Tag Archives: Tom Shapcott

Revisiting Dobrez on Dransfield: Adam Aitken on Michael Dransfield’s Lives by Patricia Dobrez

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This is a revised version of an article first published in Australia Humanities Review in 2000. Note. The references to the Robert Adamson review of Michael Dransfield’s Lives refer to the original review published in ABR in 2000. The version appearing in Rochford Street Review has been completely rewritten.

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Michael Dransfield’s Lives by Patricia Dobrez (Melbourne University Press, 1999).

A peer and close friend of Michael Dransfield, Robert Adamson, writes in “A Prodigy Life”, an earlier review of this book:

A prodigy whose life was cut short – sex, drugs, rock’n'roll, fame, transgression, a great talent for both brilliant poetry and self promotion, set in the 60s. Dransfield has been all things to all people who read poetry. This six hundred page book will stir it up again. Who is Michael Dransfield? How does his poetry stand up after almost half a century?

I think it is not Dobrez’s ambition to answer the first question with any finality and quite clearly she hasn’t set out to be an authority on the question of Dransfield’s poetic abilities. The intended audience for this book seeks readers interested in an interesting life. This is not the kind of biography which defends the poetry in any formal terms, but the poetry is used to illustrate the life as a many mansioned room of intertextuality. The danger Adamson sees is that Dobrez puts too much store on the poetry as an illumination of the life. He writes: Dransfield didn’t write confessional poetry and it is misleading to look too closely into the poetry for clues that might reveal something about his life. He thought Lowell’s work in that mode was prehistoric. On the other hand, Dobrez claims among Dransfield’s great influences Sylvia Plath and the critic A. Alvarez, a strong proponent of confessional poetry. Either way, Dransfield wrote much poetry that does illustrate his life, though good poetry it may not always be. Dobrez finds that Dransfield pirated his own diaries for poems, and there is ample reference to real people and events.

Adamson reads Dransfield again and finds that his memories of the poet are not real: ‘The poet I knew in the late 60s and early 70s doesn’t seem as real.’ Felicity Holland’s review focuses on the biography as a detective thriller with no final revelation (HEAT 14, March 2000). She adds that ‘[p]lural biography is a rarity – biographies which ease contradictions and create an illusion of subjectivity are not.’ Similarly, Adamson re-inscribes Dransfield as a plural subject and an unreal memory – Dransfield was all things to people who read poetry, and his poetic practice was inseparable from his life:

Dransfield loved pretence and used it in his life and work. He was a true symbolist – he invented a life for himself along with his wonderful poetry. This imagined life (Dobrez calls it ‘imagineering’) was woven through his existence. He embroidered everything, including his correspondence and his conversation and relationships, with his imagination. His existence itself wove in and out of reality and other people who weren’t poets found it difficult to tell what was really happening in his life. (Adamson)


I would add Dobrez’s detailed and wide-ranging biography shows that Dransfield is and was all things to people who don’t read his poetry. The real value of this biography is in the way conservative Australian attitudes and standards of the late ‘sixties are revealed as one cause of Dransfield’s self-destruction; and the point is Dransfield didn’t commit suicide or intend to die from overdose. There’s no proof he wanted to commit suicide and in fact he died from septicemia contracted from a dirty needle he was using to inject morphine, which he was taking to alleviate severe pain caused by an accident. In short, to many he was a drug addict, a draft dodger, a university dropout and a hippy. No doubt, in Australia during the Moratorium years, to be any or all of these identities was an invitation to abuse and rejection, as in a sense they still are today. As a reaction and in a gesture of solidarity with the Left, Dransfield used poetry as a lyrical protest medium and he often wrote to protest. For support he therefore gravitated towards the Generation of ’68 community of small press publishers and writers.

But we must be wary of turning Dransfield into a poster boy of the Left, as he clearly sought approval from conservative poets like A.D Hope. Dobrez’s detailed research suggests that Dransfield was nourished by the loose and internally riven poetry scene despite its lack of funds for producing books for mass circulation – indeed a defining parameter was a cynicism about tying poetry to any form of capitalist profit-making or ‘professionalism’. But Dobrez shows that Dransfield was not a slave to counter-culture (which he mimicked when it suited); he wanted very much to be feted by the ‘establishment’ of the time, and if not adored by it, at least tolerated. Dransfield was delighted that one of his poems found its way into a school text. The slightly older generation born in the ‘thirties and earlier, whose leading lights were Tom Shapcott, Rodney Hall, R.F. Brissenden, Geoffrey Dutton and others, is crucial in generating the reputation that Dransfield needed to carry on being a professional poet.

