States of Poetry

for Lee Harwood

Softly solarised and parallel
two lines echo each other, glow slightly,
in a space that is nowhere

#

                                                         I am perched
– I 'find myself' so –
                                            sitting forward –
                                   hand
                                                     on knee

the knee I've thrown over
the leg beneath:

I look left,
out the window

– of the
Boulevard cafe

(does it call itself that?
I don't think so) –

to the brickwork laneway outside –
wet with the rain,

                                       that is now stopped –
people going past
                                       in Hindley Street.
Onto which
                                  the lane 'gives'

tho who talks like that?
                                                           Not me
– I'll give you 'gives' –
                                                                    but
am I me, right now,
                                          not, say, Lee Harwood?

or
someone?

Anyhow,
a little back in time
– & looking at the rain, &
thru it,
at the harbourside road the corso of Trieste,

some-
how
in Italy

                                      A land I love 'unreasonably'
'disproportionately'
                                                   ((conventionally))
                                                                                    but 'love' anyhow

Hullo, bel paese,
kind people,

feeling
a little out-of-time, suspended

                                                                   between a
here & now,
                           a then, &
                                              some near, near-ish,
                                                         future

More fragile than I used to be.

                                                          Wondering
how to explain this to my sister
                                                                Should I, in fact,
                                     'explain this to my sister'?

we have not seen each other,
have

'hardly' seen each other since '73

forty years more or less
Three or four times
in that interval?

#

                                          This is the kind of
                                                     coffee shop,
I will tell Gabe,     where you could still buy
                                                                  a Vienna Coffee,
                                                   I think. I'll check the
                                                                        menu
as I leave

                                 The newish waitress
                                                                                       whom I like
– (who would not know how to serve one,
she will never have been asked) –
                                                                                                  looks
very nice today

                                                      The boss     gives me
                                                             the second
                                                                   'free'    –

I MUST
BE A REGULAR

                                                                               Now I see
or note again
                              what first caught my eye
as I approached the glass,
                                                                   four
                                                          silver lines
reflected, in the window, on the side that I look
                                                                                         'out' :

the metal arms of the cafe chairs.
                                                                          They catch
the light
                            float, disembodied,
                                                                          'upon', or 'above',
the intricate paving without,

                              so that I look thru them
to see
                              the wet brick,
                                                                 the grated
metal drains
                             that flank at either side, &
a round cover
                  removable – like those in Italy, sometimes
still marked with the insignia, the lettering, that
                                                                                        proclaimed
'ancient Rome', 'Roman'
                                                       'SPQR' ?
                                                                        – that might be, by now,
some of them,
                               quite old :    early twentieth century.

Ours stem probably
from the seventies or the eighties.

                         People walking past, in black,
black & red, greys,   but black mostly – for winter.
                                                                                                    Me,
too.
               Two people across Hindley laugh

as they help each other re-pack rubbish
spilled from a split bag

a woman, a man
                                                 I guess they work in Burp
the awfully named
                                             'eatery' (or 'food outlet'
                                                                                                  tho
who am I to be so snobbish,
                                        make these distinctions?)

                                                                both, at different times,
stand, hitch up their pants, bend again
                                                                                   &
rebundle the refuse
                                                         A very handsome Asian couple
                                                                                                go past
small,
                 smiling,
                                       she     in red coat & very high
– 'above-the-knee' –
                                                   soft black boots
                                                              soft deeply black suede

Elegant
A kind of gift to the eye –

for me, a too old,
not very handsome man.

An African girl, eating chips

#

a guy, narrow pants, cap, on a phone.

#

Gilbert Place.

#

                                                                Posters on the wall
for Elton John '& his band'
                                                             I thought he was
                                                                                            dead
or at least retired
                                     & Dylan Moran
                                                                                      A young guy
in clothes too light – homeless I think –
                                                                                    goes past
(I look outside)   his
                                                                      figure
large,
           – black t-shirt, black pants, low –

stumps past like a fridge, from side to side

                                                                                   A guy,
unintentionally debonair,
                                                      using a long, furled,
pink umbrella
                                  like a walking stick
                                                                                  flamboyant
but not consciously so,
                                           lost in thought.

As who isn't?

– 'Thought'.

Each with
our own.

Ken Bolton

Recording

Should the unique serve to typify?
Have they been ill-used? To what purpose?

