The Enemy

"No anger inside means no enemy outside."

- Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche

Dark Flame

Many of you from beyond these gilded shores may be wondering what the hell is going on in Sydney at the moment. Well, you're not alone. Yesterday areas of the inner west were no-go areas for "Skips" (people of Anglo-Celtic appearance) as attested to by my friend who says she was kindly escorted back out of Granville by two squad cars while her boss sat next to her re-writing his schedule for the day. This morning I received two pages of hate-fueled bilge in my inbox addressed to the "Sons and Daughters of the ANZACS." Apparently 90 years ago young boys died on the cliffs of Gallipoli so their descendants could prey on the innocent and defenceless. There's only one thing I despise more than a mindless thug, and that's a mindless thug who has to drape his sociopathic tendencies in the flag of this or any other country. Flags are symbols of unity, morons, not some gold pass to a fucking boys club where you have to check your racial credentials at the door. STOP BURNING MY CITY!

I am a very heart-sick poet downunder.

Margie Cronin in Skopje

Yes, you read right. One of Australia's most brilliant and daring poets, MTC Cronin, has just released a collection of new and selected work in both English and Macedonian. I have already eaten up my advance copy and suggest you do likewise. Just click on the "Buy Now" button in the Bluepepper bookshop to the right of your screen for your copy.

American Beauty

I have pasted in a review of an intriguing new work by American poet John Hospodka below. Just click on the Post heading and follow the links to purchase straight from the publisher.


GREETINGS FROM HARDSCRABBLE, CHICAGO
By John Hospodka
Bohemian Pupil Press, 63 Pages

Greetings From Hardscrabble, Chicago embodies not only a time and place but a state of mind. Just the title evokes images of the Chicago’s South Side much the same as Hell’s Kitchen can never be mistaken for anything other than the Manhattan neighborhood that bears that particular name. John Hospodka’s words are much more than brush strokes of personality. He adeptly reaches his hand into the heart and soul of Hardscrabble and delivers us a canvas of prose and poetry that breathes the way art should breathe-- with blood pressure and depth. The “Mr. Man Monologues”, might easily be viewed as a trio of short-short stories but, in reality, they’re a “conversation” between the reader and the book itself. Mr. Hospodka’s subtle crafting subdues the reader just before exciting him. A very nice touch that one discovers well into reading the monologues. Hardscrabble’s centerpiece, “Soliloquy At Hi-Fi” begs to be read, especially with an opening sentence that casually states “A better man couldn’t have killed her.” Hospodka’s blend of tragedy and hope serves as the concrete mix with which he mends the shatter marks of a broken heart.

Hospodka’s scalpel-edge poetry is well worth reading. “The Night They Tore Old Comiskey Down” is a superb visual opening for this book. “Song From Hardscrabble” is heartbreaking while “Hotel Chicago” brings us the Windy City much the way a vintage photograph forever captures a single moment in the life of a neighborhood. The finale, “The Reckoning of a Post-9/11 Bohemian Hardscrabbler” is the perfect ending doubling as the perfect beginning.

Greetings From Hardscrabble, Chicago weighs in at 63 pages but it is the first volume of Hospodka’s South Side Trilogy. John Hospodka’s writing jabs like a Golden Gloves boxer, always keeping you on your feet so you can feel the next punch as it hits.

Reading John Hospodka’s work is reading Chicago


- John A. Mangarella 2004

BOOKSHOP

Bluepepper is setting up a bookshop with an emphasis on self-published works of poetry and titles from small presses. A pay pal link has been posted on the page and I am once again inviting poets and editors to contact me regarding titles they are keen to get out there. I know how difficult it can be and would simply act as a first point of contact. However, anyone who fails to meet their commitments either end will get the full BLUEPEPPER treatment. Just click on the EMAIL ME link to the right of this post.

ADIEU

Thankyou Brian Lara. Not just for accepting some questionable umpiring decisions with all the style and grace the cricketing public has come to expect of you, not just for your magnificent, near-flawless double century in the Adelaide Test brought to a (rare) fifth day conclusion today, but for your even-tempered, wise, magnanimous speech during the closing ceremonies. Why do I love cricket so much? Well.....To watch a man left alone out there against perhaps the greatest bowling attack in history looking for all the world like a child picking flowers for his mother is one thing. But then to hear him speak with such incidental ease of the generosity of Australians, of their boundless mirth and ease with strangers, their fishwife banter in the slips, well, it almost made this blogger feel like the member of some tribe worth knowing. Pure poetry, courage, poise, and dignity. You will be sorely missed on these shores, Brian Lara. I hope the Carribean respects you as much for the man as for the cricketer.

POETS BEWARE

BLUEPEPPER is currently seeking submissions of poetry, reviews and essays on a wide range of literary and cultural topics. Previously published work is acceptable as long as due acknowledgments are made. 3-4 poems per submission and articles no longer than 1500 words. To submit click on the email me icon to the right of this page and paste work in the body of the email. Attachments will not be opened. Payment is a little bluepepper beside your name. Copyright remains with the author.

Closing Time

Being the avid barfly that I am (no, that is not an oxymoron), I find it interesting that just as the "Howard mandate" presses in on civil society from all sides, the licencing hours in NSW have been drastically relaxed. An Aussie version of bread and circuses? Surely you would have to be a little addled to believe the Howard Ministry has really thought through its "beige revolution". The sedition clause in the new anti-terrorism bill is a truly reckless piece of legislation, handing power to the same mindless drones responsible for the ordeals of Ms Rau, Alvarez et al. And from where I sit (on a pay cheque that barely covers the fuel bill down the mountain), the new IR laws place far too much emphasis on qualities not exactly surfeit in the corporate world. I'm talking about empathy, largesse, dignity, honour, all words that clang like Victorian pot-boilers in this shiny happy world willed into existence (ironically enough) by a bunch of men and women probably more at home in Northanger Abbey than the hushed and bristling streets of Howard's End.

