Anna Couani is a Sydney writer and visual artist who runs an art gallery in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe and who lived in The Blue Mountains town of Blackheath as a child.. Her recent books are: Small Wonders with Flying Island Books, and Thinking Process with Owl Press. Both books are available from her - send email to awcouani@gmail.com. Her out of print work can be found here and some of her visual art can be found here.
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| The Shop Gallery Glebe |
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| Glebe Point looking to the bridges |
I've been writing music to my
poem called Skype Window (in my Flying Islands book Small Wonders), the 3rd piece of music I’ve written so far, and find that the range required for vocals is quite narrow and pretty repetitive. Think
Leonard Cohen etc.
Seeing
as we’ve started here, why not talk about working across different media? I’ve
just installed some of my visual work at the gallery, behind Hilik’s posts. See
Facebook. The selection criteria was “stuff that is framed or hangable” so
there’s no thematic aspect to my part of the (now joint) show. It’s funny
though, that Hilik’s and my works don’t seem to conflict at all, so it seems to
me. Just happenstance.
Like
mine, your life is saturated in writing, art, music, not only in your own
personal realm but on site and also living with another artist. As well as your
life’s work as a teacher of literature and literary publisher. I see parallels
in our lives because I was an art teacher, then English teacher, also publisher
and organiser of readings, and art gallery manager. Some creative practitioners
only do the creative stuff, don’t get tangled up as much in production and
education. That’s as well as the multi-disciplinary activities. Sometimes I find
the complexity of my situation a bit overwhelming.
KIT
An odd starting point. But odd is often good,
or at least an occupational hazard for our kind. As is situation complexity and
attendant overwhelmed-ness. Best to go
with it I guess. And I actually wonder if there’s much choice. I mean if
somebody said to me ‘you flibberitygibbet… quit this crazy
music/painting/poetry/storymaking … publishing/translating etc etc and focus on
one thing and do it properly’ … well, I wouldn’t be a happy camper
you inspired me to try to make a list poem
of what one does in a day / how a day
consists, creatively and otherwise
… that’s yesterday’s on the daily kit (i.e. 14/4/20 – #105 – ‘all in a day’)
… what the COVID-plague time proves is that the general illusion that there’d be time for
everything if I just stayed home and got stuck in … is exactly that – i.e. an
illusion…
… you’ve led me though to reflect Anna that
conversations
don’t really begin
you always find yourself already in them
and later – even many years perhaps
(and I like to think down through generations)
yll think that’s where-how I found out that
the conversations are in us
without them we couldn’t be
wouldn’t have any lines to speak
or means to disagree
and the great thing about this
time in the virus
is that we’re so well equipped with
the means to converse
… it’s somehow a time of appreciation
(I know easy for old farts who were home
painting and writing anyway to say… but still I think it’s true)
our pants have fallen down
and now it’s time to look up
wings are all passage through
fleshed, feathered to the bone
always see out
for light between branches
skip the eternal din
ANNA
So has our
conversation begun? (I take your point that it’s been present for decades). I don’t care where we start though, the multi-disciplinary thing just
popped into my head, probably because it’s a similarity. I was also thinking
about “the common good” idea that you’ve mentioned before and which is
something that Hilik and I harbour.
Maybe a listing
thing is a good way to do some mental organisation of the complexity of stuff.
I’ve been spending time moving things around my 3 room studio, trying to give
each room a bit of focus.
KIT
It was your word ‘seeing as we’ve started
here’, Anna, that led me to the conclusion that we’ve begun… You can see on the
blog how other conversations appear…
The room by room thing is a good idea … I
think we both have the ‘all available space’ fills problem/issue…or maybe it’s
just a thing to accept?
I feel the need to replace wardrobe with
bookshelf space … what is this telling me?
Such a glorious day… the garden beckons…
The pool’s just over 20˚ now… which makes
swimming more aerobic and much less time consuming, if you know what I mean…
I think tomorrow is going to be a warm one too
ANNA
Another fabulous
day down here and things are becoming more organised in my studio.
I had my guitar
lesson via Zoom yesterday and my teacher was using a fab piece of software that
instantly converts guitar tabs to standard notation and vice versa. And you can
make a sheet with multiple tracks. Very handy.
KIT
here's one with
Maggie Ball, Anna
the method is
simply
we can back and
forth by email like this
and then when we
think it's appropriate I put the conversation up as a single blog post
... so it appears
on the day where it's posted
...
I'm not trying to
make them super-easy to find, Anna
although we could
put them up on fb to direct people if you like
... I see it more
as an archiving thing
... really a
response to the fact that in this age when poets are communicating with
each other more than ever
... most of that
communication kis lost forever
(unlike the snailmail
correspondence of ages past)
... so these
conversations will be find-able for those who wish to look for them
but keep asking
questions if you have em
ANNA
Another
topic that I think we have in common is what you call an interest in “the
common good”. I see that as an important thing that underpins many of your
activities and also ours. When I first met Hilik Mirankar in 1986, he was part
of a group called The Kelly Street Kolektiv which was an artist run gallery
space in Ultimo. It only lasted a few years but was pretty amazing. It wasn’t
just a gallery. It was run as a series of committees that members rotated
around - a curatorial committee, a finance committee, an education committee
etc. It resembled the structure of some kibbutzes in Israel. At its height, it
had more than 70 members. They also invited other grass roots people in to run
various events, for example The Poets Union had a big reading there, there was
a fashion parade of Australian fashion designers. They took art out to the
streets as well, setting up shows in public spaces. At every exhibition,
artists conducted a forum about their work. Membership was completely open, so
in that way it resembled The Poets Union and also the No Regrets Women Writers
group, two organisations that I was involved with between 1977 - 1990.
The
approach we take to running our present gallery, The Shop Gallery, in Glebe,
although it’s run by Hilik and I alone, has a continuity with those enterprises
all those years ago in that we accept all comers. Anyone can have a show in our
gallery and the cost is affordable. Of course, it’s not the only enterprise of
its type in Sydney - there are several others including a few galleries run by
local councils. However, all the other places require proposals and artists can
be rejected on the grounds of “quality”, that we regard as spurious criteria.
In our case, we have a few criteria - we don’t accept shows that are sexist, racist
or homophobic.
KIT
Last question first, Anna
I haven’t been editing … but I think that
should definitely be an option for either party before it goes up …
Yes on the question of the ‘common good’ … or
I would rather say something like ‘building community’ or ‘paying back or
‘passing it forward’ etc … I hope this is what Flying Islands and ASM have been
about, also our little ARBARO residency at Markwell …
Of course one runs the risk of being seen to
be virtue signalling … which is a lot
like being politically correct … which is a lot like showing common human
decency and making the effort to understand other people’s situation and
tolerate it (as in that old fashioned idea of empathy… kind of handy right at
the moment!)
