First of all, I want to sincerely thank you all for your wholehearted
and generous feedback. It seemed to me that people looked carefully at
others' poems (without being overly analytical), and gave their opinions
honestly, based on their own intuitions. That's great, especially after
just one week. I also think all the poems submitted were original,
thoughtful and committed, and I expect I may well see a few of them
published, once they're honed and matured.Second, I just need to let you know
that Ian has bowed out of our group.
He thanks you all very much for the feedback, but has had a few things
come up in his life which have to take priority, so he'll be doing the
Autumn workshop.Third, there have been a few issues with the group email
system. A few
people reported being unable (or unsure how) to check if their emails
reached the group. I think most if not all of those issues should be
resolved, as we get used to how it works. I hope so, anyway. Please
let me know if you're having any trouble, still. If these things get
in the way, we can revert to just using group emails instead, from
next week on.On a related matter, do people have strong preferences for how to
give
feedback? That is – replying to each individual poem within that email,
or collating your feedback on all poems in one email? If there's a
consensus, I'd like to go with that. Let me know.That's admin out of the way.
Now... where are we going this week? Well,
wherever you are. Or, wherever you have been. Or will be. Place. Places.
Your place. Other places. Displacement. Placing, as in the opposite of
“I just can't place that”. All those kinds of knowledge, which are
bodily, situational, environmental. Which includes that kind of
knowledge that is hard to articulate, perhaps because its unique to you
and you're not sure if you can communicate it to anyone else. Also, that
kind of unknowing. I'm thinking, too, of how we can know something
without being conscious of it, how something has to change – subtly or
profoundly – before that knowledge can be unearthed.All that's quite abstract.
I'd rather be concrete. I remember sitting in
an airplane as it taxi-ed into the terminal, after a long journey back
from Chennai, India, where I'd been for about two months. The airport
staff on the tarmac prepared to remove luggage from the hold, leaning
against trolleys and punching and slapping each other on the arm with a
kind of laconic, masculine warmth. Australians suddenly seemed huge,
lumbering and slow, physical with each other, yet somehow awkward in
their bodies, wanting to maximise the spaces between. Back in Melbourne,
the trains and the streets seemed empty and quiet, with hardly any
rubbish tumbling through the city. Of course, as soon as I moved to
Castlemaine, when I visit Melbourne it seems hectic and crowded, full of
advertising and bustle. A change of place made a place new, or strange.Around a
hundred years ago, Viktor Shklovsky coined the word
*defamiliarisation*, to explain (if it can be explained) what poetry
does, or could do. What is familiar – what we might see every day –
through poetic language and form, becomes strange, while remaining very
close to us. This includes home, work, cities, all kinds of
environments. Place is unsettled. I can't completely explain how poetry
does this. What I do know is that there are as many places as there are
consciousnesses, and as many consciousnesses as there are forms of
poetry, which is to say perhaps infinite. How I experience place – as a
40-something white man who is visibly different – is not how others
experience place. Some move through the world with more anonymity, more
vulnerability, more difficulty, more ease, more confusion.
Defamiliarisation is not just about how we use the language, but about
perspective, where the voice comes from and how it sounds.Anyway, so, yes, it
wasn't easy to restrict myself to just six poems
this week. Here, we have poems of the moment, of public transport, the
natural world, of memorials, work and home. None of them are
representative of any particular school of poetics – ecopoetics,
experimental, lyrical, traditional, etc. In a way, each poem borrows
from multiple approaches, and is also utterly itself.In the classic Tang
dynasty (8th century CE) poem by Tu Fu (this
translation by Kenneth Rexroth), there is a measured evocation of place
– the scents and images that coalesce around the poet's mood, a mood
which is both profoundly still and subtly disturbed. Things resound more
intensely at night, or perhaps in the wake of this visit to an abbot.
Things, also, simply are what they are. The water. The bells. The iron
phoenix. The prayers. Intruding into the moment is tomorrow, that the
poet knows he will walk in the fields and weep. Where do these thoughts
come from? How do they come out of this place?Scent, too, is a dominant
presence in Gieve Patel's poem – “human manure
/ Vague and sharp... [which] does not offend”, but also “station
odour... seeping into your clothing”. The poet cannot help but be
penetrated by this world – even if you haven't been to Mumbai, you can
imagine how the place might stick to you, climb inside you – but this is
at the same time a kind of detached portrait, curious and (somewhat)
unjudgemental. The odour is both “a divine cushion” and not at all “the
beginning of a meditation / On the nature of truth and beauty.” The poem
carves out a personal space within a public space, as we often do on
crowded trains.As a side note (though a crucial question, in a way), think
about the
form of these two poems. Tu Fu's is one solid stanza. Patel's is two
stanzas, each line capitalised. Why? Is there a relationship between the
shape of the poems and the sense of their places? I'm not looking for a
“right” answer, just wondering how the way a poem looks on the page –
open, drifting, enclosed, formal, wild – might itself evoke, reinforce,
complicate, how we feel about place. These questions, of course, relate
to the rest of our poems, too. A poem is a place itself.Anne Elvey's poem knows
this well. It is about, among other things,
place as layers, as sedimental histories overlaid on each other.
