Short prose by Jen Craig

Lola kills

This morning, as I was passing between two women who were chatting with smiling faces on a narrow footpath, I overheard the single statement: my friend died last night ­ a single statement which had the same intonation and tone, I was thinking, as if the woman had said instead: my friend came last night (a long awaited friend ­ a friend she had been talking about to this other woman for weeks and weeks now, each day bringing the event of her arrival only slightly closer).

If it had been possible to pause where I was passing, I might have done, if only to hear whether the apparently cheerful tone of the conversation was going to alter.

The fact that, by coincidence, a new piece of graffiti had appeared on a building nearby saying: Lola kills, only added to the gentle hysteria of the morning.


- Jen Craig 2008


Jen Craig’s short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines. In 2007 she finished a MA in Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney, with the completion of her first novel, Since the Accident. Her blog of micro prose can be found at http://absurdenticements.blogspot.com/.

New Poetry by Mark O'Flynn

Francis Bacon's Studio


From the perspex doorway, thick as a bank
teller’s window, every dream is achievable.
Not a draught stirs. The rosy splatter of the rainbow
arcs across the ceiling like a blood spill.
Loose feathers of paint, the forests of brushes
held fast in this holy, primal mess.

Behind the ravaged door every mother’s nightmare.
Scraps of newspaper fossilized in place,
the round mirror a bloodshot eye.
The light preserved, exactly, like the light
of a grimy London hangover. The floor,
long forgotten under tins of rubbery paint,
slashed canvases turned towards the wall
await the verdict of the rats in the temple.


- Mark O'Flynn 2008



Nets

One thing you can say about the razor wire
when the overnight spiders cast their fishing nets
and the early morning light strikes
at just the right angle,
for a moment the fence is meshed
in shimmering colour like something woven
or stumbled upon, decrepit in a swamp,
and everything to be faced on the other side
for a moment disappears.


- Mark O'Flynn 2008


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 grave misfortune to remain my neighbour until the lease runs out. His poetry, of which I have only recently become acquainted, is a compelling mixture of the tender and the sonorous, the hug and the bristle. Click on the post heading to see what I mean.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

august rain

plucking courage
from somewhere
she’s months into
this newest illness
still working still
somehow smiling,
everything passes
in grey sheets then
crumbles like yoyo
or a long landslide,
i’m awed holding a
tub of vicks at the
beside just giving
my brave face and
though it’s wearing
out, there isn’t any
thing else i have so
we make do with
that and settle into
sheets that smell so
much of eucalypt.


- Ashley Capes 2008

and yadayadaya

Which leads me to poetry as dirge, as plaint of a swinging gate, a whining dog, a town google finally takes off its maps.

Shakespeare. War. Religion. Radiohead. Love. THE TRAPPED. All that is dangerous and tender about our days.

We are, and will always be, dear readers, alive in dangerous times. We are no different to any other excepting the angle of the wind, the calibre of exception. The comfortable have for all eternity and will (at least for now) continue to spare a moment for the trapped.

Poets are the first to respond and the last to pronounce about this on-going crisis that is us. But that is just their method. They are, like journalists and infantrymen, prone to a breath-taking mortality. They stop to think, pronounce, die in the dreadful percentages of those who count.

We have those playing a two-handed game, however

turn to window turn
from tv & c
d player to col
our lifes short & on
lookers fickle read
what you fear true hear
an unknown sound one
holds the benchmark an
other chins with succ
ess theyve a whole oth
er raison detre
flatters something rac
ist precious unreal


- Michael Farrell "curtain as persons" from a raiders guide


It sounds like it means something because I built it up to dodge a bullet, which is what Michael Farrell's poetry does very successfully. I call it poetry only because that's how it came packaged via the name of a man I do not know but trust like the weatherman. Whether it is his judgment or mine that is finally askew is one of those best left to the weathermen of this great new medium. The blurb (and I am a magpie of poet's back yards) informs us that Farrell's new collection is a "raid on the inarticulate", but not as TS Eliot intended...The poems are composed through the application of principles familiar from contemporary music - sampling and remixing, repetition and substitution. Which, I gather, is supposed to legitimise this intellectual condescension passed off as a book. It is enough that we have digitalised that last bastion of spontaneity - rock and roll soul rap hip hop - but now we have to swallow these desperate grabs at street cred by a desperately over-rated writer. "Farrell's ear is as warm as an analog synthesiser" blurbs Aaron McCollough a little underwhelmingly, but at least his forms a sentence. Christ knows what the ubiquitous blurber Chris Wallace Crabbe was getting to or working away from when he was finally grabbed mumbling "...a tough little cookie".

Raise your standards, Giramondo.

The Garret

There was, back in December of last year, about the time I was lauding its crisp pages like an orphan at his first Christmas dinner, a debate opening up in POETRY regarding the merits of Ezra Pound's Cantos. A tired argument, you might say, and a tired old place to have it, but, well....I am blogging for much the same reason you are surfing.

In recent times I have gone back to Pound's Canto's to find out if I was correct in so thoroughly getting over my initial enthusiasm for them, or it.

So begins Clive James in his graffito of one of the great poetic exiles.

Fifty years ago, when the mad old amateur fascist was still alive and fulminating, I fell for the idea of his panscopic grab bag the way that I was then apt to fall for the idea of love.

Ah, dear old Clive, our very own Don Bradman of the reverse average, holding out until the maiden comes. Not so strange to your dear blogger, I suppose, as a man who so aspires, except that Clive seems to have fallen out of love with the mad visionary and in love with the ordinary when there has in fact been no surer, more steady time to do exactly the opposite.

Come let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.

One of those closed conceits so loved of drawing rooms before the big guns made litter of the drawing rooms and many of the people in them. I will let go that clunky first line, the hokey indicative. I assume Clive James emulated the same clunky grammar in his passionate commentary on the flawed but passionate man for much the same reason.

I have been disappointed by most of my heroes one way or another, but that is the point of heroes, or at least the way we have been re-inventing them since the Wars.

There is in Pound's Cantos as much to confound and disappoint as there is in any chat between the triumphant and their tired and beleaguered ancestors.


Who, who will be the next man to entrust his girl to a friend?
Love interferes with fidelities;
The gods have brought shame on their relatives;
Each man wants the pomegranate for himself...


I am not of Clive Jame's generation, so I can only blog at one remove about the desolation they soaked in around the dinner table (yes, there used to be such things, dear reader, even in my over-extended blog-time), but there seems to have been an air of acquisition in the generation following the last war that is almost Hellenic in its breadth and scope

...just as we can scrutinize the aging remains of our bodies in the mirror and decide that these loose remnants would not even be here to be looked at if we had not been strong and healthy when we were young, so we can look back to when we were wrong, and decide whether we were wrong as all that.

Indeed.

Youth and health have their virtues, as Clive James so readily doffs to the Hellenic in his Antipodean heart, but play can take your eye out...

Mascara

Mascara is an online journal seeking to promote poetry of excellence and originality. We are especially interested in the work of contemporary Australasian and Indigenous poets. Our criteria for selection are quality of image, language and innovation. The word ‘mascara’ entered the English language in 1890. It derives from Spanish, Arabic and French origins, its meaning evolving from the word mask, masquerade, to darken, to blacken. The Arabic word ‘maskhara’ means buffoon.

