January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006. He is currently studying Arts and Education at Monash, while co-editing www.holland1945.net.au and singing for his band. His work has appeared in a range of Australian print and online publications and his poem ‘Ember’ was runner up in the 2007 Monash Poetry Prize. His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm (2008) was published with the assistance of Small Change Press.
endure
like Sophocles inventing
pain
her perfection
is made
knot
by knot
as she rakes the spyglass across the horizon
in one long smudge
as she leads him home
weary of visions
and
of fighting him, placating
his attacks
eating his
blues.
pedestrian
in the possible hush
of 6am the
road is dusted
in pastel-smoke
feet bully the pavement
and cars slip down the highway.
on rubbish bins
crows flick glances
like struck matches
and the wind
squeezes by, rustling
plum blossoms
with clumsy arms.
late night
I know there’s no way to stand out –
and it’s very easy
to make someone’s throat clench
with piano
and a montage or a bit of slow
motion, soundtrack
really makes
up for substance
but what have I got – just lines
on white
envy
and really, why bother when
everything is so obviously impermanent
I guess the great lie of our time is capture –
it’s comforting to believe
everything can be caught, recorded
and remembered
so we don’t have to appreciate
anything in the moment.
april
could we meet
somewhere else
in april
maybe
on stone
with rain beading in your hair
I’d listen for once and you’d be strong
I’d be able to sit still
and you’d be happy
for the first time since april
everything would work
and we’d be able to talk, without
feeling crushed by the weight of stars
their cold light, dry as wind
and the streets, empty at dawn
but full, of yellow leaves
and little hurricanes.
yokan
full moon
splattered on the field
stumps’ moot.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tenzin Tsundue is a writer and activist in exile. He published his first book of poems Crossing the Border with money begged and borrowed from classmates while undertaking his Masters degree in Literature from Bombay University. His literary skills won him the first ever Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction in 2001. His second book Kora is in its fifth edition having sold more than ten thousand copies. His third book Semshook, is a compilation of essays on the Tibetan freedom movement. In January 2002 Tsundue’s profile peaked when he scaled scaffolding to the 14th floor of the Oberoi Towers in Mumbai to unfurl a Tibetan national flag and a ‘Free Tibet’ banner down the hotel’s facade. China’s Premier Zhu Rongji was inside the hotel at the time. He is also known for his trademark red headband which he has vowed to wear until the day Tibet is free. Tsundue’s poetic voice speaks powerfully of the suffering of Tibetan exiles.
Horizon
From home you have reached
the Horizon here.
From here to another
here you go.
From there to the next
next to the next
horizon to horizon
every step is a horizon.
Count the steps
and keep the number.
Pick the white pebbles
and the funny strange leaves.
Mark the curves
and cliffs around
for you may need
to come home again.
A Personal Reconnaissance
From Ladakh
Tibet is just a gaze away.
They said:
from that black knoll
at Dumtse, it’s Tibet.
For the first time, I saw
my country Tibet.
In a hurried hidden trip,
I was there, at the mound.
I sniffed the soil,
scratched the ground,
listened to the dry wind
and the wild old cranes.
I didn’t see the border,
I swear there wasn’t anything
different, there.
I didn’t know,
if I was there or here.
I didn’t know,
if I was here or there.
They say the kyangs
come here every winter.
They say the kyangs
go there every summer.
Tibetanness
Thirty-nine years in exile.
Yet no nation supports us.
Not a single bloody nation!
We are refugees here.
People of a lost country.
Citizen to no nation.
Tibetans: the world’s sympathy stock.
Serene monks and bubbly traditionalists;
one lakh and several thousand odd,
nicely mixed, steeped
in various assimilating cultural hegemonies.
At every check-post and office,
I am an “Indian-Tibetan”.
My Registration Certificate,
I renew every year, with a salaam.
A foreigner born in India.
I am more of an Indian.
Except for my Chinky Tibetan face.
“Nepali?” “Thai?” “Japanese?”
“Chinese?” “Naga?” “Manipuri?”
but never the question – “Tibetan?”
I am Tibetan.
But I am not from Tibet.
Never been there.
Yet I dream
of dying there.
Space-Bar: A Proposal
pull your ceiling half-way down
and you can create a mezzanine for me
your walls open into cupboards
is there an empty shelf for me
let me grow in your garden
with your roses and prickly pears
i’ll sleep under your bed
and watch TV in the mirror
do you have an ear on your balcony
i am singing from your window
open your door
let me in
i am resting at your doorstep
call me when you are awake
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Debbie Lim was born in Sydney where she works as a medical writer. Her poetry has been published in Blue Dog, Quadrant and Poetry Without Borders. She is winner of the 2008 Inverawe Nature Poetry Prize. She was a guest poet at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival.
How To Grow Feet of Golden Lotus
A mother cannot love her daughter and
her daughter’s feet at the same time
– Old Chinese saying
1.
Begin with a girl of five:
her arches will be firm
but she will not yet know real pain.
Soak feet in warm water and herbs.
Massage. This will be their last
pleasure, though recalled
with bitterness.
2.
Curl four toes
under the sole like a row
of sparrows sheltering under a ledge.
Bind with a long strip of cotton
or silk – whichever you can afford.
But leave the big toe free:
this will be her keel,
for balance.
3.
Pull tightly
as on the reigns of a disobedient horse.
Time will break them.
Strive to make toe kiss heel.
4.
Every second day
turn your ears to stone.
Unwrap the bandage and ignore
her crying as you rebind them,
each time tighter. Remind yourself,
as your own mother did,
that there is no such thing
as a truly liberated foot.
5.
Beware three terrible blooms:
ulcer, gangrene and necrosis.
They are insidious as a woman’s curse.
A toenail can take root in the sole
and left unwatched, the cleft
between ball and heel
nurses all kinds of enemies.
6.
Two years will train them
into pale lotus bulbs
of the most sensual beauty:
iron, silver or gold*
7.
When she is older
the mere sight of them
peeping from beneath a gown
will arouse in men
the most powerful kind of desire:
lust combined with pity.
