2009 Archive
Aug
My father died, and was lucky.
He was revived on the operating table.
He is very frail.
I have been writing a poem a day since
- here is one from yesterday.
Aug 24
I wake with an image of Banksia serrata, old man banksia
tough, gnarled and twisted, but relaxed about his appearance,
loveable, growing old gracefully surrounded by birds who love him.
I speak to my mother who sounds exhausted, had never
seen dad so unhappy, so she brought him home,
had trouble just getting him out of the car, even with help.
She had to hold him upright while he cleaned his teeth,
he wanted to use mouthwash (a man of routine even at death’s door)
and she told him he couldn't, had to get to bed between
fresh linen probably looking like winding sheets.
He said, "I'm so much trouble",
she replied, 'Don't be silly', feeling bad; dad hates a fuss.
Why the hell is this a poem? A tradition pervaded by God
and angels, a charm offensive so often seeking consolation
like Rorty reading Landor, not Plato or Dewey for solace.
And what about the stink? He's coughing up ashen crap,
the vomit he inhaled on the operating table.
I can smell it from here.
Where does happiness come into it?
In the Histories Herodotus warns: Call no man happy until dead.
B was so disappointed that every single flower of our terrestrial rock orchids was eaten by unseen insects, but so happy when the spider orchids and smaller dendrobiums flowered. Happiness!
B
‘Happy? I associate happiness with being in Australia or somewhere where everybody is happy drinking beer and surfing. But happy? Even Americans don’t believe in happiness. It’s in their rhetoric but they don’t really believe in it.’ Colm Toibin, 2009.
Spring is a misnomer here - still. The first mosquito, three loads of frog spawn in two days (Aug 26th) spider orchids flowering. The Gymea lily is finally blooming and the first wisteria flower is out.
"Allow me to be honest and tell the truth about our age and its people.”
August Sander
I am writing various pieces that mix poetry with other textual modes. The most recent text concerns the photographer August Sander and travels via landscape and Neanderthal Man, John Calvin, Henry Ford and Charles Taylor into Nazi Germany.
“I painted landscapes. That was tantamount to emigration.” August Sander
The domination of nature connects with the domination of people, and as ecofeminists points out, of patriarchy. German ideology of conquest ratcheted up in 18th century Prussia with Frederick the Great who used scientists and mathematicians, the bureaucracy and the army to control waterways and drain marshes. He civilised the land through discipline. The German Blut und Boden refers to the ideology focussing on a concept of ethnicity based on descent (Blood) and homeland (Soil). The German expression was coined in late 19th century Racialism and National Romanticism. Richard Walther Darré popularised the phrase in Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, 1930.
Sander had been photographing peasant farmers since 1910 and his most famous one 'Three Young Farmers in Sunday Dress, Westerwald' is from 1913. They are on their way to a dance, well dressed, but in a rural landscape and with rough shoes and walking-sticks. Sander was still photographing farmers in 1933 when The Reichserbhofgesetz implemented the ideology of Blut und Boden, aiming to "preserve the farming community as blood-source of the German people." Ewiger Wald’s film The Eternal Forest (1936) emphasised German relations to forest and the Nazi Party's obsession with Blut und Boden. At the time forests covered over a quarter of the densely populated country and were highly productive.
The peasant was seen as purest example of Aryan blood and closest to the soil. Rudolf Hess and his wife Ilse desperately wanted a child. They tried innumerable miracle cures. Finally, a son arrived and at his birth every gauleiter was instructed to send to the Führer's deputy a small sack full of German earth from each Gau, or district. The earth was spread beneath a cradle, so that the child would symbolically begin his life on the whole of German soil. Europe was covered not so long ago by the wildwood, a Pagan place. Goering was Reichforstmaster, determined to preserve vast tracts of forest in occupied lands.
The death mask of his son retains the objectivity and consistency in approach to composition and technical aspects that he maintained over many decades. I want anger and pity and desire in Sander - but it's not there.
A week up in Bellingen
A beautiful part of the world - saw a regent bowerbird, grey goshawk with fledgling, square-tailed kite, black-shouldered kite, Brahminy kite, osprey, sea eagle . . . to mention a few.
No Bikes
Regent Bowerbird
A thieving heron
I didn't catch him in the act.
The flight itself was beautiful . . .
