States of Poetry Victoria - Series One
Series One of the Victorian States of Poetry anthology is edited by David McCooey and features poetry from Kevin Brophy, Amy Brown, Michael Farrell, A. Frances Johnson, Cameron Lowe, and Jessica L. Wilkinson. Read David McCooey's introduction to the anthology here.
Melbourne is home to numerous poetic institutions, including Australian Poetry Inc, Collected Works (Australia's best bookshop for poetry), and, of course, Australian Book Review. Among these institutions there are vibrant – if sometimes occult – print, audio-visual, and spoken-word scenes. Regional Victoria is far from eclipsed by the metropolitan centre. The Bellarine Peninsula, for instance, is home to numerous poets, including Barry Hill, Diane Fahey, and Anthony Lynch. Two of the poets included here – A. Frances Johnson and Cameron Lowe – are 'Bellarine poets'. Living in Geelong myself, I make no apologies for this regional bias. In putting together this anthology, I have focused largely on early- and mid-career poets whose poetics I find appealing. It is a poetics attracted to openness, energy, catholic interest, and wit.
Kevin Brophy – the most senior of the poets represented here, and a long-standing participant in poetic culture – writes poetry that is by turns plangent and comic. His work brings together a highly original, and rich, mix of the surreal, the lyrical, and the satirical. Jessica L. Wilkinson, one of the youngest poets represented here and the founding editor of Rabbit, a journal of 'non-fiction poetry', demonstrates that mode with an innovative suite of poems concerning the choreographer Nijinsky. One of the most intensely 'local' set of poems is from Amy Brown, a poet who was, in the first instance, 'foreign'. A New Zealander, Brown considers Melbourne with an eye that is both affectionate and critical, and she does so using a poetic language that is both delicate and authoritative. Possibly the 'coolest' of the poets, Cameron Lowe is also deeply interested in the everyday. However much other poets might be interested in quotidian particularity, Lowe's quotidian is all his own, both intensely 'felt' and intensely 'aesthetic' (from the Greek word meaning 'to feel'), undoing the supposed distinction between affect and aesthetic distance. Lowe is also attracted to an aesthetics of name-checking (something found in other contemporary Melbourne poets' work), referring without hierarchy to family members, friends, and poets (local and distant).
Proper nouns abound in the poetry of Michael Farrell, too, though his work is more explicitly 'experimental' (should such a term mean anything these days) and his comedy even more surreal or absurd. It is interesting that Farrell has been charged by some as being 'unduly' obscure, since – as the poems included here illustrate – his work is richly playful and steeped in antecedents of various kinds. Farrell's work is notable in part for the way it 'queers' classic (or reactionary) Australian tropes and myths. Perhaps this is what makes Farrell such a necessary irritant in Australian poetic culture.
Farrell's queering of Australian tropes is inherently a political act. While such an aesthetics is far from 'protest poetry' (a category that many literary poets would see as potentially facile and politically naïve), there is no doubt that recent years have seen something of a 'political turn' in Victorian, and Australian, poetry generally. Many poets have been galvanised, if not radicalised, by the actions of the federal government. Political satirists such as Charlie Pickering or the cartoonist First Dog on the Moon have the medium and audience to publicly intervene in the tragedy and farce that is political life in contemporary Australia, but poets are also engaging with the torsions of national politics, albeit often in complex and tangential ways, as Brophy's 'Before I Speak' illustrates. Indeed, one might say that such a 'tangential poetics' is in fact a necessary addition to a public discourse so otherwise debased.
The continuity between poetry and politics, anger and artfulness, is eloquently seen in the work of A. Frances Johnson. She – like Lowe – shows that being a 'Bellarine poet' does not simply mean attending to the bourgeois blandishments of coastal life. One of Johnson's key strategies is to imagine and recontextualise Victoria's largely repressed histories. Her 'Shrine', for instance, is one of the great poems on the frontier wars in colonial Australia. Just as First Dog on the Moon brings about his powerful effects through the marrying of political rage and cartoon comedy, so Johnson produces her powerful effects by marrying political rage with lyrical intensity and wit.
The six poets collected here are not 'representative' in a demographic sense, but they do illustrate the variety and vitality of poetry in Victoria. They bring together the Magic Pudding, Frida Kahlo's face, and Tunnerminnerwait.
For Marianne J Boruch and David Dunlap
We walk past the ruined past
pasted to the Academy’s cloister walls,
past broken Latin stones’ fractured inscriptions,
one fragment reading ‘OVE IS’,
and I know that though the sea is coming
and volcanoes are not finished with us,
crossing this garden in this courtyard in the evening
with a sentry in a box by the iron gate
watching black-masked fundamentalist
speeches on a laptop on his desk,
all seems to be falling into place
temporarily and beautifully.
You say goodbye, we say goodbye,
and we drift away down a hillside
past a bar where young people under awnings
drink and talk into the evening, seeming
to know how to live deep into this night
how to make the harmless sounds of conversation.
We want to sit here too with them on the hillside,
a scooter waiting outside
and an unearthed monstrous stone foot or hand
propped artfully somewhere nearby.
