Ern Malley, the original dromedary of Australian poetry has been anthologised, criticised and mythologised beyond belief. It's perhaps sobering to reflect that while Ern Malley's creators, his twin Gepettos James McAuley and Harold Stewart along with his original sponsor Max Harris have passed from this world, Ern's legend lives on. What is it about Ern Malley that refuses to die?
Much has been said, refuted and regurgitated about contemporary China's emergence as one of the world's economic superpowers. As the current hegemon, the United States perspires beneath the weight of a colossal and seemingly incurable national budget deficit (not to mention the more visible disasters of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina). China's fiscal and technological advances, on the other hand, seem destined to elevate the vast Asian nation far above its troubled rivals in the region and, perhaps one day, across the globe.
The Kurdish Center of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers, invited me, as an International Vice-president of PEN, to travel with a group of Kurdish writers on a one-week bus trip through Kurdistan in March, 2005. Nestled in the Zagros mountains, surrounded on all sides by repressive neighbors, Kurdistan is the place where the Kurdish people, an ancient mideastern people who are not Arabic and who speak an Indo-European language, have finally had the chance to make their newly autonomous region a model republic.
A library, a private library is something which many of us own. Even if it's just a few books on a shelf, or hundreds, neatly cared for and ordered, filling many book cases. If you set out in life collecting and reading books, these books will become precious to you, and one day you will probably bequeath them to a family member. But what if this library consisted of thousands of books; many about highly specialised subjects such as Eastern Philosophy, and you were the family member who inherited this library? Could you care for them in the same manner as their original owner? What would you do with them?
trying to keep my eyes open & dreaming of pigeons the same
things keep happening in the cricket as in my dreams its
just pigeon after pigeon after pigeon after pigeon
after pigeon when i sit at the window sill
in the mornings
watching the pigeons
i think its the cricket again again
his boots are taking on a golden sheen
i saw a bit of this film the other day
and there was beat takeshi
slapping this mans face
over & over again
there is no difference between the replay
and the next ball &
& the sound of them birds
i also love all the leaping about
muttering away in the morning & darting after the ball
the heater on so late into the night
Ern Malley's cat writes: “the 2005 ashes series was my first ashes”.
If only he'd met a nice girl
and settled down in Croydon..
That blasted poetry, a void in
which his arty friends would hurl
him. He could of been a mechanic
by now in Footscray
instead of dead today
at twenty five. He was always manic
What with breeding mozzies,
frogs- that damn pet swan.
A life gone down the drains. Aussies
thought he was having them on
I said, I said “These poems are jokes.”
Ironic now he's labelled Hoax …
Burwood,
New South Wales
Dear Editors,
I am not certain that I am eligible for your competition, but please bear with me. You see, I am the sister of Ernest. I feel compelled to point out a grave error in your information. You see, Ern had no children – at least, not as far as I know. Although Goodness knows what he got up to with Lex Banning and all those Bohemian friends who led him astray. There was a nice quiet lass back in Melbourne, but they broke it off. I blame the Poetry.
1
are these fields
or a flatbed art
hemmed by mountains
these scatterings a sky
or a world above this one
a golden sunrise
a kneeling figure
ravines and temples
in clouds or speckled paint
2
a monstrous bird
on its side, beak
parting the black
collapsed caryatid
oblivious passer-by
3
the side of a silo
overcome by vegetation
4
an eye
or moon
in blue night
5
snow-melt
in the pastel's
upper corner
6
oil scraped off a landscape
the hill that fell off a wall
aspects of natural vegetation may be the same as Sydney (ref. Seddon)
but the focaccia are entirely different
*
Fremantle
At 8.40 you could fire a gun &c
*
Forget the one horse
this is a one-iron
and a no ironing-board town
*
you can see why all the really savage punk bands came from here
*
It's an art deco city. Also a high Victorian one.
