conversation with Greg McLaren

And today on the daily kit we bring you a conversation with Greg McLaren...

the short bio:

Greg McLaren mainly is.

or

the slightly longer bio:

Greg McLaren is a poet and sometime critic who escaped NSW's Hunter Valley and now lives in the lower Blue Mountains. He is slightly anthologised. His books include The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead, Australian ravens, Windfall (all with Puncher & Wattmann) and After Han Shan (Flying Islands). A new collection, Lineages, two series of sonnets, is forthcoming with Puncher & Wattmann. 

GREG

Howdy Kit

I'm here somewhere between sporadically, constantly and frequently today. 

Ready when you are.

Have loads of draft work at the moment - 8-liners based vaguely on T'ang and Sung poems of exile...

KIT

rotary hoe

why not send one

and then I can retaliate

and we can discuss

you getting this rain there?

seems oddly apt to be rained in now

GREG

Howdy

This is the first one in one of the two sequences that I appear to be working on - "Exile" (though that is probably prone to change). 

Shorebirds pick around at the park’s edges.

The ocean’s a heavy restless blade,

but the river mooches around on its wide flats.

There is a vast mess, roiling about

in the shallow depths of the Party. Dusk

comes. You are walking now to the safe house.

I watch, follow a moment, keep

looking as the corner swallows you.

I began writhing this group while in Newcastle over the summer - an unintentionally long stay: 3 weeks when we'd been thinking of one. Mainly due to smoke and fire and illness. I was reading Burton Watson and David Young's Du Fu translations late at night and pining slightly for the mountains. Or resisting the pull of Newcastle. Possibly both - multitasking!

The other series is "The mountains" - drawing on the political/exile/civil war themes in the T'ang poets especially, but also positing a potential/likely near future for here. The poems in that sequence are pretty much located in one area the Exiles has no particular place to go to. I guess. 

KIT

That’s a familiar issue … writing the stuff and wondering where it can go/ has to go … but there’s also where it comes from

… yours reminds me of a dream I had last night

looking out of an apartment building

seeing the authorities

wondering why the fools are out there

there must have been lots more

but that’s all I’ve kept

… a lockdown dream

and

the party is swallowing again

a plain sight performance

only warm water will wash it away

have to stomach that and then

dusk is the blade

go in, be gone

so lucky to have ancestors

who found us where to go

…

and of course I think of Meng Jiao in these maudlin times … working on a poem titled ‘the sorry-for-the-self’

which ends (at least for the moment)

look through the mirror and see it all gone… you cannot

compete with me － no one will notice these words

GREG

I like how your Meng Jiaos are much less, erm, sober, than Hinton's. Have you read Bill Porter/Red Pine's Finding them gone? He travels around China for 30 days visiting/seeking/not finding graves and traces of the poets. I've been dragging it out as much as possible but am now down to his last 36 hours. 

I'm increasingly finding that the poems I've been knocking around that borrow/steal from and efface the Chinese poets - the place they're from (as in our historico-political-cultural moment), the place they write and the source material are just manifestations, if you like, of the same trends and weaknesses and opinions and reflexes. Well, not the same, obviously, but hugely interrelated: not fused but braided maybe - in their own various contexts and so on. 

In some of the poems the crisis is transposed into a future but is lifted pretty direct from the present - a bit like Atwood and the Handmaid's Tale (another touchstone for now):

Night before noon. The food’s gone off.
Snowing ash from the hacking cough of flames.
Send the kids and soft zebra onto the river
in the blow-up pool, try to hold on, try to splash out
these flaring embers. Then, walking out on the re-shaped tarmac,
through the smouldering trees, the black blank signs,
carrying someone’s child, who has heatstroke,
across the crackling mudflats to the bridge out.

This is what I really connect to: thanks for clarifying it!: 

so lucky to have ancestors
who found us where to go

It's the age old thing of looking to what and who came before. Not a comfort, but an alarm, a form guide, a map in almost invisible ink.

