The Best American Poetry

Two Poems from Whirlwind Duststorm by John Hawke [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

There’s a certain watchmaker’s quality to many of the poems in John Hawke’s collection Whirlwind Duststorm (published by the excellent Grand Parade Poets): assemblages of distinct parts meticulously pieced together into compact forms that give measure to grander, more abstract notions, while always being embedded in the quotidian.* Hawke’s descriptive precision and exactness of image are impressive, and they are often in tension with the open-ended nature of the poems themselves. This tension creates an enjoyably destabilizing effect for the reader, as when one stares too hard at an object and it begins to shimmer and blur, opening up the world from the particular to a more powerful and interesting ambiguity. The two poems that bookend the collection, “Axis” and “Dormition,” both achieve this effect.

John Hawke teaches literary studies at Monash University in Melbourne and is poetry editor of the Australian Book Review. His previous volume of poetry, Aurelia, was published by Cordite Press in 2015.

Axis

 

One sulphurous puff, then the white stick

is flicked spinning in a flare of sparks,

red globes throbbing down the harbour channel.

One vulnerable hand lifted, its sallow disclosure

pallid as the history of human error

pasted on placards, where arc-lights scatter

a brittle confetti: the florilegium of choice.

These itinerants marred by the stages of grieving

gather by handfuls at the terminus, swell into masses.

Some still bear marks of disfigurement

like mortal wounds, gashes insecurely bound,

heaped in the exhaustion of travel.

Most are older than usual, in loosely

drooping camisoles, or subsiding gowns.

A woman offers a baby she has never fed

to another for burial, passing in aura

through the mirror’s cathexis, the attendants

hunched in flag-bright uniforms,

paddling a ghost-train sleigh under the patchwork

awning of a coral tree, through scarlet petals

and tunnels of black opal. Then a steel door slams to.

Dormition

 

A mirror that refuses to light. Paired

black cockatoos patiently rowing

avenues of pleached hornbeams,

 

aurora hunters calculating degrees

of space grammar. The clutch and

groan of the grain elevator, laddered

 

as the scaffolding of Golgotha,

signals harvest: coils of feed grass

rolled silver under sheets of rain.

 

There was noise coming from your

house last night. The pipes rusting

closed deliver a treacle of ochre

 

and untraceable metals. That awful

Rachmaninoff under Richter’s piercing

thrumming of thrown daggers.

 

Lopped paspalum hovers yellow for days

on the steady pool of this late season.

I’m very comfortable. I’d prefer to sleep.

 

A fine rain hatches his skeletal shoes

crossing the light from the vestibule.

He doesn’t realise that he’s dead.

*A notable exception to this is the truly brilliant prose poem at the center of the collection, “The Wedding,” which, at eight pages, is too lengthy to post in full here but is alone worth seeking out the collection for. You can also read the terrific title poem, “Whirlwind Duststorm,” here.

"Clouds" by Francis Webb [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

This past Saturday, 8 February, marked the centenary of the birth of Francis Webb, one of Australia’s major poets. A devout Catholic, Webb’s poetry is infused with a mystical, redemptive Catholicism, whose transcendent spirit might find a precursor in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Webb struggled for much of his life with mental illness, and today is recognized as the first Australian poet to address such issues in their poetry. One of his most accomplished poems, “Ward 2”, set in Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital, opens: “Tight scrimmage of blankets in the dark; / Nerve-fluxions, flints coupling for the spark; / Today’s guilt and tomorrow’s bent; / Passion and peace trussed together, impotent”. The eight-part poem is a major achievement, I urge you to seek it out in full.

Toby Davidson, the editor of Webb’s Collected Poems (UWA Publishing, 2011), has written an illuminating essay celebrating Webb's centenary for The Australian Book Review, which offers a valuable introduction to Webb's biography and poetry (you can find it here). Davidson, who has written superbly about the tradition of Christian Mysticism in Australian poetry, argues in the essay that Webb’s asylum poems “‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo” (1952) and “A Death at Winson Green” (1955),  “represent a quantum leap in how mental health was represented in Australian poetry.” 

 

 

Admirers of Webb’s poetry stretch from Judith Wright to Bruce Beaver, Gwen Harwood to Robert Adamson. Les Murray, writing Webb’s obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, called him ‘the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged.”  Adamson, in a lecture given as Chair of Australian Poetry at the University of Technology Sydney, urged his listeners "not forget how deep a grasp of poetry Webb had, his intellectual agility as a technician, his deep knowledge and experience as a poet.”

I have chosen to share Webb’s poem “Clouds” as it is, I think, as good a representation as any of the poet’s “intellectual agility as a technician.” The final two stanzas in particular display Webb’s rhetorical powers most fully—a cadence that swells with the force of his imagery, reminiscent of early—that is to say, peak—Auden.

