Here is a photograph taken around 1910 of shearers at the property known as Ensay Station (in the eastern part of the state of Victoria, Australia) enjoying a tea and smokes break. The slight man standing with a metal cup near the left of the picture is my grandfather, Michael Frederick Duggan. He was born in 1870 not far from the location of this photograph in a small settlement called Hinnomunjie. My father was born in 1909 and I was born in 1949. It still seems strange to be able to claim something as early as this as a part of my own life. My grandfather lived until 1962. He worked as a general farm hand though he had also been a postman. This term hardly does justice to what he must have had to do: deliver mail in rugged country where there were few roads as we know them and not a lot to navigate by. He happened to be an expert horseman and won many races as a jockey (I used to joke that as time went by what my family gained in physical size, they lost in equestrian skills). Tomorrow I vote for the first time in British council elections. Our local representatives, like those of most of Kent, are entirely Conservative. Labour are a different beast, I know, to those idealists of the early twentieth century. But when I go to vote I will be expressing my distant solidarity with the people shown half a world and a full century away in this photograph. OK, so Gordon Brown and Ken Livingstone might not be the perfect representatives of the politic I espouse. But would you want our (inept) council running Faversham, Boris Johnson running London, or, ultimately, David Cameron running the country?Wednesday, 30 April 2008
yesterday and tomorrow
Here is a photograph taken around 1910 of shearers at the property known as Ensay Station (in the eastern part of the state of Victoria, Australia) enjoying a tea and smokes break. The slight man standing with a metal cup near the left of the picture is my grandfather, Michael Frederick Duggan. He was born in 1870 not far from the location of this photograph in a small settlement called Hinnomunjie. My father was born in 1909 and I was born in 1949. It still seems strange to be able to claim something as early as this as a part of my own life. My grandfather lived until 1962. He worked as a general farm hand though he had also been a postman. This term hardly does justice to what he must have had to do: deliver mail in rugged country where there were few roads as we know them and not a lot to navigate by. He happened to be an expert horseman and won many races as a jockey (I used to joke that as time went by what my family gained in physical size, they lost in equestrian skills). Tomorrow I vote for the first time in British council elections. Our local representatives, like those of most of Kent, are entirely Conservative. Labour are a different beast, I know, to those idealists of the early twentieth century. But when I go to vote I will be expressing my distant solidarity with the people shown half a world and a full century away in this photograph. OK, so Gordon Brown and Ken Livingstone might not be the perfect representatives of the politic I espouse. But would you want our (inept) council running Faversham, Boris Johnson running London, or, ultimately, David Cameron running the country?
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
Ian Friend
Ian Friend has just posted me details of his upcoming retrospective exhibition in Brisbane. The Murdoch Press (Courier Mail) have risen to the occasion, giving the show a good write-up. A book is to appear shortly. Ian works mostly on paper, a very thick, almost indestructable variety that can withstand the blast from a garden hose. This is essential since he reworks his surfaces constantly. I find that his work renders meaningless any distinction between 'abstract' and 'figurative'. There is great play of surface and depth in it. A few years back Ian made a series that took off from JH Prynne's book of poems, The Oval Window, for which I wrote a catalogue essay (this catalogue and the cover of an edition of the Prynne book featuring Ian Friend's work are reproduced above). I only wish I could be in Brisbane to view what will be a marvellous show.
Friday, 25 April 2008
fame
Reading David Caddy’s most recent piece on literary celebrity had me reflecting on my own brief moment in the spotlight. It is probably an unfamiliar experience for British poets unless, that is, you’ve been published by Faber, but partly because Australia has a smaller population, partly because for long periods there hasn’t been a single dominant (and financial) poetry publisher, it is possible for a poet in certain circumstances to be widely publicised. It happened to me in 1987 when my book The Ash Range was published by Pan/Picador. Four earlier books had appeared from small publishers to mixed reviews and I would have been lucky to have sold as many as 100 copies of any of them. The Picador book came out in a modest (for them) edition of 1000 and was shortly after reprinted.
The Ash Range was a documentary poem, an ‘epic’ perhaps in the Poundian sense of the term (‘a poem containing history’) about a region called Gippsland. It consisted largely of edited down letters, news accounts and other materials together with some bridging work of my own (in all it was about 90% from outside sources) and it contained some old photographs and a couple of maps. I had embarked upon it with no clear sense of how it could be published or of who might be able to do it and want to do it. It would probably have been too expensive an exercise for a small publisher and I felt it was too eccentric for a large publisher to be interested. Some sections meanwhile had appeared in Scripsi magazine and one of the readers at the time also worked as an editor with Pan Books. She suggested that Picador could do it but I was sure that once the project reached the suits they would take it no further. To my amazement it went ahead and the problems I felt that the text would occasion were easily dealt with (I’d thought, for example, that the book would have to be done in a large format - like The Maximus Poems – just to be legible, but the designers fitted it with ease into the standard format).
