Drifters Cafe & Caritas Poetry Event

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Sharp windy, slow setting night walking.

Saturday last, I went out into the city, to the Drifters Internet
Cafe. Nestled off the side street down stairs the market dock
Salamanca shade of Wellington side of town. A relaxed venue for
listening to a poet. Poetry for Pakistan, a fund raiser for the
Caritas Pakistan Flood Appeal. A series of readings had been organised
for the appeal, but this was the only one I could attend. I was lucky
to be able to make it to this reading. More formless than planned out
this document is my attempt to understand what I learnt about the
event.

Ghosts of the Galapagos; the poetry of flight. A series of new lyrics
by Paul Healy. Fog lifting revealing panta, revealing all things, the
picton bridge, the blue heron. I arrived late, mid poem, and began to
quiet sit and poured myself a glass of water. And set myself to
listen. And ordered a cup of chai, frothy in the modern style with a
shake of cinnamon on top. High vaulted and perfumed poetry.

A simple quiet venue, with a small attentive crowd. I was at once
swept up with the flow of the poets words, his skill at 'making', his
simple and confident reading style. As advertised the poetry was a
series of lyrics around the theme of flight, about bird flight. This
ordinary, everyday idea separated itself and allowed multicoloured
ideas to flourish.

I was, with the poem about the lame gull who was able to gain the
choicest food, struck with the scientific cold harded factual manner,
in that compassion may not be the best reaction in many a natural
relationship. The human desire to place our values, and with good
intentions to intervene is not always the best course of action.

Songs of loss and desolation, of joy and astonishment. A dialogue of
nature and a lesson in what is being done in our state. A tale of
chemical warfare in the forests and Tasmanian devil facial tumours in a
poem called simply '1080'.

Everywhere images of the wonder and of the erotic generative spirit of
nature. Will to Power, nature struggling to create and manifest across
many forms. From the rushing diving collared sparrow hawk making a
kill, to the blue heron still on blue rock shading the water to tempt
the little fish, to the unlikely pigeon in some plot of dead land
neither bush nor city highlighted in a ray of setting sunlight, to
clinking currawongs in the Styx Valley sounding like far off church
bells, the images of flight blended with a scientific understanding of
the environment, and created a strong series of lyrics.

The poet confessed his surprise at some poems which seemed to come all
at once, as if formed from the ether. This is of course the result of
study, and practising technique. Leave the reader hanging, the poet
offered as advice, using his own work for examples. Add a strong grasp
of the English tradition, and a love of the classic forms of
poetry. The comparison thoughts that sprang to my mind while words
described the spine tailed swift flying 5000 feet in the sky and
'rides the summer thunder wall', of course was Hopkins, followed by
the ol' Will-of-Wisp Yeats. Scrambled into the forgotten linkages of
the Heraclitian Gyre.

A poem about the Pied Butcher Bird described the harmony of white and
black and gray camouflage colouring, there is a unity in
diversity. Pied Beauty and a similar eye for natural detail as
Hopkins, and while I can not agree with the poet's program of reviving
the classical forms of English poetry, I will agree that the study of
poetry is worthwhile as an end in itself. A rigorous understanding
and appreciation of the various forms of poetry, allow vast fields of
poetic imagination and inspiration to spring to life. Ripe fruit for
the poet to feast upon. Even for the experimental poets it must be
accepted that 'no verse is free', and for all poets that creation is
social creation.

So while there was a strong spiritual element that I could not agree
with, I am only too happy to quote Lenin, “Intelligent idealism is
nearer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism." and
leave the subject closed.

Listening to the ABC local radio in the morning, I was at once struck
with the passion and pleased to hear the poet speak of the importance
of supporting young poets, and the need to create a space for young
poets. This is to me very important and if I can add a slogan to the
argument, it would be 'More mentors, Fewer English Teachers.' While I
readily accept that poetry comes in many shapes and sizes, and is
indeed a raw creative purgation involving language, practised by a
wide and diverse section of society, I do find it amusing to hear
academics discuss other academics as having a 'demotic voice.' Allow
me to step off my soap hobby horse box, and commend Paul Healy as a
poet, and even more importantly as a mentor.

