Sydney City Poet

Hi, Sports Fans!: Redirect

bitsandends — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 16:34:34 +1100

I have to admit that few people who know me well would use the words “sports fan” to describe me. I’m appreciative of sports, of the rigor with which the athlete trains his or her body and even find a great deal of beauty in the enterprise. It’s not uncommon to see great dramas unfold on the field, and I love that idea of a huge number of people sharing a transcendent moment. And yet it’s rare that I sit down and really watch. When I do, I enjoy it—but I enjoy so many things, and when it’s athleticism I want to see I prefer to watch dance, or else the circus. (Since I’ve taken classes in both of these areas, perhaps it’s not so surprising. Whereas the one time I played touch rugby I was rubbish at it; I contend that this is in large part because I didn’t know the rules and at fifteen I was playing with a bunch of army enlistees in their twenties. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that this affected my ability to put in a good showing.)

The exception to the rule is tennis. Coming to Melbourne for a family Christmas, I decided to stay through January so I could see some of the Australia Open in person, and watch the rest of it on the television set at my parents’ house. This week I put in a nine hour day of spectating: nine hours, and I didn’t open a book to read once. There are not many things, besides Christian Marclay’s mesmerising film work The Clock, and Dumas’s thrilling The Count of Monte Cristo that can hold my attention for nine hours at a time. Orson Welles might die at midnight every night, and the mysterious Count who was once a Corsican boy might take revenge at regular intervals, but when the players are playing a fifth set to advantage, the outcome is not foreordained, even if respective rankings suggest otherwise. I like to pick an underdog and hope he’ll rise to the second week of the action; almost invariably this leads to heartbreak.

Keep reading here…

Salvage Art: Redirection

bitsandends — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 15:22:36 +1100

When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.

—Louise Bourgeois

Last week I went to see the exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s late works currently on display at Heide in Melbourne. It was a pleasure to go back to Heide for the first time in years—when I lived in the Banyule Flats area, I would often walk out to Heide for an afternoon, and going to see the current exhibitions was a somewhat nostalgic experience for me. It was also nostalgic because in 2009 I attended the retrospective of her work held at the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington DC: a huge amount of space was given over to Bourgeois’s entire career. I had never heard of her before I attended that retrospective, but came away entirely converted. Both her use of text (predictable for the poet) and her use of the needle were particularly moving to me. I love, too, that the everyday materials of her own life become the materials of so much of her art—literally. Many of her sculptures incorporate the textiles of her own clothes. Entering Bourgeois’s world feels very intimate.

…Keep Reading Here

Redirection

bitsandends — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:14:25 +1100

I can only say that I am a creature of fits and starts, of ebb and flow. Finding myself ready to return to a blog, I also find that my blog is out of date. I am no longer the Sydney City Poet, though I want to continue with many of the threads I picked up with that role. I hope that in time that someone else will have the opportunity to pick up the mantle of the “City Poet” and no doubt whoever does so will make the role his or her own. As for me, I want to continue reflecting on art, literature and individual poems. As such, I will both be writing here, and at the same time migrating the content of the Sydney City Poet blog to Stitched with its Colour.

As well as posting new material there, I will gradually repost still-relevant items from this site as well in order to consolidate my work in one place. If you’re interested, please follow me on this new voyage…

Hibernation

bitsandends — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:45:00 +1000

As a blogger I have been, apparently, feeling rather ursine and gone into something like a hibernation mode for the winter. Which is not to say that I haven’t been writing, reading, thinking, attending—but that I have been recording more in my own diary and notebooks than I have in the public space of a blog. I can only hope that, in person, I haven’t seemed too bearish to friends.

I suspect my sudden hibernation it goes hand-in-hand with my own awakening (yet again) to my own ignorance. It is a periodic occurrence, like that moment when you step out of your own home library, where you are proud of all the books you have read, into the vast collection of a university or state library and realise how much knowledge you will never have. I find these moments incredibly humbling and also invigorating—but they do prompt me to put my head down and just try to get a little smarter rather than running to the keyboard. For all the odd facts I have accumulated and delighted in (eg. that tapirs bare their teeth and raise their snouts when they smell, a move known as the “Flehman response”; that the takin, a goat-antelope, is the national animal of Bhutan; that you can tell the sex of a Little Penguin by measuring its beak) I know scarcely anything of the world. And for all my reading in and around the particular area of literature (gleaning such tidbits as the fact that Christopher Smart was put in an insane asylum essentially for being “too devout”; that according to Euripides’s Helen, the Helen transported to Troy was a fake—the real Helen was secreted elsewhere, virtue intact; that Charles Olson, before he became the author of the Maximus Poems, was obsessed with Moby Dick—just as Dan Beachy-Quick, the contemporary American poet I am spending much of my time studying at the moment, is also obsessed) even there I feel that I have learned very little. Sometimes I even get the basics of prosody mixed up: I know my iambs, my trochees, my spondees and even my choriambs—but will often get my anapaests and my dactyls mixed up. (Lets leave those other feet out of it for now.) It is the same for us all, and I imagine that in such sobering moments of realisation we all want to listen a little more, clamour a little less.

I often return to moments from childhood reading to remind myself of things. In the case of my ignorance I remember, among other things, a moment in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Mrs Which, Mrs Who and Mrs Whatsit give the children gifts to help them complete their quest, and Meg, the central character, is a little miffed when she is gifted her faults. Half the time I will burble on about the odd bits of trivia—mixed in with the moments of insight I have had; but then I go quiet as I remember that above all I am a student. On a daily basis I remember there is much to learn. Among things I would like to learn (or learn about) right now are the names of all the types of trees that grow in the suburb around me, the work of the Transcendentalists, how early explorers experienced the world as they “discovered” it, how to make more things with my own two hands, the basics of sailing, the physics behind the “singing” of icebergs, to navigate by the stars… and… how many other things?

I recently read the new book Quiet: as a study of introversion in a society that largely valorises extroversion, I found myself nodding in recognition at its descriptions on nearly every page. Though I am often loquacious and can “pass” as an extrovert in many situations, I generally fall strongly into the introversion column. One thing introverts need is down time after stimulation: and being the “City Poet” has ensured plenty of stimulation. It’s stimulation I have been incredibly grateful for—anything that provokes further thought is a gift—but that has also left me seeking the quiet conversation that takes place between the pen in my hand and the notebook on my desk.

So I ask that you forgive a quiet spell—and also encourage you to take some quiet time for yourself. I’ve been enjoying taking a book to Sydney Park on sunny afternoons and reading aloud to the ducks and passing dogs. (I clam up when other people are nearby; I don’t want to appear too strange. The animals don’t begrudge me the pleasures of reading aloud, and seem quiet interested in it actually.) On drizzly days I wander around the park with my umbrella, looking over the wetlands and searching along the ground for a four leaf clover. This is slow time, reverent time.

