talking to himself again

most of a conversation may be talking to myself

and so I go it alone to be here…

(do you remember that high school essay where you wrote somewhere in the middle ‘I bet you never read this anyway’… well we seem to have reached that era… let’s call it the age of the blog!)

and

…as mentioned elsewhere blogwise…

I’m interested in what Stephen Spender described as the Beethoven method in that fifties essay about the making of a poem – the work made from the pieces rather than having holistic beginning (the Mozart method)… I think that is my native inclination too

but

Always two ways to look at the thing/anything

there’s the idea of sculpture as building up versus chipping away …

but you can always take turns at the thing

Lagging behind is a good way of getting a look up ahead at what’s going on without necessarily going under the wheels… particularly helpful in the present circs – I mean during corona capers – where you wouldn’t want to be ‘ahead of the curve’

… digging a hole and filling it in – I suppose you could call that a life’s work – it can be done for fitness too, eventually you find a fit (have one, or both)

… building does seem to be addictive…it has been for me… I guess it’s some kind of compensation for that feeling anyone could have of being just a passenger on Spaceship Earth…

Just! Just the most amazing cosmic privilege we know of matter ever having

… life plus consciousness … and you can’t see where this is going

The planet’s always going round and always in more than one way at once (hence for instance weather)… and I take that as a kind of role model …building is merely a matter of comfort

… you should have enough shelves to place yourself among the right books

But not so many that you can’t find them…

The two paths things … and stop with Frost in those deep snow woods just having a wonder with it all …

… the trick for me is not getting stuck on one side or the other… (the building up, the chipping away, the Beethoven, the Mozart)… I mean to keep it shifting

And by making myself do it every day I at least create the illusion (for myself) of getting better at it

take a turn around the garden

make your way around a tree

never let the old heart harden

take a turn with me

take your turn around the forest

make a way around the world

be just one voice in the chorus

where every little creature’s curled

(those three chords of eternal return!)

Is it a garden or is the bush?  Can it be helped or can’t it?

i.e. a thing that requires tending or a way that you happen along, hoping not to die of exposure, starvation or walking into an unexpected fire, flood, other cataclysm

… call me a wimp but I’m sitckin’ with the garden

in time beyond

for godsbother

let’s cook up beginning

here’s how it goes

as if we were mere tunes of the clock

still with these pages to do

all these birds who sing at my door

feathered to a fault

those who are nowhere

are with us all ways

it’s time beyond I tend

so lovely to be at the end of a line

to be no one’s ancestor

here’s my place of pride

as if I were this volume in the garden

and only these lines to write

Let me also say – from having taught creative writing as a career – that the idea of inspiration is unhelpful bullshit in general except in as far as it’s good to keep breathing… everything is from somewhere, not because there’s nothing new under the sun, as for that dour old fuck in Ecclesiastes… what’s under the sun is relentlessly surprising – hence subject matter … we’re not visited by angels, we’re visited by experience, by memory,

be presence to the moment… we’re the ones who are visiting … and try to keep a record … it’s helpful for ourselves at least…

Two ways to go
why two?

And then there’s the two ways view versus any other way… does that get us off the hook?

Let a hundred flowers bloom

I like the still image …

reminds me of the Compton Mackenzie story Whiskey Galore

… maybe out of the war an enormous amount of mind altering substance will simply wash ashore –

and it will be poetry

And as they say – happy days!

… will they ask after us? – our difficult duty is to not give a toss

I think we’ve reached that age

My philosophy is that nothing is ever finished … all works a draft until we’re gone

Which, I guess, is a variant of the perfect is the enemy of the good or  just do it!

The thing I hate most about proofreading is the idea that you’re not supposed to change the poem

… I think a poem is the thing that changes

because it changes us…

I might not want the punters to see it that way but that’s how it is with me

I don’t want to spend time with my work without having a fiddle…

It’s good to be happy where you are…

If we have to do any striving, I think we should settle there

…

Kafka’s gate closing before the law and that imperial messenger who can’t make it and Zeno’s arrow falling by the wayside … and now there’s a virus chasing after us all ... on the one hand it’s like they’re upping the ante… on the other it’s like the music’s slowing down and hopefully when it stops we’ll each still have a chair…

make nightmares into poetry!  one of the many duties!

actually I did write a song last year

they’re burning down my house again

they do it while I sleep

I lie there like a corpse 

and dream

and in the dream I weep

they’re burning down my house again

they do it every night

I dream the wish

and they upend it

with greed and hate and lies

it’s me me me and all I deserve

I just play around with words

they’re telling me the house is not on fire

but they’re burning down my house again

I see it with my own eyes

they’re raising up the sea as well

they’re dialling up the bile

they fuck this whole wide world of ours

and I think what I’ll… what I’ll…

I drive a car

I eat red meat

they burn the coal

just for me

I’m deep in my hypocrisy

nevertheless I can see

this is what happens to the meek

they’re burning down my house again

they do it while I sleep

I lie there like a corpse 

and dream

and dream

and dream

A one chord wonder

… I mean three chords is probably overdoing it, don’t you think?

It was in the bushfire midst and our coal-loving government seemed to be doing nothing … and now we’re all cheerfully distracted by disease from the fact that they’re doing nothing and going on loving coal… and burning down the house…

 It is good that we don’t all write the same way … and even better that we’re not all writing the same poem / song .. the something new under the sun – that is the miracle of art, and it is also the miracle of language … a finite set of every-changing signs that allows for infinite creativity…

Which brings me to the line!

Which could lead us to vexed question of punctuation (if we wanted to go there)

The line! Many have toed it to be where they are! And some have towed it away …

it is kind of a breath

kept short best

tending more phrase than clause

because okay poetry can be/is writing

but it’s always speech first for me

and we don’t speak in sentences

except we’re lawyers (or we’d like to be)

but okay – on paper or on the screen –

I always want to ask ‘can you hear me?’

… travel by string

on a windy trill

climb to the tree

there already

reach out to fall

just bed to catch

take a tumble

in the machine

…

But I can’t agree with WCW that a poem is a machine

(machines can be a little … mechanistic)

but I do agree with the nothing sentimental thing  

no baggage NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE

… one keeps returning to this

Which tells us something about the nature of travels

(is that like Eliot’s poetry as the escape from emotion?

or can we stick with Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow’?

… more proof poetry’s whatever you want

… Dylan Thomas’s ‘whatever makes your toes twinkle’)

… it’s a nice idea to take for a walk – the machine conceit I mean

and I like my lines on the way

a kind of track-making

salute to all doors

the lines afoot － the effort in － the heart come racing till

in fear of where I am

and might be otherwise

smoke rising from my ears

a sign

and breathlessly up in the work

.

under own spell

gone

I am constructing the flower machine

and how many words till it’s said

crawl into these least and hide

here for my vanish

and how about you

now you’ve come along this far?

I’m telling this to no one

you see how far I’m gone

…

I think I have as many short line poems as long, … as many lyrics as rants (if you prefer to look at it that way), maybe in between too

… anyway, I tend not to think of it that way… I think a lot more of my stuff is lyrical than ever makes it to the strings or into a tune …

Punctuation for signposts and have your wicked way with them…

Punctuation is the part of the poem that is 100% writing

(whatever it advises or suggests)…  it is an available tool

…it just annoys me when poets follow the rules of prose punctuation just because they’re there… because they are OBEDIENT to rules…

That, is not, in my view, how poets should show themselves to be in poems…

But I guess this is one of the sets of two opposed approaches in poetry – the embrace of ambiguity and the flight from ambiguity… I play around with both but definitely favour the former more, which is in turn favoured by minimal (or even zero) punctuation … if the reader WANTS sentences then the reader can jolly well work out for themselves where they begin and end… and maybe the reader will also then have the pleasure of going back and reading another way ?

