The Best American Poetry

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

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

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

 

Louis Buvelot "Summer Evening Near Templestowe"

 

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

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

 

 

slippage (un)fixed

 

Louis Buvelot is painting. It’s a quarter past

midday and you wouldn’t know out here unless

you looked at the sun but Louis doesn’t look

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

A mammoth gust of wind blows a twig onto the

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

picks out the twig with his thumb and forefinger.

It messes up a branch of his painted eucalypt.

There’s something else stuck to the grass in the

foreground. It looks like a tooth; human or

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

once he’s done that he sees another appear.

And another. Louis goes on picking out teeth

until finally he pulls a whole skull out of his

canvas. He tosses it away and puts the finishing

touches on the landscape. Calls it The Clearing.

 

[First published at Cordite Poetry Review]

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tennis Court Ode

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

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

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

 

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

 

Aubade

 

Open up, Oblomov: for the dust pan sings

Tinny-tang for all your years asleep.

Who knows what maidens may have crept

And brushed their lids against your cheek.

Awake old slav, the kitchen calls,

Eggs are frying, a saucepan falls,

Outside an old grey wind begins to weep.

 

In your bowels a lyric stirs—

Your toilet call, you morning birds,

Urging out your lazy feet

To rest like dumplings on the boards.

Your brain now beats about its bowl,

Cake-making, for your acquaintance, Soul,

Will make a formal call at five.

Thi is, if you are still alive.

 

Old poet, dragging on your drawers,

Seeking a rhyme without a clause—

All creation is about its chores!

Oblomov sighs, subsides, and snores

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

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

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

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

1945

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

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

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

with the world that was the case already fading.

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

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

 

Wake in Fright (1971)

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

 

Wake in Fright

 

The roo, stewed,

is outcome of shotgun,

the messy tear of skin.

The goat will break teeth

if not carefully cut

and held in the slow cooker

longer, so the metal falls

deeper into the pot. Two shot

between here and Jurien,

one almost kid-sized—

oven-roastable.

Coming home, the slab

of red in glad-wrap

on the bench is just flesh,

indistinguishable.

This is something

I should learn,

the full process.

Filling the chamber, the shot,

how to angle the body

so the blood spills neatly.

All the old farm boys

know, teach their sons.

I could be one

with a gun. Just

cock the handle

and be ready to take

the recoil, the bruise

on the collarbone,

the misfire, the graze

from dropping knees to ground.

The corpse, too heavy

to lift, winched against sky.

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

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

 

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

 

The Ambition

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

Queenscliff

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

Three Poems by Carody Culver [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Carody Culver is a Brisbane based writer, editor and poet whose recent chapbook The Morgue I Think the Deader it Gets (published online here at one of Australia's best homes for poetry, Cordite Poetry Review) deserves your attention. Playful, ironic and genuinely funny, these poems are marked by a casual erudition and a humor that is at once generous and scathing—no small achievement. Like Jawbreaker candy, Culver’s poems are perfectly sweet until you take a bite into them.

Photo by Jackie Ryan

“Short biographies of magicians’ assistants” offers up a list of names of magicians’ assistants and a pithy description of their demise. The brevity and inventiveness of the poem (I love the assistants’ names) make it easy to look past the otherwise obvious and uncomfortable detail—all of these assistants are women, all of them suffer violent ends. Culver’s clever use of rhyme and meter give the poem the feel of a nursery rhyme, a feeling which is abruptly ended by the final line’s refusal to conform, breaking the poem out of its own illusion.

Short biographies of magicians’ assistants

 

Tallulah Sparkles—cut in half

Delilah Diviner—sawed apart

Phoebe Angel—guillotine chop

Amber LeBon—dagger head box

Electra Montgomery—live cremation

Mary-Beth Moonshine—failed levitation

Juniper Bliss—disembodied

Daphne Golden—disappeared.

 

The Morgue I Think the Deader it Gets takes its title from a line in the chapbook’s opening poem, “The More I Think”, which itself takes its opening line from a well known public artwork in Brisbane by the conceptual artist Sebastian Moody (who is, coincidentally, my cousin). The poem rearranges the artwork's maxim until we reach an aphorism that could be a worthy companion piece to the original.

