The Best American Poetry

Three Poems from "Exhumed" by Cassandra Atherton [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Cassandra Atherton is Australia’s prose poet extraordinaire. As both expert practitioner and charismatic evangelist, Atherton has worked for over a decade to elevate the profile of the prose poem on the local and international stage. Along with co-editing two anthologies (Anthology of Australian Prose Poems and Dreaming Awake: New and Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom), she recently co-wrote the first book dedicated to the form, Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020), tracing the history and evolution of the prose poem, and discussing the work of some of its most notable exponents.

 

 

In a 2022 interview with Nin Andrews on this blog, to the question “Why prose poetry?”, Atherton answered in part: “I love prose poetry’s compression and the allied sense of breathlessness it so often conveys. Where lineated poems tease the right margin, the prose poem embraces it.” 

The poems in Exhumed, her 2015 collection published by the excellent Grand Parade Poets series, do more than just embrace the right margin, they seduce it, and then ardently fasten themselves to it. Atherton’s lines move towards their margin like a slightly manic lover moves towards the object of his or her affection: charged with desire and susceptible to razor-sharp alterations in register and mood. It makes an Atherton poem a veritable Pandora’s box of text: secure (and seemingly innocuous) within its defined borders, but once opened—entered—all kinds of mischief is let loose upon the reader. Terrance Hayes’ description of the American sonnet as “part prison / Part panic closet”, “part music box, part meat / Grinder”  could easily be applied to the Atherton prose poem.

It is interesting to think of these poems in terms of boxes or caskets in light of the collection’s opening epigraph, which is taken from a 1869 letter by D.G. Rossetti. In it, Rossetti describes digging up a book of poems he had interred in his wife’s coffin. Exhumed in turn digs up dozens of works of literature, art and film (there are references to 13 different works in the opening poem alone, from Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” to Nabokov’s Lolita) and embeds (or reburies) them into the lives of the poems’ speakers. The distinction between art and life becomes vague as each begins to reflect, and imitate, the other. This synthesis of art and life is one of Atherton's major achievements in Exhumed, to celebrate without sentimentality the fact that, for many of us, our favorite poems, films, paintings, are more than just artefacts, they are experiences we absorb into the deepest parts of the self, to take with us throughout our lives—experiences that can have a profound influence on us and that we can continue to draw upon to make sense, or light, of the world.

 

 

 

 

Vertigo

She loves the romance of a rooftop. Something about being closer to the stars. There's clarity in the air and the strange movement of light across the sky. The answers to the universe float just over the edge. She can  see them, but they are beyond her outstretched fingertips. The stained concrete is cold through her dress, but she edges forward. And that's how he finds her. Lying on the edge, her neck reaching out like a gargoyle; her arms embracing the silence. He grabs her by the ankle like an anchor. Or a shackle. She whispers into the void. He wants to believe it's his name.

 

Making Out with the White Rabbit

Long after he has gone, I have him. Still. On the tips of my fingers. I  don't want to eat, wash my hands, brush my teeth. I shouldn't talk. I want to be swaddled in Gladwrap and slowly suffocate in his scent. Draw arrows on my neck pointing to his teeth marks. I delight in the marks he leaves on my body. But he is always late and I'm never his important date. So I set my watch to Daresbary time and wear it to bed. I dream I'm eating marmalade on toast and solving Pillow-Problems. When I fall out of bed I'm swallowed by a rabbit hole. Distorted hands claw at me as I fall. I see a glimpse of his waistcoat forever ahead of me. The tick of a pocket watch grows louder until I wake up. Alone. I won't cry when he leaves me. I'll know it's because I have outgrown him. As he always said I would. I won't argue when he closes the door behind him. We will have come to the end. I knew that we were temporary. He told me long before we started. I won't follow him when he leaves me. I'll just watch him leave and scurry down his rabbit hole. Back to Alice.

Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books

for Amy Baillien

Your new bookshelves are driving Deweyites mad. Spinner wheels in hand, they ache to enforce the decimal classification system on your vertical timber. Pragmatist systemisers, it doesn't matter which Dewey you prefer: Melvil, John, the library cat or even Huey and Louie's brother, they all believe in shelf diagnosis. So, choose your own system, but ask yourself: Is Emma inappropriately touching Moby Dick? Is Don Juan pressed up against Clarissa or lying on top of Jane Eyre? Don't put Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina too close to the edge and remember that given half a chance, The Brothers Karamazov will lean on Little Women. Whatever you do, make sure you keep American Psycho in the plastic wrapper. Frankenstein can bring some life to your Gothic collection but keep Dracula away from The Monk and keep Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in separate sections. Don't worry if you lose The Invisible Man, Voss will go looking for him. I suppose you could order your books by the colour of their spine or the birthplace  of their author, but that kind of Creative Intelligence is, in the end, just Experimental Logic.

"[Regarding] The Pain of Others" by Autumn Royal [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Autumn Royal’s “[Regarding] The Pain of Others” takes its name from Susan Sontag’s book-length essay discussing the moral hazards involved in the photography of suffering—for both the taker and viewer of the photograph. In Royal’s poem, she makes clear that these same hazards can extend to any artform. Taking the form of a dramatic monologue, a celebrated playwright finds that life is imitating art: he is being visited upon by the themes he has “so realistically & poetically portrayed” within his works. Ironically, however, the playwright is reticent regarding his own suffering: “I’ve experienced a great loss, which I choose not to discuss / at this point in time.” Perhaps this inhibition is influenced by his belief in the necessary distance the artist requires from his or her subject to authentically represent it, but this seems an especially dubious position in the case of the playwright: if the artist has the right to keep private their own suffering, what right do they have to publicly portray someone else’s? Royal’s speaker is in turns fascinating and repulsive—his self-regard is complemented by a complete lack of introspection. When he is questioned at a dinner party regarding the ethics of a script based on a “widely reported and terribly violent incident,” he merely points out his interlocutor has passata sauce not only on the upper region of their lip, “but also the tip of their nose.”

 

Autumn Royal’s second collection The Drama Student (Giramondo, 2023) was last month shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. The awards are the richest in Australia, and several friends and poets featured in this series were nominated alongside Royal in the poetry category, including Luke Beesely for In the Photograph, Ali Cobby Eckermann for She Is the Earth and Jennifer Maiden for Golden Bridge: New Poems.

 

[Regarding] The Pain of Others

 

Since many of the plotlines explored throughout my plays

have started leaking into my current reality, I’m now publicly

admitting to embracing other people’s anguishes for the sake

of my own creative endeavours. Over the past decade,

I’ve consistently been celebrated as a prophetic & iconic

playwright — a trademark I still justifiably hold.

However, since the themes I’ve so realistically & poetically

portrayed throughout my works have tragically

begun to impact upon my daily routines —

my gratification with such accolades may not fully

be appreciated without such a declaration.

