land rewrites itself, isn’t it
isn’t it
repastured
reconstituted: 2% fat homologized
[place a place content fat the milk
changes nation a nation
viscosity takes precedence
to pour the milk from jug a jug
someone has to redesign the curvature the spout
cream jug milk jug
to correct for nation specific pour
prevent drips spillages
group by absence &
money-making potential]
Working in the summering senior partner’s office
on Pennsylvania Avenue
reminds me of the inferior debts of kitsch,
those sand-storm debts of Timbuktu
and the pickled herring jar where we matured that wish.
You don’t pay for saunas in DC in July,
or coffee if you’re a guest
I am reminded of the gratitude I must try
to show the founders, their parents
my parents, the schools, police, all in terms of why
Wherever he is, the summering senior partner,
there’s hills more sand than grass
judging by his photos he pays for saunas there
then dresses cheaply for his class,
while fish swim past his fishy-food he tramples beche-de-mer
will he know I was in this cell, working while he summered?
It’s true he slaves harder at
the desk than half of congress, not a single word
escapes him, unlike the judge of brats,
or the man who laid his pen down to get hammered.
Back at the summering senior partner’s office
on Pennsylvania Avenue
thinking on these inferior debts of artifice.
The random thefts I owe to you
the man who owns this office so I can have all this.
madam, i’m adam: noah’s nose knows no gnosis: physis machine: i, cassandra: romano umano: ++: (black out): ares & aphrodite: renaissance: cc: evo-revo: wah wah wah: clones, drones, loans & moans: the drowned world
Trace nit up yap at start,
angst, ablative. Oh, palp up! Not Adam n Eve. Shame. He mad. Nude. He made rag as garb. Eviction now, eh?! Paradise Lost is brood, breed. Non, Abel, do not murder! Start reversed, I as rêve.
Civil war, lead ax, ammo tall, a ton. Shat actor live on dewy milk, cast a butt aft, open on a void evolver hose. It raps, sips. Sim I, ode ruse. Zoom saps new ruin. Fie Sir, pug nod, guts know. Tender tug broke EP spool. Park rims swallow anus. Emo R&D, I lap a poopsi. Bog bursting as bags, exasperating as Paliperidone. I spat pit? No, ‘tis an array to revile id. Pee boom at nadir warms butt, oh!
Top tiff — I spit on loot, a nab insatiable.
Tram-rats’ tat-inditing Napoleon wept as live grubs died amidst rides. Ah, pap! Nose snuff saw, eh? Die ma semes putrid. So read piss atop a rot nip pit.
God spat in a cad till its wall lit up.
Martyr track cast octopod wall, lay as odd as ossature in Eden as a trap-door snaps nips ages apart. Egalitarian anabasis spills Estaban loot on buttock. Culpable on a nab, no six-pack cock can keep mutation turning. Ah!
Hone dead bastard tell. I ok risk. Call aid’em timer DIAS now. Spot saw red rum. Fi, sac rot, narrative room ahoy!
9691 bat see cares,
REM miracles ram revolt rare.
Sate caffé on exhausted arm. Set a tip: LA? Peru? Tan on tit. A is a rue. Pale Mal, Fat Sam say rots level at last. Oh!
Madam Armagnac, tapping ass hoe, no smirk, cul top, leer dell, I who middle hold. Lots to crap on.
Strafe strait. Rap as loot.
Note sluggard nepotism arc, scraping raw God’s sum.
El go to of/for ETA: eat, meet, saw, die. It was.
I won’t sin. Omen: Myra, us. Soy sore so. He dud.
Pure pussied urn at tip. Pulse it live, meet, see big wang grow obstinate flap.
Spivs report radical iota. To hommage tons draw a bon-bon. Eton on hose. It tit trips, eh? Tote pip. Suppose I ram Mam? Cite, die!
Erythema, I burn, aware of dark cankers’ bulbs’ nips.
Slink cop, erotic as wall ain’t, rat as dwelling awl. Eek!
Luna mod sac. Combinatorial spaces.
Ah prefer not to [TRON’S RAT AVATAR SNORT: LEAR’S I, ISRAEL]
n-refer phase caps
Liar! O ta, nib. Moccas do Ma. Nul keel wag nil, lewd sat.
Art nail, law sac. I tore pock Nils: spins, blubs, re. knack rad Foer.
A wan rub I am, eh Tyre?
Eidetic mammaries op. Pus. Pipe to the spirt titties oh no tone. Nob-nob awards not, e.g., ammo-hot.
A toil acid art roper’s VIP’s pal
Gnaw, gibe, esteem evil tie. Slup. Pit tan rude is super-up dude!
Hose rosy ossuary mnemonist now.
I saw tie. Id was teem. Ta, eater of foot, ogle.
Muss dog, warg nip, arcs cram, sit open, drag guls.
Eton tools apart, I arts e-farts.
No par, cots told. Lo, held dim, oh willed reel!