Asian Couple

The Asian couple.
I am inclined to think Chinese –
mostly on the basis of size,
but not Japanese (the man
might be bigger, be
better, less self-effacingly
dressed) – maybe not
mainland Chinese.
She
is a bright shape & colour
Soutine, Sargent, van Dongen –
for the fast, big city.
I like her for her good humour,
appetitive, optimistic – for her
visual eclat. Tourists, or living here?
In the market – for oysters, sights,
real estate?
She has her husband's arm. Both smile.
He is laid back.

African Girl with Chips

The Africans seem increasingly
to fit in. They are a new factor.
Week by week less surprising.
They assert themselves
in small groups, talking animatedly
in pairs, striding, quieter solo.
Perhaps the chips are protection,
compensation, or just a meal. An
ordinary girl – of 18, of 20 or so?
Black jeans, blue top a fashionable
parka, her expression one of
caution, defence, apprehension.
She looks about.

Fast-walking guy

The guy walking fast, phone
pressed to his ear – all for business –
in which case the business looks shifty
tho it may just be his manner – on his way to borrow fifty,
meet a friend, give somebody
a piece of his mind, pick
a car up, have an argument

Homeless

The homeless guy I see him
only from the back, which makes him
more of a 'subject' – 'subjects' look out
a window, don't they, like I do –
& think – & as with
those romantic paintings I see
his view – it's mine – he is 6 metres further in –
rounds the corner, moves eastward
with the crowd. Rundle Mall. Somewhere.
Which might be what he is thinking:
where to go, what to do, for
heat, for movement, the long day to fill in.

(The young guy in black – who rounds the corner
of the Boulevard – Gilbert Place – thinks what?)

Flamboyant

The thirty-year old with the umbrella,
striding – where the homeless kid
was strictly 'graphic novel' –
has that hipster look,
of operetta.

Debonair. Protected

Ken Bolton

Octopus

Quick across the twilight road,
the eight legs of the cat.

Flood

Water corrects the earth
to flatness, patching fields with sky.

Alarm

Little boat of red figures, adrift between two days.

Window

The creek slides through the rain's eyelashes.

Aidan Coleman

i.

birds have their own topography : overlaid
on ours : which is vertical & detailed :
with its own system of needs :
its own deviations : the nerve-ends
in my fingertips : & a tremor in my latissimus dorsi
rouse me : a domestic industry
starts up : a saw : or sander : on some abutting title :
the sound raw : with alternating notes :
one contention in the hypothesis
of morning : suggesting whole lives :
whole civilisations : a parochialism : an argument
for god : or gods : or evil : a football crowd
clamours : & over it an umpire's whistle :
piping : a flawed adjudicator : the fiction
at the noumenon of the fiction : the field
on which the binaries play out : any number of them :
it's soul-work : in essence : & the day
rolls back its reminders : the eye in its socket : god :

ii.

in the subtractions of light : the season
of sheer high contrails : a midden
of laundered clothes : sheets peeled back :
over the shuffled pack of the morning paper :
i arrive at a sense : at a sense of :
at arrival : a body upright in its song :
a door clicks shut or open : on the further side
of the wall : a parallel space : in its inclusions :
in its variations on the same meridian :
the afternoon satiated : in its details : the spines
of unread books : horizontal : read
like a failed poem : leaf-fall on the pavers :
two leaves : on a forked tree : sheared back :
to an austerity it thrives on : a sluice
of sound : of traffic : blood in its hammering :
the upper room a panopticon :
power-poles an idiom : in the minutiae :
in the lengthening paragraphs : of shadow :

Thom Sullivan

Recording

I am history now
in the scales, the age of sounds

I make sense then drop it
it gets dirty, it breaks
the ants carry it

I am bent at the switch
my tapes of the archive
decay, loops stutter
glitch arias

I am bent at the floor
facts roll under the chair
little dust songs
or songs outside
the parrots know

and I am still my species
struck, listening

Jill Jones

Recording ('Bent' begins at 6:21)

Amongst discarded data, twigs,
plastic containers, fingernails –
'The unconscious, at all events,
knows no time limit' –
the shape of an ear, marginal facts
blown about by a northerly,
washed by stiffening rain – something
like symptoms, clues, bird spit,
possum fur, leaf miner, blood and bone,
a story or many of what passes
through here daily – what the drift of oil
or rice grains, the tea leaves (ah!),
might say, though they don't
speak at all. Or the message of
bodies or of precedents, portents,
what maps of rain or a star's passage
lay out before us in our days
and nights in the backyard
signs of the time, literally,
as they spark and spit in the sky
and over these grounds.

