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Lyn McCredden
reviews
Untimely Meditations and other poems
by Ken Bolton
Wakefield Press, 1997, ISBN 1 86254432 8
This review was first published in Heat magazine. It is 1,600 words or about 6 printed pages long.
I’ve just been watching Bill Sennet’s Kiss or Kill on video, and rewound twice to the don’t eat bacon/ I was adopted scene between the two detectives, played deadpan by Chris Heywood and Andrew S. Gilbert. The scene is an hilarious spin on the Australian bush yarn or tall story, played with restraint, effecting a mounting hilarity, a perfect piece of yarn-spinning for pleasure, set in the middle of a macabre thriller always on the edge of comic deflation. The film also got me thinking about the kinds of humour which come together with pathos, tragedy and the deflationary in Australian film and writing.
Trying as I am to come around to my subject — poet Ken Bolton’s new book, Untimely Meditations and other poems — I will insert only one more film reference. In a recent Age spread of reviews of “Australia’s best films”, two reviewers tackled that hoary old chestnut, Australian identity, and made claims about truly Australian films. Tom Keneally, writing about Muriel’s Wedding in The Age (14 February, 1998), described it as shining on any list of films “representing the milieu in which most Australian’s live: the domestic, municipal, tragi-comedy.” Adrian Martin, writing about Crocodile Dundee, described the film as having “the laconic wryness of a venerable Australian sensibility... (with) its sarcastic undermining of great Aussie mythologies.”
Somewhere in the middle of these attempts at describing Australian film, and what makes it Australian, I started thinking about Ken Bolton’s poetry. Not that film is a thematic preoccupation of his necessarily, though it does crop up, but it’s something about the rapid abutting of genres — comic, desultory, meditative, ironic — and the way each of these splinters off into the others, that is so Ken Bolton. It’s also the fact that the poetry, as with many of the Australian films I’ve been thinking about, works through a central character, one who doesn’t / can’t / doesn’t want to rise above the limitations of what he or she apprehends. But this character embodies, dare I say it, in a postmodern way, the vertigo of such rapid conjunctions. Think of Malcolm, Muriel, Helfgott, or the many characters played by actors like Bill Hunter, Noah Taylor, Mel Gibson, Judy Davis, Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, in which the slippery, rapid-fire conjunctions of genre — from savage to deflationary, pathetic to hilarious — occur. As Keneally writes of the scenes between Heslop and his film children in Muriel’s Wedding, they are “flinchingly funny... at the same time fragile but robust.” He describes Heslop as “the King Lear of Porpoise Spit.”
Now it’s not as if Ken Bolton’s persona ever reach the pitch of the tragic. Nothing as pure as that. They are funny, self-deflationary, potentially pathetic, detached, exuberant, poetic, often simultaneously:
Super
fluity
be with me now! & if you need not defend —
because I “mean” nothing —
render me invisible & safe from
gratuitous attack
(not Linda’s who would defend me
but the crowds that gather & knock about
these places
art galleries, & places like the Exeter I want to live
in Greece
where insults are in another language, to which
I’m deaf, as this extra drink will render me, mild &
unprotected
but calm in my misunderstanding
watching
everyone move around me, divided...
It’s so much to do with the spacing. The mind represented is a languaged mind, a humorous, questioning, unpompous and ultimately meditative bundle of impressions, desires, words, relations, knowledges. It can’t and won’t take itself seriously, but there is something in this refusal which is deeply moving and valuable. The subjectivity at work, or play, is seeking itself through language, and through a community of friends and fellow artists.
I can hear possible detractors talking about the clubiness, perhaps the boyo-clubiness of some of Bolton’s poetry — down the Exeter, few beers, lots of mates who are poets, lots of poems dedicated to other poets — but it’s necessary to read Bolton not just in short bursts, to read his whole volume. There’s a deeply serious — and flip, and gauche, and witty and almost self-cancelling — consciousness at work in words here, and it demands attention. One that is seeking community.
I think it commands attention, firstly through its range of serio-comic techniques: jumbled lists of things from a contemporary domestic / psychic landscape; daydreams of a mildly self-inflationary kind; glimpses of puffed-up self-importance; aphorisms of a semi-serious silliness; embarrassingly personal notes offered in the full awareness of their embarrassingness; weird juxtapositions — quotes and misquotes, names, theories, memories, things; sportive name-droppings; mock self-deprecation; real self-deprecation; agonising self-analysis wandering into moments of letting go, even of joy. And that’s not the half of it.