KIT

Yes… and while I hate to speak ill of anyone’s work (except for Trump, our Prime Monster, Duterte etc etc) it was the easily explained (he’s not really a poet) boring awfulness of Hinton’s much lauded translations (as for instance compared with A.C. Graham’s wonderful economy) that got me on the Meng Jiao bandwagon in the first place … (that project [about fifteen years ago], for the benefit of our viewers, working with graduate students, involved translating the whole extant oeuvre of Meng Jiao [about 500 and something pieces] over about a year and then playing with the results to create two books - a book of translations and a book of responses After Meng Jiao … Meng Jiao for those who don’t know is a second tier Tang poet who devoted the first half of his career [and oeuvre] to having the shits because of failing exams and not getting to be a proper bureaucrat and the second half to ill health and the deaths of friends and so on… he is popular known as the greatest ever whinger in Chinese letters… Su Shi is note to have said something like the Song Dynasty equivalent of ‘I’d rather hear a fingernail scraping down a blackboard than have to listen to another fucking Meng Jiao poem’…  Perhaps I’m overstating my distaste for Hinton’s work … here as link to an article about it all at the time

https://cipherjournal.com/html/kelen.html

… that gives a bit of an idea about the dynamics of the whole project … I think I published more about it later, but this was written when I was in the thick of it …

yes Bill Porter is a mate of a mate of mine so I’ve read lots and dined with the bon vivant in Macao and heard his wonderful lecture on hermits… I haven’t seen finding them gone but I’ll have a crack at ordering one now

… and meanwhile at Markwell the pumpkins hide in plain sight

my super may have gone down the toilet but we’re heavily in pumpkin futures here

Add caption

we, from so far away

and strangely

jacaranda finds a season

imported from

the one world spun

who picks up the pieces?

will history know?

how nest feathered

soiled

caught corner of an eye

tip toes

traceless

as the all-before

and I, as lost

how strangely here

as if imagined

as if and so because

the palimp-sinking’s settled

my dispossessing’s done for me

up frangipani, bamboo

cheese trees take your time

be water gum, button wood, pencil cedar

names will never stick

little pumpkins on a stem

big ones in patch are thirsty

note creek cabbages its palms

fences and paddocks

for dinner moo

and whom we love

all here for what the weather proves

ask not what you can do

but how to listen

come quite still

GREG

While Hinton's versions are flat and a bit odourless, I do appreciate the material being out there, and being able to pull the strands from a range of translators - BIll Porter, Hinton, Burton Watson, David Young and the Barnstones (whose translations of Wang Wei are magnificent) - clarifies (and enjoyably confuses) what seems to be going on in the poems. 

The adaptations I've been working with for years and years now resolutely hold to the same movement and sequence of image as the originals, even when the tenor, context, voice and so on varies wildly. 

But more recently I've been using the 8-line stanza in an unregarding way - not really holding to the conventions of the Chinese forms they're loosely conversing with. Maybe it's a form of linguistic distancing. (Joak). I'm more interested, for the time being at least, in the situation: political, historical, personal, cultural: how these things are radically different yet disturbingly at times similar. That image I used earlier of braiding is from human evolutionary theory, to do with various populations of prehistoric humans that may have remained separate for thousands - tens of thousand of years - but still interbred when they encountered each other, creating not a family tree but a braided stream of human evolution - intercrossings, separations, parallels, junctions and so on. THat seems to be the best analogy for how all these other themes come together in my thinking about these poems that I'm trying to make and the stuff that's happening around us today - and also how that connects to the T'ang and Sung situations, so far as the little I understand of them goes, that is. 

Say hi to Bill Porter for me - and a great big thanks. Really like his Stonehouse translations too.

KIT

Angel to Love -- straight ahead of me!  the Britannica Great Books Synopticon

it’s funny with forms … apart from haiku/senryu, I typically feel that an attempt at a form is a way of drafting towards something free-er that will be the real poem… I don’t know how villanelle efforts I’ve made over time but when they end up succeeding they’re always no longer villanelles… but the discipline-- or the effort at it -- along the way was helpful … like throw away yr disabled sticker and park a block away

…

I think this connection with who we were before we were us is important…

(especially living in a stolen country) as does most of the world’s population

(especially with all the wishful fantasising about mum and dad’s mum and dad…)

it intrigues me for instance that, until very recently, the number of humans in the air at any one moment was roughly comparable with the total number of homo sapiens at the end of the last glacial (I.e. at the beginning of the Neolithic)…

it seems like human progress from the tribal is mired in not so much a Hegelian dialectical progression as something much simpler …more like two steps forward one step back to the dinosaur trumploving brainstem (the one before the birdbrain)