I’ve experienced a great loss, which I choose not to discuss

at this point in time — but I’ll admit that until recently,

I’ve always felt more comfortable writing about

the lives of others — from a distance, but most especially

while my subjects are inhabiting their own homes.

It’s not unfitting to mention that after years of dinner

invitations & appearances — I’ve been praised as not only

being an exceptional conversationalist, but a much-desired guest.

During such dinner parties, I’ve always offered to wash-up

after each course, yet I’ve always been denied this pleasure —

so I end up refilling my glass & observing the performance

of domestic politics. Over the years, I’ve only ever contributed

to one squabble — when an amateur actor, cast in one of my plays

premiering at the time, didn’t recognise me & vehemently

began questioning the ethics of the script — which was based

upon a widely reported & terribly violent incident.

The actor’s naïve soliloquy continued until I politely remarked

that there was not only passata saucing the upper region

of their lip, but also the tip of their nose. After the actor fled

to the bathroom to wipe away now, not only the tomato purée,

but a solid amount of mascara — my fellow comrades reassured

& praised me for my honesty. I was then reminded about all

the positive reviews the show in question had received.

I’ll have to conclude this admission shortly, but do I hope

this announcement will be respected & will allow me to continue

my quest for writing authentic dialogue & descriptions —

something I truly believe is often unattainable for people directly

experiencing the duress which makes for such interesting

material that I possess an ability to curate & represent upon a stage.

As proof of my skills, I can testify that I’ve received numerous

writing grants & government financial support — even patronage,

which, as you’ll reasonably understand, I’ve not been able

to question or reject. My hand-to-mouth existence prior

to my fruitful reputation isn’t unlike the precariousness

of those begging for money while resting against the entrance

to the building where I’ve recently commenced my latest

writer’s residency & like most artistic entrepreneurs — I can

offer nothing, as I believe carrying coins grinds my inspiration

down & closer to the pavers, which I’ve strived brick-hard

to lift myself up & away from for the sake of my creative practice.

"Rain or Sweat" by Charlie Hillhouse & Sebastian Moody [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

We’re almost through with the Dog Days of Summer. Hopefully, for those of us who live in towns and cities where access to nature’s arrangement of cooling-stations: things like lakes and rivers, woodlands and oceans, are difficult to reach, temperatures will begin to come down soon. Since late May, the heat in New York City has been unrelenting. NBC’s “Storm Team 4” says it’s the city’s hottest summer on record. High temperatures have been accompanied by even higher levels of humidity, driven by La Nina’s southern oscillation.

There is a cumulative quality to this kind of heat: it becomes seared into the fabric of our being, to be worn in uniforms of torpor. Meanjin (Brisbane) is a city that knows this kind of heat intimately. With its subtropical climate, Meanjin summers can span up to five months, arriving early in late November and not leaving in full until April. When the heat properly settles in, the city, as if by instinct, slows and slows and finally reaches a full stop. A camaraderie develops: expectations of efficiency are lowered, decisions of consequence are postponed. There is a collective hibernation, everyone bunkers down, sprawled out under ceiling fans or blankly staring into the middle distance in air conditioned bars and clubhouses, patiently waiting out the somnolence.

This is no mean feat: Meanjin is a city of nearly 3 million people, which has produced some of Australia’s most important cultural moments and institutions. Two of Australia’s premier literary magazines, Meanjin and Overland were founded in Meanjin. Australia’s (and possibly the world’s) first and finest ever punk band, The Saints, formed in the inner-suburb of Petrie Terrace in 1974, contemporaneous to the Ramones in Queens, NY. More recently, Meanjin based artist and Kamilaroi/Bigambul man, Archie Moore, won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at this year’s Venice Biennale, with the Australian Pavilion being curated by Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) curator and Meanjin resident Ellie Buttrose. The win was a first ever for Australia at the Venice Biennale, and underscored Meanjin’s outsized importance to the nation’s arts scene.

All this makes you wonder what else Meanjin might be able to produce if the city functioned at full capacity for more than seven months of the year. Or perhaps it is the enforced cessation, the embedded tolerance of idleness and the resigned acceptance of the suspension of normalcy during these months that allow for such impressive creative works to emerge. 

Rain or Sweat is a short film by the artists Charlie Hillhouse and Sebastian Moody which captures the lethargy of a Meanjin summer. It follows a Queensland man (the architect Dirk Yates) over the course of several summer weeks with long, considered frames that are memetic of the kind of melting and lengthening of time that sustained heat can produce. We are shown the glaring, sunstruck days, nights so thick and loud with insects they are palpable, the growing pressure of an approaching storm and the force of its release in a subtropical downpour. The shots are accompanied by an equally considered narration by Yates, who remembers summers past: “When summer is at its hottest, I sometimes think of my father. When we were kids, when it was really hot, he would take off his shirt and lay in the hallway on the tiles, these ceramic tiles, because it was the coolest part of the house. It was kind of like what a dog would do. It’s what I would do if I had that.”

Introduction to Alan Wearne (Part 2) [by Thomas Moody]

Alan Wearne’s poetic vehicle of choice is the dramatic monologue. He is a master of the form. Like those mid-Victorian poets Clough, Meredith and Browning, whose prowess in narrative verse Wearne cites as more or less challenging him to try his hand at the form (“We can do it… go on… can you?”), Wearne takes full advantage of the scope offered by the dramatic monologue: from compelling narrative plots (often topical) to psychological portraiture (always entangled) and everything in between. 

Take The Nightmarkets, Wearne’s epic verse novel that follows a year in the life of six characters and includes ten separate monologues totalling over 10,000 lines. Set in 1980s Melbourne and the city's surrounding suburbs, the poem involves the romantic relationship between Sue Dobson, a leftist-activist-journalist in her late 20s from the inner-city, and the noticeably older, inescapably patrician, politician Jack McTaggart. McTaggart is running for federal office and looking to start his own political party. To complicate things further, Dobson has been commissioned to write McTaggart’s biography. The poem not only surveys the political and social landscape of early 1980s Australia, which was still suffering from the hangover of “The Dismissal” (the removal of the progressive Labor Prime Minister Gough Whiltlam by the Governor General in 1975), but also the conflicted personal lives of those who strive to shape this landscape. 

 

 

In Wearne’s monologues we witness his characters' attempts to validate their contradictions, justify their compromises, explain themselves to themselves—that is, we witness the ways in which we navigate in our own minds the sharp collisions between our supposed convictions and how we ultimately choose (or are sometimes compelled) to act. Wearne achieves this effect through the energy of his language, in particular the tightness of its rhythm, which allows for a simultaneous propulsion of the narrative and for the rapidly oscillating nature of human introspection to be faithfully mirrored: the slightest change in cadence is significant enough to mark, discernibly, the slightest changes in mood or train of thought.