She will walk
the walk of a beautiful woman.
8.
The smell she might live with
for the rest of her life.
But she will learn the art of beautiful
concealment: washed stockings,
draped hems and hours
stitching shoes
of the most delicate embroidery.
9.
A woman with lotus feet
steps through mirrored days
of privilege. She sits
under willow trees, works
tiny worlds with her thread.
A woman with golden lotus feet
will always be waited on.
There are just two things
she must never forget:
Always wash the feet in private.
Always wear slippers in bed.
* The binding process lasted for approximately 2 years. The lotus or bound foot was classified as gold, silver or iron according to its final size. A golden lotus referred to a foot no more than 7.5 cm long and was considered ideal. A silver lotus measured up to 10 cm, and an iron lotus was anything larger.
Extraction
The worms are shrunk in their tunnels
hiding apologies. The cicadas
are banging out a death trill.
While I sit with this ache in my jaw,
my souvenired pain in a bottle.
Up in the gutters, nests are falling
apart into shitty straw and the lawn
is a sea of green tips ripe
for amputation. I am sick of waiting
with this mouthful of gauze.
From inside, I watch you mow:
dragging your diesel heart
in crooked rows. You see only
the metre in front of you, trail
a blunted yellow wake. That vein
working in your left ankle
will be the death of you.
Summer sours everything too quickly,
especially washed skin. My mother sits
in the air-conditioned lounge
obliterating herself with symphonies.
Her mouth has turned into a violin
string, she can stay still for hours
on the verge of breaking.
The sun is an old medal
swung through days like this:
cicadas, heat, deafening afternoons.
This dull socket will keep me
awake tonight. If not,
I’ll pray for dreams of snow.
Girl at 6.20am
An ordinary street, suburban
in flat daylight.
But imagine 6.20 am
when the sky
is pale and slowly leavening
there is something secret happening:
cars parked silently
in driveways and dulled with frost,
and how the cold builds
a second skin
around bushes and letter boxes
so there appears to be
two of everything: one visible,
the other crouched inside, sleeping.
I could reach out
and touch a gatepost, turn
and walk up somebody’s driveway
if I wanted to.
Halfway down the road
there is a tree
I think is cherry blossom.
It leans over the path,
ignores the fence
of the garden it grows in.
Soon it will be loaded with white petals,
cause a sidewalk snowfall
before turning
into a brown skiddy mess.
But just now, as I’m approaching,
its branches are clean
and so dark they could be
stapled to the sky.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jal Nicholl lives in Melbourne, where he is a secondary school English and philosophy teacher. His poetry has previously been published in Retort Magazine, Stylus Poetry Journal, Diagram, Famous Reporter, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Shampoo Poetry.
Audit
Subtract the tangible,
these pebbles smoothed unseen
by god, by water,
by machine;
let mortar
wear away the stone
of prison opened to the public,
and of private home.
Sculptor,
split the frozen tun:
release the grapes inside,
imagining
the chisel is your tongue.
The Annunciation
The messenger appears, his face
a bright mask over sleeping darkness,
but hazy, seeming an actor in
the kind of dream you have when you know
you’re dreaming. He reassures her,
in his old-fashioned gold-trimmed livery,
his sanguine complexion, the cool blue
light he casts around him, speaking
tunefully; he has come to tell her
that, suddenly (although it’s hardly news
in heaven) she’s at the centre of
the whole plan of creation. Congratulations!
You have been selected . . . he begins,
ceremoniously reading from the letter
whose seal he’s broken; but at some point
as the speech continues he stops reading,
adopts a more intimate tone, as he folds
and pockets what you’d assume
was meant to be delivered, and concludes:
So don’t you dare tell anyone–
of course they’d never believe you–
but if you do and it gets back to me,
I’ll come back and there’ll really be news. She thinks,
Were I to ask the name of his boss–
let alone for some I.D., who knows
what might happen? Perhaps she screams
beneath the whoosh of dazzling wings and arms
that clasp her as he whispers like
a gale in her ear, the name of the disease
he’s giving her.
He’s gone, the light gone
From her blinded eyes–but the street
outside the window he came in is squealing;
revived, she can no more cry than sleep–
it’s the supernatural child who cries, already,
to force her to eat, though she’s not hungry;
and soon she’ll have to talk to it, soothe
it with a song, devise a story
to satisfy the world, and keep it straight.
Father in Heaven
A lookout over wetlands, like
a cattle chute against a closed gate
in an empty paddock–
See how the heron drops a moment from
his equilibrium, how ducks
dive astutely and with open eyes.
Feel the advance of shadows that will
flood the roads tonight like sand
a tussock facing the sea. Thus
speaks the one whose likeness
you are, pointing to fields impenetrable
to a bored child’s imaginary
hide-and-seek. But you’re well
above the horizon here, as never before
those views you used to try to paint,
though you had to lie down in sand
or grass to frame, for example,
a closed street in the pose of a nape and shoulders
turning to follow a face–
their own. This one who made you
ejected you from shelter, or you left
after a certain age, because
that too was nature. The same now turns
his weekend face on you, having found the place
agrees with him as much as he
with it. Ceci n’est pas un oiseau,
you say; but see how the bird goes its way
conducted by his definite finger,
sped by the name this gesture bestows
as the sun strikes its wing like a window, and
past this horizon, unthinking,
as if it really were.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
On The Apocrypha Of William O’Shaunessy
MICHELLE CAHILL in conversation with PETER BOYLE
MC: What were the inspirations for your work The Apocrypha Of William O’Shaunessy ?
