Monday, February 21, 2011

New Poetry by Jonathan Clare











Writing in The Quiet

If you knew me I'd be a famous man.
Maybe with nothing but at least a friend
if you say goodbye it'd give me a chance to say hello
Because maybe, if you told someone that you knew me
They could know me too

- Jonathan Clare 2011



In The Wild

Students lounging in an air of their own in a bubble a sphere of a world where the population is one but simultaneously everyone.
 Lounging in unconscious content unthinking of anything but the sun and its glare and their squint to protect their eyes and occasionally brushing a hand slowly through their hair.
 Lounging on sandstone created some aeon ago.
 Lounging with their backs to the baroque with their backs to society with their backs to the world and tomorrow.
 Lounging maybe with another but cast off he/she is like some sidekick companion barely even noticeable.
 Lounging with a camera floating and glinting its pink casing away from their face and onto everything.
 What a snapshot.
What a picture to misconceive.
They just snapped a picture of me,
And how beautiful it is to watch the students lounge like reptiles warming blood,
How strange it must seem (vaguely a mist in front of a cloud)
But they caught me with a click and they caught me catching them catching me
Sweetly insidious beings.
Us loungers,
We are the mundane religion
Modestly rebelling against mundane religion.


- Jonathan Clare 2011

Monday, February 14, 2011

New Poetry by rob walker









Cloze procedure

we are at the zoo when
your doctor calls you

talk about the lump i
fill gaps from a half

conversation sun beats
on our bare heads  i

think of cancer nervous
meerkats sit up take

notice as you ask a
phone do I need an

ultrasound we all turn
heads inquisitively

awaiting an answer

- rob walker 2011


rob walker is an Adelaide poet.










Sunday, February 13, 2011

New Poetry by Tricia Dearborn







 
Night vision

I take off the clarity of the world
and place it on my bedside table.

No use for it with my lids pressed
neatly together against the dark.

Slowly my brainwaves settle
into delta rhythm. Old lovers

breathe into my ear, or leave me
yet again. I fly. Breathe underwater.

Watch tornados gather. Waking, I fill
the kettle, translate the night’s happenings

into ink. The morning news
from the land the sleeping see.

- Tricia Dearborn 2011



At the laundromat on rue St Florent

My tired reflected face is framed
by the curving leap

of my jeans ­—
always the last to relinquish

the final skerricks of damp,
not dry till the rivets

will singe your skin.
I watch as the jeans submit

with seeming grace, or joy,
tumbling to rest, then leaning back

legs spread as they’re lifted and tossed
across in streaming freefall.

Like the fearless girl lining up again
for the wildest ride.

Though later, when the denim
flattens momentarily

to the glass, it’s more like
someone get me out of here.


- Tricia Dearborn 2011




The answer
If you want to take your mind off your troubles, create a god. It’s easy.
Toss back a few too many drinks. The Hangover God demands greasy chips and egg and bacon rolls; asks that you tend the altar of your headache, surrender to a queasy inability to come to grips with the world. 
Pick a fight with a loved one. The God of Relationship Dramas encourages outbursts and recriminations. Practise door-slamming and seething silence. Make offerings of blame and blazing rows.
Or step onto the God of Perfection’s hamster-wheel. Forget the roses, forget the sunsets: focus on getting it right; being first; being best. For penance, each error a tiny whip.
The Caffeine God will smite you if you haven’t performed the holy rites by nine. Enjoy the temporary bliss. Be warned: this god will mess with your nerves if you dare to leave the fold.
The God of Thinness says less of you is always better; asks that you stand side-on in front of mirrors, sucking in your stomach; do secret, impromptu skin-fold tests on belly, upper arms and thighs.
Or bow to a God of Mercy and Compassion who’ll throw you in hell if you cross the line. Forgo your sensual animal nature; spend your precious human hours striving not to sin.
To take your mind off your troubles, create a god. Forget you created it. 

