A Conversation in and out of poetry with Jean Kent

 A Conversation in and out of poetry with Jean Kent 

Jean Kent grew up in rural Queensland and now lives at Lake Macquarie, NSW. Eight books of her poetry have been published: the most recent are The Hour of Silvered Mullet (Pitt Street Poetry, 2015) and Paris in my Pocket (PSP, 2016). Her awards include the Anne Elder Prize, Dame Mary Gilmore Award, Josephine Ulrick Prize, Somerset Prize and runner-up for the Newcastle Prize. She has received several writing grants from the Australia Council, including Overseas Residencies in Paris in 1994 and 2011. Jean has also worked as an educational psychologist, counsellor in TAFE colleges and teacher of creative writing. Her website is jeankent.net.au

 

And today on the Daily Kit, a conversation with poet, Jean Kent.

 

KIT

I’ll put my pumpkins here because Jean refers to it/them immediately below

 

the pumpkins! 

in corona-time

they are the only ones travelling now

they are joining the dots

swell connected

they are rising

they are rhizome of the open air

world revolution a few thoughts away

 

this is their year

umbrella crowded

solar collectors 

 

take the fences 

scale the bath

they escape all bounds

 

carbs!  nomad empire!

day by day wilted and more 

fast, well ahead of winter

 

no social distancing with them

 

mosquitoes with

more otherworldly 

 

shrink underleaf to be among

every lantern head one of us kin

we’re all of us buried there

in the company of pumpkins  

 

in soup and scone 

in fresh invention

 

of course we cannot picture

those who have already

gone to a better place

 

 

…

 

actually I now see that was not the poem

… seems I had two butternuts!

I think it was this one (kind of related!)

 

among the butternuts

in plague time

 

I hear the hammering of those at home

and have these Bunnings thoughts myself

but know I shouldn’t go

 

it’s sunlight tops the trilling here

a yellow butterfly makes light

of this the moment following

 

sky grey enough to show its will

it’s sunshine keys the colour

we keep an open window

 

and let the day in still

 

 

 

 

 

JEAN
Well, we’ve done it again.  I was just talking to you in my head as a prelude to sitting down at the laptop to talk in an email, when there was a ping! 

I saw your message had arrived… but as I was on the way to empty the scraps in the compost and check the pumpkin vine that has planted itself there, I did all that  … then spontaneously took ‘a turn around the garden’ … before coming back inside to read your message. Which, amazingly, was accompanied by a link to your “Take a Turn’ (around the garden) song. 

 

 As we seem to be on the same track with these gardening ideas — and, I think, their connections to poems — I was hoping to carry on talking about a message you sent previously, which I’ve copied in here: 

 

"I think the main trick to growing pumpkins (and possibly just about anything) is to not have the intention... it's all very well NOT preparing a bed or NOT digging in the compost... but once yv inwardly entertained the hope of pumpkins the whole project is doomed” 

 

This describes rather beautifully the way I write poems. I don’t actually plan to write them. And I am hopeless at the kind of ‘Write a Poem’ exercise that other people seem to fly with in writing workshops. 

 

But I think I do a lot of subconscious preparation of my writing garden … making compost out of journal notes and diaries, pottering about in my real garden (where I’m probably clearing my mind of too much rational thought), reading lots (other people’s books, both poems and prose, as well as old notebooks of my own) … and just letting random seeds germinate and grow however they want to, before I start looking to see if they’ve actually become poems. There are an awful lot of wild vines that just linger in early drafts for years before I find a ripe pumpkin.

 

You seem to have an extraordinary ability to be always writing drafts for new poems — a poem a day? — which I suspect is a really good habit to develop. But the nearest I can come to that is making very brief diary notes each night — they are very prosaic and really just records of what is happening here, but I do slip in little observations of any birds that have visited, or things I’ve noticed — and always, I mention the weather.  A line or two that could become a poem might also go into a separate notebook, but I don’t have any discipline with that. I’ve always had times of intense poetry writing and other periods when it just doesn’t happen — or if I try to do it, it doesn’t work well — so I’ve learned to live with the idea that for me, at least, things can’t be forced too much. 

 

Having said that, I should probably add that my greatest leap toward writing reasonable poems probably happened after I spent a year writing the drafts of two novels. I knew I had limited time because I’d given up my TAFE counselling job to take up a grant, so I was very disciplined. I sat down every day and worked solidly — and it’s probably that exercising of the word muscles which led to poems being written on the side as well.  The novels are still sitting unloved in the filing cabinet, but over the year or so, the poems just seemed to improve. And people wanted to publish them, which is always a good nudge to writing more.

 

In this time of enforced social isolating, I’ve noticed there’s an idea floating around that the creative people should suddenly become very productive.  Suddenly? And immediately?? After all, there’s a lot for us to respond to, isn’t there? Well, yes, but there’s also a very different emotional atmosphere, and it’s not one that I find very conducive to poetry writing.  The big difference for me at present is not that there’s plenty of enforced staying at home — I would happily do that normally, and love it when it’s possible — but that there is so much anxiety in the air and I’ve had to adjust my normal timetable to minimise that. A dose of daily news in the morning feels important, but it is death to calm writing -- for me, anyway.

 

What I’ve actually found the last few weeks good for is revision.  Fortunately I have a big stack of poems that haven’t quite produced good pumpkins yet, so I’ve been pruning and pinching back unruly runners and looking for the flowers to keep. It could be just hallucinatory relief that I’m able to distract myself doing this, but I’m hopeful about what I’m doing. 

 

This idea of pruning and revising takes me back to all the drafting that you do. There’s obviously some rigorous cutting and walking around the edges of the early versions that occurs before you arrive at the poems that go into your books. Your ‘Butternuts’ poem, for instance, has a wonderful clarity and attention to just the right imagery that strikes home now “in the time of plague"— the ’not-going to Bunnings’ although home handyman activity has become irresistible to many people, the consolations of sunshine and a yellow butterfly, the allowing in of daylight — all terribly simple, but a really accurate and acutely affecting summary of how we’re living. I love it when poetry can take what should be such everyday things and make them magical and unforgettable. 

 

This is like a gift of a poem that just arrived when you walked out your door … and yet, poems like this don’t just arrive (or not very often, anyway).  I tend to believe they come after there has been a lot of subliminal preparation. Do you agree?

 

 

KIT

Ah well, Jean, the thing about habits … as I was recently remarking to Beth Spencer… is that they’re hard to break … she was saying how amazed certain people might be that I keep churning it (poem drafts) out with monotonous regularity (not her words) …

let us not forget how dimly such habits are viewed in certain circles! …

… how disparagingly the word ‘prolific’ may be used

(though mainly by the ‘precious’, whom we might as easily disparage)

 

anyway the point I made to Beth was that I’m at a stage where it would be a lot harder for me not to do it … it would be frustrating, disappointing, etc … I’d be lost

 

but that does not mean that expecting daily productivity of yourself is necessarily a good thing… it just happens to be a thing I’m stuck with, so might as well flaunt…

ours is a country with a frankly remarkable number of good poets, and most of them getting better as they go… but not many can be as regular as me… so (annoying as that must be to many) I suppose it’s become my brand

 

… I do think there is a problem with daily production on topics I won’t call random, but let’s say as they come which is that that production saps the energy you might be otherwise directing towards MAJOR PROJECTS… of which there are currently and always (at least notionally) quite a queue…

… ah the unloved novels on the shelf

… and not only mine … but dad’s!

Then there’s the mountain to weed and prune problem

Which is a lot like the five acre problem

(five acres /2 ha being nothing with beasts, but an astounding amount  of territory without em

… lantana! privet! Need I say more?)

the piles from project 366 !   and their division simply into possible m/s material is a huge task …

thousands of pages to process towards possible m/ss, mostly no doubt for books that won’t happen

 

and yet with daily production, I often find that by mid-morning I’ve produced a draft of something definitely new though usually connected with something from before … and that’s a lot of energy gone that might have gone into a story or whatever …

 

I think I keep going this way because I think I’m getting better at it and simply because the material’s there… it keeps presenting to me

 

Day is so fragmented …or as Nietzsche said – the day has a hundred pockets for whoever has the stuff to put in em…

 

And that of course is a topic in itself, and one appropriate to this apparently diaristic moment we find ourselves in 

Of what does the day consist ? … if you are cursed/blessed with this life of making ?

 

in the one day

here’s what I remember –

 

hey in the daybright

first thingily

with fences over

the chewing too

 

let sleep have back again, but no

it’s all I have of the dream

 

for little aches of waking

cow, camel

crossed my eyes, I stretched

sat on an esky that wasn’t there

I salute the risen one

 

now day before me spread

invisible with doors

 

through webs I went

 

it is a vast thing to be crossing

insect over

the continent so

 

climb desert

make a forest way

 

afoot about and acre it

so many missing already

with hardly a cynical thought

 

but lung-full, hill up, April-ing

thought fire, but not yet

 

bring kindling now, pile up

and under roof where dry

 

gather the family – wallabeasts

swampies and now the choughs have come

taken over from the kookas’ shift

and bowerbirds still do

 

in a dragonfly’s ponder hover

iridescence catching

follow

 

yellow of paper wings

feathers not much

 

bees bigger than ever now

 

a garden tinker all there is

first round that was

 

all in a day’s and I won’t call it work

 

a wonder that the flightless

have so much to declare

 

.

 

must be the ancestral dream

passed down

from

what’s my name?

 

and all along I knew

there never was the time to be here

 

only way out of my head

with this song is

write another one

 

take it day at a time

 

among my branches birds ignore

the every supplicating call

 

scratched initials in the paint

saw them

already there

 

(these are some lightly revised fragments from #105 on the daily kit)

 

 

For some reason the corona-capers have been particularly productive ideas wise

… and reflecting on that I think it’s because this is a moment of such hope --- hope that the world might wake up … and for instance think about the other creatures on the planet (this is kind of what today’s and yesterday’s drafts were about for me [#109 ‘wingless creatures’, #110 ‘under house arrest’])… that despite the evil-greed lunacy of a Trump, there’s hope that the reset button may send us down a better track 

But I totally agree about the ‘Write a Poem’ exercise… and what a hypocrite it makes me… though I have doled it out for decades, I’ve only ever myself come spontaneously to the makings of a poem …

(this all leads to the question of the teachability of poetry making or of any creative activity… perhaps a topic for later?)

.. let me be careful with that word ‘spontaneous’ though … I think ‘inspiration’ (like all signed-up-for religion) is a myth for the feeble minded … poems come from somewhere and if you want to think you’re visited by angels or aliens, well that’s your business … but in my book it’s up there with the spirits of the dead visiting you in dreams … yes, consciousness comes from somewhere, but the dead don’t have spirits and they don’t visit us in dreams

(I say this as one who very regularly sees and converses with his deceased parents in dreams… and I would say that, after my father’s death, he appeared to me pretty well daily in dreams for at least five years … so I do see where this is coming from, but it has not yet rotted my mind)

 

…

now to the question of ‘subliminal preparation’ and the unconsciousness of artmaking in general… I like this formulation – that poetrymaking is an art of knowing and not … and at the same time (or closely in turns)… it can’t be just one or the other

… and in this way the experience of making art mirrors that of appreciating it … art works when/because it changes you because you cannot have known beforehand where precisely it was going … this is most obvious in the case of a story (no point reading if you know already how things end up) but it applies I think equally to all art … art being our means of making new worlds/making the world new … that is the point of doing it, of being with it

 

… and, believe it or not, it always comes from somewhere

 

a good analogy is in the (largely) involuntary art of dreaming… everything is the dream is from somewhere… Freud and Jung and others got us on the helpful track of seeing this all as systematic (culturally and personally)… and each of them with a kind of mumbo-jumbo that came from somewhere … they were as we all are, of our time and of our place and culture and language

…

But dreams are so important for the creative process, for every creative process I think – by analogy and for actual material … I particularly love that hypnagogic space you get into between waking and sleep where you can see the dream imagery and you can’t control it but you can tell it … and of course this comes from somewhere …  you know like you can see the colours and the shapes from what you’ve been painting, hear the new tune (the tune evolving) because although the strings aren’t in your hands now, they are still in your head … and then what will you remember?  Are able to achieve what you have been given while dreaming or almost dreaming … I mean – are your hands and your words and your eye in the waking world up to what the mind has given?   Often not, I find!