The bluestone cobbles tire our feet as we go down
to a tram where more people out of the night
talk, drink, lean a cheek on the black window glass
of a swinging electric lozenge whose brakes hiss.
As a child I was impatient for night to come properly down,
as if doubt could infect the universe if dusk lingered.
Doubt was the rope that tied hands behind backs.
Doubt was the door left half open.
Doubt would keep you from the confessional.
I dragged blankets over my head,
wore soft napped cotton pyjamas
as the night at last came down over me neatly.
I wanted it there, then I wanted it gone
when I opened my eyes.
Night, larger than any cathedral, larger than our suburb,
was the thing squatting over us more ancient than childhood,
always interested only in itself.
Tomorrow the sky will reveal a smog-grey streak
swiped across those distant mountains.
We will walk to the top of a nearby hill,
I will remember your legs over me in the night,
your shoulder against mine,
we cannot untangle these bodies, their unreadable parts,
we are Gullivers to the ropes and threads of the night.
We will walk to the top of a nearby hill
and remember something
as the hill falls away below a low wall
all the way down to a river that rolls like a prisoner
in its narrow cell until its mouth spits the broken
vowels and letters of the past out in an unheard howl to the sea.
This night in the Academy’s cloister
we passed a beautiful stone coffin,
the sliced off tops of columns,
a cocktail party under arches,
and we feel right, we are right,
we step out into the night
and drift down the hillside past a bar
where people sit in semi-dark talking
of the life they have or would have,
glancing up at us as we walk among them,
the night perfect, us perfect too.
The sea is moving strangely, insistent,
and volcanoes are considering
what sounds they might make.
The enormous ruins are held down
and scraped back by many bony hands.
The sirens we will hear tomorrow
from the park where we walk
will never cease, they will go round and round
sweeping up whatever they can in their path.
Kevin Brophy
for Wolfgang and Birgit
I failed to sleep last night, I failed to have the dreams
that would take me safe from one day into the next.
I failed to be brave, afraid of the train, its snout of steel
pushing out of the dark into the station at San Pietro,
its sides towering over us blue and white and filthy with night.
It hissed, cracked open, impatient, warm as a belly inside,
I was shaken as it took us like some fallen angel breaking
its teeth on a language too new and too earthly to speak.
I have opened the door to the day without faith in its miracle,
I will cough up the night from my lungs, the city will breathe
and I will see across on the opposite hillside a man on a balcony
move among his plants, touch them, sprinkle them, nodding.
My belly is soft, my head is a stone of my making, I report
that little is known, little is left, too much is imagined.
I think I might try now to go to a church and be prayerful.
I think I can see that the man on the balcony follows some rule.
I failed to sleep last night, after listening to my friends speak
of repairing, slowly, the falling-down church on the hill in their town,
as if too much would be lost, as if angels would drift unanchored
from this town unremembered without its dawn-lit shining omphalos.
Kevin Brophy
This poem has not yet been written
and before it is I want to say I respect
the President of the United States,
the man himself and his office
and I respect what the people
mean when they say Democracy
though I do not know what this
might have to do with being armed
and having put these points like this
as plainly as possible
on the table here between us
I can warn you I might be saying tomorrow
or perhaps in a few days time
depending on my mood and inner music
that there will be
no agreement, no truce, no bipartisan understanding
and no poem
until the military ceases
to buy the bullets made in the precision workshops
of Missouri, Iran and Africa.
This poem, as you know, has not yet been written
and in protest at the militarisation of education,
work and death,
it might never be written or spoken.
You will understand what silence is
when this poem remains unwritten,
uncreated and forever unspoken.
But I want you to know
this poem, even if never written,
holds the President of Russia
in severe respect, the man himself and his office –
this is
in case you might misunderstand
what is meant
when what must be said fails to be spoken.
Kevin Brophy
we know that the sun comes up when we pray,
that it's here to bless us every day,
we know that communists boil children
to fertilise their socialist fields,
we know that Italy has the most beautiful
secretaries in the world,
we know that there are giant rats swimming
in the Tiber,
we know that the heads of Royal personages
rattle when they fall,
we know that drugs are merely chemicals,
and happiness is a chemical too,
we know that the Virgin Madonna was too young
to be a mother,
that Joseph was a hundred years old at least
and should have known better,
we know that dictators go weak at the knees
when US dollars are crisp and new,
we know that slavery is still a preferred arrangement
for the most successful capitalists,
we know that eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning
can be the most segregated hour in the week,
we know that children will hug to themselves
the bombs that kill and cripple,
we know that somewhere soon a last wild cat will stalk
past an automatic camera,
we know that hatred is its own relentless river,
pushing us with it,
we know what it means to stand in our shoes
with the truth at our backs and another in our eyes,
we know what we read in the news could be true,
but that all we've learned can only mislead us,
we know the facts we know keep changing their colours,
their loyalties, names, addresses and income,
we know that the buttoned-up banks are our true confessors,
fattened on the grease of our secrets and sins,
we know that the bats swooping in
to hang from the trees that line rivers of lies
must be blind,
and we too will close our eyes at last when the long evening comes,
we know that the soul
is a myth, that our hearts might stop beating so hard
if we could close all the doors and shut up the windows
and seal up our homes and turn up the heaters,
we know that the wolf falling from the building in front of our eyes
is a message we can never be sure we've received.
