RIP Peter Spencer Lowe (1926-2012)

My father and my friend, soft and contrary as a Sydney autumn.

New Poetry by William Wright Harris

Ode on an Egg

Jungian theory of

Universal Archetypes;

an egg symbolizing

fertility for a

small tribe in

Africa, for Sioux

Nation. Every culture

has a flood myth

and vampire lore-

dragons, serpents, worms.

The blonde hair of

Freya and Aphrodite-

The beards of Tyr

and Ares, pointing

towards war-

Symbolism of all

creation, frying in a

pan, on my stove.

- William Wright Harris 2012

 Ode on a Chicken Pot Pie

Reading Bukowski

is like

eating a Chicken Pot Pie.

American lamentations,

the sore muscles from

working fourteen hours a day

six days a week

under

the hot California sun

are the chicken.

The sauce is race track poems-

gambling in their

drunken

loneliness again.

Peas, carrots, and

other vegetables

and

spices are the

references to Tchaikovsky,

Pound, Van Gogh.

Those honest chinaski

poems the cooked flour and egg

baked into a crust

Word by word

page for page

bite by bite

on the end of a fork.

- William Wright Harris 2012

William's poetry has appeared in seven countries in such literary journals as The Cannon’s Mouth, Ascent Aspirations, and Write On!!! He is a student at the University of Tennessee- Knoxville, where I have been lucky enough to study poetry in workshop settings with such poets as Jesse Janeshek, Marilyn Kallet, Arthur Smith, and Marcel Brouwers.

Come Celebrate

COME & CELEBRATE LANGUAGE

On Sunday 5th February, 2:30 PM you are invited to a gathering with the

launch of five titles:

AU/UA Contemporary Poetry of Ukraine & Australia

Les Wicks - Shadows of the Read

Paul Cliff – Vanuatu Moon: prose poems –Books 1 & 2

Les Wicks - Barking Wings

at

the Friend in Hand Hotel

58 Cowper St, Glebe

upstairs bar

2.30pm

*

AU/UA Contemporary Poetry of

Ukraine & Australia

This e-book is the first collection of contemporary poetry from both countries in both languages accompanied by rich photography. Exchanges between our two dynamic cultures are yet to fully develop & this work is an important step in that process. Work includes some of both nations’ leading writers plus some younger voices.

The title can be downloaded freely at:

http://meusepress.tripod.com/AUUA.pdf

http://issuu.com/meusepress/docs/auua

http://krokbooks.com/ebooks/krokbooks.com_auua.pdf

ISBN 978-966-2362-84-8

Published by Krok Books in association with Meuse Press.

The anthology will be launched by Prof. Marko Pavlyshyn. Bilingual reading of poems on the day. Unique opportunity to hear a great old language from a young country.

Yummy Ukrainian snacks will be provided.

Event generously sponsored by Ukrainian Studies Foundation in Australia
and Ukrainian Council of NSW.

*

Also available is Les Wicks’ Shadows of the Read – a chapbook of poetry in Ukrainian & English by Krok Books.

*

Paul Cliff – Vanuatu Moon: prose poems Books 1 and 2.

Cliff's wry and observant take on Vanuatu, in two booklets (chapbooks). His fourth (and fifth) published volumes of poetry.
Another great title from PressPress. $9.90 each

*

Les Wicks - Barking Wings

Wicks’ 10^th book is full of feathers, life, shadow & laughter. Beguiling language, a bam-bam-bam of image is all underpinned by a core accessibility that invites you in...”

$9.90 published by PressPress

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Should you be unable to attend copies of the books can be purchased.

Paul Cliff's books are available from: http://www.wellsprungproductions.com.au/PressPress/PressPress_Home.html

Les Wicks' Barking Wings is available from:

http://www.wellsprungproductions.com.au/PressPress/PressPress_Home.html

or from the poet's homepage

http://leswicks.tripod.com/books.htm . Shadows of the Read can also be ordered here

New Poetry by E.F. Schraeder

How to Retire with a Million Dollars

Start ten years ago

invest in everything you

believe against.

Pray for redemption, luck.

