SO LONG BULLETIN

THE POET CRITICS / PETRA WHITE

So Long Bulletin salutes Southerly for the broad approach to poetry reviewing outlined in its new statement. Reviews editor Toby Fitch aims to cut across ‘cliques and coteries’ and ‘transcend the comforts of pack mentality’ by encouraging ‘the rabbits to review the monkeys, the monkeys to review the elephants, and the elephants to review the dinosaurs’. I admire Fitch’s intent to shake up the reviewing scene and to increase the number of reviews that are published.

I suspect, however, that the problem is not people reviewing only those to whom they are sympathetic – though that certainly happens sometimes. I think the problem is more that poets, writing as critics, feel they have to be nice to each other. Perhaps it is tempting, when you are reviewing a fellow poet’s book, to be careful what you say, in case they end up reviewing your book, or perhaps they will one day sit on the Literature Board or judge you in a premier’s prize. Most of us would want to preserve critical integrity and strike out that thought immediately, in favour of writing a clear, honest and unbiased review that puts readers ahead of poets: but it is something that has to be thought through, and it requires courage. In an ideal literary world, there would be enough non-poet critics, and poets wouldn’t have to get involved; but I can only think of two or three of these wonderful beasts and they can’t cover everything. In our world, poets are the reviewers, the judges, the editors, the funding assessors. And this is a fragile world. I have heard of reviewers being advised to ‘go gently’ on a first book; to avoid being ‘negative’ about poets in general. It is like a system of entitlement: at some stage, everyone gets a review, a grant and a premier’s prize. The problem with this system is that it disenfranchises readers in favour of looking after poets’ careers.

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BEST OF 2011

Well, SLoBs, it’s April, so it is now time to comment on the year that has passed. 2011 was a most poetic year. Australian Poetry Limited launched its first international tour, to Ireland in 2012. Much poetry written in Australia is world class, but it rarely gets the chance to travel to wider audiences. Congratulations to Petra White and Paul Hetherington, who will be touring Ireland. SLB hopes this inaugural tour opens a series of many more. APLtd also launched its flagship journal, ‘Australian Poetry’. Congratulations to editor Bronwyn Lea on an excellent first issue.

The institution of a Poetry Chair at the University of Technology in Sydney is excellent news. And as the inaugural Chair, Robert Adamson is the perfect choice, both in his own illustrious publishing record, and also in his role as an editor of Anthologies and as a visible and benevolent actor upon the poetry scene. He knows the terrain of Australian poetry, and his tastes are broad. SLB will be fascinated to see what the chair can do to promote the reading and study of poetry.

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WONDROUS CAULD / BONNY CASSIDY

An artist made a drawing
           A base was built in Antarctica
                                   fuel tanks   laboratories
warehousing   accommodation.
that another artist rubbed out
Now they are dismantling that base
                       shipping it piece by piece 
                                                         to Australia.
entitled Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning
It has been remarked
that no human should live   in wilderness
                       the poems be written
                                        from photographs.
but that’s another story.

(Caroline Caddy, Picture this)

Uniquely, Antarctica seems to attract artists and scientists towards direct cohabitation; and often the two disciplines inhabit the same bodies.  Historically, figures such as naturalist and artist Joseph Dalton Hooker accompanied early explorers; and more recently, in Werner Herzog’s documentary, Encounters at the End of the World (2007), this duality of roles is revealed through Herzog’s quasi-naturalistic investigation of the humans inhabiting the USA’s McMurdo station.  In that film, a tractor operator is a philosopher; and divers end their day by noodling away at guitars on the roof of their hut. 

The USA runs an Antarctic creative fellowship program through the National Science Foundation.  In fact, one of its forerunners in the 1960s was an expedition taken by Sidney Nolan and Alan Moorhead to McMurdo as guests of the USA.  They were continuing a tradition of expedition artists that was established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Hooker, William Hodges and Edward Wilson. 