The following passage is taken from Sue Dobson’s monologue “Climbing Up the Ladder of Love,” which is featured in full in Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021. I think it is exemplary of Wearne’s energy and ear for the Australian vernacular—also for his comic effect. Chatting with dock worker Kev at a bar, Dobson imagines the morning to come if she takes the guy home, a morning filled with embarrassment, in main part created by the space between the ideals of her post-grad-educated socialism (what we would call in Australia “Champaign socialism" or "chardonnay socialism") and the realities of Kev's working class life. Having recently reread “The Masque of Anarchy,” it was hard not to compare the idealism of Shelley’s famous ending couplet with the irony of the final couplet of the passage below—Wearne's holds up pretty well.

(Note: an “ocker” is similar to “white trash” or “hillbilly”; pronouncing the letter “h” with a hard h “haitch” was viewed in Australia as a signifier of poor education).

 

From ‘Climbing Up the Ladder of Love’ (from The Nightmarkets)

 

            Drovers, miners, abalone-divers hit town, go on a bender

and, if so much creeps up grey, ill defined, to confuse 

like then like now, I also head to pub company. Tends either to amuse

or bore, and when these overlap keeps reminding 

me how Lou once said: 'Maybe it is this mind thing, 

but Melbourne! On occasions I've heard and agreed, or thought and said myself

Fuck fuck fuck. In this place do they think of nothing else?' 

            So chatting-up one Friday at The Standard,

after a joint has hyped me ultra-candid:

'Like getting smashed, Kev? I do. Wine, lager, bitter, 

draught, even stout? Nah. Spirits only tonight.'

                                                                            The hues of winter

filled the public bar: blacks, blues and browns;

with friends to share my ups and ride my downs

I'd arrived back. And this Kev deserved I make a start 

in 'getting along'. But the taste was tart and I shuddered, 

saw myself staring in

a barrel of bullshit, all that's (so called) egalitarian.

             A Women's Studies postgrad meets a wharfie/ 

painter-and-docker/ that ilk, say, invites him back for coffee, 

a number, a rave. And what's to follow 

the next day? 'Bonjour Kev.'

                                               'Huh?'

                                                          'That's hello

in French.’

                 And the final hour is spent 

trying to save him/you more embarrassment.

             Oh a touch of the worker and consciousness unfurls 

to separate the women from the girls, 

they think. Poor deluded molls, why slave 

after ockers? Haven't you heard they've 

almost another language? Why bumming it 

round public bars for even further slumming it?

Sure there's a whole class struggle to instil 'em 

with, but you just wince with every 'haitch' and 'fillum'.

 

Introduction to Alan Wearne (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

Of all the major Australian poets, none have captured the Australian idiom as faithfully and expansively as Alan Wearne. A tacit member of the famed “Generation of ‘68”—the disputed label given to a group of poets who came to prominence at the end of the 1960s and reshaped the nation’s (then predominantly conservative) poetic landscape—Wearne has fashioned a truly original and idiosyncratic oeuvre, renowned for its narrative, character driven poetry. Often epic in their form and scale (his most successful published works are arguably the verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers Part 1 & 2), Wearne's poems take tales of urban Australia and unfurl them simultaneously in two directions: outwards through the country's sprawling and scattered metropolises, and inwards towards their characters’s equally expansive and discordant internal lives. Lovesick suburban drug dealers caught in webs of international power, adulterous politicians, blue-collar workers with philosophical bents—Wearne’s characters, via a cacophony of monologues, sing of an often bizarre, banal, endearing, brutal modern Australia, with irony, wit, compassion and pathos. 

Near Believing (2022), gathers a selection of these monologues and narratives from Wearne’s nearly 60 years of writing, from 1967 up to 2021. The first poem in the selection, “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete,” was written on the 22nd of July, 1967, the day before the poet’s nineteenth birthday—an extraordinarily precocious feat. The poem comically sketches Jesus as a first class runner. His apostle Bartholomew, unimpressed with his master’s teachings (“Brilliant. Yes. Yet never near to God”), finds Christ’s true grace in the splendor of his athletic prowess: “often we came down the mountains / (jogging loosely, never with a cramp) / my running partner, heading for Jerusalem, / appeared as if his feet were next to God.” 

Wearne has said that his poems are “rather like autobiographies in which I don’t appear.” While “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete” is of course a comic poem, it is more complex than the farcical portrait of Jesus the jogger it at first glance appears to be. For me, with my Jesuit upbringing, the opening phrase, “Always in training”, makes me think not only of training in an athletic sense (although I do like the idea of Jesus as an annoying, obsessive fitness junky), but a religious one also: the human incompleteness that requires the constant training of the soul to bring it closer to God in order to be filled with His grace; a process which is never complete (always training), or to paraphrase another poet “created unfit, commanded to be sound.” Meanwhile, the distinction between Bartholomew’s disdain for Christ’s words (“even when I felt he’d gone too far, / think Here we go again out came the logic / smooth as a circle”), and his reverence for Jesus’ actions—or action, perhaps the most rudimentary action of all: running—might inverse the hypocrisy the poet (or reader) found in the Christian orders of his youth, whose actions often fell short of their words.

 

Alan Wearne (photo by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne)

Alan Wearne has published over ten collections of poetry, including The Nightmarkets (1986) which won the ALS Gold Medal, The Lovemakers (2001) which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the NSW Premier's Book of the Year, The Australian Popular Songbook (2008)  and Mixed Business which is to be published by Puncher and Whattman later this year. He is also the founder and editor of Grand Parade poets, which he launched in 2011 and has published fourteen collections of Australian poetry to date.

Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete

 

         Always in training. Yet helping with his work

was partly boring, sometimes even nasty.

Still, even when I felt he’d gone too far,

think Here we go again out came the logic

smooth as a circle, Roman disciplined.

Brilliant. Yes. Yet never near to God.

         Only when he ran.

Only when I saw him striding.

(He’d leap and throw his arms above his head.)

It really was a case of Run with me.

I did. And often we came down the mountains

(jogging loosely, never with a cramp)

my running partner, heading for Jerusalem,

appeared as if his feet were next to God.

        This too was a feat: running for a month

(as rumour had it).

                            Sprinting in the temple

was nothing less than perfect. Tables knocked,

whips raised and money lost.

He charged them twice.

         Of course revenge was needed, and his arms

were raised once more; his feet, however, broken;

sort of enforced retirement. Still,

he made a comeback to end all comebacks.

                                                                       Once

there were ten, and I half-walking, pacing

(my room-mates, seated, limbered-up in thought).

We stopped the noise and movement; standing still,

I heard the footsteps pounding up the stairs. 

"Sein und Zeit" by Judith Bishop (Introduced by Thomas Moody)

You don’t need to be familiar with Heidegger’s opus “Being and Time” to appreciate Judith Bishop’s namesake poem “Sein und Zeit.” There is an opacity to the poem which is unsettling; opening with the line “We can walk into a room not knowing”, we are never told exactly what it is we do not know, only that our not knowing extends to “whether” (a choice or an inquiry into something), “or when,” (a period of time), “or even that” (something we know we can determine or identify). The totality of this ignorance, of this absence of knowledge, gives it a kind of presence—a phantom that haunts the whole of the poem.