I’ve written before of slow time. Blogging takes place in fast time, but we all need periods of renewal. In her journals Susan Sontag wrote “Work = being in the world.” My way of being in the world lately has been circumspect, but I feel that as a result of this I will have dispatches to send back soon.

Going Home

bitsandends — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:33:00 +1000

“Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.”

This is Gertrude Stein speaking to Alice B. Toklas—though I admit I have found it in Jeanette Winterson’s book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Unlike Winterson, I somehow haven’t yet made it to this particular part of the section of “S” in the modern library, though I own a copy of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and am once more reminded that I must read it. It moves up the pile. That in turn brings Stein’s Tender Buttons out for a rereading too. She also has me yearning to pull out Virginia Woolf again. So it shall be, once I finish reading Jeanette herself.

I recently realised that I’ve been reading Jeanette Winterson for more than half my life, and when I saw her at the writers’ festival in Sydney recently I told her that she is one of the reasons I am a writer. It is true that I had always written, and had always wanted to write, but I was also raised with true pragmatism, such that whenever I stated that I wanted to be a writer, I would be asked, “What else will you be?” I took it that the “what else” (answers were usually the obvious ones for a child bent on learning: a doctor; a lawyer; a vet) would be the career that took precedence, and that writing would be my hobby. Reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit as a teenager, and later the essays of Art Objects, I saw that it was possible to live mostly on books and grit.

I often tell people that “I take art daily,” as is proclaimed on a badge I bought in the Guggenheim museum in Berlin in 2003. I have gasped in front of artworks. I have gone to galleries to spend an hour or two with just one painting: sitting in front of it and looking, then turning to a book or letter or piece of homework for a while—then looking back to see what else I notice. Music—which I studied seriously for a long time, and wrote almost as seriously for a number of years at the Conservatorium—has long been a part of my life. Alongside all the wonderful concerts and recordings I have attended and heard there have been, in particular, three truly profound musical experiences in my life. These have made me understand why so many people say that all art “aspires to the condition of music”. Between the supposed celestial “music of the spheres” and the fact that many plants thrive not just when talked to, but when played to, music strikes me as absolute essential. I don’t play often anymore, but there is true joy for me in singing freely.

When I first heard a friend perform the fifth movement (Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus) of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps from memory—eyes closed, she swayed with her cello, as if the two were a single animal, as the pianist accompanying her gently and insistently provided the constant pulse that tethers the movement to the earth—just—at the pace indicated: infiniment lent.The circumstances in which the quartet was written (composed for the only four instruments available in the Prisoner of War camp in which Messiaen was held during World War II: though sketches of some of the music had existed before Messiaen entered the camp) infuse the eight movements. It is the fifth movement in particular, which the violin and clarinet sit out, that makes me escape my own skin a little.

Nonetheless it is books that I feel have saved my life, their earthliness and earthiness a particularly important part of the way they fill a basic need in me.

On a trip into town with my mother as a child we visited the ABC Shop and discovered a copy of Alice In Wonderland—unabridged—on cassette. Heavily reduced in price, it was a bargain we couldn’t pass up. This was during a heatwave, and the rumpus room downstairs in our house was naturally cool. That afternoon we pulled out an ancient tape player, lay on couch and bean bag, and listened to Alice. I often listened to these tapes while going to sleep—could also recite large portions of the book at one time—and somehow have always associated this old favourite with escape stifling heat.

This was not the only book on tape that meant a great deal to me. When I was very young I inherited a tape my mother had made for my eldest brother of herself reading three children’s books. I particularly remember the intonation of her voice as she read the words “Bread and Jam for Francis,” and the way “Fran-cis” was turned into a lilting spondee, equal emphasis on both syllables. Later, for Christmas, I was given a cassette of Anne of Green Gables. I particularly loved to listen to the second side of the first cassette and the first side of the second: Anne settling into her life, and then striving academically; Anne taking her place at Queens and winning the Avery scholarship. We also found copies of several of the Chronicles of Narnia, and these were among the only tapes we could agree on listening to on our long car trips from Melbourne to Cowra: it was Narnia and Biggles. My vote was always for Narnia. Though there was plenty of reading aloud of all sorts of books, my memory of these tapes is more vivid, perhaps simply for the repetition of listening to them so often, for the regularity with which they gently pushed me into dreams.

But I was speaking of earthliness, not dreams. In the music library at Melbourne University’s Ballieau library I spent many hours with headphones on, score in hand, listening to recordings. All the Ligeti I could get my hands on. The string quartets of Shostakovich, then Bartok—and then stepping back to the string quartets of Haydn. Monteverdi’s operas, the madrigals of Guilliame de Machaut, the strange, alien sound of George Crumb’s electrified viols. These were all wondrous moments of discovery, and truly changed the way I thought of music, but none of them prompted the pure mirth or despair I twice experienced reading Dickens in the Lauinger Library of Georgetown University. The laughter was prompted by some episode or other in Bleak House—something absurd in Chancery most likely: I don’t remember the details, simply the way my (very loud) laugh disrupted the studious atmosphere of the second floor. The second time was reading Great Expectations. Pip was embarrassed by Joe Gargery, and showed it. Joe, ever simple and true to himself, not unsettled by his appearance or how he was treated, but only by recognising he had strayed out of his element and needed to get back to it, said simply, “Pip, there has been larks.” Suddenly I was sobbing uncontrollably.

Not that sobbing in a public place over the book in my hands was new territory: I was once sent home from school for crying inconsolably. In grade 6 I was finally finishing the last of the novels that follow Anne of Green Gables into adulthood. Here was Rilla of Ingleside—a book that I also credit with making me a writer in its way—and here was the death of a character I loved as a real friend. I had been reading hungrily as we lined up waiting for the school day to begin, and then realised what was happening in the story. My tears fell silently at first, but they wouldn’t stop the entire morning. When recess came my teacher asked me to stay and talk. “What’s wrong?” I somehow got out the words that “Walter died!” At first my teacher thought I was talking about a pet, or perhaps an uncle or a cousin. I suppose she wondered why, if I was this upset, I had been sent to school at all. At last the words tumbled out, “He’s in the book.” She didn’t know what to say in the face of my grief. I have always wanted to visit the Courcelette Memorial in the small town of Courcelette (population 141 in 2006), in Picardy, France, to pay my respects. Though his name won’t be marked on the memorial, of course, I nonetheless want to see the place.

When I need to wallow, or even have a good cry, or just to relax mindlessly, I watch television: and the truth is I love television. I think I alarm friends with the seriousness I adopt when discussing, for instance, the finer points of certain teen television shows I have watched and loved. I don’t think these shows are Shakespeare, but I do think they reflect our world in interesting, and at times frightening, ways. But even though I can’t turn off my analysis, they are, comparatively, popcorn. When despair goes deeper, I do not turn on the television. Nor do not put on Messiaen—or P J Harvey. Instead I turn to books. To poetry, to essays, to novels. Sometimes I stray into new words, but when I really need a blanket, when I am at the end of my tether, I reread: after all, rereading a book is, for me, both a way of going to another world, and a way of going home.

