Splog
18 December
An abridged version of the following first appeared in The Victorian Writer, December 2011.
Submissions. Submissions. Susmissions. Yes, those old chestnuts. They’re not talked about all that much between writers. I suspect many submissions are stealthily sent out behind the Kabuki screen of a day job or in pyjamas at 12.43am on a Wednesday morning.
I’ve done both. How about you?
In 2011, I experienced four ‘firsts’ in the endless permutations that submissions result in. Two of those were good, the other two … not so much. Equally maddening or wonderful – and, rarely, both – the net result of submitting unsolicited written pieces in to a publication is nearly impossible to predict. Turkish coffee grounds won’t help, neither will a magic eight ball. Plastic fortune telling fish curl abstractly in one’s palm …
… what does such prognostication mean!?
Not even tea leaves can predict what outcome a given submission will generate. Though I did waggle a few pouches of darjeeling over a submission once just to see if any vision blossomed.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Read the first half and introduction to this piece over on Kill Your Darlings’ blog, Killings. One of those ‘firsts’ – the most ignominious – is mentioned there. I bet I’ve got you beat in the shame stakes.
One (another) first occurred after I ran across a publication with its acceptance window wide open. I had a few completed, un-submitted pieces that fit their themes, knowing the publication well. I sent them in, unsolicited. No time like the present for reverse defenestration. They were received, read and taken, all within 24 hours. Sold. It was enough to buoy the spirits enough to – you guessed it – keep submitting.
Not long after that fortuitous event, I responded to a call on a given theme for a one-off publication. What luck. I had just the item. Off it went via email, ensuring all guidelines were met. Not thirty minutes later, I received a chilly reply …
we will not be using this
And nothing more. Signed by nobody. All lower case. No punctuation. No ho-hum or even flippant ‘thanks for being interested’ rejoinder.
Gad. A first that will, I hope, also be a last. It sandbags the spirits enough to stop submitting.
But how quickly fortunes change. Not long after that abrupt event, another first occurred. I
received a Facebook message that I nearly deleted, thinking it spam. A word caught my eye in the
title: my last name. Yes. I looked. It was from an editor of a journal in Canada. My attention held. The gist was, ‘Great to finally make contact. Yes, we would love to publish them all’.
Huh? … wha? Who is this person? But I haven’t submitted anything? Finally make contact?
… um, did that message say … all?
I played along, replying that that was terrific news and thank you very much for taking them all, wondering where this non-submission caper would end up. I didn’t quite know how to couch a ‘By the way, which pieces were those again?’ comment. I lucked out, didn’t have to. The titles were named back to me in a follow-up email from the editor. Sure enough, my stuff. How four of my pieces got onto an editor’s desk in British Columbia, I will never know. But that’s manna I can get behind.
I recall once, when I first began submitting to publications, being met with a rejection and an acceptance on the same day. For the same publication. Regarding the same piece. The rejection came via email in the morning, yet in the post that afternoon was a lovely handwritten note with the words writers fang to read:
‘We’re delighted to publish …’
With trepidation, I emailed a copy of the piece back to the editors as is commonly requested. It was printed. I was paid. I never mentioned the concurrent rejection nor did the editors.
Another oddity occurred in an email I received from an editor of a major Australian literary publication. Simply, the editor replied ‘I like this. I like this quite a bit … but I don’t like it enough to actually publish it’.
Well okay then. That’s that.
I appreciated the frankness without obfuscating about there not being enough room in the publication as if it was a self-storage unit filled with eight million brooms and 8,000,001 was just not possible. No sir, no how.
Now, I have been on the receiving end of submissions. I know what’s meant when the ‘no room’ outcome is trotted out. It’s coyness irks me a bit. But what to say? It’s as good a reason as any and a totally valid comment – especially for print, where you must limit yourself to a tiny portion of what you’re given to read. I’ve sent out unsuccessful notices with the same spiel. But it is always a shade maddening that the latest ark didn’t have room for you but did – you later read when sifting through that which your submissions weren’t accepted for – some pairs of creatures as ungainly as cephalopods. Ah, that beholder’s eye.
I once submitted a piece to a longstanding New Zealand journal and was soon thereafter greeted with the good news of acceptance. Hear the good news! And I did. And the news was good and bread was broken. But in that reply, I was also greeted with a fully edited re-write of my submission accompanied by a page of scrawled notes – incorporating no less than three colours of ink, mind you – on how their version would be stronger (am I not popping enough vitamins?) than the one I submitted. Their suggested edit contained virtually no trace of what I originally sent in. Completely unsolicited re-writes: not so nice. And yet? The journal proceeded to published the piece in its original submitted form anyway. Flummoxing, that.
I’ve found that some submissions seem to get rerouted to Jupiter. Woop Woop, maybe. To Hell. Or even Oklahoma. I have a few submissions outstanding that have racked up a few years without so much as a peep of receipt acknowledgement, let alone a take or rejection notice (and this by a publication that published the very first thing I ever sent them). Some publications work under the rider of ‘If you don’t hear from us by Guy Fawkes Day, then you’ve been unsuccessful’. Fair enough. A little lazy. But putting together a publication is a mountain range of work to climb. Sending out rejection notices to submitters is never the fun-hooray! task editors vie for. It’s a valley to slog through. These outstanding submissions of mine were sent in without any such if/then logic proviso.
I hear they have many tornados in Oklahoma. In fact, I know so.
Is there a retiree in Woop Woop whom wonders why she gets so much post every day? I hope so.
As the twenty-teens approach, online submissions are becoming the norm. About time that’s the
case. I have zero love for Submishmash and similar account-based systems; one more cursed site to
try and remember a username and password for. I know they’re designed to relieve admin loads off editorial teams. And to that, I acknowledge its purpose is worthy. But from the angle of a submitter, I admit to being as curmudgeonly as Will Self. I have no qualms with uploading or attaching a document independently, I just don’t want an account to do so.
I remember once seeing an ‘opportunity to fax in your submission’ in some guidelines-er-other. No excuse for that. That’s both preposterous and tacky.
To finish: the audacity of some publications – specifically those that are online-only – requiring an international reply coupon if submitting to from overseas? Oh, please. Stop mounting your high horse without a saddle.
I’d rather go to the beach and swim in jeans.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 4 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
from our life is a box. / Prayers Without a God ~ MTC Cronin
we thought of ourselves
now we need poetry
we observed ourselves
by the water
did we drink?
we followed the line of ourselves
to where the sun marked the ground
with the beauty of the last tree
when did we write the first poem
sent out to meet the horizon?
there came slowly a day
when all vision troubled us
we turned ourselves into our words
which until then
had not lived
~
the prayer for those who speak
is sung
in the minute before the hour
in the song on the bridge
for what passes beneath
in the one shoe for the other
for the other that is spoken to
see the mouth make a brick
a bird, a plug of the ocean
in a test-tube
the striking green of the rainforest cycad
is no trouble for the tongue
it goes even to curl on those little stones
that have never existed
those imaginary stones
in the no-sun
This excerpt is from MTC Cronin’s collection our life is a box. / Prayers Without a God published by Papertiger Media.
Sutra ~ Barry Hill
The Lotusbird, before it runs on lilies
must lift its toes, along with its legs—
daddy long toes to succulent stems.
Then it must raise its head
level with the dip of its bud eye
to step again— meditative, still dry.
It’s silly, the way we are surprised.
The lilypads are its heaven, luminosity its food.
It goes as lightly as a prayer.
The red comb, rooster wild, is wisdom.
It wears its heart on the petals.
Its take off is like leaping flames
wings as vertical as falling ash:
an ascent with a splash of lotus bloom—
levitation in a shaft of lemon white.
This poem appears in Barry Hill’s collection (with paintings by John Wolseley), Lines for Birds, published by UWAP.
The Spider in the Kitchen ~ Andrew Sant
I fed the spider beef.
