Earlier this year I trumpeted young ex-pat poet Emma Jones' first collection, The Striped World, and so not only am I happy to announce that it has been awarded Britain's prestigious Forward Prize for a first collection of poetry, but that the judges actually offered a relatively coherent, cliche-free justification for their choice.
Josephine Hart, who chaired the Forward Prize judges, described Jones yesterday as ''an ambitious and intriguing new voice''. Her poems ''are both elliptical and visionary - inhabiting a parallel world of strange, disjointed images within which we nevertheless find echoes of familiar experience''.
What Sydney "critic" Jaya Savige meant by his comments that follow in today's SMH article is anyone's guess. Something about Dead White Males, presumably. Maybe someone should tell the kids at Darlington that po-po-mo is done and dusted, because if there is one thing Emma Jones' collection does not smack of in the least it is any effort to please the professors. In other words, it is genuine and heart-felt and profound. Maybe that's what Jaya meant in his glib reference to the "yellowed pages of tradition".
I received a welcome gift in my inbox recently from the Chicago poet, John Hospodka. Titled "South Side Trilogy", it is a fascinating multi-media collection of immaculately wrought free verse accompanied by audio and illustrations, mostly in pastel. Not so much a verse-novel as a poetic snapshot of life in Hardscrabble, the legendary slum of Chicago, the work somehow manages to exude a wistful air of nostalgia while bringing the day-to-day life of contemporary Chicago to the foreground, as though you didn't just rub shoulders with ghosts in the windy city, but walked right into them.
The Night They Tore Old Comiskey Down
Middle-aged men in a sagged circle
of unplanned stillness outside a funeral
parlor: one visualizes the deceased’s use
for a nicknamed slang, the other four weigh
temptations affected by the nostalgia playing
a heady deaf tongue to their collective grievance.
Two elderly ladies share a cigarette and gossip
spiritedly about a lesson about something
other than a headlong retreat into the hunched
idealism that declares one must never trust
a fellow who tucks in his shirt on the weekends.
Within the parlor a new widow scans
her only child’s altar boy eyes, but she can
-not yet locate any semblance of biography.
A spleen-driven spasm redirects the foul
trail of a cop’s demystified secret from his spine
to his colon: “I’ve gotten to the least of me!”
His partner, troubled by this overdue reaction,
half-mouths: “Relax, that scum’s ghost is going
to turn out to be the best friend you’ve ever had.”
Last week’s church bulletin comes to a respite
upon the tar-pimpled sidewalk that red-carpets
an unnamed Hardscrabble saloon. An untried
front page from the Chicago Tribune tumble-
weeds audibly atop the bulletin, pauses against
the slightly glass-speckled breeze, clutches
the bulletin’s unbiased ink, steals away for
the unresponsive gutter at Fibs and Teeth St.
A college dropout struts by the saloon, peeks in
through the smoke-mirrored window, spots
an unspoken-of relative: You’ll see, one day
I’ll be an historian.
According to the publicity, the "South Side Trilogy" can be obtained in traditional hard copy as well as accessed online. Just click on the post heading for details.
Dorothy Porter was never going to go out with a whimper. The Australian poet who once claimed to write best to the tribal din of Melbourne's Hunters & Collectors was a poet utterly transfixed by life. I only knew her in passing, but from what I can glean Dorothy seemed to regard death (her own came earlier this year after a long and courageous fight against breast cancer) as merely one more aspect of life, not its polar opposite. Her last, and perhaps her finest, collection of poetry, The Bee Hut, was written very much in this spirit
have I the strength
to pay suffering its due?
she asks in "The Ninth Hour", one of the most technically accomplished, moving and strangely exhilarating poems about death and dying I have ever read. There is Porter's characteristic tone of defiance here, but for once she is not raging like Xerxes, for
I have come to a river
of blood and vinegar
I have come to a river
where only pain
keeps its feet
and she appears transfixed by this new challenge life has thrown up at her. It is a courage perhaps unique to poets, a courage that knows its limits, and by this very knowledge seems amplified.
Let me join the frilled and flying
damned
and live vivid
as a wet dog.
- "After Bruegel"
After her final verse novel, El Dorado, I wasn't so sure what to expect from Dorothy Porter. Despite a perception in some quarters, I buzz far from the inner circle of Australian literati and simply assumed she had recovered from whatever it was that ailed her. My first instinct was that Dorothy was caught in no-man's-land with a few too many quivers in her bow - poet, novelist, librettist. - but with the phallanx of Australian literati to protect her. For, as compelling an achievement as her best-selling verse-novel, The Monkey's Mask, undoubtedly was, the two that followed will slowly fall between the stools. I doubt I was alone in missing the edgy 3 am dance of Porter's earlier collection, Crete, the deliciously tender mischief of
No sensible woman eats poppies
or else
she'll dance
she'll fall over
she'll wake up
with a woman in her arms.