I'm seeing this landscape from terra firma,
an hour ago in the lounge reading Rage for Curiosity
illustrating Evans, Lycett, Watling and Lewin,
even the wonderful Lewin not seeing the sublime
from the topographic with the smell of aviation fuel
evaporated. Conrad Martens laid off from the Beagle
draws the foreshore as he sails through the Heads,
beside me, B is rapidly sketching the scene,
pen + ink, pen + imagination, pen + optimism
that form can emerge from this interlaced chiaroscuro
of earth and water, shining off and on like one of Homer’s
armies, blood and armour in rusted intermodulation.
Light flows conveniently as mist westward into valleys,
terra incognita, then the plane surges forward
and only sea and sky remain, terra nullius so vast
and wondrous, buried alive in blue
you could easily imagine (and we want to)
that there was nothing we could do to hurt them.
The weekend before - Macmasters Beach, Central Coast
Sunrise
K showing the boys how its done
July
I bought Jasper John's Flag (short extract)
Jasper Johns. Flag (1954-55). Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Art markets emerged in Italy, Holland and Britain in the sixteenth century, though the first we know of was in Antwerp where The Church of Our Lady was renting booths out to painters and sculptors by 1480. Auctions began in the 1660s in Restoration England. In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli visited Rauschenberg’s studio where he saw Johns’ work and offered him his first show, at which the Museum of Modern Art bought three pieces sealing his fame. Thirty years later, his paintings sold for more than any living artist in history.
If Flag ever came on the market a conservative value, even in the depressed art market of July 2009 would be one hundred million US dollars, I have a bargain. Not only did I pay 1 cent per square centimetre for mine, compared to a hypothetical, but conservative estimate of $6,069 per square centimetre for the original (which is smaller too; the original being 107 X 154cm), but I don’t pay for insurance, handling or security. John is dropping it off tomorrow night gratis, (as I finish this off he has failed to show). He acquired it through a Chinese connection. Probably my favourite painter, van Eyck was paid a salary as court painter to the Philip The Good, Duke of Burgundy, a total of 100 livres a year (about A$1,000). A small panel by this master would fetch a million Australian dollars today.
In 1971 a small painting convinced Getty, a fabulously mean and wealthy man, to pay nearly a million dollars for a version of Rubens' most famous oil sketches of heads of African men (in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts). He was pleased to claim it, for his new Malibu museum, the most expensive painting per square centimetre in the world, but months later the Metropolitan Museum bought Velazquez's Juan de Pareja and it was more expensive per square centimetres. The Getty purchase was soon recognised as a fake and never been displayed.
Spring is a misnomer here - the flowers are bursting into bloom in the bush, boronias, spiderflowers, coral heath and the miniature flannel flowers.
The Hacking early morning July 25.
One short film I'm completing concerns a guerilla gardeners' make over of a concrete disaster in the heart of Sydney, increasingly a planning disaster. This morning it is announed that Sydney is to sell itself as a place of "vibrant magnetism" where we work hard and "live large"!
I tend to write longish investigative poems, but believe that a poet has a public role (however limited in our culture) and that includes writing occasional poems for friends and for significant events, like weddings and funerals.
Here's one I wrote for a colleague whose father died last week.
A man tends his plants in the rain,
waterdrops bounce off tough citrus
leaves which retain moisture and survive
the sun’s bite that energises life.
Those oranges you gave me grew
an orange light tasting of freshness,
they are what I know of your father
caring for his daughters, his fruit.
Beyond the clouds the sky is blue,
birds insist on song; it’s noise
I know, but peace envelops those
we love who leave the garden.
Exciting new collaboration with factor 23, putting some funk into my 'disgusting love poem'.
Bird Nettle Lane Brew have been busy making short guerrilla-bricoleur movies this month. Passing the above, I wondered what the carbon footprint of such endeavours are.
Spring came two months early. Figbirds arrived from up north in the first week, perhaps koels will be a better marker, like England's first cuckoo in spring used to be (numbers down by 37% since the mid-nineties).
June
Launch of GDS No 28 - last night - with a sound piece on the revolutionary Italian composer Scelsi from "nine poems in the shape of a piano" on the accompanying CD -
A beautiful production by the editors, Lisa Greenaway and Klare Lanson.Back to winter, a Stockhausen festival, our garden, friends and an everyday Enmore aesthetic.Rubbish Enmore RoadWith Rupert Sheldrake! Aspect Poems?May
Favourites exhibitions from the trip include, 'Charles the Bold: the splendour of Burgundy' (Groeninge Museum,Bruges) and Mark Wallinger's cabinet of curiosities, 'Russian Linesman' at the Haywood. But the most impressive were both of ancient Egyptian art. One being the new Nebamun galley in the British Museum, the other at Zurich's Kunsthaus 'Giacometti - of Egypt.'
