Photograph Elizabeth Lewis
the seven-eight count of unstoppable sadness by Marcella Polain, Puncher & Wattmann, 2023 and coming to nothing by Morgan Yasbincek, Puncher & Wattmann, 2023, were launched by Lucy Dougan at the Bar Orient, Fremantle on the 27th of November, 2023.
It’s such my great privilege to be with you here to launch two such accomplished and substantial poetry collections by two such distinguished WA poets, Marcella Polain and Morgan Yasbincek, in Fremantle/ Walyalup. As I begin, I want to echo our wonderful MC Jan Teagle Kapetas. The culture, history, and connections to the land on which we’re standing go back tens of thousands of years. I’d like to acknowledge that it’s the land of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation we’re gathered on, and to pay my respects tonight to elders past, present, and emerging.
I know that Morgan and Marcella will be thinking back to Fay Zwicky launching their last poetry books: Marcella’s Therapy Like Fish and Morgan’s White Camel. I have this precious memory of them both helping Fay on and off the raised stage – and a memory from another context – of Morgan making an impassioned declaration for Fay (when Fay was still living) to be included in the planning of an event – to be looked to as a grandmother. This is the words she used…she’s our grandmother. When you spend time with Morgan’s new book, you’ll find her beautiful elegy: ‘three poems for Fay Zwicky’. So, as we begin – remembering Fay.
I want to start this launch – this occasion rather – because that is the rightful word for the coming into the world of Morgan’s coming to nothing and Marcella’s the seven-eight count of unstoppable sadness – an occasion – with some framing quotes, hoping they’ll reverberate as we go along
The first is from Fay herself, from Volume 5 of her journal (a previously published excerpt):
‘… a woman over 50 is invisible, so is she in the literary spectrum. She may pop up in journals, anthologies…may publish a book or two. But she will not be accorded the critical attention she needs either favourably or otherwise. It will be just one more book on the growing CV. She is not young enough, new enough to be given the homage we pay to youth for actually doing anything at all. She is past modernity, having spent tenuous years wondering when it’s all going to stop mattering that much, wondering who’s listening…worrying about the self that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. She is, in fact, almost ready to write her best work.’1
The second is from a Jerry Saltz interview with Tracey Emin:
‘…women peak between the age of 50 and 80… So this is why if you are a female artist and you’re doing okay at 50, you’re going to be doing quite good at 60, fucking excellent at 70, and out of this world at 80 and 90.’2
And the last is Virginia Woolf’s dairy (1918) after she first reads T.S.Eliot:
‘I think he believes in “living phrases” & their difference from dead ones; & so making this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.’3
OK, let those hang. Let’s think about poetic bonds or ties. It’s particularly beholden on poets to live with the work of other poets – especially dead poets – in this sense all poems are conversations across time. Poetry is an ancient art carried around in bodies that pass it onto other bodies…over a long, long time. There are many sparks between poets through time: think of John Clare writing as Byron, Diane de Palma in seance with Keats, Kae Tempest repurposing Blake, think of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth forging a poetry that was ‘not decorative but subversive…not the stuff of drawing rooms’ to quote Adam Nicolson4…and this list goes …poetry born from authentic relationships and connections through time and place, often defying time and place.
So what also makes this such an occasion then is that in Marcella and Morgan we meet one of these authentic conversations in poetry (and in life) – poetry AS life – that they have shared now for many years as friends and practitioners. When you read these books you’ll see that the work is supported by a network of women sharing their work – the Saturday Writing Sisters – and also women critiquing and editing each other’s work. This is especially important because sometimes almost one of the most vital things we do – making poems – seems to have no significant context, is poorly paid, has perhaps only seemingly symbolic value, when it is indeed work. I think of Marcella’s poems in the section of her book dedicated to the Saturday writing sisters and I think of Morgan’s poem “bad shoulder”.
It’s no surprise then that the collections share things: preoccupations, images and a commitment to the lyric tradition, that new poetry flowering on the stem of the oldest. I made a list of recurring motifs and words (I’m sure you’ll find more): talismans, jacarandas, doors, rooms, colours, cats, birds, horses, rain, the moon, dreams (Marcella is a cat person; Morgan is a cat & dog & horse person…although Marcella has a dream horse).
These are both incredibly atmospheric collections, deeply grounded in the local and specific ‘feel’ or patina of where each poet lives: the creatures, colours, textures and scents of those places. There’s an abiding sense of the lake (I’m assuming the lake at Hyde Park?) in Marcella’s work and of the Marri trees in the Hills in Morgan’s work. There is respectively in these presences the uncanniness of the burbs and the mystery of the bush. A poetic sauce reduction might be: Uncanny for Marcella, Mystery for Morgan. These states suffuse each collection.
