West End

According to a report just released by the Australian Treasury, two centuries of Western global  fratricide and hegemony came to an inevitable, if somewhat abrupt, statistical end on March 28, 2012. Statistics are like that; underwriters of the binary world we all but a special few inhabit. 

For according to the most credible and exacting our Commonwealth has to offer (other than yours truly), it was on the 88th day of this year of the Mayan apocalypse (and 88 being a propitious number for the Chinese, by the way) that the wealth of the planet shifted from west to east, returning Asia to the prime place in Old World economics to which it (by which I mean China) had grown accustomed for some 1500 years until about 1840.

Could be in years to come March 28, 2012 will go down with those other landmarks of the slow eclipse of Western hegemony, but I doubt it. Like the birth of the internet, it is a slow, painful, yet ultimately fruitful thing for which no-one will openly declare patrimony.

In the short-term, of course, nothing much will change. Hollywood will continue to leach this country of its best and shiniest to no good purpose. India will continue to insist it is a stand-alone while shoring up its borders east and west, and the likes of Melbourne critic Peter Craven, or our very own Sydney-institutionalised Gerard Henderson, will continue to bend an ear to their ghosts, blinkered to the new possibilities.

Nevertheless, this seismic change variously and often vaguely trumpeted since the 1960’s has now passed across the desks of the bean-counters, and from there, as we all know, there is no going back.

I can’t help wondering, though, what this epoch-defining moment will mean to those dedicated to the destruction of the Western hegemony? And I am not just talking about the Taliban. Will they turn their attentions further east to patterns of life at least outwardly at odds with their medieval obfuscation? Not that such a thing as "Western hegemony" has ever really existed, of course, but even if it had, its time has passed now, or is at least well on its way to passing. The subjunctive “legacy” will start to rise on the word-count, matching the flow of the smartest and brightest north to Shanghai where managers (even now) have begun to nod their heads when they are actually awake. 

The next two decades will no doubt sort the creative, malleable minds from the more doctrinaire and regimented, particularly in resource-rich and increasingly skills-poor countries such as Australia. I owe a doubt here, of course, to the late Donald Horne. But doubts and misquotes aside, the next twenty years will either sort those prone to incessant hyperbole from those less inured to extremes of behaviour (predictive or otherwise), or bring them closer together. Student of 1914 as I am, I hope it is the former, not the latter.

So, at the risk of falling into my own trap, I predict a kind of digitalised belle epoque being the new political divide for the foreseeable. Not the tired old left-right polemic of so much of the “urban” poetry peppering my inbox, but the malleable and empathic against the so-called agents of “change“ who are anything but.

And while we are on the subject of those apparently unable or unwilling to understand the forces and historical trends against which they so publicly rail, what in the world was Julian Assange thinking when he signed on with Russia Today for his show The World Tomorrow? The title's bald assumptions aside, was Assange not aware of the track record of this Putin-backed outfit? In fact, if any media organisation could be regarded as the living embodiment of everything Wikileaks purportedly aims to take down, it is Russia Today. His maiden performance was wooden and obviously heavily-scripted, and his reference to Hassain Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, as a "freedom fighter" was as trite as it was inaccurate. I appreciate the Aussie ex-pat and hopeful Senator has some serious legal bills, but this latest chapter in the Assange saga confirms a complete lack of judgement which can only lead any thinking person to question both his and his team's essential motives.

New Poetry by E.F. Schraeder

Ramona from Assisted Living Tells us, the visitors, about yesterday’s emergency outside work, where the ringing bells remind us of death with every tone; how a small girl wandered, an archetype through a corn field. Text messages alert hundreds who gather, hand in hand for three hours walking the cold rows long past sunset to find her. Lost, like these ones we look over to talk, while they slumber in wheelchairs, tilt toward perpetual dusk until a waiting hand finds them. - E. F. Schraeder 2012 For the Birds Every visit past the glass cage where bright canaries and gray lovebirds nest, their orange beaks pecking at straw and string, I worry for them, watch the mindful cat on the cushion. My concerns fall from the glass, collapse to the floor like heaps of empty husks and seed shells. They wait out their lives, pecking and sleeping, chirping their stories to residents, visitors, nurses, anyone who pauses long enough for hello. Most pass them on the way to mothers and fathers, grandmas and grandpas. They behave like the framed prints on the wall, unassuming and decorative, overcrowded and sad, small eyes looking for something not found. - E. F. Schraeder E. F. Schraeder's creative work has appeared in Haz Mat Review, Corvus Magazine, Bluepepper, Kicked Out, Whitechapel 13, and elsewhere.

