Negative Capability

Why did I chose Shiva to be the cover of my new book, Vishvarūpa, since the word makes reference to the multiplicity of Krishna when he reveals himself to Arjuna at the battle of Kurukshetra?

Perhaps because Shiva is a god of the south, as well as of the mountains; the ascetic and the animist. He is an accretion of gods, a figure built from many countries and districts, his cults more ancient than those of Krishna. He is also the transexual, the ardhanarishvara, whose origins can be traced back to Plato’s myth of a lost androgyny.

I like his dreadlocks, depicted in this bronze Chola dynasty image as the fan that radiates from his head. Look closely and you will see on the right side, the goddess Ganga, the personnification of the Holy river Ganges, who according to legend falls to earth through Shiva’s hair. In his dreadlocks, there is also a crescent moon and a drug-inducing flower expressing the wildness of Nature.

In the Nataraja form Shiva’s eyes are closed as he dances furiously in a trance to the tantric cycle of birth and death. Some say he is stoned. Eponomously, he is the destroyer of darkness. His South Indian aspect is found in some of the most ancient temples in the subcontinent.

Vishvarūpa was launched, sublimely, by Judith Beveridge last weekend at the Friend in Hand pub in Glebe (photographs at this link)

The book is available from 5 Islands Press http://fiveislandspress.com/catalogue/vishvarupa

I was a material girl last week end during my attendance at Poetry and the Contemporary, a symposium organised by michael farrell and Ann Vickery, inspired by the Language poetics of Ashbery, Olson, Howe.

Somehow in the midst of all this Jill Jones launched my book Vishvarūpa, a brief lyric moment, which some might describe as spanking the open poem as it floated through the evening’s indiscernible substances. Afterwards some of us walked the length of Lygon Street all the way to La Mama to catch dinner.

But here’s where it all happened: at the Victorian Trades Hall, and if no poets are photographed outside it maybe because they were mingling within the spaces, making coffees, herbal teas, lunching on vegan delites or breaking lines in the labyrinthine corridors and rooms of this historic building which has been the venue for many fringe events and forums.

Highlights for me, at least, were Andy Carruther’s paper on Sonic Ekphrasis, Jill Jones/Bonny Cassidy/Claire Gaskin on Unimprovement poetics, Pam Brown’s General complaints, Martin Edmond’s wonderful eulogy to Alan Brunton, a playwright/poet whose work I had not known. Ruby Brunton’s perfomance of her father’s work was rarefied.

Breathtaking, too, was David Herd’s looping lexical ebullience. You can hear David (Visiting Scholar from the University of Kent) speak on Ashbery’s humane poetics from 2-3.30 in the Woolley Building at Sydney University, July 13.

She’s a Welsh mythological figure, a beautiful woman called Rhiannon, dressed in gold and silk brocade, who ambles on her white horse into the fifth century kingdom of Dyfed up to a magical mound. King Pwyll sends horsemen after her, but she cannot be captured and always leads. She calls out to Pwyll confessing that she comes seeking him, and she would rather marry him than her fiancé, Gwawl. She would describe her spouse as ‘feeble’ in wit, and one day take the Celtic sea god, Manannan, for her lover.

If I believe in her, who could blame me? She’s from the Bright World. The maker of birds her song is so beautiful it sends you to sleep and when you wake your pain or the danger you face has gone, and you see three birds dipping their wings as they fly away.

Stevie Nicks wrote the song in ten minutes.

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There are traces of bird imagery in poems of mine selected for the summer issue of Fox Chase Review which is now live. Also featured is the London-based Hong Kong poet/editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and prose by Nicolette Wong. I particularly enjoyed reading poems by Josiah Bancroft and a haunting fiction on the fragile subject of infant death, by William Hastings. Founded in 2007 in Philadelphia, for the last two years this eclectic and elegant literary journal has been edited by Diane Sahms Guarnieri. A Reading Series also enables invited authors to showcase their work.

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