- Tricia Dearborn 2011
 
Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning poet and short-story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Australia, the UK, the US and India. Her poem sequence ‘The Ringing World’ was joint winner of the 2008 Poets Union Poetry Prize, and her poem ‘Come In, Lie Down’ appeared in The Best Australian Poetry 2008. Her first collection was Frankenstein’s Bathtub (Interactive Press, 2001). In 2009 she received a Developing Writers grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. She is currently completing her second collection.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Two Fires Poetry Competition

Two Fires Poetry CompetitionFirst prize worth $1000
Closing date 1 March 2001
 
Two Fires Poetry Competition for poem up to 30 lines
Download entry form from www.twofiresfestival.com.au
Results will be announced at the Two Fires Festival of Arts & Activism in Braidwood NSW April 1st to 3rd.

Enquiries 02 48461075

Friday, February 04, 2011

New Poetry by Mike Berger









Fire in the Kerri

Running like hell straight
for the billabong; fire biting
my arse.

Pushed by devil winds,
flames jump and explode.
Gum trees are matchsticks.

Orange tongues searing the
sky; dense smoke stings
my eyes.

Whirlwinds wind in
tight circles. Blackened
earth gapes where
fire danced.

Diving headlong, the
cold water steals my breath.
Bombarded by flaming embers;
choking in the dense smoke.








The roar of the fire passes;
leaving trees smoldering,
emitting bright orange glows.

Despite its brutal charge,
the fire was an awesome 
thing. 


- Mike Berger 2010



Mike Berger is an MFA, PhD. He is retired and writes poetry and short stories full time. He has been writing poetry for less than two years. His work appear in seventy-one journals. He has published two books of short stories and three poetry chapbooks. He is a member of The Academy of  American Poets.

A video homage to poet Jim Harrison by John Hospodka




 According to Wikipedia.......

James "Jim" Harrison (born December 11, 1937) is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and writings about food. He has been called "a force of nature,[1]" and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.[2] Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and have retained some of the best of an agrarian pioneer ancestry by dint of their intelligence and some formal education. They have attuned themselves to the best of the natural and civilized worlds, surrounded by excesses but determined to live their lives as well as possible.[3]



Sunday, January 23, 2011

New Poetry by Michael Lee Johnson









Leaves in December

Leaves, a few stragglers in
December, just before Christmas,
some nailed down crabby
to ground frost,
some crackled by the bite
of nasty wind tones.

Some saved from the matchstick
that failed to light.
Some saved from the rake
by a forgetful gardener.

For these few freedom dancers
left to struggle with the bitterness:
wind dancers
wind dancers
move your frigid
bodies shaking like icicles 
hovering but a jiffy in sky,
kind of sympathetic to the seasons,
reluctant to permanently go,
rustic, not much time more to play.


- Michael Lee Johnson 2007  (Bluepepper 2010)


For more information regarding this poet, simply click on the post heading.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Wing it!

















I have begun to tweet in my drive to harvest as much good poetry for Bluepepper as is humanly possible for an aging misanthrope with legs too long and pockets too deep and ears that pop whenever a black cockatoo flies east. So hungry am I for the best, dear reader. If you do not know the protocol by now, just glance to your right in the sidebar.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

New Poetry by Stuart Barnes









THE HAIRCUT

I like men
I like the masculine
- Peggy Lee

It's not the mirror I 
     despise 

but the mist as 
hard as a fist against
my face, the Freddy 
Krueger fingers, 
the concatenation of
florid adjectives, the
peroxide highlights,
O drug-fucked slut,
Ricardo, François, Shai.



- Stuart Barnes 2010




GRIEF’S

livid as the Führer’s flag, not sheepy-woolly grey.
Appalling, like the gorgons, a pall that smokes
the living, the dripping never expunged from the
Christmas china. Melbourne’s inclement weather,
a pail of tar, a shock of feathers, prevailed since
his positive diagnosis. Her blinded emerald eye,
their broken bones not knitted, enough to twist
this corkscrew through the Arctic, Hades’ gates.
The vacuum, black, in which no man survives.