- "Or Else" (from "Crete", 1996)
A poet living in the very act of writing, of picking herself up just as she is falling. I can't tell you how many times I have heard writers complain about how writing drains them when, as Dot Porter knew only too well, it should in fact do the very opposite, for
You can't preserve love
behind foggy windows.
Often when I read American ex-pat, Linda Gregg, I think of Dorothy Porter back in her Crete days of the early 90's, so tender with love, and I can almost sniff the light dancing on that almost interstellar blue of the Mediterranean, but Gregg always manages to break the spell because beneath it all dwells something intent on pulling her down, on harvesting her flesh, her womanhood (by which I, as a man, cogitate freedom). Dorothy Porter's poetic spirit, on the other hand, shouldered up to the breeze and laughed with the ripples and spat in the face of the necromancer casting a shadow over her towel. She could not help herself, for she was mad with life, or at least the poet in her was. Beauty was everywhere in her dusky, wide-set eyes, and in this an early trill in her parting song, we have the imprimatur of Dot Porter's distinct brand of living ( dare I say a very Australian brand of living?)
I can't shake
that ghost-town pub
whistling empty-bottled
through its black windows,
and its strangled verandahs
creaking with a terrifying
ancient thirst
under a two-storey coat
of bristling blackberry.
Is it taunting me
with the dancing skeleton
tune
of my own life's mystery
struggling for rhythm
and lyrics?
I hold in my hand
the greedy, bleeding
pen
that has always
gorged itself.
The bliss-mouthed
gluttony miracle -
that stained Keats
grape-purple
that had cynical Byron
reeling on the ceiling -
when the plump berries
sing
and your pen slashes ahead
like a pain-hungry prince
hacking through
the bramble's dragon teeth
to the heart's most longed-for
comatose, but ardently ready
princess.
- "Blackberries" (from The Bee Hut)
Well, I imagine you can sleep easy princess. Your legacy is safe.
I am beholden to my daemons to presage this article by stating for the record that I am usually wrong.
Considering the state of law reform in this country, and the moral turpitude of many of this country's self-appointed stewards, it surprises me little that Bob Ellis has finally decided to sue the playwright Louis Nowra over his June 2009 article (one could hardly call it a review), Making a case for the unexamined life.
Though the article caused quite a stir at the time, the whole thing passed me by largely due to the fact that I only read The Australian if trapped in a lift, and anyway Bob Ellis holds little interest for me either as a man or a writer.
As far as I can make out, however, Louis Nowra has a problem in regards to the article in question, and that problem is that he opens with the seed of a slowly flowering contradiction. The only time Bob Ellis has impinged on my life, his fateful article begins, was when I was in a solicitor's office.
Not the most musical of openings, but I won't quibble over syntax here. What is important is that Nowra goes on to relatehow Bob Ellis did not in fact impinge on him personally in said office, but rather via the sage words of said solicitor, who found it pertinent to remind Nowra that Ellis had shifted the goalposts for publishers in Australia after passing off a piece of lewd gossip as salacious fact and landing his publishers in court. Nowra's solicitor was cautioning him against making the same mistake with his own book. Even though the stories were true, he said they would have to go unless I could back them up factually.
Thus by this simple device, the reader is led to believe that Nowra is somewhat of a disinterested observer in the one-man circus that is Bob Ellis, the Aussie auteur.
Perhaps Nowra should have listened more closely to his solicitor, for later in the same piece he relates how he and Ellis in fact played in the same cricket team.
Given Ellis's occasional misadventures with the facts, I was interested to read about something of which I had a first-hand knowledge (good to see that grammar improving, Louis). He says he played for a Sydney suburban cricket team called the Metros for more than 10 years from the late 70s. During the same period I played in the same team for three years and I only saw him turn up once (my emphasis).
I was going to quote more of this passage, but I fear doing so may land me in the same hot water as Louis Nowra.
Now, either Nowra's earlier statement that he was only ever impinged on by Ellis in the abstract is at best an obfuscation, or the Metros are one seriously dysfunctional cricketing family, or, more to the point, Nowra failed to heed his solicitor's advice and is relating in Murdoch print a piece of club house gossip as though it were a fact he could personally verify.
If read in this light, Nowra appears guilty of mixed messages. Either he knows Ellis well enough to while away a Saturday afternoon with him on a cricket field, or he knows him only as I do - as a name and a professional bugbear - and is happy to print in one place what he dare not print in another.
Now, let it be re-iterated quite clearly for the record here that I am no fan of Bob Ellis the writer or the man. He strikes me from a distance as that stamp of boomer male against whom I have been struggling all my creative life, and without whom the cultural life of this country would probably be none the poorer.
But read in the light of this apparent contradiction, Louis Nowra's article reads less like the "pure gold" of James Bradley's opinion (www.cityoftongues.blogspot.com) and more like the vituperative snarl of one grand old dog at another through the gilded mesh of Sydney gliterati. That Bob Ellis' reply to this article only helps to underscore many of Nowra's points about him does nothing to alleviate the impression that he has not been totally forthcoming. Passing acquaintance, after all, does not a passing stranger make.
