The End of the World by Maria Takolander
Giramondo Publishing, 2014
Maria Takolander has grouped the poems in this, her second collection, to isolate three slightly different impulses in her work. Because the central section is comprised of poems whose point of view underlies those of sections one and three, I shall deal with it first. All of its poems explore the dark and unforgiving nature of the world. Continue reading
This post is in reply to John Dale’s recent piece in The Conversation, Here they are: the rules for book reviewing, and Peter Rose’s evisceration of it In defence of book reviewers in Australia, also in The Conversation.
Dale airs many grievances about current flora and fauna in the environment of Australian book reviewing, but there is one critter he un-cages that informs the entirety of his semi-light-hearted invective; his insistence that ‘It is generally acknowledged, however, that the standard of book reviewing in Australia is poor.’ It’s hard to know how to respond to such an incomplete observation, but as Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review, I do feel it is my duty (of sorts) to attempt one. Our primary criteria for reviews, long or short, are that writers must critically engage with the reviewed text, its operation of language, what the intent of that was, what the results actually are in their extrapolation, and cite passages from the text to support assertions. Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ doesn’t cut it.
Cordite does all it can to avoid publishing what are ostensibly florid book reports (all too common in our Internet age and the unending spaces for ‘content’ it begets). It’s imperative to expand and, at times where we’re able, step beyond the proven coterie of poetry criticism in Australia. We also have reached out nationally and internationally for new critical voices over the past three years.
So how do we match a title up with a reviewer? Three primary concerns: reviewer interest, reviewer impartiality, and sympathy for the poetry being reviewed. By ‘sympathy’ I mean that a reviewer should have at least some interest in the aesthetic a collection purports / embodies, or has kindred knowledge of the tone invoked or the subjects covered. We’re Cordite Poetry Review: we do a lot of them. The function of our reviews isn’t solely for your entertainment, as Dale claims should be the primary purpose of a ‘good review’. Rather, we provide as steady and as critical a look into our literature as we can, all inputs considered. Squinting up your eye and peering into a microscope isn’t the comfiest of operations, but it’s worth it.
Dale does have a valid point via his ‘local problem’. In our occasional hunt for new reviewers, invariably a smattering of reviews from our endeavour just scrape by, even after extensive but negotiable edits, and we publish them in the interest of diversity. Some we have to reject. But the sizeable majority of reviews we publish articulate what we seek … and would pass Updike’s five rules that Dale mentions as well (though I don’t fully agree with his first one).
If you’ve launched a book, then we won’t be retrofitting the speech into a review. We also won’t allow authors to review themselves, which we get asked more often than you might imagine. And not by a kilometre’s worth of mile are we able to review every new poetry collection noted on this list. We maintain this page to let people know what’s coming up in general. It’s not exhaustive, but it is extensive.
Critics like Lucy Van, Bonny Cassidy, Rosalind McFarlane, Maria Takolander, Andrew Carruthers, and Kate Middleton are excellent … and they are so precisely because they consider and deliver exactly this sort of literary engagement. Every time. And there are another 30-40 critics who deliver equal quality in their own voice for Cordite Poetry Review. This list grows each year. To say ‘the standard of book reviewing in Australia is poor’ makes sense only with a myopic read of our literary criticism.
Analogue Bodies is a collection of essays by Tom Lee, materialised as set of illustrated books by Zoë Sadokierski. The project looks at different parts of, and events within, the human body and historical ways of depicting and making sense of them. It aims to humour and, on its day, to educate. It was presented as part of the recent Emerging Writers’ Festival 2014 at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.
Weranga by B. R. Dionysius
Walleah Press, 2013
Threefer by Ken Bolton
Puncher & Wattmann, 2013
Ken Bolton and B.R. Dionysius emerge from different traditions, respectively: a New York School sense of everyday occasion punctuated by the presence and shaping forces of contemporary art (Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler are clearly present in Bolton’s diction); and a modernised kind of Romantic pastoral, littered with juxtaposed objects of the natural and contemporary world. Yet, at admitted risk of over-generalising, both of their recent books can be seen to be dealing with notions of how to write memory in poetry: how to write a poem to be honest to the process, even the implication itself, of remembering. How can language be used in the service of this retrospective vision, they ask; how does language, shaped by differing poetic forms, illuminate, distort or neutralise it?