- Stuart Barnes 2010

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

New words and pictures by Wayne H W. Wolfson









Siphon

There is a voice coming down the tube. I want to say tunnel but even with my eyes only half open, I can see it would be too narrow to traverse. There is no trick of perspective the entrance is not off in the distance but small and right by my head.
The whole thing would seem more possible if I were to say the lining of the tube was made from experience but I can not. Although it too is an intangible, it seems right to say instead, years.
At first it seems just like a pressure change but it is actually someone passing by the other end of the tube, stopping. Now, a low hum, which travels the entire length of the tube, slowly becoming words. Talking, fragmented as if a secret told over the course of a dream.


 - "Cats" (pastel & paper)

 Faintly, I smell lilacs, it is her. She speaks to me; she tells me that she had a baby anyways, with someone else. From my end, I was going to put my mouth up to the hole to also speak but realize that I had not cared about anything that she had to say. Holding my tongue, I stuff a piece of wadded paper into the hole before walking away. 

- Wayne H W. Wolfson 2010
(for more info on Wayne, just click on the post heading)

Monday, December 06, 2010

The Circus


Apart from the resources boom of the past half-century, it would appear my country's greatest export, since Australia Square first punched at the virgin Sydney heavens as a perfect circle, is a particular breed of itinerant ratbag intent on shaping the world in their own image, or at least of leaving their mark on it like a child scratching her name in a desk the first day of term.


The latest in this long, snaking, checkered line is, of course, the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, physics graduate, computer programmer and hippy child. Like many of his generation (of which I am, need you be reminded, one of the eldest of the elder statesmen), Assange bears no allegiances and is innately suspicious of anyone in authority. That such a stance seems blind to the rather obvious paradox of his own and his institution's sudden ascendancy, I will leave to one side for the moment.

For those of you whose only experience of cyberspace is Bluepepper (and I know you are legion, or the sky would not be the colour it is), Wikileaks is a "controversial whistle-blowing website", according to the print and electronic media, who all in all seem strangely ambivalent about the phenomenon Assange has set in motion. Perhaps because in their jaded wisdom they clearly see the paradox I mentioned above, or perhaps because they are a lazy, pampered breed of lapdogs happy to see someone else doing all the dirty work, or perhaps because they see nothing so earth-shattering in the material Wikileaks has managed to get its hands on.

Truth will out, for it forms the bridge between our suspicions and our latent paranoia, beneath which a dark, slick something flows, well, thickly. Anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh or suffered piles through a Wodehouse knows that the stamp of the pampered and infantile is to accuse rather than empathise, to suspect rather than think.

Perhaps it is more the means of conveyance than the substance of the matter that is the matter here, when all is said and done.


In the latest chapter of the Wikileaks/Assange saga, roughly one quarter of a million confidential diplomatic documents from Government cables right across the world have found their way onto the Wikileaks site. If there is a bias, it is merely through weight of traffic from and between the US diplomatic missions, for as I said before, Julian Assange and his cohorts appear to be equally suspicious of authority no matter where it crops up to impede the mind and body of we ones so burdened and so gifted. 

However, nothing I have read so far has struck me as particularly earth-shattering, although I must admit I have had a good deal of trouble gaining access to the Wikileaks site and thus have had to rely on the very mainstream media Assange and co were hoping to circumvent. You could play a good game of poker with the ironies and paradoxes stacking up in this story, but does any of it make us any the wiser? 


Remember that we must elect someone to represent our collective interests, whether through consensus or the myriad shades of coersion. There is simply no way around this in our flawed binary universe. We cannot present our collective interests individually and expect real action. Such a system is called a committee, and at international level is little more than a sound and picture archive. Assange believes we have a right to be informed, and we do of course, but only when there is a reasonable expectation that we will be both willing and able to act upon the information so kindly proffered us. Is this the case here?