Dobrez develops an Oedipal approach to explain Dransfield’s breakdown and lack of confidence in the face of older authority figures. Dransfield was too freaked out to launch his book at the Adelaide Festival, fearing that A.D. Hope would urbanely tear him to shreds in public. Dransfield was constantly unsure of how his Father and Grandfather – a Gallipoli veteran – would receive Drug Poems, and his craving for their acceptance may have added to the strain brought on by contradictory loyalties and generational differences. In fact Dransfield registered for the draft, though seemed to have only a vague idea why he did so. Dobrez ties in the psychology of such gestures with Dransfield’s fascination with his own family’s medieval roots, symbolised by a gruesome signet ring he wore consisting of a Turk’s head impaled on a sword.

Dransfield was acutely aware of what is called in ‘nineties parlance ‘marketing’. He had a strong sense of what was glamorous and saleable in the late ’60s/early ’70s. Through a description of parallel artistic activity in the music and visual arts scene, Dobrez shows that Dransfield wanted desperately to become the first Australian poet to become a pop idol. Perhaps his most destructive delusion was that he could control the mirror games of the market at that time. In order to sell his book Drug Poems at a time when all books had to be checked by the censorship board, he could project the image of the drug poet to a public he thought wanted to read about drugs and drug taking. The problem was that in 1972 his book didn’t sell, and in the end it was the Commonwealth Literature Fund that baled him out with a Young Writers grant. Then, as now, poetry by young Australian poets didn’t sell.

Dobrez brings in Fredric Jameson and Jacques Lacan’s ideas of the Gaze to reinforce her notion of Dransfield as a mass of contradictions: he was at various times and all at once the Imagineer, the purple Prince, the Troubadour, the Unrequited lover, the Edwardian squire, and the Keats of Hippiedom. All of these are well-known masculine roles in which the poet/Magus is in control of the Gaze and its object. But one of Dobrez’s most interesting chapters reveals Dransfield as a sympathiser in the house of a Female semiotic as practised by his lover Hilary Burns, a painter who specialised in childhood visions and the power of the Gaze. The period of life in a Paddington Loft and on various rural properties constitutes for Dransfield a growing female aestheticism, which was solipsistic and illusionistic but also a happy and creative period, during which Dransfield wrote his most enduring poems. Dransfield was also extremely close and relaxed with his mother and sister, in whose house he fell into a coma under mysterious circumstances.

In the end he became at least one of his projections: the Posthumous Poet. For me Dobrez’s text conjure the ultimate question: not how did he die, but what would he be doing now, if he had lived? Far from the notion of the drugged out hippie, Dobrez’s narrative shows Dransfield was developing life-preserving skills in a time of late-capitalism, and became adept at property speculation at a time suburban baby-boomers were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the ‘normal’ lifestyle choices of baby-boomerism. Dransfield’s rural experiment was a precursor of the ABC comedy series Sea-Change, Dransfield consumed ’60s culture better than anyone, and, according to Dobrez, this consumption included the re-appropriation of a ’50s dream of home. Dransfield’s well-known ‘Courland-Penders’ poems are a fabrication of an ancestral home haunted by ghosts and nostalgia for an aristocratic ideal. According to a friend, Richard Hopkinson, Dransfield ‘had visions of magical properties just waiting to be bought for negligible sums! He wrote to every country council in NSW inquiring about their next auctions’ (D, 436). In Dransfield’s postmodern scale of values, there was little difference between the visionary pleasures of drugs and the pleasures of living in a restored colonial mansion in Cobargo. In fact, they went together. However, despite one successful sale, the reality of real estate brought Dransfield down: a) the properties suffered problems with sewerage, wiring etc.; and b) Dransfield could hardly afford the mortgage. As Adamson asserts, the 60s is a decade no different to any other era ‘when poverty hovers above the rented Loft.’

Was Dransfield an operator? According to Dobrez, ‘he was ready to write advertising copy if the occasion called for it, as he was to write poems; he might have fitted very easily into an emerging commercial culture in which value is determined by image’ (441).

