The Best American Poetry

"Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O'Hara" by Jennifer Maiden [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

“Chatty abstraction” is how Eileen Myles described the defining quality of New York School poetry in an essay in the Fall 2003 issue of Mississippi Review. “John Ashbery heard John Cage's randomness of composition and was a fan of abstract expressionist painting and John Ashbery decided that we could do that in literature, too," Myles writes. "Abstraction. Let the sentences stop and start like one's attention. In Frank O’Hara’s poetry the abstraction took a vivid human form.”

Jennifer Maiden’s “Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O’Hara” moves seamlessly in and out of a number of conversations, which give the poem an architecture through which Maiden’s flow of speculation (on the nature of poets and poetry, the stubborn anxieties of influence, aging and more) can run. There are brief chats between the speaker and her contemporaries, Johns Frobes and Tranter, dialogue with a reviewer, her daughter, and, as the diary form encourages, with herself. These ”real” or “historical” conversations lead into, and set the stage for, the longer, imagined exchange with Frank O’Hara “on a gritty tenement balcony / on a star-chilled American evening / with drinks in our numb hands speculating / why poetry is so much about denying / what one is not.” It is this "chatty abstraction" which allows the poem to be so open to conjecture and so free to espouse.

 

Jennifer Maiden has published 28 collections of poetry and has won many awards including the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Age Poetry Book of the Year (twice), the overall Age Book of the Year, the Kenneth Slessor Award (three times), and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. She has been described by Gig Ryan as “one of the most striking voices to emerge from a generation that included John Forbes, Martin Johnston, Robert Adamson and Michael Dransfield.”

Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O'Hara

Years ago when John Forbes praised
my later work, he said my Problem
of Evil was influenced by Tranter’s
Red Movie, and being younger and furiouser,
I rang Forbes and explained P. of E.
was actually written first. The paper
printed an apology but wicked Forbes
started at once to speculate that Tranter
had based Red Movie on P. of E., a claim
of which I thought I’d better warn Tranter,
     who laughed:
‘Anxieties of Influence’, and that phrase
came back to me recently when a reviewer
said I’d learned a lot from Frank O’Hara.
I explained to my daughter I’d never
read O’Hara and she, the Fire Tiger,
defended me on those grounds, so the reviewer
professed shock that I had never read O’Hara.
I wondered: am I shocked myself
really that I’ve never read O’Hara? I do
not miss O’Hara, but I said I would
write a poem called Frank and I about us.
The imaginary O’Hara would confess
of course that he has not read me either,
despite which we would feel quite at home.
I see us relaxed on a gritty tenement balcony
on a star-chilled American evening
with drinks in our numb hands speculating
why poetry is so much about denying
what one is not, and why anxiety
about influence is stubbornly so scary.
‘I’ve heard you use long lines’, I
would say, and explain, ‘The longer
lines in my last book were two typos I
just missed and not an urge to run
some novel verbal marathon.’ He might
reply, ‘My long lines were a try
at showing poetry is still not prose, however
long the line and to avoid the slashes
which Olsen thought pauses for breath.’
I nod, ‘I’ve used slashes, too, but not
for that, just to intensify
and quicken the pace.’ We would
be getting on quite well by then. ‘Someday,’
I’d say, ‘I would like to read you, but
of course now there is my current worry
that influence might be retrospective,
and that I’ll recognise your hand
in everything I’ve written, anyway.’ He’d say,
‘I don’t think it’s likely – aren’t
you more into the lyrical? You look
sort of more lyrical but that
might be the light.’ I would wonder: have I
aged back to O’Hara’s age? He died
before he turned forty and maybe
one ages to the time and company.
Or maybe there are such lost creatures
as poets and each meeting each at first
in any place is nervous and newborn,
under erudite, angry cover. My daughter
thought the critic was doing the haka. I
might have done the haka with O’Hara
had I read him, but in the ever
new American night I would rather we
still sat there still, regaining self-
sense outside the great archives of torture.

                First published in Australian Book Review

Happy Birthday Ern Malley! [With an introduction by Thomas Moody taken from David Lehman]

Yesterday marked the 105th birthday of Ern Malley, who remains one of Australia’s most internationally renowned poets and our greatest ever literary hoax. After I disclosed that I'm Australian in our first ever email exchange, David immediately wanted to know where I stood on the whole Malley affair. While the hoax overall has legions of fans, many people feel that the poems themselves cannot possibly possess any quality due to the nature of their genesis. In his review of The Complete Poems of Ern Malley published in Jacket in 2002, David offers a comprehensive introduction to Ern’s formative years and a lucid and insightful commentary on his poetry, arguing that Ern’s oeuvre has merit beyond the hoax, no matter the dubious motivations behind the poems’ creation. You can read David’s review here. Happy birthday Ern!

The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax by David Lehman

"THE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry."

 

 

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weeps gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.

"Fe" by Sarah Day [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Sarah Day is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Tempo (2013) shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, The Ship (2004) winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Queensland Premier’s Award for Poetry and joint winner of the Judith Wright Prize ACT National Poetry Awards, and most recently Slack Tide (2022). A former editor of Island Magazine, Day was born in England and grew up in Hobart, Tasmania. Her poems often engage with the natural world and the ways in which domestic experience connects to history and society at large. Day’s poems are also noteworthy for their formal skill and musicality.

 

“Fe” from 2018's Towards Light is a quiet sonnet with a subtle rhyme scheme and a clever turn: magnetic north, with its subterranean loops and seemingly planchette-like randomness, should confuse, “but fails." Instead, the pole's diurnal shift "quietly adjusts our compasses, our hearts” to align us with the movements of the natural world.

 

Fe

Magnetic north is always on the move,

looping its slow deep subterranean loops

around true north which it eludes

like an errant partner in an Arctic dance. Whoops –

gliding now at forty k per year from Canada

towards Siberia like a planchette on a Ouija –

anyone would think these shifts might derange

a home-bound salmon and rearrange

the map for pigeon, turtle, snow goose

or the coded alphabet inside the honey bee

dance; it all seems set to confuse

but fails. Blood hears more than its own euphony

as the sliding behemoth in fits and starts

quietly adjusts our compasses, our hearts.

 

 

 

John Forbes (Part 2) [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

When John Forbes died of a heart attack in January of 1998 while sitting around his kitchen table talking with friends, he left a relatively small body of work with an extraordinarily high strike rate. Forbes was well known for his critical acuity, and his trained eye did not suffer mediocrity, in his own work or the work of others (his friends included). As Laurie Duggan remembers, “John wouldn’t pretend (or allow you to) that anything could be gotten away with. He was his own harshest critic, and he may well have been the conscience of modern Australian poetry.”

