Homepage
Poetry post-1900
This author’s Contents page
save the language from poetic tongue
‘milk bar’ is accessible but
‘tangible’ is not
Hello Lenin!
help, I’m trapped in this
chip packet
right you are, son
he wiped his moustache
the cat nuzzled the chips box
it was 11.40 p.m.
*
‘Could you work in
a place like that?’
(a paper factory)
outside it looked
& felt like rain
‘it always does
in Alexandria’
*
In a strange way
I like this place.
Cook spaghetti bolognaise
Eat it to ‘Books and Ideas’
spit and swear at
Roland Robinson
Tom, you shit
(the cat)… out
of the sink!
(1974)
A big football full of air
presses out as the wind presses in
walks up the street
eats banana & grit
past the furniture shop painting –
white rhomboidal table escapes perspective
man in neckbrace with
halfmast pants.
No mail today (threatening letters
from READERS DIGEST ORGANISATION)
the head bounces up & down
full of words. Buy shortbread biscuits.
Collect magazine from newsagents.
Phone sickness excuse to the library.
A bag full of funny gas
gathers itself on the pavement.
(1980)
In this town a dance is
the dance.
The chill
of shoulder straps, Friday night
outside the Main Hotel,
a sacrifice for style.
Sunday, the glint
of a flute in the trees up the Mitchell’s bank;
snatches of Mozart: skewed notes running off the scales.
The path goes on endlessly, crackling with twigs.
Auxiliary generators whine over the agistments.
Across the river,
white branches lean in the wind
that blows down from the Divide.
(1988)
Yeats said: a poet
‘is never the bundle
of accident and incoherence
that sits down to breakfast.’
Yeats was a shit.
The Indian summer is over,
leaves of the fig only beginning to yellow.
I’m happy we don’t have real seasons
— the sight of all that dead vegetation
between Washington and New York
last year’s fall,
and what a relief it was
to get to San Francisco
and the green of eucalypts:
not simply a sense of being
closer to ‘home’.
Groan of a tram from the Esplanade.
A dirty wind
distant radios
turpentine
the Triffids singing
‘Chicken Killer’.
Tambourine Life!
I punch holes in the mystery bags
— in the mixed metaphor of political commentators
‘puncture a few sacred cows’
Buried items:
my guitar
with blackened bass strings.
I couldn’t understand why older people owned musical instruments
they no longer wished to play
— were these the discarded apparatus of courtship?
(for me, simply the knowledge that imagination
exceeded physical capacity
and I would never be able to play the tunes I ‘heard’
— this and a hatred of the ‘folkie’ strum.
I would want to make an acoustic instrument sound electric;
play against its limitations
— of a piece I guess
with my feelings about poetry;
no wish to condone a limited and sectional interest
in its workings.
Works of the past remain great even if we venture elsewhere,
they’re taken for granted if used as templates
and I always suspected
the search for romanticism’s narwhals
— why not the washing machine?
the sausage?
(The Mystery Bags of Charles Peguy!)
* * *
Metallic sky at 4 pm over Chapel St,
a line of used refrigerators,
grey over the art school
‘little fidget wheels’ &c.
Water slips down gum leaves,
pools and drips from fig.
Friday.
A wrong number.
I get up to see what happens next.
A foghorn.
Pigeons wheel over a rooftop laundry.
Remember when the avant-garde writers would sit around
describing the items on their desks?
(If I buy a set of spanners
will I become a mechanic?)
Television squares the reflection of this couch
into a few centimetres;
stretches it vertically
so that my legs, in the middle, break the screen
in a dark stripe like a Barnett Newman
(so who said: ‘aesthetics is for the artists
like ornithology is for the birds’?
Ad Reinhardt?
Dancing laundry
a gust of rain
mahogany on pale hardwood
(sneeze)
‘implements in their various places’
another gust (the sky: piebald?
‘couple colour as a brinded cow’?
(why compare a hemisphere
to a beast?
Ask the poets.
Or I’ll watch blank television
like 1976.
Birds manic at dusk
a wide-screen movie through the venetian slats.
The light that can’t be photographed
behind the birch.
We are condemned to write as we please
shirts flapping against the skyline
traffic rumble downhill.
could I burn the books
(not the records!)
to begin again
not even a desk
replete with objects to describe.
I have floorboards,
a TV (TV!)
but I won’t describe the casing
— that would be too John Forbes.
To describe the cathode ray tube
would be too John Tranter
(though from this
I’m saved by ignorance).
I’d mention
the program if it were on
(being a literalist)
— tonight: The Maltese Falcon!
* * *
A pilot light splutters in the otherwise silent kitchen
as a clear day clouds over.
Rosemary, comatose, has missed all this.
