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 fasten ardently to it. Atherton’s lines move towards their margin like a slightly manic lover moves towards the object of their affection: charged with desire and susceptible to razor-sharp changes 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. It is a remarkable way to celebrate the fact that, for many of us, our favorite poems, films, novels, paintings, are more than just artefacts, they are experiences we absorb into the deepest recesses 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.

Introduction to Michael Farrell (Part 2) [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In 2019 Michael Farrell edited the anthology Ashbery Mode, a collection of over sixty Australian poets whose work has been inspired by John Ashbery. The anthology is as much a testament to Ashbery’s range (both form and tone) and durability as it is to his inimitability. Ashbery’s influence is noticeable in Farrell’s own poetry, the two poets share a penchant for playing with form. 

“Good Fortune” borrows much of its formal restrictions from a sestina: six, six-line stanzas followed by a tercet. But Farrell disrupts the traditional sestina: instead of repeating the end words of the first stanza in sequence throughout the poem, he repeats the opening words, while maintaining the traditional pattern. The shift in placement alters the dynamic of the poem, which assumes a “push” force, rather than the “pull” of a traditional sestina, in which we know where we will end up, we just don’t know how we are going to get there. The irony of Farrell’s adaptation of the sestina is that the opening up of the end words to variation does not alter the form’s overall effect. We still know where we are going to end up: right back at the beginning.

Good Fortune

Suddenly I was a banker with a magnificent desk

Yet it seemed that after years of success and luck

Everything I’d worked for was about to disappear

Due to mismanagement or fraud or the economy

Thanks to good fortune however, it turned around

And I kept the desk with its four kangaroo legs

 

Suddenly I was a farmer with a magnificent flock

Yet it seemed that the good seasons and high yields

Everything I’d taken for granted had now collapsed

Due to climate change or bureaucratic guidelines

Thanks to good fortune though, I was able to sell it

And it became a sanctuary for sheep with wooden legs

 

Suddenly I was a toymaker with a magnificent factory

Yet it seemed after years of innovation and record sales

Everything had become unpopular and old-fashioned

Due to multinational pressure or the cheapness of plastic

Thanks to good fortune or rep, I got a new commission

And became a maker of robots with weaponised legs

 

Suddenly I was a priest with a magnificent window

Yet it seemed that the amount of joy and worshippers

Everything that seemed right in the world, was dwindling

Due to scandals and competing with Twitter and Satan

Thanks to good fortune or God’s grace, or Coca-Cola

And the thirst for promotion, I became a Coke on legs

 

Suddenly I was a porn star with a magnificent action

Yet it seemed that the decades of sex and recognition

Everything that’d once been a stud’s due, was over

Due to ageing or cams and the rise of amateurism

Thanks to good fortune or surgery I literally became

A donkey and could do so much more with four legs

 

Suddenly I was a kangaroo with a magnificent head

Yet it seemed that after years of a cushioned existence

Everything in the building including me was obsolete

Due to mismanagement or asbestos or the economy

Thanks to good fortune I was reprieved (and relieved)

And went to the home of a creature with two legs

 

Suddenly no-one believed in magnificence any more

Yet everything that once had legs was due to return

Thanks to good fortune and the decline of the circle

Introduction to Michael Farrell (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

Michael Farrell is one of Australian poetry’s great experimenters. Over his eight collections to date he has pushed at the limits of form, structure, syntax and more to interrogate, and indeed reshape, what “Australian poetry” actually means, particularly in its post-colonial paradigm. His seminal critical work Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796 - 1945 expanded on this project, and further established him as among the nation’s most adventurous and original intellects, along with being one of its foremost poets. 

 

 

“proust aboard a doomed corvette” is taken from Farrell’s second collection ode ode (2002), a collection marked by a talent for hyper-paced parataxis, reminiscent of Dean Young. Farrell’s early poems are laced with pop-culture and literary references, wit, irony and pathos. The imagery is surreal and their associations surprising, but they always remain rooted to an emotional truth, so that in Farrell’s poetry we are able to identify both the fractured external world around us and our equally incongruous internal lives.

 

proust aboard a doomed corvette

the blue car was too slow marcel

insisted this was a virtue so we

toured the galleries gave cats lifts

painted bodies as we passed there

were some whose souls we entered

briefly & saddened like weevils

in an opened cheese remained

illdisposed to heroics haircutting

ate nothing so this is the moon

marcel remarked gloomily the life

forms are disappointing i dont

understand what god was getting at

leave god out of it i said

annoyed at last by his trilby

twitching watch the road baron

he replied there arent any moon

roads anyway i thought you

were driving out of petrol time

to abandon vessel lay low hope

a cattle farmer comes along we

can steal his wife horizon his

bitter expressions well the first

figure to come along was an army

deserter we were too sentimental

to harm we lent him a cork

shelter a phone that remembered

princes number ned kelly shrieked

mp we continued without holdups

 

"Parable" by Louise Glück [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last Saturday’s referendum to alter Australia’s constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice failed to pass. It is, I feel, a devastating and profoundly sad outcome that cuts to the very soul of the nation. Indigenous leaders have called for a week of silence to mourn the result, a result that can only be viewed as Australia's latest rejection of our First Peoples’ rightful place within their country, and I want to honor this request by not posting an Australian poet today. 