Zurich: Margrit has no idea, so we follow the circle on my map drawn by a woman in tourist information. We exit the tram, no sign of a cemetery. We stop people who have no idea, eventually a young man about to enter Flinten Church offers to ask someone inside. He emerges to tell us that it’s not here, but by the zoo. We take another tram, at the last stop kids pile out and follow the sign, but we have to ask again. A little bent lady isn’t sure but points up the road, and there it is, and the famous people are marked on a map by the entrance. Joyce lies next to Canetti. We walk up through beautiful art deco memorials, statues and trees, I record the bird song blossoming over a statue of Joyce. B finds him an obnoxious man.
"Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket.
More interesting if they told you what they were.
So and So, wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino.
I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a woman's
with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew." Joyce, Ulysses
From the hills we reverse back down to the Cabaret Voltaire.
The walls are dogged by posters and pictures and writing, a mirror ball's revolutions, red flames flickering from an electric fire without heating. The bar is empty, just a guy tapping away on a laptop. Downstairs the gift shop sells T shirts, designer band-aids, a sadist-masochist kit (boxed). I ask what’s on. Tonight there's some guy with a laptop and an Internet project, he’s vague what it's all about.
We ask people where Lenin's house is, soemwhere just up the street. The number I got from the Internet doesn't seem to exist. We know it's close by, no-one knows, until an old man wearing a beret points just up the street.Reading Zurich (Reading at Atelier Margrit Linder (her ochre hangings from Bundanon in background) with Elisabeth Wandeler-Deck, and Bronwyn). Romanesque chapel, Osogna, Southern SwitzerlandSo many beautiful images and a fantast bestiary from BasleTwo schoolgirls
Eurostar, 5 May
Low slung farmhouses, wide fields in thin brushstrokes
with an enormous ceiling. 'Do you think the sky looks bad?'
There aren't any sheep.' And a scarcity of trees has unearthed
plenty of dull greens and browns, the forecast predicts colder conditions ahead. 'So are you worried there's going to be
a second ice age?' 'I am. Does that surprise you?'
April
Kildare
Always remember in your heart those three things:
Whence you come, who you are and what shall become of you.
Friar Michael, from the Kildare Poems, early 14th C.
In a large field of rabbits, jackdaws rummage through
the ruins of Grey Abbey (between the Black and White)
in the grounds of the Irish National Stud. I am alone.
Behind me, people work their way through once rare breeds
in ‘The Village’: Calvin Klein, Bally, Reebok, Nike,
LK Bennett, Orshof and Oneida, Villeroy & Boch among
large posters over glass, ‘Fantastic fashion boutique coming soon’.
A red grouse glides past, ‘brown’ surfaces as such a mean word
for the subtle beauty of the plumage, a feathered headdress
momentarily crowning the ancestors, several Earls of Kildare,
seven executed men and various anonymous in unmarked graves.
And I was alone in a large space opposite Descamps showing
John Minihan’s B&W photographs of writers, only in Ireland I thought.
Heaney is laughing with another writer, face stretched vertically:
Heaney is not laughing, standing by the tomb of Louis Macneice.
His favourite photograph (one sold world-wide) is of a young woman, in the garden of the nursery where she worked, the sun
drawing slender legs through Diana's transparent skirt.
Dublin Airport
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’
Innisfree is I think a fake nostalgic poem. I’m mindful of Walden and sitting in a rental car in Sligo, glimpsing the small isle through rain shaving the windscreen with a putty-like light.
The poem is out of my reach, like this poster of the poem in Dublin airport, ripe with reflections in a classified area. Yeats wrote the poem after walking down the Strand and glimpsing an advert for alcohol showing a ball balancing on a jet of water. He was homesick for an idealised Ireland.