Summer flies
in town were oddly few.
The spider took it in her stride,
tackled the bloody meat
with her black legs and due
surprise. She liked it.
Mince, matchhead size, soon
burned in her abdomen. She thrived
and bred, though I never saw
her dark stranger call. The babies
were little monsters, big
and hungry. I obliged. Fillet steak.
No-one else now entered
the lovely kitchen until,
one day, a wise guy
– distant relative in his teens –
who’d got wind of my arachnids,
looked down on me and from
his core, swore in a baritone
it was the hormones in the meat.
His bent head proved the ceiling now
too low. The spiders stretched
themselves across wide windows.
I looked heartlessly into their eyes.
This poem appears in Andrew Sant’s collection, Fuel, published by Black Pepper Publishing.
Parts of Us ~ Thomas Shapcott
1
We are not born with shadows. They are clambering weeds
that crept up on us while we were not looking.
They do not follow us – we follow them
wondering if there are barbs as well as seed-heads.
Shadows take over whole paddocks of our childhood
but that is not to say there is comfort in numbers:
we had to learn to count.
2
The eyes are faulty interpreters. They pretend to know
the language but do not listen to accents
and are too confident for their own good.
3
Stop! But I did not stop:
neither did you. Some things
exist purely for the sake of rhetoric.
Some things simply call attention to themselves
or merely demand attention.
We are not good at obedience.
4
The tongue is a reckless speleologist;
it is quite unaware of confinement
and is perpetually eager to discover Lascaux.
5
The ears are trapdoor spiders
until the bulldozer clears the paddock
and leaves all our cleverness burried in rubble.
Bulldozers are mobile phones before technology
crept into our side pocket.
6
Never ask the nose for solutions.
Solutions are once upon a time
and smell is older than that.
Smell takes more getting used to
than the thought of a stranger’s excrement
in the corner of your own living-room
right on the carpet.
7
Laughter has horns on the underside
but it has green leaves that shine in the dark.
8
You smiled once. I caught it and held it in my hands
even though the wind was blowing in my face.
9
Tears are dry colours pretending to be a rainbow:
they own nothing but you can’t tell them that.
10
Did I commit a sigh?Breathing is always dangerous.
It is like a telephone message in a foreign language –
one that you think you once knew.
11
That was not a baby’s cry –
it was the electrical impulse surfacing from far underground,
warning the reptile brain of the death of ancestors.
12
Strange how the skin is not party to the brain’s confidences.
It tells its own story and is never truthful.
But what is truth? All things are relative
and the brain is the least reliable of witnesses.
13
To ask questions is to act interrogator.
The witness box has many exits
and witnesses for the prosecution
are not always going to get the colour right –
that is, if there really is a colour.
14
The location of God is in the navel.
The umbilical cord has been severed.
We are on our own.
15
Bones wait. It is not that they have any patience
with calendars. They remember too much, they hoard things,
and when all is said they know there is no last word.
16
Hair tells us we once loved.
Hair is almost impossible to manage
and yet it manages us most of the time.
Hair is the underside of a cloud’s imagination
but, caught in the mouth, it brings us down to earth
like a shower sink-hole after shampoo.
17
Did I say we are born without shadows?
And you believed me?
18
The word ‘dance’ is on my lips.
But dance is not music,
as if music can be notated.
Notation is the mark of our failure.
It is our mark.
This poem appears in Thomas Shapcott’s collection, Parts of Us, published by UQP.
Damage ~ T M Collins
for John Andrew Tate
The Needle and the Damage Done
Neil Young
Often I hear the
click of guns but
later I realise it’s
the tapping of the
spoon on the dish,
the vein bulging,
the fist clenched,
eyelids half shut,
trees outside shake
their leaves, cars
strut dirty paintwork
as the nick happens
and the shitter enters
along a slow blue link
to the brain.
This poem appears in T M Collins' collection, The Crooked Floor, published by Ilura Press.
The Affair ~ Lisa Gorton
Our last illicit weekend,
a little tired and driving
to some Blue Mountain
getaway or other.
On the motorway
it is the car that overheats
whoosh
I think a whale is
caught in our engine.
We wait in the car
trying to feel
absolute about each other.
They all drive past.
This poem appears in Lisa Gorton’s collection, Press Release, published by Giramondo Publishing.
dreizehn ~ Nathan Shepherdson
Trakl’s voice, a voice like a second self – Kokoschka
soaked with rain
drinking wine
you sat in the painter’s studio
a studio with black walls
the dark adding blood to colour
you watched in silence
watched the silence ( )
movement in the painter’s hand
air stained with pigment
portholes in his head
with a view to the Viennese Ocean
collapsed with broken bodies and
you drew words in your mouth
invoking poetry as an additional witness
soaked with rain
drinking wine
movement in the poet’s hand
air stained with pigment
you name the picture – Die Windsbraut
This poem appears in Nathan Shepherdson’s collection, Apples with Human Skin, published by UQP.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 3 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Migrants Dreaming ~ Peter Lloyd
— Would migrants dreaming —
would the Gitanjali Song Offering
know what to do with these exiled moments
of peacock bride-silks, waterfalls lustred with vanilla?
Purple-in-the-mist drifts over rooftops: windows melt into an Indian poem …
as ‘a lotus song in the jewel, her naked breasts play counterpoint to flutes’
and the sound of zithers drifting up the street;
— fragile — delicate as a sari of distance and silences,
Kashmir dreams itself over again, a fading light
— but outside time, another life
‘meeting the same souls and bodies that distantly were yours … ’
— until a bell rings through a falling dark of window boxes
and naked children fall into an ossuary of golden twigs
and fragile wishbones for the dead.
The surreal vanishes.
A door bangs back into reality.
And cold rain suddenly spatters through broken glass.
From a bulldozed squat in time —
hunched shadows from a window watch like cripples from the wall …
This poem appears in Peter Lloyd’s collection, A Fingerpost for Rembrandt, published by Wakefield Press
from The Mundiad ~ Justin Clemens
If philosophes of the Enlightenment
Opposed to science the religious bent,
Our catastrophic era goes to show
“To Believe” — is but the same verb as — “To Know”
And — like the Roman Empire in the days
Before it fell to crucifying ways —
Enforces such extremes of moneyed rank
As must make I.M.F. directors wank,
And blasts from every agency and channel
Its mania for bloody spectacle,
So that hard labour in the present age
Is done by those who mutely watch the stage,
For — though Marcel Duchamp’s bon mot might irk —
“It is the spectators who make the work,”
And are at once the truest and the most
Alienated of the toiling host,
Receiving not a single dollar for
The Sisyphean tasks that scrape them raw —
Whence, tirelessly dissatisfied, they range
Where nothing changes in eternal change,
From politics to love, to war, to sport
While all their yawning children hum — or snort —
Until there’s no good way to tell apart
Religion, Entertainment, Life, or Art.
So anthropos aptéros finds its ends
Bound by this Sovereign who unstopping sends
His voiceless envoys down the humming lines
That writhe and clutch like artificial vines,
To wring from flesh as if it were but grape
The wine that fires the sorrows of the ape,
Then sows those sorrows till the ape goes mad
And builds an empire on a micro-pad
Complete with Schizoid-Paranoiac traits,
Part Uncle Joe, Judge Schreber, and Bill Gates,
Where black-eyed boxes catch each sparrow’s fall,
And our bright globe becomes a disco ball
Whose beams irradiate the meanest rue,
So that the thought “Now’s Night” is never true,
And death-camps turn to service industries
Which strive to seek to find a way to please,
And never-ending webs of silicon
Become the Whole, Totality, The One —
So even Hobbes’s great Leviathan
Must tremble like the swollen lip of man
Before the New World’s Brave Principium
That money spurts as information’s come.
This excerpt is from Justin Clemens' mock-epic, The Mundiad, published by Black Inc.
