States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two
Series Two of the South Australian States of Poetry anthology is edited by Peter Goldsworthy and features poems by Steve Brock, Cath Kenneally, Jules Leigh Koch, Louise Nicholas, Jan Owen, and Dominic Symes. Read Peter Goldsworthy's introduction to the anthology here.
the priests and the witchdoctors both
will bless your new vehicle; the Virgin
will keep you in mind if you fashion a model
of what you want, attach it to the front of the car
a second storey on your house
a house pure and simple
a swinging baby doll
attached to your grille
‘The Virgin won’t give them anything’
shrugs Father Abraham: it’ll be hard work
gets the second storey or the first
good luck or bad that delivers or
witholds babies
The medicine men pooh-pooh the minimal
offices of the Friars - they themselves offer
in addition to the basic plan, prayers to the earth gods
thrilling rituals and holy smoke
the camera pans round a wall of wax engravings
for the attention of the Virgin of Copacabana
here, our gurus advise visualising
what we desire:
a private welter of wants
I like the Bolivian way
heart on your sleeve, swinging dice
buffeting the rearvision mirror
a decade of the rosary, a burnt offering
hey! down here! we’ll take anything!
a shout-out to whoever’s online
Back at Cranfield Street by 5
Motorway horridness receding into fumey oblivion
We are just in time for Pointless – words ending in ‘air’
‘debonair’ ? – others, phoned at random, knew that one
Two pounds fifty left on my Oyster card once I’ve put it through the barrier at
the delicate, high-slung, white and black, wooden pedestrian bridge over the
Brockley line
all along the route is densely wooded with lanky elder saplings
dock and nettles, layers of green petticoats below the asphalt belt
Wendy’s raspberries are flourishing in her damp back garden
I only notice the hundreds of orb spiders strung on webs between the bushes
when I come eye to eye with one as I bend to gather fruit
Brockley Market turns two on Saturday: I’ll be there.
travel the best excuse to scavenge: any find might be a clue
to the answer you’ve been seeking
I’ve picked up a copy of Worzel Gummidge
‘Do tell us how you came alive?’
‘... so far as I can mind, it all started with a itching in the head,
when the turnip began to sprout.’
Three Oxford Children’s Modern Classic authors
ring bells, from the list inside Worzel’s cover
Rosemary Sutcliff, Philippa Pearce, Astrid Lindgren
I know the TV Gummidge, not the book
or its author, Barbara Euphan Todd
who ‘started writing when she was eight’, the little swot
the written story’s charm eludes me
a grim, mirthless tale of mud, muddle and mayhem
Why do I love England? And yet I do.
banded bumble bees already at work
by 6 am in the rosemary
slaters still hovercrafting over the bathroom floor
not realising the sun’s up
not a shrug of wind in the garden
the surface of the sea
taut-stretched grey marle
yesterday, the pair of sea eagles
flew above the car, keeping pace
for a bit as I drove
an escort of black-and-whites
on your way, ma’am
nothing to see here
Fed Wendy’s cat, walked to Broadway
Market through London Fields
a month from now these will be
once again names to conjure with
jump on a 236
Newington Green
lured by the memory
of Belle Epoque patisserie
glowing golden in a corner
always misremembered
as Raisin D’Etre
My fellow-travellers clearly
locals despite farflung origins
even on my ninth visit
I’m a day-lily among annuals
When I’m seated at my table
the escargot pastry is perfect
the coffee not
c’est la vie
From Wendy’s bookshelf
I’ve taken Death of a Ghost
Margery Allingham
best-loved Dame of Crime
died a year younger
than my present age
so many books!
