992) p.130. the overarching question of guilt and The bitumen has refused to give help to children 2 Janet Malcolm, THE SILENT WOMAN: S YLVIA PLATH AND TED innocence in a way which gives us no HUGHES (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) p.9. without knees. It’s rained blue gloves, escape from the invective of Plath’s Lady Lazarus’ resonating ‘charge’: “There is a charge | For the eyeing of my scars, This article was made possible green gloves and black, and later a thousand hands in part by a grant for contribu- there is a charge | For the hearing of my on the sleeping park. In front of the Law Courts tors from the New South heart... |And there is a charge, a very Wales Ministry for the Arts. they must have dismissed all eyes without charge. large charge | For word or a touch | Or CORDITE 7 E d i t o r i a l L e t te r s Pi O hat Prime Minister John Howard saw Everything Poem, part 4 the need to involve a poet in the writing Young poet cranky Tof his draft constitutional preamble (pur- at unfavourable review portedly an ‘aspirational document’, but inter- There are pretations vary) is, on the face of it, a good ’m still laughing and so is Kevin Pearson who 455 active volcanoes in the World thing.This suggests that in moments of per- just rang me to read me Jennifer Kremmer’s ceived national need for meaning, a politician Iattempt to review my book, FILTH [see CORDITE and blood completes will reach for a poet, the arch maker of new Nº4]. I’m sure she has no idea just how many books a circuit of the body meaning. However the truly disappointing such a pathetic attempt at a slam will sell. She might be pleased though to know that the blurb on my every 23 seconds, nature of the resulting preamble only points a impending title PO I N T OR M O N D, SH I P L E S S w i l l but you weigh certain disingenuousness on Howard’s part. He almost certainly include: 40 times as much as your brain tried to use poetry to invest a debased docu- ment with the trappings of a credibility he clear- “‘The Prince of Darkness’—CORDITE”. and it’s impossible ly never meant it to have. If I could just stop laughing long enough to note to describe a spiral-staircase [without using that in two hilariously bad reviews, FI L T H has suf- a finger] In which case, Howard’s preamble, in short, fered from the lack of any classical education among could be seen as a low point for public poetry. younger poets essaying reviews while still wet so watch with one eye That Les Murray subsequently distanced himself behind the ears. Both have attacked UN F A I T H F U L and listen with the other, i’m about to attempt from his client and virtually disowned Howard’s TR A N S L A T I O N S without giving any indication that a handstand bastardisation comes as no surprise. these are translations. It may indeed come as a shock to Ms Kremmer to know that John Forbes praised using one finger! hose of you troubled by the irregularity of the modesty of my quote from him on the blurb. CORDITE’s appearance (thank you for your T Among other things he had said in a reader’s report In 1665 calls) may be pleased to know that we’ve recommending publication by A&R, were “Hugh dropped the pretense of claiming to be quarter- Tolhurst has a big future” and, “His translations Robert Hooke ly. Journal production is exacting and time-con- from the Latin of Catullus include some of the finest drew a picture of a [*] snowflake, hung it Up suming work, and the order simply too tall with translations of the 20th century”. on a wall our current resources. We publish, like most It’s a pity I can’t ring John to tell him that Penguin and marvelled on the workings [and poetry journals, as often as humanly possible. UK are soon to publish CATULLUS IN ENGLISH and the Glory] CORDITE will come out at least twice a year, but Professor Julia Gaisser of the Department of Latin, probably not four times a year. Subscriptions Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, has informed me of God:— will still cover four issues. that she will include no less than three [no more than “There are 36 letters three, either?—E D ] poems from UN F A I T H F U L in the Russian alphabet he light on the hill just got a little brighter. TR A N S L A T I O N S. This, of course, being subject to TCongratulations to the Poets Union for final editing by the series editor, Christopher Ricks. and rhubarb establishing the Australian Poetry Centre in the He’d have liked that, just as he liked the way that originated in Tibet,but Miles Davis was precinct of the Balmain Library. —continued on page 23, column 1 a diabetic Adrian Wiggins and an oral culture has no Text!” ORDITE is one of Australia’s most exciting / and innovative poetry publications.We publish the work of approximately 30 writ- [Now] C I may ers in each issue.We give priority to contemporary or “may-Not” know what i’m Australian poets, but also publish international saying [cos work we believe to be of interest to our readers. 4/5ths of everything living on this planet Counted amongst our many contributors are some is under the sea, and baritones resonate better in the bathroom] of the most important Australian poets of our time, but if you and some of the most important writers of the stick an elephant in a refrigerator, it’ll explode future. Our reviewers are practitioners, our essayists an’ there’ll be nothing but are experts in their poetic field. smoke pickle So we’re different to your usual commercial and spinach magazine. so don’t try and understand all this in English: Each subscription helps us publish. Subscribe “Sleep today! Subscribe and share CORDITE with a is an alert process friend—on us. A four issue subscription is now designed to prevent the brain from going into a coma” only $19.We’ll send two issues to your friend /

You Your friend Picture this:— Name Name You’re in the middle of an argument Address Address so you get-Up to get yourself a Brandy but the Thermometer BURSTS (like a pimple!) (cos it’s thirsty!)

CO R D I T E PR E S S IN C | PO Box A273, Sydney South, NSW 1235 AU S T R A L I A you turn round to “laugh” [email protected] | 02 9517 2664 —continued on page 9, column 3 8 CORDITE téphane Mallarmé is dead. unanswered question, however: is this restricted to recitations of bush bal- favour of more personal poetic visions. glorification of Mallarmé appropriate Long may his absence ladry, acts of larrikinism and various Macauley’s Catholicism, for instance, today, or is it merely our millennial other shenanigans the validity of which led him to substitute “the ultimate Slinger. Long may the horri- musings that cause us to look back on lies, unfortunately, outside the scope of symbol”, Jesus Christ for what, in his fying abyss of the white (and his works in such a favourable light? this review. May I simply say, the fact earlier work, can only be described as that there was, of all things, French an occultist fascination with sign and black) pages confound we poets, Martin Harrison, John Hawke and Kris poetry in our midst during those pre- symbol. prattlers and plagiarists.And long Hemensley opened proceedings with a Federation years is reason enough for a m ay we question the substance spirited discussion of the inadequacy of After an interpretation of the poem conference in itself. of our languages, the correspon- critical responses to 20th century ‘L’Aprés Midi d’un Faune’ by dance dences between organic, s y s- Australian Modernism (or, as Martin students from Monash University, Robert Adamson joined Martin Harrison in conversation, recalling his first reading of Mallarmé in the late David Prater 1960s. Listening to his casual responses to Harrison’s questions, I got the impression that, for Adamson at least, Mallarmé is still around, like a good friend: “He was an amazing guy”. Mallarmé Writers’ Event Adamson also shared some humorous anecdotes, such as his avid reading of Dylan Thomas in the mistaken belief Alliance Française de Melbourne that the Welsh poet was in some way related to Bob Dylan. He even went so 8th—9th October 1998 far as to claim that, had he not seen the word ‘Rimbaud’ on one of Dylan’s album sleeves, he might never have got temic lifeforms and the unstop- into the Symbolistes at all. Some would pable progress of symbols: num- argue that this illustrates well the fact that, in many ways, pop culture sup- bers, letters, marks, voids. . . plies writers and artists of post-war One hundred years have passed since generations (or, should I say, writers the death of one of France’s most enig- and artists steeped in matic and curious poets. And yet for ‘Postmodernities’) with what are sup- one hundred chaotic and turbulent posedly literary influences. Think also years editors and publishers all over the of Patti Smith’s insistent “Go, world have surveyed poems, articles, Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud!” essays and stories stamped with Speaking of pop culture, it was encour- Mallarmé’s indelible influence, brushed aging to see younger writers and artists with his unmistakable reverie. In the featured on the programme at this same way, his paradoxical presence Event. Dmetri Kakmi examined sexual could be felt at this small-scale but metaphor in the works of Edgar Allen intense event held last year, a celebra- Poe, referring to the current trend in tion as much of Australian writings and Gothic horror movies and fiction. writers as of Mallarmé himself. Textbase (an art and writing collective Who was this man? What does he based in Melbourne) launched its 3rd mean to us in Australia as we approach issue (devoted, fittingly, to ‘chance’) as a new millennium (this timeless excuse part of the Event. At the launch, the for reflection, this milestone we poten- editorial collective gave a simultaneous tially pass each day and yet, like all true performance of their textual contribu- symbols, this number celebrated as tions, a cacophonic and often amusing much for its mystique as its significance babel of noise, voice, sound byte and in fact)? Where is Mallarmé—is he pre- silence. sent in these rhetorical questions? Is he Another boundary-pushing writer behind my eyelids, guiding my whose work was featured at the event thoughts as I touch type? Or is he in is Javant Biarujia, who has spent the the air we both breathe, ineffable as a last twenty years constructing his own gnat, unquestionable as a virus, tren- language, Teneraic. Only Biarujia and chant as an offensive rumour? one other person speak this clever and Ironically, the spirit of Mallarmé’s oeu- engaging dialect. Notwithstanding vre can be said to have influenced translation problems, a piece incorpo- writers far more than any general, NANCY LIM Washed Ashore rating Teneraic, English, French and widespread knowledge of his works. Greek was performed for the baffled Particular attention was paid during Harrison preferred to phrase it, he correspondence between audience. I found it a highly entertain- this conference to the ways in which ‘Modernities’). Of particular interest Mallarmé and Christopher ing take on Dadaist techniques, with Australian writers have been influenced was John Hawke’s examination of TBrennan (the first Australian the creator of the language absent, a by Mallarmé’s poetic theories, and the Symbolism’s parallel influence on poet to appreciate Symboliste writers, reading from inside a pink box and works of the French Symbolistes Australian letters, from the first critical as shown by his Sydney University lec- memorable phrases such as “Genet- (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine et al) responses to Mallarmé’s work in the tures in 1904) lends weight to Hawke’s sait-quoi?” and “L’Aprés-midi du toc in general. Despite this, the over- Bulletin in the 1890s, to the more insistence on a wider and more appre- tudieu” (trans: “dog turd afternoon”). recent writings of Judith Wright, whelming impression I received from ciative reading of Australian writers and The evening session on Thursday was Kenneth Slessor and Patrick White. the Event was that when Mallarmé was their responses to international trends devoted to readings, with Rosemary not mentioned at all, the question of It was a revelation to hear of writings and movements. His research was thor- Lloyd in the chair. First up was ough and thought provoking, offering his influence became more fascinating. on Mallarmé in the 1890s BU L L E T I N Michael Deguy, who was visiting from Therein lies both the charm of his and was initially surprised that his solid evidence of Mallarmé’s influence France for the Australian Divigations legacy and the frustration of attempting works should have appeared alongside where, at times, others have been con- conference held at the Australian to write anything substantial on the those of fallen Aust. Lit. 101 icons tent to ponder the apparent insubstan- Centre earlier in the week. It was a subject. Steele Rudd and Henry Lawson. I also tiality of ‘originality’, ‘inspiration’ and delight to hear him speak, even as a ‘uniqueness’ in Australian verse. The strong impression I was left with is had to admit to a certain sense of relief non-French speaker. Robert Adamson of the number of contemporary that, in the 1890s at least, Australian His examination of James Macauley (who also cannot speak French, though Australian writers whose work, though literature was not quite as provincial and A.D. Hope, two poets traditionally his poetry has been translated into that defying categorisation, can be analysed and ignorant as we have all been led to regarded as conservative, was a case in language) read from his new collection constructively in the light of believe. Perhaps this is just a symptom point. Hawke showed that they had of poetry, his take on Mallarmé’s Mallarmé’s writing, thus positing him of Ye Olde Cultural Cringe. The fact come under the spell of the ‘Tomb for Anatole’ drawing a quiet as an inspirational figure, even demi- remains however that our appreciation Symbolistes during their formative —continued on page 24, column 2 god, in certain writing circles. An of that time period is, in many respects, years, only to reject them later in life in CORDITE 9 Matthew Rohrer but it’s. . . disappointing you Wake-Up Precision German Craftsmanship and wonder Why It was a good day and I was about to do something important you’re swimming and good, but then I unscrewed the pen I was using / to see the ink. Precision German craftsmanship. never trust anyone The Germans are so persnickety and precise, who sez:“I’m from the Government and they wash their driveways. Their mountains and streams i’ve come to help” [the vertical-groove dance around each other in a clockwork, courtly imitation in the middle-portion of the upper-lip of spring. They built the Panzer tank, out of rakes is called a philtrum hoses and garden gnomes; they built me. and Pandemonium, is the Capital And I’ve seated myself above an avenue on the brink of Hell] of mystery,always just on the lip, with my toes over the lip but my bowels behind. Consider this [if you like]:— When I replaced the ink the sky was socked in, Karl Marx was a journalist only one window of blue open in the north, directly over someone. Asparagus was mentioned by the Egyptians But that person was reading about Rosicrucians in the laundromat, Shakespeare signed his name 4 different ways he was unaware as the blue window closed above him. and a face-lift takes 1 The rest of us are limp and damp, 4 /2 hours I see a button in front of us that says “spin cycle.” / I’m going to push it. [Now] i don’t know what kind of problem Shakespeare [or anyone else] had but it takes 20 seconds for a solution of oil + vinegar [in a glass of water] to separate and IBM’s motto is THINK [so THINK !] make it Up! according to the Copenhagen Interpretation: “Something’s there if something’s there to say it’s there [even if it isn’t]!” / Matthew Rohrer what i’m Dreamocracy trying to get at is this: This is This The most terrifying sound— That is That an ice cream truck and This’n’That is . That in the middle of the night. not ——————> That! so don’t suffer the “cause” I’m perfectly flat according to the manual feeling my fingerprints. it’ll take you another 12 hours to clean a 1,000 It occurs to me that bricks [by the answer to our childhood questions is: hand] and 3 days we’re being tortured. to learn how to use an artificial-leg When I’m with my thoughts finally / I’m someone else, I am so you driving an ice cream truck though the night may want to keep this in mind with no lights, pulling on the string that rings the bell. a “raindrop” I am the unwholesome whippoorwill trilling in the moonlight. travelling at 25mph is about th I am awake late defending the campsite against elves. a 5 of an inch wide I am tortured in a sandbox at the army base. and the last thing I am throwing sand in a little boy’s eyes. a Pilot does I am getting very sleepy. before the plane goes down is “whistle”

—continued on page 11, column 3 10 CORDITE

