for J.L. (and Necks fans everywhere)Looking out into a forest of flowering Pink Bloodwoods and peeling Blackbutts, I hear Vertigo for the first time.
Two decades after Sex the usual groove is bushwhacked by a tinker’s percussion and electronics out of the blue, cicadas work an industrial background accompanied by woodwind from the Miners, a piping King Parrot and Lorikeets improvising avant-garde, high-register shrieks.
Then, through the cover of trees, the neighbours join in. Norm is drilling metal, forcing a basketball hoop onto the frame of his hand-made palm house assembled from scaffolding. In the west, Graeme is on his chainsaw demolishing a bamboo forest planted by the previous owners.
The origins of cosmic music are not always attributable. Tomorrow, I will go down to the estuary at first light and listen.
Richard Tipping’s Instant History is a treasure trove of uncollected and new work, in two parts. The Postcard Life brings intense responses to travel in fifteen countries in the 1970s and 1980s. From a meeting with the Empress of Iran, to sailing along the coast of Mexico; from tongue-twists in Tipperary to Vipassana meditation in the Sierras; from ancient sex in Luxor to the visual collisions of Tokyo and quietitudes in Kyoto; from drug-shattered New York to being lost in the Louvre. In the second half of the book, Rush Hour in the Poetry Library, socially pointed but affectionate poems from Tipping’s adopted home in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales mix with a sardonic politics, humorous social observation, and pictures from a philosophical writing life. Best known as a visual poet and word artist these days, Tipping brings a fresh and energetic voice to the page.
Biographical note
Richard Kelly Tipping was born in Adelaide, South Australia and studied in humanities at Flinders University. He has lived in the USA (1974/75), and the UK and Europe (1984/86). While lecturing in media arts at the University of Newcastle he completed a doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects (2007). Tipping has published eight books of poetry, and is known internationally as an artist working with sign language and typographic concrete. He is strongly represented in the print collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the British Museum, London; and is collected in depth by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Tipping lives between gigs in Newcastle and Maitland, NSW. www.richardtipping.com
Three poems from Instant History
Writing Class
The poet presents himself as a dichotomy. Whatever is apparent becomes obscured, and all the luscious facts wither into hard statistics. Born here, did that, intended something else but I forget what. The intruding ‘I’. The breakneck speed on machines of make-believe which finally slow motion curve into the cemetery. Alibis salute the endless proud moments passing in formal parade. I returns to me and assumes him. The biography keeps breaking in to the picture, looking for safety pins or paper clips or a staple gun, anything to fence out layers of advice peeling from public walls: reality is for people who can’t cope with art. Written words line up like bright pills in a glass case, your fingers turning the key. Time is for people who can’t stop. Rigor mortis keeps looking at the clock.
Tipperary
These cont-pink faithful churches in stone-walled Tipperary raising both armed pulpits up to rectify divided Heaven coughing out red barns and slate-tight cottages for slurring rain to barricade, tipping thatched tweed caps in all the wheeling, run-down towns to the budding eyes of mud-faced potatoes, black and white cows chewing saturated greens and tourist butter pats in squares of gold ending the rainbow in a pint of real Guinness coal-black as the castle-burning barons of Yawn. The roads are running sore with unfinished yarns where the truth is history trying to awake on signs in languages both half unused and Ireland stuck between the water and the wafer there’s no way around the priests but a faithful daughter with a smiling paddywhack clinging to the steeple the North’s the gold harp stolen from the people.
Earth Heart
Blood, sap, rain and sea – Earth’s heart is sweet water Flowing in spirals of gravity. Vast clouds sail past, reflecting In a rippling blue lake of sky Their endless ideas for change. You can feel each slow tree By the green shore breathing Time’s dappled shadows in. Fresh weather. Swallows’ wings Near pebble edges lapped by tide Quick dancing in the rising wind.
Note: This poem was written for Hear the Art (Earth Heart) 1996. a typographic visual poem made of bricks, 26 metres in diameter, permanently installed in the grounds of Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, NSW, Australia. Hear the Art was the winner of theinaugural acquisitive Sculpture Park Prize
Soft Riots (poems) Domestic Hardcore (poems) Word Works – Airpoet (visual poems – folio) Signs of Australia (photographs) Diverse Voice (visual poems) Nearer by Far (poems) Headlines to the Heart (poems) Five O’clock Shadows (poems) The Sydney Morning (visual poems – four print folios) Multiple Pleasures (postcard catalogue) Public Works (visual poems – art catalogue) Multiple Choice (art catalogue) Lovepoem (visual poems– folio) Subvert I Sing (visual poems) Off the Page & back again (visual poems) Love Cuts (photos & poems, with Chris Mansell) Tommy Ruff: Adelaide Poems Instant History (poems)
Gillian Swain My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) is Gillian Swain’s first book, following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001). Gillian’s poetry is published in various anthologies including A Slow Combusting Hymn (ASM & Cerberus Press, 2014), The Grieve Anthology (Hunter Writers Centre, 2014; 2019) and some journals including Burrow #1 (Old Water Rat Publishing, 2020), and the Australian Poetry Collaboration (2019). Gillian shared equal first place with Magdalena Ball for the Maclean’s Booksellers Award, in the Grieve Project 2019. She has been a feature poet at several events around the east coast of NSW, holds poetry workshops for adults and children and is the curator of poetry and related events at the Indie Writers Festival ‘IF Maitland’, plus other poetry events. Gillian spent her childhood exploring the waterfront of Lake Macquarie and has lived in Newcastle, Northern NSW, the UK and Ghana, after finishing studies at the University of Newcastle. She lives in East Maitland NSW with her husband and their four children, where they run their successful coffee roasting business, River Roast.
The cover picture on My Skin its own sky is an extract from Girl on a swing in blue on blue by John Maitland. Look up his work, it’s wonderful.
Poems from My skin its own sky
Summer Holidays
After “Fair Haired Girls End of Summer Holidays” by John Maitland.