Colonial violence is considered in the light of Christian remembrance. A
map is sketched on an oval, a sporting arena made into a place of
memory. “Late evening we came … while the stories were told until day”.
The poem knows that the sheer weight and depth of these stories is hard,
perhaps impossible, to tell. The poem knows, too, that invoking weather
as sympathy or consolation might be “a cliche”. Instead, mostly on the
right hand page, we have a field of marks on paper, as if the poem were
another map, a visceral history of sorts.There's a similar – though also quite
distinct – kind of unsettlement
in Stuart Cooke's poem. Loosely speaking, this is a poem of landscape,
of place beyond the city – though such places cannot escape the human.
Among acacia and eagles, vineyards and groves, and a very human way of
being within place and not quite belonging. The lines slide and leap
across the page, moving as the eyes move, both meditative and
overwhelmed. Words are broken in two or mashed together – “mag /
nificent”, “r / attling b / ack to the coast”, “itdoeswhatitdoes”.
You'll notice different aspects than I will, but I was struck by “I'm
joining / with the split”, and by the “snake coiling ( ( ”.
Punctuation and line-breaks here reinforce an unresolved and ambiguous
sense of place.Another ecopoetics is in play with Jill Jones's poetry, but it's
much
more about the human, urban world. It's not explicit where we are, but
there is “the building”, “a desk”, “data” and “ceremonies”, all of it
spoken of by a collective “we”. It gives me certain visuals, concrete
and steel and human bodies together, almost de-personalised. Again,
you'll have your own take on it. I'm interested, here, though, in how
the “we” shapes our sense of place, how even the blue sky seems strange,
a kind of foundation.Finally, Quinn Eades takes us home. Well, to his home, and
in particular
to their kitchen table and what surrounds it, what it supports literally
and figuratively. In this place – the poem and the table – family and
writing come together. I've included this because writing about place is
not always exotic or ambitious or universal, but by attending to the
intimate, it somehow does touch something much bigger. It also reminds
us that associations and memories attach to objects in their place.This week, I
want you to write while dwelling in a particular place. It
may be a train carriage, your own workplace or office or bedroom, a
park, shopping centre, vacant lot, library, bushland, laneway, swimming
pool, creche, desert, waiting room, church, mosque, art gallery. It
should be any place you know well. You have two options – to write
absorbantly or with resistance. In other words, you could write as if
taken over by the place, absorbed, as if your words are channelling the
heart of the place, like how a dancer embodies the music. Aim for
embodying it, rather than just describing. Think sensory, but if ideas
come, let them. The other option is to write *against* the place, to
resist it, pull the loose threads of it, see what dwells underneath it.
This could be a dark history, your own ambivalence or aversion, even
perhaps how hard it might feel to capture this place in language. I
think our six poems this week have elements of both (yours might too),
but you could say the Tu Fu, Quinn Eades and Gieve Patel poems are
absorbant, and the Anne Elvey, Stuart Cooke and Jill Jones poems are
resistant. Pick one approach, and see what happens.I should also say I came up
with this idea before reading your poems
this week – and some have already written place poems (eg Mike's),
though most are based in memory. The key to this exercise is – as I say
– the present experience, and how your langauge interacts with that, in
the moment. You might need to write a whole lot of rough draft while
there, and later go back and edit it into shape. Or it may all come in a
flow while you're there. Either way, see if you can somehow use the
page, puncuation, line-breaks, etc to reinforce your sense of that
place. Hugely looking forward to seeing what you come up with – I've no
doubt it'll be really diverse! Good luck!
Andy.
Andy Jackson
http://amongtheregulars.com/
Attachment:
anne elvey on all souls eve.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
jill jones blue.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
gieve patel from bombay central.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
stuart cooke hinterland.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
quinn eades where I write.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
tu fu visiting tsan.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