Still undemolished facades (it takes recession to ensure this)
*
edge of empire
the taped sounds of barking dogs
Spencer's ‘Christ'
bitten by scorpions
*
notebook stuck on formica
sunlight on Eurokitsch
the great weight of national literature
the need to subside on a couch
‘but it's off to the School of Business, ha ha,
off to the School of Business'
– Arthur Hugh Clough School of The Popular Lyric
*
I think I'm a natural egalitarian. I am slightly alarmed to be addressed as ‘sir' by cafe waiters (this practice seems to have only recently become general)
*
CHURCH OF CHRIS
*
Goodbye pork pie hat
(one passes rested
on an inappropriate head)
back at the Villa Italia
the mind goes blank
or the light reflected off metal structures on the roof of the laboratory prior to a storm. The whitish sheets over a darkening sky, a series of regular solids, an obsessive repetition of inarticulate demands. Elsewhere there are holidays, banks circulating notes, a surfeit of intention, but here there are only moments, blocks of consciousness arrayed as patterns in fabric.
When the server goes down the sense evaporates. Corridors become walls, the narrative fades. The novelist has unravelled her plan in which moths have eaten holes. We are left as vegetation in a suburb is a memory of wilderness, a crossed wire bringing back thoughts of the past. Rumour itself ordains our history. Those marks on a fence speak as the lines of a book close upon themselves.
The blue distant hills beyond which is conjecture. The unnamed walking the wall, using up their time in the office. Everything nonetheless has a perfect three hundred and sixty degree clarity, is open to scrutiny. The top of the box removed, the silkworms among the leaves. Those white fibres form an elaborate chain in which the small and large circumferences are cemented forever.
for Keri Glastonbury
As far as I am concerned
the black swan of trespass is permanently
on loan to you – you have earned it
by getting the body – orifices and all –
onto the page; by navigating your poetic
dog past the law and those delightfully placed
mince-ball baits. Over and over
as I turn them, your clean white A5's make me fall in ink-
soiled love with a clitoral wit and insouciance so concerned
it hugs itself. I want to be in your coterie
of one. I want to be the one
whose legs split for you as wide as the skin
of the compost banana that made us laugh
that uncomfortable quiet-in-the-mountains
morning-after at its unsheathed penis-
ity poking from a huddle of eggshell
testicles in the sludge of emptied tea.
And now finished this breakfast of milk-
cold words, whisper some more rude bits into the gash
of my imagination. Really use that smart mouth.
I'm languishing like a swan on her nest – numeral and bent letter of her neck…
I wish there was no world; no language of p's and q's.
I wish we could tell them all what's in your little book of poems:
Lots of unfunny things are funny! There's no such thing as cool!
for Vicki Viidikas
The sun has risen perfectly
again
Not inevitably but I respect
your wish
How sweet were the parasols
you unfolded with those
wishes
and their flight more real
than all that had been concealed
in darkness
Regret has flown unable
to land anywhere
afraid of the large black crow
we nailed to the roof
of the new day
Do you see the lips releasing
unoffered cries
the stranger's burning back
growing wings which need
no bird
the mind in the air of sailing?ñ?
And I too float
despite the heaviness in my palm
of the share of stones that are
mine
ERN MALLEY liked nothing better than to garden. It was there, in his rubber gloves, that the words of the poems would come to him.'
I walked down to the corner of my street
and turned where the bunting swayed, listless
a little. Then they kicked up! a breeze moved them.
The footpath had been chewed a bit,
to widen it,
by a tractor at one end.
Near the garage were a lot of little lights,
but it was daylight and they weren't on.
I took a note from my wallet,
put it in my left shirt pocket then
in my pants, then back in my wallet again.
A nervous habit. I felt then
where it no longer was.
I do these things.
Feeling for it still now, with some urgency,
I had it in my hand as I approached
the counter of the petrol station – which doubles
where I live as a food and grocery store –
bought a stick of chocolate that I had
never tried on any afternoon prior to this,
simply on a whim.
The girls at the bus stop chewed and stared,
stared and chewed, and one of them said
What's the time? When's the bus coming?
I said, I don't know. I'm from out of town –
I know nothing of what goes on around here.
