Nothing is True

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So as one who has spent his entire career on the fringes of the poetry world, I am more than a bit amused at the recent plagiarism scandal in the poetry world. In the same way that opposition to the ETS is actually a symptom of a deep seated fear of change and of science so too is this plagiarism scandal the symptom of a much deeper problem. There are others words that we dare not say as well, words such as incompetence and monotony, and the most dread of all words ownership.

I look back at some of the events in my life and I have to laugh. Many years ago while living in Brisbane and working in some soul destroying proletarian sort of job an academic knocked back my submission to an anthology of poetry telling me that I did not speak the language of the working people. Too stunned to reply I could only laugh. Later I entered the Vogel Award, not that I am a novelist of any sort, but I wanted to see if I could write a full length novel. I have no bitter feelings for having lost for my book was not very good. But the point I want to highlight is that this was the same year that the award was won by the execrable The Hand That Signed the Paper. A remarkably nasty little book that went on to win the Miles Franklin award! As a side note a previous winning novel Jack Rivers and Me was not written by the claimed author.

So here we can see a pattern of foolishness.

But enough of my nonsense and moving right along. It was with great amusement when I jumped onto the computer and saw a series of posts and comments about the most recent scandal in the poetry scene. Every single post attacked the individual involved. Some saying that the poet refused to travel the searing road to find his own voice, others, like protesters in front of Scott Morrison's office chanted shame, shame!

Now it is not my intention to defend the poet, Andrew Slattery, as I do not know him from a bar of soap. But rather I wish to find any deep seated failures that allow this to happen. For like anything else in our world, the poem is not a thing, but rather a relationship between people.

So besides the terrible word plagiarism, the first word we must bring up in relation to this “scandal” is incompetent. First I have to note that it has been almost three years since he won the Rosemary Dobson Prize. Three years and nobody from the judging committee noticed! Even more shocking to me is this sentence from the SMH article that leaves me shaking my head. An entire poem was lifted from the philosopher Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Have none of the judges ever read Beyond Good & Evil? Surely one of the most unique voices in Western philosophy and the doyens of literature in Australia did not notice. This is surely a level of incompetence that makes the sins of the poet pale into insignificance.

In my travels as a poet I have at times had a foolish or unreasoning fondness of the idea of the gloss. Submitting my poems to various journals and what-not, I was informed (again by an academic) that to use a gloss was an example of pretentiousness and that modern poetry could not be pretentious. I retorted that if pretense is from the word to play, who if not a poet could be pretentious. So the gloss is no good, in-text citations are clunky and disturb the flow. Foot notes seem better, but to my mind the best thing to do would be to mention in a bit of a proem that this is a cento with lines from XYZ poets. But would the poem then pass the muster of the academy? I think not, I am happy to be shown wrong. All of this lifts the cover on the sleeping lump that is poetry in Australia. That it is too closely bound with academics, and we can note that academic is close to the word anemic. For that is what passes for poetry in Australia today, a bloodless, lifeless regurgitation of the known.

The third and final point I wish to make concerns the idea of intellectual property. Did the Homeridae even care about intellectual property? For is not the literal definition of rhapsode a stitcher of words? This was noted by Pindar
In the same way as the Homeridae,
Singers of stitched words...

Did Shakespeare feel he was plagiarising when he used, for example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as the basis for Romeo and Juliet? Did the medieval balladeers feel they were plagiarists when they recycled lines and tunes? And what of the works of Eliot or Joyce, to name just two?

Or to quote Pound with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly.

Plagiarism as a crime (or sin if you prefer) rises with Capitalism, for the ancients had no problems with the idea of recycling and reusing works. In our bourgeois world (and I would invite my readers (however few they may be) to join me in recreating bourgeois as a word that expresses contempt) where the individual is risen above all, and the very idea of the co-operative spirit is brought into doubt what are the pressures on the author? It seems to me that copyright and intellectual property, while sounding helpful and fine in theory are used by big conglomerates to control thought, and art in our society. One only has to look at the shameful acts of the Disney corporation in ripping off fairy tales and then claiming ownership of the idea of, for example, Snow White. Or the equally shameful and bogus claims of Men at Work and the Kookaburra Song. So keen where they to defend their rights that tehy did not even know, until an unfortunate episode of Spicks and Specs. Examples of publishing companies abusing copyright can be extended seemingly endlessly.

So here we have it, my thoughts on this topic. The words that can not be spoken are, incompetence -- the incompetence of judges. Monotony, the stranglehold of writing held by academics who seek only to reinforce their own position. And of course the vile words of ownership, which seeks to make money at the expense of art.