New Poetry by Ryan Stewart

MSK 

I thanked my doctors once
And then I went away -
I'd sooner not annoy them twice
(I had some catch-up play)

 But little did I think
How much I grew inside
What pleases doctors most -
Old patients swinging by


- Ryan Stewart 2012

Ryan is a professional dog trainer and aspiring writer. He has been shuttling back and forth to LA to peddle scripts for the last couple years but most enjoys writing poems, essays, and children's stories. This is his inaugural publication.

New Poetry by Phillip Ellis

A Credo in Metre

I dream of the world and sleep, and, when waking,
I find I am caught, a fly, and in amber
so solid. I dream the world as I slumber
and find, when I waken, something so dreamlike.

The world is a dream no God could imagine:
so complex the world, so flawed that it's likely
all creatures evolved, and were bidden
to rise from one cell through time and by nothing.

The beauty of magpies carolling mornings,
the currawongs chiming evenings have given
a shape to my day, and beauty of singing
no God could imagine, being so petty.

So turn I my back on gods, as a mortal
and limited man, and peace is my trophy;
afraid of no Gods, I live, and I know this:
I'm saddened I'll miss this world with its beauty.


- Phillip Ellis 2012



Late Swim (After David Brooks)

The coping strategies of the wind
that echo around my head, like roof-iron
and rust torn into the air, seem as though rock
is forever cold to the palm, and then are gone.

The thought's disappearing, as storm-clouds
are after an infodump of rain on islands
haloed by the light of the newborn moon.

The only true light I can think is 'star',
not as in celebrity, those who walk amongst them,
or those whose cuddled dolphin in the bay
is in reality rapist without arms,
weighing choices as though choices were a bird.

I would speak of this one star, speak of her
that dreams of me in Aotearoa, but no tear,
the fading sea that carries no tree
or foam forwards, will fall again:
the wind has not yet torn away that roof.

But to speak of her with adulterous
and adulterated thoughts, is it not like bones
and cartilage, and nothing more as man, as being enough?

I will not speak of that star then, that is down
in the low skies, as if it were in bed
and toasty warm, over the dawn sea.

Perhaps
it will not fade in the dawn, be
too wan to shine when the day is late.

Perhaps this is the only poem that I could make


- Phillip Ellis 2012


Phillip's new web page is www.phillipaellis.com/

While you were sleeping

The recent announcement that the newly elected LNP government in Queensland will soon be scrapping the prestigious Queensland Premier’s Literary Award should come as no surprise to anyone but those guileless few still trying to sell us the Bronte girls as serious literature. 

The LNP (the Liberal-National Coalition of laissez-faire urbanites and socialist - no sorry, I mean heavily-subsidised primary producers) is, after all, the new coalition of the people (according to the degraded line run like old Telstra broadband), and the Australian Labor Party that of the political elites so practiced in the arts of demagoguery that they cannot see past their bellies (or arses) to the corn supply. That is the new paradigm. No prizes for guessing who are the Gracchi brothers and who the new little Caesars.

Forget for a minute that it was John Gorton, arch conservative and advocate of the “all the way with LBJ” approach to matters on or around the 17th parallel, who way back in 1972 founded the Australian Film Commission, from which such flowers as “Rusty” Russell Crowe, Mel “Mad Eyes” Gibson and “Bouncing” Baz Luhrmann were later to bloom. Not to mention “Our Kate” Blanchett, but then she does not fall into any of these categories; she floats…..