Potluck rims one. Ohs! Sag, nip, pat. Can gam ram a dam?
Hot salt as level, story as mast aflame.
Lap Eurasia, tit no nature palpitates.
Made Tau, ah Xeno? Efface taser art lover.
Mar Sel car immerse race, estab. 1969.
Yo, ha, moo! Rev it, arrant orc, as if murder was tops!
Won said remit, medial lacks irk. Oil let drats ab da Eden, oh, Hag nin-rut. No it. A tum, pee, knack cock!
Cap Xi, son, ban a Noel. Ba, pluck cot, tub, no tool. Na, bats! ESL lips. Sis, a banana! I Ra till age trap a SEGA. Gas pin spans rood part. A sane denier, UTAS, so sad.
Do say all law do pot.
Cot sack car, try tram. Put ill law.
Still it, Da, can I taps? Dog tip pint or a pot as sip Da eros. Dirt up seme, same ID. He was Fun’s e-son. Pa phase dirts Di, made Idsburg evil, sat pew Noel.
O, pang! Nitid nit at star mart. Elba it as nibana. Tool no tips if fit pot hot-tub smarm ridant at moo. Beep!
Die live, rot Yarra! Na, sit on tip taps, i.e., no dire πi lap. Sag nit. A rep’s axes gab. Sag nits, rub gob.
Is poop a palindrome? Sun AWOL, laws smirk, rap loops. Peek: orb gut, red net.
Wonks tug dong up rise if wet wen spasm oozes uredo — I miss piss parties, oh!
Rev loved I ova none. Pot fat, tub at sack limy. Wed no evil, rot cat. Ah. Snot all atom, max a deal. Raw li vice-versa, Ides revert rats’ red rum to nod. Lebanon Deer. B, door B, sit sole Sid. A rap. He won no it. Cive brags: a gare, dame. He dun, Dame hem. Ah, seven! Mad Aton. Pup lap hoe, vital bats, gnat, rats.
Ta.
Pay, Put in E-Cart.
and mostly these days I just like to look
at you and sometimes make words
out of your name or rock you
in my arms till the thought of I
with or without poetry
no longer matters.
It’s not like I have forgotten
how to worry
about disappearing forests, landfill or the ozone layer
I pray that when you grow up there may still be
polar bears, for instance, forests and an ozone layer
keep the sun off yr precious face
and not just in the zoo
I worry about other things too, but mostly
it is hard to be unhappy these days especially
now the spring’s advancing and you’re learning
about hands – how to hold things in them
and take everything it’s yours
I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. –David Gilmour
I can’t really give you the tour. I’ve just moved, it’s a mess, and I just got out of bed, and the books here, well, they’re so sophisticated you probably wouldn’t understand them, and …
Okay, I’ll be honest. It’s because you’re Chinese.
I don’t have anything against Chinese people. I just don’t love them. When I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese.
Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any Chinese people in the course. I say I don’t love Chinese enough to teach them, if you want Chinese go down the street to Lee’s Garden.
Chekhov, of course, was not Chinese. He had a loud Western laugh, so they would never let him into a Chinese restaurant. Everyone who ever met Chekhov somehow became a little less Chinese.
I’m a natural teacher. What I teach is guys, real guy-guys. Heterosexual, not Chinese.
I read this book about China once. There were men with long fingernails stroking tiny bound feet. I know the difference between pornography and great literature. All my favorite parts are underlined.
I teach only the best. What happens with great literature is that the Chinese in the shadows keep moving around. Stop that. What’s intolerable is Chinese who give up all their secrets, like Fu Manchu. I’ve watched him a hundred times and there’s nothing new in him.
travel in the paganini
canoe and you’ll never become
punctual feed that sort of salad
to your favorite shark and it will
be pissing beetroot, and set off
an alarm i finally located
your power of attorney doc [so
unreadable even bookworms had
only nibbled at the edges] in
the shredder handbook
your rare coin collection was
so rare i couldn’t find it if
you are intent on casual touring
don’t get lost in the slush fund
i can hear your bones clicking
you are somewhere out there
in the etheric brambles but
your name is so outdated you
will need a new one – perhaps
several you will be required to make
the purchase yourself
To distinguish fact from fantasy, Miss Satin
had grown from the headdress upward into gay
explanations and ratty descriptions. The letter to
Baudelaire had come, or purported to come, from
features of the terrestrial décor — theatre programs,
dinner menus, the infamous Eulogy of Make-up. She
herself had garlanded Nature on great occasions with
plumes of black thought, worn with regrets at the side,
but nothing, she reasoned, could rival a fan, their
abjection as rich as you please or quite simple:
a few recited lines of verse, but most were good
to go. A challenge and a rebuke would follow,
hidden away in her journal, where she
is forced to sleep, eat and drink in order to
protect herself. Something hovers in the far distance:
a shimmering of prospects embossed in gold, of really
artistic design, like the fustanella of a whirling dervish.