But why does any of this matter?
Because so strict are the defamation laws in this state that, as Richard Ackland put it so succinctly in a recent article about New South Wales Defamation Law Reform,
When journalists see the word "reasonable" as the defining legal test they may as well pull out a gun and shoot themselves.....a journalist may think it "reasonable" to make 10 phone calls to check a story. The judge will say, "why didn't you make 11?"
Ackland regards this as a purely mainstream media problem, but as the recent use of NSW Defamation Law by a US citizen to sue a UK blogger proves, it is a concern for cyberspace as well.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
BONDI LINE
Come join in an exploration of Bondi Beach
with 3 of Australia’s leading poets
joanne burns Brook Emery Les Wicks
with music from Maryjane Leahy
accessible & engaging –
unique perspectives on a world icon
@ Bondi Social
1st floor 38 Campbell Pde Bondi Beach
2.15 for 2.30 October 10
FREE
Open mike session where audience members can read their poem on or around Bondi. Prizes for the best poems. Winner will be published in “Guide to Sydney Beaches”.
This event is part of the celebrations for Waverley’s 150th Birthday. Proudly supported by Waverley Council.
joanne burns has had many collections of her work published, the latest being 'an illustrated history of dairies' Giramondo Publishing 2007. She grew up in Rose Bay and Dover Heights, Bondi was often her 'playground' from very early childhood into early adulthood. She was a member of the Bondi Ladies Swimming Club for a couple of years, and taught beginners in the 'Learn to Swim' classes at Bondi Baths in the summer of 1961-2. In her teenage years she also played tennis at the legendary Tib Dorahy Tennis Club of North Bondi. She attended 1st Class at Bondi Beach Public School, where her great aunts Beatrice and Marjorie Taylor were Headmistresses.
Brook Emery has published three poetry collections, and dug my fingers in the sand (FIP 2000), which won the Queensland Premier’s Prize, Misplaced Heart (FIP 2003), and Uncommon Light (FIP 2007). All three were short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Prize. Individual poems have won the Newcastle Poetry Prize, The Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the Max Harris Award, and the Australian Sports Poetry Award. He calls Bondi Beach his second home. He was once a Beach Inspector there and is a Long Service member and former captain of Bondi Surf Club.
Maryjane Leahy has been playing classical guitar for more than 30 years and has been a composer for 15 of those years. Her current focus in composition is music for contemporary guitar. She is also pursuing her life journey through music in a Masters degree in Composition, looking at incorporating Indian rhythms into Western orchestral music. All of Mary-Jane's guitar pieces are a reflection of her personal experience and each has been written for someone who, at the time, had a great impact on both the direction and meaning of her life journey. Her recent collaboration with Dominic Wy Kanak has taught her a great deal about the relationships between white and Indigenous Australians.
Les Wicks’ 8th book of poetry is The Ambrosiacs (Island, 2009). Wicks has been a guest at most of Australia's literary festivals, toured widely and been published in over 200 newspapers, anthologies and magazines across 12 countries in 7 languages. He runs Meuse press, which focuses on poetry outreach projects, the latest being “Guide to Sydney Beaches”. Les was a westie kid with family in Bondi. His main ambition in life was to live over east which he has managed to do for about 35 years.
Received my copy of Issue One of the new Perth literary quarterly, dotdotdash, today and I felt a charge of energy waft out as I opened the envelope. Inside was a heart-felt letter from the editor, SJ Finch, and one of the sleekest looking literary publications I have thumbed through since Ireland's The Stinging Fly. In fact, if I had to bundle this 10-pound baby, I would call it half-Stinging Fly, half-Eddie Magazine of mid-90's Newtown, as the graphics are both shopping-list intimate and arresting as an ANZAC day plinth. And as you would expect of an issue entitled "Quicksand", there is poignancy and pathos running all the way through this issue, and not a little of that Gilliganesque slapstick as the truth is slowly dawning......SKIPPER! SKIPPER!
dotdotdash
It may not have saved the SS Minnow, but it just may save you! Click on the post heading for subscription/submission/stocking enquiries.
Reading Anna Goldsworthy's article about the Australian National Academy of Music got me thinking about a great many things, but mostly about scale. It is a beautifully written article that launches itself from something of a default position in matters of Australian excellence (ie that elite sportsmen are champions whereas elite artists are snobs), toward a stratospheric overview of the heights being scaled in that beleaguered institution I will henceforth refer to as ANAM. We are a strangely Cartesian country in that regard, both body and mind striving for identity, and all in the great epoch of monumentalism where the deliberate project on all sides of politics has been to dwarf the human, as though if only power could purge itself of the human element it would run as cleanly and smoothly as that famous Pythonesque hospital without any of those mortally sick people in it.