A household boxed and stacked is full of possibility
— if we could live this way forever.
But there are books to consult, pieces of music
inaccessible here or elsewhere, which no-one
could have imagined would be necessary
— memory allows
and does not allow a return to beginnings
(brain-junk can’t be disposed of so easily
so a use must be found for these pieces
apostle spoons, odd socks and vanished riffs,
my old school motto: Labor Omnia Vincit
(that futility, a prefabricated set of classrooms
on Melbourne’s (then) outer edge
with a latin tag.
We were mostly office and factory fodder
harbouring a few right-wing councillors
(owners of slide-rules).
Monash Uni up the road was a different matter:
the Labor Club brought new levels of boredom
— my first experience of the ‘procedural motion’.––
In 1968 I would not wear jeans
— a phenomenon I saw as the upper class dressing down
(the ‘boss class’ as the Labor Club would say).
I wanted to dress up
wore black and white check trousers and neat turtlenecks
like my favorite bands.
Years later, long haired, bearded, in flared jeans
I appear on the right of a photographed group:
Kris, Retta, Robert and others with Robert Duncan;
an inner-city backyard,
Duncan having read
with metronomic hand
the beats between words
just as important,
and listened
as we read portions of our own work,
taken in particular by Walter’s poem
(Walter Billeter).
I look all this up in old diaries
— but I didn’t keep one in 1976;
my poetry notebook
filled with intermittent scrawls,
the writing getting larger and less decipherable
at the end of drunken nights.
Still no mention of Duncan’s visit;
just the photograph
on the wall at Collected Works.
I had been in Melbourne a few months;
interviewed in a pub
for a teaching job.
I taught for a whole semester
then drove back to Sydney
thankful for sweat and alternative radio
(Unemployed at last!).
I didn’t write about the things on my desk,
I drew pictures of them:
crooked chair backs,
jars of pencils, book spines.
I would copy labels,
items from newspapers,
misread headlines.
In the library I would investigate Chinese texts,
articles on geomancy
and their bearing on the siting of cities
— this was 1977:
Alan Wearne
in Sydney, with John Forbes
held up a newspaper headline:
the death of Elvis
in Victoria Park
(the headline, not Elvis)
— just beyond the library
where I ferreted that year
salvaging from the stacks
items on popular culture of a city in wartime and depression,
the culture of Luna Park
remote as Borobudur and Angkor Wat
through which my father (still in uniform) walked;
a set
for an unmade movie
— ‘snippings of idiot celluloid’, not
The Maltese Falcon –
a jumble of genres
when backyards of the poor were allowed
to abut on the Harbour
and in Melbourne the rich had no interest
in Port Phillip Bay…
. . . choppy, under cloud,
the horizon clear to the Bellarine Peninsula
as I round the Upper Esplanade
heading for Acland St and music
(the abrasive notes of Link Wray
reverberating later
in the emptied living room.
Mauve and silver tonight,
a red beacon intermittent
over towards the rip
as I round Alfred Square to the bottle shop.
Return to a floor coated with fine powder,
walls patched with white
round the window, uncurtained,
aquarium-like;
slump on a couch before the television
feeling rigorous
in a sloppy way.
The Selected Martin Johnston
(John says) including prose
to appear next month
(will there ever be a collected poems?).
We would taunt Martin
with his prized pentameter
‘polychromatic springtime’s gay cadenza’
recited in race-callers’ tones.
Martin, I remember mostly
weaving, snake-like at a table
barely able to stand
voicing his poems perfectly.
This evening turns wretched.
In cold rain I wait for a rail to Fitzroy,
step off in Johnston St for a restaurant
but before this
into the Tankerville
where Vince Jones sang,
Wilbur Wilde sitting in
— the band’s slightly raised eyebrows
as he played at Charlie Parker,
a rock’n’roll honker out of his depth
(his spacings meaningless
unless as pause for the next idea.
Painted on the bar walls,
a Greek god
with muscles twined like macramé.
Then there’s a figure like Toulouse-Lautrec at a funeral
a bottle of evil purple liquid
poured over his top hat
by the figure (presumed) of The Artist;
this scene overlooked by a goddess with misshapen breasts;
the whole, a kind of pastel psychosis
above the dado, the familiar tiles,
the wood floor’s perspective in the long bar
rendering the pool table as a stage prop from Van Gogh.
Brett Whiteley would have been outpaced here
by naiveté’s greater ambitions.
The painting’s unfinished,
a segment of wall breaks off from this narrative
indecipherable without a key.
Is it still in progress?
Or was it abandoned years ago when the artist
enlisted on the other front
(i.e. joined A.A.)?
Over all this, Channel 9’s quiz programs proceed uneasily
high on a bar T.V. in the grip of the Gods.