And there you have it, short but sweet. Another Australian poetry hopeful is launched on the web. It is over a year old now, and judging by the two issues so far, it has a long life ahead of it. Diane Fahey, Phil Hammial and my long-suffering neighbour Mark O'Flynn are just some of the talents so far published. The mag has a strong editorial team with a subtle focus on Australia's troubled relationship with Asia, that amorphous mass where most people live. The editors are open for submissions all year round of poetry, reviews and short essays. They even PAY! Yes, that's right people, this is a grown up editorial team with access to funding and a willingness to share it. Do yourselves and Australian writing a favour and check it out. Just click on the post heading. And no, I don't know who the pretty girl in the picture is.

Vale Mahmoud

Mahmoud Darwish, a poet of great tenderness and lyrical intensity, has died in the US at the age of 67. His work became a rallying cry for the Palestinian struggle, and although the poet scorned the tag "poet laureate", he was closely allied with the Communist party and later the PLO, one of many Arab liberation movements which it spawned. Darwish spent 26 of his 67 years in exile, first in Moscow, then Paris, then Cairo until finally settling back in Ramallah in 1996. This later period in his life proved to be perhaps his most productive, spawning six books including Unfortunately it was Paradise: Selected Poems in 2003.

About Darwish's work, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, "Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging...."

I Come From There

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....


- Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008)

Eternal Youth

The streets of Sydney are once again being blocked off. Last year it was for the secular end of hot air in the guise of the APEC summit, this time it's for the Catholic Church in all its atavistic glory. We are even getting our trickle of medieval milksops up here above the snow line, and I can't decide whether my teeth are clenched against the cold or the sanguine chatter of believers. I do not begrudge them their life choices, merely the imposition of them on the rest of us. What we have here is state-funded proselytizing courtesy of a New South Wales government still in thrall to the old DLP/Santamaria Catholic left. Like the church it is playing host to, it is decades behind public opinion and only retains power in the absence of any effective opposition. Apparently I can be cautioned, or perhaps even fined $5500, for remonstrating with a Catholic youth trying to sell me their wares. Indeed, so vague are the laws passed in the dead of night a few weeks back, that the police seem tongue-tied when trying to explain them to the general public. All I can suggest is that all we cemented agnostics with a tendency to flashes of anger in the face of the untried and the supine keep off the streets of dear old Sydney as much as possible for the next few weeks. I'm sure whatever is up there is looking down with an oily smirk on its lonely, indelible face.

New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

Cronos

He eats
of their flesh,
Cronos
devouring his young.
How he fears,
as he swallows it all,
flesh, blood, bone,
stone alike.
How he is undone
by his rapacity.
How he dooms
his fellow Titans.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2008





Memento Mori

Three dead trees
against the eastern sky:

beyond us are death,
skeletons of rabbits,
and you cannot ever
return from whence
you must go.

Three magpies
in the burgeoning dawn,
in the carolling dawn,
on the frostbitten lawn,
and I’m back beyond
dead trees against the sky.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2008

New prose by Jen Craig

The decorative circle

Last week, she told me, as she was driving, she happened to listen to a radio feature on the life and work of Hildegard von Bingen – a twelfth century mystic who had so fascinated her during the nineteen eighties that she had bought a book of her illuminations and writings.

It was only as the actor read the line, My new song must float like a feather on the breath of god, that she realised, not only did she fail to recognise these words, but that she could not even recall actually reading the book she had bought and treasured through so many moves and changes of relationships. In fact, all that she remembered of it, right then in the car, was that the cover was a pale egg yolk yellow and, in the centre on the front, there was some kind of mandala, or at least decorative circle, which, now that she came to think about it properly, she said, was very likely the one thing that had attracted her to Hildegard von Bingen in the first place.


- Jen Craig 2008

Jen Craig’s short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines. In 2007 she finished a MA in Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney, with the completion of her first novel, Since the Accident. Her blog of micro prose can be found at http://absurdenticements.blogspot.com/.

Xerxes

I am afraid I will have to rant now. I was taught to respect another’s wishes, until they began to mutter words like “faith”, and “no more”, then we were supposed to find a minister, or “minister”, I have always been hazy on matters as intimate as religion. Anyway, it’s too late now. I am Anglican and so barking mad by default. Either you are all too talented, too feckless, or too prudent to submit to me. Your choice, invisible one. This blog becomes either a bible or a history.


But you should know I tread this earth very lightly. I am a tall, fleshless thing, and my stamping up and down will not coax one boat further to the shore. Yours or any other. I may have given the impression that such is what I am looking for in poetry. For that I apologise. For being agnostic in most things that matter to our time, I do not. I am a poet. They shoot better than me for nothing.

Mark Dapin had an interesting little rant at the opening of his piece on the young writer Chloe Hooper in The Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend 28/29th June 2008). It is a rant couched by a wide shot of an elfin Chloe Hooper all little-girl-lost in her "small converted factory in North Fitzroy". It begins (and I only quote at all because its cry to the buried past lends it gravitas)

"Covens of Australians are jealous of Melbourne author Chloe Hooper. They hiss and they bitch and they spit and they mew (you can tell he's English, can't you), and by night they drink pinoit gris and howl at the moon. They think Hooper (meaning Chloe, first names in this country please, Max, the war is over- I think?) has had it all too easy. On the publishing-party canapes circuit, rumours spread like exotic turrine on very small crackers."

Well bugger me!

I mean the canapes and those nasty turin poor poor Mark defers to Pepys red-faced Albion and island of shoddy paperwork. From whence he fled and brung the bad taste here, ta very very.

He should be working for me, don't you think?

For we are still just a tiny island, miraculously white, and shorn of all sheep now, Mark. And yet, there's a story of incarceration, of a kid boxed in, of a child out of step with her time. And some bald prick with his arms crossed looking frightened as hell pretending he knows everything.

I'm sorry, I seem to be drifting between small, bloated men now. I was referring, just then, to Andrew Wylie, the old Testament god guy of all Antipodeans with a mss and an rss and no sense of good old bss.

And the ridiculous leap

No-one in the writing fraternity who cares about what they do ever wished Chloe Hooper anything other than "good luck". She made you young again, pilgrim. Didn't she? Unfold your arms, stop looking east. It is a dangerous occupation.

When there is a lack there is a tendency to fall about. That is history. All great cultures are prone to it. As are all great drunks.

New Poetry by Wayne H. W Wolfson

Rue Linnei

It is a hot day, the specifics I don’t know, never having mastered the metric conversion. The heat makes everyone crazy dumb. It is only after the sun goes down that some will attempt to recreate the day’s madness with drinks and different positions.

Christina does not cover up as she hangs some towels to dry. Leaning forward, the geraniums bow their heads at the touch of her skin.

I steal a glance, imagining the taste of salt and flowers on my tongue.

Despite the heat there is a breeze in the courtyard, caused perhaps by the tiny space between each building, a closeness which makes the sidewalk gasp for air. The green of the trees rustle.

It is like a secret, the sound of a quickly running tap or the metro as it glides to a stop.

Out front, everything remains still. I whistle some Django so she will know that I have gone and she can cover up.


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008



Beethoven

They called me “Beethoven” because the thin walls could not hold back my music.

Although I think if it had been anything besides symphony they all would have complained, but to complain about symphony would almost seem an admission of ignorance. They may not get or even like it, but no one wanted to appear left behind by what they considered class and culture.

Originally they called me “Professor.” This made the old guy who rented the room across from mine with the grey, push broom moustache upset. I learned later he had been a teacher before forced retirement.

He never complained that I heard. Very quickly though, I was “Beethoven”.

