Armpit Hair

Toys

A Summer Birthday

August again, my month, and I watch a fat brown turd
fall from the arse of time into the filthy trough
between last year’s dimwit and next year’s retard.

I Wouldn't Give a Flying Fox For Anything Else

Roos

Temple Monkey, Hua Hin

Rainbow Lorikeets

When Mr Men Go Bad

Hobart from Mount Wellington

Hobart Harbour

Junior

Rufous Night Heron (?)

Great Ocean Road

Luna Park, Melbourne

St Kilda Beachfront

Black-Crowned Night Heron (?)

Junior the Gang-Gang

Laughing Kookaburra, Perth

Nullarbor

I was dreamt by no white man’s god.
I sat bone-dry through Noah’s flood.
Here your Christ could rise from the dead
to only buzzards above his head
and an afterlife he’d quickly trade
for a waterhole by a tree in the shade.
Inside my mirage of heat
I do not speak: I hallucinate
inside your skull. For I am mute.
My heart is stone. I bleed stone blood.

Letter to America

Saw a wedge-tailed eagle in the wild the other day. It started by circling another one on the ground, then dive-bombed it a couple of times before sitting sulking very high up in a branch, waiting for its rival to depart, which it duly did.

Which reminds me to mention Helen Macdonald’s book Shaler’s Fish, which it took this trip to Australia for me to discover, at Kris Hemensley’s incomparable Collected Works bookshop on Swanston Street here in Melbourne. Macdonald’s book has to be one of the best published by an English poet in the last fifteen years, let me opine, confidently sidestepping any hyperbole. Here are the beautiful last three stanzas of ‘letter to america’:

& you were scraping the ice from the leading edge a.m.
printing an image of the mansions of the dead a.m.
looking for a small world in the uninhabited air
trying to extinguish some deeper desire for fire

with something as cold and as hard and as temporary as flight
& what you were hoping is that the air would recolonise you
recognize you and welcome you into the sunlight
and all would be forgiven. ink in the thick air would curl

into glyphs of desire & the lightly starred heel
would dip into the sea at dawn as it spoils
into a blaze of mute objects
in the pure suburban heavens

Letters to the Tremulous Hand

One of the fine Australian poets I’ve been reading over here is Elizabeth Campbell, author of Letters to the Tremulous Hand (John Leonard Press). The Tremulous Hand of her title refers to an anonymous thirteenth-century scribe working at Worcestershire Cathedral and known only by the distinctive tremor in his handwriting. Her sequence on him is a marvellous piece of textual ghosting between the lines of history, of harmonics, feints, palimpsests and silhouettes. Here’s an extract from section five, ‘gewyrdelic (historical)’ which uses found text from the scribe glosses:

Gaelsa, ‘lust’, glossed once
As fabula, ‘story’. Fracod, ‘infamy’
Rendered as versions of fragilitas.
The poem torn and gummed to stuff
The cover of a parish register.
Hraew, ‘corpse’, never glossed correctly.
The tremor misdiagnosed
As age: the left hand,
Wynstra, he mistranslated
As dextra, the right.

And from the end of the previous section, ‘address to the hand as a fellow scholar’:

Do you tremble? Good. Better
to write by: the hand moving without end, griefwheel

milling the past. Glossing
heolstor hiding-place, your mark the ghost

of living thought, Time thought’s winding-sheet.
No-one at court loves our language.

Schools sold, teachers punished, scholars shamed:
I am all your subject: you are mine –

life and works and time – each the others’
elegy and grave and afterlife.

Bettongs and Potoroos

William Buckley, transported convict, escaped and lived in the bush among the Wathaurung people of Western Victoria (Australia) for thirty-two years. On re-entering white society at the splendidly named Indented Head he overcame by now severe difficulties with the English language to dictate an account of his adventures to a missionary, George Langthorne. Read more here.

From the notes to The Life and Adventures of William Buckley:
1. Probably pigface (Mesembryanthemum).
2. Probably the call of the yellow-bellied glider, a kind of possum which possesses one of the loudest calls of any marsupial.
3. The name literally means ‘returned from the dead’.
4. In fact, witchetty grubs are delicious at any time.
5. Bettongs and potoroos.
6. This is a rather garbled account of the koala.
7. Termites.
8. The identity of this red-spotted double-headed serpent remains a mystery.
9. Langhorne’s writing is indecipherable here.
10. This account confuses the echidna and the wombat.