‘[W]e skirt Lissadell and Innisfree. All of these places now live in the imagination, all of them stir us to responses other than the merely visual, all of them are instinct with the spirit of a poet and his poetry . . . Seamus Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’
Give William Barnes a go: In cloudless zunsheen, over head, Wi’ fruit vor me, the apple tree Do lean down low in Linden Lea. My Orcha’d in Linden LeaI visited Walden once: A small green desk, with a lid sloping down, as a school desk, a very low chair with rockers and a small bed - the necessities preserved with a copy of Wilson’s ornithology, stained from pressing flower specimens. Emerson and Thoreau agreed to demolish the hut. No relics. You can never reach Walden and are unsure you want to, but you head that way. The map fools me. I ask at the information kiosk on the outskirts; a matron informs me that the Pond is closed, something about an air show. Try in ten minutes, she suggests.
Across Highway 2 there’s a huge jam, the airshow’s happening and it’s last day of school. Kids are heading that way towels draped over their cosies, the humidity suddenly crawls all over my skin. A mounted ranger rides down the line of cars ahead and bends over offering advice. Perhaps something like, Don't forget to read The Maine Woods.
Heathrow Airport
Heathrow was fun and games. First mistake was a women at the first booth, I thought she was passport checking so I walked up to her - Stay behind the line, she shouted. I didn’t realize it was photo opportunity knocks. Then I just remembered to drank our juice before security - I went thought metal detector, loud alarm went off, random body search the guy said, very intimate - then my bag got stopped, they said I had a bottle, triumphantly I pulled out the empty plastic bottle, was walking off when they called me back, saying what about the other bottle? I said there wasn't one. They searched the bag and pulled out from the bottom a pint of Fuller's ESB I had forgotten was there - it was a present. He was going to keep it, I explained it was liquid gold, so he let me ask the supervisor, they were sympathetic but intractable. So I said I'll drink it, then had to borrow a confiscated bottle opener off him. So sat drinking fast beside the X Ray machines, with women sitting next to me putting their shoes
Tring Museum
Chesham Valley Walk
back on. Then I asked Bron to take a photo of me supping, couldn't see any signs 'No Photos', she took one and got pounced on. Some middle aged guy with a moustache demanded to see what she had taken, but she didn't how how to find review, so they spent 10 minutes fiddling while I polished off the beer. We thought he had deleted my beer action photo, but we found it!England
Spring has arrived. No-one knows how it did it.
Antonio Machado
We arrived with the branches stripped and daffodils out and within a week the first bluebells had hatched.
April Fool's Day - can't see any jokes in the Herald online.
"Stop it, begs bikie mother" - today's headline has some punch, even irony perhaps, but fails on the practical joke level.
Australia doesn't seem big on celebrating today's frivolity - a shame. My mother was fooled last year by the evolutionary audacity of flying Adelie penguins. There are some classics - see the best April Fool's of all time.
Am flying to Europe, and yes am having to fork out an extra $220 to offset my carbon load. The most effective way of spending this money is unknown. Planting native trees, investing in alternative renewable energy sources, or a year's subscription to the Wilderness Society?
A 2008 study found that only four of the 59 airlines operating into and within Australia offer carbon offset schemes and those that do so provide low key promotion of the scheme, with the facilities to select the carbon offset flights located external to the airlines’ Home Page.
George Monbiot compares buying a carbon offsets to "pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it."
March
Wednesday March 25 at 7pm
Featured reader in RhiZomic Readings' return for 2009 @ Kerrie Lowe Gallery, 49 King St. Newtown (opp. Goulds Books).
I will be reading new poems from my Bundanon manuscript inlcuding 'Kitchen Music' to the sound of Will Barton on didge, which I recorded at Bundanon. Just published, Southerly, 'Double Exposures', 68:3.
Forthcoming in April's 'Going Down Swinging' No 28, CD
a sound poem from the series Nine Poems in the Shape of a Piano,
about the music of the Italian composer Scelsi, the Charles Ives of Italy:
He who does not penetrate to the interior,
to the heart of sound, even though
a perfect craftsman, a great technician,
will never be a true artist, a true musician.
Count Giacinto Scelsi
My favourite Australian film
Wake In Fright (1971), thought lost, has been painstakingly restored from material found in film canisters marked "for destruction" in a Pittsburgh vault. I saw it when I first arrived in Australia, before I had been out back, and I have have never forgotten its impact. If you haven't seen it (director Ted Kotcheff, with Gary Bond, Donald Pleasence and Chips Rafferty), you'll get your chance soon.
Will Barton is currently touring telling his musical story of his heritage, the landscape around Mt Isa with the Song Company and photographs from Allan Chawner. They visited Kalkadunga land in July 2008. (I applied to the Literature Board for a grant to do the same this year - from a poet's perspective, but without success).