All I can urge myself and others to do is to test the new laws, poke and prod at these weasel words transparency flexibility and see whether or not they bite. I figure it's like Pascal's gambit. Either way this government has shown its true colours and who it really represents. All it will take then is for the country to do the same. Poets and writers should all feel revitalised rather than frightened or dispirited. I know I do, and hey, the pubs are open 24/7!

Light on the Hill

David Musgrave gets our vote this week for his launch of Puncher & Wattman, a new poetry publisher. Funded with prize money, savings and income from his day job, Musgrave starts off on the front foot with a new title by Nick Riemer "James Stinks (and so does Chuck)". This will be closely followed by titles from Peter Kirkpatrick, John Watson and Simon West. Musgrave says he felt the need for a publisher that "appealed unapologetically to readers of poetry rather than a wider market." Musgrave wisely expects to make most of his sales via the internet (seeing how all the bookshop shelves are choked with political memoir). For more info, just click on the "Light on the Hill" post heading. You get our vote, David.

Meanwhile Louise "what's-poetry-got-to-do-with-it? Adler is continuing to tell us all how clever she is for signing up a clapped out pollie to pen a lot of turgid, narcissistic bile and shamelessly manipulating the media to fill the shelves of every bookshop in the country. I am old enough to remember the days when Melbourne University Press published poetry, but then we poets are something of a liability in the shiny new world envisaged by those seduced by weasel words and the relentless shift of capital from a living culture and community to this faceless, heedless thing called economy.

Benito di Fonzo's "Her, leaving, as the Acid hits"

In this world of short attention spans the need to move through a narrative at a fast pace has delivered us the Verse Novel. Note - Dorothy Porter's success with books such as The Monkey's Mask. Now comes performance poet and playwright Benito Di Fonzo's "story in the form of a free verse novel in four movements and two tennuously linked appendices."

This free-flowing fear and loathing in Newtown circa 1990s is ostensibly the story
of being dumped for a drug dealing dwarf barman whilst tripping off your nut in the
early hours of a Sunday morning.

However, Di Fonzo's history as a performance writer (he used to co-host Bardflys at The
Friend In Hand) gives his style a Spalding Gray like 'oral' quality that lends the
book an intimate conversational immediacy, keeping the reader hooked, and
allowing Di Fonzo to use the primary plot as a springboard for a series of sub-plots
into everything from junkie flatmates, how to score Rohypnol in Surry Hills,
defeating the 'pissed spins,' and other sordid tales of Bacchanal, without ever
losing the main thread.

The use of a free verse form keeps the story flowing quickly, yet poetry also gives
it that broken scattered sense of the holiday in the psychotropics that our anti-
hero is attempting to survive.

Small Sydney publisher, Independence Jones Guerilla Press, delivers a story for
anyone who's ever taken the wrong drugs at the wrong time in the wrong place,
and been able to do bugger all about it but ride it out. So turn the page, tune on,
and drop in to this Newtownian fable of sex, drugs and poetry.


- Hilton Freebourne 2005

Hilton Freebourne is a published author, poet and a man of the arts.

Poetry by Wayne H.W. Wolfson

Sikozu


What little is left of the candle before it births only smoke. The rooftop across the street, the Cutty Sark billboard, like the stage of a bankrupt theater, now only lit by its only two un-smashed flood lights.

A lone car horn plays the blues.

The room viewed in this blurred miasma, right before sleep. Blurred still. At this point why bother to look?

To catch a glimpse of grace. The obscure origin of want.

All these years, the dead weight of an empty bed, but only on occasion.

Next to me the sideways shadow of her, or her.

None are better.



- Wayne H.W. Wolfson 2005

TREVOR HEWETT "PENINSULA"

Review of Peninsula, Selected Poems by Trevor Hewett


These are poems about the magic of nature, or more specifically about places. In fact just about every poem is subtitled with a setting, mostly rivers or locations in and around Cornwall. And Hewitt does well to get across not only the look of these places but the feel of them.

The natural world is a source of solace, of contentment and enlightenment for us, maybe even salvation, but we have to go looking for it. In Valley (Bodmin Moor) the experience of nature almost converts the writer into a believer. He is saying that these are some of the places where we can find an escape from the unsatisfying rat-race. We have lost touch with our roots and need to get back to the garden, and in Light Years (River Camel), Hewett despairs that we might never get back.


…and you wonder how

we got this way

and whether any notion of content

we may have had

is now as distant and receding

as the galaxies above.


These are not original ideas or themes by any means. However there is a surprising depth in these seemingly common images of nature. I found Gulls (Widemouth Bay, Cornwall) quite moving, although it is a short poem about the way these birds face into the storm.

Most of the poems reflect the magic of nature, but together the images build a detailed picture with nuances. There is also the powerful, indifferent, cruel side of the natural world, but Hewett finds the life-sustaining aspect even of this. I particularly enjoyed the way throughout the book he made an entity out of nothing, of turning silence into a magical force. One poem ends with the line ‘The silence swells.’

A book purely about landscapes would be dull, and Hewett breaks it up with a few pieces about people or events. Miro (Padstow) tells of a refugee from war, who finds a fairly bleak suburban life to be paradise compared to the horrors from whence he fled.

Hewett makes good use of alliteration in some poems, using that very English way of filling lines with contrasting consonants. In Swannery (Abbotsbury, Dorset) he reminded me of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And this poem is written to a strict meter and rhyme structure, although the book is mainly free verse.

The poem Fisherman (Looe River, Cornwall), sums up the themes that run throughout the book. Nature is profound and beautiful, it is the source of our wisdom. But the last line ‘its unbearable beauty’ unsettles us while we’re enjoying the comforting idea that nature has all the answers. It implies that the communing experience is not all easy.

This is Trevor Hewett’s third collection of poems. On the basis of this one I think the others would be well worth a read.


Clark Gormley

Trevor Hewett’s book is available from www.independencejones.com

[Clark Gormley is a writer/ poet/ singer. He has been performing his work at Poetry at the Pub in Newcastle for several years. His poems have been published in the Poetry at the Pub Annual Anthologies and a selection of his work in the book, 'Turn of Phrase'. He has also been published in the University of Newcastle magazine Opus, Heist magazine and SKiVE magazine online].

