‘It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.’ WCW
Flight QF 2101 8.3.2021 Extract
Poem written on the back of the boarding pass
From the air, creeks reveal themselves, dark veins draining the landscape, wandering uncertainly a brief revelation before we climb into ribbons of grey-white clouds, the horizon smeared pink.
Cloud free, the rivers and creeks are painted with mist, some dendrite sharp, others languid snaking. There’s so much water floating here on the edge of the driest inhabited continent.
Now the sun positions himself to show the creases in the wooded mountains, the land buckled, tempting the word wilderness, but down there lie scattered ruins of old tracks, rock shelters, sacred trees, ceremonial sites, hunting grounds that look so far away from up here. A wide valley spills sour milk everywhere, small white dots, tombstones are cherished homes, sheds or barns, fragments of our immense footprint on the planet hard to realise.
And your absence is almost visible.
~
We were close to flooding our ground floor on Friday. Natural disasters focus you on the news. I have just read that people within low-lying properties in Bulahdelah have bene told to evacuate due to the Myall River rising. Thoughts go to Kit and Carol and hope they are secure in their beautiful property.
I am relieving myself, a natural start to a new day over Japanese Irises, watching a low, sharp light tightly focused by the foliage, solar rays must be photons not waves. This red eye rising over the raucous ocean gives us everything, even the BCC cut out of my back a couple of weeks ago. I think of our garden, our love, how I should write a love poem every day, tallying the magic conjured daily, because 600 million years away our star will discharge so much solar radiation that silicate minerals (90 percent of Earth’s crust) will rapidly weather recasting the carbonate-silicate cycle. Carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 photosynthesis used by trees. Though, some plants use the C4 method, enabling survival at concentrations as low as 10 parts per million, but eventually plant life will become extinct, leading to the extinction of nearly all living beings since plants are the bedrock of the food chain.
I end my contribution to the nitrogen cycle, zipper up, notice the ‘clumping’ Black Bamboo is starting to run amok and stray into the Irises, Austromyrtus and Club Moss, a fern that popped up two years ago. I should survey our garden in days, and love in heartbeats, every second.
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.
Pam Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria. Most of her childhood was spent on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane. Since her early twenties, she has lived in Melbourne and Adelaide and has travelled widely in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions as well as Europe and the U.S., but mostly she has lived in Sydney. She has made her living variously as a silkscreen printer, bookseller, postal worker and has taught writing, multi-media studies and film-making and worked from 1989 to 2006 as a librarian at University of Sydney.From 1997 to 2002 Pam Brown was the poetry editor of Overland and from 2004 to 2011 she was the associate editor of Jacket magazine. She has been a guest at poetry festivals worldwide, taught at the University for Foreign Languages, Hanoi, and during 2003 had Australia Council writers residency in Rome. In 2013 she held the Distinguished Visitor Award at the University of Auckland, New Zealand
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. To commemorate his contribution, a book called Iman Budhi Santosa: Sebuah Obituari will be published and launched in March 2021.
Before a nameless tomb (translated from Indonesian by Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang and Kit Kelen)
I cowered next to you
no need for an introduction
you ran out of relatives
while I was still looking for an address
you’re a book
I’ve just written the first paragraph
you’re moss, I’m grass
in the open field
Di sebuah makam tanpa nama
Sesekali aku berjongkok di sampingmu tanpa harus berkenalam dan merasa perlu
Engkau kehabisan kerabat aku mencari sebuah alamat
Engkau buku aku baru menulis paragraf satu
Engkau lumut, aku rumput di sini semua patut disebut
A new year ahead, full of potential, energy and disappointment with moments of clarity and elation no doubt for Flying Islands poets.
Jan 1 2021
Alone. Moon brimming as she parachutes into the Nature Reserve, the estuary now a wasteland of sand and sticks and logs and stingray hollows, new lagoons formed, the river has shunted north a hundred metres another place entirely, in just a day.
Clouds slip through the fingers, the radius extreme, the movement incessant and my feet slip on the ribbed sands and I look 360, focus slips from trees to moon, to water in low tide quiescence to sky’s blooming choreography.
We are never alone. A Striated Heron flies silently across the old mouth, black on black, sounds of laughter carry down the river, a party of overnighters, seeing in the new year with alcohol, their togetherness out of sight. A golden crinkle reveals where Helios is hiding and will arise.
When he does the beam zips down the sea and along the flattened river to anoint me and my lens, my work, this solitary concord by river, sea and sky, a vast altar offering Magpies flying down to rifle the stretched beach and silver whistling fish clearing invisible hoops in the two new lagoons.
I jump ephemeral infiltrating tributaries, my right knee winges, so many people died last year, the ones I knew had cancer. None of the 1.8 Million strangled to death by COVID I knew that I know.