Australia Day in Beijing ~ Caroline Caddy
Gas heaters in the walled compound.
Move with the crowd toast one side then the other.
The contrast makes me know how cold it’s been
meeting greeting juggling cold cans in cold hands.
Your glove takes mine from face to face
Finns Russians French Italians.
I can barely move my mouth.
You are the citizen here in my language.
You join a clutch of smokers then return.
It takes me where I thought I’d never want to be.
Then the anthem and I’m with my mob
taking pride in not knowing all the words.
I sing half-hearted your shoulder against mine
singing for me.
The babble resumes frozen air kisses.
Getting to be someone else because we are somewhere else.
I want to leave you know the way
through another and another room where the drinks are free
Then somehow we’re out together in the burning night
abreast and keeping step past walls past doors
no words no talk in the cold open streets
walking very fast.
This poem appears in Caroline Caddy’s collection, Burning Bright, published by Fremantle Press
Broad Bean Meditation ~ Tracy Ryan
The devil makes work for idle hands.
– Proverb
Firm and certain outcome of even the most slattern garden,
the uncountable counted on, pedestrian, insistent,
you force us into step, our loosest day must
grow up to embrace you the way we bend to a new
baby, image of generation and helplessness,
process compelled upon us who had no plans for this
and now by the white plastic bag-load, as if some warped
stork had cracked a joke at our expense and left a prodigious
gift in the kitchen – the whole shebang
wants blanching, wants freezing, wants dreaming up
new ways with old words, riffs on a rhyme already stuffed
down the gullet so long we’d retch if we didn’t know
we should be grateful, ought to answer the challenge,
get you in storage before it’s too late –
late for what, to resign you to compost,
faith in continuation? In the idea that there’ll
always be more? You most ancient of human foods.
I have measured out my life in broad-bean pods,
stained to the very fingerprints, that you might fix
my identity, criminality, complicit as I am in this rise
and fall thing, this giving and receiving, in no way
up to it but doing my bit.
This poem appears in Tracy Ryan’s collection, The Argument, published by Fremantle Press
Japanese Garden ~ Stuart Cooke
Take a world
and open it like a breath
in the cup of your hands.
Take some land soft as dough
and drop it
in a cool moon of water.
Take swamp hens, some ruffled swans,
let their songs shoot short bullets
over the waves of distant traffic.
Stop
while the swans’ long black necks curl
to the grass freshly growing
from the freshly laid dough.
Take lines of willow scrawled
on a creaming sky
and an exuberant breeze
to wrinkle the olive-green lagoon.
Now let their trunks rise
to tightly-woven clouds
and the wind brush the willow’s thick hair.
Take the path away from the children
chattering
like bristles of light.
Step towards a stone jetty and a dingy
with a small hole in the bow.
Take a man, half-grown, full
of conflicting sounds,
of the hiss of meat, of hair growing, of the hush
of what has already fallen.
Take this man.
Then, scratch light
from the wrinkling water
and whisper, Infinity.
Two ducks
keep diving.
Already, there are flowers whitening
for which he has no name,
and patterns slipping out
like flies dancing.
Please, take him away.
This man in sunset’s oven,
baking in time.
Take him from the noise:
that absurdly luminous lyre;
those wraiths shrieking in their graves
beneath monotonous, celestial stone.
La Serena, Chile
This poem appears in Stuart Cooke’s chapbook included in Triptych Poets 2, published by Blemish Books.
Wasting ~ Robyn Rowland
Ireland
August 1983
Your body carries
the smooth bronze of this foolish summer –
no rain in Ireland.
You are sinew, strung muscle, blithe strength
a finer study of my father’s limbs
arteries pulsing with exertion.
Nut-brown bloom is on you
and this mountain is no challenge to
your springing step,
though once the peak is attained
small crossing of its summit before descent.
Supple as the Mulcair over rocks
you move across terrain familiar as your hand and
the years tracking your eyes
beginning to furrow mortality.
Rapid urgency to move drives you
to expel, dispense
that bursting energy, danger in your flesh.
Decision made,
celibate, you fold your body away like
a best shirt
or those silk stockings my mother saved in
the war,
kept in a drawer till the battles ended
they were moth-riddled, mildewed from the damp. I
ache for this wasting,
to know age will melt you slowly to shapelessness
like old wax scraped from the frames
the honey long spun out.
Juiceless, left in the sun to soften
it will be reformed, reshaped.
no longer a container for that sweetness
but flareless candle,
life burned down inside,
wax melted inward
to lightless stub.
This poem appears in Robyn Rowland’s collection, Perverse Serenity, published by Spinifex Press.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 2 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Courthouse Afternoon ~ Fiona Wright
for Tara
A girl in coral and horn glasses
is discussing the relative frequency
of her massages and orgasms,
and how protein shakes
are made from cattle hearts,
and how the sniffer dogs
might find the Valium in her handbag.
It’s an Indian Summer, and the fairylights
asphyxiate a tree, the bistro buzzers
skitter on the tabletops
and she leans in close,
and chews her plastic straw
and lets her eyes grow wide
on the nervous man beside her.
She tells him
about a recent wedding, where both parties
looked like they were eight months pregnant
and how she’s never understood
why lemons cost much less than limes
and that she’s still black and blue
from horse-riding
and this pub really changes of a Friday
and she never should have listened to her mother.
Three women haul their prams onto the balcony
and shake bottles of formula
and order bloody marys.
A girl in horn-rimmed glasses and coral nails
grabs the man beside her by his nervous hand
and leads him out into the street.
This poem appears in Fiona Wright’s collection, Knuckled, published by Giramondo Publishing.
(for the siblings) ~ Kevin Gillam
they are there on the cusp of a
little hill, in the trampled splendour
of a suburban yard. they are three,
elephantine trunks standing against a
background of untidy sky, their oily
confidences drab on Escher limbs,
and the still bricks and lost pickets
heighten the haecceity of these three.
I go and sit with them often. I sit
between them, face to a bleary just-risen
moon and while breathing deeper and deeper
I find a kind of un-stringed puppetness
owning me. everything around them is
not tinted, a landscape of slow bleeds
with aching grace: the cusp where they stand,
splashes of buffalo, pot-bellied air,
the impressionist light. some spire in a nearby
church tolls its god, and in the corduroy silence
that follows, this join-the-dots man of me
forgets numbers, this seep of leaving
rooted in turn in the clear outline of these three
draws me towards them. having no need for eyes
I follow the scent of sweet decay,
let my soles find exposed pasts, and since
no-one is around, I brush my cheek
across them, hold them, press my chest
against them, know their ribbed unknowns
This poem appears in Kevin Gillam’s collection, Permitted to Fall, published by Sunline Press.
Summer ~ Stephen Edgar
A spiritless, grey-lit interior,
Midafternoon, the nadir of the day
When visitors are scarce; as in a mime
Silence informs the empty corridor,
Making all sound extraneous, far away,
As though it were the memory of time:
A closing lift, a nurse’s wordless voice
Monologizing on the office phone
Offscreen, the metal rattle of a trolley
With all it offers those without a choice,
And somewhere hard to judge the sullen drone
Of a polisher spreading its melancholy.
Wards open to the left and right, from which
The stillness wells like stage mist. Ranged in beds
Lie figures from the London underground
By Henry Moore, while in a curtained niche
An intimate family group with half-bowed heads
Out of Renaissance art sits gathered round.
As in a nightmare loop the eye regards
The bowls of grapes, the bunches of bright flowers
(Watered by someone once who then ignored them),
The drinking vessels and the get-well cards
Again, again the faces drained of hours,
Emptied by their waiting even of boredom,
Subsisting in their realm of four o’clock.
Procedure rooms pass by, and linen stores,
And stores for dressings, cannulas, syringes,
And blank, shut rooms where no one comes to knock.