Anna Goldsworthy should write more. I know she is a great musician, but rarely do musicians of any stamp write with such precision in the medium of the tongue laid flat.
Last year, when Peter Garrett announced the withdrawal of funding from the Australian National Academy of Music, he must have been startled by the response.
The usual flat-line tone all editors ask of their novices these days. And so I imagined myself wading through another plaint from the top end of town that is the performing arts in Sydney. Until...
He constructed an arc in loose parallel to Bach's variations, generated by texture and density rather than harmonic progression. His variations were not only polyphonic but polylinguistic........an hour after he sat down, the Town Hall clock chimed eight; he wove these tones into the texture of his improvisation.....
To a sunny exile of the East European defiles of Sydney's Castlecrag, this sings like a scrap of Zbigniew Herbert who witnessed mind and body colliding in a way I never. In other words, tender and thoughtful and unadorned.
Peter Garrett, for those readers north of the line, is the Australian Federal Minister of the Arts, and the erstwhile lead-singer of the iconic rock band Midnight Oil. He otherwise fits the Westminster bill perfectly in being both bald, middle-aged and proud owner of a law degree. He is also passionate and intelligent and perhaps a little too scrupulous for Australian politics at the highest level. Anyway, as singer of Midnight Oil through that fecund post-punk era from 1978 to 1984 he could not put a foot wrong. As left-wing anti-nuclear activist from 1984 to 1989 ditto. But perhaps like the veterans of all wars, a piece of him misses the action.
I went looking for a war
and the only guns I saw
were never used in anger
- "Armistice Day" Midnight Oil
The point about Pete Garrett and Midnight Oil, though, was that they somehow managed to bridge that divide between the body and the mind in the Australian polis at the time. Everywhere, from student digs to mechanic's workshop, echoed with the dissonant, rhythmic, strangely polyphonic eloquence of Midnight Oil throughout most of the 1980's. In hindsight, the only anomaly is the stretch it took for Garrett to, well, stretch his arms wide at the ballot box. His Christian proclivities aside, I will state my bias here as an older X-er with an enduring love for the man. I was not alone in finding his announcement regarding the withdrawal of funding from the ANAM a little more than confounding.
Giants are writ large in Occidental Culture, as is perhaps befitting the hemisphere where things are pressed tall only to topple into the dread sea of long memory and the dying sun of the Portugese.
Only giants could have moved such stones, amassed such armies, mustered such goodwill amongst the myriad and single-minded.
Only giants beyond our reckoning now could have mustered the courage to establish the institutions that maintain us. For those who can't live with them, the digital age allows you to live beside them. Not quite body, not quite mind, but a memory none the less.
Anna Goldsworthy brought me away from Ezra Pound's giant-killing, in-human couplets
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
- Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"
John Cage playing his toy piano snatched a few startled sounds from the last sparrows of WWII. That was not his intention, for he was thinking always with his audience, a war before. We, on the other hand, though still trapped on the same old roller-coaster, seem to have opted for the perennial winter of discontent....
Late the following night.... A small audience had gathered in the darkness to hear Ross Bolleter, co-founder of the World Association of Ruined Piano Studies. "The piano was a great agent of social cohesion.....(it) was home and brought home with it." Were we celebrating or mourning the piano's demise? Was this a wake? Why was it so beautiful? "When a piano was sold or dispensed with, it was proof of imminent ruin and disgrace."
After all these years, there is still a sort of defeat in winning. I had to go into exile, I kept bumping my head on the roof of the city. Everyone else preferred to stay small and could not understand my complaining.
Exile, I won and now I was spending time with her. My punishment? Or maybe I just thought too highly of myself. I did not want to repeat the same old patterns and so kept my circle of friends small.
Enza was always around and sort of fell into my orbit by default. She had two small black swans tattooed on the back of her neck, heads bent as if supporting hers.
At first I thought she had been pulling my leg about never reading. She often had no idea what I was talking about but liked listening to the sound of my voice.
We fucked but usually as an almost after thought to the night. We found plenty of other things to argue about.
"Triple X Theater" (ink&paper)
I had just met my deadline, editor happy, I now had the illusion of freedom.
Enza had a new scarf which she was anxious to dirty up. We went out.
The drinks were the prize, winners, losers; the only difference was who had gotten caught.
She tells me about her day, none of that matters.
I am talking to me again through her, a two drink chorus. Now she is just letting me talk. No matter how clear my thoughts, I can not get the stars to reflect off of my fingers.
She has to run off for a moment, probably to score. The waiter with sleepy eyes which people mistake for wisdom watches her go.
Under the awning the heater is snapped on, Votives are lit. I have won and now have nowhere to go. It is not for Enza, I sit at my table and wait. It is for yesterday but a specific one, a far older one than that which carried me empty handed, into today.