Reductio ad absurdum

In another piece of utterly irresponsible journalism, the Sydney Morning Herald did its best to whip the populace into a frenzy yesterday after the dramatic shooting and arrests of scores of suspected terrorists in Sydney's west. References to 'global conflict' were a constant refrain, but as always in these types of stories in these types of times, we only got one half of one side of the story. I am not poking a bony finger here at the new anti-terrorism legislation, because but for a few obvious concerns (and the nature of its passage through parliament along with the startling acquiesence of the states) it strikes me as a fairly sound piece of legislation. My gripe here is with the media, with their complete lack of vigilance, especially when we were perhaps never more in need of a sceptical, partisan, vigilant media. This is becoming an addendum to my "if this war goes on....." post, but perhaps that's as it should be. I have, however, for no reason other than that I love his work, been reading a book about the death of Christopher Marlowe,in which the mind and motivations of the spy is picked over a great deal (Marlowe was spy in the service of Queen Elizabeth I and appears to have been murdered by Elizabeth's spies). I have been struck by many parallels between the Reformation struggles and our own times all through the book, particularly the mindless hysteria, and the utter vitriol spouted daily in government circles, but this comment particularly struck me (probably because I read it last night): "This is the reductio ad absurdum of the intelligence world: self-perpetuating, self-referring. They live in and by the confusion they create. That is really their only allegiance." (Charles Nicholl from "The Reckoning") LEST WE FORGET.

Poetry by Danny Gentile

Matters of State



i



You

bellicose

raucous



give strange

adapted words

& raise a glass



You demand

an upstanding

audience that



race through

the vestibule of

a 5 star hotel



chasing another

Pick me! Pick Me!

from childhood



You offer a toast

words like dice

words of focus



runes in ash

& an exotic

cigarette



from a case

neither ornate

nor austere



Your appearance

Raison Detre for

a special event



The acclaimed

Cause Celebre

of the moment



Ice sculpture

smoking under

a chandelier



ii



You there!



You there!



Coining a phrase.



Your there?



How about

one for the

management?



One for

the ladies??



How about

I ask you

for a change?



The moment

was never

self evident



with you

far too busy

arranging poise



Let’s not

get ahead

of ourselves



means: don’t

complain you

have no choice



the thinker delivers



the clown destroys



Sluice



Through days of sorrow

& iron-cast brow, nights

of water unsettle dreams



to sweat the day open

& drag its furrow over

faces that languor there.



Every face is anguishing

staunch expressions of

appraisal & approximate;



all very well in waiting

for night & its further

hinged apprehension.



Light opens onto you in

fish-tanks from it’s bulb.

You are not the same under



every differing filament.

The city carries pages that

drink from the overflow



as if it were a stream,

not slopping stagnation

jarred in this. You swallow



fish; an irksome action

offers them as coins that

only flounder against all



that is real & rational.

You plead waters to abate,

but little ever comes of it.



Night & day are relentless

& the pavement a fist that

hardens you down. Scales



have flaked to nothing

but dreams that carry you

uncertainly & carry you



in arms of automation

to where the field still

cries in echo for the rain.



Danny Gentile 2005

Dead Poets

On the subject of war, terror and the death of literacy, today marks the 87th anniversary of the death of the English poet Wilfred Owen. If you have been living on another planet for the past century and have not read any Wilfred Owen, I suggest you begin with "Strange Meeting". For the rest of us, vale company commander Wilfred Owen, gunned down trying to capture a railway junction a week before the armistice. A sorry loss. Essential reading.

If this war goes on.....

Was a short, plaintive work written by Hermann Hesse during the darkest days of the First World War. It echoed many other writers and thinkers of the time, including Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell, who believed they were witnessing the values they held dear being subsumed by the dreadful expediencies of world war. People who see the same thing happening now, and who blame this "slide" on the war on terror may be conveniently forgetting the slow capitulation that was already occuring long before September 11th 2001. That we rely on our leaders to protect us now is unfortunate, because our complacency and self-absorption over many years has produced a venal and heartless ruling class who hold the citizens in as much contempt as we hold them. That this slide has been mirrored by a decline in literacy and of any meaningful public discourse should be a surprise to no-one. For us to have been brought to this place we must have been at least partly willing. Everywhere I go I encounter somnambulists utterly devoid of humour, with only a scant repertoire of what were once regarded as normal human responses. A large chunk of life is simply not present in them, or perhaps more to the point, their first instinct is to recoil when touched by the visceral and the idiosyncratic. I intend doing everything I can to reverse this trend. I believe good writing will encourage good reading, which may in some small way induce good living. If I have scared anyone I apologise, but it is all too easy to blame the politicians for whom we voted for a situation we could have very easily avoided had we been more alive to the world around us. Read read read, good people! Here endeth the lesson for today.

Poetry by Andrew Jackson

SOMETHING ELSE

Since the door was locked, I’ve learnt so much.
A face can feel the sun yet forget what it's for.

Bars obscure the world, the room
to stand up, take a few steps. Legs buckle

even under the weight of a body with no soul.
At intervals I'm fed, given medication. The walls

absorb the smell of the dead who arrived earlier.
Battery is a system of power that pulls everything in.

I have no desire to lash out. The voices are calm
and impersonal. If I can be stomached, if

the risk to the population is low enough, a detached
voice might announce my release. These wings

are withered and pecked to the bone,
and see the future, like the sky, is an open

lie. Everything is a weapon.
Bleeding, refusing food, speechless, I speak

the only dialect left. Outside are people
who say they wouldn't treat an animal like this,

their faces averted like statues, ideal humans.
My life depends on you becoming something else.



A FRAME IS MADE OF FOUR KNIVES

You know no lens could expand wide
enough to take in the entire globe of
the tear that slides now down her face.
She’s not thinking of the sea, but still
these waves come, in them reflections
of family members, adrift, motionless.
The button’s pressed. For an instant
all you see’s a blank black screen, then
she’s back. You’ll move on, clutching
a hope you’ve not cut out too much.
But four knives make up each frame,
even though they’ll print the caption
you’ve written that speaks her name.