Glimpsed from a junction in the corridors
What seems a painting down the hall impinges
Into the atmosphere, although the glare
That pullulates across it from the lighting
Wipes out its subject from the dazed newcomer,
Till he approaches closer to that square
Of tell-tale glass, which stares clearly reciting
The myth of an outer world; its content: summer.
Who would have thought that blue could hurt so much?
This prospect also has forgotten time:
Along the shore the many-lacquered frieze
Of small waves lays a stationary touch;
The trees, as though self-mesmerized, all climb
Unmoved, you’d say, into a printed breeze
In which the yachts, remnants of an event,
Have long been left behind. Almost without
A cloud, the unimagined sky annuls
All qualms across the bay’s embellishment
Which it exults
above — except, far out,
A white dismay among the feeding gulls.
This poem appears in Stephen Edgar’s collection, Other Summers, published by Black Pepper Publishing.
sound (& silence) ~ Pooja Mittal
terrible silences speak to me—
terribly pale silences, soft as the faces of new pigeons.
under the arch of an upturned sky
the rain collecting (wet-feathered coin-glitter) in endless gutters.
slow aggregate of things
that shine, that refuse to shine.
breaths suspended, crossed arms of branches
suddenly deprived of clothing—
the nude earth
aching
like a young bride.
stripped & open, foot & soil
indistinguishable from mind—this downpour relentless
as the clatter of abandoned weapons. knife-quick,
bird-voices hide & reveal themselves.
sleight of hand, a shifting veil,
a stifled breath, a touch withdrawn.
terrible silences. across chasms of nearness,
between blades of grass, these silences
speak to me—agonizingly thin
as the voices of infants, all-encompassing as dusk,
merciless as dawn.
This poem appears in Pooja Mittal’s collection, Subliminal Dust, published by Odyssey Books.
Audiology ~ Geoff Page
The winter shrubs are
crisp with wrens.
Wire brushes on a snare
are suddenly a
well-heard whisper.
It’s not a miracle exactly
but something very close.
The world retrieves its
rustled paper,
the sibilance of
jingled keys
as now I start to hear my shoes
complaining on the gravel.
My typing turns as brittle as
an office full of clerks.
Max Roach playing cymbals
leaves his fretwork in the air.
The sound of Clifford Brown on trumpet
is sweet and clean as first I heard it
fifty years before.
The world seems more
transparent now,
thinner than a leaf.
This poem appears in Geoff Page’s collection, A Sudden Sentence in the Air, published by extempore.
House of Ash ~ Lyn Reeves
My house burnt down.
I couldn’t do a thing about it. I just sat there
looking out the window while it burned.
It started in the bedroom. The smell of smoke
had been around for months, years maybe,
but it didn’t set alarm bells ringing.
Smoke clung to the curtains. The smouldering
mattress scorched the sheets. A sooty film
grimed the windows and the walls.
My skin paled with the slow drift of ash.
It brittled my hair. The taste of cinders
parched my mouth. Words began to blaze.
They flared up wantonly, igniting spotfires.
As fast as I put one out,
sparks flickered in another room.
Perhaps it was a fault in the wiring, or
the too-bright light through a magnifying lens, or
the piles of crumpled poems on the floor — good kindling.
The sun was a crimson disc and the moon promised no rain.
Tears couldn’t stifle the flames.
They only drove them underground
where they devoured the foundations.
I kept looking out the window.
No firemen came with bright red engines and vanquishing hoses.
No water bombs dropped from above.
The house continues its long slow smoulder
until everything I touch crumbles
the heart hollowed right out of it.
Now I live in a house of ash
alert to the slightest wind.
This poem appears in Lyn Reeves’s collection, Seasoned with Honey, published by Walleah Press.
from Out of Bounds ~ Dominique Hecq
Incarnadine Sun
The skin of day bursts
A wild goat leaps off the page
Word parola Wort mot woord –
a dice throw cast in jest –
a tongue in free fall –
images adjust to words:
things said
things utterly written
Where do words come from?
From behind an eyelid
the world slows down
silence swaps
the living with the dead
the mother with the child
the dead for the living dead.
Is language the world?
Washed out Moon
Milk letters spilled
in mid air song
High up in the mountains she drops and falls in a mirror you call a lake.
Her eyes are split and so is her face. Her skin is inside out. Burning. Freezing.
She swims in air solid as glass, glimmering as silver.
She wheels herself back through a field of rocks to what you would call home.
She is all shivers and sweat. Her voice booms in her chest. Her head.
Husks. Her heartbeat is strong. Is weak. Is no more.
How long must i wait for this death to come, she asks – for this death to go?
In a foreign tongue she hears that she is not prepared.
This excerpt is the opening lines to Dominique Hecq’s collection, Out of Bounds, published by Re.Press.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 1 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Projections ~ Alex Skovron
WHAT IS IT about masks and capes, and midnight escapades, and the colour black? It’s 1958 in a Rose Bay gloom (the Wintergarden, say): Wagner’s overture engulfs the gritty screen, and the grim crusader, ensnared between those deathly spikes of steel, the walls still closing in from Saturday last, at last ingeniously escapes; ‘The Batman!’ screech the sprung crooks of 1943, the serial rolls. Shortly I’ll be crouching over a pad to sketch that wondrous pointy slit-eyed cowl. Or 1960 at the Metro, Bondi Junction (facing the Coronet), where I rustle my ninepenny Smith’s while my courage surges to Zorro’s amazing sword (‘the sign of justice done’); later I’ll practise slashing an imaginary Z, will render on bluelined airmail sheets the mystique of his ebony blindfold, that spirit-level hat, the cheeky pencil moustache. And in between there’s 1959, where Sleeping Beauty delivers a shriller charm: Maleficent is magnificent – for weeks I’ll struggle at my miniature desk to never quite accomplish her bristling lines, her tempestuous cloak, the terrible horn-topped angular grandeur of her scowl … These (and others too) the instructors of a particular art: they empotion me, inflict the all-embracing myth, during that innocent universe where white is black. By 1977 the triggers of memory twitch when I countenance Vader’s hollow metallic lament, his mantle all-enshrouding (night-mammal, blade-wizard, enchantress-witch), his helmet a master-stroke from the century’s blackest hole. Let him keep. In a decade or two, a dark new hero will defy the screens of our sleep.
This poem appears in Alex Skovron’s collection, Autographs, published by Hybrid Publishers.
Last Poem ~ Kate Middleton
for P.
I went to pick a rose for you
and found there were no roses—no symphony, no cherish.
The seasons are lost in a brushstroke now,
the blankness of my inattention. And I wanted to give you
those easily crushable petals (they are so easy
to grieve for) but the morning frosts
have seized us all. Instead I gave you the tissue
of my thin words, and said
I wish these were roses.
Brought like Josephine rushed roses through the blockades,
the giddiness of bringing those buds into a new country.
The gentle, pressable flesh of them
an explanation for my warring self. We sat together
in the cold house, the words between us withering,
having lost the libraries of eloquence
they used to hold, the pattern of sunshine dropping through
the red lace shawl hung suspended in the window.
This poem appears in Kate Middleton’s collection, Fire Season, published by Giramondo Publishing
Les Fantaisies Bisarres de la Goutte ~ Pete Spence
an anonymous mass
was something
Einstein was looking for
through all this plasma
and grit!
today i can’t even
throw a shadow
as i lazily air my feet
nor can i gather
enough energy
to have a tantrum
and i’d like to!
tantrum ego!
does a tantrum have mass?
the air leans
against a wall
taking a breather
in the specific
gravity of the moment!
the daze goes by
but don’t get
any more impressive
now that the ladies lounge
is full of pokies!
a new brand of air
is advertised
but clearly
it has evaporated
into the dun mass
seeking anonymity
This poem appears in Pete Spence’s collection, Perrier Fever, published by Grand Parade Poets.