But the bottom line for me in all of this is that poetry is fundamentally made of speech

(elevated, denigrated, ‘such as men do use’ or whatever) and speech is made up of sounds and of phrases and of clauses … so sentence structure is a kind of shackling to another agenda… perhaps an unavoidable agenda, but not an agenda that needs to go unchallenged…

e e Cummings, Don Marquis and others opened up a path that remains available … why should we ignore that?  Why would that be not for us?

I like to see speech creeping into prose as much as possible too (hence I suppose my so much ellipsis) … I guess the bottom line though must be use what you choose – it’s up to you BUT exercise the choices available … don’t be taken for granted…

…

I’m not sure what you’re rejecting when yr rejecting the post-structuralist project,

… and that’s because there is no ‘post-structuralist project’ (except from the point of view of over-zealous name-the-era critics… you know the mob who always always get paid so much more and live in so much nicer houses than the people who create art of pretty well any kind

[of course I’m talking averages here … and no disrespect to Ken Done, whose work I like and who seems to be a decent sort of bloke as far as I know … which is not very far])

BUT

I smell a straw dog here… maybe a whole pack of them, turning over the bins and getting into the garbage

… and where there’s a straw dog there’s fear

and where there’s fear ask – is there paranoia?

so

‘post-structuralist project’?

To me it’s just zeitgeist stuff… it’s not a doctrine or even an ideology, it’s just an attempt at an acknowledgement of where we’re at

What we do with where we’re at is another question …

How much has the way poetry’s gone got to do with post-structuralism?  Well, hopefully poets are aware of the era in which they find themselves…

Like modernism and post-modernism

Structuralism and post-structuralism

are simply epoch-framing guideposts for understanding where ideas and expressions of art come from and might be headed

I’m very grateful for the contributions to thought of people like Barthes and Deleuze and Kristeva and Derrida and Foucault and many many others … who are hard enough to fit into a sentence because apart from writing in French and being so frequently misunderstood, their main characteristic would be disagreeing with each other about so much …

 the idea that thinkers who’ve somehow unwittingly acquired this tag given by certain pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey academics are together conspiring to wreck poetry or deprive humans of selfhood or something or other … is frankly … silly

Anyway which structuralism are we talking about … American?  European?

If we go back to Saussure

…yes all that binarism (langue/parole) was a bit limited and a bit of an optimistic wrap and so deserving of critique

BUT

I can’t imagine what my / what our understanding of language and of culture would be without Saussure

…

If I had to follow anyone there I’d follow Merleau-Ponty (who anyway mainly denies the langue/parole binarism)

but who wants to be a follower?

Having a crack at the ‘poststructuralist project’ is a bit like saying ‘I don’t the nineteen seventies’ … fair enough, a question of style… but the nineteen seventies are not a program or a plot or a movement or an ideology anymore than post-structuralism is…

… asked to take sides issue by issue is another question… I would, every time, go for Saussure’s priority to the spoken word, I think Derrida’s claims for the anteriority of writing are an unhelpful, a distracting, metaphor…

Whether it’s the case that there’s a cohort of cultural studies academics who get your goat for some reason or other

… that’s another question … but I’m not wishing to conjure up another straw dog here for a replacement

…

We’ll end up discussing the idea of ‘political correctness’ if we go further down this track … and that would be fun too…

I think there’s always going to be a problem with the attempt to name the epoch you’re in

And these big name games – they’re part of a grand narrative approach to understanding the history and development of thought … so a little self-defeating, is your objective in using them is to get beyond grand narratives…

All this reminds me of this wonderful (1898) set of World’s Library of Great Literature  I have in the shedbrary…

Very accurate – as per our contemporary judgements – well into the beginning of the nineteenth century … but then alas, gradually beginning to paint an incomprehensible (to us) picture of the later nineteenth century… the epoch is rarely right about itself… the early history of the Nobel Prize for Literature is nicely illustrative of the idea… though certain they did pick some winners…

Just think… this could have been the Elizabethan age, and at the beginning of our current queen’s reign, that idea was attempted but it just didn’t wash – not that there was no monarchy of the divine or absolute kind (there hadn’t been for centuries), just that it didn’t suit present self-reflective epochal purposes…

To the specific question of the fractured self…all I can say is the selfhood is something

modernity and now the contemporary zeitgeist has fractured…   je est un autre!

This has been going for some time now!

And that the illusions of individualism that the western world has suffered from and

retrofitted to ancient antecedents (for instance in Greece) are overblown, fanciful,

unsustainable

… and where does that leave authorship and literary ownership and the idea of plagiarism

and the common intellectual property of the ages and the times… I think TS Eliot re-set the

rules with The Waste Land – call that an artefact of Modernism – and it’s gone on from

there… worth noting too that ‘intellectual property’ in the world today has bugerall to do

with literature or any kind of art

… but I drift…

the bottom line in all of this is that we are of our time

…the real question from the point of view of the poetry that you and I both value is whether the fractured self of our times is less (or more) of an emotional issue/entity/intensity…

and I would say no…

I think all of this is bringing us perilously close to questions about the value and function of

poetry  … and how these are exercised … live questions in my view … because I think

poetry’s vocation  is to be at the cutting edge of the sayable … and then some…  

… fractured selves of fractured times… remember fractured fairytales? Our postmodern

childhoods!

Our times are pretty fucked up

(I know they all say that)

In such a way that political engagement is in fact not avoidable

This does not mean everyone writing the ‘I hate Trump’ poem

(though a little venting never goes astray… well, I suppose it can go astray…)

is advised or helpful or good

…

it means telling the wake up story … it means the slap in the eye

And if we think that’s what poetry always did and always had to do

then I hope we are in tune with our times !

Has there been a poetry that is cynical and clinical and detached and laughs at the garden and the bush because it actually has no place for living things other than the hu(man) ego – well, yes there has, but I think that nitty gritty city ditty is on the wane now…

a cynical sort of a smartarse poetry – a poetry of the in-joke – has its own natural vanishing point … and there’s no sun shining there…

Has there been an academic kind of creative writing school poetry that prizes obscurity and in-jokes too – yes, there has, but I don’t think it every really caught on outside the university and I do think it probably served some useful purposes behind the ivy…

And actually the rarefied pretend contexts of academic creativity only mirror other illusions of other artworlds (with the difference that they’re generally better, or at least more consistently, funded)

… but I risk whole kennels of straw dogs here, so I’ll stop while I’m ahead…

Poetry is – whatever else – a very variable kind of mirror and means of showing us what’s wrong … so one needs to be careful not to shoot the messenger here…

… grand narrative unity deserves to be threatened in a way that must us uncomfortable

We don’t live in a fairytale now and no one ever did … likewise epic, ballad, name yr

genre… what is the relationship between life and genre ?  how is genre lived?

… getting too close to any of these questions frankly often results in awful poetry

Jumpy obscurity has its place …it can be a kind of challenge (can you keep up?)… there should be no limits to the modes of moods of which poetry is and will be capable … so I am loath to proscribe

…

But I think we agree about poetry and feeling

… it don’t mean a thing if you can’t feel a thing !

…

The attack on the pathetic fallacy was well founded (although Ruskin does seem to have been a complete prick… or maybe I watched the wrong movie?)

