Kit’s Art and Poetry Plan for 2024

 

Kit’s Art and Poetry Plan for 2024

(or his particular embarrassment  of riches)

 

daily kit

My daily kit commitment is to post a new poem in English every day and a new poem in Esperanto every day (with or without English translation). By this means I build up a stockpile of quarry-able material for various prospective projects, as among the many outlined below. Daily produced painting/drawing may or may not be posted alongside or separately from the poems. There are other things I do more irregularly with the daily kit, including little exhibitions and translations of other people’s work and conversations with other artists and poets. The daily kit is my public busybook and the place where the world can see what I’m up to, if the world cares to look.

 

POETRY

Ongoing Projects

 

ATARAXIA

This is a very long term project, which was funded with a three year Australia Council Grant, from 2018-2021. I can provide interested parties with a detailed description from that grant process, but suffice it here to say the classical Greek idea of ataraxia entails the state of calm and equanimity one might hope for from a garden. ‘The Garden’ was in fact the name of Epicurus’ school in Athens. I have a huge amount of draft material towards the collection-in-the-making, gathered over the last six years or so. Drafts towards the parts of this (as outlined below) regularly appear on The Daily Kit, just as they appeared on Project 366, in the pre-daily kit era.

 

The draft title poem for the whole collection won the third prize in the Newcastle Poetry Prize a few years ago. Many other parts have been published in various places and a lot of it has been translated into languages other than English.

 

The principal parts of my ataraxia – as a collection – are as follows.

 

a field guide to Australian clouds – meditations on the sky, taking in a lot of thinking about climate change (title poem for this part – a prolegomenon – won the Local Prize in the NPP a few years ago)… drafts file for the field guide currently contains 125 A4 pages of typed notes)

 

dream journal (or sleep to dream) – collection of poems directly inspired by dream experience… (currently 360pp of typed notes)

 

godsbother – a collections of musings intended to bother gods of all kinds  (currently 520 pp of typed notes)

 

ataraxia – poems meditating on garden and bush (currently 630 pp of notes)

 

 

Each of these will eventually be a book-length work in its own right. But my long-term hope is to have them appear as a collection together. My model for the work is Whitmans’ Leaves of Grass. In other words, the whole is intended to be an infinitely revisable life-work, that could appear (or not) in all sorts of ways, over time.

 

Alongside these collections-on-the-way are a number of poetry projects that could be related to ataraxia or fully independent, or something in between.   

 

wise surprise

This is a book about art practice and poetry making in particular. A kind of a recipe book for making poems, made in the form of poetry. Borrowing half a line from an old poem of mine ‘blessing’ – ‘may the poem speak its wise surprise’ – I want to riff at book-length on the idea that wise surprise is the most fundamental thing a poem ought to achieve.  My hope is that next year’s workshop will be helpful inspiration/impetus for this project.

 

ghost writing

This is work associated with a small exhibition I had at Manning Regional Gallery in Taree, earlier this year. That walk-in installation titled palimpspectre consisted of ten square meters of paper – painted, drawn on and inscribed with poetry, along with a one hour soundscape and projection of slides (details and landscapes) into a ‘well’ on the floor. As an artwork, this ‘scroll’ is a kind of prototype for ¡CALLIGRAPHATE!  (please see below), a project of which it would from a part eventually. The idea for ghost writing is to find connections between place as palimpsest and page/canvas/board/screen as palimpsest. It is work particularly about Australian identity and how it is haunted, what it’s buried, where the skeletons are kept. A lot of this work was drafted during the Voice referendum debate, so it reflects on big issues associated with justice and reconciliation and what’s at stake for everyone with the idea of ‘Australia’. Probably this is the next book-length work I should seriously try to complete and offer for publication. (Currently 230 pp of notes)

 

 

 

 

ekphrastics

An ongoing, regular, now permanent, part of my practice, involves visiting galleries and museums to make ekphrastic poems. I don’t have a particular plan to make a book out of them, but will go on collecting these drafts, as I have now for years. I should probably be more pro-active in getting these out into the world too!