… the cosmopolitan idea is thousands of years old (Menander and Terence in the West, Mozi in China and some of the Daoists tending that way too) but then yll still get Hitlers and such … my faith is in the idea that it is TWO steps fwd and only one back… but I’ve always been an optimist…

o mongrels be one!

brace for their scorn!

anyway I think we should continue the conversation mainly in poetry … what do you say? or maybe haibun style a bit of back and forth

here’s one up in the air

see if you can smash it down

as many of us in the air

now as were totally

at the end of the ice

so many few wished

and away

airborne of course

horizon biding

levitated

as were landed once

they, as we, a seeming stillness

many worded

travellers, void to void

lightbulb lit

evaporated

shaped to any notion

all meaning

tempted from time

as we are

come from the sea unsalted

set off as if there were no map

come to the mountain to fall

spectacular the stillness

minded when to see

GREG

Ug.

       Brought back to ground by timelessness'

everything - that dark, old voracity:

coinage because clock-hunger eats what needs

saying. Imagine flying out of quarantine, 

back to Li Bai in Wuhan. 

                                        He floats - no - drifts

across the hissing river, mist-wide.

Here, draconian keeps us not dead yet.

Its head peers from between bluffs 

either side of whichever river's nearer.

Wait. See what happens. 

                                        These times

i guess, might spill and eddy back into someone

other's. What could that mean, if it did?

Wrack, time-flat stones, tide-smooth whatever.

KIT

yes, the corona-boner… pandemic as the authoritarian party’s wet dream…

virus crosshairs bringing us to

the crossroads moment

might we not simply be kind to each other?

in earnest, more often, as a matter of course?

and there’s another way

‘steal and die’ may sound harsh

but

when there’s a zombie apocalypse?

Plutarch tells us Draco sought but failed to find

penalties heavier than death

everyone’s a bit

yes and no now

and there’s the love of punishment

or you can watch the empty street

faces worn from the coin

no more

they’re taken out of circulation

I prefer the laws of Solon myself

and some of his poems:

money travels

virtues stay home

and the clock

blank pointing thing

poised to strike

has its smug share

of the wall

GREG

Watch the empty streets -

they won't be empty long.

Lou Reed on Magic & Loss:

to cure you they have to kill you,

the sword of Damocles above your head - 

Doc Pomus, his lonely avenue

swings out under glitchy streetlights, 

night's tumour spasmodic, 

never exponential until the end -

save the last dance for me, 

won't you? 

                     Attention drifts from one

source of data to another. 

Go watch The Walking Dead, 

read Station Eleven, find the full list

of lists anywhere online - you can't say

it took you by surprise, 

                                           so different

from before. 

Throw enough coin, we'll forget

the way next year sprung its flares

all through the summer. 

Burnt-out towns look like a thousand years

ago - shells of wine-shops, lines 

of people getting out of the towns

with no water, no food - the locals

snapped in behind, scrounging about,

digging new wells, throwing the governor

in the old ones. 

Head for the mountains, watch who moves

in the valleys. 

                          Mist comes rolling through,

or smoke. 

KIT

what I remember about the Black Death

miasmatic conjunction of planets

best theory we had  to begin

night air -- a lot of rot

some said not to worry -- a fleabite

they didn’t last long

hid in a mountain

and villages vanished  

made up stories to pass the time

It’s all about position

terrific views all round

you wouldn’t want to look a bit different then 

pogroms were yet to be invented

but what’s in a name?

someone to blame!

anyway slept through most of it

don’t suppose I was much help at all

glad I wasn’t a monk

everything was so green after

forest and creature were back

less competition for everything 

and less to compete for

wages rose

remember those?

plenty of building materials, firewood

had a little ice age

everyone hit the road

no horses then

went rat’s back

but you had to have the right kind of rat  

a lot of luck in that

it was the beginning of great things

Renaissance, Incunabula

there was the great vowel shift

had to wait a while though

and here we are again

all a bit of a blur  

still coming into style  

and how shall we name the dance?

GREG

Come down from the mountains, they said.

