away from home and back again

Heading Home

Pushing it to a hundred

flanked by paperbacks and pines.

Their branches tremble,

startled by the high-beam halo.

Velvet Underground

drowning out the engine.

Singing the choruses and

dipping lights for oncomers.

Mumbling the verses

and slowing to eighty

through Balnarring and Hastings.

heading for the city,

the freeway and the lights.

Leaving the winter coast

and the house without curtains

for another weekend.

 

- Adam Ford, Not Quite the Man for the Job (buy it here)

Reading this, I'm reminded of the song Animals by The Guild League, which begins:

Clouds of feathers fleece and foam,
halfway to my childhood home.
In the car and on my own,
white lines where the road is sewn.
Stitches holding down the car,
beside the sun under the stars.
Through the evening coloured so
like pink champagne and eye-shadow.

It's on their album Inner North (buy it here)

poem love #1

Having a Coke with You

Frank O’Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

visit the Frank O'Hara website here

anzacs and ANZAC Day

To celebrate ANZAC Day, I finished Michelle Cooper's The FitzOsbornes At War. And cried when the unexpected thing happened. Why, Michelle, why????? Also, I ate the rest of the ANZAC biscuits I made the other day.*

Days like this make me wonder - ever so navelgazingly - about being so fascinated by war and war stories and being a pacifist. At primary school we learned to sing Eric Bogle's song And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. I can picture us sitting in the little weatherboard house that was our school library and I first (I think) heard about Gallipoli, about Suvla Bay, and carried the image of damaged and disfigured men returning from the war to people in my mind, and how the crowd waiting for the returned soldiers didn't know how to react to it. Then in high school we watched Peter Weir's film Gallipoli. I read Rilla of Ingleside, Goodnight Mister Tom, A Little Love Song, The Diary of Anne Frank, A Farewell to Arms and all the war poets. I studied history at uni and took all the 20th century war classes. More recently I read Salinger's stories, The Montmaray Journals, The Pursuit of Love, The Quiet American. The trenches, the Blitz, Hiroshima, the concentration camps, the French resistance, silk stockings and Dig for Victory, the Kokoda trail, the Cold War, Vietnam, the first Gulf war, and the second. It's so ugly and tragic but I suppose there's a kind of macabre romance to it, which is food for all those stories I just can't put down, or put away.

Steven Herrick has written a post on visiting Gallipoli here.
Folksinger John McCutcheon sings Christmas in the Trenches, a beautiful song that tells the story of the 1914 Christmas armistice.

Here is my absolute favourite war poem:

  Dulce et decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
  Wilfred Owen

*I also saw The Avengers. It was amazing. 

expression is the need of my soul

talking about archies the other week put me in the mind to re-read the wonderfully hilarious poems of archy and mehitabel by don marquis. archy is the reincarnated spirit of a free verse poet, now a cockroach living in a new york newspaper office. at night he scurries out and types poems by jumping and slamming his wee cockroach head onto the typewriter keys - hence lack of capitalisation and most punctuation. the idea is that the newspaper men happen upon the poems in the morning and start printing them as a column.

and here's a piece, a selection, from right near the start:

"expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore
there is a rat here she should get without delay"

archy's poems give a beautifully satirical view of life in nyc in the twenties and thirties, the excesses and toughness of those decades. the poem "certain maxims of archy" is particularly memorable and includes stanzas like this:

"don t cuss the climate
it probably doesn t like you
any better
than you like it"

and

"prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into"

and

"boss the other day
i heard an
ant conversing
with a flea
small talk i said
disgustedly
and went away
from there"

and

"the bees got their
governmental system settled
millions of years ago
but the human race is still
groping"

alley cat mehitabel, in her many previous lives, once lived much more grandly than she does now (once she was cleopatra). but she's toujours gai, darlinks, toujours gai even when she's down on her luck and or burdened with kittens. mehitabel never intended a life of matrimony or motherhood:

"the life of a female
artist is continually
hampered what in hell
have i done to deserve
all these kittens"

archy interviews pharaohs in the museum, has a radio interview with mars and one time finds the shift lock (caps lock) key and experiences the JOY OF CAPITAL LETTERS. hilariously funny yet sometimes tragic and cynical, you must get a copy without delay. and what's more, the best of archy and mehitabel is going to be published in october! go, demand your local bookshop order it in! i am placing an order for at least twenty-three as i type this.

go to the don marquis website for more on archy.

Monroe and a Poem

Marilyn Monroe reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Those Awesome people are at it again, with the blog Awesome People Reading.

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet
needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

Shut Not Your Doors - Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1881)

You can read Leaves of Grass for free at Project Gutenberg or you could go to your local secondhand bookshop and find a musty, pre-loved version to keep forever.

vis ink...in stores now

it was quite remarkable to see this:

turn into this:


visible ink is a student-run literary anthology out of the RMIT professional writing and editing diploma. last year we received around 200 submissions for this edition. i wish i had a picture of the piles of submissions to show you, very unruly and wonderful. out of that 200 we had to select a tiny sample for the journal (there were only a few heated discussions). and with such a diverse bunch of editors and readers on the selection committee, we ended up with such a delightful mishmash of pieces: 16 stories. 11 poems. 12 images.

the editing process was probably my favourite part of being on the visible ink team. emailing and talking to the authors about their words and stories - perhaps seeing a little something that they could no longer see, knowing their piece as well as they did. learning a little something about inDesign (being thrown in the deep end a little) was horrible and fantastic at the same time. i felt just a touch proud of me when it was all over. i hope all 'our' authors are happy with the finished product - we are so grateful for their talent.

