Primavera
Spring has arrived in the suburbs of the metropolis. There are school girls sitting on our nature strip conversing at dusk. The nymphs and gardeners have been diligent. Peach trees are covered with pink blossoms and the magnolia we cut back last year has flowered thickly in dark, opium-scented maroon. Abundant species of wattle cross-pollinate, colouring the freeway, north and south.
In my semi-sedate state, after dropping Tegan off at school, I flew to Brisbane last week for the Queensland Poetry Festival, where among the highlights were readings by Andrew Taylor, August Kleinzahler and performances by Emily XYZ and her partner. I was there to receive a poetry award, and I think it all went well enough. It was nice to have a few hours alone to write in my hotel room, which surprised me with its brash vista of plazas, appartments, cranes, billboards advertising condoms and the cropped foliage of palm trees. And it was fun getting dressed-up formally, curling my stubbornly straight hair, before stepping out into the Valley’s balmy night and heading for the Judith Wright Centre, a revamped industrial art space, which has a great vibe. I got to meet the poets Bronwyn Lea, Felicity Plunkett and Graham Nunn, whose work I really admire.
Half-way through the announcement I realised I had brought the wrong poem with me, having entered two. It was a funny and arbitrary moment, which I recall slipping away quite perfectly, proving and disproving Murphy’s indefatigable law of errors, and the notion of impermanence I am forever failing at learning to absorb. May the goddess bring me rest, if not restylane.
Bombala Track—Brett McMahon
Bombala Track
Rex Irwin Gallery
38 Queen St
Woolhara
24 August -September 18
One of the country’s most exciting abstract painters, Brett McMahon exhibits his latest series Bombala Track at the Rex Irwin gallery in Woolhara this month. McMahon’s organic style imbues the inanimate subject with new vitality. His work has progressed from industrial surfaces and textured urban landscapes to coastal environments. His art derives from seemingly insignificant details the eye catches, which resonate with perspective and emotional intensity. Fluidity and strength are features of his genderless style.
Bombala track explores the tensile linear narratives of the paperbark swamps and bush reserves at the southern end of Dudley beach in Newcastle, where McMahon lives with his young family. The track with its coastal lagoon is a favourite walk for the artist. He describes the process of drawing from the natural formations and serpiginous patterns:
“I was in the bush every couple of days drawing and experiencing the bush directly through different light and weather conditions. I find the time I spend in the bush rewarding and I always return to the studio with something new to paint.”
Sketched in ink the lines of trees, trunks and branches are transcribed on to heavier watercolour paper using tools such as brushes, scrapers, pencils, oil sticks. McMahon is known for his manipulation of canvas, bringing to life the weathering and embedding of landscape. The interwoven trunks balance energetic shape with sobering tones. McMahon’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally in private and corporate collections and galleries.
Joy for Tatjana
On Tuesday night I read poetry with Andrew Lansdowne at The Gods Cafe in Canberra. Among the welcoming poetry community, fostered over the years by Geoff Page, was Isobel Hannan, a close friend of Tatjana Lukic’s. The date of the reading happened to coincide with the second anniversary of Tatjana’s death. A Croatian born writer, Tatjana’s life journeys pitted her against the traumas of war, migration, family disruptions and cancer, to which she eventually succumbed. I read the poem “Joy,” in memory of Tatjana.
When we last met, on 20 June 2008, I was touched by her humility, her humour and her passion for living. We shared a meal of home-cooked soup, we drank Turkish coffee and smoked one or two Camel cigarettes in her garden. Eastern spinebills were feeding on nectar, and blue wrens darted about the fernery at the front of Tatjana’s house. The poplars were late in their golden-leaf, before winter’s dramatic fall. We spoke of her hospital admissions, her family, her writing, the tiredness and forgetfulness from which she was suffering as a result of her treatment, the side-effects of her bloated moon face and hair loss. Despite the seizures and falls she was experiencing, the lapses in consciousness, despite living alone in her home in Yarralumla with only rudimentary emergency support, she was busy sewing curtains, trying out scarves and wigs, painting in pastels, matching the days of the week to colours:
“so, see how i see them ( no idea why), and tell me how you see them
(days and their colours). it’s interesting to know:
monday blue
tuesday brown
wednesday green
thursday red
friday purple
saturday orange
sunday yellow”
(from an email to the poet, joanne burns : 30/7/08)
She loved most to cook for her friends. And what seemed most vital to her then was to continue to edit and complete her manuscript. Tatjana’s spirit bore witness to the Noble Rider that Wallace Stevens wrote of, her poetry affirming “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” Yet her language was not one of the aesthete or the conspicuously private, responding ironically and empathetically to cultural and historical realities. The poems were to be published soon after her death in the superb collection La La La, which won the Canberra Critics Award in 2009.