From the lolly shop of the good-time Hades girls
Girlery by Melinda Bufton
Inken Publisch, 2014
The title of Melinda Bufton’s debut collection, Girlery, asks to be read ironically, but is in fact quite apt, bringing to mind a repository of all that is ‘girly,’ in the same way that a reliquary houses relics. Alternatively, it could be a verb: something close to a feminine form of tomfoolery. One imagines a stern injunction to ‘cease this girlery at once!’ With titles such as ‘Dealbreaker,’ ‘Bumper Book for Girls,’ ‘Lollyshop’ and ‘I will call you smitten because it suits your crazy eyes’ among the twenty-three poems collected here, both these associations are appropriate.
my feet are hungry by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Pitt Street Poetry, 2014
Readers of Australian poetry will expect a new collection from Chris Wallace-Crabbe to be a work of erudition and wit. In this they will not be disappointed. Wallace-Crabbe is entirely in command of his craft and possessed of intelligence that does not waste itself in trivialities. Continue reading
Goad Omen by Corey Wakeling
Giramondo Publishing, 2013
How do you hear the title to this volume of poems by Corey Wakeling? Goad Omen: two words that really slow you down as a reader, make you dwell on their unnatural pairing. Three dipthongal, molasses-slow syllables. They sound like a slip of the tongue, a conversational mishearing, or typo that should have been Good Omen perhaps. Continue reading
I know bird poems have become almost a cliché in Australian poetry, but I have a great fondness for the topic and so I couldn’t resist Dimitra Harvey’s evocatively brocaded poem about yellow-tailed black cockatoos, Calyptorhynchus funereus. Astute observation is at the heart of this poem, the poet’s careful pinpointing of particulars is what makes it so memorable, but the poem is so much more than just descriptive, it evokes many tones of mood and it richly maps the birds to landscape, weather and to folklore. Right from the start the birds are linked with death: ‘Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets/ we wear at the edges of burial plots.’ And later, ‘each wingbeat scores broad arches in the wind/ with the measured pace of pallbearers.’ The dark undertones in the poem burn off any hint of sentimentality and the birds quickly become augers, not only of death, but of the life-giving force of rain. The way colours are used in the poem is one of its attractions, the stark blackness of the birds is set off against ‘they sky’s bayberry vellum’ and at sunset when ‘the sun decants its port dregs’.
What I enjoyed most is the way the birds intensely haunt the imagination of the speaker. This poem is an excellent example of how the poet, through attention, exploration and invention, discovers the images and metaphors, the rhythms and sound patterns which open and reveal a unique set of meanings. To my mind, poems created without a basis in feeling, however artful and clever, are ultimately dissatisfying. We can see in Dimitra Harvey’s poem how the poetic imagination depends upon emotion, so that by the end, the speaker’s deep connection to the birds allows for an expansion and activation of knowledge. – JB
Calyptorhynchus funereus (Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos) Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets we wear at the edges of burial plots. I've read stories of the storms you portend; how you are a cipher to an inch of rain. For weeks, I've watched you plane the sky's bayberry vellum, seen falling light transpose your silhouettes into a straight-cut script I've tried to sound out - a susurrus of fricatives spattered with quick cool vowels. And when you've tacked low above the house, I've studied your lean, cleaver-knife tails; how each wingbeat scores broad arches in the wind with the measured pace of pallbearers. Now, as the sun decants its port dregs, your squeals ricochet from tumbled bloodwood trunk, shed wall. Tomorrow, squalls in the north will blast down burry clouds. You'll slow-sail in, moor to the needled limbs of the pine in the yard. You'll flex your crests at the gum-scented westerlies, and unpick cones for their seeds with your feet, your bills. When you flutter out your wing I'll learn that the ridge of its underside is a craquelure of lemon. The yellow thumbed on behind each of your polished eyes will flash like roman sun medallions. I'll read stories of high summer and drought, of roots cracking with thirst, flowers opening dry buds to the deluge. But tonight, after your bodies dissolve against horizons seeping all the reds of pomegranate seeds, I'll stand and listen to the ticking of night beetles - my tongue smarting with the honeyed-metal piquancy of rain.
Stone Postcard by Paul Magee
John Leonard Press, 2014
Unlike the recent Australian governmental fervour for signs of title (British, monarchist, hierarchical) and their accompanying anathemas contra entitlement (Australian, social democratic, welfarist), poetry titles struggle with self-authorization and singularisation. Continue reading
when they came/ for you elegies/ of resistance
by Christopher Barnett, Wakefield Press, 2013
Christopher Barnett is an enigmatic figure: an exile and outsider, an active and proud Socialist, Australian but long based in Europe because of feeling, as Mark Roberts asserts in the book’s foreword, ‘profound disillusionment with Australian society’ (ix). Continue reading
Notes for the Translators: From 142 New Zealand and Australian Poets
Christopher (Kit) Kelen and Jo You Chengcheng, eds
Association of Stories in Macao, 2012
Notes for the Translators from 142 New Zealand and Australian Poets steps into the fertile territory of literary exchange. It is a welcome invitation to poet-translators to immerse themselves in the work of contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets.