 

Sebastian Moody Think Bigger (2009)

 

The more I think

 

The more I think about it the bigger it gets

The bigger I think about it the harder it gets

The harder I think about it the sharper it gets

The sharper I think about it the pointier it gets

The pointier I think about it the sorer it gets

The sorer I think about it the sicker it gets

The mirth I think about it the laughter it gets

The bisque I think about it the lobster it gets

The morgue I think about it the deader it gets

The years I think about it the older it gets

The sage I think about it the wiser it gets

The sound I think about it the louder it gets

The money I think about it the richer it gets

The think I get about it the better it gets

The gets I better about it the thinker it bets

The better I get about it the thinker it mores

The more it thinks about it the lesser I’m for

The less I know the more it gets

The less I am the more I know.

 

 

The brilliance of “A short guided meditation by a thought leader” is that it is as ridiculous as it is believable. Culver borrows from corporate jargon and the language of spiritual capitalism to usher us through a guided meditation in which we collaborate with our breath, visualize our inner core competencies and connect to our own best practices. It would be of no surprise if we were to see some of these phrases used in absolute earnest by an upcoming ad campaign, as some new brand assures us we are shovel-ready and results oriented.

 

A short guided meditation by a thought leader

 

As a thought leader, I’ll be leading your thoughts in today’s guided meditation.

Think of this exercise as a form of change management. A way to move the needle on your future potential. A chance to touch base with yourself. Are you ready to take things offline? Let’s pivot.

Close your eyes. Collaborate with your breath. Action that in-and-out. Be purposeful. Be the champion of your diaphragm. Get yourself in the loop. Connect to your own best practice and really put those boots on the ground.

Now let’s curate your own innovation. First, visualise yourself as the head of a for-profit start-up. Amplify that vision. It may have lots of moving parts, but you’re the one who can make it pop. I want you to buy in to your own empowerment, cradle to grave. Find that culture fit. Don’t guesstimate—this is your time to land and expand.

Let’s take it to the next level. Visualise your business strategy: are you a game-changer? A disruptor? An influencer? Breathe in on your scalable ideas, breathe out on your entrepreneurial approach to Industry 5.0. See yourself shifting that paradigm. Visualise your inner core competencies. Amplify them.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Peel your own onion. Ride your own tailwinds. Be your own strategic partner. Feel yourself expanding your bandwidth as you run this up the flagpole. It’s about organic growth. It’s about building your brand. Raise the bar—you’re shovel-ready and results-oriented. This is your summit.

Get all those balls in the air. Every one of them is authentic. Every one of them can build capacity. Every one of them has its own special sauce. Crowd-source yourself. Drill down. Tee up to empower your new normal.

Now it’s time to circle back and close the loop. Sit up. Reach out: let’s all join hands and form a steering committee.

 

Ms. Culver has produced a gem of a chapbook. I urge you to seek it out.

"Imperial Adam" by A.D. Hope [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

When A.D. Hope published his first collection of poetry, The Wandering Islands, at the age of 48, he was already regarded as the leading Australian poet of his day. The book’s belated publication in 1955 was due in large part to Australia’s prudish censorship laws, and there was much in The Wandering Islands to rankle the censors. Hope’s poetry was often explicit in its sexual details, but this candidness was matched by a mastery of form and authority of diction that verged on the virtuosic and the pompous respectively. As Clive James writes “[Hope] spoke from on high. His vocabulary was of the present, but it had the past in it, transparent a long way down. And it was all sent forward like a wave by his magisterial sense of rhythm.”

Hope’s strict adherence to formal verse and his oracular voice can at times inhibit the erotic he audaciously explores, so that restraint (a crucial element of seduction) can calcify into incapacity, as if both partners have handcuffed themselves to the bed, beyond each other's reach. Hope's is also a singularly mascuiline eroticism. 

“Imperial Adam” is Hope’s most anthologized erotic poem, and his best. Rejected by the publishers of Australian Poetry in 1954 because the editors feared it bordered on “intellectualized pornography”, the poem reimagines paradise and our species’s first sexual act. 