It'll be fine, they said. 

                                         I watched every step

down the scree, the fire trail, the ad hoc bridge

across the creek, arterial after that rain. 

But the damp rings of ash from the camp fires. 

But the street signs marked with new directions.

But the quiet, the clearer air.

The last night up here, looking out over the plain -

the swept bright dust above.

                                                      The lights of cars

still threading the dark, their streams of light. 

Is the election still on? I'd heard rumours

while reception was fine. My envelope

never arrived. And how are you?

Has the swelling gone down? That sniffle,

did it go of its own accord? 

                                                    Hello?

KIT

never sniff at a swelling

… but this smells like dreamwork to me, Greg

So I think I should respond in kind, even if I’m wrong

(perhaps especially if…)

survey the neighbours

see how much they’ve built 

perhaps under the machinery noise

their acres of as much interest as ours

so many nooks

then notice on our side, a new campus  

sprung from how?  who knows?

but I accept

and they give me a tour

lots what you’d expect

but best the Fibonacci spiral sleepover 

a dream room …

it’s for Children’s Lit and must be a hit with the kids 

you go down bed at a time

bring a pillow

then on the street again

not a lot of population

never there before 

of course you must be wondering

[by that I must mean I]

which way will it be home and vanish?

remember your dream to tell?

don’t wake me with it please

…

every dream for me a home

I mean my house is there

it’s all built out of the unknown

and never was before

GERG

Greetings, good Viscount. I've had to revert to the approximation of prose, Kit. There's a point where the energy of my thinking or whatever it is that happens can let the poems run, and then, suddenly: the dictates of working, especially at the moment (constructing what is supposed to look like meaningful online programs of learning for primary school aged children), with the stresses around education and the pandemic and the administrivia of general family life flicks a bit of a switch and I find I can't respond as thoughtfully, or quickly or amusingly (amusedly?) (bemusedly?!). 

And I realise that a lot of what I've been writing to you in our conversation has at least edged around a few different aspects of time: mainly historical, but also about how our current circumstances are spoken to (though not necessarily listening very closely or astutely) to other times. I suppose I'm thinking specifically of what little I know about T'ang dynasty internal and international politics, but also other episodes (though nothings' ever a discrete episode, is it? - always something "else" feeding into it and feeding out from it, loopily) where there are sudden upheavals that were more or less surprises - black swans of the imagination, if you like. (Not my idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable).

And that also feeds into the "dreamwork" you mention: taking known things and fooling them into poems, switching and morphing the contexts. That has been an interest of mine for a while, though it probably snuck up on me. What seems like a good idea to play with often becomes the thing you end up doing for some time. So, I might start talking about that: though maybe not in a methodical way (I don't think through my work that way, preferring a semi-accidental/incidental mode/'mode'/mood: can you see what I mean about non-methodical?!). 

Of course, talking about why someone does certain things in their poems: how do you really know why you do? Certainly, I have barely a clue most of the time. I suppose I go on my nerve, but it doesn't feel like an especially risky undertaking - what's at risk, really? My 'standing' among peers? My 'profile'? I just like to get the work done that I feel like doing at the time. 

I've been interested in classical Chinese poets for a long time - I admired the pre cision of their attention, the broad historical and cultural scope you see in much of the work, and the vivid sense of personality you feel in their poems (though some translators flatten these voices, filtering Du Fu and Li Bai and Wang Wei through their own late-century/early-century very polite poetics - I won't mention David Hinton's name: while his versions don't often thrill me, they're a sound resource at the very least, and offer at times a model of how not quite to do things). 

It took some time to think of the idea of adapting some of these poems to other contexts: namely, mine! While there's a lot of contemporaryish Aust poetry sitting in settings that are a bit rural, or a bit urban, there's very little that touches on how I experienced growing up in a rundown countryish town that had seen much, much better days, and resented itself, and the attitudes that drifted through and settled there as well. And nothing much really talks about crappy working class experience from the inside - let alone how history touches on all that. 