Allotments by Laurie Duggan
Shearsman Books, 2013
In 2012 Puncher & Wattmann published Laurie Duggan’s serial ‘Blue Hills’ poems in one collection. The ‘Blue Hills’ – a sequence that first appeared in Duggan’s The Great Divide (1985) and then reappeared intermittently through a number of subsequent books until being brought together in The Collected Blue Hills – are notational works concerned with the idiosyncrasies of place, or perhaps space, depending on one’s theoretical allegiances [if any]. Continue reading
Daylight Saving: a selection of poems by Robert Gray
by Robert Gray. Paul Kane, ed. George Braziller, 2013
In ‘Minima’, Robert Gray writes that ‘the senses can mislead us, / … when we rely on only one of them.’ Gray himself is in no danger of being misled. The dimension of synaesthesia in his perceptions has been widely noted, but it manifests itself in this collection as something both chronologically prior to, and conceptually broader than, the apprehension of one sense through another. In these poems, the synasthaesic crossover is on a continuum with other comparative and synthetic impulses: not only does he compare, for instance, ‘bird-song’ to ‘wandering lines of wet paint’, he also observes how the same shapes emerge in objects of different substance and scale, how the same ordering principles work in divergent contexts: ‘the wind paths, beyond the breakers, run out / across the water, / sinuous and spreading, like the arms / of the open eucalypts.’
In his forenote, Paul Kane explores the Buddhist inflections of Gray’s figural thinking, reflecting that the work of juxtaposition, apposition and comparison in his poetry is grounded in a Buddhist sense of underlying shared qualities. Rather than creating externally-imposed connections, his poems are ‘moments of revelation or unconcealment’. While the collection is aimed at American readers, this sense that the comparisons he draws existed prior to their poetic articulation is part of the book’s particular power for readers familiar with the places described.
When I saw the landscape around Guilin city And realised it was still as the painter Xi Dao had known it, In the T’ang period, I feel suddenly exulted,
The source of the exultation is the accord between the personal experience of a world and an artistic representation of it, and this same process, in reverse order, animates the reader’s encounter with Gray. It is not simply that Gray’s observations match our own: in the most interesting cases, we don’t have anything there to match. What Gray does is render explicit those impressions in us which might otherwise remain unconscious or inchoate. His description of the Australian landscape mounts a freeze-frame over our unedited reels of memory, bringing to our attention the moments we didn’t know to record.
This poetry of the ‘momentary mind’ is one of tremulously alive, circumscribed scenes: we usually know what time it was and what the light was like. What is particularly striking in Gray’s annotation of perception is that the poems often house dramatic juxtapositions in poised, grammatically intricate phrasing. In ‘Home Run’ the description of the view on the North Coast Line emerges in calm chronological order, its astonishing images scalpeled into diligent prepositional phrases: ‘The sea / is as blue as ink, or as a dye, newly pulped, / from out of which a great billow of fabric has been lifted, / the slightly lighter sky’; ‘there is a knoll / … / … / from the top of which the long grass streams’. These unblinking phrases have the effect of a full house gently displayed; the off-duty speech of a mime who forgot his painted face, as the poems matter-of-factly handle the torsions of ‘a downpour that is splashing up ferns’ or the Romantic expansiveness in ‘a sheen on the night and across the ranks / of water, / and close mountains that joined moonlit earth and sky’. The reality principle evident in both his empiricism and his unhysterical grammar means that when he writes of ‘the feeling that I wear great wings/ while stepping along the earth’, we believe him, and are recalled to our own.
Image of and by Nicholas Walton-Healey
Land Before Lines is a book from Melbourne-based photographer and writer Nicholas Walton-Healey. The 144-page, full-colour volume (the images appear in black and white here for page recall considerations) features portraits of 68 Victorian poets and a single, previously unpublished poem written by each poet in response to their photograph.
Jacinta Le Plastrier: What led you to starting off on this project which, given the complex personalities of so many poets, must have felt like a daunting prospect?
Nicholas Walton-Healey: There wasn’t a single event. For a long time I resisted the idea. It seemed ‘too obvious.’ Before commencing the project, I was spending a lot of time with poets, mainly through my involvement with Rabbit Poetry Journal. I found it really very difficult to be around so many creative, intelligent people without participating in an aesthetic dialogue with them. I mean, although you might be able to go up to a certain poet and say, ‘your work is wonderful because of x, y and z,’ that sort of compliment always means so much more when it’s said in your work.
I studied poetry in the honours year of my first degree. I wrote a thesis on the relationship between the visual and literary arts. If you look at the work of the ‘greatest’ poets, you see a sustained engagement with the work of visual artists. I’ve always been fascinated by that intersection. I know that when I suffered writer’s block, or was in the process of conceptualising a suite of poems or a piece of writing, I often turned to the visual arts or the work of particular visual artists for inspiration. That’s actually how I began taking photographs. So I guess if you really want to trace it back, you could possibly say that the project started here.