PB: Many and varied. It is a long work – about 400 pages with a wide variety of material. I began it in 2004. Museum of Space had been published, I’d just returned from the International Poetry Week in Caracas and, though I had written several new poems, I really wanted a larger project. A young Venezuelan poet at the Festival, Edmundo Bracho, had read a few very inventive humorous prose poems from a sequence called “Noir”, imagined conversations written in a formal archaic Spanish purporting to be scripts for various famous 1930’s Hollywood films. I’m not a film buff but I do know something about the Greek and Latin classics and I thought it could be fun to try such inventions – poems and prose fragments written under the names of various real and imaginary ancient writers. The project rapidly took on a life of its own and picked up on a lot of other interests – my fascination with languages, philosophic ideas about time and circularity, history, political events and indirect ways of writing about such things. There was also the example of Edmond Jabès’ The Book of Questions, a masterpiece that deliberately blurs the divides between novel, lyric poetry, philosophical essay and traditions of Rabbinical commentary. Large sections of that book are attributed to imaginary rabbis. Likewise Henri Michaux’ prose poems of journeys to imaginary lands have long been favourite reading of mine. But alongside that desire to experiment and make something new for myself, there was a strong sense that I wanted to speak in my own indirect ways against the background of the world that Bush and Howard had made, the apocalyptic world of globalised capitalism.
MC: Is The Apocrypha Of William O’Shaunessy what you would describe as an epic, and what drew you towards this classic form?
PB: It has some elements of epic but I wouldn’t describe it with that word. There isn’t a single sustained narrative line running through it. It is deliberately fragmented. I think of the great epics – Homer, Virgil, Dante – as being more authoritative but I’m interested in leaving plenty of holes for the reader to go in different directions.
There is, though, some sense of epic about it. People, places, debates, various authors like the poets Omeros Eliseo and Erycthemios, the philosopher Leonidas, the exile and writer of miniatures Irene Philologos, the traveller and essayist Lucius of Ocampo, appear across the work. The struggles between Eusebius and other realms like Ebtesum and Kitezh, the lessons of Phokaia, the sense of it being a vast travel book also thread the whole together. My model is probably more a kind of the Histories of Herodotus with vast holes left in it than the Odyssey or the Aeneid.
What I particularly enjoy about such a large form is that various types of writing, styles, concerns can bounce off each other, reflect or subvert each other and so build a very many-sided whole bigger than just the sum of its parts. Also, in the tradition of Ern Malley, it has a single ficticious author, the late classicist William O’Shaunessy, and includes an appendix of his other writings – poems, short stories, biography. So it also belongs in the tradition of heteronyms going back to Fernando Pessoa. I enjoy the creative sense of becoming someone different, writing in quite different ways, for example, when I’m the Byzantine poet in exile Irene Philologos compared to when I’m the slightly Cuban Omeros Eliseo or the rather Wittgensteinian Leonidas.
MC: Did your writing of the poems require specific research into ancient history, philosophy, or languages?
PB: Mostly not, but I did refresh my memory of a few of Plato’s Dialogues, reread much of Thucydides, read a few histories of the late Roman Empire and discovered Valerius Maximus’ book, and read quite a few philosophers and books on the ancient world. I had studied Latin and Greek at High School and still know a certain amount of that. I was able to write the epigrams to the book in Greek and Latin but did check them with dictionaries.
MC: Many of the poems seem like dreams or the fragments of dream. Were any of the pieces inspired by dreams, and if so, how did you record them?
PB: I don’t think any of these poems come specifically from dreams but I have long written down at least some dreams in my notebooks. A few of the poems come from vivid daydreams or half dreaming thought experiments. Book III, for example, was written while staying with my ex-wife’s family in the Philippines – parts of it sketched out after mid-afternoon naps. Its concerns reflect tropical landscapes, water, poverty and what all those things might do to people. The concerns are quite real but they are given an oneiric bent. Personally I enjoy the freedom that gives to the writing, a way into talking about big things without preaching.
MC: The substance and the discipline of writing prose poems differs to that of free verse. Do you have a preference for writing poetry in either form?
PB: To me they are different types of poetry that work in different ways and make different demands on the poet. I enjoy writing in both styles. There are, in fact, a lot of free verse lyric poems in The Apocrypha. The selection Michael Brennan made for International Poetry probably favours the prose poems and prose writings over the more familiar free verse forms – perhaps because the main narratives and main issues are more obviously there in the prose poems. The lyric poems tend to be more personal.
MC: It seems to be a series of poems about books, about reading and writing, or philology and the imagination’s relationship with books. Why is this fascination so compelling and how might a reader read this book?
PB: Of course, each little section is ascribed to some author or other and often comes from a book. So you have the excerpts from The Green Book of Ebtesum, the uncut Etruscan edition of Herodotus, Omeros Eliseo’s book Nineteen Poems of Life and an Ode to calm temporarily confused ghosts etc. And the Apocrypha themselves are organised into seven books, each made up of roughly thirty numbered sections or fragments. So there is, deliberately, a sense of entering into a labyrinth. But, if the poem – for The Apocrypha as a whole to me forms a poem – looks inward towards the fascination and delight of reading, it also looks outward at our own world. There is a strong satiric element to the book – the kingdom of Eusebius with its principle of maximising inequality, its desire to own everything including the right to use the present tense, for example, or the Dawn ritual of purification for descendants of those who participate in slaughter. Echoes of Howard and Bush and their policies can be found across the work. Likewise, for example, there are echoes of September 11, the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, Monsanto and its bio-piracy, and of Australia’s own legacy of violence and indifference. I don’t see The Apocrypha as a bookworm’s book about other books but as an indirect, but perfectly forceful way of speaking about how things are.
Philology and imaginary languages are something that fascinates me. Imagining radically different languages is largely about imagining different ways in which we might be, imagining alternate futures for ourselves, for humanity perhaps. It is part of the thought-experiment aspect of poetry that attracts me strongly. In creating something large you need light and dark, the joyful as well as the appalling. So Kitezh, the city whose buildings are made of water, surrounded by a river that reverses the direction of its flow by night, appearing and disappearing at whatever might be the centre of the world, stands opposite the ultra-capitalist dream of Eusebius. Mostly the imagined languages, like those of Phokaia, explore the creation of an artistic, emotion-based, relationship-centred world, compared to a world dominated by commodities and pragmatic purposes.