Or, on the obverse, that it was the pronounced lefty in anything but what mattered most, Bob Hawke, who set in motion the corporatisation of “aunty” ABC. 

Last year (2011) the Queensland Premier’s Award allotted almost $250,000 in state and federal revenue to 14 no doubt well-deserving and hard-working writers in as many fields of endeavour. It took just one change of government with no pronounced mandate regarding the arts (other than the usual grainy Photostat) to reverse 15 years of what some would call a job well done, others a waste of time.

And in a parliament with only one chamber since 1922, and the most overwhelming majority in that lone chamber's history (Labor managed to hold onto 7 seats in an 80-odd seat chamber). 

Some would call that stultifying, others just a smoky room. 

What it tells me, social democrat though I am and anarchist though I am about to sound, is to trust no patron, however large or small, whether of the people or (apparently) against them. You will soon enough find yourself dancing for drinks in dog-leg bars.

Writers should not live on stipend, inoculated to fate, the menial, the hard landing.  

Work the long shift, the long haul, free the lobes, cure yourselves of sinecure.

New Poetry by William Wright Harris

bride

russian beauty

kandinsky

painted in

winter hues

bubbles of

whitespace

form her gown

& crown of beads

her hair a veil

falling in

lines

capable of rendering

all

creation

- William Wright Harris 2012

William's poetry has appeared in ten countries in such literary journals as The Cannon’s Mouth, Ascent Aspirations, generations and Write On!!! A student at the University of Tennessee- Knoxville, he has studied poetry in workshop settings with such poets as Jesse Janeshek, Marilyn Kallet, Arthur Smith, and Marcel Brouwers. 

Poetry workshop with Les Wicks

AP’s online workshops provide poets nationally and internationally with the opportunity to connect with Australian poets and poetry.

Online workshops run for four weeks and operate by participants emailing the tutor their poetry a few days prior to the first scheduled day of the workshop. The tutor will respond with feedback and direction. Participants will then continue to submit their work, improving their piece based on feedback offered weekly, for the duration of the course. Please enroll by clicking the register button below each workshop. You will then receive confirmation that you’re in the course and be contacted a few days before the workshop begins by the relevant tutor.

$75 AP members, non members $95

http://www.australianpoetry.org/programs/professional-development

New Poetry by Rachel Barenblat

FEVER

You're on fire beneath my lips,
hot as the coal that Moshe grabbed
when the angel forced his hand.
As we rock in the dark
I want to pray for healing
but I'm muddled with sleep.
I sing to you in two holy tongues.
You whimper. My eyes are closed
but I have known your face
since it first appeared, blurred
and grainy, on the ultrasound screen.
When I replace you on cool sheets
you cry out once and then curl
clutching yellow bunny in one hot hand.
The white noise machine croons.
What do your fever dreams show you?
How long will you remain a furnace,
incandescent in my arms
and exhausted from the burning?


- Rabbi Rachel Barenblat 2012



COMFORTER

you wake in your crib's embrace
from the dream of a distant heartbeat

a voice says cry out!
and you cry out

bewailing the tragedy of separation
until I gather you to my breast

glowing numbers shift silently
and your desperation eases

someday you'll learn to fumble soft stars
into their places

to nuzzle your giraffe
and count adinkra like talismans

but for now I am consolation
I make the rough places plain


- Rabbi Rachel Barenblat 2012

Rachel's first book-length collection of poems, 70 faces, was published by Phoenicia Publishing in January of last year. 70 faces is a collection of poems written in response to Torah. Rachel is also author of four chapbooks of poetry, and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, among them Phoebe, The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, and The New Orleans Review. Rachel holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was ordained as a rabbi by ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal. Today she lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and son.

New words and pictures by Wayne H. W Wolfson

"Last Call" (Paper & Marker)

Last Call

A clown in a baggy brown and yellow checkered suit bends down to pick up a balloon, with every step forward to get it, the tip of his foot moves it ahead a little. The band had gotten off the stage to take a break but the trumpeter who had been lingering as he waited for his girlfriend, one of the dancers, plays a slow lament from his stage-side table. Nearly falling over in the process, finally the clown gets the balloon. He cradles it in his arm like a baby and tenderly presses his cheek up to it. The waitress asks me if I would like anything else before settling my tab, a girl with a round ass from Rome plumps down onto my lap and there is the sound like a shot ringing out of something popping. 

- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2012

"Marina Has The Blues" (Watercolor & Paper)

New Poetry by Stuart Barnes

Colour after the car crash

Colour is a basic human need …

like fire and water,
a raw material, indispensable to life

– Fernand Léger

Through Mosman’s veins they pestered them, orange freaks of Krishna,

silver weavings, citrus Fendi glasses,

blister pearls at clavicles, scarlet Prada clutches,

funereal stiff jackets, ‘why the crutches?’

‘Strangely spotted fingers plucked Deliverance’s bluegrass!

We wanted them away from us, their ghastly hues like mirrors’ …’

- Stuart Barnes 2012

Stuart Barnes is arranging the manuscript for his first book of poetry, & writing his first novel. Poems are forthcoming in Southerly Journal, The Warwick Review, & The Weekend Australian Review; an essay – 'Robert Smith: More Than Meets The Lancôme Eye' – will appear in Issue 3 of VLAK: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts. He currently lives in Melbourne.

New Poetry by Phillip Ellis

Ocean Writing

I have been thinking of your name, recently
when I have had the chance, and how it is clear
as a clean glass of water, with the sunlight
unhindered as it emerges through the sides.

You have a specific way of you being
your name, to me, that I would want to whisper
its clarity to the Pacific Ocean
so that it can write it across green shallows.

And those who cross this border of land, water,
on their way to, from, Aotearoa
shall read your name and shall remember your name,
and, like a meme, word will reach you in the end.

You will maybe wonder why it is your name
is written in the shallows of the ocean,
or you will remember me, and you will smile
at a romantic fool beside the waters.

And I'm hoping, at heart, that you will be pleased
enough to investigate this for yourself,
and to look towards the rising sun, foaming
over ocean, lean your head on my shoulder.


- Phillip Ellis 2012

New Poetry by Kathryn Guelcher

Shoes

There was something about

the way you pressed your thumb

on the top of his shoe to check

the size

the way you reached down

sure-handed

blood surfacing and resurfacing

under the nail until

your hand was my father’s.

I was both child and wife-

anticipating and admiring.

Aglow with the warmth of

the fit.

- Kathryn Guelcher 2012

In addition to being a mother of three, Kathryn has been teaching high school English in a suburb outside of Chicago for 12 years.  This is Kathryn’s inaugural publication.

New Poetry by Martin Jervis

Heavy Cold

There are razors white laced

slicing up tomato soup in a gulp.

There are thick whirlpools of glue

stirring up in deep raw bubbling pits.

There are streaky nitric burns deep

burrowing into lake rusty whites

There are senses hung in acid glow

tissue suspended in a film of moment

and I blow my gurgling nose flute

in a trumpet of anaemic yellow.

- Martin Jervis 2012

Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, a great deity cast a line,

Caught word made flesh, created and

Saved all creatures earth bound passage.

Oxygen made if not discovered, chemical

Process plus hydrogen two equals water. Out

Of the primordial soup crawled warm food,

Multiplication and various diets, first cause.

Warmth sucked out, cold imports rushed in

To carve ice statues, misplaced sun, hard

Water kills all tongues. Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

Consoler, Comforter, Jehovah, Spirit of Truth,

Dove, you killed them all, distraught, learned

Complexities of death of creation and creation

Of death, replenish that blue earth, sow seeds.

All things reproduced, land and sea, walked

And swam, tiniest microbe to largest whale,

Fauna, flora, special places beneath the

Corrected sun, left in the hands of Zamiel,

Beelzebub, Sammael, Belial, Lucifer,

Ahrimanes, Mephistopheles, he swore

Never to return to that spinning sphere.