Andrew Jackson 2005


Andy Jackson was born in 1971, is physically extraordinary and a writer of poetry, fiction and reviews. His latest poetry collection is Aperture, which includes a CD of collaborations with musicians. He is currently working on another with an Australia Council grant, and can be virtually contacted at captainoverload@yahoo.com.au.

Poetry by Kevin Gillam

Three degrees

(i)

bleakness leaks from my
shut eyelids, sun splashing its
rhymes in orange and

blood, aimless verse of
vein, astrology and loss.
patient as silence

the question waits, won't
inflect, horizon pursing
lips on inbetweens

(ii)

bleakness
counts them best,
keeps me
on its empty pages,
undefined
as hyphen,
flabby vernacular
of now

afternoon sun leaks
through pickets.
folded over,
chasing it,
smell
of wet print

(iii)

bleakness works each piece
of shade in 4B, prefers
a smudged, matt finish

press leak: 'templates for raven'-
title of exhibition


- Kevin Gillam 2005

The poet's inspiration

Poetry by Geoff Fox

YA AHAD (invoking The Only One)

In these hills
the soft light fills
my skin & pulls
me into All
the world
as old & loved
as God:

one
by one
by night
& day
in these hills.

- Geoff Fox 2004

SUBMISSIONS

BLUEPEPPER is currently seeking submissions of poetry, reviews and essays on a wide range of literary and cultural topics. Previously published work is acceptable as long as due acknowledgments are made. 3-4 poems per submission and articles no longer than 1500 words. To submit click on the email me icon to the right of this page and paste work in the body of the email. Attachments will not be opened. Payment is a little bluepepper beside your name. Copyright remains with the author.

Oh so very Sydney

Below is the full and original version of the poem "God Drinks at the Sandringham", a piece I penned in late 1995 as the unstoppable tide of gentrification was sweeping over our beloved Newtown. Now, there seems to be some confusion as to the authorship of the above, following on from yet another article in a Sydney paper regarding the song inspired by the poem. The facts are these: in 1998 Tim Freedman of The Whitlams asked if I would consent to him using the poem (or at least the body of it) as the lyrics for a song on his upcoming album. I was more than happy, especially once I had signed the contract and seen the changes he had made to the text. I liked the tune and still do. I was not shafted, but in answer to some people's concerns, yes, it would be nice to see my original inspiration given credit in the mainstream press. However as we all know, at least in Australia, and especially Sydney, our august rags are not exactly poetry-friendly.

God Drinks at the Sandringham

He usually comes to sit by me
in the grainy light of 4 o clock

He will often sit on His hands
He is kind but nervous

I don't think He has very much money
His conversation is minimal

He likes to sit like pity
in the crook of my arm

He watches people come in
smiles, they are of Him somehow

they nod and pat His back
He is what we call in our sinecure way "alright"

He has time for everyone
He drinks slowly, deliberately

from a schooner
that always looks half full

what He does for a living
is anyone's guess

and needless to say everyone
has their own version of how He came to be here

walk down King street any day
and you will find Him waving at you

it is utterly spontaneous
a simple gesture of recognition

at certain times on certain days
He could almost be a white flag in a brisk wind

- Justin Lowe 1995

LULU DOT COM

Is this in effect the Google of publishing? This no-obligation print-on-demand web-based publisher has taken the world by storm and pretty much cut the industry clean down the middle. There is the reaonable argument against Lulu that it lacks any sort of filtering process, that there are already more than enough bad books being published. But the counter argument would be, well yes, there are a lot of bad books being published already and not enough good ones, so who's fault is that? Some people see a crime on every street corner, others a sweet kid with a glint in his eye. If anyone out there has published or purchased books through Lulu.com. I'd be interested to hear from them. In fact, I'd very much like to start a regular review of poetry works published through Lulu. So if anyone has one available, feel free to let me know.

Extract 2. from The Wordman

James Titch. A small, stooped, carrot-topped little man with a big idea of himself. An idea so big, in fact, it kept his face a permanent beetroot colour, as though slowly crushing all the capillaries.

James was a singer/songwriter with the tiny handicap of having absolutely nothing to say. So I said it for him. His tunes were largely incoherent snatches of melody lazily pasted together. In fact, they complemented him perfectly – small creatures with big ideas of themselves. Maybe that’s why he struck a note with some. To be honest, I could never see the appeal, and I worked around him as much as with him struggling to piece together something plausible and engaging from the tuneless morass.

I stuck to my guns on the James Titch assignment, because I saw the potential, not of James Titch, but of the job itself. I think for the first time in my short life I suffered a surge of ambition, and I’m glad that I did. Until the very day he died, my father loved doing jigsaw puzzles, and maybe I inherited that from him. Piecing something together from the shards.

That James Titch imploded within days of the record’s release is about the only thing people remember about him, therefore I won’t trawl through the sordid facts again. Needless to say, it was an unpleasant assignment and one few people would have taken, but maybe the Fab Four recognised me as a fellow hard-nosed bastard and reckoned my lap was as good a place as any to dump last week’s baby. They were renowned for picking things up and then just as quickly putting them down again, and James Titch was just another toady they were desperate to get rid of.

His whole short, pathetic life, James Titch’s one and only dream was to have people adulate him. He had no great love or flair for music, but it was the meal ticket of the time, and as the album slowly came together I could tell he was having second thoughts about the whole thing. But by then, of course, it was too late. The tragedy of James Titch was that he couldn’t really stand being stared at. He was a remarkably unattractive man (perhaps the only remarkable thing about him) who could neither walk the walk or talk the talk. In fact, he moved just as clumsily as his songs, without rhythm or any sense that he knew where he was going. But he was not an easy man to like, let alone pity.

By then, as most of us know or perhaps even remember, “happenings” had become de rigeur. No-one who wanted to be anyone in London at the time could hope to get anywhere without having a happening. This was partly due to the disparate nature of the scene by then, and the consequent need of people to draw attention to themselves through any and all means possible. Ego, though, was becoming endemic. People despised themselves as a collective, but nothing seemed more important or immediate than each other’s inner workings.