And so re-writing, re-envisaging, re-imagining those poems of internal exile, of civil war, or rural suffering, of hermiting: this all seems a good idea. Of course, cross-pollinating historical and cultural and other experiences is endlessly fraught, no argument. But I'd also argue that not opening up those conversations and connections and exploring how they might work is equally fraught, at least. Instead of being fraught with a range of (necessarily so, really) misunderstandings, we risk not understanding much of anything at all. But these are generalisations, and all generalisations are bad. This is what I find difficult talking about: how to speak generally while being genuinely and specifically meaningful. I could talk about what I did, say, in a particular poem, but as for broader patterns in what I've done, I'm not sure how much use I am! 

KIT

Oh no! prose!

and loopily please swan it!

I think we’ve had different motives for approaching Chinese classical poetry …

my motivation was being there mainly or initially

in other words a little effort at understanding where I was at the time

(very helpful too)

and then that morphed into a method for teaching poetry writing (via translation) …hitchhiking on the fact of there being so much of the oeuvre extant and untranslated, therefore available for modeling (and so also self-esteem) purposes for students who were otherwise typically producing pretty woeful what-I-think-a-poem-in-English is meant to be

…

then of course beyond all of that is the joy of being in touch with (arguably) the world’s longest in-one-language-more-or-less continuous poetry tradition…

so we meet at the modeling …

                                       

I like the idea of fooling them into poems … the ideas, the words, the images, the known things, whatever

…

black swan droppings

every word is an accident waiting, that’s happened         

and

poetry is an art of knowing and not

given the prizes glitter

it’s indicated to not give up a fuck

but do what you need to get done

which is maybe as simple as continue with the habit you have and hopefully improve at it

and really who cares much what that is or how it works

… I think our first aim has to be to do no harm

then maybe just to get people to think about that idea

as it becomes more and more novel and vital

having hung around English Depts (or equivalent)

for so much (I might say most)

of my life

the one thing of which I am absolutely convinced

is that poetry is

(at least 99%)

of the time

better than talking about poetry

better in the sense of smarter, more rewarding, more of a point to it

the other one per cent is to prove

(as if we needed reminding)

1 that there are bad poems in the world

… more and more in fact

2 that prose and talk (and lectures too) are as good as poetry

when they ARE poetry

and

3

if it looks and smells like a poem

it still might not be a poem

(you read it here!)

GERG

The funny thing is, I don't even recall my motivation for initially looking into Chinese pottery - other than it was there: I think I picked up the Penguin Poets of the Late T'ang at a now defunct second hand bookshop at Balmain on a lunch break from my many many many years ago job in a public library. 

It slowly struck a chord, and somehow here we are. I started making adaptations of, at first, Du Fu, in about 2013 - as a kind of powering-down from study, late at night, and with a tiny daughter and at the same time starting to think more deeply about the recurrence of things, patterns of events and the choices people make in times that may or may not be troublesome or 'interesting'. 

And that is precisely where what you get at when you talk about your "joy of being in touch with (arguably) the world’s longest in-one-language-more-or-less continuous poetry tradition" becomes a bit of a focus in other ways: what do these poems, and their writers' lives, have to say about what we're seeing, doing, experiencing, participating in now. I'm not necessarily seeking answers, in fact, probably not at all: the institutional powers are still (as almost always) incredibly and subtly powerful and persuasive. And although the Du Fus, Li Bais, Wang Wei's Su Dongpos, Bai Juyis and so on have a lot to say about that power from a lot of different perspectives, I see a lot of what not to do in their poems. Or, at least, the effects of what happens when you do what probably shouldn't/doesn't need to be done. 

And it's in their poems' representations of those smaller, closer, more intimate effects of the large, implacable decisions that I guess, at the moment, I find the really juicy stuff. And how that sits with other attitudes: the seeking of something other than the self (in the Chan/Zen movement you start seeing in some of these poets, in their consideration or placement in 'nature' - and consider what has happened to that nature in the meantime [I'm thinking of Bill Porter's terrific book, Finding Them Gone, where in part his seeking the graves and living-places of China's poets is a drifting through the Seven Gorges and finding them fathoms deep, buried in the dams' backwash]). 

In looking at how these poets explore and experience the effects of governance, it becomes clearer that we can do so in ways that are a little outside our own cultural traditions. Which I guess is one of the reasons I find myself returning constantly to re-visioning, adapting these poems into different cultural, economic, political, historical, religious, literary contexts and always finding something useful and astonishing. 