It is interesting to compare the poem to the canonical narratives on the fall of man. “Imperial Adam” does away with the parables of Genesis and the angels and theology of Milton's Paradise Lost to focus exclusively on the carnal. There is no serpent to tempt Adam, but Eve’s body, in particular, her pubic hairs: “The innocent sunlight showed the place of love; / The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.” The other inhabitants of paradise watch on in awe as Adam and Eve have sex. Upon reaching her climax, Eve lets out a “terrible and triumphant female cry”. There is something to this act that the beasts recognise as new: it is more than sex for procreation, it is sex for pleasure, driven by desire, and brings with it a whole new world of possibilities: ecstasy, gratification, jealousy, envy, shame, and most devestatingly, precipitates man's fall away from god. The fall is not sealed by Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, but rather by Eve giving birth to Cain, his “pygmy face” arriving to a fearful audience. The poem's shocking final line “And the first murderer lay upon the earth" links sex from its origins with violence and death, to make it antithetical with innocence and complicate god's first instruction to man: be fruitful and multiply.

 

Imperial Adam

 

Imperial Adam, naked in the dew,
Felt his brown flanks and found the rib was gone.
Puzzled he turned and saw where, two and two,
The mighty spoor of Yahweh marked the lawn.

Then he remembered through mysterious sleep
The surgeon fingers probing at the bone,
The voice so far away, so rich and deep:
"It is not good for him to live alone."

Turning once more he found Man's counterpart
In tender parody breathing at his side.
He knew her at first sight, he knew by heart
Her allegory of sense unsatisfied.

The pawpaw drooped its golden breasts above
Less generous than the honey of her flesh;
The innocent sunlight showed the place of love;
The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.

This plump gourd severed from his virile root,
She promised on the turf of Paradise
Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;
Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs,

And waking, smiled up at him from the grass;
Her breasts rose softly and he heard her sigh --
From all the beasts whose pleasant task it was
In Eden to increase and multiply

Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind:
He took her in his arms and there and then,
Like the clean beasts, embracing from behind,
Began in joy to found the breed of men.

Then from the spurt of seed within her broke
Her terrible and triumphant female cry,
Split upward by the sexual lightning stroke.
It was the beasts now who stood watching by:

The gravid elephant, the calving hind,
The breeding bitch, the she-ape big with young
Were the first gentle midwives of mankind;
The teeming lioness rasped her with her tongue;

The proud vicuna nuzzled her as she slept
Lax on the grass; and Adam watching too
Saw how her dumb breasts at their ripening wept,
The great pod of her belly swelled and grew,

And saw its water break, and saw, in fear,
It squaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.

 

Vale Jordie Albiston [by Thomas Moody]

We were saddened to hear the news last weak of the death of Melbourne poet Jordie Albiston at the age of 60. One of Australia's most highly regarded contemporary poets, she will perhaps best be remembered for 2003's The Fall and its much anthologized title poem, an account of a woman falling from the Empire State Building who at the same time tumbles through the story of her life.

 

Albiston's poetry was frequently adapted to other mediums: her collection Botany Bay Document was transformed into a performance work entitled Dreaming Transportation by Sydney composer Andree Greenwell, which premiered at the Sydney festival in 2003 and was staged the following year at the Sydney Opera House. In 2006, Albiston's biographical verse The Hanging of Jean Lee was used as the text for an opera. Albiston's poetry was often experimental within the confines of strict formal settings. Jack & Mollie (& Her) is a book-length poem comprising decasyllabic cinquains, while Euclid's dog: 100 algorithmic poems uses various mathematical concepts and proofs as bases for its eight poetic forms.

In 2019, Albiston was the recipient of The Patrick White Literary Award for her significant contribution to Australian literature. She will be greatly missed.

 

Soul v. Body

A soul hung up, as 'there in chains
Of nerves and arteries and veins...
— Andrew Marvell

Bout after bout I fight my body
over who will rule us, me or
her, and round after round sees
me thrown down, knocked out.

Physical she has the upper
fist, the flesh and blood that
gets bums on seats, while my
defence is simply the idea.

She is the temple and I am
the tenant, held like a hermit
in a strange arrangement with
the world, against my will.

Yes, I am the snail and she is
the shell and she is for sale
for giving me hell every time
she has climbed on my back

As the audience taunts and the
bell goes again, I see certain
stars yet staunchly believe
that spiritually I cannot lose.