Dara Weir Jennifer Compton Apology for and Further Explanation of an Attempt to Divert Accusations Not a review. . . of Equivocation When I love Rosalind, Beatrice, Lady Macbeth. And the fair In my hometown, it was like January, a person, a place, an object, I don’t see Ophelia. Oh and not to forget Tolstoy’s Anna like January in Oaxaca, in Fortin what there is to argue about. Karenina. He is gentleman enough to admit that he is —Norman MacCaig ‘Ineducable Me’ not privy to her and writes her from the outside as best he may so I get a good picture of what it looks de las Flores, like Fortin friend sent me a copy of OMEROS by in the mid-forties, like the 40s like—from outside looking in. That perspective is Derek Walcott because he liked it so welcome because I spend my whole life on the inside in December, like December Amu c h . He quoted to me—“A gi r l looking out. smells better than the wo r l d ’s librari e s .”I on the river, a forest of willows Perhaps the trick is to write women like men—and found that faintly offensive without being then put in reason and accountability. half in, half out of water, able to put my finger on it or wishing to get Flaubert said “Emma Bovary, c’est moi!” like the river in the picture, on my high horse out of context. Incidentally, Tolstoy draws a truly realistic portrait of like the picture above your bureau, When OM E R O S (“0-meros,” she laughed. “That’s the English Thoroughbred mare, Frou-Frou, whose what we call him in Greek.”) arrived by mail I made death prefigures that of Anna. like your bureau filled to overflowing an attempt to read it. I began to feel as if I was sick- All of the above is the longest preamble to sitting to with feathers every colour of the spectrum ening for something or perhaps overtired. It seemed to me a dull plod through a place of no attachment. read FR E D Y NE P T U N E by Les Murray. A handsome feathers blown through vowels, book, but I sat to it with some trepidation because of I found the lines my friend had underlined—”Both of comments ranging from dismissive to downright ugly through curtains of bougainvillea, going them wept | the forgiving rain of those who have from people I know and—shall I say, curiously inter- on forever, forever as it formerly was, truly loved”; and “In God We Trust. | But then we esting reviews. I haven’t seen all of them but I all trust in Him, and that’s why we know | the peace thought Andrew Riemer made a fair fist of it. And in the lustre of a loved one’s luggage, of a wandering heart when it is housed.” from a standing start in, I think, four hundred words. baggage to carry lightly or solemnly The man who wrote the book is obviously a poet—a What if I didn’t like FR E D Y NE P T U N E? What if I good poet? A great poet? Poet is enough. There are thought it was ghastly? How could I make it a no go toss-off into the Bay of Fundy. poets and then there are the people who are not area—such a large book, such a lot of work? I think Thank you for four golden mice poets. Derek Walcott is obviously a poet. Les’d see past the old theatrical dodge of “Good was- But his book OMEROS isn’t doing the business on me. n’t the word!” who never wake me up at night, It must be my fault. My eyes have always for the pocket-size surveillance device, glazed over when I’ve had a chance to learn about Greek Gods and Goddesses. I for books which tell me nothing’s unakin. don’t want them cluttering up my brain. David Prater In January it was like my hometown In a similar fashion I have rejected fairy tales, clowns and the skill of driving a car. Xanana’s Dog in the 1940s in the middle of December, So as OMEROS is a transposition of myth- December a cool glass of water at noon ic Greeks, Achille and Philocrete, to the You can call me Xanana’s dog but Caribbean, I’m starting out behind the in the summer, a clinking of cowbells eight ball. Helen is wandering around You can’t run from my lapping tongue; please to signal it’s evening. I was seven there too, getting the washing in etc, but Say a prayer for Xanana’s dog but she is not, apparently, a protagonist. Don’t you dare tell them where I am. four, eight, eleven, still unborn, But I still should be able to get a handle brother to my younger sister, on the story. I know nothing about the They can’t find Xanana Gusmao, though Caribbean but I’m prepared to learn. I sister to my mother, father like a twin, don’t reject the idea of the Caribbean out They search the church for him, crying: twins like vapour trails on clear nights of hand. But I couldn’t get a sense of the “Where did he go, where is Xanana?” So spirit of the place. I couldn’t get the They arrest me, because I’m Xanana’s little dog. in October.You were my shadow smells or the colours or the kinship I dared not step into.You stood by dynamics. I didn’t know who was who or why. The poet eluded me. His motive Set me free! Asleep at night forget, my shoulder, champion, angel, faithful stood downwind from me. The move- In the day remember, asleep at night forget me but companion I dare not look in the eye. ment of the narrative was veiled. The whole shebang teetered somewhere in In the day remember that I am Xanana’s dog. What was it like for you? between anything I could come to grips Free Xanana! Were you about to step into your skin, with. And maybe that is the raison d’etre of the book. For it is, according to the They chain me up, but I’m Xanana’s little dog; like water poured from a pitcher, blurb, fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile. And the exile (I They set me on fire, but I’m Xanana’s little dog; like an ant into amber, like molten gold? know) is never truly anywhere. They call me names, but I’m Xanana’s little dog; Was the gold like someone’s fortune I dropped down onto what I found They beat me and try to make me speak offensive. or folly,folly a moving picture you’d get but I am only a little dog. The concept of women as vases— “Your into for a quarter, when a quarter meant name in her throat’s white vase sent me more than a dollar, a dollar a bit to find You.” | “Good. A girl smells bet- Set me free! Asleep at night forget, ter than the world’s libraries.” —perme- In the day remember, asleep at night forget and of a future you’d be expected to furnish, ated the book. And into these vessels In the day remember. I’d be with you to finish, pours the poet’s appropriating libation. A girl may be better than a book but she of a finish wearing the date of your birth, can be read. Trouble comes for Xanana’s little dog; polished with everyone’s hopes, Look. I’m no vase. (I’m no girl either but Java comes for Xanana’s little dog; I took that to be idiomatic.) I’m as full as East Timor says goodbye to Xanana’s little dog— polished with everyone’s dreams a boot with my own ideas. lost in a basket of keepsakes. “Goodbye, Xanana’s little dog!” It’s odd than some of the most believable women I’ve read are written by a play- wright who knew that these women Xanana, Xanana, Xanana Gusmao! would be played by male actors. Please help me, I am only a little dog! CORDITE 11 I surfaced from FR E D Y NE P T U N E three nights later book I will not quote it. (Forget I mentioned ! (and it’s not as if I didn’t have other work to do) it. Read and enjoy.) I do like it when the poet exhausted and somehow transformed by gods and confesses the book need not have been written but if you goddesses who have always lived next door to me and and could not be written and, in fact, the book insist [and persist] myths that I have had a hand in. I think it is always a was not written. That I, the reader, shall have on being a BAD EGG transforming experience to enter a language that you to make it up as it goes along. are already in. The language and the purpose of the and on While I was reading, or perhaps I was being language that is already heard, that has always been getting yourself “exiled” [to an Arab country read, it was hard to tell—pulled willy-nilly available to you, but never so well. It was as if I had from shattering climax to transcendent . . . like been reading something that had always existed. bathos—I found myself a girl-child again, back Ireland] I had the same experience reading THE BONE PEOPLE on the lawn listening to my father and uncles just remember:------by Keri Hulme. At last—something good in my own and uncles-by-gift yarning around the half-gal- language. lon flagons, and I said out loud “It’s just a Paper yarn.” And I wondered at the odd reviewer In spite of the narrative greed that consumed me is always strongest at the perforations who’d made heavy weather of it. Hadn’t they FR E D Y NE P T U N E was an exhausting read. I didn’t and had a father? Or uncles of any complexion? know who would exhaust first—me or the poet. One Weren’t they the keepers of the old language? any Fool of us was going to have to cry quits. In the end it was Had they never heard it or had they forgotten inexhaustible. Whenever I thought I’d headed off the can start a sentence. it? poet he came round the side of the hill on a fresh horse and hunted me from cover. As it were. I And yet I forgive them because it’s hard to thought I knew the ending, the last couple of pages, know what FREDY NEPTUNE is. I don’t know but cunning Les hadn’t read me the last line and what it is. It batted me around from arsehole to although I like the last line most of all the lines in the breakfast time and I wanted to write a review of it but I couldn’t write a review of it. I take the easy way out.

Pam Brown One thing I do know is that FREDY NEPTUNE is —————— a film. It is already a film and I want to be the If you’re At the Ian Burn show one who puts her name on the screenplay and says she wrote it. listening to this MCA 1997 here is a suggestive misprint which the only thing you’ll need to know is pleased me. The quote from TH E some people at the Ian Burn show TAR M E N I A N O F SI A M A N T O which fuels “do” there’s a badly recorded the book is attributed to Atom Egoyan. 1878— 1915. Must be the grandfather of that film play the piano better b&w video of Ian Burn director Margaret and David rave on about—I with their & colleagues performing reasoned to myself. But it’s simpler than that. elbows anti-authoritarian art spiels— It’s a misprint, a dyslexic transposition, that resisted at least one attempt to right it. It puts —————— drumkit, keyboards, guitar, voice— me in my mind of a poem by Aaron Fogel it’s the ‘Art & Language’ days, called ‘The Printer’s Error’ and I quote— the mid-seventies—recorded I hold that all three most likely,on a Sony portapak sorts of errors, stage. The way the people passed by each other, errors by chance, (I set one up—a tripod errors by worker’s protest, looked through each other, almost became aware of and errors by each other, almost touched. The way the past infects in the lounge room God’s work, the present which becomes the future. I followed the of our communal house are in practise the movement of the manuscript (which is the focus of same and indistinguishable. & let it run full twenty-minute the play) from hand to hand as it passed backwards It’s not Atom Ergoyan. It’s Atom Yarjanian. and forwards across time. The play lives in its brackets to film quotidian comings And, oddly, I kept putting my nose up over the edge machinery not by all the things that I thought I was & goings). of FR E D Y NE P T U N E and muttering—“This isn’t like saying. Some things don’t change but the way you ah—here’s Terry Smith OMEROS. This is better than OMEROS. I’m glad Yaron perceive them does. with plenty of hair—a stringy beard sent me OMEROS. So give me twenty years (please God) and I will &, possibly,an Afro—singing along I rang Les to say “Good was the word!” but as I spe- write a review of FR E D Y NE P T U N E. And reading it now in all it’s inchoate glory is what will enable me in the refrain— cialize in preamble launched into “I’ve just tried to read OM E R O S but I couldn’t come to grips with it” to write that review. “...ee...gal–it–tar–i–an...ism...!” and he replied “FR E D Y was written as a reaction to gustily. OM E R O S. When I read it I thought ‘You’re wasting I’m chuckling now—this is your time transposing an existing myth. You’re better off making up a new one.’” amazingly cheering—I feel In the same way the play I’m working on is a reaction it’s my culture—or was—&, easily to EQUUS by Peter Shaffer. The hoof pick is a handy could become metaphor (although I think he’s thinking of the karaoke! icepick that killed Trotsky) but in my opinion, and the opinion of horsemen I have consulted with, it as it contains, for me, would be impossible to blind horses with a hoof pick. Pam Brown equivalent nostalgia. They wouldn’t stand for it. It is not the tool for it. ingenuous, idealistic Audiences accept it but maybe not many of them In Ultimo in ‘98 have ever handled a hoof pick. Or a horse. and schismatic! direct-action practising populist artists As a postscript to my preamble I had a phone call I maximise my traipsing from MayBritt of the ANPC asking if they could put round the district— (anti-institutional-intellectual-academy) my old, old play CR O S S F I R E (formerly NO MA N’S vs L A N D) in their Fertile Grounds readings in theoretical conceptual post-object artists Melbourne. Premiered at the Nimrod Theatre in at the end of Bay Street 1975. So I pulled out my copy to read it and see if I Bert Flugelman’s silver shish-kebab (yet not always nor certainly pro-academic) could iron out the inevitable gaucheries. And I found it was my schism too, our exegesis, myself touched by this piece of work I don’t remem- lies abandoned “artists think”? well, maybe— ber writing. The missing ingredient by which I could in the Sydney City Council yard understand what I was hammering on about all those behind the garbage trucks garage they did, for a decade years ago was now available to me. The future had all under the same become the present. What was extraneous and (“Living City” tin roof ephemeral had fallen away. say the What engrossed me was the two hours traffic on the t-shirts) 12 CORDITE Bridge, as either And the city with its back to you forewarning, or characterization. He was an Ken Bolton artist, not a poet.) At some level, I think, young # Happy Accidents poets know what they let themselves in for—an economic & One of the first poems that did it for me D.U.I. in the 1970s social reality they allude to with crossed fingers & Was ‘Tricks For Danko’. By Robyn Ravlich. humour. Some of course get real jobs or train Graceful, & clear, and actual. for Gary Oliver properly Another was O’Hara’s ‘For Grace, for something. My friend John lucked his way into Are you, perhaps, a After A Party’. And there were Berrigan’s THE journalism ‘Reader of Books’ ? SONNETS, hardly expecting his charade to work. The profession —John Jenkins took him to its bosom, suffocatingly, tho not too the poem where “Terry’s spit suffocatingly. None I knew I had been reading some poets before, Narrowly missed the Prime Minister,” leaving a mark who were supposed to be good became doctors. Laurie’s made a late well-timed run On the TV. (A poem of Laurie’s.) Later at academia. Most of us have shit jobs. “Headfirst a poem I loved was Anna Couani’s into the beautiful accident.” (Tranter must have And I suppose they were ‘The Bomb Plot’. John was writing poems but it was on come in to some money. The line works differently for him.) That pretended to be advertising. A different first reading John Forbes’ John. Who became a best friend. # ‘To The Bobbydazzlers’ Remember Rae—reading ‘The Deadshits’? Kris Hemensley’s poems—’Rocky Mountains & my eyes opened. Tired Indians’ There did I breathe John’s The way we used to shout various lines & one about some biscuits—I liked a lot, though From various poets, over & over, for being I couldn’t emulate them. Their domesticity ‘intense inane’ & the way Too ridiculously full of portent? “Head first reminded me you felt for them Into the beautiful accident!” “White horses. of a happy little band of Melbourne poets whom I White horses.” assumed mirrored ours in Glebe, Newtown & I felt for you, John: as though Balmain—the I sat, saluting— # Westgarth/Merri Creek/Brunswick gang: Kris, Robert, & stonkered— Things we said: “Ah, Bin 33!” “Je suis Walter, Retta. Letters from them were cheering & I Mr Tarzan!” This is the life. Crash or crash thru. wrote back on happenings here—one, in which facing an horizon “Grandmother divided by monkey Adders . . . (equals ‘Outer Space’!)” Is that attacked everybody at a reading, casting aspersions on —blue sky, a baby or a shirt factory—(No one can tell the Soul, blue sea— In this weather). One false moof and I die you! Potency, Alcoholism of his major rival (also on the There’s no accounting for taste. I em, bill), who did empty a sophiss-ticated his own equivalent of the same, while a performance- of all but admiration, Euro-Pean! (slight Austrian accent) This is the life. artist friend Head first into the beautiful accident. Ah, Bin 33! tried to stage her nervous breakdown (over her cheered, in-touch Another husband’s at last, Bin 33? infidelity)—& which intuited the interest Then we said them all again. & coming intervention silent, on a kitchen chair, of David Bowie into her life. She made a lot of in Glebe, No one said It’s a great life if you don’t repeated noise— weaken or Get this into you, though we must’ve to the puzzlement of the audience, upon a beach, in my imagination. urged who did not realize its import, something similar. I can remember the songs we # and anyway had the poets’ dark mutterings danced to— to work on. but that is life, which is the important thing— We took her away, sedated or placated her (I Another time I was sitting but not important here. On a firm kitchen chair. The poems can’t remember). John & Laurie read, finally, Were Laurie Duggan’s. Then did I breathe in # attacking no one just reading great poems: it was A speck of muesli I was having— a total But did I choke? I didn’t—these poems I first saw Alan Wearne coming down fucking gas, Terry’s spit narrowly missing the Prime Gave much to live for, the banister at a party singing a methodist hymn Minister In particular a sort of infinite ‘Quiet Moment’ wearing a little conical hat or something suggesting etcetera In which things were ‘in their place’, deshabille. # ‘Attended to’… Etcetera. I cleared my throat, I met him first actually at the Adelaide Festival vowing in ‘76—he told me something weird about another I wrote some poems just by going through my To continue in this knowledge. poet. note books circling all the good bits still Carol Novack had big eyes & beautiful hair & when # unused—from poems, letters, notes & quotations— she played pool her hands shook almost & typing them up in the order they came mesmerizingly. I think I stood up. It seemed too odd adding new stuff wherever I felt like it. I still Sometimes the balls went in. Anna’s pool was do these occasionally. People don’t understand them To be sitting, the poem was so great— better— Yet, a short one, it was over. I moved but I feel exhilarated. Laurie’s poems & her writing, for a kind of intelligent mobility. had introduced me to Philip Whalen’s (& these From the brown, cracked, wood table I was Carol took up Law. The party I saw Alan at reading at I liked). Philip Hammial introduced me to the poems was for Brandon Cavalier, a person I have never of Tony Towle—whom I knew & liked heard of only by one or two things & walked to the door, Pam Brown’s poems or seen since. His shirt had full sleeves in anthologies. AUTOBIOGRAPHY & OTHER POEMS Still in my hand—& stood awhile, like a pirate’s. (He was a poet.) Reading them in the doorway, was a great book. Breathing in, breathing out, looking # Years later my inexpert emulation of it At the view, that you saw—if you “Poetry—it’ll be bigger than tennis,” enabled me to write NOTES FOR POEMS—a book Stood straight—just above the tin. was a line already part of poetry folklore critics at the time ignored, or disliked. The cat used to hang about me when I stood there when I joined the team. I never saw or met the man As they do still, for all I know. —Pots of mint & things, at my feet— who uttered it. (Similarly, when I came to Adelaide, I remember the early Alan Wearne poem I liked I was introduced to Ian de Gruchy—& well after had Jesus Christ or John the Baptist running up On the step, looking over the fence—the Iron I’d heard his “The ambience is all around us”— some stairs. CORDITE 13 # constituting a militant facet of its productivity couldn’t see it. problem: Some German poets I liked—Bisinger et al—but That’s how it was when I started. Steve took a large supply of dope that he & others I have not kept up, & then it was the 80s Earlier I’d read Creeley & Olson & smoked & another poem. earlier still Larkin & Davie. But really on the roof at lunchtime & on numerous breaks after what I found exciting were the ideas I entertained & before. In toilets, wash rooms, stairwells & broom about Johns & Rauschenberg & the aesthetic cupboards. Notes jockeying for ideological position Anna worked with him, & Alan Jefferies. (‘Good-o Gary Oliver, poet & carouser. We drank the mythical Bin 33. of Greenberg, Fried, Stella & the Minimalists, Goodooga!’) ‘To The Bobbydazzlers’—see John Forbes, NEW & Steve became a public servant eventualy & wrote the ideas of Kuhn, the dreaminess of Marguerite SELECTED POEMS, A & R Duras speeches for Keating, but took so much time off Laurie Duggan—see NEW & SELECTED POEMS, UQP & the steel & irony of Robbe-Grillet, the look he returned at last from the U.S. to find himself Pam Brown—see NEW & SELECTED POEMS, Women’s of ‘key works’ by Rivers (‘key works’?) & the erased in charge of the photocopy paper, with a lone desk Redress Press; THIS WORLD, THIS PLACE, UQP de Kooning, —alone—in the storeroom. He resigned. & 50–50, Little Esther Books ‘Tricks For Danko’—Robyn Ravlich, see APPLESTEALERS His great book then was TO THE HEART OF THE the nerviness of Gorky; Tony Tuckson; Joan anthology Mitchell. WORLD’S ELECTRICITY “Terry’s spit …” see Laurie Duggan, “Cheerio” in ‘Bean Spasms’, when I read it, & ‘Tambourine Life’, which I loved: intemperate—exasperated—lush. SELECTED POEMS, UQP fell on fertile ground. Apart from the R n B Sal, with whom I lived in Redfern, ‘The Bomb Plot’ Anna Couani, see ITALY, Rigmarole of I played mostly, I also played John Coltrane— would catch the bus down Chalmers Street, the Hours Press “A different John”—i.e., John Jenkins—see BLIND SPOT, all of this a cliche or at any rate ‘of its time’. past the exchange, to the station— Gargoyle a book rep, a job she was good at but hated. The sober brain of Donald Brook, internalized ‘The Deadshits’—see Rae Desmond Jones, ORPHEUS WITH in mine—where it nowhere resembled very closely Anna & Rae became teachers. (In fact Rae became A TUBA, Gargoyle Poets Brook’s big brain—looked on. The English mayor “White Horses, White Horses”—actually “Wet horses” was Department of a difficult inner city council.) Nigel, also a teacher. the phrase: see Pi O, FITZROY BROTHEL, Fitzrot publica- was dull. Anna introduced me to my own mind as Denis Gallagher tions “Crash or Crash Through”—Gough Whitlam a captain of industry. Did he ever sort mail? ‘Curious Stranger’—(to be ‘analysed’). It has grown “Grandmother divided etc”—Ron Padgett &/or Ted curiouser & curiouser, & I have learned to watch it I don’t remember. Berrigan closely. Watch it, watch it! A favourite phrase— “Is that a baby…”—John Forbes spoken as by a removalist backing up a piano # “One false moof”—Kenneth Koch or something large. I was never a removalist like “Austrian accent”—indicates Rudi Kraussmann ‘The European Shoe’ by Michael Benedikt I liked I don’t think it was Bin 33—I think it was Bin 26! other poets. I became a poet when a flatmate a lot “Poetry, it’ll be bigger than tennis!”