Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Audible Aussies: Summations and Reflections on Poetry Magazine's May issue

Devin Johnston opens the May issue in prose.  Another Ph.D. and award wielding poet whose stilted biography doesn’t blur the earthy history of 20th century poets he writes in the Magazine’s Australian issue.  Images of Ginsberg as a western Sikh, chanting mantras and William Blake, flow into the life of Robert Adamson, Australia’s champion poet and ambassador to American poetics.  Adamson’s biography, by contrast, begins with details of juvenile delinquency; that’s an author bio!

Johnston points to the current of poets through time, the flow between Australia and the States as navigated by Adamson, first as a collector then leader of Australian poets.  He is now Poetry Magazine’s guide to Outback writers.

As a whole, the issue is an Australian epic.  The continent's modern history, landscape, and religious visions converge in images and rhythms of desert colors, ghosts, and wildlife.

“Axe Derby” by Bonny Cassidy is a blur of syntax and line breaks, a popular style of today’s poetry.  A line, though punctuated, never fully stops the flow of meaning across sentences.  At first this frustrates me as a reader.  Why not package sentences in traditional punctuation, the way we learned in school?  Unwrapped, meaning is confused.

But Cassidy unwraps her sentences to blend meanings.  We read of “knuckle-men” and a “blonde” only to be slapped in the middle of an unpunctuated sentence with “we.”  The smokey men and laboring women become criminals of a “poisoned planet.”  As sentences punctuated correctly, such a blend is disjoined.

From this place, our universal guilt for polluting the plant, Cassidy’s poem turns the timeline forward, making a generational comment, “descending the spirit heap . . . (in which) children are returning to pick up the butts.”  Cassidy seems to suggest we break this cycle, even if these crimes makes the individual rich.

In the poems success, beware of Australian slang.  What’s a “pinkie?”  A “rousie?” Online slang dictionaries will get you through.

Also, how can a “splinter . . . flip like a car?”  I’m not sure.  Perhaps this mix of metaphors is clearer to an Outback thinker.


Jaya Savige captures the lights and land of the Outback in "Magnifera," long hand for mango, stuffed with enough botany jargon to please a science journal.  The challenge is chewing through it all, like eating a mango barehanded without making a mess.  The sounds Savige writes, "plunk oblong pits / belonging in a goblin's pot," gobble the reader, as "summer lightning . . . electric(ifies)" the Australian sky.  In "Carousel" Savige slips into the surreal but maintains his visceral, wild tone upon a "luminous canoe . . .(of a) lunar ocean" which transform into "spinning sonic coins. / A slideshow of old wishes."  Here, Savige loses me, but I'm not sure such ethereal language is ever meant to be fully understood.

Fiona Hile breaks the momentum of the wild desert speak which introduces this month's issue.  Her style is more strict and critical of such musings, as the title "Forget the Stars" bluntly suggests.  Her colliding lines bring abstractions to life in "taxidermied light" crying out against disillusionment.  "The hold of the tender new."  "Ghosting motions of the incomplete."  "The dissociated fanfare of motivated loss."  Equally disturbing images align with Hile's bleak tone.  "Britches, seeping glib intent."  "The halo of the nation is the caul-throated / blood of hench."  In other words, "the halo of the nation is the" amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus (or hairnet depending on Hile's intent) of a muscular man.  I can't help but read sexual violence.  Even rape. "There is no mother in" this movement and some ghostly aggressive brute--"Your teeth the grinder"--gnashes his teeth like Satan at the gates of Hell in Hile's "fall of romance."  Only one line of Hile's disillusionment follows a patterned rhythm and seems to comment on the experience with awareness: "Either will the aching swells, apart from bliss."  As "aching swells" are willed "apart from bliss," the rape victim equates rape to a descent to Hell.  Perhaps Hile's use of rhythm in only one like captures the absence of rhythm in sexual assault.  The poem is dark, the rhythms harsh and sporadic, casting a shadow over an unnamed speaker in a place of abandoned wishes and forgotten stars.