Could this all have been avoided? Yes, the author could have noted the use of other writings, but would it have won? With the storm spreading across facebook, I doubt it, for too many seem to place an individual originality above the work of art. But from my point of view, this whole imbroglio was worthwhile as it allowed me to do some research into the ancient idea of the cento. Was the poem good, were the ideas good, did you enjoy and learn something? So we must finish with a half-forgotten quote from Ezra Pound, “it is a poor critic who talks of the artist and not the work of art.” For now we know more about Andrew Slattery and very little about the actual poem written.

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painting from http://www.kounterkulture.co.uk/blogs/charlotte-bracegirdle-and-las-meninas

Literature and Change

This is a response to an article by Tadhg Muller on the island website

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Sometime last century, when I was still a wee bairn, I had ideas about art. Looking back I can laugh at my naive ideas of becoming an author, an artist. Now I can see my career as little more than a spectacular abortion. I could alone bewail my outcast fate, or I could face up to my numerous personal failings, to a heroic lack of discipline, an almost pathological contempt for the editing process, the various bad choices I made. Or I could look back over a life of brutal violence, of drink and drugs, of death and suicide of work and family and love. Sometimes I look back, and I want to cry, sometimes I have to laugh. And then I think, “but above everything don't write unless you have to; if you need money make boots and we will respect you as a competent cobbler; if you write for money your work will show it.”

One of the greatest pleasure that comes with growing older is surveying the history of our lives. The joy of I told you so, the sorrow of I told you so...

Now. Cold wet winter night. Raw and wild. My heart is sad and sore.

Sometimes I stand in front of the bookshelf in the bookstore, and I sigh a sigh of relief at having dodged a bullet. A vast accumulation of books to be judged by covers, a wall of images and colours that captivate and scientifically seduce the eye, and thus the mind. Standing in the stink of the temple marketplace, amid this babble of books, I think of Plato's begging priests and soothsayers who go to rich men's doors and make them believe that they by means of sacrifices and incantations have accumulated a treasure of power from the gods that can expiate and cure with pleasurable festivals any misdeed of a man or his ancestors. And I listen as white-noise muttering gains intensity. Listening to, breathing in, becoming this cacophony of privileged voices and I tilt slightly my head, and half closing my eyes the words appear, certain words form themselves and a song bursts forth. An echo of the Iron Lady herself -- There is NO alternative. And in my reverie I overturn tables. And in my profanity I leave and drag myself through the negro streets looking for an angry fix. Cheap thrills! 48 pills!

This is a large part of the reason why I use poetry as my medium. Partly because I like the ephemeral nature of poetry, better than the novel, poetry allows one to easily diarise our daily struggles for sanity and clarity and my daily readings. Having a family and working, poetry allows me the freedom to create, without the full time effort novels or larger pieces demand. Poetry better than the novel allows one to make rapid changes of tone, mood and subject. And poetry better than non-fiction history allows one the freedom to see things as they could be, for the true is a gaol of what has actually happened. Poetry allows the flights of imagination required for political action. Poetry allows for the building of utopias. And most importantly, poetry, being the most despised and ridiculed of all literature these days keeps me at arms length of any thought of earning a living through art.

"I never mentioned a man but with the view
"Of selling my own works.
"The tip's a good one, as for literature
"It gives no man a sinecure.”

“And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
“And give up verse, my boy,
“There's nothing in it.”

So what is to be done? So much!

Not so much a manifesto or a prescription, rather a suggestion. Utopia. No more let us write of dystopia -- we live this daily. Our age demands utopias. Use as a model the sexually free, politically free, Zeus mocking and theoi humiliating cloud city of Pisthetaerus. Or the classless society of De Sade's Tomoe. This island kingdom, was not only sexually free, but promiscuity was mandated. In this imaginary land the king (who was more a figurehead than a ruler) would not allow himself to eat off gold plates while the children the makers eat black bread washed down with bitter tears. Or even the science fiction of Gene Roddenberry, author of the first interracial kiss on American television profaning a time beyond money and property where all needs are met as easily as plucking fruit from swollen trees.

Maybe some practical examples. In the gallery built by Hobart's very own Bruce Wayne, MONA, there is a certain poo machine which is loved and hated in equal measure. The Cloaca. It leaves me cold to be honest, I stand at look and understand, in my own erroneous manner. And I think, how great would this work of art be, if from one end it was fed babies (for it is when we are children that we are our most authentic) and out the other end it pooped chains. For is this not the fate of our children? To be digested and transformed into consumers of shit, to be everywhere enchained shitty gold bond citizens excreted by a reactionary kultur process that puts short term profit above all else.