Photo of Duncan Hose by Nicholas Walton-Healey
The complexity of the poets’ personalities fascinated me. It was actually the main reason I persisted with the project. But this sort of complexity isn’t specific to poets. What is specific to poets is that their chosen medium of expression is financially unrewarding. Poets can’t sell individual works for thousands of dollars. They can win prizes that are worth lots of money but there isn’t that system of patronage or gallery representation or even the opportunity to forge a living by selling private, independent works. I think this accounts for some of the ‘complexity’ of these people’s personalities. I mean, in the best instances, some of these people are producing work that’s every bit as important as that being produced by the country or state’s leading artists, but because poets don’t get the sort of recognition that artists working in other mediums sometimes receive, something gets twisted. I don’t mean to imply that these people write poetry for recognition or accolade so much as to emphasise how unusual it is to see some of the most accomplished and creative poetic minds living in situations or circumstances that would comparatively be described as poverty.
JLP: How long did the project take to complete, and briefly, tell us how it unfolded and developed? How many images all up do you think you might have taken?
NWH: The project took about eighteen months to complete. All together, I took over 200,000 photographs. That’s not something I’m particularly proud of – it suggests incompetence. But digital photography is all about excess. You get rewarded for keeping the shutter rolling. I think the excessiveness of it makes people relax. They get used to having you continually snap away and so become more likely to let you in on that fraction of a second where they display a side to themselves they wouldn’t normally present to the public. Sometimes people just get bored of having their photo taken and that’s really the best time to go to work.
The project started with Jess Wilkinson, who I happened to be in a relationship with at the time I photographed her. I think her book marionette is incredibly brave and this goes back to what I said before about verbally articulating something to an artist. The greatest compliment you can give them is to make a piece of work that implicitly articulates that compliment.
After that, I started taking photos of some of the other poets we were socialising with. Meanjin got on board around this time and suggested I get a poem from each poet I photographed. They published some of the portraits and poems in one of their issues (these appear in ‘Volume 72, Number 3’). The project really just kept growing from there.
Photo of Myron Lysenko by Nicholas Walton-Healey
JLP: Can you summarise the conceptual intention of the project which is contained in the book’s title, Land Before Lines?
NWH: This project is fundamentally about creative exchange. One of the ways I facilitated this exchange was by asking the poets to nominate a landscape or location where they would like to be photographed. This question compelled the poets to personally invest in the photographic process and made it more difficult for them to complain about the photographs (joke).
I’ve seen so many awful portraits of authors. This is because photographers typically work from the opposite premise; they ascribe to themselves a position of authority. I was very conscious of the fact that the poets I was photographing had far more established and concretised aesthetic convictions than my own, and rather than deny this fact, I elected to work with it.
So this is what the title means. Sure, the ‘land’ obviously refers to the fact that the poets in this book are united by the Victorian landscape and that this unity is privileged over any stylistic or aesthetic ‘lines’ that could be drawn between the poets or their particular use of the poetic line. But Land Before Lines is also a metaphor for a creative sharing that, in this project, is privileged over any division or fencing between photographer and poet. I mean who is actually the photographer and poet? Are the subjects of these photographs even poets? I’m certainly aware that this series of photographs constitutes a portrait of me as much as it does the ‘Victorian poetry community’ or the individual poets presented in the book.
JLP: What your thoughts on ‘auto-ekphrasis’?
NWH: Well, I know that an ekphrastic poem is a poem about a piece of visual artwork that also comments upon its own status as an art object. But I’m unsure of what an ‘auto-ekphrastic’ poem is and I’m not going to waste my time speculating – this is what academics get paid to do.
When I wrote my thesis on the relationship between the literary and visual arts, I used the relationship I perceived between Frank O’Hara’s poetry and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings as a case study. Those two artists were personally and aesthetically very close (O’Hara even wrote a monograph on Pollock); critics seem to have allowed the distinction between their sexualities to cloud their ability to see the true nature and extent of this relationship. I mean, in order to see this relationship, you really need to get over the emphasis literary critics repeatedly place on the supposed frivolity of O’Hara’s poetry. Although this frivolity is important, especially in the later poems, I think it’s too easy and convenient to just attribute it to O’Hara’s belonging to the second group of artists associated with the New York School (which are supposedly more closely aligned with Pop Art than they are with Abstract Expressionism).