I'd love to know where Gig Ryan was when the insights for "Civil Twilight" were revealed.  The poem shares a loss of local town culture, as "estate agents . . . conquest . . . the footpath's velvet edges,” and the familiar softness of the land is suddenly "ajar with fridges" among other signs of modernity.  "It was no use" for the little local to sob over the change, nor is there ever a capital gain that regrets an extinguished culture.  Ryan's poem returns us to the wild Outback as lorikeets, the famous rainbow birds of Australia, "flit the race" of industrialization and are replaced by trash eating pigeons.  Her tone and protest continue in a second poem, "Nautical Twilight," which echoes Savige but is anything but surreal.  Instead Ryan composes the colloquial of "local trots," (nearby strolls?) and  an aborigine "stumped up," (tenacity?).  The poem is another jab at westernization, now focused on the individual within Australia's lost culture whose cultural "mores" are crushed by "coin."  Again, nature flees the invasion of westernization, this time "in a trapdoor."

Claire Potter is the first poet of the issue to leave Australia for "a northern winter" in her poem "The Art of Sideways."  But even in a Australian poet’s exodus is a call to nature found.  Here snakes, sidewinders native to our western deserts perhaps, become symbols for time and space as scaly and "polished skin (is) a simple clock" with "the distance between north and south . . . mapped / with the shape and angle of his eyes," like a compass or sundial.  Curiously, Potter's spoken style connects snakes and weather: "Just as rain can fall sideways and eyes look aslant / might a northern winter not widen the light in the same way / a snake exceeds its skin?"  Snakes can exceed their skin; that's how they grow.  Winter light might exceed light itself; what might this mean?  A light beyond light?  Is this what Potter sees in the States?

Two short stories close the poem. One, told in past tense of seeing a snake in the desert, which might have been a "hairnet" or fabric for a wedding gown or net for catching fish, captures Potter's civilized lenses for the world, as the snake fools her vision; the other is told in present tense and features a tree, again a snake’s camouflage.  Here perhaps the snake becomes the poem itself, casting meaning "in all directions."

Amanda Joy deepens the Australian awareness of snakes in "Sea Krait, Broome."   In this sketch of seeking, we find Joy on the road, fleeing the "city's cool centrifuge . . . (and) fray."  For three days Joy is on a ride of poetry and travel, chasing a ghost similar to those of her contemporaries published in the Australian edition.  Snakes are epiphanies of imagery here too: "An olive python curled under a van" with a belly full of neglected kittens.  In a frenzy of travel and writing, Joy parks and "lunge(s) from the car" to dive into the ocean ahead, only to be met by two venomous Krait, upon which she panics and falls.  Again we find the passionate Australian wild in a wild environment.

Joy's second contribution, "The Long Dry," conjures more images of Outback and desert, but the poem is a drought of soul, not land.  The suicidal urban landscape is juxtaposed to more remote images of land, plants, and you guessed it, snakes.  Joy places herself between these extremes and becomes them both.  "Dumbbell of yield and sequence / Through years of discipline I learned containment."  Her wild instincts are forced to coexist with urban life.   The space torn between elevates religiously.  "Sentences in the Bible begin with And God / As if starting was difficult."  Starting what?  This poem or the weight of the hands of ancient scribes lifted by God as agent of the details?  What is Joy starting?  The next line of poetry?  Immediately following this stanza of meditation are "the roof rats."  Joy lets nature lift her weight.


Sarah Holland-Batt too is a body divided in "Thalassography," a poem about bodies of water. Instead of finding epiphany and divinity in nature, Batt finds herself. The voice of the poem is wise and somehow immune to the awe other poets feel toward nature in this issue. She speaks mostly in the present-perfect verb tense, sharing all that she has "known . . . skimmed . . . (and) tackled" in the Australian waters and the Pacific Ocean. Batt occupies a space "where the movement of water / is the movement of (her) mind." The Pacific Ocean becomes the space between her Australian and American worldviews,"vast enough to divide a life," as she too embraced Colorado as homeland when young.