—Paul Desney, legend kept showing me his poems, for evaluation, & though not so much his other poems & I wrote has it. any demurral of mine met with Well, “Headfirst into the beautiful accident”—John Tranter, THE a poem, you wouldn’t know—as you’re not a poet. BLAST AREA, Gargoyle Poets ‘The Mysteries’, because of it, with other influences I could do better, I thought, & so I began—doing ‘Rocky Mountains & Tired Indians’—a book of the same in there too: quotations, bits ‘in the manner of’ & better, if not doing actually ‘well’, till around name from Stingy Artist Press ‘reminiscent of’. (Of Robert Kenny, Walter Billeter, Retta Hemensley 1976, the point at which this tale began. whom? O’Hara, Ashbery, Robbe-Grillet.) Kenneth “attacked everybody at a reading”—supposedly top of the bill was a visiting American poet everyone regarded as Koch # dull, a turkey. He never knew what was going on. A I read a lot then. (‘The Circus’, ‘The Departure domestic argument that was probably not explained to When I first met Johnny J his grant From Hydra’, him. had run out. He used describe himself as a ‘The Railway Stationery’, ‘Fresh Air’, & later AUTOBIOGRAPHY & OTHER POEMS—Tony Towle, Coach grifter—which word he enjoyed for its hokey, 1930s THE ART OF LOVE & OTHER POEMS). Alan Wearne House South/Sun Books NOTES FOR POEMS—Ken Bolton, Shocking Looking Books arcane quality. If it was a specific job description early recommended to me John the Baptist—see Alan Wearne, PUBLIC RELATIONS, it might have been John’s: for example, Colin, Schuyler’s poem about a man mowing the lawn, Gargoyle another friend, in which, ‘Bean Spasms’ & ‘Tambourine Life’—see Ted Berrigan claimed the shoes John wore were his. John I think, Hugo Winterhalter & other composers & SELECTED POEMS, Penguin had had them for a year but, caught out, handed conductors “spoken as by a removalist”—this is an evasion, right? them over are in the sky. Or are those two poems? It was Johnny J—John Jenkins Colin Mitchell, bon vivant very good (fairly cheerfully). Colin shook his head. I loaned Museum Railway Station—maybe, in fact, Kings Cross John my thongs but I did not begin reading Schuyler as a fan until Railway Station & he walked home. Those days I was on a higher later— Steve K Kelen degree scholarship, & it was his later poems, too. John Tranter’s “Good-o-Goodooga”—a line from one of the mneumonic though I did nothing but read & write poetry— ‘Rimbaud paragraphs the mail exchange memorized so as to identify postcodes in their mail sorting. more intensely than anyone ever did an M.A. Laurie & the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy’ in an early Paul Keating, Prime Minister form I liked for a time TO THE HEART OF THE WORLD’S ELECTRICITY—Steve wrote movies, though he did not earn a lot by it. though it puzzled me, but I liked its sense of a deter- Kelen, Senor Press He used don his dark glasses & say emphatically mined ambition— Sal Brereton—IDEAL CONDITIONS, Magic Sam/EAF; OTIS Think ‘Mogul’. Mostly he did the dole—as we were a major work, like an Historical Painting. Ron RUSH magazine # 12/13 all about to do—or worked in the library Padgett’s poem, Denis Gallagher—see COUNTRY, COUNTRY, Island Press & MAKING DO, Club 80 Press setting out to prove, I think, just how many sick days in which God “runs off giggling” I liked, for the Nigel Roberts, see IN CASABLANCA FOR THE WATERS, could be achieved before redundancy. Pam worked graceful mystery Wild & Woolley screenprinting for an American hippie employer of its perfection—’Some Things For Anne’, was it Michael Benedikt, THE BODY, Wesleyan Uni Press who turned gradually straight capitalist exploiter. called? “Rimbaud & the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy”—John Pam ‘Ruth Etting’s Tears’ I liked but that was later— Tranter: early version in NEW POETRY magazine; a later version in SELECTED POEMS, Hale & had once been a nurse. Now she did the dole, there were other Schjeldahl poems I liked then— Iremonger taught film. his version Strange Days Ahead—Michael Brownstein, Z Press And works now in a library—taking probably the of ‘Life Studies’, & ‘Hullo America’—the attack on “John (Forbes) liked Kenward Elmslie” maximum number Robert Lowell & GIANT NIGHT—Anne Waldman, Corinth of sick days (that ‘envelope’ first tested by Laurie). Bob Dylan. There were fabulous poems in STRANGE GREAT BALLS OF FIRE—Ron Padgett, Holt Rinehart & Winston, later reissued by Coffee House John Forbes worked in a tinsel factory, &, one time, DAYS AHEAD, I REMEMBER—Joe Brainard, Full Court Press, later Penguin I was too. John liked Kenward Elmslie as I remember. Edwin Denby—see COLLECTED POEMS, Uni of California IANT IGHT surprised to see him in a lottery ticket-&-snacks Anne Waldman’s first book, G N , I liked. I LONG DISTANCE—Lewis Warsh, Ferry Press, & PART OF type booth, also liked MY HISTORY, Coachhouse Press like a large Punch & Judy, outside Museum GREAT BALLS OF FIRE, I REMEMBER, Edwin Tom Clark—see WHEN THINGS GET TOUGH ON EASY railway station; Denby. . . & STREET, Black Sparrow Patti Smith—HA HA HOUDINI, City Lights then he went in for removing, which built him up Lewis Warsh I found curiously comforting. (LONG “others liked Duncan”—Robert Duncan considerably. Big, but never boofy. Most of the DISTANCE, & one Gerard Bisinger poets I knew in the late 70s that was a diary.) Pam liked Tom Clark & worked briefly sorting mail—at Redfern Mail various Frenchmen Exchange, and Patti Smith. Others liked Duncan—but I 14 CORDITE t ’s satisfying—or perhaps just easy—to ken word anthology Poetry Nation with coeditor know that the recent art of “slamming” Regie Cabico, a Nuyorican poet, it was impossible p o e t ry that has swept North A m e ri c a not to notice the ways the slam had shaped the imagi- I nations of those working within its libertine con- has a definite origin. It just so happens that straints. As surely as the sonnet keeps the poet to one man, M a rc Smith, running a ve nu e fourteen lines and a certain scheme of rhyme, slam- called the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago in ming makes the poet make something definite, iden- the early 80s, decided that the best way to tifiable, unique. Performance spice up his mori bund open-mike poetry The main genre-defining elements of these slam edited by Phil Norton evenings was to introduce an element of poem are: 1. that it be short (measured not by breath, jeopardy (as in the game show) to the read- or page, but time; usually three minutes); 2. that it be clear and 3. that it persuade; bluntly, that it win. ings. Rarely has so little expectation, and so much pressure, There’s a long and short of what a slam is, but the merged in one aesthetic. shorter is closer to the soul of slamming itself, so: the Few classical, even modern, poets have worked with slam is an event where a small group of poets per- time as any consideration at all (except in how it forming their own work compete against each other makes them old or kills them), few have prized com-

Todd Swift The Hungry Art of the Slam Poet

for the high score of the night, as judged by patrons prehensibility above complexity, and fewer have of the establishment, usually from zero to 10—a 10 laboured under the anticipation of swift victory or being, well, perfect. defeat. Most poets have suffered the transcendence of From those humble, even insipid, beginnings, has a late revenge, often from the grave, and rare is the sprung something of a religious movement, as cities poet who has gone to his verse as if to a rally. But across North America, then English-speaking coun- rhetoric was once considered a great art, a defining tries everywhere in the world, began hosting similar one in the Greek lyceum, and not simply a pejorative slam competitions, and sending out teams of four to term for the lies pols utter to grab the upper hand. meet each other in bardic battle yearly at the (U.S.) With persuasion a must—and a running meter in the National Poetry Championships. There’s even a background—the slammer is compelled to apply “Slam Poetry Inc.”, run by Mr. Smith himself, jeal- every strategy available to the poet, including the tra- ously guarding the trademark. ditional ones, so their pieces are often startlingly his zealotry (for slam poets take their work musical. But the sense is often jarring. At stake is the seriously, as all commited athletes do) has mind and heart of the judges—the ones who get the Tnot gone unnoticed by the bemused media poem—so they better really get it. What moves a (TI M E MA G A Z I N E, CNN), who periodically find it public is what we get: anger at injustice, sympathy at useful to lace their wars and scandals with. And now suffering, exultation at conquest (sexual often), and a there’s even an award-winning indie film, Slam, fea- rage for inclusion. turing one of the great National Champs, DJ This foregrounds the person, and personality, of the Renegade. slam poet—and not their persona—for the mask is What may be most interesting, though, is how the torn off and thrown to the crowd long before the forces at play behind the highly-structured competi- slam poem ends. By then, the slammer is walking, tion model of the slams has resulted in a new genre dancing, shouting, naked by words, hopeful that we of poetry emerging. At first, critics and fans alike did will see that nakedness, and find it good. Sometimes it not conceive of such a grand potential; it was just is, and mere ones and zeros cannot quite reward the getting up and doing in public words in such a way contestant that transcends the contest. Then the poem that body and tongue met the audience halfway and wins somewhere deeper than a bar, and keeps on long hopefully sucked them in. after closing time. But this has changed. In doing research for my spo-

So let me get this straight for Troy but they get holed up on some the way of their famous dead dads—and middle of nowhere island, waiting for a good Cassandra, who’s the daughter of one Michelle Morgan wind.And Agamemnon, who just happens famous dead man and the sister of another There’s this happy family man to have Iphigenia with him famous dead man and the auntie of another Agamemnon, with his lovely wife, chasing after Auntie Helen in a one Clytemnestra, and the three kids fleet of battle ships with and who has a strange gift for prophecy, Iphigenia, Electra and the boy ten years’ worth of sea biscuit and arrow- absolutely correct in every detail but Orestes. heads,Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia? no one ever believes her for a head wind? Whom Agamemnon decides is a lovely girl, Only Agamemnon’s brother’s wife, too good to waste on the open market and who turns out to be Clytemnestra’s sister Let me get this straight. a dab hand in the kitchen Helen, runs off with some blow-in from And there’s a goddess in there somewhere So all that experience with entrails Asia Minor with a reputation for bad Agamemnon and Menelaus get Helen back and he can’t resist one more souvenir judgement and and burn down Troy and to remind him of his time abroad an association with plaster. kill all the men who aren’t already dead and Greetings from Ilium. sell all the women and children into slavery And Agamemnon goes after Helen with his except the boy children of all the really Let me get this straight. brother, Menelaus, across the sea heading famous dead men—they make sure they go So Clytemnestra, who’s taken up with a boy CORDITE 15 Human life is ultimately a mystery. The exploration of The creative process was driven by all three of us We oger is busking in the Central Station tunnel. that mystery in all it’s complexity and contradiction, is were a triangle. . . sometimes, equilateral, sometimes Inspired by his tunnel-dwelling stories, Pete the purpose of his art. Hitch your agony to a star. right-angled, sometimes obtuse. We were mother, Rand I decide that our journey track will be in —Saul Bellow. father, baby, we were victim, rescuer, persecutor. We Central tunnel. We sit watching the human army of o make an album with no money were Adam, Eve and Lilith, the three wise men, the commuters hurriedly race through the man-made three witches of Macbeth, the three musketeers, Suzie intestine. Late at night, armed with DAT and boots and no publishing or distri bu t i o n and the Gingermen. . . Slowly, with passion and we record footsteps. Empty, it is at it’s most menac- Tdeal is an act of faith. Unlike the solo curiosity, fuelled by the energy that only triangles can ing. In the urban jungle, we’re only protected by each project of writing a book, an album requires generate, we created POST ROMANTIC. other. After four months Roger takes the advice of that you find collaborators who share yo u r the coconut lady. “Don’t stay down here too long”, fa i t h . And so the sharing of that fa i t h becomes an act of love. Saul Bellow said that “faith is not a reflex action, it Trials and Collaborations must be earned through the consideration of the full range of human experience and it cannot exist with- A Post Romantic Journey out the knowledge of profound despair.” Perhaps that is what inspired my collaborators to dive in and share Wednesday Kennedy with me the PO S T RO M A N T I C journey. I could not have made the album without the creative generosity and friendship of fellow artists such as photographer Lewis Morley, Violinist composer Natasha Rumiz He stands her up between his legs and Hori Toru. It would not have been completed if and grabs her by the throat she said, offering him a sliver of the coconut she it where not for the sustained faith of the Gingermen, with love he plays her. chewed to keep her feeling sane “It gets to you after a I want to be that cello Roger Holtom and Pete Pagac. while.” I want to get what she gets Some call this the era of forgetfulness. I call it a name I But she’s not the sort of girl who likes to share. And this unravelling of hieroglyphics. can’t remember Personally I call it love and there’s something in my throat or nine months I lived between my flat in Lasts only so long as their are marks to read then but it’s been there so long I’ve forgotten how to scream. Kings Cross and the studio in Surry Hills. Frank it is gone. Moorhouse said that a story is like a one night F n August 3rd 1998, PO S T RO M A N T I C w a s I had only two tracks written when I approached stand and a novel is like a marriage. The same can be Roger and Pete about recording the album at said for a track and an album. An album is a long- launched at The Basement. Eighteen Albatros Studios. I had no money. What I did have term commitment. You take your vows to finish the Omonths after it’s conception. There have was an all-consuming vision of what the album would album, no matter how long it takes, no matter how been many black holes during that period of time. be and enough inspiration to convince them of the badly you want to want to escape the sticky web that Funding rejections, sponsorship rejections, distribu- album’s significance. Pete would tell me later that he is created when the boundaries of life and art become tion rejections. Regardless, the album is made, the was bewitched into making the album. That his cre- blurred. The streets became our script. We started baby is born. My first child. It has not taken over the ative and emotional investment was against all his bet- walking the neighbourhood, mooching, loitering on world. But it is more precious and poignant than I ter and rational judgement. But no creative endeav- street corners, sitting in cafes, lying on overpass ever imagined. our is a rational one. The creation of POST ROMANTIC bridges like three escapee trolls and howling over the I have now taken artistic asylum as a child-care work- was filled with as much mystery as an imploding star. roar of the traffic. Then we would take the world er in a vacation care centre. I lie under trees with Even physicists have trouble predicting what will hap- back to the studio and craft the journey around the seven-year-old girls who read my palm and tell me I pen to such stars. Some end up as black holes. Others stories and feed in the poetry of the streets. am going to New York for a great adventure. All of become galaxies. POST ROMANTIC I assured him, was my collaborators have now gone off to other projects. destined to generate a galaxy. That’s corner’s got a history you can feel it I have three hundred beautiful albums under my bed. My dream was to create an album which would be a you can smell it Occasionally I pull them out and open up the twelve standard-bearer for Australian spoken word. Inspired but it’s not a pretty story page booklet, illustrated with hand-drawn maps of so nobody wants to tell it by the vibe created around the UN I T E D ST A T E S O F Sydney streets and the photographs of Lewis Morley. but let me tell you now before you hang around much I take the album from it’s case and place it reverently PO E T R Y album, I wanted to create an Australian longer that it’s not the sort of corner that you want to equivalent, integrating spoken word, music and get to know. on the turntable and then I lie down on my bed as underground urban sound scape. the first track begins. I close my eyes. And all I can see are stars.