As women do we conjecture,
look at the evidence, terrestrial margins,
small movements in our yard,
materials under our feet, that move
through our hands and leave
scrap, pictograms and incisions,
odour and decay, diagnosis and taste,
gnosis and art, spider webs brushed away,
cuts from thorns, feelings (ah!),
shopping lists, flourishes of a gesture,
what is seen or touched, nosed
in all that specific and uncertain
divination of the present,
and what presents in the wind
and fleet shadows of today's weather:
for instance, the way a raven calls
and is answered from across the road
by another, with the same
or similar call, at differing intervals?
It's communication you can guess about,
though you don't really know
if it's a system of messaging,
or a type of presence, a big guess,
such as Holmes and cigarette ash,
Poirot and little grey cells,
the psychopathology of everyday life.

Though sky is always opaque as reality,
it bears clues and trajectories,
various evidences blowing like dust,
in fact, are dust – it all happens
as slowly, as quickly as a thought,
the event you know and forget
as someone writing all this down in evidence
against you – but there's a feeling
that can't be formalised or even spoken
as we pass in and out of and into again
the known, or the known knowns,
and the unknowns, the way things
brush past, or the way you fall
in haste, in love, what trickles onto
a porous path, as traverses of skin.

Quote from Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Jill Jones

Recording
('Memory Lapses and Clues, or "Don’t Forget to Remember"' begins at 1:03 and ends at 6:20)

This may be the new hunger, walking
through buildings that are off limits.
Fraught kisses on the carpark stairs.
Tripping on rubble that does not build.
Meanwhile, the clucky gestures
towards klutzy. Choices that seem
wrong somehow. Sentiment or sensibility.
A plantation daring not to flower.
A vacant bouquet you can't throw
over the skyline. A tablet
roughly swiping over the cataclysm
from backbench to backflip.
That daggy champ who carked it. Typical!

Houses are billowing. I'm somehow
getting the drift of all this palaver.
Those rumours of defenstration.
Yet another Euro-kerfuffle.
A mis-heard bird-call as the ratification
of no-matter-what. Patterson's Curse.
Murray Cod. Too many cockeyed seraphs.
Lurking minority do-gooders
desperate to kit up with sorcery
or leftovers from interjection culture.
Half your bloody luck.

The orchestration today seems feeble.
Some cyclist dithers in your path.
As if it's the failure of endearments
on any plane. Sensation that irks. I, too,
have gone there. Environments
which try our ease. I have dealt with
frosty margins. Striations
full of torpor. The pressure of
dwindling ruminants.

Welcome to more misadventures,
more posters, too many songs about
nothing much. Tickle and hum.
That night some nabob barged in on me.
As if I'm wronged with entitlements.
Petulant snuffles. Dimwitted subscriptions.
A sad trackstar with no story to sell.
No scandal or hot-blooded dope.

Are there conditions for angelic visitation?
For a heart-to-heart with tiaras
after the cache of dogmas goes missing.
Rejigging a sequin that won't blush.
A damp squib. The enemas
you will eschew. The bootstraps
we wish for. A torment
of old shills. As the crow flies
a holiday goes feral. Another swab
overlooked. The rustle of irony.

I'm shuffling on sand like a deck chair.
They're raising the Titanic. Huzzah!
Tomorrow will be released
from its profligacy. Blame it
on the bossa nova. Oh you knaves,
we are beyond you now.
We'll go exploring Newcastle,
using a map of Berlin.
The accursed thingamabob will walk
sprightly through the kitchen.
The galahs are passing over.
Say yes, and it might mean
something, the sun may shine.
We'll smooch and glam amongst
junk, amongst honeybees.
If they're still here, we are still here,
febrile but aspiring,
with hoops and frocks,
and our filthy alarms.

Jill Jones

Fitness: fact, fiction
or fantasy? – among things
meant. Parachutes

open like fuchsias,
picnic hampers
of kittens float quietly

down, as peaks
push through
resplendent mists.

Your sense
falls upward
like helium or blinds,

now it's precisely
subtitled, you realise –
as the first tentative

steps emerge
to be recorded
like a baby.

Consider the aspirin
in its exuberance
that picks itself up

and turns itself over
to become
no other than

water and air.
Like effusive, ever-
digressing chatter –

you could.

Aidan Coleman

The do-it-yourself piano isn't
kicked to matchwood, and you take
this for affirmation. When we
work out how to switch off
Bob Dylan, your plangent homemades
will go unaccompanied, no longer
sought like an injury lost in the mists
of Hansard. People suggest topics

they won't be using, and this is
more like an archive sneeze
than what yesteryear's beard
in physics said it could be.
Quite unlike the night beyond, snowing
sheet after perfect sheet of stars.