Another shared dimension of these books, and one that marks them both profoundly, is that both poets are the children of an immigrant parent: Marcella having Armenian heritage and Morgan having Croatian heritage. Neither collection shies away from the complexities inherent in this, and especially inherent in approaching this in English language. This is not new in their work which has previously explored cultural dislocation and inter-generational trauma. Morgan writes in ‘Sappho’s Gift: A Poetics of the Fragment’:
There are events to which I am connected as the child of an immigrant,
but which I am alienated from. They augment and parallel the psychic,
psychological and historical life of everything written and spoken.
And in ‘Diaspora’ Marcella writes:
this point this pen this
pin I hold to prick to un
pick some of history’s blisters
Each collection also draws strength from these cultural bonds in powerful mythic women figures: Babayaga in Morgan’s work and Nar (Armenian goddess of water, sea, and rain) in Marcella’s.
In thinking about what these collections share, I want to acknowledge that they are both big mid-life books so naturally they are exquisitely marked and stressed, even distressed, by having reached that phase in life as two sensitive and compassionate humans. They not only register globally shared griefs of our current crises: grief at ecological crises and grief at the Pandemic but also the grief and suffering that comes with the natural losses in one’s own life. For this reason, family ties and ties of friendship touchingly punctuate both collections.
I want to turn to each collection singly now and focus on the mature poetic styles of these two consummate stylists, styles forged over time by commitment to the craft and to lyric traditions. Think about a signature style, that voice print on the page, in relation to the body: as an expression of embodiment and an expression of a lived life. I intuit that this is very important for both Marcella and Morgan as a necessary struggle. Again, the formal aspects of poetry are not dry or decorative but are very old aspects, very human aspects, belonging to an oral art passed on from person to person/ body to body/ heart to heart…learned by heart, riffed on etc. At the end of the day, that is Eliot’s conception of tradition: there’s all these old poems out there on one plane and the job of the poet now is to decide what to do with them, how to learn from them, repurpose them, and make them new.
What Marcella achieves both stylistically and emotionally (these two things are not separate in her work) is hard won. There’s a constant sense of on-edge-ness in this collection with all its clicks and blinks; the constant sense of uncanniness and disorientations and of an inner maelstrom (that painting that the poet encounters in the makeshift hospital – storm at sea). This on-edge-ness is marshalled by – is sometimes barely contained by– the way in which her use of enjambment and unpunctuated syntax brings such a depth of emotional texture and richness to her work. Although it can often feel pared back (Marcella can do a lot with a little) it nevertheless expresses a stylistic lushness and a wildness because of this signature. It’s exciting to trust this unpunctuated syntax and fall into the energy of Marcella’s lines. This is not easy to do. She has honed this signature of her embodied experience over a long time: go to the clamour of her poem ‘bus tree for a great example of this.
I admire Marcella’s vulnerability and generosity as an artist – and her control too – her respect for her readers in holding back – all those dangling line ends and exhilarating non-ends to the ends of poems. Many of her poems work against usual expectations. There’s so much understanding here about the outer limits of expressive possibilities that at times it can feel like a surrender…or a slipping beyond what is readable/audible.
I also admire this book’s engagement with the lyric mode: its meditations on ephemerality through those time tested images and motifs such as flowers, the seasons, weather. This is a very elemental earthy book: soil, rain, graves, fruit on the turn are in it as well as the nightclub stamp of the grim reaper that smudges in the shower in ‘bird magic’. There is the ending of ‘wink of the sea’ with its beautiful sure echo of the medieval lyric fragment, ‘Blow Westron Wynde’: Marcella’s riff on this is
christ if I can’t
ever hold your
hand again
It’s hard to mention stand outs in this book which is so evenly excellent (ditto Morgan’s)…but I know I’ll be returning especially to Marcella’s sublime sequence ‘for bird and all who love her’.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the word fierce/fiercely is repeated in this collection. It’s key to the beginning of an understanding of Marcella’s work as a whole, her attitude and orientation Despite ageing, illness, grief there is still making jam, there is still crabbing, there is still the brother ‘bending down to kiss my cheek’ (63). Overwhelmingly so there is love…it’s there right from the start in the epigraph from Audre Lorde.