Life after life I fight my body
over who is the purer, me or
her, and death after death we
return to the same new debate.

Two Poems by S. K. Kelen [introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last week, the UK’s Channel 5 television network announced that they were dropping the long-running Australian soap-opera Neighbours, putting the show’s future production in jeopardy. The program has been on the air for thirty-six years, and is an Australian institution—it seems every Australian actor has passed through Neighbours at some point, either on their way to international stardom (Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce, Margot Robbie) or onto the conveyor belt of domestic television obscurity.

The news prompted a number of hyperbolic reactions in the Australian and UK press, citing the desertion of our national soap-opera by the British as a metaphor for the deeper decay in Australia’s international appeal. Writing in London’s Sunday Times, columnist Caitlin Moran claimed that Australia as a destination was not “aspirational anymore,” and that for Britain’s Generation Z, the country has become “that place with all the dead reefs and offshore refugee internment camps, where the entire country often turns into one big barbecue.” 

 

This is a bit like blaming the box office failure of the latest incarnation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile not on cultural shifts in media consumption, movie-going especially, or the film’s impoverished script and diminished cast (when compared to the 1978 version starring Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, David Nivin and the imperious Angela Lansbury), but rather on Brexit, the gutting of the National Health Service, and the punitive Nationality and Borders Bill. 

While Moran’s article speaks more to the quality of the Sunday Times than it does to the challenges facing Australian tourism after nearly two years of closed borders, it was a reminder of just how far away from much of the world Australia actually is, and how disorientating this remoteness can be (for people on both sides).

Two sonnets by S. K. Kelen from his latest collection A Happening in Hades capture the stupefaction in the moments precisely after this distance has been crossed. There is nothing quite like touching down in Australia after a 20+hr flight, it feels as if you have landed in a different world. In Kelen's poems, the speaker disembarks at Sydney airport where “People speak slightly differently” and “football players you’ve never heard of / headline the national team”. The dreaded flight is so long that during the journey the world has “tipped into a new Age”

S.K. Kelen is a former winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and has over ten collections of his poetry to his name since first being published in 1973.

 

Parallel Worlds (Earth No. 47)

                                                        

Sometimes slip into a parallel world,
then the one after that, it often happens flying.
It's a whole new universe when you land
and disembark. Sydney Airport Earth No. 47.
People speak slightly differently,
the airport's festooned with bright advertising
campaigns for brands and products that didn't exist
a week or so ago, football players you've never heard of
headline the national team. Everywhere a raw nervousness,
the talk gets giggly about a new war, the time to hate,
and who to hate, keep in mind the terrorist thrill,
sexy and mysterious. Join the fight to save Propaganda.
Make do in this tiger-free dimension—at least a while—
hotter here than the last world, things fall apart fast.

 

Parallel World Two (Earth No. 48)

                                                        

And disembark. Sydney Airport Earth No. 48.
I grew blasé, details were different, but each world's
Fundamentals were pretty much the same, a stasis of constant flux:
Humans mistreating Nature (and hoping to get away with it),
Love and entertainment, war an politics, eating, creating and destroying
So we can build, a race to top then the end we were too mesmerised
By reality stars' voluptuous flesh and eyes to see the forests die
And the oceans rise. Cataclysm made clear: from moment to moment 
The universe changes. The change started when I flew in
From God-knows-where and God-knows-when.
The world suddenly tipped over into a new Age, something different.
It was the day after tomorrow the collapse began, the structures
Built and evolved over aeons faded and the striving died, replaced by
Grey resignation and regret that spans the globe. And life is quiet.

 

"tidemark" by Jane Gibian [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Jane Gibian is a Sydney poet and librarian, who recently published her fifth collection of poems, Beneath the Tree Line (2021). Gibian's poetry chronicles the internal landscapes of modern city life, and is marked by the subtlety of its details which often accumulate into something more transient and amorphous as they pass through the minds of their speakers.

 

"tidemark" is a great example of this affect: through the clarity and exactness of its details: the "pale baby capsicum forming inside / its dark red mother", the poem leaves us with an impalpable and elusive disquiet, "that part of the beach / pining for home".