That Chinese poets dead 1200 or 1300 years, and who directly, often, served their emperor, can speak to someone who grew up pretty much as a bogan in the economically and culturally depressed Hunter Valley in the 1970s and 1980s, is something I still find sobering. But I probably shouldn't: that's always been one of the things powerful literature and art has done - to show and enact connection. Perhaps I still find that surprising because that mode of connection simply was not part of my life as a child or young adult, and perhaps actually sorting out how that connection might work (or THAT it works, at all) is, in its apparent (to me) novelty is precisely its power for me. I dunno.

He takes a breath, reaches for the Panadol. 

Often, in the poems I've adapted - I'm thinking of the second section of my last book, Windfall - there's a shifting of context that works in ways I definitely don't even begin to pretend to fully understand (and probably don't need to - that's what keeps them going). For example, it might be, or often is, a shrinking down of significance - from the western frontiers of 8th century China at a time of great political, military and civil upheaval, to riding around the borders of Kurri Kurri on a 10-speed racing bike in 1982, and thinking that almost the edge of a world. Or re-working Du Fu's civil war poems to take Australian politics' right-wing tendencies to a logical conclusion, where other citizens become enemies, and the euphemism scatters through the air conditioning in an institutionalised, militarised way. Which is a much more direct correspondence than the first instance above. 

But in all of these adaptations, I really want to maintain a structural integrity that connects my preposterous reworkings to the originals. Generally, this is in the movement of key images, which remain, almost invariably in their original sequence: only I find some sort of contemporary or vaguely historical or (to me) feasibly near-future correlation that also makes sense in terms of my own take on our historically hysterical moment. In a way, working through these adaptations has led me, somehow, to taking that outlook and perspective to a much longer work, which although it doesn't directly link to the Chinese tradition, certainly comes out of my interest in it - a long verse narrative (is it a novel? who knows) 'set' in a 'near future' in a pre- and post-pandemic catastrophe. 

Shit, I better stop there for a bit.  

KIT

PREPOSTEROUS REWORKINGS

There’s a book title for you!

I do think it’s a wonderful thing that we both started with the same book… the AC Graham… that in the sea of books just one can set you on this path that carries you on through life …

Memories … those potsherd ostrakons that saw me out of the city… into the sticks where I’m glad to be…

I feel a bit that way about Czeslaw Milosz … whose collected I’ve been reading and annotating for donkey’s years (I’m up to p 600 now and I look fwd to typing up my annotations when I get finished and seeing what comes of that… during the bushfire emergency it was one of the books I had packed ready to evacuate… some tough choices there)

…

To go beyond our own cultural traditions is one of the purposes of poetry… but poetry enables us to find our own cultural traditions too… a large and moving target … especially for people of the Australian persuasion for instance

… connecting with the past and elsewhere is part of poetry’s vocation for making human/humane, in the cosmopolitan and care-for-all-creatures sense…

I’ve always been more fascinated with Axial Age China than with say the Tang or the Song… what interests me in the Tang and the Song is really the poetry… and especially the poetry of the lesser known… say Meng Jiao and down…

But the time frame from Confucius to Mozi (much more sympatico with the latter… in fact I think all those Confucius statues around the world now would make a good site for an international ‘blame Confucius day’… what a list I have … don’t start me…)

… that age really interests me (and of course the Axial corollaries in the West with the pre-Socratics and on and in India with Buddha and co…) … if I had a time machine I know where I’d go…

Anyway I do think it’s important to spend a part of each day in another age … or perhaps several parts in several different ages … and for me the ancient world is particularly important … I usually hang out in the 19^th century a bit too… Dickens or Trollope or Brontes or someone…

and meanwhile in a century closer to home…

I’ve been gradually making my way through my father’s mighty multi volume unpublished autobiography (just a few pages a day)… it’s now January 1939 and he’s just won £2000 sterling on the gaming tables in Rio (he was there to play ping pong but no one was interested)…only days before he’d drunk half a bottle of scotch for a dare… he’s 26 so he can be forgiven (not to mention, survive it) … it’s nice spending time with dad in a new way (and hearing new stories, despite the amazing number of stories with which I grew up)…

…

It’s hard not to feel just a little sorry for those who’ve not been afflicted with poetry

… losers… but it’s a bit of a meaningless thing to say as it is so far from our imaginable universe

…

As for Kurri Kurri being the edge of the known universe…

I have read the Book of the Dead and I know…

At Markwell there are likewise esoteric wisdoms… the garden has corners no one will know…

… anyway I thought I should probably include in this conversation my response in poetry to your last book, Greg … herewith --

ravin' Australians

what kind of a suburb is the bush?

with its cars to the acre all rust

and shallow buryings?

