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.

Tuesday Poem - Taking a Pig to Market by Kevin Brophy

Taking a Pig To Market


Pigs are keen to look at everything, as dogs are, and that is why

they love to be put in a trailer and taken on a journey through this

endlessly puzzling and amazing world. To be taken on a trailer

and driven away is to find yourself unexpectedly in charge of

the world, to find yourself filled with curious thoughts and new

experiences. No need to ask why this is happening and where we

might be going. These are considerations far away in a future so

distant it might as well be tomorrow. 



Kevin Brophy's contribution to the joint book Radar with Nathan Curnow
(Walleah Press) are prose poems of infinite but mordant jest. I couldn't like
them more. It was very hard to pick just one. I, alas, don't know how to fully
block on this blog (maybe it isn't even possible) but they are laid on the page
in the handsome book in elegant frames of absolute margins, which I can't
reproduce. But still, here is just one of the cool yet ardent works for your
viewing pleasure. 

  

Tuesday Poem - Wildlife by Nathan Curnow

Wildlife

for Alexis

She leads me into the worn out wildlife park

where all the kookaburras care to say is ‘lol’.

Brown kangaroos remain slumped upon the green

like used teabags on a kitchen sink.

Alligators dreaming of their glory days

as stars on Miami Vice refuse to move until

they score a bit-part, one that’s bound to cost an arm and a leg.

While the Aldabra tortoise munches on salad

as it’s done for a hundred years, the great vegetarian 

who has never thought to demand anything more of lettuce.

My girl skips and charges, fierce and innocent,

we come to this park every week.

She confronts the big reds—as buff as steroid users

who could kick the shit out of Olympians.

Singing her ABCs at the top of her voice

as emus beat box by, the lop-dop of a well-drum,

a billabong hidden somewhere inside their throats.

And the Burmese python who waits for us

inside the Reptile House, does nothing when we arrive

because it’s shed its skin and need do nothing again for weeks.

She gallops into darkness, past the whiptail lizard,

chameleons barely roll their eyes, the hog nose snake

forever smirking at her nostrils spread flat on the glass.

Then she turns the corner, finally stops, there is a girl

up ahead with her mum, the shock of a creature

the same age and height, they stare.

She backs into my legs.

This poem comes from the excellent joint book (with Kevin Brophy) called Radar.
It's available from :

http://walleahpress.com.au/garradunga/?tcp_product=product-one

Tuesday Poem - Thirteen Reviews of the New Babylon Inn by Geoffrey Lehmann

Thirteen Reviews of the New Babylon Inn

for Nicholas Lehmann

I

“The world’s eighth worst hotel?

I vote it Number One!

I’ve known better in the back-blocks of China.

I was offered heroin at the entrance.

The narrow stairs shake when you tread on them.

I couldn’t get my door to lock

and the sheets have holes and strange stains.

Read the reviews before you book.”

II

“The manager yelled at me

when I asked where’s the free internet.”

III

“Don’t be deluded by the photos and location.

My room was like a horror film,

dank, the tiniest I’ve ever seen.

I could hardly wrestle my suitcases through the door.

To sit on the toilet I had to twist my legs around

or have one foot in the shower.”

IV

“Their free American breakfast!

A small piece of white bread, a droplet of jam

and microscopic package of cottage cheese.”

V

“No cold water. Both taps had hot water!

And a power point in the shower cubicle.

See the photo I’ve posted.”

VI

“Six panels were missing in the ceiling –

something to look at when you’re lying in bed.”

VII

“My wife woke up thinking I was tickling her feet.

I felt a tickle too,

and switched on the light.

Two beady eyes of a small rodent!

Grabbing bits of our pizza

he vanished through a hole in the wall.”

VIII

“I complained about mice eating our chocolate.

‘What do you expect?’ the man at front desk said,

‘Mice like chocolate.’ ”

IX

“Extra friendly staff

found my lost passport under the bed.

They attend you like a princess aus Deutschland. Five stars.”

X

“My secretary

will never book for me again.

My secretary isn’t going to be my secretary. ”

XI

“I didn’t expect pre-warmed bed linen,

residues of bodily fluids

sandwich wrappings and cigarette ash.

A hooker and her john

pulling their clothes on

hurried out the door

as we checked into our room.”

XII

“Just out of college

we were sucked in by the price and location,

and were review-skeptics.

OMG, they were right!”

XIII

Dreams are explained.

8¹/₂th Avenue has five lanes

of bumper to bumper, humid traffic.

The beautiful grid

of this flat, granite island,

its horizontals and verticals of space,

are a psychic phenomenon.

I step out from my air conditioned limousine

with tinted windows,

and recognize the facade from the photos:

a fire escape zigzags down the front,

the New Babylon Inn

is backed by a tangerine sunset.

A young price-conscious family with luggage

is staring from the sidewalk.

I walk up and open the glass door

with precision.

They pick up their things and follow.

Management greets me

and my credit card

like a friend back from the dead.

Here is another poem from The Best Australian Poems 2012 edited by John Tranter. It is not that I am not reading anything else at the moment (I am enjoying Radar by Nathan Curnow and Kevin Brophy and hope to get permission to put up some of their work soon) but I did find so much to like in this year’s Best Of.

Geoffrey Lehmann has published seven collections of poetry and a Selected Poems and Collected Poems. He has edited two anthologies of Australian comic verse and co-edited (with Robert Gray) several anthologies of Australian poetry, the most recent being Australian Poetry Since 1788. He has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and continues to write as a literary reviewer for The Australian newspaper. His poems are widely published, most recently in The New Yorker.

Tuesday Poem - Kohlrabi Soup by Jan Owen

Kohlrabi Soup

How it trapped the dust,

the stucco façade of that old square house

the colour of deepest heaven

behind the oleanders’ poisonous pink.

Half the back yard was an offering of scarlet tulips

like a ritual letting of blood.

In the other bed the lymph-coloured kohlrabi

craned on their purple stalks,

slowly gathering the will to walk.

The father, young and newly ill, had begun

in desperation to build a catamaran,

safe outside in the shed.

By five pm, the hemmed-in kitchen was already dim.

She had finally made him the kohlrabi soup

and put it to cool on the bench.

When he came inside,

the babies, latched in their chairs,

were brandishing spoons and shrilling with hunger;

he yanked the plug

of the bakelite radio blaring against the din

and cut the cord with his knife.

Late that night she tiptoed into the kitchen:

the abandoned soup had set to a sinister pond

gravelly-soft as semolina, elastic as phlegm.

It was the exact colour, she saw, of the moonlight

mottling the yard of scattered toys

and the phalanx of triffids beginning to stir.

Over the scene,

a disappointment balloon

was drifting to if and when

the boat would be launched,

the family split,

and the small blue house knocked down.

Another wonderful poem from The Best Australian Poems 2012 - this time by Adelaide poet, Jan Owen.