Tag Archives: Australian poetry

ISSUE 24. Double Issue October 2017 – March 2018

Posted on by
photographers-shadow 3

Photographer’s Shadow. Anna Couani. Photograph 2017

 

Featured

  • Featured Writers:

 

 

Loading Now

 

subscriber01

 

Published by Rochford Street Press
ISSN 2200-9922

“An art work has to be approached—there are the footsteps”: Judith Rodriguez launched ‘Footsteps’ by Greg Rochlin at Collected Works Bookshop

Posted on by

Judith Rodriguez launches Footsteps by Greg Rochlin (Littlefox Press, 2016), 2.00pm, 22 October 2016 at Collected Works Bookshop

Footsteps A5 cover art etch linesHow long have I known Greg Rochlin? I don’t know. There are friendships where you’ve known someone for years but never felt you’ve known them. And there are those you’ve met, in class, on a committee, at a dinner, and they become part of your friendship circle; your life is changed that bit by them, they expand your world. Greg is one of those.

I can’t actually remember the CAE group he was in. But at Yak and then at the Moat meetings of poets, he’s an irregular regular, whose poems always create interest and sometimes discussion.

Should I add that Greg takes part in the Melbourne productions of plays in French? An extra language is an extra string to your bow; it opens up another literature in the medium in which it is best met—its own language. And it gets you thinking constructively about language, because other languages behave differently from English.

Greg is the only student poet I’ve known who has proposed a new and difficult poem form, the villanellette. It is, if you like, a parody of the villanelle that shows both its problems and its finesse. A trial and critique that both entertains and exercises the poet.

Now we have Footsteps—what a modest title, by a poet who understands that one is always going somewhere, making a fresh start, directing the words to be different from say, just conversation or a business mission statement. An art work has to be approached—there are the footsteps.

– Judith Rodriguez

Judith Rodriguez is a Melbourne poet. Her recent books are Manatee (2007) and The Hanging of Minnie Thwaites (2012). She wrote the libretto for Moya Henderson’s opera Lindy which was performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2002. She taught at La Trobe University (1969–1985) and Deakin University (1998–2003). Judith is a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award.

 

Featured Writer Darby Hudson: ‘WALK’

Posted on by

WALK COVER

WALK

“To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home…”

-Charles Baudelaire on the flâneur (The Painter of Modern Life, Le Figaro, 1863)

The way you walk is your walk.
From a great distance, you can recognise your mum or brother by the shape of their walk, a mile away.

WALK 2 Darby Hudson

Your walk is your DNA in motion.
Your walk is your spirit saddling your body like a horse and taking it for a ride.

WALK 3 Darby Hudson

When you meet someone for the first time and they walk towards you,
you witness their vulnerability though the nakedness of space –
you see their whole body unconsciously attempt to own the earth in the face of impossibility.
It’s why when you see someone with a swagger, or a
rehearsed
.                    dance
.       move,
it gives you a sense of sorrow.
These are moves for an earth unowned, a life unlived.
But it’s why a walking conversation with a good friend is one of
the loveliest things possible.
And you are never alone.
Not alone at all.
If you want to summon the familiarity of your spirit, all you have to do is
walk the earth.
Even if it’s down to the shops.

WALK 1 Darby Hudson

-Darby Hudson

WALK is an illustrated poem. The full text of the poem, ‘WALK’, has been published in Rochford Street Review along with a number of illustrated pages from Darby Hudson’s mixed media book with the author’s permission.

Darby Hudson is a writer and artist from Melbourne, Australia. His poetry has been published in wet concrete, old trees, thin air, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, and Cordite. His little book WALK, an illustrated poem, was independently published in 2017.

WALK is available from Readings Bookstores online

 

Featured Writer Darby Hudson: Biographical Note

Posted on by
Darby Hudson pic

Darby Hudson. self portrait (2017).

 

Darby Hudson is a writer and artist from Melbourne, Australia. His poetry has been published in wet concrete, old trees, thin air, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, and Cordite. His little book WALK, an illustrated poem, was independently published in 2017.

WALK is available from Readings Bookstores online

Featured Writer Darby Hudson: ‘WALK’

 

“Dark Convicts is an enterprising and exemplary work”: Tony Voss reviews ‘Dark Convicts’ by Judy Johnson

Posted on by

Dark Convicts: Ex-slaves on the First Fleet by Judy Johnson (UWA Publishing, 2017).

Dark_convicts_coverThe subtitle of Dark Convicts identifies these men (as it happens they are all male) as ex-slaves on the First Fleet: eleven black prisoner-pioneers who are among ‘the founders of Australia’, as the continental commonwealth would become known. The site of their enslavement had been what would in its turn become known as the United States of America.