A beautiful villanelle wafts between the volatility of many poets in this issue. In "My Darling Turns to Poetry at Night" images of words and punctuation flutter around the late night writer whose beating heart is "a late bloom of red flowers that refuse to fade." Lawrence frees the one he loves to write his/her way out of fear. This is how I hope my wife comtemplates my own late nights of writing; take these lines as examples which have her in bed alone.   But Lawrence is more than a voyeur, his "Darling" must be poetry herself.



Cassie Lewis darkens the tone of the issue with "In a Dark Room." It's hard to see the speaker in the shadows, but the imagery of the surrounding world is alive, and apart. "Rock quartz next to a fence . . . a falcon glides into view . . . (the) sky of streaming blue," all these vivid images move with detail, separate from a depressed speaker, who laments an unidentified "you," while sitting alone in a dark room. But depression and longing pass, and when they do, the surrounding world changes; the same thing happens when wrapped in poetry for hours. When "the room reassembles . . . it's different." "Curtains / are no longer red, now they're dusty," and old ways of thinking, or feeling depressed, become "outdated." Lewis takes us from the dark room, to a memory of a past love fogging up the drive-in, to the first light of healing.



Robbie Coburn shares a narrative poem in "Shock Lessons, a Paddock Scripture." Coburn recounts a memory of exploring his family's farm, unsupervised and curious to explore "how far the landscape stretched." At the end of the property line, Coburn mistakenly touches the "copper threads" of an electric fence, "struck by that first surge through the body, electricity / running like a vein of blood beneath the skin." Thus shocked, and "no longer wishing to know more, to understand . . . all I could do then was give up." This is how Coburn ends, giving up. The narrative sequence captures the curiosity of childhood and any of those shocking, abusive moments where our curiosity was electrocuted out of us, leaving us to give up and accept our place, fenced in and away from untamed thoughts and landscapes.

Elizabeth Campbell fascinates her poems with mythology.  "Cloaca Maxima," named after an early Roman sewer, equates the organics of the term with our treatment of others; we treat each other like crap. A wonderful image of people filling their minds with the passions of their hearts is captured via deer drinking from rivers, but remember, we're talking about a flow of feces in this poem. A likely homeless woman speaks to Campbell as the poem shifts to "Venus of the Drains." The contrast of these nouns is brilliant. Campbell, in part, blames herself for the state of the downtrodden as she asks, "Do I make it happen / to her by having / face and chest that wash with red?" I love the ambiguity of "having" in the last lines, as our selfishness and possession is kept from people who need it most.


From a goddess of the sewers to an excerpt from "'Semele," Campbell's interest in old tales persists. Simele, human lover of Zeus, was burned alive by one of Zeus' lightning bolts, but "it didn't feel like a myth or a metaphor to her / as she burned up with the brightness she saw." Semele burned alive because she demanded Zeus prove his divinity, which in turn killed her because no human could look upon a god. The metaphor is clear: Don't ask for too much. The myth of sex with a god is clear enough too. So what does Campbell mean then? If "it didn't feel like a myth or metaphor," what did it feel like? Burning alive? Like burning at the stake? Is Campbell's poem a critique of violence towards women? I'm not sure; if this is the case, the violence is "brightness," and I'm not sure that comparison fits.

I was most affected by Petra White's interpretation of events in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. In a passage from "The Wife, Ezekiel & God," White comically opens with "the wife," like some lamenting sitcom voice might say, "How's the wife?" The wife is not doing well in Ezekiel; God kills her, echoing the tough luck of the previous poem. But White gives the wife the last say, as she subverts God himself and "gleams through him like heaven through a needle," beyond the angles "encased in power." In death, whatever is less surely transcends any idea we protect on Earth.

Language and gender is power, White is well aware. The second half of the poem, indeed the first half is devoted to "the wife" history forgot, glosses over the ritualistic references found in the Old Testament as a modern reader of the Bible would, then turns to the Babylonian siege, "their deaths now a hold they can walk through," as God turns his back on the slaughter with Ezekiel close behind. White is critical of the sexism and brutality of a text so many call sacred.

