Nov-Dec 2011
December 2011
Tinsel from Xmas past, Kalang River
Bron skimming on the Never Never
Some exceptional environmental writers are coming to BRWF:
“Every place is a story,” my Yarralin teachers told me. Deborah Bird Rose, 'At the Billabong'.
"When the world is allowed to grow old, when things are retained, or left to unfold in their own way, then it is possible truly to inhabit places, to come to belong to them, in ways that are undreamed of in change-based societies." Freya Matthews, ‘Letting the World Do the Doing’.
". . . poetic language has the capacity to turn our gaze to the world beyond the page: and if the world to which it urges us to attend is a more-than-human one of Earth and Sky, then this, I believe, is what qualifies it as properly "ecopoetic".” Kate Rigby (on Mary Oliver).
Xmas dunny, Valla Rural
Urunga Head
Boxing Day Goanna
Boxing Day dawn, Pink Bloodwoods
Not used to so many people in the estuary (pumping worms)
Christmas in Australia, Valla Beach
We have just had a long lunch of smoked salmon and tiger prawns, followed by capsicum nut roast and three salads then the main of whole baked Pearl Perch and roast potatoes followed by Christmas Pudding. Champagne and white wines helped it all go down.At least we are not wasting anything.
This event is transparently worth celebrating, these particular lives, health prevailing, an existence coaxed from starlight. The white corrugations so bright on the sea/sky’s vivid orchestration that we squint. Nothing is perfect - they forgot their swimmers.
The beach is deserted. I am the only one with a camera.
We are the voyeurs using our binoculars to see the Sacred Kingfishers, White-faced Honeyeaters, Noisy Friarbirds, Superb Fairy-wrens and the first Mistletoe Bird of the year – well worth photographing with a long lens.
Note: "The paparazzi-magnet married couple [Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom] have settled into a quiet place in Valla Beach, a small enclave on the Coffs Coast, for Christmas weekend. We hope Valla likes guys running around with cameras..." The Daily Telegraph , December 23, 2011.
'Enclave': A portion of territory within or surrounded by a larger territory whose inhabitants are culturally or ethnically distinct.
Our feral Xmas tree, cut down off the highway
Beach ecg
The word Essay derives from the French ‘essai’, meaning ‘attempt’ or ‘experiment’.
I have just read a text that heightened my senses, intrigued and excited my intellect. It was a wonderful essay on a subject I have little interest in - gay marriage, disliking the institution and not being gay. Yet the text is brimming with a poetics of making sense of the world using personal experience and theoretical/historical perspectives.
The author of 'Working Arrangement' is Justin E. H. Smith, yet he is currently working on a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Why? There are more than twenty English language translations (See William H. Gass Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation).
“A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.” Cynthia Ozick, ‘She: Portrait of an Essay as a Warm body’, Atlantic Monthly, Sept 1998.
On Sunday I was up Mount Killiecrankie looking for the rarest bird in NSW - the Rufous Scrub-bird, and gazing across the range to the Dorrigo Plateau. We heard one a few metres away, with a range of calls, mimicking the excitable call of a Logrunner, the insistent song of the Lewin's Honeyeater and ending with a series of earpiercing whistles.
Too good to miss!
Poems can emerge from anywhere and be about anything. Roadworks on the most dangerous stretch of road in Australia presented me with this poem.
Driving into a photograph
Dec 9th For CW
All I wanted was to get some nice pictures of trains at night.
O. Winston Link
Ahead dusk wipes the sky blue/green marine, baroque clouds sail
over a silhouette, hard to make out, slowly waving a red light-stick
in one hand, the raver holding a sign STOP in the other, beneath a bank
of lights, hair in rats tails, face in shadow, tattooed Tysonesque,
restlessly looking from his ceremonial pole across to where the sun
is setting behind the mountains and mountains of cloud then back
to his work, pale youthful stubbled jaw chewing gum, arms hanging
coloured paintings. The visible spectrum moulds the world but leaves
a gap for the absurd bill flying across the deserted highway,
the ibis heading for the coast and night’s obliteration.
The headlights pick out a contemporary hot-pink roadwork sign,
retroflective brilliance on the most dangerous stretch of road in Australia
with numerous fatalities, the light is all ahead of us to the south.
I wish I had my camera – ‘Isn’t this a great photograph?’ ask if you
know the work of O Winston Link and his demanding nostalgia for steam.
My camera packed up two days ago, I feel nostalgic for this image already.
I can’t reach these wonderful rhythms and acuities to pin them down,
preserve the life of this scene, making it all count for something
being both intentional and utterly contingent on light and life and sight.
I think I’m trying to say it seems just like a painting.
It’s a long stop - the car in gear impatiently urges us on with an energy
barely under control. We chat in the usual meander. I was the only one
in the Cabinet Office who didn’t wear a tie. You mention bow ties.
They are, I suggest, like facial tattoos to make a statement – your take
is the tats are bravado. I nearly forget to mention that as he listens
carefully to his two-way radio and slowly swivels his warning
to slow and I give him a thumbs up as we ease past
he gives me, in return, a beautiful gentle smile.