Rather, I would like to pay my respects to the great Louise Glück. “Parable” is the opening poem of Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), a favorite collection of mine. The poem captures the state of futility we too often experience in our shared existence, a condition that can be overwhelming at times like these, when shadows appear to be falling upon all corners of the world.

 

Parable

 

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,

in order that our souls not be distracted

by gain and loss, and in order also

that our bodies be free to move

easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss

whither or where we might travel, with the second question being

should we have a purpose, against which

many of us argued fiercely that such purpose

corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,

whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated

pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as

a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it

glimmering among the stones, and not

pass blindly by; each

further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,

so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,

like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,

which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,

and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line

so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.

Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which

some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem

to have achieved an agreement; our canteens

hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so

(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still

preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;

we could see this in one another; we had changed although

we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling

from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed

in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose

believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free

in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

"Self-reliance" by Sarah Rice [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Sarah Rice is a Canberra based poet and visual artist who holds a PhD in Philosophy and has lectured in art-theory  at the Australian National University's school of art. In 2011, she co-won the prestigious Gwen Harwood poetry prize. Her limited-edition, art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (Ampersand Duck, 2010), with prints by Patsy Payne, is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

 

 

Self-reliance

 

No one is going to come and save you.
And because of this you must fold
your clothes at day's end

despite the urge to abandon them
to the backs of chairs. You must shake
the crumple of sleep from the sheet.

You must clean your teeth. Wash the teaspoons.
Fold your pyjamas too and lay the neat squares
to rest under your pillow of a morning

despite the fact that in a few hours all
will be done again in reverse. All will be undone.
And there will be no-one to see.

No one will know the bed corners were tucked
into triangles. No one will see the sleeves cross
empty arms against flattened chests and wait quietly.

No one will know if the spoon was licked before it re-
entered the jam jar. And no one will call you to bed
and to the relief of sleep. That midnight hour must be

crossed alone.

The curtains drawn and redrawn, drawn and erased.
Be wary of sitting too long in a warm place, of holding
cups of tea for too long, or lying in bed thinking in the morning.

Be up and doing, up and at 'em. Be the bird
that gets the worm before it eats the apple.
Try to resist writing poetry.

"Tenebrae" by Theodore Ell [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Theodore Ell’s first collection of poems Beginning in Sight won the 2022 Anne Elder Award, judged by Gig Ryan, Ella Jeffery and Marjan Mossammaparast. As the book’s title suggests, Ell’s poems are conceived through a gathering of visual details, their accumulation developing atmospheres and meanings that are often vague and indefinite. Part of the appeal of Ell’s poetry is the contrast between the precision of these details and the shadowy effects they create. In “Tenebrae”  the arrival of nighttime into a city apartment is presented with rigorous particularity: “Sky /  in the gaps of a broken comb - the medley / of towers, antennae.” The way the night seems to enter the apartment, to break the distinction between the inside and outside worlds, generates a vulnerability, ominous, that transforms solitude into isolation, reminiscent of some of Pierre Reverdy’s poems. Tenebrae is of course a Catholic service held during Holy Week in the days leading up to Easter, and a tension exists in the poem between “the cold communion” of maintaining this solitude by watching the night pass by from the windowsill and the desire to enter into the world: “Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves – / not dress circles”.

 

 

Tenebrae

 

Nightfall on the sill. Trinkets, hardened dust. Sky
in the gaps of a broken comb – the medley

of towers, antennae. The city: a queue
for dinner at a swish place, or a catwalk.

Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves –
not dress circles or crystal filled in series,

only forgetting the rule of doubt for hours,
leaving morning till morning, whole vacancies. 

This sill, monogrammed by wine rims. A living.
Rest from studying the pavement in silent lines,

from the cold communion, aid. Frail-voiced
nuns chant responses from behind gilt fences

through the workless days. They reach some in the street,
who look in, down a ribcage of coloured light,

high rafters, canopy – a keyhole vision
of dusk between towers, that toothed horizon,

a light that breaks our outline, hides our numbers.

 

"Intimacy" by Dominic Symes [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Dominic Symes’ “Intimacy” was first published in the bi-annual journal Meniscus in 2021, an issue of the magazine in which the specter of Australia’s covid-lockdowns understandably hangs over many of the poems and short-stories included. It is difficult not to read Symes’ poem in this context: for many of us, the lockdowns transformed intimacy into a state of near claustrophobia. But Symes instantly turns this association on its head: the intimacy he is speaking of is gained in solitude, finding the quietude offered by reading and the small gestures of the natural world. The impersonal torpor of the lockdowns is brought back to us in the brilliantly depressing couplet “how we both sleep better after sex / but we’re both too tired to initiate”. The poem then shifts again to that liminal space we are taken to whilst reading, at once a lonely and intensely sociable act, in which we often develop a deep intimacy with the writers we read, noticing the most subtle shifts in their style, like a borrowed reference, as clearly as “ the haircut changes the shape of your face”.