Because the book is so long it sets up certain challenges to the poetry reader, or probably any reader. It’s too long to read from cover to cover in one sitting, as I often do with poetry books. It has some degree of sequence and structure so flipping to poems at random might not be ideal either. Personally I think you could open it at random and read a section or two here or there. It might be good to read it Book by Book, as each Book is constructed as a unit, or you could read a couple of Books, break, then read a couple more. You might want to intersperse the reading of Apocrypha with a few of O’Shaunessy’s own stories or poems. You could hopscotch through the book in several ways. Or you could read it in, say, three sittings from cover to cover.
Ultimately, though, it will be for the reader to decide how they will read it and what they will take from it. I imagine some readers will respond more to its playful side, others to its intellectual paradoxes, others again to its social/political dimension.
MC: Is there a sequential or chronological narrative in poems from The Apocrypha Of William O’Shaunessy?
PB: Not in any strict way, but certain large themes – Eusebius versus Ebtesum, the Kingdoms of pre-Roman Africa, what is language, the life of Irene Philologos, for example, do get gradually revealed as you read on over the seven books.
The organisation of each book is more a balance between a main focus or location and the need to ensure variety – both in content and in style – between free verse lyric poems and prose poems and longer prose excerpts, for example. So Book III focuses on water, Book IV on the island of Phokaia, Book VI is more focussed on poets, especially Irene and Philemon of Mauretania, Book VII is more centred on philosophers, but each book has a range of other things.
MC: In some ways, as Michael Brennan suggests, the Apocrypha could be seen as “a homage to Borges.” In your view, to what extent is the work influenced by, inter-textual with, or paying tribute to the labyrinths, mirrors and philosophical idealism of his writing. I’m thinking here of stories like “The Library of Babel”, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”?
PB: I honestly don’t think of it as a homage to Borges. The influences are far more diverse than that – Michaux, Jabès, Bonnefoy, Char, Jonathan Swift, Joyce, as well as Cortazar, Manuel Puig, poets like Pessoa and Ern Malley are all there in the background as well. On the other hand, I do love Borges’ work and have been reading it for over thirty years so I’d have no great objection to someone seeing it as in part a homage to Borges. After all, O’Shaunessy’s poem “Reading Borges late at night and imagining Buenos Aires” is how I chose to end the book.
MC: The work seems to play with several paradoxes: it is protean, yet it seems to subvert the possibilities of the future as much as historical truth. It invents alternate languages and alternate grammars, yet it speaks of the beauty that lies beyond speech. What is the function of paradox, and to what extent is the poetic voice, in this collection, a visionary one?
PB: I think everyone loves paradoxes, or at least relates to them. They capture so much of our experience of life. Our concepts of both time and language abound in paradoxes. Paradoxes, where they are fresh and telling, address us like poems, push us into seeing things differently, at least for a few moments give us the gift of being in a different world. Many people talk of poetry in terms of metaphor but perhaps the paradox is an equally important aspect of poetry.
I’m not sure of the phrase “a visionary voice”. It recalls Blake and Allen Ginsberg, both of whose work I deeply admire, but the phrase conjures up the danger of being a pretentious know-all, someone who claims to have a unique pipeline to Truth. Ultimately whether one’s work is visionary or not is for other people to decide. I would see the poetic voice in The Apocrypha as involving (depending on the section concerned) largely playful but also serious thought-experiments and a passionate engagement with life. Whether the whole achieved is a visionary voice is something I’d prefer to leave to others’ judgement.
MC: You describe it as a mixture of fiction and prose and fictive translations from imaginary texts. Do you see this work as a development in some way from your experience of translating French and Spanish poetry?
PB: In places yes. I had been trying to do my own translations of Cuban poet Eliseo Diego and the Spanish poet Antonio Machado but had to give up, feeling I couldn’t capture the essence of what I felt in the Spanish in the English. Some of Omeros Eliseo’s poems are my own attempts to write a little like what they might have written had they written in English. There are also occasional echoes of poems by Borges and Yves Bonnefoy in The Apocrypha, but only to a minor degree. Perhaps to some extent surrendering to a heteronym resembles putting one’s poetic skills at the service of another poet in the process of translating, but I suspect it is a fairly limited resemblance. After all, in The Apocrypha there is no literal text guiding my versions.
MC: What kinds of challenges did you encounter in the syncretism of the work; by that I mean the shifts from lyrical to historical, from abstract to discursive voices and the alternating syntax that these might require?
PB: Only the difficulties everyone experiences in writing. Writing in different styles is a challenge, writing in the same style for a twenty page poem is also a very big challenge. Avoiding monotony in style was one challenge in a work this long. In some sections the challenge was to sound archaic and slightly bizarre (to fit a particular persona) without being merely confusing and clumsy for the reader.
MC: The verse novel has established itself as a successful sub-genre in contemporary Australian poetry. How might your book differ from a verse novel?
PB: As I see it, the verse novel narrates a story using the line-breaked form of poetry – the line breaks and certain typical rhythms of poetry, its conciseness, its omissions, perhaps certain more striking metaphors mark it out as poetry. If a verse novel was in prose poetry we would simply call it a novel, possibly a rather fragmented one, but there is a long tradition of that going back to Faulkner and including something as wonderful as In the skin of a lion.
The Apocrypha has some elements of a novel but it isn’t a novel. It is as much in prose poetry as in free verse form. Its fundamental concern is not narrating a story where the fate of the characters is the reader’s chief interest, though there are quite a few characters in the book. It is more open in form than a verse novel and has, at heart, a different conception of poetry. I am most interested in poetry as a way of perceiving and relating to the world, an alternate way of thinking that uses thought-experiments, paradoxes, playfulness to get outside the limitations of the reasoning self. There are some verse novels I deeply admire, like Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and Walcott’s Omeros, but in general the idea of writing a verse novel hasn’t appealed to me very much. It does seem to come out of a different, more technical perhaps, concept of poetry.
As to The Apocrypha, I think it is a form of its own.
MC: Did the work stem from the writing of individual poems, which are integrated into a whole; or was it written more through the filtered perspective of characters forming a discontinuous narrative?