 

But one of the up-sides of jetlag (something we won’t be getting for a while now I suspect) is more time spent in that hypnagogic creative space … I started writing ‘jetlag series’ a few years ago

and as part of the personal Project 366 debrief I began recently collecting them into the one file … and found that I really have a lot of dream-related material to develop

… so there’s another project to which I must regularly return!

 

I think it’s also important to acknowledge the unconsciousness of presence to the waking world as well … the role of memory in this and the role of that unconsciousness in all art making… I frequently realize that I have an image in mind and to which subliminal thought frequently returns – a streetcorner somewhere, a day with someone gone, a flight of stairs, a shopfront – mainly from childhood , these things I guess … (I imagine people with major traumas have a lot more of this and it is haunting and horrible for them)  …

 

Anyway, in amongst that subliminal matter, I catch myself thinking – I wasn’t aware of that, but that’s where I’ve been going all this while …I didn’t mean to be but that’s where I was just now…

My book of mother (which I thank you for so generously reading the draft of, Jean) is full of that sort of stuff, so I know you know what I mean… Kurt Vonnegut actualized this in Slaughterhouse 5  … which I think was a brilliant idea…

 

… everything’s from somewhere … but of course ambiguously so…

Does it matter if we know where ideas, images etc are from?

Yes to the extent that we mustn’t plagiarize (wittingly or otherwise)

but beyond that – no, it doesn’t matter… what matters is what you make from it!

 

I love that passage at the end of The Odyssey where Odyssesus court bard appears after all of the suitors have been slaughtered and says – spare me, I’m inspired by the gods and b t w, I make up all my own material …  Phemius says it all!

 

But right now where we are, I feel ataraxia  is my overarching project … to attempt to do justice in poetry to this ancient idea of the equanimity, the calm, the friendship

 

I feel oddly proselytic about it … being ‘in the green’ is the way to save it and ourselves

 

I propose an anthology –

                                                                                                                   

The Poem in the Garden

!

now would be a time for that!

 

but anyway – just an idea

over to you now, Jean

 

b t w – I don’t believe your notes could be prosaic, Jean!

But maybe it’s time to see a draft of yours on the way?

 

 

JEAN

As always, you’ve responded with an abundance of thoughtfulness and surprises, Kit!  I think we would need to write an entire book to cover all these ideas and questions.  

 

Sadly, I have a couple of other book-length projects that are calling me with urgent needs to be finished, so for now I shall just reply to a few of your thoughts.

 

Firstly, I do want to say that the word ‘prolific’ should not always be taken as a criticism. I really admire your dedication and immersion in poetry —  your writing every day is a really important part of that (and yes, I understand absolutely that you might be lost if you couldn’t do it — I am too, if life intervenes too much so that I can’t write). 

 

I also want to say: as long as you can be prolific, make the most of it!

 

I wish I could still work at the enthusiastic pace that you’re maintaining — when I was younger, I probably was better able to do this, and filled so many notebooks with drafts of poems and stories … but now I’ve reached an age where I suddenly realise that I get tired and run out of both creative and physical puff sooner. It feels important now to focus on gathering in what I've already begun and trying to get the books finished. I know creative people are supposed to be able to go on well into their later years, but even for typing things up you need to have good eyesight and concentration.  As well as the free time to do the work … 

 

You mentioned in one of your other conversations — with Magdalena Ball, I think — that you used to wonder why your father didn’t just "get on with it" and finish his novel, but now that you’ve passed 60 you start to understand how hard that might be. Well, as I’m getting closer to 70, I certainly can sympathise with your father. I really need another lifetime to do all the things I’d like to, but there are more constraints now — and when there are other interruptions like family members being ill or dying, sometimes I do wonder how much any of this writing really matters. Would anybody care if there wasn’t another book from me? I would be disappointed, of course, but we are all such small specks of being … and only a very few of us are going to leave much that will be remembered for very long. 

 

Getting back to the more positive topic of your morning drafts, however, I do agree that this is a good practice.  When I am ’teaching’ — I recommend that people write each day.  It makes perfect sense to me that if we do this, we have a much better likelihood of moving from some kind of stuttering start toward at least the beginnings of a poem. I don’t believe in inspiration, either. So much of what I do is just hard work.  From a pretty messy first draft where I don’t know where I’m going, I have to keep going back and refining, and that means discipline and rational control, applied to what may have been intuitive to begin with. 

 

 I really like the point in your draft where you write:

only way out of my head 

with this song is 

write another one

 

Yes! And although you may be drawing on a dream for your poem, for me it starts to come alive when real details emerge (admittedly they’re enigmatic, but they feel like they are yours, rather than any one else’s):

 

 

for little aches of waking 

cow, camel

crossed my eyes, I stretched

sat on an esky that wasn’t there

 

 

My own drafts at the moment are coming from a funny mixture of family memories and research. For previous poems, I’ve written a lot from triggers of memory — but these are rather different. The book I am really trying to finish is based on the experiences of my maternal grandparents during World War1. It’s a big story, which is personal because these people have always been in the background of my life — but at the same time, it’s quite a quest into the unknown as my grandmother died in 1927, so has always been a mythical figure. And although I knew my grandfather as a child (and lived in the same house -- my mother’s childhood home -- for a year or so), he died when I was 15. His diaries from the war are from part of his life that was never talked about, and my grandmother’s letters to him are also something I knew nothing about until fairly recently. This is all fascinating to me, of course, but will it make good poetry to interest other people?  There is a definite narrative which I want to follow —which helps. I can spur myself towards new poems by bouncing off others or by immersing myself in what my grandparents are actually doing at particular times, developing some drama because of the contrasts in their lives, for instance. And by some odd coincidence, the part I’m mostly filling in now is 1918-1919, when Spanish flu is going to affect them.  I had already written a poem about the Qld-NSW border being closed and them having to go into quarantine at Wallangarra on their way home to Dalby after my grandfather returned from the war … I never expected a couple of years ago that that situation would happen again!

 

I’m usually reluctant to let people see drafts when they’re very new, but here’s one that I hope is going to be towards the end of the book.

 

 

A Christening

(25^th April, 1921)

 

It isn’t only wars that kill.
Though this is the day for remembering
that, the returned Anzacs in their hats
with brims brooched up under rising suns
carrying the shadows of lost men
in those pockets between felt

called again to attention
as they gather in their small troops
around rising memorials
in country towns.

My mother in her long fall
of christening dress, at one week old,
won’t remember whether sun slanted
on her newly named, lace-bonneted head—
but she will carry forever the name
of the aunt who was felled,
not by a world war, but
by a whirl of infection—

gathering troops of measles germs
that no one in 1914 
could combat.

Her parents on this remembering day
are walking away from shadows,
wearing the still warm
April sun of Dalby
like cloaks of hope to shield them
as the black soil plains flatten their world 

into a safe bivouac between ridges,
the Last Post a faint tease in my mother’s
ears, the small town saluting,
stilled, before the coming chill.

 

As you can see, I’m working very much in the past, whereas your current focus is on the present, and how we might go into the future. 

 

I really like your goal of attempting "to do justice in poetry to this ancient idea of the equanimity, the calm, the friendship”— 

 

that is very much what is at the heart of this grandparents’ war book of mine. I’ve had to include scenes from the war — that was an ordeal to write, as I have no stomach for the horror of it, at all — but it's the perseverance and positive determination to stay alive and make the most of their lives that I really want to celebrate.  And their story was supposed to end ‘in the garden’ — back on the farming property my grandfather bought in 1919. Sadly, that didn’t last long, because my grandmother died in childbirth. But it was a vision that sustained them during the war years, and I think they passed on that idea to their children, who then passed it on in turn. 

 

On that note, I think it is time for me to go out 'into the green' here. Whatever else I stuff "into the pockets of the day” (I do love that phrase!), it’s necessary to always have at least a glimpse of garden. Or sky … or trees … 

 

Over to you again!

 

 

 

KIT

Hats carrying the shadows of lost men…

Not only wars that kill!

I think it is a very good moment to be considering the world a century back…

They came from war to pandemic and it worries me now that Trump’s last desperate effort might be to take us from pandemic to war (possibly seeing Kim Jong Un’s likely demise as an opportunity)… not meaning to alarm you, Jean

 

There’s so much sadness we’re from, so much sadness we’ve survived… so much hidden from us intentionally or not, to spare us the pain of the past

 

I see more and more how my dad had spared us so much of where we were from in the interests of being Australian, because, as far as he could see – and having had quite a bit of choice – this was the best kind of human one could choose to be … luckiest, best chance at

 

I think my father was possibly the luckiest refugee in the whole history of asylum seeking… and he was grateful and he gave back, in New Guinea, in Borneo, in Japan with occupation and with shrapnet and malaria he carried to the grave at 91 … I think I’ve told you I’m gradually making my way through his massive unpublished autobiography (which actually ends when he joins the AIF… so really it’s the story of a Hungarian becoming an Australian in the process of getting around the world)

…. now in Volume IV it’s mid 1938 and dad’s in Montevideo, and thinks they might have just commissioned the first ping pong (sorry, table tennis) table ever built there, but he’s not sure…

Then en route to Brazil another table they have built becomes for some time inaccessible in the hold of their otherwise luxurious ship because a boa constrictor (bound for a Sao Paolo zoo) has taken up residence in and amongst it … I think yr beginning to get the flavor of the thing! Boys Own stuff!

 

SO!

I am quite engaged with the past, as you already know from a book of mother…

But dad’s side has always interested me more… more mysteries there… more on which to speculate AND

I feel I have duties to perform…

Like for instance getting that autobio published in some shape or form

 

I too had a grandparentless childhood – one set to the war in Europe and related horrors, one grandmother to asthma when I was not quite three (I remember being in her lap on the front steps of the house) and a grandfather (RAN WWII below decks hero) from whom my mother estranged herself.

 

I’m not sure if I’ve told you this, Jean, but when dad died he left me and my brother a list of works he wanted us to complete or edit… one is the novel under the pool table – The Man From Overdraft (commenced in 1966, never completed)… another is the autobiography… I’m sure I won’t tackle everything on the list but I’m determined to give something a crack … I’m just in a preparatory phase now… as you know I have a few other pots on the boil and backburner myself…

 

And ATARXIA is the main one and the overarching principle, as you have identified

 

…yes the garden! I wrote this for you today:

 

leaflight

a dance with the old bones

in Groundhog Year

 

 

look into day

go unseen – here!

Nietzsche’s hundred pockets

 

every mad step inspired

plenty of life

not enough lives!

 

plague at the gate

I have called it forever

now it comes catching the clock

 

I promise I won’t look

green thought, green shade

by blade and later leaf it

 

socks worn through

why worry?

in person with the petal

 

and underwing

swing by

I love a branch impeded view

 

keep the tree

sweep far off

in rounds

 

and kid ourselves a garden

(doctors will find them in us as well)

sunbright

 

wind to its old tricks

weather and it comes to seasons

everyone is rising here

 

everyone lays low

a Mr Lincoln whiff that red

look around

 

in air and under all about

ask myself

where is that music (?)

 

day makes of me

forget the world, remember this self

here where I am at home

 

 

Isn’t the corona-cosmos telling us all to wake up (or maybe go back to dreaming) and be in the garden, be with the garden…  even if that, too, is illusion… belong!  treat yourself as a member!

 

The ship’s going down all around us … but it turns out this was what we had to lose… maybe it’s not too late?

 

 

 

JEAN

 

I love a branch impeded view …

 

Ah, yes … Perhaps that should be the first line of a new anthem for this country? 

 

Your poem immediately made me look out my window and feel very grateful for this garden-centred home we have. I took some photos for you of the view from my desk just after I finished reading … 

 

Here’s the first one, catching a bit of sky. 

There is so much in this poem of yours that strikes home for me. 

I love all the sudden changes and paradoxes … everyone rising / everyone laying low … That leap from the wondrously mundane "socks worn through" to the lovely surprise of "in person with the petal” ... 

 

So many shifts in time and place … the plague at the gate, now, like something we have been waiting for … And the garden, in the mind from past and present poetry — as well as "in the body" for doctors to find! 