More Pricks Than Kicks

Of the porcupine: ‘If under threat, it will attack by suddenly sprinting backwards’ (David Attenborough).

Big Ned, Glenrowan

For the Irish in Australia

Greetings comrades, Michael Collins writes in 1922 to the memorabilia collection on the wall of a pub in modern-day Perth; I have seen the letter myself. Its tone is warm and relaxed. He speaks of hard-won freedoms and of the struggles to come. His views, however, on Australian marsupials, on the welfare of the bilby and the pademelon go unrecorded, as though these creatures did not have to struggle too, in their way! The oversight is not to his credit. Where are the rallying cries for the ghost bat and the laughing kookaburra, the death or glory vows for the Spinifex hopping mouse?

It was the year of Collins’ death. Fifteen years later the constitution of the Irish Free State was born with not a mention of the war waged daily by Australian wildlife for the simplest dignity and self-respect. Irishmen and women, is their cause not ours too? The shame of it burns red on my brow, the same ochre-red of the sunset over our Perth suburb, the deep red of the Australian earth in which we burrow and raise our young, and whence we lift a quizzical head, thinking of Ireland, only of Ireland, when the rains pass, the all-too-brief and restorative rains.

Blister Pack

An excellent Australian poet: David McCooey. His Blister Pack from Salt is well worth a read:

Their green desires
rose between them

until one day a maze
appeared so thick

and tall neither one
of them could see or hear the other.

{Ends}

I would write more, but this post finds me in the goddamn launderette and my socks are nearly done.

Galahs

Galas
of gallous
galahs.

Trailer Park Ghost

Brad Mehldau, you were
born a week after me

and have spent a lifetime
overcompensating.

Your albums come in so fast
that buying the new one

I often get the unrecorded
one after that by mistake,

and am grateful. You name-check
Derrida in your sleeve notes

though he never once mentions you
on the back of his books.

Is it time to bid farewell
forever again to the past with

another suavely whispering standard?
Goodbye storyteller, sings

a wispy line four octaves up,
meaning, once more

round the contraflow,
my rakish chromatic uncle:

a remembered condom of fluff
on a needle, an umbrella hat

permanently expecting rain.
A trailer park ghost

dodges bass-lines in 7/8 time.
I’ve heard some rueful whistling

in strange hotels, but only you
have chased leaves round the porch

in all the places I’ve never been.
This venue not on the T-shirt.

There is no T-shirt.
Against what modulations,

what untold fallings away
should I steel myself,

remembered as they happen,
heard through arpeggio drizzle

and tipped from a lazy weekend’s
shopping, the door key passed

greedily over the shrink wrap ?
Too late the left hand sees

the turn off the freeway:
no bridge passage now

till New Jersey and no one but me
in the car to sing along.

Penguins, St Kilda

My angry brethren of the darkening ecliptic! Quaint little birds, fairy penguins would not seem to bear comparison with their sturdy Antarctic cousins. They are a backyard curiosity, a mere toy of a thing. They are excellent divers, let it be said in their defence. And better, as they come splashing among the rocks in the breakwind this mild winter evening, back from the sea and posing for photographs yards from the end-of-the-pier café, they prove themselves masters of an environment the emperor penguin would find sheer torture; in the same way that nipping across town to the supermarket in a sensible family car may be so far beneath the skill of your average sports car driver as to be almost beyond it. The comparison is hardly exact, but can stand. I say it can stand. The penguins did not stay long, and the evening turned cold. Still shivering, I found the Riesling in the café sweet to the point of sickening, and yet I drank it, grimacing, gladly.

Only Connect

One of the great things about this country is how Aussie Rules football seems to be on a rolling schedule, with games on all the time. This makes it technically impossible to walk into a bar or turn the television on without seeing someone punch someone else, live, as presumably enshrined in the Australian constitution.

Only connect, as Larkin said to someone at a particularly slow boxing match.

Rendezvous

tomorrow
I can’t do

but I see
yesterday’s free

Finches, Melbourne

finches at the
bakery window

above the dumpsters
and Adult Store
rear entrance

on stony ground yet
not one fallen seed
has been lost

On Rottnest Island

Given
the existence
of a quoiquoiquoi-

corker
of a vintage
marsupial

untimorous beastie
placidest quaker
and but for this

offshore quag a
dead-cert
croaker

its snout scenting
you twitching
quaquaqua-

quicker
and the biscuit-dry
whip of its tail

(a real cracker)
serve only
to underscore

the queer care
this small town
in Greenland

featherless
quacker
self-addressed

pouch post
must put into being
a quokkquokkquokk-

quokka.

