Image by George Quasha
I.
I went to visit Chris Mann in his apartment in Manhattan at the beginning of July 2012. Half of his apartment was covered with plants. There were trees, ferns and flowers hanging from every landing. Mounted on the walls were wood-framed bookshelves, completely packed. The other half of the apartment had a wooden table, kitchen, grand piano, and beyond that, some rooms for sleeping.
Carol Jenkins records Lyn Hatherly in Arthur Boyd’s original Bundanon studio
Six episodes of A Way with Words, featuring recordings of:
Michael Sharkey
David Mortimer
Christine Paice
Kerry Leves
John Watson
Julie Chevalier
… a poem apiece.
For two years, from September 2009 to October 2011, I produced a weekly radio program showcasing contemporary Australian poetry called A Way with Words. In all, 106 episodes (each of around five minutes) were produced. Presented here is a chance to listen in on six gems from the archives vault – some of my favourites, chosen for the most part because they are impossible to find elsewhere as audio.
A Way with Words was broadcast weekly by ArtSound in Canberra, picked up by Ozwrite on the National Community Radio Network, Dover Road Radio broadcasting from the Isle of Wright in the UK, 2KRRR Community Radio in Kandos and 3RRR in Melbourne.
Image by Pearl Pirie
“Queensland Poetry Festival is thrilled to welcome award-winning Canadian poet Shane Rhodes as the 2013 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence. Since the residency program began in 2005, Queenslanders have had the pleasure of hosting an international poet for three months each year, bringing their ideas and creative energy to inform, influence, and engage fellow poets.
Photo by Kent MacCarter
I first met John Mateer in London, at a reading at PEN International’s Free the Word! festival, where the international outlook of his poetry intrigued me. We corresponded regularly by email from that point forward, both of us often on the road, discussing poetry, translation, and travel. Mateer is a cosmopolitan poet, an international poet too little known on this side of the Pacific. His poems resonate with a deeply empathetic vision of the natural world and its inhabitants, be they Australian lizards or the translators he compares to angels, an assertion I can only aspire to live up to as translator myself.
Sound and Bundy by Amelia Walker
Interactive Press, 2012
Amelia Walker has imaginatively approached the theme of the stories behind fake poets with Sound and Bundy, a collection of poems by three fictional poets and their collective, doubly fictional Ern Malley reincarnation named Jason Silver. Peter Lind, Shannon Woodford, and Angie Rawkins are the three protagonists in this very convincing work of fiction by Walker. A story emerges about these three poets who wrote together under the guise of Jason Silver, and the ways in which their lives and poetries intertwined. The result is something between an alarmingly realistic (but fake) anthology and a verse novel. It effectively sucks the reader into its reality – suburban Adelaide in 1998 until 2006 when both one of the poets, Lind, and the Jason Silver moniker commit suicide.
Lime Green Chair by Chris Andrews
The Waywiser Press, 2012
In a recent article published in Sydney Review of Books, Emmett Stinson argues that Australian reviewers’ and readers’ responses to Australian short story collections are regulated by the receptions of these authors in the US. And so, according to Stinson, the so-called cultural cringe lives on. But is this really the case? And should we really be suspicious of internationally recognised Australian writers such as Chris Andrews whose second collection of poems has been published by Baltimore’s Waywiser Press, the publishers of such giants of US poetry as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur and W. D. Snodgrass?
Two with Nature by Ellen Hickman and John Ryan
Fremantle Press, 2012
As a book quite different to what is usually seen in the poetry sphere, Two with Nature, Fremantle Press’s book combining the poetry of John Ryan with the botanical illustrations of Ellen Hickman, contains some interesting possibilities and contradictions. In his introduction Ryan notes how ‘the term ‘botanical poetry’ might seem an unusual juxtaposition of two quite different practices – science and poetry’ and it is here that the importance of the ‘with’ in the title can be seen as Ryan and Hickman’s aim appears to be with nature through a combination of scientifically accurate illustration and poetry.