PB: I worked in both these ways. The second was, though, very important. If it hadn’t been close to the dominant mode of writing The Apocrypha I don’t think the whole would work. There were, also though, several individual lyric poems or prose poems I wrote separately and then had to think about where, if anywhere, they might fit.
MC: The world of these poems seem to be governed by an order of physical and ethical beauty which prevail over inconsistencies and distortions in time, logic, grammar and language. Does this suggest a kind of political or philosophical allegory?
Yes, though I trust in a way that is not preachy.
Certainly I agree that beauty is a key value that runs through the work, whether it be the aesthetic beauty of the lost music of Parmenides, the physical beauty of Ebtesum and Kitezh, or the kind of ethical beauty found among the peoples of Phokaia and Siripech.
MC: What are the functions and the conceivable limitations, do you think, of repetition, in poetry?
Repetition gives the reader the chance to encounter something from many different angles. Repetition lets a poet go deeper into something they have visited before. You write one poem about your mother or father; later you write another. In The Apocrypha because it’s so long certain themes, issues, ideas, places, fantasies get revisited a few times, always I would hope with the aim of going deeper. The danger is obviously monotony; the danger is that by giving more you will be giving less. This is, in principle, no different for The Apocrypha than for a collection of poems about your family like The Dead and the Living or The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds or for a collection of poems largely inspired by Science, like Carol Jenkins’ superb Fishing in the Devonian.
As a reader when you’ve read something good you want more of it. As a writer or a poet when something draws you strongly, a topic, a style, a structure, you want to see how far it can take you. The danger is monotony or mere mechanical repetition. As poet or writer, you have to trust your instincts with this.
MC: Has your work, do you think, progressed from description and expression to inscription?
Interesting. I would have to tease out what this might mean. There has been a development, or at least a shift, from the first two books published in 1994 and 1997 to the last two books, especially Museum of Space. While I’ve always written some surrealist type poems, more experimental in form, the first two books tend to have more poems describing my early life, people, historical or social themes in a fairly direct way. What the painter saw in our faces has some poems like that – “Paralysis”, for example, but there are more prose poems than before and the long title poem is an experiment with voices and with fusing different dimensions of experience. Museum of Space tends to be more prose poems, thought experiments and poems that have a playful surreal feel, though there are still a few, “Memories” or “To J”, for example, that might have been in the early collections.
Largely this is about the need to move forward, to find new ways of writing and not be caught in merely repeating myself. There are also the natural shifts you might expect in a poet as they get older – for example, death is around me more now than it was twenty years ago. Writing about myself in any direct way has perhaps become more difficult, as the self I look into is a more gloomy one. In this regard, it’s interesting that The Apocrypha takes me further than ever away from myself, though not, I would want to stress, away from the real world.
I am drawn by the fluidity and playfulness poetry offers, by its possibilities for inventing meaning, inventing other lands and new structures. Counterbalancing the rather bleak image of becoming a gloomy old man endlessly writing poems about himself, a danger I felt with certain poems in Museum of Space like “Rain at Midnight”, “These autumn days” or the various “Jottings”, this new book launches me out into a wider world that offers a sense of creative freedom.
One other way of thinking of the description/expression/inscription idea would be to think of a shift towards a type of writing where awareness of writing itself becomes an equal focus of the work. So within The Apocrypha there is this multiplicity of authors and books, this fascination with the trajectory of writing as a human activity. There are gradations from the awkward, slightly gauche tone of some of the prose writers to someone like Irene Philologos. I always think of her as someone who writes from a place of purity, a place where only the essential is possible. Her name, lover of the logos, the meaning, the essence of things, the word, points towards notions of inscription.
This sense of inscription, this turning towards the act of writing as a focus, is also reflected in the use of a multitude of heteronyms. The tradition of heteronymous writing is so strong in the Latin American world, such an inventive and rich tradition. There is Pessoa and Machado. Eugenio Montejo practised heteronymous writing, as in El cuaderno de Blas Coll. One really peculiar coincidence I wasn’t aware of till nearly finishing the book is that the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman has a collection Los poemas de Sidney West, which he published as translations of an American poet living in Melody Springs in the Midwest, a completely invented figure. Within the book there are references to one of West’s friends, a certain O’Shaunessy. So far I’ve only managed to read a few excerpts of Gelman on the web. The Apocrypha, however, is unlike anything I know in the tradition of heteronymous writing by having so many writers and poets in the one book, by using imaginary lands and histories and also by being largely a satire in the Swiftian tradition.
MC: Your poetry slips across the boundaries of the visible and invisible world, and seems to be thematically fluent or connected: an excursion into the real and abstract spaces of galleries, museums and libraries. How intentional has this engagement been?
I don’t think my work, either in The Apocrypha or in earlier books, is obsessed with dusty libraries, art galleries, museums and concert halls in the sense of being the daydreams of an aesthete. The museum of Museum of Space is something open to transience, something that always has to be created, not individual works that could be owned by anyone, almost an anti-museum. Paradoxes interest me and the desire for beauty, for meaning, for whatever might counterbalance our commodified world. In the absence of credible religion, art in this deeper sense intimates the possibility of a more humane world.
MC: How can the poem be free from reality, or from the poet’s inner reality?
PB: Hmm, you wouldn’t want a poem to be completely free from reality – if it was, how would it speak to anyone? On the other hand, part of the delight of poetry is that it frees us, at least for a while, from the oppressive mundane limiting sense of reality – our domination by the jobs of the moment, anxieties about the future, obsessive and futile regrets over the past – all of the stuff that could be called “reality” and that largely serves to block us from living.
Likewise you wouldn’t want a poem to be completely free of the poet’s inner reality – even if it could be. However, equally, in states of gloom, depression and difficulty, as a poet you don’t want to be monotonously repeating that in your poetry. You want to get outside yourself. Every poet seeks ways to do that. You might engage in writing experiments or take inspiration from photos and paintings of the wider world or write verse novels about other people or experiment with a range of styles and contents. And, sometimes, you might be able somehow to siphon that gloom and darkness into a poem that works.
MC: In what ways does this book pose a new direction in your work?