Last year I went to see a play called Murder. This was a play about, unsurprisingly, murder using the music of Nick Cave. And I sat in the audience and I thought, why not a play called Poverty with maybe the music of (among others) the Gang of Four. This imaginary play could make people think and talk about poverty and the role it plays in our society, and how Capital needs poverty to survive.

How different would have been the arc of the life of Emma Bovary if she had read, really read, Justine (Good Behaviour Well Chastised). Careful reading would allow her to see the brutally honest morality of de Sade. A morality that would have allowed her to understand her betters as they are. Blood sucking vampyres who prey upon the souls of the weak and vulnerable. Who see war and famine as money making ventures. She would have learned to hate her oppressors, rather than idolising them and trying to worm her way into their society. For it is no coincidence that the greatest villains, the greatest murders and thieves are the wealthy and powerful in the novel. For this is as true of our age as it was in the time of the Sun King. Or as The Philosopher wrote “The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.” As the ideals of the ruling class are the ideals of the age, so we see much written and spoken to convince us that our real enemy is not the wealthy but rather those poorer and more unfortunate than ourselves.

I do not know, I may be right, I may be wrong. I do know, however, that I am write for myself.

The shitty shadow play

A friend whom I have never met, but only through the inernet, Ian Milliss wrote this article for the 250th anniversary issue of Art Monthly. Our digital dialogue has allowed me to develop respect and some sort of affection for his views and opinions. This article made me think about stuff, and I was at first going to reply with a witty internet sized one liner, but the more I thought the more words and ideas were vomited forth. So I guess you should read his article first, to get some context. Or not.

---

The shitty shadow play of a shitty world, so a pal of mine in Canberra called the art scene and the local artists. This is caused by the global fordism of art, as Ian so clearly points out. The idea that Disney will buy out the museyrooms is a dystopian fantasy that sadly can become true, if we do not keep on guard. (One only has to look over the history of the cinema, and the banal state of publishing in the Anglosphere, to see the danger will are facing.) Indeed David Walsh refers to MONA as a subversive adult Disneyland, and much as I admire and appreciate the gallery one has to ask the question, how subversive a can a Disneyland, adult or otherwise, become. Is the goal of art to titillate and 'shock' with walls of vaginas, and smears of poo? Or is the goal of art to, in simplistic terms, try to make us better people, to try to make us see the world though the eyes of pure childhood playfulness anew? We have only a tenuous grasp on life, and we should not settle on facile blandness.

The mass production of art combined with, not a lack of talent, but rather a lack of ideology. Indeed ideology seems to be a dirty word these days, but to me it is nothing more than an attempt to bring things together, and attempt to make sense of the contradictions of internal world versus external world. A gathering together of threads, going way way back to the PIE *weid- meaning to see.

Too many people, schooled as they are in the vapid world of witty one liners and the constant fear of any authentic activity take ideology to mean little more than impractical thinking about things. Not really understanding that there is more to life than the constant one sided pragmatic jumping from one crisis to the next with not understanding as to how all things are interconnected and come together. Art is seen as apart from politics, apart from our interpersonal relationships, apart from the choices we make as consumer. Of course like all things human ideology can become perverted, and can become a hindrance to thinking and activity, but this is why the critical activity must also be turned inward, one must constantly question oneself. So when new experiences, new ways of seeing arise they must be integrated into one's ideology.

We can see this negative understanding of ideology clearly in recent critiques of the green party, who are constantly assailed for having principles and a policy they are not willing to throw overboard at the first opportunity. This can be summed up with a quote from Michael Danby, the federal member for Melbourne Ports, reported in the cesspit of pretend pragmatism vexnews

'The Greens have discredited themselves with many inner-city voters I talk with every day by voting with the Liberals on asylum seekers. Frankly I’ve been struck by the magnitude of the criticism I hear of their self-indulgent and viciously ideological position on asylum seekers, that is costing lives.'

While I do not like to see the Greens on the side of the LNP, it is wrong and a misunderstanding to say the Green Party voted with the liberals. They voted as they saw fit, in a way that they felt was true to their positions and policies. On the other hand the liberals in a choreographed display of populist vengeance (who can forget the staged spectacle of Joe Hockey and his histrionic welling up at the idea of  sending unaccompanied children to Malaysia, while at the same time cynically supporting the idea of turning back boats) voted in a way that would bring maximum disruption to the government, regardless of any ideology the LNP may have.

But I digress, for it is late and I am tired and a bit tipsy.