Eternities by Martin Edmond
Otoliths Books, 2013
In this collection of prose pieces, memory and daydreaming are powerful forces, determinants rather than second-order effects. Its theme I take to be the transactions of past and present as they are occasioned by the spaces of a city (in this case, Sydney) or, to use another approach, Sydney’s ghosts. The title of almost every piece is or was an actual place in Sydney. The sites Edmond’s imagination gravitates towards might be seen as typical: legendary once-sharehouse (‘The Caledonian’), soggy-carpeted nightclub (‘The Manzil Room’), harbour’s edge (‘Blackwattle Bay’). While the pieces mostly derive from Edmond’s personal experiences of the city, some are enhanced by the work of archival research, amplifying the double vision of the past being tangible in the present. Continue reading
Hyaline by Matthew Hall
Black Rider Press, 2013
How does one review a book of poems that has no table of contents and no page numbers?
More to the point, perhaps, is how does one read such a book? What do those absences signify? Individual poems have titles, yet they seem to move on, almost glide on, from what preceded them, and into what follows. “Artifice’, the book’s first poem in the section ‘Harm’s Light’ in fact has each section beginning with the last line or two of the preceding section, pausing, but resuming , then handing on to its successor.
from ZEROFOURZEROFIVEZEROSIXTWENTYTWELVE
First: drive down to Marina del Rey
turn right, a blue surfer shark will greet you, tell his story for a nickel
my nickel, I pick out
New Collected Poems (with CD of the poet reading) by George Oppen
& Garry Thomas Morse, After Jack at Small World Books
Béatrice selects a memoir & an Anne Tyler novel,
& from the Vietnamese hat stall, a fine, new sun bonnet for Flick
the endless posé of Harley’s, the odd
Kawa, & clichéd pick ups – Ford Toyota GMC
heading east
WRONG WAY
DO NOT ENTER
Horizon Ave.
it sez
Lunch: ordered off of the menu at Mao’s Kitchen –
‘Chinese country cooking with Red Memories,’ ‘Lunch Combination for the Masses’
“Mao loved to say, “Wei renmin fuwu!” – “Serve the people!”‘
Mao is vegan friendly, it sez.
Home: to Airlane Avenue after a detour to Ralph’s for trash bags
a bourbon & and run through Guy’s machine code poems
(Notes from a Lecture Delivered by a Former English Poet Laureate)
At the age of six you were a bloody little genius
Bauxite was the only word you could spell
But I knew the year of the Battle of Hastings
from a title on the spine of one of mother’s books
salvaged by the boxload at an auction for fleeced up
calculators. Now, in the online gallery I follow you
around like a fox, impressed by your use
of the word formaldehyde. You stink of it and I’m arrested
skinking the meat off the bones you left in a box
of araldite, glued, I thought, on site, for me to you,
your plexiglass apiary. Some kind of art world
controversy dogs me like a blue
kettle so that anyone who makes a film I love.
Study for a running spotlight, scrounging
for sunshine in the flangular nape of the broad
eighteenth century, soldiers waft like truffle oil.
It’s only when you come to the harbor /
that you realize how you miss it.
A Nobel Prize is not enough, you have to kiss arse as well.
Massive sense of self peers piggishly from the space between
brain and brow. Wishes critics would see in his poems
mistrust of the middle classes forbidden entry to the mistaken
political observation. The next day in The Australian
Diabetica. Sweet graves. Lying in your vat of sugar.
Where you make the mistake is where the profundity
is Botch = depth. Computer manuscripts read like they were
yesterday. The other one, skinny and honking like a goose.
Getting you confused with some other English-speaking
painter. Someone re: cycling can read your mind.
Born of albatross, ruby skilled, fleeced sixty thousand on the first day.