Kevin Brophy
You woke with a headache
and opened the bedroom window blind.
You bent forward as morning light came in.
It fell on your belly and breasts
and your sleep maddened hair.
I could hear the sickness in your voice
as you accepted a salad bowl to throw up in
and two pills with breakfast.
The new sun tipped itself up over distant mountains
outside the kitchen window and slapped colour on the houses
across the slope from us, oranges and yellows,
a set of green-blinded windows,
and darker green tops of the thick trees behind.
Two gulls floated past the balcony
wondering what to do with themselves
now that the sun was out and a whole day promised.
Coffee, cereal, your emails, homework
all attended to at the table as the headache dissolved
magically you said, kissing me quickly
as you ran out late to your lessons across town.
The plants on the balcony know nothing of you.
They lean out over the traffic fumes below
and do their best to breathe and grow,
to do their part as we all do.
Kevin Brophy
The Docklands cranes that hoist containers
from ship to shore and back again
are giraffes according to my friend's four-year-old.
Residents of the urban zoo sleep on their hooves,
work all day and eat stars instead of leaves;
now there aren't many left in the city.
Perhaps they live on bats, as the bats eat flies –
double swarms obscuring church spires.
The four-year-old wears a Batman costume
padded with muscles and adores yelling, Emergency!
Extract from Our Effects
Amy Brown
The university plovers are fat and silent,
'toe-walking' across lightly frosted lawn
so as not to wake whatever invertebrate
is breakfast. At home they are scrawny,
caught up in shrieking war with pukeko.
Until I moved to Melbourne I maintained
my ornithophobia, which became impractical
in a place with murders of crows on most
corners. So, I decided to love their oil-
spill plumage and dinosaur gait, the way
they wait on pedestrian crossing signs
providing a third alternative to red and green.
Stop, go, or flap black and blue to the lip
of a rubbish bin and spit out cigarette
butts mistaken for cold chips. Swallow fear.
Extract from Our Effects
Amy Brown
Preserving jars filled to the brim
refract the living room window's
light in fuchsia and absinthe bows
across the late afternoon wall.
Skewered with toothpicks
and balanced in their simple
womb of tap-water and sun
two avocado stones compete.
Whiteboard pen marks my name
on one jar, yours on the other.
We are willing to wait months
for roots, hoping to see a shoot
push through the blackened pits
eventually. I know this climate
won't allow tropical trees to mature
let alone fruit. All I hope for is
proof that growth is often logical;
a stalk of life can be controlled.
In their shadow, our toothpicks
look like skeletal hands, held.
Extract from Our Effects
Amy Brown
The board game Holiday was set
in our loud neighbour's. On the box,
a ruddy family: flushed child's cheeks,
father's gin-blossom nose. Lame puns
confused me ('Koalas Cross Here –
Koalas Furious Here'); typecasts
spanned Wake in Fright and The Castle.
Passports are required to enter the lucky
red land I knew from wet afternoons.
Cold-sore photo was forgotten when I met
a real Australian daughter on the City Circle
tram; her first time in the CBD too, visiting
from Ballarat. The name appealed, as did
trumping it with a whole other country.
Our holiday differed from the game.
Two hours in the cool, white cake
of the State Library holding a book
from the Philosophy section, admiring
the architraves. Praying agnostic, I felt
ready then to burst through the ceiling
and announce that I would be staying.
Extract from Our Effects
Amy Brown
When it was nearly still acceptable
to nip the shoulder of the pleasant boy
sitting cross-legged in front of you
(leaning back and pulling the royal blue
wool of his jersey with loose teeth)
I had an elastic idea, which stretched
through the next twenty-five years. Senior
primary school's kingdom of fully grown
flax bushes and adult-sized toilets,
places to hide without being sought,
would shrink each day I endured it.
Back to the wall, pencil marked above skull,
I started to see how the world – one school
at a time – might be folded like a map.
Extract from Our Effects
Amy Brown
We are following a track that loops
around a lake impaled with trees,
a pinned-down habitat for platypuses
I would like to see, so try to walk
silently until a shadow across the sun-
dried turf in front of me blushes
curls and slides down a bank.
I stop, tell you what I've seen, smile
at the luck. You jump onto a log.
For the rest of the walk, we stomp
and you look for a eucalypt branch
you can thump like a third foot
to seem heavier and many-er.
We discuss tourniquets, mobile
reception, anti-venom, helicopters.
Intermittently I mention the platypuses,
explain that my country's native species
hide in timidity not anticipation
so I seldom feel like prey. Giant ferns
and no people remind me of home.
At the far edge of the ellipse I recall
the lake is a fifty-year-old mistake
flooded with rainfall and dammed
by tonnes of weather-made shingle.
Humans would not choose to leave
a hundred trees piercing the water's
surface. The orchard of totem poles
seems tapu, uncanny as a gallery.
