Ken Bolton, Starting at Basheer’s (Vagabond Press 2018)
I’ve come late to Ken Bolton’s work. He has been a presence on the Australian literary scene for half a century. His Wikipedia entry lists 20 books under the heading ‘Poetry: Collections and Chapbooks’, beginning with Four Poems in 1977, with a print run of just 300 copies. He has published more than one small magazine, operated a small press and written art criticism as well as poetry.
Before Starting at Basheer’s, I’d read only one book by him, London Journal London Poem (2015). That book consists mainly of one long poem in which the poet and his partner Cath (writer Cath Keneally IRL) visit their son Gabe and his partner Stace in London. When Gabe appears in Starting at Basheer’s, he is in London while the poet is mostly at home in Adelaide, working, people-watching in cafes, or staying up late at night. The poems have what looks like an easy spontaneity, so they are something like what New York School poet Frank O’Hara describes as ‘I do this I do that’ poems. (This isn’t just me showing off what I learned in the ModPo course I did last year. O’Hara crops up a number of times in this book; if you’re interested you can read a little about him and ‘I do this I do that’ here and here.)
On first reading, I just loved this book. It felt as if I was invited to share relaxed moments with someone who just happens to have a lot in common with me demographically. We’re both middle-class white Australian men in long-term relationships with women, with sons we admire and love. We were born two years apart, and may even have been at Sydney University at the same time. Friends are occasionally mentioned by first name only, and sometimes I know who they are (‘Pam’, for example, is the poet Pam Brown, ‘Laurie’ is Laurie Duggan, and ‘John’ is probably the late John Forbes). Further readings left me feeling less of an insider, but enjoying the poetry no less. Bolton knows a lot about poetry and art and movies, and wears his knowledge so lightly that you don’t notice that you’re learning things or being challenged until you hang around a bit. It’s his erudition that has stood out more on subsequent readings.
It’s always handy when a poet give us a phrase describing what they’re up to. Bolton does that a couple of time in this book. ‘Up Late (August Mute)’ on page 103 has these lines:
_________But I am
'up-at-night',
again
___ ... proving I'm here, alive
taking stock of things
registering the moment:
me, the hum from the
fluoro light, the mess
– relative – I keep
this room in
‘POEM (“I reach”)’ ends:
And I write a poem today myself:
not very good, of that I'm sure –
but it marks the moment.
These poems are generally about registering or marking the moment, including whatever is going through his mind and the incidentals of his surroundings. There’s often a spontaneous, unrevised feel (the poem may not be ‘very good’), but I can promise you it’s not easy to get that casual feel and still be readable, let alone as enjoyable as these poems are.
Sticking to my practice of writing about page 76, here it is (click to make large and legible):
Read out of context, the page amounts to an almost self-contained piece of chat about an old movie. In context, it’s a lot more interesting than that.
It’s part of a long poem (131 lines), ‘Dear Gabe,’ (the comma is part of the title), one of two poems framed as letters to Gabe in London. The poem has the informal feel of a tossed-off letter: the syntax and spelling can be loose, and even the line breaks feel relaxed. It’s written the day after a phone conversation, and Bolton, or the speaker of the poem, visualises where Gabe was calling from, using his recent photo of Gabe and his partner Stacey. He paints a picture of the family home where he was during the call, and then:
It would be good to have you back home –
or to be over there with you is the
alternative.
Which leads to the possibility of meeting up in Rome for a couple of weeks. Turn over to page 76, and the mention of that possibility has sent the poem/letter ricocheting in a different direction. It’s not exactly a digression, because the whole thing is a post-phone-call rumination with no main thesis or agenda or narrative thread (‘I think this I think that’, if you like):
Two Weeks in Another Town was a not very good novel
& a bad & unintentionally funny
film: an American in Europe, up against all its
shocking amorality, venality & corruption:
Kirk Douglas playing a guy brought in to
save a falling director, get the movie back in production,
on budget, & quickly in the can.
You don’t need to have read Two Weeks in Another Town (Irwin Shaw 1960) or seen Vincente Minelli’s 1962 movie to understand and enjoy these lines, but as a dedicated blogger, I rented the movie from a streaming service. (I’m not dedicated enough to read the novel, sorry!).
That plot summary is as good as you’re likely to find.
on budget, & quickly in the can. Italy. You can
imagine. Well, you can't. I can.
Of course, the reason for the plot summary is that the letter-writer doesn’t expect his son to have seen the movie, and in these lines he realises that he is speaking across the generations. He may also be realising that he has been to Italy and Gabe hasn’t.
imagine. Well, you can't. I can. The world is
spared, today, much exposure to Kirk
at full throttle. It was possibly an attempt
to make something like La Dolce Vita, but
understandable-for-Americans, & with a 'clear
moral point of view' – as they used to say,
the duller critics.