I say
if you’ve got a virtue
signal it!
the others need to know
as per this piece last week –
signal
virtues
breakfast
of champions
out
of the box
let’s consider kindness
and all of love’s little shows
compassion is one I like to get
should virtues ever shine on me
something gentle, loads of thanks
blessings and best wishes
piety – not so much
humility has limits
mercy… let have a run with that one
shaming the devil won’t count for the truth
but wink and you’ll guess what they mean
already too much information
demons are personal, you know
all sorts of fantasies we can just skip
patience is a handy one but tricky in such times
and there’s making people laugh
respect’s one I’m a fan of
(what do you expect?)
loyalty – there’s a trick
consider doing what you said you’d do –
reliability and trying your best
there’s gentleness and tenderness
being aware and taking care
somewhere over the rainbow
there’s pots of gold to castle kings
straight tie, neat suit, lovely frock
won’t cut it
but being there in a crisis
proffering shoulder, lending an ear
offering asylum, help to the helpless
the needful to the needy
straightforward stuff !
also there’s looking after yourself
it takes a certain silliness just to see the joke
some curly headed rough and tumble
lots to stand up for
breathe deeply
look up
take in the stars
then yes there are the negative virtues –
not being an arsehole and such
we don’t count calling out the seven deadly
but certain kinds of witness
get to wear the little crown
and upside down it on the table
with levelling with
and owning up
salt and pepper
hard or soft
you choose your own spoon
some knock things on the bottom
some like to tap the head
just be a good egg, won’t you
shouldn’t cost you much
lead by example –
your own reward
and here’s the nub
you’ve been too quiet
if you’ve got a virtue
signal it!
the others need to know
…
Which reminds me oddly of one of the few jokes I’m
able to make in Chinese --- which is basically – better to be a dumb egg than a
bad egg (bendan bi huaidan hao)…
always gets a good response…
and now to the vexed question of quality …
and now to the vexed question of quality …
While I thoroughly approve of yr policy for The Shop
gallery
I can’t see how it could work for instance for Flying
Islands
but that’s because Flying
Islands runs on a kind of variable mentoring system
… meaning when I work
with someone of your standing and experience I basically do not intervene in
any way editorially unless asked … but with people at early career stage I do a
very intensive work-through-the-whole-book thing … I’m doing a few of these at
the moment for the next set … typically end up doing it with about half the
titles …
One of the nicest things
about the series for me is bringing the old and new hands together
… but do I care about
quality? Am I making judgements about it? Absolutely … I can’t see how to avoid
this
Let me put it this way
There is in my mind without doubt more good poetry in the
world than there has ever been (and especially in Australia) and AS A
CONSEQUENCE there is more bad poetry in the world than there has ever been
‘who reads must choose’
pompous old Bloom says… and series editors have some of that work of choosing
for the readers …
And in art probably this
is true too …
While there are moments
and situations in which conspicuously not excluding or including per se is the
best and most democratic procedure … I wouldn’t generalise to make it a moral
commitment …
mind you I haven’t seen any shit shows at your
gallery (but then I haven’t seen all the shows) …
I’ve generally been impressed with the quality and
the range … does that make me an artsnob?
I think what’s happened with your gallery is that the
cloud of interest and ideas and feelings around it attract a kind of clientele
(if that’s the right word) that guarantees a kind of quality (if that’s the
right word)… and this is a good thing!
ANNA
I like the idea of
being politically correct, don’t see it as a defect. Not that you can always be
so, but I think it’s good to have aspirations beyond self-interest even if you
can’t make a monumental difference.
…
I’d like to do some
conversing about ‘the local’, in my case, Glebe. Because that’s what I’ve been
obsessing about for years in my work, it keeps coming back. In writing, artwork
and in music. If it’s okay, I’ll post something from what I’ve been writing:
Wearing ear plugs, you could imagine you were not located on a main
street. The sun shines through the windows and there’s a view into the leafy
branches of the trees outside. They seem so close. The sun is strong also,
strong enough to expose photo polymer plates just inside the windows. A light
fitting is installed on the underside of the bench, a present from an artist
teacher and that works for exposing plates as well.Creative work takes a long time, time spent dreaming, musing through
processes, possibilities. So a lot of time is spent on the dream project, one
that never finishes. Then there’s the memory project, also infinite as you turn
over events and people hundreds of times, each time applying a different take.Memories come flooding back, like the old person relating stories to a
child. But alone, they’re ephemeral, anything could become a story if you
stayed with it. What am I, the writers and musicians ask rhetorically. And
answer - I’m a storyteller. What exactly do they mean by that. Do they mean
that they remember stories or that they create them. Are they aware of the
extent to which a narrative is a construct. “I’m a storyteller” suggests a
natural process or maybe a vocation, denying those thousands of years it’s
taken to get here. The story flows out of and through them. They, acting as a
cipher.The idea of the memory palace, a mnemonic device. What if the memories
that attach themselves in a memory device were entirely fictional, rather than
facts. Does the palace distinguish between the real and the imaginary.A car passes on the road in the sunlight. The male driver’s face is half
lit up, like a beard but green. Yellow and green as Glebe Point Road is, in
memories of the 1970’s, almost like a dirt road, quiet, peaceful and somehow
remote. Walking along the main road, barefoot because it was never that urban.
And then you could walk straight into the city where now there are obstacles -
tall buildings, precincts.So move to the other side of the building to avoid the noise, cop the
intense western sun.Now quiet and the sun dapples the leaves of the tree across the street.
The main street mostly empty as people stay inside to keep safe from the virus.
Like the period of fires, when the street was full of smoke from the bushfires
and hazard reduction burning that went on for months. Herded back close to the
local. But thinking of connections, the virus expanding outwards and coming in
from other countries. Opening up and contracting.
KIT
And now the bug is almost licked here and we’re about
to realize how cut off from the world we are and will be for some time, though
not virtually and not in memory… it is as if a period of reflection is
beginning …
It’s not as if there were no unanswered questions
before now … in fact the only sane reaction to the world in general is probably
– ‘why the fuck?’
but now that no one is up in the air
it seems that everything is
(couldn’t resist that)
…
mundane things like
‘where did my super go?’
‘how is money, at all?’
but big things like
‘why can’t we just take a little breather and go
again without everything falling off a cliff’
and
‘if we can give this kind of (important and
appropriate) attention to this a little deadly thing that’s just snuck up on us
and needs immediate fixing …then why can’t we pay attention to the massive
planet fuck we’ve been doing for the last few hundred years and possibly
forever (species wise I mean) …?
I read an article recently claiming the total cost of
fixing climate change between now and 2050 would be around A$70 trillion
(compare with annual world military spending of around A$2 something trillion;
estimated cost of corona virus, a few weeks, ago, over A$5 trillion)… just for
perspective … looking for a figure on the total cost of NOT acting on climate
change between now and 2050, but I haven’t found that yet …
…
the preciousness of place, of the local and familiar
has suddenly taken on this new significance… I feel a lot of sympathy for people
who haven’t such lovely places to be as we’ve made for ourselves (with all the
problems they each of course have)
…
your continuity with Glebe is a remarkable thing,
Anna … probably not unusual on the world scale but unusual to me and my
acquaintance … my relationship of thirty something years with the place at
Markwell is strong and important to me, but, as you know I’ve been away a lot…
but this was the place I always dreamt of … there is something wonderfully
archetypal/life marking about building your own house, making your own garden
(however crappy these turn out to be)…like giving birth, I guess… if I had to choose to be under house arrest
somewhere, I’d definitely choose to be here, and in a green lovely season like
this
after the drought, full ponds and tanks
in the midst of the pestilence, we have our health
… it’s as if the cosmos were yelling at us ‘appreciate the place…
take care of it, dickheads’
… maybe we’ll listen this time?