Oscar Wilde’s witty little ‘all bad poetry is sincere’ (‘springs from genuine feeling’) certainly hit a nail on the head  

but not only does this not mean that not all sincere poetry is bad  

… it doesn’t mean that good poetry isn’t also sincere

and it doesn’t make sincerity a bad thing… 

I’ve always said to people who want to be teachers –

If you can’t bring yourself to encourage people, don’t bother … that is fundamentally what the job is

And to people who want to write poetry I say –

If you can’t bring yourself to mean anything with real feeling, then don’t bother…… that is fundamentally what the job is

So though we’re coming from quite different theoretical spaces/ assumptions

I think we broadly agree about why we do poetry

I have a poetry passport

the sun most overhead

as on its way gone

o wilderness mine

and breeze beginning

making tracks

and yet survive

far and away

a lone and level stretch

where I’m now

sneer, wrinkle

bring you revelation

antique that I am

Maybe changing the world is a bit of a grandiose goal… better to say waking the reader/listener … or I like Auden’s line –

 ‘The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.’

Does that make Auden a deconstructionist?

Increasing confusion and complexity in poetry, fragmentation of self, unbelief, distrust, casting of doubts on everything – these are all things of our time –  things poetry cannot help but reflect

but for me

poetry’s more important role is to make sense

to make sense of the complexity

and in all of this to have a heart

… it doesn’t need to explain itself as much as we’re doing here …

that’s because poetry is better than the explanation of poetry (and if it isn’t, then it failed – it didn’t work)

(remember Pascal– the heart has its reasons of which reason can know nothing;

Remember Michaux – it is not the crocodile’s job to yell watch out for the crocodile)

…one way is to make a picture

…a nother way is to turn the picture upside down inside out give it a shake

Or in the words of Brecht’s last poem:

            And I always thought: the very simplest words

            Must be enough.  When I say what things are like

            Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.

            That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself

            Surely you see that.

Simplest words! … that’s the point!

That’s why working with translators is so important …

Meaning is no longer yours once you let your cat out of the bag

but what’s the point of making a poem if you don’t know what you mean

and

If you’re not moved by the poem then what was the point of it ?

… and this goes for the maker as well

… of course you can overdo that … like Dickens weeping over the ends of his own novels when he re-read them …

It’s good to make your characters live but there is a risk of going to far, with that, with anything…

Except that I’ve always thought in poetry, a good principle is

when you’ve gone too far – go further!

…

Truthful answers will always be good …

truth was

always past

the words

but had no

other house

one followed it

hounds and all

whiff weakening

the skin pricked up

sometimes a growl

or any little confidence

could yet betray

the truth

and sometimes

you could taste

it too

sometimes swallow

it could come back up

that was and is

the bitter truth

mainly though

gut's incidental

truth's dense with verbiage

cultivated

and here's the hard cure

some lives are

to tell the truth

until it's gone

be lost

to find a way

.

UTS was such a breath of fresh air after Sydney Uni, after the dread Woolley Building – such a breath of fresh air that politics was possible, that what you were studying had some relationship to a real world with presence and meaning related to things I cared about in the here and now… I think it was where I first heard of Lyotard, and Bachelard and Foucault and Lacan and a cast of thousands and I was grateful for that… an opening of theoretical horizons…

I felt the hundred flowers were blooming there… I really never felt I was being subjected to any doctrinaire orthodoxy of any kind… that was mid-eighties… post BA, Dip Ed and an MA in communications I never finished at Macquarie, which thinking back on had had a kind of bureaucratic orthodoxy to it … probably why I never finished… though I learned a lot … and yes, marvellous that it was all free… and certainly would not have happened otherwise… so thanks Gough, yes

… no thanks to John Dawkins though who’d sat in my office at Macquarie and when I interviewed him swore blind (all on the record) that a Labor government would NEVER introduce tuition fees…

Water under an ancient bridge by now!   

… on politics more generally –

I grew up with a certain amount of background DLP lunacy and an uncle in Opus Dei, so I appreciated all the Marxism I could get… and poetry… Ginsberg, Kerouac… these were my heroes after I recovered from TS Eliot…

yes, I think Marx’s main problem was not being much of a seer … in terms of understanding the world around him – what a quantum leap forward from the best available theories! As with Darwin!  As with Dickens!  And yes as with Saussure a little later! But yes, after Christianity, perhaps Marxism stands out as the most misused message/understanding in the history of ideas… I guess Dante has Karl in his own little circle watching Kim Jong Un on an endless loop at yumcha – over a caption that reads ‘Beware what you wish for’…

… anyway, I can tell you from deep and long experience of Humanities academia, in conferences around the world over decades, that universities and humanities bits of them are not run by lefty ideologues… though many the right wing ideologue would have you think this … this is conspiracy theory stuff

…of course there is a left in the academy and it has its doctrinaire characters and there are orthodoxies there as on the right, but the idea that this left you imagine is generally in control everywhere is quite fanciful

…there are at least as many right wing dickheads running the show as left wing dickheads

                

… I have seen snobby conservatism triumph over open minds on university committees (and especially hiring ones) more times than I care to remember, and certainly a lot more times than the other way around. (I’m talking from early eighties at Macquarie till quite recently… so, not hearsay but experience in the room over forty years)

(I should say I do recognize a definitional problem here … because you would probably call left wing the right wing [i.e. ultra conservative, intolerant] operatives of the Chinese Confucianist Party (you know, the party that’s ruled for the last 2,500 years there)… I don’t think there’s anything left or Marxist/Leninist about any of them … just one more dynasty in the empire that happened to sprout from a peasant uprising against a previous corrupt dynasty that needed overthrowing … not to mention real live foreign oppressors who made you take opium for a hundred years …)

oops… off on a bit of a tangent for fun there!

… and though the personal is always political, let us not forget the arbitrary nature of clique-iness, of matey-ness (and the fact that it tends – whatever oppositional exceptions there may be – to favour privilege, in terms of class and gender and race and more)… so the private school lads giving the gig to one of their own is a cycle that takes some breaking… so the blackfella who never gets a job and who keeps getting locked up by the almost-all-white cops is a cycle that takes some breaking

…

A poem should not mean but be???

– beautiful poem – but Macleish was so wrong – not mean but be !  that is garbage! And disingenuous garbage at that! I’m not aiming for the museum!

poetry

comes from a shallow place

so easily missed

like marks passed over

too small to see

it’s never unexpected –

everyone’s hoping for rhythm, for rhyme

until the wall appears

then we first notice

these women and men

girls and boys

animals every one

shaped like sledgehammers

with poetry on their backs

bashing head against brick

until the message is clear                  

yes all writing is communication … no getting around that

all sorts of forms of communication

all kinds of games too

yr in yr out yr up yr next

coming, ready or not

Wittgenstein’s useful here

… I find the cult of him curious (not that it’s current now, but when it was)

Of course there are private languages                                

here we are in one right now

of course those private languages not possible without the public ones

… and as to the limits of my world?

Yes we press on into and over horizons … cling to last planks when the ship has gone down

So curious how sociolinguistics and philosophy of language have managed to avoid each other in the Anglo-American academy… when essentially hunting the same prey…

…

…as for this worded world of ours and how it rubs up against the wordless one –

(or think of it as consciousness and its other – purusha and prakitri in Indian philosophy)

Szymborska’s ‘In Praise of Self-Deprecation’ seems to say it all …

                                                       

… sometimes we do get to glimpse the outlines of the cage – a physical one or the mind forged manacles, and then we have, as poets, a duty to disclose…

And as for political poetry generally – Auden wrote some of the best in my view – especially ‘Spain’ – yesterday all the past but today the struggle!