*

I knew a cloud once

here's the story

*

smoke shaken

solemn parrots declare

this nation colourless to light

day with its opening paddocks sets off

and  we're the fireworks after

*

some objects are empty

meaning we have the opportunity to fill them

this is how the mind lights

more insect than bird

smoke dissolved to steam

we go to ground like dinosaurs

does one ever mean to pollinate?

it's all the other excitement moves one

of course display must be a big part

*

what kind of a tree is the city

with its reach of roots

cloud touch opinions

and traffic all on the flat

all rolling

flat out

rolling

days years

that glitter and stim

we are flightless creatures

someone's bound to dig us up

*

the yards at Hornsby

slept to there

and back to Central again

no one to wake you in those days

but light at last would come

(that rosy fingered gal)

*

we're always finding an event

authentic to each it has to be

grey skin like a tight elephant in the moo n

takes satellite to tell

to tell us where and when you've gone

*

hey your my Christmas present

I would have known you anywhere

*

school days

period  called that to embarrass the girls

though not all of them could be embarrassed

just as there were boys who, punched, would never feel a thing

the race of iron

and the weather was on

the marathon

we walked

as far as my place

where we stopped for a durry

or a little joint

proved that the war had been fought

to defeat fascism

Mr What's-his-name

who made kids hold chairs over their heads

in the corner for a double period

who threw the javelin through the dog

at the carnival in front of the whole school

and that was the end of him

I'm sure he'd thought he's miss

on the day of the marathon

we knew

the Persians were bound to win anyway

we walked

*

you hear the dogs chatting over the fence

it's always the weather with them

no one remembers a happy childhood

nothing can set us alight here

and listen to forever

it has a smell like coal

tit for tat

as if too numerous to save

*

disgustingly drunk

a nearly moonless night

the only time I ever spent actually on a bowling green

I was 16 and throwing up

three of us each a third of the bottle

scotch an uncle had given for Christmas

knowing mum and dad wouldn't drink it

thinking there's always be a snifter

whenever they came over

but you can be wronger than that

*

once you start picking at the thing

glimpse of the empire of signs

Shintaro Akakusa, you die!

how eager were your ninja for this

faster than the Shinkansen the mind of McLaren

traverses the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

you shouldn't have shot him

the gun's the last resort

remember - we're phantom agents

Buddhism was always crabby

if it's a religion at all

and now the age of Buddha tack is upon us

on bicycles girls text and trundle

alongside the Imperial Palace

all that smiling like a thirst dog

embarrassment half hidden

eat mihon

Matsushima

Kure

Ama no Hashidate

to practise floating and awe

you don't have to be there

gaijin

o bicycle climb Mt Aso

slowly slowly

that's me in the ancient rain

*

having been in Kyoto three years

a long time ago

and visited a few times since

keeping Kyoto always in my heart

memory too prure to drop bombs on

when I go there now I'm a ghost

but moreso in the Middle Kingdom

legends of the camera kept

like that loyal dog at Shibuya

we left 1000 yen on the floor in the airport

to test the legend of Japanese honesty

it was gone in moments

Petersham passing

pissed haijin

hope spilled over

and we ended up here

colours you won't forget

like childhood is imprinted on you

follows you round all of your days

it's a shabby sun we've caught

I have attempted to map the furthest extent

but I ended up indoors

salmon

*

you put things in a poem

for a kind of deja vu sepia

in JB hifi the young bloke

explained to me the function of a dash cam

I'd like the daguerreotype model

with blurring when the traffic moves

or cyanide at a pinch

*

a kind of aspic runs the clock

it's only time moves on

all the other worlds in windows

peep and peekaboo

*

the jew picks at the half healed scab

the black man plays with his foreskin

the gypsy tunes wrath for the unwary

the fiery Slave does despotism

makes taiga of mere home

all the other races do this

the whiter than white

point a gun and shoot

without the reputation

your Nazi gets a kick out of this

women are baggage here too

*

a ghost is merest motion

like a tick made avatar

dark

folded into a call

self said

until it's gone

*

why not pink  gum?

