east-west

The sonnet sequence ‘East’ that appears in the Reality Street anthology is one of the earliest poems I’ve continued to reprint. It was written early in 1971 when I was still at university. The poem is dedicated to ‘John & Margot Scott’ and (coincidentally) John’s poems appear just before mine in the anthology. We had both been at Monash University along with Alan Wearne, and the three of us had written sonnets. Our common influence was Ted Berrigan’s book which, though first printed in the early sixties, had only appeared in a mass-market edition (Grove Press) around 1967. Our interests in poetry were otherwise divergent: John read Yves Bonnefoy and both he and Alan had read many of the more obscure English sonneteers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. My own interests around then centred on Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. My two friends were precocious but I was a slow starter. When I wrote ‘East’ I sensed that they had been waiting for me to do something like it.

On the surface it isn’t very much like Berrigan at all, other than in its patchwork feel with the lines seemingly scissored in and the eruptions of advertisements and news headlines. The time given in the first section – ‘8 p. m.’ – may be a small gesture of my indebtedness. The sections are all ‘traditional’ sonnet length: fourteen lines (so the section that is numbered ‘2 & 3’ and set out as a newspaper cutting, breaking off in mid sentence is, if you count all the lines including the headers, fourteen times two).

There are clearly other writers behind the poem. The most obvious one is Charles Olson, whom Berrigan would probably have found ponderous, eminently worthy of a fake interview (like the one he did with John Cage). One of Olson’s shorter sequences is called ‘West’, and it is this poem (plus ‘Buffalo Ode’) that generated my own poem and gave me the title. The movement of the sections backwards and forwards though time comes partly from Olson’s way of doing history where the evidences are presented as they unfold to the historian, not reshaped into a conventional historical argument. The time shifts also come from William Faulkner and the way he chose to tell a story (The Sound and the Fury) in a non-chronological manner.

Obviously my own memory and events in the history of my father’s family are central to the poem too. But these are placed against items from newspapers of the day whether trivial (‘CLERIC SPEAKS OUT AGAINST MIXED BATHING’) or momentous (such as the lines about the My Lai massacre that was before the courts as the poem was being written). In doing this I signal that my own experience is no more important than whatever else is going on. Within the poem there are lines that place it as a literary artefact (referring also to my own situation as a putative literary scholar) such as ‘Compare/contrast selected passages/with special reference to poetic qualities’.

It’s not a poem I have chosen to perform much over the years, partly because it is visually oriented. It is possible to ‘do’ the newspaper cutting from 1912 as a kind of radio piece, and to change voice for other sections but, on the whole, the direction my writing took was not a dramatic one and I mistrusted the more florid styles of performance. I’m happy just to see the words and phrases in this piece sit next to each other rather than hear them.

a sonnet anthology

In today’s mail, a book I’m proud to be a small part of: The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. As Jeff Hilson notes in his introduction there has been a spate of sonnet anthologies in recent years, all of which have represented more or less a ‘call to order’ from conservative forces. The dismaying similarity of these collections seems to indicate that the market itself forgets from year to year while the editors keep on assuming that their kind of medicine is what’s required. These anthologies present the sonnet as a somewhat static thing from which any divergence can be no more than a curiosity. Hilson, in contrast, begins with the test of linguistic innovation (using the term ‘linguistically innovative’ as others might use ‘avant garde’, ‘experimental’, or ‘post-avant’). The anthology begins appropriately with Edwin Denby and ends with poets in their early twenties. It encompasses the visual sonnet among other practises that break down the various aspects seen by reactionaries as essential to the form. It is notable that innovative makers of the sonnet largely see this kind of poem in terms of the series or sequence rather than as a self-contained individual unit. In this regard the mid-to-late twentieth century work of Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer (in particular) introduced younger writers (myself included) to possibilities we may not have discovered for ourselves. The Reality Street volume reflects this influence, but it also shows how much of an opening the new sonnet provides. Its sheer diversity is a long step from the dreary inevitability of the usual sonnet anthology.

Milan

holiday

I'm off to Milan. See you all in a couple of weeks time. Meanwhile, here's something to look at while I'm off screen.

moral panic revisited

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is at it again. This time he is objecting to the photograph on the cover of this month’s Art Monthly Australia. The picture, taken five years ago by Melbourne photographer Polixeni Papapetrou, is of her daughter Olympia, aged six. Papapetrou’s partner, the critic Robert Nelson noted: "It's interesting that if the Prime Minister comments on, say the greenhouse effect, he gets expert advice first . . . I would like to know which art expert advised him on this." In The Age’s report he said the photo was one of Olympia’s favourites and that "even my nine-year-old son said: 'Don't people understand that photography is acting?"' The usual suspects condemned the magazine. Joe Tucci, the chief executive of the Australian Childhood Foundation told the paper "a young child cannot understand how, with today's technology, the picture can be distributed around the world . . . It could haunt her when she's thirty and wants to be a lawyer or teacher". Somewhere somebody seems to have lost all sense of perspective and the Prime Minister’s readiness to weigh in isn’t going to help matters. Probably quite a few of us have naked photos taken at ages zero to whenever. At age thirty we are more likely to be embarrassed by something we did when we were twenty than when we were six.

thursday night in London, sunday in Sydney

At last night’s Crossing the Line reading (sorry, again none of my own images) Sophie Robinson and Peter Philpott (above) read from new work. A sequence by Robinson, read in the first bracket, will appear shortly in Jeff Hilson's Reality Street anthology of contemporary sonnets. This is an eagerly awaited production, gathering poems from across the Anglophone world (some of my own pieces will appear in it). Peter Philpott’s two brackets consisted entirely of an intriguing work performed in a number of voices and guises. Its tonal complexity managed shifts from the (relatively) sober to the slapstick, even incorporating elements of vispo that I wish I’d been able to photograph. These were blu-tacked to windows and mirrors, the act itself part of the performance. And if I were able to astrally transport myself to Sydney on Sunday afternoon I'd certainly be going to a reading by three Salt authors: Pam Brown, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Kate Lilley. From this distance all I can say is: 'break a leg'.

the small press squeeze

On one of the British poetry lists Ken Edwards notes some of the problems faced by a small press and the advantages and disadvantages of print-on-demand technology. The advantages are well enough known by now. Once the initial costs (the technology) are covered, the press doesn’t have to worry about housing back stock or dealing with bookshops on the usual sale or return basis. The major disadvantage is that bookshops won’t (generally) stock POD titles and the mass media won’t review them. It’s all down to the web and word-of-mouth. Amazon will supply POD titles (though the firm has been making threatening noises lately about publishers having to use its in-house printers). Meanwhile even good independent distributors like SPD make it uneconomic for non-American small presses to use their services. I am an inveterate buyer of books who will chase something up on the web where necessary, though I also make considerable use of bookshops. In London, places like Foyles and the London Review of Books store have sizeable poetry sections, though the titles are often weighted towards the conservative end of the spectrum. I was pleasantly surprised to pick up a copy of Jackson MacLow’s New and Selected Works (at the LRB shop) recently. This was however, a U. Cal title. In these shops and most of the good ones I know small presses need not apply (the only place I can think of that still stocks books like this is Melbourne’s Collected Works). I know my Sydney friends at Gleebooks (another good place) won’t approve of my use of Amazon and such sources but it’s not as though I have any real choice.