beneath an unflattering
photo, her Green Penguin blurb
‘In my family, it would have
seemed strange not to write’
yet I know no other Allingham
my internal satnav (not the Epoque
vendeuse’s doubtful directions) tells me
Church Street is nearby
Abney Park cemetery therefore
in walking distance, a favorite for
the unchecked frivolity
of its riot of nameless
creepers and saplings
gobbling tumbled memorials
rampaging madly on
my lately-penned Will specifies
eco-burial, probably in a polite park
better this rampant decay under
thrusting, immodest new growth
the Victorian way
en route to last things, I detour
via penultimate ones
a light-filled ex-factory
scuffed wooden floors
raised platform at the back
sparse, select items dangling at intervals
and in the wide window
a light-as-air linen swingcoat
faintest oyster blue-grey
made for a small man my size
not too many pounds asked,
enthuse with the attendant
who seems as charmed as I
by the garment, as perhaps she is
leave empty-handed
In the cemetery I peer through a screen of oak leaves
squint at the flat Yuri had, with Teresa the mad landlady
a few years back, overlooking this tangle of rubble
deepest green shade
the passage of years
sickeningly vertiginous
when it’s your childrens’ years
you’re reckoning, let alone
amongst tombstones
outside Epoque earlier,
two girl cyclists hugged goodbye
stalwart in Birkenstocks,
tortoise-shelled by Freitag backpacks
full of calm and poise
grounded as I wasn’t
I thought of my reading at their age
how I longed for each new
Drabble, bound to be bursting
with important
tips for living my modern life
all forgotten
Margaret is coming
to Writers Week, I’m reading
her new books, elderly heroes
all passion spent
Margery’s spectral tale from 1934,
in my backpack, is a painter’s story
Lafcardio, RA
Royal Academician
my ghosts today are clamorous
not unfriendly
a tablescape
drooping roses near death in a jam jar
dull Ian Rankin in a yellow cover lying upside down
Mongolian phrasebook
sample tube of Sensodyne
Cinema ticket: The Great Beauty
opener for the Italian Film Festival
password to Smartygrants
for accessing two hundred applications
business card for Phnom Penh silver and gemstone jeweller
a blue and a black biro
invitation to popup arthouse fundraiser at Goodwood School
receipt for Geranium Leaf Aēsop cleanser
Yuri’s business card at the Apple Store
with the bitten silver apple on gloss white
white enamel teapot with red-rimmed lid
remote control for Smart TV
another Scottish crimemeister, Stuart McBride
Close to the Bone, his back to me
at the far end of the table
notebook
this pen
Cath Kenneally is an Adelaide poet and novelist whose book Around Here (Wakefield Press, 2002) won the John Bray National Poetry Prize. Of her six volumes of poetry, the latest is eaten cold (Walleah Press, 2013), in which each poem responds to one in the volume Cold Snack (AUP) by Auckland poet Janet Charman. Kenneally’s two novels are Room Temperature and Jetty Road (both Wakefield Press). She works as a print and broadcast arts journalist, being Arts Producer at Radio Adelaide for many years and responsible for Writers Radio, an award-winning national community radio books and writing program. She was the inaugural CAL/J.M. Coetzee Writing Fellow at the Coetzee Centre at Adelaide University in 2016. She holds an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Her work has appeared in many national and international journals and anthologies, and been translated into several languages.
Poems
in my end is my beginning – just
a rat’s nest coiled in back-shed dust,
a tangle of demented knots
gothic as the Grimms’ dark plots,
a thrumming song of wreak and wreck
(whose satin bed, whose trusting neck?),
the tautened threat from fist to fist,
the carpe diem tug and twist.
My image haunts your DNA,
that tiny ruthless shadow play.
I’m hairshirt-hallowed, gallows shred,
bog-buried hair and voodoo thread,
discord from a black mass choir,
devil’s helix / heaven’s tripwire.
My dreams are rope, I nightly string
up rank despair, the summer swing
to grace the judas tree’s green spread.
Crumble up your holy bread
and feed the crows spaced out along
my cousin wire who codes this song.
This came out of a workshop exercise, a version of Kim’s game – translating objects on a tray: pebble, spoon, nut, string, thimble etc. JJO
Insects are nature’s netsukes, and, by jiminy, crickets are such bright creatures. JJO
This ‘structural scandal’, tongue’s yen for kin
as family is a sort of chime, the thrift
of loaves and fishes unconsumed by scorn,
is natural as natural history
with all its modulations of again –
seed, crystal, comet, crocus, rain.
Even our code’s in rhyme – adenine,
cytosine, guanine and thymine – turn
and turn again (cynghanedd rules the cells).
Call cousin metaphor a silent rhyme,
flashy matchmaker signing What a catch,
this link and latch of things.
Say reason follows suit when politics spells peace.
Note In the beginning was the Word and it rhymed:
quark, antiquark, spin, counterspin.
Left and right are the first and best of gifts;
hand clap, bird flight. Born binary,
we lose and use our balance stepping out,
or, for embodiment of rhyme in tights on a roll,
ape Clem on his circus wire with music and meaning
weighting the opposite ends of the balancing pole.