In Change Repose

I have been busy and neglectful, and I have not added any poems or what not. As I have not been writing anything of any intent lately, my hand has been forced and I have dug up some younger and older poems. This one is some sort of a love poem, and with echos of the dark philosopher. As the sun never ending explodes and consumes - expanding endless fire and then contracting the crushing gravitation, as the sun even so is our loves.

I think this was written sometime in the mid nineties.

Nothing is true of this poem any more, all the persons real or imagined are now dead, past along; fit only as a feast for the birds and dogs.

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Single Step

There is...
    Upon a flat seascape. A plot of sport, of salt
This is where the ship went down
Twisted metal. Flouncing oil.
The very real fears
Of the wounded.

And I am reminded of your smile
Restrained
Your laughing neck. 
A mocking toss of the head.

And what we call love.
Bound
Discreet
    We Overlap.

At times I collapse within you.
At times I recoil.

Place and Experience

Last Wednesday went off to the Lark Distillery to hear some writers addressing the theme of place & experience. (Experience being the name we call our past mistakes.)

Whipping windy rain and whipping wind I potted down the hill from North Hobart to the coitus centre shore line. Having a few intrudes to slaughter I wandered around the docks and parking lots and slipping away alley ways. Thinking of Dr Swift and the rain shower over the city of Stella and their pet sweet sick letters, I wondered about the city centre and more and more killed time, feeding my door mouse air plane head.

Went up to old Jam Factory where once upon a time over one thousand people worked. All that is over now. The needs of rationality destroying the local and the particular. The docks once busy with whores and sealers and whalers and sailors and drunken colonial triad sons thriving and molesting the colony.

The walking tide slapped and swirled around pulsing the estate of marine cold timey milky making critters. The wind whipped nano-shards of slushy ice all around and I was only to happy to get to the wagram unwobbling pivot warmth of the dark wooded lark.

The University of Tasmania had run a poetry contest themed place and experience and the winners were to be announced. Four poems were read; three from out of state - so proxy's spoke instead. Jillian Pattinson won the prize with her poem The Still Point. The title of this poem inspired by Eliot.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.

Stillness and a search for answers for something that shall remain, I could see why the judges awarded this poem the first prize.

A found poem based on diving instructions which was amusing at first and then to my tastes rolled down into not so amusing territory. I did not take notes so I can not remember perfectly, but one poem, as introduced by the reader, used white space to denote pauses and so add musicality. The poem was well written, but in the end no more than a catalogue of the images the poet saw while walking in the bush.

So after a bit of minor disappointment, I was thrilled to hear Robyn Mundy and Danielle Wood read.

Robyn Mundy read of her experinces in the Southern Polar Regions. The excerpts from her novel 'The Nature of Ice' were beautiful and terrible at the same time. The blue ice of the Antarctic, the raw bleeding feet of Douglas Mawson. I was inspired to investigate more the ability of beauty to exist in the most terrible of places and times.

Danielle Wood then read from 'The Shack' a charming bit of work investigating themes around development and change in a small Tasmanian sea side town. By coincidence I had just visited Opossum Bay recently and my partner had remarked how it looked like there used to be a bunch of holiday shacks and now it was cheek by jowl with Mc Mansions. How could I not enjoy this reading which spoke of the very thing!!

And then I won raffle! A bottle of gin, which was nice as it was my birthday! All in all a enjoyable night.

Reticulum

Into the Heraclitian fyre. Reading a book on microbiology, specifically about the structures within cells. It seems the endoplasmic reticulum has taken on more roles than when I was in high school; well it is good to see talent rewarded. Reticulum is defined as from a latin word for network, more poking about gave other meanings and uses of the word reticulum, including the stomach of a cow, a constellation, even a snood. So I jammed all these fragments into a notebook poem. Entered it into a contest and did not even rate a mention. So here it is...