… the other thing I was thinking about Glebe and Markwell is the
Sydney and the Bush thing … how the inner city is important to me and so is the
bush and so is the general elsewhere but I have a kind of irrational and
lifelong (it seems) distaste for suburbia (not doubt to do with having spent
most of my teenage years there)… it seemed to me at the time I suppose to be
full of unjustifiable and unfruitful distances, when actually it was pretty
lovely and lots of bush and fresh air about
… memory is a strange beast… I’ve thought and written about this
a lot in relation to
my mother’s dementia, and now I’m making my way through my dad’s
autobiography – a
massive tome of a thing that ends in 1940 and is really the story
of a Hungarian becoming
an Australian
dad in the age of the auotbiography with favourite tree
Badge of the Hungarian Table Tennis Team in the 1930s
and autographed picture of dad wearing it
dad in the AIF
dad in the age of the auotbiography with favourite tree
right now it’s the middle of 1938
and dad is stuck for a week on top of the Andes between
Argentina and Chile because of
having not bothered to look at the timetable which would
have
told him that the trains were only once a week …
his ping pong partner is pissed
off
and blames dad (they’re likely to miss bookings in Santiago) but dad is saying
it’s all part
of
life’s great adventure
it’s wonderful for me all these memories, however
dodgy/coloured remain available…and a great example … it’s so important to get
them down on paper or wherever … I think at a time like this, more important
than ever
everything can be made into art … I like Gadamer’s idea that art
speaks … that it transforms
itself into a possibility for truth… when we encounter art, it
makes a difference, it makes us
different, it makes us who we are … I know it sounds like too
much thinking to say, like that
overburdening of consciousness Nietzsche associated with our
species (its peculiar
problem)… but actually the making – in word, in image, however,
somehow connects us with
the animal we just happen to be… and so with every other creature
too
I am a memory
in orbit with
some wagon hitch
for steering star
bliss of where
you are forgetting
realm of just ideas
glimmer twist
once dressed
my self in day
umbilical
with a clock
bigger than time
sat out in the weather
all sorts
hopes pointed
last leaves among
a little lopsided
treasured up
still in the pouch
or just a hop back
deep even in space
connected
to the craft
hearts held
stroke here
once was
ANNA
(interrupted
with)
The
mentoring thing you do for people is very positive. Teaching is a worthwhile
thing to do. It’s both interesting for the person doing it and helpful for the
receptor. I think your contribution in that area has been great. I’ve also
enjoyed having that (literary) role when it’s been possible, outside of my job
as a school teacher.
What
we’ve noticed in the people who apply to have shows in our gallery, is that
they have recognised our orientation without us telling them and they are
people who want to run their own shows. That also suggests a particular
attitude to the art scene and to galleries. They take their own work seriously,
are doing something substantial.
The
question of “quality” is kind of problematic, not useful. If someone is in the
position of making selections, naturally they will think that their choices are
good ones and it’s hard to believe that what one likes might be simply a matter
of opinion, which of course it is.
There
are so many amazing practitioners out there and these days they are more
visible, thanks to the internet. Previously they were pretty much hidden. I’ve
been hugely impressed by the people who come through our gallery, the depth of
their engagement in their work and the uniqueness of their techniques.
KIT
(responded
to the interruption with)
…
yes… art is a duty… and mentoring is a part of that
… I
can see I’ll be locked up for a long time for all this virtue signalling …
can’t be helped and I’m at home anyway
Yes
‘quality’ is problematic
…it
shits me when you read the definiteness of reviewers or judge’s reports for
comps (I know anathema for you)… what I mean is that attitude that my
reading/my judgement is the correct and proper one … I cannot imagine taking
such an arrogant position
… the
point of engaging with art and the point of art engaging the world is OPENNESS
Judging
is the opposite of that
and
yet – all coming with assumptions, formed by ideology as we are – judgement is
something we cannot help but do
…
cannot help but do but we don’t have to up the ante and revel in it and lord it
over those we’re appointed to or simply
cannot help but judge… let’s see Trump…
Anyway,
it’s perhaps why I took a lifelong vow never to review
…
just don’t want sitting on the judgement seat to have anything to do with what
I make as a poet …
b t w
I
think the Shop Gallery and Flying Islands are in these regards … and the key
word is inclusiveness … we’re wanting the hundred flowers to bloom and the
hundred schools of thought to contend (even though Mao was more a less a
hypocritical murderous dickhead with great excuses)
…
It’s
a bit like OZ and Aotearoa dealing with the corona-capers – call it elimination
or containment… doesn’t matter much…we’re both going in the right direction
Can
we please just take turns in the conversation, Anna?
… it’s your turn now
ANNA
I’m
writing in prose at the moment, rather than poetry. Feels right. So below is my
latest thing - in blue. It’s based on the part of my childhood where I
was most in contact with my mother, Stefania Siedlecky. Coincidentally, she’s also written an
autobiography that I have on my computer. However, not being a ‘writer’, it’s
not very literary - more like a chain of factual reports, anecdotes and focused
on medical issues. She was a career medico, starting as a GP, then doing
gynaecological work, then family planning and finally working for the Federal
Govt as Adviser on Family Planning, then Women’s Health. She was the doctor who
helped set up the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre in the 70’s, then worked in
the Health Dept in Canberra for about 12 years. See her bio here.
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| Mum graduating from University of Sydney 1943 |
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| Mum receiving an AM in 1987 |
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| Mum with Marie Bashir and Dorothy Buckland Fuller at the 40th anniversary of the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre in 2014 |
Mining the past. Is what writing is. Checking in with things that have
become personal icons, stumbled upon in earlier episodes of writing, less
self-conscious. Go back, back to the old town that hasn’t changed much. Except
now most of the r5oads have tarmac. People have been replaced.
The
country road, dirt road. Dusty, yellowish brown. I paint the road with black
gesso. Over the gesso is a layer of rust base. Layers of black on black. Then
the oxidising patina liquid then becomes rust. The country road like rust. But
waiting for the country the road passes through, currently absent. Now only
yellow like the drought. Waiting for the bush, the stitches. The voice. The
songline. Lying awake dreaming of stitching on the canvas with wool, down the
track.
Driving
with Mum the doctor out there, travelling to the other tiny branch practice.
Doing house calls over a wide area. Those days it was pretty much The Bush. She
would talk to me in an endless monologue as she drove. Not always geared for
the childish brain. Pointing out the native vegetation on one side of the road
and introduced species, poplars turning golden, on the other.
Below is Mum’s recount of setting up practice in Blackheath on her own
around 1949-50, prior to my father joining her in a GP partnership. She
was 28 in 1949. She was born and raised in Blackheath and her parents lived
there.
"My
practice grew throughout the next year. I had patients from the nearby towns of
Medlow Bath and Mount Victoria and from the Megalong and Hartley Valleys. After
the first year I decided to open a clinic one day a week in Mount Victoria,
about five kilometres away, which would be convenient for my patients and would
allow me to organise my work in that area more easily. I was able to hire a
room attached to the public hall. About 11pm one night I had a call from the
Mount Victoria police to say a woman who had been drinking had been brought to
them, having fallen over and cut her head. The wounds needed suture. I went to
Mount Victoria and took her to my surgery there. She said, “Wait on, how old
are you?” I replied that this was no time to question my age, put the stitches
in her head and delivered her to her home."
Also
attached - image of this painting I’m doing of the country road. It’s
unfinished.