Dominic Symes’ first book, I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation, was published by Recent Works Press in 2022. 

 

 

Intimacy

sometimes you get it reading Rilke

 

the small glimmer of sunlight

from the window

which rests

between your neck and the pillow

 

how our fault-ridden bodies

are supposed to shed, regrow and forget

 

how we both sleep better after sex

but we’re both too tired to initiate

 

you can tell when a reference is second hand

in a personal essay

I read it when I was reading such & such

 

like the haircut changes the shape of your face

the humidity the quality of your skin

 

now soft to touch

but strong, firm, young

 

some letters he wrote just to say

sorry for not writing sooner

there was this war I got held up in

 

 

"Refugee" by Francis Geyer [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Francis Geyer’s “Refugee” first appeared in the Summer 1962 issue of Meajin, one of Australia's premier literary magazines. Geyer was Gwen Harwood’s second published heteronym, whose creation freed a multitude of Harwood’s most notable poetic strengths (read more about Harwood’s heteronyms here). Harwood styled Guyer as a European romantic, a Hungarian refugee who most likely migrated to Australia following the 1956 revolution, and afforded him a rich lyricism and sentimentality missing from the poetry Harwood was writing under her own name and that of Walter Lehmann, her other heteronym at the time.

Harwood’s heteronyms caused much embarrassment to editors across Australia. Meajin’s then editor, Clem Christesen, who was the inspiration behind Harwood’s famous poem ‘Abelard to Eloise’ (which reads acrostically “FUCK ALL EDITORS”) for his alleged plagiarism of one of Harwood’s lines, appears to have identified Geyer as one of Harwood’s heteronyms (see below) but printed the poem none the less. Sifting through Meajin’s digital archive, I was pleased to see Geyer still named as the poet of “Refugee.”

 

Refugee

 

I remember the rough-spoken landscape frayed

by years of upheaval, the towns

unimaginably old, and the thoughtful passion

of the Christ in a church where we prayed.

 

I remember locked figures in the streets:

duel or embrace, I did not know;

the impetuous gestures of our guide

as we came to those gates where the river meets

 

rock, the savage boldness of the flood.

A voice saying ‘Freedom’ in a tongue

I have forgotten, the wet red sandstone,

my life-long terror of blood.

 

I remember the ocean licking at lonely piers,

and the scavenged food. I cannot remember the faces

of father, mother, my sister; only the places

that were not home, and the tears.

"Marrickville" by Louise Carter [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

With the directness of paint-thinner, Louise Carter’s “Marrickville” strips away at the euphemisms and self-told fictions a young poet must decorate her life with to sustain her vocation. A share house is “a glorified squat for people / who don’t want to pay full rent”. The poem takes its name from a historically working-class neighborhood in Sydney’s inner-west, and Carter’s sharp eye and the precision of her phrasing, in turns frank and humorous, brilliantly capture the ridiculous circumstances (if all too common) that early-stage gentrification can present: “We’re a generation of ideological orphans / building Zion in Marrickville, our dyed hair a symbol / of our kinship – while the original residents, the old-school / Greek immigrants, gaze bewildered from their porches / as hordes of us jog past them of a morning, / farting smugness.” The poem then turns inwards, the speaker, like many poets at various stages of their lives, unable to mount a defense for continuing to pursue her vocation, instead, she wonders if it might be more judicious to “swallow your insolence, move back to the suburbs and give birth / in front of the TV.” It is this balance Carter finds in her candidness, never excessive, sometimes enlivened with a splash of irony, that gives “Marrickville” its power.

 

Louise Carter lives on Gadigal land (Sydney). Her poetry has appeared in Meanjin, Best Australian Poems, Westerly, Cordite and other publications. Her first collection of poems, Golden Repair (2023) was published this month by Giramando.

 

Marrickville

 

It’s been three weeks since I cleaned the bathroom

and it hasn’t been cleaned since. But that’s what you get

in a share house – a glorified squat for people

who don’t want to pay full rent but dress it up

as ‘community minded’ – a place where conversations

about the fairest division of the gas bill take place

over the compost bin. You could say, hopeful of heart,

that it’s a family, which it is – dysfunctional –

the air seething with PMT, all of us rolling

out yoga mats to the sound of the kettle boiling,

the fridge stocked with kale and coconut water

but never meat. We’re a generation of ideological orphans

building Zion in Marrickville, our dyed hair a symbol

of our kinship – while the original residents, the old-school

Greek immigrants, gaze bewildered from their porches

as hordes of us jog past them of a morning,

farting smugness. I’m so far from home,

from the buzz-cut lawns and yipping dogs, from kitchens

with microwaves and African violets softly dying

beside disinfected sinks. These days I take comfort

in YouTube and weed on nights where the urge

to give up on this poetry caper becomes overwhelming –

the fear that there’s nothing you can do to avoid

becoming your mother so you might as well swallow

your insolence, move back to the suburbs and give birth

in front of the TV. These days I force my focus

onto whatever the present moment happens to reveal –

organic toothpaste, bowls caked with chia seeds,

my own face glimpsed in the mirror like seeing

a celebrity in a cafe – the intimate recognition

of a stranger in this, the mediocre immediate.