Poetry is about commitment

About drawing lines that need to be drawn

About making us see what we won’t otherwise see/know/feel/touch…

It is the wake up call!

All of that is political – political in the broad sense – which is the sense that matters…

How many of us are there for it?

Always a fair question

On the general political framing questions

I think we can agree all dictatorships – all tyrannies – are evil and destructive and tend to end badly, often in worse tyrannies … I think the guillotine is the best ever symbol of this…

The best systems so far as far as I can see are the Scandinavian type of social democracy … or NZ’s not bad in a few ways

… and we in Oz have a lot of the magic formula – like medicare frinstance … and we had more once … free education frinstance…

As far as democracy itself is concerned, I think the two party system is doomed … what NZ and what Germany and other places have is infinitely better … the answer is that democracy needs to be as participatory as possible, as local as possible…

This current crisis could not be a better demonstration that the world needs saving from corrupt plutocracies, from empires in drag…

Capitalism is a wild and mean beast

And ungoverned leaves everyone fucked

but an economy without ‘business’  - without the motive to make better – is not an economy at all

… no point in redistributing nothing … so it’s all about balance in my view … finding the golden mean and

From each according to their ability, to each according to their need

Now who said that? Kinda catchy!

Do what we can

Every gift an affliction also… and I think that’s another angle from which poetry needs to be considered… that it is something we cannot help but do… that we will be unwell and less useful if we attempt not to do it …

points about who’s hearing us / who can hear us / are apposite…

but I think for many of us by now habits are too ingrained

… we simply have to write what we have to write and it doesn’t matter much whether anyone’s there or not

… I’m so glad Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman kept on … and Blake and …

.

Oh a last hurrah for politics with (so-called) ‘political correctness’! There’s a lot of fun to be had there!

correct

1

he really doesn't mean what he says

he just comes out with these things

                    some

                                times

he's not trying to offend anyone

just a little set in his ways

please don't pay any attention

he wasn't referring to you

you're not one of that kind 

it's not all about you

some people have too thin a skin

some people can't take a joke

it's creeping – this correctness

like some people know how

not to offend

like the rest of us are fools

we just tell is how it is

we just say the truth

it's the first thing

that comes into your head

boong and nigger

poof and yid

don't they see themselves

for what they are?

they're all too sensitive by half

can't they take it?

we don't mean anything by it

I'm just saying

and then there's one of us

so sour – calls us out for just words

(one of us – that gets my goat)

let's call them out

for – arrogance, is it?

for thinking they know it all

there's too much history in some

it's like they know how words must mean

what's wrong with a little lynching?

it's too good for them!

you feel dumb

they talk down to you

with knowing what you are

to say just what we all say

everyone says

what everyone knows

it needn't be behind their backs

I call a spade a spade

how useless the disabled are

that's exactly what!

and let's all laugh at mental illness

isn't it funny the way a girl throws!

the other tribes are jungle dark

you simply cannot trust those monkeys

we know they're dirty, dangerous

we don't mean to offend

we know about the baby's blood

know all about their vile disease

and worst of all are turban-heads

saw yours off as soon as blink

their slaves are women

they won't drink

I know what I know

and we'll show them

who's right and wrong

it's like my daddy said to me

once wogs were far away

but they're next door now, these hoardes

so many to a room, and mean

and once an x always an x

and no, I don't know y

never the twain shall

I have a secret ballot

you won't hear a peep out of me

2

we only pretend equal, the same

your skin or all between the legs

my need

your want

what's mine's not yours

and gimme gimme

how I came here's not your affair

out of my way

shortie

fatty

girlie

dog

this is the real world

get used to it

kingdom

power

and

glory

all present

and correct

3

what does it mean?

that we shouldn't care

about the feelings of others?

that it's best to laugh at them?

to taunt until well let's see what happens

pick at the scab till blood comes

you mustn't think rape or racism's funny

you mustn't mock conscientious belief

oh pardon me if I indulge such strictures

and tighten the noose around your freedom

which, forgive me, would seem to be

'just screw them before they screw me'

yes, the world and we could be better than that

it's no sort of nanny-ism to think

that others deserve the respect I expect

though yes, a world that way would be safer

4

'politically correct'

like a joke from the seventies

come back to haunt us

perhaps we were a little doctrinaire

but we could take the piss

we could barely tear ourselves from the mirror

those who have hoped for a better world

who gave it their hearts and minds

in the dark

as long as the dim

deny hope

in favour of their fondest lies

which all amount to

'I am better

why can't the lesser just comply?'

what gormless fools these bigots are

take away the mirror

then they will see

actual others

please correct me if I'm wrong

laughter is always at someone's expense

then let it begin with being at mine

and let's go on that way

forever and ever

amen

…

political correctness

identity politics

… seems to me these are just tags (highly motivated tags) purposed to paint people into corners…

and the people being painted into the corners are the ones who tend to have a practical understanding of what’s wrong where they are and what’s wrong with the world… and what could practically could be done about it … these people are not in charge anywhere right now… nor is it disingenuous of me to say that they have not been generally in charge in universities (humanities or elsewhere)…

‘the left’s natural inclination…’ – spare me please

… this is David Attenborough describing some curious woodland creature?

Everyone should be given ago … we build better societies by  being INCLUSIVE… that’s certainly my policy with Flying Islands but I certainly make an effort to ensure we have enough women and NESB persons in each batch, and I have certainly noticed, adding up the numbers each year, that it would be easy to let it all be dominated by white blokes and particularly of our vintage…

… now you could say well that’s just because we’re better poets and let’s not let standards slip but uniformly apply same measures of quality to all … that would be fine except there are no universal measures applicable (never were and never will be) AND the provision of role models is a ley to making it possible for the under-represented mobs to get a go in the end…

Or is positive discrimination the problem? Or quotas for women or minorities?  These may be necessary temporary measures…

The relationship of these kinds of things (attitudes, policies) to the incarceration of Aboriginal people is simply that some kinds of unfairness need addressing at a collective level … otherwise the white boys keep getting the jobs and the black boys keep getting locked up… but surely the aim is to create a society where there isn’t entrenched disadvantage for particular groups of people

… that makes sense, doesn’t it?

I’m struggling to see what’s at issue here… I myself have been a victim of positive discrimination, but I see why it was happening and was necessary at the time… I myself have been a victim of sexual harassment (one of many, in a particular workplace) and I think it’s ridiculous when persons of narrow perspective pretend that men cannot be victims of sexual violence… history is replete with patterns of victims becoming perpetrators (just consider how child abuse usually goes from generation to generation or Israel and the Palestinians)… BUT it is more absurd to claim that …like that creep Bettina Arndt… that men are equally the victims of family violence… more absurd to downplay the Shoah just because some Jews have done bad things, just because Netenyahu is a creep…

… we have to rely on facts and figures (the empirical stuff), appropriate theoretical models and expert knowledge to understand social phenomena … of course this gets harder in the era of fake news, when just by using that term we have gone along with the coinage of the biggest news faker in history, or at least since Stalin and Hitler

and as for China … the idea that the home of Dickens-strength capitalist exploitation and the greatest wealth disparities in the world today is somehow the result of Marxist thought (or left-wing thought) is frankly obscene… obscene  in the same way that attributing child abuse to the ideas of Jesus is… the people who indulge these fantasies have motives, self-interested, self-congratulatory (and in the case of the US – self-aggrandizing) motives…