My fingertips read the table as of brail. Eyes now wander down, the surface, stars, lattice holes which allow me to see my shoes, their hunger, starving.
I could have another drink. I do not wait, for anything. That first kiss, music of our youth, twirling her on the dance floor, red dress blossoming out with the undulating current of her motion, that first kiss with her, ours.
Believe me, it isn’t coming around anymore. I have forsaken or forgotten it all anyways. How could I not, knowing it would be I who broke that fragile shroud of memory.
Enza comes back smelling of smoke. Her pupils are two large, black pools which when seen from certain angles reflect the stars.
Once again I am fresh out of rants, doubtless to the relief of many of those whose air of entitlement is only outdone by their vapidness. I will be reviewing Dot Porter's parting shot next week, so start curling your toes, oh milk-faced ones. In the meantime I am CALLING ALL POETS.
Just click on the SUBMIT tag at the foot of this post (I am still not getting a sidebar!!) and submit anything up to five poems, a 1000 word comment or review in the body of the email. NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE. I have a very good turnover time, and that applies to most things I do. Just ask my bevy of exes.... The worse you will get is silence, as I won't comment on subs unless I can see some way of working with the author to make them more suitable for posting under the Bluepepper. There are no payments and thus no guidelines.
If you are looking for the submissions link, rather than trawl through this pre-industrial plaint, just click on the post heading.
But for any budding Paul Hardacres out there....
I have suddenly lost my sidebar to the bottom of the page, so anyone searching for links or archives are out of luck as I followed Google's advice and deleted it all. Anyone out there with a tip on how to rectify this problem is welcome to contact me through the submission tab now situated way down below (or to the right, depending on whether you have heeded my advice re the HTML gorgon in me).
Indian diamonds
a rock of hammer
men in orange and
their swarthy God
but I'm not
in the market
for another banner,
to kick another dog
- Start Barnes 2009
Compliant
sums me up programmed like
my mythical C-3PO
violin skinned
like a cat before breakfast Venn
circles
overlapping like slapping hands in a manic kids'
game a kiss
on a murderess's cheek by the bus teeth
brushed at recess after school
on the oval take a punch
in the guts Centre
For Excellence {hyaena-
boys smoke} short-back-and-sides
braces
suffering Messerschmitt-
jokes Pritikin
Program weekly mass "don't write!" not a friend
on my boy-Elektra back a criminal's
colours
in my hand
- Stuart Barnes 2009
Stuart Barnes's unpublished memoir, A Cold Decade, was shortlisted for the 2009 Olvar Wood Fellowship Award. Living in Melbourne, he's currently editing his first collection of poetry and writing his first novel, a fable-fantasy.
For reasons known only to themselves, the editors of Melbourne's Cordite Magazine decided to open a comment stream left happily dormant for the best part of six years, a mangy hydra to which yours truly contributed his set of gnashing yellow teeth. I was not at my best in the early years of this decade, and no doubt suffering one of my Swiftian "episodes", replete with tiny feet in the night, hog-tied mornings and perfumed winds always blowing the wrong way. Paul Hardacre and I, well.....there is a good deal to be said for silence in this game, the space between words. And Richard King was more than happy, I'm sure, to leave me where he found me, under that rock I will always call home.
In the midst of all this petulant wank, however, sprang a gentle and very pertinent question: where does poetry spring from? I had steamed off by then in search of a mirror that would tell me what I wanted to hear, so for me the question sank like a stone. Only the truly great question the origins of their craft, leaving the rest of us to needle over our "profession", last refuge of the vagrant.
At the risk of a lawsuit I will paste the original dialogue here..if I can....JUST WRESTLE.....this f@@cking LAWYER!!.....off....my...arm....
THERE!!!........
Monday, November 17th
Who invented poetry?
Can anybody help?
While not being able to answer ‘who, we may be able to find out ‘why. A certain ms. hummburger has this to say: poetry sucks crap. it was invented so that people had something to talk about.......
November 26th
I think it was a mail order firm in Michigan. [apologies to Douglas Adams]
And so trail off the usual stale breadcrumbs into that toy forest of Australian academia....the glib response of the vagrant, the true professional [apologies to Jean Genet]. I am history for I am now. Like Uncle Leo with his painted eyebrows, both aghast and eloquent in all the languages of mankind as the interlocutor in us all backs away......
this did not help me at all ill make sure i never come here again you guys should get more serious i have research paper due and no answers to my questions yet you guys should Fuck off
Well, fuck off, poetry at this blog at least is a linguistic fossil, but all the more immediate for that. I hope that cools your ardour a little. An appendix of the soul, if you like, the medium through which we trained our tongue to our clumsy ear all those crazy parties ago. Language and song and story all live here, my little fuck off friend. Cricket came later, but completed the puzzle to this blogger's satisfaction.