Art should be part of this trying to make sense of the world, and while I do not disagree with the idea that the world is in many ways unknowable and in constant flux,  one has to also admit that the world is repeatable and in many ways can be known. This can be seen in the simple act of cooking dinner, I apply heat the water boils, I apply a knife to the carrot and it cuts, I add yeast to flour and the dough rises.

One day art in the future will dissolve, and this process is beginning,. This can be readily seen with our street art, as well as the space created by the internet. When this day comes art will be simply a part of everyday life, and there will no longer be a need for the priestly caste of critics to mediate and tell us what is pure and what is impure. Conversation will become inclusive. The conversation will no longer be the purposeful obfuscation using silver dollar words. The conversation will no longer spew forth from one sided two faced confusers with a weak grasp of the ideas of thinkers such as Derrida. The weakness and shallowness of these types of posers support their ideas with a firm grasp on the language and tropes of the arts bureaucracy and ways to job the system. Everyone will be an artist precisely because there will be no artists in a festive echo of Lenin's idea that one day the lowest clerk will be able to run the affairs of the state. Art and humanity will be free and human activity will be seen for what it can be, a type of play, a thing of joy, and not a hammer with which to batter the other in vain attempts to gain control and dominance. Art will be enjoyed for it's 'spiritual value', not it's exchange value. Art will become integrated into life, and indeed ones life itself will become art. To me this should be the aspiration of all artists. 

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

Gallifrey Falls!

Dantesque Hades

---

An amusing Dantesque view of Hades, from the reactionary and
maculate Aristophanes. This piece is from The Frogs. Here Herakles is
describing what he saw in Hades, the suffering of those who have
violated the law. The reference to Morsimus being a fellow poet and an 'insipid'
playwright that Aristophanes did not have much respect for,
describing him with a flurry of insults in another play (Peace, if I
remember correctly) as having arm pits that stank like a he-goat.

I think the moral here is do not beat your parents and treat fairly your
rentboys.

Then comes the Earth moist
With much filth everflowing.
In this sewer they lie down.

Anyone
Who abused guests,
Or those who were
Roused by tender boys
And filched the small
Coin payment,
Or those who beat their Mothers,
Or smashed their Father's jaw,
Or swore falsely the river Styx,
Or those who copied out
A speech by Morsimus.

---

image from http://imoralist.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/self-censorship-from-warhol-to-kylix-to.htmlhttp://kylieeastley.blogspot.com.au/

So Many Particulars

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One part Lucian, one part Brecht, three parts Arrian. And as Oscar would say 'all garbage all the time.' However it tickled my fancy, so read it or ignore it as you wish, I have already moved on.

---

Euoi, Euoi, Saboi!
The ecstatic raging followers
Of the loud roaring, ivy wreathed
God chanted and danced, and the songs
Reverberated the forest glens
And quiet coverts of the wide flooding
High banked river Indus. Icy cold
Waters tumbled from glaciered vast
High mountains. Closer to the world
Encircling river than the laughing
Shouting drunken god the myriad
Companions did march. Strong Herakles
Cursed and kicked the barren ground before
The most steadfast Sogdian rock.
Macedonian soldiers grew wings,
Flew up the cliff face in the murky night,
And so conquered what stymied Herakles.

Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The conquering god-king Alexander.
Not the wide fast flowing rivers,
Not the lazy streams flowing to marshes,
Not the dizzying gorges, not the cloud
Gathering mountains, not the howling
Jangling deserts, not the walls of island
Proud Tyre, not the mysteries of sand
Blown trees of the oasis of Siwa,
Not the massed cedar built long boats
Of purple clad Phoenicia,
Not the fire worshiping magi,
Not the mud built bitumen mortared
Walls of Babylon, of Susa,
Of Persepolis, not the seven walled
City of stars Ekbatana, not the
Rabbis of Jerusalem, not the Gates
Of Persia, not the battle fleeing
King of Kings, not the tattooed
Boulder hurling liberty loving tribes,
Not the craggy walls of ancient Thebes
Where only darling Pindar's house remained,
Not the foot stamping naked Buddhists.
Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The god-king Achilles reborn.

Naught but the sorrow of the hosts, the ones
That marched and fought and explored and said
Finally this far and no further,
For we are tired and our dear ones
We miss, our wives, our children, our aged
Fathers and mothers. For we have been
From home for as long as Menelaus
Before the walls of windy Illius.
This far we go and no further.

Only thus was Alexander stopped.

Postponer of old age

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Hymn 10: To Aphrodite

I will sing Cyprus-born Cytherea.
She gives to mortals tender gifts.