 

concert pieces

Along the lines of ekphrastic making, I am collecting notes towards poems for or responding to particular pieces of music. These are not lyrics but works about music. 

 

 

Chapbooks/Long poems in progress:

 

Gore Cove Track Series

a series of poems about a creek and harbour walk I do regularly on Carmeraygal country, in North Sydney

 

aubades

a collection of poems concerning dawn and the early day

 

Henro

a poem about the 88-temple pilgrim trail in Shikoku, Japan; part of which I walked in October-November of this year

 

 

I do like the idea that ataraxia – as an overarching goal, could be all inclusive – can be a kind of a Christmas stocking into which everything can fit …

 

Will ataraxia amount eventually to be being a ‘collected poems’ or a ‘selected poems’ or would they be separate projects? In either case, I should also be deliberately collecting for a plausible ‘selected’ and/or ‘collected’… and also for a miniature selected in the form of a pocket kit 3

 

Perhaps ataraxia  is something more like a Fortunatus’ purse – where the outside is the inside and vice versa. That said, it’s often the case that, in the end, certain things won’t fit into the big picture… so it’s good to leave oneself some options …

 

 

 

my poetry in other languages

A new (second) book in Romanian – a little star falling, even as we speak – Bukovina Dreaming – is currently being translated from my English language m/s by Daniel Ionita and Adriana Paul. That should hopefully appear in Romania sometime in the coming year.

I am working on a m/s for translation into Hungarian, titled az alma nem fekete (the apple is not black), some of which has already been translated into Hungarian by Bek Timur… but the project is a little stalled right now. I should aim at least to have a complete m/s in English, ready for translation, by the end of 2024.

I also have complete translated m/ss in Japanese and Italian that might find a publisher if I put in the effort, and a partial m/s in German, that might get somewhere if I were better at motivating my translator/s.

I have a complete manuscript in English – a possum climbs up to the stars – prepared for requested translation into Spanish, but nothing seems to be moving on that front just at the moment.

In Esperanto, I have about 700 draft poems since my first Esperanto book Rompitaj Labrintoj  appeared, so, although I don’t at present have a specific concept for a prospective new book in Esperanto, I do have a mountain of material from which I could select if I got up off my spotty behind.

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In the other direction, I have a number of prospects for works to be co-translated with poets from Hungarian and Finnish, but these are not very far advanced, and seem a low priority given the number of other projects requiring attention.

 

I have been collecting material for some time for an

Esperanto Anthology of Australian Poets

I think I currently have works from about forty poets, of which I have already translated about half. My aim is to have eventually a collection of at least 100 poets. I am trying to end up with a good gender balance and reasonable representation of indigenous and NESB poets in the final cut. It would be good to recruit an Associate or Assistant Editor for this project. I’m not really fussed as to how long it takes. Maybe I should aim to at least have the 100 poems by the 100 poets assembled by the end of 2024? A dual aim of this project is to recruit poets to the cause of Esperanto and to get Esperantists interested in poetry. (Esperanto, one notes, has a fine and long poetry tradition. I think it presents a number of interesting opportunities and challenges for poets, but more of this elsewhere.)

 

+ VISUAL ARTS WORK (drawing & painting)

 

I paint/draw every day and, apart from the daily kit post to a number of on-line communities of practice (mainly on fb). I am working towards a couple of exhibition goals, fitting in with my general pattern of having a gallery exhibition every year or two.

 

word & unword

is a little exhibition planned for sometime in the first half of 2024 at the WORD X IMAGE gallery in Maitland. The work on the wall in this show consists of (sometimes epigrammatic) handscripted fragments of poems, balanced against abstract calligraphic works. These (magnetically attached) works on paper are all about crossing and blurring lines between text and image, between what is intelligible as script in one language or another and what is perhaps prototypical of writing.