Past trunks, smooth and muscled
like horse flesh, I forget to march
find myself creeping, not watching
for monotremes but ghosts or
artists, reverent and vaguely willing
my Achilles to be bitten in exchange
for an encounter with the creator.
Extract from Our Effects
Amy Brown
Recording
You feel this way, kind of free when you lie down
__________________________________________
I've seen it, the cocking head, the dipping branch, but now
I'm thinking of something else. The long drawn
Out day. The novelty of peaches in
A new form. Savour the bird's body language, you may need
It to recognise yourself later. Like water, your head empties slowly
Of melody (though not music) and you find yourself alone – but
In a kind of love. The cow stretches her neck as
If to scratch it on the rough air
___________________________
You become milder, watching her, finally letting the march fly bite
& then crushing it with a hand. 'What did I cook?
__________________________________________
Chops a la Brisbane.' I heard, but looked at you like
You're a jackass. To run as if your brain's an egg
In the heat. The grass deep and delicately iced with petals
__________________________________________________
The woman identified the noodles. She was
A grandmother now, cooking them for her plastic surgeon grandson. The
True way to do it, she said, was
Under the blue light of the sky till
You could see the moon
In them. But her grandson would never be home
In the daytime so she compromised. The bookshop next door caught
Fire and the poets ran for their lives. They won't rebuild
In a hurry she thought. Unlikely. Her grandson put
On his red shirt that made him look like
A detail from Caravaggio or
A hundred kangaroo paws. The law differs. You see the plane
Appear to pause. You bring it across the sky with
Your mind. Two planes on the ground like insects without appetites
___________________________________________________________
Behind the border, the look of things meant judgment was unstable
___________________________________________________________
You could only report, and remember that
Others were doing the same
On the land that took horse's bones bigger than anything
It remembered for thousands of years. A jay is tougher than
A magpie. A maggie does the rounds
Of the bus stops where the crows don't go. They sound
Sweeter but are equally daggy in their daily activities with only
A beak and no bag to put
Over their wing. The leaves crackle like Christmas beetles
& someone runs past in a cloak. Your body changes as
Your mouth forms new words. You use a milk carton to
Explain about the university you went to. Your great love was
A Perth smoothie who rode a dugite. In their eyes
A wall of surf. It made you social, like conceptual
Art
___
There were so many waves. Our eyes are globby archives
& seeing a man on a train blow gently on an
Ant's just dust on the table. Come to me like
A cat. Clay dries. Wood blackens. Hens dart in for company
Michael Farrell
Recording
I was riding a shark through Cork, just for the exercise of course
It might seem quaint but rather it was
Gorgeous, like an early morning courtyard
Imagine the dialogue. AC/DC confronts shark
shark repeats
shadow prime minister's
Gaffe
You guys are the white Australian Uluru. Fancy, say they
It became noon. An emu
In police uniform joined the fray
'Yair, just wanted to say
G'day?' There was not a logician
In sight, so we rode like the wind
It was the church bells not the emu who rang, the red light
doesn't apply to
You. So long since
I'd heard that said. Another emu
In
Galoshes ran out. 'Forty-five on New Amsterdam'
'Got
It' went a third. We were no longer, say
In the outback
Yet we were thinking of the Magic Pudding: his slices packed
with
Grey sardines
In silver tins
Michael Farrell
Recording
Who are you? You hear the song, the
Good line along with the others in the
Hair salon. That place for standing in; for
Politics
_______
The New Dr Williams with his tricks of
Sadness
_______
Here is my bag: be sad. Here is
My bag left on the bannister. Yet let
Me tell you that elevation’s just a sound
________________________________
But the old cold plum’s a sound too!