Move to a country that believes

in health for all people,

or just in people.

Exploit advantages.

Stake your claim in the shrinking pie.

Prey.

--E. F. Schraeder

E.F. Schraeder's work has appeared in Haz Mat Review, Blue Collar Review, Hiram Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a new manuscript of poems.

Battin' for Sachin

 One of cricket’s myriad sins (in the eyes of some but perhaps when all is said and done not so many in poetry's equally arcane fraternity) is that the gentle game is a lingering ghost of British Imperialism played almost exclusively in and between former colonies such as my own, and whose passionate embrace of this "chess on grass" appears to outsiders to have blinded one quarter of the world to an endless trespass of former masters.

I have watched a horse beaten as a child and thus can do no more than to remind those who may have forgotten that 1975 is in the past, not the future. 


In Australia (least set-upon because most seasonally prized of Britain's former colonies), cricket, most mellifluous of ball games, has been for some time now inextricably linked to a peculiar form of nostalgia rooted in the early decades of last century - that apparent “Golden Age” of ANZACS, Phar Lap, the “fair go” and, of course, the “Don” whose almost perfect batting average of 99.94 has served as the Post Office Box number of our national broadcaster ever since. The bastard son done good.


In India, home of the greatest batsman since Don Bradman and subject of this piece, cricket evokes little if any such cloying nostalgia, but on the contrary appears to serve as a conduit for the future hopes and aspirations of 1.2 billion people. I don’t believe for a second that every single one of those 1.2 billion has a passionate love of the game, but if the current reaction to the Indian team’s dramatic form slump is any indication, cricket carries a weight of expectation in that country that at times threatens to break it. 


Until the relatively recent advent of 20-over cricket (the game is now played in three official formats, perhaps a unique situation in ball sports), world cricket was often (and with some justification) labelled the most “state-centric” of sports, for it is only at the international level that the game has attracted more than peripheral attention. 


To passionate participants and followers of the game in regions as diverse as Afghanistan and Denmark,  such breezy summations of their part in this strange little community of world cricket may seem a little unjust, but the fact remains that until 2005 the greatest draw card in world cricket was the hard-fought contest between national teams, only ten of which have achieved Test-playing status to the present day. That the 20-over format has shifted this focus back to the club level (albeit at this stage moneyed franchises) has been a priceless innovation in this blogger’s opinion.

The career of Sachin Tendulkar, remarkable in merely statistical terms alone, is equally remarkable in that it has spanned a dramatic era of change in what many still regard as a static game, from 1988 until the present day. There can be few other elite athletes in any sport of any era who have performed at such a consistently high level for so long. But more than this, there can be few who have shouldered the weight of expectation of so many people at a pivotal moment in their history with such dignity, forthrightness, intelligence, and humility. Indeed, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama chuckled characteristically after watching Sachin caress the ball around a tiny ground in the Himalayan foothills: “I think if the Buddha ever played a game it would probably be cricket”.


A well-worn argument against cricket is that it encapsulates a certain stultified “Englishness”, in other words that it eschews physical confrontation and speedy resolution for the maintenance of a code of conduct that lays emphasis on how the game is played rather than the result. That it benefits no-one but those who can participate or who can afford the time to watch. A fruitless, vaguely sinister leisure.


Sounds like poetry.


Doubtless such values were the prevailing ethos for a certain period in the late 19th century (when European Imperialism and rules of engagement were at their height and the first Test Match was being nutted out in Melbourne), but the reality is, as always, a little more grubby. For most of its long long history, cricket has been played in a rather more mercantile spirit. In fact, the strict demarcation between “Gentleman” and “Professional” players right up until the 1950’s (in English cricket at least) suggests that the Test cricket innovation of 1877 may have been a last vain attempt to purge the game of some of its more nefarious elements. 

However, it didn’t take long for people (nefarious or otherwise) to realise that a game that can last 5 days (or at times in its long history as many as 10!), and still offer no result, must be serving up the inveterate gambler even more opportunities to stake a wager.