Evil is natural, and is therefore likely to torture and kill.
Not so virtue: this natty little animal stupefies even the
best endowed, bifurcating plantwise at the lips and
reshaping the journal’s immense coup de bluff
into a new toilette weaving in and out of waving —
Ah, the sea, sighed meaningfully, can be synonymous
with monde or world (as in signs of spirituality and longing
for the ideal), but its factual role in the everyday, played
by fantastic has-beens, is to set one’s sights on
landing sites, citing every which way.
Technique whittled to a spear prongs earth
as tabby night filters a soaped waterfall of recollected words
jammed in a shoe, prudently
It passes on a cloud
and can’t fit in the photo
that dissolves trusty leaves
that feather bright and soft, as if a picture’s jarred time
where unlit books ramble into dream, sleep’s pillion
levering The Anthology of Fireside Chats
away from the grate with an heirloom poker
or more exactly, some crimp heater sloughed by the street
Fill the chute’s leftovers, a mug’s trail of relenting principles
wired to ankle, currency lass in a jumper times the curfew
a ball of discomfort on a vintage beanbag
while daffodils recite – preamble: body-as-quest
tougher than a table of elements in pin-drop pause
Adjust the sigh track near a convocation of analysts
A remix swims over a screen
Talk: plastic
Sometime during the winter. In the West Wing the caretaker stacks (neatly, with axe) 20 legs of lamb, 12 turkeys, 2 dozen pork roasts. The Adler on the table in the great white hall (lots of ideas, no good ones). And elsewhere the maze—polaroid dangling from the hand. Topiary fever. Worst we’ve had in years. Downstairs, at the bar, he says: “I love the little son of a bitch” [high-pitched noises, screams] Some blackhearted things, out of the Games Room with their blue dresses walking.
Scene: floral blue on white. Look, Jack, there ain’t nothing in [elevator music, twins] The carpet soft, geometric. Emerald-green and on the bed (blue robe)—most dream I ever. Had to see: bathroom, open, green and chrome. Is there is there? Who draws the curtain wide, steps. Out of the bath toward you (you toward her) in the floral West. Marks on the back, pretty white legs. Faithful hands slicing toward you like love.
Music, balloons. Back at the bar, Lloyd—whiskey for time. Been away but now I’m back. Been away but now I’m. Wolf Creek. Red Mountain. All work and no meat makes [violins] [screams] Where the hell did you, Lloyd? With limp and axe in hand, axe to the heart (the immaculate suit, the voices). Through snow and into the maze Overlook we go.
Elevator. Every little photograph on every blank wall: a dull boy. The quiet summer.
For Darren Currie …
Sometimes ANONYMITY is a fantastical doorway into the being of a writer; ANONYMITY is the passport of an unknown agent who knows no constraint to conduct acts of good and evil/ A signatory to the distraction that allows a writer the freedom to attack an unfinished sentence that has imprisoned them/ Wipe clean the restricted access to closure/ The bait of being ANONYMOUS entraps character/ ANONYMOUS is a universal stamp of someone who has the key to the locked riddles of continuity/ WHO are the dark shapes that found your lost wallet?/ WHO are the dark shapes who scratched your car and moulded alleyways with shadow?/ ANONYMITY has the capacity to grease the night with pure immunity of the senses/ To not assume that you know one person from a bar of soap than another is the vaccine of prejudice/ ANONYMOUSLY take a clean bar of soap and lather it into humanity…black and sterile of mystical but innocent, embryotic wonderment …
Watch the shadows dance,
when constrained in a vortex
diffusing magic …
(a homophonic inversion of Rimbaud’s Marine)
Last week, I knew it was time to leave the city.
The way the sun glinted off window-panes, a warning
arriving on my front lawn with the morning
newspaper, and the shape of that funny cloud…
and those kids breaking stuff, it shouldn’t be allowed
one time, let alone — the way it is now — twice.
No, man, it’s definitely not pleasant, not nice.
So I packed and got the hell out of this shitty
place, filled the tank, beat it. Hey, it ain’t funny,
the way peculiar things kind of happen
in their odd way, how certain envelopes fall open
at the fatal news, the way your best friends just leave
and abandon you to your career, and you grieve
pointlessly. The Sheriff swings that rawhide goad,
and you take off down that dusty road.
Hey, do you have enough money?