"So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or..."

bitsandends — Mon, 28 May 2012 14:23:46 +1000

“

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

”

- —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Co-Signed, K

bitsandends — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:47:08 +1000

During my first year living in Ann Arbor, I was inspired by a group of poets in the year above me who, as the WCWPCCS (the Washtenaw County Women’s Poetry Collective and Casserole Society), published a chapbook of collaborative poems. Though others made appearances in it (including male poets) the primary collaborators were Amy Berkowitz, Beth Divis, Emma Gorenberg, Kellen Grady, Elisa McCool and Jessica Young. Their first chapbook was called The Feeling is Mutual. Having not written collaboratively for a few years at that stage (and then only on theatrical and operatic works) I was inspired by the ways in which the group mind opened out so many possibilities.

This was further highlighted in my first workshop in Ann Arbor, in which we discussed one of Elisa McCool’s poems. She used the phrase “the third mind” (which she in turn told us she had found from Anne Waldman—though it has been used by many people) and reading that made something click for me. Bringing together two things, a third thing emerges that is the thread linking the two. To collaborate with another is to create a third mind: because anyone who has really let themselves enter this alchemical process knows that what emerges is a creative neither collaborator could have made alone.

While still in Michigan I participated in a few collaboration sessions, and always found them incredibly rejuvenating; since getting back I’ve pulled out a notebook with relative frequency when sitting with other people to see what happens. Not knowing what will happen is among the most exciting parts of the game: something appears, sometimes quite lumpishly, word by word or line by line or in any other increments that seem to work—and suddenly there it is.

As a writer, I live in my own head a lot of the time. I’m not the only person I know who fits that description. When in social situations I am usually jolly, but I often creep away from events early to recharge quietly at home. I chase the subjects I want to write about obsessively, and that often involves being alone with the page. I don’t mind these things: I like that time spent in thought. But I’ve discovered that writing with someone else can also be a form of rejuvenation: because the discoveries in those conversational poems are often so surprising.

Tomorrow (Sunday 27 May) I’m giving a reading at the Brett Whiteley Studio (2 Raper Street, Surry Hills; the reading is at 2pm—there is no charge) with friends and fellow poets Michelle Cahill and Toby Fitch. For this reading I wanted to think about the fact that this monthly reading series takes place in a gallery—and a gallery that was once the working space of one of Australia’s most iconic artists. At the moment Whiteley’s massive work “Alchemy” is on display: what better subject for collaboration? It’s all alchemy.

As poets we have all responded to Whiteley’s art in different ways—in our ways collaborating with the artist himself—but one element of the reading that I’m looking forward to is reading a couple of collaborative poems written with Toby Fitch as we pored over Whiteley’s work. As a reading this is something of an experiment—both nerve-wracking and exciting. As ever, I’m glad to have found myself in such a state: doing something new to me that I hope proves as refreshing to an audience as it has been for myself as a writer.

Alchemy Reading
Brett Whiteley Studio
2 Raper Street, Surry Hills

2pm, no charge

Poems Revisited: “Mothers and Daughters” by David Campbell

bitsandends — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:49:00 +1000

I often think that it is in the final line of a poem that the reader’s relationship to a poem really begins: it’s the last line that sends a reader back to the beginning of a poem that they will really love. These endings may open the poem out, resist a definitive “reading”, or they may feel like everything shuts up tight, a sprung trap. I’ve certainly heard arguments for both, and there are poets that have a decided preference for “open” or “closed” endings. For myself I find both approaches offer much to the reader: the widening view, the well-handled but slightly diffuse ending of course invites rereading as we seek to find out more about the processes, mechanisms, language, world of the poem; on the other hand, that sprung-trap feeling of a poem that brings everything together does not cut off the relationship of reader to poem, and invites the question “How did he/she do that?” just as much as the poem that contains, in Whitman’s words, multitudes.

David Campbell is a poet whose work I first encountered as an undergraduate: I was in a teacher’s office, and he was looking at some bits of poems for what I thought might turn into a verse novel. A particular phrase made him pull down a volume from the shelf and open to this poem, “Mothers and Daughters.” The longer I’ve spent with this poem the more astonished I am at its simplicity, and the way in which is simply works. Though I doubt I will ever write a verse novel now, I’m grateful that this long-aborted project brought me the gift of this poem.

The whole poem is a single sentence—a difficult feat, not made much easier for being just eight lines long; the lines are short, with two or three “beats” per line. There is enough regularity here that the poem may, overall, be considered formal, though enough variations in that regularity that the suddenly straight iambic motion of the last two lines have the effect of great propulsion; similarly, the rhyme scheme—a balladic ABCB—is only gentle in the first stanza of the poem, as the slant rhyme of “forty” and “beauty” hits the ear as intentional, but also loose. That slant rhyme also plays out something of the poet’s vision of the relationship between “forty” and “beauty”: in this poem they don’t quite meet. As such when the second and final stanza uses the full rhyme in conjunction with the regular meter, the whole poem falls—seemingly effortlessly—into place.

So much here, too, is carried in the adjectives: there is nothing flashy about the words Campbell chooses, but they all feel terribly apt and irreplaceable. The once-“cruel girls” are held up against their “subtle daughters”; it is not just the eyes of these daughters but their stare that is “blue” (a hue that, of course, has both visual and emotional registers) and “cool” with surprise; against the subtlety and coolness of the new generation, the “anxious mothers” almost bristle, so that when these two generations are collapsed into one attitude, the tensions rise even as the poem locks into place. The girls who stare at their mothers “with their mothers eyes” presumably bear the cruelty and anxiety of their mother, while those mothers reflect coolness and a hint of mockery. The poem is elegant and taut, but in its eight lines presents the complexity of the relationship depicted with a startling clarity that is anything but simple.

A selection of David Campbell’s poems is available in the volume Hardening the Light, published in 2006 by Indigo.

______________________________

Mothers and Daughters

The cruel girls we loved
Are over forty,
Their subtle daughters
Have stolen their beauty;

And with a blue stare
Of cool surprise,
They mock their anxious mothers
With their mothers’ eyes.

—David Campbell

"To believe that any appreciation implies a unified theory of value in art, to believe that a critic..."

bitsandends — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:22:00 +1000

“To believe that any appreciation implies a unified theory of value in art, to believe that a critic must develop one, is to commit at least on logical fallacy: it is to assume that just because “poem” and “poetry” refer to a relatively stable, relatively well-defined class of things, we must appreciate or deprecate all such things for the same reason, must ask them to serve the same goals. In fact, I go to Pope for this, to Keats for that, to Dickinson for a third thing, and would not willingly part with any of the three. The same holds for contemporary poetry: I do not seek ingenious compression and riddling wit from Les Murray, nor from Bernadette Mayer; I do not look for extended, shamanic engagements with the raw forces of the id from Kay Ryan. I do not look for deft comfort amid centuries-old techniques when I read Denise Riley, nor do I look for intellectually ambitious embodiments of poststructuralist feminism in Richard Wilbur. Yet all these desiderata (comic treatments, oneiric reenvisionings, and so on) are to be had in some of the poets just named. The map of poetry in English, in this respect, resembles the map of the New York City subway: many trains run to many destinations, and some routes overlap for much of their lengths, but not all trains run at all times.”

- Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

On Being Taught

bitsandends — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:07:34 +1000

Many years ago I wrote a poem dedicated to one of my teachers that ended with the lines “Still I seem to need so much teaching/ still I am so unteachable.” Besides giving the poem as a small gift, I haven’t done anything else with it except, I hope, build on whatever skill I had at the time I wrote it.

Since that time, I suspect the sentiment of these lines has stayed true, though I have come under the eye of many more teachers in the intervening years. I’ve been thinking a great deal about my choice to study poetry: I was initially resistant to undertaking an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree in writing because I too questioned the degree to which creative disciplines could be taught. Having acted as both student and teacher, I have come over the course of many years to believe that, in fact, a great deal can be taught—and that at the same time what is “so unteachable” is a certain wildness that is perhaps what I most seek out when I look for new poets to read.

And despite this notion that, at the core of it all, there is something that can’t be taught, can’t be learned, the truth is that I have learned an incredible amount from both formal and informal relationships with more experienced poets—as well as from younger poets, friends and peers, from students, and of course from books.

I first realised how much I needed teaching when I gave my first attempt at blank verse to my first teacher, poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe. He had been very encouraging with the poems I had shown him previously. When he gave me back this one the only words written on it were “Flat as a pancake.” No comment on the fact that I was writing in a formal metre, or any other elements—because, in reality, there was no reason to comment on these things. What I had given him was a failed poem, and though I was proud for having tortured language into an iambic flow, all that hard work had killed off whatever was special in the poem. Perhaps if I had never been taught anything else that single line of feedback would have been enough: I think it is still the most significant I have ever received.

It was this feedback, which stung my eighteen-year-old self greatly, that made me realise how much work is involved in poetry. That maybe after I’d written another one or two hundred iambic lines I would find a good one; that after I’d experiment with another one or two hundred caesuras I would be able to see the ways in which a pause best enhances the line.

I was told a story by another friend and mentor about her own early days writing poetry, relating one of the first times she read her poetry to an audience. Afterward, amid the congratulations, someone said to her, “You are good, but you need to write another hundred poems.” Though this was a lesson received second-hand, it’s another I have come back to. Several years ago I took trapeze lessons, and one of my teachers told me that he was only ever allowed to perform a trick without the harness after he had performed it perfectly over a hundred times. All those studies on the passage from novice status to something like expertise are right. There are things that can be taught (such as how to recognise when your work is flat as a pancake) and other things that can’t be—such as the grit to recognise that a poem is a failure, and the next ten, or one hundred, may well be failures too, but to keep working anyway. That when you’ve worked so hard on a poem that the seams are showing, that you need to work as hard again to make the thing seamless.

One of my teachers, too, gave me the single most freeing piece of advice I have ever received: when Laura Kasischke said to our class “Trust your obsessions,” a great fog of anxiety cleared for me. Again she reminded me that not every poem written out of obsession will work, but that an obsession takes hold of a writer who has something she needs to find in the midst of its subject—that obsession is personal, as personal as the biographies of confessional poets in their poems. For me, an Australian poet working for some reason on a long poem about an American river, the words gave me permission to breathe. This wasn’t an arbitrary “project,” but a landscape and story that had taken hold of me, and the best way to serve it was to listen to the frenzied voice that had me read National Park brochures and government water treaties and historical accounts of river runners in search of pieces of the puzzle that would become my poem. Even now, as the poem is still “becoming,” I say those words to myself almost daily.

At the same time that I have been lucky in these personal relationships, though, my greatest teachers have always been the books on my shelf. I learned more from reading the Norton Anthology of Poetry intensively over the course of three weeks than I have in any classroom, more from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry than from any poetic treatise. When I read the Paris Review interviews, which I have written about before, I always feel that any insight a subject gives has been spoken directly to me. And, too, when I read books, anthologies, interviews, I always ask questions and argue back. It’s that conversation that can span centuries and continents to which I always return.

Quotation, Context, Connotation

bitsandends — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:37:00 +1000

Around ten years ago, as a startlingly unknowing undergraduate, I took a class boldly titled “Literary Classics.” The thing I remember most clearly about this class was feedback I received on my first essay: do not, I was told, quote an author’s summing up of his opposing argument as if the author was supporting your own argument. When Harold Bloom gathers his not inconsiderable pith to sum up what he is writing against, don’t then quote that section of Harold Bloom out of context as though he agrees with what he opposes.

Last week I quoted myself. This week I got quoted by Andrew Bolt. If there’s one thing weirder than quoting one’s self, it’s ending up in a Bolt column. And perhaps more sobering than appearing in Bolt’s column was the verb with which he introduced my words: Kate Middleton confessed.

In truth, when I wrote my piece for the Sydney Morning Herald last week about the cancellation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, I knew perfectly well that one sentence could raise some eyebrows. “When so many writers lean towards one side of politics, a perception grows that the arts are not for everyone, but for one party only.” With more space I could have course expanded on this—I still think it’s a point worth raising, but at the same time it’s important to acknowledge both that in different eras that “one side” of politics flips (though we remember Ezra Pound’s long one man pro-Fascist rally, we less frequently do the roll-call of all the other modernists who were enamored with the extreme right before they saw the results and backed off their position) and also that what was implicit in my statement was that the perception is not necessarily the reality. Yes, at times the creators often cluster around particular ideologies, art is malleable, and art is for anyone who wants to take it in. It’s not always easy, and it’s not going to be a checklist of things you agree with. Art is challenging—just like playing a team sport can be challenging—and that’s why we bring it into our lives. One of the quotes that would lead off my own commonplace book comes from my childhood reading. In The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis writes, “If you do a good deed your reward is usually to be set to do another and harder and better one.” The desire to strive for more is not elitism; it is a combination of grit and the longing for transformation.

I’ve been dwelling on that word “confessed.” Of course this implies some sort of shame on my part. When I wrote my essay last week I was certainly impassioned in my belief of literature’s importance, but I also felt calm in laying out my thinking. I wasn’t “confessing” anything, I was making an observation. I don’t need absolution for articulating my concern about the perception of art—I wasn’t betraying anyone’s guilty secret; nor did I let slip something inadvertently. I was using my words. I was, in fact, pre-empting the arguments of Bolt himself.