"alkaway" by Ella O'Keefe [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

The Judith Wright Poetry Prize was established in 2007 by Overland magazine, one of Australia’s more inspired quarterlies and among the nation’s best homes for poetry, as an annual award recognizing new and emerging poets. In 2021, Overland published Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2007-2020, an anthology which collected not only the winning poems (including the runners up), but also a selection of poems written by the winning poets since they were honored by the prize. Edited by Overland’s poetry editor, Toby Fitch, Groundswell is perhaps the best chronicle of the state of Australian poetry over the past 14 years you’re likely to find, mapping its fashions and trajectory through the work of a number of innovative voices.

 

2015’s winning poem “alkaway” by Ella O’Keefe grabs you with the sheer charisma of its opening line “a punchline flies business class”—how could anyone resist reading what comes next? But there is more than mere surface charm to the line: when it comes to jokes and their punchlines, we speak of their success in terms of “landing.” This joke, still in flight, remains hanging in the balance. It also occupies a place of privilege, flying not in coach but  “business class,” which brings up the question of the role of humor in our society more generally, and comedians in particular, many of whom feel they are entitled to say the un-sayable, that their punchlines, no matter where they land, deserve to travel in a certain amount of comfort and be received with immunity.

What follows is a series of surprising images and phrases juxtaposed against one another, which, as the award judges note, address a range of themes “from high capitalism, health fads, technology and the law, to the domestic, cohabitation, indifference and the refuse of human consumption”, but throughout the poem the privilege of distance (how we can remove ourselves, or be removed, from what we say, see or do) seems to lurk disturbingly in the background.

 

 

Ella O’Keefe’s first collection of poems Slowlier was published by Cordite in 2020. She currently teaches at Deakin University, where she was awarded her thesis which discussed the poetry and critical writing of Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Barbara Guest.

alkaway

a punchline flies business class

towards vague archipelagos

   in the deepening Pacific

I find glassy petrol spots the size of 5-cent pieces

refracting intervals of the day

 

thrushy embers in mornings overturn

      woken by shapeless violence

your body returned

   from sleep’s legal trip

 

quilling into the afternoon

discovering ‘the therapeutic power of water’

   while wasp-shaped helicopters

   spotlight the oval – but when?

 

(in violet enamel

when bees were discovered)

 

after filtering the whole house

cohabited refuse goes archaeological

turncoat, Georgic pink

      bread bag (garment)

      elastic calendar as in

      day-shaped moments between yawns

time-check:

pearling three o’clock clicks to

night without dusk

   floating floor

   live improv set in the big suburb

 

   replica village reality effect

the bodice sits over the body

know this well already, cf. ‘it mimics nature to filter’

old-sponge chunks of wattle

   slumping on your cheek

gathering a full body testimonial

 

 

"30.11.12" by Ken Bolton [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Since the 1970s, Ken Bolton has summoned the spirit of the New York School in his life and poetry: erudite, conversational, playful, modern (as he writes in “Horizon”: “I never wanted to be postcolonial / or colonial just modern which is / the joke on me—but who wants to be a category?”) to fashion one of the most distinctive styles in Australian poetry.

Born in Sydney in 1949, Bolton moved to Adelaide (the capital city of South Australia) in 1982, where he has become a central figure in the city’s cultural scene through his association with the iconic Experimental Art Foundation, his art and literary criticism and his poetry, in which the city often acts as the guiding motif. (Bolton is also a publisher of note, founding the magazine Otis Rush and operating the press Little Esther Books.)

 

In “30.11.12” the speaker, sitting in an Adelaide cafe, takes the dreaded question all writers ask themselves when they face a blank page, “What am I going to write here?” as an entry point into the poem, answering the call with typical understatement and insouciance,  “Something, I hope.” 

We then discover the significance of the poem’s title: the date is an event, a return to the page after a year's absence, exacerbating the anxiety of the question just posed, an anxiety which is just as quickly diffused by the speaker's casual self-deprication:

A year
or so since I last launched out

in my usual spot

and stopped, because I didn’t
want the usual– which
after all this time with
nothing else happening
I miss.

 

So what is “the usual” Ken Bolton poem? 

1. Often his best poems are loquacious, sweeping and inclusive, but never “long” (take “Kirkman Guide to the Bars of Europe, their music, their service, views etcetera” or “August 6th”). 
2. They are frequently, as Bolton describes Elvin Bishop’s guitar in “poem, the terrific days of summer”: “ex- / pansive, & rolling, / with a fabulous 'well-being' type of swagger” in the way they space themselves over the page (his use of single word lines can be especially powerful). 
3. They are O’Hara-like in their celebration of interests: musicians, painters, poets, friends. John Forbes is a frequent guest. So is Pam Brown and John Jenkins. Laurie Duggan, John Tranter, Gig Ryan, Lou Reed, Manet, James Schuyler, Tony Towle and Paul Violi ("So much of what / I write is an open letter to someone" from "Home Town").
4. They wander through observation and thought, and the profound enjoyment of taking time to truly appreciate one’s surroundings, such as in “30.11.12”, when the speaker, rather than taking umbrage with the distractions the cafe presents, uses them as platforms to propel the poem forward, as when he notices the lady at the register: ” I think she is enjoying / the air conditioning, the / sudden sense of choice. Her relief – / at the prospect of rest.”

