B

Common or garden poets #9 Morgan Bell inviting Jan Dean

 

The Grave

For Jan Dean

 

“the zucchinis are King Midas

withering in their own liquid gold”

 

Magdalena Ball, ‘False Promise on Petals’

 

a backyard is a cemetery.

there are tiny bones down there.

bones of birds and mice and skinks.

each year they subside further

into the sandy soil.

 

if you were buried there,

the way you wanted to be,

all that would be left of you

in one hundred years

would be your teeth and some nylon thread.

 

you will always be

that sole cigarette ember

on a summer night

blending into the wilds of the garden you planted

behind a sentinel of spiders

Morgan Bell

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Iman Budhi Santosa

Iman Budhi Santosa, an Indonesian poet published by Flying Island in 2015, passed away in December 2020. He had dedicated his life to mentor countless creative writers and poets in Yogyakarta, Indonesia since 1969. Iman is known as one of the street poets in Yogyakarta, actively writing poems and plays even in the three-year period when he was homeless and lived in the streets. His poems, both in Indonesian and Javanese, generally revolves around Javanese culture and urban life.

Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iman_Budhi_Santosa

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Faces of Java / Wajah-wajah Jawa

Kit Kelen and Chrysogynus Siddha Malilang translators

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Andrew Burke

In 1950, Andrew Burke wrote his first poem – in chalk on a slate board. It was variations on the letter A. In 1958 he wrote a poem modeled on Milton’s sonnet on his blindness. Luckily it is lost. In 1960 he wrote a religious play about the Apostles during the time Jesus was in the tomb. It was applauded. He wrote some poems influenced by T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. They caused a rift in the teachers at the Jesuit school because they were in vers libre: the old priests hated them but the young novices loved them. It was his first controversy. (The only Australian poet in his school anthologies was Dorothea Mackellor!) Around this time, Burke read the latest TIME magazine from USA. It had a lively article about the San Francisco Renaissance, quoting Lawrence Ferlinghetti who wrote: ‘Priests are but the lamb chops of God’. This appealed to Burke who became a weekend beatnik over night.

When he left school, he hitch-hiked a la Kerouac across Australia to Sydney where he worked in factories, on trucks, at a rubbish dump and moving furniture. His poems appeared in these early days in Westerly, Nimrod, Overland and the Bulletin, and he returned to Perth to regain his health and joined a circle around Merv and Dorothy Hewett. A local poet William Grono hit the nail on the head when he described them as ‘I am London Magazine and you are Evergreen Review’. Long story short, Andrew Burke has written plays, short stories, a novel, book reviews and some journalism alongside a million advertisements and TV and radio commercials. He has also taught at various universities and writing centres and gained a PhD from Edith Cowan University in 2006 when he was teaching in the backblocks of China. As a poet he has published fourteen titles, one of the most popular being a bi-lingual Pocket Book published by Flying Islands Press in 2017, THE LINE IS BUSY (translated by Iris Fan). He is retired now but still writing and lending a hand to younger poets. A small selection of poems follow.

Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Burke_(poet)

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

The Line is Busy

安德魯•博爾克:佔線 trans Iris Fan Xing

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Michael Brennan

Michael Brennan was born in Sydney in 1973. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2001, where he wrote his thesis The Impossible Gaze: Robert Adamson and the work of negativity. He is editor of the Australian sector of Poetry International Web and is the co-founder of publisher Vagabond Press.

Brennan has written six individual collections of poetry to date and two collaborative works, with a style described by David McCooey of Jacket Magazine as ‘a strange, sometimes surreal, world, to illustrate the possible foreignness of any place, even home’. 

These are The Imageless World (Salt Publishing 2003), Language Habits (2006) Unanimous Night (Salt Publishing 2008), Autoethnographic (Giramondo Publishing 2012) Alibi (Vagabond Press 2015) and The Earth Here (ASM 2018).

In 2004, Brennan won the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, and, funded by the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts, and a Nancy Keesing studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, he was able to live abroad in both Berlin and Paris. 

