'Scrape the side!'

In 1985, five (or four, depending on the source) Australian poets went on a sixteen-city reading tour of the United States and Canada. Π.O. was one of them. Originally titled ‘The Dirty T-Shirt Tour’, The Tour is ostensibly Π.O.’s diary of that trip, the dirty T-shirt standing for the narrator’s ‘difference’: his migrant, working-class background; his flouting of social conventions; his ‘performance poet’ status. While the other poets are (repeatedly) washing and ironing in their rooms, he is out walking the streets, making astute observations, meeting interesting people. Π.O. names the well-known poets and lesser entities he befriends and the famous poets he doesn’t meet – the disreputable T-shirt given as one reason for his exclusion – but he omits the identities of the poets on the tour and the tour organisers.

I can hear Π.O.’s voice clearly from the outset (he inspires me to colloquialisms, parentheses, dashes, slashes, exclamations): his deliberate Greco-Aussie intonation, his conversational voice, the emphases, and rising hysteria, or is it performed rage? Π.O. is both poet and protagonist, performer, and public persona. It is wise to remember that the private person, whom the reader does not know, may be different to the ‘I’ narrator as represented in the pages of The Tour.