Remember when first couplets of smile-frown
made enemy-friends with knee scabs for paired badges
as right played tag with wrong and gang was the full stanza?
And how sound conjures friend from stranger
– song belong song, half riff or exact pact,
sun moon one tune, a double cadenza,
with any word an aria centre stage
through (cymbals, please!) full frontal rhyme,
that glitzy tenor of derring-do. Soprano, too.
Irresistible, these prophets of philander,
intuition’s viceroys, double agents all:
Apollo tipsy, Dionysus in tails.
How they’ll subvert a poet and serve a clown!
Their Mercury conjunct Uranus warns
it’s no go the status quo, no go the Fall,
so if you want the moment’s CPR,
the breath and beat of second chance – yes no? –
rhyme’s team will clinch the deal.
The first line quote is from Roland Barthes’ ‘rhyme is a structural scandal’. I like rhyme’s tensile strength, its echo of the pattern of things, the way it can surprise and validate, and sometimes usefully influence a poem’s narrative. JJO.
after the painting by Jan Vermeer
Two strands of pearls, warm cream, cool blue,
are spilling over a coffer and onto
a crumple of ultramarine against a wall
below a yellow curtain shifting the muted light.
Four gold coins and a silver ducat
wait to be weighed along the table edge,
but the sidelong mirror’s narrow sliver can find
no avarice in its harvest, this calm face:
the soft mouth and downcast eyes are
tender for the scruples of the world.
Her raised right hand is testing the miniature scales,
her left hand’s at the vanishing point,
and on the wall behind, a sprawled Last Judgement
murkily segregates saved from damned.
This seems no cautionary vanitas –
there is nothing in the balance here
but the commerce of light and air;
emptiness equals emptiness in the level pans
the way our moment is aligned with hers:
the chaffer of maids, the scritch of a broom in the hall,
the downstairs tap and squabble and thud
of Klaus repairing a boot, Nienke haggling for cod,
and next-door’s boys at quoits in the lane.
This small room stood when a single spark
sent the Arsenal up ten years before,
along with the whole Second Quarter of Delft;
the immense shudder of sound hit Haarlem.
Death slips easily into a town, a poem.
Jan Vermeer has framed it out of a scene
where time keeps testing true.
One of a series of poems on the paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer of Delft. JJO.
Heaved up or fountained down, the wooden slats breathe a shirr
and clattered repeat of the mill of their making, a satisfactory thud
like the outcome of a stock plot. Half hoist, they hang askew with a
pained smile, and bell pulls for self-service which pirouette
to a glut of knots. Tilt by tilt they’ll orchestrate your day, underlining gloom
and overruling light. Or clapped full shut on the heat, let laddered thread holes
shimmy the sun down beaded falls of bright. Late afternoons, the whole blank
bamboo book concertinas up to bare the view as the scooped weight
calligraphs its lines of cord – left, middle, right – to bunched boustrophedon loops.
And to lie beside the summer-tilted blinds in a sun-stripe shift of brown
and gold, with the scent of thyme from the hidden garden’s dog bark,
bee buzz, biplane snore, is to you dream you wake in the aqueous light
of green glass louvres, the sliced ice of your long-ago brother’s room,
a sleep-out with terrazzo floor, Buck Rogers comics under the bed,
night fears in a secret language, and morning’s, the first sun
totting up ingots: yesterday’s best feng shui rationing parallels out.
Mundane things can turn odd, explorable: Venetian blinds are particularly evocative with their hint of intrigue or nostalgia – from their name maybe: degrees of tilt as communication or secrecy. JJO
Jan Owen lives at Aldinga Beach, fifty kilometres south of Adelaide. Her translations from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal were published in 2015 by Arc Publications. A New and Selected, The Offhand Angel, was published by Eyewear in 2015, and The Wicked Flowers of Charles Baudelaire came out with Shoestring Press in the United Kingdom in 2016. She was awarded the 2016 Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.
