SO LONG BULLETIN

‘SOUTHERN BARBARIANS’ BY JOHN MATEER / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

To be a poet is not my ambition,
It’s my way of being alone.

            Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), trans. Richard Zenith

 

To travel! To change countries!
To be forever someone else,
With a soul that has no roots,
Living only off what it sees!

            Alvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), trans. Richard Zenith

                 

You spoke my name in King Joao Library,
the hall closing in around us, the gilt-lined tomb
of a sinking carrack …

                           … You spoke
JOHN MATEER into the dark of King Jaoa Library
and were closer to my name than I will ever be.

            from ‘Eduardo,’ Southern Barbarians, p 48 

Many contemporary Australian poems tour foreign locations, throwing in place names and foreign words, often in a decorative manner. This vein of poetry may set out to signal the poet’s own well-travelled cosmopolitanism and appropriate post-colonial modesty but sadly mostly ranges between the merely dull, and the dully Orientalist. The politics and psychology of foreignness, of otherness, of empire, is rarely touched in any but the most gestural ways. Those matters, in all their real complexity, form the core concerns of Mateer’s oeuvre . With Mateer, travel seems continuous, and continues in the various countries of his residence.

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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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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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BEYOND THE READING / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

So Long Bulletin congratulates the Melbourne Poets’ Union for recent events which go beyond the poetry reading. A couple of months ago, we spent a wonderful evening with Alex Skovron, as he reflected on his life, his writing and his influences. On Friday 24th, we fulfilled a long-held ambition to hear Michael Farrell discuss the meanings, intentions, influences and purposes of his work. On July 29, we’ll hear Philip Salom and Ben Pobjie read (and we hope discuss) their satirical poems.

Whilst the venue was not superb, the turnout was excellent, and the audience attentive, if a little reluctant to ask questions. Panellists Kevin Brophy and Jennifer Harrison commented briefly on the poems and asked some open and generous questions – the answers were not very enlightening. Or perhaps they were. One audience member commented on MF’s striking lack of verbal clarity or articulacy, contrasting this to the poetry, which she described as appearing to have been written very quickly.

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WORDS NOT TO USE IN POEMS / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

Someone likened me to the Taliban the other day, because of my desire for less dreadful poetry to be published in this country. Seriously. Apparently wishing for fewer bad books is the first step toward burning books. Hmm. Even we irascible SoLongistes probably couldn’t muster that much fiery loathing for the bad, to put in for the council permit. Best if they’re just not published in the first place.

Burning books is not a solution – everyone getting a little more serious might be.

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RE-READING PETER STEELE’S ‘EXPATRIATES’ / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

Worrying my shelves the other day, I pondered once again the age-old question of whether to file volumes of poetry criticism amongst the poetry or separately. I decided to leave the criticism where it is, indiscriminately sprinkled between collections of poems because, as I have concluded so many times before, criticism is not separate from or inimical to poetry – it is the salt of poetry’s earth! During my deliberations, my eye fell upon two volumes of excellent criticism by Melbourne poets: Peter Steele’s Expatriates, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Read it Again. I was going to write about both, but my enthusiasm for Expatriates got out of control – let me start there.

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ON REVIEWING, OR NOT REVIEWING / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

Last week I released my second collection of poems. Kindly civilians have already enquired about the reviews, and are surprised to hear that I can’t be confident that there will be any.

Friends from an older generation of poets assure me that when they started out, perhaps twenty years ago, all books of poetry, good and bad, were greeted with reviews. And fifty years ago, in a letter to Rex Hobcroft, Gwen Harwood wrote of Australian literary critics: ‘they remind me of Handel’s and the locusts came without number and devoured the fruits of the ground. They descend on everything that’s done or written like the plague.’

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FOR THE BIG GUY: LES MURRAY & THE NOBEL / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

In September 2010 I walked into the giant independent bookstore Hodges Figgis in Dublin. In the front part of the store are wooden display shelves with the numbers 1-10: ranking the current bestsellers. Above Room, Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light, and undoubtably, some new excursion in dreary dullness by Colm Toibin, was – Human Chain, Seamus Heaney’s newest collection! In hardback!

Stunned and incredulous, I crossed the road to the chain store, Waterstones. There it was again – poetry at number one! That week, to celebrate the new collection, The Irish Times ran an article asking prominent Irish people – politicians, chefs, broadcasters, to nominate their favorite Heaney poem. They all had one, and could say why. Only in Ireland, I thought.

But beyond the legendary (and partly mythical) Irish love of poetry, there is the great fat fact of the Nobel Prize.

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ON AUSTRALIAN PUBLISHING / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

Quite frequently, some well-meaning civilian congratulates me on ‘being published’. It is, they understand, very hard to ‘get published’ in poetry?

‘Not at all!’ I reply, with a vehemence surprising to the civilian.

Of course, what is hard is to ‘get published’ by a large publisher, with money, distribution and a public profile. We hear about the terrible situation of literary fiction, but to us, Sleepers looks like a pretty enormous outfit, with a saliva-quickeningly wide market reach.

What we have in poetry is a proliferation of small presses, pumping out the titles, with little distribution, and a smaller readership.

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MY DIRTY BIG LOVE OF GWEN’S BEAUT DREAMS / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

 
It’s not hard to become obsessed, as I am, with Gwen Harwood. Reading the several volumes of her letters, Blessed City, and A Steady Storm of Correspondence, I yelled aloud with laughter at her absurd slangy private jokes, and, yes, movie-goers, I promise you, teared and wept over the intimate ways in which she owns and invokes her intense consciousness of mortality.

Harwood loved the word ‘beaut,’ as in, ‘It was lovely to meet C W-C [Chris Wallace-Crabbe] and have a talk to him; he’s beaut’.

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AN AMERICAN STORY / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

In the October issue of Poetry (USA), (I promise I only read it for the articles!) the young poet and critic Michael Robbins published a lively, funny, clear-sighted and irreverent review of Robert Hass’ The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239972

In the following issue were seven letters to the editor, mostly bewailing the rough treatment given to Hass, and Michael Robbin’s response to these letters: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/toc.html?issue=2341

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