with a completely forgettable name and and eat whatever you’ve got on the spit but you never can tell. no chin whatsoever, and who’s this boy with no chin?” And Orestes does and Electra goes mad and welcomes Agamemnon back from the war. runs amok through the garden and He’s killed her eldest daughter, stayed away So Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon in the comes to a bad end and ten years doing a favour for his brother never bath and knocks off Cassandra just for good Then the Furies come into the picture a postcard, no maintenance, measure it’s a shame about the frock. where have they been all this time he’s got a shipful of women in chains not a sizzle or hiss out of them before but including Cassandra who’s frothing at the Just let me get this straight. there you go; they’re on the case now, mouth with prophecy and her frock falling Electra, who’s always been the awkward one, tearing after Orestes, he off her she’s in such a state but none of the the middle child often is, never gets a moment’s peace after this and all men listening, getting a good eyeful. talks baby Orestes into killing his because he’s killed his mother. mum and the boy with no chin Let me get this straight. I’ve remembered his name And let me get this straight: Clytemnestra says hello darling Aegisthus, Agamemnon and Orestes are the heroes. home from the war are we Because Clytemnestra’s been a bad wife and fancy a bath? shouldn’t have taken a lover or killed And Agamemnon says “Hello love Agamemnon I wouldn’t have thought I’ll just have a bit of a wash Electra was that close to her father really 16 CORDITE The lack of magazine publication is a curiosity for I’m sure that a huge propor- Mary Jo Bang tion of these poems, particularly the top R e v i e w s half in FLANK, would easily find their way When the Weather Changes to Warm, edited by Dominic Fitzsimmons into any of the magazines. I once asked Ian about this and he said something about the Boys Drive Shirtless how he should get into the habit of sending David Kelly out new poems straight away. It is of Their cigarettes wasting to nought. cd & book course his choice not to. It’s likely when FLANK gets the attention it deserves (in my Bodies locked to a mirror, an eye. An impetuous shutter. Ian McBryde FLANK Eaglemont opinion) that more magazine editors will Look. Here.At me. The skin a mere pelt, a hide, a peel. Pres s$20 ISBN 0 9586543 0 2 contact him asking for poems. However, irst the confession—this is more a the lack of magazine publication does have What is this theatricality,this amorous vanity? biased promotion than a balanced the advantage when you read the book of making you feel you’ve discovered a ‘lost Facademic review. I’m guilty of A line from the chin will elongate the nose. thinking highly of the McBryde poetry and poet’, of making you exclaim ‘where has I hope by the time you’ve read this you’ll this man been hiding this stuff?’ Well in Black will brighten the whites of the eyes. FL A N K’s case, it had been with a well be curious enough about his work to seek Shaving the hairline will heighten the brow. it out. known Melbourne publisher for 14 months waiting a ‘no’! It is of course not the Charm me. Render me impervious to injury. There are at least two kinds of Australian longest wait in history for a ‘no’. But it is a poets—there are the embellishers and the long wait. cut-backers. Sadly for the cut-backers the Make me invisible at night. embellishers tend to do better in the big Enough of the potted history. Let’s look at competitions. In last year’s Newcastle some of the poems. Here’s one from the Skin like water, teeth like milk, the sapling back. Poetry Prize for instance, Anthony shade of angels Make me invisible at night. The body as transit, coinage. Lawrence came in first with Jean Kent and The Red Sea Robert Adamson the runners up. Certainly Consequence. Clean repetition of I am. Here. Look.At me. Anthony Lawrence and Jean Kent could be How this draining pain called embellishers. Dorothy Porter is circles monthly within you, more of a cut-backer; Steve Evans is a cut- it’s deep gush churning up Stopped in front of a mirror, self locking self backer and Ian McBryde is a cut-backer. the dark rush of fury, into place. Stopped at the side of a lake, His poems are sparse and tight and concen- trated. Yet they are still fully flavoured like of uncertainty, of uneasy sleep. ledge of a window.Stopped, the impetuous shuttering. a nut or an apple. (I think J M Synge said If I could I would be We are in transit, no thought but the next, that about speeches in plays.) miniaturised, inside, riding your lake of blood, McBryde has released three books to date. The first, THE SHADE OF ANGELS, was pub- rowing a quiet white boat vanity etching the surface. lished by Radial in an optimistic “limited oars dipped in gently, The boys are shirtless: ornament and pronoun edition of 500” in 1990. Magazine credits scattering many delicate petals were minimal, about half a dozen and no over the crimson waves. poised just inches away from disorder ‘name’ magazines. In 1994 Hale & A poem good enough for any magazine. and trembling, death and the endless expanse. Iremonger released THE FAMILIAR. Again, magazine credits were minimal. The only Metaphorical, sensitive. Some may even call it sweet and naive. Yet it also has deep Australian magazine listed was NOCTURNAL resonances—the lady of the lake sort of SUBMISSIONS. This year Shelton Lea, to his eternal credit, published McBryde’s third suggestion, the Romantic out in his boat dreaming of his lady. Yet, in this poem, he book FL A N K under his Eaglemont Press feelings and causes and consequences onto is within the lady. In a quiet white boat. McBryde’s poems are infused with certain imprint. Only eight local magazine credits a simple direct thing, a factual object fluo- signatures; they are all short, with tight, are listed. The simpleness and starkness of that realis- tic description ‘quiet rescent with suggestion. But also in this brief lines of mostly three or four words; white boat’ will emerge poem there is another one of McBryde’s they are divided into neat packets of two or signatures which appears in all three books through the books as one three or four lines; there is frequent use of but gets more developed and used more of the signatures of the simple factual thing to suggest the com- effectively in FL A N K. It’s the listing of Stephen J Lacey McBryde’s poetry. And plexities of the poem’s subject; there is also the poems will move things. Often in threes. And often just a clever but well controlled use of internal revolving restaurant beyond the Romantic nouns and maybe a simple adjective. Again rhymes and sound repetition. and again the word simple comes to mind metaphor . . . in describing the poems of McBryde, but His style has evolved through the three Today I found a photo Take for example, this no way simple in the sense of being dumb. books. The poems in FL A N K are sharper and more tightly focused than some of the of them— from ‘The Familiar’: Simple in the way a snooker champ plays the most direct and certain shot, avoids the poems in the earlier books. The subjects New Order he’d taken mum for fancy ricochet. are more accurately presented. There are more hooks for the reader to latch onto. a big night out Loud boys There is an undercurrent of fear and threat There is a greater sense of looking out the only time ever. . . bully boys, the world in many of McBryde’s poems. A poem beyond what the poet himself is feeling to a schoolyard called ‘The White Valiant’ is a chilling por- try, through imagination, to understand except for the Chinese you swagger through. trayal of the car of a child what others are feeling. pornographer/murderer prior to his setting ‘slap up’ Not too bright out to find a victim. The poem is hinged FLANK comes with a CD containing sixteen but white, and that’s in Gosford about the words “the dolls” just about half of the poems with musical backing. enough McBryde reads them himself, quietly and some Friday nights with a boot way through. Nothing else indicates the intended victims are children. Like the passionately but with no excessive theatrics. and there they are and a stick He is not one of your jump around bells and a killing or two. “sad little flats” the factual object, the sim- ple article and noun, focus our attention on and whistles performance poets. Just a sitting at a table good poet with clear direct material that It’s the song of the wasp all the complexities. ‘Crawlspace’ is anoth- will leave, I suspect, haunting aftershocks of in ‘The Summit’ it’s the old command er poem in FL A N K with weird frightening it’s an aryan tune. suggestiveness. beauty or threat or fear in anyone who Seidler’s modernist cylinder hears him. He received very good respons- spinning towards a beige and glass future You salute in a vacuum. Not every part of the poem is clear, and yet es from audiences in recent visits to the through Mondrian grids We recognise you. the feeling is clear. There is an intruder Queensland Poetry Festival and the We already know and that intruder may be a rat, or a spider Australian Poetry Festival in Sydney. with his Elvis sideburns what you do. or a human. We have no idea what the intruder will do. Do we need to? It is a Given that he has had such little exposure and gravy-stained polyester The sad little flats. kind of abstract poem that leaves all sorts of in magazines, his output is small and the best poems of his small output have only (he’d forgotten to use the napkin) The pictures of Hitler. scary Hitchcock feelings floating in its The mirrors you sneer wake. just found their way into publication in cufflinks heavy on the table into. FL A N K it is no wonder that Ian McBryde mum in her hairspray FLANK also has softer poems dealing effec- has not acquired a greater reputation, is not No longer Romantic or tively with more traditional poetic subjects talked of as one of the Australian poets. I and blue eyeshadow sweet. But poetically such as sunsets and flowers. ‘Calling the suspect that situation will begin to change framing so much you’ll still find that beau- Jasmine’ is one such softer poem ending now with the release of FLANK and subse- tifully effective simple with a delightful description of “the per- quent books which I imagine will be as hope object. This time it’s the fumed/delicate tentacles of air.” good. Maybe better! As more people read turning on itself ‘sad little flats’ and the ‘Montmorency Sunset’ is another poem and hear his unique and haunting poetry ‘pictures of Hitler’. It’s which addresses night in a similar way that I’m sure his reputation will rise. where Galileo may have uttered the way the cut-backers tradionally dawn might be addressed. “All “Eppur Si Muove” have of focusing enor- around us night | is up on her haunches, mous complexities of || waiting, facing west” CORDITE 17 Peter Skrzynecki Pam Brown Day Stay In Surry Hills

Whether you’re there faintly scribbled in sky-blue pencil for an hour on the front wall of my house or the whole day in Surry Hills in 1971— it’s always like returning home— “is this the hostel where the lazy & fun-loving start up the mountain” to that room in Immunology I don’t think anyone entering the house where you’ve spent had hear of F.O’Hara, so much of the past year. their T-Rex records under their arms, sauntering With its two beds out to the kitchen to lean against and three armchairs,TV the fur-lined door I’d made and handbasin to honour Meret Oppenheim it brings to mind & for a sensual lean images of domesticity as well that somehow one’s spirit needs— the comforting Tricia Dearborn Each year as regular and unforgiving as and familiar, the secure: the rains book I planted another half-grown baby what’s easy to touch in the seedless earth... Catherine Bateson THE VIGILANT and understand. HEART University of Queensland How can I leave them now? Press 1998 98pp My handful of bitter apples my secret, salted crop? Tony,the duty nurse I want words which are scalpel sharp and shiny; poems keen enough to gut a welcomes us fish Bateson doesn’t flinch at depicting the with his happy,boyish smile. and clean it. Poems labelled not for unthinkable and her spare language only domestic use... heightens the emotional impact. ‘The “Darling, how are you today?” Grandmothers’ tells of the military dictator- “Fine,”you reply. And I want to feed you ship of Argentina’s “disappearing” of young warmly scented words; pregnant mothers, imprisoned until they “Wonderful! Now let’s get you settled.” small loaves of wholemeal bread... gave birth by caesarean section, and then I want to rock you with my mothering taken on death flights and dumped over the And he does— songs. Atlantic. in what’s become known —Tongues of Fire Each night the grandmothers dream of as Kate’s bed. their daughters; The heart is the territory Catherine Bateson bellies ripped from the birth, plump arms charts in this new collection of poetry, aptly outstretched I settle down named, and she does it with a surgeon’s shot down from planes beside you, sit and read TALKABOUT precision and a mother’s fierce care. While like arrows or great sea eagles... the subjects of the poems range from the or the SYDNEY STAR OBSERVER: tattooist’s schoolgirl lover/apprentice to a The death flights learn how hard memorial for the victims of Port Arthur, those women she writes in ‘Stories Like Dice’ that “We their torn wombs it is for people to be accepted, spend a lifetime making sense of the heart’s ballooning journey”, and it is this journey that is the all that to be themselves, air. book’s primary focus. and how easily discrimination The theme of mothering, in its various rears its proverbial This is not to say that all of this collection is guises and circumstances, is a strong one emotional heavy going. ‘Wild Nights at the “ugly head.” throughout the collection. In ‘Thirty-eight Alliance Française’ is observant and wry in Weeks’, a description of herself in the bath: its depiction of the author at 19, wanting to Your belly is a pale bare island rising out be “a sexy woman”: In the meantime of the water. While Jules and Jim cycled through You can’t seriously believe its buried trea- they prepare you for another Truffaut’s classic sure Raphael from Rouen stroked endearments bone marrow biopsy though you wouldn’t do all this for less. into my palm... to test the presence In ‘Still Life with Children’ she documents I told my French teacher the Alliance was the sameness of the days (“These days begin or otherwise not what it seemed. with a dreamy precision.”), the smallness of of further leukaemic cells— She said my accent had improved her desires (“a sunny morning and no I went back for advanced conversation and I cringe to think tears,|nappies washed and folded before and a Moroccan how a corkscrew needle lunch”) and comments: computer programmer with a unit at Kangaroo Point and a pool. will shortly puncture your flesh; this wasn’t the way I thought I’d live in my motorcycle days. Bateson occasionally moves into a “prose poetry” style, and of these poems my And you can look to ‘On Bukowski and and how you, too, favourite was ‘Stories Like Dice’, a series of Babies’ for a response to those who might vignettes recording the multiple ways peo- will have to learn to adjust criticise her for being “too domestic”. ple connect, and disconnect. The poem’s to the world outside The death of children is also a recurrent strength arises from its matter-of-fact narra- this friendly little room— theme, from the “anxiety as constant as tive and the telling detail contained within blood” around her own child’s serious ill- it, and the cumulative effect of the separate whether the result ness, to the cataloguing of actual deaths in stories, which reinforces both the diversity is good or bad. ‘All My Dead Children’, part of the and the commonality of this human experi- sequence ‘After Five Years, My Own ence. Reflection’ (a suite of poems imaginatively In ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ she explores based on the experience of Barbara the difficulties, intricacies and contradic- Crawford, shipwrecked in 1844 near Cape tions of relationships. And ‘When You York, who lived for five years with the Leave’ is a delightful testimonial to the Kaurareg people before being discovered unspoken care of many friendships: and returning to Sydney): If I send this unsigned 18 CORDITE will you know it’s from me? The poem that kept drawing me back was Mal Morgan Consider it an apple, ‘This is the Poem’, the first of the W a r d or the caress I withheld; Seven West sequence. It begins: this is my hand resting on your cheek for I’ll Leave a Poem or Two one quiet moment. This is the poem you never wanted to write in memory of Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor Her imagery is often deft and beautifully the one you’d change for any useless thing: apt. In ‘Anniversary’: nebbich a silver bangle I’ll leave you poems like these In the time between night and sunrise I a holiday on the coast Made to be read by five or six readers. call him to my bed, a long life. —Primo Levi lay out my body like a party dress. This is the one you were scared of I’ll leave a poem or two some teeth for no-one’s the one too close to the bone. This collection contains the (prize-winning) It muscles its way into your safe house mouth old books newspapers and cufflinks sequence ‘Notes from Ward Seven West’, shouting and a broken bust of Beethoven a silver wedding ring based around her experiences in the chil- breaking glass. dren’s cardiac ward of Melbourne’s Royal fashioned into honesty-leaves. I was true. Children’s Hospital. The characters of this This poem showcases Bateson’s strengths, in I’ll not leave a cellar full of vintage wines dusty microcosm are delineated with clarity and its graceful but powerful simplicity of lan- affection: Phil, who, disillusioned with guage, its emotional range, its compassion, bottles lying on their sides stocks and shares “pushing Nembutal | across the counter, and in the satisfyingness of its structure. and their dividends. I strived for something more. the little notebooks,| the penholders Many of the poems in TH E VI G I L A N T Not to be shouted over roof-tops not to be crammed announcing miracle drugs” came back to HE A R T are “domestic” in that they deal medicine because he wanted “the real with the difficulties and complexities of into letter-boxes. This poem make to be read thing”; Leanne, who says: relationships, with partners, children, by five or six readers. I’m going crazy to a metronomic beat. friends; the happenings of ordinary life; and You see, we patch these kids up, what happens to ordinary life when the they come back. We send them home, dreaded intrudes. They are by no means they come back. tame. I look forward to Catherine Bateson’s sleeve notes: release. Such simplifications inevitably They come back to die when you’re on tea next collection. betray the richness to be found in any col- “Process is where it’s at, forget about all break. laboration between talented people; the rest.” [Oho!] they’re also a red rag to a critical bull. The poem ‘From Ward Seven West’ illus- “SO BE IT is word-driven, not like music Perhaps I contradict myself by now ques- trates the poignancy of small details; and the Brian Purcell with words added later…” [Aha!] strains of the illness of a child, and the cd tioning Calvert’s assertion about cate- methods we adopt to protect ourselves and “As a musician I don’t like to be catego- gories, but in fact, if one is slipping Footloose Productions SO BE IT — conserve our vital energies, are highlighted rized, restricted by musical styles or gen- between or transcending musical styles or in ‘This is the Poem’: DARK INTO LIGHT Collective Effort res.” [Hmm!] genres, a potential audience needs to have Press some idea of what these are. Far from “The three of us have created a true meet- You don’t look at the other beds- being beyond these categories, the musical arlier this year, ABC’s ‘Express’ pro- you have only so much love ing place between words and music.” [Oh underpinnings of So Be It’s ‘soundscapes’ gram did a segment focussing on can’t afford to spill it no!] come from a very specific time: the late on any other mother’s child. poetry and music, but it was disap- E A work such as this, which attempts some- 70s and early 80s. I hazard a guess that at pointingly narrow in its focus, concentrating least one of Calvert’s synthesisers is of this My only complaints about Bateson’s writing exclusively on those artists following the thing different from the norm, should vintage, and there are constant references would be an occasional preachiness (‘What I Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and folk rock line: embody Popeye’s credo—‘I am what I am’. It should not be defined by what to the more radical work of Roxy Music Do’), and that sometimes the wording feels a ‘modern troubador’ ethic. What of other (especially the saxophone of Andy a little self-conscious or ponderous, so figures such as Lou Reed, Ian Curtis, Patti anyone—especially the artist—tells us it is. MacKay), Pink Floyd, early Split Enz, heavy with its intent or meaning that this Smith, Morrissey, Beck?—rock musicians Calvert’s like a nervous kid at his first punk electronic bands such as those on the becomes intrusive (the last line of primarily, but whose lyrics are every bit as birthday party, running around and punc- independent M-Squared label (which ‘Ultrasound Scan, Eighteen Weeks’). And interesting as the more ‘poetic’ others and turing the balloons. At the very best, his assertions are fruitless if the work doesn’t spawned luminaries such as The Dead ‘The Bones and the Song’ was a poem that perhaps more effective, since by not Travel Fast, Scattered Order and the early I enjoyed tremendously at the beginning, announcing themselves as poetry, they are bear them out, and his last assertion but which (to my mind) became disappoint- less likely to encounter prejudice from a shouldn’t have escaped from a press ingly rhetorical towards the end. ‘rock’ audience. And yet, pause a while to pity any- one foolish enough to overtly mix Mal Morgan the forms. If poets and musicians are often marginalised in Australia, The Man in a Poem Jane Williams how can such ‘hybridists’—spurn- ing genres and categories or delib- the lodger erately blurring them—hope to for Kevin Andrea Sophie and Raf find an audience? For a decade I outgrown the body simply myself was in such a group, call it a There’s a man in a poem rock band if you like, and even the drags what it can’t carry smaller independent labels told us bathed in moonlight. to ‘get out of Australia’ to have any You know him chance of success. When we finally mouth slack as a stroke did, in 1991, the European label you’ve seen him before. but eyes the colour of bees who signed us eventually He’s bending over approached a national distributor tipping his dreams with our well-reviewed CD, but we are at the centre were promptly told the band was into a bin ‘too weird for Australia’. of all that flowers in the lodger with fish-heads and bottles So I can sympathise with So Be It’s and yesterday’s paper. defensiveness in evidence on their and when he shows himself album’s copious sleeve notes, and Nobody wants them. was determined to give them a ‘fair He raises his head we must take his useless hand go’ and approach ‘Dark into Light’ on its own terms. For a start, the to look at the moon cover art is daggily forthright: through a fork in a tree. kiss him on the mouth merely the words ‘So Be It | Dark until he weeps like a woman into Light’ in primary colours on a You know the moon shaded grey background. Think you’ve seen the tree. colour Letraset, or Mondrian on an and admits he can’t pay his way off day. The foldout photos feature Can you write him the artists themselves gambolling another life? causing trouble where ever he stays around a verdant garden or cud- dling an XL Falcon; only one has a You want to don’t you but if we let him he’ll learn ‘trendy’ haircut, but none of the but where could you find three seem to give a damn about how to love us for his keep cultivating any particular ‘image’. such a magical pen? Promising so far in terms of an He’s the man in a poem independent approach, but then all he asks is time they commit a cardinal sin—hell’s every night to prepare us for his death bells!—they define, even review tipping his dreams themselves! This is Robert Calvert, main composer/musician, from the raising his head. CORDITE 19 music driven by words from Mal Morgan “music with words added Judith Beveridge later”. Maybe it might hold The Verb Mourir for pure pop songs, but in Woman in a Street Stall creative bands you can start I die at either point and end with She makes torn shapes above a pot; the opposite result, which thou diest I’m sure was also the case and I love to watch how the moon il meurt with SO BE IT. What is adds its cool, transparent edge ‘Performance Poetry’ any- elle way? Is it standup comedy, to her lips. She tests for enough spice, nous short drama, spoken lyrics, or enough distance, and I watch those all of the above within the vous space of a minute? It’s the sticks of cinnamon float among etc. very thing I love about it, her large, flat spoons.Ah, there could this uncertainty, the pauses in you know which the audience has to be a bird flapping out of tall grass the order make up its mind: a few by her sweet oasis, and a man too, minutes of rare freedom sal- and vaged from an over-hyped whose breath smells of cedar and dust, how things and over-catalogued world. who has come to quench himself, go! It’s worrying that hype is to listen too to the duet of her spoons I want now so all-pervasive that and bracelets. I watch her face even an independent group is Mozart no longer immune. And this above the steaming pot, above the Dylan C D doesn’t need it: despite milky expanse where I imagine all my reservations it’s emmi- the warbling nently listenable, whether her customers, lonely,yet open magpies you want to attend carefully to the intimacies of their thirsts, to the lyrics or have it play- all in concert. ing softly in the background to their days full of the umber scents A greater at a party. Even George of their longings stirred in well Michael asks us to “listen symphony without prejudice” to what’s before dark. Far off, the sounds I’ll never there, not what’s said is of dunes moving under birds’ wings there. In the end is the joy hear. and the point of it all. are the sounds her sighs make Neither Collective Effort Press. moored above her shimmering liquid. will GPO Box 2430V, She sifts ingredients, spoons them in, Monsieur Melbourne VIC 3001. and her bracelets slice the air Hulot! with a thin marimba music, the kind Michelle you might hear somewhere far off, Taylor as you set your afternoon to the Severed Heads); but in particular one artist and unfamiliarity with the English lan- book loneliest bandwidth. . . She sips and one album come to mind: Brian Eno’s guage. Judy Johnson WING 1978 album, BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE. a last spoon, douses the air, CORRECTIONS Five Island No mean lyricist himself, Eno’s sound- The vision I had of ‘Performance Poetry set shakes in grains, spice, the green to music’ involved a harsh, slightly con- Press 1998 $8 isbn 0 scapes on this album were particularly sym- Formosan leaf. . . this woman who pathetic to the experimental and poetic use frontational exercise in grunge; this could- 86418 507 3 of lyrics. n’t be further from the truth of jeltje’s per- calls us in, draws us in with her formances. Her world is filled with animals, first heard Judy Johnson’s This is not to condemn Calvert: BE F O R E birds, cats, frogs, and is often under threat, poems being read by the skilful, aromatic finesse; who, AND AFTER SCIENCE stands up well today, but only from vague forces—like traffic and Ipoet at Varuna earlier this like an illusionist, knows what and it’s interesting that it—or at least the noise. Think of a guileIess Leunig character year. It was the launch of sensibility behind it—can still inspire musi- wandering through a troubled world and her first collection of poems she can and can’t gain from the cians after twenty years. If one learns their you’re near jeltje’s persona on this album. I WI N G CO R R E C T I O N S p u b- immeasurable edge. . . this woman craft at a certain time and is satisfied with was also reminded of the expressionist lished by Five Islands the tools of that period, what’s wrong with painter Franz Marc, who painted animals— Press/Scarp in series number who works in heat that begs that? Would one condemn BB King for mostly horses—due to his disquiet with the five of their New Poets illusion of her, distance of her; having the same guitar style for forty years human world (well deserved as it turned Publishing Programme. I if it can still express what he feels? Old syn- out, for he died in a trench in the first had some reservations about who listens for whatever she can thesisers and drum machines—such as the world war). It’s actually jeltje’s sensibility— being present on this occa- amongst the soft resolutions Roland 808—are now as sought after as and voice—which keeps you listening. The sion, if not entirely because I Fender stratocasters. This aside, it’s impossi- poetry is whimsical, with some gentle social too had submitted my manu- of her bracelets. . . She blows ble not to at least initially place Calvert’s criticism and an appealingly childlike desire script to FIP the year before now at the fine wisps of steam, (and collaborator Sjaak de Jong’s) music in to escape (“fly away good bird”)—but there but had not emerged as one a certain era and style. One thinks of are no particular lines or phrases which stay of the six new poets. Could gently,as if she held her lips Bowie’s LOW when listening to “not (evil)” with you for long. And yet, I was hooked I be a true professional? (or is to a man’s damp cheek,though and similarly of Fripp and Eno’s NO after “think of the forest floor”—such vari- this role in relation to that of she consoles all of us, who’ve come, PU S S Y F O O T I N G when ‘Dark into Light’ ous and delicious phrasing, cheekiness, poet inversely proportional?) concludes the album. charm and warmth. With another voice, Was I objective enough to drawn out by the need for tenderness. Another of Calvert’s assertions I take issue the tracks could have descended into a react to the poems and not to with is that DARK INTO LIGHT is word-dri- New Age dirge, even bathos, but jeltje the poet? continually surprises and delights with her ven. In the early stages the voice is distinct- Surprisingly—yes. My initial bounce and quirkiness, such as performing ly raised above the music in the mix—but response to most of the poems was one of twenty-seven poems I counted eighty-six ‘Kikkers (Green Frogs)’ in Dutch. as the album progresses, for the most part it great pleasure. I think what I was reacting references to flight, the sky and light. settles and truly becomes part of the music, The music is overall quite sympathetic to to was the language, the short scenic flights, Being partial to such images and ever aspir- especially those tracks consisting of only a jeltje’s words and voice, and reasonably var- melodic journeys to places I had heard ing to new ways of appreciating things few phrases—such as ‘(not) evil’—which ious within the above-stated limitations; about but had had no great desire to visit, celestial may be another reason I enjoyed are chanted or repeated. One of these, the but for my taste it’s too polished (the more until now. Even the title of the book these poems. For some though, this repeti- eponymous ‘So Be It’, could be released as random and truly spontaneous sounds are evokes music. It is taken from the short tion may become slightly tiresome. Here is a pop song, and there’s nothing wrong with filtered out) to really do justice to ‘perfor- poem ‘Flying’, this metaphor for our lives a sample from the opening poem ‘My Baby that! mance poetry’. Even the more ‘improvised’ resonating through the collection : Sees The Stars’ : pieces have a calculated feel. SO BE IT may A refutation of the ‘word-driven’ assertion . . . my own light inevitably dying work better in a live context, which would Not so easy to dismantle the puzzle could be deduced by my avoidance of and see flying for what it is, as whole galaxies fill the palm of his give a necessary edge to the performance. mentioning the lyrics/poetry on this album what most things are: starfish hand. until now—but this is not to deprecate jelt- On the other hand, I’ve been constrained a je’s (poet, lyricist, singer) contribution. On little here by the constant assertions that this a set of compromises—a series The poems are not devoid of weight, how- the contrary, if DARK INTO LIGHT succeeds C D is ‘poetry-driven’ etc. There are ele- of subtle wing corrections ever. Johnson seems at home contemplat- it is largely due to her performance. She ments of this, sure, but I’d describe the to make the pieces fit. ing human existence, and she does this par- reminds me of a cross between Ania album as a more left-of-centre or creative ticularly well when exploring its dark and The book begins with a dedication—“to Walwicz and Björk, and like both these pop. And it’s sheer sophistry to differentiate undesirable aspects. The best of these women, makes a virtue of her foreignness my loved ones who help me fly” and in the poems are diffused with ‘light’, an unex- 20 CORDITE pected beauty higher and larger than that a page or less.) In poems like ‘Water-wheel which is happening in the poem. Roland Man’ and ‘Dawn Fog’ such economy Philip Salom Leach (on the back cover) describes this works perfectly but I found myself wanting paradox another way : “To steal from and more from some of the other poems which Acupuncturist; Under the Needles misquote Virginia Woolf: ‘Judy Johnson’s feel more like postcards sent somewhat poems are butterfly wings threaded with hastily from destinations rather than the He’s rather soulful, someone said steel.’” detailed personal letter I desired. Many of the poems are about that which is Just a few more questions—in the last line lost or leaving. There is the loss of skills of the poem ‘Sea Bed’ should “elliptic Half-undressed, your hands crossed on your chest, and precision with age in ‘Butterfly echo” be “elliptical echo”? The latter you might be lying in state Collector’ and the loss of one’s memory in notion of an ellipsis would add more to the ‘Alzheimers’. Both poems chart the