- Martin Jervis 2012

Martin Jervis lives in Leeds, England. His poetry has been published in the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Europe. Spends part of the year in India and has written a series of poems with an Indian theme. Some of his poetry has been translated into Spanish and German. He has also travelled extensively and has a Masters degree in Literature. E-book The Citron House was published in 2007 by White Leaf Press, UK.

New Poetry by Changming Yuan

Confrontations (2): Plum Blossom

Without a single leaf

Green or yellow

To support it as a foil

But on a skeletal twig

Glazed with dark elegies

A bud is blooming, bold and blatant

Like a big drop of blood

As if to challenge, to warm up

The entire season

When whims and wishes

Are all frozen like the landscape

- Changming Yuan 2012

Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman, grew up in a remote Chinese village and published several monographs before moving to Canada. With a PhD in English, Yuan teaches independently in Vancouver and has poetry appear in nearly 470 literary publications across 19 countries, including Asia Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Salzburg, SAND and Taj Mahal Review. 

New Poetry by BZ Niditch

NIGHTFALL

Fearsome response
in red green orange
light switching silence
along the salt lick highway
stopping in shadows
a cifer from bloodshot
red eyes sleepless
in the strata, blood and stone
of your nature
by the wave
of your hand and ocean
through revisions
of winding tunnels
of near and far sightedness
in blue random hours
of your narrative
half-speech
passing asylums
prisons
platoons
the lost are never found
seeking cognition
and every idol and star
goes for a swim

- BZ Niditch 2012

BZ Niditch's latest poetry collection is "Lorca at Sevilla" March St Press, North Carolina. USA, avalaible at amazon.com. New poems in Grasslimb,N American Review, Pacific Review,publishes internationally in UK. Au,NZ ,France, Austria,Germany and Japan.

New Poetry by Robert H. Demaree Jr.

LOVE LETTERS

In a box I once thought sealed for good:

Our letters, postmark 1960,

Now naïve, of course,

Florid declarations back and forth

Between college dorms and Army posts,

Embraced by a faint musty dampness

And decaying rubber bands.

Packed away for years,

A hedge against the reach of time,

They have arrived again at a crossroad:

Whether to stay,

Unable to salve the grief they know will come,

Alone, except for the silverfish,

Another forty years,

To entertain our grandsons’ wives;

Or, as we conclude, evidence not needed,

And so to join the accretion of phone bill stubs

And invitations to unremembered showers,

Black bags, in the rain, in the curbside archive.  

- Robert H. Demaree Jr. 2012

Robert Demaree is the author of four collections of poems, including Mileposts, published October 2009 by Beech River Books. The winner of the 2007 Conway, N.H., Library Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives five months of the year. He has had over 550 poems published or accepted by 125 periodicals, including the 2008 and 2010 Poet's Guide to New Hampshire. For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com

Iron and Wine

The political poem died a sorry death in the Anglosphere some years back, during the so-called Poetry Wars of the 1980's and 1990's. In one of those cruel ironies rampant in academia, it would appear that the instant politics began to dominate the running of the faculty board, political poetry lost much of its potency. The broader public, as it happens, turn to poetry for clarity, at times even salvation, but not self-serving polemic. 

As David Biespiel put it so succinctly in an article in Poetry a couple of years back (an article I have cited before in Bluepepper), the public have come to feel ".....excluded, unconcerned, and dismissed because they believe that American (read Anglosphere) poetry has become so esoteric that figuring out the differences among the warring poets is...unecessary...." (David Biespiel, This Land is our Land, Poetry May 2010).

Now I was a tender strapping acned thing during the "wars", but I have a sneaking suspicion that much of the "warring" was in fact spurred on, not by strong ideological conviction, but by the fast-diminishing opportunities for poets to pursue their vocation under the inexorable drive of corporate rationalisation in the publishing world.

Most readers of Bluepepper will have grown up in this world and will have trouble fathoming the sense of injustice and outrage with which our predecessors greeted this harsh new reality. In such an environment most were happy to point the finger while few, too few, remained comfortable with the idea of raising a hand. Sinecures were at stake. Thus the political poem quickly became the domain of the feckless and unhinged, rust-throated relics of a bygone era.