Yes, honey… you turn to look back, but instead
the future appears before you, every day
longer than the last, your dog… say,
was that your dog Hobo disappearing behind that row
of tents? Then a male voice on the radio
speaks a special message just for you, and between
one gas station and the next, that pale green
landscape just grows darker, the blue thread
crawls behind your dawdling ballpoint on the map
as you plot your escape from the horrid Barbary Coast
to that new place, where you can honestly boast
of your massive talent turning out column after column
of prose as mellifluous and convincing as it was solemn,
read by senior executives and beatniks in cafés
along with the morning news of various calamities. Graze
peacefully there, half snoring, your lap-
top snapped shut, but the road begins to wind
higher into the hills, the hairpin bends and turns
causing the brakes to heat up as the rubber burns
from your squealling tires, your fingers crossed
as you check the map and hope you’re not lost,
not in these unspeakable badlands, not just here
where the good things fade into a pale mist, where
you realise you’re lost, and you think you’ll never find
your way home: time to stop and park
in this trailer park, yes, it’s late
with a bad moon rising, with the endless wait
until dawn — don’t nod off! — then you unpack
your flimsies, don pajamas, snooze in back
until you’re woken by the unbearable light of a star
gleaming and glimmering through the trees, as far
from earth as you are from your home, the dark
seeming to grow around you, the clouds to loom
over all the sky, dark now, your cries
feeble and fading over the low rise
ahead, now a train loaded with mounds of coal
pulls by, steel wheels on steel tracks roll
onward and upward, you hear the whistle sing
its mournful song, plucking the single string
of your heart, the low smoke plume
or maybe it’s a locomotive plume of steam
lit from below by a fitful boiler flame.
You know your life ahead of you is just the same
as everything you’ve left behind, the endless night
concealing the world, but then the unbearable light
of the sun does too, with its immense
and world-bestriding blinding indifference —
and, waking, you trudge ahead with your dream.
To keep going demands an awful effort of will.
You know that what you believe is just not natural.
Your life seems like a rusting, failed factory
that tries to manufacture little pieces of sky
but instead makes more dark clouds. You long for release
from that pressure to flee the horror, to find peace.
In the mirror no monster, just a girl who looks pretty.
Start the motor. No more self-pity.
‘Et in California Ego’ began as a draft using the end-words of ‘On visiting a
Borrowed Country House in Arcadia’, by Alicia E. Stallings, in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of “Poetry” Magazine edited by Don Share.
for (but not to) Gig Ryan
You heard me. Don’t pretend you didn’t.
This town’s foliage
corkscrews down from trees that sound
a bit off. Gentles in a neat layer
writhe like a pullover
over what at a distance looks
crisply modelled.
Up close, the scalloped sails pullulate
with air gusts writhing.
But of course you knew what I was
going to say and didn’t have to pay heed.
Closeness cracks me up, it really does.
Eyes water and nostrils stream.
Buddleia brings butterflies across
the straits, and a sticky cloak of caterpillars
strips bark from dragon trees that weep
red blots.
Millions of bits of mirror
set in concrete beckon to the high cirrus.
No they don’t. If we weren’t so close
we’d have to face each other,
swarming across plenteous tiles.
Climate once mutual shrinks to its events.
Connectedness is
building a free state on pontoons
invisible from this wharf,
charging flakes of skin, fish scales
to overlay
paschal hordes showing up
obscurely furious. Words are spat
across the tresses of light breeze
a Koori boy puppets in, clothed
with tattoos of scabies spiralling at work.
I call him warrior and he trickles coin.
Here where paving is so thin if reticulated,
boots trouble the buried: re-
knit with aftershock as by the drop
of heavy fruit,
colonists paw at the straits high above.
They are wanting to shape up but
arise in glitter,
pegging out the foreshore in a seam
of gold studs. Take your hands
out of your pockets, stretch your arms.
‘Treat with Euphrasia bad memory and vertigo’
Gibson’s Folly - Earth Moving: the precipitous track descends to Wilga portal and the Tambo Purple eyebright ringed around closely in heathy dry forest lilac, pink or white ‘it comes and goes’ but when it’s gone, gladness goes with it the yellow spot behind the lower lobe a guide to pollinating insects
Rock Ore Base metals Copper & zinc: The Wilga and Currawong massive sulphide deposits are hosted within deformed Upper Silurian volcanics and sediments of the Gibsons Folly Formation Other prospects: Dogwood, Mopoke, Big Hand, Banksia, Peppermint, Boxer And Nameless But Bigfoot may bear GOLD the richest of all
High Noon The Waxlip Anomaly – a magnetic high at 12000N 15300E on the Wilga Grid Tested by diamond drill but no significant mineralisation was intersected Waxlip Spur, site of the old Benambra mine processing plant, an acid seep runs down to the Tambo River & high flows shall dilute the heavy metals 43 species of orchids were discovered in the area including the purple waxlip Glossodia major which forms no roots and depends upon mycorrizal fungi for nutrition I run up the bare clay spur to the helipad with a view beyond the failed revegetation into rugged country from Mt Tambo to the Nunniong escarpment
Wilga Spring Beside the Tambo a natural spring issuing sulphides is a blind for heavy metal seepage from the tailings dam on Straight Creek upstream. The small town of Swift’s Creek draws off its water supply 30 kilometres down river.