The morning after the first heavy snowfall and he was gone. I decided to sleep in, the whispering of the cleaning women, I knew there would be nothing left to steal unless I ran in now. Ah, but the floor was cold and I needed a shave.

I did not worry, that room with its trick doorknob had a way of growing new lodgers.

I pull the covers up and roll over. Some of the staff enforced the no visitors rule. She would throw small pebbles at my window until I got up and helped her sneak in.

How long ago was that? When asked, who left who, which side was better to be on?

She told me where she would be, even made up a little song, borrowing a melody for it, so as to not forget.

Flat on my back, I stare straight up. The halls are quiet now. Her perfume haunted the cracked plaster sky above the bed.

I would like to stay in this wonderland, but lack of motion eventually makes me uneasy. Besides, she was out there somewhere, now within a song.


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008


One of Bluepepper's trusted regulars, Wayne has just returned from his yearly sabatical in Paris.

Calling all poets

It's been just over a year since I posted a general call-out, but I haven't forgotten my threat to start posting excerpts from my verse novel. I have two to threaten you with now, so poets and poetry lovers consider yourselves on notice. Just click on the "Bluepepper" tag in the top right hand corner 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. Probably why I haven't got a girlfriend.... 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.

Magellenica now available

The sequel to Justin Lowe’s premier verse novel, The Great Big Show, told through the crooked eyes of Albermarle Darcy, DSO, a womanizing, cricket-loving, autodidact veteran of the trenches with a cast of nefarious characters haunting the piers and alleys of Balmain, 1924.

Purchase now in hardcover with handsome dust jacket.

Click on the post heading to get to the storefront.

Short fiction by Ashley Capes

eve


gunpowder-blue, walls shelter the bed, milk-sheets and a zippo click, as the cigarette glows.

a jessica-rabbit-gown on the floorboards, caramel wrappers congealing in his pockets

and her shampoo dragging lilac through the window, streetlights steady blonde beneath the black-eye-sky.

is this really what you want?

he spins the lighter on the sill, lilac smoke bleeding from his lips.

she pulls the sheet across her breasts, milky hands and clean nails.

don’t pretend you’re the one being hurt.


this isn’t a play, sweetheart.

he rubs lipstick from his neck and glances at her gown, remembering how very soft it felt.

she leans against the bed-head, blonde hair wrapping her throat in gentle fingers, eyes flat as boards.

god, you’re a prick. haven’t you had enough?

he stares out the window, exhales.

she wraps the sheets round her feet.


- Ashley Capes 2008


Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002 and is working on an pdf magazine holland1945. He is currently studying Arts and Education
at Monash and 'sings' for his band kingfit. His first collection of poetry
is 'pollen and the storm' (2008.)

Life after Egg

We're very pleased to announced that our new* pdf magazine holland1945 is open for subs, we're closing at midnight on May 31st and would love to hear from you or your writers. We're looking for text and image this time so please feel free to submit in either or both realms. A quick note: we won't be taking short stories and our images will be published in a horizontal format - but for full guidelines and contact info visit the site by clicking on the post heading.

Sturm und Drang

Talk as you see it and then as the other one sees it and then as you both picture it. Strangers aching to touch each other on this wildly spinning ball. 1945 when my parents cured the world of war for the second time, and poetry. X. 1968 when my "godparents" did the very same thing. X. Yours too, I'm sure, obliquely.

I have other sires, other grudges, but the one always balances out the other.

War war war, even here on this placid blue mountain.

Is it that my country plays cricket and sleeps strange hours?

Or is it the enduring terror of that dark spinning ball in the besieged of us all answering to the whispers of Fluellen, expert on all matters bar the vicissitudes of mass grieving

Know the glove?
I know the glove is a glove.


He was barking at his betters after a hard-won victory. I love Fluellen, the nerd in us all there in the trenches rasping to all and sundry how to both survive and appreciate the young Harrys of this bleak spinning ball.





Fluellen is the hard-bitten, butter-mouthed Welsh geek of Shakespeare's Henry V, down there in the trenches before the walls of Harfleur with Pistol and co as they bang out how to do their best by the lions in their hearts. God is blinded by the smoke, an utterance. The drama does not pale. For He wanders amongst them in a pillaged cloak on the eve of battle, haunched amongst the Fluellens as they talk the sleep and chill out of their frightened bones. Even if you've never heard of Shakespeare, that sentiment is gospel.

The young king Harry has rubbed shoulders with these men before, not as a prince, not as a man of fate as such, but as a fugitive from his destiny, in other words in a pub.

It is there he finds his poetry, there the Bard drags him down by the hair and drags him up again. The boy does not become a man by being drunk. That is left to the heroes, beyond which humanity has passed well and truly. What young Harry meets in his dissolute youth is Falstaff, of course, the still beating heart of his father's legacy. A man no boy can quite believe because he is so generous and clumsy, like the wind, but

By my troth
....The King has killed his heart


Meaning the boy, of course, come good and with a heart as big and beating hard but a little less black than old Flastaff's, he leaves his conscience to die in the upstairs room of a pub in Dover. Harry would swallow that, and the hanging later, but Shakespeare wasn't interested in ghosts, at least not in that play. He was interested in young Harry, the balls he had or hadn't, and what dead wood you must set adrift to be young Harry or young anyone. Not a bad question as we coast into the autumn years of the age of celebrity. What does it mean to have actually achieved something in the eyes of your peers?

Remember, the ground will always be breaking, the sky will always be opening.....


* Portrait by Suzie Bower

Shop talk

My email address has changed. I have enjoyed an entire 24 hours without any spam. Click on the submissions tab to update and get those insidious robots working again!

By the way, the poems published yesterday at Retort magazine are from my verse novel Magellenica, written in the voice of Albermarle Darcy, DSO as he lived and breathed in 1924 in Balmain, NSW, Australia. I am not in the habit of employing racial epithets in my poetry.

New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

The Dream of Meaning

Be the girl who's her coat,
the guy who's his car,
the wife who's her washing machine,
the man who's his tie and promotion,
the grandpa who's his rocking chair,
the grandma who's her cooling apple pie
on the window sill,
and that elusively hollow dream,
that masculine and powerful dream,
that warm and limiting dream,
that bread-winning dream,
that retired dream,
that comforting, homely dream,
may be saccharine enough to choke upon.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2008


Phillip A. Ellis is a poet and scholar living on the eastern coast of Australia. His first concordance, of the poetry of Donald Wandrei, is due for publication by Hippocampus Press, and he has a free e-chapbook of poetry, Morning Light downloadable from http://www.geocities.com/phillipellis01/broadsheets.html and he has another chapbook, Bitter Honey, available for purchase from ebooksonthe.net as well. He will be studying English at Honours level through the University of New England, Armidale, over 2008 and 2009.

New Poetry by Wayne H.W. Wolfson

Hearts and Onions


The alley was narrow. Two neighbors had agreed to stretch a rope, window to window.

It is late. Everyone is asleep, eating or hungry. From the rope now hangs a solitary shirt. Dead breeze, with the last of its strength, this torso waves the way out of the city.

No one ever looks up though. He is still now. No escape is possible, not even his own.

The last set, the bassist is half awake and the skin man seems anxious. After this, what? I feel compelled to take my time. Horn in hand I stretch out. Three small vignettes, Schubert playing the blues. The last note a stifled sob. People file out, the night air, hungry beast licking with heavy tongue.

Summer is like the illusion of the promised land, and that things are going to be better.