poem. And in the poem ‘Pencil but you are now the calmest of short deaths inevitable with tenderness and originality Melaleucas’ did the poet consciously use in a room that’s calming, but never with the misguided sympathy the word “nightly” on two consecutive that may lead to steering away from the lines? rectilinear, worn smooth by New Age silence. truth. I will not forget in the latter poem Despite a degree of unevenness, WI N G Even the acupuncturist who the grandmother who has spent the sum- CO R R E C T I O N S announces the arrival of a mer days watching her grandchildren eating looks like a well-tanned ballet dancer but cannot poet to watch for. (Some of you may have watermelon: known this already, considering Judy move a word without a minute She sucks the last inch of pulp someone Johnson’s repertoire of previous publica- passing, then a stutter on each syllable, is has left behind tions and poetry prizes.) There are poems as if memory is somewhere in a taste. here which do what I hope for in any therefore, mostly silent. poem—that is to be moved, in two ways. But husks trailed with ants are mostly In the first instance Johnson’s poems have what she is left with; touched me and left me affected. The sec- You’re nearly naked, stripped down to knickers bleached bone crescents—those pallid ond way they have worked is by transport- rinds she knows and T-shirt. He watches you ing me, beyond intellectual thought and she shouldn’t eat, though why? reason, beyond the place where I live and then actually says,Yes,and slowly his fingers she can’t quite remember. the people I know, beyond my own small move your T-shirt down habitual views of the world. discrete as sewing, for the needle he must touch Several poems examine lost relationships within a domestic context and lines like between your breasts, “You have a new coffee set. I remember and one lift of your knickers for another needle our| harlequin mugs, their rims sharpened just above your mons. to a suicide| edge…” from ‘Pseudo Coffee’ Brian Henry They are a stranger’s fingers, and they touch leap off the page to strike you. With titles book like ‘Discounting The Condom Theory Of like slow attentions. Living’ the tone here becomes more cyni- James Tate SHROUD OF THE GNOME cal, but this brand of cynicism offers reas- The Ecco Press $US23 ISBN 0 880 More, perhaps, because his face is long, voluptuary surance, if only to reassure us of what we all 01561 6 from troubled speaking already know—that flight comes with risk. he American poet James Tate writes (why else would we desire it?) and you never know the body’s own seductions conventional-looking poems that Those poems which impressed me most, Tare thoroughly unconventional. surrendering, or wary, however, are about an awakening to mor- Since DI S T A N C E F R O M LO V E D ON E S (one more in both your wrists, then ankles) each tality and the deaths which complete this. (1990), Tate has been moving toward a See ‘Gemstones’, ‘The Boy Who Drowned lyricism that carries the vestiges of narrative time he touches you and At Easter’, ‘The Burial’ or ‘Water-Wheel with it, establishing an oddly pitched, sin- says you must relax, and not wanting this ambiguous Man’ to sample Johnson’s voice at its most gular music-alternately deadpan and daz- assured and convincing. The images in zling, understated and florid, earnest and more than soulful. these poems are strange, sinister, exquisite cockamamie. His style also extends to his and always unique. Amongst them there is tone, which can be simultaneously hip and often a disarming narrative at work. Try vulnerable (only Tate would respond to the Silence.The sunlight moves across your face. stopping at one stanza in ‘The Boy Who title ‘Where Babies Come From’ with the I listen to your breath Drowned At Easter’ : first line “Many are from the Maldives” and then proceed to a moving conclusion). But and try to feel you lying in this portrait.The needles It’s not difficult to imagine the deja-vu that despite the hilarity of his poems, his vision shine on your body might is tragicomic at its core. Although wit and Accompany a toddler’s stumble. The humor can serve as defense mechanisms for like the stars shiver on the limbs of constellations. small tug On a psychic cord in the base of his a poet, Tate allows them to coexist with The body, and the silent brain—the place the painful disorientation that often charac- expanding universe. . .Years seem to be passing That still remembers birth, and ties the terizes the human condition and its frailties, Act of descending with exile. follies, and foibles. in this room of elementary The forty-four poems in Tate’s most recent The collection as a whole is not without pin-ups: the diagrams of Chinese men like pink collection, SH R O U D O F T H E GN O M E, a r e inconsistencies. A comment by Andrew blow-up dolls. among his funniest dramatic monologues. Taylor in ‘Reading Australian Poetry’ The language of these narrators, whose The lines as virtual as an introvert’s tattoos. comes to mind : “The only power they synapses seem to have been haywired, can (words) have is derived from their not Your nerves perform experience peculiar slippages and convolu- being what they signify.” In poems like tions: “I’ll keep a watch out here for the the finest calisthenics and the tiny needles seem ‘Fireball Sun’ and ‘The Woman Who malefactors | all the while ruminating rum- Painted The Sky’ even the titles sound the inverse of idea. . . bustiously on my new | runic alphabet, familiar. Some of the images here seem a mellifluent memorandum whack whack.” little too easy (not least because one of the Throughout the volume, he constructs a very first poems I wrote was about a But who knows? Perhaps, above, below,you are variety of off-kilter worlds that operate by woman who painted the sky different their own logic, as in ‘My Felisberto’, in all the hexagrams colours to symbolise her moods) and do not which the narrator’s intricate and super- work hard enough at extending the imagi- rising and falling, the whole I Ching may be rational argument is initially obfuscated by nation. This is sometimes due to the over- its absurdity: passing through you familiarity of descriptives, but on occasions may also be attributed to the sheer number My felisberto is handsomer than your like currents in a lake, the surfaces which hint of descriptives battling for their own terri- mergotroid, at all the abstracts tory. Interestingly, this seems to be more of although, admittedly, your mergotroid a problem in those poems describing land- may be the wiser of the two. but are mirrors: the trees, birds, the universe of clouds, scape. See what you think : Whereas your mergotroid never winces or a fisherman at sundown quails, The critics said for years she was too pre- my felisberto is a titan of inconsistencies. like old souls. . . as this man watches you, and me, his face dictable, For a night of wit and danger and painting only one shade of sky. They temptation handsome as a magazine seemed disturbed my felisberto would be the obvious but so serious, so. . . (Is the soul our favourite pastiche?) by the layered blue she had perfected—a choice. white-blue However, at dawn or dusk when serenity that skittered across the canvas … is desired I think of an old man your mergotroid cannot be ignored. I was disappointed that none of the poems lying prone in another room, in another context in WING CORRECTIONS spanned more than Many of these narrators are half-insane a page. (Around half the poems occupy half didacts: they possess some sort of arcane altogether—as each image CORDITE 21 jabs him, remembering so much of a world that’s gone our armour: that’s why I navigate my heart to paper.” he can’t remember us Geraldine McKenzie but calls out to the figures filling into him, says book the order of the years Charlotte Jones Frank Kuppner SECOND BEST all wrong, the slowest acupuncture undoing him, his soul book MOMENTS IN CHINESE HISTORY Carcanet Press Limited under moonlight, in the sun. . . Jean Kent THE SATIN BOWERBIRD Hale & Iremonger 1998 $16.95 96pp major tendency in. contemporary We might be in another room, when I am old, and these isbn 0 86806 640 0 poetry has been the disavowal of nerves from my father narrative, not simply as form but elving in to Jean Kent’s collection A even as a possibility. Narrative, of course, of poetry, T H E S A T I N B O W E R B I R D, blinking off in me, and as the nurse reaches down offers order, a sense of certainty and con- is a bit like entering a sacred tem- to me like needles D tainment and, most crucially, of meaning, ple, after taking off your shoes you enter a all of which are inimical to current percep- lofty space, a sense of hushed meditation you waiting there, as I am now,in the corner tions of a chaotic universe and a language and contemplation, rich in beauty and so splintered by multiple meanings as to watching silently. colour. Certainly, a deep sense of the reli- lack a single essential meaning. Yet here is gious runs throughout Kent’s poetry, Frank Kuppner, seemingly restoring narra- evoked through her observations of nature. Later, you tell me how you felt without your usual tive to a central position in poetry, with his Birds feature prominently, their humble elegant quatrains sketching story after story. points of reference, and unassuming routine upheld as some When Kuppner’s first book, A BA D DA Y kind of model for living. In ‘The Satin wanting to make the process work, knowing you had F O R T H E SU N G DY N A S T Y (Scottish Book Bowerbird’ (the first poem of the antholo- Council Award, 1984), was published, he opened up your past, gy) Kent suggests a kind of spiritual awak- stated that the work was “provoked by ening is available to those who observe the some grief, he said, and hoping he was touching you like looking at the illustrations in Osvald Sireds simplicity of the bird’s life, “Come. Nestle CH I N E S E PA I N T I N G: LE A D I N G MA S T E R S just another patient nearer. Let the lustrous bird| sleep in us AND PRINCIPLES and feeling certain that the now. Let us swallow all night | our cranky even as he struggled for his words, and even as his watching whole story was not being told”. SE C O N D cries until we too can wake | high in clean BE S T MO M E N T S I N CH I N E S E HI S T O R Y i s was lingering too long, branches still holding| a gurgle, still practis- located in the same territory and, as ing| like some hope of happiness our throat I thought of my father, so late and very close to dying Kuppner says, is “formally identical and strapped song”. Like Hopkins or very similar in its preoccupations”. Again and the no-nonsense Wordsworth Kent proposes transcendence we have 501 quatrains, many of which “are is possible through observing and learning nurse shouting: G’day Mr Salom! Now toss back supposed to be funny” and they are, the from the non-material world. ya medicine! Whey! humour characteristically ironic, delighting Her lush and heightened language trans- And my mother flinching. And all the diagrams undone. ports the reader to the mysterious and magical heart of the senses. Even the mun- dane experience of ordering a pizza at the local pizzeria becomes suffused with a sense Dorothy Porter of the spiritual, “blissed blue-green turquoise—an ocean opening itself indus- Disaster knowledge, often incorrect, that they wish psychologically in its pursuit. For all such triously smashing its sparkle| then calming back, into something whole again”. to purvey before their hold on reality slips expeditions one does well to carry a talis- for Dr Diane Lightfoot completely. This skewed didacticism could man and Bakowski’s is the heart. ‘Between Wave Breaks at Watsons Bay’ be pernicious if it were dishonest, but pays homage to a friend of Kent’s. This TH E HE A R T A T 3A M or any other hour is Tate’s narrators believe what they say: poem is a pleasing contrast to the hypnotic Why is it so fascinating the familiar but shadowy image that gets intensity of the nature poems, pounding as I for one can barely tell where I trail off thrown into bright, sometimes harsh some- it does with the fierce energy of a three- watching disaster’s colonies and you begin, since human beings are times sympathetic light in his poetry and year-old child, its central image. The grow? reported becomes alternatively the vessel and perpe- poem’s effectiveness works through its the to be ninety-eight percent duct tape trator of truth, “and your heart asks all its metaphor of child as a boisterous force of and feathers anyway. questions| that| only living| may answer.” nature “a Southerly bluster roaring up from Some hang before the mouth Bondi—”. Implicit in this metaphor is the —’Same As You’ Mercifully Bakowski has the discernment to like clusters of grapes cement his contemplation of the metaphys- contradictory notion that the child/nature is at once a source of exhaustion and at the SH R O U D O F T H E GN O M E is replete with ical with the blessedly concrete, the stuff of others wriggle same time functions as a panacea for the such narrators and characters-a jalopy-dri- living, and in this way strikes the match world weary soul. In the company of the like the tempting blips ving boat-misser, “a crack squadron of sol- which activates the candle. He is able to do child, the woman can learn to be sponta- dier ants,” “a jackal-headed god of the this on the tightest of word or imagery of distant constellations. underworld,” and “a hungry little Gnostic budgets, so that a ripening tomato is “sun- neous and free again, “and all the world you were in was also | suddenly transpar- in need of a sandwich,” among many oth- set| to a snail”, but a concept far more ently beautiful | shocked light as a bubble ers. If tragicomedy is the bastard offspring enduring than the fading light it evokes. He Is the microscope honest? with undutiful joy”. of delight and terror, then Tare is a terribly lights sparks with his inversion of the obvi- Is the petrie dish safe? delightful poet. ous and offers humour when the questions The latter part of the anthology is devoted without answers begin to infuriate, -I feel to Kent’s reflections while living in Paris that 1 couldn’t even dial a wrong num- where she took up a six month residence at Disaster can be Rebecca Jones ber’—‘Life is difficult, part one’. This is one the Keesing Studio. ‘The Baby Magpie’s so gentle on the eye, of many incidences where Bakowski Catwalk’ offers a stark comparison between book assuages life’s difficulties with an astute the fragile and innocent beauty of the wondrously translucent Peter Bakowski THE HEART AT 3AM sense of humour. Australian bush with the harsh, cynicism of a swimming mystery Hale & Iremonger 1998 $16.95 Aside from the heart, other themes and Europe, “the flashbulbs fizz out in Paris | suddenly machine-gun bursts of French with delicate working 72pp isbn 0 86806 643 5 symbols in Bakowski’s work are an eclectic report | from Rwanda”. The tenuous song reflection of his travels through the cultures parts. hat criteria is Peter Bakowski of the magpie’s is Kent’s own doubts and of the countries he writes about. It is a tes- setting up for his poetry when fears about travelling to a place far away timony to the infinite freedom and, on he ends his opening poem, W occasions, loss that identifying with a young from her treasured native bush. This theme It’s not so easy ostensibly a list of similes for everyday phe- Australian culture permits. is revisited with greater intensity in nomena, with, “Only truth| will make a ‘Imagining Myself in Australia for calling you names, poem| last longer| than a candle”. His In ‘A Man of Rome’ the measured obser- Christmas’, Kent draws stark comparisons disaster. ‘truth’, a word that no longer stands on its vations of a citizen from one of the oldest between the chilly, wintry European own terms, functions like a striker of reso- and most traditional cultures of the western Christmas and the stifling humidity of the nance, and his poetry is to question the world draw upon this dichotomy of what it Queensland celebrations back home. Even when the lid heart-rending mystery of life in a way that is to be an Australian observing the world. Christmas at home is alive with “cracking creates moments of illumination that shine It is comfortingly and enviably decorous Queensland nuts’ and the “rich mulch of is lifted a light more interrogative than a candle. It and yet threatens to stultify. This danger is leaves”. In her Paris collection of poems, on your putrid stink is this moment of revelation, of verbalizing diverted by the likening of the man’s soul Kent travels back again and again to her a thing whose shadowy image we have to the goldfish he sees swimming in the native Australia. Ironically, her travel forays you are generously grown used to in the dark, that is the true pond, the cloistered public gardens of urban are not so much a discovery of the new as enlightening us craft of poetry. Rome allow for a symbolic contemplation much as a rediscovery of the old, as child- that brings to mind oriental spiritualism. hood and family are revisited. “I am falling to the real world The search for truth is not an uncharted Whatever he writes about and from back to where it is day—day like an journey for a poet or a traveller of which whichever place he