Bishop further obscures things by telling us that whatever it is we don’t know, “Only you will know.” One of Bishop’s achievements in "Sein und Zeit" is that she is able to create a near impenetrable obscurity from clear, precise language. The contrast seems to reinforce the significance and deepness of the unknowing—the overwhelming vagueness of existence which eclipses our lives even at their most particular.

 

 

“Sein und Zeit” is taken from Circadia (UQP, 2024), Bishop’s third collection of poetry. She is the winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets University prize and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. Her translations from French (Philippe Jaccottet, Gérard Macé) have been published in Australian and international journals. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne, an MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MPhil in European Literature from the University of Cambridge. She lives with her family in Melbourne.

Sein und Zeit

 

We can walk into a room not knowing.

It doesn’t happen every time.

 

A white room can be painted to be pure.

I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.

 

But it doesn’t have to be.

We can walk into a room

 

not knowing whether,

or when, or even that.

 

That

can be the hardest room.

 

Only you will know.

First there is the walking.

 

The floor, a chair or two.

The posters

 

of visions

of someone else’s visit

 

to a room. Take a chair.

 

Only then the talk begins,

like a reckoning of beads,

 

like the body measures sweat,

words wrong

 

as a rainbow that has paled

to a shadow of itself.

 

There is always an end.

We can stand and walk again.

 

We can leave the room in silence,

carrying its moment

 

in and out of days

 

 

Two poems from "In the Photograph" by Luke Beesley [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

The mostly prose poems in Luke Beesley’s In the Photograph play within the landscape created by the divergences between our perception of the world and the world itself. Often dismissed or left unnoticed among the routine travails of daily life, In the Photograph places these divergences at life's very center. Found in dreams, distractions, mishearings, misunderstandings and false assumptions, these divergences are sometimes surreal and benign, other times banal and pernicious, but always they exert an influence over our lives, to shape (or misshape) our sense of reality. As the poet writes in “Time Piece”:

“And who is we? When you drive in towards a valley town, morning, and the light is still settling itself, purple. When the sun is stretching to the chrome, acting on an orgin-yellow, or orange, is when you begin to know a collective. But then again, often, that frisson, cinematic, is not quite the location of the town anyway. Just a collection of trees by a river—a fleeting battery-powered elegance, but you have moved on by then and shaped your life around it.”

 

In the Photograph (Giramondo, 2023) is Luke Beesley’s fourth collection of poems. You can read a previous post on his poetry here.

 

In the Corner

 

 

One evening in the corner of my eye reading in the lounge room on

 

our newly upholstered chair there was a rat. It took some time, a

 

second, for it to come into shape: mangy, artless. I trusted it was a

 

discarded sock or even one of my son's shoes, before it twisted and

 

flattened-all in one motion-and slipped under the door.

    

    First, I threw my thoughts against a broom leaning on a speaker,

 

then I went into the kitchen for a dustpan, then bathroom for a

 

toothbrush or eyelash curler, beard trimmer blade-brush, etc., but

 

eventually I dabbed at the corner with the tip of my pinky finger.

 

Sunscreen squeezed on a plate. Gerhard Richter walking his paint

 

across the canvas. This all before I looked under the oven and

 

found evidence torn variously and sourly; repugnant, the scent:

 

hot inner-sole of a runner.

 

 

 

 

 

While You Were Sleeping

 

 

I can feel a thin-very thin-transparent chute billow at the centre

 

of my chest. It's a webbed flutter, electric, and I put the blinker on,

 

overtake a small Toyota.

 

 

Two “Romance” Poems by Chloe Wilson [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Here are a pair of romance poems that offer up some too-often unsung qualities of love: the comic, the sinister, the ridiculous. The gestures of courtship in “Billionaire Romance” grow from the mildly threatening to a pitch of absurdity—or do they? In the way the near impossible magnificence of the Taj Mahal was inspired by Shah Jahan’s love for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, is it really a stretch of the imagination to think that one of today’s egomaniacal tech-billionaires might adopt every child in an orphanage and name them after their beloved? or “have dragnets dredge every kind of treasure from the floor of the ocean”? In a 19th century version of "ghosting", “Regency Romance” turns the subject of the love letter into a justification of the letter’s absence. Like a child fabricating to her teacher great tales that explain her missing homework, "Regency Romance" speaks to the often unwanted but always unavoidable responsibilities imposed by the conventions of love.

 

 

Chloe Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She was joint winner of the 2016 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, and has been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize. “Billionaire Romance” and “Regency Romance” first appeared in the Spring, 2018 edition of Western Humanities Review, an issue dedicated to contemporary Australian prose poetry. 

Billionaire Romance

 

I will buy a ship and name it after you. I will buy a town and name it after you. I will buy an island and name it after you. I will adopt every child in an orphanage and name them after you.

Everywhere you look: your name in lights, ten feet high, and everyone saying it back to you with a smile on their face.

I will have couturiers dress you and afterwards I will cut off their hands. Your lipstick will be weapons grade, your shoes fashioned from the crash-landed engine of a Soviet rocket.

I will have dragnets dredge every kind of treasure from the floor of the ocean, and if you want to eat the dolphins and turtles bound up in those nets I will have them turned into soup and fricassee and feed them to you from spoons fashioned out of their skeletons. But if you choose to spare them I will train them to eat from your hand. They will purr and rub their faces against you, drowsy with gratitude.

Your fingers will be heavy with glittering rings. But still you’ll stroke those creatures in all the places they like: behind the ear, beneath the jaw, and right between the eyes.

Regency Romance

 
 
I would have written but I drank my ink in a fit of thirst. My signature went south on a ship swarmed by pirates; it has only just returned with a rooster and a pig tattooed on the arches of its feet.

I would have written but the jam served with my breakfast turned out to be a clot of blood and to have exited the lung of my sister. It was my duty to bury her. The Turkey carpet turned to quicksand and it was all I could do to haul myself out.

I would have written but the dog caught its own tail and began eating it and the vicar said this was a terrible sign. We attended vespers in a mood of repentance.

I would have written, only the hares and the foxes dug tunnels under this house until the ground could no longer support its weight and it collapsed.

I write to you now from beneath the rubble. I write with the one hand I have been able to extricate; it scribbles to thank you for your patience, for your faith.

 

 

“A History of Blue” by Ella Jeffery & “The Blue” by John Forbes [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In Australia, especially on the east coast, the color blue is inescapable. The sky is a deeper, wider blue than you will find almost anywhere else, mirrored by the blue of the ocean and harbors around which almost all life takes place. It’s a blue that’s used to sell the country to international tourists; a blue that facilitates our “sunny” national character. We have bluebottles, blue-tongue lizards, and the deadly blue-ringed octopus. The size and intensity of the blue sky can be overwhelming: I remember once returning home to Sydney from a lengthy visit to northern Europe and feeling both supercharged by the expanse of light and color, and also somehow claustrophobic by the sheer distances this blue suggested. 