The thing I found most interesting about this relationship was that, when you really start to look into it, there exists numerous O’Hara poems that, although not conforming to the ‘proper’ definition of an ekphrastic poem, demonstrate a very clear relationship with Pollock’s drip paintings. And that’s where I think the power of ekphrastic poetry lies; as an intersection or choice to engage with ideas outside of one’s own medium. This gives the work a greater opportunity of contributing something different to the medium into which these ideas are introduced and I think artists need to engage with ideas that exist outside the formalist constraints of their own medium. Critics got that so wrong about Pollock; I mean Clement Greenberg defining Abstract Expressionism in terms of it being about the formalist qualities of painting. There’s a whole social and political context there that he’s just ignoring. Pollock’s work was very political but political in the only way political art can be – political art cannot be didactic. Similar criticisms were of course made of O’Hara’s work; that his refusal to follow poets associated with specific liberationist movements meant there was a lack of a political engagement. But this was precisely the reason O’Hara had an ambivalent relationship to the avant-garde.
Photo of Nathan Curnow by Nicholas Walton-Healey
Poems of Masayo Koike, Shuntaro Tanikawa & Rin Ishigaki, Leith Morton, trans.
Poems of Rolando S. Tinio, Jose F. Lacaba & Rio Alma, Robert Nery, trans.
Poems of Yi Sha, Shu Cai & Yang Xie, Ouyang Yu, trans.
Poems of Lưu Diệu Vân, Lưu Mêlan & Nhã Thuyên, Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng, ed.
Vagabond Press, 2013
Vagabond Press has recently issued four attractively presented volumes of poetry from the Asia Pacific region. Each contains the work of three poets and represents China, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, respectively.
Photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey
Reading MELBOURNE: a poetry feature could be analogised to living in Melbourne on a good day. Perhaps a good day doesn’t involve getting on a bus, but they are more interesting than trams or trains. It probably involves writing a poem, there’s plenty of it going on. It could be a work day if your work’s as interesting as that described in Brett Dionysius’s ‘Six Shifts at the VISY Recycling Plant, Heidelberg’ (or if your work is writing poetry). This is not a portrait of Melbourne but an enactment: poem as tram, café, accident. Poem as field of social/sporting relations (party/cricket match). Melbourne is not a discrete place either: Melbournians go to Yackandandah; Melbournians watch TV. It is not even a place as such, but a composite of experiences, like all cities. A good day in the city means needs met or needs unpressing. Days, however, stretch and change: a lot can happen. Perhaps a poem is more like an hour. A good hour so much more attainable, an after work hour might be good for anyone (for more on the hour and its relation to poetry see The Complete Perfectionist: The Poetics of Work by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez).
MELBOURNE is supported by the City of Melbourne through its Arts Grants Program. As guest editor to this unique issue, I solicited 50% of the poems (as opposed to the standard 10% or fewer guest editors wield for Cordite’s quarterly issues), and did so from poets who had rarely, or had never, appeared in Cordite Poetry Review before. These were mainly younger poets, though there were also a number of new and/or younger poets selected in the anonymous submission process.
One of these newer poets include Sian Vate, whose prose poem ‘melbs’, does what its title suggests: making the city (or more specifically, the suburb of Coburg) an intimate, yet social space, with a trace of one of the champions of such writing, ΠO, aiding its enunciation. The poem is structured through alternating negations and affirmations, yet is given lift through occasional questions and internal rhyme.
Another is Leah Muddle, her ‘flavour of’ evokes a bat’s view of Melbourne’s ubiquitous form of transport, public too in a sense, of bikes, bikes that ‘run cafes … sign t-shirts’ – and are perhaps influential in deciding the reigning cake-form: ‘flavour of’ optimistically declares the death of the cupcake (Bikes even distract us from the footy in Stu Hatton’s ‘lunch poem, university square’). It is an exemplary recycling of adjectives and images.
Claire Nashar’s ‘Melbourne sonnets’ Australianise the New York school poets’ play as well as Melbourne itself. The Yarra river, fruit bats and Corey Wakeling function as agents that move in and out of the urban, an image import-export industry, allowing and implying dingoes, bilbies, spirit animals. Nashar’s networking, ecological text delights in evading the convention of the city-bush divide.
The poems are the core of MELBOURNE, but the stakes of poetry manifest in some other features of this issue: ‘Crawling Across Tram Tracks: Extracts from Volumes 5 & 6 of Fay Zwicky’s Journal’ , introduced by Lucy Dougan; Corey Wakeling’s interview of Javant Biarujia; Alicia Sometimes’s essay, ‘Radio Laneways and the Melbourne Sound’; and ‘Some Art and Text: David Egan, Thea Jones, Nicola Bryant, Lauren Burrow, Nicholas Smith and Saskia Doherty’: a conceptual art feature from Monash Art Design and Architecture curated by Spiros Panigirakis. Tim Grey’s black and white photographic salon, ‘Plain’, emphasises the ground and sky: they are more than supports or canopies for Melbourne’s worldly endeavours.
