Poetry Monday: Philip Salom

The full program for the Newcastle Writers Festival is now up at:
http://www.newcastlewritersfestival.org.au/download-the-program/ and I'm busy enjoying some of the most vibrant poetry that Australia has to offer with a pile of new books that I've purchased and taken out of the library.  Next up is Philip Salom, author of, among many other things (some 12 poetry collections and 2 novels) The Keeper of Fish and Keeping Carter, both written with a heteronym (an imaginary character). However, the poems I have been reading come from A Cretive Life, which just happened to be sitting on my bookshelf, as yet unread.  How could I resist such serendipity?  I think I could easily write an essay on every poem in the book, including the powerfully intense sequence "Preservation: Things in Glass" which won the 2000 Newcastle Poetry Prize, but instead I'd like to give you a tiny excerpt from the title poem, which, as you might expect, is a reflection on both the notion of creativity, and perhaps "ac'cretive" as in accretion or a growth in size:

Well, it's all right for him
living in atonal jungle, each whisker
trembling like a tuning formk.
The crotchets are flying up
like waterbirds lifting in a rush
of music from the surface of a lake.

I suspect this may be a reference to the composer cited in the epigraph, whose typo 'How strange and exciting it is living the cretive life' gave rise to the title.  The last bit of poem is "Australia" - full of the sensations of the natural world, eucalypts, and the struggles of the artist, "neurotransmitters going/dry as paint left out in tins." Though there are books to read, I suspect I'll be dropping into A Cretive Life for some time to come, exploring its extreme depths, memory, loss, perception, and above all, the way we make meaning through the creative (and the cretive) process.

Blackout: the visual rendition

We've had a few storms here lately, where the power came on and off, which encouraged me (once the power was back on), to finally give Prezi a try and have a play with a poem that was indeed, as the title suggests, inspired by a lengthy blackout.  This is the result: a visual rendering of the final poem in my book Repulsion Thrust (available for less than $10 at Amazon I might add by way of a holiday gift giving prompt).  Our utter dependence on power is a notion that I'm continually reminded of every time a piece of technology (and like most people I'm surrounded by it and base my daily activities on the use of it, including what I'm doing right now) doesn't work.  Of course I do have candles in the larder, and playing boardgames by candlelight is actually a very relaxing and soothing thing to do, once the panic and sense of isolation wears off.  Nevertheless...

National Poetry Month

Now I know we don't need an excuse to celebrate poetry or anything, but since April is National Poetry Month ("breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain"), I thought it would be fitting to take the opportunity and introduce you to a few utterly amazing, very modern poets.  I could, of course, give you Yeats ("There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow"), or Auden ("In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise") or Dickenson ("Because I could not stop for Death/ - He kindly stopped for me), but that would be too pat, and you probably already know those folks well (if not, take the opportunity to do a little reading - they're wonderful poets).  No, instead I'll introduce three rather modern poets that you may not know.  First is the magnificent, late, Dorothy Porter (1954 - 2008).

III

What voice of dirty ice
is talking in my head


I can't watch the sky
without ringing Heaven.

My heart ticking as slowly
as poison
over its hissing dial tone.

Pick up, Heaven.
Please pick up.

It's me.
(Other Worlds: Poems 1997-2001)

Next is Joel Deane.

Joel is a poet, novelist, speechwriter, and many other things.  I'm just including a snippet of one of his poems here - if you want more (and trust me, you want more), you'll have to drop by Joel's website or pick up one of his exceptional books.


From "The Path Ahead"

The path ahead is surest without shoes
Migrant trees shed small square yellow pages.
Forget-me-nots stamped return to sender.
What the body forgets the mind remembers.
(Magisterium)

Finally, in my trio of poets extraordinare is Luke Davies.  Luke is better known for his novel Candy, which was made into a film with Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish (good film, even better book), but it's his poetry that really shines for me.  Here is a snippet from his poem "(plateau)" in the gorgeous Totem.  

That beauty can malfunction
Is a given.  Love knows
Of all the beauties beyond this.
At every plateau, praise.


I could keep going.  I could quote more from those three, or I could find another twenty superb, individual, magnificent wordsmiths to introduce or remind you of.  Instead I'll ask you to join the dialogue and cite, quote, or list a few of your own favourites.  Let's talk poetry for a while.  Because poetry "makes nothing happen" (emphasis is my own, though it was called to my attention by John Banville's own beautiful reading of "In Memory of WB Yeats").  In other words, it makes what was once nothing, into something that "survives".