 

Clouds

 

1. Inland

The rich surplus of consciousness rots at the wharves.

That one big bird will not preen his shallow shoulder

Nor peer at his ghost in water - there is none.

For the stooping gaffer daylight only serves 

To bear in his muggy dungarees the moulder 

Of mare's-tail (or teacake) and that old boiled lolly the sun.

All assignations of brooding grain with earth, 

All childhood, manhood among diehard trees 

As litter of string, paper, and leather are wound 

In the hot palms of the wind, sent thrumming forth 

To whirl above shoaling plains and memories 

And drum you, tissue of waters, out of mind.

2. The Town

The entrance to the Hall 

Is two splayed marble calves

Propping a lap of stone.

Plumb in the centre of all 

Itinerant hatreds, loves,

Is this mentor, but all alone.

Woolworths and Lyonses lean

All askew at twelve 

(Time for a beer or tea)

And watch the flittering scene 

Of scamper and gabble, delve 

Into known asymmetry

For their children to buy and buy 

Colours and tinny stars;

They are going too fast it seems,

No one looks at the sky

With all its department stores 

Auctioning thuds and gleams 

And greasy meccano cloud, 

Oaths rattle in heaven,

Big lists clear away:

No one has heard a word, 

No signals, omens even 

In the town this day,

3. Airliner

I am become a shell of delicate alleys

Stored with the bruit of the motors, resolute thunders 

And unflagging dance of the nerves.

Beneath me the sad giant frescoes of the clouds:

Towerings and defiles through intense grey valleys, 

Huge faces of kings, queens, castles — travelling cinders, 

And monuments, and shrouds.

A fortress crammed with engines of warfare swerves

 

As we bank into it, and all the giant sad past 

Clutches at me swimming through it: here 

Is faith crumbling - here the engines of war 

In sleek word and sad fresco of print, 

Landscapes broken apart; and here at last 

Is home all undulant, banners hanging drear

Or collapsing into chaos, burnt.

And now we are through, and now a barbarous shore 

Grimaces in welcome, showing all its teeth 

And now the elder sea all wrinkled with love 

Sways tipsily up to us, and now the swing 

Of the bridge; houses, islands, and many blue bushlands come.

Confine me in Pinchgut, bury me beneath 

The bones of the old lag, analyse me above 

The city lest I drunkenly sing

of wattles, wars, childhoods, being at last home.

 

"No Alarms" by Dan Hogan [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Reading Dan Hogan’s debut collection Secret Third Thing (Cordite, 2023), I kept thinking about Apollinaire, particularly his short poem “Hotel.” Here it is in full:

My room looks like a cage

The sun sticks its arm through the window

But I who want to smoke and make mirages

I light my cigarette with daylight

I don’t want to work I want to smoke 

 

The final line of the poem gets to the inherent tension between the Poet, for whom a certain kind of idleness—space to ruminate and imagine—is seemingly essential to their vocation (think of Whitman, whose ambition was so grand as to write the secular American bible, while at the same time he continually espoused the virtue of “loafing”) and the economic systems they must live in or adjacent to, and which often place sweeping demands on their time and attention. In his great essay on Apollinaire, "A Few Things about Apollinaire and Me,” Ron Padget writes that it is the final line of “Hotel” which determines the feeling of the whole poem: “The poet is feeling dreamy and lazy. Plunk.” The poet in his loafing, Padgett notes, is tumbling his nose “at the conventional bourgeois world.”

This small act of resistance is made more interesting when considered alongside Apollinaire’s most well known poem, “Zone.” In “Zone,” the poet possesses an intimacy with the modernized world, propelled by the same capitalist system which in "Hotel" he is looking to evade, which cannot spring from a purely antagonistic relationship. While “Zone” might not celebrate the emergent developments of the 20th century, it does, at the least, engage them, and this engagement suggests a degree of fascination on Apollinaire’s behalf, if not admiration. 

 

Hogan’s poetry similarly engages our digital age, with a poetry that inhabits internet culture at a deeply intimate level, while regarding the internet as a totalizing (and derranging) instrument of capitalism. Hogan’s poetry can be disorientating, vertiginous even. Their assemblage of internet language (in particular the linguistics of memes), corporate jargon and marketing-speak, surreal imagery and non-sequiturs into hyper-paced collages (or feeds) are unnerving in their immersive capacity: the achievement of many of Hogan's poems is not that they merely locate and name the disquieting aspects of our permanent online state, they recreate them through a lyricism that is superabundantly alert to how it feels to be living in this moment of radical distraction. In Hogan’s poetry, there is no room to retreat to “to smoke and make mirages,” there is no idleness, no way to break free from the demands of capital, because in the digital age, the instrument of capitalism, the internet, has penetrated every area of our lives, to become an extension of our own nervous systems.