___________________________
Who are you or we now? We’re the
Kind of people poetry makes. We don’t pretend
To be doctors of anything else but letters
_________________________________
There’s a pig on the terrace and a
Leaf
____
The leaf goes into Dr Williams’s bag. The
Pig goes back into the poet’s mind, squealing
Like a painting the whole time. Everyone on
The train has that image of the
Pig in their head. It will make them
Snuffle up the walls. Everyone’s ill
With an illness that takes some dancing. Just
Bring that painting here and put it with
The others; enough and we’ll have improved the
Dream
______
Load up, leg out, hat on. Dr Williams’s
Paradoxical prescriptions: primary and secondary gallantry, femininity, clowning
Footsie, miming, mimicry, dentistry, carolling, shadowing, poetry
_____________________________________________________
These bring all the sad sounds out, that
We need to be in the mix of
Michael Farrell
Recording
Strawberries: a mania of strawberries on a
Turntable
________
Drifting off in pinecones
Of thought, feeling the wind refract
Your backside. Eggs down a rabbit hole
_________________________________
Voices like coconut milk in a car
___________________________
Writing the ball past the line. Clouds
Drop on your face: no
It’s snow. The crane stops
At the lunchbox. Lightning
Axes Bondi. The memory of bending
Your mind in the wattle, honey fusing
In the feather. The dream
Of the never-refuelling drive
A story each wooden mile. The
Old places crumble: are weedy, retreating
Michael Farrell
Like a teacup in a snowstorm I
Find you and break you. A sentry reptile, I advise you
To return quietly to the campfire. You mistakenly took
My interest in theology for a strategy
________________________________
Flip to a towel, flip to
Sheets of pasta in an emu's stomach. Sheep merely fluffing the
Horizon
_______
Technology is increasingly feminine. The diction of
Saying so. I come back: your tears are testament to being
Wanted, blessed. The tail goes into the
Water, I ahead of it. Circumstances
Were against my addiction. The flattening out of smaller people by
Bigger people, ringing them up late at night with a bigger
Need
____
Don't blame me for being three
Years old. I have pain, I have chunks of weather as
Big as England. Hell creeps up, cool centimetres. There is a
Family travelling by boat from Corsica to
Delphi, the boat weighed down with questions. The children are saying
'Where is the bluest sea, we need to know, where are
The best fish?' Old wrecks strain for attention like buried religion
_________________________________________________________
The man and the woman speak in
Different terms using the same words. It's a play and generates
Tension and emotion in the other characters. We can see it
From the ship. On the ship
Sheep, one in a bonnet. To escape matrimony, to
Live in a liberal culture such as Tel Aviv where spies only
Go for holidays. Selling umbrellas made
Him even more ambivalent about the rain and the cities that
They brightened, though so few were known for them, and those
Cities just as frequently darkened with
Black umbrellas that bus drivers couldn't see. They had to
Lie about that, to save the living. It's the only way
To avoid what you want. You hated
Justin Bieber like videotape and paper. From the satellite they could
See thousands of humans doing the same thing. One is
Typing on the eighth floor. Words
Blow in. Into the day, into the night, the internet itself
Just a site. A jug doesn't boil alone: a fire comes
Down from the volcano and singes
Fringes off the poor children's clothing. I wondered what you were
Doing in the bath earlier. You put your eyes in
An ice cream container. Hoarder: sometimes
The urge to self-demolish comes down the wire more
Loudly than's wanted. The pine nuts were at an all time
High, I left a feather on the
Terrace as a signal. The mongrels sighed in the lift. The
Lift redolent of Aerogard, and nappies, and burnt potato salad
Michael Farrell
for Marcia Langton
The rock-art guide, combusting
in 43 degrees, back to image.
His sloppy dreamtime
a melted ice-cream,
far from refrigerated sublime.
Gwion rock art from the 'Tassel era' is happy art,
though contentiously attributed and dated, he says,
authoritative white sweater in white sweater.
Pompoms, plumes and tassels signal the fertile time before the great aridity.
Your stone heart, Wandjina, listening.
Without an age and a date, Native Title
becomes rockfall. Outsider art.
At night, fears of extinguishment come,
clamped in the soft-chalked
mouths of dogs. History is that quiet.
Some whites reckon pre-contact was one big
happy black camp-out, lasting millennia.
That's so's they can conveniently
keep Aboriginal people in some
pre-modern place.
It's a quote, I say, overly nonchalant.
People lower their cameras
heartwards, like Jesus snapping a selfie.
We all want the fridge.
Country is no caravan park.
The guide wipes his brow
with a neckerchief of
ochre-tinted dots, the rest
pixellating behind him.
My pale cheeks burn up like documents.
He turns, livid archaeology
in terry towelling, a man
impossible to carbon date:
What's wrong with you? he says.
What did art ever do to you?
A. Frances Johnson
1.
Even poetry dements in the end; fatal attractions to dank earth
and ash albums don't fool or buy time. Poetry cherry-picks
memory for its own ends; yet that's a medicated narcissism for
some. Earnest elegies are often rejected by dogs and children.
Listen to them howl. Voting for life outside of ritual.
I'm on your side; I'm with the hounds and the kids. I won't let elegy
make you over into a bad oil painting, don grief's sack cloth
pantomime.Next time I see you walking down the street, checking
for spot fires in unseasonal autumn heat, light fidgeting up the shape of you
between drunken ghost gums, I will laugh and say:
the death of my father
has not made a poet out of me,
no, not yet.
2.
One thing: If you do the clanking chain and sheet, let it be pure sight gag.
The quiet wit of the dead is yours. We expect nothing less
than theatre-restaurant ghoul. Our task, to entreat you
to turn up late to a Xmas of bad bon-bon jokes
and re-gifts. We will be waiting, in sodden crepe crowns,
drinking from someone else's warm stem glass, rare cooked animals
pressing down on First World intestines. All of us vying
to claim you. When it's too ha-ha or too sad I will bang my glass,
as ageing relatives blow fluoro party whistles,
hoping they'll be first off the sinking ship. Before she jumps,
one loved aunt flushed with booze
and sundowner syndrome, confides en passant:
the death of your father
has not made you a joke teller,
no, not yet.
3.
You chose a plain pine box, authenticated lightness
a clear and quick return. Death's a quick diet in that respect,
though the anorexic spookhouse cheapens –
neither sums you up nor summons you.
Most days, light and lightness refuse to pun.