Life intensifies on a small butterfly flying the wrong way out to sea, its wavering flight seems uncertain, in the last days of 2020 an earthquake killed people, a landslide killed people, a volcano might have killed people, what lies beneath the soil and sand is ready to surprise.
We live in a continual state of war, war on the Coronavirus, the war on terror, a war on drugs. Vehicles killed people, and bombs, bullets, missiles, knives all killed people.
I’m alive, standing on a sleeve of schist some think could be classified as living in some minimal sense, on an island, a huge island from an aerial perspective, Gumbaynggirr stories explain the details.
Another year, a new year not really, this estuary measures time differently, by the tides, by pluralities and patterns of rainfall, climate change, human engineering ‘solutions’.
Can this text ever enter this world of magic, of tidal imperatives, bird animations and fish ripples, mollusk tracks and crabs, their hidden lives surrounding me, their sandy spoils and bings, and the stingrays’ absence?
Space written, instead of place, a hand-held camera has no sense of the text, no sense of my weight sinking into the Earth each step. I holster the machine, breathe arms out, horse stance. This year is one that will age me.
I have been to so many countries, landed here and now have no wish to be anywhere else. This enormous room is home, my strategy is a quiet life paying more attention to the intimate details, not a new year resolution.
Experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world . . . A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, Die Welt im Wort (Prague), December 1933.
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 TSEliot 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 Mac kellor!) 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 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.
Going Home
As I exit, I walk by my books in the uni library. There is a shorter way but I choose to hear my old words whispering off the shelf ‘in the swarm of human speech’, as Duncan said. On my way home, in the safe bubble of my Japanese car, I take the tunnel and in the humming dark inexplicably think of my White Russian friend naked on his chopper, whooping loudly in his flight across the desert, ejaculating in ecstasy on his fuel tank. Those were the days, my friend. Now, my tunnel breaks into sunlight. The poet I visited today said, Even the poems are chatty now, and he was right: at the red traffic light lyrical lines come to mind and I hurry to write them down. The lights change and my pen dries out. Diesel fumes invade my thoughts as I drive so I turn the volume up on ABC Jazz to drown out my annoyance. That motel has been there for decades. I remember the one-eyed mother, with her baby in a cot, offering me her love, or something masquerading as that, in dusky afternoon light, a room rented after fleeing her husband, the sound of peak hour traffic slowing as it banked for the suburbs. I’m off in a dream world when the car behind me toots, and I’m on the road again. Her name has gone but her eye patch remains and the baby’s sweet snuffling. I change to a pop music station. Get out of your own head, I advise myself. It’s not safe there, the past is corrosive. At home I park and leave the bubble of car and poem with its own centrifugal force.
Have a Nice Day
Driving to the shopping centre,
Bukovski rambling in my ear,
I’m glad to be sober
and anonymous. When I was
young, all hormones and energy,
my poetic was all about
getting laid. Today I step
from my Toyota, head full
of Buk, and grab a trolley, swearing
at its bent wheels. That’ll help,
my sober brain puts in, sarcastic
as ever. I push and the old desire
to be listened to comes back
and I’m impatient at each counter,
waiting for this, waiting for that.
They’ve got machines now,
not people. Just key in
your late mother’s hat size
and, voila, the money is out
of your account and into theirs,
Messrs Coles and Woolies. Warmly
I remember the décolletage of
Sandy with the metal in her nose,
tongue and ears. Where is she today?
At the scrap metal yard?
This machine doesn’t rock my world.
It doesn’t have Sandy’s knowing smile,
asking sweetly through banded teeth,
Any fly bys? It’s a drive-by, fly by,
bye-bye whirled. Who’ll enjoy
fly bys on my funeral plan?
Buk’s buggered my mood, but he’s
dead and I’m still here, so
who’s to complain. The machine
says, Have a nice day with
a metallic twang and I
kick the trolley straight again.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world. Wittgenstein
As bit players, the limits
of everyday activity
are the limits of our lives. You are
half out the door, going
who knows where. Perhaps you can
tell us when we meet again.
We don’t expect cards or letters,
emails or texts, and only our
limited senses would ask for
photos of the other side.
Did you leave your watch behind?
I picture Sue running
after you, shouting, ‘You forgot
your watch, you forgot your watch.’
Time is only for us now,
empty arms of the clock
hold us back from joining you.
When you were sick
and tired of it all, you left. I can
understand that. Mind the step,
wipe your feet. I expect we will follow you
in time. They chisel years
on tombstones, don’t they, yet facts
are putty in historians’ hands after deeds
are done. It’s a variety show, all this song and dance.