They had gained their freedom by enlisting in the British Imperial and Loyalist forces during the War of Independence. Some of their fellows had been resettled in Canada and other British colonies, but many of the over 8,000 fugitive slaves who defected were shipped over to a new life in London. They had left the caste of slavery, but they could not escape the class of poverty. In the metropolis, they had no access to charity, no respect from their emancipators and little chance of gainful and dignified employment. In desperation, no doubt, many turned to crime.

Ironically, it was that decision that admitted them to the relentless record-keeping of the British Imperial and mercantile machine of state and so preserved at least the skeleton of their stories for this poet to revisit and recapture in this engaging and moving book. The substantial sequence of nearly fifty poems is interspersed with a prose commentary which identifies speakers and protagonists, sustains the narrative and contextualises the action.

Judy Johnson is directly engaged in this story since she is descended from two of the Dark Convicts, John Martin and John Randall. Martin married the daughter of his best friend Randall and their descendants now probably number 25,000. If any of them read poetry, they will be proud of the achievement of their congener. The sequence of poems concentrates on ‘the flavour of the life and times’ of the two ancestors. The poems evoke much of the detail and general condition of the early years of the New South Wales settlement.

Martin, sentenced at the Old Bailey to seven years transportation. He spent three years in Newgate and two years aboard the hulk Ceres (remember Great Expectations), where Randall was also held. It was there the two probably became friends. By the time Martin reached Sydney Cove, he had only eighteen months of his sentence to serve but had to wait until 1792 to be restored to liberty and granted 50 acres of the Northern Boundary Farm, Parramatta. His conduct had been exemplary, and he had among other duties been a member of the night watch. On the same day, Randall who had served as one of the governor’s three ‘game shooters’, and thus enjoyed some freedom of movement and encounter with the indigenous people, received a grant of 60 adjacent acres.

However, not all the Dark Convicts settled as happily as Martin and Randall. All suffered drought and famine: most succumbed to scurvy, dysentery or venereal disease. Many, Martin among them, were mercilessly flogged for minor infringements of whatever the code was. Within the first few years, several men and women were executed. In June of the first year, two young men, both in their early twenties, were hanged. Samuel Peyton for the theft of ‘shirts, stockings and combs’, and Edward Corbet for attempting to escape into the bush.

Judy Johnson neatly captures the coordinates of imperial rule. Her poem on the first church service is called ‘Church Tree’, the poem on the first hangings is called ‘Death Tree’. Equally telling is John Martin’s ironic recall of Governor Philip’s own words in ‘John Martin’s Twenty-Five Lashes’: ‘there will be no slavery in New South Wales’. The sequence maintains a balance between details of experience, observation and sensation on the one hand and the overall purpose and shape and moral ambiguity of the enterprise on the other.

The story told in Dark Convicts is preserved in many sources, and the poet is scrupulous in her acknowledgements, italicising quotations from the journals and books she has used. The power of the work, however, emanates from the poet’s disposition of the information and of the words of many of the original First Fleeters. The story covers nearly forty years, from just before the war of 1776, to 1812, when John Martin, 57, marries Mary, 19, daughter of John Randall and Mary Butler.

The poet’s basic decision on the poem’s form was to give it a kind of unity, or homogeneity, by settling ‘on a thirteen spoken-syllable line’. It sounds like a rough-and-ready metre, but the brave decision does seem, albeit unevenly, to pay off. All the poems are subjected to this measure, yet the poet achieves variety and liveliness in several prosodic ways. Many of the poems are given to the different voices of the participants (the two central characters, other convicts, the parson, the governor, soldiers, and officials). Stanzaic form varies from poem to poem, and the poet makes telling use of internal and, occasionally, end rhyme. There are also some skilful uses of quite strict prosodic forms.

The first poem, for example, is ‘George Washington’s Lost Slave Villanelle’, in which the General urges resistance against the British, or else the Americans will ‘be subjugated much like the slaves we own’. The thirteen-syllable line seems to struggle with the rhyme scheme and refrain of the verse form. However, the awkwardness of the resulting rhythm is right for what is a compromised defence of slavery recalling Johnson’s question: ‘How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’

In ‘Eleven Black Scoundrels Bound for the First Fleet’ which is ‘to be sung to the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas’, the strict line-length doesn’t appear to harmonise with the form of the song. However, in ‘Farewell and Adieu Old England’, the strict line length is matched to a form of rhymed and half-rhymed quatrains which gives us an engaging sea-shanty. ‘Black Caesar’s Pantoum or The Bear is Hungry’, a poem spoken by David Collins, the Judge Advocate, about the incorrigible giant who became Australia’s first bushranger (eventually shot dead by a bounty-hunting fellow convict), is a triumph. A pantoum (also ‘pantun’) is a Malay verse form composed of quatrains, using assonance and a complex pattern of line repetition. Judy Johnson handles the form deftly and suits it to the speaker’s thoughts, combining direct quotation from Collins with her own imagined words.

