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.