It is probably no coincidence that 1969 proved to be the apotheosis of not only the avant-garde, but of the band that had embraced it so wholeheartedly in Hamburg almost a decade earlier, and that had by now raised the individual to a whole new pinnacle of success and significance. James Titch may not have known much, but he knew he had to have a happening.

It was held at a new club just off the Grays Inn Road called the Angelsea. The whole London scene had got pretty dark by then, dense and unyielding, subterranean and gothic, and the Angelsea captured the mood perfectly. It was owned and operated by a chatty pasty-faced Welshman of indeterminate age called simply Iain. He had some tenuous and widely broadcast connection to the musician John Cale. And he had a habit of regaling everyone he met with stories of his latest piercings, by which I mean literal piercings, someone sticking needles through his rolls of abdominal lard, large 6 inch needles that made a clang when you dropped them on the floor.

Iain, as was his wont, set the tone for the evening by barging across the room making wild flourishing gestures with his hands and effecting a parting of the sea between himself and me.

“Adrian Strachan!” he bellowed. “Adrian bloody Strachan.”

I should probably point out that we barely knew each other, in fact we had only met once before in Nigel’s office and neither took much of a shine to the other. I noticed a lot of people stopped talking and turned to look at me with that vague sense of wry amusement as though I were a burning effigy. A couple of girls even fell in behind Iain as he shouldered his way towards me like they were queuing up for ice cream.

I didn’t intentionally set out to steal the show. I was just the wordman, after all. The silent partner. James Titch was already in the building somewhere, but no-one was quite sure where. His stage consisted of a foot-high trellised wedge squeezed into the farthest, dingiest corner, and there was no PA, no sound guy, just a Fender amp, a guitar, a stool, and a microphone gaffer-taped to a battered old stand. James Titch was already a dog ear in the annals of rock n’ roll before he’d even sung a note.

I suppose in hindsight my behaviour that night was a little less than honourable, but my story was interesting to the type of celebrity junkie the London clubs have always attracted (although these days they’re usually left stranded the other side of the silk rope). I had just enough trouble about me, so that I didn’t have to do anything. One of these days I’ll come up with the formula, that certain ratio that lights up a woman’s face. All I know from experience is that it exists and that night I had it.

Nigel was another story altogether. He had too much trouble. He hadn’t even been invited to the party that night, but he turned up anyway looking as sick and forlorn as I’d ever seen him. After half-an-hour of being shunned at the bar and booed by most of the guests, he left, once again with that odd look of relish on his face as though he couldn’t get enough of those turds in the mail.


Note: Although still living under a cloud after Nicola Fielding's tragic death, Adrian Strachan has become something of a cause celebre in the fickle London scene. He has picked up a job as lyricist for an ill-starred singer James Titch, who manages to sell alot of albums despite, or perhaps because of, his much-publicised implosion.

Extract 1. from The Wordman

In the meantime Nicola had arrived, all tanned and trim, her hair back to its natural sheeny raven shoulder-length bob that framed her deep round hazel eyes in a kind of Bauhaus egg cup. I called it the "peering through a window" look and stood to attention the second she walked in the room. Since I arrived in Sevilla ten days prior, I had only been with one girl, and that was cut painfully short by some prick posting up flyers in the Murillo. Nicola must have smelt the pheromones on me.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said by way of greeting, pushing me away and flopping down on the enormous spongy iron poster bed. “I suppose you know why I’m here.”

“I can guess.”

“The coast is crawling with uniforms. There are roadblocks every ten miles. I took the back way through the Sierra Nevada and I still managed to run into one.”

“Did they find anything?”

“I don’t have anything, that’s my point. The bastards didn’t show. Nigel says they’re holed up on Minorca and they’re not budging. But they still want their money.”

“Who’s they?”

“Some Morrocans Nigel knows, don’t ask me. The thing is Franco’s got the country under quarantine.”

“Why Minorca?’

“Franco and Minorca have never got on. He refuses to give them any money and they refuse to play his game. It’s been going on for thirty years.”

“So?”

“So, we go to Minorca.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Not really. That’s why I came here first. I thought you might have some advice.”

“Jesus, just drop it. Too hard basket. I’ve only just got out of the clink.”

Nicola’s left eyebrow arched deliciously. I had an overwhelming need to run my hand the length of her smooth tanned calves.

“Yes, Nigel told me all about it. Are you taking anything for that bruised ego?”

I passed her a whisky from the bottle Juan Carlos had bought me and slumped into a chair.

“Ha ha.”

The sound of children playing in the tiny park across the square wafted in on the musty river breeze.

“Actually, there’s another reason I came to see you.”

I took a sip of my whisky. The doorbell to civilisation, my father called it.
“Ah.”

Nicola suddenly sprang up and sat cross-legged on the bed, sipping her whisky like a truant schoolgirl.

“That money Nigel wired you, what happened to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I gather you didn’t need it.”

“No.”

“Perfect! Where is it?”

“I assume it’s still sitting in a vault at Pons’ office. Why?”

In her excitement, Nicola had somehow managed to spill whisky down her front and she started dabbing at it with her finger. I wished she wouldn’t.

“We’ll use it to pay off the Moroccans. My idea. You see, this way there’s no paper trail.”

She studied me over the rim of her glass. I had to admit it was a brilliant idea, but what to tell Pons?

“You could tell him we’re getting married.”

“Something tells me he’ll have trouble buying that.”

Nicola pulled a face. “Oh sorry, I was forgetting your global reputation. Tell me, do all the men in this town think you’re a god the way Nigel’s friends do?”

I took her glass for a refill.

“It’ll just strike him as a bit sudden, that’s all.”

“Nigel said he’d give you a cut.”

But she knew as well as Nigel that my reluctance had nothing to do with money. There were rumours going around that the Basques were financing their campaign with drug money. The radicals of Madrid certainly had easy access to everything from dope to smack. All of which brought possession within spitting distance of espionage and treason. I informed Nicola of all this without trying to sound too edgy, too much prey to the rumours.