It was a wonderful concert with much of the first half atmospheric (stellar) music from Ross Edwards and a stunning work from Bernard de Cluni, Apollinis eclipsatur and with Will's visceral sounds. The first half was night, and very atmospheric, the second half of daylight was more varied, with Will encouraging the Angel Place Audience to imitate sounds of native animals.
Ngata ayarku yangaalu – We belong to one language.
In the program Barry Blake writes of the complexity of the local Kalkadoon language and there’s a photograph of the last fluent native speaker, Lardie Moonlight (d. 1980). Will has a couple of dozen words he uses, and in the second half of the concert, songs he composed, aged 14 to 15, using words he knew were performed to great effect.
Congratulations to the collaborators. Roland Peelman, in the pre-concert talk, said the Song Company had wanted to work with indigenous artists for some time, but under the right conditions, with caution, respect and non-appropriation. He said Will made it easy; he has taken the didge to western culture, playing from symphony orchestras to heavy metal and it has been a natural and intuitive collaboration, as Will is “an extraordinary collaborator”. I am hoping to work with Will again in the future.
~~~~~
The bush fires dominate the news. I have turned off the televsion, too many cameras in the faces of those who have lost everything, hunting survivor's terrifying moments or excavating their struggle with loss. How to live in the bush with global warming when these extreme weather events are expected to increase?
How to fireproof anything when in Saturday's conditions fires spotted up to 6 or more kilometres ahead of the firefront? 'Ember attack' may become a more frequent phrase in the century ahead.
I wrote a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald (a very occasional pastime) just before news of the disaster emerged, about the GFC and the Government's proposed $42 billion stimulus package.
I wasn't blaming the greed and short sightedness of the financial system and those who work for it. And I wasn't suggesting some should go to artists [According to Don't give up your day job, in 2000-01, Australian artists earned an average of just over $24,000 from creative and other arts-related work.]
I wrote concerned that the environment was being left out of the debate on the stimulus package.
"Current economic measures and modelling ignores the real price we are paying for our lifestyles. We need to truly become “the clever country” by adopting new ways of thinking about the economy. For example, Ecological Efficiency minimises ecological costs by minimizing resource loss, pollution and waste while maximizing economic output. Weeds cost the economy $4 billion annually in lost production; land degradation $2.5b annually, and feral animals $1 billion annually. And land-clearing is continuing to destroy pristine habitats that are irreplaceable." A healthy Australia is the best deal for a viable economic future, as well as our future full stop.
January
JB rapping witjh Okapi Guitars
I celebrated my birthday in the bush with my first ever rap in 41.4 degrees; I brought water-pistols. Few of my poems adapt to a fast rhythmic mode. Here's an extract from one of the poems:
If you go first I will seek compensation,grief will demand
a new art of darkness that shapes muffled daylight
As the seventy-seven senses unravel, your last may hear
my strained voice, music on a radio,the chug of the respirator.
Once your mouth stops and breath fades, the heart seizes,
blood pools and drains from capillaries,
the skin pallors the substance of soul or of ghosts.
Brain cells perish in the time a song takes to sing, one professional boxing round.
I will look for signs of life’s high-wire skills;
check the props of your disappearing act
or like Orpheus sing to locate you beneath rocky Thrace.
Instead of Charon and your Celtic myths, controlled lyricism
or Symbolist dreaming, I want to account for our wildness.
A raven flying with its shadow may notice a brightness,
twist its wings at the shoulder
for more lift, flatten feathers, slow the beat, spread its tail
and brake feet first onto your face, that big black beak might open and close on your blue eyes and taste your fate.
A taxidermist could provide a glassy stare if your corpse
is complete, but I make do with ecology
and the facts or what I imagine facts to be.
US investigators examining the jet that ditched into New York's Hudson River find a feather on one wing.
BBC last updated at 23:18 GMT, Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Perhaps a world first? - video-philosophy - a piece of indeterminate genre - micro-doc, weird hybrid, called 'A flaneur's introduction to phenomenology'
.
Filmed casually during a walk one day from Blackwattle Bay opposite Sydney Fish Markets to the Botanic Gardens – the video is dense with material. Dis you know that the human hand has changed little in 5 million years. Mixed with the insights of philosophers - such as:
My hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand . . .
Maurice Merleau-Ponty