 

There is all the flicker and trickery of leaflight here. So much shadow, as well as beauty and a joke or two. Then circling back to the "self / ‘here where I am at home". Every time I read it, I marvel at how easily the words twist and surprise. 

 

Of course, I thought I would write back and say thank you straight away … so why has a whole week gone by before I’ve managed to even type a line? 

 

For those of us lucky enough to have such a view — or garden — this shouldn’t be such a difficult time to STAY AT HOME. This sort of social isolation is my preferred way of living, normally — but as I’ve probably already said, the calm that normally comes from just being at home each day, looking out through our trees to glimpses of lake or sky, is much harder to find at present. There’s not even as much time to just be in the garden — or to sit at the desk.

 

I have been distracted from carrying on this conversation so many times! Partly, it’s because I can never write very well when the world around me is upset — but it’s also very much a result of so many new requirements for this way of living. More demands to be present in the ‘virtual world’, for one … like having to dodge too many requests to do Zoom appearances, or record videos of myself reading poems (horrible … I don’t know how anyone does this looking at themselves on a phone or laptop. It was hard enough just reading to Martin and his camera, quite a different sort of experience from having real people in front of me, reacting) … 

 

Is this a change in the way we will have to send our poems into the world from now on? Or is it all going to quieten down, in a little while, so that people will be happy to read from the page again -- or at least go back to listening to our voices, rather than wanting to see us looking peculiar, lined up like prisoners for mugshots, against the laptop or phone screen?  I can understand that people may be going through withdrawal symptoms now that live readings can’t happen … but it’s been a bit exhausting even having to look at so many writers demanding to be noticed.  I suppose it’s the poets’ equivalent of the rest of the world needing to have Zoom Dinner Parties, so that they can still be seen by their friends. I’m probably sounding like an old fossil, because this is such a change from the way I discovered poetry myself. When I finally heard some real poets reading their work — and even saw them, in person, quite some distance away — it was extraordinarily exciting. That was a reading in 1970, with Bruce Dawe and Judith Wright — amongst others — and I still feel awestruck, remembering it.

 

(I am mostly looking at the laptop now — but there are still trees in view if I glance up …)

There are also more complications at present when it comes to keeping in contact with people who can’t be reached electronically -- like my 99 year old mother, in her Nursing Home 1,000 km away in Toowoomba, without a phone. I thought I would be very old-fashioned and send her a letter for Mother’s Day — that was fine (even if it did take me a long time to get into the right state of mind to think of anything to say to her), but then I realised that Australia Post is running very slow at present, so there is no way the letter would reach her in time. So, how about a bunch of flowers — ordered online for delivery from a florist nearby? Toowoomba is called a Garden City, after all — but apparently most of the flowers for its florists have to be flown in from other places. And of course, hardly any of those planes are flying there now. Add to that the fact that most people won’t be able to visit their mothers this Sunday, and you have a massive demand for flowers -- only those people who put in their orders well in advance have any hope of getting them delivered! 

I am talking about this because I suspect it is the kind of ‘minor’ disruption which adds to the feeling of lost control over our lives, which adds to general panic at present. I’d love to think that more people might take this opportunity to settle into a more thoughtful, slower way of life, but I suspect it will take more than six weeks for us all to learn how to damp down the anxiety and adapt.  As creative people who’ve already had to work out how to live with open-ended days, we probably have survival techniques we’ve learned which make it easier for us to stay at home and feel we’re doing something meaningful — one of mine is knowing that what could be mistaken by others for just pottering around in the garden is actually ‘work’ — because (I have to trust in this) it will lead to words on a page sometime… We mostly know we have to be disciplined too. It helps to have some goal in mind, whether it’s just getting that one poem right, or trying to get together enough for a book. 

My early adult years were just post Woodstock, so when I think about going "back to the garden", I can’t help hearing Joni Mitchell singing that … As Baby Boomers, we had a privileged childhood in lots of ways, but it was still one that had the shadow of war experiences (and our parents’ awareness of deprivation during those years as well as during the Depression) … There wasn’t the same insistence of having a huge house (which needs two incomes to cover the mortgage), or making lots of money — why? for what? I’m not sure.  As the daughter of a bank manager, I should know — but interestingly, my father’s attitude to money was that it was there for him to lend to people to help them live adequately, not for the bank to make profits. 

I really hope you can get your father’s autobiography finished and published.  What a gift to have it to read, anyway!  I’m not really surprised it ends when he goes into the AIF.  The Boys Own Adventure was probably what he preferred to remember. And I understand about feeling you have ‘duties to perform’. When we are the custodians of history, that adds another dimension (and urgency) to what we write. 

 

My father also lived with the after-effects of being in New Guinea during WW2.  He was diagnosed with TB when I was 6, and though he managed to keep working for some years after some very disruptive hospitalisation, he had to retire early — at 55  — which was actually after he’d been working for 42 years, because he’d had to go into the bank aged 13, rather than go on to secondary school during the 1920s Depression. And Martin’s parents, of course, were migrants — from Lithuania and Germany — who tried very hard to be grateful for the new life they had in Australia, but who still, to their dying days, were affected by what had happened there during the war  … It’s a shock to realise how long ago all of this happened. But how incredibly fortunate we’ve been not to have to live through such times … The fact that suddenly the world has changed makes that all the more extraordinary.

 

When you add this to my current poetry Ms and its absorption in the way my grandparents were living during and just after WW1, it is not surprising that I am feeling disturbed. Even before the dangerous American leader I can’t bear to name improbably took over and stayed in power — I have been wondering when the world would do a wild spin and change from its state of overwhelming consumption and self-absorption. After their enforced time at home, I sense that a lot of people would rather like to slow down, and live more ‘in the garden’ … but so far, economics seem to be dominating the way we’re supposed to go on living now, with today’s news trumpeting a rush to get everyone back to normal ASAP.  Already??  We may have a more sophisticated health system now, but the second wave of Spanish flu had a much greater death toll than the first — and until we have a vaccine, I can’t believe that the danger will be gone. 

 

So, I appreciate you not wanting to alarm me — but I am already ‘alarmed’ … both emotionally, and in the same way the exit door at our local library is ‘alarmed’  i.e. set up to be ready for an emergency (which used to amuse me years ago because it immediately gave me a mind-picture of a door on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but which is now used so commonly on public buildings that it seems right to label things like that …) 

 

(Yes, I am still at the desk, even though some of the garden has come inside …)

After I pressed Send on my previous contribution to this Conversation (2 weeks ago?), I very nearly sent you an urgent message to say I wanted to Edit it.

 

I thought I might have been too candid about my feelings of anxiety — especially that suggestion of how futile it might be to carry on writing poems. But I dithered a bit, and then had a very sleepless night — waking in the morning in the middle of the most dreadful nightmare.  You talked a lot about dreams — but mostly mine are terribly banal, running late for a train I have to catch or something similarly trivial. This one though was a horror … I’d been writing a poem for my grandparents’ WW1 book about the mice plague in Australia in 1917-18 (as if people didn’t already have enough to worry about!).  The mice were in the dream in millions, and though they were all dead — in a huge pile — they were a horrible sight. I woke up shaking … I am sure it was the accumulated awfulness of the COVID-19 news each day as well as the news reports of the 1917 plague I’d been reading that caused it.

 

So, I had to admit that anxiousness is a contagious condition at present. We have to believe that things are going to get better, but times could still be rough for quite a while.

 

But what I do still want to say, as a qualification of my previous honesty about the uncertain value of writing, is this: regardless of what becomes of the ‘draft’, there can be (and for me, usually is) much joy in the making of the poem.

 

That thought takes me back to your exemplary daily practice of drafts — and to the other fear that probably stopped me replying to you sooner.  Namely, that you would undoubtedly like another poem draft of mine!

 

I seem to remember Janet Frame saying once that she was reluctant to let go of her writing too soon — while it was still being finished, she felt too ‘tender’ towards it.  That could sound a bit precious, but it is a feeling I recognise.  It certainly applies to the work I’m doing at present about my grandparents — and that is partly, I think, because in some ways this book is going to be more like an episodic novel than a collection of poems. Each poem is somehow linked to the others, and they don’t necessarily have the same impact on their own as a poem that is written to stand on its own.

 

Anyway, after much pondering about what draft I could possibly send you, I recalled one I began when your original Conversation between poets blog started. It has languished for a couple of years — pushed out of mind by the other projects — but with this nudge to look at it again, over the last week I have given it a beginning and an end, neither of which it had before.

 

Cicada Riffs

 

The first post for this house is historical, 

a last reminder by the mailbox 

 

of a lost resident’s fence.  All summer 

the weathered wood

 

was crusted with cicada shells—

nymph cases, emptied now—

 

a trail of penitents, silent 

against that old stoic

 

hooked into the world simply

to release a shimmering

of wings and kamikaze 

bodies, so much vibrating hope …

 

Invasions of voices 

summer air interprets for us

 

as if all our dirty windows 

could be squeaky-cleaned

 

and the newspaper we’ve used 

to wipe them

 

now leaves its high pitch 

and dark ink on white pages

 

on laptop screens and websites 

bookmarked—Oh brave new post

 

that offers such conversations! 

Oh rememberer of summer rain—

 

that glitter of sweetness sucked 

from tree trunks by the insects

 

that shorthand calligraphy which now 

offers forward slashes, line-breaks

in our autumn days …

 

because 

one poet sent out an invitation …

 

one replied, then another—and another 

until     

 

when the cicadas should have been 

taking down their tinsel

 

still the skies of our minds 

continue to shimmer

 

I’m not sure if this is finished yet. It has obviously had a few fitful additions, judging by the coloured inks. After two years, it’s been a surprise to see what is actually there...

 

At the time I wrote that draft, I was unsure about how I was going to write about some of the grandparents’ story. Especially after reading my grandmother’s letters, which are enviably clear and just lift off the page as if she is speaking, I was quite tempted to try prose. As you might note, in the photo of one page, I spontaneously wondered about that! I am not quite sure what I meant by the ‘duplicity’ of poetry … that was a word that just popped out. Probably I liked the idea of keeping everything simple, like my grandmother.  When there’s such a strong story, sometimes that might be enough?

 

But it has been good to be reminded of this scribbling, and to have that simple pleasure of sitting down and carrying on with it. The joy of the making …

  

 

 

KIT

I think Les Murray was the last person to whom I was handwriting letters at all, Jean … and I found it odd… like something the hand was a little unwilling for.. .which is in turn odd I think for someone who is handwriting in a notebook or scribbling/doodling on canvas for a chunk of every day… maybe it was just that writing to Les always involved a little trepidation (as did being in his physical presence)…

What must it be like for people who never hold an instrument for writing in their hands?  And that must be a lot of people these days…

 

 

… as far as duration/frequency and so on

I think though it’s good to let the reciprocal rhythm of a conversation please itself as it were… take its time

 

… if we can’t be unhurried now then when will we ever manage it?... but I know what you mean … I was on zoom this morning… and actually part of me feels now that the ISO time is precious and it’s slipping away … and what have I achieved?   I think a lot of people must be feeling these kinds of ambivalence right now …

 

And actually I like the fact that we’re writing at more or less an old-fashioned letter pace … remembering places and times when the post was several times a day … recently I came across an old telegram!

 

During the corona-capers –

We also I think have the feeling of being in the archive somewhere… that’s part of the time stood still thing…  and which makes it really a great moment to be considering these duties to the past and our people which we have taken on… typing a sentence about ‘being on zoom’ this morning, I immediately thought how intelligible will that idea/event be even in ten years time?  Do you remember ICQ ?  I guess no one in the world under 30, maybe 35, would have any idea what we were talking about …

 

we are in one of these moments when you can’t help but think time’s different now, things are being reassessed…

 

And everything gets faster … and ataraxia gets further and further away, except perhaps for lucky ones like us (who are not merely lucky – we have really worked at this, to get ourselves where we are in life, with our all-sorts-of-mindful practices and mainly poetry)…

… this present crisis makes more important

both 

attention to the moment we’re in

and

attention to moments more generally

and

the preservation of both

 

writing to remember…

yes we are remembers!