 

Here are three of Forbes’ better known poems. Television features prominently in each of them. Forbes seems drawn to television for its democratic appeal and pervasive influence on the culture in which he was writing, with its ability, both as object and medium, to reflect back insights into our social, political and spiritual condition. The opening injunction of “TV” to dispense with an account of the program being watched in favor of a description of the actual television set itself, suggests that how we watch, the social and economic settings in which we encounter events, provides an architecture for experience which is just as consequential (and revelatory) as what we watch. 

 

TV

dont bother telling me about the programs
describe what your set is like the casing the
curved screen its strip of white stillness like
beach sand at pools where the animals come
down to drink and a native hunter hides his
muscles, poised with a fire sharpened spear
until the sudden whirr of an anthropologist’s
hidden camera sends gazelles leaping off in
their delicate slow motion caught on film
despite the impulsive killing of unlucky Doctor
Mathews whose body was found three months later
the film and the camera intact save for a faint,
green mould on its hand-made leather casing

“Love Poem” is a paradigm of concision. In ten short-lined couplets, Forbes is able to consider themes as hefty and varied as love, war (as entertainment, distraction and consolation), his own poetry (“whose letter / lets me know my poems show / how unhappy I can be”), and the power television wields over both the political and the personal. With its terrifying beauty, the televised bombing of Baghdad, which announced the commencement of the First Gulf War and was the first ever live coverage of war, comforts the speaker in the absence of his beloved. The poem makes the seemingly incongruous action of curling up with images of the war, as if they were a romantic comedy, eerily (and comically) apposite.The poem continues to play with this absurdity, switching between a clear knowledge and appreciation of military hardware and a forlorn romanticism: “Our precision guided weapons / make the horizon flash & glow / but nothing I can do makes you / want me.” The bombing is seen by Forbes as “what the west does best”, an advertisement of technological advancement and awe inspiring power—a detached brutality masked as a moral imperative. The closing couplets, in which Forbes considers that the whole performance has been put on for his benefit, speak to the deceptive force of television itself, which brings the war not just into our homes but our beds, making what was once distant and remote intimate and personal. The live images, however, far from increasing the “realness” of the event for the viewer, only further abstract it; paradoxically, the closer we come to the image, the further away we are from appreciating its reality for those who are truly experiencing it.

 

Love Poem

 

Spent tracer flecks Baghdad’s
bright video game sky

as I curl up with the war
in lieu of you, whose letter

lets me know my poems show
how unhappy I can be. Perhaps.

But what they don’t show, until
now, is how at ease I can be

with military technology: e.g.
matching their feu d’espritI classify

the sounds of the Iraqi AA—the
thump of the 85 mil, the throaty

chatter of the quad ZSU 23.
Our precision guided weapons

make the horizon flash & glow
but nothing I can do makes you

want me. Instead I watch the west
do what the west does best

& know, obscurely, as I go to bed
all this is being staged for me.

“Speed, a Pastoral” is among Forbes’ very best poems. From the opening line there is an irresistible descending propulsion that is mimetic of the poem’s concerns, the inevitable spiral downwards after a night of getting high: “your feelings / follow your career down the drain / & find they like it there”. Forbes himself struggled with addiction to alcohol and a codeine-based cough syrup. The poem opens with a ironic celebration of this intemperance, the strange combination of exquisite insight and unreasonable fallacy that one can experience when a certain level of delirium is reached. Towards its end, however, the poem shifts into a moving elegy for the Sydney born poet Michael Dransfield, a contemporary of Forbes (although the two never met) who died in 1973 at the age of 25, and in whose poetry drugs were a recurring subject. 

 

Speed, a Pastoral

 

it’s fun to take speed
& stay up all night
not writing those reams of poetry
just thinking about is bad for you
                                      —instead your feelings
follow your career down the drain
& find they like it there
among an anthology of fine ideas, bound together
by a chemical in your blood
that lets you stare the TV in its vacant face
& cheer, consuming yourself like a mortgage
& when Keats comes to dine, or Flaubert,
you can answer their purities
with your own less negative ones—for example
you know Dransfield’s line, that once you become a junkie
you’ll never want to be anything else?
                        well, I think he died too soon,
as if he thought drugs were an old-fashioned teacher
& he was the teacher’s pet, who just put up his hand
                                     & said quietly, ‘Sir, sir’
                       & heroin let him leave the room.

 

 

John Forbes (Part 1) [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the death of John Forbes at age 47. Ironic, understated, comic and deceptively erudite, Forbes’ poetry represented for many Australian poets, as Ken Bolton writes, “a high-water mark against which to judge their own work.” A keen student of art history, philosophy, military history, and cultural theory, Forbes in his poetry married his intellectual fascinations to suburban Australian landscapes and 20th century ephemera in a conversational tone and colloquial voice that owed much to his early love of the New York School, in particular John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, on who he wrote his honors thesis and a completed (but never submitted) masters thesis respectively. 

 

A precocious talent, Forbes won a major literary prize at the age of 22 with his poem “Four Heads & how to do them.” The poem borrows for its starting point a Renaissance treatise on how to paint a “Classical Head” and proceeds to riff on the form, so that the Symbolist Head “No longer begins with even a mention of anatomy, / the approach in fact leaves one with the whole glittering / universe from which only the head has been removed.” The poem launched Forbes’ career and became an anthology staple. His second collection, Stunned Mullet, was funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority for the purpose of celebrating Australia’s bicentenary in 1988. It presented Forbes with the opportunity to take on the mantle of a "Public" Australian poet. He was, however, far too suspicious of authority for any such pretensions, and in the book’s central poem “On the Beach” the poet goes from answering the call of his vocation to seeing:

 

“Milled day-glo ephemera

sell you this image of Australia

& where it appears, flogged and true-blue,

your vocation looks

more like a blurred tattoo

or something you did for a bet

              & now regret, like a man

walking the length of the bar on his hands

balancing a drink on his shoe”

 

Yet it is precisely this cynicism and self-effacement which make him a fundamentally "Australian" poet, and validates the argument for his having been a national poet of a kind. Forbes’ persistent skepticism of those things which can at times make great claims for themselves, including those things which interested him most: politics, art, philosophy, poetry, is inherently, if not uniquely, Australian, and gives his poetry an ironic mode which recalls Robert Hughes' diagnosis of Australia's national character in which the country's convict past has made its people at once conformist and cynical of authority. Eschewing academia, Forbes made his living working menial jobs, including a long-ish stint as a furniture removalist, and the meagre art grants offered to poets in the 1970s and 80s. Forbes' view of the role of the poet in late 20th century Australia was perhaps best explained by his speaking grape in "Monkey's Pride", which Forbes viewed as a kind of manifesto: "Because society has elected me / to decorate / its falling / apart with a useless panache." In one of his later poems, "Anzac Day", Forbes opens with a favorable and sentimentalizing comparison of the Australian character against a list of foreign nations' military conscripts (England, France, Turkey, Germany), until the poem takes a muted but sharp turn towards its end to the current state of the nation, resulting not in patriotic pride but rather quiet disappointment:

 

Not so the Australians, unamused, unimpressed
they went over the top like men clocking on,

in this first full-scale industrial war.
Which is why Anzac Day continues to move us,

& grow, despite attempts to make it
a media event (left to them we’d attend

‘The Foxtel Dawn Service’). But The March is
proof we got at least one thing right, informal,

straggling & more cheerful than not, it’s
like a huge works or 8 Hour Day picnic—

if we still had works, or unions, that is. 