Apart from the formal and prosodic pleasures of poetry, Dark Convicts testifies to the poet’s feel for and delight in words themselves. George Worgan, surgeon on the Sirius, writing home ‘On the Pleasures of Exploration’, speaks of ‘a bottle or two of O be joyful thrust into our knapsacks’. The ‘Game Shooters for the Governor’ talk of the ‘frizzen’ and the ‘flash pan’ of their weapon, the flintlock. Although Black Caesar’s assassin is ‘No pudding-sleeve/ parson’, he does intend ‘to conduct a service with/ his musket’.

Dark Convicts is an enterprising and exemplary work. It should engage many Australian general readers and will certainly interest both the readers and the writers of poetry.

-Tony Voss

 

Tony Voss retired from a University teaching career in South Africa in 1995 and emigrated to Sydney the following year. He continues to publish academic research papers and poetry, mostly in South African journals.

Read an extract from Dark Convicts: Ex-slaves on the First Fleet

Dark Convicts: Ex-slaves on the First Fleet by Judy Johnson is available from UWA Publishing

 

“Suture Lines reflects Scully’s passion as a poet and scholar”: Malcolm St Hill reviews ‘Suture Lines’ by Paul Scully

Posted on by

suture-linesThere is not a simple label that could be applied to Paul Scully’s second collection, Suture Lines (Guillotine Press, 2016). The title suggests the melding of adjacent and related parts. This is the context of the beginning of the poem in which the term appears, ‘StoryBird 1: Gondwanaland’, dealing with the formation of the ancient supercontinent. While the five sections of the work are more disparate than the title implies, their ‘amassing’ is manifested through Scully’s erudition and recurrent motifs which are embroidered throughout.

‘StoryBird 1’ is an early poem in ‘On a Wing and a Prayer’, a signature section in this collection. It is inspired and informed by the Persian classic The Conference of the Birds by Sufi poet, Farid ud-Din Attar. In a two page introduction, a precis of his 2016 Southerly essay, ‘ReConferencing the Birds’, Scully explains that the group of birds in Conference are on a quest to find Simorgh, their king. The leader of the birds, a hoopoe (an iconic Eurasian bird and the national bird of Israel) takes them on a journey through seven valleys, each a symbol of progress towards their goal.

Scully’s hoopoe figures, the two birds in his rendition, are Australian natives: the marbled frogmouth and the bristlebird. The particular birds were selected, perhaps, because of their rarity and reverential place in Australian ornithology. The former is a relative of the tawny frogmouth, a bird that many would recognise, while the latter is elusive and officially endangered. The reader is introduced to the frogmouth in ‘The Accidental Priest’, and to the bristlebird, a ‘patient, shy, protective bird’ in the poem which follows, ‘Sage-Brush Sentinels’. In both poems, Scully describes the birds’ habitat and simultaneously alludes to their spiritual significance. The frogmouth is ‘an abbess—// of her tawny cousin’ in ‘The Accidental Priest’. ‘Sage-Brush Sentinels’ is referred to as a ‘psalm’, with the bristlebird as its centrepiece.

Scully’s hoopoe surrogates needle their way through the poems, eventually landing their charges where they started. In ‘The Observatory Pool’, the ‘pilgrim flock’, led by the twosome, come to a pool, a metaphor for Attar’s king and court. Expecting to see a deity, they see their own reflection and in turn, realise that the one they are seeking is a manifestation of the self.

The fifteen poems of this avian journey vary in the intensity of their allegorical significance. The ostensibly literal poems provide an introduction to bird life and lore. The sexual habits of the superb fairy-wren are described in ‘StoryBird 2: Superb, Purposeful Sluts’ (a somewhat jarring title) and in ‘[Songs of the Reviled]’ pest and nuisance species are variously treated with respect and disdain. Scully grants the crows ‘clemency’, deferring to their unique place in the Australian consciousness and ear. The sacred ibis is afforded respect, cast as a victim, ‘profaned by an urban smudge’. However, the Indian myna is not spared, as Scully takes aim at its ‘lice and the displacement of locals, especially its native cousin.’ ‘StoryBird 3: The Origin of Song’, draws on the work of Australian biologist Tim Low, who challenged orthodoxy and posited that birdsong originated in Australia and New Guinea and not the Northern Hemisphere.

The other signature section of Suture Lines, ‘The Librarians of Alexandria’, also begins with an introduction, contextualising the poems which follow; explaining Scully’s creative approach and assisting the reader to navigate them. The generosity of these introductions shows respect for the reader and Scully strikes a careful balance between revealing too much and not enough.