Fay Zwicky has been a resident of Perth for many years, yet even her journals of the 1990s reflect on her formation in Melbourne. The extracts recall scenes as early as 1938: ‘the wireless, the gramophone, the Chinese market gardeners, the beer drays drawn by Clydesdales, the steaming heaps of orange manure on the roads on winter mornings, the milkman’s horse-drawn cart with it warm red light clopping in morning darkness…’ and a dream of St Kilda’s Luna Park from 1990. Lucy Dougan’s introduction to the extracts reflects on Zwicky’s position in Australian poetry, her musical upbringing, and the tensions for Zwicky ‘of a life lived between Melbourne and Perth’.
In his interview with the former Labassa resident (cf ‘Five Bells’), poet and small publisher, Javant Biarujia, Corey Wakeling elicits an allusive portrait of an international, reflective, feeling mind steering down a conceptual Yarra flow. Biarujia is both generous and critical: qualities which come further to the fore in his attendant poems ‘PLUS ÇA CHANGE … 1981–2011’, an Age cutup, and ‘The German Consulate in Melbourne’ which networks a further architectural reference into Biarujia’s productive melange (cf all its meanings, of Viennese coffee, diamonds, etc.) of the provincial and avant-garde.
Alicia Sometimes’s essay is largely homage to the spoken word scene of the 1990s. Her memories of ‘the Perse’ hotel on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy as a venue for performing poetry include not just names of poets but specific poems. Sometimes is an experienced local radio presenter as well as poet, performer and editor. Her engaging text dissolves the distinction between listening and reading, performing and reading aloud, between modes of writing and address. Her essay has correspondences with other themes in MELBOURNE: memories of growing up in Melbourne, of experimental writing (her excitement at being introduced to the work of berni m jannsen), of travel away from Melbourne and what that does to how you think and feel about the city, of the role of music and art and how they intersect with poetry. These memories all become aspects of a personal poetic history. But not just personal: ‘Radio Laneways and the Melbourne Sound’ is also social, connecting with the histories of many others, histories of earlier decades and of this one.
In ‘Some Art and Text’, Spiros Panigirakis presents the striking coincidence of six Honours students at Monash Art Design and Architecture in their use of poetry, narrative, reading and visual poetics. As Panigirakis indicates, in the work of these six artists there is no clear division between poetics as exegesis and poetry (or visual or other art forms) as creative practice. In this context we might see as ironic Nicola Bryant’s statement from ‘Ekphrasis’, which accompanies a large black dot: ‘This ekphrasis responds to the representation of a full stop’. Nicholas Smith’s interest in the night parrot recalls the poetic interests of both Dorothy Porter and John Kinsella: both dedicating books to this bird (The Night Parrot and Night Parrots respectively). For their work, and that of David Egan, Thea Jones, Lauren Burrow, and Saskia Doherty, and for the 55 poems in this MELBOURNE issue, read on.
Photograph by Catarina Fizzano
Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. – Jack Kerouac
It’s a beautiful thing to know what came before. Who walked the laneways ahead of you, smoothed any paths that might have otherwise been jarring, who stood up so you could sit down. Continue reading
Photo by Simon Mark
Javant Biarujia is an iconoclastic Australian poet, at once an unparalleled linguistic confabulator and an exponent of Melbourne avant-garde poetics since the 1970s. He is the author of seven collections, such as Calques (Monogene, 2002), Low/Life (Monogene, 2003) and pointcounterpoint: New & Selected Poems 1983 – 2008 (Salt, 2007), and numerous chapbooks. Biarujia’s work marks out its own historical forebears and familiars in a way that I believe – although absolutely in association with contemporary histories of poetry such as American Language poetry, Australian bricolage, and European surrealism – happens to hybridise baroque linguistic ingenuity with deconstructive collage and games of poetic reality that defy straightforward historical alignment.
Photograph by Neil Eliot
Fay Zwicky tells the story that in the early weeks of 2005, in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, she was invited as one of WA’s ‘Living Treasures’ to write a public poem about the disaster, and to read it at the opening of the Perth International Arts Festival. She declined. It was too soon, she thought. This was ‘not a time for poems’ – was it? But already the politicians had weighed in with their ‘fine abstractions’ and preachers were parading their concern. Perhaps it was important, after all, to come out and speak with the words of the tribe about ‘true guilt’ that is ‘tongueless’. She changed her mind and wrote ‘Aceh,’ a poem that is poetically unadorned and rhetorically urgent, and intent on letting ‘silence speak.’ In keeping with these sentiments, Zwicky held to her resolve not to read it herself. It was only because an SBS sound recordist was in the audience by chance, and captured the reading, that it found its way back to her, and she heard it for the first time, as if it had truly come out of the silence.
The push and pull between silence and public utterance in this anecdote speaks to the complexities of change in the cultural field since Zwicky’s practice became established. Poets had once gained standing within a system that valued the long apprenticeships and long lead-times of print culture. New social technologies now allowed reputations to be made in ways that could easily circumvent or dispense with the past. And yet the same technology that made Zwicky feel alienated, and made her invisible to a new generation of readers, had salvaged that reading of her poem for her, reminding her that her work could speak meaningfully to her readership. This raises questions. Are our older writers at risk of invisibility because conditions within the field have changed so much? How can the dimensions of this new age make sense to lives lived inside such a vastly different paradigm?