"Lake Mungo" is opaque without some historical context, perhaps common knowledge to an Australian. Lake Mungo is where the oldest remains of a cremated human are known to exist, Mungo lady, she's called. She was exhumed mostly burned, the remains of her bones then crushed before burial. Susan Fealy introduces us to an unnamed "he," likely the one responsible for burying Mungo Lady and preserving her memory for the ages. We get imagery of giant animals, now extinct, which once roamed Australia, and, naturally, the desert. "He wants to walk with her / along a curve of shattered moon," likely referring to her shattered bones, "where human memory / unmade her long ago," likely referring to her cremation and burial. "where there is nothing / but the terror of his faith," likely referring to any ritual for the dead, kept for the living.

Ali Cobby Eckermann's story reaches into the heart of Australia's past of xenophobia and ethnic cleansing. Her poem is a character piece, spoken by the ghostly "I" of a "Deaths In Custody inspector" at an Australian prison, likely set in the distant past, but easily applicable to any state of incarceration. How sick to imagine someone is employed to account for the pile up of death; how sick to know the past. Eckermann first comments on the spotless spaces and unchanging faces which are the object of inspection. But the voice shifts in the second stanza. It's no longer a death inspector of sterile purpose, but a slip into darkness and filth. Although the "I" remains consistent, in terms of grammatical case, the "I" can't be the same across the two stanza poem; the second "I" must be Eckermann herself, musing over her conscious as a researcher of lost aboriginal history, how her growing knowledge of suffering ancestors has changed her life purpose "from a proud strength of duty to fear." Brilliant contrast sets the following lines; "all the stories I have ever heard / stand silent in the space beside me." I am haunted. But what is this "coil of rope (that) is being pushed / under the door of this cell?" A reference to how prisoners secretly pass messages? Is it a lifeline to the past? To her future? The poem speaks to Australia's history as a penal nation.

Eckermann's spirit of protest and disassociation from the arc of history continues in "Thunder raining poison," a response to a glass art installation by Yhonnie Scarce which captures the radiation rain Australian lands suffered at the hands of British experiments with the atomic bomb. Scarce's installation resembles a giant chandelier, though the crystal shapes more closely resemble rain drops than geometric patterns.

Eckermann takes Scarce's protest of a 20 year period and extends the criticism to the previous century of oppressive British rule, echoing her previous poem, but this time with a forceful "you" which points a finger directly at the perpetrator. "Two thousand" suffering voices are captured in Eckermann's lines, all of which she loves, "poisoned and all."

Michael Brennan returns us to nature's meditations in his prose poem, "There and Then." But Brennan isn't searching for epiphanies in nature, like the rest of the nature driven poems in this issue; instead, Brennan uses nature as a device to capture passing time. Nature becomes the time fleeting before him yet remains consistent and beyond him in time. Brennan can't keep up with time, which shifts from summer to autumn to spring, "the one gone or the one up ahead," whichever one makes no difference, as their seeming permanence washes over his dreamy transience without regard for his personal affairs of friends, towns, or memories.

Luke Davies wrote "Antiphons of the Known World" for Daniel Morden, a children's writer who adapts Greek mythology for young readers. The poem's speaker is approached by Athena who spins the speaker's dialogue from a disarray of young arrogance, greed, and misogyny to a shift of hindsight on such actions and eventual surrender. I picture Davies with a number of Morden's colorful books, writing a line or two as he peruses the pages.

"Heisenberg Saying Goodbye to Mum at Lilyfield" is equally ambitious in its examination of life's turning points yet wordy and abstract in sections. The poem has its movement; "my mother hugged me good-bye at seventy-three, / knowing, just then, her strength may outlive mine," capturing beautifully a mother's ache for burying a child.





Michael Farrell pelts the reader with random imagery and obscure Australian political references in “Sheep, Golden Syrup, Elizabeth Bishop. I’m not sure any readers of poetry critique need a description of Bishop, former laureate, but be on the lookout for sheep and Syrup.

Farrell’s prose poem occupies Bishop’s conscience, with some liberties in characterizing the sheep, the masses, the golden syrup, the spoiling dollars of excess, and Bishop, the one above it all.