Snapshot, Chequers, 1960 ~ Mark Mahemoff
Here they are, resplendent in black and white,
pictured at the start of a patchy career.
But what’s the occasion?
Who have they come to see?
Is it Billy Eckstein, Nat King Cole or Gene Krupa?
They wouldn’t remember and it doesn’t really matter.
No one could eclipse this young pair’s glamour.
All the elements are there, almost as if staged.
A packet of Rothman’s
on a starched white table cloth.
Their optimistic smiles posed for the camera.
He is twenty, she is twenty three.
They reek of sexuality yet to be unleashed.
She’s revealing a suntanned shoulder
wrapped, self-consciously,
in her mother’s black fur stole.
His right arm is almost touching her back,
close but not too close,
as dictated by protocol.
There is something both attractive
and unsafe about her beauty.
It’s as if there is a hook
concealed inside sweet bait.
Neither one knew the pain that lay in wait.
The high hopes to be bludgeoned by the hammer of reality.
But here they are pre-marriage,
drugged by romance:
these youngsters, my parents,
for better or for worse.
This poem appears in Mark Mahemoff’s collection, Traps and Sanctuaries, published by Puncher & Wattmann.
Hush ~ Cameron Lowe
In the blue light her skin is electric,
a neon field, one arm displaying
the tendered cloth,
the other raising sail in the drift of night—
and what might be at stake here,
sheets swimming
in this blue sea of reflections,
the play of a smile frozen in glass,
or the mind settling on the surface
of this rising tide.
In the sudden rush for resemblance
a splitting begins, this table,
that chair, hands shaping that which
is and isn’t there, until
all that remains is imitation,
and she breathes out, letting
blue light embrace and taste her,
the light spilling from splintered limbs.
This poem appears in Cameron Lowe’s collection, Porch Music, published by Whitmore Press.
Cold front ~ Pam Brown
this shivering caravan
reeks of rum,
shadows smear an atlas
on a pillowcase
idly silhouetting a rabbit
on the masonite wall,
iced-over scraps
on the laminex splashback
grey nomad buys clairol –
the future looks bright
o only a cold front
is oblivion dark ?
come here for a moment,
sit and regard,
gape at the landscape
we’ll never inhabit
en plein air
is so much a sinkhole,
nowhere so zen
as some other place
who changed ‘the proposal’
into ‘the dream’ ?
I never said
I’m living the plan’
I’ve already been sideswiped
and I was here last
my cup’s white interior
tarnished by tannin,
readers of teacups
expended by tea bags
such a dreamy hiatus
o only a cold front
copying a trance
is too difficult to do,
sun on shut eye –
deep eggy red orange
but pocket some wisdom
when winter arrives
the grey sheen of sleet
will cleanse us like windex
This poem appears in Pam Brown’s collection, Authentic Local, published by Papertiger Media / SOI 3 Books.
This Arm That Never (Quarantine Station) ~ Nathan Curnow
This arm was cast from a smallpox victim,
manufactured in bees wax and ink, painted
yellow representing a jaundiced appearance
in a sealed glass box on felt. Note the size of
the pimples that filled with pus and erupted
upon clothes and linen, in the mouth at first,
across the palms, down to the soles of the feet.
See the wedding ring they could not take off.
We are invited to interpret the story. This arm
is fragile but in good condition, priceless as
a research tool. Check the painstaking length
the artist went to for our medical education,
donated to us by Sydney University, the victim
buried in an unmarked grave. Imagine it as
a ravaged gift, think how it must have played
a part, displayed here in our movable collection,
gambled upon the voyage. This arm that never
stops retelling the story of its deadly cargo.
Reaching through time, swollen, resigned,
still untouchable.
This poem appears in Nathan Curnow’s collection, The Ghost Poetry Project, published by Puncher & Wattmann.
24 November
A month out from the launch of his first collection of short stories, The Rattler & other stories, author and St Kilda bookseller, Alec Patric, stood holding a freshly-minted copy. Co-worker and illustrator of the collection, Miles Allinson was there too. The stories were the result of years and years of inspiration and fine-tuning and the artwork had been created up against Miles’ PhD deadline. But here it was. The two stood, transfixed. The cover was a lush chocolate with burnt orange titles and felt like velvet. The interior leaves – high quality, crème. The font, curly and clear, Garamond. The pencil illustrations whispered of sketchbook. Spineless Wonders had come through.
But twenty-two pages in, the wonder turned sour. In one of the signature sentence-long paragraphs of ‘B O M B S’, there was a noun-verb disagreement. The hostess is contrasting the Hollywood movie portrayal of plane crashes of panicked passengers with the stillness that descends the cabin in those final moments. Alec’s choice of simile is perfect: the yellow masks bounces down from the overhead compartments to dangle like rubber chickens.
Alec picks up the phone and calls me. He is charming and buoyant as always. The cover, the paper, the illustrations. The font. And then he tells me about the mistake and in the silence that follows, I remember the dangling chickens sentence. It was one of the long list of errors found by the copyeditors and I was sure I’d corrected it. But clearly I hadn’t.
Alec’s silence told me the grammatical mistake was a blight on his story and on his book. There was only one thing to do. ‘I’ll fix it,’ I say. And unlike the passengers in the fated plane, Alec breathed again.
The single copy that was sent to Alec was a dummy run, in lieu of the traditional proof. Not only is this a faster and cheaper process than generating a proof, it also means that the actual book, bound and covered, can be checked before a print run. And correcting this ‘proof copy’ should not be a huge drama. All I had to do was re-open The Rattler’s InDesign file, delete the unnecessary ‘s’ and upload the revised file to Lightning Source. The revision would take forty-eight hours, the reprint four to five days. The books would be at the shop two and half weeks ahead of the launch. Not ideal, but do-able.
As it turned out, the revision was a huge drama. In my haste to correct the copy, I didn’t relink the illustrations with enough care and consequently the hundred copies which arrived at St Kilda’s Readings the following week had one illustration inadvertently repeated.
Another call from Alec. He didn’t have to ask. I fixed the problem, checked I hadn’t created any more problems, and submitted a second revised text file. Thanks to the lightning-fast print on demand, the books arrived in time to be processed by Readings St Kilda for the launch as well as sent to their other stores.
All of this left me with a good feeling about the quality standards of Spineless Wonders, a bill for one hundred misprinted books and two cartons of books not fit to sell at full price.
Light bulb moment. I purchased a labeller and stuck Sample Copy on the back cover of eighty misprinted copies, wrapped them in an order form and mailed them to bookshops. As I am the publicist and admin for Spineless Wonders, as well as editor and director, it took me about two weeks. By this time, The Rattler & other stories, had received great reviews in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and Bookseller + Publisher ran both a review, and an interview with Alec.
On the strength of this publicity, I spent the best part of a week on the phone to bookshops. The results were fantastic. By Wednesday afternoon I had placed forty-five copies of The Rattler & other stories (as well as a handful of our first publication, Permission To Lie) in fourteen bookstores. The orders were for multiples of two, three, four or five copies and ranged from firm sale, sale or return and consignment.
Throughout the week I had many conversations with booksellers across the nation. I got knockbacks:
We can’t sell short stories, We’re too busy with our Christmas stock, This one is not for us …
At one well-known bookshop in Paddington, Sydney, the bookbuyer seems to always be out getting a coffee when I ring. Is it me or should I be worried about her caffeine addiction? A common refrain was: who is your distributor?
Andrew from Hill of Content, Melbourne said, ‘You’re really good at getting reviews. I’ll take five. Send me an invoice, you know the drill’. Michelle from Booktique in Merimbula was reading the sample copy, had seen the reviews and intended to call me. Matilda’s Books in Mount Waverley had an order from a U3A customer. I had terrific conversations and learnt lots about life from a booksellers’ point of view.