 

30.11.12

 

What am I going to write here?
Something, I hope. A year
or so since I last launched out

in my usual spot

and stopped, because I didn’t
want the usual– which
after all this time with
nothing else happening
I miss.  I hear
a high-pitched scattered voice,
look up,
& see an image that makes me think
‘I wonder how X
is going?’ – someone
I haven’t seen for a while –
a blonde woman sways
distractedly, near the till,
asking a question. But not
of me. I think she is enjoying
the air conditioning, the
sudden sense of choice. Her relief –
at the prospect of rest.
My walk here
blocked for a moment
by a girl – ex-
pensive shopping bags in
one hand mobile phone to ear
in the other – so that I thought briefly
How can anyone bear
to appear so girly?Realising
by reflex, that How can anyone bear
to walk out like him(say)?
is a question
some woman might ask
with regard to me –
dressed, after all,
‘like a styleless yak’,
to quote Paul Keating
(not a woman, tho women
liked him. I liked him). 
Maybe she has something
great in that bag,
the girl,
that on another day
I will applaud,
registering a kind of intelligence
I don’t have or
rarely access. Lunch hour –
& Temposeems filled, nearly,
with women, mostly older than me.
A free concert, maybe, in the offing.
The Adelaide String Quartet
resides out back.
Soon I will hear a bell tinkling,
announcing the doors’ having opened.
I look about briefly –
too blind, in this light,
to read the paper – too blind
with these eyes, is more the case:
an eye operation in
10 days time.
 ____After which –
all will be revealed, maybe. 
I hope I am not plunged-in-darkness –
never to see that girl again,
for example, in her
short summer frock
of dove grey, telephone
to her ear, moving dreamily,
an image, now, I love –
or the delightfully styleless yak
I see amble past … 

& whom I join, my lunch
(half) hour up – (gone?)  ((done?))

II

‘X’ was someone smarter than me
– in most respects
that count – thin,
drank a little too much,
coped, made a difference, as they say.

 

 

Two Poems by M.T.C. Cronin [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

M.T.C. Cronin has been among the most prolific Australian poets over the course of the last three decades, having published more than twenty volumes of poetry since her debut collection Zoetrope: We See Us Moving in 1995. Her poetry has won a number of Australia’s major literary awards, including the prestigious Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize.

 

Cronin has a background in law, and while she rarely, if ever, refers directly to her legal work, her poetry often draws parallels and incongruities between law and poetry, their distinct styles, languages and processes. In a 2009 lecture, Cronin asked if, as a test of poetry’s worth, we should apply to the poem Ann Scales’ statement on law as a social tool: “It is only extrinsically important, its actual value depends on its success in promoting that which is intrinsically valuable.” Cronin’s answer was an emphatic no: “Poetry’s purpose is not to provide solatium. Poetry’s purpose is not to get there, and poetry is neither extrinsically nor intrinsically important. Poetry is not a tool… its purpose is unintended and its purpose is undesigned… All that is undecided lives in poetry, and this aids decision.”

The Audited Heart

 

Words went up to the front and fought and were wounded

And died and returned home and were paralyzed -

The slippery survivors parsed together so that we may listen

To their swords

 

The clatter

 

That's where the teeth are, not in the mouth

But in the hand, stretching out for the heart behind it

This cage of holy acceptance

 

The race to the bottom of that red place

Snake, that thing, that turns there

Settled under the chest because there is only war here

 

Violence on the coast

In the corridors

The country designing itself, vacant and threatening

Without need to measure the space between this word

And my last

 

The present grows smaller and smaller

As the future grows larger and larger

The Australian's book was written

Following an oath taken never to write

Again. Everything

Had too much importance,

Too little

 

I do not want to rest my fate on the ordinary,

On security - I want to talk to everyone!

 

But God is not a parent

Not a mother or a father

And you must also look beyond my voice

To hear my voice authentically

 

Even I, who did it, must search for evidence of what I did -

So tired that there is no occasion I will rise to

Nothing intimate in my movements towards the world

I cannot rest on my own hand

 

Beauty, even of clouds, alerts me

To the partiality of the flower

I have held the smallest man's hands

The strength still in them, of a giant

 

And

Raising my laugh to the level of a physical characteristic

Say: Don't be restless with others' love

For these organs, these unreliable means of detection

Are the very ones which find the major violations

 

Like that three-eyed fish running

In the river behind our homes

 

 

The Story Of Someone Who Knows Nothing

 

Betraying no journeys, what might be is visible from here

The colours as new as the ones you see all the time

 

I am horrified by the fact that I am not in a war

(and there are wars)

 

Do I want an epoch to happen

So that my poetry may have some place to suffer

 

And become golden?

 

These poems first appeared in issue #8 of Jacket

"the hate i ate had a nice day" by Gareth Morgan [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Gareth Morgan is a Melbourne poet whose collection When a Punk Becomes a Spunk was published last year and received an admiring and perceptive review in Overland magazine by Elese Dowden, absorbingly titled "The moral risk of taking things too seriously." Morgan, an astute critic himself, has also published a chapbook of epistolary poems addressed to Eileen Myles, Dear Eileen, and his poem "the national debt" placed second in the 2021 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, among the most prestigious poetry awards in Australia. 