Allied and German, loss of innocence, the beginning of a summer
techno war. Definition of poetry wider even than the world
War II. Tradition that goes back to Homer. Purification
critiqued—Swimmers into cleanness leaping. All the hills and vales
avoid reality. Oh, the mouthless dead. It is easy
to be dead. I tried it once, before I turned to early British
modernism culled by war
Relies on Americans for the subject of death itself
Killed at Loos in 1915. Looking for English publisher.
Head of Brass makes love to Thomas Hardy:
‘If we could see all, then all might seem good,’
said the biography of the new Francis
Webb my love of Elizabethan melody
disrupted by the eradication of music /
Isaac Rosenberg is not an officer;
Married to a dozen unfinished poems.
Difficult to finish when bombs going off
but love gives sense of urgency.
The red wet / thing
permeates poems, tests my lungs for ancient value.
You would think people would care less as they get older
but it’s not the case. Crumble me
into the torn fields of France.
Poppies whose roots are in men’s veins /
Six-thirty or seven is fine with me. They meet
and begin writing poetry. Just when you thought it was over
cosmopolitan rats. We all hate home / and having to be there:
touching the hands of the opiate connotation.
Democratic erotic emphasized by
Dust of an allusion to Thomas Nash. Reverse curate
your palimpsest perception. This is the Real
Departure from previous sentimentality.
Met Wilfred Owen at the war hospital in Edinburgh.
Gave him my poems. Each slow dusk is an anthem
for doomed youth. Killed in an oven a week
before victory. Telegram arrived on the doorstep of mother’s
bells, sounding like history like bella bellissimo.
The ‘yeasted up’ language of Keats
hi on the rise of a lifetime on lips. Freudian
assumption of increased tenderness for mankind
something of a Spring
Offensive. ‘Some say god caught them
before they even fell.’ Poetry thus emerges
from the belly of the premodern. But why Owen?
nude cantata passes through, streams of globulated
five percent civilians killed = sixty percent nature
technology. Arden Lewis died in Burma. We think he
shot himself. Back in England, we think
he shot himself. Poem ends with reference to
Edward Thomas. Village of steep hill now shoulder
of mutton. All day it is raining
Dreadlock the naming of parts
Not a decent set on them, Mother has said.
Mother loved bodies and trying to kill them.
Where the bullet stopped.
After the first death there is no other.
Song of the dying gunner, buying ballads
by the metre, angling high for the death
of a ball turret gunner.
Here the lover and killer are mingled.
Being damned I am amused. Just
hear this and we can go our separate ways:
I went with father to the trench of Pozieres
wallop of cods and swallow of whistle.
Lying in a field of deadly flowers,
Black bird of trespass I drink you
rocks, thinks he’ll find something
splendid. Most of his life has come up
snake eyes. The more he tried to win
playing it fair and square, the more teeth
cracked in fights. His friend Danny the Raunch
found a wedding ring under a boulder
by Syssygy Creek. He gave it to his girlfriend
Wanda who was thrilled, who was pregnant,
who divorced him eight months later. Now
Danny sits on rocks,
doesn’t look beneath them. Spacker will avoid
wedding rings. He might find
a small bank with a tiny teller offering him
millions of bucks. Or
a rattler, disturbed, aiming for his eyes.
an ex-couple
still friends
wanted to store
their dead love
rented an old shop
and reached out
to collect
other people’s flotsam
a pink jump suit
a sandy copy of Proust
a torn photo
condoms past
their use-by date
letters of course
stale perfume
a toy bear clutching a heart
stamped ich liebe dich
a dried jacaranda petal
a lock of hair singed
a tooth possibly human
and a smear of lipstick
on a scrap of plastic wrap
a love museum
he says
she shakes her head
it’s just a dump.
‘Weather Gone Wild’, September 2012
1.
Orangutan languorous
on the incongruous jungle seat. Mongolian
boy pushes his sister
on a makeshift swing.
Frayed ropes, dirty, smiling
faces. Cloudless sky.