Unsettled weather - unsettling painterly skies:
Friends from France have been staying for a few days - the two young girls were hoping to see the roos that bounded into the garden ten minutes after they left - and the treefrogs all returned too.They did see. for the first time, a pod of dolphins surfing the waves, visible momentarily as if in glass before the wave breaks, and only metres away.
We had to rescue a Pheasant Coucal from the vegie patch - how it got inside is a mystery.
November
This month I am writing a poem a day with images at the moment (see opposite) and busy with the BRWF.
Interview with Bron on her moody thriller 'The Crushers', in Coffs Focus magazine - available online (Kindle US / UK)
Leech trying to get through my shoe to me
I bring young Beau over, slugs are beating us to the strawberries, he only takes back three trophies. Later we find the culprit in the strawberry bed - a Blue-tongue lizard, very light coloured and glossy, probably just shed its skin,with an oversized head long body with very short legs and tiny feet, it slides like a snake and homes beneath the logs. Omnivorous she (looking pregnant) will eat caterpillars, slugs and snails, as well as strawberries. They live soliray lives, but this is the season when males cruise their districts in search of mates. She can have a litter of over 20 young weighing 10 to 20g. They need cover - rocks, timber, ground cover, thick grasses to protect against predators.
Tidy gardens are the enemy!
We have just bought slug pellets, Wyn removes them all before they kill the lizards.
Quiz shows are a very popular entertainment. I’m not sure why since not that many people seem that curious about the past, present and future of the world they live in: In which century did the poet Geoffrey Chaucer live? Was it the 13th, the 14th or the 15th?
Contestant: Well, I know he wrote one of Shakespeare’s plays…
(Private Eye, Dumb Britain) Ignorance is bliss? I’m incapable of reading Middle English. Steve Ellis's Chaucer at Large (2000) suggests a modern emphasis on the bawdy in Chaucer.
Another popular pastime is conspiracy theories, a movie out this month, ‘Anonymous’ has a poster, bound to infuriate, asking ‘Was Shakespeare a fraud.’ The director Roland Emmerich complains of the "arrogance of the literary establishment" to say: 'We know it, we teach it, so shut the fuck up.'" Yet there is a ridiculous amount of evidence
Fourteen other writers mention him by name and his plays use local knowledge from place names and dialect words to specialist knowledge of the wool trade and glove making (his father’s two trades). Why complicate things?
Humans are creative and imginative beings, a cause of great art and great darkness, of joy and superstition. I belive in miracles, but one kind only - life. The others are guilty until proven inocent -
See Australian Sceptics, James Randi, positive Atheism, planet Atheism
It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish. Stephen Fry, The Blasphemy Debate with Christopher Hitchens
Leaf beetle rescued from the kitchen
Jagun poem
The Shrike Thrush sings with belladonna eyes above
her nest, her mate repeats a note then caterpaults
an earpiercing ascent over dark water slipping by
a series of fallen logs and crinum lilies. Oyster Creek
drags itself over rills toward the sea in all directions.
It’s all working out, they mate for life, own a home
invisible from the ground inside a Paperbark fork.
Clouds are sliding darkness overhead, I’m lucky
to have a roof, windows, floors and doors.
I remind myself Jagun means home.
After three BRWF meetings, a walk through Jagun to the sea: cuckoos, logrunners, honeyeaters, I disturb three black cockatoos so busy eating I am almost within reach when they take off on their long wings, voices shrieking . . . There are 6 subspecies of Varied Sword-grass Brown, this male looked like one from over the ranges:
After a chest-heaving short run on the beach the whales appeared with much fin slapping, then two baby humpbacks started breaching, at that size they flipped, rolling silver onto black back, completely leaving the water. I could see the horizon beneath them, the adults are too big too leave the sea completely. Play I presume is the fantastic urgency of being alive.
A baby humpback breaching, Bondi.
Oct 2008, AP Photo, http://www.telegraph.co.uk
The new President of Ireland is a poet - the combo poet / president has been a constant since the election. Anyone can write a poem, it's an interesting fact that few are very good. Carol Rumens doesn't think much of his poems: "The Northern Irish poets have a phrase for rubbish poetry. I first heard it from [Michael] Longley himself, though I believe he said he got it from Frank Ormsby: mad-dog-shite."
Nov 1. How sad to be always beaten to the punch and pinch
Precarious Pandanus Palm, Flannel Flowers, Everlasting Daisies, a beautiful hibiscus (weed) its deep red glowing in the shade of some flowering Coastal Banksias, and the Crinum Lilies (Swamp lily, Spider Lily) are out, Main Beach, Nambucca
Oh, and climbing pigface - why Carpobrotus rossii has that common name I don't know. After flowering the fruiting base swells and becomes a red, almost purple colour – we have scoffed the tasty fruits before. Some Aboriginal groups dried them as a sweet, and used the sap for burns.
and green wings in the rockpools
2011