 

I think this is an important role for artists and writers of all kinds and stripe

a part of the vocation

BUT

possibly poetry has a particular and special role to play with this …

the century in the haiku… the rip van winkling

of the twinkle eye

… that moment dozing off in which you lose or gain a thousand years

 

wake up and the world must be  new

how otherwise?

 

…

zooming for the birthday of a friend in New York… I was I must say v glad not to be there…

 

… and although a lot of things will go back to more or less the way they were, and time will march on, with these events as only more among those making up the calendar more generally, despite the habitual knowledge of things having been and going … there are going to be big changes

 

… it’s one of these moments where you know the world will be different and you think it can be better but you wonder if it will

… bit like the Berlin Wall moment in a way

 

…

 

 

And just briefly on the banality of dreams…

Most of the most recent ones I remember are simply single images … from one night, a view into a carriage of a commuter train… from another, a cloud of insects and being disturbed to find myself among them… or having my temperature taken…

 

or this morning’s offered a little more

 

why the airport?

 

I am waiting for the dream

read a novel there

 

can’t remember

but to Tasmania

why?

 

I see there’s only one flight 

usual crew

most in their tracky daks

(it is pyjama year)

 

at the urinal, all yakuza, smokers

 

just the one tune playing

Dvořák, but I can’t be sure

 

one can’t

all kinds of things to measure waking –

sock with hoof, temps

road is a maniac

 

the dream is delayed

perhaps rescheduled

 

edge of the world is a blessing

you can drop off anywhere

any time

 

that’s how it is

in here

 

…

On the subject mice and other plagues (we’re coming to the cicadas)

Have you read in Ella McFadyen’s Pegmen Tales  I think it’s called something like ‘The Mice at Wanderoo’… let me look it up for you and send you a pdf… of course it’s highly racist and very lightly veiled, about the Japs or other yellow perils … but just after the war so I guess understandable

 

file:///C:/Users/Kit/Downloads/Race_and_Nation_in_Ella_McFadyens_Pegmen_Tales.pdf

actually I’m a bit of an Ella McFadyen fan as you’ll see, despite all…

.

 

I wonder if our dads met in New Guinea during the war? … it’s quite possible… dad was there and then went on to Borneo, before shipping to Japan (by that time some while after the war was officially over)

 

… but right now in Rio … 1939 and Mardi Gras has just finished

he’s won £2000 at the casino , spent half of it on a big party for all the Hungarians in town

… then lying on the beach at Copacabana, sleeping it all off, he gets dragged away by the constabulary (and roughly handled) because he is sunshading himself with a green shirt he picked up in Bueonos Aires, not realizing that in Brazil this is a banned item of fascist couture … he saves himself in the end by proving his identity by slaughtering his police chief captor in a ping pong match…

 

And within a month he’s penniless again …  gambled the rest away of course … his ‘system’ didn’t work … but hey, he was only 27! … I looked up how much that £2000 – roughly a quarter of a million Aussie dollars today in spending power

 

The boys’ own continues! 

…

 

 

Mid seventies I sat on a bus once with Judith Wright and chatted… she seemed quite bitter… she was telling me how she loathed self-centered poetry – poetry that’s all first person, all I… I actually think that was most of the conversation … it’s the part I remember anyway…  possibly she found teenage poets annoying and this was her way to convey the idea

 

I knew her work then as a youngster, but not thoroughly the way I later would, so upon reflection now, I know that at that time, I didn’t really know who I was talking to/sitting with… aint it always the way

 

I spent two years teaching on the same campus in Kyoto as Harold Stewart and I never looked him up

 

(I do think though it’s fair to say that it was the sixties and earlier work of Judith Wright’s that would later interest me more

 

The heart can blaze with candour

as though it housed a star:)

 

.

 

Summer as an interpretation! … or as interpreter… the seasons are translations!

And in the case of summer from winter to swimmable, from green to dust to fire

 

I think of Sonnet XIV – sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines

That Pommy bloke was onto something there! It seems to be happening more and more often in these parts…

And in cicada time, yes!   Let me dig…

That was quite a cicada season three years ago… frequently deafening

 

I put the finder through my Project 366 file and came up with 33 hits for ‘cicada’… a theme of the times it seems  … sky shimmerers as well, can’t help it

 

But the main one I think was ‘Black Prince:

Here we go

 

 

713

Black Prince

 

with tymbals

as to masque

or tournament

late medieval

 

let's play cricket up a tree

that's for Latin rhythm

 

stuck on the one untunable note

and never riff with me

 

they are a shadow passing

sometimes make faux rain

 

they say the Australian Greengrocer's louder

I can't hear a damned thing

 

it is a wooded tinnitus

and cast eyes down

 

or grey

how do they see?

 

marry cousins

get dispensations

make war across

 

you glimpse tomb risings everywhere

shells where the world was left

 

once they had to climb to fly

now all flesh is deaf

 

to float through the garden

like a veil of dark wing flung

 

around these few weeks

just to joust and mate and breed

 

the prince so armoured for the fray

because a stutter flown

stim music

 

strafe the ear

 

and perched

and cling

 

grim for

 

must feed on sap

as royals do

 

all chorus

(that's to say, refrain)

 

song of the Magicicada cassini

head banging?

no, techno

 

other species altogether

 

but I love the names --

 

cherry nose

brown baker

red eye

yellow Monday

whisky drinker

double drummer

 

and this one who was never king

but good for burning, ravaging

on all flanks and utterly

so here's much booty brought

 

in the Jurassic were mega-cicadas

 

shall we feed the birds this challenge of flight?

the world has not the wings

 

in a certain stillness struck

can you hear the alien whirr of we're here

 

lion gorged with three parts argent

 

we serve the nymphs deep fried

 

this must be the seventh year

 

.

 

It’s not just that we’re rememberers … conversation is always returning … it’s conversation always in mind when we do this passing on

 

We need to glitter on the weathered wood…

be seen, be heard… we wish to give…

warmth coming into autumn 

 

Like I’m reluctant to light a fire outside if only for myself or if only because it’s necessary… a fire, like a meal, is something one wishes to share

 

We like to leave the tinsel up because we like someone to see

… why else make poems, art?

 

.

 

I know what you mean about the potential relative impact (PRI!) of a poem meant to be in something as opposed to the stand-alone kind

 

The ideal of course is to achieve both

… Make part of the sum themselves whole!

 

…

 

Time to be in the garden earlier now … while there’s still some warmth in the day and Vitamin D in the sky … a fire kept going all day inside today … that’s the first since last winter … but a lovely season to be in…

 

And though it will vary all over the world, Jean, I know you’re now in this season too.

 

I’m going out right now!

 

 

 

JEAN

 

I do mourn the decline in handwritten letters, Kit. Even though I’m also noticing that I now write very badly i.e. messily, and my thoughts seem to run way ahead of where the pen is up to … I’ve always really liked that moment of taking an envelope out of the mailbox, and knowing who it’s from, even before I turn it over to open.  People’s handwriting is so distinctive — it is like a frisson of their physical presence.  And you can tell something about the mood they were in when they wrote — which so easily gets lost in the regular print of an email.

 

Writing to someone like Les Murray is another situation altogether, though! 'Trepidation’ is a good word for that — it really doesn’t lead to an easy flow of sentences!

 

I had a teacher in primary school who recommended we learn our spelling by writing out the words, as well as saying them aloud.  His rationale was that you are engaging more of your senses then … touch and hearing, as well as sight.  I think he was right … and it’s why I stubbornly continue to do all my poem drafts by hand, so that there’s more of a connection with the body. 

 

What looks and sounds right when I read my own handwriting on a page doesn’t always work so well when it’s transferred to a computer screen, though.  Which is a bit puzzling — because the words and rhythms are still the same! But now that so many people do read poetry that way, I suspect the form has evolved to be much more visual. Even the way many people read aloud — at Poetry at the Pub, for instance -- is different, in a more relaxed speaking style without pauses for line breaks. This isn’t particularly new, of course. We’ve probably been heading this way ever since free verse became more accepted than strict forms.  But now that there are so many poems available on the internet, including on Facebook and on blogs, the words are more slippery. Possibly we read them more quickly as well, because there is something about this format that I have to admit really tempts me to skim and rush, more than a printed page does.

 

Did you start off typing up your poems in Courier 12? You couldn’t really fit too many words in one line then, because there wasn’t room on the (quarto) page.  And there was still quite a lot of physical connection, with all that lining up of the paper (and the messy carbon sheet behind), trying to get it all straight, twiddling knobs and then clacking away … Using little bits of some whitened paper to make corrections — or that white fluid (Liquid Paper).  Then having to do it all over again of course, typing the whole thing, because if you were submitting a poem to a magazine it had to be pristine and not covered with white blobs when you put it in the mail.

 

Ah, there it is again … the mail that brought letters … even if they were too often rejections.

 

Sometimes I wonder if the reason I ended up so addicted to writing i.e. of poems etc goes back to letters in the mail. When my father was first put in hospital for treatment of his TB, he was separated from our family for 18 months.  He was in a Thoracic ward in Toowoomba, where no one under the age of 12 was admitted.  That meant that my brothers and I could only wave to him from the car parked below his window, on the rare occasions when my mother drove us there from her family home near Dalby, where we were living while he was no longer working (it’s an hour or so’s drive now, but probably was more like three at the time, so it was quite an expedition). He used to write us letters, though. They were baked in an oven first, he told us, so that there would be no risk of getting his germs.  I have an idea that I tried to write back, although as I was only 6 or 7 at the time, I can’t imagine what I managed to write. What I do remember vividly is how wonderful it was to get his letters.  That whole magic of watching for the dust of the mail car on the black soil road — I think it came three times a week, because my grandparents’ place was 12 miles out of town —  then going to the drum on the grid and walking back to the house with a bundle of letters, as well as newspapers and fresh loaves of bread. My younger brother and I had a hollow tree in one of the paddocks near the house where we used to post ‘letters’ — so perhaps I didn’t actually do it much, I just wanted to! 

 

We were talking early on in this conversation about how we have been living now — with social isolation because of the Coronavirus — and I can see that for me a lot of preparation for this time actually happened way back then, when my father was in a sort of quarantine, and our family had to shift back a few gears, moving away from our usual life to that slower country one. The only water came from rain, the only electricity was from a generator, which was mostly only switched on at night … and there certainly weren’t any shops to just zip down to for groceries. But it was a brilliant place to be a child, free to be alone in the natural world and encouraged to be self-sufficient and amused by my imagination. 

 

Looking back on that from 2020, I feel quite a wimp compared with how strong the adults had to be then.  We’ve had barely two months of being challenged by the virus … 

 

If the return to consolations of gardens and nature and living at a less hectic pace encourages people to leave cities and opt for the country life, though — as reports in the media are suggesting is happening (both here in Oz and overseas) — then I will cheer. You have a model set-up there at Markwell, and I can’t see why regional Australia couldn’t adapt with internet access etc so that more people couldn’t have their ’tree-change’ and work from home at 21st century jobs. 

 

But you are so right about this time encouraging 'the feeling of being in the archive somewhere’ — both in the way it is sending me back to the way the people before me lived, and in the way it makes recording what is happening now feel very important. 

 

As for the dreaded virus, and its more worrying effects on people’s lives … this may be the time to add a new draft of mine to the conversation. 

 

Like so many other thousands of people with only mild symptoms, Martin and I have done our civic duty and been tested. It was partly because our postcode has been a hot spot (why? because there a lot of people in this area who had travelled overseas, including at least one person who had been on a fateful cruise?) — partly because we did have these worrying sore throats and coughs and fatigue — and partly because, as so often happens when everything is a bit pear-shaped anyway, we had another medical-type emergency, with Martin having broken a tooth, so that he wanted to be confident he wasn’t infectious before he tried to get that seen to (he did actually need an extraction). I can’t say the test was much fun … and I’d prefer not to have to have it again, if possible.  But I did write this draft afterwards.

 

COVID-19 Testing

(Belmont Hospital, 12 May 2020)

 

Distracted by roses, you must wait—
captive in your car, halfway
round the roundabout.

 

The nurses are cheerful as newly opened
buds, protected under an awning—
a violet, fallen sky. 