Raccoon crawls
from a ditch
tempted
by a choc-chip cookie.
Romeo Doneza’s city skyline is black and white
through a hole in a freestanding
rooftop door. Blerta Zabergja’s skyline:
smoke-stacked and orange-hazed. She takes
a photograph while she’s photographed.
In deep space, a single egg rests in a nest
woven by human hands.
A salt white sky
peppered by birds.
A salt white sky
storm-clouded with birds
in the shape of a girl
who might be dancing.
A snake charmer’s cobra
has choc-caramel markings.
The charmer
in saffron, receding.
2.
Aerial map of America physical.
Black and green. Warning:
fluorescent roboworm. Death
by slow grinding glow.
Diver in a test tank, a bubbled view
of a shining world above. Space probe
beneath the sea investigates
submerged mountains. A seal
in long, green grass. Man in the probe
wears glasses, his dashboard says
one nine five one seven seven one six two.
To his right,
another probe
like a drowning printer cartridge.
Many species of unnamed gastropods and shrimps
in thirty-one Brady Bunch squares. But no one
looks at anyone. A school
of orange swordtails
another printer cartridge beside a scuba diver
and a massive brain coral.
3.
A Filipino Tansier stares with gremlin eyes.
The sky
aqua, black and yellow.
Rising dust cloud. Pink and yellow lights
of Phoenix.
A burning fence pole at Bastrop.
Frozen spray on a four-wheel drive
near Lake Geneva at night. Smiling girl
skates. In Tennessee,
lovers in a flood sit on the roof
of a sinking car. Tornado scarred
Tuscaloosa from above. Survivors:
hospital and football stadium. Tornado now!
Black grey brown on a wet road
in Nebraska. An emergency vehicle chases it.
Gushing water chases a Chinese villager
down a stairwell. He’s in military fatigues.
Levee house at Vichsbury survives a flood. Miles
of brown water then Martian landscape. Bill
Tulloch sits under a tree, hat in his lap:
If you’re proud of your country, you try
to take care of it. San Saba
River is salt. Friday night’s football team stands
on its field under dusk moon. Kenneth Durst
in the Mason Feed Store watched over
by moose heads and leaning folders: They bought
a lot of hay and feed
to save at least their young cows.
One man perched on a windmill appears to fix it
while another, half-way up, stares at him.
after the fire escapes and security guards
it is good to be beyond CCTV
amidst the howling sirens whipped wind
the thin mercury sound sculpted on sand
the base jumper poised like a civilisation
on a precipice of wasting military assets
before a leap into faith and squashed Midtown gum
the fly-eyed troubadour’s declared intent
the Pitt St. tractor’s pilot manoeuvres by sextant
closer to the CWA delights aesthetic Marxism
handicapped by last season’s King Gee
the verses face up to supported living
wandering the parched grass beyond visiting hours
where in better days the wallabies grazed
lost in a hard drive somewhere between
formats and a nasty trojan horse the length
of an absence stretches like a hair band
co-opted into service as a lock a galleon
mid-ocean stranded twixt trade winds
like that commercial only melancholy
a microwave dinner in the warmth of the presbytery
when mysticism has deserted religion
it’s not enough to face down the beast with popsicles
exhibitors fill the Friday night choc top make out slot
with a CGI Jesus aloft some sea as pithy as
Wivenhoe a digital age donkey chase
piloting perilously down Pilate’s cavernous streets
distracted from our inevitable
Oedipal deaths the literary devices get left
on the shoulder abandoned like tics after therapy
while snow liquid papers over the green coronet
and the bits of science that science forgets
it is the bullsnorting bouncers who make us decline
bobbing weaving and hooking our grammar on
their death rattle line we like Hi-NRG
uptempo sounds eat yellowfin to be efficient
she kissed him behind the bike shed and it read
Thatcher OUT LBW Alderman
we have not been polled for our taxes
but we still body pop while the neocon circle sits
the gnarled acetates take you back to the crackled
part of the flanking manoeuvre you’ve already won
vinyl jams crammed
into the parcel shelf of your DeLorean
windows custom tinted as the hairs
on your neck prick with the sharpness
of that thin mercury sound
Invent Capital in the armpits of Indian women =
The sleepless housewife becomes his snake
metaphor for the splits of Germany. No ideas but in
misogyny. Let untold apartments bloom with teacups
and shifts and sharp battleships. The people
of uncapitalised carapace wait in the glass house.