writes, Bakowski writes upturned| honey jar of my mother’s gar- Bakowski is both, and his poems, consoli- with his heart, driven by the desire to den” It is the ripe time—the family living its lurid lovely movie dated over a sixth month residency in extract the essential nature of what he sens- time”. Rome, span continents geographically and Divide and Rule. es, “I think the meaning of life is to shed 22 CORDITE in subversion— heavily”. The difficulties of seeing are par- ready humour functions in a similar way, BE S T MO M E N T S I N CH I N E S E HI S T O R Y is a alleled by the difficulties of knowing. Given both the neat wit and the cheerful bawdi- beautifully written sequence. That it is 108 the context, it’s not surprising to encounter ness of the ‘Drinking Songs’, whilst engag- flawed is, perhaps, entirely appropriate. As he leaves the astrologer’s house. declarations of “the essential unreality of ing in one sense, simultaneously distance delighted to have been told That all the signs favour his immediate things”, but even this is presented ironical- the reader from events—the man with bro- journey to the capital. ly—the scholar (266) who has just complet- ken legs, the compromised Master, etc. He trips over a garden rock, falls, and ed his 8 million word manuscript on the There is a sense in which all sorts of discor- Phil Norton subject “searches his room in apparently dant events can be absorbed, and that glit- breaks both legs. book He crawls back into the house, to check increasing desperation | Wondering where tering surface, by turns lyrical, elegant, one or two details. on earth it can possibly have disappeared ironic, will subsume all conflict into art. Alistair Stewart FR A N K S T O N 2 8 1 to”. The flaw inherent in a denial of the Five Islands Press, New Poets 5. This process is conclusively sealed by the SECOND BEST MOMENTS is a much stronger material world is neatly captured in 30— work than the earlier text, more consistent use of the quatrain. Although there are a ot being all that familiar with in quality, more firmly sited in its world of Six sages are standing in a little garden Each few instances where Kuppner pushes this Australian crime history, I asked a the Chinese scroll and more inventive and has shut his eyes, and, by sheer absence of form to its limits by the use of very short Nfriend for assistance in understand- assured in its dispersal of narrative. thought. Has convinced himself that he has or, more commonly, very long lines, these ing the reference of the title of Alistar Kuppner’s declared interest in the whole been absorbed into the universe. An are isolated cases and don’t affect the pre- Stewart’s poem sequence FRANKSTON 281. story has blossomed into a series of varia- enraged servant girl is about to kick one d vailing sense of coherence, containment The title alone did not trigger any memo- tions that actively sabotage any sense of them. and craft implicit in a form which reduces ries, so I went on to explain what the series each poem to a constant four lines, regular of poems was about. Some brutal murders story as true or closed. These sages are, at least temporarily, escap- metre and a generally orthodox use of syn- of apparently randomly chosen young ing the physical but the difficulties of doing An old man stands in an open doorway, a tax. We can, if so inclined, praise the women which sent the community into a so are enacted in the frequent coupling (in traveller sees him and passes by. The old artistry that, in the face of all evidence to state of panic, and mobilized the police more ways than one) of man closes the door—these are the bones the contrary, gives a sense of some certain- force into futal attempts at coping. Masters/scholars/sages with dancing girls/ of what might be a story, then again it ties; and there is no disputing that SECOND might be two quite separate stones. This is singing girls and wine—for example, in I was then recited a list of vaguely remem- nothing new, parallel narratives are the 120, the Master who is asked to “recon- mainstay of everything from Homer to cile| His insistence on the need for a Neighbours. What makes the pattern chaste, virtuous life| With his well-known potentially disturbing is the equal weight penchant for having large servant-girls| Sit given to both stones, so that, in a subse- down on his face”. Is there a real conflict? Kathielyn Job quent variation (312), the fall of a jug off a Dichotomies abound—spiritual/material, cliff into the ocean is Juxtaposed with the political|domestic, beauty/cruelty—but Change massing of “a hundred, two hundred ships”, they scarcely ruffle the limpid quality of the both seemingly of equal value. text and its measured and orderly progres- sion of stanzas. Having decided to change her life, Another pattern of narrative occurs when she slashes the same individual simultaneously enacts 64 two separate events, as in 6: “The man Enamelled trees grow by the river. welts of green slumped, dreaming in a pavilion”. Is the A delicate humanity close their Jewelled doors over her eyebrows. same man as the one climbing the moun- And sail gently downstream towards the She arrives at her house tain path towards him palaces Here, value is no longer the issue, it’s reali- Where the worst of the loud screams have to find the writers’ group of five ty that’s at stake. This is also the case with been beard coming from. bent like fingers another pattern Kuppner adopts where a Here the juxtaposition of civilisation and narrative is established then returned to over each other’s pages, laid out terror is registered as though human suffer- later in the sequence with a line changed. ing is no more than an unusual twist to on the lounge room coffee table. This practise is repeated anything up to five insert in the last line. This does represent an times, in some cases suggesting the range of There is her body area of weakness in the text. Although the possibilities that might emerge from a given quality is generally consistent, the demands sitting with them situation but most notably entering an of 501 quatrains and the sorts of patterning expanding spiral into absurdity, thus the leaning into their words– that occur involve occasional lapses into Emperor who undertakes to visit a young they don’t notice cleverness, banality, glibness and a sort of lady of whom “he is inordinately fond” ini- portentous simplicity that doesn’t quite tially expects the trip to take a few hours. her disembodied animation work— By the last variation, the projected journey in the doorway. has blown out to “a few decades”. 379 One tells her A wet leaf clinging to a threshold uppner also plays with fragments of Gradually dries. crispens. and falls to the she has asked a few new members narrative, isolated scenes that hint at ground. a larger story. In 39, for instance, and points to the other side K There to join an enormous heap of other the lady shivering in the snow and the leaves. of the room. semicircle of soldiers who surround her, A royal dog wanders up to the heap and could be the middle act in a number of sce- pisses on it It has ballooned narios. What is really happening? It’s a into a public hall, recurring question—in 162 where “the These are minor irritants in what is general- Emperor’s favourite horse stands bleeding”, ly a vivid and entertaining sequence, a filled with duplications is this picturesque detail a domestic mishap, more significant difficulty is what happens of her dining table, surrounded or the denouement of great and tragic to the expression of chaos in the text. events? This confusion is shared by many of Narrative is multiplied, subverted, dismem- by bent backs, the characters “The civilised man with the bered; experience is compromised by sub- cardiganed, striped, seamless, head of a large green ferret” who is “uncer- jectivity and the untrustworthiness of the tain in his mind” (111) is only one of many senses and nature; profound dualities are with faceless heads and voices indecisive, anxious, apprehensive and identified and, to cap it all, there are inter- reading from their writings, unpunctual figures, crossing and recrossing mittent references to impending catastro- bridges, avoiding and not avoiding abysses. phe. louder and louder to overtake This uncertainty extends to experience of We are within half a second of annihilation. each other. She decides not the natural world, sounds are ambiguous— “An occasional rustle | May be footsteps I’ll no even have time to look at yow face to worry about her eyebrows, but is more probably just trees” (22). again. and rushes from table to table, Images are just as problematic and it’s not —112 even clear if the difficulty lies in the limita- saying: that image rises from the page, tions of the image or of the beholder - Armies muster off stage, peasant women are saying: here, your character is coming to life— glimpsed in flight, Governors despair and a 51 soldier on sentry duty has no idea whether do you see, A few bamboo stems sway unimportantly they are winning or not — in the wind. There are three. or four—pos- do you see? sibly five of them altogether. No. To be A bored God’s band closes round the She leaves her body’s imprint quite accurate: there are six of them. No, globe and crushes it. waft a moment -there are seven of them. —294 at each table and stands

Misreadings can also occur because of the However, this chaotic and violent world is in the airy empty space impulse to impose narrative on landscape— both distanced and contained. Of course, between the two half-rooms. in 241 ‘Drinking Song’ the singer describes time is extraordinarily elastic in the world They are asking her questions a mournful valley, corpses hang from most of the Chinese scroll, hours become of the willow trees, but this is amended “I months, years, decades, a stroll into the but have no time exaggerate” they only hang from four or ocean stretches into the centuries; the dis- for an answer. No-one five. Again the singer corrects himself, there tance such time spans confer obviously play are, in fact, no corpses—“but it is raining a part in the detached tone of the text. The has noticed her eyebrows. CORDITE 23 bered possible tragedies to choose from, The only extranious pieces for me were azines under his belt now] end up being the cut-up texts and graphics etc. The 1st issue assuring me that even if I was not familiar two visual “text” poems which were Citizen Cane of poetry if he doesn’t watch engaged Ania Walwicz, the 2nd the art of with the specific, I knew the general, and assembled from cut and literally twisted it]. [Still] Lyn’s choice has been heralded in the “cut-up”, and the 3rd Mallarmé.... sadly confirming the universal nature of lines from the other poems. I didn’t feel Melbourne universally as a stroke of genius Perhaps the most interesting development these psychotic offences. these two pieces brought anything to light with alicia sometimes telling me that they in recent years is the number of “art stu- that was not already in the individual hoped to include “interviews with people dents(?)” who’ve come to poetry out of art FRANKSTON 281 takes us through a nonlin- poems and the collection as a whole. we think are influencing writers at the history and engaging [once more] the stages ear chain of events (if such a thing is possi- moment.” as well as “a CD of spoken word of poetry. TEXTBASE magazine reflects that ble) and an almost schizophrenic series of FR A N K S T O N 281 is a powerful, disturbing as a document of what is happening. With shift [and the wonder is why there hasn’t voices as the details and events surrounding collection. Stewarts ability to select what that kind of openness, hope and dedication been more of it, since the last invasion in the crimes are recounted. We are given images to present when makes the work GO I N G DO W N SW I N G I N G could end up the 70s by the Ashbery / O’Hara assault]. glimpses. Not full snapshots, but little cor- successful. I understand Stewart has a corre- being THE most exciting magazine in the Danny tells me, “I’ve found the contempo- ners of torn photos. The blend of voices sponding performance piece and would be country. rary art world quite open... much more and places and time is not smooth, inten- interested in seeing how Stewart presents than the literary world” and it’s hard to dis- tionally not so, I believe. The poems don’t the material live. Due to the subject matter, nother magazine i love is Dane agree with him—”I guess all of us [at flow into each other but sit scattered, more FRANKSTON 281 is not a collection that you Thwaites’ HOBO. He has attempted TE X T B A S E] approach writing from an art like the puzzle pieces they represent. The enjoy. It is more an event you witness, then also to produce a regular tape-cas- A theory perspective”. A lot of poets on the lack of titles and page numbers further adds come away slightly dazed. It’s like seeing a sette of poetry, for the “visually impaired” scene today would benefit from a bit of to a sense of evidence gathering: everything car crash at an intersection, and then getting and others but from what i can work out familiarity with art-writers. is unnamed, unnumbered. the walk signal and having to continue on the tape idea died only after a few issues. In your way, leaving the crash behind. But not one sense [and as an outsider] it was There were other “small magazines” i Thankfully, Stewart avoids sensationalizing completely. inevitable, cos (a) the technology i.e. a tape, would have liked to review|mention but and sentimentalizing as poets so often do was too old, i.e. not a C D, (b) it was not some like RHI N O [in WA] unfortunately with such emotionally laden subjects. sold as part of the magazine, but rather as died before i got to them, while others like Instead, Stewart gives us a kind of bare an adjunct to it (c) a tape-cassette is awk- SPUR were too young and new [with only poetic reportage, laying out carefully cho- ward-packaging with a conventional A5 1 issue out] for me to do anything with; sen snippets of events: Pi O mag. and (d) the poems on the tape were maybe next time. journals There are no lone women read by “others” other than the poets in the area. GOING DOWN SWINGING themselves. [Still] HOBO magazine has been An evening is held PO Box 24 Clifton Hill Vic 3068 a beautiful beacon [for a long time now] for by the local college a lot of good writers in Australia and in a Michelle Carter to discuss career prospects HOBO sense it has never stood still. What i mean is cd for women undergraduates. PO Box 166 Hazelbrook NSW 2779 that the magazine is always trying to expand Wednesday Kennedy P O S T By 7.00 p.m. our notion of what the current of poetry & ROMANTIC. the hall is full actually contains, and he has opened its of worried men. PO Box 1297 Nth Fitzroy Vic 3068 doors to the home of the haiku in Australia ednesday Kennedy is a Sydney performance poet who recently This sense of paranoia and worry in the RED LAMP edited by Janice Bostok a one-time-editor of TWEED magazine fame I’m always excit- launched her C D album, PO S T community is one of the central concerns 61 Glemnere Cl., Cherryhawton, W ed when i see a new issue of HOBO, and it R O M A N T I C at The Basement in Circular of the work, and when Stewart deals with Cambridge CBI 4EF, UK. these, he presents the voices cleanly and always makes me participate in its writing; Quay. She was featured on the ABC Voices and that [for a magazine] is exceptional. As programme and also The 7.30 Report simply: TEXTBASE one poet put it to me over the phone, along with John Tranter and Robert PO Box 2057 Even if I get in my car safely there’s always “lots of poets bunched up in Adamson during National Poetry Week. I worry about breaking down East Brunswick Vic 3057 it” and it is genuinely “inclusive”—and that There’s something very zen about the on the road alone it is!!!!!!. and then he’ll get me. RHINO themes and styles of Kennedy’s debut PO Box 164 South Fremantle WA RED LAMP edited by Brad Evans is subtitled album PO S T R O M A N T I C. Her insistence on She starts work at 5 a.m. “A Journal of Realist, Socialist and looking deeply, intrepidly into the pain of and I walk down the driveway SPUR Humanitarian Poetry” and is perhaps the betrayal, deception, and abandonment takes with a hockeystick and check the car Grey Matta Collective most courageous magazine in the country; us on a journey of poignant beauty, to the just in case yer know? hen i took on this review, i defying the current trend in intellectual other side. It’s like a transformation. On excluded some small magazines thought world-wide to disengage aesthetics one level it’s a physical journey from subur- Stewarts sympathy for his subjects feels gen- from commitment. But what i find so bia through the inner city which is reflected outright: SO U T H E R L Y, uine, something that is important when W exciting about the magazine is how the in footsteps, playground noise, planes, trains OV E R L A N D, HE A T, [QU A D R A N T ?] , dealing with multiple stabbings and griev- poem-on-the page is given its uncluttered and shattered glass. Interwoven is the emo- ing families. Equally genuine seems to be MEANJIN. . . Why?! To tell you the truth, I couldn’t come up with an adequate criteria, space and relevant cultural context by the tional and psychic journey from childhood his contempt for the attempts of the use of notes, footnotes and introductory innocence to urbanised adulthood with its Victorian Police to deal with the crimes. except that they didn’t fit my notion of “small”. Maybe its because of the size of remarks. The very notion that a poem deconstruction of popular myths and ide- There are numerous references to exists in a cultural context, and that specific ologies about life, relationships, language. “Operation Reassurance”, a “show of the financial budgets involved i.e. if the shit hits the fan tomorrow there’ll always be cultural knowledge is important to a This is most apparent in The Promise force” and “a person would have to be poem’s understanding is acknowledged, and which Kennedy wrote for the music of game to commit a crime with so many enough money in the kitty to tie them over to a FINAL issue; not necessarily so with allowed for here. In RED LAMP i can even Hori. Here the cliches/metaphors of love police around.” get excited by a ballad, and that’s hard to are both exposed as phoney and re-vamped: magazines like GO I N G DO W N SW I N G I N G , do in this day and age. i honestly think the playmate, the prrr pussycat, the pea- Though I empathize with the frustration or HO B O (say). But even that description one feels when watching authorities boast would be untrue in the case of a magazine Brad Evan would be capable of doing an cock.. the primadonna, the wife... It’s a and reassure when the situations are any- like “&” (say) [established Nov 1997] [i.e. excellent anthology of “committed-poetry” kind of exorcism but interspersed are the for Australia, and someone should commis- naive echoes of childhood: “Cross my thing but sure, I can also see the frustration AM P E R S A N D [if you’re in the know] or sion him now. Issue Nº 4 will be coming heart, hope to die | Stick a needle in your from the authorities side in attempting to “A N D” if you “look’ at it in its printed respond to such apparently random mur- form]; cos basically it’s 2 or 3 sheets of A4 to us out of Cambridge/ Lon-don where eye.” he’s at at the moment. [He’ll be back soon ders. I felt Stewart was a bit heavy here. printed on a photocopy machine, collated, Kennedy describes herself as a bower bird. tho, so don’t worry.]