 

the hate i ate had a nice day

i can see outside my window there are lights on
like a tomazs salamun poem, squares
drifting thru a square portion of the city

yellow squares and a lyrical mattress where i now sleep
it seems everything comes in the post these days
yet the post is so fucked up?

me and eileen myles both wrote books about this
i wrote eileen a letter but they didn’t write back
this is part of the problem…. oh well

if you wanted to read up on the fate of the
global postal service, you should seek out my
chapbook Dear Eileen, but if you’re pressed for time

i’ll tell you here— it’s not looking good! still i saw
a mailman out my window, beautiful cold blue day
chamomile blue, i felt calm and new

she pushed her cart like a horizon

"No, the System Did Not Work For Me" [by Jill Jones]

Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. Her latest book is Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems, published in 2023. Other recent books include Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, A History Of What I’ll Become, shortlisted for the 2021 Kenneth Slessor Award and the 2022 John Bray Award, and Viva the Real, shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2020 John Bray Award. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work is widely published in Australia and internationally and has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish.

 

 

No, the System Did Not Work For Me

I landed among delusion, with a lag
and a dogsbody. I was hauled within a millimetre
of someone’s brown balaclava.
I was a deb in line with a litre of jackpots
holding a new key and a gypsy.
I blundered past the icing, the pioneer pasties
until it became confusing.
There was some mug serving vol-au-vents
in the event of an accident.
The dogsbody left for a two-up game back east
and though I wrote to the mug
there were questions about indemnities.
I couldn’t tell if the lag had the only weapon.
They looked like blackballs or something
you’d wear in an airlift. I did not lose
though the vortex was faulty
too many yes-men hamming it up
for too many yobbos. The dollars shook down
their own catastrophe. I became a debacle
in pearls with a litter of Jaffas. I dropped
the lucky cards
the horizon got shonky. I gave up crystals
and tea leaf methodologies. I could not lose
though the yardstick was dodgy.
It was a blast in the blunders.
And thanks for the bluffs.

"Lufthansa" by John Tranter [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

"Lufthansa" is one of Tranter's best and most anthologised poems. The poem is mimetic of one of its early lines: it seems "struck by an acute feeling of precision" which leaves little room for interpretation or "meaning" that extends beyond the surface of its language. Michael Brennan has astutely drawn comparisons between the poem's "unity, precision and momentum" and a passage from Susan Sontag's 'Against Interpretation': "Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be… just what it is."

 

Lufthansa

Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock
rushes past like a broken diorama
I’m struck by an acute feeling of precision –
the way the wing-tips flex, just a little
as the German crew adjust the tilt of the sky and
bank us all into a minor course correction
while the turbo-props gulp at the mist
with their old-fashioned thirsty thunder – or
you notice how the hostess, perfecting a smile
as she offers you a dozen drinks, enacts what is
almost a craft: Technical Drawing, for example,
a subject where desire and function, in the hands
of a Dürer, can force a thousand fine ink lines
to bite into the doubts of an epoch, spelling
Humanism. Those ice reefs repeat the motto
whispered by the snow-drifts on the north side
of the woods and model villages: the sun
has a favourite leaning, and the Nordic gloom
is a glow alcohol can fan into a flame.
And what is this truth that holds the grey
shaking metal whole while we believe in it?
The radar keeps its sweeping intermittent promises
speaking metaphysics on the phosphor screen;
our faith is sad and practical, and leads back
to our bodies, to the smile behind the drink
trolley and her white knuckles as the plane drops
a hundred feet. The sun slanting through a porthole
blitzes the ice-blocks in my glass of lemonade
and splinters light across the cabin ceiling.
No, two drinks – one for me, one for Katharina
sleeping somewhere – suddenly the Captain
lifts us up and over the final wall
explaining roads, a town, a distant lake
as a dictionary of shelter – sleeping
elsewhere, under a night sky growing bright with stars.

In Honor of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

John Tranter, one of the foremost figures in Australian poetry over the last half-century, died earlier this week aged 79. Perhaps no one has done more than Tranter, as poet, editor, anthologist, publisher, critic and radio broadcaster, to place Australian poetry’s response to modernism (and postmodernism) into an international context. From his early interests in the the poetry of Rimbaud and the American avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s -- whose formal experimentation became a rich source of inspiration in his own writing -- to his revolutionary online magazine Jacket, Tranter seemed set to blow apart the provincial, Anglo-centric character of Australian poetry and open direct lines of communication to the rest of the world.

Described by the publisher and poet Michael Brennan as the “established agent provocateur of Australian poetry”,Tranter achieved a status in his home country similar to that of his good friend John Ashbery in the US: that of being a major poet accepted and acclaimed by both the avant-garde and the establishment. With his 22 collections, Tranter won nearly every major poetry prize in Australia. His poetry was relentlessly inventive. He seemed to live and die by the motto found in the early poem “Red Movie” (1972) that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious,” and maintained the urge to reinvent his poetry into to his later works through his embrace of technology, including a series of mistranslations of poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallamre using speech-to-text software. Tranter’s love of experimentation was matched by his mastery of form and a detached, ironic voice, distinctly Australian, that Tranter himself referred to as the “Laconic Mode.”