I often do this.
It makes me feel young, because irresponsible,
or so I think.
I went round the block,
the bigger block, not the little one,
as I really wanted to walk.
I thought about what the girls had said.
Or the way they had said it. They had
addressed me
out of some slight curiosity. I wondered what I had done
to deserve it. I hummed a little song – “Tomato time,
tomato time” – to a Latin American rhythm, but I could
think over the top of it as it was unobtrusive,
in fact
it kept time with how I walked.
But once I rounded the corner
away from the girls' gaze
my walk slowed and I gradually began, though I didn't
notice,
to abandon the song.
“Abandon” –
heavy word.
Anyway, I saw a number of uninteresting things,
but this simply causes me to think, become more inward –
or irritated if I am tired.
One does, then,
blame the itinerary,
and think of it as tiresome.
On a day such as this, though, I did not
think it tiresome. As streets go, it is a familiar
and quite interesting street. That is why I walk it.
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion, despite our initial glee at receiving ten new poems by Ern Malley himself, we are humbled and disappointed to announce that this poem was in fact written by Ken Bolton and John Jenkins.
for Toss
It's a late Twentieth Century sort of feeling
driving in my car,
dead in the daytime, up at night
lively as a 'wire'.
– My 'little joke'. –
But it is curious, you've got to admit –
Does a hippy sleep like this?
Does my wife? an airhead
in some respects. Finally, but,
smarter than me. I
am her problem.
Not her only one. But major –
and abiding.
She sleeps easy.
I sleep awake, a nut.
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion, despite our initial glee at receiving ten new poems by Ern Malley himself, we are humbled and disappointed to announce that this poem was in fact written by Ken Bolton and John Jenkins.
“For a long time I stayed in bed very late.”
— Marcel Proust
I remember with a kind of spiritual / intellectual
‘wince’ the boredom of the papers on Sunday. The comics.
The last page, if you still hoped
for some relief (it was, after all, ‘the last page’), featured Val
(Prince Valiant), Radish, Laredo Crocket & maybe
The Potts … (& some puzzles, Chucklers, I never did).
Radish I remember with some affection. Though did
I feel it then? Rarely. In it a couple — or a threesome? — engaged in
intellectual
problems thought to typify their late-middle-aged, maybe
almost ‘battler’ status. There was no action in these comics —
& in this instance, invariably, the old lady, her hair worn (like Val
‘s) in a bun (Val sported, when I think about it, a curious Cleopatra cut),
dried a dish or waved an admonishing finger—& hoped
or worried that — say — money, which she hoped
would arrive, would arrive — & pay their bills. The bloke, though he did
hardly anything (& nothing that didn’t go wrong) — read the paper, bottled
beer — or carried his device, a manly hammer — tightened a val-
ve that needed loosening — & while he talked over his shoulder she wiped
up & talked back. (As fair to call this “intellectual”
as “abstract”, I think.) Maybe it would happen, maybe it wouldn’t, whatever
‘it’ was & one rarely knew. In these comics
long-foreshadowed action — maybe
because it took so long & was uneventful — like tension ‘going away’ rather
than definitively ending — did not seem like action, & maybe
Radish held some microscopic fascination — how I think of it now — because,
in a pasture out the window he grazed, the ‘wild’ or trump card we
hoped
might one day be played — in a rescue of narrativity, surreal but
consequential. Radish, the last of the comics
on this last page, took its name from the badly drawn, sway-backed horse
suspended leit motif, incendiary loose-cannon narrative device —
available, should its creators feel (as I did)
the need for it. In fact weeks would go by in which we did not catch sight
of the beast — & then we did — leading his contemplative (not to say
intellectual)
life, truly a Life of Riley, munching, chewing, raising his tail. Was he their
unconscious? their libido? The Potts’ id? “Val,”
Prince Valiant’s flaxen-haired betrothed would say, “Val,
stick it to me.” But she never did — though she admired him, as I never
could, while he practised his archery, sharpened his sword, ‘had
moods’. Was this maybe
muscular Christianity avant la lettre? or a puritan paganism? Val never
promised the violently insurrectionary the way Radish did, or even
the intellectual
far-fetchedness & ‘possibility’ of the horse — who had a rumoured history as
a one-time winner: hopes hoped
of him had some basis. Val on the other hand, had done nothing — text-
book stuff, dutifully, text-book battles, text-book dispensing of
justice, text-book falconry. There was no melodrama. Val did
everything in orderly fashion. He would never even grow bored with
himself, bored enough to come bursting through the door, cigar in
his mouth, gun in improbable hoof, announcing He-haww! The
Drinks are on me, as the horse would … or would in the comics
I desired. Was the strip named after the horse, as I imagined? Then who
were The Potts? Or Wally & the Major? Why, of the comics
on the other page, was the one I understood least the most intriguing — the
modern one, temporal miles from Val
but geographic miles from me (I assumed it was America, though almost too
literate — which made it, then, socio-economic miles from me, too)?