The recent startling example in mine and Assange's native country of collective action against a Prime Minister reneging on his promises to act on climate change would suggest that perhaps, at least at a domestic level, the possibility exists. But international relations are another beast entirely, and I fear that behemoth, the generation born immediately after the last world war, has once again led us down the garden path here. For they are a generation moulded by a world of polarities; through no fault of their own, nevertheless a fact that goes some way to explaining the lurching nature of their collective life from unsustainable (and rather short-lived) idealism to equally unsustainable narcissistic materialism, and I see no evidence that they possess either the patience or the capacity to see the world as it really is: more 1913 than 1949.



I can't help wondering if this latest bout of leaks will merely thicken our collective hides and accelerate a trend in international affairs that has been marked for some time now, in which all concerned play a timid game of watch and wait, aspiring to only the most easily attainable goals, and placing the real global challenges (such as climate change, or the north-south disparity, or a lasting Middle East solution) to the endless back burner of committees and sub-committees where the next generation of faffers and milksops are given a chance to cut their teeth.

What price so much chatter in so many ears when the chatter was already too timid to pierce a wall, any wall?

Sunday, December 05, 2010

The Carnival Is Here


New Release


The Carnival

by 

Justin Lowe


Bluepepper is pleased to announce the release of Justin Lowe’s Historical Fantasy “The Carnival”.



Signed copies are available for AUD$29.95 (inc. postage and handling) via the Paypal link in the sidebar.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Dot to the Rescue (once again)



The following arrived in my inbox this afternoon. Few greater poets, nor few greater causes, could I imagine for this sun-kissed, rain-drenched yuletide, in an otherwise smoky, fireless, Ashes-less country. 

Spears is a valedictory poem for someone I imagine to be a long-lost family member (they cross your mind when death crosses your path, believe me), and the draft is on auction in Melbourne (details below). The poem in question forms part of what I consider to be Dorothy Porter's most  succulent collection, an effect for which I suspect she was always aiming, but perhaps held in abeyance with one eye on the husk-eyed drones who ran the show throughout her long and electric career.
 
Drafts of a late poem by Dorothy Porter titled, Spears, will be auctioned as part of the Collected Works Bookshop Christmas Benefit at the Nicholas Building on Wednesday 8 December between 5:30pm-7pm.
‘Spears’ appears on page 64 of Dorothy Porter’s posthumous collection of poetry, The Bee Hut, which was published by Black Inc. in 2009.
Generously donated by Andrea Goldsmith, the auction item consists of:
* Draft 1: Original hand-written version from notebook, initialled and dated 17 August 2008
* Draft 2: Original hand-written version from notebook, initialled and dated 20 August 2008
* Draft 3: Original typescript, initialled and dated 20 August 2008 with editorial comment from Andrea Goldsmith
* One copy of The Bee Hut
Goldsmith said, “Spears is a particularly personal poem. It was written not long after the death of Dorothy's uncle, Hal Porter, and it is dedicated to him.
“The poem recalls a gift of spears presented to Hal by a group of Papua-New Guineans with whom Hal worked closely during the war. It was a gift of which he was rightly proud. On his return to Australia, the spears were burned,” Goldsmith explained.
“Sixty years later, as he was dying, he said: ‘I want my spears.’ Dot found this incredibly moving,” Goldsmith said.
Known for her passionate, sensual and edgy poetry, Dorothy Porter was one of Australia's truly original writers. She was twice short-listed for Australia's premier literary award, the Miles Franklin, and her verse novel The Monkey's Mask is a modern Australian classic. The Bee Hut, her fifteenth book, brings together the poems she wrote in the last five years of her life. By turns expansive and intimate, effusive and contemplative, these poems roam widely: there are journeys into history and to sacred places both mythic and deeply personal.
This generous donation will help to keep Collected Works Bookshop alive.
Plus, customers who spend $25 or more at Collected Works Bookshop between 1-8 December 2010 will go in the draw to win a fabulous range of literary feasts, including:
* Annual memberships with Australian Poetry and the Victorian Writers’ Centre
* Delicious hampers filled with wine, nibbles and books generously donated by publishers and writers
Lovers of literature are also invited to celebrate the importance of Collected Works Bookshop as a part of Melbourne’s literary heritage on Wednesday 8 December 2010 (5:30pm-7pm).
Collected Works Bookshop is a much loved Melbourne institution, which specializes in poetry and literary fiction from Australia, the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Europe, Japan, China and other regions. Founded in 1984 Collected Works Bookshop is a home for readers and writers, a home for little presses, and a venue for launches and readings.
Collected Works Bookshop
Nicholas Building, Level 1, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne
T: +61 3 9654 8873   E: collectedworks@mailcity.com