Poems
how strange and Viennese you are today Adelaide
like the skating rink in front of the Rathausplatz
here I am finding it hard to stay upright too
every step I take is cautious
ambulant
still moving
I wonder if it’s a frozen river
that I’m skating on the Blue Danube
or a smaller tributary
building to crescendo?
of course
after the rain last week the Torrens
is covered over with a layer of earth
silt
like sheets of brown ice shifting
glacially
patiently
it’s the Black Swans
traversing pontoons of leaf litter with
circumspect
spindly legs
it’s an abandoned bike I see
the same single speed
that I have walked past for weeks now
chained to the thin trunk
of a plane tree by the smokers’ tables
it’s these same barren trees that
deciduous
arthritic
creak and bend in the wind
but won’t uproot
walking between the Exeter and the hospital
past the Elephant and the Palace Nova
it’s the sun
low in the sky that warms my back
and it’s the light
that like a tourist bends down
and tries to pick out one of the dollar coins
embedded in the footpath
that makes me think this is all
positively Hapsburgian
Eating a burrito in the Festival Theatre foyer hair in a half-up half-down
Watching umbrellas & people blow through the door looking for E and her mother
Are they wearing furs? Where are they? E loves the theatre doesn’t come late
Two girls walk past in Year 12 jumpers & I never went to my five-year reunion
Hung up these portraits on the wall have no names on them are we supposed to care?
The play is Things I Know to be True & someone has a ticket for me I assume
To say thank-you I order three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc but forget to get one for myself
From the balcony I oversee a roomful of chairs inflate into a room full of eyes
Gin says that she just finished The Beginning of Spring translated from the Russian
Viv says the stage lighting is supposed to be fantastic & I want to agree but hesitate
Til never had any formal training as an actress but her father is the lighting designer
P points out that her last name is hyphenated in the program nonetheless
I cry in Til’s monologue & E passes me her glasses because she knows
I struggle in low-light looking far away into the distance
I sit with you and watch you smoke cigarettes in front of me
you take photographs but not here not of me
I didn’t ask for sugar in my coffee but I didn’t return it either
when the bus leaves you will be on it when the sky opens you will be beneath it
one day in the future we will agree on something
the first time we met the last time we will kiss
but these are kept safe between us
there is icing on the carrot cake and I let you finish it after you tell me
it is the only thing you have eaten so far today
the five words of overheard French you translate to me make me love you even more
though they are not beautiful words
your sketches remain upside down in my notebook your name
written across every page
after ‘Dug and Digging With’ – AEAF, July/August 2016
Looking forward to seeing you all day
& arriving at the crowded gallery steps
I say ‘this gallery is full of the same people
desperate to see something different’
but I don’t really believe this I mean I am
only here to see you & like this room
is lit just to accentuate your
best features the more I look at you
the more I find myself lost inside a mirrored
box the kind that disappears into itself
it’s called ‘smoke and mirrors’ I’ve played it
before a mis-en-abyme a play
within a play (‘played’
& ‘playing with’) it doesn’t
make any more sense this time around
yet the writing is on the wall
I have to squint to read it but it’s there
the writing is on the ceiling too & it says
‘BLENDED RUBBER TRUMPETS
UNDER A CAR SEAT’
during the performance piece I let you buy
me a beer it goes straight to my head
like black helium balloons I get high
on this darkened ellipsis ...
everyone is being silent/polite there is
a Foley track a throbbing? my own heart?
a pulsation like the pattern of light
from a lighthouse penetrating your porthole
should we run aground
it’s turtles all the way down
turns out it’s only three pedestal fans microphones
we see what we want to see I guess
‘it’s the bubbles’ you whisper & we all clap
very loudly at exactly the right time
for the first time there’s a line for
the bathrooms at the AEAF
the companion text says this is not a ‘problem’
but a ‘secret geometry’ an inside joke
& when I come back out you are talking to
someone you always seem to know
more people than I do regardless of
where we are together you are
looking over some featureless shoulder
kneeling beside a box of books (as art)
I say to whoever is listening ‘if galleries are
the new cathedrals I’m glad we’ve
worked out how to get people
genuflecting’ & upright by the exit sign
I am overcome by the fresh paint on the walls (not
paintings) this is new (nauseating?) over
powering yes the crowd spills out onto the steps
for cigarettes I open my stick of gum
that says: BEWARE THE ARTWORKS. SOME ARE
FRAGILE & you wave to me start walking over
when Aida grabs your arm & says:
‘I’m supposed to stop you running into it
see this sculpture is made
of glass’
Listening to my own listless heart beating & you
beside me I discover we are minor seconds apart
tragic-chromatic but if subtle harmony does exist
it’s a three-year-old playing fists palms & elbows
we manage to stay out of each other’s way mostly
save for collateral clashes/catastrophes: collisions
& rhythms? look at this ventricular wall I put up
meaning: I stay regularly irregular (always on time)
not jazz or syncopation but syncope synecdoche:
tickling the ivories ‘you are the music until the music
stops’ & with the train approaching the boom-gates’
chiasmus suggests crossed purposes my piano
teacher’s arm reaching across me she played the
C# and I the C our fingers almost touching when
she said ‘that’s it there, you’ll never forget it now’
Dominic Symes has had poetry published in Voiceworks, Award Winning Australian Writing (2016), Coldnoon (India), and Broadsheet (New Zealand). His reviews and criticism have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide and curator of ‘NO WAVE’, a reading series commencing in mid-2018.