The section traces the machinations of the first, third and sixth librarians of the Great Library of Alexandria. ‘There is conjecture,’ says Scully, ‘as to the identities of the head librarians’. This gives him licence to nominate particular individuals as his protagonists and to enliven the narrative with selected ‘facts’ from the library’s history. It reads like a poetical version of historical fiction. The section starts with Demetrius, the first librarian, with his ‘caterpillar eyebrows/ and pedagogic feet’. In ‘Peripatos’, Demetrius lays out his vision for the library before the Pharaoh but stumbles when questioned about the design. “There is more space than building,” the Pharaoh says. Demetrius wants to reply that ‘an enquiring mind is a plain, not a paddock,’ but chokes and responds politely, limping out ‘a few braided syllables’.

The third librarian, Callimachus develops, seemingly the brainchild of his courtesan, the first system of library cataloguing. ‘The Pinakes: A Catalogue’ and ‘(F)Re(e)-versed’ trace the genesis and roll out of the system, a response to his frustration at watching scholars walking the halls seeking items from ‘the bins that held the scrolls’.

No text was binned
without Callimachus’ eyes filing it for later enquiry, his memory sure, finely bladed.

In the seasoned arms of his long-frequented courtesan, he mused as to why
his wards’ daily ferrying did not make a track of similar remembering for them.

The courtesan suggests that he ‘commit the sequence of his mind to stylus and pinax tablet as a label/ above each bin’.

There is a single poem dealing with Aristophanes, the sixth librarian. ‘Marks of Distinction (The Invention of Punctuation)’ explains his legacy; ‘komma, kolon, periodos’, solving the dilemma of ‘UPPERCASEDENSITYOFUNBROKENLETTERS// encamped to the margin/ of the papyrus’, providing the fulcrum to lever and align meaning with intention. The poem is emblematic of Scully’s approach to re-imagining history, a fitting and satisfying conclusion to a group of poems which are both playful and informative.

The remaining three sections of the work are more loosely bound. Exceptions are a short sequence about an unusual medical condition, face blindness, in the sequence ‘Face Value’, and a number of religiously themed poems in the ‘Pseudepigrapha’ sequence in the same section. Beyond this sequence, religious terms and allusions are a feature of the work and combined with a plethora of avian references, watermark the collection.

Many specific birds are named in Suture Lines, including the albatross in ‘The Longbow of the Albatross’, contained in the opening section, ‘Heart and Hearth’. Here Scully weighs elements of this enigmatic bird, against literary and religious imagery. The literary allusions come primarily from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Scully writes that ‘Samuel Taylor well knew, though, the pious bird/ as an unpencilled architect of myth, a cumulus/ of fortune and hope’. Scully also references Australian playwriting doyen, Ray Lawler and his little-known play, The Man Who Shot the Albatross.

Lawler knew it too
when he noosed Bligh’s neck with the albatross

in the title of the play that charted an inner life
for the captain and governor…

The nod to Lawler is characteristic of poems in the first section of Suture Lines where Scully registers the influence of other poets as either a response or dedication to a poem or poet or as ‘unacknowledged references to…’ their poems. Judith Beveridge, Pam Brown and Michelle Leber are included in this framework.

The final section of the collection, ‘Beyond the Dingo Fence’, includes poems which describe polar ice and frozen seas, and others depicting coastal landscapes. In the last poem, also called ‘Beyond the Dingo Fence’, Scully presents a hardened outback loner whose ‘hair was boot-heel pressed spinifex’ and who ‘preferred goanna oil to affection’. The image of the outcast recalls similar poems in the first section of the work, ‘Laneway Tom’ and ‘Singular Voices in The Strand II’. These poems similarly examine those on the margins; a man on the poverty line who resides in a laneway shed, and a homeless person with a ‘second voice hidden/ in his ear’.

Suture Lines reflects Scully’s passion as a poet and scholar. He draws on knowledge across many fields; ornithology, ancient history and literature, to name a few. He is inventive in his treatment of these spheres of interest. His eye for landscape and the human condition is acute. The result is as ‘sure (and) finely bladed’ as Callimachus’ memory, a collection that will inform in surprising ways and have the reader wanting to dig deeper.

-Malcolm St Hill

 

M St Hill pic

Malcolm St Hill. photograph by Kim Jordan (2017)

Malcolm St Hill lives in Newcastle and is a poet and independent researcher focused on the literary memory of the Great War, particularly that of Australian soldier-poets. He was the winner of the Morisset Show ‘Lake Macquarie Moments’ Poetry Competition in 2016 and has poems forthcoming in Brew: 30 Years of Poetry at the Pub, which will be launched at the Newcastle Writers Festival in April 2018.

Suture Lines is available from booktopia

Paul Scully talks about Suture Lines to Zalehah Turner

Featured Writer Les Wicks: Four Poems

Posted on by

Emily Takes Off

The surgeons wanted to cut them out
but she had other ideas, albeit
half-formed like those lumps on her shoulder blades.