“I read the papers, Adrian. That’s why I need your help.”

For a long time I tried deluding myself about the type of man I was working for, but the longer I knew Nigel, witnessed his passion and dedication, and continued to be the recipient of his unflinching affection and loyalty, the less his nefarious dealings seemed to matter. Nicola knew this, we had talked about it when she was struggling with her own misgivings about her doting, slightly dotty, cousin. To refuse to help her now would be as good as going back on my word, as she well knew.

“So you’ll help me?”

She didn’t even look at me when she asked, just threw back her whisky and sprung up to help herself to another one, as though the issue was already settled.

“Well I can’t very well say no.”

I lurched over onto the now empty bed and kicked off my shoes, perched my whisky on my stomach and lay there watching it rise and fall, the ice tinkling gently against the glass. It occurred to me for the first time how much I relished that sound, like a song from my childhood.

The doorbell to civilisation.

We left Sevilla with a trunk full of money and Signor Pons’ heartfelt blessing the next afternoon. His brother was a little more reticent, but news of my engagement softened his heart a little. “Moy grandes,” he whispered into my ear after combing Nicola with his grey lecher’s eyes. “Gracioso!”

It was hard to believe I had only known him for three days. I left Sevilla as though a great chunk had been torn out of me. Who would ever have thought it?

We crossed the Guadalquivir into Triana and then east through the wasteland of new suburbs and rusting factories and a forest of high tensile cable. Where would a twentieth century dictator be, I thought, without his factories and utilities? Was it that easy to bribe people into acquiescence? Judging by recent events, perhaps not. Still, naked power was cutting an ugly swathe across old Espana, literally casting its long busy shadow over the castles, those symbols of an older, equally stringent theocracy. As we sped out into the countryside along the sleek new freeway (Spain in those days had some of the best and safest roads in the world), I wondered how many Spaniards still looked longingly at the castles.


Note:

The narrator is Adrian Strachan, a 25 year old Aussie ex-pat photo-journalist covering the troubles in Spain in 1969. Nicola is Nicola Fielding, an old girlfriend of Adrian's, and both PA and first cousin to his boss, Nigel, editor of "Garbled" magazine run on a shoe-string out of some Soho attic. Nigel funds the magazine through a series of nefarious contacts, one of which is a couple of Morrocans who ship hash into Europe for which he has a ready market in London. Adrian is not sure at first why Nicola needs him along, but during the trip she reveals that Nigel has hatched a crazy plan to do an expose on the Moroccans. Adrian is suitably unimpressed, and when the Moroccans failed to show up at the Minorcan rendevouz, he decided to leave her to it and treks across the island on his own. A few weeks later Nicola's body is found drifting on the currents off the south coast of Portugal and Adrian becomes suspect number one in the London tabloids, a tag that ironically launches him into full-blown celebrity and ultimate wealth (and dubious cred) as "The Wordman". Best to keep in mind this man is an ambulance-chaser.He has acute powers of observation but no real sense of right and wrong, or at least no real faith in tradtional morality, and a growing impatience with the grinding ideological endgame between left and right, east and west. In other words, a vanguard of the jaded hippy. For all that, Adrian was very successful at what he did, and I imagine the average Fleet Street hack in 1969 loathed him with a vengeance.It didn't help matters none that our hero was an Aussie, good with the ladies, and generally pretty pleased with himself. Some of you may recognise the prototype. Now get to it!

Your piece of The Wordman

In an utterly shameless piece of self-promotion, I have decided to put a call out to all you budding journalists in blog land to compose mock articles for inclusion in the endnotes of my latest novel, The Wordman. The relavent incidents in the life of the main protagonist, Adrian Strachan, will be posted with accompanying notes so you get an idea, but let your imaginations run wild people. I'm sure that's what the Fleet Street hacks of 1968-74 were doing when they penned their scurrilous articles about people like Adrian, or "Mr Strachan, press photographer", as he was probably dubbed in the media at the time(before he became The Wordman, of course). Check back for the post with all the info you'll need to start scurrilising.

Aunt Mabel

I was just about weaned on red wine during my childhood in Spain, but since moving from Newtown to the mountains the best part of four years ago, I've gone all bucolic and taken to growing my own vegetables and brewing my own beer. By the time the bird flu hits I'll be just about sorted! Anyway, here's a particularly delicious brew I downloaded off the net some time ago (the link appears to be dead now, sadly). More of a winter beer, but the longer it is stored the better it will be.

1. Aunt Mabel's Blueberry Ale
A fresh amber ale with an unquestionable blueberry flavour.

Beer Category: NOVELTY
OG: 1048 FG: 1018

Ingredients:
1.5kg Morgan's Pale Unhopped Extract
1kg Morgan's Caramalt Master Blend
1kg Morgan's Beer Enhancer Master Blend
40g Northern Brewer Hops (hops1)
15g Fuggles Hops (hops 2)
1kg Fresh Frozen Blueberries or
60ml Blueberry Fruit Extract
1 Sachet Morgan's ale yeast
Sugar for bottling


Method:
Add around 500g of Pale Unhopped Extract to 4 litres of boiling water. Boil with hops 1 in a bag for 45 minutes. Switch off heat, add hops 2 and frozen blueberries or fruit extract and allow to stand for 10 minutes.Note, if using frozen fruit it is wise to neutralize fruit pectins by preheating mashed berries with a pectic enzyme to prevent a possible haze.

Strain off fruit and hops and add remaining malt and stir to dissolve. Pour into fermenter and make up to 23 litres with cold water. once temperature is below 30C, add yeast and allow to ferment between 22 and 30C.

Bottle as normal once fully fermented after first priming bottles with sugar.
WARNING - Do not bottle until fermentation is complete ( SG 1005 or below) adding only the correct amount of sugar to bottles otherwise, over gassed bottles could explode.

Poetry on TV

'The Wordshed' will be broadcast on the new community television channel TV Sydney. It is a half-hour poetic program composed of poems, interviews with writers, readings and performances, dramatic sequences, mini-lectures, and critical discussion.