Poems
I walk through an industrial landscape
in the painful adolescent hours
before sunrise
above the sky has sobered up
but the high tensions wires
are still dripping
with conversations
long after rain has fallen
traffic lights turn
green
orange
red
city streets are wind blown
with electric light
underfoot
leaves have formed
the first rough draft
of autumn
the early morning sky
has bled out all over
the snug tiled roofs
and tranquillised gardens
of a Buddhist monastery
the air is a medley
with yellow and orange
shavings of sunlight
in the dormitory’s courtyard
well-bred leaves
are falling like penances
stone buildings stand mute
with only a monologue of prayer bells
sounding out each hour
in the commune kitchen
a group of young backpackers
eat their rice and fruit in silence
before their travels will take them
to Thailand Paris Brazil
while outside a monk walks along
the path
chanting a mantra
journeying form one end of his world
to the other
1.
the barbed-wire sounds
of crows
has fetched out the sun
from behind
the ridge
daybreak
has saddles up
the sky
2.
along the river
the mist is chain
smoking
otherwise the only
bright moments
are the small hoof prints
of sunlight
treading
over paddocks
3.
a river
untethered
at one end
its muscular frame
is narrowing out
and browning
as it stretches across
the plain
a rubber band
4.
a herd of caravans
are grazing
waterside
from a camp site
a fishing line
has been cast out
holding the river
in place
like an anchor
Friesian cows are leaning
over the fence
their eyes are an intense study
of nothing
a bus load of Japanese tourists
stop
the cows take black and white
snap shots of them
When a
child
dies
A cross
is made
in woodwork
Angels
are drawn
in the art room
The school flag
is hoisted
to half mast
In the assembly hall
vases of lilies
are placed
At recess
the children sit together
a little tighter
The playground
swing has
a minute’s silence
Jules Leigh Koch was born in Sydney and raised in Adelaide. He is the author of five poetry collections and has been a recipient of two South Australian Literature grants in 2008 and 2011. He has conducted poetry workshops in schools and colleges and at the South Australian Writers Centre. He has also worked as a mentor for emerging poets from Friendly Street Poets and the Richard Llewellyn Arts and Disability Trust. His professional life is spent working with children with special needs in educational settings.
Poems
T.S. Eliot's couch
There was once a couch in the Grolier Poetry Bookshop
in Cambridge where T.S. Eliot snoozed.
Send out scouts to track it down and when they do,
stand two strong men, one at each end.
Let them count and on the shout of three
lift it from the place where it has lain
all these years and, with a small boy
to clear its course, carry it to the truck.
Let them secure it with silken cords and waving
like rock stars, escort it down Massachusetts Avenue,
the boy in the cabin come along for the ride.
When they reach the shop where once it nursed
the injured egos and lost lexicons of poets past,
(both the full-of-form and the sadly slight)
let there be a park directly in front, shopkeeper Carol
smiling beside the door flung wide and, behind her,
if you care to climb the stacks, poets A–Z –
among them, propped up by Eberhardt
on one side and Emerson on the other,
Eliot, catching a cat-nap between browsers.
With the reverence due a hallowed relic,
let the two strong men return it to its corner alcove
and with a cold beer apiece, watch
as the small boy, staking first claim on new life,
leaps about on its cushions,
sends dust motes to write on the air like smoke.
One minute the bird is cutting a curve – blue
in two, the swift repair of air – the next,
it’s glottal-stopped in the throat of a dog.
Beyond lies the dog’s muscled tongue-hug
forcing the bird in a slavered-leather
slide past the pharynx, down the gullet
into the gunge and gore of a slaughterhouse floor.