(1993)
I have to write a poem
for a poetry reading
in the House of Parliament.
It’s the House they don’t use
since they closed it
some time ago. But it will do
for poems, the ‘Dorothy Dixers’
that live forever. Well, what to put
in my poem for the poetry reading?
Should I take a ‘heroic’ theme
in tune with the atmosphere
of an historic building? Or would this
be wrenching my voice
a little too far? With a diaphragm
like mine, booming is an impossibility.
So I’ll take a casual route
allowing accident to mingle
with intention. It could be
a Frank O’Hara type poem
as in ‘I did this, I did that’
(I looked at a map of Kent
calculating how long it would take
to walk from Sandwich to Canterbury
– Sandwich, because
it’s just near Pegwell Bay
where William Dyce painted
his wonderful painting of people
on the beach, standing, as the sun falls,
in isolated groups in this liminal space
as though waiting for the end of something
– the nineteenth century? or some even more momentous
occurrence, like, say, the arrival
of visitors from another galaxy.
Actually they have just witnessed
(or failed to witness) the passing
of Donati’s comet; an event
that dates the picture
precisely. It is October 5th, 1858.
(But now, as I write this poem
to be read in the Upper House
it is 6.30 p.m., July 20th, 2001.
On the SBS News, George W Bush
visits Europe, reads to uncomfortable children
in the British Museum Reading Room and offers:
‘Marx, Lenin, Mark Twain, George W Bush’.
A naked man sprints across the road
near Buckingham Palace. Genoa is fortified
against ‘anti-Globalist’ protesters. In Nepal
the Prime Minister decides ‘to leave these
corridors of power’… Corridors
like these I’m (at this very moment) reading in?
‘Corridors of poetry’ sounds too
High School Confidential
(but all this detail draws me still further
from my objective: to introduce something
in a not inappropriate tone
to the present setting: red plush
of a House of Review
(though my poems are stuck
on a lower level, or at least somewhere
between the high ideal (the metapoetic?)
and the mundane;
bicameral in Spirit
if not in Action.
(2001)
A misreading
the ego is a social convention
foisted upon human consciousness
by air conditioning
* * *
South Coast Haiku
Rain drips through
the tin roof
missing the stereo.
* * *
Creative Writing
No in-
tuition
in tuition.
* * *
War Poem
emotion recollected
in tanks
* * *
Corrected Poems #1
I have measured out my wife with coffee spoons
(1977-2003)
(after Ardengo Soffici)
April 1915. Seven colours
arch across the sky. Seven brushes
(hidden behind my back)
drip from a 36 year inscription.
I’m straight-faced as a mermaid on a merry-go-round
back from other cities, their strange geographies and crazy citizens.
There’s no church, cinema, editors office, tavern en route
I haven’t visited; no bed I haven’t slept in
(a stale carnival of emotions, misplaced
with my umbrella in the cafés of Europe;
remembered briefly as I left, handkerchief flapping,
on sleeping-cars heading north,
heading south).
Time and place are a duet, like dog and moon.
Sirens wail in a blurry dawn; half-forgotten dreams
arise from night’s choking armpit.
These cold jonquils on my desk
were painted once, on the walls of room 19, Hôtel des Anglais, Rouen:
a train passed nightly under our window
splitting the reflections of a streetlamp into component hues;
the Seine was a garden of burning flags.
A decade shrinks like a worm in phosphorus
and everything is present:
it’s 1902, I’m in Paris, in an attic, under glass
(a 35 centimetre skylight);
each morning the city offers fresh flowers from the Place de Cluny;
trams and buses burst from the Boulevard Saint-Germain,
overnight news hits the stands on the Rue de l’Harpe:
‘Paris Gazette’, ‘Hard Copy’, ‘The Truth’.
Raoul’s Shoe Shop competes with the stars.
Smashed on the liqueurs of sunset
like a potential suicide
I shake hands with total strangers
near the house of Rigoletto.
So much of this is best forgotten.
I’d be happier if witless…
(look at this passing gent lighting his cigar,
pacified by a page three girl;
or that cavalry soldier, galloping towards the barracks,
strands of pubic hair between his teeth…)
Eternity? See it in a blowfly’s wings.
Our eyes knit colour into sense,
the bow is drawn: let history slip away
like a platform of sobbing cousins,
let the sun’s shafts dumbly break their own records.
Remember kissing in the dark?,
the glass case of a German bookseller, Avenue de l’Opéra?,
a goat that ate brooms on the ruined staircase of the Temple of Darius, Persepolis?
Forget it!
Remember instead the geography of our touching bodies:
snow,
yellow seas,
temple gongs,
caravans;
carmine from Bombay,
hieroglyphs from Iran.