When I write, when I converse, I want to learn. I want the nuances of two minds discussing the same thing out of different sets of experiences to be able to lead to a changed mind; the change may not be in my overall opinion, but instead in my understanding of an opposing view. However, I have been very happy to have my mind changed throughout my life. We don’t change our views easily: the first version of the facts we encounter is often the one we take to be the right version of the facts. But to inherit ideas without questioning them, no matter what your ideological bent, is to stand on dangerous ground. We need opposing voices: they force us to re-evaluate where we are, what we believe. And having evaluated the situation once again I still come back to the same thing: I believe recognising excellence and the importance of literature is worth it.

No Words

bitsandends — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:26:00 +1000

If you have ever read a poem or novel or literary essay and loved it, then you, too, value literature: you don’t need to spend every waking hour dedicated to the temple of words in bookish idolatry to say that a work made of words has enriched your life.

Weirdly, I am quoting myself. On Tuesday night, after hearing about the cancellation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards I wanted to write a response. I questioned myself, wondering: “Who am I to respond?” There are many more established voices than mine, and many who have previously won the Queensland award, which I have not. However, I suppose I remembered the words a teacher and friend once said to me: when I expressed doubt over my position in the academic world musicologist Linda Kouvaris told me, “No-one’s going to tell you you’re sitting at the big kids’ table.” I had something I wanted to express, and I wrote it. I am gratified that the Sydney Morning Herald saw fit to run the piece today.

I’ve been following comments written in response to various articles since the news broke on Tuesday, and am not surprised to see how polarized opinion has been. Amidst this, there has been a call for a new defense of literature.

My defense of literature essentially boils down to the words above. I am one of those who has spent my life in “bookish idolatry,” but I have plenty of friends who have chosen other paths, other passions. Nonetheless most of them read, and allow themselves to be transported and transfigured by the words of others. Some express regret that they don’t seem to have the time to read for pleasure anymore—and yet will recall a book they have loved, whether its Dr Seuss or Frank Herbert’s Dune. If it’s as far back as Dr Seuss, I might teasingly urge them forward with something like Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark or Lear’s Collected Nonsense on them, but I appreciate that most readers let book lead to book in their own time. Similarly, someone who may not be a reader of novels could still be thrilled by Norman Mailer’s evocative writing about boxing; locally, it’s a delight to read Robert Adamson on fishing—probably more delightful for those who actually go fishing; hell, in the days that Nabokov was a regular contributor it was really possible to read Playboy “for the articles.”

Among my own recent reading, I’ve been plunging hungrily into the essays Eliot Weinberger. His essay on James Laughlin, the founder of the publishing house New Directions, was a true delight - it can be found in his collection Oranges and Peanuts for Sale. It reminded me of something worth pointing out when people object that the market should really pay for literature: classics grow over time. New Directions has a policy of never letting their works go out of print, and Weinberger points out that this policy derives from the fact that literary works are often sleepers. A decade or two after first appearing, many New Directions books that had seemingly slipped by unnoticed made it onto syllabi and suddenly found their readership. There are plenty of famous-after-the-fact stories in the arts: this doesn’t negate the fact that there are also plenty of here-and-now success stories, but there’s more than one timeline when it comes to art finding its audience. Similarly, just because a writer eschews populism doesn’t mean that writer is an elitist or denigrates a popular readership.

Today the NSW government has announced that the NSW Premier’s Literary Prize, which had been placed under review, will be going ahead on a delayed basis. I can’t help but think the timing of this announcement is a response to the outcry at the outright cancellation of awards by the Queensland government, and I’m glad to read the news. Public opinion does count for something, so make your thoughts known.

Double Duty Report, Redux

bitsandends — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 23:07:00 +1100

With the posting of the last of four blog posts at Southerly I’ve completed my month of guest blogging for this publication—and with great thanks to Southerly for asking me to write for them. Effectively the pieces I wrote for Southerly are pieces that I might have otherwise posted here as entries in my “Diary of City Poet” pieces—ie, they are essays musing about elements of the writing and reading life. I know there are readers here who have already followed the posts, but I thought I would whet your appetite for the four essays, and encourage you to head over to Southerly not only to read these, but to explore the site more generally. Our literary journals are an important space for writers. Anyway, let me take you on a little tour of what I was up to over there this month…

The first piece I wrote was “The Lives of Other Writers.” Thinking about my own penchant for literary biographies, as well as the letters and diaries of writers, also led me to think about how reading such books makes me think about my own writing life.

While our literary commentators are often pronouncing the forthcoming obsolescence of the novel or poetry (Can Poetry Matter?Dana Gioia asks and everyone wrings their hands again…) one form that seems to be in no danger is the biography. We never get tired of talking about the way we live, and wondering if it’s the right way. Many of us turn to biographies for examples of right and wrong turns, as well as for a particularized vision of an era or a milieu that interests us: they make very palatable history lessons. The genres of biography and memoir of course run the gamut of type and quality, from the masterful multi-volume consideration of the life of Henry James by Leon Edel to the “unauthorised” biography of the latest starlet, who at sixteen or seventeen already is deems worthy of a report on life in progress.

For myself, and for many other writers I know, biographies and memoirs of writers are a great pleasure to read—side outings into the letters and diaries of writers, often published posthumously, also count here. …Keep Reading Here…

The second piece I wrote wandered through the inescapable language of our high-tech world. After reading Emily Nussbaum’s television column in the New Yorker—an essay focussed on the way the television show The Good Wife uses technology in smart ways that reflect its pervasive spread into our lives—I recalled those word-of-the-year lists that the dictionaries and lexical associations of the world compile. So many of those words in the past decade were associated with our online lives or with our new devices. And I turned to poetry—because that’s what I do. In particularly, a wonderful poem by Jaya Savige, “The Fig Tree,” which I plan to return to at greater length here in the future. Anyway, a sampler of “Brave New World: High-Tech Words”:

In a recent edition of the New Yorker, television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about the television show The Good Wife. As television shows produced for the major free-to-air networks in the United States go, The Good Wife is remarkably grown-up: the adults act like adults, with nuanced, contradictory opinions and mannerisms, the parents behave like parents, and the few teenagers that appear on the show act maddeningly like teenagers. The search for the grown-up is not a new phenomenon in this time of teen-oriented media saturation: Virginia Woolf famously declared George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Like The Good Wife, Middlemarch is an in-for-the-long-haul novel, as characters making ordinary decisions become fully aware of their consequences and deal with those consequences in wrenchingly human ways. So it is with The Good Wife: while the procedural case-of-the week format of the show can be hit and miss, the long-term build up of these characters and the legal/political milieu of the show’s version of Chicago is multi-faceted, and therefore satisfying. But this is not a television review.