as if there were a science to the tree

so that you could see into them

and hear the swaying for a breeze

and know the days and years for nothing

*

coal's secret life is tree

it's all one breath

and a next was long before anyone knew

you could make that an excuse

be none the wiser

*

not like in America

where you can be sure

the city named after some minereal

is a ghost down with a highway  diner

if the road was never moved

*

I remember trying to scrub the lino floor

after the acid night

wondering which marks were actually there

before mum and dad came home

putting in some elbow grease

and mum a week later

uncharacteristically meek with query

'why would someone put a cigarette out in the freezer?'

*

 a desert is piled spices

you sneeze across it on foot

fortunately there's a ship smells much worse

you're gagging all the way

*

the road goes on without us

and busy yourself imagining that

.

&

I suggest we maybe put up what we’ve got soon

And then resume when we feel like it …

I’m doing this with some others too…

(simply because we’re going to end up with something to long for anyone to read otherwise)

Waddayareckon?

Would you like a last word for now, Greg?

GERG

It's strange, inhabiting other traditions, in whatever manner we are able. Mostly, I find reading pre-20th century writing in English often painful: the manneredness is something I never quite come to terms with. I mean, of course, this is a vast generalisation, but most of the writers I find I return to are almost exclusively from the 30s or 40s on. Of course there is immense value and worth and everything in all that other work, but in general I find it awkward to come at. But somehow the Chinese poets of 1000, 1200, 1300 years ago I don't find difficult, at least on superficial levels. I wonder if, on a very real but at the same time a quite abstract level, that we necessarily inhabit and spend time in the past anyway - we're unavoidably the inheritors of traditions we are exposed to, doused in, draped over with and clothed in, walking upon. Aren't we? 

KIT

Well, the mannered-ness of the past up until the last century is a bit of a large claim … I do like to hang out in the past pretty regularly, as I think I’ve already said…

Still and all, I think I know what you mean … it’s the alienation of an idiom so far from our own + I think a different relationship between written and spoken language… and of course a lot of class pretension goes into all of this in ages and places with much lower rates of literacy than those to which we’re accustomed…     

When we read translated text all that can be overcome… which is a little like the difference between reading the King James Bible and Good News For Modern Man… I know which I find more annoying… I mean to say that sometimes the manners of the past are a mercy in letting us know the distance we’ve come…

But those distances are always with us… without them, we’re nothing

Like starlight, however old

But we read elsewhere, don’t we, because we find ourselves in words that are always already there … no matter how inventive we get to be (every one of Lewis Carroll’ portmanteaus – the brilligs and the galumphs and the chortles – works because the suggestions are already there … so he’s just doing there in a word what the rest of try to do with them)… so we find ourselves in the words that are there and in the words we don’t know, can’t have known, because as per Terence or Menander or Mozi, I am a human and nothing human can be foreign to me … but perhaps we need to cast the net wider still, if there’s a planet to save?

pinch myself

and I have the words

the where-from

always come with a question

do you see the wings now?

give welcome then

they say a universal rule

as in any galaxy so minded

beats in a garden’s hidden hum

take dream stages

say villages of night

some burn

others bloom

here are the words in which we’re all found

there’s a this-ness can’t be divided

some generalise from there

skies

kind eyes peer down

not quite believing

this body

all these parts I play

yet often I’m about and out

all symphonies available

so many more to go

tunes various

and scratch for meaning

may others get some gist

their own

I cast about for lovely doubt

it leads me to a question

did all of this just happen?

we can make a story –

best miracle of all

not believing

but wanting to

little visit reminders

ache, itch or pang

as good as pinching

first the month

believe or not

beginning

a moon and gone

this likewise breeze

the soil’s rise green

to every colour

here’s a sky round

just because we do

faces visit

waking as well

the dragonfly all hover with

moment of its colours caught

or to be more and equally gone

call consciousness to witness

this not remembering where I’ve been

this wondering where I’ll go