Misprinting one hundred books was an expensive mistake for me. Added to that was the cost of mailing the samples to eighty bookshops. But it did mean that the product got into the hands of booksellers. POD books have not had a good reputation (poorly proofed and self-published, printed on thick, whiter than white paper stock in miniscule print with narrow margins). When I began Spineless Wonders I set out to produce critically-acclaimed POD books, indistinguishable from those produced by larger publishers using offset printing. My printing error, and the experience of ‘hand-selling’ to bookshops, gave me a chance to assess if I had succeeded.
Bronwyn Mehan runs Spineless Wonders, a publishing company devoted to producing quality short Australian stories. Her print on demand publications are printed by Lightning Source Australia and it is hoped that its distribution channels, comprising some of Australia’s best known distributors, will be operating soon.
21 November
Any round-up of new releases from small to medium-sized Australian publishers in the latter part of 2011 inevitably leads one to a sense of awe at quite what this hardy band of passionate souls are achieving – year-in, year-out in this country – in the face of the numerous challenges the book trade faces these days. I hardly need to recount those challenges here.
Isn’t it about time though that these achievements by smaller publishers are better recognised? My colleagues on the board of industry body SPUNC: The Small Press Network certainly think so (and watch this space then for an update on the possible establishment of an awards night in 2012).
But now to my by-no-means-comprehensive wrap of tasty morsels that no self-respecting Xmas hamper should overlook (if you will pardon my anthropomorphism). So why don’t we start with the letter A and that dynamic publisher Affirm Press? This year saw the publication of no less than six debut short-story collections at regular intervals, all of which were received to considerable critical acclaim. And if their hip credentials weren’t already secure, look out for their Christmas offering: Marc Andrews’ Pop Life: Inside Smash Hits Australia 1984-2007 .
Now the beauty of this sector is also that it constantly surprises, often by alerting you to aspects of culture or community that you might be only dimly aware of. Imagine my surprise when I sighted in my store the other day Sarah Miram’s Darebin Parklands: Escaping the Claws of the Machine from Melbourne Books, a wonderful account of the battle to save an unsightly municipal tip from commercial development and to create the bushland park we know and love today. For those who might have preferred the sticky carpet in those years, Melbourne Books also has Dolores San Miguel’s The Ballroom: The Melbourne Punk and Post-Punk Scene. Here’s a publisher who has got all bases covered.
In terms of fiction stocks, small presses are often considered ‘incubators’ that identify and nurture local talent before handing them over to “proper” publishers. Thankfully, the reality is rather different. Enduring relationships are often formed between authors and their chosen publishers, whose taste and attention got them noticed in the first place. So as well as Affirm Press’ Long Story Shorts series, we have debut collections from Giramondo in Jess Huon’s The Dark Wet and Spineless Wonders’ The Rattler & other stories by A S Patric.
Marvellous novels from the ever-astute Sleepers Publishing, Steven Amsterdam’s What the Family Needed and Miles Vertigan’s Life Kills have also just been released.
Tony Birch returns with his mightily impressive Blood from UQP.
Fremantle Press gives us Adam Morris’s My Dog Gave Me the Clap – which the author swears ISN’T a semi-autobiographical first novel.
There’s also a foray into the graphic novel genre from Black Pepper Publishing with Mirranda Burton’s Hidden. Dylan Horrocks, author of the acclaimed Hicksville, says “it is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read”!
And what about poetry or general non-fiction I hear you asking? These are all fields too rich to comprehensively survey!
So here’s a brief highlights package:
UQP have a finger on the political pulse with Andy Lamey’s Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis and What to Do About It, “compulsory reading for our politicians” according to Julian Burnside.
The first title in the Giramondo Shorts Series is Michael Wilding’s offbeat account of his publishing days, Wild & Woolley: A Memoir.
Puncher and Wattmann have Bruce Dawe’s Slo Mo Tsunami and Other Poems.
The irrepressible UQP also has a marvellous anthology, 30 Young Australian Poets, edited by Felicity Plunkett.
Giramondo have also started publishing a series of Selected Poems by distinguished Australian poets, with Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems being the first in the series.
In the visual arts, Australian Scholarly Press offers Simon Gregg’s The New Romantics: Darkness and Light in Australian Art.
Finally: journal culture. Sadly there was a demise this year with the treasure-chest that was Ivor Indyk’s Heat, and an almighty scare for Island who, thankfully, got a temporary reprieve. 
But there’s also good news to report as well. Kill Your Darlings has kept its early promise alive with a stimulating mix across the genres, and an excellent blog that takes a close temperature of cultural opinions and debates around the country.
Can we talk then about ‘rude health’ in Australian small press publishing? Well maybe not in their bank accounts (!), but richness is to be found at every turn here. I would urge all readers to not take for granted our cultural land of plenty – get thee to a bookshop and reciprocate these publishers’ sterling efforts.
Martin Shaw is Books Division Manager for Readings Books, Music & Film.
16 November
I
Yes, I am an accidental publisher, one who is only seeing now that my new vocation has quite a few raison d’être I was unaware of pulsing behind its existence. Money, of course, helped as did my desire to try and ease frustrations with certain (though not all) aspects of contemporary Australian poetry. Witty whingeing can only go so far. If I have a loud enough poetry mouth (and I’m sure there are still plenty of folk who’ll never forgive my hatchet job on the late Dorothy Porter’s What a Piece of Work) we all know that cliché re: money-and-mouth, don’t we?
If one of the aims of Grand Parade Poets is to promote people who are not part of (or have chosen not to be part of) the mainstream poetry scene, then the initial catalysts for its conception were both tragic and comic– an untimely death on the one hand and a deservedly enthusiastic use of emails on the other. And, having been part of the poetry world since the magical year of – you guessed it! –’68, I hope I can readily appreciate the difficulties facing young (and not so young) poets seeking audiences for their work.
It was the death of Benjamin Frater (1979‐2007), one of the most highly talented poets of his generation and an heir to Blake, Ginsberg, the Beats, the Symbolists, the Russian Futurists, Artaud and Sydney’s South West Suburbs that prompted the beginnings of this press. It was agreed by myself and a number of Ben’s closest associates that a volume of his work just had to be published, not merely in his honour but for the benefit of Australian literature.
Although there are other publishers in Australia that might have taken the risks of publishing this, everyone involved felt that it was important to keep the editing, production, etc. ‘in the family’ as it were. During this period an old friend of mine, the highly individual yet very accessible Pete Spence, was emailing me and, doubtless many of his other friends, a near continual production line of witty, idiosyncratic excerpts from his ongoing opus which has lasted over four decades.
It was at about this time I inherited some money. I thought that putting an amount of that legacy towards a poetry publishing enterprise would be worth the emotional risk, if not the financial gain. Once Pete was on board, I started casting around for more poets in a proposed initial series.
The poets I have in mind range in age from the mid 20s through to early 70s. Their geographical locations range from the northern rivers of NSW to the southern suburbs of Perth. They are diverse Australian voices which deserve to be read, and will make a real contribution to contemporary Australian poetry. We will be dealing with, as Laurie Duggan commented on the Frater and Spence, “… books by poets who ought to be better known.”
II
Almost four years to the day he died, Ben’s Selected Poems, 6am in the Universe, together with Pete’s Perrier Fever, was published. This dual project took over a year’s concentrated work, particularly from Rob Wilson (Ben’s editor), Tim Cahill (co-editor and writer of the afterword), Elle Dumuro (co-editor), Lisa Nicol (who is at work on a radio documentary on Ben), Anna Craney (who made the Ben DVD that goes with the book), Miriam Wells (Girl Friday), Chris Edwards (designer) and of course Pete Spence himself. In the last, say, three months, I wandered around, shrouded in my accidental vocation. I went to sleep with it, woke to it, talked constantly to folk about it. Whenever I was finished with them (or they with me), I started talking to myself. I might have read actual poetry, but I certainly never wrote any. I have never experienced anything quite like it.