Meanwhile, daylight's broken projector screens your old movie
in fits and starts, in the shady zones. I guard my ticket jealously,
fighting the light to scratch you out of faded Kodachrome.
Some days I catch sight of you sweeping leaf litter
down the coppery tow paths of late afternoon.
You always put a plant in the earth the moment it was
given to you. Weighted it in. Now I am putting you in,
not as swiftly as you would have liked.
You have no technique I hear you say. Build it up around the bole.
Water it in, pat it down. That way it will flourish.
I laugh and say: the death of my father
has not made a gardener of me,
no, not yet.
A. Frances Johnson
You can't see water beyond the highway hoardings, but you are told Jesus walked on it. This
is your best clue. Dinner settings, security doors, Viagra and tractor parts flash past like
signed miracles.
But you feel something pull, not daintily at your sleeve, but with tidal will,
a blood rush of stark equations of space and gravity you cannot hope to solve.
When you get there, sea fills out the world beyond the wildest hopes
of plumbers and drinking fountains, the dramatic imaginings of poets. Stop there.
The salt order threatens but that is what you wanted, that genius rise and fall,
its white-noised repeat; the fierce marine gull as priest, chanting agitprop.
Why is it that only solid things insist as civilisation?
All architectures house a vacuum, await the pourer, the pouring in.
Whether this is ocean or something molten, earth, an infill of words – you must decide. Swimming against the tide no longer helps; new speech is not achieved by drowning.
You've learnt the lessons of containment: skyscrapers and houses, banks and zoos.
In the city, people press their hands against glass and feel the pulsing tremor of curtain walls.
You are like them; this is part and parcel of your day job, listening to life moving through encryption. Knowing that, in the end, sea ice will melt all your resolutions.
On the way back from the coast you notice cavernous shops selling light fittings,
acres of lights, a confusion of Bethlehems.
In the distance the city skyline glows with penthoused unbelief.
You shift in closer now, to solidity. You have come back – strong, certain as tides.
A. Frances Johnson
Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were brought to Melbourne in 1839 by the protector of Aborigines, George Robinson, to 'civilise' the Victorian Aborigines. In late 1841, the two men and three women stole two guns and waged a six-week guerilla-style campaign in the Dandenongs and on the Mornington Peninsula, burning stations and killing two sealers. They were charged with murder and tried in Melbourne. Their defence counsel was Redmond Barry, who questioned the legal basis of British authority over Aborigines. Thirty-nine years later, Barry would sentence Ned Kelly to hang. Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were the first men to be hung in Melbourne.
Some distance from the great white shrine,
city goers appear blindsided by cephalagia,
fingers delicately cradling handsets to crania.
The fighters, Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner,
only differentiate this from grief or sickness
when thousands thread the city streets,
making and remaking identical Goyaesque gestures
as wrenched vocabularies of laughter, loss and symbol.
You are no slouch; you became like them long ago,
having moved here voluntarily after the great fires ceased.
You have forgotten to draw the Dandenongs' petrol blue
haze about your shoulders; your feeble memory
of fired country, gone. Thus you link in and disappear,
cradling your burning white head just like the others,
as if it were a precious thing to be carried to market.
The settler streets are new but always ancient, in the way
of being crowded with users, usurpers, lovers of usury.
High above the city, the gull's red eye reads the city
as a gridded history painting. Real scale outdoes the Great Masters
but not the dreams of the fighters, returned from the dead,
an army of fear: Peevay, Napolean, Jack of Cape Grim, Tunninerpareway,
Robert Smallboy, Jemmy, Timmy, Tinney Jimmy, Robert of Ben Lomond, Bob;
strong-armed, yet not yet ready to lift
their own monuments into place.
But when Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner return,
swooping down without warning on borrowed grain-fed Pegasus,
they too are caught unawares by asphalt kerbs and curtain walls,
by the stale air, the absence of a river once known
and forded with great losses on both sides.
For a moment the famed warriors are nonplussed;
the source has been built in and built over.
The burning stations and Mornington rides
rate no plaque in the victor's museum,
the tired white pamphlets – bloodless, blank.
Slowing to a canter on a stolen horse is to admit defeat.
And so, hooves clacking fortissimo possibile,
they raise their guns the old way
to glass and steel, briefcase and brolly.
The makers of this hooved ordinance,
deaf to the mobile pleadings of women,
to the white kerb of history,
are swift to recognise the indivisibility of old and new,
the cringing mouths and eyes of European
history paintings they have heard about but never seen.
And then they see you, hands lifted,
cradling your burning head en tableau.
They have come for you, to burn down
your great white shrine and take you home.
A. Frances Johnson
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come ...
Song of Solomon, Verse 11-12
Tow
Lo, the cell phone sleeps in its cell.
The raven deactivates the horizon.
There is water for everyone,
but not the kind you can drink.
The interdiction crews bring slabs
of plastic bottles and one-syllable words
deployed with biblical clarity:
no, tow, flow, go, foe.
Lo, watch the oil on the water
shimmer, a miracle of evidence.