Bookies, both then and now, have almost brought the game to its knees, drawn by the explosive nature of the game, albeit toward the bottom end. How many runs will be scored in the first over? How many times will the wind blow off the umpire’s hat before tea? How many times will that brilliant young Pakistani bowler with his whole (now ruined) life ahead of him bowl a no-ball in a session at Lords?


Sachin Tendulkar, “The Little Master”, despite the pressure placed on him by the Mumbai bookies early in his career, has not only risen above such viscera, but seems to dwell in a completely different universe ruled by the admittedly complex yet insuperably fair laws of cricket. To see him interviewed is to see cricket light up his face. He is cricket both as it has been and as it is becoming. What the game will be, what India will be, without him is beyond even this humble blogger to foresee. Other than to say that we are all the richer, whether a follower of the odd little arcane game or not, for having had him pass through this increasingly crowded, frenetic world with us.

New Poetry by Phillip Ellis

"15th of January, 2012"

An epiphany is not reached:
the sun sets in cloud, and is hidden,
and the midden of evening is cool.
It will rain later, heavily.

A currawong shuttles its name
into the late summer silence. Air
of the times, it is repeated twice;
no-one else speaks, not man, not bird.

If I were a boor, I would shout
insolence to the silence around
me; but I do not. I am not child
enough to break silence with noise.










The verandah is cool and dim
enough. My large cup of tea is still
warm. I drink some of it. And I cross
my ankles, lean back in my chair.

An epiphany is not reached:
the sun sets in cloud, and is hidden,
and the midden of evening is cool.
It will rain later, heavily.


- Phillip Ellis 2012

Calling all Poets of Oz

As much as I am sure we have all enjoyed the flood of submissions from our cousins north of the line, Bluepepper is keen to see more work from less troubled regions, so I am calling on all poets from across this sodden isle to read the guidelines and submit. Payment is a pat on the back, but I doubt that will serve as much of a deterrent to my fellow scribes, for as Dransfield once penned in the cabin of an outback rig, "to be a poet in Australia is the ultimate commitment". 

And while we're veering towards the parochial, I would be particularly interested in seeing some work from poets working within cooee of the Bluepepper headquarters in the upper Blue Mountains. Nothing thrust at me in the Station Bar, mind, but submitted electronically and without threats to let down my balding tyres.

New Poetry by Benjamin Dodds

Our Lady of Yanco

Mary

rendered in concrete

stands serenely in a block of the same stuff

inside the sheltering niche of an upended bathtub.

She was built to last ­­– her salmon drapery applied

over two consecutive weekends

to ensure the undercoat dried completely

before the laying on of her blue mantel

in All Weather Exterior.

She’s only faded slightly since then

mostly in the face.

Who could be blamed

for closing their eyes

to the rippling convection

of such Summer sun?

- Benjamin Dodds 2012

New Poetry by B.Z. Niditch

MANY EYES

So long as the rain
in late August steps
between watery walks
midday in Manhattan
with grey clouds overhead,
and clubbing tourists
sparkle with champagne,
your own mouth rests
near green bottles
of the lemony room
hearing jazz piano
for four hands,
your red lazy eye
staring at the overcast
resembling the argentite
of a showery sky,
Auden from across
an ocean of time
fills up twice
alive as animated angels
whom he enlightens
until daylight disappears.

- B.Z. Niditch 2012

B.Z. NIDITCH is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher.

His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review,; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France);Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others.

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

New Poetry by Stuart Barnes

Villanelle

on reading 'One Art', 'Mad Girl's Love Song',
and 'Do not go gentle into that good night'

So, how to start? Like Bishop, Plath, or Thomas,

arguing the colon, fidgeting with parentheses,

shadowing decasyllabics? This is a song

(of neither loss, nor madness, nor death)

of the bird returning to whit the song itself. So,

so, how to start? Like Bishop, Plath, or Thomas,

summoning that wonderland, projecting megalo-

mania, blowing unstoppable bottles of whisky,

shadowing decasyllabics? This is a song

of the bird returning to whit the song itself,

of repudiating cities, moon and anger.

So, how to start? Like Bishop? Plath? Or Thomas?