The main strain I have with this biography is that a life could be so contradictory and provisional, yet Dobrez’s discussion of postmodern theory never quite gets off the ground. This is a biography that constantly reflects on itself and invokes theory as a defence against those who expect biography to be recuperative/and or morally certain. I’m not sure if there’s too much theory, or too little. On the question of life’s provisionality I feel disquiet. Dransfield’s lives were labyrinthine and for Dobrez they are a proto-postmodern phenomenon. Why then has lifestyle/marketing theory become so functionalist? One expects a lifestyle to be consistent, otherwise its unmarketable as a ‘lifestyle’ in the first place. Whether or not one can or cannot close the narrative, I get the impression that there are mutually exclusive Dransfields vying for control of the biography, but the theory is too certain of itself, as if Dobrez was trying to fulfill the academic need to push a persuasive argument, like a PhD thesis that needs a closed conclusion. For Dransfield: case dismissed.

Much of Dransfield’s life can never be proved either way. Was Dransfield beholden to drug dealers in Crown Street? Was he stabbed in Kings Cross? Did a policeman really try to run him down on a country road? There was the talented and charming man Adamson remembers, never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he had been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete. This suggests a man who knew himself and what he wanted (i.e. the operator).

The other strain is the symptom of the unflinching way Dobrez details the ugly mind/body of Dransfield, the rejected man and lover, the velvet urinal, the pin-prick, the victim of multiple accidents with cars and motorbikes, who buys drugs to relieve pain. Adamson criticises the book for giving the impression that Dransfield was addicted to heroin. But Dobrez never definitively commits herself to this conclusion. This is theoretically consistent, for there is no final authority to say whether Dransfield was an addict. Still, it is annoying that this is repeatedly suggested. Perhaps the gap between the reality and the text should remain mysterious and unresolved, but as Adamson reveals, readers will continue to make judgements, whether moral or amoral, no matter how theoretically committed and fastidiously detached the biographer.

Here, biography of a celebrity risks becoming voyeuristic, as if the biographer and her readers were attempting to penetrate an exotic body. As readers we inhabit a morgue of illusion, rumour and lies. As a post-baby-boomer reading this, I also confront my own resentments and fraught relationship with my antecedents. I’m not sure I would have liked Dransfield the operator. There is Dransfield the prima-donna who reacts to an adverse review by threatening the reviewer with ‘a lead pipe / across your throat.’

I agree with Holland’s judgement of Michael Dransfield’s Lives as a work that takes no singular moral vantage point. It is not biography of recuperation, nor is it hagiography. It is however clinical when it needs to be, for example, the description of Dransfield’s manner of dying. It is as fair as it could be to Dransfield’s peers, relatives and friends. As Adamson testifies, it is a biography that is ‘successful in that, as one reads it, you are compelled by its narrative to reread the poetry.’ One hopes that readers will go on to do just that.

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Adam Aitken latest collection of poetry is the chapbook Tonto’s Revenge (Tinfish Press). He has just returned from three seasons in France and now lives in Sydney.

The more things change…..small presses and magazines then and now.

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One of the tasks we have set ourselves at Rochford Street Review is to discover and review the material being produced by the small literary and cultural presses around Australia. This means not only the established literary and cultural journals, such as Southerly, Meanjin, Island, Overland and the like, but the new and emerging magazines and websites which, we believe, are critical to the strength and vibrancy of Australian writing. We will attempt to do this by regularly, at least once a quarter, undertaking a detailed of review of what has been published – picking out the highlights and shining a light into as many corners as we can.

In this first article we will attempt to look at some of the current issues facing small literary publishers and have a look over the last thirty years to try and create some kind of context with which to begin our journey.

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There have been a number of articles on the literary website Cordite over recent months which have thrown the spotlight on small literary presses, both in Australia and overseas. A glance through these articles provides us with a useful opportunity to analyse where small literary presses in Australia have been, where they are now and where they might go in the future.

In one of his first feature posts as new Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review, Kent MacCarter examined the state of small publishers currently publishing contemporary Australian poetry in a piece called ‘Australian Print Poetry and the Small Press: Who’s Doing the Books?’ While his article concentrates, in the main on the publishing of poetry books, many of his points can also be applied to the publishing of literary journals and magazines. In his opening paragraph MacCarter poses a number of questions:

  • Are Creative Writing programs creating a glut of writers and, in tandem, small presses to accommodate the ambition of that growth?
  • What is the quality of that which is being written, then published?
  • Can a small press sustain a viable publishing schedule with today’s technology based on points one and two

MacCarter uses these questions as the starting point of his subsequent examination of the current state of small literary press publication in Australia. While I would have liked the question of writing programs creating a ‘glut’ or writers (are there more writers now than there were ten, fifteen twenty years ago?) and a analysis of the question of ‘quality’ addressed a little more, for MacCarter the bottom line is funding/money/liquidity/viability:

“Throughout this article, I’ll interject look-ins at what a few small presses are doing in the realm of business liquidity – a term about as far from poetry as you can march – but any perceived “perfidy” of this pragmatism will get no apology from me”.