I drift through time rings of coffee on grey the sleepless can be so sinister lips purple with cold and hats pulled low to hide eyes
it’s eerie the chant I don’t know what will happen after when the plane leaves for paris and the phone is quiet
- Brooke Linford 2009
Edges
we were in the city a hotel with jagged edges the room was a dark mahogany dormitory-style you watched me with appreciation as I filled page after page on the narrow bed you didn’t have to touch me but you did anyway the 2am traffic a yellow hush outside our window
- Brooke Linford 2009
Brooke Linford is co-editor of www.holland1945.net.au and was co-editor of egg(poetry) from 2002-2006. Her work has appeared in several Australian publications. She currently lives in Victoria where she works in administration and studies Italian.
Ashley teaches Media and English in Australia, while co-editing www.holland1945.net.au , http://kipplepoetry.blogspot.com/ and administering interactive Renku site http://issassnail.wordpress.com/ His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008 and his second, Stepping over Seasons, will be published by Interactive Press in 2009.
(in September rain, for several days a thousand earthworms, clean and pink as intestines rise out of the flooded ground swimming in some mass saturation on the concrete pathway It’s not exactly a thousand, I have not counted them, but many, all with the same singular purpose. How populated the soil is with living things, for when the rain stops and the path dries up the worms shrivel and bake like brackets, leaving not a footfall of concrete on which to tread, the earth hollow with their leaving, the corpulent ducks too heavy to fly.)
- Mark O'Flynn 2009
EDGE
the knife edge dream the cliff-top dream the empty well the windy skyscraper it’s always the same the paralysed view the bottomless canyon the rotten top-most branch the crumbling edge about to topple into the chasm the racing pulse the sweat so cold the grace of flight don’t get me started on flight.
- Mark O'Flynn 2009
Mark O'Flynn's most recent collection, What Can Be Proven, came out in 2007 through Interactive Press. He still has the great bounty of a dear and loving family, a very cute dog, and the good luck to have finally lost me as a neighbour. His poetry remains a compelling mixture of the tender and the sonorous, the hug and the bristle, even without my hairy visage propped on his fence.
You should never lend your tools to Pistoa. They will be returned broken like the smiles of the unsuspecting, and not because he is a bad man, or at least no better or worse than most, but because he is what the old crones would call distracted. I often pass him on the road between Dragon Pass and the old Venetian watchtower, his great bulk hurling its shadow down the precipice. There is something oddly effeminate in his walk, a maiden’s swirl of the hips when he thinks the world has its back to him, that massive weight pressed down on the very tips of those tapering, hairless toes. Pistoa does not sing or rain down curses on the world like most forced to ply their trade along this desolate road, but walks silent and heavy-lidded as though lulled by the whisper of his own girlish footfalls.
I wrestle with the same conflicting emotions whenever I encounter him like this, for we are well enough acquainted to know that he cannot abide me and yet not well enough for me to be certain of anything more than the gentlest rumours of his provenance. I honestly believe he toys with me a little, knowing he has the better of me in this regard, but perhaps he is like that with everyone, turning each day on its head with a yellow leer.
*
In what remains of my village smouldering on the wrong side of the Appenines (now dubbed somewhat cruelly “The Jade Terrace”), I was known as “the priest”. Why? Because I was taught the rudiments of reading and penmanship by a beet-faced mendicant who became a little too fond of my sister and who was left dangling from a gibbet until his flesh fell away into the oily pond of crows. Euclid came later, as did the revelation that my sister was in fact my cousin and that my father was in fact my uncle. It was my first lesson in how quickly the world can be turned on its head, a fact somehow encapsulated in Pistoa’s yellow leer.
When this nickname of mine reached Pistoa’s ears, how or by whom, I am still not certain. We are a strange community of solitaries passing each other on the road with our sacks of tools trading greetings and rumours of jobs and occasionally to be found in a dissolute swarm where it remains to Pistoa, the most sullen and illiterate of us all, to apply the finishing touches to our stones, whistling a steely tune as he turns a dead weight into a living thing.
“Bless this priest,” he has burred more than once as he returns me a twisted chisel.
*
It is not just for his gruff manners or his delicate hands that Pistoa is singled out by this strange fraternity of ours.
Since the Emperor and all the great Princes of Europe rode east never to be seen again, we who remain have had to find work wherever we can. The Chinese understand this and are happy to leave us free to ply our trade. City walls need constant ballasting, rotten struts replaced, stones cut for the old Roman roads. They have the same worries in the east. Cathedrals continue to rise from the charred allotments, but most of the money raised to build them now goes to Samarkand to be counted, and the Chinese are a very slow and deliberate people. They cannot understand why our places of worship need to be quite so capacious, or indeed why we should risk our lives and civic fortunes fashioning them out of stone. Yet my kind must fight our way through the same ragged hordes, chattering and laughing in Chinese, Tuscan, or Lombard it doesn’t much matter for it is always over the shriek of the saw or the sharp echo of the hammer.
