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In 1973 Michael Wilding and Pat Woolley decided to start a publishing house. Michael, originally from the West Midlands, was writing short stories and teaching in the English department at the University of Sydney. Pat, a Californian, had publishing experience with her own Tomato Press. That press had published Pam Brown’s first book, Sureblock, a couple of years before, and it was through Pam that I met Pat. Wilding’s memoir, just published by Giramondo details the years of Wild & Woolley Press. One evening in 1973 not long before the idea of the Press was hatched, Pat and Michael came back to his place in Balmain to discover that ‘the poets had already entered through the bathroom window . . . eating and drinking whatever they could find . . . Robert Adamson, John Forbes, Laurie Duggan and Nigel Roberts as I remember, give or take a few’. I ended up working for Wild & Woolley at their Chippendale office as a storeman, packer and driver. There’s a photo in the book of the tiny van (powered by a two-stroke engine) with which I did the Sydney deliveries. The Press distributed American books from New Directions, Black Sparrow, City Lights, Four Seasons, Greywolf and other smaller presses and a good deal of my income was spent on these volumes. As an employee I got them practically at cost but I remember Michael saying once, watching me sweating under some boxes ‘it’s like paying the slogging natives off with alcohol’. The Press subsequently published my second book, Under the Weather, in 1978. I’d shown the manuscript to Michael and he’d immediately taken it on. His faith in the book wasn’t reciprocated by the reviewers mostly. One well-known Australian poet called it ‘an easy tiny read’. It was the book, I’ve since realised, in which I found my own way to write. I’m grateful to Michael and Pat for letting it into the world.
If my own reading with Phil Hall represented a kind of conversation then last night’s reading at The Apple Tree was something else entirely. Here were two modes of performance that might have been poles apart. Stephen Emmerson was a classic ‘ranter’, rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet and, at least in the first part, reaching near terminal velocity. Holly Pester on the other hand drew us in initially with the quietness of her ‘News Piece’. Many of the syllables on the printed page were no more than aspirations. There was a great deal of wit in her timings and deadpan eroticisms. If you want to see some of these texts for yourselves, Hoofs has just come out as an if p then q classic.
John Martin’s painting ‘Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion’ (1812) lends itself to cheap shots like the title I’ve given this post. The first impression given by Martin’s works, currently on show at Tate Britain, is one of slickness and a limited vocabulary. Martin was never very good with the human figure (mostly the figures are satisfactory only as distant marching armies or fleeing crowds). And yet I don’t feel that the curatorial link to recent ‘effects’ movies (or to the Saatchi world of ‘sensation’) does him any favours. There is an element of belief in these works that for the most part is entirely absent from the world of the cinema blockbuster or that of the Chapman brothers. The paintings only connect with these recent practises through a lowest common denominator. The compensations are unexpected ones, such as the wildflowers visible in Martin’s images of Paradise, or some of the atmospheric effects once you’ve gotten past the volcanoes and collapsing rocks. The funnels at the centre of many of these works appear, as some viewers have noted, like medical images from an intestinal tract. It is easy to see why these paintings were popular and why they became unpopular (one particular work had to be substantially restored after flood damage - ironically enough – in the Tate basement where it had long been stored). They are crude, placed beside Turner or Constable, though not without their own merits.
The annual Small Publishers’ Fair took place on Friday and Saturday at its usual location, Conway Hall, off Red Lion Square. I was there for a good part of Saturday and read with Jaime Robles in a Shearsman bracket. On Saturday morning sales seemed sluggish but as the crowd increased things looked like they were picking up. One of the pleasures of this event is purchasing things from the smallest of the small publishers. I bought a couple of Jaime Robles self-produced books at the Shearman stall. She is a wonderful book designer, having run Woodland editions from her native California and further work under her own name from Exeter. I also bought more little books from Laurie and Thomas A Clark’s Moschatel Press produced in Scotland and Japan. And Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey kindly sold some copies of my Allotments volume at their West House Books stall.