Then came the media blitz.
I can’t remember how many radio interviews I did but I do remember that the first one was the most prestigious: ten to fifteen minutes on Terry Lane’s ABC program. I was pleasantly enough surprised that Lane had clearly read the book himself. His questions and quotations were well informed. Unfortunately for both of us I didn’t understand that the point of chat shows is chat. I gave the kind of monosyllabic answers that must have had the producer groaning (I did gradually become better at this kind of thing, even as the occasions for it diminished). In January 1988, the national journal The Bulletin had as its cover story an article entitled ‘High Flyers of 88’. My photograph appeared alongside, I’m now amused to note, figures like John Hewson, Alexander Downer, Warwick Fairfax, and Debbie Flintoff-King (two politicians, a media magnate and an athlete).
In the course of all this the book was often misrepresented. Some reviewers wrote of it as though it was a unique phenomenon, though I had never concealed my debt to earlier twentieth-century writers (Pound, John Dos Passos, Charles Reznikoff, Williams). The world of publicity has no time for fine distinctions or non-Australian writing (and it was amusing to note that when another poet, Geoff Page, brought out a book utilising documentary techniques a couple of years later it too was seen as a totally original production).
After 1988 it was downhill all the way. The editors at Picador thought I might do another book like The Ash Range and there was vague talk about releasing it in the UK. Even better, I might write a travel book. What they didn’t realise was that The Ash Range was strictly a one-off. It wasn’t just the result of two years research and writing, it was the result of the concern with a region held since I was old enough to think about it (my father’s family came from Gippsland and I had visited the area frequently since I was four or five years old). After a further book (a volume of poems), my experience with the big end of publishing was at an end.
When I was still at school I had naively thought that fame and money were things that would happen if you simply persisted as a writer. Acclaim was like the gold watch the automobile factory gave my father when he retired (they don’t do that anymore!). But the sudden increase in status (and its equally rapid decay) illustrated only too graphically that this wasn’t really the kind of career curve I was after. Now, as an older writer, my books do get reviewed in the Australian print media, usually sympathetically. I have also received the odd literary award, and for the last two years my work has been funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. I feel fortunate that this is so though I am also sure that if the average Australian poetry reader was asked to name ten poets my name would probably not appear on the list. Since 1990 all my books have appeared with small to middling publishers. Ken Bolton’s Little Esther press did one of my favourite volumes, Memorials, in the mid nineties. University of Queensland press have stuck with me through three books of poems (including another favourite, Mangroves) as well as a work of cultural history. And Tony Frazer’s Shearsman Press published a selection, Compared to What, in 2006 as well as (bless his boots) a new edition of The Ash Range.
The Ash Range was a documentary poem, an ‘epic’ perhaps in the Poundian sense of the term (‘a poem containing history’) about a region called Gippsland. It consisted largely of edited down letters, news accounts and other materials together with some bridging work of my own (in all it was about 90% from outside sources) and it contained some old photographs and a couple of maps. I had embarked upon it with no clear sense of how it could be published or of who might be able to do it and want to do it. It would probably have been too expensive an exercise for a small publisher and I felt it was too eccentric for a large publisher to be interested. Some sections meanwhile had appeared in Scripsi magazine and one of the readers at the time also worked as an editor with Pan Books. She suggested that Picador could do it but I was sure that once the project reached the suits they would take it no further. To my amazement it went ahead and the problems I felt that the text would occasion were easily dealt with (I’d thought, for example, that the book would have to be done in a large format - like The Maximus Poems – just to be legible, but the designers fitted it with ease into the standard format).
Then came the media blitz.
I can’t remember how many radio interviews I did but I do remember that the first one was the most prestigious: ten to fifteen minutes on Terry Lane’s ABC program. I was pleasantly enough surprised that Lane had clearly read the book himself. His questions and quotations were well informed. Unfortunately for both of us I didn’t understand that the point of chat shows is chat. I gave the kind of monosyllabic answers that must have had the producer groaning (I did gradually become better at this kind of thing, even as the occasions for it diminished). In January 1988, the national journal The Bulletin had as its cover story an article entitled ‘High Flyers of 88’. My photograph appeared alongside, I’m now amused to note, figures like John Hewson, Alexander Downer, Warwick Fairfax, and Debbie Flintoff-King (two politicians, a media magnate and an athlete).
In the course of all this the book was often misrepresented. Some reviewers wrote of it as though it was a unique phenomenon, though I had never concealed my debt to earlier twentieth-century writers (Pound, John Dos Passos, Charles Reznikoff, Williams). The world of publicity has no time for fine distinctions or non-Australian writing (and it was amusing to note that when another poet, Geoff Page, brought out a book utilising documentary techniques a couple of years later it too was seen as a totally original production).