Horse Riding with Gibson via the Bundara Up through Charlie Mac’s to the Bogongs To lay down salt in trap-yards Under the dappled sunlight of snow gums Late spring snowdrifts and dark shadows Replicate the flanks of piebald horses * Leaping the shallow stream At the base of the tailings dam spillway Last remnant of the rarest swamp Sphagnum moss, strawberry buttercups Sun orchids and bluebells Trampled by hooves gone feral across the Alps
SPZ 633 Blue-tongue greenhood and sprawl of knawel at the foot of the dam wall - in their own zone rare companions among Sphagnum moss: montane grass-trigger plant alongside dusky violet when the dam wall is raised twice the height ‘they were so elusive’
Mountain banksia High on the dry ridge cylindrical yellow flowers of Banksia canei nectar licked by eastern pygmy possums and feathertail gliders and honeyeaters chasing Grevillia, Corea and Callistemon and thirteen species of Eucalypt around the slopes all year over look the turquoise dam waters: 700,000 tonnes of In the steep headwaters valley soon to be flooded more deeply mine tailings: copper, zinc, cadmium, lead, arsenic, manganese, antimony lying under absence of euphrasey, blue-tongue, sprawling, and all those precious others viol-ate under dam waters Sphagnum cristatum and manifold springs along the creek bed the dam leaks down through rock, another 7 million tonnes to be dumped, vertigo in Lake St Barbara: by her name poisonous waters are rendered innocuous
Barnacle Rock by Margaret Bradstock
Puncher & Wattmann, 2013
Barnacle Rock is time-travelling through poetry. Its significance lies in Margaret Bradstock’s successful inscribing of a journey, from the search for a land of plenty by various explorers, to the position we find ourselves in now: a climate in crisis, a civilisation in error and a country which has displaced its indigenous people, replacing their knowledge with a rusted ‘progress’. Dense, a rich read, it alerts the mind into awareness.
Captives by Angela Meyer
Inkerman & Blunt, 2014
Fittingly tiny by way of physical size, Captives is a beautifully produced collection of micro-fiction by the Melbourne author and critic Angela Meyer (known also as the blog writer, Literary Minded). While in a poetry-dedicated journal such as Cordite Poetry Review, it may seem odd to be reviewing a book that makes no explicit claims to being poetry – or, more specifically, the difficult-to-define mode of prose poetry – Meyer’s micro-fictions do seem to invite comparisons with contemporary prose poetry. Continue reading
Radiance by Andy Kissane
Puncher & Wattmann, 2014
Percy Bysshe Shelley is sailing a boat on Sydney Harbour, steering with the tiller between his knees as ‘a cheesecloth moon floats above Pinchgut’, but his companion, Australian poet Andy Kissane, can’t bear to make eye contact:
… I’m a little spooked by the empty caves where his eyes used to be, and the bald white hill of his cheekbone where a hungry mackerel feasted on his flesh like a Catholic breaking his Lenten fast.
Stuart Cooke’s translation of George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle: I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this kind of work. Australians are only too familiar with the significance and value of Indigenous arts as part of the national heritage and of the contemporary repertoire. We are familiar, but they still take us by surprise. In the late 1970s, those who had the habit of mourning cultural loss in the central desert, suddenly witnessed the flourishing – like desert flowers after rain – of an art movement that critic Robert Hughes dubbed ‘the last great art movement of the 20th century’. But when we compare it to the oral traditions of the continent, we have to marvel at the ease with which that visual art was translated from ochres into acrylics, then translated into art-commodities and transported to eagerly awaiting patrons around the world.
Compared to that art movement, the song and poetry traditions seem to be sadly languishing. Who has the expertise to accomplish the tasks of linguistic translation? Thoroughly bilingual poets are extremely rare. Poets and storytellers in traditional Australian languages have yet to be fêted on the literary festival circuits. Yet despite the disappearance of many languages, we should be wary of announcing the demise of these literary traditions too early. They have that power held by sustained longevity that could emerge again, like those desert flowers, and we can never be sure what form they will take.
This is why I stress the importance of this kind of work. It is conscious of the weight and importance of all those oral traditions in the continent; the ‘real’ Australian literature. It avoids the easy translations of the visual arts, where paintings can be interpreted in New York as ‘some kind of primitive abstraction.’ It takes seriously, by necessity, the task of the translator, at which point we must theorise a bit about what is going on, and for this I can draw on my own experience in Broome, Western Australia.
A few years ago, Paddy Roe, respected elder, teacher and storyteller in the West Kimberley, sang some songs that were composed by a Ngumbal woman some years before, and then helped me render them in English. Roe spoke a few traditional languages from around Broome, plus Broome English. I never got the impression, when he was talking about languages, that they were clearly delineated from one another. Rather they were ‘bordering’ on one another all the time.1 There was no-one doing that nation-building work of separating languages off from one another, standardising and unifying them. In theorising translation, Naoki Sakai rather cleverly shows that the unity of language is in fact a modelling, and an effort of the imagination. No one ever experiences a language in all its unity, but what we do experience all the time are acts of translation. So, as he says, ‘translation is anterior to the organic unity of language and […] this unity is posited through the specific representation of translation’.