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AILEEN KELLY / CATHERINE BATESON

I first met Aileen Kelly when I ran La Mama Poetica in the early 1990s. She was one of our featured readers and I can still remember my delight in her poems, in particular, ‘My Brother’s Piano’. This is a persona poem written from the point of view of Sigmund Freud’s sister, a promising concert pianist, who was forced to practise on a silenced piano so she didn’t disturb his writing. The poem contains many of the tropes I associate with Aileen’s powerful voice. There’s the characteristic sly humour, the barbed word play and a fierce poetic intelligence and humanist feminism behind the measured lines:

 If I were to write in real day
the book I assemble nightly
in the darkened library
his drive would be described as piano envy.

                                                   (‘My Brother’s Piano’)

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ON BAKER AND BANTICK / PETRA WHITE

There seems to be an idea afoot that ‘slam’ can make all poetry popular. In The Age, slam poet Emilie Zoey Baker wistfully imagines poetry having its own reality tv show – MasterPoet perhaps – promising viewers the ecstasy of having ‘your soul unravelled like a ribbon’. This is the kind of hype that is often used by promoters of poetry; we don’t just want it on peoples’ bookshelves, we want it in the living room, in the kitchen, on pillow cases, on the iPhone; we want it to tickle them in the shower and write itself onto their steamy mirrors and appear in their porridge for the sake of their souls.

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YOUNG POETS: A PREFACE / JOHN LEONARD

Readers of poetry have a weather eye for the new, young talents whose work ensures the serious continuance of an art that is possibly vulnerable from being too little read. Slightly surprisingly, it always arrives, robust with the strange fusion of ambitious intent and self-effacement that serious artistry requires. It is true that, occasionally, there is premature praise from critics and committees of judges, if eagerness at some newness overtakes more lasting considerations of artistic reach and achievement. This is of course unhelpful as feedback, and it patronises the reading public, some of whom might (out of the corner of an eye) already be seeing a fair amount of puffery across the poetry industry. Still, that said, the poems in this anthology impress me as having a true distinction in quality and, personally, they move me.

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To our readers in Hungary:

Australian poet Jennifer Harrison will be reading in Hungary with András Imreh

at  Massolit Books and Café 
Budapest VII 
Nagy Diófa 30

Tuesday, 13 September at 7pm

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DAN DISNEY’S ‘AND THEN WHEN THE’ / KEVIN BROPHY

Mallarmé apparently said something to the effect that the purpose of all life is to find itself one day in a book. We here at Collected Works, which is the centre of the universe of books, know that to be true, but it is wise to keep this from all those out on the street who think life begins and ends out there. In the first poem in this glowing object, and then when the, Dan Disney brings the world into the classroom:

Coats wet, we come
Fog-breathed
to hear how we might come to know the world through pure reflection
               without recourse

to experience

rain on our foreheads, little fists from the tremendum, we wait
at the doors of an unlocked lecture hall.
Coughing has been falling from a cold man’s mouth. A huddle of minds in
                the dark morning

apprehend. The trees

are wearing the shape of trees.

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REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING POETRY / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

I am a poet and a secondary school teacher. For me, one of the most funnest – as the kids might say – things in the world, is working with senior secondary students who care, to read poetry. I have been immensely lucky in working at a school where a large proportion of the students care very much indeed. I also work as a freelance presenter of poetry workshops and – my most favouritest thing – professional development for teachers on teaching poetry.

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THE INCREDIBLE VANISHING POET / BONNY CASSIDY

You need only think back to the discrepancies between versions of classical myths, to notice the way that mythology tends to sprawl rather than contain itself or anything else.  The thing about mythology is that it is unwieldy and uncontainable; conflicted and inconsistent.  We create myths to give order to the world – its origins, its events, its future, our experiences and expectations – and yet they do precisely the opposite. Those myths took the shape of poems, and rightly: their quality of sprawl reflects the nature of poetry itself; the way it establishes forms of sequence and containment to hold questions, processes and meditations. 

Any glance at mythologies in Australian poetry will exceed itself, its poets and poems.  If you wanted to explore the theme further, you might also find yourself looking at any number of mythological categories: Australian poetry’s gender mythologies; the myth of the generation of ’68; myths of the city and the bush; appropriation and pastiche of myth; and so on.  Does Australian poetry possess an especially rich tradition of mythologies?  It’s possible; but maybe that’s an argument for another time.  What interests me is the absence of the poet on this continent.

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