Libby will still be up.

I knew her neighbor. He called me “Schubert, the sad one”. I think he purposely waited to hear my footsteps on the stairs, to come out and meet me. I did not care, we are all inherently lonely.

Before anything else, I would have to wait while he took his watch out. It was not a pocket one, it had just lost its band.

He would look at the watch in his palm, squint, look up as in prayer, and depending upon the time say:

“Good morning” or “Good afternoon”.

She let me in wearing an old housecoat I hate.

She always thought tea would make me healthier. The cups from my previous visit where still on the counter. After two days the sugary dregs at the bottom had hardened.

All further prophecies now frozen within this dark hued amber crystal landscape.

All bets are off, you will have to find out for yourself.

Being too tired to try to magic trick pop them in my mouth unseen, I went into the bathroom and popped some pills.

She put a record on and shut out the lights.

The scent of orange blossoms, dilated pupils, I had never noticed before the intricate patterns tapped out on the high-hats.

I opened my eyes. Her silhouette framed in the dirty blue of a midnight window.

The stars were fish which ran through her hands, who pulls at these long fingered dreams?

She came to bed.

“Take a shower, you smell of smoke.”

“You, of cheap airport cologne some of your customers wear.”

“We could take one together.”

I don’t answer, but roll over.

“Should I set the alarm or let nature takes its course?”


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008



Water Song


Somewhere, in the dark, she hides her secret wishes.

Again, the boy-girl thing.

Come on in, the water’s fine, for the Sharks.

Her blues.

A treacherous kiss finds my lips.

Where are we?

According to the informant, caught.

Dancing, wrapped around each other like good poetry.

Where are we?

In between rounds, putting her blues in motion on the dance floor, hiding from all tomorrows.


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008

New Poetry by Les Wicks

Episodic Gratification

Kill the cat.

Your name is not enough.
Trust your hands.
Kill the cat. Make It.
Don't let prayers have all the brightest stars, roll your lips.
Your choice one-day one-day.

The secret is layers, one cannot endure…
good life is an accretion of layers.
By the time you have attained
spouses, mortgages, power or esteem
there will be nothing exposed to the certainties of cold winter.

And you'll have killed the cat

which had no name
maybe once sleek
preposterously proud in its little menace.
Worse then, ginger dimmed
scars and missing teeth
but still a tomcat howl
to rake a sleeping night.

He had no humans of his own
but his kind all know the predictable call for food.
Geoffrey allowed. The approach, the grab
then throttle. A vicious, short-term fight -
scratches before a death.
This man dropped the orange, empty carapace -
it lands like exhausted breath (which it no longer had).
He could almost see refugee fleas as they packed for diaspora.

That empty ball of bone
buried in a #4 blade plot of lawn.

Next day had a paper-cut wind
his own belief in comfort
warmed the Sunday hands.
We know this choice. The end.
He becomes the intended comet
of primary happiness.
Grass grew brighter.
Everything important wins.

Each page
in the Gehennic biographies -
more food, more garbage
sleep at the edge of charms.
Thieves, chains and Hugo Boss
strange children home from school
becoming just like daddy
and the wife is toning thighs
in rooms full of energy.


- Les Wicks 2008



Kurraga City Council

The lords of local politics fly spotlit under lamps.
A desk can bluster them lazily above crowds,
stinking contrails above the craning lumpen necks
of almost-concerned citizens.
Expertise is rusted on
our mouths are angry nests as waves
corrode beneath untended sun.
There's a 1940s lemon slumber in the halls
as lesser grades sick lankly over tea.

Pyramids of waste
cacophonous hymns
cracked roads like mousetraps
with chasms at the verge.

Art projects primped then launched in a
municipal wine to an audience of three -
ossuary of the new.

Pensioners get bussed to parks
where they're mugged then rushed to hospital.
Like People's Liberation Army troops at harvest time
blue uniformed Rangers march out to reap fines from those
whose junk-pump cars go everywhere
"for the ride".

Each civic plan has kernels for the next
while good intentions seep like limescale
in a great impotent bowl.
Envy no one this choice
when they one-day raise their hand;
Australian suburban jihadis
on an asthmatic campaign.

Me too, complaint becomes habit
then every day is caught up
whining into nitre.
Overheated phones placate iconoclastic codgers,
complaints are passed up into space
until no one rings and no one answers.
There's just the fart-oomph of spent words
folding all the air.


- Les Wicks 2008


Bondi poet Les Wicks appeared in the March issue of America's Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, one of hundreds of publications that feature his work.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

as mud dries

what draws you to empty
spaces, where
echoes cross arms
and dive off rocks,
never to be heard again?

alone is just five letters
pulled together by a snapshot,
when otherwise they wouldn’t
know each other at all

but between them something
happens to make
going back possible

the way you can take words
like lead, until one syllable
breaks your knees,
and still you go back for more, sneaking

the way you find seconds
between jet engines
and a cool change,
even when running.


- Ashley Capes 2008



ashoka

whatever hands may wash
we will steal and muffle with boxes,
rachel’s blue rose on the wall
armies
of cups, crippled toothpaste
and the
peter pan complex

only the body moves
and thoughts stick
between
sills and taps that drip.


- Ashley Capes 2008



Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002 and is working on an pdf
magazine holland1945. He is currently studying Arts and Education
at Monash and 'sings' for his band kingfit. His first collection of poetry
is 'pollen and the storm' (2008.) ashleyandbrooke@bigpond.com

New Poetry by rob walker

The Teachings of the Buddha

when the others have left
a man wakes from his
stupor finding himself
in the middle of the kingdom

of bhutan in an old hotel room
with a plain brown wardrobe
half a cup of cold darjeeling tea
a piece of plain toast and the

Teachings of Buddha at his side
through the curtains orange and
yellow prayer-flags billow upwards
across the whispering thimpu river

regular white geometry
of bhutanese houses climbing steep
slopes with the cedars and the
dzhong on a distant mountain

against blue
he wonders at his place in the
world and the book
falls open to


When a man is in a house and opens his eyes he will first notice the interior of the room and only later will he see the view outside the windows. In like manner we can not have the eye notice external things before there is recognition by the eyes of the things in the house.

And from a white fog
nothingness begins to take
shape


- rob walker 2008


rob walker is an Adelaide poet currently residing in Himeji, on the coast road between Kobe and Okayama on the Japanese island of Honshu.

Les is more than I can handle

It will always have its detractors, of course, as anyone who has suddenly come into money will, and anyway, detractors are to any institution what air is to a whale. But Chicago’s Poetry Foundation is at least putting some of that money where its 96 year-old mouth is.

In its annual newsletter just arrived on my desk, Foundation President John Barr states

Recently we counted up… and were surprised to find that our partners number more than 40 different national and local academic and cultural institutions. The collective effect of all the Foundations activities in 2007……was to place the poems in front of 10 million people.

On top of this there is Poetry’s ongoing commitment to awards. Now, you may share some of my scepticism about awards (look no further than the winner of this year’s Archibald in Sydney), but at least Poetry is going some way to unclogging the funnel and allowing some real and lasting talent to slip through. There is also Poetry Foundation’s initiative American Life in Poetry, in the words of John Barr, a syndicated weekly column of poems selected by former poet laureate, Ted Kooser and published by the Foundation with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. That column now reaches more than four million newspaper readers each week, and the program is being expanded to offer a free poetry syndication service to newspapers (you hear that, SMH?!!) featuring book reviews, op-eds, and articles on poets and poetry. In addition to continuing a series of broadcasts on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer......