I was interested in Nussbaum’s article not only because I am a fan of the show, but because she proposed that The Good Wife is “the first great series about technology”—technology in contemporary life, that is, and in a recognisably ordinary world. (Of course science-fiction frequently offers often-brilliant musing on technology.) The Good Wife explores social media, twitter, e-currency, online personae, the ins-and-outs of surveillance in the iPhone camera age among a myriad of other digital minutiae. Characters display greater or lesser facility in dealing with their technology, but what elsewhere could be turned into simplistic buffoonery—hey, grandma doesn’t know how to turn on a computer!—here becomes part of the debate about, to use Anthony Trollope’s phrase, “The Way We Live Now.” Or, in Nussbaum’s words,

as the show goes on, its plots have become a dense, provocative dialectic, one that weighs technology’s freedoms against its dangers, with a global sweep and an insider’s nuance. …“The Good Wife” stands in contrast not merely to other legal shows, with their “The Internet killed him!” plots, but also to the reductive punditry of the mainstream media, so obsessed with whether Twitter is making us stupid.

The writers, husband and wife team Michelle and Robert King, are aware that these technologies are here to stay—at least until they morph into something else—and through their show they want to explore what this means for human relationships. …Keep Reading Here…

From there I took a turn towards readerly obsession and guilty pleasures: my own great love is the boarding school book, and I looked at such works in their childhood story, literary and memoir incarnations in “Guilty Pleasures (Lights Out! Meet in the kitchen in one hour for a Midnight Feast!)”:

While I often deny the word “guilty” in relation to pleasures, I admit the phrase has its attractions and, yes, usefulness. A guilty pleasure has a little subversive thrill embedded, and is often something enjoyed when we feel we “should” be doing something else. That feeling of “should” could come from an awareness that we are procrastinating, but just as often I’m sure it comes from the idea that we could be spending our time on something with greater seriousness. One of my teachers and friends, the wonderful fiction and non-fiction writer Sugi Ganeshananthan, once said, “Guilt is a useless emotion. You should dispense with it.” I’ve treasured that as much as possible, and I’m sure it has greatly cut down on the amount of guilt I feel, though not eliminated it altogether. I feel guilt about not getting things done immediately (usually when I am juggling too many things at once) but not about enjoying non-canonical reading or watching television or seeing the latest dance movie, no matter how terrible. The mind needs rest too! …

I know that many writers have their guilty pleasure genres. Dorothy Porter used to talk about her love of detective fiction—how much she must have loved being able to bring that out in her verse novel in that genre, The Monkey’s Mask! And how much she must have enjoyed that book’s great success! Another friend and mentor, poet A. Van Jordan is a huge fan of comic books and graphic novels, a love that shows up in his poetry at times.

For me it’s not so much a genre as a milieu that I can’t bypass: the boarding school. I’m pleased to say I’m not the only person I know who has a great love of boarding school books (to my delight, when I mentioned these books to my father, he went to the bookshelves and brought back Rudyard Kipling’s Stalkey and Co., a favourite of his own from childhood) though I’m often greeted with a somewhat mystified expression when I mention my addiction—and with the question, “Did you go to boarding school or something?” (No, I did not.) …Keep Reading Here…

Finally, I turned to poetry and ekphrasis, particularly two great poems—one by William Carlos Williams, one by W. H. Auden—that explore the same painting by Pieter Brueghel, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” While ekphrasis has been on my mind in general for the past year or more, I had the opportunity to pull my thoughts together when I was asked by the Rockdale City Library to give a talk for them. It was a pleasure to do so, and from this talk I pulled my notes together to write “Icarus Downstage, Right: Writing Art”:

This past week I gave a talk on ekphrasis and the ways in which pictures in themselves may tell stories. In part I wanted to give a little history, and so looked back to Homer’s description of Achille’s Shield, as well as to consider the ways in which, despite being saturated with images, we are less skilled in reading them now—simply because we are no longer accustomed to spending a lot of time with a single image. The other aim of the talk was to discuss my own practice and think about the different ways I have approached writing about artworks in my own poetry; in the middle of it all, however, I looked at two poems I particularly love that take the same great painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder as their starting point—“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” ...Keep Reading Here…

Putting these things together, I realise yet again how much I wander across different interests in my daily and writing life—but also how those interests return again and again to the work of writing (and, one of the most vital parts of that work, to reading). The riches of such contemplation are not monetary—but they don’t need to be. So let me add a note to express my gratitude to readers who follow the tapestries my mind weaves: even without readership, the creation of the words is what counts, but knowing that words are becoming part of a conversation is so very meaningful to me. Let’s keep wondering together.

Second Draft

bitsandends — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:37:51 +1100

They say all writing is rewriting; what they don’t say is that rewriting—yes, vital—often feels like stasis.

When I talk with writer friends about what constitutes a “good day’s work” we will nearly all say that the best feeling is to have written something new. To go back to something old—whether it’s looking over something that appeared on paper only the day before, or pulling a piece out of the drawer where it’s been sitting for six months or six years—can be a wonderful experience. But it can also be frustrating.

When it comes to poetry, I write my first drafts by hand—and usually the second draft too; maybe even the third, fourth, fifth and sixth as well. Though the lines may change when a poem is transferring to the computer (because the length of the line in handwriting can be different from the length of the line in typescript, among other things) it is nearly always true that the words themselves are nailed down. At times I write the initial drafts in prose, and treat lineation as an entirely separate process. While form and content really are inextricably linked, both form and content take time to nuzzle into being and don’t necessarily arrive at the same time; even so, changing the line, the stanza, the shape can also bring about small changes in the words themselves. Minor changes I enact at the keyboard; major operations take me back to pen and paper.

All of this, of course, is work—but at the end of the day it doesn’t feel like work, especially if the thing isn’t finished. To rewrite a poem for hours, or go over and over an essay of a few thousand words and to come back with no definitive “solution” (no solution is really definitive…) is disheartening. What makes it even more disheartening is that I end up feeling I have done nothing at all.

This isn’t what I tell students. To students I say: no work is wasted work, and I believe this is true, for them and for myself. But it doesn’t matter that all that work that feels invisible right now will shine through in time—because at the end of the day I want to feel that I have accomplished more than finishing a load of laundry while trying to write.

Much of what we do as writers is to sit and worry at things at which we have already worried for far too long. Poets do at a microscopic level what novelists do on a much larger scale: see that something isn’t “taking” and open up the whole work for a new attempt at resuscitation. Often it is just a matter of waiting it out—solutions come unbidden at odd moments—but again, that doesn’t feel production. “What did you do today?” “I waited.” Whether for Erato or Godot, one never quite knows.

With a final draft something is sealed and the impact of being able to heave another piece out of my mind is relaxing. With the drafts between the first, when something new comes into the world, and the final, when something “grows up,” so to speak, I feel I’m biding time, though crucial changes are made in those moments.

Last night I opened up an essay, already over a year old, and began again to work with it: I knew when I last laid it down that it was not yet done, but I pushed the essay aside, because it was all I could do. Diving back into it all these months later I found myself removing two sentences here, adding two sentences there, shifting paragraphs around and finally, hazily, understanding what needs to be done to finish the piece. It’s daunting to go into it again, but writing is always a marathon of sorts.