And yet, Zwicky has not completely withdrawn from Australian letters – her last book of poems, Picnic, was published as recently as 2007 – but much of her attention has shifted from poetry-writing to a form that represents for her a way of letting silence speak. Since 1975 she has kept a detailed journal: a combination of writer’s commonplace book, poetry work-book, and reflective diary. Its thirteen volumes record her reading and reflect on what it means to her to engage in and sustain a creative life, and they are full of autobiographical details. Selections here are taken primarily from Volume 6 when Zwicky is turning 60. The first three entries are from Volume 5.
Zwicky’s journal keeping could be summed up as a witnessing. That same dynamic encapsulated in the Aceh story, to react or to withdraw, to speak up or stay silent, emerges again and again. Because she is ‘a poet in the old, vulnerable sense’ (Vol 5, 713) invariably she does bear witness:
The world I came from is getting more and more distant, it has practically vanished. That’s why I feel the need to bring it alive—not for nostalgic reasons, but to help remember what went to make the person I am. There’s a kind of loyalty, a rough affection, a sense of protective concern that hangs around memories… The changes in social geography, the slow slide into meaninglessness and motiveless existence—these are the frightening things. The youthful escape from provincial boredom has turned into a late cycle desire to repeat the performance…How can one make one’s memories conform to what amounts to an utterly transformed world? (Vol 7, 1000)
The vacillations on this central theme of reaction/withdrawal also connect to a life lived between Melbourne and Perth; and a creative life lived between playing music and making poetry. Just as Perth was an escape from Melbourne; Melbourne is later figured as a potential escape from Perth in what evolves as a fruitful tension. In the journals the two cities merge and are overlaid as in the dream sequence included in the selection.
At the same time in which these psychic dislocations are being mapped, the journals are also a material record of the ways in which the past looked and felt. Zwicky’s ‘vanished’ world is made accessible through objects and through practices, as in the picnic scene’s ‘metal cups with raffia-bound handles’ or amongst her grandmother’s possessions the ‘trap-like metal clips to make waves in the hair’. The presence and accuracy of such details function to remind the reader that a whole way of living has gone. And there is a strong sense in which these objects and events act in a filmic and mysterious way. They are both simply themselves but also conduits to the sensing of different and only partially recoverable ways of being.
The Melbourne of the journals emerges as a place of childhood memories: a site of comfort that is later engulfed by having to fit an independent temperament to the discipline of becoming a concert pianist. This wider family culture of musicianship and performance is tied explicitly to Zwicky’s Jewish heritage and her mother’s work in helping post-war refugees, some of whom were musicians, to begin new lives in Australia. Despite her ambivalent feelings towards this time in her life, there is a change of heart in revisiting the next crop of musicians in the Melbourne family who are ‘untaught, unpressured, just music in the house…natural as breathing’ (Vol 6, unpaginated). The sense of lightness and freedom here seems to match how Zwicky first felt on hearing Britten in the student union room in the extract below.
This revisiting of the next generation of family musicians is a good example of they ways in which Zwicky’s journals constantly rehearse interactions between the past and the present, between Melbourne and Perth, and between music and poetry, until they come to rest at a point of being able to pick up and go on. They are repeat performances that favour a cathartic action, and a working out of those contrasting poles: the young concert pianist in Melbourne and the older, reclusive poet in the city across the desert who, despite silences, has remained active and engaged in an almost entirely private way.
-Lucy Dougan
Nicola Bryant | Steaks, T-Bone (2013) | Biro on A4 paper
This folio presents six recent graduates of Monash Art Design & Architecture’ (MADA) Fine Arts Honours program. As an art school embedded within Monash University, it facilitates a program that encourages students to contextualise their art practice within a discursive and to an extent, ‘exegetic’ practice. In many cases, text becomes a tool to ground and substantiate – to stake a claim in the field – that the artists constructs or composes for the work.
What I found interesting (and exciting) as one of this group’s teachers was not only their explicit use of text, voice and poetics within their art projects but their experimental approach to the exegetic text itself. I want to avoid tying this group of artists together via a central premise or a collection of neat themes. They each, in accordance with the conceptual underpinnings of their research, used text to challenge any pedestrian understanding of the exegesis to illustrate and reduce art making and audience reception. Text and the textual becomes an autonomous entity within their art, another critical tool to engage the material and social world. Each text, in its own way, slips around, courts ambiguity, evades singular interpretative routes, and at times blocks our perhaps over-schooled assumption of what an artistic process might entail.