Aidan Coleman

1.

Angling over star-fields,
the pitches lit like billiard tables.
Those lengths you were shouted up and back,
lungs scoured by brillo air.
The lazier concord of close mown grass
and low hanging fruit
of the short boundary. A tang of primitive
electronics: the circuit board's braille labyrinth,
the slab type of Amstrad.
This callow path, you
cannot take, curves around and through,
the way a perfect river might. You find
a little gate unlatched,
and the light tangles, as you step
into the ferment: into the heady reek of itch.

2.

The aubergine, by the window, glossy
as an eight ball: lavender,
the road, a torn-open
mountain pouring cloud. Noble erosions
from sceptre to cushions,
from mitre to trademark. A lavish
glut of adjectives, dissolving
in a merlot hour – flabby as any
soft landing among
the rubber bells of foxgloves.
The heart as wound
or badge, a tattoo, smudged
like junk-mail wet. A fading haze from clubs
like grates where fires have been –
signs hung out as dirty washing.

3.

Easier to paint
than rhyme, this volatility. A poet-envy
of the art-fluke, or ripeness
cut in segments sucked to the pith.
A plaintive case deflating
on a snack bar counter
where citrus men
swash fizz through lunch
and later repair the voltage of night
in the out-of-sync bounce
of signal and blinker.
You take a little kindling, the light
of a cupped match,
to hazard across deciduous campuses;
the vast, blue continent of theory. Go, softly on.

Aidan Coleman

Recording

A little pin-up
three fingers
above the knees.

Behind the curtain
a dress-up game –
pretty things come undone.

He chalks lines
on raw stitches.
I catwalk.

My body fits the timeless black.
'You can live in it, or die'
smile the lips full of needles.

Do I look a little dead
with black fabric
on bone-pale flesh?

Suddenly in the mirror
I see the last party.
This dress is me.

In the front row
button-eyes watch
a grand entrance into the hand-made hole.

Around a little black dress
the roots of the earth
grow matching belts.

Jelena Dinic

Recording

for my grandfather

He circles my arrival
on the calendar.

It is late November
and it doesn't snow.

A wooden pallet
hardens his bed.

He dreams of grandmother.
He doesn't want new dreams.

Two siskins in cages –
their song frozen like the air

that other November
when she lost her heart

cleaning and baking
for those who might arrive.

Above the fireplace a few flies
are nervous company.

'Not easy on earth,' he says,
'not easy below.'

Jelena Dinic

Recording

for Mia

I wore my grandmother's clothes
and sat on her doorstep.
Monday to Friday.
She talked.
I lied.

'I'll teach you how to write,' I said
pretending I could
hold a pen.
'Mouse will eat your ears,' she smiled.

At night we leaned on pillows
watched TV with subtitles.
I made up foreign words.
I told her it was mostly German.

'Tell me more', she said.
'Tomorrow,' I said.
'Tomorrow is Saturday,' she replied.

Jelena Dinic

Recording

after Vasko Popa

Always ready to leave
leaving
each time further
from the whispers
of the grass.

She has forgotten
her death,
the calf she once was.

Curled around an arm
a new name sewn
into her mouth
she's been there, done that.

A tramp, living beyond
the stitches of life.

Jelena Dinic

Recording

I walk through my hometown
as an uninvited guest.

Divorced
from communism

the old street has taken back
its maiden name.

I follow the steps of a lost child
watching myself

from the curtains
of memory's windows.

The doors of St Nicholas church
are rusty but open.

Inside familiar faces
and a sign

Buy candles here
they are blessed.

I count how many are needed
for the living

then for the dead
their smaller flames

burning violently
in my eyes.

Jelena Dinic

They say morning's temper
binds you to this world
of taking. As if the air said,
all you need is to scram
or laugh. If it's real payback,
why try to earn it.
There are better things to do
with your shoes.
This is no mystery.
Movement chafes expectancy
till it hurts and hackles.
It's a pissing contest,
round that hew
the hours hand you.
You can't whimper.
This, also, isn't a mystery.
It's half way day.
The dog's at the fence.

Jill Jones

Sometimes it's better in our clothes.
We are together as we are not,
we come as we are.
The sky is immense and frail,
we are full of lists and feedback,
there are no private numbers.
Why does everyone care?
The smell of sun is in the
lees.
A flower is a flower, flowers now
becoming a book of consummations.
As light enters a house,
there's nothing to return in it.
Though it's never enough, it's real
as preference is need or
choosing you.

