Tuesday poem: These greatest hits
May 7, 2012
These greatest hits
unfurling themselves beige flags
four four drumming
and I download white noise
to erase familiar grate
P.S. Cottier
So you’re out shopping, right? And out of each shop comes a different appalling noise, threatening to strangle you. You feel like running away and hiding. In the supermarket they have a pretend radio station broadcasting ads for the entire stock of that wondrous supermarket źbetween ultra-insipid whiter than beige music, scraping away at your ear-strings, subtle as an un-oiled trolley. The same over-enthusiastic voice extolling the wonders of detergent until you wonder if this is in fact hell, and the unseen she who is spruiking is in fact a cleaner, brighter Mephistopheles. Or proper commercial radio entertains you in the shop of your choosing, which in Canberra includes advertisements for brothels, sorry, Gentlemen’s Clubs… And you’re just trying to buy yourself some cosmetics…And you don’t want to be impaling yourself on thoughts of patriarchy, just finding exactly the right shade of lipstick.
And again and again it’s Flashdance or Elton John or Sheena Easton or chiselled Flame Trees, punctuated by McDonalds or Hungry Jacks or the local roof repair man who does his own ads (‘Call and ask for ME!’) and really shouldn’t. You try and tell yourself that it could be worse, that it could be Christmas with Rudolf and the long-horn gang, banging at your ears in American accents, but that’s only a theoretical worse; for the moment this is as bad as it gets. So you duck into the chemist (avoiding the vapid waft of Fleetwood Mac sprayed like a cheap perfume) and buy earplugs.
And when you get home you try and find white noise to download, but at least, at least, it occurs to you that with your iPod in, people won’t think you’re odd, even if you’re listening to nothing at all, not a single half-chewed byte, but just your own thoughts and the muffled beating of your calmer heart.
*
For poetic people with (hopefully) less rant, click on this feather:
Tuesday poems: [Mellow fruitfulness]
April 10, 2012
light slanting blinded
sun swoons into evening
winter comes to call
looks good: isn't.
winter cold as Karenin
clicking hard knuckles of frost
please take me to your railway
Yes, welcome to the wonderful city of Canberra, cold little capital town in a warm country. It was a balmy four degrees celsius this morning, and the leaves are falling from the trees in an icy wind. Just lovely. People go around in beanies and scarves saying ‘It’s a bit nippy, isn’t it?’ until you want a giant crab to attack them and cut off their blue fingers and red noses. Why, oh why, was Australia’s capital put here, rather than somewhere warm?
‘Autumn is so lovely.’ Thus spake the idiot at the shops this morning. No it’s not. Autumn is a disgusting harbinger of Winter, which lasts about nine months in Canberra, giving birth to a too short Summer after a dwarf Spring. Then comes another blood-red Autumn. And you walk around hallucinating about Queensland. (Ignoring the beauty of the native parrots and the huge flocks of cockatoos, nestled, perversely, in the introduced deciduous trees.)
Now, for a really lovely unfolding global birthday poem, written in a much more generous spirit than my little anti-Canberra rant, please click this feather, which has fallen onto the screen like a black Autumn leaf! Only birdier.
Scout troop Australia
March 1, 2012
Kevin Rudd has always annoyed me. The carefully modulated voice that sounds like a school principal circa 1970. The hideous mind-numbingly boring speeches. When he won the election back in ’07 and he gave the most tedious speech possible I knew we were in for a frustrating time. That man can stub out joy like his mouth was a soggy ashtray. (He did do the ‘Sorry’ speech, but that was properly written.)
On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the speech when he was toppled by Gillard, but even that became tedious. I don’t think he’s capable of talking for a short time; a bit like Castro used to be, but I’m sure Kevin would win in any tedious speech contest with Fidel. (In fact he’d probably finish Fidel off through boring him to death, and do what the CIA was unable to accomplish for all those years. Give that man a poisoned cigar!)
I also disliked his giving quick interviews from the steps of church, which seemed to be a very American thing to do. (“Look at me, I’m a Christian.”) If it weren’t for the precarious state of the Labor Party in Parliament, I’d hope he’d resign. But no doubt he’ll be waiting until after the next election to make another move.
And compared to Tony Abbott’s politics, Kevin Rudd is almost palatable.