Saturday, November 20, 2010

New Poetry by Phillip Ellis











"Dedication (for Clare)"

This is a simple sonnet for you, Clare,
since I have the time to write, and presume
you have the time for reading. I would dare
something spectacular, but that assumes
it is the flash and sizzle that is there
momently, not the lasting taste that grooms
your tongue, that attracts you. I would not dare
speak other than plainly: there is no room.

I have not been brought up to be fancy
or fanciful, but to be honest, plain
and sensitive; that is my nature. When
you hear I had been called nancy
boy, and worse terms, then turn not to disdain:
remember I was still this poet then.

*****

"Polestar (for Clare)"

Time has been passing me with white wine's strength
on a hot summer's day. Such are the ways
of this world: some seasons are cold and wet
or cool and dry, and others are hot, heavy
with sweat, or hot and tinderbox dry. Why,
there are very few seasons which are pure
with beauty, without some sorts of mistakes,
misprisions of climate, such is nature.

But the thought of you can make all my seasons
bearable, the heat, humidity, dryness,
cold and wetness bearable, by some magick,
because, like some fixated, creaking weathervane,
only one direction matters to me,
oh yes, only one direction matters.

*****

"What Truly Never Ends (for Clare)"

I keep wanting to begin these sonnets
with "Time is like..." and so forth. Suddenly
it seems less amusing than wearisome
to me, as if I cannot think about
anything other than this theme, this one
never-ending refrain of story. This
is what it is like for me, echoing
so softly, like cat purrs in hollow rooms.

But what truly never ends for my mind
are the echoes of your name in my room--
the word 'fern' reminds me of your country
for one thing, and ferns are etched in my mind--
and I can't stumble around in my head
without these joyous reminders of you.

- Phillip Ellis 2010

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Collected Works











It has just come to my attention that the bookshop that more than any other has kept poetry alive in this country in recent years has received the red slip from the landlord. 

COLLECTED WORKS IS BEING THREATENED WITH EVICTION!!!

Collected Works, for those off the eastern seaboard, is a specialist poetry bookshop run by the inestimable Kris Hemmensley, a legendary poet in his own right, and a selfless proprietor, as I can attest from my many dealings with him. 

For those even farther afield, Bourke Street, Melbourne has been prime real estate in the Anglosphere for the best part of two centuries, and I must admit that the survival of a specialist poetry bookshop right in the heart of Bourke Street has helped sustain the illusion in my car park of a head that south of the Murray lies another country........

.......and all it takes is a little custom to sustain the illusion....... 



PRESS RELEASE

A recent rent increase has caused Collected Works Bookshop to reassess its future. Make sure this much loved Melbourne institution survives.

Spend $25 or more at Collected Works Bookshop between 1-8 December 2010 and go in the draw to win a fabulous range of literary feasts:
* Annual memberships with Australian Poetry and the Victorian Writers’ Centre
* Delicious hampers filled with wine, nibbles and books generously donated by publishers and writers

Plus, you’re invited to come and step beyond the beaded curtain! Celebrate the importance of Collected Works Bookshop as part of Melbourne’s literary heritage on Wednesday 8 December (5:30pm-7pm). Buy great Christmas gifts and enjoy wine, nibbles and a great night of lit love! A special (free) gift-wrapping service will also be available on the night. Raffle prizes will be drawn at the end of the evening.

This special event is a Friends of Collected Works initiative proudly supported by Australian Poetry, Victorian Writers’ Centre, Hunter Publishers, University of Queensland Press, John Leonard Press, and over twenty writers including Kevin Brophy, Alison Croggon, Joel Deane, David McCooey, Robyn Rowland, Alex Skovron and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.