When I wake, wake flowers
this great fête of fumery.
I bend or pick to take or offer
this and that but it's plenty
if more, if less, if enough.
We can be together,
we choose and we drink.
Dust the song from your coat,
we are tissue, whole as we are.
Extravagance may be
tender or of such amplitude
as sounds along leaves, your hands
brushing my sleeves.
We are deciding among buttons.
They come in bright colours.

Jill Jones

On this bright morning
a cruel wind is up.
I don't care –
last night I strode among the stars.
Black swan shelter in the sandhills' lee,
while pelicans stand preening
on the lagoon's edge.
We each must share our little pill
of poison – a tattooed drummer,
a drunk, a married man –
while we sit at kitchen tables
drinking tea with other women.
Rain pelts down the windows
while we talk about the promises
they made. It's enough to make
you laugh since it's only down
to chemicals. When oxytocin floods
the brain, fools and dills
and maniacs look irresistible.
I don't care –
last night I strode among the stars
and my brain drank by the gallon
the chemical that makes me think
he's wonderful.
Now I'll need a thousand cups of tea
and tears measured by the litre
to flush the oxytocin from my brain.
Sunsets seem meaningful,
rain is glistening on the neighbour's roof
like tears. The rhapsody of nature
only underwrites that last night
I strode among the stars.

Kate Llewellyn

Recording

How's Possibly doing today?
She's okay, she's possibly
recovering from a possible asthma attack.
What's Possibly doing? The impossible,
That's what. Attending to twenty students
some of whom will possibly fail
tasks Possibly set which they feel
are impossibly high.
Possibly is cooking dinner for ten
and being polite in impossibly demanding
situations. Possibly would like to take a break
from her situation but can't possibly
because she needs the money.

Her impossible husband
will possibly rock up for Christmas
needing money and certain other things.
Possibly talks to me
about Milton and Sophocles.
She brings in the washing laughing
knowing she'll possibly manage
and between the cracks of impossible demands
find happiness sometimes sitting
at our picnics drawing the headland
which resembles an ancient Roman.

Kate Llewellyn

1.

To enter the bed we kneel
And fall into the white abyss.
Sleep is a form of fainting
The altar of the pillows swirls with wisps
Of fading consciousness – a priest
Comes down the aisle flicking dreams out
From an ancient ewer.

2.

Watch a sleeping man
Even then they still seem awesome
To me with an air of tragedy
Like a fallen horse.
His conversation with the night
Is not the same as mine,
Our personalities are the sheets
On which we sleep
And no amount of washing
Wears them out.

3.

Soft snores from sleeping children
The flicker of a limb –
Their depth of sleep – entranced, they seem
To travel sucking their thumbs
In the carriage of the cot
Across the ruts of history.

4.

A ward of sleeping women
Is a peaceful boat
Jaws unleashed like brassieres,
They lie trusting on the deck.
Their devoted illnesses sleep beside them
Only the doctors' notes clipped like love letters
To the bed
Reveal the destination of each affair.

Kate Llewellyn

You ought to ring up
The farm may have disappeared
Into the river – as it does from time to time –
Or the trees in the orchard bloomed with stars
Or the geese may have rowed
in the blue dinghy adorned with hundreds
of marigolds to the island
with six of them sitting straight up
on the bench, the other two heaving an oar
while the rooster watches appalled
on the shore.
The peacocks may have grown tails
Orchestrated with shimmering eyes
And breasts in celestial blue
One may have turned white
Overnight and resemble nothing more
Than a bride who fled afraid
To a branch of the old mango tree
Where she stays sullen and stubborn
Refusing our blandishments to afternoon tea.
For all you know, the sky at dusk
May have entered the river
And bled there giving birth to the night.
The bauhinia tree may have turned pink
And filled itself up with small birds
Trembling like thumbs given wings.
Oh, at last the phone rings.

Kate Llewellyn

I was the dressmaker's daughter
our dialogue was fabric, colour,
embroidery, pins and scissors.
The almost silent sound
of snipped cloth falling
on the table round my feet.