Tatjana could not speak English when she and her family arrived in Australia as refugees from the Balkans war. She described writing poetry in English as “one of the hardest and most challenging things” she had accomplished. She had won several national awards for her poetry collections published in the former Yugoslavia.
photograph by David Cahill 2.9.07: Reading at Poetry Without Borders
TATJANA LUKIC
25 August 1959 – 10 August 2008
Distractions at Cave Rock
Cave Rock Creek, Lamington National Park
After the city we drive to a cabin in Lamington National Park, which I remember for its blue scarps, its antartic beech, ironbark orchids and waratah sunsets. I remember a few years ago, feeling stranded, my daughter burning with a fever and unable to walk. I remember carrying her through the rainforest, the flame kurrajongs and back to the carpark. A mentally retarded boy had wandered off from his group. The teacher’s assistant found him crouched low in the bush, playing with a stick in the dirt. There is something alien and hard and empty in this wilderness.
All day I feel paralysed, observing the hierarchy of birds. Knife-sharp magpies skitch the pink galahs, who crane their necks to crack open seed. Before them the rainbow lorikeets. A sequence of flights measures time, and time intersects with travel. I am interchanging the past for the present tense, chapter by chapter. I am testing words as they retract into something shiny and dangling, and almost whole. Splitting the kernel of words bursting with new taste, I call this life because it feeds me, or as a friend says, What else can one do? When David and Tegan drive into town, I fall asleep and never want to wake. I must be exhausted by worldly things or else immeasurably content, seduced by wave-forms of wing-scatterings and the broken, uneven light.
Next day we try to climb inside the cave rock; in the heat of midday the entrance is a cleft, bewilderingly narrow and too steep for Tegan. Coming downhill she trips and wants a band-aid, her cries echoing in the forest. We have locked ourselves outside the cabin and she is sore. Inside, it’s Technology with a capital T to the rescue. She plays her nintendo for a peaceful hour or two. I love hearing the sound of her sweet voice calling the names of those playful and obedient electronic pups.
There are pademelons in the tall grass bent over bark and berries. I walk along the creek late afternoon, and spot the mottled figure of a platypus in the sand flats. Moonlight floods the valley spilling over fields of rye. Soon a few stars appear in the sky. Pine, citrus and manure stings the air. The nothingness fills me. I walk back over the cold gravel to the cabin and to the fire, with its dancing roses.
The Bridge
Last week I crossed a space between the territories of architectural criticism and creative writing at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, and the re-vamped State Library. I enjoyed hearing about psychoanalytic interpretations of home and art from Katarina Wadstein Macleod, and it was very cool to meet Katja Grillner from Stockholm who spoke about shifting place perceptions. Howard Raggatt’s “Not Songs” carved out urban madrigals from the chaos of sound, while Niki Kalms brought us raunch culture from King St, Melbourne with its after hours strip clubs and lap pole dancing venues.
These low res pics are taken from Kirilpa Bridge.
Another bridge I’ve walked recently has been Michele Leggott’s Home and Away, a Trans-Tasman digital link connecting poets from New Zealand, Australia, Asia and the States. This is a diverse digital poetry experience of an exceptional standard, and you should check it out. You might like to contribute to the poems and conversations…
http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/home&away/sydney.asp
While walking a bridge, one may experience its steel geometries, the sway and oscillations of suspension, the panorama of rivers, harbours, the modernist or brutalist facades of skyscrapers, restaurants and boatsheds. One of my favourite bridges is the Glebe Island Bridge, quite mesmeric to drive across, particularly at night, when there’s not much traffic. I like too, the Brooklyn Bridge, its spun wire ropes over East river connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn. Hart Crane described its “swift/Unfractioned idiom” in a praise poem.
Roses From TS Eliot
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
from TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton, Four Quartets.
In this passage Eliot affirms the experience of something abstract, that is deeply and near-flawlessly realised, the intersection between time and eternity, the point at which memory and imagination reconfigure the present moment, renewing time. Barry Spur remarks in an essay how positive the perspective of this narrator is in comparison to the disillusioned and despairing middle-aged Prufrock, for whom time is repetitive, a monotony, and the instrument of a social facade that cannot be reversed. In Four Quartets, Eliot’s quest for meaning, the still point in the turning world takes place in language, which is both the source and the substance, the image and the voice, casting and uttering itself into being. The poem is a not merely a literary, but a philosophical, an aesthetic act.