Though fortunately he does temper this with the understanding that those running the presses and reading the poetry are motivated by something far more exciting than money.

“The passion for literature, pulp, poetry, criticism, whatever the form this passionate wont may assume, is both arresting and rigorous in Australia. Without that, there is next to nothing to write about in this space”.

In ‘To Anthologize the Now Perpetually: The Literary Situation of the Small Press and the Archive’ (Cordite Features 23 February 2012) and ‘Little Magazines Exemplars: A Companion Piece to ‘To Anthologize the Now Perpetually’’ (Cordite Features 8 March 2012) Edric Mesmer writes from the perspective from the archivist – what can be collected and learned from the small presses. He writes from an international point of view and covers a vast history of modernist writing and small press publishing, but he does provide an expansive background for an analysis of the history and importance of small magazines and presses in Australia

Reading these articles got me thinking about how small literary publishing has developed and changed over my lifetime. In particular it made me recall an article by Marcus Breen “Writing for Readers: The new, small magazines” which appeared in The Age Monthly Review in May 1985. I also recalled a monthly column I wrote for Editions  in the late 1980’s which attempted to look at the sub culture of small press literary publishing. It occurred to me that a reading of the recent and not so recent articles might assist us to start to come to an understanding of the way the small literary press landscape has changed in Australia over the last quarter of a century – and how it might continue to develop over the coming years.

The most obvious change is technology. Back in 1985 Adam Aitiken and I were riding the last wave of the ‘gestner revolution’ with P76 magazine. I was also using the gestner machine to produce a number booklets for  Rochford Street Press. By producing a roneoed journal we were following a long and proud tradition in Australian small press publishing including such publications as Free Poetry,Your Friendly Fascist,  Magic Sam, Kris Hemensley’s Ear in a Wheatfield and many others. There was no internet so we wrote and received lots of letters, we networked through writers groups, other magazines, band venues, political meetings and anything else we could think of. But most of all we fought the good battle to distribute our publications through bookshops who were nervous of stocking books that looked ‘different’.

Cut to 2012 and the landscape seems to have changed considerably at first glance. One can ‘Google’ poetry journals or use the website of numerous writing organisations to find list of journals and presses. The ability to order and pay for books over the web has meant that the critical dependence of small publishers on distribution has, to some extent, been broken (that is not to say, however, that it still not important for small presses to get onto bookshop shelves – it is perhaps not quite as critical today as it once was). But small press publishers are still networking and trying to distribute their publications just as hard – they are just using some different tools.

That is not to say that it is easier for small magazines and presses as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. They face some different challenges – and some challengers which would be very familiar to the small literary presses of thirty years ago. MacCarter, in his Cordite article, for example, mentions the current funding issues facing the Tasmanian based journal Island, who last year lost a substantial funding source. It was a similar issue which drove much of the ‘literary activism’ that Marcus Breen  refers to in his 1985 article. Breen opens his article with a dispute. In 1984 two relatively well established and important journals, Compass and Imprint, lost their Literature Board Funding. These journals had began as small journals run on a shoe-string like most literary journals and had slowly built up contributions, reputation and circulation until they were able to successfully apply for Literature Board Funding. Among other things this allowed them to pay contributors. Unfortunately the funding landscape for literature in Australia has never been secure and suddenly, like other magazines before and after, they had their next funding grant denied. The resulting anger, frustration, shock etc resulted in the Literature Board setting up a meeting to discuss the situation with the funded magazines and journals. For many this was the final nail in the coffin. The funding authority looked to explain why it had effectively killed off two established and respected journals, and to outline its publishing subsidy scheme moving forward, to those ‘favoured journals’ who had retained their funding. At the very least those journals that had lost their funding deserved to be represented. Indeed the feeling among many writers and small publishers was that the Literature Board was indeed answerable to the wider writing and publishing community – and so a small press lobby group was formed in Sydney – SMAP (Small Magazines and Presses).