A bodice of pins drew down
over my head like a scaffold.
I spent my childhood in the sea
or standing on a table – 'A sway back!'
she said proudly.
Once I wore a tablecloth as a skirt
to school and before that curtains
as a dress.
I was always proud. The colours
clung like flowers. I was summer,
autumn, spring. Never winter.
'See,' she'd say, 'a pocket.'
Cutting fabric to a map like Australia
Then inserting flagpoles of pins
on the beaches.
'You can never match blue!'
Bodice, baste, peplum, flare,
dart, placket, gusset, yoke.
Air suddenly swept round my legs
Then my armpits grew cool
as the cold blades clipped
and my shoulder appeared.
There are no scars as no flesh
Was ever snicked so nothing bled.
No sister interrupted
the lavish pageant,
the geometry of adornment.

Kate Llewellyn

is the poem nonchalant enough to reference sufjan stevens :
or is he, too, passé : it's a poem in the same key
as his chicago : piped in to the auditory cortex : a private music :
that the world resounds with : the city resonates
from the inside : lights light up in unison : traffic stops

& starts : office-buildings with a swagger to their stillness :
an uncertain rhythm : plane tree leaves : cartwheel :
point over point : is the poem nonchalant enough to reference
one or other brand of cigarettes : plain packaged : poison :
with its woody tang : tang with its redolence of glamour :

pea coats we wear an inch or two shorter this year :
double breasted : with a narrower lapel : we're nonchalant
enough for that : a fastidiousness that has us rumpled :
a woodsy chic : in suede : or flannel : our verticals of texture :
of unenthusiastic cool : is the poem nonchalant enough

for derby boots : black : for kicking doors in : nonchalant
as leaves : circling in a corner : in mendes' american beauty :
a plastic bag amid them : lionising : self-important : buoyed
upon the wind : is the poem nonchalant enough for a warhol
misquotation : scribbled in the margin of a blank exam :

Thom Sullivan

a beetle enamoured with my lamp : a harbinger
of spring : as if the tree blossoming
on the footpath opposite was not enough :
or the budding persimmon : or the bottlebrush flowers
i didn't notice until today : there's evidence of spring :
in abundance : the enduring dusk : that's holding
still : days that are shifting south : subtly :
to an alternate frame of evergreens : an alternate room :
throwing the first shadows on the eastern wall :
on the bedside table : a book of half-read poems :
a half-read book of poems : the last of the light :
gone from the wall : from the skyline :
a breeze at the open window : portent of a cooler night :
the tree on the footpath knows it : the persimmon
knows it : deep in its cells : the beetle knows it :
the days are shifting southwards : subtly : altering the frame :

Thom Sullivan

A day in parallax – duco-blue –
a crop of borrowed gold,
in focus, replete –

fibrous stems of light, agitated,
and, over them, the bales
of cloud dispersing.

The motor ticking
long after it is silenced.
And the impulse it honours: this.

Thom Sullivan

after Paul Muldoon's 'Why Brownlee Left'

Where Brownlee went, and why he went,
is no mystery – Brady's bar.
And if a man should have fixed intent
it was him; two shots of whiskey,
one of Bushmills, one of Redbreast,
a cheer and a slab for the house.
He was then seen going out to piss
in the March morning, sure and surly.

By noon Brownlee was legless;
they found him in the beer-garden, the
modest ring untaken, his hair slick-wet –
and the publican's daughter
shifting a bucket from hand to
hand, him howling into a hankie.

Thom Sullivan

I wonder what happens
in Seb's kitchen, I see
him round the corner
into the room, sun shining, cat
ready for food, a grin
that is mixed of resignation
& amusement eyes alight
for the opportunity
each day brings. I always
liked the way he understood
things – things I've
never understood –
as an open secret, knowledge
with which he nudged me
forward. He faces, I guess,
a beach view, opens orange juice
or sets coffee up
hits the surf? He might. I
never did. In fact, Seb's
gaze said Hi, I'm me you're
you I know what I'm going to do
for the day, what about
you? amused at my life
– the comedy of error—
pleased that I managed it.
I'll put a record on, Seb, like
I always used to – today
one you'd recognise Velvet Underground
live 1969 or Coltrane's Giant Steps
but in the functional way you
would do – the necessary steps – fix
juice, move the cat off the chair, check
the surf. You?

Ken Bolton

Recording

Ken Bolton photograph by Michael Grimm Ken Bolton (photograph by Michael Grimm)

Thoughtful –and yet forgetful, easily distracted, hardly there sometimes Ken Bolton's is a lyrical figure limned against the harsh outlines, the stark colours, of the Adelaide art world, adding a word here, a thought there, in the general flux of words and deeds around town, and something of a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1957 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Bolton works at Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation running Dark Horsey bookshop & editing Little Esther books.