This poem (or dramatic monologue, perhaps) was written in an attempt to work through how annoying his way of speaking is; the unspoken supposition that seems to be there that we are all idiots. Except for Kev. I make a reference to his visit to a strip club in America in the poem; what annoyed me about that was his assertion that he couldn’t remember because he’d had too much to drink, rather than the thing itself, which is no more than tacky. I also refer to the outcry over Bill Henson’s photographs of a nude thirteen year old girl, works that Rudd referred to as ‘revolting‘. Those photographs are not pornographic, whatever one thinks of Henson.
Scout troop Australia
For Kevin Rudd
Are you listening? Working families sent you here,
children, so work you will. Tie that slip-knot tighter,
and line up straight. There will be no nude kiddies
in my scout troop, girlie. Disgusting, like an unsettling
wind, blowing ideas where they have no right to
be thought. Mandarin may be spoken, so long as that too
bores the listener into a fester of panic, like a band-aid
placed on a scabby ear, and ripped off by millimetres,
forever and forever and forever, each passing day.
Put down that filthy under-taxed fizzy booze, irritating child.
Have you done all of your homework? Wash your hands!
Have we all read sufficiently big briefs? Don’t giggle, naughty
revolting one, I meant paper, not undies, as you certainly know.
We have a visitor. The hirsute fellow nodding in the corner?
That’s God, of course, the fiscally responsible God of Working Families.
He drove a sensible, reasonably priced car to be here with us tonight.
He gives sufficiently incomprehensible thought to regional co-operation.
He puffs out cheeks and purses lips about the environment.
An occasional break-out will be forgiven, by God Over There,
so long as it involves poles and undies so brief as to be mere
commas in a speech about the need for Australian working
families, who are, after all, the setting cement of our society,
and who do fleetingly and regrettably get pissed, and ogle like
Tasmanian owls on cocaine, to be sufficiently supported
by proper and formerly fully funded fiscal policy.
Salute. Wake up, put down that dreadful marijuana and salute.
Who put those undies on the flag-pole? I’m waiting, children.
No-one’s going anywhere until the guilty one confesses,
and writes neatly a hundred thousand times:
I will stay awake and listen; heaven is a decent place,
and beauty is just one short step away from waste.
This rock poems!
February 15, 2012
For all those occasionally frustrated by the financial aspects of poetry (that is, working your guts out for love alone, just hoping that your poem may reach another person, somewhere) please check out the poetic contribution from mining magnate Gina Rinehart, ‘Australia’s richest woman’, and be consoled that money and art do not walk hand in hand. She donated the rock that the poem is attached to. The rock is a little less shiny than the poem. And a little less clunky. This link is to an often wonderful (and sometimes scurrilous) site called The Worst of Perth, where you can read the poem ‘Our Future’ in all its iron awe, as it appears in situ. Go ahead and enjoy!
But it rhymes, so it must be real poetry…The fact that this was put up in a public place confirms to me that Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory are Very Different Places. But as Ms Rinehart points out in her poem:
‘Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government before it is too late.’
Stirring stuff.
prospecting for pentameter
Poets in the corner
February 2, 2012
not everyone is such a publicist...
No, this is not a post about naughty poets (I told you to stop playing with Augusta, George*!) but about three sculptures that were just unveiled in Canberra’s Garema Place, in an area now known as Poets’ Corner. Judith Wright, David Campbell and A.D. Hope make up the triptych.
I attended the launch, and forgot to take photographs, but anyone interested can follow this link to a Canberra site called The RiotACT see what the sculptures look like. (Not everyone is as forgetful as I am.)
There were excellent poems read at the launch, and an appearance was made by Jon Stanhope, a former Chief Minister of the ACT (sort of a cross between Mayor and School Principal and Premier) who was also Arts Minister. He was supportive of this project.
While many poets pushed for something like this, I left feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Do poets need any memorial outside their words? I don’t think so. And the sculptures (while competent) show the poets at once staring into the middle distance and totally wrapped up in an internal world, with little awareness of the actual world around them. I’m afraid that’s probably how most people see poets, anyway. The idea that the real poets of the world are the dead ones is somehow supported by this type of project, in my opinion.
Byron’s memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey (a somewhat more salubrious location than Garema Place, Canberra) was not installed until the 1969, due to his most naughty reputation. Yet did the reputation of his poetry suffer in the meantime? I don’t think so. The real memorial to these three fine poets can be found in their work. A.D. Hope and David Campbell are represented at the Australian Poetry Library. Judith Wright doesn’t seem to be (copyright?) but examples of her work can be found on the net.
*Byron’s Christian name, as you all undoubtedly knew. And Augusta was his half-sister.
PS Cottier 