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Upon false bridge, above the bloody sand
Trident fisherman taunts and turns vaunting twists
While sea monster fish men fight clumsy.
Thrown, the weighted net expands and flies
Across the distance, bringing victory
And defeat. The one event contrasting.

I take the dog for a run in the dawn
Twilight early morning and the red sky
Burns and glows the bodies of sinners
Stoking the deadly judgement fires
Beyond the obsidian smooth lagoon.

Shallow filled of the retreating ice,
More ten thousand isolating years ago.
On the shallow ridge line to the south,
Red lights blink automatic guiding planes.
Surrounded always a thin spiders web
Network of roads and highways of commerce.

The brush again and over again rolls
Thin net long hair covered for service.
The tides roll daily back and forth gentle.
Hungry and exhausted flights of sea birds
Rest rare salt marsh fringed glasswort and pig face
Winged far Siberia. Calling in the night
Feeble and tired and the tiny sea star
Ejecting live surprising birth only three
The entire world and across the waters
Low and flat toxic algal bloom lagoon
Ignoble west flank black line barrack causeway
Blinking away dreamy sleep lights Sorrel.

Low in the south west sky the rhombus
Thin hair cross hairs of an eyepiece.
Cattle low and wander the green pasture
Eating and fourfold digesting unknown
Cattle thoughts as myriad folds catalyse
Blind countless transactions and combinations.
Endless the surface. Wide transformations
Are performed and the suns energy released.

Waking the first light frost of morning
I arrange the kindling and split logs,
And touching a match bring warming fire.
On the pitted surface the suns energy
Forges frothy warmth and cosy home house life.

Driving visit historic Richmond gaol
And the rooms of punishment that brought
Civilization the land without the fall
And the wrist binding tripod cat o' nine tails
Extended the love of Christ and the shorn
Hair of the women fleeing rape and the coffin
Sized black rooms of silent aloneness.
The children are too fearful to enter,
After almost two hundred years of silence.

200 Decades of Poetry

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Recently I went to a seminar organised by the tasmanian writers
centre, 2000 Years of Western Poetry, given by Christpher Wallace-Crabbe. a few days later i went to a poetry reading at The Lark Distillery. 2000 years from Homer to Beowulf all the way to Les Murray, as dizzy as a ride in the tardis. Seamus Deane described Finnegans Wake as 'a transcription into a miniaturized form the whole western literary tradition.' With this permission i conflated these events and threw in some personal stuff into one (hopefully) rhythmic layer cake piece, not so much a review or critique as an impressionistic or maybe expressionistic diary note.

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Prospect of princess parry and den mark it well while southern
whales wild in wide oak leaf shadowed river valleys give sea salt
birth and eye hugger-mugger torque haysi cosmic fantayzee jive time
hobby hobble horse down wide fit for governor boot blacking venereal
log truck careening one up one down roads to marengo darkened stolid
timber beamed low head bending hougoumont dripping blood dropsy hell
o' beans joint old fashioned counter turn and her long blue thin cold
in the night wooly ursula taperings.

 And it was spelt old fashioned - but pronounced abomination.

    Plink pop now the tide is turning and the light is failing and the
hosts of invading star fish are hidden from view divertimento river
knowing the matzo flat salt marsh islands of north west bay will
slip slide away under the lapping wave waters and the hurly burly of
pellmell havoc and arriving on end of lines reef fish into the oak of
oath value of no more tears and then thick rich aromatic tieing shoes
inventory of pockets and history of pens and pencils and lint and
little balls wadded of paper more now than at any time and an old
woman walked up the tome staircase and a young family huddled and
conspired and smoked the giant chess board fountain square never made
it to the nor'west passage never at all tried but was too old and the
snow and sleet ice blizzard were too numerous many to be over came.

    Whippington of all whipping wind end of winter winds tumult the
streets and i look down the park done the stairs dun the street to the
low heavy arcola door and the invite of grain based drip droppings
after the sundry all dawn intensive at the trumpet blowing bugle song
slow and of dead comrades legacy history of fangled metric readings
(to break the pentameter, that was the first heave) of visions
transferred to ten many add the rise of capital itself and the rise of
the city and the poet could be that one that wanders around to explode
the city in a constant new appraisal of constant new engagements.