KIT
Mining
the past is what writing is. It must be…
I
love the way you show the scene of life and the way through it as something
creative, as something with which the creative process engages, as with
painting…
And I
think there’s something about the way you were with your mother that sets up
for life your place as observer… the one whose work will later be to remember
Which
is why writing is more than mining the past … it’s understanding and making
ourselves out of it … and that’s how we make a future
I
like Herbert Read’s formulation – that art making as the opposite of alienation
… if only
Marxists
more generally had been able to embrace that idea …
So dad finally made it to Santiago – a week later than
intended/expected…
And he and his partner were really disappointed there was no one on the
platform to meet them (assumed the Chilean table tennis fraternity were really
pissed off with them)… but it turned out the train was dramatically and
unexpectedly early because the driver was trying to set a record for the
journey (and had succeeded)… anyway dad won the Chilean open (beating his
partner, Szabados, in the final [though Szabados was the better player]) and
then gets stuck in the middle of a fascist coup attempt, getting his camera
shot up and a knife wound in the head… quite an adventure… I’ve got the article
he did on it at the time … closest thing he ever came to a serious scoop I
think
Lots of past to mine!
My mum was ten years old when dad was running around in Chile getting
knoves thrown at him… Her dementia – something we experienced over years (many
more years than we initially acknowledged) – and dementia in general – are
another angle on that mining the past idea … I’m so glad I worked with that –
in terms of notemaking – at the time as much as I did
earlier and later mum
The Alzheimer’s mind is constantly mining the past to make sense of a
world not making sense anymore … or where the sense of the world is only
something briefly glimpsed then lost … like the dream you can’t get back to, no
matter how hard you keep reaching …
each word each thing forgotten as said
as sung
forgotten as
you're disappearing
the words of every sentence
cling, fit
they are the raft
it's like the dream gone into
and things that are true there
are so for how long?
how
long in the dream?
I
can't see you anymore
we
time the circle closing
down
to less than a minute now
…
The dreams and creativity thing is another really interesting place to
be …
As part of the process of going through the drafts from the 366 Project
(1.1.16 – 30.12.19) – more than 1400 drafts – I identified material I’d
started producing a couple of times for a ‘jetlag series’ – and realised I had
heaps of poems recording dreams or about dreams … so that’s something I’m
hoping to play with soon …
I couldn’t see that pic properly on my computer, Anna … it seems to have
a problem
with in-line pics … but if you send attachments then they’re okay…
ANNA
Interestingly, the expression "country road”, the literal translation of “derech eretz”, would translate idiomatically as “proper behaviour” or could be “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
Interestingly, the expression "country road”, the literal translation of “derech eretz”, would translate idiomatically as “proper behaviour” or could be “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
I’m
glad that my parents lived into their 90’s without getting full-blown dementia,
just a bit of memory loss and the inability to use computers and mobile phones.
But even so, it was pretty sad to see people who had been whiz kids reach a
point where they couldn’t sustain arguments like they used to. My mother did
develop an odd trait where she would wrongly combine pieces of information,
past occurrences. Like slightly delusional explanations of cause and effect or
things out of chronological order. I must say, I never thought to write those
things down.
 |
| parents in convoy in their 90's |
Walking
with Mum, going on walks. Not to get somewhere, but rambling. For her it was
probably her way of doing child minding. Could be a bush walk, a walk on the
beach, a walk into town. Always accompanied by her rambling monologues. Could
include anecdotes from her childhood and young adulthood, quotations of poetry
memorised at high school, speculations, telling of historical events, scientific
explanations and wonderment about things like the size of atoms or the origin
of the universe. That could be at night if we looked up at the stars. Her
education hadn’t reached the bit about positive and negative charge of
electrons. Just as mine got to nuclear physics but didn’t reach quantum theory
or Black Holes or other things I learnt more recently sitting in Science
classes as a language support teacher. She looked at the old deal table in
grandma’s house, worn down by endless scrubbings, and explained how the
discovery of atoms rocked their world, making solid objects no long solid.
Maybe
it’s just Australia, but the times driving with the lady doctor were always
filled with sunshine and quietness or are that way in memory.
And
the fabulous southerly busters we had in the mountain town. Where we could sit
in the ditches at the edge of the dirt road, hollows that would later become
concrete footpath drains and feel the torrent of warm yellow water rush past
us, almost moving us bodily.
KIT
So that’s Hebrew – ‘derech eretz’? I see the picture now…I feel like I’ve missed
part of the conversation … maybe that’s how it always is for the children of
migrants? …
When we really undeniably knew about mum’s dementia –
when we could no longer be in denial
about – when was she started getting around the house making little pigeon
noises, cooing… and I remember first (it now seems cruelly) saying ‘can you
hear that little pigeon, mum’ and of course she couldn’t … there was no
self-awareness to throw at the thing then …
Mum never ceased being in denial about her dementia …
she went from denial to not being able to deny anything at all, and with no
lightbulb moment in between… but somehow this reminded me of the great
tolerance and acceptance that was really her character before the paranoia took
over … mum, who could hear a joint being rolled a suburb away … and went from
‘what’s that funny stuff you’re smoking over there?’ to just trusting that we
knew what we were doing and it was all okay…
she
who had supernatural powers
who knew what Christmas wanted
what naughtiness was/was not
who said 'when your father gets home'
she who was a step ahead
could spell every word
before
and we could add things up
together
she, once bitten, of sharp words
of the gentle harangue
don't drink from a bubbler, cause dogs
once bright of the dance floor
spun
of the tune stuck ages before I
was
and sung out over the line make Monday
the mangle, remember? (as
neighbour is to fence!)
far and away yet with us
Drawing/painting paths… ways over, around, through…
doodling on foot, by heart, letting the place sink in … can we convince
ourselves we’re of a place? We go guiltlessly from day to day, now in the
smaller world, much more planted than before… but place is the most stolen
thing in the world, surely
… still we have to be somewhere… have to be from
somewhere
… somehow all the ancestors are me … somehow I was
there
…
Reading dad’s autobiography.. . I’m in 1938 still…
they’re crossing back from Chile to Argentina and their Hungarian passports are
running out and they’ve been issued with Chilean residence permits/kind of like
residents’ temporary passports… and at the border they don’t know whether to
present the Hungarian or the Chilean document… it’s a nicely spun yarn …
finally they decide on the Chilean one and the border guard embraces them for
having become Chileans … even though, at this stage of the game, they’d already
decided that they wanted to be Australians
ANNA
There’s
Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix and purple noon by Arthur Streeton and
the atmosphere in Sydney is purple. In The Blue Mountains, the dirt is the
colour of sand, Naples Yellow and there is purple, that I used to think of as
grey. All to do with sandstone, Australia’s east coast. Nothing like outback
Australia with its red ferrous dirt and chromium green eucalypts.
In
The Blue Mountains, the vegetation is dark and the introduced pine trees melt
in quite easily with their dark bark and dark green needles. There is that
sense of timelessness. Mum pointing at the cliffs and valleys, the worn down
mountains, telling about how they’ve been there for millenia. Walking in the
sand of a sand dune behind a beach at the coast, quoting Blake:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
This world up close, both of us with myopia but she, always miles ahead of me, seeming to know what she was doing and where we were going. And me always
thinking, there’s something missing in my understanding, I need more
information. As they looked down at me and adopted the special tone of voice
used for children, leaving out all the important facts I had to learn from
strangers. Trying to make sense of it all, making sense of the misdirection.
KIT
Things my parents never told me … that always somehow begins with who
they are / were … it leads the childless to think in terms of motive … what is
the reason for having kids? But then I
think parenthood is often what you could think of as a motiveless crime…
Parents were parent impersonators from the word go…
Why does someone become, a teacher, a cop, a doctor, a nurse… an
astronaut… how does one fall into poetry?