Hell no! Discard the cells’ nostalgia! Constrict

the GOD-delusions! Clarify the Scotch and the

shadowing decasyllabics! This is a song

of the bird returning to whit the song itself. Oh!

but the white-eyed bird’s forgotten what to whit!

so, how to start? Like Bishop? Plath? Or Thomas,

shadowing decasyllabics? This is a song  

- Stuart Barnes 2012

Stuart Barnes is slowly arranging the manuscript for his first book of poetry, and writing his first novel. He lives in Melbourne.

New Poetry by Robert H. Demaree Jr.

LINES WRITTEN THE DAY AFTER VIRGINIA’S GRADUATION, MAY 30, 1984

The gym is empty now--

Graduation was last night.

The polished floor is lightly scuffed

By the shoes of girls in long white dresses:

The rented chairs are stacked against the wall,

And beside them yesterday’s magnolias and

My orange extension cord

And the discarded programs,

Where you said they’d be.

Last night I shared my daughter’s joy

With the calmness of a minister at a wedding,

Or a funeral:

A school man on a working day.

But something has come to me today,

Walking the halls,

Picking up after graduation:

Here is where she stood last night to give her speech,

And here is where she sat laying out the newspaper,

And here her desk for calculus or English,

Or where she tried out for cheerleader:

And here are all the places of the part of her life

We thought was ours

But is no more.

An empty school, the day after graduation,

In the cool and eerie light of the sun’s eclipse--

They say this will not happen again

For thirty years or so:

I wonder if I shall see it.

The men are moving the rented organ now,

And I suppose that if I leave the flowers where they are today

They will still be there in September,

Dried, brittle, incongruous against the opening of school.

It has dawned on me thorough this day’s strange, dream-like light

That I have indeed lived to see her coming forth:

My tears belong to ritual,

As you said they would.

It has dawned on me through this day’s strange, dream-like light

That Virginia doesn’t go to school here anymore.

The men carrying away the rented chairs

Disrupt the practice of the cheerleaders:

My younger daughter squints in the now-bright sun of noontime

And plans with friends for other days.

- Robert H. Demaree Jr., 2012

Robert retired in 2001 after 42 years as a teacher and administrator in schools in the Southeastern U.S. He has family ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire; thus he hopes that his interest in what Donald Hall calls “a pleasure of place” does not preclude a look at a larger landscape.

New Poetry by Les Wicks

Tom Collins

I fall beneath my cart of names

leave colour in the wound.

There is consequence in each unanswered call

silence beyond glance.

So, leave colour to the wound up

Eat feathers in the shade

silence any glance

open up this clever fade.

I eat feathers into shade.

Among birds I am a dog,

silence any chance.

We rut beneath applause.

Among birds I am a god

but children mock my graves.

We cut beneath plausibility

to deliver only ether.

But children are only grapes

we harvest their despair

delighted under ether, a stumpy photograph offered

to the gyprock lusts of life.

We divest their despair

then lose our hair

before their gimpy loves of looting

we are the kings, tossed out of town.

We lost our air

nobody is there

we were the kings, lost in brown

claim nothing just here.

We all fall beneath our cart of names…

consequence assured.

- Les Wicks 2011

Weather

In February, the grey-tinged cuprous-green distinctive black scaled

juvenile Dugite Snake seeks out new territory on the dunes west off

                                                                                                             new money.

One looks for the linear.

Container ships shuffle,

Rottnest Island stakes the horizon. Abandoned leash,

a clipped Husky understands that

Obedience is just

a tufted philosophic conceit. Our owners call.

This contended lasagne

sees the colour of tomatoes, or rust

in paving & bricks.

We refuse the hazard

of lemon light, cornflower

laps along the lapis

our venomous build beside all careful repair.

To remove one’s clothes, we

accept the sun like leaves.

Sand beds, sand castles,

the invert birth each immersion.

The dunes seethe with otherness –

take my photo, take your time –

these minor plunders

are the least we can do perhaps

an aspiration

in our complex little tides.

