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.