Sydney City Poet

My books are split between cities: I hope this is the last month I will have this problem as I plan to finally ship the most important parts of my library (vast; even the important parts are more voluminous than seems healthy) to Sydney in January. I don’t have the piles of books all assembled in front of me, so this reconstruction will have to do for now.

Now a regular part of my life, I have books for review. While Barry Hill’s beautiful volume of poems accompanied by the art of John Wolseley is waiting for me in January, I have been reading Cate Kennedy’s The Taste of River Water for the purpose of reviewing. I’m mulling that over, and plan to write up my thoughts early in the new year, well ahead of amorphous “deadline.” Another poet I plan to write about is the American Dan Beachy-Quick. His work is layered, and takes time to pick through, but I have consistently found that he astounds me, and deserves to be better known outside of the American milieu. Born in 1973, he has already published six books (five poetry volumes, and a book of essays on Moby Dick called A Whaler’s Dictionary… just reading this description leaves my fingers itching to get hold of a copy) as well as four chapbooks, and is an editor of the wonderful online journal A Public Space. He has a new book of essays coming out soon, and already I’m planning to clear a “Beachy-Quick Corner” in my library. I’ve been spending time with his 2006 collection Mulberry, but I will dive deeper over the coming months and really peel through all of his books and write something a little more formal about this wonderful poet and essayist.

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I’ve been fascinated by Charles Dickens for a long time, and two things always stand out most: that wherever he travelled, whatever tourism wonders he took in, he always sought out the local prison; and that he was an inveterate walker, often taking in 20 miles a day of the London streets. I imagine that without such extreme walking he would have found it difficult to write his long intricately woven tales, that that very act of putting one foot in front of another over and over was a crucial part of his composition process.

He’s not alone: there are countless others, but Wordsworth in particular immediately springs to mind. Many of us associate him with his long jaunts around the Lakes District in England, yet these were nothing compared to the walks he took across Europe before he settled into his poetic career. He set off on foot across Revolutionary France, covering over 1,000 miles. More recently I’ve been reading about Werner Herzog: for him walking is akin to spirituality (I imagine this is true of many walkers. I particularly love the “My Cat Jeoffry” section of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, in which he suggests that every cat-like activity of his beloved pet is an act of praise, a prayer, because Jeoffry so perfectly performs his cat-ness; I imagine in many ways that walking is likewise a perfect performance of human-ness.) At 14 Herzog took off on foot from his home in Germany, wanting to go to Albania. He wasn’t able to enter the country, then closed to outsiders, but he walked its border to the Adriatic Sea. Imagine! In an interview he describes the application for the only kind of film school he would consider running:

…you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you had travelled alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom.

I realised, reading this, that it’s been a while since I deliberately set out for the act of walking itself, rather than to explore a particular place or get to a particular destination. Alongside reading these interviews with the inimitable (an adjective often applied to Dickens, but just as deserved by the German filmmaker…) Herzog, I’ve been revisiting one of my favourite contemporary nature writers, Craig Childs. No one can quite convey the power of the deserts of the Colorado River Basin as Childs can, and I am in awe of his knowledge of secret water holds, tinajas, kiss tanks scattered through the desert. As a reader, I am frequently stirred to action by the work I read, and when Childs and Herzog collided on my bedside table I knew that I must take notice.

I’m starting small: first just a 5 kilometre wander around the suburb, then an 8 kilometre saunter along the Yarra River (Sydney-siders will forgive their City Poet for visiting her parents for Christmas in Melbourne), and I’m realising both that I haven’t wandered like this for some time. Soon there will be more walks, different settings, hopefully longer. I suppose I must remember to keep reading the work of the walkers, or my focus on walking will slip as my highly suggestible mind becomes preoccupied with, say, tapestry weaving or the best uses of sorrel in cooking, or the cultivation of native peppermint. And when these new preoccupations come, I want to follow them too; but not at the expense of walking.

I’ve realised that there, in one regard, walkers come in two types: those whose minds must empty of their own thoughts as they are drawn again and again to their surrounds, and those who sink into meditation such that the world can all but disappear. I suppose there is a third kind: the thinkers who try to drag themselves back to the present moment. Because I am one of these third kind, falling into a cadence of thought and foot, but then realising my cadence is set and re-awakening, slowing, looking around to see where my thought has carried me. I nearly always come back to the moment when I see desire lines tantalisingly unwinding from the main path. I always want to follow desire lines.