 

Outside the screened Emergency doors, 
in the lulled business of bureaucratic
paperwork, they will not lose

 

their petals yet, though one is wearing
a raincoat to protect her
from possible storms.

 

If you sneeze, do it over your wife
she half-jokes, half-orders, as she inserts
her testing taper up my husband’s nose.

 

He shocks alight, seventy years
of sealed-in- tears    molten in his eyes.

 

The rip in the car’s bubble must be closed
on his side then—opened instead
on mine—as a mask and raincoat

 

loom to block out all views of the old world.
It is too late now to be distracted
by sun on flowers—

 

that brave plot between hospital and car park
where winter has not yet
done its pruning—

 

but as the brisk nurse bags our evidence,
exiles us to our own home
for Dali-days of stretched time—

 

the roses in the rear-view mirror
bloom lavender, scarlet, gold …
on thorn-stubbed old wood

 

making the most
of their almost-ended season.

 

Our results were both NEGATIVE.  It does seem important to write that in capitals, which is how it appeared on the phone screen — mercifully, after only just over 24 hours wait, not the 72 hours we’d been told it would probably take. When I saw the result, I was greatly relieved.  But in a funny way — like you after your zoom call — I felt slightly disappointed, because it would have been quite nice to have permission to do nothing but stay home for a while longer. No one sane could really want to be ill with this virus.  Real quarantine, where you cannot leave the house at all until you have another one of those uncomfortable tests and it’s clear, is a very different prospect from the isolation we’ve been in, where we are choosing to do the right thing — but just the same, it’s a shock to think the world might suddenly start whirling fast again, and we’ll be expected to jump back into the whirling. 

 That actual test experience was very sobering, though. The world of hospitals and doctors and illnesses isn’t one I like to think too much about — but this made it all very real. 

 

And I do agree that it is important to record whatever we can of what is happening. I very much liked your reference to haiku:

 

 

the century in the haiku… the rip van winkling 

of the twinkle eye  

… that moment dozing off in which you lose or gain a thousand years

wake up and the world must be  new

how otherwise?

 

 

Yes.  

 

I’m a bit ambivalent about haiku.  On the one hand, I love reading them — the original Japanese haiku, I mean — and they were one of my early ways into poetry.  Along with the Beat Poets, they were very freeing after the set texts of school. On the other hand, I think I learnt too much about how they were meant to be written in Japanese when I was studying Japanese language and literature at Qld Uni. Consequently, I’ve never thought I could match what the originals aimed for.

 

However, when I was asked a few weeks ago by Pitt Street Poetry to record readings of some poems for the Legere Festival John Foulcher has been organizing via Facebook, I found I was thinking of haiku as very suitable for these times. 

 

I have a very old — 1970 — edition of A Net of Fireflies, which is a collection of haiku translated by Harold Stewart.  The book itself is instant time travel — not necessarily to somewhere I want to go if it’s a seminar room with our stern Japanese professor when she proclaimed about haiku … something about transience and the ephemeral nature of life …  captured in one moment? I’m afraid I was too young to cope with the realities of Japan and some of the more brutal aspects of its culture at seventeen, so I only stayed in the course two years, just long enough to get a major toward my degree … but the haiku, themselves, yes, somehow they transcend all the academic dissection. 

 

Admittedly, if I’d been on the same campus in Kyoto as Harold Stewart, I probably wouldn’t have looked him up, either. It has to be enough, sometimes, just to have the books people have produced without knowing the people themselves. 

 

I am sorry I missed out on Ella MacFadyen and the Pegmen when I was a child. Thank you for alerting me to them. That story about the mice is so like the reports I’ve been reading about the 1917 mouse plague.  Except that it’s much more benign — as it needs to be for a children’s book. I love the description of mice in the pigeonholes at the Railway Station. So true, I suspect. The pests were everywhere! And not enough Catkins to control them! 

 

And guess what: I had to Google what ICQ meant. I must not have had any need for that when it was big — or perhaps our internet was just too slow for it. The latest big thing comes and goes so quickly — just zooms past us, if we don’t need it! 

 

In fact, it occurred to me when I was writing about old typewriters, that you may have missed that. Were they already electric when you started typing up poems? I can’t quite remember when I got my first laptop — a tiny fold-up Amstrad — but I think it was as long ago as approximately 1989.  

 

It certainly wasn’t possible then to email back and forth the way we do now.  Or to post photos onto a Wall where other people anywhere in the world can seem them immediately! 

 

Conversations were slower — still just as good, of course. As long as the wavelengths were shared … 

 

Which brings me to the cicadas! 

 

We had a few deafening bursts here during this last summer, but nothing like that mass occurrence of them a few years back. Your poem really reminded me of what it was like … I remember looking up all the different types then, because we could actually see so many of them on the tree trunks and we could hear they were different (they are different again in Qld) … and oh yes, aren't all the names something to write down! 

 

After the comparative silence this summer, how poignant this is:

 

 

in a certain stillness struck 

can you hear the alien whirr of we're here

 

 

Do you have any letters your father sent from Port Moresby during WW2?  It is possible my father may have read them … or at least scanned them to make sure they were not leaking information that people at home should not know about.  He was a censor of the mail during his time there.  He was also in the Finance Division, so would have been helping to make sure your father was paid. 

 

Apart from those facts, and his TB, I know very little about his war experience. The world is oddly small at times, though, and as long as we keep writing it, these unexpected intersections may be remembered. 

 

I wonder if your father was able to play table tennis during the war? It’s nice to think he might have done — and my father certainly was very keen on tennis, so perhaps he could have played too.  They might have been doing a ping-pong just like this to-ing and fro-ing we’re doing with thoughts and poems … 

 

At any rate, I like to think of you being immersed in some of your father’s early story, and having it in the background as you carry on with your other writing projects. 

 

As for the garden, it does need a visit this squelchy day. So much good rain this last week or so … And the first yellow flowers are promising to show on our Qld wattles on the footpath, which is definitely a sign that the new season is arriving. I must go out now before the fine hours disappear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KIT

Epistolary rhythm! With ever-proliferating topics. That’s what we’ve got going here… and it is a retro- thing… one must be minded to revive it…

 

My drafting process? It’s gone through a few stages, incarnations.  But pretty well everything starts with handwriting in a notebook or on a scrap of paper… then from there to the screen… I used to like going from there back to paper again… to kind of play with the two different textures…

And in the typewriter days, from handwriting to type on paper and back again, often via annotations on the paper.. . and of course out loud is a stage along the way too… though in recent years it’s more like sub-vocalising than shouting it out…

That said, I do think reading drafts at readings or to friends is a great try-out for work… there’s really nothing like hearing it outloud… with songs, making videos … and I do do this a bit with poems too (or I was doing so last year anyway… I posted a few on fb)… I guess I should do the outloud try-out thing more, now that I’ve actually built a stage and there are often wallabies passing… but I seem to be always pre-occupied with the next thing, or maybe the thing before, that I need to get back to before it vanishes for good…

 

The spoken and written question?…   I do believe in the primacy of the spoken word for poetry … it’s a spoken thing and a written thing… but it’s sound first as far as I’m concerned  … and maybe song first really … I think song was probably before language as such, probably it was singing led to language…  the idea that a pleasured sound might intimate more than the grunt of command or necessity was what took those first ‘words’ beyond DOS commands as it were … into the human realm of feeling and truth, of course not a realm of any kind at all … nor do I think there was song without dance …

(I begin to sound like Rousseau in that fanciful Essay on the Origin of Languages!)…

In any case that writing which Plato’s Socrates took to be an act against and a threat to memory must always be a reduction of the potential of the spoken word

… hence my battle with conventional punctuation

And also my desire to make ambiguous… and to try to trick the reader into hearing the work, if only in the mind’s ear…

And of course I know it’s an ironic reduction because of the worlds the written world opens up

and because

littera scripta manet

 

To typewriters though –   

Not sure about Courier 12 … I think I was typing with whatever it is the typewriter had … I mean its single font, which was probably something generally along the lines of Times New Roman…

 

I bought my last typewriter in 1988 with winnings from the ABA/ABC Bicentennial Prize… I have no idea what happened to that typewriter … though I keep an old Underwood for decorative porpoises in the shedbrary … that was something I found in a lane in Newtown late seventies… someone must have hoiked it over a fence in disgust (the novel just wasn’t working?)

…

I didn’t really have an electric typewriter phase at all … dad had one (the smith corona) and I did type on it sometimes… but really I was a strictly manual boy … and then I think 1991 was the first laptop (one floppy for the program, take it out and another flop for the file) … was it wordstar we used… some name like that … this was in Japan, living in Kyoto … I wonder what happened to the old Smith Corona (maybe Stephen knows) … I bought mum and dad their first computers … I think it was a bit late for dad but mum was an eager adopter

 

… actually, now I think about it, in 87 when I’d lived in Tokyo I’d had this wapuro (word processor) … very primitive one line thing …

 

Then another wapuro in Kyoto … which I discovered had no memory at all – none! – one day when Carol turned the power off to change a lightbulb and all of my work for the day was gone!  

… both are surely in the shedbrary somewhere, along with the mac classic on which I wrote my PhD

(taking it off on floppies daily towards the end, despite having bought the machine with the massive 80 meg HDD… it didn’t go when I tried to plug it in a few years back… bad sign… nor am I game to try to turn on the 1958 AWA telly in there … which would, in any case, have no signal to receive

 

…

 

I love that idea of posting letters in the woods… and in fact I have a story long on the to-do list about just such a postbox in the woods … I do know it’s been used this idea … most famously if I remember rightly in Little Women ?  … but I think / hope I can do something new with it… I do have a story (kid’s novel really) The Magic Door in the Forest…  a kind of a Chinese zodiac fable – the problem with which was that it was too complicated (too many characters and sub-plots)… one more to revisit one of these days

 

…

 

 

It’s great you turned the COVID testing  experience into poetry Jean … we need these records of the moment

 

It’s all so very particular, the here-and-now or moment-minus-hindsight… personally, I’m hoping to avoid the hose up the nose experience… maybe the pinprick antibody test will be available before long?

 

Carol had a test too and of course it was negative too

 

…

It’s funny with cruises – how they copped all that flak when of course there were cruises in Europe that were completely clear … no cases at all… while every port they visited (and didn’t disembark at) was going down with COVID… but of course those cruises weren’t very newsworthy I guess… so, cruising probably has a worse odour than it really deserves right now…

Though those princesses certainly had a lot to answer for!

 

 

….    

 

 

Now to dad in PNG… I’m not sure exactly where he was … though he mentioned Rabaul… I know he went from there to Borneo in a boat that was blown up (mined, I suppose) in Labuan Harbour, leaving dad with shrapnel he carried for the rest of his life… also he got malaria there which stayed with him, and had some interesting adventures with scorpions…

 

I do remember dad talking about how pointless it was to write letters at all because of the censors… and I do have a (probably last) letter from his mum in Budapest, complaining that he doesn’t write … and I’m guessing it’s 44 or 45 and dad is deep in the jungle somewhere trying to avoid the Japanese who are trying to avoid him … he was in intelligence and one of their jobs was of course to inform Japanese soldiers that the war was over

 

He had this amazing experience with trumpet lilies … actually both Stephen and I have written poems about it … essentially one of his mates brewed up some lilies in a lull in the fighting and they all went tripping in the jungle, during which time the war kind of resumed

 

Dad's Borneo

 

All the grog's gone.

Brew up trumpets.

War is for waiting.  Never

stopped what we did.

Ages pass us yet we listen

itching for our faraway.

Time written in the record's

wrong.  In pocket letter's

decomposing.  Battle 

everywhere, jungle in rifle

sights.  Dropped perch to earth,

the monkeys seeing things

see us.  Toy with a stillness

of enemies facing, not quite.  

Soldier falls from his tree, I fall.

Wake in the skull house. 

Brew up no trumpets. 

The waiting is war.

 

 

This is what happened… dad fell out of his tree where he’d been too scared to move because he was convinced the Japanese soldier had the jump on him… but when a monkey climbed up the other tree and pushed the Japanese soldier (he having been deceased all along it seems), then dad fell out of his tree and woke up in an Iban skullhouse, thinking that he was now on the other side!