! (Though I must admit, I found myself nod- and cut down to an A6, with no card- She skilfully recyles the vernacular in new ding at his description of the police at the cover, colour or expensive design to worry he last magazine i want to engage contexts. In ‘Scream’, for instance she uses mall: “The show of force display | looked about i.e. maybe a $100s worth!!!! [OH! I with is called TE X T B A S E and its the familiar echoes of a mother’s warnings like a stall at a school fete || one women didn’t put a value on elbow-grease, but given away free in Melbourne. It to signal impending danger, fear: inquired | where she could buy raffle tick- T that, in poetry, is a given (aye!)]. Easy! And comes to us not from an “editor” but from Don’t forget your lunch, Have you got a ets.) may i say BRILLIANT!; i.e. the heart of a a “collection” of editors for should that be cardigan It’s cold outside... Some of the strongest and most disturbing lot of good poetry being written around the “participants”?], it being a kind of ongoing traps lately. “&” came out of the “burgeon- sections come when Stewart shows the vic- collaborative project, by a core group of 6, So begins the archetypal journey from ing” Melbourne “spoken word” poetry tim and the abduction. In these sections, none of who are actually “real artists” as innocence to betrayal. Reference to the scene, Adam tells me and editorially [from the sparse text undercuts the brutal actions: they put it in a letter to me. This magazine Bluebeard myth, evokes the cultural enig- my perspective] it’s a sharp and tasteful [in short is interested in questioning every- mas of death and femininity. she is pitchforked with stabbings. selection each time. But even $100s can be thing [or so much of everything as they are a clotted butchered clutch a precarious existence for some magazines interested in] and its unusual [in another And I will know my Prince for his beard of bruisings and gapings and editors like Adam Ford have been way] in that you really can’t contribute to it will be blue, indgo blue left known in the past to be on the dole. —[well.. i you can but they’re not really Blue as the dark ice in the lake as a dead bird interested in the one-off contribution. Blue as the shadow of the hole in the is left Another important small magazine emanat- night. to the middle of the road ing out of Melbourne is Lyn Boughton’s What they want to do is get really excited by a contributor and engage them, with [or GO I N G DO W N SW I N G I N G [which has been Kennedy’s voice is almost ghostlike, dislo- And then later: coming out “yearly” now for almost a within] a dialogue about aesthetics, or work cated in time: in progress]; then have it transcribed into rolls her over and digs at the throat decade] and which has been associated with the rise of performance poetry in Australia print [or parts thereof] for the benefit of Some call this the era offorgefflulness chop out that fuck’n screaming But I call it a name I can’t remember since its inception, and in a sense showcases their audience. As DJ Huppatz [one of the editors] put it “We don’t really take unso- and there’s something in my throat but it’s he Five Island Press chapbook style a lot of poets who have been important to licited writing but we are interested in unso- been there so long suits this work as you basically get it bloodflow. With the 17th issue however licited writers”. [their italics!]. So each issue I’ve forgotten how to scream one book one story. Unfortunately, Lyn Boughton has decided to call it quits; T of their magazine “is like curating an exhi- I found that it was an incredibly fast read, the new editors—Adam Ford and alicia The narrative structure is polyphonic rather bition”, a kind of “artist run gallery” full of and was over almost before it had begun. sometimes. [Adam Ford could [with 2 mag- than linear, moving like a pendulum back- 24 CORDITE wards and forwards it serves to re-evaluate for its beautiful, almost Absurdist turn Kathielyn Job’s first collection NOW, THE the experience of the past and create new Prater on Mallarmé of phrase: “Is this a taxi or a cloud?” ME L A L E U C A was written while living in meaning in the present. With the help of Following this, Kevin Hart shared Dubbo. multitracking and re-mixing, the cast of murmur of appreciation from the audi- some poems from (I assume) his new Charlotte Jones recently completed an PO S T R O M A N T I C includes the subaltern ence. Chris Wallace Crabbe also read collection and Justin Clemens spoke of MA at the Australian Film Television and voices of Karl the dero-artiste, buskers and from several of his collections, intro- Mallarmé in terms of postmodern and Radio School. She also studied at NIDA’s street crowds. True to form many of the ducing a translation of one of Playwright’s Studio, and writes poetry. tracks were recorded on location around media theories. Mallarmé’s poems with, perhaps, just a Rebecca Jones graduated with a BA in the inner city. ‘Tunnel Vision’ is a mesmer- Elsewhere at the Event, Rosemary Communications from UTS. She has had ic fugue of the soundscape in Central little too much self-deprecation. Lloyd presented an academic paper on poetry published in INKLINGS. Station’s famous tunnel. Here words are Though Jean-Luc Steinmetz (another reduced to subconscious whispers: “I’m fol- French poet scheduled to appear at the Mallarmé’s prose writings, particularly David Kelly writes cut-back poetry him- lowing you fragments of thoughts, an urban Event) could not attend, Rosemary ‘Italage’; Michael Farrell delivered his self, but some of his best friends embellish. meditation in a foreground of walking Lloyd more than made up for his own translation of ‘Tomb for Anatole’, Wednesday Kennedy released her C D rhythms and city noise.” absence with a reading from his work. using knocks and pauses to dramatic POST ROMANTIC in 1998. effect; and Michael Graf, the Event The physical or concrete becomes August Kleinzahler is an American poet. After the readings, there were some organiser, read from his own transla- metonymical of emotional and psychic questions from the audience, especially Stephen J Lacey’s poetry has appeared in states. In ‘Karl’s Corner’ (written about, tions of Mallarmé. Visual artist Juno on the subject of translation. However, those windy journals WE S T E R L Y a n d and recorded in Kellet Way, King’s Cross) Gemes graced the walls of the Alliance SOUTHERLY. the mood of the street affects the life of it’s perhaps there had been a little too Française with an installation inspired much champagne imbibed before the Deb Matthews lives in Adelaide and is a residents: “Nobody loved that corner and by Mallarme’s famous dice poem. The freelance writer/editor. She is currently proceedings began, for all too soon that corner never loved nobody and you Event culminated with a Christopher working on a novel. could also say that there was very little love there was nothing left to say. When Brennan Gala, a chance for the partici- Geraldine McKenzie lives and writes in for the entire next block You notice these asked how he felt about being translat- pants to draw together the various the Blue Mountains. things when you live on the ground- ed into other languages, Deguy replied strands unravelled over the two days floor...” in French, drawing laughter from the Mal Morgan’s sixth book, OU T O F T H E and also to unwind in a social and FA S T LA N E was released by Five Islands From the seduction and jealousy in ‘She’, francophones. When Rosemary Lloyd relaxed atmosphere. Press in 1998. These poems concern his the fractured amnesia of ‘Scream’ and thoughtfully translated Deguy’s answer experience of living with cancer. ‘Wounded Aphrodite’ we move to the as ‘I am overwhelmed by sloth’, all The Mallarmé Writers’ Event abound- emotional catharsis of ‘Cigarette’, a mono- ed with creative talent and was a show- Michelle Morgan is a writer, composer present knew that it was time to go and performer. Her work has been pub- logue remarkable for its relentless intensity: case as much of contemporary home and dream of the abyss of the lished in Australia and the USA. She leads a “There was fire in your belly, youjust empty white (or black) page once Australian writing as of Mallarmé him- band, Chelate Compound. ripped through things ripped into them, self. The fact that all speakers agreed to more. Phil Norton is at large in Transylvania. hungry, starving devouring everything in appear without payment illustrates fur- sight and so beautiful in your destruction...” Friday morning’s session was devoted ther the dedication of all involved. The Pi O is a Melbourne poet. His epic work 24 HO U R S was published by Collective POST ROMANTIC is a narrative of desire and to both readings and papers. Paul spirit of generosity and exchange pro- Effort in 1995. memory delivered through a range of emo- Carter’s discussion of Mallarmé’s duced lively and stimulating discussion, tional tones by a diversity of voices. It tra- intriguing phrase book for French stu- proving that Mallarmé, though dead Dorothy Porter has published eight col- lections of poetry, including three verse verses the genres of free verse, conventional dents of English brought into play one hundred years, lives on in the song, cello rhythms and city soundscape. novels. Her most recent is WHAT A PIECE issues of (mis)translation, (trans)migra- words and images of writers today. All The success of the album is due to its the- tion and (linguistic) representation. A OF WORK (Picador, 1999), a verse novel set praise the empty page! in Sydney’s Callan park in the late 60s. matic and stylistic harmony, its fine collaba- little known work, Mallarmé’s phrase ration of textual, sonic and visual elements book deserves greater attention, if only Famous Reporter David Prater is a Melbourne writer. (cover photography by Lewis Morley). A Patricia Prime is a New Zealand poet. stunning performance and production. A biannual literary journal Brian Purcell’s first collection LO V E L Y Edited by Lyn Reeves, Lorraine INFESTATION was published in 1995. Marwood, Anne Kellas, Angela Matthew Rohrer lives in Brooklyn, New L e t ters. . . Rockel, Warrick Wynne and York. whenever the Latin words “Catulli” or even powdery, behind the ears and interest - Ralph Wessman Philip Salom’s latest collection is NEW & SE L E C T E D PO E M S (arc, 1999). His next, “Catullum” appeared, my translation ed in contemporary translations of Catallus. $14 for two issues was “Tolhurst” rather than “Catullus”. Giving this misdemeanour its due impor - ON LOCATION, is due out in 2000. tance, I wasted no time counselling the Walleah Press Rae Sexton’s translations of Alain Bosquet Forgive me for being a bit stern for a reviewer concerned! PO Box 368, North Hobart, have appeared in a New Directions edition minute but do something about your Tasmania 7002 of his work. reviews. . . Boyle was good in I love it when you’re stern. Peter Skrzynecki published the novel CO R D I T E Nº1, but award-winning Kisses, Ginger Spice. THE CRY OF THE GOLDFINCH in 1996, and clowns and a fair bit of sycophancy has Contributors the anthology IN F L U E N C E S: AU S T R A L I A N crept in since. CORDITE is in danger of VOICES in1997. becoming the Spice Girls of Australian Emily Ballou’s poem ‘Enter’ won the Textbase Post Box 1997 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Todd Swift is one of Canada's leading poetry, and though I tremendously poetry activists. In 1995, he co-hosted the enjoyed the review of my book, you Thanks for the review in your last Mary Jo Bang is a New York poet who prestigious U.S. National Poetry has edited a book of lesbian writing. She won’t have impressed the bulk of your issue. We really appreciate the support Championships. He is co-editor of POETRY (and incidentally, we very much like published her first book AP O L O G Y F O R NA T I O N : TH E NO R T H AM E R I C A N readership by running such silliness. ANT what you’re doing). [Well, someone W in 1997. AN T H O L O G Y O F FU S I O N PO E T S ( V é h i c u l e It would be dignified of CO R D I T E t o likes our reviews!—ED] The address that Judith Beveridge is currently working on Pres, 1998). publish this letter in full. was printed on your review was slight- her third volume of poetry. She will be Michelle Taylor has lived in England and reading at the 12th International Poetry Yours faithfully ly wrong. It should read: Textbase, PO Scotland. Her first collection, FI R S T Festival at Columbia in June. LANGUAGE, is due out in July. Hugh Tolhurst Box 2057, Lygon St North, East Brunswick VIC 3057. There are a Ken Bolton’s most recent collection, Elizabeth Treadwell lives in Berkeley whole bunch of postal boxes in East UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS, was shortlisted for California, and is editor of the literary mag- Firstly Hugh, we all think you have a great the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry. His Brunswick these days, so the Lygon St azine OUTLET. future! I’m left with only one question. forthcoming collection is titled AT T H E Dara Weir is New York poet. Who was the intended audience of your North bit is important. FLASH AND AT THE BACI. translations? Are these specialist translations Pam Brown is a widely-published Sydney Jane Williams’ first book OU T S I D E TE M P L E BO U N D A R I E S (Five Islands Press, to be read only by those of your peers quali - DJ Huppatz poet. Her most recent collection is 50/50. 1998) won the 1999 Anne Elder Award. fied with a classical education? If so, you’ve Co-editor Michelle Carter is a GP on the central taken a very narrow view of the contempo - TEXTBASE coast of NSW. She has had poetry pub- Mijanou Zigane recently graduated with an MA in Theatre Studies from the rary Australian poetry readership. No, it’s lished in ULITARRA, LINQ and IMAGO. University of New South Wales. my belief you wrote also for the general Jennifer Compton , poet and playwright, poetry reader, and therefore ‘general’, ie lives in rural NSW. Her play TH E BI G non-specialist, reviewers are qualified to hold PI C T U R E premiered at the Griffin Theatre what reviewers since time immemorial have in 1997. SideWaLK held: an opinion. Here, the offence seems to Tricia Dearborn is a Sydney poet, with be that the ego of the poet Tolhurst has been poetry forthcoming in SO U T H E R L Y a n d a new specialist confused with the ego of the poet SCARP. In 1998 she was awarded a place in QUARTERLY MAGAZINE Catallus—but is this not clearly suggested Varuna’s inaugural Residential Mentorship for the poetical Programme for Poetry. in translating “Catulli” or “Catullum” as $20 for 4 issues “Tolhurst”? Diveristy of opinion being Brian Henry is editor of the American what it is, I cannot imagine either that poetry journal, VERSE. The Sidewalk Collective there’d be unanimous approval of your work Felicity Holland (formerly Felicity PO Box 58 amongst those classical scholars dry, perhaps Plunkett) is an editor of SIGLO. Enfield Plaza SA 5085