State Editor's notes

'Since his arrival from Sydney in 1982, Ken Bolton has been increasingly influential in the Adelaide poetry world, both through the readings and publications he organises, and his example as a poet: self-deprecating but hardworking, unobtrusively rigorous, undistracted by the usual vanities. He has simply got on with it for several decades in several venues, mostly in the Hindley Street precinct.

His own work is characterised by its zero-degrees cool; he seems to have taken his formative American influences – Koch, Schuyler, Padgett, but above all O'Hara – and refined them through an apparatus built from of French cinema, nouvelle roman, and contemporary art criticism. The resulting voice is coolly conversational but flexibly elastic: it can contain multitudes. Even those things Bolton tries to avoid – 'the cornily 'poetic', strong reliance on metaphor, and the supposedly ineffable and transcendent' in his own words – can be contained, at least ironically.

Many of these influences and obsessions can be found in his personally 'curated' catacomb: the Experimental Art Foundation Dark Horsey bookshop, an Aladdin's cave of poetry, literature, cinema, and art writings, in which the Lee Marvin readings also take place.

Browsing there can feel like a leisurely stroll through Bolton's mind, as does reading his poems.' writes ABR's States of Poetry - South Australian State Editor Peter Goldsworthy. Read his States of Poetry introduction here.

States of Poetry A note from Ken Bolton on his poems

'Gilbert Place - Cafe Boulevard'

'What Do I Owe Them?'

'Salute'

Recordings

#61 States of Poetry 2016 SA Podcast | 'Gilbert Place - Cafe Boulevard' by Ken Bolton

#62 States of Poetry 2016 SA Podcast | 'Salute' by Ken Bolton

A note from Ken Bolton on his poems

The 'Gilbert Place - Cafe Boulevard' poem – was written, I discovered, a week or so before Lee Harwood died. The poem partly attempts his manner. At one stage the poem wonders what the Boulevard calls itself: in fact it claims 'Boulevard café', 'restaurant', Cafe bar', and 'internet café'. But no 'ristorante' or 'boulangerie'.

'What Do I Owe Them?'– is a kind of guilty supplement to the preceding poem. It arises from anxiety about having done 'justice' to the people chosen/images chosen. But of course one cannot – and in any case my projections and assumptions are just that. Individuals are taken as types. But it was interesting to have the poem kick on in that way, wrong-headed as it was.

State Editor's notes

'Aidan Coleman's first poems were beautifully and simply imagistic – influenced by poets such as Robert Gray, but with a tough-minded epigrammatic spine which was much his own. He lost that voice – and the power of speech altogether – for the best part of a year after a cerebral catastrophe; his second collection of poems, Asymmetry, movingly and powerfully charts his long, hard road to reclaiming language.

The four short poems I've included in the online selection offer a hair-thin link back through that wall of muteness to his early work; the other poems invite us to meet him halfway on a continuing journey, in the pre-articulate world where poetry is at its most allusive, where secondary colours are as important as primary, and where learning all over again to stand and walk, let alone speak, has forced him to invent new kinds of connectivity.

In effect, he has been forced to build new kinds of poems from the linguistic ground-zero up.

A cosmic irony: having once lost the power of speech, he has now become a professional speechwriter. Perhaps, in some analogous fashion, having to find new ways of joining words and sense has led him to his current project: a literary biography of John Forbes, an exemplary poet of the associative and allusive,' writes ABR's States of Poetry - South Australian State Editor Peter Goldsworthy. Read his States of Poetry introduction here.

'Shorts'

'Motivational'

'Immortal Diamond'

'Secondary'

Recordings

#49 States of Poetry 2016 SA Podcast | 'Secondary' by Aidan Coleman

State Editor's notes

'South Australia's most loved writer is known for her memoirs as much as her poems, although the two can be nicely entangled, as in the recent superb A Fig at the Gate. She is also known – to her friends at least – for her legendary letters, a selection of which (First Things First) was recently published. However much she works at them, her poems feel as if they arise as spontaneously and naturally as those letters. Freshness is their particular quality, whether they offer the invigorating freshness of cold spring-water, or the warmth and balance of a freshly laid egg in the palm of a hand.

Many are justly famous, and not just widely read but widely recited by others – think of "Breasts".

In one of her letters she writes of her "topics": "mine are the weather, domesticity, love, art, gardening, the names of plants, a woman's simple daily tasks and her heart's thoughts ... Bucolic, pastoral, rural, domestic, modern, feminist, even hopefully at times poetic."