Melon Hill stands above

our wriggling constructs. Like

the dugite territorial,

we are the seams of cloud that ride

a thigh, radiatus 360°

the tablets of life not

mostly us. Straight can’t

be busy, can’t be still.

These are the lines we own, we

are inked. To understand

sometimes burns, scarification

that passes for writing.

Sunset queues into the Indian Ocean,  to

cave-art Bobtail Skinks on the sand

their indigent homage to the tones around -

gamboge faces above a pale blue belly.

We map the streams of grace,

our hunger paints in the names

that fail to actually affix

(they call this river Swan).

I wait for the colours

we bathe in everything.

- Les Wicks 2011

Les is one of Australia's most consistently interesting poets. His latest book is Shadows of the Read (Krok, 2011) Ukraine $10.00 (Aust) in Ukrainian & English http://krokbooks.com 

A bit of moderation please

The idea that Sydney's most literary frangipani, Marieke Hardy, is her own cyber-stalker stretches even this blogger's credulity to breaking point. 

Thus, news that Marieke has been ordered by the courts to pay out $13000 to the man she wrongly accused of being said cyber-pest has an irony even her posturing on the First Tuesday Book Club could never hope to trump.

Bluepepper is among the first to recognise that some very nasty things have been blogged about our Marieke over the years, but as one who has so obviously coveted a public profile (constructed, I might add, on very shaky foundations), she should have been prepared for the flip-side of celebrity (it is, after all, the enduring obsession and governing principle of a certain Sydney milieu in whose serried ranks I have been known to stamp and bellow). Penning a shabbily written "memoir" peppered with rather pedestrian sexual adventures cannot have done much to soothe these savage cyber-beasts, none of whom seem to have warmed to her predilection for Old World smarm. 

I am not sure of my legal position here, and thus I will err on the side of caution and not repeat any of the poisonous bile directed at that flower in her hair. Thankfully the disgusting blog, "Marieke Hardy is Scum" has been closed down and speculation continues over the identity of the blogger.

Suffice it to say, Marieke has posted her apology to the wrongly-accused, forked out her 13 grand to same, and hopefully learned a hard lesson in the price of fame. It is the sincere hope of Bluepepper that in the future she perhaps learns to moderate her public profile to be more in keeping with her literary pretensions, removes that ridiculous flower, and concedes that there is an element to irony more substantial than her Cheshire grin.

New Poetry by Phillip Ellis

"Not a Sonnet about Frank O'Hara's Reginald Grundies"

If I could be a single thing
in all the world of single things,
and be a single thing forgotten,
uncelebrated, then, I guess
I'd rather be O'Hara's jockstrap.
And not the first, and not the last,
the one before the very last.

Imagine: I would formfit, snug,
but not so snug I cut the blood off,
and give him comfort and support
and confidence that all his skidmarks
stayed on my surface, not his trousers,
and then, placed scrunched upon the washing,
I'd be fulfilled, my task complete.

*****

"Gordian Knots"

How fortunate is he
who can breathe and read
the breadth of an ode
sinking within, the ice
of a glacier gouging
high, hanging valleys
into a mountain range.

How fortunate is she
who can breathe and read
the sunlight-sharp sonnet,
singing of mysteries
embodied in a gold-bright
moment, the mysteries
of the moment made magick.

And fortunate are they
who can breathe and read
a pantoum poured into
shape, beaten and quenched,
fired and beaten
and quenched, until
the form is bright like lightning.

For the poem is no
gentle thing, when it seizes
the dawn, or the dusk
or soft night, and brightens
with the glare of seven swords
cutting the Gordian knots
of our minds.

*****

"Name me, I Die"

I am the sound of my name,
bounded by sound. I grate,
because my nerves and senses swell
by gods' decrees.
Thoughts of welcome verses
clot like cream;
I dream of burning,
meaningless words
and no answers.

If you speak, I die.
Release my name
to both worst and best
in their vain quest for flight
from the burdens of time.

Name me, I die.


- Phillip Ellis 2011

Seasons Greetings

Bluepepper 

wishes all our faithful readers 

a Merry Christmas........

........and a Happy Boxing Day