 

 

“On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra'' was published in Forbes’ posthumous collection Damaged Glamour, which features the poem's namesake painting, a glittering triumph of style over substance, on its cover. Forbes uses this perceived lack of substance as the substance for his poem: the extravagant, superficial display of wealth, the “sulking” royalty, the sycophantic hangers-on, the celebrity gawking—Forbes takes equal aim at both the super-rich and those who would worship such wealth, of whose gestures of contempt fail to mask “raw envy.” "On Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra" exhibits Forbes' concision, his formal ability and superior talent to subtly shift perspectives: From the trashy contemporary glossy magazines the painting comically reminds us of, to the 18th century painting itself, to the protagonists from antiquity the painting represents ("our / contemporaries minus coke and sunglasses"), these shifts produce a sliding movement throughout the poem, with one perspective sliding out from beneath the other to assert itself, a rhetorical effect that creates an irresistible momentum. And if the poem’s social and political critique may itself be in some measure superficial (no matter how accurate), it arrives at a devastating final few lines. Agape, eclipsed by Eros, is absent from the painting. Where shall we place it? How about dragging it down to the basement to be tortured? "You wish, voyeur, you wish." In the culture of spectacle, Forbes suggests, the only way in which charity and kindness can capture either our attention or imagination is if they are being put on the rack. The human reflex to want to be witness to such brutality and callousness makes us, the readers, no better than those idlers gaping on the balconies.

 

On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra

Any frayed waiting room copy of Who

could catch this scene: flash Eurotrash

surveys a sulky round faced

überBabe who’s got the lot—what else

could this painting mean, except that

superstars can will their luck, or

just how little raw envy’s hidden by

contempt, so words like ‘Wow! Great

Tits!’ or ‘Comic Opera Wop’ sum up

the observer, not Anthony and Cleopatra,

attached to pets & entourages—our

contemporaries minus coke & sunglasses.

What’s that pearl without price she’s

dropping in her glass? A mirror of

their self-regard, replaced by each

others’ glances. Still, it glows, blue

& blank at the centre like their hearts,

flanked by idlers on balconies leering

& placing bets. But if they suggest Eros,

what role does Agape play in this--

downstairs & screaming, being shown The

Instruments? You wish, voyeur, you wish.

 

 

"Australia" by Ania Walwicz [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In Ania Walwicz’s “Australia” we get a critique of the country through the eyes of an outsider. The poem’s diction (a vibrant, broken English), paired with the accuracy of complaints (“You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me”) hints at an immigrant speaker who knows her subject well. The litany of grievances is elevated through the use of second-person pronouns, their intimacy giving the protestation a propulsive energy, with the “you” being addressed subtly morphing as the poem develops. We begin with complaints against Australia's too open landscape: “You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing,” followed by a shift to a more personal version of the pronoun, the “you” both an individual in and of themselves and an individual personifying the sentiments and attitudes of the nation-at-large: “You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me,” until we arrive at the speaker addressing you, the reader, and, perhaps, herself: “You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.” The poem tracks the immigrant experience, from being a stranger in a new land to becoming immersed (if only with a measure of hostility) into the fabric of the country, becoming a constituent of the “you”—a part of Australia—herself.

 

 

Australia

 

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram. 

 

"Microbiome" by Andy Jackson [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Andy Jackson’s Human Looking (Giramondo) won both the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry and the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 2022. The book’s title possesses a canny doubleness that can inform us of how we might enter the collection: life is, to a large degree, a cumulation of looking, both as observer and observed, and this looking is always human, that is, flawed, partial, dismissive, adoring, indifferent; while to be human looking implies that what is being observed is not considered human at all.

 

 

Jackson lives with Marfan Syndrome, including severe curvature of the spine, and his poems give a visceral account of what it is like to be considered “human looking”—to be on the margins of society because of the way we appear to others. “Microbiome” reminds us, however, that to be human is to be inhabited by a profusion of non-human life, and that these microbes dining at the body’s “soft table” are “always hungry / unfussy.” The speaker, then, offers up his menu: both somatic and psychogenic, including “starch, sugar, paper and ink,” “hesitation in the face of violence,” and “the scent of the skin of the one I love” suggesting an intimacy with the microbes that is almost erotic, reminiscent of Donne’s flea.

 

Microbiome

 

While we live, we ourselves are inhabited

– William Bryant Logan, ‘Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth’

 

In the earth, prepared and silent, what will I

be offering you?  It’s said the menu opens

with the liver and the brain, for their wealth

of enzymes and water, the heart

before the bones.  But so many of you

are already here at this soft table, always hungry,

unfussy.  I’ve been feeding you protein,

fibre, starch, sugar, paper and ink,

self-consciousness, the crimson jolt of the rosella

in the leafless tree, my own dying cells,

hesitation in the face of violence, more water,

the scent of the skin of the one I love,

confusion with almost everything else.

And what will you make of all this

turning?  Warm compost, what remains.

 

"Pet" by Kate Lilley [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Kate Lilley has published three books of poetry, including Versary (2002), winner of the Grace Levin Prize, and the acclaimed Lady Like (2012). Her most recent collection Tilt won the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for poetry. 

Lilley is a poet of exceptional formal skill whose poems engage with a profusion of ideas and subjects that are testament to a fierce intelligence. Over the course of three collections, her range of references and thematic concerns are dazzling, from 16th century England to 1970s Sydney, Viennese psychoanalysis, female sexuality and desire, the golden-era of Hollywood, childhood trauma and the conflicts and contradictions of the self (daughter, poet, lover, teacher, patient). Yet Lilley’s erudition is always tempered by the poem’s urge to connect. As John Tranter wrote of Lady Like, “it's the yearning, euphoric human peeping through the veil of art that seduces the reader.”

 

 

Lilley’s poetry also carries with it a savage wit. In “Pet”, Lilley playfully explores the complications and power dynamics in paired relationships, specifically that of teacher/student (turned lovers), while managing to get in the most brilliant and faintest of slant-rhymes (“bottle of gin” with “Olivia Newton John”), and one of my favorite closing couplets. Happy Holidays.

 

Pet

 

The new teacher takes me out:

orchestra, revolving restaurant, lesbian bar.

I burn my leg on the exhaust of her bike.

Next she comes around with a bottle of gin

and her admiration for Olivia Newton John.

Mortified, I let her do as she pleases.

