The Best American Poetry

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.

"Christopher Brennan" by John Tranter [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

To honor the late John Tranter, one of Australia’s finest ever poets, I thought I would share some of my favorite poems of his over the coming weeks. “Christopher Brennan'' encapsulates much of what makes Tranter so special. The poem most obviously showcases his mastery of form, which fulfills the demands of the sestina so nonchalantly it seems to be at the same time a perfect representation of the form and a highly exaggerated parody. The voice: casual, ironic, conversational but detached, as if the speaker is partially distracted or worse, the poem is uninterested in itself. The poem is ostensibly a biographical sketch of the Australian poet Chirstopher Brennan, but within this portrait Tranter deals with a number of themes that occupied him over the course of his life, most notably the value of poetry (Tranter once mentioned in an interview that every eleven years or so he developed a strong distaste of poetry and questioned its worth) and how to locate Australian modernism within an international context.

 

 

Christopher Brennan was an Australian poet born in 1870. Heavily influenced by German Romanticism, he is probably best known for his 14 part cycle “The Wanderer.” Brennan was also an early enthusiast of the French Symbolists, in particular Mallarmé, to whom he sent his first collection and received back a note of praise. The poet John Hawke has written that at the turn of the 20th century there was “a stronger interest in Mallarmé’s poetic philosophy in Australia than virtually anywhere else in the English-speaking world.” Brennan was at the avant-garde of this movement. In 1897, the same year Un Coup de dés arrived on Australia’s shores, Brennan produced a handwritten facsimile of Mallarmé’s masterpiece, a parody called  Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebraic- Symbolico-Riddle Musicopoematographoscope & Pocket Musicopoematographoscope.  Years later, Tranter would continue this tradition by producing his own mistranslation of Un Coup de dés, “Desmond’s Coupe.”

You can read Tranter's thoughts on Brennan's parody here.

Christopher Brennan

 

He spoke German,

Fluently, and French.

One he got by study,

the other from an inclination to drink

absinthe, like the poets who were always writing

among the cafes and the bottles and the crowds of women.

 

How do they do it? He liked women,

though they seemed a little too German,

at times, invading the domain of writing

and buggering up his whispered amatory French

the way that a few too many drinks

would ginger up but addle the study

 

of his volumes of foreign verse. In the study

he worked at a huge monument to women

for an hour or two, then had a drink.

Phew! Like a good German

he had a method for everything, and like the French

he wasted it on writing

 

poems about feelings like writing

all through the night. His study

lamp glowed out across the Quad. Famous French

poets wrote to him, once or twice. Women

from one end of Europe to the other admired his German

manners. Ah, Heidelberg! Must be time for a drink.

 

Back to the heatstruck colonies. God, a drink

would go down well, eh? Those oafs writing

gibberish and hoping for a pass in German

Romantic literature, look at them, as though study

were enough! What about inspiration? The women

of Sydney are not really suited to modern French

 

poetry. And now Mallarme’s gone loony — too French,

if that were possible. One last drink.

In a sheep-farming province, young women

who wish to develop the discipline of writing

should take up the study

of German…

 

He yearned to dream in French, but all he heard was German.

He inclined to drink, and trudged through a torrent of study

And when he reached for women, they became his writing.

 

 

"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.

 

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

TV

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

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

 

Love Poem

 

Spent tracer flecks Baghdad’s
bright video game sky

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

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

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

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

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

chatter of the quad ZSU 23.
Our precision guided weapons

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

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

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

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

 

Speed, a Pastoral

 

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