The Poetry of Destinations
Let it not be said that Kelen doesn’t get out of the house and suburb. Although the neighbourhood and its backyards are clearly the main vernacular – ‘field of the poem’ – there are regular jet departures throughout this book to Asia and North America. In fact, there is more Asia than North America, and perhaps this is par for the course for his generation: being a part of Asia, not acting like some neo-imperialist brat of old-empire trying to lord over it. He is truthful to his era and to the desire for wider and wilder experience outside Western belief systems and canons. Thus, the ‘Grand Tour’ poet morphs into the economy-class Everyman, back-packing the self to faraway places. Self-discovery via ‘the Other’ has spawned post-colonial studies, which in turn rose from the ashes of a scholarly guilt complex after Edward Said’s political dialectic pointed out home truths about Orientalist Studies and Western colonialisation of the world map.
Earlier Australians followed the expat-off-to-London-to-be-an artist model, believing our great desert land was a dry womb. Since the Seventies, affluence and accessibility to cheap travel has shifted Australia’s centre of influence away from Britain. Thus, Kelen now wheels a nifty cosmopolitan suitcase through the anti-terrorist airport screening process onto Eastern philosophy and other vivid phenomenological experiences – down the Mid West State, Interstate and the Trans-Sumatran highways, pulling in at Burger King, observing the bicycle army on Hanoi streets, or drinking dirty chai at Madurai Station in Tamil Nadu. These are some of the destinations of his poems and revisiting them again through this Selected is like being at the kitchen table again and going through the photograph album with him. The US poems are mostly ‘road poems’ with stopovers and the connection with Native American animal totem culture ties up with traditional wisdom and planet ecology. When it comes to Asia, Kelen focuses on the urban south. India arouses tourist cynicism, as does a lot of what he sees in Indonesia and Thailand. Hanoi is clearly his ‘Paris of the East’ and has drawn him back more than one time it would seem. The earlier poems are refreshingly lacking in Western angst and cultural irony:
Love shimmers on the shore when breezes shiver lets the spine know its alive. Oh celestial Ha, your name means water of the rivers, bamboo spirit, one gold star’s music on a night like this, peace from the sky then a storm whips off the Eastern Sea the rain dissolves balconies and the flooded streets flow like rivers I feel love and cannot help it, the country, Hanoi, most romantic city and river (‘Red River’)
This is Kelen at his most unguarded. Other Vietnam poems like ‘Thousand Star Hotel, Hanoi’ also do uncharacteristic things, dramatising Vietnamese voices without imposed irony. Here a new kind of empathy is visible, where the poet is not just the clever commentator, but a voice of place truly identified with the speaker of the poem: Huan, ‘decorated veteran, part-time cyclo driver’ whose renown rests on being the neighbourhood barber. He has endured and survived:
some days the clouds re-enact the old stories Almost yesterday the sky lit with dragon’s breath, we fired at American phantoms and bombers. We were always bamboo, now we are also steel.
This comes from one of the long narratives in the book. The poet has disappeared into the neighbourhood of the poem, dropped ‘his stuff’ – his literary correctness, and got down to the ego-less art of writing poetry. It is an acknowledgement, perhaps, of humility before the subject: in this case, the struggles of the Vietnamese people, which are bigger than one’s self-cultivated ‘style’ or ‘voice’. The later poem ‘Hanoi Girls’ reports from a more familiar commentator perspective, yet still expresses a high level good heartedness for the older, less urbanised city of his imagination.
Yet, I wish more from Kelen – more unselfconscious identification with idea, place and time, rather than the orchestration of theoretical positions and modes of style. They often filter life to the point that somehow loses the largeness of experience through the smaller funnel of personality. I may be wrong about this and, as I said at the outset of this essay, I am a Kelen fan because he hardly ever displeases the reader.
Like Felix the Cat, Kelen does pull arty stuff from his bag of tricks – never randomly – and avoids the blatant or pretentious. There is thinking behind his writing decisions. Anyone who can scribe credibly and sympathetically about national obsessions such as cricket and footy deserves a wider readership for the sheer attempt of putting poetry into the public domain. The question of relevance I raise merely as a point to pause and reflect upon the ‘far distant’, while Kelen’s otherwise very self-assured and entertaining performance to date has been consistent and with more high points than lows. There are few – perhaps no – clangers in this collection.
Final Watershed
The more recent poems at the end of Island Earth continue his preoccupations while evoking sympathies more ecological, alongside poems rankled by mad things done in the world. There are poems with an elegiac mood, more family focus, a sense of his middle-agedness, not to mention the second-last poem in the book, something different for Kelen: an unabashed love poem with ‘The Blue Exercise’. The last poem, ‘Bird Diary’, with its sulphur-crested cockatoos, links back to one of the first Kelen works in Island Earth, ‘Very Early Morning’, completing some kind of cycle of returns.
Throughout his work, Kelen has wrestled with the devil in the details of things. That concrete connection with his world remains his strength and brings a reader back to poem after poem. However, the real challenge for each poet today is that the same world can be visited all too vividly and virtually via social media. How to make it new? For instance, as I mentioned at the outset of this essay, my nephew and his / our generation’s need for language and articulation is secondary to the nightly feast of blogs, movies and shows.
Does this mean the poet of negative capability has been reduced to a second-hand chronicler unseated by the virtual eye of technology? How can Kelen’s (or anyone’s) poetry compete? Can poets afford to retreat into art and speak big things to increasingly small audiences? What is the poet’s future and relevance in all this? Is it a cosmic joke? Impossible rhetorical questions these, and the subject of readings and essays to come.
This is a watershed book for S.K. Kelen. Let us hope that where he goes to from here during his ‘last quarter of the match’ will be even more interesting, provocative, entertaining and perhaps more personal and touching than his productive time spent so far on / in the field of the poem.