“the sky’s huge blue hand pressed / against the windows” is how Ella Jeffery captures this paradox of feeling penned in by a vastness of sky. “A History of Blue” opens with the “Brainscan blue” of the pre-dawn sky, a slight nod to Eliot’s etherized evening, and goes on to offer a compendium of some of the most surprising and compelling ways one can describe a color. The “drowsy” blue of the grandfather’s tattoo is my favorite; you can almost see the old, fading blue-ink yawning and sliding down the skin as if slinking into bed.

 

Ella Jeffery’s debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt (2020), won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and the Anne Elder Award. She is a recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies.

 

A History of Blue

 

Brainscan blue of the horizon’s edge

before dawn. That is the blue

of indecision. Five blue lights blinking

the plane through metaldust sky

while the Pacific lilts like aquarium-plastic

around some humid or hypothermic blue latitude.

Look closer. Here’s Stradbroke Island

in shades of blue-ringed octopus,

blackblue crabs on rocks like moving bruises.

Drowsy blue of my teetotal grandfather’s tattoo

and the blue book of his brain

that remembers all birds by their Latin names.

Blue guts of swimming pools, blue-tongues

scrummed in one shady corner. First and last:

the sky’s huge blue hand pressed

against the windows. 

“The Blue” illustrates two of John Forbes’ greatest talents as a poet. The first is his ability to take the transcendent and reduce it down to the domestic and routine in an image that perfectly reflects back to us the banality of modern life. In this case, it is the blue of Sydney which is “built-in like / a modern appliance / at my fingertips” suggesting that the color’s sheer accessibility cheapens its effect. The second is the propulsion the poem gathers and where Forbes chooses to interrupt it. Reading the poem aloud, we are thrust irresistibly forward until an anticlimax arrives with the lines “I can’t mix up love / with the weather & / feel better,” wherein a pause occurs and we are allowed to gather our breath, only to be launched again into an impelling force, driven by the repetition of “sky” and “only” and landing at a closing line that is at once exasperated, resigned and proud.

 

You can read more about John Frobes here and here.

 

The Blue

 

The blue in Sydney 

has nothing to do 

with yachts or ideal 

ways of life, it's 

built-in like 

a modern appliance 

at my fingertips & 

far out beyond the 

scenes & decor 

days blue as pencils 

pass by & even cut 

to tears on a cold 

blue empty morning 

I can't mix up love 

with the weather & 

feel better / the sky 

is only the sky & 

that's only a symbol 

of fucking Sydney 

or the wide blue 

yonder I wouldn't 

live anywhere else

 

Two Poems by Melinda Smith [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Here are two poems, "Stendhal Syndrome" and "Fugal State," from Canberra based poet Melinda Smith, both taken from her most recent collection Man-Handled (2020). Smith won the  2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call.

 

 

Stendhal syndrome is a curious phenomenon in which a person suffers dysautonomic symptoms, such as tremors and fainting, in the presence of works of art. Reading about the condition reminded me of the great opening passage of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, in which the narrator watches a man crying in front of  Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, and wonders if the man is having a “profound experience of art.” The narrator, a poet, worries that he is incapable of having such an experience, and is deeply suspicious of anyone who claims they can: “Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, the profound experience of the absence of profundity.” 

The speaker of Smith’s “Stendhal syndrome” takes this skepticism as the consensus position and, in disbelief of her own experience, claims an exception. The fact that she is arguing her case to a judge suggests there is a kind of failing in allowing oneself to be so affected by art, a slouching of our modern, permanently ironized, posture. It’s interesting to consider where the guilt arises from: is it too indulgent an act to submit so fully to an artwork? Or, perhaps, are such experiences only available to rubes and philistines, and to admit to one would be to admit to one’s own lack of sophistication?

 

Stendhal syndrome

 

Swooning is so 1817. But I can say truthfully, it happened, 

this century, in the Uffizi. It happened.

 

Tears, even. I know. I thought

I was past that. I thought we all were.

 

Everyone cringes at words like transport,

ecstasy. I was drunk, your honour, drunk on paint -

 

no, drunk on charcoal and paper,

those only. Or the echo of prayer. Struck 

 

dumb and ringing like a cuffed head, a bell,

a gong, trembling, concussed, a pulsing

 

tuning fork, thrumming the same note

as all the others, overcome by the marks of the master's 

 

hand, this last sketch too much, the straw, just

grey and black on yellowed paper, just perfect 

 

love, caught, still breathing, one radiant face

among thousands, full-on   felling me   still

The following are two definitions of Fugue taken from the Oxford dictionary:

1. Music a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
2. Psychiatry a loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

 

In “Fugal State,” Smith ingeniously demonstrates both definitions in the repetition of a single line: “You are always beginning again.”

Fugal State

 

You are always beginning again—

it is only a matter of degree:

you walk into a room, forgetting

 

the book you came looking for, walk out

with a dirty glass you lay down

another ring without realising

 

like a tree it doesn’t hurt a bit

You are always beginning again:

you walk into the forest, forgetting,

 

there is a storm, there is a morning,

you walk out, trailing possibilities

from your hands they drip, like

 

snapped branches There was a storm,

there was a morning There was

a name, once, a specific and grievous

 

history, a mobile number, a particular sequence

of houses, an immunity to certain indignities,

there was more and more forgetting

 

Entering a room full of bonsai, you breathe

moss, and cypress, and the clean, bald smell

of long-dry river-stones  The air hums

 

with age, with what the trees have known

and have forgotten and will know again

they are always beginning

 

you breathe, you dream you have been

reborn as a small ceramic deer

You sit under the momiji, the scarlet

 

baby’s hands of the Japanese maple,

in a forest small enough

to fit on a dinner plate

and begin

again

"Intruder Wants the Writer" by Lionel Fogarty [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Here’s some magic from Lionel Fogerty’s latest collection Harvest Lingo (Giramondo, 2022) which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards. Fogarty must be among the most unique voices writing in English language poetry today—his use of syntax and the way he disorders established lexical categories (“No hidden child backward growing up / gains my learned on the road sky”) compels us to concentrate on each line so thoroughly that they seem to exist in isolation of each other, like islands in an atoll which are only connected in the mind of the cartographer or reader of maps. Fogarty's syntax creates new compositions in English language, with previously unheard combinations of sounds and rhythms—a new music.

John Kinsella, writing in Overland magazine, suggests there are at least three ways to a Fogarty poem: “One way is via lines of list-words in which words undo each other through juxtaposition and add up to an immensity. Another way through the staccato interrupting of English’s flow to make us concentrate on the impact of each word as colonial toxin. And yet another, and maybe most vitally, is reading with a flow, taking these other factors into consideration, and letting them sing their ghost tracks, samizdat, and cultural communiques that are not for all ears (to hear what you don’t hear and possibly can’t hear).”