Maybe every form of art is a kind of a falling out of the world? And yet
the world still goes around with us… hopefully better for effort, hopefully a
little less alienated…
Nobody knows which was, but here we are still in the conversation
… I like that line from Levinas
only the absolutely other can
instruct us
I think that’s why people have pets, and travel … or did…
Now we have books and the internet, e-mail and memory… expanding
capacities for reflection (one hopes, calm)…
…Now dad’s in Montevideo arguing with a carpenter who makes four
unsuccessful ping pong tables before finally producing an acceptable one
… thought to be the first in the country, though that might
easily, he admits, not be true… the
carpenter’s
wife knits them a net… which is kind of cute …
I’m glad
that COVID 19 can never touch my parents
… one less
thing to worry about in the slightly greyed out world
the ancestral ping pong table, now in the old dairy, where often things expire
ANNA
Never told us important facts. Like, the fact that it can cause problems
for you if you repeat the fact that your parents are Communists. Mum knew the
kind of trouble the reputation of your parents could bring from her experience
at Katoomba High.
Another incident occurred when I was in second year at high school which
demonstrated local prejudices. The girl who sat next to me didn’t do her French
homework and was reprimanded by the French teacher. I patted her on the knee in
sympathy so this teacher made me stand up. He said he could not stand me for
several reasons: I was the daughter of a foreigner, who was in the Labor Party,
and I had a bursary which he considered meant that I expected special
treatment. I was sent out from class. I was feeling terribly ashamed and was in
tears when the headmaster came past. He kindly sent me down the street to do a
message for him. The other girl’s stepfather complained to the headmaster, and
my father complained as well, and the French teacher was transferred to another
school the next year. At the end of that year, however, when the certificates
were awarded, instead of awarding the certificate for coming top in French on
our exam results, the teacher ran a special test to determine who was going to
get the award. Then he told me a boy beat me by one mark.
The
trees and bushes at the side of the road are now black, hovering over the
Naples Yellow sand and pale purple shadows. Waiting to receive the verdigris
patina, to translate into the feel of the Australian bush. Black, like a fly in
milk. Out of place, a blot on the horizon.
A
print edition called Unseen Landscape, printed in Naples Yellow and then
embossed. A tiny sun appears. Coming into being - sunrise. In photographs it’s
dazzling white but I hand-colour it with watercolour, could be white.
Then,
looking out the window of my beloved bedroom at the back of the house, due
east, at the sunrise, blinding. Impossible to sleep through. At Grandma’s
place, her treadle sewing machine in front of her north-facing windows,
sunlight streaming through her lace curtains onto the work. The gentle sound of
the machine as she works. My studio now facing north north east, flooding with
sun in the morning.
KIT
Yes,
streaming morning sun … is a love of mine … it’s great being on the west side
of the valley and
getting that sun first thing just a couple of ridges
in from the old pacific sea … sweeping the pond
top, lighting
night’s webs
first light
(again)
like a clock struck up
and here leaps puppy
play
it's all we can be to believe
then
up image and away
all mine
that I see now
make off with
claim the day for next
by chariot
flagged thought
who of the past could quibble me
now?
it comes for me like a last wish
lost
noose of all and could commute
I'm pillow pressed to say
it's dawn
like a birth pink lipped
loved me from the beginning
dream caught out in it
I hear come like gossip
touching up the trees
spread
turn
roll
last stretch to it
receive
again
again
o heart beat home
to mean just we are here
dawn on the dam, sun over the Koolonock Range
I’d hate
to live on the east side and suffer the maximum afternoon sun in summer
and be in
the shade half the winter morning…
the
problem with my parents was me being a communist but they got over it (I mean
dad got over
it)
because I was also magically a good boy too at the same time and anyway there
was no one to
vote for
but the Labor Party or maybe the Disarmament Party, so the club I belonged to
was actually
pretty
harmless… I mean I wasn’t signed up with Bela Kun’s mob to imprison his mother
or anything
like that,
and I hated Stalin just as much as he did … though I did like that song from
the war by
Willie
Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewoqPHaEo6I … I guess
there’s a time and
place for
everything
I remember
a French teacher who used to rub her breasts on some of us in the senior
classes as she
came
around the room, and I never begrudged her that… the only reason I didn’t take
French at uni
was that
the classes were at 9 in the morning … so I went for Archaeology instead which
was at 11..
and which
I never regretted (although I did kind of regret not doing French [and about 50
other
languages]).
Autumn is
lovely and it is wonderful to have the feel of the bush all around all the time
… wonderful
to be in
the green again after so much drought and fire threat… I think having lived
overseas for so
long
there’s a special kind of appreciation I have for the bush and can never lose…
I guess
this current lockdown affects us less than anyone else in the world … just
shopping for
groceries
a little less frequently and next Sydney and o/s jaunts delayed… but otherwise
art writing
garden
music cooking ping pong visiting the nooks and crannies… lovely to be at home
ANNA
Gone grey in Sydney and the cold has hit.
The next stage of the painting - verdigris paint represents
gumtrees. Now to stitch!
it’s autumnal
so obvious in a mountain town
the huge pines
and liquid amber leaves
piled high on the streets
to crunch on
great weather for bush walks
lilac, holly with red berries
But the isolation, the emptiness. My mother
seemed not to notice, maybe because she was born in the town, was used to it.
And bigotry was standard.
Because of my father’s atheism and politics we
were a bit on the outer in this small town of six churches, however we didn’t
really experience a lot of antagonism. However my father’s business rivals
sometimes used to sling off at him by calling him a communist and a foreigner.
For example, he used to fill up with petrol at a petrol station run by one of
his business rivals who also ran tours. If my father had a car full of
passengers this man would say, “I suppose these people feel pretty safe driving
with you? Do they know you’re a foreigner? Do they know you’re a communist?
These people are trusting their lives with you.” My father was never a
communist. He called himself a socialist. My sister and I were sometimes
referred to around the town as “the bold Russian brats.”
There was a haunting there, so it felt. Maybe
because of the early colonist massacres of the locals. And west of there, murderers
could walk free without trial if they killed Wiradyuri people. At school, we
learned over and over again about the explorers Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth
discovering a route over the mountains. As though people hadn’t been navigating
through there for millennia. And who showed these explorers the way anyway.
KIT
It’s like someone’s flipped the season switch
and now suddenly it’s winter … two weeks ago we were still swimming and now
it’s all backs to the fire … five degrees first thing some mornings…
I love the mountains in winter… and always
think of the Hydro Majestic which is the source of some of my earliest memories
…
… particularly the paintings (the hunting
scenes) that were in the ballroom and are now in that long corridor with the
incredible Megalong view… these images are among the earliest I remember…
That view – in sunshine, in amazing mists …
the feeling that that country / wilderness went on forever … that south went on
forever, that Australia did…. That was something
that made a great impression on me as a nipper …
When dad was a freelance journalist still
(early sixties), we’d go there a lot midweek when it was cheap and a cheque was
in from somewhere … everything was in guineas for freelancers… and of course
dad had had a long relationship with the Hydro because he’d been a guest as a
ping pong player there late thirties and I remember (I don’t know what’s become
of it) but they’d had a dinner menu in their honour, with Hungarian dishes, and
with the dishes more generally named after them… a kind of a clunky ‘we’re not
parochial’ effort …
And so, close to the explorer’s tree, we come
to Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth… the toffs who crossed at the top…
Australia, the famously classless society! It makes me remember
another famous Lawson…
I always think of Banjo Paterson writing about
Henry Lawson… there’s this great quote where the lawyer says… roughly, if I
remember – Henry and I saw the same country and roughly over the same period of
time but the difference was that I was on horseback and had all my meals cooked
for me…
White men finding their way over the mountains
is a really interesting story of class… and 1788 to 1813 seems like such an
eternity (consider what’s gone on in the last 25 years or pretty any 25 years
recently)
If you wanted to get to the other side of the
Great Dividing Range because you felt hemmed in grazing wise by the mountains
to the west of Sydney, by the rivers and mountains north, and the Illawarra
escarpment south, which way would you go?…
Of course it’s easy for us to look at a
contour map now and say – head for Goulbourn
… but these white men had to find out for
themselves with whatever help (local knowledge) was available
There was the famous Irish compass … the piece
of paper with an arrow for north on it
(possibly the earliest Australian Irish joke)
… but it was because of that piece of technology and the rumour among the
convicts, that just over the mountains was a city of white men, or China, or
anywhere better and worth escaping to, that Governor Hunter sent off an
unlikely expedition in 1798 to basically prove there was nothing there …
I’m reasonably well versed in this because I
researched and wrote an (unpublished) verse novel about this in the 90s (of
just the last century)…titled Vinegar ..