When she moves in with me and my boyfriend, an alcoholic poet,

I develop a fever like Villette (which I haven’t read yet).

On the bus to school she cries about other girls,

Jobs she has had to leave in a hurry.

She shows me their bewildered letters, I disassociate.

When I stop having sex with her,

She calls me a bourgeois bitch and joins a gun club.

"Transit of Venus" by Marty Hiatt [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Marty Hiatt is a Berlin based poet and translator who runs the intrepid Baulk Press. Originally from Melbourne, Hiatt’s work keeps alive the correspondence between the experiments in French poetry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and those taking place in Australian poetry today, exemplified by his great long-poem “The Manifold”. His translations include works by Philippe Soupault, Apollinaire’s  “Vendémiaire” and Nathalie Quintane’s contemporary masterpiece Tomatoes.

 

 

Hiatt’s own poetry is infused with the spirit of those writers he translates, who seem to give him, as Soupault said of Apollinaire, “permission to go faster and father”. In “Transit of Venus”, discordant images crash against one another, creating a kind of junk energy: both energizing and enervating. “Possible arcs are continually amassing”, but they are of “almond milk or intratelluric menses”. Engines and alien dialects lull either the monsoon season or the speaker, or both. The effect is a curated disorientation (“I look down but not back”) that embodies precisely the defining features of our postmodern selves: we haven’t simply “had enough of the old world” but are addicted to the new world we continue to fashion around us, a world that causes us to be at once both perpetually exhilarated and permanently exhausted.

 

Transit of Venus

 

standing on top of the helicopter counting

the bristles of my toothbrush

i look down but not back

for with precision instruments we’re raked

a vision of my next career move pins my eyes

but it turns out to be just another thundercloud

to hack through like one more enemy toad

gliding past black n red wreckages

in whose erstwhile spans we’re serried

as one — whether baggage attendant pilot or stag beetle

we kiss one another’s lofty bitumen with creaking lips

 

my lust for diesel is becoming

a problem n water’s too hard

though other possible arcs are continually amassing

like almond milk or intratelluric menses

that help me through the dilation of the monsoon season

lulled by so many engines n alien dialects

 

about the garbage press

the circular koan foreseen by the oracle composes itself

trips on a splattered helmet

pronouncing radio static that implores me to return

to my neglected duties to world’s best practice rooftop dining,

silt deposits n jubilant mastication

mammoth concerns devour one another in the lagoon

i’ll have to leave the slack-water revert to aerobic status

even as the advancing front engulfs what little

oxygen i’d extracted n carried through

 

suns set at 9am

after peak hour broke its banks

damaging conveyors n other infrastructure

it is time to pick up my thighs

from the dry-cleaners. no cash

so steam torture in its stead

platoons flush by too quick to indict

though silken families stranded on the pontoon

compliment my figure, at once

offering their condolences n implying

the loss was worth it all told

but their countenances turn with my shoulder

 

in the application window tread on the

heads of the buoyant while

distilling new perfumes to compliment

the scum of enslavement

i frankly didn’t lack a post (i’ve blades) but

to run with the exhumed midst manifolds

lengthens the spinal casing improves bee fertility

n at time of writing no synthetic substitute

has yet appeared on the open market

 

then so spruced, break left, set course for

high-voltage transmission lines

for the great axis has at last been precisely determined.

they’re winking as adult themes in children’s books

but to whom? so am i:

not even the blind could miss em

 

Marty Hiatt's latest collection of poems The Months Of (2022) is available now through Baulk Press.

 

"Biography of Elvis" by Claire Nashar [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

It's well known that Elvis never toured internationally because his Dutch-born manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, believed that if he (Parker) ever left the United States he would not be allowed back in. This did nothing to lessen Elvis’ appeal around the world, and Australia was no exception, where a healthy fascination with the King still very much exists. Every year on Elvis’ birthday, around 30,000 Australian Elvis impersonators descend upon the small rural town of Parkes for the Parkes Elvis Festival. Now in its 28th year, the festival holds over 200 events across five days.

 

The Parkes Elvis Festival

 

Sadly, not all Australians’ passion for Elvis translates into such joyous events. After holding out for as long as possible, fearing the worst, I recently saw Elvis, the biopic by Australian director Baz Luhrmann, for which I feel it is my patriotic duty to apologize for.

Claire Nashar

As an olive branch I offer “The Biography of Elvis” by Claire Nashar, a Sydney-born poet who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Buffalo, and has two collections of poetry to her name: Lake (2016) and Handmade (2015). Nashar’s poem adds sometimes absurd and fantastical, often intimate and quotidian details (all hearsay) to Elvis’ bloated legend. To me, these speculations, no louder than murmurs, seem far more worthy inclusions to Elvis’ story than Mr. Lurhmann’s overblown theatrics.

 

Biography of Elvis

(after Mark Leidner)

They say Elvis could shoot a hoop from twelve metres out.
They say it was because he was missing a tiny bone
in each of his wrists.
They say that when he sweated the inside of his clothes
became gilded, and if they happened to already be gilded, became
like rainbows or supernovae.
They say that Elvis had a way with birds.
They say that this explains the mob of ornithologists that tried
to kill him in Georgia.
They say that once, after observing the flight of a group of grey
pigeons, Elvis predicted the rise and fall of the Spice Girls.
They say that if you listen to Blue Suede Shoes backwards, that’s
what it says.
They say that when Elvis was a child he often saw the ghost of a dog
that had been shot in the head.
They say that when he was older he drank dom peringon just to
forget it.
They say that he once lived in Alaska, in a spare log cabin with a
potbelly stove, and watched movies about pilgrims on
the television sets which he collected to people his
home with presidents and game show hosts.
They say that he once visited Sydney, Australia, but I’m not sure
I believe that one.
They say that Elvis never told a lie.
They say that he married for love.
They say that when his heart broke for the first time he created a dance move
so sad that it would break all other hearts forever, but that it made
him so afraid that he died without ever showing it to anyone.
They say that Elvis was a born a Leo, but that in end
it didn’t matter.
They say that if he had been born an insect he
would have made a great bumble bee.
They say that if Elvis had been born a fruit-bearing tree
he would have been a Santa Rosa plum.
They say that if Elvis had never been born at all, Michael Jackson
would have been forced to invent him out of plasticine
and chux wipes and to breathe the breath of life
into his puny open mouth.
All in all, they say that Elvis was sometimes a very sad man.
They say that after Michael Jackson brought him to life
Elvis cried and cried and cried.
They say that to this day, he has not moved in a very
long time.
They say he had a twin brother who died at birth
in a shack in Mississippi, about that one
the biographers tend to agree.
They say that whenever he checked out of a hotel
he would write the cleaners of that hotel a heartfelt
message on the special hotel stationary and sign it
with a flourish of the special hotel pen, which afterwards
he would sometimes, but always absentmindedly,
put in his pocket.