We conventionally represent translation as bridging two languages, as a ‘communication model of equivalence and exchange,’ but that is not what it is, it is a ‘form of political labour to create continuity at the elusive point of discontinuity in the social’. Roe was working on creating continuity within the political grouping of the people called Goolarabooloo. This is not a ‘tribe’, since it is composed of different land-holding groups speaking different languages. It is a kind of political confederacy unified by ‘lines’ of significant ceremonies and responsibility for sites going down the coast from One Arm Point to south of Broome. So, what happened when I sat with Roe and we began to translate into English? The political labour was now across another social discontinuity: an Aboriginal cultural corpus can now link to a putative Australian nation, and the songs could now impinge upon what we think is the representation of the national literature. There are a lot of steps on that journey! So far, it is largely only Indigenous writers working in English genres who have mounted that national stage.
The complex process of translation spelled out by Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle – from a spirit being to Dyuŋgayan to Roe and Butcher Joe, to Ray Keogh to Stuart Cooke; from Nyigina to Broome English to Australian English; from oral production supplemented with gestures and sand drawings via tape recorders and notebooks to alphabetic script printed on paper – reinforces the idea that translation is emphatically never about reducing the number of mediations, nor indeed facilitating the transfer of meaning.
Without Ray Keogh’s work this translation would not have been possible. The Bulu line might have halted, and not been repatriated to the community as it has now been in this book form. I got to know Keogh well when we worked in Broome in the 80s when he was doing the ethnomusicological recording that became his thesis. He loved to sing himself, and had a big resonant voice that often exploded into laughter. When working with the old men he would laugh, too, as he tried to get his tongue around those palatal sounds: ny and dy. And as he was transcribing expertly and meticulously he would sing the songs with them too, continuing the life of this Bulu. Who could have guessed that it would then travel to the University of Sydney, where Keogh would sing the songs to ethnomusicology students in his classes, for some short years before he was taken from us?
Consider this surprising idea from Andreas Lommel, remembering fieldwork in the Kimberley in 1938:
They, of course, taught the corroboree to others still roaming in the bush. I even met some Worora men months later in Broome who taught the corroboree for a fee to others who did not understand their language—this did not matter.
The poet made his songs in the language of his tribe, but, for rhythm and sentimental reasons he changed the language so that some of his songs could not be translated.2
The idea that clear understanding might ‘not matter’ and that obscurity might even be introduced, leaves us with what Cooke is calling the ‘haze’, the necessary obscurity in translation, and in poetry itself, which is a precondition for its vitality and sustainability. I am anxiously optimistic about the rich possibilities that this work offers. Anxious about the loss of the corpus of oral traditions and those still waiting for translators, but optimistic about their hidden powers searching for new forms and for the right occasions to erupt into the open again.
Pablo Neruda said this:
It’s the words that sing, they soar and descend… I bow to them… I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down. I love words so much… The unexpected ones… the ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly they drop… I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them… Everything exists in the word.
I have extracted this from a much longer piece written by Neruda in his memoirs, but it gives you an idea of how much words meant to him. Most poets share a similar passion and compile lists of favourite words. Some of the words on my current list are: sassafras, pandemonium, mandolin, pasture, gondola, rubicund and myrrh. Thus, when I came across Mona Attamimi’s poem ‘Myrrh’, which is from her long poem, ‘The Sisters’, I was immediately drawn to it.
Of course, a poem is always more than its title, and this poem you’ll find has a powerful and exotic narrative. Straight away suspense and drama are evoked through the appearance of the ‘deaf white cat’. Making the cat ‘deaf’ is indicative of the power and suggestive nature of the language. The poem seems to me a masterpiece of economy, what is not said as important as what is said. The poet gives us just enough in order to hook our interest, the selection of detail evocative and resonant of strangeness. The cat sniffing the onyx ring on the finger of the hand that holds the bag of myrrh is wonderfully conceived, as is the image of Ruda ‘wrapped in the scent of burnt salt’ in stanzas 6-7. So much in the poem works through suggestion. We have forebodings of war and destruction, the wrath of warlords and gods, a story that you feel is going to plunge its readers and characters into darkness, before they emerge into light. The success of a long narrative poem depends upon how the details, the characters and the drama are dealt with, and I would say that restraint and judicious choice of image are essential ingredients for avoiding melodrama and keeping the reader’s interest. It is obvious that this poet knows very well the weight of certain words – their gravity, their lightness and all that’s in between – and she knows balance and poise, too, demonstrated by the poem’s pacing and by the tight stanzaic structure playing out against the poem’s looser rhythmical structure. After reading this poem, I feel the words have been a memorable gift, just as precious and exotic as one of those six hundred pouches of Nile myrrh. – JB
Myrrh
In the deep of night a deaf white cat
strays into a garden, leaps onto
a window, lands in the Grand Mafraz,
and stares at a horde of turbaned men
rewarding the Lord of Seiyun six hundred
pouches of Nile myrrh. Her tail
brushes the Lord’s wrist; he idly
strokes her dry nose; she sniffs the onyx
ring on the finger gripping a pouch
of myrrh, then the fur on her back
prickles, her spine arches and her claws
dig into the cold ground.