III
If there is another attitude of mine which can partner with my hopefully enthusiastic support for the Bens and Petes of this world, it is an attitude brought out on occasions when certain quasi-literary opinion piece writers (more often than not in the Murdoch Daily Broadsheet) present themselves as some kind of Andrew Bolt and/or Janet Albrechtson of the craft – wheeling out all those buzz phrases only the truly ignorant could think they would get away. It is then that the combative side to my nature urges me to continue in the publishing game.
‘Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory’ announced a headline around the time that I was deep at work preparing to launch the Ben and Pete double act. Whether journalist, teacher and author, Christopher Bantick, thought up this ridiculous phrase is debatable. Its cultural revolution ‘wall poster’ style seems to have a sub editor’s touch, but Bantick certainly supplied the data upon which this call to arms was based. Reading it, one has the fear that if the dice rolled an unfortunate way this critic might end up reviewing my books as a publisher. I don’t know if other countries have to suffer such reactionary diatribes in their mainstream literary media but, if Australia is the exception, then the editor in charge might have kept of this in mind to justify its publication:
‘Here’s something worth a good old Aussie stir, poetry. That weirdo corner of the arts. Now, what they require is yet another blood sport spat.’
I might have engineered a reply to Bantick and his backers but I was on auto-publisher at the time and could do nothing else.
If Bantick’s article requires, say, a Quarterly Essay style reply to fully bury the article, such as it is, well and good. I can only inform you how it affected your correspondent. Bantick’s initial target was a young Australian woman who had won some kind of International Poetry Slam event. He could not allow her any pleasurable five minutes of glory. Instead, he set up some sneering, huffing and puffing near-to-hate attack, doubtless thinking that, via attempted satire, he was on the side of ‘greatness’.
If the leading satiric poets of the language are Dryden, Pope and Byron, then their chief targets surely were not the slamsters of their time … slamsters who were probably down on the village green or in a nearby tavern regaling friends with witty enough doggerel on issues of the day. No, the targets were Shadwell, Cibber and Southey; writers with a decided ‘Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory’ mind set. That, plus poetasters who believed they were the men to do it. Meanwhile, down at the tavern, local bards were doubtlessly urging punters into some folk ballad sing-a-long, which one day might be taken up by dialect poets such as William Barnes … who in turn would lead to Thomas Hardy who would then lead onto W H Auden, etc. Although they have no pretentions to be Virgil or Dante (and isn’t that their charm?), poetry slams can be a pretty basic word sport. They’re an easy target if you’re after one.
Think of the little league at half time – mind you, when your team is down by ten goals at half time, wouldn’t you rather watch the little league? That one of their Aussie number won some International Prize is a pleasant enough novelty and that she would love poetry slams on Commercial Prime Time TV (an idea that Bantick abhorred), is an entertaining thought balloon.
But Bantick cannot allow this amusingly honest World Champion Poetry Slamster to bask in her few hours under the media sun. He compares this news-worthy (enough) item with the fact that Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s recent Order of Australia was never mentioned in the press! Now, I welcome this award given to Chris Wallace-Crabbe – his urbanity and wit being one of the resilient strengths of our verse and criticism for nearly sixty years (though I can think of other Order of Australia poets whom I believe did not deserve that gong!) But mention this in order to attack some successful poetry slamster? Why would one bother? Except, perhaps, that it just adds to the all-purpose huffing and puffing, demeaning for all concerned.
Mind you, one of the poems positively referenced by Bantick – in his all purposeful diatribe – was nothing like the work of Wallace-Crabbe or indeed of Wallace-Crabbe’s close colleague also mentioned in the article Peter Steele. This was Sylvia Plath’s incomparable ‘Daddy’.
‘Daddy’?
Surely if there was a 20th Century poem that might bedrock a young woman’s slamming career, it might well be that great hymn to patricide. You get the kind of confusion Bantick’s bile was giving forth?
When it comes to poetry, one of the great refuges of opinion piece writers surely must be a reference to ‘scansion’. When I see such a reference, alarm bells are surely ringing for I know that this writer has little else to say! Now, whether a poem that purports to be written in a regular metre can attend consistently to that metre (or if, in changing metre, it doesn’t look/sound clumsy) it is a bedrock of much great verse in our language. How pleased I was when I heard from Gerri Pleitez, a young poet I know with heaps of ‘attitude’and she had read Gray’s Elegy. And, yes, it somehow made sense (this kind of pleasure and attitude equalling that joy a few years ago when my former student, Alan Murphy, by then well into his 80s, wrote and recorded his first and probably only rap song). That is how it should be.
But ‘scanning’ has its limits. With those that harp on about it, or the lack thereof – remind me so much of those neo-conservatives who love to introduce the Magna Carta into their ravings. It even reminds me of those holocaust deniers who proclaim they aren’t anti-Semitic, they just want to establish … the truth (as if such referencing instantly grants them some kind of moral high ground)!
Bantick, in his column made reference to one poem that scans, My Country by Dorothea Mackellar – and boy does that scan – it does nothing else but scan itself to death. That this particular piece of clichéd-ridden, sub-Georgian doggerel can still be referred to in an article of comment about contemporary Australian Poetry must really show up a paucity of intellect and imagination. Do you think that were there to be an opinion piece in the New York Times on contemporary American poetry, that a mention of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Edgar Guest would even be countenanced? If you don’t know these two look them up and consider it.
IV
Is it any wonder one would now feel it was a duty to publish Benjamin Frater, Pete Spence and hopefully those others to come? I can say My Country made me do it.
V
In the late 1990s, John Coventry, a businessman friend whom I have known since grade 2 (1955), gave me his card. On the back of that card was his company’s mission statement. Perhaps it was the poet in me who thought that this phrase I had never seen before was some kind of joke John had concocted, though one I didn’t quite get. I soon saw this term again and again, by now making me think that it was a businessman’s joke, one transcending any single CEO. Wrong again. I saw that mission statements were indeed universal, every direction I turned there they came hurtling towards me in all their corporate hyperactivity … whilst I wryly, sorely became aware that if there was a joke, it was on me: verse novelist, dramatic monologist, satirist, friend of John Forbes, Laurie Duggan, Gig Ryan, Pi O, Nigel Roberts, Rae Desmond Jones, poet sophisticates all.
Whose was the first mission statement? We’ll probably never know. Such is the way of the current world. I reckon we’ll soon be auditioning whose is to be the last. Until then, thirteen years after I received John’s card, I give you (ah such is the power of language) Grand Parade Poets Pty Ltd’s never to be repeated, don’t-tell-me-you’ve-guessed-it-already …
Mission Statement
Poetry for Grand Parade Poets is the imaginative use of language under pressure for the enjoyment of yourselves and others. We believe there are plenty of readers who don’t want Australian Literature, let alone its poetry, to be turned into a sideshow booth at some 365 days a year writer’s festival, or a dingy, cramped branch office of Cultural Studies. Poetry is too serious an occupation to be beholden to such ephemera, though with a wonderful perversity there is no section of the arts better suited to not taking itself seriously. Poetry must be elitist and democratic since it brings high-powered imaginative entertainment and intellectual pleasure to those willing enough to meet it at least part of the way. Grand Parade Poets wishes to publish poets of music, passion and intelligence. We trust you will enjoy the results.
Alan Wearne is publisher at Grand Parade Poets.
24 October
This is the second instalment of a three-part series on blogging. We’d like to share the thoughts of three prolific bloggers and get their impressions on how the relatively free-form online space compliments and/or diverts from print publishing.
Part 1: Concrete & Chalk: Ruminations on blogging by A.S. Patric
Blogs used to be great. They were windows to troubled souls, a psychological choose your own adventure. You could read about people’s lives and comment if you felt so inclined. More importantly, blogs offered online interaction when interactivity was sorely lacking.