"Poem of a New Driver" by Belinda Rule [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last weekend, the Bathurst 1000, Australia’s most famous race, was won by Holden drivers Shane van Ginsbergen and Garth Tander. It was a historic victory as it was the final Bathurst 1000 to feature Holden, the iconic car manufacturer of Australian classics including the Kingswood and Commodore. Holden was the last remaining Australian car company, until the brand's owners, General Motors, shut down production in early 2020. 

Holden Kingswood

Growing up in Australia, cars were totemic: a symbol of freedom and independence and an expression of character. Much like in the United States, Australia’s wide open spaces lend themselves easily to the mythology of the road trip, while our sprawling cities make cars a product of necessity.

Belinda Rule

Belinda Rule’s “Poem of a New Driver” captures perfectly the symbolic power of the car: “When I first get the car, I pull all the fabric / of the city towards me”. Rule’s ode has a casual lyricism and uses imagery which counters our expectations “the road a seatbelt / speeding on its reel.“ The poem elevates the experience of driving into a near mystical practice. The supernatural speed of the car unrolls the sky, abstracts and distills the trees into essence, transforming the driver into a “master of all trees” and a connoisseur of that unknowable moment before death.

Poem of a New Driver

When I first get the car, I pull all the fabric

of the city towards me, race it through

like cloth beneath the presser foot.

Come here, Geelong! And it does:

a satin bolt of sky unrolls,

the road a seatbelt

speeding on its reel.

 

You see so much of the sky driving:

you’re an eel darting upwards

in a limpid bowl of glass,

      trailing the road like a tail.

So much of trees, too:

abstracted and distilled by speed

into essence. When you walk

there is only one tree,

and your beetling body

labouring below.

At speed you are

the master of all trees—

all of them arrayed as if curated

just for you.

 

And always you know you might die.

A second’s distraction and

you will swerve, careen, flip,

and in mid-air you will be

the master of something new,

a mote exploding from the sun,

the knower of what

may only be known once,

and then only for a second;

at last,

purely happy.

"Torrents of Spring" by Philip Mead [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

If T.S. Eliot had been writing in Australia, "The Waste Land" might have opened "September is the cruelest month". Spring has just arrived in the Southern Hemisphere, and on the east coast of Australia it looks likely the season will only compound what has been the wettest year ever recorded.

 

The great Philip Mead's "Torrents of Spring" seems superbly situated for the occasion, a spring poem more doleful than celebratory. Through the speaker's conversation with the dead Scottish poet Sorley Maclean, who is on his way to Calvary (evoking both one of Maclean's most well known poems and the Crucifixion and resurrection of Christ), we are reminded that loss is just as an essential element of spring's process of renewal as the blooming of acacias and bottlebrush. But how do we find renewal in the loss of a loved one? According to Maclean "there are no solutions" but to be in the world and know that it carries on:

What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.

The last line suggests that art exists outside of this carrying on; one step removed from life, it can be deferred. I like the idea that art is free of the future, that its temptation to exist lies not in time but in the eternal. It allows for us to meet dead poets in city laneways and have them assure us we continue to dream in death, as in life, "lonely as exoplanets".

 

Torrents of Spring

 

I thought I recognised Sorley Maclean
walking towards me down Niagara Lane.
As he came alongside he said look up,
you can see our friend the sky where the tall buildings
lean in towards each other. I can see some glyphs
floating across up there. The in-between goes all
the way back to the well of darkness.
Sorry but I’m an analogist, and out of area.
Back on the corner the tree shadows had seemed
to scatter around his ankles. He said he was on his way
through, from Antofogasta to Calvary, reminded me
that the lamps are a super important part of the
hanging universe. We keep dreaming he said,
lonely as exoplanets. The hard thing, I know,
is losing one of your own. That always takes up a lot.
Then after a very long pause he said, there are no solutions.
What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.
I know you’ve read about my afflictions. And I was different then.
I wanted to ask him about sudden gusts of wind,
and the cries of memory, the unexpected turns
in full lives, like his, and the enigma of where people end up,
but he was gone. Round the corner and down the street.
The last thing I remember was his scarf, the blue of flax lilies.

 

                                                                            first published in Australian Book Review

 

 

"Grafitti" [by Lisa Gorton]

Lisa Gorton is the former poetry editor of the Australian Book Review and the author of three award winning collections of poetry: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion, and Empirical, and the novel The Life of Houses, which won the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction in 2016. Gorton has a special interest in ekphrastic poetry, having written poems for several exhibition catalogs and also composed a series of poems for the artist Izabela Pluta’s book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation. 

 

One of my favorites of Gorton’s poems is “Graffiti,” in which her talent for the ekphrastic is turned to a wall in the city of Pompeii and the scribblings that deface it. The wall was long ago “chained-lugged to the city” by “slaves bent double against the weight," and the poem is constructed around a number of contradictions built out from these details: the aspirations of the wall's purpose (“peace dragged in as a pile of stones”) and the violence of its creation; the dignity of the wall's longevity and the “piss-riddled importunities” that now cover it. We then arrive at the mesmerizing final four lines, in which the poem turns away from its prior concern with notions of permanence and fixedness towards the fleeting and ephemeral: ashes fall softly from the sky and the speaker has to repeatedly stand up to shake them off. "What a weight of light!" she exclaims. We first take this "light" to mean the cumulative weight of the ashes, but our interpretation is immediately undercut by the poem's extraordinary final line.

 

Grafitti 

 

‘I wonder this wall can bear the weight of such words’

Graffiti on a wall in Pompeii

 

The city is smaller than you expected.

Its houses turn their backs on streets –

       And given half a chance

       who wouldn’t bunker down behind a stack of silence?

       An arm’s length of wall permits any depth

       of meditative calm or your money back –

Its walls are made of potsherds, broken bricks and stone

cut from the hill’s mouth, chain-lugged to the city –

       It happened just as you picture it:

    slaves bent double against the weight, whip cracks and flies,

       that crowd in the marketplace breaking off mid-sentence

       to see peace dragged in as a pile of stones –

The stucco of the city walls is everywhere

scratched with these piss-riddled importunities –

       – Cruel Lalagus, why don’t you love me?

A wall can bear the weight

       – All the girls love Celadus the Gladiator

The weight is nothing to the wall

      – Caesius faithfully loves M[… name lost]

A wall can bear the weight

      – For a good time, turn right at the end of the street

Out of the dark, ashes fall softly.

We have to stand up again and again to shake them off.

What a weight of light!

The dark is smaller than you expected.