Brennan collaborated with Akiko Muto, a Japanese artist, to create his second chapbook titled Sky was sky, which was a dedication to David Brennan, who died in 1999. Sky was translated by Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, and published in 2007. Brennan’s second collaborative work was an art book: Atopia, which was produced with Kay Orchison, a Sydney-based artist.

This biography is an abridged version from wikipedia. To read more about Brennan’s awards and recognition and the connections between his works read the full entry at the following link.

Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brennan_(poet)

The Earth Here

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Magdalena Ball

Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer and interviewer, and is the Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader, a literary review site that has been running for some 23 years. Her interview podcast, Compulsive Reader Talks, has over 150 wonderful interviews with the likes of Maria Tumarkin, Ben Okri, and John Banville, to name just a few. She has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, and online, and is the author of several published books of fiction and poetry.

Links: magdalenaball.com/wordpress/

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

High Wire Step

High Wire Step is a collection of poems that engages deeply with political issues, from the impact of violence, oppression, and human arrogance to the power of empathy, collective consciousness, and humility. The varied voices in these poems are often playful and post-modern while keeping a fiercely scientific perspective, encompassing collective grief and responsibility, and drawing together the macro perspective of the universe with the micro perspective of heartbreak. These are poems about the impact of greed, bigotry, social change, genetic inheritance, homelessness, disability, and loss, but they are also poems with a slightly mystical slant, exploring transcendence and alternative forms of power and transformation  From the technological singularity to crypto-currency, edible crickets to Trump Tower, High Wire Step moves organically between time and space, between an urban and a wild landscape and between despair and hopefulness.

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Common or garden poets #8 Magdalena Ball inviting Morgan Bell



False Promise on Petals

For Morgan Bell

‘Train your eye

slalom through sunset webs

Learn quickly.’

 Gillian Swain, “Garden Poem”

Evening pours in 

taking everyone by surprise. 

It’s always the way

heavy and wet, dirt flowing 

like everything you ever needed

but too much all at once

the zucchinis are King Midas

withering in their own liquid gold

potatoes are corrupted, their broken bodies

purple gemstones, bleeding into the earth

cucumbers fall too early off the vine, nourishing

only thriving fungus in mottled shades of grey.

I am also bleeding in, my body in a state

of change, loosened by deluge.

I have always been rain, a false promise

petal softness, cascading down down

into roots dissolving. 

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Common or garden poets #7 Gillian Swain inviting Magdalena Ball

 

Garden Poem  

 for Magdalena Ball   

                                                                                                             …today the purple

                                                                                                                                and the scarlet bells

                                                                                                                 ring in

                                                                                                            Irina Frolova, ‘Lightly’


 

­­­Caught up in tangerine

colour like persimmon

 

soft and crumpled

ornamental pomegranate

 

a false promise on these petals

all forgiven.

 

This fiery red

too delightful to mind

 

your step

soft soil after rain

 

slip and sink into this

sweaty spring.

 

All the notes in green

turn and curl

 

hang fresh, new

shadow dance

 

under the canopy

spiders sling afternoon silk.

 

Train your eye

slalom through sunset webs

 

Learn quickly.

 

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Alloy, Usually Hardened response to “How Would You Like…”)

Alloy, Usually Hardened

(response to “How Would You Like…”)

This is what you call joy

created through an amalgam

of death and rhythm

an admixture of metals

in a city nothing more

than concrete and dreams

built from frozen seconds.

Kodak Instamatic, a birthday gift

which only captured black and white.

I could tell from your face

radiant 

in a way I would not see again

even on the third, fourth, fifth marriage

your finger heavy with the weight of 

so many rings

that I was dancing

twirling like a clumsy ballerina

just outside the boundary of the frame. 

I’m still dancing

no more graceful than I was then

caught in the suede fringe of your 

famous jacket.

Just behind you, behind him

is a couple kissing

against a winter tree

no leaves, just a ghost of a tree

a ghost of love.

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Newry State Forest, 31 March

 Newry State Forest, 31 March

‘Destruction of world’s forests increased sharply in 2020’. The Guardian, 31.3.2021

‘simply squint/ till words do as bid.’ Kit Kelen 

Checking GIS coordinates, but which coupe?  