 

What can we discover – what can we learn of ourselves and the world – when we come to the borders of sense? And what’s over that border? The reader/viewer of this exhibition is led along from known words to words unknown and to the semblances of words. Along with the paper work on the wall are a slidewell and a soundscape, likewise distracting and de/familiarizing the viewer/listener’s expectations of presence to image and text.

 

The experience for anyone attempting to pay attention is that of being lost in a territory of strange lines and signs, or, conversely of coming on a journey from a wilderness of scribble into meaning/s that can be recognized and understood. In either case, a participant in the work is tasked with finding their own way, and, in fact making their own poem and meaning, randomly/whimsically, just as the eye is carried, or by some unknowable method of their own.

 

Meaning is something humans can’t help. In defiance of a so-called ‘asemic’ orthodoxy, the hope of this walk-in work is to provide a demonstration of the maxim –

no signs without meaning – no meaning without signs.

¡CALLIGRAPHATE!

a forest of words concerning the forest

¡CALLIGRAPHATE! is an immersive installation experiment in encounters between image and text. The exhibition draws the reader/viewer/listener, through a maze, into multiple forms of writing and mark making (in sound and off, on and from the wall).

 

Physically, ¡CALLIGRAPHATE! consists of a paper maze made of twelve 1.1m x 9 m ‘scrolls’ (each double-sided, with painting and drawing that merges text and image). These are hung from a ceiling, allowing passage, so that the reader/viewer/listener is drawn along on a journey and invited to be lost in the fluid ‘walls’ along the way. In the paper maze are ‘clearings’ where there are slide ‘wells’ (text and image projected on the floor and/or ceiling), and soundscapes (poems [in various languages], songs, other music, ambient sounds) intended to lure the listener in various directions. The immersive experience is designed to generate ambivalence in the participant – an ongoing tension between focus and distraction, a wish for stillness and a need to move on.

 

The topic of the installation is forest (its importance to us, threats to it, the places where forest was, and what becomes of those places). This project is about the pressing need to preserve forest on a global and on a local scale. It is about the need to re-create lungs for the world where these have been lost.

 

This is very long term work, and, in a sense – although it has its own independent rationale – it is a visual exhibitable iteration of ataraxia. ¡CALLIGRAPHATE! and ataraxia are bodies of work that could contain each other.

 

 

 

MY DAD’S WORK

When my father died twenty years ago, he left me and my brother a two page list of works he would like my and/or my brother to ‘do something with’ … e.g. edit, revise, publish, re-publish or something … This is … well… a bit cheeky, but it’s exactly the sort of thing you can get away with when you’re dead… As a full time academic, I never had time to look at this material, but now I do, and so I read some of it every day. There is a mountain of material and I’m not likely to run out of dad-reading-matter any time soon. (Note: my mother left some short stories and a few short plays, but these comprise a tidy oeuvre, the only thing to do with which would be to publish them… which is a good idea of course.)

 

The works of my father’s I’m currently most interested in are:

 

Failed to Return – a novel he wrote in Hungarian in the thirties, dealing with life in Budapest and in England at the time, and with a lot concerning his relationship with his mother … He translated it into English in the fifties and I’ve read it … a good yarn and I think quite publishable with some tidying up

 

Freedom is a Rainbow – a novel in five parts or a collection of five novellas, dealing with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 … an event my father did not participate in directly himself (having been a refugee to Australia in the late thirties) but which he did experience vicariously through interviews with many Hungarian refugees who came out to Australia after the events of ’56. Part of it was serialized in The Bulletin in 1957, and I had read that but only recently discovered the complete collection, through which I am now making my way.

 

The Crazy Prophet – written in Hungarian between 1931 and 1935. This is the famous (to me) ‘lost novel’ of my childhood. I believe I have found half of it. It would be interesting to get it translated. My hunch is it owes a lot to Madách Imre’s The Tragedy of Man. I fantasize it might have the potential for a Bulgakov style romp through thirties Budpaest, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

 

The Autobiography – a massive work in five volumes, with a terrible title, that goes up to 1944. Full of fascinating stuff. Growing up in Hungary in the 20s and 30s, world travel, Australia from the refugee sportsman’s point of view.  Storm clouds in Europe. Sydney at the beginning of the war. A trove of family stories.