*
In the corridor, under a thick cloak,
Ruda waits for her Lord to disburse
her a pouch of myrrh. At first light,
she pockets her prize and stands
by Lord Seiyun while he turns the key
to his daughter’s room. Wrapped
in the scent of burnt salt she enters
the dark alone, whisks the child-bride
from her cot and hides Khigala between
the folds of her thick cloak. In the silent
hall the air is still, and there is no sight
of Lord Seiyun. Like a ghoul riding
the wind, Ruda glides into secret
passages and chambers clutching the child
till she reaches a tunnel that opens
onto a parched meadow
beyond the city gates. She emerges
in the morning chill as the Lord’s army
prepares its journey into the Rub Al’ Khali.
Behind the fading moon and white sky,
a scar-faced god witnesses Khigala
quietly clinging onto Ruda’s sleeves
as they travel through the desert
in a caravan overflowing
with pepper, barrels
of pomegranates and a handful
of slaves: dowry for an ageing groom.
Photo by Kent MacCarter
On the weekend after Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minister, announced that the Australian Defence Force would be assisting the US forces in attacking ISIS, the war hero Ben Roberts-Smith was featured in the magazine section of The Weekend Australian. The journalist detailed the process of painter Michael Zavros’s making a portrait of Roberts-Smith for entry in the nation’s most famous art award, the Archibald Prize.
There was a quality of déjà vu about this – Ben Roberts-Smith, a muscular, Anglo-Australian warrior, Australia’s most decorated soldier, came to national prominence when he was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery, which took place at the same time that Australia’s withdrawal from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was announced. There was widespread opinion then that Australia had made a mistake by joining the Americans in the ‘War Against Terror’, and that the withdrawal could be seen as a defeat.
It would not take a cynic to see that on both occasions Ben Roberts-Smith, an ANZAC archetype, has been conjured up to reassure the public, by all his image evokes, that Australian political decisions are not largely dependant for their direction on US policy. But what struck me was not this fairly typical manifestation of public/national image-management, but that deep in the article it mentioned that Ben Roberts-Smith was in Brisbane to read a poem.
To help raise the profile of Mates 4 Mates, a not-for-profit organisation that assists soldiers and their families to recover from the traumas of conflict, and to promote the British-sponsored Invictus Games, a kind of Paralympics for physically rehabilitated Commonwealth soldiers, Roberts-Smith was recording a poem I know well: William Ernest Henley’s 1875 ‘Invictus’.
It is a poem I once wrote an essay about, focussing on the role it played in the film of the same title by Clint Eastwood, a film that took South Africa’s campaign to win the Rugby World Cup in 1995 as metaphor for the nation’s psychological recovery following the dismantling of Apartheid. Several years ago, I presented a draft of the essay at the Poetry and Revolution conference at Birkbeck College in London under the title ‘Invictus and the Negotiated Revolution’, with the ironic subtitle ‘Or Clint Eastwood’s idea of the lyric poem’.
At that time, the effects of the post-GFC budget-cuts were being very strongly felt in the education sector in the UK – in fact the London Riots had taken place shortly before – and there was a lot of talk about revolution among the poets. So much talk, in fact, that I found it almost debilitating, and, probably, more so because my understanding of the politics of language, influenced by my experiences over the years in several countries – South Africa, Indonesia and Egypt – is in being conscious of language’s everyday power. Certainly, the kind of political articulation that the poets were hoping for in London suggested to me nothing but their own powerlessness.
Better, I thought, to look at a Clint Eastwood movie that claims that Nelson Mandela not only loved the Victorian era poem ‘Invictus’, allegedly reading and memorising it regularly in his prison cell on Robben Island, and that he gave it to Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African rugby team, to help motivate him and his team so that – yes, this is Clint Eastwood’s version – they would defeat the All Blacks and unite multiracial, post-Apartheid South Africa for the future.
In my research for the paper I discovered that Timothy McVeigh, the notorious Oklahoma City Bomber, was also fond of this poem and that he presented it in lieu of a final statement after he was sentenced to death. A Google search revealed that there was a brief flourishing of amateur literatury criticism in the media at that time, many provincial college professors and journalists claiming that McVeigh had misread the poem, and on YouTube I found, among countless individuals reading the poem, many it seems for school assignments, the disturbing image of a Slavic man, his face heavily painted in camouflage, reciting the poem from memory.