On my walk sentences formed, thoughts on pieces I have to write for others and thoughts on poems I want to write for myself. I’m always conflicted about whether to get my notebook and pen out at the moment these ideas arise. In the end, I wore them in and then as I sat at the Fairfield Boathouse, watching over the ducks, I scribbled some notes to myself. Because walking, like cooking Texas Chili, is another form of long-simmer, and sentences tumbled over the rhythm of footsteps become worn in over the course of kilometres.

Already I am trying to decide on the next direction I will wander, and wondering what words will unlock themselves in my toes.

When Sarah Holland-Batt’s debut volume Aria appeared in 2008, it made a welcome addition to Australian poetry. This fully formed new voice gave readers a fully realised first book: among other things, the architecture of that book was a particular strength. The final poem “The Art of Disappearing” sends readers out of Aria with the mind opened. Reading its simple catalogue and seemingly artless style, my own phrase for my first encounter with this poem was that it “took the top of my head off.” Yet “The Art of Disappearing” is a quiet poem—this piece doesn’t contain the verbal fireworks of many memorable poems. However, it is from that very quietness that the poem gains its power.

With its echo of Yeats’s line “Things fall apart, the centre will not hold,” from the poem “The Second Coming” (a poem full of now-famous phrases) this poem holds not an apocalyptic vision, but instead a swelling melancholia at the inevitability of change, at the marching-on of time. The boldness of this poem is wrapped up in its simplicity and directness. Repetition forms a central part of the piece, and while repetition is a vital tool in all poetry—especially in lyric verse—the poet will normally repeat her language exactly only two or three times. Here, however, Holland-Batt repeats the borrowed phrase six times within the opening five lines of the poem, guaranteeing that when she does vary from this the phrase will linger on in the reader’s mind. This repetition is a gutsy move: it takes an assured poet to understand the rhythms of her own poem to the degree that she knows just how long she can string out that incantatory repetition. Adding to the incantatory effect of this repetition is the structure of the poem: nearly all lines are end-stopped, and most frequently this end-stop comes in the form of a period. With the line so frequently equalling the sentence, the poem is formed primarily from simple declarative statements; the second line, made of two complete sentences, initiates the reader into the form of the poem at the outset.

At the same time that it draws on repetition and the unit of the line-as-sentence, Holland-Batt names an entire world. The image of the moon breaking on the fencepost of the opening line creates the distance between earth and the heavens. The move to desire and memory create the emotional register of the poem. Then the poem veers toward a more specific situation and sensibility as the poet writes “The house you grew up in: its eaves; its attic will not hold,” and follows this with still lives, Botticellis, “white peaches in the bowl.” The world described is as curated as those still lives—until it is not. Here the poem turns as it notes that “Something is always about to happen,” such that there can be “no stay or wait or keep.” Change enters the poem in the form of marriage, re-naming, and from the artful vision of still lives, the messier debris of “the car idling” and “scraps of paper” enter—these are the things that “go on.” The “dark water” that “flows endlessly on” at the poem’s—and the book’s—close is both akin to and the opposite of the scarf of sunshine mentioned earlier. This dark water is the strange material we gather about us as the world itself flows endlessly on, beyond the poem. And yet, despite this seemingly bleak exit, I personally find that each time I read “The Art of Disappearing” I feel, perhaps oddly, only the beauty of the poem, and a new openness to the beauty of the complicated world. The naming of abstracts—desire, memory, later pain—combined with Holland-Batt’s images create an emotional openness that transcends melancholy.

“The Art of Disappearing” appears in Sarah Holland-Batt’s collection Aria, available from University of Queensland Press.