Total it up: More love than hate,
more laughter than tears. Do you need
a torch? Or is that light at the end of the tunnel
light enough? Perhaps you can send us
a clue or two, telling us, What happens next?
Eh? Tell me that.
Taibai Mountain Poem
for Jeanette
I saw a shining moon last night
through leafy poplars and pines
on Taibai Mountain
and thought of you awake
amid the lowing of Brahman bulls.
I thought of Li Bai
spilling ink down the mountain
leaving black stains
and wondered whose Dreaming
spilt red on The Kimberley?
None So Raw As This Our Land
for Mary Maclean
Many have been more exotic places, but this
you offer us, a taste of our land. The air
so crisp with chill we wear entire wardrobes
like hunters’ furs—jeans over track pants,
footy socks, beanies, scarves. Mary’s roo dog
does our hunting: an emu caught at the throat,
plucked and thrown whole on a cooking fire,
smoke full of singed feathers and flesh
stings our noses. We wrestle with tin-canned
standards in words the wind blows away. Huddled
round campfires morning and night, we go where
the sun breaks through as day unrolls. Breakaways,
mulga bush, a never-used dam a hundred years old,
this place of bleached bones and broken glass
queries our presence, unwashed, awkward on
its unpaved ways. Marrakesh, Katmandu—tales
of former hikes, but none so raw as this our land.
Much is on my website https://photovoltaicpoetry.com.au/, including a link to my new album based on my daily Pandemic journal, VIRUS 2020.
Poem
‘Take ekphrastic inspiration by responding to Olive Cotton’s The photographer’s shadow (1935).’
Here is my effort in any case, perhaps too prosaic, too much information, a tribute when I come to think of it, to a remarkable woman and artist. I wanted to celebrate a marvellous photograph, my favourite of hers.
‘A partial eclipse ~ Olive Cotton, The Photographer’s Shadow, 1935’
I sense her finger crouch, a waft of excitement, tempered
by darkroom apprehension. At first, you would prefer the heads
to align, but that would probably appear too contrived and lose
both Janus and that touch of Bresson’s decisive moment.
‘I don’t believe it’, shouts Max, hands on his head, or mimes
Munch’s Scream in a compact composition, flat origami,
lines and blocks in graded shades. Becoming familiar
with this chemical romance I’m sure this moment took time.
Her arms are sculptural, symmetrical, grounding the image
and they echo the relaxed arms of her model and lover,
her stand-over tactics prevent her nestling in his arms.
Max flops on his back, repetition with diverse consonants.
Thirties beauty was clean lines, fashion, stylish sunglasses
ignoring the beauty Polykleitos achieved using strict formulae
to chisel male nudes, stretching and relaxing athletic limbs
to embody erect perfection. After all, the gods take human form.
The gym body is now ideal but she muddies his torso,
doesn’t care to crop a swatch of swimming trunks
teasing an everyday aesthetic, ordinary glimpses
stretching time and place, if only we paid more attention.
Bush or beach are the Australian locations. Childhood friend
and later husband, Max Dupain, famously exploited the latter
(Sontag stressed, that’s what photographs do). Both children
played with Kodak Box Brownies, Olive’s ‘great awakening’.
The subjects are well known, well, hardly subjects, they float
through history, voiceless and paper dry in this brief eclipse
yet we share their vast circumstance of sky, heat and jaunty light,
the silver presence of the gulls, our noisy abrasive ocean.
One figure prone on earth grain, one ghost in negative radiance,
heads dead centre of the body, ephemeral . . . Have we become
too focused on images? Ekphrasis has been inverted.
100 million Instagram posts shared daily need more poetry.
Look between your legs. Go on, upside down, as blood rushes
to your visual cortex a giant locust hovers and a man vomits
an unkempt beard thirsty for play, surreal, artistic and ridiculous.
Have you decided? Scream or laughter? Rabbit or duck?
We can’t control what we see, mortality, scraps of beach-towel,
one vague nipple. Saccades give the game away. Men go for
the eyes then the erogenous zones, improvising love and eros.
They both loved shadows, increasingly rare phenomena.
~~
If you need a narrative this moment passed, their shadows stretched.
They left and went home for dinner. The country went to war.
Olive left Max for a new husband and his farm near Cowra, and
for children, isolation and poverty without electricity or water running.
I feel sad because the marvellous career of the photographer Olive Cotton
kind of stopped . . . she married another guy and moved to the country.
Shaune Lakin, curator
I was very happy, I loved the space and freedom. I never regretted coming here.
Olive Cotton
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. Her Flying Island book, High Wire Step, was published in 2018. Her most recent publication is Unreliable Narratives, published by Girls on Key Press in 2019. A new poetry book, Density of Compact Bone, is forthcoming from Ginninderra Press in 2021.