As you may have intuited by the dots, I could go on, but all this vibrancy and optimism is making me dizzy. I am a native, after all, of that hoarse whisper south of the line where our only poetic “institution” is a bloated avatar for all the good we inherited, whose skewed pronouncements on those less fortunate than himself speak volumes for his clinical condition and not much else, and whose output seems to yellow and blister at each fresh reading. Had I a fraction of his money (this is a man, need I remind you, who could afford to return an enormous government grant, in essence buying copy to air his pithy grievances), then I assure you I would be doing my utmost to explore ways of salvaging what remains of this island’s proud literary heritage. Let’s face it, Poetry are drawing up the blueprints.

It behoves none of us to draw too many parallels between Americans and Antipodeans. They are a programmatic race infused with an energy alien to us. They are only ever looking in one direction (the Iran-Iraq war is, after all, ancient history to those whose parents’ taxes largely subsidized its prosecution and the eternal “liberation” of 2 million souls), while we are forever in two minds. In fact, just this morning I was struck on reading Don Bradman’s classic “A Farewell to Cricket” that he refers to heading off to the “New World” when setting sail from Sydney for his tour of North America as though leaving the “Old World” behind. Only the pedant in me was struck by it.

The great Don’s Dominion-esque approbations aside, institutions such as The Poetry Foundation enrich us all, Antipodean or American, poet or passing stranger. Did I mention their decades-old “Open Door Policy”? It was enshrined thus by founder Harriet Moore in 1912

The Open Door Policy will be the policy of this magazine – may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.

Though an institution with plenty of money (it is in the process of building its own headquarters, for God’s sake, in downtown Chicago!), Poetry has never really forsaken its modernist roots, ie that vibrant, exploratory, oftentimes reckless spirit so characteristic of the first two decades of the twentieth century, workshop of that thundering rollercoaster on which was conceived this island’s all-too-partisan equivalents. “it is a strange bird/this world/whose habit is/to fight itself/whose left wing/and right wing/tear themselves/bitterly apart”. So said Michael Dransfield, back when our “institutions” were still young. But someone needs to tell these dons of the dilatory that the old bird is dead. That the wings weren’t clipped but blasted clear out of a September sky. Someone needs to tell these grand old cocks to either shit or get out of the nest and give this chick some room to hatch.

New Poetry by MTC Cronin

DURESS

Oh great poet
There seems to be something you do not know
Otherwise why so many laments
Though artfully concealed
You have made from words?
Shall I tell you what you are missing?
There is only one thing
Joy
When someone mistakes it
Anything is bound to happen
Including these things
You have been forced to write


- MTC Cronin 2008

[from FALLS]

Margie Cronin is one of Australia's most accomplished and prolific poets. Her latest book is "Prayers in a Box/life without a god" through SOI Press (2007)

Congrats Stephen

And while we are dwelling on matters north of the line (which I have and so often will, dear readers), congratulations to Sydney poet Stephen Edgar for picking up the chalice in this month's issue of Chicago's Poetry magazine.

Texas Muse

More from our fiscally embarrassed cousins to the north - 32 Poems is a smart little A5 poetry mag out of Texas Tech University that publishes poems of 32 lines or less. Basically the tendency is toward the succint and tautly lyrical in a late Robert Frost, Roethke kind of way. Somehow Sandra Beasley gets away with a compelling 55-line poem entitled "The Wake", resplendent in that grand tradition of Americans abroad

The girls, they are finishing now, they are yawning,
and the gondolier mutters for his lunch.
As they pull away from the canal's slick edge

the water holds, for a breath, the shape of their passing.
He knows no plate could manage that wet cleave,
no pastel give more than the dimmest echo

of that blue lack.

The editor, Deborah Ager, runs a tight ship, and there is a consistent tone that runs through this issue that whispers of "writing class". But this is fabulous, inventive, vibrant poetry that has graduated well beyond any school. There are one or two try-hards, but at least they try. All in all well worth the few rusty pennies I spent on a subscription. 32 poems gets a big thumbs up from Justin Lowe. Just click on the post heading for more.

Shoehorn

Thanks to one of those delicious accidents of the internet, I have come across my blog idol in the form of Maurice Oliver who runs Concelebratory Shoehorn Review out of Portland, Oregon. Each month Maurice invites poets and artists whose work has caught his eye to submit 6 poems, the best of which he posts on the first of each month in issues of quality unsurpassed in the blogsphere. I have no idea where the name comes from, but this blog is a revelation to me, an absolute treasure trove that I have been glowering over for a week now like a vagrant happening on a chest of gold. Click on the post heading and dig in!

New Poetry by Ray Liversidge

Things to (and not to) do

A found poem from a notebook of Edna St Vincent Millay

For Jordie Albiston

Care for nothing except poetry.
Keep everything from mind but this.
Forget that you exist.

Even if suffering torment speak in voice
with no hint of pain. Keep corners
of mouth up. Cry as little as possible.

Disguise feelings when You-Know Who(m)
is in room. Have many lovers.
Remember things to do for Eugen.

Go out of doors every day. Putty
up holes where bees get into garage.
Put panes in several windows.

Exercise will-power in all things.
Have a drink, sometimes.
Never leave the syringe about.

Don’t become sloppy in anything,
in thinking, in dress,
in anything. Don’t fool yourself.


- Ray Liversidge 2008



Awakening

He woke still lying on top of her, and knew by her breathing that she was asleep. Their lovemaking had been brief and – as she liked to say – sweet; then sleep had quickly overtaken them though neither of them were tired. She was on her back and bore his full weight in her groin as he had fallen at an angle so that his upper body lay lightly across her chest and his head rested sideways on the pillow above her shoulder. This meant that their faces were almost touching and that his view of her profile was from below the level of the lobe of her ear. Rapid eye movement and the occasional twitching of limbs suggested she was dreaming. Her hair had fallen so that the pinna of her ear was covered. In the moonlight the exposed portion of ear looked like the bottom half of a face. With every quiver of eye and limb her ear wriggled ever so slightly so that the auditory canal looked like a mouth attempting to speak. If – as she said – he had been distant of late he hadn’t noticed until now. He lifted his head from the pillow and whispered three words into her ear. She woke.


- Ray Liversidge 2008


Ray Liversidge arrived back in Melbourne in November 2007 after travelling to the UK and Ireland on a reading tour. His first book ‘Obeying the Call’ was published in 2003. His verse novel ‘The Barrier Range’, which draws on the expeditions of early Australian explorers Burke and Wills, and Charles Sturt, appeared in 2006. He is currently working on another manuscript on the work and lives of dead poets.

New Poetry by Jane Williams

Peddling poetry

the woman in the gift shop explains she sells more tangible accessible
craft toffee you can get your teeth into huggable sweaters G rated
calendars tea spoons and tea towels coasters but no ashtrays not
these days she takes the book turns it this way and that as if it is
an abstract painting unsure which way is the right way up she has
a look that could be saying something about poems that don’t even
rhyme being a waste of God given space not to mention time
wouldn’t buy poetry m’self she admits when pressed wouldn’t read it
though I s’pose this proposed a little cautiously some might
she doesn’t go on to suggest the cardinal sin that others yet again
may even write it and I wish she’d ask me what it does so I can tell her
the right poem can take your breath away return it sevenfold inflating
parts of your brain you never knew you had it can shake your faith or
just as likely restore it knock the chip from your shoulder bring a dogma
to heel trigger cries of joy that leave your enemies wondering what it is
they’re missing out on wrench from you a howling that sends your lover
running to hide all the knives it can leave you silent so silent you begin
to hear things you never heard before the sound of your mother wanting
you just you just the way you are the sound an angel makes when falling
the sound love makes when it isn’t being asked to qualify itself the sound
of the desire for war spontaneously combusting the right poem can
make you believe and forsaking all others for the rest of your days
follow wherever it may lead


- Jane Williams 2008


Jane Williams' most recent collection of poems is 'The Last Tourist' (Five
Islands Press 2006). She lives in Hobart,Tasmania.