Scans were inconclusive
but the medical profession poked-prodded
to a point where bruises blossomed across her back.

There were suggestions surgery
could leave a tattoo of pain across her adult life…
all within acceptable boundaries
drawn by those without affliction.

As the skin began to split around
the urgencies on her scapulae
doctors sought orders from the court.

Her parents took the family on an extended holiday.
Process servers fretted about the vacated home but
all the neighbours refused to answer questions –
common good, common purpose.

Emily’s wings required some adaptation
but she thrived above the clods of debate, that
aggregate of rules, those
endless line markers at their bitumen.

Her party-dress of clouds now skims the globe.

 

The Love-It-Till-You-Don’t Club, Kingscliff

Terry. Vietnam.
That word is enough, they
cured the cancer. Big deal.
With his Seniors Card rode the bus to pick up Nembutal.
For years he felt there was magic yet in his world, plus
he lived near the beach.

Friends will be there
but by obligation “not there” –
this loving called death must legally be done in solitude.
Booked into the Sunshine Motel.

He belongs to a group that helps their members live & die.
Never too much pain, nor much joy
he remembers the boy he was
& apologises at the air.

Medicine can be tougher than the patient.
Lost his way at Falldown Bay.
Never too much pain.
Those who cared flapped about him pesky precious,
orbited his damage for years.

There were pinnacles in his life.
Marlene & her hippy dresses,
she could tea away apocalypse.
Cowboyhat Hannah just got to scootin’
as Daisy went & flowered straight out of the garden.
It’s not that it matters, small tears
in an old t-shirt. They were all so piss-weak
& twice as strong as him.

Not a dole bludger,
that pride above disability.
Mate/employer Davo reckons
he can’t cope without him
(should never have been a builder anyway).
Davo whinges a lot, reckons he’s just a man
fighting depression, custody, bankruptcy but
he  never served.

Terry served, knew a few miracles.
Still shrugs, thinks big deal.

Slipping away, this day
people will drop by around 7pm, check there’s no pulse.
The road to well is sometimes a dead end.
Call box notification to police, because those
hard-pressed cleaning staff aren’t paid enough for bodies.
Terry will be honoured, a forward scout again, trailblazing
in the territories beyond hurt.

 

The Last Trick –  Colloquium Perspectives on the Arts
in Post-literary, Poly-liminal Aggregations

With the Australian Empire on its knees
(& unable to afford the arthroscopy)
I was invited to address a modest gathering of minds
to discuss the Twenty Doctrinal Errors.

Parliamentarians promised to save our misspelt solds.
My position in the Temple was dependent
on the continued satiation of grandees.
This involved  robust video presentations of puppies plus
the adornment of statues featuring
that reified, reassuring, retooled Roman god Quotidian.

Not for lack of effort
though as the years drag on my pretention
has become more prefab.
Authorities became concerned & a
clerical constabulary questioned my
grammatical life choices.

I fell.
Not in a graceful mort d’un cygne way more
abattoir chute.
I zeroed.

So with nothing left, retreated to my reservation
(1970’s working class apartment)
& there await developments.

Swapping meals with my friend in #8
(Mustafa’s a bit heavy on the meat –
me on the dairy –
we both believe in garlic & mushrooms)
I defend the right to die
alongside discouraging my ex-lover’s suicide.
Yesterday rode my bike by the bay,
this irrelevance is a sanctity.

 

Grand Mal

He knew her when they were seeds.
Now they flash their Seniors Cards & call it dance
He wasn’t ready, ever.
This life is birdcall across scree…
deep & meaningless as any deity.
Thoughts proclaim territory
as that territory shrugs.

A table with a view.
Meeting her again, both
are fat on good intentions. The nests are brimming
with dependents. This anthem of glut
has clogged the world

& isn’t enough.
Not by a long shot.

So later they rut mindful of
backs & knees.
So unexpected: she had worn just comfort underwear,
he hadn’t shaved his back.

Age will give you everything, don’t struggle.
Turn down the lights
& remember your medication.

 

– Les Wicks

 

Les Wicks

Les Wicks. photograph by Susan Adams (2014).