After 1988 it was downhill all the way. The editors at Picador thought I might do another book like The Ash Range and there was vague talk about releasing it in the UK. Even better, I might write a travel book. What they didn’t realise was that The Ash Range was strictly a one-off. It wasn’t just the result of two years research and writing, it was the result of the concern with a region held since I was old enough to think about it (my father’s family came from Gippsland and I had visited the area frequently since I was four or five years old). After a further book (a volume of poems), my experience with the big end of publishing was at an end.
When I was still at school I had naively thought that fame and money were things that would happen if you simply persisted as a writer. Acclaim was like the gold watch the automobile factory gave my father when he retired (they don’t do that anymore!). But the sudden increase in status (and its equally rapid decay) illustrated only too graphically that this wasn’t really the kind of career curve I was after. Now, as an older writer, my books do get reviewed in the Australian print media, usually sympathetically. I have also received the odd literary award, and for the last two years my work has been funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. I feel fortunate that this is so though I am also sure that if the average Australian poetry reader was asked to name ten poets my name would probably not appear on the list. Since 1990 all my books have appeared with small to middling publishers. Ken Bolton’s Little Esther press did one of my favourite volumes, Memorials, in the mid nineties. University of Queensland press have stuck with me through three books of poems (including another favourite, Mangroves) as well as a work of cultural history. And Tony Frazer’s Shearsman Press published a selection, Compared to What, in 2006 as well as (bless his boots) a new edition of The Ash Range.
Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Mountains and Rivers Without End
I was probably introduced to Gary Snyder’s work by the Donald Allen anthology. The first book of his that I owned was the New Directions volume The Back Country, followed by the earlier volumes Riprap, Myths & Texts, and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End. All these purchases would have occurred in 1970. In 1971 I took part in a festival held at the Australian National University in Canberra (Alan Wearne had been invited but couldn’t go so he’d given them my details). Despite its academic location this festival was the precursor to an altogether more ‘counter-cultural’ one held at Nimbin two years later. As well as reading my own work I took part in a session where people read their favourite poems. My choice was from Snyder’s newest book, Regarding Wave.
By the mid seventies I had moved away from this work, put off by the more overt ecological agenda in books like Turtle Island (I agreed with the ecopolitics but felt that the poetry had lost out to these concerns – much as it had with the very different Australian poet Judith Wright). I also moved away from Snyder’s variety of Buddhism. On Bread and Poetry, the book in which Philip Whalen, Lew Welch and Snyder chew the fat about poetics and the right way to live seemed to me symptomatic of what had gone wrong with Snyder’s work in particular. The Zen thing in this volume is mediated by a very American kind of enthusiasm that the writers seem unaware of. Their philosophies come across with a kind of boy-scout earnestness while the sexual politics are still those of unreconstructed beatniks. Jack Kerouac’s novels dealing with the San Francisco scene of that time had also exhibited attitudes that would be considered naive by anyone from a culture that wasn’t irony-free. The Dharma Bums in particular seemed more cartoon than documentary to me (I can still imagine toon images of a cross-legged Japhy Ryder explaining ‘yabyum’ to his friends).
Nevertheless I bought Snyder’s selected volume No Nature when it came out, placing the earlier books in the archives (a limbo somewhere between the shelves and St Vincent de Paul). Mountains and Rivers, a work I still liked, seemed destined to be added to sporadically and quite possibly never finished. That could have been its nature, but it wasn’t. In 1996 it came out as a completed volume. And in the last few months it has appeared in a new edition from Counterpoint, Jack Shoemaker’s press. It’s an impressive book with an overall shape the earlier instalments mightn’t have suggested. A painted screen or scroll may extend a scene depicted in time as well as space. It may suggest the endless but it does this within limits as does this volume. Some of the work contained in Six Sections has been lost in transit. Other pieces, like ‘Bubbs Creek Haircut’ and ‘Night Highway 99’ have been shifted around as the whole work’s composition abandons a chronology that might have seemed arbitrary in any case. Strangely Mountains and Rivers Without End reminds me at times of the cinematic structure of Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’ with its movement across a continent (in Snyder’s case continents) and it’s shifting registers.
Saturday, 19 April 2008
political quote of the week
Dr Nelson, who has a single-digit approval rating, told the Victorian Liberal Party state council meeting in Melbourne that people had underestimated him for 20 years and still did.
"I am very determined and I will keep fighting and speaking up for everyday Australians," he said when questioned about the leadership. "I can assure you I am going nowhere." (The Age 13/4/08)
"I am very determined and I will keep fighting and speaking up for everyday Australians," he said when questioned about the leadership. "I can assure you I am going nowhere." (The Age 13/4/08)
Friday, 18 April 2008
tuesday or thursday
Lisa Samuels (above), read with Avik Chanda at the Shearman reading on Tuesday. Nina Zivancevic and Vahni Capildeo (below) read with James Harvey in the Blue Bus series at the Lamb pub on Thursday.
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