From their front row seats in the corporate box,
the Fates look up from cotton, cloth, and shears,
bite their juridical lips and then decree
that, just this once, one little bird need not
a swallow make. Instantly the dog,
acceding to their thumbs up, sputters a cough,
and from his yawning gawp there flies the bird.
Peter Roget suffered from depression, disconsolation,
gloom, melancholia, pessimism ...
He lived a life of bitterness, desolation, grief, irritation,
lamentation, misery, pain ...
Not that there weren’t periods of bliss, exuberance,
happiness, joy, light-heartedness ...
Not that he wasn’t awake to the wonders of the world,
to its beauty, brilliance, grace, loveliness, magnificence ...
After a visit to the village of Inverkeithing in the Scottish Highlands,
he recorded in his diary that it was beautiful.
When he first set eyes on the meandering water of the Tay,
he wrote that it, too, was beautiful.
And as for the riverbanks near the village of Dunkeld,
his diary asserts that they were remarkably beautiful.
That his thesaurus was still fifty years away
is perhaps worth mentioning.
After Karin Gottshall
Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my mother just because
I like saying it. I like it for its mouth feel and pleasure:
... meet my mother.
It was a phone call at 3 am drove those words away.
Three years later, with no conscious effort on my part,
they followed an overgrown but still navigable path
all the way to my mouth that they might line up
and spill from it just as they used to:
I’m going to meet my mother.
Some days, I go to the Broadway Cafe and sit at a table
for two, one with a view of the sea. She loved the sea.
Mothers come and go, some with daughters, some not.
Each time the door opens, I look up and imagine her
standing there in the Chanel suit she made herself;
a smile crinkling her eyes, her hair blown about a bit.
Then, the sea suitably gazed upon in her stead,
I check my phone and pretend to read a message
that could well be from her in which she says,
‘Sorry, the cake’s taking an age to cook,
can’t think why, what about tomorrow?’
London 2016
At the National Gallery I pay sixteen outraged pounds
to view the Beyond Caravaggio exhibition. No chiaro
to speak of, only scuro, each canvas caked in mud-brown
and bad-blood red on a background of black black black.
I dodge the ladies of the U3A religious art class, decline
the complimentary depressive illness, and in a quick scan,
meet the resentful eyes of a carping King of the Jews.
He parts the flesh around a deep gash in his side. ‘Look!’
he cries. ‘As if crucifying weren't enough!’ I’m defensive
as a guilt-edged politician who can’t say Sorry.
The flight into Egypt fills the opposite wall: Joseph,
the sleep-deprived stepfather, flat-backed, out cold; Mary,
her frock undone, nipple dripping milk, martyring herself
to the earthly demands of a smug and smiling Jesus,
his know-all tell-nothing gaze double-daring disbelief.
I make a dash for chiaro, albeit in the grey day
that leans on the railings overlooking Trafalgar Square.
Its spouting fountains, puffed-up pigeons,
and 23-foot bronze thumbs-up on the rent-a-plinth,
are all I need of heaven and a welcome relief.
Louise Nicholas is a semi-retired teacher and long-term member of the Adelaide poetry community. WomanSpeak, co-written with Jude Aquilina, was published by Wakefield Press in 2009, and a chapbook, Large, by Garron Press in 2013. Her collection, The List of Last Remaining, was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript award and was subsequently published by Five Islands Press in 2016. A collection that incorporates her own and her mother’s writing is due for publication in April 2018.
Poems
standing on the Puente Romano
in Cordoba
watching the rio Guadalquivir
run beneath
like time itself
I do the math
2,000 divided by 44=45
history is nothing more than this
45 times a life of error and uncertainty
the main lesson of monuments in Europe
for which you only queue twice
unless you want the audio guide too
but mostly we take the negative capability option
in the face of poor signage or poor French
and let our consciousness run freely
against the object
sounding it out
although sometimes I feel a need
for an audio-guide to life
an authoritative-sounding voice
with a haughty accent
telling us how magnificent it all is
and not to expect too much
from the vaguely unsatisfactory present
I guess that’s what literature is
one never-ending guidebook
with tips from those
who’ve done it all before
and our own collisions
with objects and texts
which give us something to say uniquely
and one might call poetry
while I won’t be leaving
any monuments
and have conquered little
beyond a 700 square metre block
in an outer suburb
I hope these notes
help the next person.