.it was about that expedition and the Irish convict uprising at the Battle of
Vinegar Hill in western Sydney (1804)… named after the 1798 rising in Ireland
that was kind of related …
Anyway without getting stuck on that… the 1798
expedition to which I refer was led by one John Wilson, (who was illiterate but
it seems a bit of a polyglot) and recorded in a diary by a youngster name of
John Price (all of which ended up in Historical Records of NSW)
Wilson was a convict (value of crime 1/-)
who’d got out in 1792 I think and scarpered away from settlement as fast as he
could go (a bit like William Buckley later on… he could see which kind of
society was the more toxic) … and basically Wilson lived with the blackfellas
and all over the place, more or less from then on …
He was quite a character… eventually speared
by probably Awabakal people in a dispute over a woman … so up in what would be
the Hunter… but the point is he had wide communication among different
Aboriginal groups and in different classes of the settler society…
… anyway by the time he had the chat with the
governor that ended up in him leading this little ragtag expedition (a number
of the bootless turned back after the first day), he’d told Hunter that he had been more than a
hundred miles in every direction from the colony… pull the other one, the boys
in charge thought, but it turned out to be almost certainly true… which is why
he led them the best route out of Sydney if your destination was those golden
slopes of the primary school social studies book…
of course the point is that all of Wilson’s
expeditioning was a result of chatting with the locals wherever he went
(couldn’t have been easy), picking up what language he could and being shown
the ancient footways that led from everywhere to everywhere else…
All this whingeing about not being able to get
over the mountains to open up a new gazing world… but in fact it suited a
convict colony to have a wall of mountains around (or the perception of one)…
The immediate aim was to persuade the
priest-ridden Irish miscreants that there was nowhere for them to go… I think
it did the trick… Wilson led those who remained for the whole week or whatever
it was to Mt Towrang, near Goulbourn, and said check it out, just keeps going
from here…
And they feigned not believing him when he got
back too… an untrustworthy source…
… this
is fifteen years before the Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth myth machine got
going, and of course John Wilson was long dead by then…
My John Wilson, as I recall (!) is a kind of
deranged (poetic) genius... a Socrates to his scribe Price (the young Plato of
the piece)…
That was a long digression, but fun! Maybe I
should revive the beast?
ANNA
Interesting history lesson, explains
the synthetic quality of the Blaxland Lawson Wentworth myth. Why not revive
your treatise? There’s so much to know about the history of our place, what it
looked like in 1787 and there’s documentation that we never read, aren’t
exposed to. Like the glittering white towers of oyster shells that occupied the
foreshores of Port Jackson. Years ago, I heard an architect read those
descriptions from an early journal. It puts such a different complexion on the
landscape.
The Hydro Majestic was a major thing
when I was a kid in the 50’s but not a place that the locals went to. It was a
tourist thing so would be like us Sydneysiders visiting The Rocks in Sydney. I
remember European tourists, probably Hungarians, visiting Blackheath. One time
I was standing in a milk bar wearing only shorts, no top and a fur clad
European standing at the counter and looking down at me amazed that I could
withstand the cold. There were also women with lacquered hairdo’s and gold
jewellery swimming breaststroke in the local pool in summer, trying to keep
their hair dry. The Europeans looked so sophisticated and so urbane compared to
the locals.
KIT
Not a
treatise! A verse novella, dammit! Everyone has me in a little box…
ANNA
|
I had no idea what from your history thing was in, only saw the
bit you sent. I haven’t put you in a box at all. It’s all open as far as I’m
concerned, we can all do whatever. I often have ideas for an intended form and
ideas for writing. Mostly they don’t get off the ground. A few years ago I
wrote 10 poems in a series called Ideas for Novels. The first 5 were published
in The Rochford Street Review. Somehow the idea for that was sustaining. Then I
got the idea of “rewriting” them as prose, calling them Novels from Ideas and
did that for 2 of them. But I just never got into it seriously. It’s hard to
know whether one should push oneself to execute “a good idea” or just leave it
alone, not force things. I get easily bored with myself so how would a reader
feel?
Ideas for novels 6
Ideas for novels 6
I’ve often found a tension between my various interests and
sometimes feel like a dabbler and a dilettante rather than a serious
practitioner, jumping around from one thing to another. Music has been part of
my life since age 4, thanks to my mother. I had piano lessons with an aged
Radeci cousin in a studio above the Woolworths in Katoomba. Cousin Jose was a
bit of a legend as a teacher of piano and violin up there for about 50 years.
But she was a weird person to look at and was quite frightening with the
elegant stick that she used to rap you on the knuckles with when you made a
mistake. For decades, her only comments to me was to repeat, “Are you
practising?” Or, “What about your music?” And that imperative from my
mother as well - you must keep up your music. It’s always been part of my life
but now I’ve written a few pieces as well, some guitar instrumentals and
recently putting poems to music. I find that feels like a connection to my
other creative writing, especially because the music I’m writing refers to
Glebe where I live, connects to writing set in and about Glebe. Not to mention
that Glebe is full of musicians!
Likewise one can trace one’s interest in each sphere of activity
back through one’s life. I wrote a piece like that about my interest in visual
art, it’s on my art blog:
Recently I’ve returned to writing prose (creatively, as opposed to
other types) and felt a sudden sense of exhilaration again, just as I had when
I first started writing “in this way” in the 70’s, what I call experimental
prose. I love the discontinuousness, the lack of overall purpose or direction
or constraint, so that chunks of text can butt against each other in a crazy
associative way. When I was first writing like this, it was pretty unacceptable
to the public audience but now it’s become almost de rigueur, at least among
poets.
Also when I enter that zone (the creative writing headspace), I
adopt a kind of cadence and rhythm in the language that is always somehow
similar. It has a particular spoken-like quality, different from normal prose
writing like what I’m writing right now. I think of it as having to do with
thought and breathIng in real time.
Recently, the corona shutdown has given me some uninterrupted time
to focus on my work and I’ve been doing printmaking, painting, music writing
and creative writing in tandem. That’s something I haven’t done before, jumping
from one thing to another in the course of a day or a week. And it’s been
great, stops me from getting bored with myself. I do things piecemeal,
following a process, a series of steps for each activity. It’s very like the
way I used to organise the art making curriculum when I was teaching - divide
the processes into small steps and take one step at a time. Repeat for each
activity. So it’s all process driven, not product driven.