Les Wicks’ 13th book of poetry is Getting By Not Fitting In (Island, 2016). For 40 years Les has been a figure of substance in the Australian literary community. He has been a guest at most of his nation’s literary festivals alongside a substantial list of international ones, including Festival de Poesia Medellin, World Poetry Festival (Delhi), Beyond Baroque (L.A.), Austin International Poetry Festival, FI PTR (Can), Vilenica Festival, Struga Poetry Evenings (Mac), Festival Poesia de Granada (Nicaragua), and International Poetry Festival Istanbul. His poetry has been published in over 350 different newspapers, anthologies and magazines across 28 countries and in 13 different languages. Les is seen as both a “stage” and “page” poet. His work is a mixture of accessibility and dense use of language. He is a master of capturing the vernacular. His poems are both humorous and fierce, often in the same poem. Les is equally well known is his work as a publisher and editor. Most people will remember Artransit which put poetry and art into Sydney and Newcastle buses. However, that is just one of dozens of similar roles: some predictable, like literary magazines, while others range as far afield as publishing a poem on the surface of a river. The most recent poetry anthologies he has co- edited and published are Guide to Sydney Rivers and AU/UA: Contemporary Poetry of Ukraine and Australia. He has coordinated workshops across the country. website: http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

Getting By Not Fitting In is available from Island Press

 

Featured Writer Les Wicks: Biographical Note

Posted on by
Les Wicks

Les Wicks. photograph by Susan Adams (2014).

 

Les Wicks’ 13th book of poetry is Getting By Not Fitting In (Island, 2016). For 40 years, Les has been a figure of substance in the Australian literary community. He has been a guest at most of his nation’s literary festivals alongside a substantial list of international ones, including Festival de Poesia Medellin, World Poetry Festival (Delhi), Beyond Baroque (L.A.), Austin International Poetry Festival, FI PTR (Can), Vilenica Festival, Struga Poetry Evenings (Mac), Festival Poesia de Granada (Nicaragua), and International Poetry Festival Istanbul. His poetry has been published in over 350 different newspapers, anthologies and magazines across 28 countries and in 13 different languages. Les is seen as both a “stage” and “page” poet. His work is a mixture of accessibility and dense use of language. He is a master of capturing the vernacular. His poems are both humorous and fierce, often in the same poem. Les is equally well known is his work as a publisher and editor. Most people will remember Artransit which put poetry and art into Sydney and Newcastle buses. However, that is just one of dozens of similar roles: some predictable, like literary magazines, while others range as far afield as publishing a poem on the surface of a river. The most recent poetry anthologies he has co-edited and published are Guide to Sydney Rivers and AU/UA: Contemporary Poetry of Ukraine and Australia. He has coordinated workshops across the country. website: http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

Getting By Not Fitting In is available from Island Press

Featured Writer Les Wicks: Four Poems

 

“Art in response to Art”: Rob Walker launches ‘Dreamday’ by Amelia Walker at the 2018 Adelaide Fringe Festival

Posted on by

Dreamday by Amelia Walker was launched by Rob Walker at the Campbelltown Arthouse in Campbelltown, SA on 18 February 2018.

Dreamday Amelia Walker Book Front Cover Image (2)Amelia Walker and I met at Friendly Street Poets sometime around 2005, I think, when she was still nursing and wanting to get out. As a ridiculously precocious and talented teen, she’d already attracted my attention with her tribute to the Adelaide collection Fat Streets & Lots of Squares. I was more than a little impressed that she’d already been published in 2003 when I was 50 and still-to-be-published!

After that, I enjoyed randomly bumping into her at local gigs and discussing poetry. It was at the launch of her Just Your Everyday Apocalypse on an infernally hot night at the Jade Monkey in 2006 that Amelia, Mike Ladd and I had an enthusiastic discussion about forming a kind of impro music/ spoken word ensemble with bass player, trombonist, [and] programmer, Steve Matters, percussionist Andy Mills and sax-player Derek Pascoe. And thus, we begat Max-Mo.

It was Amelia and her partner Richard who house-sat our small farm at Cherry Gardens when Lyn and I lived in Japan in 2012. So, we may not be related but we share a lot of history!

Rob Walker. photograph by Asbjorn Kanck 2018

Rob Walker. photograph by Asbjorn Kanck (2018)

It was around this time that Amelia produced her unique collection Sound and Bundy in which she ambitiously took on the voices and personae of fictional performance poets Pete Lind, Shannon Woodford, Angie Rawkins, and the mysterious Jason Silver.
In the meantime, there has been a PhD and too many health challenges but precious little published poetry. So, it’s an honour and a pleasure to be part of the launch of Amelia’s first new collection in six years.

Now to this book. Dreamscape was originally a South Australian Living Artist exhibition of works presented by Campbelltown Arthouse from August to September 2017 on the theme of dreams. Amelia was approached after the program had been curated to provide poetic responses and earlier versions of her poems formed part of the exhibition.

The tradition of the ekphrastic poem is a long one. You know, those poems which describe a work of art and attempt to further its meaning and our understanding. If any of you are poets yourselves, you’ve probably had a crack at some stage. The danger is succumbing to giving a blow-by-blow physical description of the image and didactically telling the reader/ viewer what they should be seeing.