I sometimes think of authors who get it right the first time—who write “at the white heat” and either score a hole in one, or write in a state of possession until everything is in place. I have experienced this once or twice, and my impression of other writers’ narratives of “one-and-done” drafts is that it is for them, too, a rare occurrence. And during the hours of looking uncomprehendingly at another draft, I have to remind myself that the only reason poems sometimes arrive seemingly fully formed is because of this practice in between.

I think, too, of Annie Dillard. In her book The Writing Life—a book that was very influential when I was just starting out as a writer—Dillard recounts the conversations she has had with people who want to be writers. When people ask her how or if or what do I need she simply replies, “Do you like sentences?”

And when all is said and done, I love sentences. I love smaller syntactical units, I love lines and line breaks, I love editing a piece of writing it has the sheen of desert varnish. The time spent over a page not getting anywhere is important because it is also time not spent at some other task either: my mind empties itself of all the extra noise of days until in stillness it sees a way forward. Then I move forward.

Poems Revisited: "A Consumer's Report" by Peter Porter

bitsandends — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:05:00 +1100

When Peter Porter died in 2010, I found that many friends outside Australia—who regularly read poetry—were not at all familiar with his work. I shared with them a small number of his poems to whet their appetites: among those I chose was “A Consumer’s Report,” which proved a hit among friends and students alike. This poem initiates the reader into its modus operandi from the outset, with the opening tercet putting the joke on the table. The reason the poem works derives from the fact that Porter sustains this joke for the duration of the poem, and then, when the reader believes the joke has been stretched to its ultimate end, the poet adds yet another surprise.

One of the main pleasures of poetry is that it returns the reader to consider the precision of language itself. In day-to-day life we’re used to hearing words mangled or emptied of their meaning through overuse. (Don Watson’s book Weasel Words tracks such emptiness in the language of management at length.) At times, when corporate or political-speak gets excessive airplay, I can’t help but feel we really are living in the world of Orwell’s “Newspeak.” In “A Consumer’s Report” Porter reminds us that even language that seems to have been repurposed by the corporate world can in fact be reclaimed and renewed. Often this reclamation can happen simply through the application of a set of familiar terms to a surprising new context: this is exactly what Porter does in his poem here, taking the language of marketing, and billing life itself as a commodity to be test-driven as you would a new car or skincare product. In so doing Porter wittily leads the reader both to examine the nature of the titular consumer’s report, but also prods his reader to a serious consideration of life itself.

Clearly our consumer has had a particular experience of life—life has, after all, been “gentle on the hands” of the writer; however the particularity of this example is countered by more general truths that all of us must face: none of us are aware, after all, just how long it will be until the built-in redundancy kicks in. Porter pulls apart familiar phrases—what does it mean to be “on the side of” life?—and places the terms “market researcher” and “philosopher” on two sides of the same coin. This balancing act between terms we would never normally equate anticipates the poem’s end, in which Porter informs the reader that, when all is said and done, there is still another weighing act to be completed: the unnamed “competitive product” (ie. death) must be experienced for a true comparison to take place. This final move drops us into a more serious realm, and we realise that the comic tone we have enjoyed until now has always had a sting to it. In fact, the ending prompts the reader to begin again: and that’s what the best poems do. Invite you to experience them over and over.

“A Consumer’s Report” appears in Peter Porter’s The Rest of the Flight: Selected Poems.

_______________________________

A Consumer’s Report

The name of the product I tested is Life,
I have completed the form you sent me
and understand that my answers are confidential.

I had it as a gift,
I didn’t feel much while using it,
in fact I think I’d have liked to be more excited.
It seemed gentle on the hands
but left an embarrassing deposit behind.
It was not economical
and I have used much more than I thought
(I suppose I have about half left
but it’s difficult to tell)—
although the instructions are fairly large
there are so many of them
I don’t know which to follow, especially
as they seem to contradict each other.
I’m not sure such a thing
should be put in the way of children—
It’s difficult to think of a purpose
for it. One of my friends says
it’s just to keep its maker in a job.
Also the price is much too high.
Things are piling up so fast,
after all, the world got by
for thousand million years
without this, do we need it now?
(Incidentally, please ask your man
to stop calling me ‘the respondent’,
I don’t like the sound of it.)
There seems to be a lot of different labels,
sizes and colours should be uniform,
the shape is awkward, it’s waterproof
but not heat resistant, it doesn’t keep
yet it’s very difficult to get rid of:
whenever they make it cheaper they tend
to put less in—if you say you don’t
want it, then it’s delivered anyway.
I’d agree it’s a popular product,
it’s got into the language; people
even say they’re on the side of it.
Personally I think it’s overdone,
a small thing people are ready
to behave badly about. I think
we should take it for granted. If its
experts are called philosophers or market
researchers or historians, we shouldn’t
care. We are the consumers and the last
law makers. So finally, I’d buy it.
But the question of a ‘best buy’
I’d like to leave until I get
the competitive product you said you’d send.

—Peter Porter

Double Duty Report

bitsandends — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:16:48 +1100

As well as continuing on with this site, I have also been asked to be a guest-blogger for the journal Southerly for the month of March. I’ll be posting there once a week all month—the first piece, musing on my attraction to reading the biographies of other writers—is now online. Nonetheless, I’ll still be posting here—there are more interviews, Poems Revisited essays and “diary” entries to come. So join me here—and there!

Writerly Ancestry, or Influence and Anxiety

bitsandends — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:19:00 +1100

I love to argue with the literary critic Harold Bloom: my copy of his The Western Canon, for instance, is incredibly dog-eared, edge-worn and marked up. Especially the lists at the back, his extensive proposal for a canon of Western literature. I bring up Harold Bloom because he’s the one that introduced that phrase, with his book of that title, The Anxiety of Influence. As poets, we are almost honour-bound to reject the generation immediately above us, seeking out other models. I argue with this too: like all poets, I have groups and poets who attract me, and those to whom I feel an inexplicable aversion—but mostly I welcome the sheer variety of poetic forebears, and when feeling lost about what it is I’m doing, where I’m going, I’ll return to someone I haven’t read in years, or else I’ll push onward to someone I’ve never read, or never read intensively, before. I’d like to think that the “when” of these poets’ careers doesn’t come into the equation.

This is on my mind because this week I’m going to be in conversation with poet and podcaster Fiona Wright at the NSW Writers’ Centre as part of their “Talking Writing” series, considering the career of Judith Wright. A colossal figure in Australian poetry, I remember discovering her work in the Norton Anthology of Poetry as a teenager and thinking that, after all, it was possible to be Australian and to be a poet. As time has gone on, I’ve been interested, too, in the way Wright uses and addresses the landscape in her work, and have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about her use of form. Of particular interest to me in this area are the poems she called “ghazals.” In fact, these poems only glancingly resemble the ghazal, but what fascinates me was that she was looking to this different poetic tradition years before others. The ghazal had a moment in vogue in the Romantic era—amongst the German poets, including Goethe—and was then overlooked by poets outside the traditions of Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetries until very recently. Though I rarely publish “formal” poems, I have actually written quite a lot of poems that either adhere to or play on traditional forms, and Wright’s approach to the ghazal is one of the most interesting adaptions I have found. There are poets who have become gatekeepers for the form in recent years—no doubt worried about the way in which a longstanding tradition in Middle Eastern verse has been so quickly taken up and broken down by the Western poet—would most likely be horrified by Wright’s incredibly free interpretation of the form. Nonetheless, the poems are gorgeous and suggest ways to play upon poetic traditions closer to home.