here's the first piece in the anthology (one of my absolute faves):


The Sniper on the State Library Dome
by Michael Crane

The man with madness
in his eye looked down
and aimed his high-powered rifle
at the many people on the street
below and fired and yelled
‘This is because I read Jewel's
a night without armour and she
did not love me.' He put another
bullet in the chamber and fired and said,
'I read Bukowski and I'm tougher
than him.' He moved his position
to the left of the dome, reloaded
and fired and hit a woman
on her way to work at the library
and he said, ‘This is for the Great Gatsby
because I loved Daisy.' He fired a few
more shots and hit a man reading Playboy
in a newsagency. He decided his killing spree
was too slow so he took out a submachine gun
and fired at the pedestrians on the street.
‘This is because of Hemingway,' he said,
'for running with the bulls and this one
is for James Joyce writing books
I could not understand and this
Is because Gertrude Stein was too fat
and this is because Truman Capote
was gay and take that Homer, Shakespeare
and Chaucer for rhyming with obscure words.'
He ran out of bullets and took out knives
and stared to hurl them down
as the policemen snuck up behind him
and wrestled him down to the ground
and a few weeks after his trial
he was led to the execution chamber
and the priest took out the Bible
and the man said, ‘Not another book!’
And he screamed all the way down
to the electric chair until the very end.

you can buy visible ink at readings bookstores, the sun bookshop in yarraville and by snail mail (contact the committee via the website). if you are of a writerly persuasion, submissions will surely open soon for this year's vis ink. keep your pens poised and your eyes peeled.

up with rainy days and with poetry!

here is my favourite bit of allen ginsberg's howl.

so, as we all know, it begins -

'i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...'

then it goes -

'who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,'

'trying not to make out with my spoon'

the sky is everywhere, jandy nelson

this is lennon's story (lennie to most people). her older sister bailey has recently died unexpectedly from a fatal arrhythmia and the book explores her grieving process and her relationships with her gram (who has looked after her and bailey since their mother took off exploring), her uncle big, her friends and two different boys. toby is bailey's boyfriend - equally as adrift and devastated as lennie and the two fall - horribly - into each other's arms for comfort. joe fontaine is the new boy, a total dream, and it is with him lennie (or john lennon, as he calls her) feels like she can play music once more.

i found that the sky is everywhere actually had some similarities to secret scribbled notebooks - very lush surroundings, lavish emotions, an elderly guardian, sisterly connections, intriguing boys. it made me imagine how bereft kate would have been if sophie had died. but ssn wins because of its deliberate, perfectly-chosen, prose with not a word too many...

this book is full of blowsy overblown language. however, i didn't mind. lennie was such a ridiculous romantic, complete with a wuthering heights obsession. it worked, i think.
i didn't like the blue font though, it was vair distracting and sore on the old eyes. and though i liked that the book felt a little like a diary with the elastic strap thing, i think this very moving story could have used a more sophisticated jacket.

my favourite part? when lennie becomes acutely aware of sex and her body and goes around kissing the furniture. wonderful!

poetry, by way of cinema

the other day i indulged myself and went to two films. first, my crick-crack-rock-chick best friend and i saw jane campion's bright star. it was divinely romantic without being mawkish.

here's a great keats poem:

give me wine, women, and snuff

until i cry out "hold enough!"

you may do so sans objection

til the day of resurrection

for, bless my beard, they aye shall be

my beloved trinity

and this poem also shows what i felt was one of the strongest aspects of the film: that these regency folk, including the romantic poet himself, were just people like you and i and that in spite of all those period films that would have us believe that everybody comported themselves with the utmost restraint and good manners, these people were smart and fun and fiesty and played outdoors and climbed trees and joked about with their elders.

the movie was brilliant, so subtle and romantic but fun and passionate. keats was beautiful, the inclusion of his poetry made it come alive again and abbie cornish was a revelation as the wonderful fanny - she was phenomenal in those final few scenes. however, it was paul schneider as mr brown that stole the show in his tartan "onesie" and sarky asides.

later that night, the evil sister and i watched nowhere boy, the story of young john lennon with an excellent focus on his relationship with his aunt (who raised him) and his mother. it was much more moving than i'd prepared myself for so the combination of these two films left me emotionally exhausted but a good cry is always welcome!

the boy - err, young man - playing john lennon (aaron johnson) was robbie in the hilarious teen movie angus, thongs and perfect snogging and i was a bit worried about his tween looks and simpering voice but he astounded me and now i think i'm a bit in love with him. he's beefed up, but more importantly he did really well imitating lennon's mannerisms and laugh (it was the laugh that got me - brilliantly done!) his performance reminded me of lennon's performance in the ace beatles film a hard day's night: i think the writer and/or director must have been fans - the opening scene of nowhere boy was defo an homage. he was also very impressive in the more serious scenes, as were kristin scott thomas (the stern aunt mimi) and anne-marie duff (john's mother julia). beautiful. two thumbs up for nowhere boy.

spring

yesterday was so gorgeous and sunny and bright that i'm getting excited about nicer weather. while winter is great for hot chocolates and curling up in your bed to read a book, spring (and summer) are great for being sprawled on the grass (reading a book) and at the beach (reading a book) and being in the beer garden (usually not with a book, but you could definitely do this)

in honour of spring, here is one of my favourite spring poems

here’s to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here’s to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning’s beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever’s afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here’s to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon


ee cummings