Farrell too took the liberty of typing a keyboard picture of an Australian politician like a peeping tom in the window spying on Bishop, an interesting move in our digital age of writing.

Well, the politician’s wife throws a fit, so the politician ignores Bishop; the tension builds before this moment and dies afterwards, leaving this reader disappointed in the strength of the narrative arc.  But ending with seemingly trivial content seems to also critique the trivialities of rich leaders, which Farrell illustrates from the perspective of Bishop, who might symbolize how outsiders view the outback for its difference.  Perhaps Farrell's poem is a response to Bishop and this stereotypical view of Aussies.

Lisa Gorton detaches the reader from the clinging images of everyday life in the passage from "Empirical: IV." I love when poets comment on the devices they employ. It demonstrates an awareness of form and guides the reader. Gorton takes us "where I step into the background of my imagery," then delivers image after image which feel permanent but are fleeting to the timeline beyond human imagination. "Napkins / in their rings. long-stemmed glasses under a hanging lamp" shift to images of nature ready to make dust of everything we humans make; "grapes of wire and jade colored glass, their bloom of dust--soon will sit and eat." What a brilliant contrast of imagery, setting a table for the unending mouths of time to devour. Gorton takes us to reality by exposing the "unreality . . . (where) "one by one they (all people, all  times) have vanished into that blank / behind their names."

I was relieved to find the closing poets for this issue are aboriginal. Even with the visceral nature that dominates what these writers have produced, excluding native voices would contrive these poetic voices to hearsay. I'm glad Poetry Magazine chose to represent the source, although somewhat buried at the bottom of this issue's pages.

Lionel G. Fogarty is tough to crack in "Head Keeper Futures Corridor's Bay." Aside from the grammatical blending of verbs which become nouns as the lines read on, aboriginal language too must be what I'm reading in these lines. "Conzinerices atturies" is not in the dictionary nor does a Google search decipher these words. Great wordplay too is found in the poem as "overseers" come from "oversea" then "shook weekage house living, stay by a dead cold rotten lie." The lines are surreal in how their content moves beyond their words. "Every sand rushes the beaches are first people's / museum ample by laughter original" makes no tangible sense whatsoever; but if the reader digs deeper, this disarray of language captures the disarray of history that is of the Australian aboriginal. This is a poem to be heard, rather than read, and appropriately so; much of the poem muses over the renaming of Australian sites by westerners, as Fogarty, "Dromana man reclaim names first foremost."

Samuel Wagan Watson delivers a culmination of the entire issue in "Booranga Wire Songs." Watson doesn't overdo his desire for knowledge like some in this issue; he doesn't fetishize nature to the point of triviality like others in this issue; ghosts aren't a spooky symbol for depression like still others insist in this issue. Instead, Watson lets poetry do the talking, rather than his desire for poetic moments to control the voice of his writing. Awakening images begin the poem in prose fashion as "ghosts play along" with the sounds and movement of the night. Then the poem breaks into verse and song as a circular desert plant "spin(s) / down from a spirit circle; / the writers cottage / (A pact made above the cottage by local artisans ... winds rest for the / time being." Watson is effortless in what others try so hard for. The third part of the poem shifts back to prose, and we are reminded of the head ache of wanting to be alone which we discover in "consumer discount" environments; but really we want "to sing aloud and be heard in the ides of a full moon over pine trees," striking the reader with the communal sense which nature engenders.

I can't say enough about Watson.

Watson's mix of prose and verse again greets us in "A one ended boomerang." I'm not sure there's a better symbol for an Aussie out of place than what this poem's title captures. An epigraph from de Vinci, declaring that in flight, a person will never walk the same, contrasts beautifully with Watson's symbolism of a displaced native. He's upset with time that passes unnecessarily in running from place to place. His body becomes an hourglass, the sand of which noisily slips down his body and away into oblivion. "I am a pencil that cannot sharpen, / ink that slides off paper, / outside of our time, I am lost / a one ended boomerang." These are the strongest, most moving lines of the issue, and they are the final lines of the issue.


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