… disgusting, authoritarian and yes, fascistic as the regime in Beijing is, the boot in from the Anglo Yank grovelling world of the last week truly appals … and Smoko Morrison grovelling along to Uncle Sam… makes one want to chunder in the old pacific sea…

of course both empires – the crumbling flailing about Trump empire and the burgeoning back on its feet now we’re the biggest and oldest and newest time to get even now – they are both very scary and bad for the world… but it makes me sick that Australia should be siding – against its own interests – and against all reason – with US imperialism just at its least rational moment…

… it doesn’t make me sick because I approve in any way of what Beijing’s up to … it makes me sick that we cannot simply say these are not the ways … that we cannot say the WHO needs our support … it could be better but without it we’re all fucked… it also makes me sick because the echo of white Australia racism and older imperialisms is so strong in it … and it makes me sick to see racist scum emboldened by the words of government ministers physically attack Australians of Asian descent (or tourists or students or temporary migrants)…

I agree with so much of what you say

Re free speech, resilience, openness, democracy and education... the value of the compulsory vote

the need to be still, the need to bump into…

the dangers of wallowing, of persecution mania, chips on the shoulders

… the nightmare weight of the past upon the minds of the living – that turns out to be a tough one to shake off

… even though everyone loves a bright new morning

equality before the law

and in health and in education

(which is why the current gap between outcomes for Aboriginal people and everyone else is unacceptable)

… question is how to get to the bright new tomorrow of truly equal opportunity?

(it seems to me that truth and reconciliation, apology for wrong and moral restitution – these things are worth much more than their weight in gold… or any kind of funding)

If you love these things … and if above all you love and value PEACE (not to mention prosperity in the sense of there being enough of the good stuff to be worth sharing around) then you have to ask yourself who and what are the greatest threats to peace, to prosperity, freedom, democrary…

And the greatest threats in the world today are nationalism, the resurgent right and its totalitarian and racist tendencies and eco-catastrophic unrestrained capitalism …

The core threat to the world of the nationalist agenda is not giving a fuck about anyone else …

As best represented in recent weeks by the US turning its back on the WHO … which is to say who cares if a whole lot more foreign kids die of malaria and starvation and so on… and who cares what the long term geo-political consequences of that might be… well, fortunately UNICEF still cares and fortunately Bill Gates does too…

There simply are no ‘left wing’ leaders in the world today… the most left one surviving I can think of right now is Jacinda Ardern … whom I nominate for omnipotent deity (though I think she might be a bit too busy for that)…

…

not taking oneself too seriously (being able to take the piss out of oneself … which is as I recall where ‘politically correct’ was in the seventies --- a kind of leftie in- joke where there were three categories – ideologically sound [IS], ideologically unsound [IUS], and (biggest category) or all – ideologically undecided [IUD]… but somehow this got hijacked by right wingers with serious irony deficiency (v common in the US)

anyway, I think I’ve dealt pretty comprehensively with the right wing myth of political correctness … ( a genuine right wing conspiracy)

… here’s a nice piece on it in The Guardian  that covers most of the relevant territory

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump

… and as for so called identity politics, it’s more or less the same story… it’s a right wing way of trying to put the minorities back in their box because they might be a little threatening … notice how women’s groups and black activists and migrant activists and on and on – they don’t talk about themselves doing identity politics… they rarely form political parties based on those issue-bases (and when they do, those entities never last long (though sometimes they can have positive and even long-term positive effects … consider the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in front of parliament and how that helped to keep minds focussed)… but I think that in general such entities don’t last long because of the inherent contradiction in seeking inclusion by exclusive means…

… can there be a problem with focussing overly on one’s own disadvantage and the injustices to which one is subject?   Absolutely … this is called a chip on the shoulder … best example I can think of would be in the men’s rights activism so called of nasty persons like the aforementioned Bettina Arndt… or white supremacist types (esp in Europe or the US) – they are kind of a parody of people with a cause… but of course having no sense of humour or irony they cannot see themselves as parodic…

Essentially we may think of these as sadfucks who make our world more dangerous and less pleasant

But to a practical example –

consider the case of Aboriginal disadvantage in Australia

… just a few simple facts like

Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than yours or mine

Aboriginal men being 30 times more likely to be imprisoned than you or I are

… these are just the head of a long long list

There isn’t to my knowledge an Aboriginal Political Party in Australia (though I think there may have been such efforts in the past

… but for the reasons mentioned above it would be doomed…

The Maori seats in the NZ parliament going back to the Treaty of Waitangi I think, are an interesting experiment in all of this

…

… so here’s where the argument is tending … instead of these straw dogs ‘political correctness’ and ‘identity politics’ (or which we’re yet to see concrete examples to take more seriously than the baker who doesn’t like gay weddings…

A much more useful paradigm is inclusion versus inclusion

In other words if the goal is to build a society where the law is worth something and where people of every kind can be equal before it then you have to work out the means by which equality is possible …

That was the case with the marriage equality debate / moment in Australian history … gay people decided and campaigned convincingly to get a right that straight people had always had… v much like votes for women a century earlier… in my view only gay people should have had the right to vote on that issue… what right do I have to say that someone with a different sexual orientation should or should not possess a right that I take for granted? … it is an absurd proposition and yet ten years ago I might have had serious doubts (as I recall Julia Gillard did) about an idea that was a bit out there then … my doubt would have been about not knowing whether or not this was something gay people wanted… but, and although I know gay people who didn’t care about marriage equality, this became clear over time

… it was nice to see progress is possible when so many things are going backwards, especially for the poor old earth…

… of course it’s very sad that so many parts of the world remain to mired in bigoted assumptions and hate that they can’t come at this kind of tolerance, which is the only thing that can keep the world in the eight billion humans sense going round

…

On another, related, topic –

To take symbols and statements at face value (the red flag for instance) is … well… I think this is an unhelpful view … I don’t think that Trump is a very stable genius because he tells me so… I make my own judgement

What was the swastika MEANT to represent for the Nazis ?   not what it means to us

Having a crack at intolerance in the Islamic world – fair enough – big target … but there’s no kind of religiously organised orthodoxy – Christians, Jews, Buddhists gets away here – I can still smell Giordano Bruno burning at the stake and he had a lot of company down through the ages

From which I think it is fair to conclude that the opiate of the masses stuff was spot on

The bits of religion that are best – for instance in Buddhism and Daoism are so because they are the least like religion in the organised sense

The fact that laughter is always at someone’s expense is no reason to give up on laughter and the idea that political correctness has killed stand up comedy is … he he … a joke … it was funnier when you could do slapstick with spastics?  Trip up the blind woman?  But yes let’s mock all the religious garments!

a funny thing happened to me on the way to the firing squad

choosing between Hitler and Stalin feels uncomfortable

until you realize it’s because Stalin’s so much like Hitler you hate him

… of course, inside a Gulag, it will feel different

… so many habits in common, these two

if you started to write it all down

you might not live very long

… but that was once upon a time

today

brains have been well washed

love Trump

let’s hear it

FOUR MORE YEARS

they will be formative for someone

a funny thing happened to me on the way to the firing squad

I was thinking about Mao and also Zhou En Lai, Pol Pot, Idi Amin

why does Napoleon never get a mention?        

something in the metrics or maybe it’s the brandy?