Collected Works Bookshop is a much loved Melbourne institution, which specialises in poetry and literary fiction from Australia, the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Europe, Japan, China and other regions. Founded in 1984 Collected Works Bookshop is a home for readers and writers, a home for little presses, and a venue for launches and readings.

Collected Works Bookshop –
Fiercely proud
Fiercely independent
Fiercely vital for this City of Literature

Help keep Collected Works alive!


Collected Works Bookshop
Nicholas Building
Level 1, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne.
T: +613 9654 8873

We look forward to seeing you there!

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

My sense is your non-sense

















Alison Croggon makes an oft-repeated yet nonetheless interesting point in her editorial for Cordite magazine's addendum "remix" issue 33.1.

Alison, the only poet of whom I am aware attended Kevin Rudd's hidebound, and for no other reason infamous, "People's Summit" of 2008, conjectures, maybe a little on the cuff, in "Creative Commons 33.1":  We all like to think that we are makers of language, but anyone poking around in the engine of poetry uneasily realises that it is just as likely to be the other way around, that just as DNA shapes our morphology, language is the shaper of our consciousness. Like I said, not the most original thought you are ever likely to encounter, perhaps more prim than piquant, but then this blog is full of them.

Alison makes the point (once again, well worth repeating) that the act of writing can take possession of us, that we become a poem, story, or novel in ways that we never expected when we first put pen to paper. I myself have been a 12th century stonecutter by the name of Lonzo "The Priest" for the past 18 months, a sensation I am struggling to work out of my system now the tale is told and all I have is your bruised ear, dear reader. I am sure anyone who has been in this game long enough knows the feeling. It is, after all, why we persist when the fat cheques keep getting lost in the mail. 

Ms Croggon then introduces the equally familiar Cartesian fugue of body/mind, all in an effort to arrive at the conclusion that poetry's great contribution to the human experience has been its ability to elucidate the otherness of so much of even the most trivial encounter. As so many Ashberrians out there have attempted to prove time and time again, even a trip to the corner shop can be an exercise in this. At the expense of a footnote,

John Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet.[1] He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". Recognized as one of America's most important poets, his work still proves controversial. In an article on Elizabeth Bishop in his Selected Prose, he characterizes himself as having been described as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism." Although renowned for his complex, post-modern and opaque work, Ashbery has also stated that he wishes it to be accessible to as many people as possible - not part of private dialogues.[2][3]

Thankyou, Wikipedia.......

That much of Ashberrian poetry is dull and nonsensical is neither here nor there, for such poetry invites the mash-up, and that is all our priviliged, miraculous lives really are in the Ashberrian universe. A perfect storm of nothing but physicality and sound and the predictability of another poseur writhing around on some wine-bar stool, open mic in hand.



But perhaps I am being unkind, for serve up any tosh and someone out there will be prepared to devote their lives to it. Poetry has a good deal to answer for in this regard, although I offer in its defence Alison's point that poetry's great strength is its ability to bring out the otherness in ourselves and the world around us, tearing down the veil between universes, mercurial as chance, to which our esteemed editor seems to hinge all hope of success in the issue concerned. As far as the quality of the issue Alison "remixed", I will leave that up to you to decide. The thought of putting any sort of value on it, either in the red or the black, gets me about as dizzy as an ARIA steward in a portaloo.

Which brings me a little closer to the nub of this blog.

I have a long and reasonably-documented history of vertigo. It has plagued me consistently since late 2003 and does not look like going away anytime soon. The world will keep on turning. All my public pronouncements on the subject have been in poetic form, so I was interested to come across an essay by Tony Hoagland in the September 2010 issue of Poetry Magazine out of Chicago. There has been a marked tendency with this august publication in recent years to tend toward the Ashberrian and vertiginous, and it has turned a lot of readers off, but the ambulance chaser in me has kept up my subscriptions in the hope either I or the editorial board in distant Chicago would see the light. My persistence has been rewarded by many poetic jewels, but it is essays such as Hoagland's that I tend to thumb straight for whenever another handsome little A5 issue arrives in the mail.