Dan Hogan (they/them) is the author of Secret Third Thing, which won the Mary Gilmore Award and the Five Islands Prize. Secret Third Thing was also named one of the ‘best 25 Australian books of 2023’ by The Guardian. Hogan’s poetry has won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, Judith Wright Poetry Prize, XYZ Prize, and Val Vallis Award, among others. Their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published widely, including in Overland, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, The Guardian, and Jacobin. Hogan runs DIY publisher Subbed In and edits the working-class literary journal Industrial Estate. In 2024, Hogan received funding from Creative Australia to complete their first novel, tentatively titled The Phrog.

No Alarms

Give the brigalows time to impersonate metal. Fold the final
reminders like bed sheets. Ignore the echoes. Are you revolted
the right way? Mosquito into the tidiest corruptions. Zap. Soak
the stains. Ear against the wall, diagnose water hammer. Put
the email address here if you are sending a copy you do not
want the other recipients to see. It’s always home time somewhere
but don’t tell anyone. Come bearing data. Using techniques, never live
it down. Somewhere a landlord is kissing another landlord. Please
clap. Consider the executive sated. Boil the kettle. Pour the tea.
Prayer for meteorites. Oblivion coldens quickly when there is no-one
to take a photo. Steam tentacles stopping in the air. Nobody actually
knows how to count to ten. Fake it ‘til you make it. Quake-happy fault
lines at the edge of the whole disgusting sky. Please clap. Not tired.
Just playing with my eight-ball eyes. Misery during the work shirt
donning process. Head hole problems before breakfast. A cursed
nexus. Tfw it’s Thursday all day. The best part of being stuck in traffic
on your way home from work is being late to the work you have to do
for work after work. Clouds standing sentinel with their rain bodies above
Old Guildford. The sky is about to happen. Please clap. Would you
say your depression has a purpose? The air might be air-conditioned
but who is ringing the bell? Ignore the previous email. This meal needs
a nap. Please remember me to your boss and payroll manager. Dead leaves
on the bonnet. New window wipers work. Couldn’t sleep because dreams
were movies that kept rewinding. Running early for once. Do yourself
a favour and don’t. Please clap. Do X number of things for Y number
of means. Portending the spectre of an ending, remember to send me
your bank account details for dinner. Emit an electricity of unshakeable
compliance until the dawn of a new contract. Slurp. Slurp. Locomotion
and food and why. False mirror enabled. So on and so forth. What is
the warmest document type? What is the reverse of a chandelier? Is it
fern spores? Submission without the act of submission. Ten days sick
leave. A multiplicity of forces with no discernible origin. The doctors
will call this a way of being on medication. Reports are due. No time
to grieve for lost futures. TGIF. Please clap.

"Australian Tourists" by Peter Murphy [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Peter Murphy (1945 - 2024) was a playwright, author, librettist, photographer and poet recognized for his accomplishments in various forms of the genre, including concrete poetry and sound poetry. His visual and written works are notable for their wit and ability to accentuate life’s everyday absurdities. The breadth of his talent was remarkable. A glowing review of his debut short story collection, Black Light, in the February-March I980 issue of Australian Book Review opens with the line, “Peter Murphy is one of the very best poets under forty writing in Australia today.” 

 

 

"Horrible" by Peter Murphy

 

“Australian Tourists” takes aim at Australians’ uncanny habit of holidaying in places very much like the ones in which they live. Growing up in Sydney, a coastal city with beaches aplenty, I always found it curious that the entire metropolis seemed to resettle just a few hours up the coast each summer, to beaches not too dissimilar from the ones left behind. For me, the most impressive feature of the poem is its economy of language, made possible by Murphy’s deft line breaks. The poem’s idiom, overtly ordinary, evokes the monoculture it describes, and is lubricated by Murphy’s use of one word lines, subtle repetition and some really clever rhyme (“transfigure,” “St Kilda,” “mirror”) that occasion a flow so effortless, the effort required in reading the poem is “to persuade yourself /  you’ve moved.”

 

Australian Tourists

 

travelling in Australia 

 

have to be particularly 

sensitive 

to difference

 

if they're to believe 

they’re somewhere else

 

or that warmer climates 

or denser cities

 

in which they're introduced 

to people like themselves

 

can transfigure

what looks like home 

into the exotic

 

when palms in St Kilda 

mirror

those in Cairns.

 

And though there's no debate 

about distance

or change

 

it's paradoxical

that effort is required 

to persuade yourself 

you've moved.