Today blogs feel tired, or at the very least in need of invigoration. These days, everything is interactive. We now Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, news sites and micro-blogs. Where does that leave traditional blogging? Well that depends. If you’re a blogger of expertise or a collaborative blogger, then you’re still in good shape. Take the literary sphere: I don’t surf for new blogs but I regularly check in with those blogs I know and trust. In my world, that’s SPLOG, LiteraryMinded, The Column, Verity La and Killings. What about writer’s personal blogs? I rarely read them. Why? Well, I’d rather read a writer’s selected thoughts than their everyday meanderings. I’d rather explore what they write, rather than what they choose to discuss.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run your own blog, but it does mean you’re indebted to make it interesting. Local lit is already showcased in Radio National’s The Book Show, RRR’s Aural Text, breakaway podcast The Rereaders and JOMAD and ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. If you’re covering similar territory to any of these programs, your thoughts run the risk of being more echo than shout. Blogs are also competing with books, TV, and films, not to mention the rest of the Internet. Given a choice between watching a DVD and reading about the life of a writer, most will choose the former, if only because they’re tired, stressed, and have to work in the morning.
None of this stops me writing blog posts, nor should it stop you. Ultimately it comes down to why you’re blogging in the first place. Blogs works best when they’re about interaction rather than promotion; if you enjoy connecting with a small but loyal group of readers then by all means start a blog and enjoy the conversation. If you’re planning on being the next literary “it” boy or girl, then please, save the world from another self-indulgent blog and just hire a publicist.
In a digital market, much is free. Your time is not, and running a blog takes a lot of time, both to write original content and to make sure your blog is suitably tech-savvy, incorporating widgets, buttons and twitter streams. As a writer, do you have that time? More importantly, are you the type of writer who enjoys being permanently plugged in? If you’re Max Barry you lap it up and prosper, but for others it creates an existential nightmare.
Now is a uniquely beneficial time in blogging history. As a writer, you can take part in a quality collaborative blog without having to maintain your own. The blogs mentioned earlier have built loyal and dedicated fan-bases, and they all want quality content. What does this mean? It means if you can write well, you can choose where your work appears. Along the way, you’ll build a professional profile, creating win-win relationships with the best in the business. It’s not necessarily better, but is certainly easier than setting up your own blog and spending the majority of your time creating content, hoping someone, somewhere will recognise your genius.
Still worried you won’t get discovered without your own blog? To that I say Cate Kennedy, Peter Carey, Steven Amsterdam, Nam Le, Alex Miller, Karen Hitchcock, Kim Scott and Patrick Cullen. A couple of these authors have excellent websites (and I’d definitely recommend getting one of those) but none run their own blog. Or to put it another way, some writers write while others lead the discussion. A precious few do both. It’s impossible to be everything to everyone, and therefore begs the question: which type of writer are you?
Laurie Steed is a writer, editor and reviewer based in Perth, Western Australia. A recipient of Varuna and Rosebank fellowships in 2011, his work has featured in various publications including the Age, Meanjin, and Sleepers Almanac. He’s a PhD Student in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australian, fiction editor for various journals and an active member of the EWF Program Advisory Committee. When not working, he likes to hibernate like the bear, and to a lesser extent, the European Hedgehog.
18 October
This is the first instalment of a three-part series on blogging. We’d like to share the thoughts of three prolific bloggers and get their impressions on how the relatively free-form online space compliments and/or diverts from print publishing.
Part 2: Things You Can Tell Just by Blogging by Laurie Steed
There’s a chalk outline on the concrete. We imagine a sprawled-out body with one hand raised as though waving. At some point early on, writers realise that the space within the chalk balloon belongs to them and soon begin returning to it with totems. An old typewriter. The nub of a pencil. Notebooks. Letters of acceptance or rejection in a bundle. Artefacts accumulate. Books and trophies bearing our names seem ideal for filling in the outline on the ground. We return to this retrospective view of our lives again and again but no writer ever comes back to it with a blog.
Perhaps it’s because the best we can achieve with a blog, (if we are not secretly hoping to have it promoted into book form as Krissy Kneen and a few other writers have done) is to garner a few comments from fellow writers. It doesn’t get much better than that. No Nobel awaits. The artefact melts away quickly. A post gets old after a few days and we begin thinking about what next to produce for a small coterie of literary comrades.
If a writer holds to this perspective their blog will fail within weeks or months, (the usual lifespan of the blog). Investing considered thought—focused narrative forms—into electronic veils does not give the same satisfaction as chiselling words into stone. There’s another way of approaching an online creative space and that’s to break with a Stone Age mind frame. To release the idea of permanence and readership and open up a new channel for emerging forms within our own process.
Writing is often a monumental act. A writer will summon up determination and courage and attempt a novel, moving with colossal intention from one phrase to the next. Writing can be a more intimate part of our daily lives, intended not only for transmission to spectral audiences far and wide, but also for ourselves. The literary qualities we have devoted ourselves to can be absorbed into the membrane of our daily lives, giving unique narrative to our private existence.
Most of us begin with paper. A notebook for a few thoughts, character details, ideas for stories… a private place to sigh and thrill—in words intended for our eyes alone. Some writers have scribbled out their entire creative DNA in these kinds of books. It is interesting to juxtapose Anais Nin, who produced her diaries for publication and found lasting recognition through them, and Henry James, who in the final days of his life, destroyed as many of his notebooks as he could: one suggesting the creation is all that is relevant, the other showing the creator in the midst of art. There is also a question here in whether our primary intention is to project ourselves into art or to channel art into ourselves.
If some writers scrap the paper and move directly to composition, producing nothing but extended prose, they give themselves no space to explore their creative possibility other than within the heavier, determined medium of the literary artefact itself. Within the blogging space the writer now has a place where a sketch can grow into a fully formed image, which might continue to expand into a large scale sequence, developing organically into a short story, novel, memoir, etc. The blog offers the writer a moving surface to range out these potentials, allowing a vital admixture of exposure and time into his or her process.
The medium is not just a frame. It affects every word that takes shape. Carving words into stone is so laborious we only ever get the essentials. Date of Birth. Death. Name. Beloved: Wife/Mother/Father/Husband/Son/Daughter. Biblical/Poetic Phrase. Paper maintains a similar expectation. It is a formal space. The words need to carry a higher value, invoking depth and density, even if the prose itself poses as casual, passing banter. The words need to be at least worth the cost of publication. A blogpost responds only to our creative desires and needs, and its production is free.
A blog can be a stage in the development of our work or personal evolution, yet the medium itself offers possibilities some writers will find liberating. So far, the most successful literary blogs have created a place for the bookish equivalent of a great phone conversation. Still to be seen is a new form; a unique blogging creation. Flash fiction has been growing to maturity, especially where prose is driven by concision and precision, delivered in the sudden space of a post. Blogs will continue to grow diurnally, offering an aesthetic of the in-transit—catching the attention of the distracted, overwhelmed, burnt-out reader with new forms of focus, rest and renewal.
The secret of art is that the sublime will always find ways to struggle through whatever comes to hand. Oil pigments on cheap canvas or applied directly to walls leads to the Renaissance. Printing presses produce novels. The excess of military brass instruments after the American Civil war provide Jazz the tools to develop. Images fixed into film-thin plastic frames and passed through a shaft of light usher in cinema. The blog uses a different kind of light through other frames, but we will watch only a little while longer before the sublime breaks through again.
Writers will continue to find the greatest satisfaction in artefacts like the book and trophy. We turn ourselves into words and having those words made into something solid again is part of the bargain. (It seems a paltry existence if that’s all we hope to leave as evidence of having lived). Perhaps we can’t help sketching out the body on the concrete in chalk, looking to fill the shape with a biography worthy of a life. There are ways we allow for the superfluous, overabundant, exuberant to emerge and fill out the picture of a person lying on the concrete, delighted by every passing thing, crossing the open sky above.
a.s.patric.Ink
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