(I must declare a interest here. AS an editor of P76 I was involved in setting up SMAP and was eventually one of the SMAP delegates invited to the meeting with the Australia Council)

Writing a number of years after the 1985 meeting in Editions Review in 1989 I reflected on the outcomes of the meeting and indeed of the whole SMAP episode. On one level SMAP did achieve some positive outcomes:

“A number of articles on small literary presses appeared in the arts pages of the major dailies and the ABC radio pro­gram Books and Writing produced a special report on small presses. In Sydney Neil Whitfield, former editor of Neos (a maga­zine devoted to publishing creative writing by writers under 25) set up a small press stand at Harkers Bookshop in Glebe………was it worthwhile? Well there were some spin-offs. Contacts were made, a net­work was set up between magazine editors in different regions and, for a period, liter­ary magazines and journals gained at least a little of the literary spotlight”

But by 1989 Tom Shapcott was once again speaking at the Word Festival and one of his concerns was outlining when and how the Lit Board determined it was time to ‘kill’ off a journal….. Things had come almost full circle in four years.

As we can see by the Island incident, where the Tasmanian State Government cut funding for 2012, the established, funded magazines are only as secure as their next grant application. Indeed, while it might seem alarmist to suggest that old established journals like Southerly, Meanjin or Overland could have their funding cut and their future thrown into turmoil, one only has to look at the actions of the new conservative government in Queensland  (the axing of the Premier’s Literary Award within days of coming to power), to realise that a decision to kill off a literary institution can be made at the stroke of a pen by a new government with a symbolic point to make.

Given the apparent dependency of our writing culture on government subsidies, and the likelihood that these government subsidies may become more difficult to obtain as the political landscape across Australia changes, MacCarter’s concentration on the economic bottom line of poetry publishing becomes a little more important.

In coming months Rochford Street Review will attempt to examine how Australia’s literary presses and journals are responding to these challenges. We will look at individual issues to understand who is publishing what, provide a platform for new and emerging magazines and journals (both printed and web-based) to announce their arrival as well as documenting their battles to publish, distribute and be read.

- Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review.

A new ‘lost’ issue of P76 has recently been published. For details, and a listing of all issues of P76, go to http://rochfordstreetpress.wordpress.com/p76-literary-magazine/

References:

Cordite Poetry Review

Age Monthly Review

Editions

Kris Hemensley on Pete Spence’s new collection ‘Perrier Fever’. Grand Parade Poets 2011.

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The following is a slightly edited version of Kris Hemensley’s speech to launch Pete Spence’s latest collection Perrier Fever at the “Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium”, held at the Bella Union, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton as part of the Grand Parade launch; Thursday, 7th July, 2011.

Perrier Fever Grand Parade Poets. 2011

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Pete Spence is an old friend & colleague; a member of our Collected Works Bookshop collective in the mid to late ’80s, (which included such luminaries as Robert Kenny, Jurate Sasnaitis, Des Cowley, Ted Hopkins, Rob Finlayson, amongst many others); a fellow little mag editor (who’ll ever forget Post Neo?), gallery buff, international traveller.



He was first mentioned to me by the late Geoff Eggleston as a poet friend he’d like me to meet –circa ’82, ’83… Ah Geoff : author of this memorable couplet, “No man is an island / and no woman is a clipper-ship” — I still dont quite know what it means! Likewise, Pete’s line always in my head : “relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po” –the entire verse is, “a parenthesis ladles the tune / relaxing on a Li-Lo reading Li Po / under some amended weather / tumbling sunshine”…

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James Schuyler said you’d never get New York poetry until you realized the gallons of paint flowing through it –painting & painters. Following that thought, Pete’s book abounds in names (Pam, Ken, John, Corny et al), references to painting, to poetry & to poets, & to music, composers –as though a record is always playing –a symphony, perhaps, he shares with Alan Wearne, his friend & publisher. Spence is a poet of fraternity –which includes conviviality & melancholy… No wonder his recent poem in progress is called The Kynetonbury Tales, and a delight it’s been to read via e-mail. And, therefore, what a coup that Alan Wearne has pinned this pilgrim down long enough to make a cohesive book out of a vast & errant production –this book out of many possible compilations. And Alan is to be heartily congratulated on his Grand Parade Poets publishing project, & this particular volume.



It’s such a good looker… Designed & set by Christopher Edwards, — who shares with Pete similar ‘adventures in poetry’, –the chance & play –the relishing of words as though a different species of artist –painter, sculptor, composer.