“Intruder Wants the Writer”, which opens Harvest Lingo, lends itself particularly well to all three of Kinsella’s suggested approaches. I will hopefully have more on Lionel Fogarty soon, so stay tuned.

Intruder Wants the Writer

To write as a child to be a man

No boxes of childhood voice

my present, writing details.

No hidden child backward growing up

gains my learned on the road sky.

Future’s song dance lit pen friends for me in evenings

Not one sort of personal fireworks voice,

gave rise to the now existence dared.

Reluctance response by these ages,

Spare me not remorseful teenage pandemonium.

Pare her tempest defiant with red yellow brown ochre.

Breathe well inside the walls of rooms helplessly undecided.

No baby’s cries touch my raiment saddest crutch lost of mum’s death.

Those life survivals by childhood happenings are snapped

by swine trample readership.

Embellishing more than needed.

 

Note: All posts by Thomas Moody are copyright (c) 2024 by Thomas Moody. All rights reserved

"October 1999" by Bruce Beaver [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Bruce Beaver (1928-2004) has been called one of Australia’s “least known great poets” by Dorothy Porter and a “poet’s poet” by Timothy Schapcott. The two epithets reference the same quality: that of a poet who was underappreciated by the wider reading public but whose importance to contemporary Australian poetry has never been questioned by those readers who, perhaps, matter most: poets themselves.

Beaver published thirteen collections of poetry over the course of his life, winning almost every major Australian literary award. His fourth book of poems, Letters to Live Poets (1969), was a seminal collection, groundbreaking in both its form and style. Beaver’s conversational, epistolary voice, at once personal and worldly, was entirely new for Australian poetry. As Schapcott writes,”Nothing like this had been written in Australia before.”

 

Beaver was central to Australian poetry’s development towards more expansive horizons as both a poet and mentor. He was one of the original board members in 1964 of the highly influential journal Poetry Australia, which, with its embrace of international movements and openness to experimentation, was at the vanguard of poetry in Australia for over a decade. Throughout his life, Beaver’s apartment in the beachside Sydney suburb of Manly, which he shared with his wife and was built on the ruins of his childhood home, was a welcoming meeting place for younger writers and poets. Despite his waning health in his later years, Beaver continued to publish his poetry, with his final collection, aptly titled The Long Game and Other Poems (2005), sent to his publisher, University of Queensland Press, just before his death.

October 1999

 Got my gal, got my Lord, got my song

Gershwin, Gershwin, Heyward

It’s come! Spring’s second month with
hot and cold days and the last
October in two thousand years.
This time the fin de siecle’s
crazier than even the frogs
could imagine, even though they
invented nutty ends of centuries.
This time more bombs, earthquakes,
floods, droughts, gun-murders as well as
more pink and white blossoms
in the perfectly sane streets, full
of not-so-sane human beings.
But most of them are in love, including
me because we’re still alive
enough and the weather’s warming up.
It’s like the Old Testament: great poetry,
lousy theology and a God –
damned God – Still there’s the Lord
to come in the New Millennium and this new
Spring. Blossoms and bombs. Every
Spring’s mad with love and wars,
babies and murderers. And if you think I’m
not going to keep on chanting about
it, you’re nuttier than the century’s end.

From “Pool Sweet, 2019” by Jarad Bruinstroop [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Part 1. of Jarad Bruinstroop’s triptych, “Pool Sweet, 2019”, is charged with risk and tempered by an understated bathos. Drawing associations between the Transfiguration of Jesus, one of the New Testament’s most important miracles and a major Christian feast day, and David Hockney’s Peter Getting out of Nick's Pool, is exciting, transgressive and, the poem proposes, suitably inadequate. Hockney’s painting is “less mesmerising” and “less glorious” than the Transfiguration, and this deficiency prevents us access to notions as sublime and aspirational as “heaven” and “the future." In Hockney's painting we are inescapably in the material present, but, the poem confirms, “This is how it should be.” 

 

 

The poem’s brilliance lies in its suggestive power; it is rich with potential allusions. When we consider Hockney’s nude Peter getting out of the pool as a substitute for the Transfiguration, we not only think about sexual desire as divine and the potential for the naked human figure to be holy, but also the Apostle Peter: in the lines “To get out of a pool / is to capitulate / to gravity”,  Bruinstroop seems to invert the story of St. Peter, who, while walking on water in imitation of Christ, sinks because of his wavering faith. In the closing stanza, Bruinstroop calls to mind the ritual of Christian baptism.

 

 

Jarad Bruinstroop is a writer who lives in Meanjin (Brisbane). His debut poetry collection, Reliefs, won the 2022 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. As the 2022 University of Queensland Fryer Library Creative Writing Fellow, he is developing a novella cycle that draws on Brisbane’s Queer history and the Fryer Library special collections. In 2023, he won the Val Vallis Award. His work has appeared in Best of Australian Poetry, Meanjin, Overland, HEAT, Island, Westerly, TEXT, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Rabbit and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from QUT where he also teaches.

 

From “Pool Sweet, 2019”

After David Hockney’s Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966)

 

1. Peter Floating (1998). Watercolour on acetate.

 

If instead of trudging after Jesus

up the mountain, St James had sat

in a dark art classroom

 

and watched the procession

of masterpieces until he saw

Peter Getting out of Nick's Pool

 

projected on the wall,

the light would have been

less mesmerising. No more

 

a flash of lightning than a match

struck. And the glory,

oh the glory, would have been

 

a good deal less glorious.

They wouldn't call it

the Transfiguration

 

and nobody would speak

about heaven or the future.

This is as it should be.

 

To get out of a pool

is to capitulate

to gravity. But to get in.

 

To get into a pool

Is to put your faith

In the water

 

"Leonie" by Lucy Dougan [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Lucy Dougan’s “Leonie” speaks to the strange charisma that inanimate objects can assume over time when they share our space with us. A sculpture of an anonymous artist’s model, after living with the family for decades, suffering “endless room changes, / the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves”, becomes almost sacred to the speaker. Having borne witness to so much of the family’s life, the “many rows and unkind words” and “also good times, rafts of regrettable TV”, the speaker develops an intimacy with the figure that is itself familial, bordering on the erotic: “If I were rendered blind I would know / your lightly pitted cheekbones, / your brow line, your rough underside”. 

The sculpture is, of course, brought to life not by any innate animation it possesses, but by the memories the speaker and her family have imbued it with, and this artificial nature offers it a lifespan that is greater than their own, meaning that it can be a reservoir for these memories for longer than they themselves can. It is this dual character, at once familiar and extraordinary (the speaker's intimacy with the statue is interrupted by its headache-inducing epoxy resin), that inject these objects with their eerie presence. The figure, outliving the speaker’s parents, becomes uncannily totemic of them: “Stranger, stay with us, / watch over us, / never leave us.”