"To the Fugu" by Debbie Lim [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Debbie Lim’s “To the Fugu” takes the carnal intimacy of eating to its perilous limit with the seduction of the world’s most lethal delicacy. The poem is in the comic, erudite and slightly unnerving spirit of Donne’s “The Flea,” and here again the act of consumption is associated with the pursuit of love. In “To the Fugu,” however, the risk of failure is life-and-death. Seduction of the coy fish, then, must be undertaken by a master of the craft, and Lim’s speaker is a culinary Casanova, basking in the precariousness of the chase, knowing that one false move will likely end up in fast-moving paralysis. Bon Appétit.

 

 

Debbie Lim received the 2022 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press) and a full-length collection will be published by Cordite Books in 2025. She was born in Sydney, where she lives on Darramuragal land.

To the Fugu

 

I cannot see her tonight

I have to give her up

So I will eat fugu

              – Buson
 

To kiss you is to mimic your own stunned face:

small-mouthed, teeth slightly bared.

But you refuse to flirt, giving nothing beyond

that slope-headed stare: not even girlish aspirations.

And yet, such potential within that provincial body!

This could bloom into something beautiful:

a chrysanthemum or crane.

Eight chances I will give you, for what’s love

without uncertainty, those few tingling doubts –

a growing numbness in the throat.

 
Fugu: Japanese for pufferfish (literally translating to ‘river pig’), which has neurotoxic properties.

Also refers to the notorious dish made from the animal which, if not prepared properly, can cause death by asphyxiation.

 

"To the Fugu" originally appeared in Cordite Poetry Review 50: JACKPOT!

"To the Bobbydazzlers" by John Forbes [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Tough day to be thinking about poetry, let alone Australian poetry.

Luckily, John Forbes has a poem for just about every occasion. 

 

 

To the Bobbydazzlers

American poets!
you have saved
America from
its reputation
if not its fate
& you saved me
too, in 1970
when I first
breathed freely
in Ted Berrigan’s
Sonnets, escaping
the talented earache of Modern
Poetry.
                       Sitting
on the beach I
look towards you
but the curve
of the Pacific
gets in the way
& I see stars
instead knocked
out by your poems
American poets,
the Great Dead
are smiling
in your faces.
I salute their
luminous hum!

Two poems by joanne burns [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Another prose poem this week by another virtuoso of the form. joanne burns (who has previously been featured on the BAP blog here) has published fourteen collections of poetry since her debut Snatch appeared in 1972. For the next half-century, she has pushed the boundaries of genre, with her work often taking place in those indefinite spaces between poetry and prose—not only with prose-poems but also parables and microfictions. For decades she has renounced capitalization, preferring the egalitarian quality of exclusively lower-case words, which according to burns “levels the playing field.” 

“how to sneeze in peace” was first published in the Australian journal, Heat, in 2001 and showcases burns's imaginative faculty which allows her to so acutely locate the absurd in the quotidian. I also wanted to share “she had more friends,” a poem I have always loved. Ingeniously laconic, the shift in the poem’s direction is as sharp as the poet’s wit. The title in particular takes on a new and gloriously more sinister interpretation after the poem is read. Enjoy.

joanne burns lives in Sydney and is currently assembling a new manuscript of recent works: rummage.

how to sneeze in peace

the burden of dreaming, the bed a huge net dragging the monster octopus of story that lunges through the head at night: the corpulence of the drowning psyche. who, what, are these people, these shades, these feelings, places, likenesses, that tangle one up like a bad load of washing. this shamozzle of the long night.

tentacles shoot out new episodes, plots and subplots in the hours before dawn. who is the octopus – the dreamer or the dream. grubby stories, leviathan lore, cheap little anecdotes. you turn in the bed, and its creak documents another story. the glare, the smirks of strangers, familiar places, rearranged by the psyche’s cruel interior designer. you know the loci by name but they look different. as if you are awakening from an anaesthetic.

in dreams irony does not exist, even suspicion, perspicuity is a struggle, you suffer physical pain if you try to break out of the dream. the dream and its fleshy, multifarious burdens insists you remain naïve, compliant, committed.

but for those who have been blessed with dust allergies there is a way out. if you find yourself near dusty spots in one of your dreamings try to get as close as you can to these sprinklings or mites. within breaths you will feel it coming. a huge sequence of sneezing that will blast you from your deepest slumbering, with a shower of clear ink, writing invisible gratitudes across the lightness of air.

 

she had more friends

 

she had more friends 

than you could fit 

into the back of a truck

 

that's why she didn't mind 

leaving them parked 

on a cliff edge

 

while she went 

for a stroll

with the brake in her pocket

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.