 

tidemark

                                                        

you begin here: part of a distant beach
missing its home, a doll’s saucerful
of the cleanest sand sleeping in your ear

grown into something with glairy edges,
a tidemark advancing and receding less
with the disintegration of arctic sea ice

affirmed when you accidentally cut
the pale baby capsicum forming inside
its dark red mother, the centre of a world

to turn around: beneath the surface
dark rocks loom in the glassy water,
further out, mutable peaks of white froth
tease your eyes with dolphins

where you end: that part of the beach
pining for home, and at the centre
an instrumental continuo around which
all other voices circle and rub

 

January 26 [by Thomas Moody]

January 26 is officially Australia Day, however, many Australians refer to the date as Invasion Day, which is, let’s face it, the far more compelling title, and in point of fact, the more accurate. On January 26, 1788, Admiral Arthur Phillip sailed into Sydney’s Botany Bay with the “First Fleet” to establish the penal colony of New South Wales, eighteen years after Captain James Cook had claimed the territory for Great Britain on the spurious grounds of Terra Nullius (no man’s land). It was not until January 1, 1901, that the then six British colonies came to unite as the federated nation of Australia.

If you were to ask Australians what they most valued about their country, I think a fair share would point to the landscape, to the red soils and pristine beaches, the trees that keep their leaves and shed their bark, the huge skies and brilliant light—all of which were very much present before Phillip arrived just over 230 years ago. Others might say that it was our laid-back, casual way of life which takes pride in giving everyone a “fair go,” qualities one does not readily associate with penal colonies or 18th century British maritime officers. Still others would maintain that it is our Indigenous peoples and their culture, which, as the oldest continuous culture on the planet, spans over 65,000 years, and for whom January 26, 1788, is most decidedly the worst day of all of them.

 

The Aboriginal Flag

It seems reasonable enough, then, that as the date is a cause of great pain and suffering for our First Nations peoples, it should be commemorated in a more somber and reflective manner, and our national day of celebration moved to another date. And while there is a growing movement to have Australia Day reassigned, there is also a vociferous slice of the population for whom this proposed change is an intolerable offence (ironically, while observing Australia Day, these celebrants often seem determined to forget what day it is entirely, with only their empty beer cans littering the rivers and beaches, public parks and nature reserves, to serve to remind them when they come to).

 

"Change the Date" protest

January 26 is a date that lurks deep in our national consciousness, and it is no surprise that it makes its way into the work of many of our poets. In Toby Fitch’s “January 26” the mindless celebrations at a local park come to represent the failings of a nation that is “struggling and still unsure / of learning how to start over again, how to walk this back, / uninvite ourselves from this hot, manicured parkland”. 

 

Lionel Fogarty

The poem I’d like to share today does not reference January 26 directly, however, the date seems imbued into its core. ‘What Saying Says’ from Lionel Fogarty’s Minyung Woolah Binnung is preoccupied with distinctions: the future is “black”, the playwriter is “Abo”. These distinctions could only come about, of course, because of January 26, 1788.

While always dealing with the spectre of Australia's history, Fogarty’s poetry also seems to be relentlessly forward looking. His use of the English language is so entirely unique, it is as if he is creating a language on the page as he goes: “race as taken us / ace as lag us / pace as sagged us”. And this is, perhaps, the greatest distinction: to write poetry in the English language that is not like English language poetry at all.

 

What Saying Says

 

What saying says

          same as laying bout

 

race as taken us

ace as lag us

pace as sagged us

 

The still distillery owned

          Reliving our black future

          is of most greatest to a eye

 

But the Abo playwriter said

          he bro’s you not listens

          to noboby not even your

          own kind

 

The sun shone at a cold night’s air

          The half moan came over the

                   body is laying on the frosted

           grassed plains

 

Now the laughter at hate

           Laughter at TV crap

                    Laugh at my world reefed for

           a leaving sign 

"Request to a New Year" by Judith Wright [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Judith Wright was one of Australia's foremost literary figures of the 20th Century, and one of only two Australian poets (alongside AD Hope) to be considered for a Nobel Prize in literature. Her passion for Indigenous Rights and her work as a conservationist led her to be viewed by many Australians as the nation's conscience. Wright's poetry often speaks to her love of the Australian landscape, and her despair at its molestation for economic gain.