___________________________ 

The Art of Disappearing 

The moon that broke on the fencepost will not hold.
Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.
The house you grew up in: its eaves; its attic will not hold.
The still lives and the Botticellis will not hold.
The white peaches in the bowl will not hold.
Something is always about to happen.
You get married, you change you name,
and the sun you wore like a scarf on your wrist has vanished.
It is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things;
imperatives will not still it—no stay or wait or keep
to seize the disappeared and hold it clear, like pain.
So tell the car idling in the street to go on;
tell the skirmish of chesspieces to go on
tell the scraps of paper, the lines to go on.
It is winter: that means the blossoms are gone,
that means the days are getting shorter.
And the dark water flows endlessly on.

—Sarah Holland-Batt

Image: Frank Hurley’s “A radiant Turret lit by the midsummer midnight sun”

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The ice was all between

The ice was here, the ice was there
The ice was all around

                                            - Coleridge, from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Though it’s summer here, I’m preparing for ice: this Tuesday (20^th December) at 6pm writer Rebecca Giggs and I are giving a free reading at the State Library for their weekly Tuesday in the Galleries program. The current exhibition celebrates Antarctic exploration, including maps from before the European discovery of the landmass, as well as objects such as Captain James Cook’s telescope.

Join us in the ice fields.

In the galleries
State Library of New South Wales
Macquarie St, Sydney

Last week I suddenly succumbed to my obsessive nature. A single thought lodged in my mind, and it had nothing to do with writing. It was this: “Learn to make a Texas Chili!” Or did it have to do with writing?

Recently the poet Felicity Plunkett gave this year’s “minislec” for the Red Room Company, and she talked about, among other (more serious?) things, “procrasti-baking” and the fact that many writers have such an activity in their lives. Something hands on, exact—but also creative—that gives them something of a break from the more taxing act of the facing the page itself.

I’m not really a baker, but I love to cook. Instead of channelling my energies into intricate cakes and breads, I like to toy with the main meal—especially those that take a long time to prepare. Soups, casseroles, stews and now—Texas chili.

Though I love cooking, I succumb to the modern on-the-go meal pretty often. These meals are gratifying insofar as they take away my immediate hunger, and allow me to keep my attention on whatever is at hand—whether that’s reading, writing or the checking in on latest antics in Fringe science. I don’t feel bad that I eat these dull meals: cooking is not my job. I’m neither striving to get dinner on the table for anyone but myself, nor working in a professional kitchen. Still, I believe that anyone who works towards intellectual pursuits needs to let their brain idle: that idling is in fact an important part of the creative process. Sometimes the brain needs a side project, and cooking is rewarding because you get to consume the results—literally.

So last week I was contemplating Texas chili. Living in the United States—but nowhere near Texas—I had heard little bits about Texas chili, and I knew it was one of those dishes that has no fixed recipe, one that everyone’s mother—or uncle, or boyfriend—makes the best way. And I realised that all those beautiful New Mexico chilis I saw last year dried, and hanging in beautiful arrangements in small New Mexico towns like Hatch, were abundant for a reason. For the first time I paid attention when I went to the supermarket and realised that buying chilis in Australia you could buy birdseye chilis, or those that weren’t even given a name, just designated as “red.” Occasionally an exotic stock runs to jalapenos or to “sweet peppers” but the amazing array of peppers I came across in the American southwest aren’t needed in the cuisines that dominate in Australia. The fact that the chilis aren’t readily available gave me an excuse for a chili hunt.

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On Tuesday 13^th December (that’s tomorrow!) I will be reading at Sappho’s Bookstore in Glebe with a troika of lovely, talented ladies—Pip Smith, Felicity Plunkett and Fiona Wright. The reading is free, and I’ll have copies of Fire Season available there as well. As always at Sappho’s, there’s an open mic too.

I spent some of this afternoon pulling out poems and deciding what to read, and decided it might be nice to highlight some of the work that doesn’t address art or the Colorado River—somehow, even though both of these have been constantly on my mind, and on the nib of my pen, a whole lot of other poems have also kept conjuring themselves.

Tuesday 13^th December, 7pm

Sappho’s Bookstore

51 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe, Sydney 2037

Walter Cronkite Interviews Frank Sinatra

I first started to interview people—especially poets—because for a long time I have loved reading interviews. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m especially a fan of the Paris Review’s “Writers at Work” series. I remembered when I first discovered these interviews, and read through all the second hand copies of the collected interviews I could find. Those I couldn’t find in second hand shops I borrowed and renewed endlessly from the Ballieu library at Melbourne University. As a young writer, searching for my own way into the work of writing, I loved that the Paris Review interviews went from the prosaic facts about the writers’ working days to thoughts about process and subject matter to occasional writerly gossip. The “Writers at Work” interviews are a real treasure.