And Alan himself along this track, whose Otis Redding poem way back in Public Relations (published by Gargoyle Poets in 1973), advances his share of Pete’s kind of fun:

“Redding, Redding, remorse will smash any epilogue chance, / any sweat-liturgy you sang and I might have attempted / once I walked in the rain until one once / to shout O, ’tis (forever!) Redding” …

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So, a poet of fraternity –which tag can deal with correspondence & address (the given social world a poet inhabits) and the matter of influence. And if I can use the French ‘chez’, thus “with” (which Paul Buck gave me decades ago) : “with” in preference to “after” with its misleading implication of “imitation” –, then we can say Pete Spence’s poems stay with the effects of his long lasting affections… He revisits them, he calls upon them –they are become motifs –they are his muses, they are his amusements –elegy, ode, sonnet, City, Landscape, Weather, the Sun, the Sky…

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I opened his book at random the other day, on page 105, –the poem entitled Shop :

“i thought the shop / was called SLIDE / until i walked into the door!”

I’m still visualizing a kind of Jacques Tati cartoon, or Charlie Chaplin, or Rowan Atkinson. The jokeyness transmutes or elevates from ha-ha to Surrealist smile in the poem Drawing:

“i muscled in / all the angles / crosshatched in / the shadows / only to realise / i’d drawn / a horse without / neck or head / and its tail / was a cloud / in the sky” –

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Perhaps this collection, Perrier Fever (and I reiterate, one possible selection of many –notwithstanding the attrition, the loss & destruction of poems along the way, allusion to which I recall from conversation 25 or 30 years ago), perhaps it is his humourous selected poems (different kinds of humour)… But even so it’s informed by the totality of his poetry. Remember, Pete is no Spring-chicken. A different personality would have seen him vying for volumes & anthologies many times over.

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Pete Spence’s poetry has all the exclamations of the New Yorkers, all the happenstance & hutzpah –which is another way of saying all the spontaneity & presence –which is another way of saying that more often than not the Pete Spence poem is both written in an ideal space, called the poem, and enacts the ideal poem, a doing that’s simultaneously done –which is another way of saying that whatever happens in the poem is the poem, informed or inspired by the insight that anything might enter the poem –because it can and because it is the poem… What does your poem mean, Mr Stevens? asks the earnest correspondent. Stevens replies : Mean? Mean? The poem means nothing more than the (–and we can interpolate, nothing less) than the heavens full of colours & the constellations of sound! Which is another way of saying that Spence, like Wallace Stevens, can be poet as painter, poet as musician, poet as inventor & conjurer of effects –of sensations which course the mind, tickle the tongue…

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But who is Pete Spence?
As scholarship, let alone the insatiable curiosity of the reader like Pete himself, as it expands its purview, so outsiders are claimed for the vast continuum; so peripherals are identified, brought in from the cold, –not that the cold isn’t a legitimate or even desirable place to be.
Alan’s told us a little about Pete. Pete’s written a little about himself here in his book. I’d like to add one story to the biography.
It’s the story of a possible history, had a manuscript for an anthology around 1971, actually transpired. In 1973 I was given custody of the mss. of Dark Ages Journal. In 1984, in my H/EAR magazine, dedicated to a ’40s/’60s/’80s chronicle of the ‘New’, I described that anthology’s perspective. It was a Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, New Zealand compendium. Its editors had included Charles Buckmaster, probably Garrie Hutchinson & either Richard Tipping or Rob Tillett. Students of the ’68-’71 or so period will recognize many of the names –Michael Dransfield, Charles Buckmaster, Terry Gillmore, John Jenkins, Vicki Viidikas, Garrie Hutchinson, Frances Yule, Ian Robertson; New Zealanders like Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Gary Langford. But the unusual Melbourne names are Walter Billeter, Robert Kenny, David Miller, Robert Harris & Pete Spence.

I licked my lips relishing the different history this coincidence promoted back then. The La Mama [Poets Workshop] ’60s style become conventional even as it was being hailed in the anthology edited by Tom Shapcott, Australian Poetry Now, suddenly had the possibility of rejuvination! I like it very much that Spence is part of that potential history. As he is now in the present day.
Without further ado, in launching Perrier Fever, may I introduce to you : Pete Spence…

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The original version of this speech can be found at http://collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com/2011/10/merri-creek-poems-pieces-25october-2011.html