Reading so much poetry, I often find it difficult to assess the impact any one poet has had on the way I myself think about poetry—but it’s a real pleasure to have a reason to revisit Wright’s work and to ask myself questions about the ways in which her example has suggested avenues for my own work, directly or indirectly. I’m looking forward to hearing Fiona’s thoughts on the subject, too: as two young female poets, separated by a small number of years, I’m interested to know how she came to Wright’s work (in the classroom? in anthologies?) and where she slots Wright in when it comes to her own personal canon or anxiety of influence. When I sit down to write, what I think nearly always becomes clearer as I keep at it; likewise, in conversation more facets of my own understanding come out as they are pressed against the knowledge and intuitions of another.

This conversation is a free event for members of the NSW Writers’ Centre. For non-members admission is $20—or you could just think about joining the centre, and enjoying more events in the future.

Talking Writing: Judith Wright and Poetry in Australia

Thursday 8 March, 6:30-8:30

NSW Writers’ Centre

Garry Owen House, Callan Park, Balmain Rd, Rozelle

On Translation, Poet Translators and the Creation of New Work

bitsandends — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:45:45 +1100

Poet, Editor and Translator Michael Hulse

A number of years ago I ran into an acquaintance in the library (he worked there; I merely frequented the place) and he asked what I’d been reading lately. I mentioned that I had recently begun reading a lot of Polish poetry. His response was that he didn’t really respond to the work of Cseslaw Milosz. This event has stood out for me for a long time because it wasn’t Milosz I was reading at the time, nor was it Szymborska, the other Nobelist—I had stumbled across the work of Adam Zagajewski and Zbigniew Herbert.

This was before the larger selections of their work were commonly found in Australian bookshops, so the university library was my connection to their work. Nonetheless, his reply wasn’t surprising: because when it comes to writers in other languages, we really do tend to know only one or two names. Nonetheless, translators are working away on the books of many, many more authors—and many of these authors are just as deserving of attention. I wonder if sometimes we have a bit of a “one and done” attitude with non-Anglophone literatures. There is, after all, so much to read—if we know the work of Milosz, we know something of Polish literature in the second half of the twentieth century. (With the recent death of Szymborska—a sad event that at least had the happy consequence of bringing attention to her poetry again—Zagajewski will now be the prime living representative of Polish poetry for the outside world; Piotr Sommer will no doubt be next up.) Similarly, if readers know the work of Syrian poet Adonis or Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish they know something of recent Arabic-language poetry. I too am guilty of this, no matter how much I constantly try to address my own ignorance.

And it’s a lot to ask of any reader that they delve further: the world of so-called “world literature” is enormous, and often only translations of the biggest names are readily available. Only a couple of hundred books in translation are published in the United States every year, and no doubt only a fraction of these are published in Australia.

In a poem in his recent book Southern Barbarians, the poet John Mateer declares that “translators are angels.” I too subscribe to this opinion: translation is perhaps the ultimate labour of love. One translator I know translated a contemporary novel and for his efforts received only $500. Merely retyping a novel would surely cost more at any decent hourly rate; rendering the work in a different language would take much, much longer… Another friend translated Estonian poetry: among readers there doesn’t seem to be a high demand for this, and I doubt he’ll ever profit much from his efforts. But literary translators—especially of poetry—are rarely in it for the money. And though a few translators names are known—William Weaver, for instance, the translator of Italian authors Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among others is well known—being a translator is often akin to being invisible. Yes, your name goes on the book as well, but the average reader pays little attention to it. The flipside is that many successful translators are also creators of their own work, yet it is their translations that reach a wider audience. Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Libyan birth, and my former teacher, is now Adonis’s translator: he recently toured the United States with Adonis, and the pair gave bilingual readings. I was privileged to attend one of these readings in Michigan a year and a half ago. But Mattawa is also a poet of considerable power: I believe his recent book Tocqueville deserves serious attention. The book has received some of that attention in the United States, but coming from a small independent publisher, it remains unknown in Australia.

All this is on my mind because Michael Hulse is in town, and will be reading and talking at UTS tomorrow night. Hulse has a formidable record as a translator: best known for his translations of three of W. G. Sebald’s works (The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo) Hulse has done much, much more through his career—and has a lot of work ahead of him. He has translated authors from a range of periods, and is one of the foremost translators of German literature. Whether it’s a rendering of Goethe, Rilke or Elfriede Jelinek, you are in good hands when it comes to Hulse. And like many translators he is also a writer: he has published a number of books of poetry, the most recent being The Secret History in 2009, which followed on from Empires and Holy Lands: Poems 1976-2000. We know poetry won’t sell in the same numbers as, for instance, a Penguin Classics edition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, but his poetry is well worth reading.

Beyond that, Hulse is an accomplished editor and anthologist. He edits The Warwick Review at present, and acted as the co-editor of Bloodaxe’s The New Poetry and, most recently, The 20th Century in Poetry. I’m looking forward to hearing him read and discuss his work tomorrow night; the event is free and open to the public, so please join us.

Michael Hulse Reading and In Conversation

UTS Building 3 (Bon Marche), Level Two, Room 221/2

Entrance on Harris Street, Ultimo

Tuesday 28 February 6:30-8pm

"Language is not the dress but the incarnation of thought."

bitsandends — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:34:05 +1100

“Language is not the dress but the incarnation of thought.”

- William Wordsworth

Poets + Picnic

bitsandends — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:40:57 +1100

I am delighted to be included in the line up for this year’s Poets’ Picnic run by Woollhara Municipal Council and the Woollhara Library, taking place this coming Tuesday evening, 21 February. I’d heard about this annual event from a number of people, and was honoured to be invited to contribute to the reading, taking place at twilight in the Blackburn Gardens. It’s a free event, and sure to be delightful. (Here’s hoping for good weather…)

Please join me, alongside Kit Brookman, Tricia Dearborn, Carol Jenkins, Vivian Smith and Alan Wearne reading poems loosely allied with this years’ theme, “Talking About My Generation.” There’s live jazz at 5:30, and the picnic kicks off at 6pm. This year it’s being hosted by Simon Marnie of ABC Radio.

Poets’ Picnic

Blackburn Gardens (next to the Double Bay Central Library)
New South Head Rd,
Double Bay

Tuesday, 21 February, 6pm