Amelia Walker. photograph by Asbjorn Kanck 2018

Amelia Walker. photograph by Asbjorn Kanck (2018)

Amelia avoided this pitfall simply by giving her personal reactions to each artist’s work. I say ‘simply’ but she confided to me that there was some angst involved at times. What if she didn’t “get it”? What if her interpretation of the piece was completely at odds with the artist’s intention? All she could do was trust her gut. So, these poems are often a tangential memory triggered by the image.

This is Art in response to Art. And surely this is the ultimate purpose of Art – to elicit a response in another human. (“Hey! I hear what you’re saying… I’ve felt exactly the same way!”) Sometimes, the reaction to an image seems immediate. At other times, there’s a musing, a reflection, days later.

‘Still falling’ is a wondering on the nature of those dreams that slip away before we wake.

“I wonder, what becomes
of those dreams we don’t remember

—the ones that giggle as they slip
through fumbling morning fingers

of consciousness, escaping like gold
and silver glimmers in a clear

yet rapid stream? What makes it flow
so fast, that stream?”

What impresses me about these poems is that there’s no pretense or artifice; no attempt to be arcane or esoteric. These are the kind of musings we all have —expressed better than most of us could! The James Joyce Ulysses kind of consciousness-streams which flow through our heads daily as we go about our mundane jobs, shopping and coffee-drinking.

This surreal internal world is explored in ‘This Comfortable Cage’, a response to Man Trap by Salvador Loreto:

This Comfortable Cage

After dinner, we watch a film
in which a man becomes a rat, only to realize
this is what he always was—trapped
in the box of a high-rise apartment
with higher rent, among the city lights
so bright they drown the stars,
(sometimes we need the dark to see).

In one scene, the man’s teeth crumble
and fall from his mouth,
making way for his jagged rat smile.
It reminds me of nightmares
I used to have recurring: spitting shards
of chalky ivory into a sink
pink with blood.

Losing teeth is common
in nightmares, friends tell me.
Such dreams come, they say
in times of insecurity—some threat
of loss, or losing,
especially loss of face.

My dream encyclopedia claims otherwise:
teeth pertain to speech, or failure to speak,
tooth decay to foul words—maybe lies:
things that may be denied, but never unsaid.
(The rat in the dream regrets
words the man fed to women.)

Through the whole thing, I can’t relax.
I’m thinking about our damn mortgage
—all that paper, all those words—
signed names and numbers
that simultaneously shelter
and bind us, and will tomorrow drive us
back to work, were we’re driven
to smile and smile
as though we mean it.

Mike Ladd, Rob Walker and Amelia Walker. photograph by Asbjorn Kanck 2018

Mike Ladd, Rob Walker and Amelia Walker. photograph by Asbjorn Kanck (2018)

There are poems which might be immediate thoughts on viewing a canvas; others contemplating while riding a bike after days have elapsed. Despite Dr Walker’s vast knowledge of poetics, these writings are decidedly unscholarly and accessible to all. As she responded to the artworks – or did her own mulling on the notion of dreaming – Amelia found that characters began to emerge as they had years before in Sound and Bundy and a kind of verse novel condensed from the fog.

After thousands of years of studying dreams through religion, philosophy, science and art we still have no real idea of the purpose of dreams. Perhaps this is part of our fascination. We are only now beginning to realize the importance of dreaming and our everyday internal world for our mental health.

the audience at the launch of Dreamday by Amelia Walker

The audience at the launch of Dreamday. photograph by Asbjorn Kanck (2018)

In conclusion, I’d like to thank SALA for promoting visual artists (while they’re still alive!) and Campbelltown Arthouse for funding this fine project. Over the past decade or so we’ve seen arts funding dry up from the state government. It’s been so important for community groups and local councils to promote the Arts at a grassroots level. I appreciate this from my own experience —my first poetry collection, micromacro, was funded when it won a competition sponsored by the City of Onkaparinga in 2006. Since then, many other councils have followed the lead.

Thanks to Campbelltown Arthouse, both for initiating the exhibition and publishing the book. All profits from sales will be reinvested in the Arthouse’s work. Finally, congratulations Amelia on your dreamy collection. Consider it launched!

—Rob Walker

 

Rob Walker has produced six poetry collections, including tropeland (Five Islands Press, 2015), Original Clichés (Ginninderra Press, 2016) and Policies & Procedures (Garron Publishing, 2016). His poems have been published in journals in the UK, US and Australia, including Best Australian Poems, cordite, Australian Poetry, Tincture, Verity La, Quadrant, and Rabbit. He recently performed work at the Adelaide Writers’ Week 2018. His short fiction, memoir and essays have appeared in Bewildering Stories and Zodiac Review in the US and Transnational Literature, Pure Slush, fourW New Writing, Short & Twisted, Stringybark Books, and on ABC Radio National.