 

                                    First published in The Australian Book Review

"Snow Gold" by Emma Lew [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

 

 

Here is Melbourne poet Emma Lew speaking to the Australian Book Review in 2019 about her approach to writing poems:

"Writing a poem, for me, is an experience that blurs consciousness and the unconscious – the one relentlessly and obsessively advancing and checking the other. It begins usually with a line or a rhythm or both that I set down and run with, develop, push out from. I keep lists and lists of lines jotted down in a series of exercise books; lines gleaned from overhearing, from mishearing, from reading and misreading. Improbable lines, nonsensical, hypnotic lines; lines that have struck me purely for their nuttiness, or for their arresting syncopations or tones. I’ve stored up line upon line over the years, and I turn to them for something to start with, sometimes changing words or syntax, then seeking other lines that seem to connect with the first, then others and others – until I can start to see a kind of sense and tone emerging, and I try to nurture this thing and shape it and see what it seems to be trying to say, to adumbrate, to offer. It’s been frustrating, but over the years I’ve seldom been able to write anything with a ‘deliberate’ subject. It’s always been a matter of the poem coming into being and me, its humble, toiling servant, eventually stepping back and beholding something of my self – my pining orphan self, my besotted pupil self, my steely, dour agent provocateur self, my serial killer self."

Reading Lew's poetry often takes us to those liminal spaces between the conscious and unconscious she mentions above, where we can experience both an awareness of unusual intensity and a trancelike stupor. "Snow Gold" exemplifies this almost incantatory power. A propulsion of images build upon one another without effacement, so that a swarm of shadow lines and ghost images trail throughout the poem, sometimes to return, sometimes to simply linger in our subconscious. They give the poem its unnerving affect, which seems to exist in the "grey hour" the speaker refers to "when mourners become lost and follow the wrong coffin." We are uncertain of both time and place: what army moves in a manner that would allow a troupe of musicians to follow? And, even if they could, what troupe of musicians would ever follow on their heels? We too, feel that the poem is leading us someplace familiar yet disorientating, where winter arrives "in one jump like a wolf" and the commonplace becomes pregnant with mystery.

Snow Gold

So, on the heels of the army, our troupe moved.
I gave birth in the street and night nailed the great city to the earth.
I saw the plague stalking like a stranger whose language I could not
    understand.
My sores were dressed, my handkerchiefs hemmed.

It is one thing to listen to the heart and its murmurs. 
A strange woman came to see me, saying that she was my lover’s wife.
It was the twilight hour that is called the 'grey hour', when mourners
    become lost and follow the wrong coffin.

We walked a little way together and the talk burned like agate.
I know they say that one should speak well of the dead or not speak at all.
The winter came in one jump like the wolf. 
An eye grew sightless because there were frightening scenes I did not
    wish to see.
I had talent for the noble virtues of blind faith even then.

An agile acrobat threw his plank across the ditch.
The wine now travelled from mouth to mouth.
The sentry’s face clouded over, and he wept at the prompting of my
    fingers on the strings.
So the young men paid their precious francs.

The wagons pulled out to the east like a sunburst.
Of course I sang, like a log covered with ice.
We lived unbuttoned through the black country,
taking such great mouthfuls of bread, as though we were seagulls.

What was I besides the strength of my shadow?
I climbed up on the trains and tossed down coal.
The wind blew and merged with me, my childhood and my life,
    my passions and transgressions.
Even if they weren’t gold, the trinkets glittered.

I often wonder how unpenitent people could live under a sky.
It was that kind of Tatyana I had come to be.
Let my father say as many harsh and stupid things as he likes,
but the skin of my hands was like fine snow. 

                                                        First published in Heat


                                                        

 

slippage (un)fixed by Bridget Gilmartin [introduced by Thomas Moody]

Brigit Gilmartin achieves a lot within sixteen short lines. “Louis Buvelot is painting” is the kind of opening you’d expect from a Frank O’Hara poem: both casual and direct, and there is an easy brevity to “slippage (un)fixed” that masks the significance of what it addresses. The poem is ostensibly about the artifice in art, the distance between the artwork and that which is being represented, no matter how faithful the attempt. Ironically, the landscape painting Louis Buvelot is working on is continually interfered with by the landscape being captured. “A mammoth gust of wind blows a twig onto the canvas” to mess up a branch of the painting's eucalypt. “Louis / picks out the twig with his thumb and forefinger.” Next a tooth appears in the painting's foreground. The tooth signals a shift (a volta?) in the poem's themes, as Gilmartin masterfully moves us away from representation in art and towards Australia’s colonial history.

Louis Buvelot was a Swiss-Australian painter best known as Arthur Streeton’s tutor, a founding member of the Heidelberg School. Inspired by European Naturalism and Impressionism, the Heidelberg School was a movement in Australian art during the late 19th century which favored painting en plein air and claimed to be the first set of (settler) artists to see Australia “through Australian eyes.” (Up to that point, landscape painting in Australia had neglected the great tonal idiosyncrasies in the Australian countryside.) The movement coincided with the county’s push towards federation, and there is a fair amount of nationalism associated with it—these are the paintings you find reproductions of in textbooks, on the walls of pubs, and as symbols of “Australian-ness.”

 

Louis Buvelot "Summer Evening Near Templestowe"

 

What these artworks refused to include was any representation of Indigenous Australians, their culture or their violent mistreatment by colonial Australia. The exclusion of Indigenous representation was symptomatic of Australia’s historical amnesia, or as W.E.H Stanner termed it “The Great Australian Silence,” in which Australians do not only fail to acknowledge the atrocities of the past, but consciously choose not to think about them, to the point of forgetting they happened at all. In “slippage (un)fixed” we get Louis Buvelot literally "clearing" the landscape of this history from his canvas in real time as he paints “Louis goes on picking out teeth / until finally he pulls a whole skull out of his /canvas. He tosses it away and puts the finishing / touches on the landscape”.

What makes “slippage” (un)fixed” such a terrific poem is that an ignorance of the history it references is no impediment to its enjoyment. Gilmartin's casual tone immediately welcomes us inside the poem, and the deftness of her transitions mean we never linger too long in any one place. It is such a visual poem, and the imagery so exact that once we arrive at pulling skulls from a canvas, we can see it so clearly it is hardly fantastical, an achievement which also might be mimetic of the ease in which history is erased (this process itself a fantasy), and the ease in which we accept this erasure.

 

 

slippage (un)fixed

 

Louis Buvelot is painting. It’s a quarter past

midday and you wouldn’t know out here unless

you looked at the sun but Louis doesn’t look

at the sun because he’s squinting at the trees.

A mammoth gust of wind blows a twig onto the

canvas. It lodges itself in a glob of oil paint. Louis

picks out the twig with his thumb and forefinger.

It messes up a branch of his painted eucalypt.

There’s something else stuck to the grass in the

foreground. It looks like a tooth; human or

animal, Louis doesn’t know. He picks it out but

once he’s done that he sees another appear.

And another. Louis goes on picking out teeth

until finally he pulls a whole skull out of his

canvas. He tosses it away and puts the finishing

touches on the landscape. Calls it The Clearing.