Blood circulates: a seasonal dance
more beautiful than its sense.
The rainbow, the poem, marry this day to all others.
I sit at my table, smoking and watching:
a young leaf shakes in a garden opposite;
white pigeons flutter in the air like love letters thrown from a window:
New theory: tell me about it!
(the structure of language, circuit diagrams, the discourse of love)
as this bright wreath stretches over Easter,
leaving untouched the fruit, light and multitudes below.
Day sinks in the scarlet basin of summer;
there are no more words
for a fiery bridge.
Youth, you pass like the end of a movie I walk out on,
lit up by the rolling credits
in a fabulous suit of old manifestoes.
(1993)
I xxxvii
You drink from crystal
and you piss in brass;
it’s the vessel between
that lacks class.
* * *
IV lxv
The one-eyed
shed fewer tears.
* * *
VII iv
Those about to die young,
the insane, the criminal,
they encourage them all
to write poetry.
(1985-1987)
Bull Town
Hog Town
Ram Town (Talbotville)
Spring Hill
Stonewall (after the Confederate General)
Little London
Howittville
Mt Pleasant —
renamed Grant, 1865,
This
I suppose out of compliment
to the Crown Lands Commissioner,
known to be at one time
nearly an hour on the Hill,
a regular Caesar
Veni, Vidi, Vici.
Saturday afternoon in Bull Town,
Tipperary men
made themselves obnoxious
to the rest of the population.
They would form mobs, insult, attack,
and cut down tents.
A vigilance committee
on the Californian model
would make a raid.
Father McGirr
read the assembly at Neddy Gray’s Hotel
a homily.
His horse was got hold of;
its mane and tail shaved, the bridle
put under its tail,
and backed up
to the pub door.
By August 1862
the police station closed.
During a heavy storm on the Omeo plain
lightning shattered a heavy post in the stockyard;
hail in drifts six inches deep.
In 36 hours, two earthquakes,
hot winds, and a foot of snow.
A poor fellow
William Wadsworth
whilst trying to save a cow
was thrown off his legs by the current;
hurried along with the hetrogeneous mass.
A few miners have left the head of the Ovens river
for the head of the River Dargo;
diffi culty of provision and quantity of snow
caused many to return,
only twenty now
on the new ground;
under the influence
of one of Saxby’s most frigid prognostications,
snow, heavier than a Laplander might wish,
a gale, toppling the roofs of several houses,
scattering shingles about the streets.
Numbers
are leaving the place daily. Times being hard
petty thefts are becoming frequent.
A woman
with a large family
caught stealing from a store.
Saturday last,
a miner, about thirty-five years,
became intoxicated,
lay down at the foot of a burning tree;
shortly afterwards, his head was shattered
beneath the trunk.
SIR, — The whether is hot and uncomfortably dry and so
are we poor diggers for want of water. No gold is to be got,
and in consequence no grog, so all we have to do is to read
the newspapers, hope for rain and growl at everything.
Some of us diggers are talking of going to the Bendock,
but we hear that the man who kept the punt at the Snowy
has sunk the craft and left, because the Government would
not give £30 per year to keep him from starving, so any
body that wants to cross from Gippsland now must chance
the ducks, and if he cannot swim like one, will most likely
get drowned.
— I am, Sir, your obedient servant
GENERAL GROWLER.
* * *
Extreme heat, a cloudy sky,
a dense canopy of red dust,
wind, veering to the south
accompanied by fine drops of mud.
A great many fires in the bush.
The weather
ending the century
and the silence
of back blocks.
Roads break up.
Railway lines
run to nothing;
to a liability
walked out on;
to a madness;
to snow and dust;
a hut burned down
as a council
breaks promises,
its worthless gifts,
and the world
promises war;
abandons the local.
A Chinese settlement,
houses huddled together as if for warmth
in the characteristic style of this Asiatic race;
the joss-house door
always open, free to the
curious or religious wayfarer.
Tung Un,
dressed in white duck trousers and a dark grey coat;
his wife, a good-looking English woman;
a store,
for a place like Harrietville
of a respectable size.
Three Italians — Giacomo, Bernardo and Batista,
otherwise ‘Long Jim’, Bernard, and Baptist,
splendid specimens of men,
the Subalpini —
inherited in the snows of the Pennine Alps
their power to beat severe exposure
and laugh at the winter of Cobungra;
Britons driven, shivering down to Harrietville.
Indian hawkers.
Arabs.
A Polish Jew
sold a lot of ‘Brummagem’
a.k.a. ‘Carlton’ articles
up and down the Snowy;
the first pioneer of this form of civilization,
although I am informed
there is a sewing machine agent
ahead of me.
(1984-1986)
http://april.edu.au/duggan-l/poems-2005.shtml