Wounded iridescent rainbows
leak from under the hull. For two days,
the hawk drone has shadowed
its nest of wood, dreaming of
the time after rain, flowers appearing
on the earth, the singing
of birds, the time come.
Fuse
Wire was once a useful thing.
Piano wire brought song,
made the piannola in the desert
unspool melodies to support
a soldier's farmblock optimism.
Wire brushes cleaned the mud
from workboots, penned animals
inside their stalls. Fine gauge
fixed the porcelain fuse so a light
globe shone over air-conditioned
Bethlehem. And here, razor wire
taught children what to expect.
Photograph
He avoids dining out
on his award-winning photograph;
its forced correspondence nags;
the camp's hall of mirrors looks
nothing like his shaving mirror.
He has seen this room before,
filed many versions of the same shot.
He knows how the poem goes
before the poet has written it:
war, movement, hunger, displacement,
incarceration, hopelessness, suicide, image.
He will not dine out on it; on the one of many.
But the next night he books a restaurant,
a good one, eating past life.
When a little death on a plate
arrives, he cuts the image
away like an army surgeon.
Birds
Do not alight the old way.
No longer seek boughs bending in the breeze.
They do not recognise a non-segmented sky;
nor sing in the face of obstacles
Overall, the sighing cloud
is less trained, less orderly
than the Hummingbird would like.
This does not stop it moving close to the wire,
behind which, disorganised families
prepare meals of goat and bitter greens.
Radio Afghanistan can be heard far distant;
lovesongs fit the desert city like soft shoes.
The bird does not care. It tracks and targets.
And where necessary, drops its payload.
The young corporal on headsets listens in,
Discharge, a pure lyric.
He and his birds are never fooled
by the ghazal in the aviary.
After some days away, the bird flies back,
lonely at 18kph, whirring perpetual dawn.
A. Frances Johnson
Recording
The particulars of the evening being, whether consciously
evoked or – 'a great shemozzle'
as Kent said –
merely one day washing over and into the depths
of the plane tree
and those other trees of
darker green
whose names I don't claim to know – the pissing
possums don't know them either
so worry not – and the block of cream
apartments where one half of Gert
'the writer' Loveday
lives –
'Thou art not possum nor lemur nor
mathematician' –
that is, the particulars
– putting to one side money,
its lack, that sudden straining
for breath – the particulars
being exactly what they are
and mostly the same
as the last time
I looked –
Frida Kahlo's face
upon a field of green
beads, a tanker's red hull
through palms –
sway on sweet palms
against the lying
of the Right – they don't,
but the last sun falls
on roof tiles, on the corrugated
iron of the carport, on
the plane tree's leaves,
etc –
the particulars can go
on and on, or run off
to flirt with Gert –
'cyclamen, sing awhile
with me' – I was thinking
of love in the abstract way
one sometimes does,
this being the hour of
my lungs for now and
ever after –
when you spoke behind Kahlo's face,
'dinner's nearly ready – I'll just
have a shower'
and Edith Pevensey's eyes a green leaning
to gold in the 'luminous hum'
as bats take to sky,
in the slow fade –
fade on – of Tuesday's light
Cameron Lowe
Recording
1
The sound of shovels scraping
gravel, voices
of men – the night's
heat
clinging still –
Awake to this, or
swimming
yet in sleep
you mumble –
A fly
is walking
on your forehead
2
'Ten thousand women
and I
the only one
in boots' –
Today, a thousand
cyclists
all dressed
in Lycra –
Sirens of fire-trucks
36º at 11
no figure 5
in gold –
3
Salmon in the cat's bowl,
chilli flower –
I water
cyclamen, you display
new shoes.
The stopped
clock:
12:16
wind change –
Of the snow dome
you write:
'this is not a place
not a world ...'
and yet –
4
After the heat, violence
of wind, the sound of it
in trees –
sun on the spider's web
by the white chair
star pattern in chalk
on the balcony –
details arranged, leaves
blowing down
the street
5
'Breathe it out quietly'
you write
'air thick as milk' –
The moon rises
over pines
police lights
on the esplanade –
you write:
'blackened leaves
swimming' –
the night
closes in, smell of spices
slow-cooking –
Cameron Lowe
The carpet could be cleaner –
so could the world.
There's too much cayenne
in the soup.
The grand abstraction
is one approach
to the poem, I guess –
so too the eye
of the flea.
I can't even taste
the vegetables.
And love?
Mosquitoes are circling
the light globe –
Norma, dead now
a month. And
after we cast the lilies,
Anne said: 'there's
room enough in there
for all of us' –
Cameron Lowe
winter once more and still
the grapevine's crimson
leaves veil
the front fence
as the number-cruncher
declares
'you should cut that back –
it's a classic
white picket
you've got there'
Cameron Lowe
'The gestures of delight are her delight.'
Notate October's last hurrah.
'Dear Cameron, You have an undigested
John Forbes influence,' wrote Gig, a decade past.
Digest, instead, the dusk –
2P –>
64
EASTERN
BEACH
raven's eye, white sails, a barking dog.
Little Suzuki under the plane tree –
fat mags on a blue Commodore.