*
The few Chinese I have discussed the matter with agree there is a heaven, only theirs appears to have no God in it. What point, then, trying to reach it with our spires? They talk like Pistoa walks, smirking and heavy-lidded as though our language tickled their throats. But unlike them, Pistoa cannot forgive a slight, no matter how abstruse. He is one of those who talks of rebuilding Milan, often when he is drunk on rice wine.
*
In Arezzo even now every man’s cousin is every other man’s apprentice. Pistoa is no exception, and when work is slack I lodge in his cousin’s old room in the house of Master Cano off the Carnival. The road has its own serendipity.
The address is not to Pistoa’s taste, for to he and many like him the Carnival is not some harmless if rather ubiquitous distraction but a subtle tool of subjugation worthy of priests and Ghibellines.
“Only a fool whistles at dragons,” he spat at me once through the haze and steam of their pipes and rice wine and the ducks basting to a warm terracotta while they exhorted us with their hands held in prayer to please cut off a slice.
*
If I seem to welcome these admonishments of his with an involuntary grin, it is because of the stories that follow Pistoa wherever he goes, as stories do the solitary. They buzz around some men like flies. That he has been to Samarkand and worked there on the Prefect’s palace. That he has ventured even further east to view the great sarcophagus that houses the bones of the Emperor, seen the tattered Valois standard flapping in the dry silence. The mountain of Mongol skulls. That he returned fluent in the harsh language of the Chinese and comfortable with their ways. I believe these stories because they explain the strange expanse in his speech, the odd gestures, and I have seen him carousing with the off-duty sentries night after night. But I am yet to get to the bottom of his contempt for the Carnival, only that my love of it seems to reinforce his dark suspicion of all that exists.
*
Now and then, because we both appear to have no family or friends, I will follow some vague, sunstruck, weary gesture of Pistoa’s toward an inn where we slump amidst a drunk and tired rabble of sentries and Lombard whores, and he will gaze at me as though at some shape in the mist while I ask him with my eyes if not with my tongue what is all this that has suddenly befallen us? Where does it come from and what does it mean?
“This table is your home, priest,” he softly cupped the air between us last year in Ravenna that week of the crow clouds, before staggering off to the dice games in the corner where the chickens flap and die and he will dare the drunken sentries to bet their swords on a throw. More than once the captain of the watch has locked him up for doing this, but sometimes I think this suits Pistoa who has never been so sure of a roof over his head as a man with a sister for a cousin and an uncle for a father.
*
In the house of Master Cano reigns an air of perpetual disquiet, as though something had arrived at the door one morning that no-one could quite put a name to. When the Chinese first knocked on the gates of our towns and cities, tired and bemused as we at the size of the world, two old soldiers were billeted in my very room. That was a long time ago. But like them I still find myself drawn back to this house and Master Cano with his foul mouth and soft voice and that sense of something lurking behind the fire. Pistoa spits whenever I mention it. But time here seems to pass like time was intent on passing when I was a child. As shapes rather than a line or the perfect circle of the Chinese. All different kinds of shapes, some familiar, some decidedly odd. Anyway, Pistoa spits at almost everything I say.
The girl who lives with Master Cano is very much in love with Pistoa. He cannot bear to hear this, but it is true nevertheless. I am nothing to her, worse than nothing for I make more work for her, except when I mention that I have seen Pistoa. Then she rushes to me, pats my shoulder and plies me with drink. Old Cano calls her his daughter, but she is not his daughter. There is no glint in his eye when he talks of her, merely a dark brooding, a kind of welcome shadow from the glare of the sun. Rumour has it she simply appeared one day, there in the attic room, dressed in a man’s costume with buttons down the front and barking incoherently into a tiny box that feels like soapstone to the touch. She speaks a strange dialect that seems to dart like needles from her mouth. Sometimes that tiny box of hers will make a whirring noise like pigeons in the eaves, but it must be rusty for it never seems to finish its cogitations to the girl’s satisfaction, although it did make her some money for a time at the Carnival. She is a lazy, foul-mouthed girl of twenty who is constantly complaining and raining down curses on Arezzo and all its people both great and humble. That we still queue for water at the Bishop’s fountain, for instance, or that we fix our hours by the motion of the sun as though Euclid were her uncle. She howled out once when the novelty of her whirring box had worn off on the crowds at the Carnival that she envied the Chinese their short walk home, and old Cano laughed so long and loud he made the embers crackle in the fire.
She calls herself Rosa, and it is obvious to me that she has never worked on the land, because she gets her seasons all blurred like a child’s matins. Old Cano thinks me pedantic, and perhaps I am, but I have never in all my travels through these strange times encountered someone quite so at odds with the world. There was a time not so long ago when Rosa may very well have been brought before the Bishop, but the Chinese have put a stop to all that after the Prefect’s report on the last burningsin Milan filtered back to Samarkand.
“Ah priest, she is only a girl!” is Master Cano’s stock reply to my misgivings about Rosa. For as far as the old man is concerned, the Chinese have outlawed the devil.