… you never think of Charles Manson or Jack the Ripper

at a moment like this

but consider Caligula, Cortez, Pizarro, Genghis Khan

so many Magnificents and Terribles

the odd forgotten bloodthirsty pirate

you can blame kings and emperors and czars

the goes around comes around theory

a funny thing happened on the way to my reincarnation

karma? you’re kidding me

that can’t be right

even at the last

see spirits rise

here’s the second coming

dance in the old bones yet 

believe on me

yeah, right

still there are random attacks of history

I was in Saudi on my way to a beheading

(very popular there)

turned out to be mine

still working out who it was I offended

have to think fast though

in China you get a bullet back of the head (economical)

the emperor reigns forever

the trick though is living so long

try coal mine

try fireworks factory

get a job at a sewing machine

in India they have Modi

someone will bowl him out

think! in the Philippines they’ll just burst into your tin hovel these days

bang bang, don’t bother counting

out of your misery

so

who’s fucking up the world right now?

we come to

Duterte

Bolsonaro

Erdogan

Orban

every bully gets a kingdom

that’s how they hand them out

it’s never comfortable in the tumbril

why can’t they use the old carriages

they were plush and had suspension

but anyway it’s not for long

a funny thing happened

actually on the steps up to the guillotine

someone asked me what I believed

and before I could answer

they asked me why      

of course one prefers a conversation

to this sniping gotcha stuff

I held up a little mirror then

to see which world was gone

what’s in a name?

something far far better

of course you can shrug off this sort of thing

can’t matter much at such a time

but I did have a think about guilty pleasures

contrition will do you no good

confess!

we who are about to die

w t f – do we have to salute you?

what difference would it make?

over heaven and under the earth?

them’s dangerous ideas

here’s some hemlock – easy with it

washes down a treat

which kinds of monster take freedom away?

and as I live and breathe

(not long)

a secret silent as the grave

… will they give me one of those?

I doubt it

they say you can’t take it with you

…just watch me

a little Lethe dip?  why not?

cyanide capsule to clutch

and then we come to

the fool on the hill

the Trumped up worldfuck of our times

every totalitarianism is a fascism

there never was one without a nation

… it’s only ever in the service of a state…

or empire bloated in denial

socialism in one country was ‘our own fascism’

you wouldn’t have wanted to be

… well there’s actually quite a long list

some people survive just by being themselves

for others, that strategy’s poison

most people go peacefully in their sleep

that’s the dream run

hundred billion and counting

or there could be someone careless

could be a new disease

a funny thing happened to me on the way to the firing squad

I asked my how did I get here?

how did we?

they say the guillotined head has time for a haiku

but don’t try sonnets or villanelles

you might blurt a tanka out in the chair if the power’s on the blink

it’s muffled doggerel your hanged will spew under that choking hood

but for the firing squad, you get a smoke

can make a speech

always the joker

and why not

have you noticed how nothing ever happens when you’re starving to death

or take malaria for example

dad had it from the war

but emphysema killed him

very early on he asked ‘who is my enemy?’

it was what my father wanted to know

when the Reds locked up his mother

for not teaching their way

and then the fascists did it too

they weren’t called that yet then …

in the end though they weren’t fascist enough

no stomach for slaughtering Jews

Hitler had to do it for them

liberation?

not the nicest

but some days you have to choose

check in with the worldometer, you’ll get the idea

know the best medicine?

a funny thing happened – not telling

born free?

I don’t think so

plenty of chains to lose

the rest is silence

so they say

I wouldn’t know myself

.

In closing for now let me say that there are times when you really do have to decide which side you’re on… I think of my father in South America in ’38 deciding he would give up his nationality for the rest of his life because it was his duty to fight fascism and not to be consumed by it … (thinking about this because that’s where I’m up to in his autobiography right now)

And while we’re in that part of the world, a tribute to a role model there…

trad. emma villazón

La Chascona

(Casa de Neruda en Santiago)

todas estas partes son la casa

formas suavizadas por el tacto

por la tinta, por el tipo y el color iluminado

con dignidad de manos

este sol invernal, postrero para nosotros,

me dejó verter una bebida

y todo alrededor, risa obesa

por un altar de estrellas

el testigo de los árboles

una casa descuartizada para hacernos enteros

amigos pueblan los paseos entre

galera bajo cubierta, cama arriba

y el bar veraniego para coronar la vista

un estudio del fin del mundo

palabras lo llevaron hacia una frenética calma

canción –sin ningún acompañamiento requerido

el amor es el secreto aquí

vertemos a través de la tumba de las palabras

homenajes de todos los pueblos

ponemos corazones un momento aquí

para que su última pena

permanezca con nosotros 

recuerda, para eso hemos venido

también amo el océano que compartimos

hasta que tuve quince años

cuando eso viene de verdad

nuestra cruz es solo de estrellas

la desolación de una playa sigue con nosotros hoy                

y tú —capitán de tierra— la abeja que rescataste

de una telaraña está libre y también hoy con nosotros

porque las flores nos enseñaron amor, los pájaros enseñaron la canción

porque la palabra amable se encendió y el mundo fue uno

y la muerte, sí la muerte —sabemos que estás viniendo

estos son restos mortales    

una piedra secreta nos besó y sus cerros están con nosotros

solo es cuestión de la respiración

somos la pequeña tormenta                    

en un mar esmeralda

este es el primer amanecer en que despertamos para

espumar que el viento mueve —esta es nuestra orilla

marina, cielo y tierra de una bandera

yo entierro nuestra despedida en estas vidas

sabemos que la muerte está llegando

aquí está la estatua —elegante, ágil, como raíces invisibles

que llegan hasta sus antípodas   

hombre y mujer dónde están ahora?

bombas caen en palacio, la muerte debe estar cerca

pero lo olvido          

este regreso es tu triunfo  —siempre estuviste acá

fuego aúreo 

soy el ronquido esclavo     

y así se va el poema

cargado de luna

recuerda que esto fue una vez un mundo nuevo

hubo una vez un Cristo que nos iba a salvar

bpero ahora es el turno de que miremos arriba          

hijos e hijas de las estrellas

ahora, hermanos, hermanas, de una pena

temblamos al cadalso de pasos experimentados

sirenas corren por Santiago         

como si su vigilia nunca debiera terminar

la voz sigue todavía conmigo

continúas hablando

tu voz de todos los tiempos

mientras yo escuche          

habrá luz     

todo esto      

para vivir en un jardín con un mar

y todo lo que eso ofrece    

para extender el banquete pródigamente

para vivir con montañas

en el amor de la gente

para ver a través de este cielo, de estas ventanas

el simple milagro de que la verdad es un trabajo        

de que hacemos el pan cotidiano

La Chascona          

(Neruda’s house in Santiago)

the house is all these parts                      

ways smoothed by touch                                     

by ink, by type and colour lit                     

with dignity of hands                                          

this winter sun last for us                        

here let me pour a drink                                     

and all around, fat laughter                                           

for a shrine of stars                                                           

the witness of the trees                                        

a house dismembered to make us whole            

friends populate the walks between                 

galley below decks, bed above                           

the summer bar to crown the view                              

a world’s end study                                            

words worked him to a frenzied calm    

song – no accompaniment required         

love is the secret here                                         

we pour through the tomb of words      

tribute of all lands                                             

lay hearts a moment here                                 

for his last sorrow                                       

still with us                                                             

remember, that’s why we’ve come                             

I too love the ocean we shared                  

till I was fifteen years old                                 

when it comes to truth                                     

our cross is just of stars                                    

that desolation of a beach still with us here today

and you – land captain – the bee you rescued

from the web of a spider free with us here today too

because the flowers taught us love, birds taught song

because the kind word kindled and the world was one

and death, yes death – we know you are coming

these are all mortal remains                                 

a secret stone kiss and the heights are in us 

it’s only a matter of breathing                   

we’re the tiny storm                                                                    

in an emerald sea                                            

this is the first dawn we wake to             

foam the wind takes – this is our edge

sea, sky and the soil of a flag                           

I bury our farewell in these lives              

we know death is coming                                 

here is the statue – sleek, lithe, like the unseen roots

that reach to their antipodes                              

man and woman where are they now?        

