like a version (five)

For Xmas my niece bought me a cd called "like a version", a Triple J publication that puts together covers of well-known contemporary songs. In his introductory note to the album Robbie Buck, the Triple J radio host, describes the process as "ludicrously simple...offer an artist the chance to pay homage...then sit back and watch the magic unfold." I wouldn't argue the point that magic unfolds - it does, on quite a few of the tracks, but I'd suggest there's a lot more in it than the automatic process he reduces it to. It's interesting the choices the artists make (possibly but not necessarily ode or homage), there's a tension in the interpretation itself, in its distancing or sense of rapport or approximation, and in this context at least, technical considerations are foregrounded - most obviously, vocal range. The Kooks do MGMT (well), Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals do a great version of Under Pressure, and Bob Evans' version of Lily Allen's Not Fair asked me to rethink that song's comments on gender. And the album answered the question of who had done that fantastic version of Berlin Chair - the anonymous one I'd heard one day on the radio on my way to work...It's Holly Throsby.

late october new york

Picture Quality

To the guest handed the improvised antenna:
‘don’t do anything just stand there’.
We all know the crystal picture
he’s holding’s highly fragile.

From this angle at least that slight screen
adjustment corrects most aspect surface glare.
But he can’t do nothing or not for much longer.
As the scene deteriorates, irony etc.

Someone else has a go. Fleeting applause finds it’s only a replay.

montreal-ottawa

yonge street

centre island toronto

Hesitant Apostrophe

Don’t apologise for your ideas -
I actually liked that one, the way
you describe the light, rounding
the corner, the ice only vapour
on the glass. Things this close

to you. The irises and therein
the kind of longevity we quantify
in an afterlife! The early game.
Wind like nothing we’ve ever seen.
And things we know. I like it. I mean it.

being mechanical

interior radio city

now and then

the first coffee doesn’t wake you
you sleep in then go out
09:26 and or 28 degrees
but that was minutes ago
cooks hill books every room
in the house its own genre
half of fiction skimread
like a stylus skating dust
in the audible distance
know the song not the title
nor the words no more
than the melody really - the song?
on tiptoes handpicked the lady
and the little dog and other stories
alternate title try future cruelties -
tonight ol’ petrov’ll tell the beggars of Ukleyevo:
god’ll feed yer – at which political point
i’ll say no more or fall out of the poem

montreal

San Francisco

Ontario

fall colours

take your shoes off

threat level orange


as one locked up

for his jokes


then ouest over

the sierra nevadas


brown and sparse

with first snow


if your fingers are blue

why are zero degrees plural?


fountain sculpture

the border freezes


stuck like mud

to the ring-necked duck’s feet


mistletoe or maple

seeds have wings


tables of blue grapes pomettes

poems grow in any climate

barite

a Sunday morning still

If you get inspired…

make the bed

poems roll out

like a sea

of altostratus

some

where

south

of hokitika

a glacier

migrates

an inch at least

there are photos

to prove what

can’t be seen

these looking

remarkably

like time

when you get

to the end

of anything -

you stop

and think

that things

stay truly still at all

can only be

an illusion

THISISNOTART

For anyone unfamiliar with it, the TINA festival, held in Newcastle each October long weekend, is well worth a visit. Last year's festival was great; it featured readings and presentations by a number of poets I was interested in. So it was great to hear them read and meet them and talk about writing for a few days. This year's program looks just as lively, the link to which is here.

latest post

boats and trams

riding on the wrong

side of the road might

be hard to get used to

like phrasebook philosophy

or vertical stairs’ll

get us nowhere

but fishing in the cbd

surfing in the river!

whatever the season

dense low-level cloud

chokes the coffee shop

too busy figuring the ring

road an umbrella for two

cite same chain store on the

corner by the bridge similitude

at the tired thus emotional end

of town (the map lost) at last

a place to park the bike a fire

nightfall fell unnoticed

in those chapters

Strathfield

From "GIN"

I fled New York somehow,
it's all her's now . And cold...


Black roofs and red roofs . Tile.
While,
blackbirds in the shadowed backyard
hop about thru bright yellow leaves, or
flap between the lower branches .


What comes through in so much of Blackburn's poetry is "the musical structure of [the] poetry" as outlined in his "Statement". As I'm reading through "The Journals", I'm thinking more about what he has to say about music or s o n g in poetry and the way it relates to human relationships.

"the trees are full of grackles"

Paul Blackburn's poems, at least those from The Journals, seem so energised. There's a sense of movement and unpredictability in the poems' shifting imagery, their creative use of lineation and enjambment, their irregular syntax and occasional omission of the definite article, their use of conjunction as a way to propel the poem on to the next idea - and there's also a sense of movement in the form the poems take with their single line indentations and indented margins.

(Which translates as a bit of a problem here where what's posted or published isn't necessarily a reflection of what's initially composed. I don't have a clue with html so trying to work through this at the moment. If there's any good in this it's that it reminds me of the importance of these kinds of spatial concerns in the way poems are read.)