In search for the endangered Scrub Turpentine 

and the Native Guava shrub, bush bashing

just find a cicada casing with a Lantana floret.

Neanderthals took care of the sick and the dead, 

pollen clusters of different species of flowers 

seed a grave in Shanidar cave, Iraqi Kurdistan. 

They knew Mother Nature invoked passionately 

by D on the forestry track, working to save us all.  

The late afternoon sun is a brilliant sea urchin

spiking like a virus or the Greek sun god Helios 

shown with rays shooting from his head, no –

more exactly starbursts, an optical diffraction 

light shredded by the blades of a small aperture.

The trees like vertical slatted blinds procure privacy 

for the sun-drenched distant hills. I can see the sea,

my legs are bleeding, a flock of Yellow-tailed

Black Cockatoos are crying in the lazy distance.

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The hornbill observation station The Straits of Malacca

After reading Kit’s these flying islands 


and misreading Hornbill for Hornball (Kit’s poems flow quickly, like the stream that has appeared in our garden) and Hornbills have a rasping sound a little like cicadas)

Poem written 2019. ‘Sail on’ Wolf and Gina


The hornbill observation station         The Straits of Malacca   

 

They are seated stoned, gazing on blue vibrations

inlaid with shallow mirrors. The tireless tide

is backing off from torn mangrove transitions.

 

They are not yet intimate with lives around them,

200 species of birds and 500 types of butterfly

or are these redundancies when love is kicking?

 

An old Chinese proverb says, ‘knowing the names

of things is the beginning of knowledge’.

We are waiting for the Hornbills commuting to roost.

 

Pneumatophores spear through kneeling mud,

the first in South East Asia to spring from the sea,

inheriting tags like Langa, Langka, Langapura.

 

I ask how they live on this island that crumples cloud.

Wolfgang’s hand is off the tiller, moored his yacht,

lives in this row of dwellings called Purple Haze

 

and has found work as a sparky in the new marina.

Gina adds quietly that she works on herself.

‘I’ve given that up’, I smiled, most possibly a lie.

 

Unable to recognise a missed opportunity,

I flow with no sense of a transect, unable

to a quadrat over time and places, or

 

tally a discrete muster of people (named),

adventures, artefacts and unexpected

spectral junctures orbiting the circumference.

 

I talk travelling days, index wildest countries,

complain how age bullies me to safer harbours.

From having timeless fun, time lines my expression,

 

anxious that green threads unravel leaf by leaf,

tree by tree by forest, drop by drop, river to ocean.

I write, donate and occasionally demonstrate.

 

Wolf is Austrian, heading the opposite direction.

Gina is from Switzerland’s Italian corner.

I describe crossing the language border,

 

gardens abruptly sag and tangle, houses relax,

Ticino Merlot for lunch, arousing eloquent

laughter, contingent, unpredictable, infectious.

           

We’ve lost the destination Odysseus fought to reach,

home is a concept eddying in currents of the modern

that propel ‘a restless itch to rove’, as Dante put it.

 

I try to remember the name of the commune

we explored above Lake Maggiore, ‘Monte . . .’?

Where they abandoned meat and clothes, where

 

Isadora Duncan danced naked, Tillich, Steiner,

Lawrence, Ball, Klee, Jung and Kafka ate lettuce

and Herman Hesse lived for months in a cave.

 

A Hesse novel squats in their rented shack,

‘Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Glass Bead Game?’

They giggle. They have no idea, it’s in Spanish.

 

The dream of happiness is readily forgivable

but how come the future keeps failing the past?

Are many wheels turning? Are ghosts hungry?

A Wreathed Hornbill shoots the margins,

wiry frame clamped to oversized black wings

trailing the burnished goitre and solid bill.

 

‘Where are the rest?’ I demand.

I love her laugh, it’s fresh as fresh,

brief encounters need not be trivial.


Names are cerebral but absorb possessive breath,

a Black-hooded Oriole hooks gold behind us

sweeping out the remnants of blushed light.

 

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