bombs fall on the palace and death must be near

but I forget it                                                                     

this return is your triumph – you’re always here

gold fire                                                                  

I’m the slave snoring                                            

and there goes the poem                                  

plenty of moon                                                  

remember that this was once a new world

there was Christ once would save us     

but now it’s our turn to look up                      

sons and daughters of the stars                       

now brothers, sisters of a grief                          

we tremble the scaffold of practiced steps

sirens run through Santiago                               

as if his wake must never end                            

the voice still with me                                       

you keep speaking                                                

your voice of all times                                       

as long as I listen                                                  

there will be light                                                 

all this                                                                    

to live in a garden with the sea                     

and all it brings                                                      

to spread the banquet lavishly

to live with the mountains                             

in the people’s love                                         

to see through this sky, these windows

the simple miracle that truth is work       

we make our daily bread                               

…

Wow, the word ‘turd’ turned up About 33,600,000 results (0.36 seconds) … and I happen to know it’s a real thing…

Or let’s try will ‘o the wisp

About 8,670,000 results (0.38 seconds) 

Wait a minute … let’s look for God

About 3,380,000,000 results (0.57 seconds) 

Now we’re in the billions and last time I looked … still doesn’t exist…

And no amount of wishing…

But can be a lovely idea of course…

If you take it the right way…

Of course it disturbs me that you hold some of these opinions you espouse

… whether or not I could blame Rupert Murdoch is a moot point when there is so much for which to blame him… Rupert Murdoch is the single greatest threat to democracy in the world today

(and of course this fact will matter more or less depending on what value you place on democracy and what things you think it might threaten…)

… and yes I think there are fuckwits of all political persuasions… of course there are … power corrupts … in academia and likewise in the arts this is the most sickening when it corrupts judgement…

Of course, persons of any race can be racists … I think that it’s logical concomitant of the idea

Dogma has to be fought – with reason and with imagination, with openness to contradiction and to other views… these are aspects of liberation – as per the Paolo Freire model – which is all about listening to the people, the oppressed… it’s not about accusing or vilifying them… it’s about providing the means to people to understand the world and express a view about it… and the means of making their own future…

I didn’t know a conversation was meant to ‘help’ either of us, per se… I thought it was just what friends do… to talk … and in these times, and for poets who’ve been at it for a while, on paper/screen seems an apt place to talk… and yes, it’s good if helps one to work things out – what’s important, where one stands, where to go, how to go on… all important stuff

… I guess conversation then is a kind of gift

(you see how in just one paragraph you have changed my mind, opened a new way of seeing)

You don’t think the Trump presidency represents right wing resurgence? Wow! But I do hope yr right that it’s an aberration… I actually gave you a whole list of right wing resurgences in the poem above… a by no means exhaustive list … I think fascism (or near fascisms) is/are rising in the world today

I do resent the gaslighting accusation – it’s nonsensical (well, a gaslighter would say that)… but to be absolutely clear, I really think that ‘identity politics’ and ‘political correctness’ are essentially convenient fictions popular among right tribes … note I do not deny the existence of a left (among whose tribes I have counted myself for all my adult life), I merely think you’ve made a straw dog of em/ of us  

Here’s a definition from google by the way (font of all wisdom, of course) –

Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. It works much better than you may think. ... For example, in the movie Gaslight (1944), a man manipulates his wife to the point where she thinks she is losing her mind.

Here’s Psychology Today  on the warning signs

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/11-warning-signs-gaslighting

I’m not sure how reputable a source that is… but I do think it’s interesting how reversible such accusations could be in the sphere of politics

… You deny my reality by saying the left are authoritarian monsters and promoting fictions like political correctness

… I deny yr reality by saying that there is a worldwide right wing threat to all we hold dear…

There is a symmetry to this that Lyotard I think captures really interestingly discussing Holocaust denial in his book The differend

…

I don’t think there’s more I can say really

You are as wrong as you believe me to be

(nice to get things in proportion)…           

Fundamentally this left right thing is about who sits on which side of the speaker, so you could say that by definition the right has always already won (though I do not believe that is an acceptable definition)

…and yes, happy to stop discussing politics here… it’s obvious neither of us will convince the other

But I should say in closing the topic that it must have been clear to you from early on where my political commitments and beliefs lay (and I’m happy to acknowledge some are ‘beliefs’ and that there is ‘faith’ to keep, though not of a religious kind) … They haven’t really changed…

My commitments vary with evidence and fact (with the objective conditions as these change) but I declared myself a socialist hedonist at an early age… and before I’d really encountered Epicurus … I expressed the idea then and now again – everyone should have a good time … let’s make that the goal… yes, there are some things in the way … and what about all the other-than-human creatures (of whom we eat seventy billion a year, not counting the fish)? … still and all  I absolutely don’t think life is suffering or that there are any cosmic punishments or rewards in store… if there were then it would be our sensible duty to ignore them and carry on being as good to ourselves and each other as we possibly can be…

It does sadden me to think you think I’ve had some kind of dream run in life…

Luck? Yes I was born in the right skin in the right country at a good time… I had parents who really loved and cared for me, and who were great role models of hard work, persistence, adventure and imagination… and who were part of the worldwide struggle against fascism that kept Australia free… I had a free education and I took it as far as I could go… I have been able to express myself, to be social, to be a hermit, to be home, to be away, as I liked, because of the precious freedoms my imperfect society afforded me… I have been lucky in love and to be loved, wise enough to have not overdone substances so far…  And I’ve had the privilege of being able to share with others my imperfect words, images, ideas… I have been the kind of teacher/mentor who has helped many students in various parts of the world to realize their creative potential… I have friends everywhere and I really try to listen to them, and not only when they agree with me…

… perhaps being a teacher (or having been) is the most important thing for me… that kind of sharing – of skill and knowledge – is always about sharing power…

I have observed a tendency for power to attract fuckwits… Trump being the clearest contemporary avatar of the fact…

But I also know that there are plenty of cops who go into the police because they want a safer society, teachers who want to help people to learn, doctors who want to heal… in Chinese philosophy, if I had to choose a Confucianist, I’d choose Mencius – because even if Xunxi were right (that people basically are fuckwits) it would still be better to think of things the other way… it’s a little like Pascal’s wager concerning the probability of God’s existence (which I’m sure I would have found very convincing at that time)…

As far as ‘successes’ are concerned, I think I’ve worked pretty hard over a long period of time, taken a lot of risks and knockbacks, thrown a lot of hats into a lot of rings and had many swallowed up in the flames… or gone gurgling down into the mire…

I mean to say I applied for a vastly greater number of things than I got …

I know there’s a lot of suspicion around competitions and likewise around peer reviewing in academia … fair enough, BUT to consistently succeed in BLIND competitions is about the best measure of quality available to us while still breathing above ground… unless you want to count sales or royalties (and I’d rather not go there)

It’s posterity will tell… or not …

Do you think I am not disappointed at how under-appreciated my work is?  This might almost serve as definition of a poet in the English-speaking world… but disappointment is rarely helpful baggage… take only what’s required on the voyage…

Do I deserve to be discovered? Not so different from asking if the cockroach I just squashed deserved to die… it just had to stay outside and it would have all been okay… though some small mammal may have snacked…

We just do what we have to do… it is though nice when hard work is acknowledged and even if not much can be claimed for the results

I also think I’ve devoted a lot of time and energy to building community through friendship … which in my naïve way I suppose I take to be the direction in which both testaments, the Dao de Jing, the works of Marx and Mill and above all Epicurus have pointed me … je ne regrette rien

spreading the love … that’s the Jesus thing I like

calm and focus – there’s some Buddha I take on and why the image of Buddha is always a reminder to pay attention to the here and now… (as every haiku ought to be)

the pre-Socratics and all the origin texts from everywhere – the effort to understand on the basis of so little known…

philosophy to understand the world and more – there Marx’s 11^th Feuerbach thesis      

to better the world!

