Author’s picture by Kingsley Flett

G-d, Sleep and Chaos by Alan Fyfe (Gazebo Books, 2024) was launched by Lucy Dougan at The Laneway Art Space in Boorloo/Perth on 26 July 2024. Madison Godfrey was the evening’s emcee and Alan was accompanied in readings by Maddison, Lisa Collyer and Scott-Patrick Mitchell.

I am delighted to be here with you tonight to launch Alan Fyfe’s debut poetry collection G-d, Sleep and Chaos published by Gazebo books. Poets here have been developing a close relationship with Gazebo’s poetry imprint Life Before Man and it’s just so exciting that Alan joins Lisa Collyer and Natalie D-Napoleon in this list. Lucky Life Before Man!

Alan has a very distinguished track-record. He is winner of the Karl Popper Philosophy Award. His first novel, T (Transit Lounge, 2022), was shortlisted for the T.A.G Hungerford Prize here, the Chaffinch Press Award Prize in Ireland, as well as the WA Premier’s Book Award. G-d, Sleep, and Chaos, the book of the moment and tonight, was awarded Silver for the Flying Islands unpublished manuscript prize. He currently teaches creative writing and was most recently shortlisted for the WA Writer’s Fellowship in the Premier’s Book Awards.

Let me start by taking you back to the days of hard copy. Yes…then. This is the story of how I met Alan (Al) and it involves hard copy. I was doing the admin at the Westerly desk and there was this short story Al had written called “Summer”. Back then any piece long-listed was printed out and put in the wooden holds slot just inside the door of the office. Once those built up they’d get posted off to the external editor. When “Summer” was sitting in the holds Westerly was between general editors so things where a little in limbo. What I clearly remember from this time-frame, though, was holding onto that story for dear life. Every time I walked passed the pile I’d reshuffle it to the top because that’s where I felt it belonged…I was willing it to leave the longlist for the shortlist (willing an eternal Summer if you like) and eventually it did. The rest is history. Summer is an adjacent part of Alan’s much lauded and stunning debut novel T. He came to the launch of Westerly 60:2 and there we started a conversation that has never stopped and that has especially grown out of a mutual devotion to the work of the late great Fay Zwicky.

I want to talk about Alan not only as a writer but as a human – his compassion, his solidarity with other humans, other artists, and the whole writing ecology of here and everywhere. Like and value UWA publishing? Then you’ve pretty much got Alan, along with and Barbara Temperton, to thank for the fact that it still exists. When Fay launched my book The Guardians she talked about poetry and (quote) “moral poise” via some words from the tenor Luciano Pavarotti: “A bad man may sing a song good but you don’t remember the song.”ⁱ Fay went on to describe a poetry conceived in the soul rather than the wits. I very much think the poems in G-d, Sleep & Chaos are conceived in the soul, strongly so, and I think you won’t forget them because Al falls under the category of a good human singing his song. This is a generous book and I’ll get to that soon. My hunch is that for this reason you will find something of yourself in these unnumbered pages. Here’s me in the poem ‘Ocean’: “You broke on the stanza and had three children and four jobs”. As that single phrase suggests, this is also a book for the particular pressures and strangeness and pain of our time. This is so very much a book for now.

If you know Al, then you will know his generosity is legend. The second time I met him, he was collecting tents for people experiencing precarious housing…I could go on with myriad examples of his decency but I want to remember that at the demo to save UWA publishing we did, for the first time, co-read an extract of Fay’s iconic poem ‘Kaddish’, her own iconoclastic version of the Jewish prayer for the dead. I’m not alone in thinking that it’s one of the most significant poems written by an Australian poet and it’s one that we plan to keep alive through ongoing co-readings.