That image, in my recollection, is more disturbing now, knowing of the conflict unfolding in the Ukraine, and especially because he gave the impression that immediately after his recitation he would be going off to fight.
On the site of Mates 4 Mates, Ben Roberts-Smith can be found reciting the poem, a poem that up until the last two decades or so was taught widely in British schools and, I imagine, until the 1960s throughout the British Empire. To such an extent that in correspondence Michael Schmidt, the editor of British poetry magazine PN Review, wrote to me, as he rejected the essay, that he strongly disagreed with my observation that ‘Invictus’ was an obscure 19th Century poem.
In Roberts-Smith’s voice the poem is just as it is in the mouth of Morgan Freeman/Mandela, and as it is on the page that passed from the hand of the condemned McVeigh to his legal representative. Whether it was McVeigh, his lawyer or the judge who read aloud those words to the court, I don’t know.
What impresses me in every circumstance in which the poem is read is how impersonal it is, how it unmakes the personal subjectivity I appreciate in the poetic. Clint Eastwood’s Mandela was right – ‘Invictus’ is motivational writing, like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
In listening to the Australian war hero read ‘Invictus’ I can hear again that it is simultaneously a poem about conflict and about suffering, that it is a poem that asserts the individual even while it is, like much lyricism in popular culture, nearly completely impersonal. In the sense that it is depersonalised, it is, to me at least, not a poem: it’s an anthem. While I am sympathetic to the goals and care of Mates 4 Mates and, with reservations to the military action against ISIS, Roberts-Smith’s performance elides what I appreciate in the politics of the poetic: the discovery of another’s inner life, their loves and doubts, the vulnerabilities and hopes, another’s – in a word – sensibility. Watching him robotically reading that poem on my computer screen, I worry that he, like so many of us, is trapped in a mediatised, politicised image.
I wish that, instead, he had chosen to read us a real, intimate, 21st Century poem.
Postscript: On the long weekend – the Queen’s Birthday in Western Australia – before this short essay was to appear in Cordite Poetry Review, Perth’s Sunday Times had part of a statement by Ben Roberts-Smith on Australia’s decision to assist in the fight against the IS. On its front page: ‘… they probably don’t deserve to share the Earth with the rest of humanity.’ (It should be remembered that Roberts-Smith is from Perth, and this statement was made on a visit to the city. Perth, too, is the main base for the SAS due to its shorter flying time to much of the world.) The absolute violence implied by this statement is startling. It demonstrates the way in which Roberts-Smith, now an MBA student and motivational-speaker on the corporate lecture circuit, is a figure who articulates, even embodies, government policy. Seen in light of my short essay, his ‘using’ the poem ‘Invictus’, I hope I can prompt some skepticism about his sort of conjunction of language, nationality and today’s imperial violence, and, let’s not forget, the consequences of having a war hero read a poem.
A Hunger by Petra White
John Leonard Press, 2014
Petra White’s A Hunger is a kind of Collected-Poems-so-far, containing her two previous books, The Incoming Tide and The Simplified World, and a new collection that provides the overall title. It is not a large body of work but it is an impressively consistent one and a third book is often a good place from which to get a grip on a poet’s overall orientations.
Maps, Cargo by Bella Li
Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014
Realia by Kate Lilley
Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014
The Violence of Waiting by Jennifer Maiden
Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014
Elegy intensifies around the objects that remain, those keepsakes that must signify a spent life. In Kate Lilley’s Realia, the first poem ‘GG’ is an auction listing from Greta Garbo’s estate in which the repetition of Garbo’s name intones like a docked requiem. Only things exist timeless, immutable, saleable, as shining representatives of the once-living. Life’s fraught event is reduced to its acquisitions, and transformed, satirised, into capitalism’s ultimate wearer of labels: the former consumer of commodities is now more amenably cast purely as a selection of those objects, whose value her absence increases. Continue reading
STUNG
by Chris Mansell
Wellsprung Productions, 2014
Chris Mansell is a widely published poet with a lively range of interests, a multi-talented writer who bridges various creative worlds; her work sometimes fusing with music, the visual arts, and theatre. Her departure from a narrow specialisation in poetry is highly admirable, but may have made her somewhat under-appreciated both as an energetic innovator and important poet of her generation. Mansell’s first book of poetry appeared in 1978, and she has published more than 25 books and chapbooks in the intervening decades; while her Schadenvale Road, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2011.
Internal Weather by Lucy Williams
Walleah Press, 2014
While Lucy Williams’s Internal Weather is split into the unavoidable cycle of life – birth, childhood, and death – the collection as a whole is a love song, a tribute to ‘difficult events’ and ‘unattended shadows’. The poems emphasise how the ‘forming of words’ and the ‘making of stories’ locates these instances in specific moments of memory and time. Indeed, love is the lung-set of Internal Weather: love for a child, first love, romantic love, love lost, love for the dead, love that ‘surprises … like religion’ and thickens ‘doubt into determination’.