Liberty! – there’s Mill

the whole of our parliaments considered together (back to the Althing, back to the Areopagus, the Forum) and argument and deciding – these are who we are … we in the sense of me knowing and generalising my tradition (while hoping to respect the others, at least to the extent they’ll respect mine… and in the spirit of generosity and luck and privilege… maybe just a little more)

Socrates, Plato and all of their interlocutors… the conversation… and Aristotle – even better

every day I discover more members of the cast

(life’s too short to meet them all)

more and more of them are poets

the ones with religious leanings slough off

… churches and temples … just not very helpful

and that goes for pyramids (all sorts, every monument to death)

no – we need to stick with life while we’ve got the puff

… poetry as part of the broader world-bettering project !

Because art – not as object or commodity – because art as the thing you do

(garden, novel, painting, dance, music making, publishing, collaborating, making conversation

because ART)

is the opposite of alienation

ART IS THE CURE

!

.

I would propose that if we choose to go one

(and I’m perfectly happy to stop)…

we should do it by poems alone

and so here’s mine for today:

playing with the tomograph

imagine me

sliced right down the middle

equal halves

and everyone can see in

like that cow Damien Hirst did

equal halves

dark ages and here’s my face to light

who to be?

which one?

think of a balanced diet

or mongrel me

go wild with the knife

all kinds of cuts

and ways to baste

the city and my woods

where did I stop being this that?

make a cartwheel once we were

(Aristophanes’ idea)

according to Plato, as he recalls

(see how third hand it all goes)

takes a while to work it out

by I’m the magic pudding

(that’s why always running off)

music and paint

I must balance with words

when out of puff

walk the walk (how else?)

I swam in a pool of genes

came clean

towelled off

nobody’s ancestor

what they knew would chill the blood

this is how I have my nose

curly locks

wry ironies

such lungs

the sturdy heart I tricked

think of it as a club

the family you won’t know

accept a slice

please won’t you?

they took off their pants

so I could be

each morning erect a statue to fact

and too much information

because I am them

and they are me

it’s all a raft to cling

I and everyone goes under

someone said

‘what they don’t know won’t hurt’

but here we are wondering

will it be sinister

what if murderers?

someone has to have been

stories they never told us

ones they were never told

these must hold the key

as with the air we breathe

once theirs

and pass it on                

they forgot so we’d be free

and ask no thanks

but heaven knows them

cloud down glad watch over

as eyes of an eternity

live up and make a reputation 

or we could lower the tone

whichever way

we’re in the dark

joy weeps, won’t it

what are the odds?

(that’s a thing you hear)

just a body in a billion years

imagine me

sliced right

must not

must never

think of them

but always wake to light

>>> 

a poet's fantasy #1

we write for the time when

poetry will be broadcast

24 hours a day

from stations dedicated

by epoch and genre

with the right kind of music accompanying

broadcast by poets all shapes and sizes

in every language too

no advertising

(no forms debased!)

the work will be

occasional and abstract

pastoral historical comical

allegorical

every syllable

gospel

we write for the day

poems will be draped from public buildings

from slam palaces (once casinos, banks)

from the humblest hovel

no one will buy a tent

but shows its poem to the sun and stars

the cardboard street dweller

will be ashamed not to have some verses

penned for fairweather spells

for donations

every event public and private

will be presaged by poetry

introduced with verses of the right kind

of proper weight –

solemnity

piss taken too in equal parts

seduction is the work of verse

it's how the race goes on

and off the rails as well

everything must be out of control

and in time-honoured measures –

iamb, trochée,

dithyramb best

there's a logical conclusion

we have to get beyond

we shall ambivalate

neologize

no longer shall we die for words

we'll make em up instead

we're much past reason

with the heart

and delve down deep

words under words

and over sky

who knows what we'll fish up?

there's a better world a comin'

perhaps no one is listening today

but we have already invented a future where

the legislators will be acknowledged

parliament will be full of them

the people with the broadest minds

will hone the rules down to a few

and this will go on everywhere

around the piano

behind a guitar

wherever rhythm finds the day

words will follow suit

the xenophobes won't even line

history's dustbin

suits will have been picked threadbare

because we'll all be thinking then

I'd rather be making a poem

a song

a painting

a garden

a house

as perfect as a poem

all

the fools in charge

the generals will have come to their feeble senses

and graduated to the nursery rhyme

apt saws will keep them from doing harm

a stitch in time will save them nine

they'll look before they leap

there won't be weapons any more

or borders, guards

every dog will be beatific

poets!

a season of love is coming

it's not a kingdom

it's on Earth

and we won't say republic

the whole of the world will be out of doors

we'll call our polity the picnic

and we'll continue afternoon

as long as suits

and we'll imbibe

freely but wisely

we'll each of us

be muse and mentor

standard bearer, hack

who is there won't anthologize,

while days away in praise of skies?

we'll cut our purse to suit the cloth

once money's from the picture

poems will be the currency!

Ginsberg wants to pay with good looks

but some of us are godawful ugly

still sing like angels

(better, cause we're real)

poetry's the precious thing

not so for rarity

but for abundance

appreciated!

known! 

poems in the letterbox

every magazine's for poetry

and every poem's accepted too

not because standards have fallen

far from it

no, because every poem is good

everyone knows how poetry's done

cause poetry's for everyone

and rings in the air when read aloud

and though still chock with mysteries

every poem is understood

because in the time to be

poetry will be the way of things

poetry will rule

ubiquitous poetic spirit

as wise as worldly

philosophers bow

before the fact concise

made popular, particular

made portable

made prompt

but hark I hear a blowfly drone

there is a smell of something rots

was creature once as we

it seems a long way to the light

when you sing from the foot of the well

yes poets, we write from dark times

and darker

this was a year of darkness coming

we may be playing with ourselves now

we have that old defence

we're doing the best we can

we write now for the time when

truth has set all free

for the world come green

we're to observe

make paradise our paean!

we're bringing truth back into the picture,

with justice, with freedom, with right

but we must compose a way there too

a way that can't be known yet

begins with some simple words

they won't swallow manifesto

if you call it that these days

o brave new world that we're beginning

no church could be as broad as this

as ours

the hundred flowers are blooming

the hundred styles and modes contend

here's Cassandra

poets, on our collective tombstone

these LED lights coloured, flashing

BEWARE WHAT YOU WISH FOR

fair enough, she has a point

and there's Zarathustra

railing from heights

but let's not let that get fascistic

Blake weighs black with joy

Whitman wags his tail

Dickinson's still working in doors

Sappho's on the way

o poets

we live for such a time

beyond ourselves

we live

!