The Artists
David Egan presents an audience with a series of discrete moments. A seemingly identical set of landscape paintings sits atop of a continuous frieze painted with a spear of broccolini. Both of these tropes of painting play simultaneously with the gestural mark and systematic reduction. In 2014 Egan has exhibited at Slopes Project in February and will be exhibiting at the Substation Centre for Art and Culture in March and with Patrick Miller at Adult Contemporary in Perth.
Thea Jones investigates the material consequence of touch – this contact between ‘things’ is envisaged as a complex interaction of physical forces – that questions how we as subjects understand intimacy. In 2014 Jones is completing an Arts degree and exhibiting at Seventh Gallery in June.
The process of understanding and reading everything and to some degree nothing in the space of art might sum up Nicola Bryant’s concern. With a degree of wit, Bryant grapples with everyday musings within a textual space that is wary of grandiose narratives.
Lauren Burrow presents literal and methodological intersections between objects, narratives and the detritus of creative processes. With a concise formal vocabulary she frames materials that that are both partial and lustrous. In 2014 Burrow is exhibiting at Platform Contemporary Art and Trink Tank in April and Seventh Gallery in June.
Nicholas Smith explores the elusive qualities of attraction – between people – between people and animals – and between people and objects. Within this matrix of desire is the search for the night parrot. In 2014 Smith will show in a group exhibition at Seventh Gallery in June.
Saskia Doherty engages in process driven experiments that are staged in the space of the gallery. She exposes the potential for relentless continuation of the process but also allows for the halts and its performative potential. In 2014 Doherty is exhibiting at C3 Contemporary Art Space in March, Platform Artist Group and Craft Victoria in April, West Space and the Monash University Museum of Art in May.
1.
Intruders in the house.
We are walking up a river.
We walk quietly.
No more social esteem and prestige.
The river winds on.
With my eyes closed I would lose
consciousness pending further research.
The river. We were walking upstream.
2.
Enough of that has been said.
It feels like my wide mouth eyes again.
It feels like my wide mouth eyes.
But only if I could keep my innocent heart.
3.
In the insensible –
run out of money, run out of love.
In the distracted breath –
buttress, flakes, torsion.
Weirder than weirdland man.
Have braggart. Have stew.
4.
Carve that up and get me out
you is paranoid
just ahah,
down with the scalpel scissors and simple cleaver
just ahah,
operating a real machine.
5.
How carnivorous we get
in glad happy nature
we are all
we are all
bare? spare? forked?
Sensationally bodied, marketed and sheer?
More or less terrific?
How carnivorous we get
and you.
6.
Worth the hungry miles
worth the burning and
the crowding season. Worth
the virtuous galloping on
the ugliness and guts.
Worth how it gets.
7.
There are so many of us in the world.
And all of us so sick.
Me speaking personally I love the clean dementia
and perhaps the soul divided
walking around and yet still on fire
walking round then running up the street.
A man stands on the corner of Swanston and Bourke
plying his trade
which is not immediately clear to the observer.
Perhaps he’s
selling something nobody knows they need yet.
The observer
wishes to verify his or her own presentiments
about how the world
operates in all its flawed and reckless applications.
Nothing is
as it seems, nor as it actually wants to be,
for example
the illusory nature of bricks and mortar, transitory,
ephemeral as wind.
Air will last longer than this human achievement.
In the contest
between ill-will and charity ill-will will win,
the speeding car
will come off better than the hapless pedestrian.
Only stone,
as an ambition, can approach any sense of permanence
lying in wait
at the bottom of rivers, or the top of book shelves
disguised as souvenirs.
The sun will continue to rise long after the extinction
of our species.
That man on the corner with his basket of stones,
still not sure
who he’s waiting for, what his trade is.
There is a something; orange orb;
a fluro zorb blood orange’n
blurry. corpuscles, violent yellow’n
red like smorg, eye of smorg, smorg ablaze
like a pink pink hot pink nike pink
…
run fast, 13-minute-lap, pink and a question:
What would yogi doona a knife’ight?
What if air’s two’n one is t’win?
skip (ya right?)
to the empty shops on the dry side, the east
of Burke Rd (yeah?)
[each has a local, and a septic liver, west, past Cremorne]
Sensing desperation on your writing & tetra-chroming down the hill
Stopping in the floodlamps (rabbit stopping, staring), bag laid:
vacant block’n shagging through the chain wire’s yr straw bed:
Yr an Ariel – hold on – written by a maker:
Yu quote and note t’change t’your – meaning their –
own words, on the cnr where bored kids drive beamers
far & fast.
An easy one three five degrees
And you just fill the gaps.
Bush fires; haze; death.
Cancel them and call it the
ceremonial scrubbing Lucifer avails
the wallaby mystics; Ophelia’s
apocalyptic howl for a Narcissus,
in all events.