Born in the small country town of Cooma, Tranter grew up on a farm on the south-coast of New South Wales (in an interview with Toby Fitch, Tranter, tongue in cheek, draws a line between Rimbaud, Ashbery and himself as poets who all grew up on remote farms). Moving to Sydney in the early 60s, he studied intermittently for a decade, traveling across Europe and Asia before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Literature in 1970, the same year he was to publish his first full-length collection Parallax. Disappointed with the state of Australian poetry, and the country writ large, which he described as “suffocatingly dull and hideously authoritarian in those days”, he took a role as a publisher’s editor in Singapore after completing his degree.

On his return to his homeland  in1973, Tranter became a vitalising force in Australian poetry as an editor, anthologist and radio broadcaster. He edited the two major anthologies of modern Australian poetry: The New Australian Poetry (1979) which confirmed the status of the “Generation of 68”, who, in Tranter’s own words, “rose to public notice on the crest of a wave of poetry readings, ‘underground’ magazines, and a generally expressed antagonism to the established mainstream of poetry at that time, which they saw as too conservative,” and were to change the course of Australian poetry; and The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) co-edited with Philip Mead, which includes the entire oeuvre of the hoax-poet Ern Malley alongside works by indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty. Tranter also resurrected his journal Transit as a publishing company, publishing collections by friends including Gig Ryan, Martin Johnston and John Forbes. In 1975 he co-developed the first iteration of Books & Writing on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio. He would later take charge of a weekly, two-hour arts program, Radio Helicon on ABC Radio National from 1987-88  on which he interviewed a range of Australian and international poets including notable interviews with John Ashbery and John Forbes.

Tranter was early to recognise the power of publishing through the internet, and in 1997 began the international online poetry journal Jacket. His championing of Australian poets alongside internationally recognized names was instrumental in establishing contemporary Australian poetry throughout the world as a distinguished and distinguishable poetics. In 2004, Tranter established the online Australian Poetry Library which presented biographical and bibliographical information on over seventy Australian poets, as well as poems, book reviews and interviews.

Tranter’s own poetry, meanwhile, became renowned for its innovative style in which heightened disjunction and the use of surprising and irregular metaphor appeared to respond to the postmodern condition, in which we daily encounter a confluence of incoherent phenomena. 1976’s ambitious long poem “The Alphabet Murders”, in which each new stanza opens with the proceeding letter of the alphabet, begins:

“After all we have left behind

this complex of thought begins

a new movement into musical form, much as

logic turns into mathematics and automatics

turn into moonlit driveways — ‘form at the edge

of hearing’

Tranter’s increasing formal experimentation, including audacious pastiches, mistranslations and reimaginings of other poetic works, seemed to dislocate the poet almost entirely from the “I” of the poem. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald upon the occasion of the publication of 2010’s Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter compared his poetry in the light of Buneul’s quote about the ideal film having no names in it, and for the screenwriter and director to be anonymous. “In the same way medieval cathedrals give you this intense emotional experience yet you have no idea who designed them or built them, films and poems could be like that too, in a way.” The opening lines to Tranter’s poem “Having Completed My Fortieth Year” seems to confirm this outlook “Although art is, in the end, anonymous, / turning into history once it’s left the body.”

In my favorite poems of Tranter’s, however, the “I” is very much located, grounded in both a temporal and geographical space, and more often than not that space is the city of Sydney. In his verse novel The Floor of Heaven, Sydney appears almost as a character, while in “In Praise of Sandstone,” which takes the end words of Auden’s famous poem “In Praise of Limestone” and places them in a Sydney landscape, we get a portrait of the city’s topography, a short history of it’s convict past and a study of a typical workday.  “Ode to Col Joye” takes its setting as a shower in Sydney, with the speaker trying to pin down which poet the day he has woken to most represents. Is it a John Forbes day? a Ken Bolton day? a John Ashbery day?

                                         it’s the kind of day

where I notice that my Renault—

      a beat-up Renault; how

          Sydney, and how French!—

has the name RENAULT on its side in chrome letters—

how metonymic

                             that the name of the object is seen as

being part of the object to which it refers

This is the Sydney I grew up in—cosmopolitan, sardonic, colorful, confident, playful— the same features that we most often encounter in Tranter’s poetry, which, like “Ode to Col Joye”, begins in Sydney and spirals across Australia and the world, continually delighting those who happen upon it.