where what they did
was sit, & amble around, in an airy open-planned lounge or den — & maybe
read the comix, or Sunday papers or a magazine. The heroine hoped
she would not be bored, & father — handsome, quizzical, sporty dresser —
made dry remarks — as did mom — another intellectual?
The young girl (eighteen? twenty-two?) wore Prince Val’s hair-do, better
than Val did,
& torreador pants & maybe lounged on her spine, oblique & petulant — &
hoped
her boredom would end: like me she hated the comics … & Sundays … an
attractive young bourgeoise — while I remained, like Radish before me,
a ‘dark horse’ — yet, like the girl, soon to grow fiercely intellectual.
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion: “… despite our initial glee at receiving ten new poems by Ern Malley himself, we are humbled and disappointed to announce that three of these poems – namely Escape Clause, A Fool To Care and Prospect of KB as a Young Critic – were in fact written by Ken Bolton. .”
Hell – now what could be
more vernacular than that? –
he was an agent merely, mother, don't
you see? But I see myself you are
plotzed, or becoming so. Raffiné, sure,
distingué too, we'll allow, but well on the way
to shickered, my louche little maman
all unbonneted. No more for you.
For me there should be everything. I
loved him. That shirt, those boots, the tragedy –
as you remarked – of having so much the essence
of day time TV star nailed it
for me. Nailed it to me: me
& impossibility. Ha ha. For you to spy on
& laugh at through your glass. I
will not keep his number. You have spoiled that
for me. I don't think I will even have
another drink on this verandah.
I'm going to bed now – you should too –
to dream of him against the balustrade
the sere waves & wind & tufted sand dunes behind,
wind in his hair. Or not to dream. Why
bother? That corner where I lean sometimes
& have liked to look mornings at the incoming waves
tiny, scudding, pale & clear
or darkened in the evening, which say only, now,
“Fool to care”.
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion: “… despite our initial glee at receiving ten new poems by Ern Malley himself, we are humbled and disappointed to announce that three of these poems – namely Escape Clause, A Fool To Care and Prospect of KB as a Young Critic – were in fact written by Ken Bolton. .”
I have presumed to mark the moment of conception:
I shall now commemorate
the hour of my final deliverance. Boing! Kenneth Koch's
giant soup ladle sweeps me into the sky.
“Gentlemen,”–tips hat, waves cane to faces below–
“I am delighted at the development
of the refluxomatic engine. The earth's burping,
if you will, affords opportunity & mechanism–
& a new dance craze–as well as the pattern
from which a novel midget racer
can be built, 'ready to assemble'!
This one I have painted a French blue
& drive like a Gordini–the Gordini of the mind
–or the Bugatti of the mind–
keeping all the while my eye on the actual road
& hand steady on the actual wheel, a dream
of toast provided by a good woman, part Aunt Bea
part Salomé, toast & marmalade, &
a view of the garden (for am I not Bonnard,
or Vuillard–at some level, really? Aren't you? Isn't
everybody–aren't we all, at some level, to a degree,
hungry? Here, have some!), on my right
the morning paper: & I read
bauxite has fallen!