Let’s keep thinking about the dead. Afterall, this is a book that opens with the most beautiful of elegies, ‘Eulogy for Hasan’, and moves swiftly and effortlessly on to the both hilarious and moving imagining of the author’s own death in the Auden-inspired ‘A Funeral In Pinjarra’ (it’s a nimble ride this book, I tell you). It’s particularly beholden on poets to live with the work of other poets right? –especially dead poets – in this sense all poems are conversations across time. In her book Negotiating With The Dead Margaret Atwood claims: “all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality”.ⁱⁱ From “Funeral In Pinjarra”:

Haul my half-dead carcass to a teleconference,
so I can tell everyone I’m not afraid,
even though I’ve always been afraid.

You might have heard me say this before but I want to say it again here: Poetry is an ancient art carried around in bodies that pass it onto other bodies …over a long, long time. Living and dead, poets teach other poets how to be poets. In Alan I can hear, as I mentioned, W.H Auden (“Spill all the tea”/”Stop all the clocks”)…I can hear Fay, Allen Ginsburg and Anna Mendelsshon too. In his work there are conversations with Emily Dickinson (especially beloved of Al), with Charles Bukowski, and with our own dear Scott Patrick-Mitchell (ultra beloved). There is also a tuning into older ‘songs’, to prayer, its cadences are central to this book, and to the poetic thinking in Jewish mysticism which is also central. In all of it I sense and glimpse William Blake, that granddaddy of psychogeography, so attuned to different dimensions and orders. He’s there in the overall atmosphere of this book, in the vaporousness its imagery tracks to approach the ineffable: (quote) “the reflection of your soul in the surface of an ammonia clouded aluminium toilet cistern”. There’s also a strong sense of Blake’s whispy ancient-modern mash up graphics in the image of G-d’s “silvery dandruff” floating “like manna” in the wonderful poem ‘Euthypro Dilemma’, in the various mysterious angelic presences that haunt this book (part Peter Falk from Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire/ part pint-sized Amy Winehouse). It’s there, too, in the encompassing ethical stance of Al’s work to human frailty, suffering and to inequality. From the poem St John’s Wort: “so happiness grows everywhere and everywhere we fight it off” has an especially Blakean ring.

This is to say that like all truly satisfying works of art that Al is in possession of an auteur vision. He’s managed to pull all the disparate and quirky aspects of his reading and dreaming life (dreams are very important in this book) – he’s managed to pull all that into a persuasive whole, into poems that are small journeys, atmospheres or theatres through which a reader can roam. And that, dear readers, is an immense act of generosity.

I want to think a little about where that generosity comes from. When Atwood writes about this negotiating with the dead that a writer has to do she thinks about Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus where the underworld journey (that funeral at Pinjarra etc) is the defining condition of being a poet. The journey must be undertaken, it is necessary. The poet—for whom Orpheus is the archetype—is the one who can bring the knowledge held by the Underworld back to the land of the living, and who can then give us, the readers, the benefit of this knowledge. ‘

Is he of this world? No, he gets
his large nature from both realms,

says Rilke of Orpheus in Sonnet 6 (Part 1 13).ⁱⁱⁱ I said before that this book was nimble, well, in part that has to do with the ease with which Al can simultaneously inhabit two realms. There’s always something going on beneath the beneath and it takes a lot in life and in writing to get to the point of having access to that. So hats off to you, Al!

I’m also thinking about death and prayers because of Al’s response in an interview to a question of how this book evolved, how it came to life. This is his response:

At the time of the massacre of 11 people at L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh, I was studying prose poetry and I tried to process my feelings about the event through a prose poem. The poem took six months to find the right 128 words but, once it was finished, the entire collection flowed from there.^iv

I can absolutely understand this notion, this process of there being a heart to a book from which all else flows out and what a beating heart it is. This lends G-d, Sleep and Chaos an extraordinary sense of organic rightness and wholeness. But this beat is a beat that leans into silence, like the silence that is reached at the end of Fay’s own ‘Kaddish’:

After forgiveness,
Silence.’^v

At the end of ‘After Pittsburgh’:

Many thanks, for the light that comes to those of us left. Many thanks, for the dark which makes the outlines.