-- Thomas Moody

See also this obit: https://jacket2.org/commentary/remembering-john-tranter

An inspired editor, John was always able to get me to write something for Jacket -- or to find a place for something wonderful that came my way. A wonderful writer, he was, until the day of his death, Australia's leading poet.-- DL

In Praise of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

Word has just reached us that John Tranter, the brilliant poet and editor, died on April 21, just eight days shy of his 80th birthday. We will be running a tribute to John Tranter and posting some of his poems in the coming days. For now, let us let Thomas Moody introduce American readers to Australia's leading poet and literary editor. Part one of Moody's essay is below; click here for part II, which we posted on  September 1, 2021
 -- David Lehman

An Introduction to John Tranter [April 29, 1943 – April 21, 2023] (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

The difficulty in introducing John Tranter is knowing where to begin. Surely any attempts to elucidate his poetry would be reductive, and any measure of its influence fall embarrassingly short. Tranter is a major poet and in my estimate the major Australian poet of the second-half of the twentieth-century (though John Forbes might have something to say about that). His renown stretches far beyond our antipodal boundaries. As his good friend John Ashbery wrote in the introduction to Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter is an "international phenomenon".

In the course of his more than twenty collections, Tranter has seemed to live and die by the motto found in one of his most ambitious and accomplished poems, "Red Movie," that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious." Tranter's poetry always surprises and refuses to rest on its laurels—just as you think he's hit on a winning formula in one collection, he upends it in the next. Through his fifty years of writing he's employed a multitude of styles and techniques, but always present are his keen ear for the Australian vernacular, a frighteningly sharp intelligence, and a "larrikinism" that never lets his poetry take itself too seriously. 

 The poem I'd like to share today is not particularly representative of Tranter's oeuvre, though it does exhibit several qualities that we can find in many of his poems: his wit, a love of the movies, and his extraordinary ability to absorb the essence of another poet and transmute it into a contemporary Australian landscape (both geographical and emotional) to offer us something at once uncannily familiar and entirely original. "After Hölderlin" is a favorite of mine, and I suspect it may be a favorite of Tranter's too, as it serves as the opening poem to his new & selected, Urban Myths. I plan on sharing much more of Tranter's poetry over the coming months, so stay tuned.

After Hölderlin

When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
or the office routine. I dreamed
in the mottled shade of many a beer garden
among a kindness of bees and breezes
my lunch hour lengthening.

As the flowers plucked and set in the little bottle
on the table still seem to hanker for the sun,
nodding in the slightest draft, so I 
longed for a library loose with rare volumes
or a movie theatre's satisfying gloom
where a little moon followed the usherette
up and down the blue carpeted stairs.

You characters caught up in your emotions 
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.

I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn't let you live;
I felt for you when you were thrown from the car
again and again; when the pilot
thought he was lost and alone, 
I was speaking the language of the stars
above his tiny plane,
murmuring in the sleepy garden, growing up
among the complicated stories.
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and the shadow
in the arms of the gods.

Posted by Thomas Moody on August 04, 2021 at 10:45 AM in Australia | Permalink

Comments

Thank you, TM, for this column on the "international phenomenon" that is John Tranter. I love the poem -- perhaps the more so because, for me as for the two Johns referenced (Ashbery and Tranter), Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry is and has long been an inspiration. Looking forward, I am, to more Tranter -- and more Moody.

Posted by: David Lehman | August 05, 2021 at 12:24 AM

How good to be reminded of Tranter’s excellent poetry which doesn’t get seen much here in the US.

Posted by: Mark Pawlak | August 21, 2021 at 08:59 AM

From the archive; first posted  August 4, 2021

See also

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/an-introduction-to-john-tranter-part-1-by-thomas-moody-1.html

"deflated at dusk" by Rebecca Jessen [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Rebecca Jessen is a Brisbane based poet whose first poetry collection Ask Me About the Future (UQP, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Commended for the Anne Elder Award. 

 

"deflated at dusk" evokes the sometimes excruciating slowness of a family summer vacation in Australia—bbqs and tomato sauce (ketchup), sand in the bed, Aeroguard for the mosquitos, Mum narrating the weather "with every vagrant cloud"—which seems to absorb all life and sense of identity and singularity into it’s soporific spell.   

 

deflated at dusk

 

xmas lights trapeze across campsites. all-day

bbq smell makes me reconsider my vego status.

no-one tells you swimming is more fun

in the wading pool. has Mum ever existed

without a cigarette in her hand. smoke

and Reef Oil wafting from the porch. two essentials:

Aeroguard and Masterfoods tomato sauce.

so what if I still check the news hourly.

life moves fast elsewhere. here

the easy affection of toddlers

is life-affirming. sometimes a bucket really is

just a bucket. we are all deflated

at dusk. Mum narrates the weather

with every vagrant cloud. I don’t even mind

the sand in my bed or the mirror

of my alternative life. I’ve never been less

 

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O'Hara

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

                First published in Australian Book Review

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

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

The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax by David Lehman

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

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

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

 

 

Petit Testament

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Fe

Magnetic north is always on the move,

looping its slow deep subterranean loops

around true north which it eludes

like an errant partner in an Arctic dance. Whoops –

gliding now at forty k per year from Canada

towards Siberia like a planchette on a Ouija –

anyone would think these shifts might derange

a home-bound salmon and rearrange

the map for pigeon, turtle, snow goose

or the coded alphabet inside the honey bee

dance; it all seems set to confuse

but fails. Blood hears more than its own euphony

as the sliding behemoth in fits and starts

quietly adjusts our compasses, our hearts.