Quick, the strike
starts under the sign of the dialectic and the writing
is a death-gripped scotch on the rocks. Compose yourself
and wait is the usual order for Saxifrage, at those slow words
from directors struggling to reconcile their gods and the
writing of October. His weed stones us all, women are
to be everywhere ‘things’ or ‘flower’ through to, obviously,
‘quiet’. And that, ‘my credo’, was all that was left in the notebook
with a cry of ‘EINE PAAR SEIDENE STRUMPF’.
the gulls her
voice is fixed to tense the drum
the neck, hair clear on end, the gull her
voice to what she’ll call the flock of them, each one
clawed as human talk: grip let the arc of her
is taut: the neck its hum
her skin of the
drum
amp all of tremble
in the caw: gull form
please this turn of her
each bliss gull form
dumb wave disturb
not arm nor wing:
the flock at that new call
is bristling: what space for seabirds!
but each just backs up higher
at her, high enough to be edged out
not space but room: her voice formed that
Cocky Bennett was a sulphur-crested Cockatoo who lived to the ripe old age of 119 years. After a life of seafaring he came to live at the Seabreeze Hotel at Tom Ugly’s Point, Sydney – where he died in May 1916. The bird had been featherless for much of its life due to suspected Psittacine disease. Cocky was stuffed by Taxidermists ‘Tost and Rohu’ and now resides with the Kogarah Historical Society.
A sentence of one hundred and nineteen years
reveals a portrait of the bird as a pirate.
A claw-beaked sailor of dark brews and beers,
purveyor of bawdy discourse, bar-room brawler.
He circumnavigates the wiry longitudes of his cage,
pale and puckered, scant feathers whorl
and stub pink cockatoo skin as if the cook
had left mid-pluck. The drinkers gather,
they offer profanities as plumage and gawk
at his status as living kitsch, ‘One at a time,
gentlemen, please! Let me think!’
As a centenarian, Cocky’s earned his shrine
in the cabinet of quirk and circumstance.
Now he’s dead they’ve glassed him in.
One hundred and nineteen years. A sentence
twice caged – in life and in death,
tethering freedom in case a bird might fly,
or explore a feather’s breadth.
All day those birds, the nurses
flutter in their blue plumage.
He stares through the window
at a swatch of heaven,
sees the neat white
stitches of a jet.
Something flickers
in the corner of his eye:
a feather, buoyed by a cobweb
outside the glass,
buoyant on the currents
of the air.
He understands
why the feather moves,
how a spider’s net
has ensnared it
as he has understood
from the surgeon
that it will take six weeks
moored by the ballast of traction,
until the unhinged wing
of his pelvis heals.
All day he hears birds
praising the sky
until dusk
when sparrows scatter
their crumbs of song
and the nurse completes
the diurnal graph
of his vital signs
like the curves and dips
of a swallow–
the closest he’ll get
to flying.
No one saw who did the deed.
No one saw who pushed the giddy counselor
off the ledge of the dam towards the
copper-bottomed lake down below.
Male staff simply guffawed as the top of her two piece
floated on the water like a green duck,
while the pretty victim, herself, resurfaced in a daze,
her left cheek shaved raw
where it had scraped the rough stones.
Was she twisting her shoulders to hide her bosoms bouncy and pink?