All my creative activities are physically conducted in my studio,
one spot with work stations in it. In your case, you have a number of
buildings. Do you rotate around them in a day? How do you allocate your time?
KIT
Well, I
did write ‘verse novella’…
It’s a bit
of a sore point, the being put in a box thing…
you know – if yr this yr not that … people
can’t help
it I guess … like to know what / who they’re dealing with
The worst box/label
in a way is Publisher, I find this a lot … people think yr not a poet because yr
a
publisher…
I’ve been on the other end of this too …not thinking really … in 93 or 94 on
the Poets on
Wheels
Tour, I think I really annoyed Heather Cam , introducing her to someone as my
publisher…
when she
was there as a poet! So learned my lesson…
but let’s
see if we can make a poem out of that
out of the box
not what
I’m meant to be
but he’ll
grow out of it
the hats
are faster than the eye
and mostly
they catch fire
here’s the
box I won’t fit in
quite a
crowd in there already
herr
doktor doktor professor
orphan and
always estranging myself
now you
see me
now …
no joke
at school
some teachers said lawyer
fuck them
I went on
the streets
slept
rough hitchhiking
wore
placard
sang not
so nicely
swore I’d
comb the beach
that was
in the cigarette age
after
school, but in sight of the gate
will I
wake up to myself?
people
call themselves poets
can’t
really be
went
exploring
out of
ignorance taught lessons
never
learned
he never
really grew up
are we
gaslit?
yes dear
wake up
one morning and
bliss me
with the epithets
it keeps
‘em on their toes
… well
that was a crack at it anyway … but to answer the more serious question
about the
relationship between different creative activities throughout the day and more
generally … I think the general arrangement is guilt (must be the catholic
roots somehow, shallow as they are)… I mean to say one thinks one always ought
to be doing the other thing, the serious thing, the important thing … but whatever
yr doing at the time’s not that …
partly
this is result of institutionalisation …
and this
leads me to the perruque … have we
discussed the perruque… ? Michel de Certeau’s idea in The Practice of Everyday Life…
The perruque is a kind of bricolage, but it is more
specifically what de Certeau thinks of as 'time stolen from official
consciousness' – the love letter written by the secretary in the moments she
can steal, the wooden toy the carpenter makes in the workshop for his kid when
the lathe is otherwise unoccupied. The poem. The poem by pretty well anyone
anytime (as long as they're not a poet lorikeet or on a grant or something).
That's to say the poem when it's at home is generally some kind of a perruque. It's the thing you're doing when
you might been doing something you were meant to do, when you might have been
gainfully employed…
the
problem with being ‘retired’ – or in our case of living ‘the artlife’ (which is
a kind of afterlife, I guess) – is that the only person you can steal time from
is yourself… and why not? You can afford
it… but how to escape from the remorseless nagging feeling that you ought to be
doing something else, something more important, more serious????
… take
that as background
but let me
actually describe – as best I can – staging of creative activities around the
day … I actually
wrote you
a poem more or less about this a little bit back … I refer you to the daily kit (i.e. 14/4/20 –
#105 –
‘all in a day’ … so about a month ago at the beginning of this conversation,
more or less)
No, it was
‘in the one day’
following
on I suppose from Nietzsche’s famous dictum that the day has a hundred pockets
for
whoever
has the stuff to stuff in em!
Un/fortunately
my work stations are all over the place … i.e. littered over the whole five
acres…
though
what I think of as the nerve centre is here at my desk in the house where I am
typing now…
morning
starts generally with an hour of yoga in the shedbrary (though it’s starting to
get a bit cold
over there
now!) and gathering lines in a notebook (more often notebooks)… they’re what I type
from to
generally get together a poem for the daily
kit (before that
it was 366… the daily thing anyway … then the
rest of the day I spend flitting project to project and
never
catching up with myself… some painting/drawing if the whim …
the
problem with the everyday thing (which I know we’ve discussed) is … almost the
opposite of the
perruque problem … that you think – there you
go, I’ve put a poem up, so I’ve done my work for the
day … but
what have you actually done, you flibbertigibbet? Yv just done some whimsical
calendrical
genuflection (might well be an aubade frinstance – I could open a bloody
AUBADERY and
never run
out … one of the glories of living in
the bush I suppose
I work /
play in different spaces (study, shedbrary, dairy, etc) and I guess there is
some fitness value
in the
moving between them (they say yu shouldn’t sit for too long)
…
the in -betweenness
is important too
and part
of my practice is walking around… the peripatetic mode … which is a kind of
foraging … or more like letting things land… a kind of a practice of
receptivity (which I think is radically different from inspiration [as per its
much vaunted mythology] which I think is essentially bullshit … or let me put
it this way … the whole world is visiting and all the time … the trick is to be
at home in the right way to receive…
anyway
all of
this activity though generates more stuff…
and more stuff… and more
… and this
is a lot like hoarding
Except
beautifully in our day and age it need take up no space… it takes up less and
less space … conforming with Moore’s law… the endgame of which must surely be
the disappearance of all knowledge and we along with it …
That’s a
conversation killer!
…
let me
give you though an idea of the scale of my not catching up with myself for the
record
for the
record!
The more
than 1400 drafts I put up on the 366 blog represent more than 4000 pages of
draft notes… in among those are many many possible projects, and a number of
very defined poetry book projects towards which I am drafting …
So I
really need to push myself to sort and sift and revisit/rework … make the
things that need to happen happen …
That’s the
big kind of activity to which I need to commit in order to get anywhere…
Back
though to the perruque idea, I do though worry about being where I am
in life’s selva oscura (a lot further
along than Dante) and am I getting done the job I need to be doing
… for
instance getting serious about novel projects because people might actually
read a novel that worked! … unlike poems nobody reads…
…
a thing I
like about these conversations is their openness to posterity … I think poetry
is an artform particularly teeming with creatures who entertain illusions about
themselves … their place, their reception … particularly perfectionist
illusions – if only I make it to the
seventeenth draft then the world will know how perfect my poem really is and
then it and I will live together
however
sadly happily I don’t think things work that way …
with these
conversations – and I agree with you absolutely about the value of a
conversational mode
(spoken
cadence you said)… and the steam of consciousness coming out our ears …
Poems are
to be heard because seen
(I know in
the nineteenth century it was seen and not heard… and you can find the signs of
that very easily – there’s a cap at the beginning of every line)…
Being with
a poem should be like being in a conversation … special kind… this is why I
like the ‘annotation mode’ of making … coming from the margins of someone
else’s work …
But with
these conversations – the blogversations – I like to maintain an openness to
the idea that
maybe
someone will read maybe no one ever
it models
the attitude we need to cultivate for creative work more generally I think
By their
blogs shall ye know them… but if you want to do that, you’ll need to hunt
around
we vanish
into our making
vanish
into our own word tombs
ever
building
… and have
to wonder if these little worlds are miniatures of the real one we’re vanishing
just to
keep chatting here
ANNA
Finished the country
road painting, added the stitching, using hand spun and dyed wool
country road
we drove down
thinking we’ll survive somehow
keep chickens, eat eggs
forget meat
didn’t believe in work
as in having a job
the 60’s
this was before
the now righteous
mainstream sustainability people
shocked relatives by co-habiting
seems laughable now
our old Kombi like a cocoon
the drawing I made of it
on a country road
...