 

I do have dad’s soldier’s paybooks and his little discharge booklet (also my baby health book in the same trove… so I can give you accurate accounts of my weight and length in 1958 and 1959, should you require these at any stage.

 

...

 

It’s interesting we’ve talked so much about the materiality of method in composition – voice, handwriting, typing, on screen, on paper, out loud … this stuff is super important

 

but I was reflecting today 

that the sources more important than the methods… especially once one abandons (as we’ve agreed I think) the idea of inspiration per se, the idea of angels / muses visiting and so forth

 

I was reflecting that for me I think there are really four main sources … these are

 

Dreams

Margins … includes ekphrastics all responses and responses to music… the premise being ‘in the presence so a poem comes’   … if yr on the same page as a great poem, yv got something to live up to and so you can give it a burl … make notes and gather later

Walking – the peripatetic mode… … make notes and gather later (and in the case of a true ‘place poem’…keep returning to the scene of the crime (first really started this on the Rome residency, mid nineties)

and

the Eternal Return to one’s own work (esp draft work)… or mining the archive …

keep going back on the principle nothing is ever wasted and everything can be recycled…

 I think at least half of what’s echoing in the minds of every mature age poet is their own lines… and this is not egotism… it’s a logical necessity… if you didn’t hear yrself this way, you simply be lacking in self-respect…

 

But, of the four, the dream mode’s the one I’ve been with most lately

 

I’m in the mode … getting more vivid… here’s what I woke up with yesterday morning and urgently needed notebook, pen and glasses for

 

at the conference junket

this is it pretty well verbatim

 

forget my room number

forget why I’m here

and here again

 

of course though there are inklings

 

no need to travel anymore

I’m always already on my way

 

writing this down in the great waking tide

against

won’t yet be

 

forget my panic for a fascination

 

just today’s poem in here – call it duty

know I’ve reshaped myself and seeing

 

and back to the fray

I’m recognized

still brought to the lounge

(I have hovered, found a way, but now)

told they are reprobates

I know they are

I think – Americans mainly

all the one beard or might as well be

I almost say you see can see why they say…

 

on the bus, is it?

more of a stadium

hand on my shoulder suggests

intrigue

a long time lost between conversations

 

in that family left to introduce myself

hajimemashite doozo yoroshiku onegaitashimasu

such strangeness

they are cold

it’s centuries of training

the correspondences arbitrary if meaning

who are these ones? – style cripples, foundering tongues

 

they take the language away – I’m alone

then it’s as if I’ve come out

 

that quarter, gingerbread almost

not yet

 

their faces, that street

I could ask for Central

or be lost and go with it 

 

see their faces

will I fit in a word?

 

the hard thing is sex

must not be spoken

what lips

 

and I’m arms up out with the wonder 

 

the headgear all icing

cake decoration

bright I mean

not to taste

 

they are all urgent and gone

 

and then of a sudden

drab streets

tall tenement walls

as if in a first shooter game

I feel no fear but that I should

 

can’t see that

but I see in the dark

see through it

 

none  of this can be the day

very often wonder

what kind of craft is it

could have brought

 

joy of as if my own creation

keep walking and wonder

which way the souk?

and if I retrace

 

but already I know

the streets I came

will never  be there again

 

just so

come into the open stars

 

know by the planets close

this is another world

 

and, as with everything suspected

 

swim home in the air

(no one else does

but all know that you can…

that wink glint each to each

tells he dreams

… dreams still

… and let him)

 …

 

from the fire to this lost song

 

you could go anywhere in there

but don’t … it’s why immortality

 

it’s as if so far into this dusk

the dawn were coming now

 

someone shows an arrow out

that arrow never lands

 

type it all up in daylight

 

ask

is it every night

such a world

where I am lost and lose

?

 

my own wheeze brings me round

 

.

 

I know we’ve already discussed the dream thing quite a lot, but one thing I love about dreammode

is the feeling that yr work’s done before yv had breakfast … nice company too

… yr in the Coleridge zone

 

Have I mentioned about dad and dreams?  How he was a dream analyst … bit of a fancy way of describing the crude Freudian fun he was having for women’s mags

And as a result of this I still have a pile (mainly handwritten, mainly women’s) dreams from the fifties/sixties, from around the Commonwealth … kind of an interesting document of the times

 

… as kids, we got sixpences (then we went straight to ten cents – that’s inflation!) for dreams if we could record them for dad… (kind of like tooth fairy money, but more work) … I guess that must have got me started…

I don’t even recall him saying ‘yll thank me for this later’, though I do … really we were into it and it seems I still am

…

Maybe not the number one source, but possibly the most pleasurable…

 

…

 

Those fine hours are ending earlier and earlier… I’d have more of course if I could kerb my siesta addiction… but it’s just too nice to not have a lie down in the warm loft on a sunny day, or on a wintry day with the fire lit

 

 

 

 

KIT

hoping all's well and yr getting through things Jean 

 

it's been a while since I've heard from you 

 

I do have some ideas about resuming the conversation 

but I'm not sure if yr ready for that or what yd like to discuss 

 

anyway 

thinking of you two 

and hoping all's well 

 

and that yr enjoying this glorious day of sunshine !

 

 

JEAN

It’s very good to hear from you. Thank you! 

 

Your timing is good (again).  I suddenly realised last week that it was already 8 weeks since my mother died — I can’t believe this, but I think it is right — and that means it must be at least as long as that since we suspended our conversation. I am tending to run out of puff rather suddenly at times, but having a good project to think about would surely be helpful.

 

So yes, I have been wondering about the possibility of resuming … I think that the question of Sources is something I haven’t replied to, so that may be a starting point.

 

I would very much like to hear what other ideas you have. 

 

At least we are keeping well clear of the virus, so far.  Hope you and Carol are well, too — has the Barmah virus been banished??

 

Will look forward to another message from you soon.

 

Love to you both,

 

 

 

KIT

ah the Bahmah goes on but much milder than before 

... my impression, Jean, is that it's typically six months worth 

... some people get Bahmah and Ross River at the same time, poor buggers

 

Carol's with her printmaking cobbers right now so she's doing alright 

just a bit tired and a bit of a rash that comes and goes and headaches ... and the inflamed grizzle bone

 

it's funny about getting out of puff

 

I have two blank paged titled ideas for poems in my big notebook right now 

 

one is 

GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF 

and the other is 

OUT OF PUFF

 

serendipity of a kind

 

but anyway 

I think returning to sources would be a good way to resume the conversation 

and I think the ball's in yr court!

...

it is interesting with time 

yv just had one of life's seriously time disordering events to contend with 

in the midst of the world's most time disordered 'moment' for a long time 

 

and that was more or less the other topic I was going to propose 

... motherlessness and time as we live it now 

 

but this might be too raw

 

so totally up to you 

 

 

 

JEAN

This year is certainly on track to being the most 'time disordered' in my lifetime so far — and I do find it shocking that months have just vanished since we last talked here. 

 

I think I have a line in my COVID19 Test poem (from May) about being 'exiled to our own home / for Dali days of stretched time …’ while we self-isolated, waiting for the results.  Back then, I wasn’t expecting to have to cope with the death of my mother as well during this virus crisis, so it is very odd now to realise that time isn’t being stretched at all anymore, instead it is mostly slipping away as if it doesn’t even exist.

 

Partly that is emotional exhaustion from being ‘motherless’, and partly it is (I suspect) a malaise that may be rather common in this stage of the pandemic anyway.  But before I run out of puff trying to talk about that, let’s go back to where we were up to at the end of your last email.  You talked about your sources, and asked about mine …

 

I think that most of my poems come from emotions — triggered by memories, people and interactions with people (my own, but also observations of strangers or imagined reconstructions of other lives), and places.  

 

I am quite fascinated by how slippery (and unreliable) memory is. It is such a lifeline to our past, but having just seen how three children can write totally different eulogies for their mother, I’m intrigued at how brazen we are as poets (or I am, anyway) in our claiming of personal history which may be absolutely contrary to anyone else’s recollections. And yet, if the poems are to be worth much, I think it is critical that they do come from our own personal slant. At least we’ll create something honest that way, and hopefully something that transcends a straight biographical record. 

I also love the way simple things — objects which have some personal significance — can trigger memories, which then turn into poems.  A friend of mine said that when he was writing about his grandfather’s experiences as a Light Horseman in WW1, touching his grandfather’s spurs was like getting an electric shock. I’ve been trying to use the objects that have been preserved from my own grandparents’ lives to get that same sort of shock … the wedding dress, the kit bag, the original letters and diary … I don’t think I’d have made much progress writing poems about their story for my next book if I hadn’t had those tangible things to look at and touch.

 

Incidentally — and veering away to your idea of talking about being motherless, I’m going to take a deep breath and add a very new draft here … something I started in Toowoomba, a week after the funeral, when I was there alone and starting to tackle the huge task of sorting some of my mother’s things (there is a huge houseful of ‘treasures’ and stuff, collected over nearly a century) …

 

My Grandmother’s Maternity Cape

  

Once it must have been the dull cream of ageing
magnolia grandiflora petals, this thick

 

folded fabric my mother told me is her mother’s
maternity cape, stowed away amongst our own history

 

in drawers of unmade Liberty prints and cast-off
dresses, Vogue-patterned and Singer-stitched …

 

Under my hand the textured silk has a grain like sand
where the sunlight sleeps mid-morning—its swoop

 

over shoulders and back would be a warm wave, circling
to rest at the waist behind the clasp of a grosgrain frog—

 

this fabric bought in Egypt in 1916, entrusted to a seamstress
in Scotland and wished into a tent for shelter, homebound  

 

on the SS Mongolia—that sea voyage where she stitches
so many small silk dresses, between bouts of sickness

 

in the long hours alone, her fingers and their needle
dedicated to the journeys of secure thread and delicate

 

hemming, her seams not allowed to fray, her beaches
of fabric the last pacific acreages where the world

 

cannot interrupt, or threaten to unpick her—even now
a century later, when this emptied clothing still rests

 

almost gold, a burnished moment I try to grasp,
neatly folded in one of my mother’s archival drawers.

 

 

 

I thought this would be a poem for my book about my grandparents’ story, but with my mother’s death I think that one has reached its end. I would have liked to have it finished while she was still alive, and I think I did (except probably for some final polishing) — I just needed to decide that it was time to stop! That is a difficulty with poems telling a story … in a novel, the gaps would be filled in, but I prefer what I’m doing to be more episodic.

 

So this new draft could be the start of something else. I’m in awe of how generously and prolifically you wrote your Mother Poems, Kit — so soon after your mother’s death, too.  People sometimes talk of rediscovering their own childhood after a parent dies — but I think because of the funeral and the fact that my mother’s presence is still so strong in her house and garden, so far I’m more focused on her.

 

In the time leading up to the death and the funeral, and then in the couple of weeks of shock when I was still in Toowoomba afterwards, everything seemed to be possibly the beginning of a poem: wearing her dressing gown, sleeping in my old childhood room, walking round the garden (her garden), cutting Bunya Pine fronds to put on the coffin … I wrote down first lines, and often didn’t get much further — too much else to think about, all those practical distractions that follow a death, like clearing out the nursing home room,organizing the funeral service and spreading the news … (And in these times of COVID restrictions, it was probably even more complicated than usual, with only limited numbers of people allowed, all their names and contact details having to be collected and given to the funeral director, interstate relatives unable to come and even locals having to be gently told we couldn’t fit any more into the chapel or invite them back to the house afterwards … )

 

By the time I was home again and had more time, I looked at my notes and was quite flummoxed.  What was I thinking?  Is there really anything still lurking in those images?? With the awful finality of my mother’s death, the whole question of what matters in a life becomes more urgent.  Ditto -- what sort of poems matter? 

 

But of course, we collect these fragments anyway, for later use, perhaps. And that place — my mother’s house and garden — is also a major poetry-trigger for me, so anything that reminds me of it is potentially powerful.

 

So yes, like you, I know the archive is a huge source I draw on.  So many years of notes and drafts and diaries with snippets and clues … The house is so full of paper which in itself might look worthless, but at the right time, it can be treasure for more writing.