 

 

The action in "Request to a Year" does not take place in Australia, but rather Switzerland, and has a kind of European detachment to it, a "difficult distance" that allows the speaker to recount a catastrophic event in a tone approaching disinterest. It is a challenging poem in many ways, I am not sure I would want "the firmness of hand" the speaker requests, which allows one to witness tragedy and coolly sketch its portrait. While the poem is successful in granting the speaker her wish (the poetic equivalent of the firm hand she is appealing for is realised in the dispassionate voice the poem adopts), it is less convincing in its admiration for the "artist's isolating eye" being a thing wholly removed from the world. Is it desirable to be unconditionally accepting of our subordinate place in the natural world, a world of spectacular beauty filled with spontaneous danger? Or would we like to think that if we were watching our own child being dragged towards the precipice of a waterfall 80 feet high, we would spring into some kind of action, no matter how futile our efforts may be?

 

Request to a Year 

 

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great-great-grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,

who having eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland

and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,

while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.

Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

 

"A Present" by John Tranter [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

As it is the season of giving, here is "A Present" from John Tranter's masterpiece Starlight (2010). "A Present" is a part of a series of poems entitled "Contre-Baudelaire", which "echo, respond to and sometimes argue with some of poems from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal".

 

 

A Present

Hey, sweetheart, here's a poem, take it
or leave it. One day, in the mysterious future,
these lines blown roughly off-course
may come to rest in a library, to amuse
a bored reader for a while. My portrait of you
will float above the limping syllables
and by the special magic of art, drift
in the haze of imagination, above the page.
Why do I bother? It's hardly your charm, from
Paris to peoria no one likes you much;
those who know you give you a wide berth.
You mock the talented and sneer at the stupid
as though God had set you up in a judgement;
more demon than angel, but utterly lovely.

 

Two Poems by Luke Beesley [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Luke Beesley is a Melbourne based writer, artist and songwriter, whose most recent collection of poetry, Aqua Spinach (2018), was shortlisted for the Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal. Beesley’s poetry is interested in the movement of thought and experience, and the ways in which they can dislocate language. Through unexpected shifts in syntax, Beesley transforms the quotidian into something approaching the surreal, and turns the arbitrary, in the words of Toby Fitch, into "an important aesthetic category."

 

“A Hat'' is reminiscent of John Ashbery’s “Leaving the Atocha Station”, in which disturbances and diversions form the core of the poem, and calls to mind Richard Howard’s great observation that Ashbery “reaches a pitch of distraction.” There are many similarities to be found between Beesley's and Ashbery’s poetry: a love of wordplay; a preoccupation with film and music; and a dreamlike calm, an effect which can be nourishing, even medicinal. Enjoy.

 

A Hat

I had been walking for 10-15 mins without a hat. Inside the hat
I was able and was able. Customer accounts. Phlegm of coat
rack hardened around my shoulders. Amuck this gunky, silvery
circumstance, I made a decision, or it, it was the dec tha ma!
The made, ago. Idled another coriander blemish. Awning. Team,
to ever, day, docent. Soup with three full. Or stopped-up chicken
cougher? Arp. I had been walking alongside water lilies (you can!)
too! Have to(o) take me till I walked into the early 20^thcentury and
spied Arp up in the late, by it. MoMA said warm itinerary. I have it.

 

An Attempt to Get Oats Into this Poem

It was no reflection on my fondness for you, the throwing of the sour milk.
The sound of the silver bucket spread out like a town at the beginning of a
Kurosawa. The milk was hula. The day: ultra marine. You stepped in the mood.
Do you still follow bees? I found four in a tea pot...
On the cover of your book is an open locket and within it your relatives?
Cousins? Their faces are small but I can recognise your eyes. With what
poems will you describe them this Christmas. Christmas like the name Tony
Tuckson. I guess I see spilled paint across the canvas like a pulled muscle.
We could get a towel, or sit in the sun? There's a bus! And our reflection in it, 
turning. It was my thought today that as poets we should eat good breakfasts.
You? Oats, sliced pear, pepitas, other seeds, natural yogurt.