Dreamday by Amelia Walker (Campbelltown ArtHouse, 2017) is available from Lulu

Dreamday by Amelia Walker launched by Dominique Hecq at the AAWP 2017 conference at Flinders University.

 

“We must dream, and honour our dreams, in order to live actualised lives”- Amelia Walker: Dominique Hecq launches ‘Dreamday’

Posted on by

Dreamday by Amelia Walker launched at the AAWP 2017 conference at Flinders University by Dominique Hecq on 1 December 2017.

Dreamday Amelia Walker Book Front Cover Image (2)Amelia Walker’s new book, Dreamday, vividly tracks the contents of dreams attuned to phenomena that reside both under and beyond the surface of things. The poems retrace the events in one day of the narrator’s life, opening her private world onto the public sphere through a voice that is at once playful, witty, sensitive and assertive.

The Interpretation of Dreams is one of Freud’s most important contributions to psychoanalysis. It is at once surprisingly clear and confusing. The key idea is that ‘The meaning of every dream is the fulfilment of a wish’ and Freud is quite categorical about this. He adds: ‘there cannot be any dreams but wishful dreams’ (134). To illustrate his thesis, Freud tells the story of little Anna who, denied strawberry cake during the day, dreamt that night of enjoying the most delicious cake. Our dreaming activity, Freud explains further, is a regressive reactivation of the hallucinatory means of ‘wish-fulfilment’. Nonetheless, on the same page, Freud hesitates and writes: ‘I feel certain in advance that I shall meet with the most categorical contradictions’ (134). One of these contradictions concerns ‘anxiety dreams’, or nightmares that indeed undermine the idea that dreams fulfil wishes. It is this contradiction that Amelia Walker explores in refreshing ways in her new book of poems, Dreamday. In ‘Prelude’, she asks:

Are dreams simply desires
too wild, too deep to seek
or even speak
by day?

Is that why we have nightmares?
Is that why they frighten us so?

The book provides an array of answers to these questions set against the very idea of interpretation.

Amelia Walker_ photograph by Jason Nahrung

Amelia Walker. photograph by Jason Nahrung

Dreamday comprises twenty-eight ekphrastic poems. It began ‘as a poetic response to Dreamscape, an exhibition of works by South Australian artists at the Campbelltown ArtHouse’. Some of the poems were displayed together with the artworks. Others were written retroactively. The collection is preceded by a ‘Poet’s Note’, or exegetical foreword, where Walker writes about her encounter with the visual material, its emotional impact and influence on her writing process. Here, she states: ‘We must dream, and honour our dreams, in order to live actualised lives. In this, she is closer to Jung than Freud. Jung disputed Freud’s ‘wish fulfilment thesis’. He believed that dreams are doing the work of integrating our conscious and unconscious lives—he called this the process of individuation. In ‘Meeting Morpheus’, Walker briefly reconciles Jung and Freud with direct reference to the act of creation:

Ah, creation…Morpheus would muse. But you’ve mistaken me.
I’m a weaver more so than a maker. My name means ‘form’
which most often means reshaping, much like this old chair
you call a throne—jagged fragments thrown together,
sourced from the wreckage of gone thoughts, polished
‘til seams between mirror and windows blur,
become new reflections, new outlooks.

This process is not work, to me. Or if it is, it’s work that sustains
rather than drains, for along the way I salvage certain parts
of my materials, marvel at the sparkle of unhemmed pieces,
and sometimes even arrangements abandoned along the way
–failure merits more credit than it gets.

Just as Morpheus balances success and failure, this book balances night and day, dream and daydream, truth and desire. Above all, it resists the ‘meaning’ ascribed to dreams, including dreams within dreams and other nightmares, by psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and other interpreters of the human psyche.

– Dominique Hecq


Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She read Germanic Philology at the University of Liège and then flew over to Australia where she completed a PhD on exile in Australian Literature. She also holds an MA in Literary Translation. Dominique is the author of a novel, three collections of short fiction, five books of poetry, and two plays. Over the years, her work has been awarded a variety of prizes, including The Melbourne Fringe Festival Award for Outstanding Writing and Spoken Word Performance (1998), The New England Review Prize for Poetry (2005), The Martha Richardson Medal for Poetry (2006), and the inaugural AALITRA Prize for Literary Translation in poetry from Spanish into English (2014). Her poems have been published in anthologies, journals and on websites in Australia and overseas. Having recently reconnected with her mother-tongue, Dominique is currently negotiating the pleasures and perils of self-translation. Hush: a fugue (2017) is her latest book of poetry.

Dreamday by Amelia Walker (Campbelltown ArtHouse, 2017) is available from Lulu

Dreamday by Amelia Walker launched by Rob Walker at the 2018 Adelaide Fringe Festival