(By way of aside, I read a beautiful sequence of poems yesterday in the latest PN Review by Jee Leong Koh. “What the River Says,” in particular, shares some of these themes.)
Eliot was influenced deeply by Eastern spirituality although he was a theologically committed Anglican. There are exoticised traces of Hinduism in The Wasteland, and a Buddhist sympathy that is evident in his expressions of spiritual truth, as acceptance of death in life, and of what exists beyond the spatio-temporal order. Time is crucial here. Eliot is saying that although we are liberated from consciousness in the present moment, which is space, when we enter consciousness we enter time, we rely on memory and delay and therefore language to reconstruct and appraise our experience of what it is to be human in this world. Something new from something old is the quintessential modernist project, and there is only so much of the real which we can endure. Under this mutability, language cracks.
It’s interesting to observe this tension between the Buddhist recognition of impermanent mental states and the writer’s compulsion to explore them. The act of writing is liberating, freeing us from reality, when it should dare to say beauty or to say truth; as moments in meditation when Logos, or thoughts are abandoned, and the experience of light enters the body. The body feels lighter, cooler, as if a sea breeze were passing through the bones. This is not a power, but the reverse of a power, a spiritual happiness, without the contamination of thought, which I would chose over writing, if the work of writing wasn’t somehow asking me to be responsible.
Four Quartets contains patterns, repetitions and contrary motion, which are the juxtapositions of music, the apposition of words, forming cycles rather than straight lines of meaning, invoking waves, rather than forces. It’s worth noting the simplicity of the adverbs and adjectives, their abstractions: “empty”, “dry”, “vibrant”, and the repetition of nouns, objects like “pool,” “bird,” “flowers.” How skilful then, that the poem sequence is so dreamlike, incantatory, a dissonant, intense music, which feels more polished than his earlier work, lacking the irresolute conflict of The Wasteland.
Written in the late 1930′s, Four Quartets seems far removed from much contemporary verse that is dripping with diction, materiality, the excesses and fetishes of language. We live in times when we are consumed by language, by text, as if consumption were our god, our blog, our necessary angel. But today, I have no need for plinky prompts. I have Eliot’s roses @—>—>
Assoc Professor Barry Spur” The Centre of Meaning in Eliot’s Four Quartets“
The 2010 Mildura Writers’ Festival
(Photograph: From the Arts Mildura website)
This week the 16th Mildura Writers’ Festival opens. Located in the charming township of Mildura by the Murray river in ambient café venues and the lecture halls of La Trobe campus, the festival brings together some of the country’s finest writers and thinkers, yet has an international trace, being directed by Paul Kane, eminent poet and academic from New York. This year’s guests include Morag Fraser, Nobel Prize runner, Les Murray, the inspirational Kate Jennings, whose memoir, Trouble has recently been published by Black Inc, as well as some wonderful poets: LK Holt, Lisa Gorton, Peter Goldsworthy, Robert Gray. The poet/translator Stephen Sartarelli, known for his translations of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels and for his translations of classic French and Italian poetry is another guest.
The festival has a cult following; several of my friends are attending this year, though gatecrashers may be bounced. This is a sophisticated, witty and warm literary event not to be missed.
Book Online
http://www.artsmildura.com.au/writers/writers_packages.asp
Beyond the Fetish: Lorna Murray’s Art
Pastiche and irony, structure and fragility, decadence and utility, are the contrary themes of Lorna Murray’s conceptual designs. Her images explore and interrogate the personae of woman as cultural product, as fetish commodity, as mirror selves in the absence of what is real. In these costumes, fantasy offers the opportunity to confront and renegotiate socially structured identities. Dressed in manipulated orange satin, the curvaceous female body adopts conventional postures to embolden her subversive gestures against backdrops of linear corrugations and symmetrical urban surfaces. Or dressed in tin, rivets, pink silk and fur, she becomes a cyborg accessorised with recycled objects: taps, clocks, spools, purchase tags.
At a symbolic level, there is an interplay between the patriarchal order, the material and the anima. The feminine instinct, which is supple and vulnerable is expressed by the use of decadent fabrics: feathers, luxuriant velvets, lush, embroidered surfaces. Yet the designs are exaggerated in their layering. The manipulation of fabrics evokes memory and cultural boundaries, which stereotype and frame the female form into a sexualised object, a product to be used and exchanged for the pleasure of men. Found objects of everyday use resonate with the anxieties of consumption and sustainability.