 

 

“Leonie” is taken from Dougan’s most recent collection of poems, Monster Field (Giramondo, 2022). The title refers to “the mysterious zone surrealist artist Paul Nash’s called ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed, which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past our eyes’.” Monster Field is Dougan’s seventh book of poems. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015) was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Dougan lives in Perth, where she is poetry editor of Westerly Magazine.

Leonie

 

Paid artists' model,

your face has lived with the family for decades.

You have suffered endless room changes, 

the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves 

yet you remain sanguine.

Your hairstyle has weathered the years

and the many rows and unkind words you have presided over, 

also good times, rafts of regrettable TV.

If I were rendered blind I would know 

your lightly pitted cheekbones,

your brow line, your rough underside and slight headache-inducing 

scent of epoxy resin in which a finger could snag a glassy splinter 

of what it is you keep inside the void of your cast.

I cannot see you as empty for in your hollow head lives the clamour of us all.

And something else, you still abide with us 

even though our mother and father are dead and gone.

Stranger, stay with us, 

watch over us, 

never leave us.

 

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

Yesterday marked the 106th 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."

Here is "Petit Testament." A misprint altered the last line from "I have split the infinitive" to "I have split the infinite."  I vote for the former.

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.

Here is "Petit Testament." A misprint altered the last line from "I have split the infinitive" to "I have split the infinite."  I vote for the former.

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.

From "Television" by Kate Middleton [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Kate Middelton’s recently published book length poem Television (Giramando) is an emotional survey of the poet’s tv watching history. Both in its form and compositional approach, the poem owes much to A.R. Ammons’s Garbage. As Middleton writes in the book’s notes, “Re-reading Garbage, I was struck by the fact that in taking garbage as his subject Ammons could include everything. As I began to write about television, I wondered if the same might be true of this subject.” 

Television, like garbage, does include everything, however, everything has to pass through the very specific medium of television to be included, with its unique peculiarities and predilections. Divided into thirty-three cantos (Inferno,  Purgatorio or Paradiso?) of unrhymed couplets, Television embraces and investigates these peculiarities; at times the poem prosecutes tv’s preference for scandal and the sentimental, it’s (corrupting) influence and ability to distort (particularly in the poet’s teenage memories of watching Beverly Hills 90210 and Twin Peaks, “the autopsy / on Laura an autopsy on girlhood”), while at other moments extols it’s virtues, however flawed: “television, / you are spiritual: teach attention and inattention in equal measure”. Notice Middleton’s deft use of the colon, borrowed from Ammons, as a means of “linking the disparate but coexisting, and so staving off completion”, as Mark Ford wrote.

 

Kate Middleton is a Melbourne based poet whose collections include Fire Season, which was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, Ephemeral Waters and Passage. In 2020 she was runner up for the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Award.

From "Television"

 

6. 

 

I want to celebrate Astro, the robot boy I loved, his Pinocchio 

ache, a moment's solace that time he found a robot girlfriend:

 

incandescent eyes at last find eyes to beam right back: and him 

fallen in, into, unprogrammed love: but soon the complication

 

revealed, its violence: his robot girlfriend not just another robot but, 

also, a bomb, the bomb, the one he needs to find, defuse, and his

 

girlfriend sacrificed: a higher pathos: so: her body on a table, 

disassembled, redeemed, everyone but her saved, (a celebration,)

 

except the robot boy and his lonely deathlessness: did he understand 

time's passage in a different way, its metronomic tick echoing

 

in his ever-childish body?: did he understand the replaceable, 

Argonautic parts of himself as his own, as bodily integrity,

 

autonomy?: for all his griefs, there's that final shot—a wink, 

a playful secret: Astro tells us, his audience, his only confidantes,

 

he kept her legs, which, non-explosive, did not require 

sacrifice: and he caresses his own thighs, calves, and we

 

understand it: her legs, shared legs, now his legs, no rejection 

of the transplant, no foreign tissue, instead a flawless

 

interchangeability, the comfort of this particular

inheritance incalculable: I recapped the scene to the boy

 

at the video store counter, our own private form of payment

for my late fee, as if it were just gross and not wondrous

 

as well: and, to me this transplant only feels complete

years later, its longing for closeness, the intimate fact of being,

 

at last, one being, like me once telling my lover I want to feel with

your skin: Astro usurping this longing, Astro the only one

 

who ever really felt it

“to paint like picasso before 1904” by Grace Yee [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Congratulations to Grace Yee who last week won Australia’s richest literary prize, the Victorian Prize for Literature, for her debut collection Chinese Fish (Giramondo, 2023). The collection traces the story of an immigrant family from Hong Kong living in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. The judges comments noted that Chinese Fish “focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. (Yee) tells this story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying sustained attention to historical circumstance – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants.”

 

In “to paint like picasso before 1904”, first published in Overland in 2019, Yee’s “sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve” are on full display, along with a beguiling mix of registers switched so seamlessly and effectively, it is near impossible to get one's bearings within the poem. In "to paint like picasso before 1904", Yee takes from us our sealegs so she can more easily steer us through the urgent and the absurd until we arrive, implausibly, at the poem's title.

 

 

to paint like picasso before 1904

 

        there is a species of tavern where drinkers make disparaging remarks about chinese

immigrants. it is patronised by a squadron of pirates of otherwise sweet temperament, who

truck their goods with whomever they please.

        baring dog-yellow teeth, they sit in plastic fold-up chairs in cheap t-shirts designed

by europeans unmolested in canton.

        each ship at the bar plays furiously, leaving a trail of wild colonial girls cruelly

strangled after the first wash.

        in the wake of their missionary grandmothers, the risk these women take is

calculated on trigonometrical principles. female players have the option of wearing cones so

they don’t get kissed for no reason.

        everyone looks for their partners online these days, including an entire class of

whining feminists for whom postpartum incontinence has never been a problem, but who

nonetheless kegel jade eggs at every opportunity.

    it’s hard for these women not to feel violated by the knowledge that their dna is

half-man, but the smarter chicks check their purses of emotional labour in (the taverns’) tiny

grimy bathrooms and suspend intercourse by returning to campus via the victorian roads.

        in high pollen weather, with abscesses fit to burst, they heroically collaborate in their

efforts to arrest the flames.

        after years of feckless liaisons, some of these women set sail for the orient. landing

in the earl’s court, they feel secure in their portion of comparatively uncontaminated

empire.

        with contempt in equal parts for men and aliens silently stoning their gallbladders,

they manage to live peacefully, albeit corpulently, by a calendar of saints for years under a

special licence to paint like picasso before 1904.

“The Apology Day breakfast” by Ali Cobby Eckermann [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

This year, January 26 arrives in Australia with added resignation following the defeat of the  “Voice” referendum late last year, which would have altered the Constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament. The Voice emerged from the Uluru Statement From the Heart, a petition written and endorsed by First Nations leaders calling for substantive constitutional and structural reform. 

The Uluru Statement was released on National Sorry Day (May 26) in 2017, a day that remembers and acknowledges the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families and communities, known as the Stolen Generations. The brutal policy was carried out by successive governments from the mid-1800s right up until the 1970s, but it was not until 2008 that a formal apology was given by then prime minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian government.