New Poetry by Maurice Oliver

Categorical Imperatives

Try to imagine a small room where the only
furniture is a TV. The TV has a hundred
channels and two sets of memories. The room
suffers from amnesia and has a leaky ceiling.
There’s a bowl of fruit on the TV and the room’s
floor once was the life of an oak tree. Neither
the TV nor the room has ever had a headache
or felt contempt for a total stranger. But, the TV
does wear glasses and the room is terrified of
the dark. The TV wonders what it would be like
to have a dent in the bridge of its nose and the
room longs to know what a clock sounds like
when it ticks. Personally, I try not to wonder
about much of anything other than how robust
this exercise in the use of your imagination
has been. I’ve provided a space below where
you can leave comments. While you scribble
yours, I’ll go stand at the window and watch
the Pepsi truck pull up to the asylum so a bottle
opener can fill the vending machine.


- Maurice Oliver 2008



Progress, Disguised As A Centipedes

And when the dust finally settles, here’s what’s left:

-A row of concrete dividers on a receding hairline.

-Every wood-framed church in the Bible Belt.

-Trains that are only used to scare away ghosts.

-A building that was originally scheduled for demolition.

-Thickly spread peanut butter wedged between two silos.

-A coat rack made from barrels of Agent Orange.

-One lamppost that longs to be a lighthouse.

-A pair of spectacles that desperately need polishing.



- Maurice Oliver 2008



Maurice Oliver first discovered his desire to write poetry while on an eight month trip around the world in '95. It took another eight years to gather the courage he needed to share them with anyone other than close friends. After what seemed like tons of rejections one poem was published. To date, his work has appeared in numerous literary reviews, journals and magazines in seven different countries. His latest chapbook is titled "One Remedy Is Travel" and was published last year at Origami Condom. A year ago he created his own literary ezine which can be found online at: www.concelebratory.blogspot.com

New Poetry by Wayne H.W. Wolfson

Dead Moon

My woman lies sideways and hangs her arms around my neck as if drowning.

Later, with a growing sense of unease, I would get up. In the dark, in this strange place I would bump the coffee table; upsetting a pyramid of dominos which could not even muster up the enthusiasm to fall all the way to the floor.

I stare out the window. A drink would be nice. A drink is not worth the fight in the morning.

I swear I saw her make a scratch mark, whisky tide chart, on the label.

The moon is dead, in sleep.

I stare at her, I scratch the label, carving our initials, then go back to sleep.


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008



Odd Land

Last night I felt a hundred years old. No, no secrets, barely enough strength to whisper in your ear. I sit by the window, cigar in hand. The smoke, it carries the notes of Prez’s horn out into the night. A fragile thing of beauty pulled apart by the sky.

No. The seagulls on the rocks below mark the time since you have been gone with a spiteful lament.

His mouth says what I want it to, a triangular pink gash from which emerge ugly things, my truth.

One of us he mocks. One of us he drives away.

All these years, sometimes in the place between waking and slumber I still see you, in your summer dress, standing below on the rocks.


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008


Wayne is a California based author. More information on his works and CD Midnight Latitudes can be found at his site Terrible Beauty
www.waynewolfson.com

New Poetry by Phillip A Ellis

Turn the Page

I fell asleep in the arms of my god,
and woke in those of a burnt-out body
by the banks of a roiling river.

I keep dreaming I’m happy, sane again,
but the path veered away
and the fords fell away
as scales from both eyes
in an ugly miracle,
and I’m sick of ugliness and silence
whilst, within, cacophony.

And the worst thing is, I can’t remember
what it’s like asleep in the arms of a god,
free from the dregs of fear, and drugspun static.

Turn the page,
and forget me:
I dare you to....


- Phillip A Ellis 2007


Phillip A. Ellis is a poet and scholar living on the eastern coast of Australia. His first concordance, of the poetry of Donald Wandrei, is due for publication by Hippocampus Press, and he has a free e-chapbook of poetry, Morning Light downloadable from http://www.geocities.com/phillipellis01/broadsheets.html and he has another chapbook, Bitter Honey, available for purchase from ebooksonthe.net as well. He will be studying English at Honours level through the University of New England, Armidale, over 2008 and 2009.

The Grin

Intimacy is one of the great human paradoxes, an elemental whisper that seems to possess both body and soul; colour, light shadow, smell, touch, taste. And yet it is really no more than a suspicion that the external world may not be quite so hostile after all. That we have brushed against Other and that perhaps (forgive me, Ezra Pound) there may be commerce between us.

There is simply no way of arguing intimacy with anyone. Colours range, intimacy doesn't. Poets consider it theirs now, all others having left the field. The tender trail of a finger down a lover's forearm, the muffled plea of that lone sock in the corridor. The milky spill of the stars over your sagging wind-blown camp. The clutch of events in the ears of the resolute.

We bury intimacy along with our names, to paraphrase Cicero.

Poetry is, of course, eternally charged by intimacy much as the asteroid is eternally charged and dismayed by the vacuum of space. It is the poet impatient of the intimate who will tutor you on form in the small hours and yet will not hear a word read in its defence or anyone else's. I may lack a certain homely charm, but hours spent in a small room with such people are short on the cosy and long on the intimate.

So what, then, do I mean by "the intimate"?

I will spare you the John Donne bedroom conceits, fleas, etc. This post is neither about the frail edges of life or its long, nagging shadows. It is about the happenstance, the life discovered as it is lived, the union of time and space that is the miracle of all sentient beings. The nooks and crannies. The life we surrender from ourselves everyday for the good of all of us. A habit formed over millenia that those millenia seem designed to shatter every day for the last 3650000 days, or so. And yet here we are, just.

As I write this I am watching a cricket match. She of the indelible nooks and crannies. That should be a surprise to no-one. I am an Australian and that is what we do here - quaff wine and agonise over a game that is about as divorced from our sunny, fervent nature as any game could possibly be. So why the enduring fascination across centuries and tribes of this most ponderous and challenging of contact sports?

It is intimacy, of course. In all the most celebrated portraits of the game in this country (with the stark exception of Drysdale, whose iconic painting had more to do with how this country had been bled dry to the point of serial ghost towns, ie with the cricketer's themselves than with the cricket), the players stand focused, mirroring some point between time passed and the world at hand, florid with potential.

I had the great fortune to be privy to two fascinating Test matches recently, one in Kolkata where more than 300,000 witnessed the match, the other in Kandy smack bang in the highlands of Sri Lanka, where less than a tenth as many cheered their team to victory on the fifth day from what seemed an impossible position on the second day, especially after the dog crossed the field for the first time. To the uninitiated, a Test match is so-called because it extends over 5 days, ie 30 hours of playing time, which is often not enough to get a result at that level. Dogs do not usually factor in the equation. But Kandy is that sort of ground.