 

The Man from Overdraft ­– story of an Australian everyman/Candide, my father started in 1966 but never finished. This probably the one he would have most liked to have worked on and it is a veritable meter high mountain of paper, but it lost me after about page 150… I suppose I should have another crack at it at some point.

 

And there are other unpublished novels and plays I am yet to read. So I shall persevere, not knowing where I might end up with this amorphous and rather daunting mass of work.

 

I am considering ‘co-authoring’ possibilities. In life, one rarely has such a pliant co-author.  Nevertheless, one keenly feels a certain responsibility.

 

FICTION & DRAMA

 

Ghosts in the House

(idea for a mini-series)

Parliament House, Canberra, as setting for a story in which every now deceased member of parliament is available for interaction with any other. A little like the untapped potential of the plague hoards in the basement in the British series, Ghosts. A certain amount of Night in the Museum too. A way of enacting the ongoing presence of the past with us. This drama would provide the opportunity to pit the great figures of Australian political history (Billy Hughes, Menzies, Whitlam, Keating, etc.) against each other in ways that would be revealing of ethos/conscience over the longue durée of the polity. Would these characters remain stuck in their ways or would they reinvent themselves, as Malcolm Fraser did in his later years? So much potential for passionate conflict, plots, knives in the back and so on. A swirl of possibilities at this stage, but I’m attracted to the potential to deal in a really new way with key issues like government and parliament’s attitudes to indigenous Australia, immigration/xenophobia, race business more generally, relations with the British Empire and the US, welfare, national symbols, in fact everything. Do the ghost come out at night and debate the present day issues? How do they elect a speaker? Are they sitting on top of each other in the chamber or do they take turns, do pairs? Whatever one does with this idea will naturally be seen as politically motivated (we… because what else could it be?)… it might therefore have a better initial shot at life as a novel… or as a stageplay of much more limited scope (The Ghost of Billy Hughes?).

 

One immediately realizes that this is a concept that would be easily transported just about anywhere. Prima facie, the Westminster version would have much more potential, likewise the Washington version. And of course one could easily imagine more limited iterations; e.g. just the White House, just 10 Downing St.

 

 I doubt I’ll really get to this project this year, but then again I might come up with some plot if I just keep it at the back of my head. Also, it might be better as a collaborative project. I suppose that’s probably how mini-series come about. And I suspect that the best ideas for them probably never come about. I probably shouldn’t be putting it out there, it’s such a pinchable idea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Philosophy of Table Tennis (novel)

Just a Moment (stage play)

 

I think of these, perhaps unreasonably, as the one project, with two different names and two different modes of realization.

 

As with (and parallel to) ataraxia this is a ‘concertina’ project. Year after year this doesn’t really get moving, but the notes for it keep piling up. One day, I’ll just have to stop doing everything else and do this. I guess I’m waiting for the bell to ring.

 

The stage play concerns a character, Zeit Glimmer, who lives in the moment. So the play is set in the moment. Time passes around him and events can be seen on the screen around the stage. Others characters pass through, but essentially Zeit is eternally alone in his moment, playing the piano and attending to various introspective hobbies. This is all until Fia (a girl who gets lost in her mother’s handbag trying to answer her mother’s mobile… see notes for independent story below) falls out of the handbag and into the moment with Zeit.

 

So, as a stage play, this is mainly a two-hander (Zeit and Fia), though many flat characters drop through (mainly for illustrative purposes). Just a moment is a philosophical exploration of many issues (a kind of a tour of big questions in philosophy), something along the line of Sophie’s World (a book that in my view is unsuccessful in very interesting ways.)  A Socratic dialogue in some ways, a kind of battle between philosophy and poetry, in others. The obvious initial conflict to drive the story derives from the situation of the key characters – i.e. Zeit wants to be left alone, is used to his own company; Fia is affronted by being lost, by being stuck in the moment with this strange stranger she never chose to be with, by being unable to answer her mother’s phone (which keeps ringing) and of course by wanting to get home (think of Dorothy in Wizard of Oz).