 

[First published at Cordite Poetry Review]

 

"Tennis Court Ode" by Hazel Smith [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

John Ashbery, whose birthday is tomorrow, has been an important figure for several generations of Australian poets. This influence was acknowledged by the poet Michael Farrell, who in 2019 edited an anthology of Ashbery inspired Australian poetry, Ashbery Mode. With over sixty poems, of whose poets span fifty years, the anthology is as much a testament to Ashbery’s range (both form and tone) and durability as it is to his inimitability.

The anthology includes a sestina, a pantoum, and poets as various as John Tranter, Jordie Albiston, Bella Li, John Kinsella, Gig Ryan, Ken Bolton, Laurie Duggan, John Jenkins, Kate Lilley and Toby Fitch. Despite his tremendous influence, Ashbery remains, as Farrell points out in his introduction, a “largely underground phenomenon” in Australia, someone who is “read by, and recommended by, poets to each other” but whose poetry isn’t taught in schools and cannot be found in bookstores.

In America, of course, Ashbery has achieved the extraordinary feat of being appreciated by both the avant-garde and the mainstream, with The Tennis Court Oath, which turns sixty this year, perhaps the only collection not to make the crossover, its experimental cut ups lacking in popular appeal.

Ashbery Mode features an ode to the collection, "Tennis Court Ode", by Hazel Smith. The poem opens with the great line “you can join in any conversation without really knowing the score” which seems to me perfectly to characterize Ashbery’s poetry, which so often meets us mid-conversation, or disrupts thought and, without any bearing, we are happily taken away on a meandering tour of digressions and distractions towards expectant revelations that seem never to arrive, or never arrive in full.

“Tennis Court Ode'' ends with another brilliant line, “a voice from the convex mirror shouts ‘he’s the John Ashbery of tennis!’” As someone who considers himself a fairly knowledgeable tennis fan, this one had me stuck. Who, of all players past and present, could be considered ‘the John Ashbery of tennis’? Rod Laver, an Australian, perhaps?

Tennis Court Ode

you can join in any conversation without really knowing the score
the garlic on the ghost's breath was deposited on the letters
push back the boats they cry from the decks of miscarrying vessels
a foetus sticks its head out and then retires to fallopian bliss
that which is salient I have found is usually that which is hidden
as dementia starts to cut its teeth, secrets begin to throw racquets 
a technician unplugs the autocue as an aid to the autoerotic
he made others feel he was dependent on them even though he wasn't
off-shore processing, onshore protests, people smuggling poetics
writing becomes like death row with stochastic bouts of remission
sometimes he said I find myself not liking people who everyone seems to admire
the doctor talks and talks though he's taken an oath to listen
as a stranger swivels on his bar stool and knocks over the carefully poured drinks
the jury decides it wants to go home and serves a hit and run missive
it's the time of hanging on parliaments and hung-up prohibitions  
it's the time of backstabbing and net-rushing, of re-combinative commitment 
the anxiety of influence, the passivity anxiety breeds 
she took the headscarf on and off unsure about metaphor's limits
as the poem becomes as breathless as an asthmatic culture permits
a voice from the convex mirror shouts, 'he's the John Ashbery of tennis!'

"Aubade" by Max Harris [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Max Harris is best known as the editor responsible for publishing the oeuvre of the fictional poet Ern Malley. The hoax has become the stuff of legend and Harris’s role as the dupe overshadows his substantial contributions to the arts in Australia for over half a century, as an editor, publisher, poet and the country’s most vocal champion of its nascent Modernism, in both painting and literature, throughout the 1940s. Harris’s journal Angry Penguins, which he founded at the age of 18, placed the Australian avant-garde in an international context, and included artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Australia’s leading surrealist, James Gleeson. 

 

“Angry Penguins” became both a movement of artists, and a label of scorn used by conservatives for modernist trends in the culture. The phrase is taken from Harris’s poem “Mithridatum of Despair” and refers to drunks in tuxedos at night “straddling the cobbles of the square / tying a shoelace by fogged lamplight.” Harris’s early poetry is heavily influenced by European modernist and surrealist techniques, but an irrepressive lyricism is evident in even the most experimental works. The Ern Malley affair represented a fault line in the poet’s own writing. After the scandal, which saw Harris charged with Obscenity for publishing “indecent advertisements,” his poetry became less ebullient and more pensive, clear and declarative. “Aubade”, which imagines an elderly Oblomov, still in bed, stirring at a lyric gathering in his bowels, displays the poet’s own sardonic humor.

 

Aubade

 

Open up, Oblomov: for the dust pan sings

Tinny-tang for all your years asleep.

Who knows what maidens may have crept

And brushed their lids against your cheek.

Awake old slav, the kitchen calls,

Eggs are frying, a saucepan falls,

Outside an old grey wind begins to weep.

 

In your bowels a lyric stirs—

Your toilet call, you morning birds,

Urging out your lazy feet

To rest like dumplings on the boards.

Your brain now beats about its bowl,

Cake-making, for your acquaintance, Soul,

Will make a formal call at five.

Thi is, if you are still alive.

 

Old poet, dragging on your drawers,

Seeking a rhyme without a clause—

All creation is about its chores!

Oblomov sighs, subsides, and snores

"1945" by Gwen Harwood [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last Wednesday, June 8, would have been Gwen Harwood's 102nd birthday. Harwood was one of Australia's finest poets and one of its leading literary hoaxers. On August 5, 1961, Harwood published a pair of sonnets, “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Abelard to Eloisa,” in the Australian weekly, The Bulletin, under the pseudonym of Walter Lehmann. Unknown to the editors at the time of publication, the sonnets read acrostically FUCK ALL EDITORS and SO LONG BULLETIN (you can read more about the hoax here).

Harwood's development of several heteronyms, including Lehmann and Francis Geyer, not only offered social critique to Australia's chauvinist mid-century literary establishment, but also allowed her poetry to map our species' labyrinthine psychological landscape with greater possibility. 

Harwood also wrote poems under her own name, with speakers who shared much of the poet's life experiences. "1945" details Harwood's move from her tropical home of Brisbane in the north of Australia, to soporific, grey Hobart, capital of Tasmania. The poem echoes Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, “Know’st thou the land where lemon- trees do bloom, / And oranges like gold in leafy gloom” (Book III, I). Both poems dwell on paradises lost, either through concealment or exile; in Harwood’s case, the land of citrus and color is being left behind for a new home whose light is much reduced from her tropical roots and which swells with the presence of Tasmania's violent colonial history.

1945

Nineteen forty-five. I have been sick
all the way from Brisbane; first time in the air.
My husband's waiting in civilian clothes.
Another name now. All those burning glances
cancelled, all those raging letters burned.
And my mocking friends - 'Holy MaTRIMony!'
'You've had your wings trimmed. You'll be Mother Goose.'