I quite like having the art gallery
manager hat. Becomes an umbrella that can include just about anything, remains
enigmatic but also satisfies queries. All those years in schools, I kept the
writing persona under wraps to avoid all those awkward conversations. Have
you been published? I remember all those odd questions about art and
literature from non-practitioners like, that’s a bit childish isn’t
it? or is that what you call abstract? (about
artwork) or do you call that writing? what is experimental prose? (about
writing). Basic stuff. If you met another practitioner in a school, you’d be
speaking sotto voce in the corridors and pausing if someone walked by. All the
teacher practitioners were in the inner city and I always worked in the western
suburbs, being committed to teaching migrants.
In my family milieu, art wasn’t on
the table, was considered an occupation of the lackeys of the capitalist
running dogs, along with pop music. (Pre-electric Dylan and protest music were
acceptable.) It wasn’t a waste of time, it was an abomination. There is the
question of doing something useful with one’s life and for me, school teaching
was that thing, did it for 40 years. I see running the kind of gallery we have
as useful too. I waste time by daydreaming and feel that I should be making art
or writing more often. Antigone Kefala says, no, you must have down
time, it’s productive for creative work also you need to be
disciplined. She works on her writing every day at a specific time. I see
her as a mentor. It’s fantastic that she is totally committed to the validity
of creative work and a great tonic when you might feel that writing or making
art or making music is a waste of time. She was raised in a household of
musicians.
I find that rotating around my
several disciplines gives me a sense of making progress, one step at a time,
not running on the spot. It’s also great when I find connections between them.
The instrumental music I’ve written is about physical Glebe where I live and
I’ve written a lot of poetry and prose that’s based here as well. To live in
Glebe, have a gallery in Glebe, work in a studio in Glebe - it sounds like it
could be limiting but I find it wonderful and creatively energizing after
commuting to the west for 40 years to work. I’ve just finished writing music
for a poem called Skype window which is a poem set in the home
of a writer friend, Yota Krili, who lives in Glebe. I’ve realised that Glebe is
an incubator, not only for me but for many creative people. Now I’m writing
music for Antigone’s poem called Coming Home, set in Annandale, a
suburb next door to Glebe.
KIT
It’s good
to believe in where we are and find the art impetus there. I think it’s the
point of
consciousness
and why evolution got to our species… Here-and-now’s the place to be,
except if
it’s not and then you know.
… and yes
Markwell, too, is I think an incubator … the bush and the inner city are in a
way flipsides of a coin… they are where I always wanted to be but then being
overseas a lot got in the way … and interestingly that was mainly a city experience
but all the residencies have been more or less bush … nothing suburban, which
has been good … although I do think with
age I’m getting over my irrational teenage loathing of suburbia
As
mentioned somewhere up above I think, I like Herbert Read’s idea that artmaking
is the opposite of alienation…
and yes I
can remember the arguments from certain dour lefties about art being a waste of
time,
bourgeois
indulgence and all that …
anyway …turns
out we were right … creativity is the core activity to make life worth living…
and right about
all sorts of things …
…
commuting? Why waste time on that when you can be where you are? Turns out you
can work
from home
… have more fun, more time, a nicer place and less carbon footprint
(I’ve been
extremely lucky on the commuting front through most of my working life… living
on campus for instance… or my first high school teaching job at Enmore, in the
eighties [where the only school I’d listed as available for was the one five
minutes walk away], or Kyoto, in the nineties, where my commute was a cycle
through for instance the imperial palace gardens every day)
… money …
turns out deficits don’t matter, you can print as much of the stuff as you like
…
I had
always suspected it was a bit of an abstract entity (they don’t call it the
dismal science for nothing)…
And even
when they discover (these wizards of capitalist common sense) that their sums
were out
by a mere
60 billion bucks (or one third, let’s say ) they still won’t give a penny to
the arts or
education
or the ABC or overseas students or the casually precarious because these are
the people
who have
to be punished because they either can’t or won’t vote for the COALition … for
the fossils
whose
mission is to burn the planet (excuse my little rant there… and for reference
I’m writing this the day after the govt’s jobkeeper
scheme was
admitted to be miscalculated by 60 billion $ … but they can’t help the arts or
unis with
some of
this because they are simply too mean to do so) aaaaaarghhh !!
…
art every
day !
or else
what are days for?
… I always
thought that in retirement the beauty of life would be that everything can and
actually
should be
a hobby … but now as I’ve said, it does worry I’m not getting to main events …
I’m worried a bit about being like my dad and not getting to the main avowed projects
… although I have to say reading his autobio now, it’s a pretty impressive effort
for a bloke in his eighties… it’s wonderful for me now though to be with him a
bit every day
… but am I
flibbertigibetting? … flitting from picture I can’t paint to instrument I can’t
play to poem that no one will read… these are the kinds of reasonable question
from which one should shy because they’re probably unhelpful
We should
make ourselves write novels, for the simple reason there’s a chance people
might read them…
Because
all this incubation and creative activity in my view needs to be purposive…
political, not in any sledgehammer way but in the way of getting people to look
and think again
…to find
better understandings on which to act in this world we humans are fucking up so
fast
… the
perhaps corny point of it all is to raise consciousness … and not just with the
products of art there to be consumed, but with the process of making it… isn’t
that what we’ve done throughout our working lives as teachers of creative
process?/ isn’t that what we’re still doing now through our collective and
collaborative activities?
But this
consciousness thing is a curious creature
I like
that line of Nietzsche’s on consciousness in The Gay Science –
Consciousness is the last and latest
development of the organic and consequently also
the most unfinished and weakest part of it. From consciousness there proceed
countless errors which cause an animal, a man, to perish earlier than
necessary... If the preservative combination of the instincts were not
incomparably stronger, if it did not in general act as a regulator, mankind
must have perished through its perverse judgements and waking phantasies, its
superficiality and credulity, in short through its consciousness.
… will the
human brain turn out to be more serviceable than the dinosaur job? Time will tell but odds are (and I hope) you
and I will never know…
colour doodle
ANNA
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I agree with my father’s analysis of cultural work, that its
public face is controlled by a wealthy elite. We practitioners are blighted by
the star system they’ve created and judge ourselves by their arbitrary
yardsticks, often feeling that we come up lacking. What is positive though, is
that there is a growing community of practitioners locally and internationally
who distinguish themselves from the Establishment structures that oppress us.
The Internet has provided us with the means of connecting and also of creating
public communities. It’s not necessarily the creative work itself or as an
activity that is compromised but how it is mediated.
There’s a huge groundswell of practitioners who have been able
to educate themselves in their own field and today anyone can become an
artist/writer/musician without having first been tapped on the shoulder by a
powerful benefactor or patron who might dispense favour upon his supplicant.
It’s a bit like pre-agricultural communities where every member had to be able to
take on any role, we all have the innate capabilities to do whatever is
required.
Notions of excellence and quality are fictive, ephemeral. Here
one day, gone the next. The real question is how to free oneself from our
brainwashing to be able to make something that we feel ok about or feel that
we’ve learnt from the process.
The most recent print I made was for a print exchange with the
theme Unseen. It started as a drawing of an imaginary landscape that I made
into an aluminium plate intaglio etching. I printed this and transferred it to
acetate so I could make photopolymer plates, one intaglio and two relief. Then
I printed the intaglio in a pale colour and later used the relief plate to
emboss the image. That was the product I sent to the exchange. Now I’m going to
print 2 relief plates together. They’re mirror images of each other so I have
to decide on the colour of inks to use, what combination. In this case, it’s
been the process not the product that interested me.
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