Delete "hopefully". Llewellyn is naturally poetic, naturally personal, and uniquely generous with it.' writes ABR's States of Poetry - South Australian State Editor Peter Goldsworthy. Read his States of Poetry introduction here.

States of Poetry

'Oxytocin'

'Possibly'

'The Dressmaker's Daughter'

'Telephone'

'Sleep'

Recordings

'Oxytocin' by Kate Llewellyn

State Editor's notes

'Having migrated to Australia from Serbia in her teens, Dinic writes in both English and Serbian, but remains profoundly influenced by the minimalism of the postwar East European poets, none more so than the work of her great countryman, Vasko Popa. Her poems can range from the domestic sublime of life in her adopted home, to the tensions between the Australian present and the Serbian past, to nostalgia for the lost world of childhood, to explorations of the process of translation itself.

Some poems, she writes 'were conceived in Serbian language, therefore, in my poetry I occasionally practise translation.' She likes to 'explore how culture influences the meaning of words and how we attempt to translate words without losing their meaning, as well as how we experience and read translated literature.'

Like Popa, she can take mundane things, and with a few deft strokes supply several levels of depth. Even a little black dress, even a humble leather purse can suggest a deeper darkness. Of Popa she has written: 'The bones of his culture are also mine. In many of my poems there is a smell of the Balkans' other name: gunpowder barrel.'' writes ABR's States of Poetry - South Australian State Editor Peter Goldsworthy. Read his States of Poetry introduction here.

States of Poetry

'The Silence of Siskins'

'Alterations to the little black dress'

'Babysitting'

'Handbag'

'Back'

Recordings

#31 States of Poetry 2016 SA Podcast | 'Alterations to the little black dress' by Jelena Dinic

#32 States of Poetry 2016 SA Podcast | 'Handbag' by Jelena Dinic

#33 States of Poetry 2016 SA Podcast | 'Babysitting' by Jelena Dinic

#34 States of Poetry 2016 SA Podcast | 'The Silence of Siskins' by Jelena Dinic

State Editor's notes

'Jill Jones has described her poems as "broken songs", but they somehow manage to break and reconnect and break again even as we read them. They are tapestries of the moving present: passing impressions, sensations, and feelings; things glimpsed or overheard both outside and within her head; reworked and rejuvenated clichés; deliberately dislocated sentences – all woven into poems that reveal both sides of their weaving.

Or perhaps more accurately they reveal the hidden stitching a micro-second before, or a microsecond after, they display the polished finish.

"The phrasal or line shifts in the poems," she writes, "are intended to call-up emotional or speculative shifts. Nonetheless, I try to compose a kind of order ... even within the disorder, and to persist with an idea of singing, however strange it may sound or look on the page. I aim for connection, even in the difficulties."

Well, yes. But the songs always contain within them a kind of anti-singing; the songbird is also, enigmatically, interested in the sound of one beak clapping. Currently working at the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, Jones is a much sought-after teacher and exemplar,' writes ABR's States of Poetry - South Australian State Editor Peter Goldsworthy. Read his States of Poetry introduction here.

States of Poetry

'Bent'

'Temper'

'Memory Lapses and Clues, or 'Don't Forget to Remember''

'Come in Colours'

'Smooching the Parameters'

Recordings

'Memory Lapses and Clues, or "Don't Forget to Remember"' and 'Bent' by Jill Jones

State Editor's notes

'Much of Sullivan's recent work belongs to what I like to think of as his colonically irrigated period. I mean this in a grammatical not medical sense: his use of colons as the sole means of punctuation is unique as far as I know. The simple, zen-like 'In Camera' selected for the print edition contains only one crucial, summative colon, but it hints at what is to come: the use of colons, and colons alone, to separate snatches of perception or thought or dream that are tentative and transient, yet not quite disconnected enough for the breath-separation of a full-stop.

They remain, crucially, part of a stream-of-consciousness, the colons keeping everything afloat and in play, in one never-quite-disconnecting sentence.

The effect is cumulative, and subtle, and powerful. There may be no summative end-point in these newer poems; rather, we see a mind at work in the flow of 'qualia', as much circumnavigating its perceptual world as striking a flag at its centre.

'Noumenon' is a favoured word of Sullivan's, but his work might be seen as a dance of both the phenomenon and the noumenon. The poems prod at essences; they are built from small perceptual things, but also – in a Kantian sense – suggest things-in-themselves.'writes ABR's States of Poetry - South Australian State Editor Peter Goldsworthy. Read his States of Poetry introduction here.