That poem ‘After Pittsburgh’, I think, holds the core or crux of this glorious collection in its phrase “lending phonics to the unseen”…the unseen is utterly pervasive in G-d, Sleep & Chaos. After all it’s there right from that absent “o” in its title. This process of lending phonics to the unseen becomes an aesthetic move in itself which is in turn political. These are poems that go to the edgelands, to borrow a word from the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts,^vi and that go to the invisible labour hidden at an airport, to the outlines of the pressure of a pen in a recipe book that ghosts the phrase: “I can’t fucking take it!”, to the strange energies of contemporary commerce in the outer burbs symbolised by the animal-headed humans you can walk right through at the Canning Home World. In all of this, Al mines for the ineffable and mystery in the most ordinary and banal of spaces (between the furniture and the wall/ the shadow behind the picture frame) to ask that the light shine on the overlooked (even on or especially on the memory of fleas). This crux, this lending phonics to the unseen, takes me back to one of the most compassionate, poetic and prescient writers of recent times: John Berger’s call to remind us that ‘our customary visible order is not the only one’. In The Shape of a Pocket Berger writes:

It coexists with other orders. Stories of fairies, sprites and ogres were a human attempt to come to terms with this coexistence. Hunters are continually aware of it and so can read signs we do not see. Children can see it intuitively, because they have the habit of hiding behind things. There they discover the interstices between different sets of the visible.’^vii

I would say that another really important register of the unseen in Al’s book relates to intergenerational trauma. Go to the poems “Rabbits” or “Trains” to think about this.

There’s such a beautiful democracy in Al’s work and I’m not surprised that he’s finding a devoted readership. As a woman reader of this book I want to say that I especially really love it that the bus driver has her reasons for being late, that the keeper of the recipe book has written “I can’t fucking take it” and that the hamantasch cakes are secretly vulvas that go right back to the worship of Inanna, goddess of love, war and fertility.

Al, my sincere congratulations to you dear compadre on such an amazing and assured debut collection of poetry. Also my sincere congrats to your family Yasmina, Yitzak and Anna – families that support poets rock – and also to Gazebo books. You’re at home in lines, you’re at home in prose, you hang out with both Bukowski and also at the same time with Dickinson. You hang out with me at Fay’s bench by the river so we don’t forgot and we pay our respects. You’ve written an entirely reviving book for these unnerving times that’s full of a loving kindness for your fellow humans. I know I’m yet to convince you that young Wordsworth is cool but I’m going to keep on trying. I saved this quote from Adam Nicolson on Wordsworth for you some time ago because I think it could equally apply to your poetry and how you see poetry: that it is “not…an aspect of civilisation but a challenge to it; not decorative but subversive, a pleasure beyond politeness, it’s purpose…to give voice to the voiceless”.^viii

Get your voice and large nature on up here and read us some poems – but just before you do – I declare G-d Sleep & Chaos is now launched in Boorloo/Perth at the Laneway right here and right now: Bravo! Bravo!

 – Lucy Dougan

References

ⁱ  https://westerlymag.com.au/lucy-dougans-the-guardians/

ⁱⁱ  Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 156.

ⁱⁱⁱ  Rilke, Rainer Maria. ‘Ist er ein Hiesiger?’: The Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. David Young. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987, 12–13.

^iv  https://gazebobooks.com.au/meet-the-author-alan-fyfe/

^v  Zwicky, Fay. Kaddish and Other Poems. St Lucia: UQP, 1982, 8.

^vi  Farley, Paul and Michael Symmons Roberts. Edgelands: Journeys Into England’s True Wilderness. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.

^vii  Berger, John. The Shape of a Pocket. London: Bloomsbury, 2001, 5.

^viii  Nicolson, Adam. The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels. London: William Collins, 2019, 5.

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