Down Under

If he could shit, Beckett’s Unnamable says, his turds would come out in Australia. I hereby fundamentally expel myself from the Northern hemisphere to go and spend six weeks down under, that topsy-turvy land where toilets flush the other way round and hot snow falls upwards from the ground.

I assume I will start posting from down under, eventually, but in the meantime can you please take in my milk bottles and keep any interesting pieces from the books pages of the West Hull Advertiser for me, thanks.

Wtf?!

Scott Street Bridge

Hommes et Femmes

There’s a Jacques Lacan joke about a boy and girl on a train pulling into a station. ‘I see we’re in Femmes’, says the girl. ‘No you idiot, it’s Hommes!’ the boy corrects her.

Consider the implications of that joke in relation to the review pages of the new Poetry Review. As follows:

Steven Matthews reviews John Kinsella. Man/man.

Sara Crown reviews Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Tamara Fulcher and Mary Oliver. Woman/three women.

David Morley reviews Adam Foulds and Ciaran Carson. Man/two men.

Jamie McKendrick review Michael Hofmann/Bernard O’Donoghue. Man/two men.

Adam Thorpe reviews Taha Muhammad Ali and Mahmoud Darwish. Man/two men.

Jane Holland reviews Charlotte Mew, Ruth Pitter and Janet Frame. Woman/three women.

Michael Hulse reviews Matthew Francis and Robert Crawford. Man/two men.

Sarah Wardle reviews Annemarie Austin, Sujata Bhatt, Alison Brackenbury, U.A. Fanthorpe and R.V. Bailey. Woman/five women.

Tim Liardet reviews John Seed, Ken Cockburn, Julian Stannard, Graham Mort, Gerard Smyth, John McAuliffe, Philip Nikolayev and David Grubb. Man/eight men.

Melanie Challenger reviews Lotte Kramer, Zoe Brigley, Jen Hadfield, Gerrie Fellows and Julie O’Callaghan. Woman/five women.

Tony Frazer reviews Kenji Miyazawa, Soleïman Adel Guémar, Ivan Blatný, Nikola Vaptsarov, Yana Glembotskaya and Oleg Burkov (eds), and Marc Falkoff (ed). Man/four men plus two anthologies, one of whose three editors is a man. Reader, Nikola Vaptsarov is a man.

Charlotte Newman reviews Tamar Yoseloff, Kathryn Simmonds, Deborah Garrison and Jane Griffiths. Woman/four women.

The Tony Frazer review complicates things ever so slightly, but leaving those two anthologies out of the picture we still have seven male reviewers reviewing 21 men and five women reviewing 20 women.

Hommes and Femmes. Someone tell me how highly significant this is, and why, or why in fact it means nothing at all.

Ignoble Savages

Hard to disagree much with this from William Logan:

The disparity between what Graham believes she’s doing and what the reader sees on the page is enormous. Perhaps these rambling, doddering, lifeless poems are “crucial,” as she claims; yet it’s as if all their imaginative energy went to “enact the idea of, and sensation of” writing the poem itself. I’m not sure aesthetic choices should be justified in philosophic terms, because it makes matters of taste seem conditioned or inevitable (taste can have philosophical carriage, but perhaps it takes a century or more to discover it). Her language, so slack and unbearable now, doesn’t possess the resources of Williams or Whitman, whose arguments lay in language, not length of line. Graham can chatter in the latest philosopher’s mode but can’t compose a good metaphor.

{Ends}

Readers of Poetry will remember the centrefold-style excitement of the poems that ended up in Sea Change, reclining Odalisque-like on their side, beached and out of proportion to their surroundings, like an Antarctic glacier floating into Tampa Bay.