The ancient lyric fragment is a bridge from Marcella’s to Morgan’s book. Morgan’s poems are also in dialogue with the past and particularly with fragments, with the very idea of the fragment so eloquently explored in the book’s last piece: quoting from ‘Sappho’s Gift’:
I look for it, long for it, dig for it through my very body with my pen
But we need, in Morgan’s work, to go back beyond Westron Wynde…back back to Sappho (and Sapphics)…and back back to wisdom traditions and back back further back to ancient female presences that embody the cosmos.
I experience Morgan’s poems as a spacious sitting with their rich preoccupations. There’s a patience in them, a worked for clarity that also always has an ethical dimension as if the poet is learning how to live through what she makes. Her poems mention tolerance, lenience and kindness. Her poems do sit. They are unforced, carefully made and capable of summoning a sense of deep time. In this spaciousness and in how they evoke senses of scale they remind me of the films of Terrence Malick. Like his, her work expresses cosmic dimensions. She understands that even that most domestic of spaces is a portal to the sacred. A daughter and mother sitting at “our little round table” in the poem ‘Carson Street’ becomes a place to consider “that first light…the wet print of cosmic waves that floated a planet to life’s shores”.
Her signature voice is at home in supple (mostly) long uncapitalised lines that manage to be both close to a human voice thinking or speaking and also to prayer or the incantatory at the same time. Her poems are painterly. They bristle with colour, a glamorous sensory uptake of the world and a primal sense of the deep connection between all living things: from ‘lead mare’: …
…. she presses
her forehead into my chest, I kiss the
velvet cover of each nostril, sweethumidity of grassy breath.
I admire the ways in which in her astounding ‘Echo – Sappho’ sequence (in which she is in dialogue with Anne Carson’s translations) that she brings a sense of ancient and contemporary utterance together in a seemingly effortless way. This is not easy to do: quoting from ‘do I still yearn for my virginity’:
……………..…we swim wickedly in
black water outside the circle of light from a boutique hotel.
Approaching what is possible in a very sincere way is an important register in Morgan’s work too. The last pages of her book feel like being very far out at sea (like the girls who cannot come in for their towels in ‘boulders’), very far out at sea as a reader while being in very safe hands. The outer limits of this book so bravely abandons lineated work and opens out into exploratory prose in different registers that in the very last piece becomes such a generous map of how Morgan experiences making.
The writer is a peacemaker. She isn’t a “real” writer, a disembodied persona that accompanies a best seller like a complimentary bookmark. She is a writer who ‘writes to survive.
These collections left me with an abiding sense of two poets pushing on with great courage which takes me back to those staunch words of Fay’s “you’re making your best work”, and Tracey Emin’s “you’re heading towards fucking excellent”…although I already think you are.
I warmly congratulate you both Marcella and Morgan, I warmly congratulate your families – your partners Mike and Peregrin – and the Saturday Writing Sisters along with editors and your publisher David Musgrave at Puncher & Wattman for supporting you in your practice.
Even though there is all this support, there is also a sense of aloneness and bravery in standing before Sappho or Westron Wynde or Audre Lorde: it’s you alone that remake new poetry to flower on the oldest stem. Borrowing from Morgan: I come to you both with poet’s questions and I’ll be thinking about these dazzling new collections for a long time beyond today but here and now can I ask you to please raise your glasses to these two exceptional artists in our midst as I declare Marcella Polain’s the seven-eight count of unstoppable sadness and Morgan Yasbincek’s coming to nothing launched at Bar Orient on the 27th of November in Fremantle, Walyalup. Brava Brava!!
1 Zwicky, Fay and Lucy Dougan. ‘Plain Speech: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journals.’ Axon: Creative Explorations 5.2 (2015). https://www.axonjournal.com.au/issues/5-2/plain-speech
2 https://www.vulture.com/article/tracey-emin-interview-lovers-grave.html?utm_source=Griffith+Review+eNews&utm_campaign=a483324794-
3 Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Volume 1: 1915-19). Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Penguin Books, 1979, 219.
4 Nicolson, Adam. The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels. London: William Collins, 2019, 4.
– Lucy Duggan
——————————————
Lucy Dougan’s books include Memory Shell (5 Islands Press), White Clay (Giramondo), Meanderthals (Web del Sol) and The Guardians (Giramondo) which won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for poetry. With Tim Dolin, she is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP, 2017). Her latest book is Monster Field (Giramondo). She is currently working on an edition of Anne Brontë’s poetry with Beverly Taylor for Cambridge UP and is poetry editor for Westerly.
.
.
the seven-eight count of unstoppable sadness by Marcella Polain is available from https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/the-seven-eight-count-of-unstoppable-sadness/ and coming to nothing by Morgan Yasbincek is available from https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/coming-to-nothing/
.
Rochford Street Review 