Bauxite! Get up you big galoot–I'll tell you
when you've fallen!
But that's my mind, cajoling. Ka-chink–ah,
change! (My mind again.) Reaches in till
takes out medium denomination, airs it, puts it
(airily) in pocket, breast pocket, a decorative edge poking up,
leans out once more, clears throat, the
thrusting chin of Lenin–“Gentlemen!” (Crowd
cheers) “Gentlemen!– (Mind you, …)” —
begins.
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion: “… despite our initial glee at receiving ten new poems by Ern Malley himself, we are humbled and disappointed to announce that three of these poems – namely Escape Clause, A Fool To Care and Prospect of KB as a Young Critic – were in fact written by Ken Bolton.”
grinning at my isolation i rub my hands in the dust
upon my trembling intuitive arm
showing my hat to the event
i wanna be a
ustraliana
im the ideal state the perfect human
like batsmen made liminal you priests only only think its
irony because you cant face that
there may not be nor ever has been
any mine is a
blanc masterful face
the figure that strode hell swinging
his head by the hair
on church st
down to the bay at night and on the water see reflected
golden lights
b & h and fosters im gonna be a
ustraliana im not gonna be a
n australian idiot welcome
to a new kind of tension
the ends of every hair on my head are blanc hot
i become the shadow which always follows
all batsmen and always precedes them
day works at its own empire
but the true & actual gods of this earth require no
illumination
i assert my original glory in the dark eclipse
and in this pitch
the sparkle of something baseless and without depth
i emit light just as i carry shadow with me shadow
& everything under the sun is in tune
but _____
one moment of daylight lets me have the
difference between a salad and a diced cow
like a blanc arm thrust
my hat to the event that
is where i sometimes keep my hair
out of shadows dark & sinister my deception comes
i vary my angles sometimes i am satire sometimes i am sun
with the crack of an outback whip i rise from the wrist
o kestrel there
is cunning certainly there is cunning
but all irony is eliminated there is cunning but there is
no irony & not everyone can be steve monaghetti
it is not the isolation and the occasion that lifts me
i take full responsibility for my action
s every action i have ever taken
whirled in their vortex it gets me wkts
i am pure product
there have never been any indiscretions
the dead tree gives no shelter the cricket no relief
can you hear the sound of hysteria blanc
swan flamingo
es give us our penguins or our pigeons
red nikes & gold ponies
nothing but partnerships
___ it is
not shot
but ill always be a hot shot
4s or 6s ive never been one for lonely singles
you can stick my pink appealing head on a
flamingos body give
us our pigeons or our pigeons or
our parrots
fear makes them play a blanc shot
whos a pretty polly hot shot
hear the sound of hysteria
disappear in the throng
malaga 2005
WARNE MALLEY materialised on the plains surrounding Toldeo during the summer of 2005. Bowling handy legspin and speaking only a unique dialect of the Spanish language he moved quickly south. He currently captains the first grade side for a small club on the coast. He clearly has no sister.
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion: “We're also deeply ashamed to admit that we didn't pick Nick Whittock as the author of The Marketing of Blonde Tips, originally attributed to Warne Malley.”
That's why blondeness hurts —
In every movie I portray
Vulnerability to
Humanity. You've got it,
That's why being
A 'goddess' hurts: the people
Never measure up.
I approach the foam.
I mother in mock
Profile. Dangling,
Reminiscing my in-
Volvements … It
Doesn't hurt any more
Than being in love (the sea).
VERONICA MALLEY is a retired schoolteacher. She lives with her companion in an inner suburb of Melbourne. Of the Romantics she prefers Byron; she is writing a long work entitled 'Peas and cantos'.
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion, we're moved and astonished to admit that we didn't pick Michael Farrell as the author of this so-called poem.”
Build a house, a subject close
To dreams … where snow falls
Outside and dingoes pad, making
Shadows. Up the stairs to light —
The night will pass like black
Oxygen. Down the stairs to fear
Is a way to absorb experience.