PB: I think it is a new direction, but there are no guarantees as to what will come next. I mean it is new; it is very different from what I’ve done before. However, I don’t know if it is a one-off experiment or will be a recurring feature of future poems.
MC: You have said that when this work leaves your hands, you might take an entirely different direction. Is The Apocrypha Of William O’ Shaunessy essentially ontological, or, a book of the self?
I’m not quite sure what you mean by ontological here. It is a book about the world out there and about philosophical ideas, but it does trace certain parts of my life. O’Shaunessy strongly resembles some aspects of myself as I was in my twenties and early thirties – there are a few prose pieces attributed to him written during my early thirties. Likewise the love poems and poems about death, depression and pain come from experiences over the five years of writing The Apocrypha. During those five years I was doing my best to cope with a largely unhappy marriage, fell in love, got diagnosed with cancer, got separated and divorced, started a new life. I’m sure traces of all these experiences are in many of the poems.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jessika Tong is twenty six years old. Her work has been published in various national and international literary journals including The Age, Tears in the Fence, The Speed Poet’s Zine, FourW, Stylus, Verandah, Pendulum, Wet Ink, Polestar and The Westerly. She recently performed at the 2008 Queensland Poetry Festival and her first collection of poems The Anatomy of Blue is forthcoming in 2008 with Sunline Press.
Moscow
.1.
How will I describe a man to you?
Stirred from clay
Peeled from the old black bark of German oak
Curled inside my palm, his arms
Tucked back like new, featherless wings.
How will I describe a man to you?
Can words do him justice?
The bones pressed upon like envelopes,
The flesh salted and steamed.
And men, where are the women?
Where are these homes of children and kitchens?
These waist deep cauldrons,
The highways thick with winter lights…
.2.
Thinking that my hands were pearls you took
Them to meet your mother
She sniffed the city lights at my wrist,
Alarmingly red,
As if slit and put us to work like rusted mules
Where they would bloom
Softly and out of place against the cold white steel.
I began to bleed bolts and axe heads.
To eat and live machinery.
Its hissing motor
A heart, my heart that turns over each hour
With a long, desperate cry.
Going home, we share an apple seed.
A chicken bone. We march on.
One red foot in front of the other,
The grinding of metal,
Finally a small child that throws up
Lightening each time I lend my breast to it.
My dear, we are producing terror
In that warehouse.
Do not look so astonished that
We no longer breathe love or its strange pollen.
That the whitewashed tongue of decency
No longer pricks our imaginations
But leaves brick dust on our teeth instead
Of those mythical fires.
.3.
Water froze during the night, closed up its
Clear, consistent arteries.
The war encrusted pipes screamed at our
Tea cups while we danced off death
Before the stove light.
The two of us, great wounds
Refusing to scar, to mend the tortured rhythm
Of arms that no longer hold the other.
The air froze right there.
We could touch it.
Pull it between our teeth like a blackened finger.
That month four people in our street
Killed them-selves just to be warm.
The landlords arrived and threw all of their things
Into the gutters.
Lovely in life
Now they are turned in leaves
Ferried from the canopy to the earth
With no right to privacy
The kind that we share in this room,
On this bed, across this kitchen table.
I ask you,
Has enough been sacrificed for you to be a whole and I a half?
.4.
When I first came to you long nights of whisky were the rage.
We sat up reading Chaucer by a kerosene lamp
Fingers melted to the orange bone of light,
Tingling with alcohol.
I got pregnant, what a disaster you said,
But it was an accident.
Buttoning your heart, scrounging for an axe in the empty pantry.
‘We can’t afford an abortionist. You will have to kill it yourself’.
Biting on a cloth, gas flooded the womb, ate out
The bonneted Eve that slept upon my wish bone.
The old woman from next door
Bent above me and I sunk into her arms
This old mother who smelled so much like my own.
She took it out, that sobbing seed
And feed it to the cat. Then
Knotted a yellow ribbon onto the door handle.
The deed is done!
She told me to get up, get up and dust your-self off.
Put on your best dirtiest dress, scrape mud onto your cheeks.
Trick yourself with perfume and bread my lovely thing.
Do you really want to be all alone in this old country?
You will die out there for sure if he does not come back.
.5.
A little Stalin
You are fat and clean while the
Rest of us are filthy.
We are plucking at the greased bones of God
Starving and sickly as he points us away
From his door.
One night you return to me
Rich with stories of your other wife.
Of how she soaked you with pig fat before
Taking you into her mouth.
You wear
The robes of a Cleric convincing us all of
Your sainthood.
Unfortunately for me,
I curtsey
I fill you with apologetic kisses.
Who is this woman before you with the pomegranate seeds
Crushed between her teeth?
For six long months I dwelled at this doorway
Between these four walls eating rat poison,
Wailing in my widow’s armour.
At this flickering apple tree that I have sat beneath
With blue copies of myself
Hot against your cheek.
I pasted that
Long four letter word to your crutch
In hope that it will seed and give off a
Sweet fruit.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Liam Ferney is a Brisbane poet whose work has been published in Australia, New Zealand and North America. His first collection, Popular Mechanics, was published in 2004. It’s follow up the french word for ‘voyage’ should eventually be raised from the depths of the Marianas Trench sometime around 2010.
Kurilpa
for Paul
all those flat whites & what was the name?
shopping for bargain bin westerns
after the donuts
while the day kept it’s blistering silence
like the coal station at black diamond bay
given as a gift to the jungle.
with no where to go i drink beer with fish
& banished cheap music but
i remember you making machiatos
where the cats played sax
before you shopped for kalashnikovs,
gunja by the kilo
at a 3rd world truck stop.
they were beautiful days
tables adorned with tulips and skulls
where renegades retired
& we are ready to assume
the poise of our generation.
common music betrayed by static,
the treachery of an fm ocean.
Iron Lion Scion
As abandoned as drive-in’s, tracer fire
no longer fireworkflecks the six o’clock news
and the friends he made in Barcelona
have all upped stumps, migrated to Angola.