I have only recently got cable. Cable TV was never a matter of great concern to me and I still can't quite explain why I have it now except that I am older and more settled with my leases, and well, let's face it, free-to-air is getting a little light weight.

I am not, I promise you, a conduit for pay TV. I have a point here. Intimacy. The happenstance of us. Cricket. The smiling old dog who stopped a match between two proud nations every day at 3.05 pm on her way home from somewhere to somewhere. No-one cared or dared to stop her and ask - not the cricketers, not the managers, not the groundsmen, not the police, not the cameramen, not the producers. They all just stood and waited while she waddled and grinned wide through their moment. Not once. Not twice, but every day of that Test (5 days) there she came smiling and strutting from one end of the ground to the other.

I cannot think of another sport played at this level where such quirks of fate would be tolerated, but then we are talking about a sport with its own mad aunt vocabulary - "silly mid-on", "googly", etc - and its own mad aunt obsession with food and drink (there are two meal breaks - the first at 1pm, the second at 3.40pm, as well as a brief drinks break every hour). Ian Botham, England's greatest cricketer and now a wise and personable commentator, tipped the dog would be back at the same time the next day "it just has that look about it, going about her(?) business", by which time the English were batting and the Sri Lankans were hugging the boundary rope in a vain attempt to staunch the early flow of runs. A gentle murmur around the ground and there she was picked up by the cameras trotting diagonally through the game from third man to the long off rope. It was obvious one or two of the Sri Lankan players were more than a little discomfited by this grinning quadraped making free with their bread and butter, but then the camera panned back to Muttiah Muralitharan, the champion spinner, grinning from ear to ear, and suddenly the dog was swallowed up by the crowd.

I switched to the Kolkata Test between India and Pakistan, the roar of the 70,000-strong crowd in that enormous stadium so deafening I had to turn down the volume in order to make out what the commentators were saying. No dogs crossing here, the perimeter ringed with barbed wire and truncheon-yielding police. And yet the crowd were happy, vibrant, attentive. They seemed to be clustered into precincts - the face-painting crowd, the flag-waving crowd, the mullah-crowd, the shy, pretty girls and the young couples seeming to savour every moment together before marriage and children. Indian crowds, it doesn't take a genius to realise, are there with one eye on the camera, erupting like a field of wheat at the slightest shift in focus. They spend all night on their quirky placards and all day waving them around upside down for the cameras. "Sachan is such a one" and so on. But as a crowd the Kolkata mob is second to none for intelligence and good breeding. They cheered the roof off, of course, when a Pakistani wicket fell, but they also offered generous applause in recognition of opposition feats.



The match, after all, did end in a draw, even after five days, and with no trotting dogs or wasp clouds. I am working up to the wasps, patient reader. It was a tense contest, one of those engaging Test matches where even from 8,000kms away I felt as though I were eavesdropping on someone's difficult first dinner date. At times in cricket the action turns inward away from the spectator, and you either make that leap to become a participant as one would at the theatre or you give up and go home. It can be an exasperating experience for the uninitiated, or it can be the window to understanding a most profound and intimate game.

So, while one umpire fainted and another was summoned, I switched back to Kandy, where Sri Lanka were supposed to be batting their way out of trouble and into the cool highland evening. What I found was fifteen grown men (11 fielders, 2 batsmen and 2 umpires) lying face down where they had stood only a moment before. For a moment I assumed the worst, but then one or two players raised their heads and squinted as though into a very strong wind, and it was only then I noticed the white occlusion between camera and game. A swarm of wasps had, like the grinning dog, decided this was the quickest route home.

New Poetry by Mark O'Flynn

PEASOUP

Fog is a cloud that has lost the will to fly.
Bill Bryson


After the downpour - a peasouper.
Fog so thick it is like glaucoma. The spirits
are said to be let loose in such a fog as this.

I wanted to go to the centre of the oval
where even the dark silhouette
of the treeline disappears and you
can imagine the world evaporated.

Out there I found a bunch
of cricketers camouflaged in the mist
waiting for their blindness to lift
and the contest to resume. It felt distinctly odd
meeting them like steamed ghosts,
part cloud, part will’o’th’wisp standing
with the drowned worms in the grass.


- Mark O'Flynn 2007

Mark O'Flynn is a widely-acclaimed poet, novelist and playright who has just returned from a three month writing residency in Ireland. He has had seven plays produced, published a novella and three books of poetry. His novel "Grassdogs" was released last year through HarperCollins and his third book of poetry "What Can Be Proven" was released last week through Interactive Press. He also has the dubious of honour of being my neighbour.

New Poetry by Jo McInerney

Returned

I remember ceasing to exist.
Not a near-death experience, no extra-corporality,
I simply lost my definition, went out of focus.
I could look in a mirror to see no one I knew.
I understood it would be useless to try to talk.
The words would not emerge or, if they did,
the hard syllables would crack and fall,
broken pieces of a dialect no one ever spoke.
I could still see. People moved around me
like square dancers treading the pattern,
smiling, laughing. They did not realise they, we
were about to lose our grip, release our toes,
demagnetise and drift off into nothingness.

I don't remember how I came back.
Did the Martians unload me, did I find God,
did I love someone or they me? I'd like to know.
I'm afraid that last encounter was only the first.

- Jo McInerney 2007


Jo McInerney spent the first twenty years of her life in Melbourne. She
has lived in Gippsland for the last thirty years and has been writing
obsessively for the last two.

Shameless

An interview I did with Maggie Ball is posted up at Blogtalk Radio (the tab to your immediate right). You can also find her review of the book in question, The Great Big Show, at a number of sites including The Compulsive Reader.

The Monthly reaches out

THE MONTHLY FOR AUSTRALIANS ABROAD

The Monthly is now available online.

'The Online Monthly' will be published simultaneously with the print edition. It will contain the full text of the current issue, plus every article ever published in the magazine.

We have decided to publish this online edition so that we reach the local 'internet generation' and give Australian expatriates easy access to the magazine.

Believe it or not, there are currently an estimated 860,000 Australians living and working overseas. If you know any of them, and think that they might enjoy The Monthly, please forward this email to them. They can consider subscribing via the link below.

This is a logical step for The Monthly following the incredible success of the printed edition, which is here to stay.

For more information see www.themonthly.com.au

New Poetry by Steven Balters

Rattus Norvegicus

It was afternoon, but you had to stay behind with all the people
Who grew tired of the sun caked windows that inspired sleepwalking.

The grey circuitry boxes tucked inside of the white concrete
Exploded. He knew, yes he knew and he warned of it,
And he sent everyone out the door, following fumes from an electrical fire.

Night was beginning to flood the gymnasium anyways.

Fire consumed and burned and spread to every last classroom.

Now you wonder how he knew the wiring was flawed and self destructive,
Or how he knew rats were gnawing at the motherboard, the system board,
The system. The system was feeding generations of rats by the time the
Roof gave way to the stars, and he only looked oblivious.

Now you wonder this.
As you stand with your best friend
In the slicing sun,
With a school in ashes behind you.


- Steven Balters 2007


Steven Balters is an 18 year old first year student at Seattle University. He was born and raised in Omaha on the plains of Nebraska.