Murray’s work wears its sophistication lightly, with fluid referencing of the historical and cultural styles by which women have been shaped. Victorian flourishes of bloomers, lingerie and corsets mash with 80’s fluoros, with 50’s classique, with hints of tartan, and New York sunglasses. Colour becomes iconic. Red is the colour of paradoxes, suggesting danger, vitality, passion, and prostitution. Yellow evokes the intellectual, the stimulant; while orange is at once the shock absorber, the subdued and the seductive, the spectacle of celebrity and the immortality of peach. Pink is chidlike; the woman drowning in fairy floss, in disproportionately sized hats and flouncy fabrics as she critiques and exploits the likeness of herself. Through her work Murray unfixes the codes of female subjectivity as her heroines venture beyond the fetish to a space of semantic indeterminacy.
Adorned in vintage cotton hand-embroidered apron, with suitcase in hand, this contemporary heroine is historically framed in quiet defiance of a domesticity that no longer tethers her.
The Porous Language of Rock
Found Image: the porous language of a rock facade in Leura.
Winter is here, and today it felt as if it would be snowing somewhere in the mountains. After midnight is a quiet time for thought; there is a possum climbing the overgrown branches of the magnolia tree and the moon is rather beautiful.
Last week I met up with fellow poets at the Asialink event: Michael Farrell, Simon West, Dan Disney, Sam Byfield, Jennifer Mckenzie, the author of Borobudur, and the ever-buoyant Matt Hetherington. It was lovely to meet Nic Low, Lian Low from Peril, Lian’s girlfriend, MC Raina from LOCA (Ladies Of Colour Agency), Margaret Mayhew and Maxine Clarke, whose work I really admire. Mascara vs Peril was awesome fun, Asia being the new spice; though my boots were definitely made for fashion rather than comfort. I braved the cold in a strappy, soft leather dress I found at Seduce, in Newtown, a month or two ago. I’ve been under the spell of a sweet melancholy of late; and shopping is therapy.
It was very nice to meet Nathanael O’Reilly an Australian poet who teaches in Texas. His first collection Symptoms of Homesickness is published by Picaro. These wonderfully crafted narrative poems capture the diasporic identity, somewhere between home and elsewhere, a metaphor for the unknown. I particularly enjoy their realism, the way in which they evoke the yearning for a reckless, peripatetic youth spent in rural towns, for teenage friendships, mateships, encounters with, or dreams of post-pubescent love. I like the arrangement of the poems too; it’s a fine, understated debut.
Another enjoyable read is Ali Alizadeh’s Iran, My Grandfather, which blends the genres of memoir, fiction and historical account as it reconstructs the story of Alizadeh’s grandfather, Salman Fuladvand, a police chief, provincial governer and emancipist under one of the late Shahs. Through Salman’s perspective the complexities of Iran’s history of revolution, fundamentalism, modernity, war and tyranny are realised. The book is striking also for it’s intrepid description of the writer being cast adrift in the cultural wasteland of homogenised white Australia. I can very much relate to Ali, when he writes of not-belonging. He eschews the direct anger of Ouyang Yu, expressing a more pessimistic sense of isolation, which, I suspect, many migrant writers would understand.
I describe myself as a “migrant Goan-Anglo-Indian” in my bio and the author Tom Cho, once asked me why I’d made this choice. For me it is a political gesture; a way of reminding white Australia that migrant writers do exist; that their stories, poems and words are worth listening to; and may one day no longer be threatening.
Although we are globalised we carry colonial baggage. Several taxis I caught in Melbourne were driven by Indians. All were men; most from Chandigarh in the northern state of Punjab. They had immigrated without their families, and seemed desperately lonely, missing their culture and faith. I don’t know what the word for loneliness is in Hindi. We spoke in broken English.
Mascara vs Peril
The image is by Daniel Lee. Design by Owen Leong, whose work is on show this month at the Depot Gallery, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo as part of the Anna Pappas Gallery’s exhibit. Owen’s work explores how race, colour and gender mark and transform the body, and the ways in which physicality is culturally framed.
I wasn’t too sure about this image at first, it seems so at odds with Mascara’s profile but I’m finding it dramatic and confronting and futuristic…looking forward to meeting the Peril camp tomorrow night in the Asialink HQ.
I have these fab boots to wear, D & G’s I bought on sale in Castlereagh St after a somewhat costly trip to the dentist a few weeks back. They are brown, mid-calf length with the subtlest of gold heels. However, it’s not a nightclub is it? It’s just a poetry reading I’m going to for god’s sake…