Adam Kirsch talked about the algebraic quality of Graham’s work in his recent book of essays, and the defiant fill-it-in-for-yourself quality of the earlier poems he was discussing. Graham books, in a Beckett phrase I like, have always come with ‘missing parts included’. In Sea Change though all too many of these have been filled in, in all the wrong ways, and all I find is Heathcote Williams meets the Discovery Channel meets the nearest piece of late Heidegger to hand. Dipping into ‘Embodies’ at random I find: ‘& there is still /innocence, it is starting up somewhere /even now, and the strange swelling of the so-called Milky Way, and the sound of the /wings of the bird as it lifts off /suddenly, & how it is going somewhere precise, & that precision, & how I no longer /can say for that it /knows nothing, flaming, razory...’ I pause on that insistence on ‘precision’. Bird-flight is a very precise thing, but this writing isn’t. So much of Graham’s work operates on a meta-level these days that it has become enough for her to make a gesture in the direction of precision for her writing (she must think) to take on that quality. If the whole thrust of Sea Change is towards an attention to the natural world (‘Absolute unmixed attention is prayer’, as Simone Weil said), its effect on me is of sublimation – a book-length sublimation of its material into a stance, a style, a tic. The natural world has become so much material, in a strange mimetic echo of the despoliation of the earth that she writes about. Display supercedes meditation and understanding. A rare and showy bird is pluming itself, energetically, on behalf of the lesser species that have not made it into camera-shot. This is not to say I think Jorie Graham has become the Harvard wing of Exxon Mobile, but still.

There is a three-part series on BBC at the moment about the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda, and attempting to recreate an episode in which some St Kildans were marooned on the nearby rocky outpost of Boreray for several months the camera crew ran into storms and winched their man off the rock. The historically respectful thing would have been to leave him there, or better again to have sent the camera crew but left the presenter at home, or best of all just not to have made the programme, perhaps. Because how better to honour Hopkins’ words, ‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet’, than by getting ourselves out of the picture as much as possible, and preferably altogether. This may be a flippant suggestion, but as a rhetorical impossibility is at least worth a try, or a better try than the vapidities of Sea Change.

These reflections prompted by George Szirtes blogging about the New Writing Worlds 2008 Human: Nature (note Grahamesque colon) conference in UEA. Szirtes worries about the recrudescence of Noble Savage theology he finds in those who would lecture us on the wisdom of indigenous peoples, and the hymners of nature who would overlook its weakness for letting off tsnunamis and earthquakes when the mood takes it. I would agree that there is a mood of neo-Rousseauism afoot, as memorably skewered by Kathleen Jamie in her LRB review of Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places, but think this is less a problem than the common failure to grasp our true predicament: that we are the last indigenous people left, the last tribe to make contact with the folk who still live in the forests of Peru and Papua New Guinea, the most dogged believers on earth in the absolute state of nature in which we live, whether we’re admiring our sensitive response to a Seamus Heaney poem or fuelling up the people-carrier for the school run, the last culture left with no use for or conception of anything beyond ourselves. And what are we going to do about that, eh? That’s what I want to know.

If I want to see rabbits here where I live, I can drive to a dual carriageway roundabout, where a large colony appears to be thriving. That to me is contemporary nature.

On the subject of nature writing, I would also say that if Jorie Graham is a distracting sideshow it’s good to be reminded by an extract from his forthcoming The Last Pool of Darkness in the new Dublin Review that Tim Robinson is, for my money, the best writer on nature writing today, and probably the best prose writer at work in Ireland or Britain too. Always nice to end on a note of hyperbole.

Photo found here.

Found

‘Sunday Discount night 25% off in eating over 2 people’ (on Indian takeaway menu).

Found

‘Pictures are illustrations only’ (on Chinese takeaway menu).

Manatee, Manatee

Manatee, manatee, all is manatee. I mention this because the author’s likeness of Ned Kelly in his home-made armour adorning the cover of Cliff Forshaw’s A Ned Kelly Hymnal (Paper Special Edition) is demonstrably not Ned Kelly at all, but a manatee, and a manatee wearing a jilbab at that. The manatee is a religious beast by nature, sheltering behind its faith from the slings and arrows of man’s inhumanity to manatee. (That’s a Kit Wright joke by the way, I didn’t just make that up.)

The final photograph of Kelly, bush-ranger-bushy-bearded, the whites of his eyes:

Eyes peeled like hard-boiled eggs. Flecked red.
Yellow. Black-dotted. Jaundiced, downcast or lidded;
hooded with flame, day’s end or blood.
Or pool-balls, yours, spotted, on the edge of the pocket:
one good crack (stripes, then on the black)
and they’re lined-up, potted.

Sidney Nolan’s Kelly portraits, old Wanted posters, ‘the price above that head dolorous with silver haloes’:

Helmet or bucket?
Kick it. Fuck it.
What’s it matter when
eight thousand pounds
press on four men’s heads?