Saint Max

It was the poet Margie Cronin who first drew my attention to Melbourne's The Monthly magazine in one of her frequent circulars. As relatively young writers we had both been hungering for a new voice in the Australian mainstream print media, and The Monthly seemed to be it. It seldom disappoints. But as we head down that slippery slope towards another Federal election, it seems even such young luminaries as The Monthly can't resist the temptation of dragging their colours through the mud of Australian party politics. Mungo MacCallum I will excuse because he has never been anything else but partisan, and his writing is wry and insightful and fed by a rich tradition of Australian political writing stretching back well into the 19th century. His labelling of all swinging voters as "nongs" says a little more about where his politics are stuck than the true state of the Australian polis, but sadly he is not alone in this issue. Atavism remains a plague on this country, and The Monthly is far from immune.

I will begin and end with the cover story of The Monthly September 2007 because I believe it encapsulates all that is wrong with the current editorial approach of what promised not so long ago to be a clean break from the beigists. I know very well why it is the cover story, because it promises to appeal to the most general readership, part human-interest, part political commentary, and because its subject is the universally respected retired ABC journalist Maxine Mckew and her tilt at John Howard's seat of Bennelong (where I am currently jotting down these notes in my boss' carpark after a 90 minute drive to a low-paid job, but more of that later). My problem is not with Maxine Mckew, whom I greatly admire, nor with the intentions of both writer and editor. Maxine will probably fail in her challenge, but she doesn't need me to tell her that. I think what she is doing is bringing the values of the Australian Labor Party to an area of Sydney that has not had much direct exposure to them since the decades between the wars, a thoughtful, charming and beguilingly self-effacing advocate for what, after all, aren't a bad set of core values for what still touts itself as an egalitarian society. My problem is with the tone of the piece. It is one of almost breathless adulation that repeatedly renders the journalist, Judith Brett, immobile when a chance beckons to dig a little deeper. For instance, early in the piece she accuses McKew of a slightly bloodless consensual brand of politics so beloved of marketing types, then all but claps her hands when caught in the trap.

And when I ask her (McKew) about the ALP's position on old-growth logging, and Rudd's, in my view, disgraceful courting of the Tasmanian logging industry, she simply smiles.

Really? And what do you expect her to do, Judith, a journalist of her experience hearing a reporter from The Monthly couch her own opinions within a question? Is this the Big Issue? I can imagine the ever-graceful Maxine feeling for a 2-dollar coin in her pocket.

The journalist then spends two paragraphs on a rather breezy analysis of recent Federal parliamentary history, highlighting a cycle of sorts between consensus (the Hawke years) and the head-butting of Keating and beyond. I'm told it all rates very well on New York cable. She confuses history with short-term trends, however, a chronic distemper among journalists who refuse to read books thicker than a tabloid. Bob Hawke's consensus was a successful ploy to placate Moody's and win back the triple A rating, but it was also a successful attempt to bury the hatchet of the old class war that had been picked up by middle-class students in the 60's and poked and prodded until it was almost unrecognisable. By which I mean Whitlam.

Of course Rudd is very different from Bob Hawke, he doesn't have Whitlam and a faux class-war to bury. He just has Paul Keating and his volumes of visceral bon-mots to bury ("conga line of arseholes" has become the national favourite, I think). History never really repeats itself, not really, that's just a stick our imaginations hold over us whenever the winds of change blow the map clean out of our hands. But saints do not good politicians make, and Kevin Rudd is a very good politician. The likes of Judith Brett would do well to remember that the next time they consider committing twaddle such as this to paper

So if Rudd were to win, the times would suit McKew's style of politics and her gift for listening to people. All the courtesy and charm that made her such a persuasive interviewer are being brought to her new role as a candidate, as are her skills in intelligent listening. When she's talking to you, you have her whole attention: her wide eyes are attentive, she smiles and nods, she reaches out and touches you.....

And so on.....

In fact, while I was typing out this dire excerpt I was thinking to myself I should inspect more closely the funding streams for The Monthly, because this piece is beginning to feel more and more like paid advertising. But then I considered the subject, a truly sincere and honourable woman....But then I thought of the party she is representing, one of the oldest and toughest political outfits in the Westminster system, and then I thought, slow down Justin, one step at a time, and anyway, these are your knees.

At street level, right under McKew's office, the Liberals have rented a shopfront which is plastered, inside and out, with posters of a smiling John Howard, Australian flags and the Liberal insignia. The door is open and inside a man is sitting at a desk. I'll go in and talk to him later, I think.........

This is good thinking, Judith, you are a journalist, and the man you have set in so sinister a setting is, for better or worse, a small part of the other side of the story.

One of the posters of Howard had been graffitied...."One of your lot did this, I suppose." He (from across the street) is about 70, trim and fit, with a buzzed head and a muscle bound walk. Our embarrassed protestations that we know nothing about it....are met with scornful insults. I don't feel like going to talk with him after that.....

Great journo's instinct there, Judith! Just what this country needs, another half-told tale!

This is palliative journalism for an ageing generation whose habitual posturing sounds increasingly creaky.

To Judith Brett's eventual credit, she does feel out the opinions of the older Chinese community in Benelong who have not forgotten John Howard's infamous anti-Asian rant in the late 1980's. But once again she fails to ask them the question even your humble poet-blogger has managed to ask them here in this very car park - why only now has the local Asian community turned against John Howard? Instead we get a self-proclaimed "eureka moment"

My eureka moment came when she was talking about the Liberals' attack on the unions. "When Howard is attacking unionists, he is attacking all the essential-service workers, the nurses, the police, the transport workers. And the teachers. I am sick of teachers being insulted and beaten up on. I am appalled. I want to be a champion for teachers."

You're not alone there, Maxine. But all these are state issues. The TWU aside, the Federal government has no say over the fate of any of them, and the last time I checked Benelong was a Federal seat. At least one woman at the interview knew that.

So what is my point after this heartless harangue? Well, I would have hoped many of you could by now sing along at least half the chorus with me.

Firstly, I abhor the fossilisation of Australian written culture in the bitter aspic of 1975. The banks got to Jack Lang in NSW in 1933, and they got to Whitlam in Canberra in 1975, as they have got to so many others more and less worthy than these two. Forget it, move on. Both sides had very good reasons for what they did and anyway all are history now.

Secondly, I am tired of lazy journalism fobbed off under some Wolfeian banner taking up precious real estate along the ever-diminishing print highway of this island. These are cramped, complex, terrifying times that no amount of courtesy and charm are going to see us through (as anyone who walked the police gauntlet out of Hyde Park on APEC Saturday will shakily attest). This is no longer a world populated by ideals, international jihad aside. We all have to look squarely at things as they are, at the world we have inherited, try to steady that roller coaster that has been going wild for the best part of a hundred years. It is, after all, the credo Maxine McKew has never stopped living by.

New Poetry by Kevin Gillam

one bulb

a pillar of cloud rests
above your room of one
bulb on a string, breaths in
their many, thoughts stunted,
too few, where you lie, curled
and clammy, hands and arms
splayed as if on a clock
at a quarter to ache

you've done this before, half
gone and left this constell-
ation, half gift and stayed,
as moon for one bulb. floor-
boards won't whisper, stars blink,
don't see. you kiss cirrus


- Kevin Gillam 2007


his numbers

for him, numbers were his plug, as
sometimes (and he'd read this, man of
reason that he was),
he felt the bath-water spiral
(didn't everyone?) towards madness,
inviting the sweet collapse, gifts of
meander, violent shake, up/down
in/out of jigsaw box

some numbers looped, spun in this man of
reason, and, fully given over, he
didn't fight, didn't kick, couldn't, just
invited, in from the cold, hot
meal, fire and time, in,
in from the cold came his numbers


- Kevin Gillam 2007