'Mount thy charger in the gloaming, Kev.'
Should I reflect? 'Is it omelette time?'
More wine. Gig's no brick,
that's for sure.
Cameron Lowe
Recording
Professor Kevin Brophy is author of fourteen books of fiction, poetry and essays, including This is What Gives Us Time (Gloria SMH, 2016) and Walking,: New and Selected Poems (JLP), shortlisted for the WA Premiers Poetry Prize. He was 2009 co-winner of ABR's Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay for his essay '“What’re yer looking at yer fuckin’ dog”: Violence and Fear in Žižek’s Post-political Neighbourhood’; his works appear in many Best Australian anthologies. He co-edits TEXT, an international journal for writing courses. In 2015 he was writer-in-residence at the Australia Council B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome. He is working with an Australian Research Council team investigating creative excellence. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.
States of Poetry
'Siren'
Further reading and links
‘Working with Words: Kevin Brophy’ (Wheeler Centre interview)
Kevin Brophy's 2009 Calibre Prize winning essay '“What’re yer looking at yer fuckin’ dog”: Violence and Fear in Žižek’s Post-political Neighbourhood’
'The Philosophy Exam' by Kevin Brophy (published in ABR in May 2014)
'The Sublime' by Kevin Brophy (published in ABR in June 2011)
Amy Brown is a New Zealand poet, novelist and teacher who has lived in Melbourne for seven years. In 2012 she completed a PhD on contemporary epic poetry at the University of Melbourne. Her first collection of poetry, The Propaganda Poster Girl, was shortlisted at the 2009 New Zealand Book Awards. Her latest book, a contemporary epic poem titled The Odour of Sanctity was published in 2013. She is also the author of Pony Tales, a series of four children's novels published by HarperCollins.
States of Poetry
'Cranes'
'Fear'
'Luck'
'Map'
'Snake'
Recordings
States of Poetry 2016 VIC Podcast | 'Snake' by Amy Brown
Further reading and links
Amy Brown's author page at Cordite Poetry Review
Amy Brown's Victoria University Press author page
Amy Brown's author page on NZ Poetry Shelf website
Michael Farrell was born in Bombala, NSW and has lived in Melbourne since 1990 (Fitzroy since 2008). His most recent poetry book is Cocky's Joy; he also has recent chapbooks: the thorn with the boy in its side; same! same! same! same!; Long Dull Poem and roughly proofed (the latter three are available as free downloads). He has a PhD in Australian literature; his revised thesis was published as Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945. He co-wrote the Dick Diver single 'Waste the Alphabet'.
States of Poetry
'Fancy'
Further reading and links
Michael Farrell's Open Page feature (ABR, March 2015)
'Waste the Alphabet' by Dick Diver. Co-written by Dick Diver and Michael Farrell
Cocky's Joy by Michael Farrell
Writing Australian Unsettlement by Michael Farrell
same! same! same! same! by Michael Farrell
roughly proofed by Michael Farrell
Long Dull Poem by Michael Farrell
the thorn with the boy in its side by Michael Farrell
thempark by Michael Farrell
A. Frances Johnson is a writer and artist, and a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. Her novel Eugene's Falls (Arcadia 2007) mapped the life of Australian colonial painter Eugene von Guerard. Her poetry collections are The Pallbearer's Garden (Whitmore Press 2008) and The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street (Puncher and Wattmann 2012). Her awards include the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the Griffith University Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize. A new collection, Rendition for Harp and Kalashnikov, is forthcoming (Puncher and Wattmann). An academic monograph, Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage, was published by Rodopi in late 2015.
States of Poetry
'Australian awe:white guys on life and art before 1788 '
'Shrine'
Recording
Further reading and links
A. Frances Johnson's blog
A. Frances Johnson's author page on Cordite Poetry Review
Cameron Lowe was born in Geelong and grew up in the coastal town of Ocean Grove. His two book-length collections of poetry are Porch Music (Whitmore Press, 2010) and Circle Work (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013). A new collection, Blink, is forthcoming in 2016. He lives in Geelong.
States of Poetry
'Breathe'
'Nocturne'
'Pastoral'
'Sift'
Recordings
Further reading and links
Cameron Lowe's Puncher & Wattmann author page
Cameron Lowe's Cordite Poetry Review author page
Jessica L. Wilkinson is the author of two long form poetry works, Marionette: A Biography of Miss Marion Davies (2012) and Suite for Percy Grainger: A Biography (2014), both with Vagabond Press. She is working on a third manuscript, Music Made Visible/Like Rockets on a Starry Night: A Dual Biography of George Balanchine and Lucette Aldous. In 2014 she won the ABR Peter Porter Poetry Prize, as well as a Marten Bequest Award for Poetry. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Rabbit: A Journal for Nonfiction Poetry. She teaches Creative Writing at RMIT University.
States of Poetry
Recording
'FAUNE et JEUX' by Jessica L. Wilkinson
Further reading and links
Jessica L. Wilkinson's 2014 Peter Porter Poetry Prize winning poem 'Arrival Platform Humlet'
Jessica L. Wilkinson's author page on the Poetry International website