I wake up
in the middle of the night
in a panic
about my dead-end job
the credit card
the housing market
until poetry appears
like a window
I go through
& compose
a couple of works
of genius
by day light
they won’t be much
of course
but it’s enough
to get me
through the night.
Wednesday 28 November 2016, Adelaide
the day of the storm
I had a poetry reading
with Nathan Curnow
overland from Ballarat
to launch his collection
The Apocalypse Awards
an hour into the unprecedented
statewide blackout
I took his call
you bastard
you brought the apocalypse with you
the reading cancelled
I waited around in the darkness
still in the office
with a swag of poetry books
and no way to get home
on the electric train
the city outside in gridlock
the rain stopped
I ventured into the half light
people wandered the streets
with fear on their faces
and nervous laughter
cars bumper to bumper
I decided I’d walk to my father’s
he lives about an hour’s walk north of the city
I passed a huddle of Ministers
scheming down the steps of Parliament House
toward the intersection
of King William Street and North Terrace
where bystanders stood transfixed
watching a fire truck
stuck in the middle of the intersection
sirens wailing
a man in high viz gear
consulted with the driver
and eventually the truck
negotiated a way through
the politicians stood there
with blank faces
some partially shielded by their advisers’ umbrellas
guys I’d written dozens of speeches for
powerless now
like the rest of us
I walked towards North Adelaide
most of the shops were closed
I realised I had no cash
the Oxford had a hand written sign
on the door of the front bar
in blue pen
open ‘til 6 pm
inside a few punters
nursed beers in candle light
I walked on past the banked up traffic
feeling the weight of poetry books
on my back
their ink would outlast
the electronic readers
though even libraries burn
I felt hungry
and wondered if my father
had food in his house
he’d have long-life milk
tinned food and cash
I was a teenager again
lobbing at his door
broke and hungry
tired from the walk
how much longer
will I have this refuge?
six months ago
I held his hand
while he lay sedated
for four days
following a triple bypass
when they finally roused him
he asked me if he was married
and I had to break the news
not once but twice
and twice divorced
our roles reversed
as he pieced together his life
and I answered the big questions
like how we came to be here
as the days passed the fog cleared
and here I was now at his door
the dog barking
that’ll teach the stupid bastards
to close Port Augusta Power Station
we’d driven by it the year before
observed the stream of smoke
rising from the stack
and he’d posed the question then
how that thin trail of emissions
in so much space
could impact on the atmosphere
and now I see his carbon-based world view
vindicated as the batteries on my phone
run down and before long
the device is useless
while on my wrist
the LED lights of my smart watch
flash wastefully in the candle light
as my father discourses
on candle power
and how they used to have
six candles at each end of the table
he tells me
the smell of burning wax
brings back memories of the block
on Maize Island in the Riverland
while for me the blue kerosene lantern
brings back memories of my own childhood
camping on the block
amidst the ruins
of his ancestral home
and I guess all the old timers
will be thinking of the ‘56 flood
I remember him telling me
as a child
it would happen again
but I couldn’t imagine the Torrens River
ever bursting its banks
and now the dams and reservoirs
are full and the Torrens gushes past the weir
I’m in the right place to survive the apocalypse
my father’s world of hand tools
his brace and bit with assorted augers
rip saws and other tools
he’s never owned a power tool
we haven’t had a blackout this good
in a long time
he exclaims happily
and for once isn’t alone with the TV
we suck on cask wine
I pull out my new chapbook
and finally get to show him the poems
he takes his time reading the book
and I wonder why I haven’t found time
to share some of the poems
over two years old now
we hold our own slow reading
in the candle light
my swag of books not wasted
and after a few hours
I borrow his VS Commodore
to drive home
through the windswept darkness
negotiating intersections
without fear of breathos
when I hit the southern suburbs
order is restored
the lights are back on
as the grid is built up
suburb by suburb
I’m reunited with my family
impressed by their resourcefulness
and by morning
I’m awake to both sides of politics
working the airwaves
renewables vs energy security
Turnbull stoking the coalfires
Weatherill weathering the storm.
a flock of starlings
rises like applause
from the roof
of her Majesty’s Theatre
I met Ted Berrigan
in a dream
wearing a T-shirt
standing in a sparsely
furnished room
the early Berrigan
not yet bed ridden
but distinctly
pot bellied
& the beard
of course
it was a vivid dream
I can’t remember
if he said anything
literary
but he seemed pleased
to be there.