 

For the speaker in Ali Cobby Eckermann’s “The Apology Day breakfast”, the apology and its accompanying function offer no substantive remedy to the intergenerational trauma inflicted upon her, rather it just adds another layer of intrusion (“how does one define the jigsaw / when the pieces are misshapen / by the constant hands of others?”) into the process of healing she has undertaken through her own conviction, “you offer breakfast and forget / I found my mother," and force of imagination, “and rebirthed my son/ Together we are the Banquet”. A conviction and imagination that will need to be more resilient than ever this coming Friday.

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara poet and artist from South Australia whose work has been published and celebrated around the world. Her poetry collections include little bit long time and the award-winning collection Inside My Mother. Her verse novels are His Father’s Eyes and Ruby Moonlight, which won the inaugural black&write! Indigenous fellowship, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, a Deadly Award and was named the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Book of the Year. In 2013 Ali toured Ireland as Australia’s Poetry Ambassador, and in 2017 she received the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University.

 

The Apology Day breakfast

 

my mother did not grow up

with her mother I did not

grow up with mine my son

did not grow up with me

 

how does one define the jigsaw

when the pieces are misshapen

by the constant hands of others?

 

the gift of life is maternity

and the removal of this is

a reparation that has no price

 

the picture is askew in the portrait

you offer and rejection is the new

graffiti to rewrite the script

 

you offer breakfast and forget

I found my mother

and rebirthed my son

Together we are the Banquet

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: January 17, 2024

Today’s offering is by Cassandra Atherton, an Australian prose poet and scholar. Her poem below is from the first issue of The Mackinaw which “celebrate(s) prose poetry, in the present as well as its history and its future, and provide(s) a space to publish, read, and discuss this wonderful genre.” “Plum(b)” is full of wordplay and literary references.  Smart and fun, this poet sees not a red wheelbarrow, but a fancy red fridge. Always ahead of her time, it will already be tomorrow (for us in the US) by the time Cassandra reads this in Australia.

Plum(b)
 
William Carlos Williams was a genius. And he has my lover’s initials. Or rather my lover has his initials. I often eat the plums that were in the fridge. But I don’t expect to be forgiven. Not everything depends upon that. Or the wheelbarrow of promises that still lies at the bottom of his heart. That’s just a vain hope. My lover likes plums. The ones with the tough skins and the scarlet flesh. Not the yellow. We like the same food. Except for chops. I won’t eat lambs to the slaughter. Once I was called a ‘goo-goo-eyed’ vegetarian. Which basically means I won’t eat anything cute. With big imploring eyes. Because it would be almost like me eating myself. Baby cows are cute. Pigs are cute. And lambs are definitely cute. Even mutton dressed as lamb. So they are all out.  But I eat chicken and fish and sometimes beef. If it isn’t veal.  He lived on a farm once.  So he hates sheep. He tells me that sheep are the stupidest animals ever. They deserve to be eaten.  He even tells me the story about how sheep follow each other in straight lines and that the earth becomes shiny and solid beneath their feet. And he and his brothers would ride along their little tracks. On their bikes. Red bikes. Like that wheelbarrow in his faulty heart. One day he might even grow me some plums so that I can pick them and put them in our fridge. I want a red Smeg 473L fridge. I want my whole kitchen to be red. He draws the line at a red fridge. He has never heard of Smeg. Smeagol. Smaug, the dragon. He doesn't believe in the nuance of sound. He doesn’t understand the importance of a big, red, expensive fridge. He thinks they are just for keeping things cold. Like plums.  -- Denise Duhamel

 

Cassandra Atherton

 

You can read more from The Mackinaw here:

https://www.themackinaw.net 

"Passing Through Chicago" by Petra White [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Petra White has published five collections of poetry, including her most recent Cities (Vagabond Press, 2021). Here debut collection, Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press, 2007) was shortlisted for both the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and the ACT Poetry Prize, while in 2010 she was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for The Simplified World (John Leonard Press, 2010).

 

 

 

Passing Through Chicago

 

Rivers of road, rivers of river, snow-clumped trees,
the angel, flowering in moonlight.
People would have muttered if they’d seen.
What good is an angel now?
His terrifying beauty, hidden beneath a wing.
If we think we could be rescued, from the fate we’ve shored up,
it is not an angel, it’s a person, rising out of flames.
Perhaps the angel, fallen to earth as lightly
as a feather from a falcon, has nothing to offer but himself,
pale clawed feet in the dark street, his feeble torch
on this avenue of twitching flags, threads of a great anxiety.
He crawls into the attic of number 1813.
In the space between home and state,
the angel shudders, turns, cramped wings shake open –
through the house a molten dream, through breakfast and dinner,

through the silver sorrows of the city,

its lumpy cracked streets, its America, soaring in the snow.

"Night Flight" by Sarah Holland-Batt [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In the introduction to her collection of short essays on Australian poets, “Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry”, Sarah Holland-Blatt writes “As a form, poetry is full of freedom and possibility. It asks the reader to be open to coincidence and association, to music and imagery, to chance and change. Poems are full of surprises: each line is a little detonation of language and imagery, each stanza a series of swift steps into the unknown.” Holland-Blatt’s “Night Flight” is a perfect demonstration of these detonations of language and imagery. From one line to the next throughout the poem, we are shepherded across continents and desires, to destinations known and unknown, physical, temporal, bodily, imaginative and personal, where everything is “defined / by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh / and those killing Chicago winds”.

 

Sarah Holland-Blatt is one of Australia’s leading poets, editors and literary critics. She has been published widely internationally, including in The New Yorker on several occasions. From 2014 to 2019 she was the poetry editor of Island magazine, and was also the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. Her three collections of poems to date have swept up nearly every major literary award Australian poetry has to offer, with her most recent title, Jaguar, winning the 2023 Stella Award.

Night Flight

 

As my plane drops down in turbulence

I think of you and of Salt Lake City,

I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes

and of Omaha and of adamant plains.

I think of all the places

I have never been: Caracas,

La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way

our bodies puzzled together in that room

over pine woods where night deer

passed in the snow, their lonesome

inscrutable tracks sluicing

in the morning’s melt, I think of

your eyes that are almost the colour

of mercury, of their unbearable weight,

I think of the plateau of your chest

rising, rising, and of your hand

resting on my right thigh,

of the slim glint of your wedding

band in the dove predawn light.

I think of how everything is defined

by distance: how close we were,

how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh

and those killing Chicago winds

and union towns near Detroit, Michigan

where loyalty is the only religion.

I think of the sound of your breathing,

which is the sound of fields

of blond Illinois wheat bent down,

I think of those silver silos

of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville,

barns blazing in all that silence

as we drove through what we could

not think or say. There is no grace

in this kind of longing, there is only pain,

pain which I have always preferred

anyway – it is where I live,

and called love by any other name.