Transvestism and the Molly Malones. Kelly gang member Steve Hart’s similar inclinations. De Valera smuggled from prison in a dress, in more recent times. The Glenrowan shootout. The hanging. And, by way of epilogue, Nolan’s ‘Death of a Poet’ in Liverpool’s Walker Gallery:

Death-mask or bust. Kicked the bucket.
Right now he’s just something in the trees,
round as a gourd, shiny on top,
bald as baked clay, a terracotta pot.

Or one that’s bloomed, blown, grown scratchy dry;
breeze-rustled beard ready to fall to scrub,
dead-heeled by some passer-by.

{Ends}

This blog of course takes a strongly anti-nepotistic line, but wriggles off the hook of promoting one of its (its?) friends by insisting we’re not really a friend of Cliff’s at all, and are only pretending for as long as it takes until he returns that tenner he owes us.

I warmly recommend this book. Write to him at c.forshaw at hull.ac.uk if you want a copy.

Photograph shows the author helping to launch a beermat (no really).

Insomnia

For anyone in the habit of sitting bolt upright in the wee small hours wondering what ‘the healthiest single phenomenon’ to occur in poetry ‘in several decades’ might be, wonder no more. Silliman:

I was thinking about the debate, to call it that, between flarf & conceptual writing, and specifically thinking that such a debate was in many respects the healthiest single phenomenon I’ve seen regarding poetry in several decades.

Now roll over and go back to sleep. You’ve probably got an early start.

Thorngumbald, Worthy Successor to Agriculture and Flower Show Of

My new favourite bedside volume is The East Yorkshire Village Book, as ‘compiled by the East Yorkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes from notes and illustrations sent by Institutes in the County’, and if that’s not all right by you then too bad, as I’m about to treat you to some extracts from it.

Roos today is a friendly village where older residents and newcomers mix very well. New housing is being built and the community is growing steadily. At one time villages had to be more self-sufficient and the village used to have more shops and trades than there are now. There is still a grocer/newsagent’s (with a petrol pump) and a butcher’s shop selling savouries and cakes.

Some people would say that the most exciting pastime in Preston is to watch the traffic lights change, but others would strongly disagree! Many are happy to live in the village of Preston – not Lancashire, but Yorkshire.

Thorngumbald was once renowned for its Agriculture and Flower Show until costs and age overtook its original helpers. A worthy successor has emerged with the Annual Gala, raising funds to help village projects and renovations. Old and new have integrated quite well, though few of the true Thorngumbald villagers are left to recall the transformation.

[Thwing] has gradually succumbed to the advent of the motorcar and modern day living. Types of occupation have altered, although farming is the predominant industry, and more people are commuting from the parish. With no village shop, bus service or school, the village church and public house are now the focus of activity in the parish, with little to mar the tranquillity of the quiet backwater.

{Ends}

This fine photo found here.

Free Milk

Jeremy Noel-Tod on Ted Hughes in the new Oxford Poetry:

In December 1969, Hughes comments that he is ‘half-inclined to suspect [Crow]’, but has decided to publish it on the grounds that it is ‘my masterpiece. Insofar as I can manage a likeness of a masterpiece.’ Crow’s likeness to a masterpiece is just what maims it: a pseudo-Modernist ‘super-crude’ experiment in lyre-smashing that pales beside the elegant revolutions of Hughes’s contemporaries (Veronica Forrest-Thomson definitively establishes the distance between Hughes and Prynne and Ashbery at this time in her book Poetic Artifice (1978)). The Crow poems were the apotheosis and implosion of everything that had made Hughes the Eng. Lit. equivalent of free school milk: symbolic animals, prosaic morals and nutritional alliteration.

{Ends}

Other nutritional prose by John Redmond, Chris Fenwick and Andrew Duncan, and poetry by Stephen Burt, David Constantine, George Szirtes, Peter McDonald, Andrew McNeillie and others. Read more here.

Richard Price Beams Message into Brains of Huddled Masses, Cafe Waitresses

Richard Price and Simon Lewandowski introduce their rotating letter-cell installation Hotel/Motel/Motet at McCoy’s café yesterday. Geoff Squires, Christopher Reid and Cliff Forshaw look on, and four teenage girls crouch over their cappuccinos in awe, terror, delight, indifference and any other number of randomly unimaginable responses.

Drift Trawlermen Beam Message Directly into Brains of Huddled Masses, Local Pigeons

Remember When You Fought For Yourself

At the Cafe Slavia

I’m off to Ireland for a few days, so barring any on-the-hoof postings you can all amuse yourselves reading this new long poem by marvellous Irish writer Justin Quinn.