So he spends lunch hour’s lolling at the lights,
the cavalcade of unspecific grooming,
a crimped starter at the boom where we all go bust,
melting figurines of Posh and Becks
puddling on the high table, the slow waltz
with the sticky palms and dystrophic hearts.
You’ve cancelled your appointments
but there’s no point apportioning blame
on the circus tent revivalists preaching at the riverbank
or a hedge fund backed Buddhist retreats.
The aficionados swear by the tune in the tumult
a detached viola, adagio on the kitchen radio.
That’s how Black Tuesday sounds on a website,
there were warnings but they were polite
and for once the phoney doctors are right:
“Coin is clarity, that much is bankable,”
(you’re holding it long until the ever after)
“call our hotline,” that’s what they say
coming down off the millennium
like a bad pill on a good day.
some nights the heat
Coming home
I read the alleyways
like Toohey Forest tracks.
The night is over tropical,
silences and shuffling,
television antennas
and fake iced tea.
Kept awake
by Kinsella’s
anthology aliens
the earth’s thermostat cranks
and I smoke This Plus™
at the top of the stairs.
My accent gets smudged
like important digits
penciled on an ATM receipt
dishwashed against the coins
in your wallet.
Watching the scuffling
drunks at the end
of the street
it’s as though I’m the big prize
on the crooked game show
destined never to go off.
I learned surrealism
from travelling exhibitions
then did my best to forget it
hoping I could come off
easy and casual
like terry towelling hats
or cold beer.
The brave and the free
These are not good days with the Gipper still on TV,
the Kool-Aid sins of the brand new colony;
when the truth is too grotesque to grasp
all we’ve left is a remembrance of things fast.
While the lights go out on Melbourne’s plains
our best friends have all assumed new names.
The things in your cupboard you no longer trust
the graduate scheme analysts are nonplussed.
And like any goomba I’ll extract my vig,
endure the torment when they breach the brig.
It seems like yesterday that Bopper, Bamba and Holly:
the asthmatic engine, the wheeze of Buddy’s Folly.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Kylie Rose lives in Maitland with her four children. In 2007 she was a resident at the LongLines Poetry Workshop at Varuna, the Writers’ House, and was awarded a retreat fellowship to work on her collection, Sea Level. She is due to return to Varuna as a resident/ consultant for the 2008 LongLines Community Week. Her suite of poems, “Doll Songs” was commended in the 2006 Newcastle Poetry Prize, and an extract of Sea Level was included in the 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize anthology. She is currently collaborating with poets and composers on a project commissioned by the Hunter Writers’ Centre.
Bees,
Nanjing
In cloisonné fields,
emerald greenhouses cling-wrap the earth
and incubate the foetus grain.
At the toll gates, bees rap and rattle
my face painted on the glass eyes of the coach.
Bees propel themselves
at my steely hive with zeal,
their pharyngeal meal meant to ease
the propolis seal stoppering my throat.
Welcome Queen, incarnate, they hum.
Nanjing––plum blossom city––
opens its fist for you.
Hanshan Temple,
Suzhou
Gilt flames squall.
Incense pours into carved
and fecund air.
From the pagoda,
temple faces squint
with faithful irises of coin.
Three blows, the bell’s belly
induces fortune’s triplets.
A fourth strike
renders me
fortune’s orphan.
I leave, a monk,
robes––dissolved peach––
flirting with fallen
sycamore floss.
One Thousand People Rock,
Suzhou
In the Dynasty of Song,
one thousand men lost their voices
on a stone octave.
Still ringing in the spring rain of peonies,
one thousand voices sink my skin.
White sepulchral birds in unison,
chant through bony, fluted beaks. One
thousand egrets howl a mating dirge,
calling soul from stone
to nest.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, essayist and translator in English, Spanish and French. His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. His poem “Juarez” won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Mexico in 2006. Amirthanayagam has written five books thus far: The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, March 2008), Ceylon R.I.P. (The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2001), El Hombre Que Recoge Nidos (Resistencia/CONARTE, Mexico, 2005) El Infierno de los Pajaros (Resistencia, Mexico, 2001), The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, 1993).
Amirthanayagam’s essays and poems have appeared in The Hindu, The New York Times, El Norte, Reforma, New York/Newsday, The Daily News, The Island, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews (Sri Lanka). Amirthanayagam is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and a past recipient of an award from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia. Amirthanayagam is working currently on a translation of poet Jose Eugenio Sanchez.
After the Party
— in Memoriam: Anura Bandaranaike
I remember an evening
flavored by my mother’s
cooking, bringing
two smart patriots
together, to speak
about devolution
not yet realized,
accommodate
what makes sense
seeing the island
from afar, the only
way forward,
two dear friends
who met then
for the first time.
Now, one is laid
to rest, and
the other engages
readers still
to think afresh
about slow or fast
bombs, double-speak,
cynical tongues, how
to bring more than
twenty five years
of war to an end
before all our parties
break up and families
gather, with shot-gun
shells and confetti
to scatter, at weddings
held on holy ground
beside gravestones
where fathers and
brothers, mothers
and sisters are buried.
Adjustment
We walk across railroad tracks.
It’s late, the moon full, waves
roaring on the other side
of coconut trees. There
aren’t any goons asking
for id’s. It’s 1980 or some
such year before current
flapping of metal wings, birds
alloyed everywhere dropping
pellets right on our foreheads.
Aiyo, we say, how the hell,
machan, don’t buggers
know how to shoot, and
these poisons flowing
in our blood.
What’s become of older
weapons of war, when
knife pricked or bomb
blew off the head but
left the next man alive
to attend to his family
and the fight? Now
cancer multiplies
his cells and we should
not walk across railroad
tracks or down on
the beach off Galle Face,
which today’s children
know as a high security zone,
and their older siblings
as no-man’s land, lovers’
folly, but we protest
too much, surely
we can carry passports
in our bathing trunks?