    And the satyrs and the sibyls all siren faulty attempts at candour
and of the cloud burst over above around the city streets busy with
the pleasing hum of 'em of gossipy gossiping old Irish washerwomen one
each side the river and gossiping and wagging overt the fading of hue
of light and the rising of the bats two thousand aeons of poetry and
rushing and wild riding past the makaris and buoys and gulls and
outhouses that glide us on our ways names rattle and hum and a helter
skelter treasure hunt of voices all at tumult once clam bakerings and
clamouring for attenzione multitudes within hoboken leaves of grays
hobart both without space and across tim tam time tinny more as a way
things be done than as a tink inna itself.

    Poor potsherds of poetry grand sweeping and the rise and break
down of the universal synthesis distilled into a few short paragraphs
like archaeologists digging and calm breaking in and out of diggings
to phyre inspiration and research to imagined readings for if the
first duty of the singer is to sing the urevent is to listen.

    Cups and nut blank note books of chai verde and penciled middlings
and scrapings and lite sandy bay which ways with fruit and various in
a rend about way the sundry attempts at legumes and all the things
that could be wanted - food drink and made comfortable.

    Mea cuppa daze latter atom upsy duke of work neither up nor down yon
hill wise way and the plank and the frog and toad and the one that
goes dawn with the growing drawn of the sun and the old bone budding
grove jena wise grain groan graven impalage holds all of our absolute
rattle tattle freedom and absolut freedom and terra hazy daisy i
enter and drink and raffle and sit myself down.

    Many times with two poets reading it becomes like a contest a two
house raze and peepee come up to me and they expectation plead wonder
ask how 'twas it? how 'twere it? lah lah eh and i chaw out me pierce
and that be that. 

    And then (sum say) - so if you speak highly of poet A- ergo all
that twerp nite means you did not like B-.

    Disb NOT the case.

    Simple minds nourished on the lies that piss for culture in this
our age can only see competition and dichotomy and difference and all
your san franciscos will fall into this error but we should understand
that one thing does not negate the udder.

    Sarah Day generated a charming solid suspension with her poems a
feeling was generated while she was reading of time moving slow of
folding vast distances and ages even across language failures simple
and with an eye for the imagist detail light and luminous.

    Christopher Wallace-Crabbe spoke second and spoke well clear and
with the light touch with a seurte as one would hope to hear from a
poet who has published over twenty volumes of poetry in a career
running since 1959.

    Both poets wended their way across border lands of the particular
and to use this as a jumping forward base for wider explorations all
the poetic fames including love & death and the endless cycle of
rebirth and transmission across time and space generations both poets
spoke to and from a deep educating understanding of traditions of the
storms of yestertempest of the leaves that wither weather the
superstitions of birds that migrate the changing seasons.

    Tight control of language of the words and the why and wherefores
simply used and with no flamboyance political without militant fist
clenched marching. Questioning and slicing doubt and no overturning.
Compassionate.

    And after all this afternoons of wild squalling spittles and of
sugar dusty mountains and afternoons of rainbows and child delight and
sally forth to sea froth tidal salt shallow splashing as spray the
causeway.

    -- and so ends my catechism.

Fish That Fly

An old poem - a response to the idea of the of Intelligent Design. there are atoms and and the void. the world is matter in motion.

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& sum creatures
Look about the world
One thousand loveless eyes
& sum creatures
Without effort
Effortlessly
Turn shit to soil.
And some creatures
Grow larger fabled
Unforgiving elephant.
Rain forest of love.
Fish that fly birds that swim
Ours a remote world is.

& she spoke her building hands
Spreading across the table
Each of us we age we grow

And the infant desires to nurse
And the infant desires love...
Love a rain storm of love
Now clear clear jet clear
Night is upon us.

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

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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.