That’s funny and spot-on. ‘Kirk / at full throttle’ made me particularly glad I’d seen the movie: near the end, Kirk Douglas’s character, eyes bulging, drives a car at breakneck speed through the Italian countryside scaring the living daylights out of the woman in the passenger seat, all somehow establishing that he’s not crazy. Ken is right to assume that Gabe and I (and probably you) don’t need to have the reference to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita spelled out for us. I don’t know if I’ve actually seen that whole movie, made two years before Two Weeks, but Fellini’s general use of carnivalesque images contrasts marvellously with the weird, frozen faces of the ‘decadent’ Romans in the final scenes of the Kirk Douglas movie.
the duller critics. America has slipped a bit
in the innocence ratings. But Italy ... Berlusconi
might have stepped right out of Kirk Douglas's
nightmare.
Well, yes. There’s no date on this poem, but if it was written after Trump’s (first?) election, ‘slipped a bit’ is a delicious understatement. The Berlusconi reference could have been made anywhere over a stretch of decades. The date really is immaterial: the same observations could have been made any time in the last 20 (even 40?) years.
Back to the proposal to meet up:
___________ That said, Shall we go?
(It may be that we won't. The duller critics
are back! One of the dullest now runs things
in the Australia Council – so, no money for me
in the foreseeable future. No travel. No Italy.)
A bit of literary gossip that would surely delight those in the know, but sadly no names. I went so far as to look up recent heads of the Australia Council (which became Creative Australia last year), but I have no way of telling who the dullest of critics is/was. A footnote identifying him or her might have gratified a lust for scandal, but wouldn’t have made a difference to the poetry, which is after all what I’m reading for. (Relaxed though their style may be, these poems don’t hesitate to pick a fight. There are other similarly non-specific snippets of gossip – notably the mention of legal issues with Les Murray’s estate in ‘In Two Parts, a Letter’, the other letter to Gabe which also, incidentally, includes insightful chat about a film, in that case Les enfants du paradis.)
Then the poem turns again:
There is no news: I mean, you're up-to-date –
nothing to tell of news from here.
It’s a letter, you’re supposed to give some news. But this is a letter following so soon after a phone call, so nothing new to say. All the same, the writer is called on to say something about himself:
nothing to tell of news from here. It seems so ridiculous
to be my age, that, tho I feel okay, one can't
help thinking about it. I would certainly like
to see you more
It’s as if the whole poem has been circling around something, and now hits it with the word ‘it’, only to recoil immediately. The speaker, with no matter-of-fact news to give, almost accidentally mentions a persistent preoccupation. I love the elegant way the verse communicates that though he ‘can’t help thinking about it’, he has trouble talking about it. He prefaces the reference by describing it as ridiculous, he says he feels okay (clearly intended to be the opposite of ‘it’), he uses the pronoun ‘I’ everywhere else, but here uses ‘one’. Nor can he explicitly say what ‘it’ is.
(Lest you think an explanation is to come on page 77 – nah! Those lines spell out how much he’d love to see his son, and the poem ends with a description of the circumstances in which he’s writing – alone late at night, with jazz playing – and what he imagines is happening at Gabe’s end:
And school kids soon will start walking up Jermyn Street
& young mums will appear & you will play guitar a bit,
& then get to work
Note the absence of a full stop. This correspondence will continue.)
So what is ‘it’ that can barely be mentioned and must not be named? There’s no mystery really. All that has gone before – the cross-generational movie talk, the reference to duller critics of the past who are back again, the changing status of the USA, and earlier reflections on the way the family house has changed over the years, all this has been quietly and persistently marking the passage of time. It would probably be going too far to say that ‘it’ equals death. But I do read it as referring to mortality. He’s not saying, ‘I’ll be dead soon, so I’d like to see you.’ In fact, he’s carefully not saying that: ‘I feel okay … I would certainly like to see you more.’ He quickly moves back to the question of catching up with each other, but the glimpse into the abyss, however brief and hedged about, remains, and the poem has done its work.
These lines from another poem – ‘Poem (“this notebook’s”)’ (page 118) – are relevant:
something serious
or something that 'becomes serious' –
that old trick. Is there
a name for that sudden
pounce or 'descent'
into gravity?
Maybe what I’ve just been describing is exactly such a sudden pounce or descent, and a release or ascent that is just as sudden.
The book is full of such unspectacular, but deeply human moments.
Me fail? I fly! 