When the water subsided

When the water subsided

air cleaned of whistle and fog

debris swept from lawns, roads

living rooms ghosts

flattened shingles and twisted metal  treasures

there was so much silence

the tap of your hand

on my arm

was a sonic boom

compressing every sound wave

into one

gigantic sigh.

*****

Authors for Queensland made over $20,000 for the Flood Appeal! I enjoyed it so much (and Qlders now have the Yasi cyclone aftermath too), that I've decided to offer my last 5 stock copies of Repulsion Thrustposted anywhere for anyone who donates $10 or more to https://telethon.smartservice.qld.gov.au/donations/index. Just email me the receipt and your postal address and I'll get a copy to you straightaway. Thank you!

A very global Father's Day

It's an odd thing but, while Mother's Day is the same worldwide, Father's Day differs everywhere.  It's June in a lot of places (including the US, where my own father lives), but Sept in the Antipodes (where I am), March in Italy, and Dec in Bulgaria - just to pick a few places at random.  Wherever you are, it's never a bad time to give your dad a little nudge and wave, and maybe even a hug if you're in proximity.  This Father's Day, I'd like to honor my grandfather, who is no longer alive, but with whom I had a kind of special affinity.  He wasn't a particularly easy man to get along with, but I always found his company pleasurable, his stories rich, and his energy well aligned with my own.  Here's a little poem I wrote for him. 

Grandpa’s Birds

In the stark reflection of his blue eyes,
bluer than the cloud filled sky (no clouds – even the cataracts are gone)
which opens out above his grave
there are pigeons.

Pigeons emerging from their cardboard box
a surprise gift of joy and youth
filling the otherwise world-weary air
racing
from one grandparent to the other
from one village to the next
their homing instinct
so different from mine
so sure.

I stood there, a child frozen in time
small, awestruck
watching them disappear.

He watched them arrive
as he knew they would
his faithful pigeons
my message on their legs
safe in their coops on the roof
he took one out, stroked its wing muscles
cooing his deepest secrets
those inarticulate dreams English couldn’t handle
the broken heart, that eventually stopped his own flight.

In his sightless eyes
the birds still fly
a freedom he knew, instinctively
even when utterly grounded
a man of the sky
returning always to his home.

"Grandpa's Birds" is reprinted from the book Imagining the Future: Ruminations on Fathers and Other Masculine Apparations, written in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson.  It forms part of our celebration series.   The poem also won the Lake Macquarie Literary Awards local poet prize. 

Guest Poet: Sam Smith performs apostrophe combe

Sam Smith, my editor for Repulsion Thrust, is also a magnificent poet himself, as well as being a novelist, and publisher.  His many endeavours can normally be found at http://thesamsmith.webs.com Today he's performing his wonderful poem "apostrophe combe", a sedoka sandwiched between 2 blocks of prose - as used in China's Heian period (794-1185).   The text of "apostrophe combe" appears below. The music was written and performed by Mark Kime. Enjoy!
 
Click here to play Streaming Audio

apostrophe combe

Slant-stacked, unquarried, these slate cliffs are a wafered ice cake that has been snapped, then pushed together, refrozen and snapped again. Within stratas of slate are stratas of slate where water can penetrate. Through other stratas of black slate white and pink quartz has been dribbled and veined. On beach stumps this quartz is last to be eroded, becomes a globular warty mass, a dirty icing, nor more picturesque than fire-melted plastic.

    Above the lustrous blue

    of a shale-silted sea,

    over path-scarred heathland,

    goes the flame-flicker rotation

    of three brown butterflies.

Could as easily hate this place as love it. Arrive on a wet day, gusts from every which way flicking rain into your face, walk over/through drain surge and gurgle; and it will feel relentless, this ever-blowing wind, the wet that gets into everything. All that you will see of the grey sea is it roiling white around black rocks, misshapen balls of its khaki spume flying over the gulls sitting out the storm on the putting green. A sustained blast of wind will seem to hold down any house you are in. Only, on its cessation, for the house to balloon out as if about to explode. Except that this time it doesn't. And you await the next blast.