It was a natural step for me to move from reading these interviews to conducting and writing them up myself: I’m one of those people who, upon encountering something I truly admire, wants to find out if I can do it myself. This means I’ve dabbled in a lot of things alongside writing my poems for all these years. Most of that dabbling has been very unsuccessful (which doesn’t at all diminish my pleasure in learning what precise skills I don’t have) but sometimes I return and return to an activity until I start to get it right. In a pinch I can do a drop roll from star into crucifix position on a Cloud Swing—but I’d rather do an interview with a real Cloud-Swing artist; or, even better, with a writer. So, after a several-year break from interviewing people, I have begun again to ask questions in earnest for this site. (I dipped my toes in the water several months back when I interviewed the academic, poet and superstar birder Macklin Smith about the his life-list of birds, and twenty summers spent on the Aleutian island of Attu spotting birds that strayed across the Bering Strait from Siberia.)

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It’s relatively easy to hear about the major books by the major poets coming out around the world; similarly, within Australia’s writing community, it’s easy enough to keep up with the newer names emerging. What we don’t often get to read about are the volumes published by independent presses internationally—especially those that focus on poetry. In addition to the essays and interviews on this site I want to offer a glimpse of some of the books appearing around the globe, especially work by poets in the early stages of their career and poetry in translation. 

The Forest of Sure Things
by Megan Snyder-Camp
Tupelo Press
USD $16.95, 978-932195-88-0

The poet Megan Snyder-Camp opens her debut volume The Forest of Sure Things [2010] with boisterous, sock-it-to-me apostrophe in the book’s prefatory poem “Sea Creatures of the Deep”: “O sockeye O rock sole O starry flounder.” This playfulness shows a poet willing to take delight in slightly absurd moves; similarly, the book’s second and final section is preceded by the poem “Church” in which a preacher tells his congregation that “Wile E. Coyote’s lifelong quest/ for the Road Runner was like us hungering for Jesus.” These poems, however, are at odds with the quieter and more opaque tone of the body of the book; nonetheless, both “Sea Creatures of the Deep” and “Church” play an important role in The Forest of Sure Things, creating a rapport with the reader that will carry their trust into the poems whose pleasures are not so immediate, but arguably more lasting. This debut collection takes the story of the first birth in a century in a small seaside village (followed by the couple’s second child arriving stillborn), and weaves through it Snyder-Camp’s impulse to take up elements of this story in a novel, as well as glimpses of her own marriage and entry to motherhood. Though these elements recur through the book, and it is roughly divided between the first section’s engagement with this external story and the second section’s more personal poems, the book doesn’t strictly present a narrative, instead creating a series of stills which allow the reader room to fill in the gaps in between.

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This month has seen me chewing over books for specific purposes: for reviews, for background before conducting interviews and for research both for my own poetry and to prepare public presentations. Nonetheless, I’ve carved out a little time for reading for pure leisure as well, and as ever the resulting reading list is varied. 

Over the whole of the past month I’ve spent a lot of time with Best Australian Poems 2011, which I am reviewing for the Australian Book Review.  I’ll save my thoughts on the volume for the review itself, but as always I was struck by the way in which a different sensibility lays out the year in poetry in a different way. Alongside all my editions of Best Australian, I also possess many of the Best American Poetry volumes: seeing, for instance, the poems chosen by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Lyn Heijinian one year, contrast with, for example, Paul Muldoon in another is a delight, and drives home again the fact that editing an anthology is a creative act: no-one else will assemble the annual quilt in quite the same way as each individual editor has done.

I’ve also returned to two books read in October—John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians and Megan Snyder-Camp’s The Forest of Sure Things—in order to review them as well. This glut of reviewing has me thinking about the way I read differently when I read to review from when I read simply for pleasure, just as I read differently when research is my primary goal. This is something I hope to expand on as I continue my “Diary of a City Poet” “essay-lets.”

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