 

I don’t have your ability to remember dreams, but I have a feeling that my dreams are often processing memories or emotions from both banal and disturbed times in my life, and that the imagery from the dreams probably lingers in my subconscious and emerges in poems, given the right prod that starting to write can give.  

 

Walking? Yes, I used to do this a lot.  Especially when Martin was teaching in TAFE and didn’t get home until late, I would ramble round the neighbourhood just before sunset, collecting glimpses of other lives in lit-up rooms and garages … Most of the 'Place of Silvered Mullet' poems came out of that.  

 

In Paris, too, it was good.  I really need to walk alone if I’m hoping to subconsciously work on poems, so I had a regular routine of going to the Jardin des Plantes every Sunday.  Mostly I’d go there on the Metro, then wander around the gardens for an hour — it was so good to be amongst trees! even if the flower plantings were a bit regimented — and then I’d take about half an hour to walk back home to the studio, usually via the river. The only other poet at the Cite des Arts at the time — Rolf Hermann, from Switzerland — had said he planned to write a series of poems about the streets of Paris, which I couldn’t imagine I’d do myself.  However, just for fun, and because Rolf and I were doing some translating of one another’s poems, I thought I’d give it a try, starting off with streets that meant something to me.  So that was part of my walking plan as well.  Getting to know the local neighbourhood, just as I’d done with Kilaben Bay, and seeing if that would lead to poems.  Surprisingly, I found it wasn’t a bad plan.  With a bit more work — and patience — this may be another book.

 

None of this happens without the lure of words. Sometimes in Paris it was a struggle to find those in English, with the English rhythms … walking was also a way of being in my private bubble, with my own language.  And I suppose the constant murmur of French in the background probably made me value the possibilities of word play in English even more than I usually do.  (Which is, of course, a lot!) 

 

As I was typing that, my Inbox pinged: and your spring wake-up call arrived! This strikes me as very much the way our time now operates — there is a lot of pinging and word-waving even though there is also quite a lot of uninterrupted solitude (or time at home, at any rate — for a lot of us that means even more time with a partner or family). So, I will aim to ping back to you very soon … 

 

I thought I would add another poem, though … I will just have to decide whether it will be one from the Paris book-in-progress, or from the Grandparents’ project … 

 

I think I’ll go with ‘Lessons from my Grandfather’, because it is a mother poem (written while she was alive, but with a feeling that she might not be here for much longer).  And also because the tennis in it may bounce back to you and your father and his table tennis.

 

Lessons from my Grandfather  

i.m. George Finlay Campbell (Regiment Number 28, Fifth Light Horse, WWI)

and for my mother Isabel Jean Sharp (nee Campbell) 18-4-1921 – 15-6-2020

 

What he has seen of war
                                  he will not tell.
When a mouse runs into the kitchen
                                  he will not want to kill it.
The only thing he wants to hit
                                  for the rest of his life
is a tennis ball …

 

When his wife dies  
barely nine years after the start of Peace,
                                   he will soldier on …

 

He will see their six year old daughter
                                   ghost after the hospital car
and he will console her
                                   by listening to her heart
to see if it is broken

 

he will say ‘Listen to mine—
                                   it is broken too’
but like the gold watch he wears
                                   on his gentle wrist
                   its sobbing tick goes on …

 

He will take his daughter to the palings
                                    standing as upright
as a shooting gallery against the tennis court fence 

He will teach her
                       how to aim a ball sweetly there
so that it comes back and comes back
the breaking thwacks of the racquet
                                    and the hit boards

 

continuing       echoing into the empty dusk
                              around their Darling Downs house 

 

until she has the grace of a champion
                      an assassin of nothing
more damageable   than scores    on the game sheets

 

she will store in the hallstand her mother carved,
                       its wood decorated
with Illawarra Flame trees’ splitting pods—

 

dark pods that spill seeds
                 as shiny as my mother’s voice
ninety years later,
                 telling this to me.

 

In fact, now that I’ve waited a day to insert that poem and tidy up this draft for our conversation, I realise that this is actually a poem about my mother being ‘motherless’.  She was six years old when her own mother died (in childbirth, having her fourth daughter).  In fact, that is probably what this entire grandparents’ book of poems is about: a gift to my motherless mother, trying to keep her parents’ story alive.  What timing — finishing it (in draft form anyway) just as her own life was ending.

 

It’s another sparkling day here. In spite of whatever grimness the news bulletins may be about to bring, the garden is doing its best to stay amazingly alive. 

 

I’ve been promising myself I’ll plant some flowers for spring once I’ve finished this talk with you. I have primulas and heartsease (to go under the already flowering mini-daffoldils, which are a reminder of Paris, where I grew them in a windowbox at the Keesing Studio) … and thryptomene (something my mother always had) … and a couple of infant flannel flowers … 

 

It’s time now to walk past the scent of brown boronia in its pot by the front door and send you a thank you wave. 

 

I’m so glad we’ve been having this conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KIT

Sorry to be slow, Jean …

Have been on the road (unusual for these times, I know)

… off to Warrumbungles, Pilliga, some visiting and also Western Plains Zoo along the way …

 a breath of fresh air…

but a big setback for lots of my correspondence!

… it always take me time to adjust to being back … and now off to Sydney this arv…

… and – among other things – we’re actually going to see a play at the Belvoir ! I think it’s quite heroic of them to have organized this in the circs… and I’m really looking fwd to it

 

 

But to our chat …

And starting with touchstone objects

 

(did I tell you I’m making a little parents shrine at Markwell?)

 

… and more particularly to the maternity cape … getting the voyage into the fabric as you’ve done is deft … and it’s so many different such related voyages of course … and here we are now sailing on with it too…

 

…dealing with the house … it seems we were doing it forever… it’s a little like building that way …

In the one case there’s wishing and wishing and then suddenly it’s standing and just a little smug as it were always there … but with the emptying … suddenly it’s gone

… in the case of mum and dad’s place the people who bought it kind of put it on steroids and have weirdly mcmansioned it in a way … quite unexpected but the result is I truly feel that it no longer exists … and in a way this is a kind of a relief

… in memory and dreamscape inspiration I’m more involved with the house before that – the one at 17 Avenue Road Mosman, which was the first eight years of my life … I think that’s because not only the harbor magic and the pre-decimal era lost, but simply because it’s harder to retrieve from there, so more enticing … it conjures an unattainable point of origin…

 

… the funny thing is with the house at St Ives my brother and I have recently emptied, is that though it seemed such an endless burden and though I retrieved an absurd amount of stuff (with which the shedbrary is now packed), I nevertheless regret having not kept a little more of what’s clearly now gone forever … it’s as if one felt there was something I might have found had I searched more thoroughly in the cracks … but this is pure fantasy I think …

 

And to abstract from here –

 

Memory and its loss, its availability, repression, return, its accidents – all these things are very present to me now – post mother and covid continuing … it is quite the whammy what we’re going through… a big mortality reminder and a big no Planet B reminder at the same time … one of these moments when politics really matters … especially this US election… it really feels like a bit of a last chance to start on the big fixes that are needed … but let’s leave the politics for now…

 

 

I am more and more interested in the dreamwork and its relation to poetry making – the work of remembering dreams and the work of remembering childhood and the work of remembering in general …

 

I don’t know if I told you but I’ve been having this dream dialogue with Shari Kocher over the last month of two…

 

The more you talk about dreams the more you remember and the more you dream as well… but you have to be quick in the morning first thing … mental notes made half waking in the night rarely cut it in my experience …

 

But it’s interesting that once in the mode, then even when there’s nothing remembered there’s still the electric shock you mention

 

 

traceless

 

and where to tell 

 

nothing left of this wilderness in me

was I afoot

or how

?

 

any map there might have

inklings

and soon the smoke went

 

where have I been?

 

only hunches and knacks

 

you might think muddled

but treetips and winged song

 

when there nothing

I gather myself

and solve a thing outside

 

one place named for another

now gone

 

and later in the day come

 

it’s like that book

shelf beckoning

an age till I come in

 

something somewhere

clear and cool

 

I, dressed to it

attended well

 

nothing of me left

 

nothing left of me

 

 

 

I feel funny showing this to you before I show it to Shari … guess we have to call it a cross-conversational moment … but actually there’s no dream content in there at all …

It’s a meditative result on being in the mode of dream-oriented writing upon waking …

 

I just let these fragments pile up, become an archive in their own right, which will probably have autobiographical uses one day … another quandary to mine!

 

I’ve long since had a title for it though, which is

All Over the Place

.

 

And this bring me back to dad … I’ve finished reading the autobiography and now I’m starting on the novel he started in 1966 and never finished

The Man From Overdraft

… one of the many projects he would like me or Stephen (or both of us) to polish off for him!

…I have to say it is quite all over the place this far … but I’m only about 50pp in thus far…

 and early in this he dwells on the war experience I mentioned … up the tree opposite the Japanese soldier in Borneo, in the jungle and then waking up in the Dyak skull house

… he gives the experience to his protagonist, the Australian born Arthur Otta … but it’s dad’s experience I know as told by him from childhood… and it seems to be a recurring motif in the story … though as I say I’m not very far in yet and the m/s is a veritable mountain reaching from the floor of the shedbrary to the slate of the pool table …

 

So this is a new daily business phase which may or may not amount to anything

 

.

 

The gaps between and in poems that would be filled in a novel?

They are where the reader breathes!

 

Yes and what matters? Which poems do and how and for whom and for how long ?

… I think these are among our unknowables

… I mean if poetry is, as I believe, an art of knowing and not

Then these are things are on the unknowable side …

 

The grandfather lessons poem is especially moving

… I think there’s something important about getting the generations into the one frame

 

Which is somehow I think what I want to do with dad’s autobiography – to bring my autobio business into play with his and with speculation … to consider is to reconsider

and to bring the conversation back and into new modes along the way

 

…I have a fantasy  timeslip where a century is swapped

and eight year old dad of 1920 is with me in the shedbrary in 2020 … and we work together with the Hungarian dictionary he brought with him to Australia in 1937 (of course I don’t tell him that … it would be too much to take in … and there are a few other Hungarian books as well we might look at as well…

 

the possible projects are, like garden, like the forest – a horizon growing closer as one approaches

… and what we have to think of death is that there, absent of the action, everything left of us, absent the pleading and the excuses, will or will not belong …

 

Sorry to be slightly morbid thre!

 

But now Spring stirrings are suggesting to me that our next natural topic is the garden … so much in bud and/or in flower now

(and Costa’s wonderful compost lesson night before last!  [still on the ABC site if you missed it … think like a microbe he said --- YES!])

 

Memory and the garden!… plants from earliest childhood that moved  namelessly with us from the old house to the new across Sydney and now I want to keep them alive at Markwell

… for no other reason than for memory!  Because I see them in mum’s hands

 

… here’s an edit of today’s:

 

we, our own woods

 

floruit

 

wordslip

 

and come to a clearing

 

it’s in the sky’s full height

in a body

so spun

aware

 

think things I can do

think difference

 

in a stretch

to petal set

 

here make Spring

a hidden house

 

we grow to it

 

through glass unfurl

image

and letting

 

from some or other elsewhere soil

everything now rickety with breezes

built

 

like languages to which we’re lost

 

and tend

no mystery but time we’re in

 

I do my distance from the sun

 

unfrond my frolic

let love take course

 

sweet where the garden raises

 

in a corner of let’s say life

 

kind of a profligacy

couldn’t before

 

have thought

have had an idea where I am now

 

run the numbers

never too many

never too few

 

I was the one who stole the fire

hubris led me

 

struck purpose for an end

but no

 

after, for the record, say

lived in these times

we had no choice

 

is it the same for you?

 

 

 

 

JEAN

 

Hullo Kit! 

 

Finally, here I am again — and after six months of conversation, yes, this must be my final hullo here.

 

As always, you’ve planted a forest of ideas in your last message. So many trees to peer through in the future … 

 

So many phrases to carry on with … falling leaves of words and 'hunches and knacks' … all good starts for poems. This really is a rich archive you’re making. 