*
When Master Cano speaks about Rosa’s mother late at night, drunk in that chair he never seems to leave, I know he is lying but I let him go on with his fabulous tales of love and loss and love regained because the telling seems to assuage some terrible need in him. That is the other reason I am known as “The Priest”, for I am easily waylaid. There is no doubt in my mind or anyone else’s that Rosa loves the old man, but that does not stop her leaving him alone for hours, sometimes days at a time while she cavorts with those harpies in the Piazza Grande. There is such a shine on her face when she returns, however, to find him just where she left him that I can’t help thinking he is her anchor in a very wide Sargasso. It is a shore I have sat on. But her relief soon enough turns to the usual howling and breast-beating about the idiots who surround her and the stench that rises from us all as though the flesh had already left our bones.
*
For all their appreciation of our work, the old soldiers’ breathless lionising of the craft of men like Pistoa, caressing his dedications to the Virgin with their rough peasants’ hands, the Chinese have no need for us east of the Appenines. It was there, in my home, that the Mongols found themselves funneled between the mountains and the sea, and where as a consequence they wreaked their most horrific devastation. I am one of those, like Rosa, who has watched his life vanish before his eyes. It was there the Chinese finally caught up with their wayward cousins after pursuing them halfway across the world, and where, according to one old soldier who lodged with Master Cano, so deafening was the clash of metal on metal it brought the snow down off the mountains. Now the Mongols have vanished like a terrible mist, and the Chinese have no shortage of men to guard the mountain passes from round prying eyes. Even the meanest of goat tracks are peppered with their eerie hessian tents, bunched at the lip of the ridge east or west depending on the season, almost as though they had decided to retire their ageing auxiliaries this way, eking out a living in the mountains that shadowed my childhood with the sorry remnants of the Mongol herds.
*
The little creature has eyes the colour of moss on a keystone. Lifeless, if you look at it a certain way, and the piercing cold of little things. It seems trapped in its tiny body. Pleading with us with a scratch of song, its stiff little wings flapping like the corners of the old man’s mouth who holds it on a string. Whirrs and preens as it jumps through hoops, the little string a mystery, a straight line through a circle, then settles down stiffly again on its bright copper perch. The old man then invites all and sundry to lift the rope and run our hands over its stiff little body, but that is the realm of children, and their expressions always seem a mixture of disgust and puzzlement. I can never decide whether at the man or the bird.
I lay no claim to posterity in writing down what I see and hear, for I have learnt that the senses can only be trusted as far as reason holds them to account. Thus by putting these things into words I hope to see them more clearly. For the world seems to me to be full of dark shapes perpetually hovering in the corner of my eye. Perhaps, as Master Cano insists, they have always been there. Plato said as much, but I cannot account for what Plato saw in the Attic light of long memory, only that these shapes seem to demand my attention. And so I will commit them and their strange world to parchment, in the hope that by doing so I will bring us all a little closer to the world of light and reason.
I have entrusted these pages to Master Cano who is my sole confidante in this life and who tells me of a loose board in my room that will accommodate them quite happily. The Chinese may have outlawed the devil, but old habits die hard and he shows no interest at all in what I am doing. It was not so long ago, after all, that words could kill a man. He is wise in his own way, but a head so crammed begins to unburden itself as it begins the slow ascent to heaven, so I am happy he does not ask too many questions. For there is something about the way that girl Rosa looks at me that reminds me of those dark shapes in the corner of my eye. As though she were awaiting my answer to a question she had not yet mustered the courage to ask.
*
When spring finally arrives we are called away to clear the rubble in Parma. Needless to say it is back-breaking work at the behest of the local Captain, a leather-faced Turk with notoriously deep pockets who grows sheepish when he learns who we are. He explains that his soldiers are too old, and with a measure of deference he feeds and clothes us and lines our pockets when we are done. Even Pistoa is touched by the care the Chinese take with the dead and the maimed. Once the rubble has been cleared we dig down into the cold coughing loam, but we can find no evidence of subsidence. It is just like before, in Prato and Firenze, as though the buildings had been buffeted by a powerful gale.
On my return to Arezzo, Master Cano tells me of other such incidents across the mountains, which would explain the sudden ageing of the local garrisons. He holds out a grey box to me and asks me to rub my hand over it. The surface is smooth as soapstone, much like Rosa’s little box. The old man tells me my room is full of these objects, and I go up to find them neatly stacked by the window, a hundred or more grey and placid as a lake except where the pigeons have been. He tells me Rosa knows something but is not telling and when pressed left the house in a storm.
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If you are here simply to sample some great poetry with bite,then feast away. If, however, you are in search of a copy of my latest collection, "Hall of Mirrors" (available from 15th July 2020), or my Selected Poems, "Days of Wine and Bruises", both are available via the Bluepepper Bookstore tab below.