‘The Wordshed’ will be presented by Johanna Featherstone, from The Red Room Company, (www.redroomorganisation.org) on behalf of the Writing and Society Research Group in the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney.

Six half-hour episodes will be produced in the first instance, to be broadcast between the startup of TV Sydney in November and December 2005.

Blanc Mange

Reuters reports that the UN, in the face of strong US objections, has approved the first international treaty designed to protect movies, music and other cultural treasures from foreign competition. The vote was 148 for, 2 against. French President Jacques Chirac was quoted as saying: "This is major progress in a world which must protect cultural diversity and organise a dialogue of cultures that respects all." What affect (if any) this will have on our FTA with Uncle Sam only time will tell. Maybe the UN could inaugurate an International Out-of-Work Actor's Day?

ninety-nine names

Apropros the visit of Indonesian poet, Rendra, here is a link to an interesting poetry site http://www.ninety-ninenames.com. The name refers to the ninety-nine Arabic names for God, Allah being the one most of us are familiar with. The site has a pretty simple layout, but you can sense the care and devotion put into it. The beautiful sufi texts are a collaboration between Indonesian sufi legend Mustofa Bisri and Australian Geoff Fox and come in both English and Indonesian. They should move even the most stone-hearted among us.

The Long Bow

Poetry is in many respects the art form of the "long bow". Hence the expression "poetic licence". And that's what this little blog is going to be all about - the breathless leap into the abyss, the "big call" - anything but the "well-that's what the computer is telling me" 21st century drone.

On the subject of which, I saw an article in the Sydney Morning Herald today headed "Schools failing to pass on values." There seems to be an entire industry based around stating the BLEEDING OBVIOUS. A lot of grant money goes into uncovering the link between ADD and 16 hours of television viewing a day from the age of 3, etc, and the Herald has taken it upon itself to be the purveyor of such moribund fare. According to Professor Brian Hill, branded in the Herald article as "a Christian", "we are producing young people focused on the immediate satisfaction of needs..." He makes a valid point, of course, but it just strikes me as a little late, by about a generation, if my arithmetic can be trusted. What I gather the good Professor would like to see is a more holistic approach to secondary schooling, with a more cohesive (read traditional)humanities-based syllabus,and less stress on the vocational as it currently stands. What he sees at the moment is "students surrendering to the dominant value system peddled by the media, which is instant gratification and do your own thing." Here, here Professor! But where were you and your Christian buddies twenty years ago when modernism (the last great positive/alternative "ism")was being wheeled in for its lingering post mortem? If memory serves me right, the church and the mainstream media couldn't wait to see the entire movement dead and buried. If the ensuing cultural trend has proved more enervating than edifying, more industry than individual, then who's fault is that exactly? George Bush is as much a product of post-modernism as he is of the Christian Right, ersatz BIG BROTHER and ADD. There's my big leap for the day.

Poetry by Coral Hull

From: The Sorrowing Harp Sequence

1. Anniversary Ghost


I. Celebrations

My sister, my mother, my father, my brother,
you were strong as a group, I was outnumbered
and your killing hands were upon my throat,
but still I flowed like a river and I did not die.

My heartbeat pounded like wings into the dawn,
as the plunging water filled my lungs,
when I left myself, to be taken away by calm.

I entered a world of profound strangeness,
where no tree grew and no bird sang.

It was dim and old and unbecoming,
like an unseen dream behind all of civilsation.

At first there was a black dog,
troubled and racing across the long lost scent
and a thousand howling hills in the night,
as if drawn from old memory.

Somewhere, I sensed the heartbeat of the cosmos,
but it was just a play of moonlight upon still waters,
where the storm of betrayal and the chill of deceit
within my heart, had sank forever from your sight.

Or so you thought --- but I did not die.


II. Generations

My glass eye opened from beneath the lake,
as shoulder to shoulder you lumbered away.

You were the last and first landscape.

You are the murdering tool for generations.
A beast of fear who follows instructions.
The curse was passed down like a stone,
into lives who had forgotten, so long ago.

I saw your back, as you left the water's edge.
Your face was turned away from the moon.
You were just like a cold and lonely planet,
a shadow to the galaxies, moving, unlit.


III. Questions

How must I sing to the stars with the voice of a lake?
How must I express to a night, the crime of this act?

I might have drifted away like river weed,
or leaves across the water's silver surface.
It would have been easier, had I vanished.

But I howled like a wolf,
until the moon blooded over with tiny bats
and the landscape of your many departures
turned to violet infra red.

Did you hear that mournful dog? Was one tear shed?


IV. Traditions

I saw two old eyes glittering, your lips as a grimace
that bordered an envious smile.

In this hungry way, you seemed to eat yourself alive,
at the time of my unbecoming.

The cruel lifeless gaze was like a faceted gem.
I searched for a soul, but there was no essence

I stepped right through you, to the other side.
For the corpse you had killed was left behind.

What has this sorrowing world brought upon itself?
How must I sing to those who feel the same way?

Where is the heart within, or must I abandon hope?
What is there left to tell, that is not already known?

Coral Hull 2005

Rendra

Arguably Indonesia's most influential poet is visiting Sydney this week to conduct workshops. Jailed by the Soekarno and Soeharto governments for his revolutionary poetry and plays, Rendra described the most recent Bali bombings with just one word: "kejam". Cruel.

"Those who have ethics are regarded as a stupid person, a weak person, a loser," he says. "Why must I be a winner? Must I win at all costs, even if it's not ethical?"

Rendra has been a regular visitor to Australian shores since 1972, and his Bengkel Theatre in Jakarta often hosts young Australian playwrights.

"By tradition a poet is an interpreter of life. Not just an entertainer.....The Government might try to make the students organisations weak, the women's organisations weak, workers' organisations weak - but it seems typical of the Australian people always to resist."

Here's hoping.