 

"Voyage" by Bella Li [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Bella Li has published three collections of poetry, Maps, Cargo (2013); Argosy (2017), winner of both the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards 2018 for poetry, and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2018 for poetry; and Lost Lake (2018). Born in China, Li emigrated to Australia at the age of three. Her work is often a unique assemblage of collage, poetry and photography, and, as the titles of her collections suggest, often deals in themes of exploration and loss—the shadow of Australia’s colonial history always looming near.

 

“Voyage” calls to mind Baudelaire, whose own “Voyage” trails Li’s as a kind of ghost ship. “Sullen days”, as Li’s poem opens, is just one of the bitter truths Baudelaire thought our travels brought us, not an opening up of perspective but a realization that the world is “tiny and monotonous” and we are but “oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui”. Or as Li phrases it “my eyes reeked of distance”. Baudelaire’s themes take on new stakes in Li’s writing, as she pitches her work against a national history of exploration leading to dispossession and her own migratory past.

 

 

"Why I Like You" by John Jenkins [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

John Jenkins is often associated with the "Generation of 68", a loose collection of poets who began publishing towards the end of the 1960s and, in the words of John Tranter, "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." Jenkins has published over fifteen collections of poetry, several in collaboration with Ken Bolton, including The Ferrara Poems and Poems of Relative Unlikelihood.

 

                                                                  Ken Bolton (left) and John Jenkins circa 1990

"Why I Like You" is the type of love poem we all wish we could write more frequently: exuberant without being mawkish, inventive, funny—a statement of love which generates its authenticity from imagination and embellishment. How could anyone refuse being compared to a the beauty of "a tropical / avalanche in a glass full of gold"?

 

Why I Like You

                                                        
Just let me say
that I like you because
you fell from the sky

as beautiful as a tropical
avalanche in a glass full of gold.

Another reason
is your energy.

It often happens...
Before I've slept in after breakfast
you've already showered, walked the dogs,
and made a little aeroplane out of an ice-cube.

Should I also mention
that you remind me
of starlight pulsing
between the spokes of a bicycle?
You whirr around so fast it leaves me breathless! 

Or say, "I like you because
you celebrate the motors of flesh and air."
Should I also say that?
Well, I couldn't imagine you ever earnest or dull.

And it is really
a coincidence
that la douceur fleurie des etoiles
(a quote from Rimbaud)
also reminds me of you?
Is it just a coincidence when
lost in our husky sled
we could wake up any moment in Cuba?

And really, I'm wild too
about your little joke
when you dip the entire universe
into a can of blue paint
so everything is my favourite colour.

I also like you
for your teeth
which are useful for untying knots

and because of Tasmania
the love-shaped island
between your thighs,

and for your eyes
which rhyme and are green
tiny traffic lights
saying yes yes when we kiss!

 

"International Experts" by Pamela Brown [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

With the recent announcement to open Australia's international borders next month (or as the Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls it on his official website, "taking steps to reopen to the world", which sounds more like a chapter from a self-help manual than government policy), I thought it would be a good moment to share Pam Brown's "International Experts".

Brown is a central figure in the formative period of contemporary Australian poetry which took place in 1970s Sydney. With Anna Couani, Ken Bolton and Sal Brererton, she helped put together the iconic Magic Sam magazine, which published some of Australia's most important poets. Brown has published more than twenty books of her own poetry and prose, including Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2004. She has also served as the poetry editor for Overland and an associate editor of the brilliant and too-short lived Jacket magazine.

 

 

"International Experts" cleverly appraises the appeal of a place with its current cultural output. Both London and Paris have "had it", while "the americans / are doing / all the writing / these days". The speaker settles for a trip within Australia, and, based on her criteria for choosing a destination, why not? With Brown and her coterie, Australia just might be the most appealing destination of the lot.

 

 

International Experts

                                                        
when we get restless
we talk about
where we could go

we decide
london has had it
except for music.
madness.
marianne faithfull.
the selecter.
paris has had it
except for a few memorable spots.
paul eluard.
gertrude stein.
statre. semiology
and plastic bertrand
from belgium.

of course
we mention 
new york.
the americans
are doing 
all the writing
these days.

asia and india
are out of the question.
no package deal ashrams.
although japan
is interesting
comics and posters.

really though 
berlin
is the place to go.
fassbinder. brecht.
a politically 
complex past.

experts.
micky met
sumo wrestlers
in japan
before america
and europe.
jill saw paris
and london 
last year.

down in sydney
the air goes bad
and I fill up with gases,
go to the movies,
by books, a record
and a train ticket
to queensland.