In his essay, "Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness", Tony Hoagland gets straight to the gist of the matter:

Here are two well-known descriptions of what a poem is, and does, one by (William) Wordsworth, one by (Wallace) Stevens:

Type A: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. 

Type B: The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully.

For the moment I will leave that "almost" of Wallace Stevens to one side. The parentheses are there for the wine bar poseur mentioned above who adamantly refuses to read anything "literary" in which her name does not appear. 

Hoagland asserts rather boldly only three paragraphs into his piece that there are in fact plenty of readers alive and well who seek "a kind of clarification". I assumed at first he was referring to that "otherness" Ms Croggon made such a point of making seem so, well, other. He is speaking, however, of poetry that "helps you live" in this world, and asserts rather boldly that to "scoff at this motivation for poetry because it is "unsophisticated" or because it seems sentimental - well, you might as well scoff at oxygen." He is referring here, I assume once again, to that much maligned school of plain-speaking poetry for which Billy Collins is the poster boy. Neither harking back with any great poignancy, nor looking forward with any great hunger. America as it is. 

Against this, Hoagland sets what he calls the poetry of "dis-arrangement", the school of Ashberry et al. Not so much estranged as flummoxed by the object seen up close. It is "the world in a grain of sand", I suppose, except with strobe lights and microscopes rather than reading glasses and candles. "In our time," Hoagland goes on to say, "this bifurcation of motives among poets has become so pronounced as to be tribal." Once again, not the most original thought that will pass your desk today, but Tony has a point, even if it appears to be at first glance a very American point; the Great Society polarising before our very Spielberg-ed eyes.

As an example of Type A, Hoagland offers up George Oppen's "The Building of the Skyscraper", written in 1965 at the very apex of American triumphalism.

The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.

And so and so and so......

The apotheosis of the artist divorced from the lying, vertiginous world around him. I am beginning to see where Ashberry got his audience. According to Hoagland, Oppen "performs the role of tribal father here...", although he offers no solution, merely a place to stand while the storm whirls around our heads. King Lear or the Falling Man? Well, 

You think you can begin as if it were ten years ago & you were still that person

A woman turns her head to catch a glimpse of her former lover

I offer you the key to a city without words

The guy on trial for rape wears glasses to make him look studious


And thus the world of disjoint according to Lewish Warsh in a poem called "Elective Surgery".

This being Hoagland's primary example of Type B. 

The vertiginous effects of such poetry, the stark and bitter randomness of the associations, Hoagland seems to be saying, is merely a poor substitute for tenderness, merely substituting one conceit for another and leaving the world even more polarised than before.

It is a long essay. A long, long essay.......replete with many examples, and much back-tracking, a compulsion spared we bloggers. But for all his American filibuster, Hoagland still manages to end with something even the most toothless of us can chew on for a while.

Even if we are falling, we can feel fortunate that we have some human company in the descent. Ah, poetry.

Surely, he seems to be saying, poetry's brief days as a divisive force are at an end. If not, then all real talk is at an end, for all stories have reached their conclusion and there is nothing left but sleep. For where poets go the truth will follow, even as far as Fox News, the blogosphere, or that milksop speechwriter waiting in the wings.

King Lear and the Falling Man. There in two tragic icons lie the two schools of contemporary poetry and much else beside. The former screaming toward the heavens and the latter toward earth, neither expecting much for all their howling, but a want of tenderness. 


Saturday, October 09, 2010

New Poetry by Ashley Capes









kitchen poetry

I run the knife under hot water,
wrap it in a patterned
tea-towel &place it in the drawer.
Beside the kettle is a tiny
jumping spider
but it does not twitch. I imagine
the way its many-chambered eyes
must have tracked my clumsy movements
as I prepared vegetables
for an omelette. Even if the meal isn’t poetry
doing something this simple
could be, and so I hope to make you smile
when you come home.

- Ashley Capes 2010