We melt with good old-fashioned happiness
at the desolate terminal. I see the city
ending in bush, St George's on the skyline,
KEENS CURRY on the hill. We find a cafe.
'Lunch is off. Afternoon tea's not on,'
the waitress snaps, and sniffs. She knows we're strangers.
Saturday afternoon.How doth the city
sit solitary. A shuttered delicatessen
proclaims HIGH GRADE AND CONTINENTAL FOODSTUFFS. 
What continent? Perhaps they mean the mainland.
I’m in my summer clothes. A wind breathes cold
truth in those English trees that tried to fool me
with their false fronts on a tourist office poster.
Know’st thou the land wherein the citrons bloom?

I do. Exile's the name i give that knowledge.
Even as I say How Beautiful How Charming
why do I feel that some demonic presence
hovers where too much evil has been done
near the harmless rivulet, the Georgian buildings?
Hungry, we link our lives and wait for evening.
In my husband's luggage the Tractatus waits

with the world that was the case already fading.

"Wake in Fright" by Caitlan Maling [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

What initially drew me to this poem was its title. Wake in Fright is arguably the greatest ever Australian film. It is definitely the most disturbing. Set in the fictional outback town of Yabba, the film centers on a refined, if slightly pretentious, English school teacher, John Grant, who is passing through Yabba on his way to Sydney. The town is striking in its peculiarities: It is mono-sexual (there is not a woman in sight); the streets are entirely empty and the bars are completely full; everyone seems to know each other and no one pays for anything. Yabba imprisons Grant with its hospitality. In what is meant to be his first and only night there, Grant meets the town’s chief of police who forces him, by way of Australian custom, to get drunk. The teacher begins to lower his grandiosity and his guard, and joins in the local curiosities—all of which include drinking beer. Grant goes on to get paralytic drunk and gambles away all his money. Waking up the next morning in his dusty hotel room with a devastating hangover and empty pockets, he suddenly realizes he has no way of getting home. The townspeople offer to take care of him, but will not let him leave: for the next week he is shipped around from house to house, always offered a bed to sleep in and a cold can of beer to drink. Nothing else. Grant’s world turns into one long bender, and the harder he resists drinking, the more drunk he ends up getting. His ethics and his cultural refinements gradually begin to slide off him, lubricated by the beer and the good cheer of his hosts, he begins to lose his ability to discern himself from the locals (people he only days before considered to be brutes, thugs, savages) and the thin veneer of civilization is washed away.

 

Wake in Fright (1971)

The film captures the menace lurking behind Australia’s jocular national character: the tyranny of its good cheer and the threat hidden in its hospitality. In a distressing scene to watch, Grant is taken on a late night kangaroo hunt, on which he violently clubs a kangaroo cub to death (the kangaroo, of course, being Australia’s symbol). The next morning he is served his first meal: kangaroo stew. This seems to be the moment Caitlan Maling’s poem takes for its starting point. The clever opening rhyme and metre gives the the poem a false sense of innocence, which both masks and heightens its true maliciousness, reminiscent of a Frederick Seidel poem. "Wake in Fright" then turns away from its namesake film and shifts to a more personal register that reflects on the nature of a hunt: "This is something / I should learn / the full process." Maling is a Western Australian poet who is a previous recipient of the John Marsden Poetry Prize. In 2014 Maling was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and won the Harri Jones Memorial Prize. 

 

Wake in Fright

 

The roo, stewed,

is outcome of shotgun,

the messy tear of skin.

The goat will break teeth

if not carefully cut

and held in the slow cooker

longer, so the metal falls

deeper into the pot. Two shot

between here and Jurien,

one almost kid-sized—

oven-roastable.

Coming home, the slab

of red in glad-wrap

on the bench is just flesh,

indistinguishable.

This is something

I should learn,

the full process.

Filling the chamber, the shot,

how to angle the body

so the blood spills neatly.

All the old farm boys

know, teach their sons.

I could be one

with a gun. Just

cock the handle

and be ready to take

the recoil, the bruise

on the collarbone,

the misfire, the graze

from dropping knees to ground.

The corpse, too heavy

to lift, winched against sky.

"The Ambition" by Robert Harris [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Robert Harris died too young at the age of forty-two. During his lifetime he was never a major figure in Australian poetry, however, a recent publication of his selected poems, The Gang of One, has shone much deserved light on his oeuvre. In his review of the book in The Australian Poetry Review (found here), Martin Duwell writes that one of the rewards of reading through Harris's various collections is that one sees "how hard he had to work to make himself into a good poet."

 

I like the idea of the poet not arriving fully formed, but, like so many other things in life, being the result of experience, effort, patience. "The Ambition", anthologised by John Tranter and Philip Mead in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, seems to me a poem of great skill presented to us with a deceptive nonchalance. And I think its first line might be one of my favourites. Enjoy.

 

The Ambition

Mum, I'll be a fireman!
Did you know they gross around nineteen thousand,
work four days in nine,
quit, if they ever quit, in good faith

& moonlight driving meat trucks?
Aged people sometimes wander in 
to look at the fire station, 
saying they used to live here,

at this number. They look a long time 
at the appliances, till the head shaking
Chief rings the nursing home.

When you're old I'll be a fireman, Mum.
At green upper storey sills, waiting for fires,
I'll lean on my blue arm and look at the sulphurous city

 

"Queenscliff" by Cassie Lewis [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, published by Melbourne University Press in 2020, gives long-overdue recognition to the breadth and quality of Australian prose poetry. Alongside recognized practitioners of the form such as Anna Couani, Jordie Albiston and Pam Brown, the anthology offers a comprehensive selection of Australian prose poems of the past fifty years from what has been a neglected tradition in Australian publishing.

 

 

Cassie Lewis’s “Queenscliff” takes its title from a well known Sydney beach and is a welcome inclusion to the anthology. Some elusive dread looms over this poem as it mixes detail and feeling in the way memory does. Nothing sits quite right: just as in the speaker’s room “in Queenscliff’s solitary Bed and Breakfast”, the floor of the poem slopes. The speaker’s admissions are surprising and puzzling: “I don’t understand champagne”, “I must control the urge to be hesitant”; and while she declares to love only her companion, her absent father also labors “under the illusion that he of all people wasn’t loved.” 

 

Queenscliff

We can see the lighthouse from our window in Queenscliff's solitary
Bed and Breakfast. The floor of our room slopes and I don't understand
champagne. Later, from the pier, you catch an enormous, rare fish the
colour of coral and slowly let it go. It feels like summer. The fish swims
out into the deep water. I love only you. Misery is usually someone dead,
perfect: derision felt as the binding presence of grey, great books. I must
control the urge to be hesitant. And from memory, that bus shelter at
the edge of the world, with its wads of chewed invective, I see my
absent father: mourning, directing cranes over the skyline. Labouring 
under the illusion that he of all people wasn't loved.