I have a serious tone off voice which
once adopted I am not even
interested in —
there is nothing I will say
that I care to hear
— though it
can say things
with which I agree.
But that is politics! & I fall asleep,
or run a mile, depending...
Why would you want to read such self-indulgence? But when you do read, the layers of self-consciousness reveal — no, not a self exactly — but a self in the process of trying to catch., .motives, desires, webs or
patterns of meaning which keep peeling away, disintegrating, turning out to be so embarrassingly common:
people do
see me & say There goes that jerk, or What an
odd looking figure,
or even That’s Ken Bolton — sitting over there
— I wonder what he’s doing.
On this night, I like to think,
they said Ooh, what an interesting looking
man,
what an awful lot of letters!
It’s the self in all its daggy, would-be smooth, unrelentingly self-conscious moves, revealed for a public who will no doubt summon up descriptions, categories such as “jerk”, or “interesting”. It’s the private, the very private, awkward, needy thing made public. And that’s a brave and funny poetic act. It’s self-absorbed, but surely in a way that implicates that public, all those individual readers, in its embrace, whether they like it or not.
Attempts to place the self in a community, in a tradition, in relationship, are at the heart of this self-absorbed poetics. The centrepiece of the whole volume, the poem “Lecture: Untimely Meditations (Tentative Title)” begins with three framing quotes: “a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms” (Adorno), “Time is marching” (John Lee Hooker) and “Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!” (old saying). They aren’t bad indicators of Bolton’s parameters as a poet. The persona of the meditation is a poet who loves his life, finds it a burden, needs to locate himself within a community but is a loner, and is willing to suck as many sour persimmons as he is ready to hand them round. Les — “Where’s/ the beef?” — Murray gets a big one, as do John Tranter, Bob Adamson, the New Romantics, the old parochialists, dogmatists of all kinds.
The lecture is a personal and poetic history of Australia. It’s by turns wonderfully and politically incorrect, bitchy, dreamy, acute, self-indulgent. It’s also deeply committed to poetry, to the traditions, idiosyncrasies, failures, narrownesses and beauties of poetic language. It’s a kind of “analytical wondering”, a worthy meditation which, in-step with the genre to which it fitfully belongs, is excruciatingly aware of the fragility of things — writers and words alike.
I think there are probably quite a few readers, even readers of poetry, sadly, who will read such shenanigans as merely shambling personal commentary. That would be to miss a great deal, about the poetry, and about how selves construct their meanings and communities. But maybe this is to generalise too easily. That’s something Bolton doesn’t do. In “Dazed”, a poem dedicated to the late and consummate Australian poet John Forbes, but written before his friend’s death, Bolton is again found teasing out the fragile, daggy, humorous rhythms of thought.
so that the weather
of one’s mental life
of this one’s —
flickers
from light to dark, constantly,
like time-frame film
which looks moody
experienced as film
but as mental life
is “trying”...
Bolton begins this poem by scooping up and quoting in full Forbes’s complex poem “The History of Nostalgia”. “Dazed” is a wry, moving, merry-go-round meditation on art, meaning-making, full of admiration for his poet friend, and imbued with a longing which the poem would cringe from calling spiritual, though that’s one of the categories it considers for itself. But if close, even painstaking attention to the minute verbal possibilities of his friend’s work — a humble, witty, attentive hermeneutics — can be considered a spiritual activity, then Bolton does himself, and his poetic friend good service.
There are many, many poems in this volume dedicated to poetic mentors or friends — O’Hara, Berrigan, Forbes, Pam Brown, Laurie Duggan — as well as to dozens of workmates, lovers, rivals. It’s the world of a poet — individual, even lonely, self-obsessed — but one which is able, through language, to create poetic community, to continue seeking ways of speaking and writing beyond mere technique and mere self-absorption. Read it at a sitting, and then go back for more. It mightn’t offer general truths about what it means to be Australian, or a poet, or even a self in process, but its existential, poetic grappling with such questions will hopefully draw you in.
http://april.edu.au/bolton-k/mccredden.shtml