We little girls stood stock still, peeing into the chilly water
suddenly made warm with fear. Would we be pushed next?
We watched the big, hairy college boys now scrambling
down from the heights of the dam, whooping like pirates, pleased with their prank.
We waited for them to swoop down, heron-like, and snatch one of us away, like a fish, grabbing us from the shallow safety of the red and white ropes and the dog paddle lane.
We held our breaths and stretched our flat little chests out onto the water, holding ourselves still and stiff, hoping to be taken for dead,
just as the swimming instructor had once advised.
Recently I’ve been thinking about ghosts
ones that seem to have nothing to do with
the enhanced or rather …
accentuated being of those they
appear to, but have their own quest …
Elena told me that her husband had
haunted her, yet only before he died
Then she said she had grown up with …
couple of ghosts in the country. They were
old bushmen that had been murdered or …
maybe just fallen in a hole …
Poetry brought them out she said. When my
father died I went through all his books to
save them from the Salvo’s; I used to go
down to the creek and read the bleaker …
moments of King Lear, and snippets from …
Faerie Queene, though I was barely aware
of their meaning. The ghosts would sidle up
quietly and sit on a log. After I
wondered if they would have smoked if I’d …
offered them tobacco. When I dream …
about them they’re always my father – both
of them. I told Andrew and Janine most
of this last week, when we were heading to
the beach. Andrew was predictably …
skeptical that Elena had ever
been in the bush: it’s that colonial
research crowd she’s mixed up in, he said: as
if they were bootleggers or bikies …
Elena had taken to …
academia in her sixties and
had been experimenting with her hair
colour, having been either blonde or …
brunette (not a mixture as so many
are now) all her life. Andrew always …
insists on the urbanism of …
Australia, as if the country’s …
distant past, and something basically …
shameful. Janine said nothing at the time
it would have been like her though to launch …
into a complex monologue on …
subject about three days later, if we
hadn’t gone off the road soon after …
hit a poplar. Elena’s a very
good public speaker. She has a rich tone
to her voice, encompassing sympathy
irony, dry humour. She has been asked
on occasion to speak at …
funerals of strangers, of people who’d
come to deliver something and had …
heart attack on the steps for example
Elena could make a joke of this …
manner of dying and be thanked for it
afterwards. Elena was speaking
suavely about the self-consciousness she
had felt giving a paper at …
conference on a writer who was in …
room. Then she shifted to …
conversations on ghosts we’d been having
recently. I can see him now she said
in quasi Lady Macbeth voice, standing
by the dahlias; and that’s just where I was
Andrew and Janine were outside, ashing
in the pond, not wanting to have …
anything to do with …
Elena’s ironic praise – how absurd!
positivism
consequential
the rise of prose capital is
printing press capital(ism matter of ‘f’act credit
context you remember that which is not yet structured
appropriate
experience
object
the problem is not the problem naming word for god which is never spoken stayle
but the recognition of the problem all other words organized in direct harmonic structure
For NO’R
Freeze, salt, shiver then slap: it’s a lethal dose margarita
that shoots us back, without fair warning, to overheated
Southern Crossed boyhoods, continuous cricket, hot chips.
Footnoting Picnic at Hanging Rock, me humming
US Forces, we walk about the old stockyards, in Texas
but not here (you Ballarat, me Cronulla) before we list
at Remington’s The Luckless Hunter, recognize
that pale-faced Apache as yet another last aborigine,
one sentenced to brave it alone through ancestral lands,
every lone star a tombstone, every sound a lost noun,
every remorseful painting an additional subtraction.
This is for the tourists. This is not for the tourists at all.
We stall before a vainglorious statue of a cowboy
wrangling a writhing bull, man triumphs over bronze.
Then heel-and-toe it over western heroes, star-pressed
into the trail, set to favourably brand history, or its opposite
as a family films two dudes on horses, neon winks: Sirloin!
and Caravaggios fill museums, contrasting light and crude.