 

Perhaps because I’m feeling very conscious of mortality just now — and probably only just reaching a stage of grief where I can’t escape the fact that my mother is dead — I found your ‘traceless’ poem very moving and on the nerve. It’s a haunting poem, and feels haunted as well … So many lines just stopped me — I was about to say ‘dead’ — but I should think of a better description, because really the feeling is one of shock and occasional thrilling into life, as well as the twist of your ending:  

 

nothing of me left 

 

nothing left of me

 

Even though I don't draw much on dreams for poems, I understand absolutely when you talk about a draft like this as  'a meditative result of being in the mode of dream-oriented writing upon waking …’  I suspect that’s the mode I’m trying to reach too, especially with first drafts, regardless of what time of day it is or how awake I might be.  Later, the rational mind tries to make some order of it all — and even if all we have are a few drifts of images in notes, that’s still potentially powerful. 

 

it’s like that book 

shelf beckoning 

an age till I come in

 

Yes! 

 

I love the way the search for self and place in this poem is also linked to writing — and reading. The playing with words is wonderful:

any map there might have 

inklings

 

 

I also love the title of the autobiographical work that may eventuate: All Over the Place!

 

No doubt I’ve already said this, but even if you don’t ever manage to finish your father’s autobiography for him, reading all those pages of his, and being drawn into his life as he has written it, has to be enriching. It all does connect with the clearing out of houses — the retrieving of stuff and the regretting of not having kept more — the searching for traces of ourselves, too, in these places and other people. Even thinking about any of this is a nudge towards remembering and memory, and that very important preservation of history.

 

I have no idea how I’m going to cope with this when it comes to going through my mother’s house. We already have boxes and boxes of Martin’s parents' things under the house here (and in a storage unit) ... Because he was the only child and the only relative in Australia, it all had to come here.  And because he is their sole survivor, none of it can really be thrown out.  Not yet ...  So there is really no more room here for anything more, even if I could work out what to collect!

 

Is it pure fantasy to think that we might find something really important to keep if we just search more thoroughly? Probably. 

 

And yet, the loss of place can be as profound a source of grief as a person’s death. I remember how devastated my mother was when the homestead where she grew up was sold and taken away to be reconstructed on another property for someone else. (It’s the house that is on the front and back covers of the first edition of Verandahs, so at least it still exists there as she (and I) knew it.) She never wanted to even drive past any more. The land is still there — and still belongs to the family — but it is eery, seeing an empty space where the homestead used to be, with all the trees and garden surviving (more or less) and the sheds and ant bed tennis court just stopped in time. 

 

I’m having the same kind of despair about her house in Toowoomba, now that it’s no longer hers. Even though we plan to keep it, once all the estate is sorted my younger brother hopes to live there. I doubt that he will McMansion it, but it will still be his, which will mean it will inevitably change. The realisation of that was like another bereavement when I was up there for a couple of weeks after the funeral. It’s not so much the house I’ll miss as the garden … that could stay as a shrine to my mother, because almost everything there was planted by her (apart from the very old camphor laurels all around the house and the native green wattles still left in the last paddock). I was glad to have a day there alone, back in June, just walking around, photographing as much as I could.  Like you, I have brought cuttings galore from my mother’s garden to this one, but what I make here will always be a small gesture compared with the acres of plants she grew. 

 

COVID19 is delaying all of that sorting and saying farewell.  Until I can cross the border to Qld again, everything to do with that has just stopped.  It’s frustrating, because I know it’s going to be a major upheaval and it’s looming at the back of my mind — but it’s also been one of those contrary gifts of good time ‘at home’ that this pandemic has offered. While I’m safely here, I think I’ve been going through one of those odd stages of grief which causes bouts of frenetic activity in between the inevitable periods of not being able to do much at all — and that’s resulted in what I hope is some good progress with writing work.

 

My big project of grandparents’ poems has reached a stage where I decided it was time to declare it had reached 'The End’.  While I wait to see if it’s actually publishable, I’ve been distracting myself with my other major collection-in-progress, which will be poems about Paris.  There is a lot of ’the garden’ in this book, because the only way I think I could stay sane during those residencies in Paris, without any garden of my own, was to go to other people’s — especially the parks, which are wonderfully tucked into pockets amidst the houses, as well as the big public green spaces like the Botanic Gardens.

 

Wasn’t Costa’s lesson on composting good! 'Think like a microbe' … Well, I have been trying. My three bins here were taking a while to make any good rich chocolatey mulch-food for the garden. A bit more layering is what they needed.  

 

Very like writing poems, really.  The good ones have so many layers, almost naturally.  Your ‘floruit' certainly does … with its soil 'from some or other elsewhere' and its making of Spring ‘a hidden house’. 

 

What I’m noticing even more than usual this year is how our KIlaben Bay garden is saying a lot about the long cycles of weather and the changes in the natural world -- as well as offering some consoling recurrences right on schedule.  The big patch of bush nearby that was burnt in January has had a hazard reduction burn and so have some other local areas.  By this time in 1993, before the really bad fires in early ’94, we already had bushfire smoke, but so far everything here is greener than it was then, and much greener than it was last year. We no longer have as many birds here — too much subdivision in the neighbourhood, even if we stubbornly hold onto our little wild patch — but this week the dollar bird did its initial reconnaissance circle over the gully, just as it has on almost exactly the same date in October for the 30 years we’ve been here. I don’t know where exactly it comes from at the end of every winter — New Guinea, probably — but it is always quite humbling and wonderful to see it come back, from so far away.  And good to know that the habitat we’re offering it for the four months or so it needs to nest and raise chicks is still all right.

 

That thought of the memory garden, and planting so many things from childhood and gardens of the past … seeing them in your mother’s hands … is so right. When I do get back to my mother’s garden, I will be hoping for that too.  

 

I do need to get outside with mulch and compost, though. What grows without effort in that rich volcanic soil in Toowoomba often needs a bit more coddling here. The wilder parts of the block will need some tidying and clearing before the summer too, just in case that La Nina doesn’t come. 

 

But first, bringing my side of this conversation to a close, here is a final bit of gardening on the page for you.

 

Le Jardin des Plantes

(Botanic Gardens, Paris)

 

Like the Canadian woman who wept
at the Soirée for visiting artists
and ignoring the foie gras and goat’s cheese confessed
that she longed to go home to her forest,

 

I need trees.

 

So that is why, each Sunday in Paris,
I go to the Jardin des Plantes.

 

It’s not the same, I know, as being in my home gully
of angophoras, pittosporums and stringybarks …
and no match at all, for the Redwoods in Fall …

 

But after a week in the stone forests of culture
I’m grateful this city could also find room
for a Garden of the World.

 

And though I grumble
that it’s not really a garden—

as I join the hordes of walkers under the arches
of manicured plane trees—then stop, looking askance
at the Exhibition Beds of Poppies and Peonies
exotically from Elsewhere …

 

still it plants us in a place of calm

 

a jardin of softening ‘j’s’ … like Jussieu,
a man gentle enough to bring seedlings for giants here
in his hat—so the legend goes—

 

tender foreign plantings that became
these Lebanese cedars

 

that gardeners have helped to stay rooted here,
in the heart of Paris …
so many generations creating

 

storeys of needled shade
my homesickness sleeps under now.

 

 

 

 

KIT

I think it’s very appropriate that we end, where we began, in the garden, Jean. And as summer bears down on us, perhaps we can say, with Marvell, ‘with a green thought in a green shade’.

…

 

We have so many topics to attend! Especially if we’re attempting a wrap up … not that that’s necessary or even really possible !   because the conversation goes on regardless!

 

…

It’s funny (well, perhaps funny  is not the right word), the idea of a stage of grief where you have to admit that someone is actually gone … in a way, I have come  to feel that never really happens… because of dreams, because of things you need to tell, because of unbidden memory putting you at the scene of past crimes, because of all sorts of stuff … then one starts thinking – and I think as one gets older/as time accelerates it is easier to think/feel this – what if we simply don’t accept that time has gone? … maybe that idea  is too Vonnegut – as in Slaughterhouse 5  -- the only really trick in that story being the future known from the past as part of it … but the allegory there is really about so much of life ahead being known/predictable (even to the extent of its unpredictability) … in any case there are so many senses in which they are still with us and will be as long as we are …

 

I think with the dementia death too there is the added aspect of kind of having them back after they’re gone … maybe that’s what a book of mother is all about after all …

 

 

The house – and yes I think the cuttings are really important ! – it’s funny I’ve started dreaming about mum and dad’s house – I mean the house we sold last year – the one that through desecration is basically no longer there … last night I dreamt a kind of film noir setting upstairs between the bedrooms with shady great coated characters drawing revolvers on each other … yes, weird… but what’s interesting to me is it’s only eighteen months after having last set foot in there that I begin to dream of it (or remember dreaming of it!) … whereas the house of my earlier childhood, I’ve consistently dreamt of for many years…

 

I am quite interested in the relation between the image content of dreams and the material that presents itself to you without thought in daily like … that unconscious imagery of return is how I think of it …

 

rêve and reverie?  Maybe …

But maybe it’s not reverie (or is my idea of the distinction too tainted by the English-language idea?)

… tricky … but do you know what I mean? … I mean images that you suddenly realize have been playing over in your head for the last day or week or month (an angle in a long lost garden, a streetcorner, a bedroom, somebody’s smile … could be anything … ‘these foolish things’ – I think that is precisely what that song is about!)… of course it applies to music just as well (when you realize yv had a Brahms or a Beethoven riff in yr head off and on for a week)… it applies to any sensate revisiting… first movement of the seventh symphony a little of late …

 

I think that image flow – a kind of stream of unconsciousness – feeds poems if you let it … and whether of value or interest to anyone else…  it’s part of the important cathartic work that poetry is for the poet … the working  through stuff

 

I always thought of Wordsworth’s  poetry as ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions’ and Eliot’s ‘escape from emotions’ as opposites (as of course they are), without, as I now do, recognizing they are part of the one wrestle!... whether you indulge or distance feeling, it’s still feeling that yr dealing with… (hey, that’s almost a lyric!)

 

… so much feeling comes to us from the world beyond human emotion… a lot of Ruskin’s disdainful blather about the pathetic fallacy ignores the fact that the source of feeling is so much from nature … and it’s merely our creatureliness gives us a world on our own terms … why beat ourselves up for what we just can’t help

 

I see the sated channel bill

top of the mulberry

languorous

can’t cram in any more of the purple

… birds have been known to burst 

 

And in any case the effort at reciprocation, however flawed/fraught/doomed is only what the bird comes to the window for … what creature won’t see itself wherever its consciousness seeps?...

 

(I should say pan-psychism interests me more and more… this idea that the cosmos is consciousness because, if we agree that consciousness is not an illusion, then it’s not possible to sensible draw a kind of subject/object line to declare where consciousness is not)

 

Anyway it seems appropriate to finish my side of this conversation with a garden and tree poem

…

 

And here, why not, is this morning’s (or it was when I typed it, yesterday!)

 

in the after rain

 

which is a time of the garden

 

out from under

 

how puddle

 

roofs steam

 

sway breezes

pale to

 

dismantle a clock for it

and stand the stillness

 

often unmisting

in a cure of roses

(that’s just an instance for)

 

bow and now

(suit of grey gone)

a headsup

all rise

 

on wings of a visit

this then the insect age

fresh as

other flowers invented

 

punctuation!

all telling

dense fret of opportunity

 

falls of a shine

crossings out, quotes

sing but not a chorus

 

first thought blue

here’s the machine

to throw shadows

 

in the after rain

leafy and wingsome

words and a world of them

making it up as we go

 

all of this light coming to us

all of this coming to light

 

 

 

Happy to close off here. But I should first ask if you would like a last word, Jean?

 

 

 

JEAN

 

Just a very few final words, Kit.

 

This morning I woke to the sound of gentle rain on our roof — and evidence outside of a reasonable soaking of the garden overnight.  I hope you have it at your place, too. 

 

All day, the rain has continued, and the cuttings of plants from my mother’s garden that I managed to plant earlier in the week should be getting a good start in their new homes.  Lots of compost, too, has been shovelled out recently, so 'green thoughts' and 'green shades' should have more chance of surviving here as this year heads into summer. 

 

I really like the ending of your poem:

 

in the after rain

leafy and wingsome 

words and a world of them

making it up as we go

 

It’s been good doing all this gardening on the page with you …  'all of this coming to light’ will, I hope, continue even though the conversation here has reached its final line.