Steve Brock published his first collection of poetry The Night is a Dying Dog (Wakefield Press) in 2007, and received a grant from Arts South Australia for the completion of Double Glaze, published by Five Islands Press in 2013. He is the co-translator with Sergio Holas and Juan Garrido-Salgado of Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche trilingual anthology (Interactive Press, 2014). Steve completed a PhD in Australian literature at Flinders University in 2003. His work has featured in the Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.) and has been published in journals in Australia and overseas. His most recent collection is the chapbook Jardin du Luxembourg (Garron Publishing, 2016).
Poems
Steve Brock began writing in the shadow of the New York school, but in ‘dreaming with Ted Berrigan’ – ‘I can’t remember if he said anything’ – might be saying goodbye to those earlier cool dudes and already anticipating the more variable temperature of South American poetry. He has spent a lot of time in Chile especially, and has translated extensively from the Spanish. Of course, Latin American models are a pretty broad canvas. Just to take the temperature of Chilean poetry – Nicanor Parra is drop-dead cool, Neruda is hot. What seems to be emerging on Steve’s recent work is a relaxed, often laconic style which is heading back home across the Pacific to be its own influence. It is deceptively unrhetorical, but it contains multitudes.
Coleridge said we are given the Beautiful – but we must ‘seek out, or give, contribute or rather attribute’ the Sublime. Cath Kenneally is a poet of the everyday sublime in her predominantly, but by no means exclusively, small seekings-out, small celebrations, small attributions. Often these take place indoors, as in the word sketch ‘A Rich Full Life’,k which is a still life on a table. Well, a poem is also a kind of drawing or painting: graphite on paper/jet-ink on paper. Kenneally wears her learning lightly, often ironically: she is finally more interested in the infinitely fine texture of the world than generalisations about it. I can see her sitting at that lightly sketched table, drawing – but just as easily I can see her driving a bus through Paterson, New Jersey, jotting her perceptions and ideas in a notebook, the going home to where Ken Bolton has been cooking some zanily decorated cupcakes. If that’s too obscure a reference; check out Jim Jarmusch’s movie (Paterson, 2016).
I don't know if Jules Leigh Koch has read the postwar East European minimalists, and their tight, poetic compressions in which no word is wasted, in which the silences – the whitenesses – between the lines are as important as the words. Is it the metaphors Leigh Koch rejects that makes his poems so fine? Or are the whitenesses the witnesses? Another fine Adelaide poet, Rachel Mead, puts it better than me: ‘Koch makes an art of distilling urban environments down to a series of spare, potent images, reminding us that each day we never walk out into the same world.’
Louise Nicholas has published widely for some years, but I still feel she one of the undiscovered treasures of this poetic town – and this poetic country. She is an alumna to some extent of the Jan Owen’s Aldinga poetry workshops, but brings her own particular brand of often sardonic humour. Sharon Olds is a favourite, and I can see why – less because of influence, perhaps, than because they map similar terrains. ‘I choose laughter,’ Louise writes in the last poem in her latest book, ‘because it joins the dots, / allows us to find the sense in senseless, / connects us all to the last’. Her carefully thought-through, closely focused autobiographical poems do all of that and more, whether they choose laughter, sadness, wonder, love, or joy.
Jan Owen is one of Australia’s most distinguished poets. Her work has been of the highest standard for some decades, but who’s counting? Her recent translations of Baudelaire have received high praise here and overseas.
There is a terrific poem in ABR: ‘String Says’. It is also terrifically strange, belonging to the category that Les Murray like to call Strange poems, in which are different or unusual poems. Jan told me twenty years ago that I should try writing to write some poems with my left non-dominant, hand – to access strange regions of the brain. I don’t know whether Jan wrote that with her left, or right, or both, stereo – but her Muse comes multi-armed, like a Hindu goddess.
Dominic Symes is an emerging voice on the Adelaide Poetry scene. I first heard him in Ken Bolton’s legendary in their-own-lifetime Lee Marvin readings (now legendary beyond their lifetime, sadly) and to some extent he is another alumnus of the New York school through Ken’s tutelage – but there is a personal, particularly subjective strain emerging. And maybe my ear is pre-programmed by my own predilections, and maybe I’m straining to hear it, but more recently there is also East European strain which may be genetic – he has a Slovakian grandfather.