Rub
(Berries and Chicken)
There’s a rub in these black
berries on bread with a glass
of milk on a Saturday morning
when rain trickles down
through mist and fitful
cold ‘though not to complain
about weather, this is no
long john winter,
and across the Pacific
an old friend rides bullet
trains and types into his
Blackberry about once
forgotten wheelbarrows
and rain water evenings
we ate steamed chicken
outside the library
at Chatham Square
in Chinatown; meanwhile
the poem will not insist
on personal memories,
wishes to barter in
chinatowns, capture hearts
in Frisco or Vancouver,
or even in the birthing
places, Guangzhou
or Shanghai, or some
Cho Fu Sa, or far northern
village; I have to study
the map and ask the reader
to travel with me into the heart
of this ginger and hot rice
beside a white chicken.
Backwards
Nice to walk
backwards,
to that first
time, spade –
thin, I gathered
my wits
outside
typing class
while a girl,
brown-skinned
like mine,
came up to me
and smiled;
I held her hand
and felt her
hold mine.
—a Friday
in Honolulu,
allowed
to wear sandals
to school,
beaches
beckoning
boogie boards,
yet I admit
I did not
know
what
to do with
that hand –
Come Home
Come home,
now– not just
for kiri bath
or poll sambol,
or a salt slick
on the beach
and a tumble
in the hammock.
Come home,
now– wandering
the planet means
nothing
if you don’t
return for the party
and make
your parents glad.
Come home,
now – though
the parable
does not fit.
Father died
abroad,
and Mother’s
left to keep
their house
running
for another son,
and always
local allegiances,
and church
up the road,
and visitors
from England
and Australia
or the island
once called Ceylon,
where branches
of the family tree
flower still
saying:
Come home,
now– for
a stringhopper
feast,
to remember
childhood
jeeps rolling
over jungle
tracks, or
the name
of some half-
forgotten
agreement
to share
all the loaves
in the basket,
before noting
how singular
the Army
has become,
bereft of
minorities,
its esprit
du corps
changed
utterly
into a
question
of loyalty
and tribal
allegiance,
the island
lost at sea,
and now
the alarm
ringing,
time
come
for my
airport taxi.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Baby
“There is no solitude greater than a samurai’s, unless it is that
of a tiger in the jungle…perhaps.”–Bushido
She shines like wheels
In the orange overcast.
Alone within and the walls
Hover like fronds.
Pulsing with emerald self-mastery
A door slides open.
She’s alone without language
As a blade…
A paper lantern and a
Lighter’s ornamental pearl.
She’s passing and flying
Like a submarine
But the white heaven belly
Means someday baby you’ll commune
With daylight’s milk.
What do you want me to do?
Encircle the pillow of grass–
Doughy fist in the human grasp.
Fields
Stacks of fields preaching lines
like balls of sheet music singing cusps
of snow, atavistic & keening.
Within each ivory pecan is a faded blond kazoo.
Storefront evangelists gasping proper
& faithful–sock swooping,
seeing the dead end of time:
The field was a lady young and fair
And died just groaning in despair.
Austere zither shadow-paints the mighty & meek,
in a jagged barrel up to the neck in salt.
Let the rains come down hard as a rail.
in their strict declamatory beams.
Let the cotton glomp together as a consolidation
of domination.
Snow launched for eleven fat ensembles.
A floating bridge dying like jasper & sugar.
Lukewarm night and morning appetite.
Radiant, unoccupied, & raspy the field was heard.
The tambourine rattles like a cloven hoof:
Your mother and father, fare you well,
Your wicked daughter is doomed to hell.
Within each white bulb is a white balloon:
sizzling filament clinches a fist of white.
A plant’s imprimatur as the pages unfold their map.
Within each ivory pecan is a faded blond kazoo.
We must love / we must love for the field
to care for us. In the field / in the field
we ought to trust.
Echolocation
Owl
The Devil’s headlamp stalks the red cells
in a mouse miles from itself—the yellow lens
is resinous, fat, dense as pearl firming-up
& renders its beam heavy with currents.
Into a dustbowl of annihilation the rotating head
seizes its empire of blood; a storm collapses each
mouse bone as the threnody of rain crushes the air.
Bat
Their music is a quiet submitted to order by darkness.
To translate their invisible wind is to sculpt a gastronomy
of the eye. They hang with their backs to the cave’s engine.
Each ungodly contralto splits the radio-beam into a blister.
Sucking a berry from its root, they are a single purple wing.
Do not tread in the sweeping arc where this puffing locomotive
swallows the engineered airstream. It is a silent calypso.
Bumblebee
They unfurl their jerseys from Mexico to Miami
in an anatomic miasma darkening their bunker.
They are darts of themselves, swallowing the porchlight
melting in the melon punch & fists of downpour.
Their stuffy plunking ignites a redline to the stucco ceiling.
Curling clockwise like a coaxing faucet
their fronds dust a car horn in a polyp concerto.
Richard Pryor
The healthy flee from the ill,
but the ill also flee from the healthy,
like a wasp dying from the cardboard house,
and this explains perfectly
the tunnel entrance, dripping
with water into the seeping floor.
Hold onto your possessions
with your teeth, said the prophet,
and death with its cherry blossom
and insomnia, will move on.
What is it like to be burned?
Do you simply move toward
pain or cling, with fever,
to your right not to live?
The mayor of Peoria
moaned like a pink cocoon,
the bed did creak,
and the candle’s nude tangoed on the walls.
The fire’s black wings and the yellow
bodies flutter above the filth
and I desire and look no one
in the eye, when I enter.
At the moment one’s torture begins,
one’s covenant
with other human beings is lost forever.
Put On All the Lights
Three of the R&B singers took refuge in the darkest plush of Bamako nightclub. A sound erupted between them. Here the velveteen memory grows weak, so I don’t know if it was a fight or a wakeup call. But I can still see one of the women they had abandoned, standing by the bar, with its ochre padding and brass pins, yelping like a ragga, her hair thrust out like a pool, fighting for supremacy. Her ping-like crystal yells proclaimed above the fizzling light…Was she a victim? I have no idea. The gods of noise—her sisters—had condemned her to the backwoods of AM; but the chandelier above her head, hailed its beams like dust upon her head.