Upon her lovely face, ever smiling,
The mischievous bloom of beauty.

Hail Goddess of sweet-tiled Salamis,
Ruler over sea girt Cyprus!

Grant me charming melodies.

Your song sung, I shall
Recall still others.

---

From Canto One by Ezra Pound
In the Cretan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, oricalchi, with golden
Girdle and breat bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:

Aphrodite the foam born goddess, rising from the severed, flung away
genitals of the God Ouranos. She arose from the ocean Chaos, and
danced across the foamy salt sea waves, grasses and flowers grow where she steps. Born fully fledged, she never had a childhood. The cuttlefish and the sea urchin are sacred to her, for even down to our so called enlightened times many of us still think of seafood as an aphrodisiac. Myrtle, roses, poppies, doves and swans are also sacred to her.

She has many names and functions, many more than the concise, accepted
into polite company versions of her myth are able to encompass. Some
of her names include; The Eldest of the Fates, The Black One,
Man-slayer, and Aphrodite of the Tombs.

In Sparta she is Aphrodite Ambologera, the postponer of old-age. Also
we see Aphrodite Morpho, the well-formed, here she is in fetters and
wearing a veil, a vain attempt, an altogether simple-minded plan to control the goddess. Another temple is Areias, meaning warlike, or devoted to Ares. Sexual passion and the blood-lust of battle both being seen as impetuous, as action without thought. Unlike Athena, the Goddess of Strategy in War. In commercial Corinth, as well as militaristic Sparta, she is seen as a defender of the city, as a warlike Goddess.

Like all the ancient gods the tales of Aphrodite a mass of contradictory stories and attributes. She is ready for battle, she is beautiful, she is cruel and she is sentimental. Like all things she is a mixture, and when the stew is no longer stirred, it will separate, and separation means death. Copper eyed Aphrodite, the laughter loving goddess with quick glancing eyes, riding on a swan across the sky.

the pic comes from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aphrodite_swan_BM_D2.jpg

Roses

It is sometimes hard to write with a family and job and et cetera - so this took about a week to write and in the end i just the said the hell with it and called it quits. Poss is TS Eliot, as in 'old possums book of idiotic cats'.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The Hollow Men





yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper,
...
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.
Canto 74

The photo is from the cascades female factory

---

The roses are slow to rouse themselves
Tight buds build slowly to blossom
As the afternoon light creeps off
To bed later and later each day.

This is poss, how it ends, not a bang
Nor a whimper. The cracking sound
Of ice, the crackling rain forest
Fire, a sudden belch of methane.

The echoing murmur of the wealthy
Perverting discourse of lies and doubt.
This is how it ends, fearful
Unable faceless desires

Not a bang not a whimper not swaying
From the lamp posts. Spasmodic crisis
Looping collapse makes bird song still,
Ends the soft mouse rustling grass.

Forest Of Error

wrote this a while ago, at least two years ago. for a project which was alas absconded. so out of a perverse sense of fun i 'ave maria druggt it outta those jaws of dem serial mice, and 'ave plug plonkt it down here for all to enjoy

---

Halfway through this the journey of our century
I found I was estranged my way
Hard against a misty wood glum
I stumbled slumbering

Not with God
Or angels or daemons or 
Satan or magick or Buddha
Or Yoga or Zimmermann

    The wind sang to me...
    With Avarice has
        No one a painted
        Paradise

Not for their eye nor heart
Nor mind nor soul

    CONTRA NATURA

Corpses alone
Are brought to banquet
With Avarice

And all along the wide 
Fine road is now over 
Grown darling buds 

Vampirism
Chewers of Flesh
Gnawers of Bone
Dispensers of Life & Death

They mock and flog
    The OTHER

And i am all alone in
This spreading oscura
Alone this wide cold
Universe of nothing
But nothing - endless
Cycles of Nothing

Houses of whores
    Of pink brick 
    Golf course roos false
    Collanades & meat four
    Times a day (or more!)

Out with piggy wives
Clutching forks and knifes
To eat their bacon

    And 51% of people
    Surveyed are not wiling
    To pay any more than 
    A tenner a month

Never gets any better than this
This is as good as it gets

Ratcuntprickdog
Costellohowardr
Uddbushblairpu
Tinpalin

And they wonder why
The young have no 
Respect

Wars and rumors of wars
Matthew 24:6
And the blood up lust 
Of the non combatant


    And i am alone
    This spreading wood
    Of mine olde 
    Glum gloom

        And the wood dissolves
        And i stand at the gate
        Of a great city

At this great city
Stinking already of
    Greed and Death.