Poets in Need

America, for all its obvious flaws, has always treated the poet with a strange kind of reverence only occasionally glimpsed in the long history of humanity (the country they recently invaded being another obvious example). I have always found this somewhat curious, and as an antipodean, something to aspire to. One of the links on this blog is Big Bridge, an American site I highly recommend for its vigour and diversity in all things poetic. And it also has a link to a page entitled PIN (Poets in Need), where visitors can make donations for poets who have fallen on hard times (defined as misfortune through flood, fire, eviction, etc). I don't know how successful the program is, but to me the very concept is like a warm breath on a frozen ear. I hope I don't have to explain the metaphor. Will Howard's Australia reduce us to such measures? The polemic stops here.

Poetry dot com

Poetry dot com. Most of us have surfed right into it at one time or another, maybe even been seduced into surrendering up a precious sample or two of our verse with the promise of those big CASH PRIZES. I used to deliver pizza with a kid who gushed that he had been published in America, only to find that this wasn't quite true. As far as I can tell, this organisation operates something like the Borg in the later Star Trek series, assimilating all the verse they can get their hands on in some enormous database only to sell it back to its original owners in the form of placemats, tea towels, etc. Sound like any economic regime you know? Has anyone out there got any stories they want to share about the august troop at Poetry dot com?

more or less than

1-100
MTC Cronin
Shearsman Books
UK 2004

I have followed Margie Cronin’s career closely over the past decade or so. It was an interesting time, and I like to think that in our Newtown days we struck up a friendship, a fellowship, however tangential our lifestyles were.

Cronin has published nine collections in that time, a prodigious output by any standards, but through it all I believe I have witnessed a great poet constantly at war with her strengths and seduced by her weaknesses.

Perhaps this is a risk poets run more than most, I honestly don’t know. But because Cronin is so assured and so prodigious in her chosen craft, this ongoing tussle has become quite compelling for yours truly, almost an epic in itself. I wouldn’t even be prepared to call it a failing, because at times this abandonment of the poet’s trademark staccato for a rather more somnolent andante really pays dividends, as though she were being given singing lessons by the ghost of Ezra Pound

if it finds a hand, it says to behold is god
if a mouth, it says the word is god
if a foot, the way is god
this is how their shadow was thrown
both ways
and they found themselves pursued by memory
unnarating grief and hope
with death following, not waiting ahead

The above passage is lifted from midway through poem 29 of one of the most audacious poetry collections to have ever been published in this country. I will happily admit that slightly clunky “unnarrating” to further scrutiny, but I adamantly refuse to denote themes or the like, for to my mind Cronin’s poetry in general (and this collection most acutely) is all about nuances, the creeping shadows of these autumn days.

Cronin’s jauntiness is the product of a particular time and place (where X marks the spot, apparently), but like a great Pixies’ song, it alludes to ancient roots, something as old as beer and heartache.

I could easily damn this collection forever as a poetic representation of the linear view of time, where poem 1 is a deceptively (linear) allusion

not simply the stream but they who thought of following

One simple brushstroke of yearning and memory, at which point a lesser poet would have run with this ball until both she and the spectators were bored out of their minds. But Cronin lives too much inside her poems for that. By poem 5 she is already delving deep into the murky currents of our special autism

the tongue, the tongue, steps backwards into a web
respun daily by an appetite that thinks never of holiness
the tongue makes them miniature and blind
the tongue caresses and ruins their splendour
in its own land it speaks the language of stones

I think were Margie Cronin an artist she would work mainly in either oils or bric a brac, her great flourishes at first appearing a tad clumsy until the eye has had a chance to range over the whole (the mind, as always, slow to catch up like my dog barking at a skipping stone). As I say, this is a poet who lives very much inside her poems

this was their magnifying glass, and not just glass,
but the metaphors, what they see what they see through



Cronin, for all her flurry, is not a peripatetic thinker. Like Ariosto, skipping along in his deceptively plain pentameter, the religiously free-verse Cronin dances around a room crowded with ideas and startling imagery that can often seem wantonly disjointed, although on a second read you begin to enter into the mind of the poet. It is both exhilarating and exhausting, especially for those critics who have deemed this rather oblique and chancy calibration as the poet’s fatal flaw running through all her work. But to me their rather waspish tone suggests a sleeper awoken rudely in the night.

There is rarely a dominant narrative thread in Cronin’s poetry, although there is often the suggestion of one in the dominant tone, usually a vaguely confessional tone that quickly loses patience with itself and breaks out to lead us on a merry dance.

a way to lose myself away from death
a way to be dying so that I cannot feel the dying at all times
more, and not quite that,
a winter-asleep
a spring-wins
an ongoing not even ordinariness
but just what might be enough to keep the moment
cradled within its own worn hands
the breath clean in its perfect dress of flesh
more, more-or-lessness,
the whole of the body bathed in sun
or what might be like it
this is not cliché but simply simple
the moment is warm

(poems 82)

As the collection climbs jauntily towards its apex, the monumental poem 50, I realise what I am witnessing is not so much the poet grappling with her strengths, as the eternal child inside the mother grappling with the enduring miracle of life itself, the lottery of both our fortunes and misfortunes. A lesser poet would have reduced this to a series of snapshots, but in Cronin’s world there are no givens, which is why in her poetry each moment shines with such jaunty radiance

for example
they claimed to understand planets
how opals grow
when in fact what they knew
was the art of cutting and polishing
and the sorts of things that might happen
sand would forever elude them
and libraries become full
with the paper clot
of their denial

(poem 47)

I could live my life by the tenet of these last three lines (and maybe I have). Be that as it may, there are many in this country of infinite promise and incessant self-abnegation who deny Margie Cronin her due. They are legion but they are aging and their voice is croaky.
Were they to take the tapering structure of this collection to heart, they may very well stamp their feet and decry the incessant playfulness of a world that may in fact survive them.

- Justin Lowe

WELCOME TO BLUE PEPPER

Welcome to Justin Lowe's poetry blog BLUE PEPPER. Some of you in the Oz poetry scene may remember my previously colourful and short-lived creation, HOMEBREW magazine run out of my bedroom in Newtown NSW during the late 90's. Well, this is the on-line version, open to submissions of poetry, reviews and articles of all manner and style within the shrinking confines of public taste. Remember, keeping safe doesn't have to mean playing it safe.
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