Tuesday Poem - Letter To Ken Bolton by David McCooey

Letter to Ken Bolton

Dear Ken, tonight there was a power blackout

at our place, during which Maria and I watched

Fiona Shaw perform The Waste Land in an app

on our iPad (which was luckily fully charged).

Her performance was electrifying (har har),

changing voices like a dial sweeping across a radio.

Unlike Eliot’s adenoidal readings of the poem, Shaw

treated the poem as theatre. I’d never thought about

how Madame Sosostris would sound with a cold.

So there Maria and I were, with our electronic device

and three candles in a darkened house, like some

eighteenth-century tableau, a fact we both noted

more or less simultaneously, commenting on

the disjunction between the technologies.

‘The domestic postmodern’ one of us called it

(the quote marks inevitably hanging in the air).

Meanwhile, Shaw’s presentation of Eliot’s poem

brought out new shades previously unnoticed:

how ‘Falling towers’ reads post-9/11; how those

‘hooded hordes’ evoke Hollywood Islamophobia; and

how camp (‘queer’ even) the poem could be

(and not just because of the bit about Mr Eugenides).

Shaw made The Waste Land strangely sexy; the

Cockneys in ‘A Game of Chess’ funny and tragic.

Actually, the blackout was a brownout, according

to the man from the power company who I called

on our out-dated Nokia mobile phone. (Students go

into raptures of nostalgia when I look at the phone

in class). But ‘brownout’ doesn’t sound quite

so lyrical, does it? It has an embarrassingly

scatological sound to it (or let’s just say ‘shittiness’,

which is more James Joyce than T.S. Eliot). Or else

it evokes the War, meaning the Second World War,

my parents’ war, my father turning eighteen

years of age in nineteen forty-six. But in the forties

I don’t suppose they had clothes dryers to turn off

during a brownout so as not to burn out the motors.

And our brownout didn’t last long, just enough

to make the night seem strange—reading to my son

by torchlight, boiling water for tea on the stove-top,

peering through the blinds at our darkened street,

the street lights looking uncertain. But by eight-thirty

‘service had returned to normal’. I was answering work

emails, and thinking about writing this letter

(this ‘verse epistle’) to you, who I don’t know well

but whose voices (those that occupy your books)

have kept me amused and aglow, like a boy with

his ear against a radio in the war, valves warm

in the night, the room filled with interesting

and recondite thoughts. P.S. By coincidence,

I have a copy of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives

on my bedside table, a novel which features in

one of your verse letters. All of your writing shows

that such coincidences are the stuff of art (where are

those quote marks?), every thought and every action

jostling together like bumper cars or comedians or

paratroopers, drifting down from the sky like beautiful

mushrooms and being fired upon by grim-faced Nazis below,

their automatic weapons ripping through the delicate night,

all a diversion for the Resistance to blow up the power station.

What a marvellously interesting poem this is, by Geelong poet, David McCooey. I know Ken Bolton's work quite well, and can really relish the synchronicities that David plays with. But I don't think, I hope, that you need to know KB (or Fiona Shaw or even T.S.) to 'get it'. I find it holds, I opine it holds on to the reader tenaciously. David's most recent book of poetry is Outside by Salt Publishing, which I haven't read yet, but which I will be reading soon.

http://www.mwf.com.au/2012/?name=Writer-McCooey-David 

The Weekend Australian 25-26 August 2012, Review p. 20

The Best Australian Poems 2012, ed. John Tranter, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2012, pp. 80-82.