 

The obvious problem with this setup is that of driving a plot through a situation in which ostensibly nothing can happen because no time is passing (the problem Beckett resolved in Godot by way of the novelty of plotlessness). The problem is how to drive a ‘story’ through conflict and suspense derived from discussing philosophic questions. Needless to say, I don’t have all the answers but I do think that these are good problems to have.

 

The action of the stage play provides a kind of ‘still centre’ for the much more widely ranging, more reflexive (and largely auto/biographic) novel that would spread out around that central plot/situation. And of course these two works will have plenty of opportunity to diverge as they develop.

 

I think that this is ‘the one novel’ I have to write.  Just as ataraxia has a model in leaves of grass, so the philosophy of table tennis has a few different kinds of derivation – in narrative terms, there are affinities with Tristram Shandy (hard to get started) and with the Bible (a multitude of often contradictory genres and viewpoints and styles… a kind of ‘background incoherence’, over which order must be laid). It has a  haibun aspect as well; it’s a narrative into which poems fit, a story written around poetic ‘moments’;  and it has a Thousand and One Nights aspect too… it’s a story into which other stories fit. The framing for the whole thing, in the case of both the play and the novel, is the idea of presence – of being in the moment. Something very close to ataraxia. So, in a sense, it’s really all the one work.

 

The ‘just a moment’ idea has a multitude of problems in any format… but my thinking is that if I am able to realize the plot constraint of being ‘in the moment’ on stage for two hours, then the temporal problems of the novel might resolve themselves from there. And of course it is quite possible that the drafting of the stage play simply ends up being formwork for the novel. Who knows what will evolve and what can survive from these ideas?

 

 

I can see a relationship between this work and ataraxia as suggested above; the relationship between this work/these works and ¡CALLIGRAPHATE! is also evolving. It may be as simple as the idea that ¡CALLIGRAPHATE! provides a venue for just a moment/the philosophy of table tennis…  the purpose of which work/s is ataraxia.

 

Who knows?

 

 

KIDS’ STORIES

I have a number of complete kids’/YA works that I ought to be flogging somewhere, some already published, so I’ll skip them here… others, finished, or in various stages of composition/drafting.  

 

for instance –

 

abuzz – the story of Melissa the Bee

a kind of a pseudo-mythology of bees for 8 to 12 age range, a text-heavy picture book

which has actually been completely translated into Chinese by an excellent poet, Cui Yuwei…  

 

There’s another one

I fell asleep in the library

that has had a complete German translation for a couple of years

 

And there are other stories and poems that exist in various stages of completion/drafting, for instance –

 

Bicycle to the Ancient World

story of a time travel bicycle (runs on the principle – distance = time)… this could also have a place in The Philosophy of Table Tennis

 

A little book of endearments

for all ages really, self explanatory… could be 365 of them, a new endearment for every day?

 

The Girl Who Got Lost in Her Mother’s Handbag

Story of Fia, who goes on various adventures as a result of getting lost in her mother’s handbag (a kind of Fortunatus’ purse) while trying to answer her mother’s phone, because ‘it might be something important’.

In one iteration (please see above) she ends up on stage ‘in the moment’ with Zeit Glimmer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SONGS and MUSIC

 

I need to be producing some for the soundscape for ¡CALLIGRAPHATE! and actually for word and unword, more urgently,  as well. I typically write about a song a year, and this seems to happen in a completely unplanned way; likewise the (loosely termed) ‘music’ comes from doodling around on piano and guitar mainly, so I had better dust off microphone soon!  Perhaps I need to focus on some kind of accompanying gibberish, something a little jabberwocky … hmmm…

 

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I see now why I’ve resisted making this kind of a list in the past. It’s a bit overwhelming! But I’ve gone and done it now. And if you’ve read this far with me, you might be needing a little lie down. I know I do. Or a walk to clear the head.