There are, of course, great political poems that endure because they go to the very essence of what it means to be human. The East Europeans turned it into an art form, as did the Enlightenment English, but Pablo Neruda (with due apologies to my friend Margie Cronin) seems to me to sum up the general failing of political poetry in that he is either a great poet or a seductive polemicist, but never both at once. Vallejo could be at times, or the Catalan poet Estelles. Some but not so many. Perhaps in large part because the mistrust many people bring to poetry they bring doubly to the political poem.

Blame Plato if it makes you feel better.

Of course I am speaking as an Australian. An avowedly Euro-centric Australian, but an Australian nonetheless. We are perhaps the least prone to seduction by honeyed rhetoric, more impressed by Cicero's courage than his eloquence, and those who decry the absence of the Great Orator in this country are blind, I believe, to one of our greatest strengths. But then perhaps I am beginning  to show my age.

The West Australian/Cambridge poet, John Kinsella, would appear to differ with me on this as on so much else (earnest and sardonic being as oil to water), for he has published yet another stridently political poem in the Spectrum pages of this weekend's Sydney Morning Herald (18/02/2012). Titled "Penillion of the Iron Ore Eaters", the poem is an embarrassment that should never have left the beer coaster on which I suspect it was penned. It labours under the kind of tortured rhyming scheme I remember with an ache between my eyes from open mic night at the Sandringham Hotel, circa 1996. This combined with its utterly incoherent train of thought (surely the death-knell of any political poem?) will do absolutely nothing to help preserve the pristine Pilbara coast currently so hard-pressed by the mining boom. It may even prove counter-productive, both to the poet and to his cause, by re-enforcing an attitude abroad since the Poetry Wars that poets long ago lost all right to a fair hearing.

New Poetry by Richard Hillman

aside

for Alicia

someone said that lovers saunter

and i’m trying to imagine that

with difficulty – it is late

and we need to get home

and the car headlights

make out shifting shapes

beside the old road

in this dark we expect something

will jump out at us

i feel your hand resting

on my thigh

as i ease on the brakes

going into the bends

you tell me you’re sick

of these half-lit trees

that you need out

of this darkness

and i suggest stopping

somewhere

perhaps parking

on the ridge

overlooking town

i find the turn easily

but we don’t saunter

beneath the stars

because the backseat

barely has room for two

- Richard Hillman 2012

Richard lives in Wauchope, NSW, where he runs creative writing workshops from time to time. He has had several poetry collections/chapbooks published, including Timber Country (Picaro Press) and Raw Nerve (Puncher & Wattmann). His poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally, in print and online magazines. Richard has been a recipient of SA Arts and Commonwealth grants for his writing.

New Poetry by Maurice Devitt

Street Song

Step on a line

you marry

the devil

no longer

to savour

the candyfloss

of grace -

instead

the check-list

of sins,

the first

confession

an easy choice

between murder

and omission,

the craving

to beard

the bogeyman,

loosely

imprisoned

in an upstairs room,

the curious

keyhole of mascara,

the too-loose clip

of his mother’s shoes

and in the corner

a wireless

playing

all the best tunes.

- Maurice Devitt 2012

Lost Earring

Did it fall

as you took off

your coat and how

did you notice?

The sudden

slight imbalance

a pin-prick

of air or fingers

expecting

the confidence

of silver

only to feel

the lobe of a baby

untarnished

by the script

of borrowed

beauty?

Spurred

by the curiosity

of distance

and lust

I saw it

quite quickly

in the drunken

shadow of my chair

but demurred

wanting the search

to last forever

- Maurice Devitt 2012

A student at Mater Dei in Dublin, Ireland, Maurice is reading for an MA in Poetry Studies. Short-listed in 2011 for both the Fish Poetry prize and the Cork Literary Review Manuscript Competition, and runner-up in the Phizzfest poetry competition, he has had poems accepted by Abridged, Moloch, Paraxis, Weary Blues, #firstcut, Boyneberries, Stony Thursday and Smiths Knoll and is working towards a first collection.