A house has to learn. You come
Later … and in dreams and storms return.
VERONICA MALLEY is a retired schoolteacher. She lives with her companion in an inner suburb of Melbourne. Of the Romantics she prefers Byron; she is writing a long work entitled 'Peas and cantos'.
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion, we're moved and astonished to admit that we didn't pick Michael Farrell as the author of this so-called poem.
Fated to have a poem
For a face. Like a horse
Stumbling through blue light
Discos with a fake
Erection for the press.
It's a pinnacle of sorts,
Dudes. (Reeves ventriloquised
Me). If this is the ocean —
Pass the salt. I'm on fire
Etc.: no sleep till Spring-
Steen. Every few days I come
Here at the mountains; to be
With the giants, think about
The small things that make me big.
VERONICA MALLEY is a retired schoolteacher. She lives with her companion in an inner suburb of Melbourne. Of the Romantics she prefers Byron; she is writing a long work entitled 'Peas and cantos'.
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion, we're moved and astonished to admit that we didn't pick Michael Farrell as the author of this so-called poem.
the collective semiconscious
slurps in its uniform of quicksand
like a tour squad gelato sunday
in negotiation with soap bomb
analysts, did you forget the
immortality of dirt; the thawed
prawn, pericles, busks near
a bin
Sylvia Malley is a cousin of the late Australian poet Ern Malley. She is the daughter of Ern's cousin, Morris Malley. The Ern Malley literary scandal caused the Malley family to fear poetry for many decades. However, Sylvia, a Malley inheritrix, could not avoid the family's innovative poetic genes, and one lunchtime while browsing through the Australian Poetry shelf in Dymock's Bookstore, George Street Sydney, she discovered Ern's poetic oeuvre in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry [ed.Tranter/Mead]. Since then she has become an avid reader of contemporary Australian Poetry and a closet poet herself. Through her internet browsings she discovered that the on-line poetry journal 'cordite' was seeking submissions for a 'Children of Ern Malley' issue, so she decided to take a chance with one of her recent poems. Sylvia works as an optometrist in the business district of Sydney. In recent years she has become a keen harbour ferry spotter. She lives in Manly.
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion, we're moved and astonished to admit that we didn't pick joanne burns as the author of this so-called poem.
Being out with new couples
reminds me of monotremes
They oftentimes speak of falling
in and making kissyface love
They gab a fragrant
arrow of shit, too
with the same cupid mouths
SIMPER MALLEY’s rapier and acerbic social observations are oftentimes mistaken for Bill Bryson-esque whinging. This is not the case. Bolstered by surviving the crushing poverty and abandonment of his youth, Simper exploded onto the global literary atlas in the early sixties with unmatched bravado. His Making Hamburger from Freshwater Trout while Fishing America for Pert, Young Chicks, published 1966, affords him to rest forever on his laurels in the public view; a perch he was never comfortable with as he felt his later work was far superior to his earlier successes. Simper Malley bought the farm, in every sense, in 1983. This is his most recent, posthumous publication. Montana misses him greatly.
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion, we are humbled and disappointed to announce that this poem was in fact written by Kent MacCarter.
We brought out the new italics
because we wanted to re-
emphasize things formerly iterated.
We had nothing new.
Those of us working on this
end of things understood
we could only do this once.
Once you bring out the new italics
you can't put them back
in the box. We smiled as if we
had anticipated this day,
when you would look up to us with
wonder in your eyes, afraid
of the things you had heard so many times
before. This is why the new italics.
Resole Malley, a Trappist Monk, was raised by wolves. He has Canadian blood, which, unlike Canadian Bacon, doesn't stay fresh if left out. He has rambled around some, mostly from the bed to the bathroom, and once saw Prince in the Los Angeles airport. He also dated Vanity's sister, but has no claims to ethnic insider information. He published a novel once that some people liked. He also claims to have written “Islands in the Stream.” His wife tells him which shirt goes with which pants.