 

An Introduction to Martin Johnston (Part 2) [by Thomas Moody]

Martin Johnston died in June 1990 at the age of forty-two having published three books of poetry: Shadowmass; The Sea-Cucumber; and The Typewriter Considered a Bee-Trap; a novel, Cicada Gambit; and a collection of translations of Greek Poems, Ithaka. His short life was marked by tragedy: his mother committed suicide in 1969 when Johnston was 21, and almost exactly a year later his father died in his sleep of tuberculosis. In 1974, Johnston's sister Shane committed suicide. A year before Johnston's own death his half-sister, Gae, died, also in tragic circumstances.

 

 

"The Sea-Cucumber" is an elegy Johnston wrote for his father, ostensibly dedicated to the painter Ray Crooke. Crooke, best known for his dust-colored landscapes of the dry Australian outback, ironically won the prestigious Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1969 for his painting of Johnston's father, George. "The Sea-Cucumber" details an evening in which Crooke shows George Johnston one of his new works in which the painter has "floated / a sfumato background almost in front of the canvas". Johnston's father is "garrulous as ever" but the young speaker knows there is something forced to his father's performance, as he presses "every word-drop, like the wine of a harvest not quite adequate." 

 

Ray Crooke North Queensland Landscape

The poem speaks to the limitations of art and centres on the metaphor of the sea-cucumber who, when touched, "spews up its entrails / as though that were a defence" to capture the futility of the writer who knows his work cannot save him. "The Sea-Cucumber" also gives us a taste of Johnston's eloquence, his erudition (which creates no impediment to a genuine intimacy), and brings to the fore a haunting melancholy which lurks in the corners of many of the poet's works. 

 

The Sea-Cucumber

                                                        for Ray Crooke


We'd all had a bit too much that night when you brought out
your painting,
the new one, you remember, over Scotch in the panelled kitchen,
and my father talked about waiting. Well, he was doing that,
    we knew,
or it could have been the dust you'd painted, the way
    you'd floated
a sfumato background almost in front of the canvas
so your half-dozen squatting dark figures couldn't see it
that moved him in that moment softly, in damp stone,
    outside time.
He was as garrulous as ever, of course, but somehow
in a time of his own, it seemed that he was pressing
every word-drop, like the wine of a harvest not quite adequate,
to trickle in brilliant bridles across the stained table:
what sorts of eucalypt to plant—so that they'd grow quickly—
art dealers, metaphysics, three old me he'd seen
at Lerici, playing pipes and a drum under an orange sky.
Memory finds a nexus, there in your image,
people just waiting, not even conscious of it,
or of ochre and sienna pinning them in an interstice of hours.
None of this, you see, will really go into writing,
it takes time to leech things into one's sac of words.
The bloated sea-cucumber, when touched, spews up its entrails
as though that were a defence; my father's old friend
the gentle little poet Wen Yi-tuo, who collected chess sets
and carved ivory seals in his filthy one-room hut,
is gutted one night and flung into the Yangtze.
The dark river runs through your dusty pigments.
Ferns, moss, tiger-coloured sun beat at the window with banners
but the dust ripples between trees, and among the waiting
glints of each an meta are wiped from the fading hand.
This people of yours, Ray, they are that evening
when we first saw them, or the other one when my father 
planted nineteen saplings in our backyard, or when you looked
    at them
later and said, They're coming on, and his fingers
drummed a long nervous question on the table, though 
    he agreed.
And we were all waiting, though not in your style of art:
more of a pointillism in time, disconnected moments,
a flash of light over an empty glass, a half-finished volume 
    of Borges,
the cabbage plan stooping at dusk into the chimneys,
certain paintings, Corelli, or a morning like the fuzz
    of a peach,
all bright and disparate. But I think, remembering that painting
of yours, that if one could step away, ten yards, or twenty,
    or years,
at an angle perhaps, a frame would harden into cedar
and through a haze of dust we would see all the brilliant dots
merge into a few figures, squatting, waiting.