This energised quality of course suits the idea of a writer on the go. In 1967 Blackburn returned to Europe - he had lived in France and Spain between 1954 and 57 - this time on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The poem BIRDS /AMSTERDAM is dated Nov. 18-20 1967. The cleverness of the poem is that it sees or hears in the names of the different districts of Amsterdam (Prinsengracht, Herengracht? Leidseplein etc.) the same harch consonant or nasal sounds the birds make along the canals. It's great too in its humour and imagination: it begins with: "Flurry of fat sparrows hits the fence...10 notes 2 chords/ I try to sightread/the melody/ too fast, they've gone" - this one of several such moments in the poem. Finally I love the way the experience itself devolves to the page so that when it says: "it's ducks swimming along leaving/delicate wakes along the quiet canals/Well, not so quiet . QUACK", it's both the duck we can hear and the poet reading the poem aloud to himself or his readers.

Paul Blackburn - The Journals

I picked up Paul Blackburn's The Journals the other day at Cooks Hill Books and Records. The poems in this collection, Blackburn's last, span the years 1967-71. The last poem, dated July 28, 1971, was written shortly before the poet's death in September of the same year. The editor, Robert Kelly, states in his introduction that Blackurn had "tried to collect the pages together and did sense them as a continuous and ceherent whole". So far I've only read a few of the poems, though in the next weeks I'm going to keep a kind of journal of The Journals, quoting or commenting each day when/wherever something catches my eye.

How better to begin a book of poems than with these lines from

JOURNAL 5.XI.67

How is it I keep remembering

after all those/these facts,

this flack

keeps . coming?

It all drives back upon the brain .

After yesterday, two things were

plain-ly set against the mindfall

Liked this too in

CYCLE WORLD 1966

An-other/ terrible Sunday morning in the world,/ everybody juiced and coffeed

and then the opening lines of

UNCHARTED

SUN is that

rare in Paris, I

almost swim in it

The day accomplishes itself with its

small failures & annoyances

It's the little flashes of colour set amongst the quotidian that I like in these poems - Blackburn's attention to the everyday/the world.

More to come tomorrow.

Melbourne

Custom/Made

Though some of you probably arrived here via Cordite Poetry Review, for those of you who haven't seen the latest issue, Cordite 30 is now online. Edited by joanne burns, "Custom/Made" features new work by Jal Nicholl and Sam Langer, Bonny Cassidy, Nick Powell, Tim Wright, Michael Farrell, Derek Motion, Carolyn van Langenberg and others, including me. Check it out here.

Poem For Sale

My Poem "hotel universo" (which appears below - in full) is currently for sale. The poem was auctioned last month at an unnamed literary location though failed to attract sufficient interest from bidders. I'm thinking the poem would suit a magazine or journal or somebody with a sense of humour. I expect it's worth about eighty-five dollars though I'm willing to negotiate on this. Also, if anyone's got anything they'd like to offer, we could do a swap. Or, I'm plain willing to buy your poems. Let me know what you've got. Get me here, or on 0404 802 776.


hotel universo

bowties or butterflies:
the sauce of your choice.

an umbrella collapses.
the chairs are inseparable.

-

this display a glass
bottomed gondola.

model train derailment
halfway into the mountain

-

like restless in ‘the
method of immersion’

la lingua madre
surfacing for breath.

-

bus stops pine needles carpet
the terra rossa tennis court.

imminent arrivals
text-to- destination.

-

grammatically she says
you cannot enter the walls -

stick figure stuck
in a stone cell to illustrate.

-

poems of place.
souvenir this that

his own little
piece of vesuvius.

-

up/down some
unsigned street in pistoia

reception deserts us returns.
digging deep for lost vocab.

-

and cinema centrale
settles it:

visiting mono-linguists
wilt in the provinces.

-

puccini’s composure
smoking centre square.

uncorrupted: unembalmed.
don’t hold your breath for sainthood.

-

most frequently
asked question.

what to feed the children:
death or fairytales.

-

makes two of us
out of a tower’s skinny staircase

the renaissance
spills into the backyard.

-

dialogue with
the hand-held guide.

tale of the twins
history and hearsay.

-

somewhere more specific
than piazza napoleone…

…hotel universo.
see you at two.

-

vatican declares
the way we worship

obscene wealth’s
‘a modern sin’.

-

albeit belated your –
“xmas high-rise haiku”:

inflatable santas
hung from the balconies/with care.

-

thank you gesture
the eyes of the mime.

could’ve/should’ve.
squeezed the accordion in.

-

almost a memory
that pillion rider’s

shirt-tail billow
ing into the past.

-

in your dreams!
a skybed absorbs local turbulence.

home to
culture shock.

Poets Paint Words II (II)

Some photos of Sydney poets Peter Minter and Astrid Lorange with Michael Farrell and the Peter Booth painting, Untitled.

Poets Paint Words II

Newcastle Regional Art Gallery is currently showing its second instalment of Poets Paint Words, an exhibition of painting and poetry. Nine poets were invited to respond to a painting from the collection and a couple of weeks ago the poets arrived in town to read their work. Lisa Slade and Peter Minter have done a great job curating the show and there's a real diversity of work on offer. Just to help out, I've put together some educational resources that any visiting school groups might like to use.