We’ve come late to The Bear on TV. I think we turned it on for a moment a couple of years ago, saw a lot of people shouting at each other and decided to give it a miss. But now we’ve just finished watching season 2 and are hooked.
Among its many joys is Jamie Lee Curtis as Donna, the main character’s off-the-rails mother. In the final episode of season 2, she has been invited to the ‘family and friends night’ of the new restaurant. Nerves are already stretched, and the prospect of Donna arriving drunk and ultra-disorderly adds an extra layer of dread.
I’m not giving anything away when I say that this extremely volatile character gave me the first line of today’s verse. I’ve wrenched the line from Donna’s context and let it play out in mine.
Verse 13:I don’t know how to say I’m sorry
I don’t know how to say I’m sorry. The words come easy, and too much. I'm sorry if I made you worry when you kicked away my crutch and sent me sprawling.1 In the water I said sorry to the copper – sorry that my wet arrest made extra work.2 You may have guessed nuns taught me acts of pure contrition 3 back when I was barely six and what goes in at that age sticks. To not say sorry meant perdition. I often play the sorry card, but say it from the heart? That’s hard.
Then, I ducked the daunting task of writing a stanza beginning with ‘Water lapping on their doorsteps’, a line taken from Senator Mehreen Faruqi’s description of the drastic situation of Pacific Island nations. But the challenge refused to lie down and die, so here goes. It might be worth reminding you that Imhotep was a kind of deity of ancient Egypt who may have been believed to help control the flooding of the Nile; and that the Golden Soul is a ship that left Newcastle on the weekend bound for Japan with a load of coal. You probably don’t know that Mary McKillop, now a canonised saint, once placed a statue of Saint Joseph on the doorstep of her nuns’ residence, and floodwaters stopped just short of the statue.
Verse 12: Water lapping on their doorsteps
Water lapping on their doorsteps, not a miracle in sight. No hope will come from Nile's Imhotep, none from praying day and night to effigies of saints and fairies, Hare Krishnas or Hail Marys, even chanting 'No more coal'. Great ships like the Golden Soul still sail, indifferent as weather. Science says we know what to do, but who's in charge? Yes, you know who! Still, let's paddle hell for leather, do wise things and crazy stunts, everything, everywhere all at once.
With any luck I’ll be back to domesticity tomorrow. Maybe something about our new EV?
There were more than 5000 registered participants at the ‘protestival’ on shore, a beautifully organised event with a brilliantly diverse population, many of them in tents. Hundreds of small craft, mostly kayaks, paddled out onto the water and in spite of an impressive police presence – water police from Sydney, and squads of riot police in black, many wearing masks – at least one coal ship was turned back. There were about 170 arrests on the water, of which I was number 64. (According to the police, they had to pull 34 people out of the water: I was one, and I was in the water because of police action. Police had to help ten people to shore who were unable to get there unaided: what police don’t mention is that they had confiscated those people’s paddles.)
I kept my ears peeled for an opening line for a November stanza – that is to say, an iambic tetrameter ending in an unaccented syllable. At first I thought I had to take Senator Mehreen Faruqi’s description of the drastic situation of Pacific Island nations: ‘Water lapping on their doorsteps.’ I was searching around for rhymes for doorstep, and was thinking ‘Imhotep’ had possibilities, when I was returning from my post-arrest processing and a possibly drunk man in a bus stop muttered at me, ‘I hope you drown if you’re protesting.’ Delighted by this gift of a line I thanked him, completely without irony. The poem got completely out of hand right from the start.
Verse 11: I hope you drown if you're protesting
I hope you drown if you're protesting, hope your voice dies in your throat, I hope and pray that the arresting coppers drop you off the boat. May your chant of people power getting stronger by the hour echo down the halls of shame. It's not your skin that's in the game. Some of us have made a living digging, carting, shipping coal. A living? More! It shaped our souls. Thatcher gave what you'd be giving. You say you won't let ships pass. I say shove that up your arse.
I do feel obliged to mention that everywhere in the Climate movement, people talk about the importance of a just transition to renewables. There’s a lot of disinformation around, but this man’s quiet bitterness was clearly heartfelt, came from a real place
John Levy has commented generously a couple of times on this blog (here’s a link). When he emailed to ask if I’d like a copy of his recent book, with no expectation to blog about it, of course I said yes, provided I could send him one of mine. So we swapped books: I sent him two, he sent me three, an unequal exchange in more ways than the obvious. He has responded to my efforts with what I now know to be his characteristic generosity. And now I am blogging about his, motivated by joy, not obligation.
John’s books arrived when I was sitting down to lunch with the Emerging Artist and our grandchildren. I flipped 54 Poems open to the first page, and read out the prose poem ‘Kyoto’:
Kyoto
I'm at a temple. A young monk in black robes walks by, looks at me, stops. He points to my long hair. Brown. Then to my goatee. Red. He touches my armpit and looks puzzled. I point to my hair. He points to my crotch. I point to my hair. He invites me in for green tea.
The children liked it, probably because of the crotch reference. The Emerging Artist liked it, possibly because of the colour play. I liked it for both those reasons, and also for the comedy about communication and connection that don’t need words.
These three books reminded me that poetry can be a lot of fun. It can deal with death and loss, all manner of elevated cultural matters, or issues encountered when working in a Public Defender’s office, and still be fun. It can talk to goats and spiders and be silly about words, while still being serious. It can be warm without being goopy, and self-referential without being wanky.
Naturally, I went Googling. Among other things, I found John being interviewed on the website of Touch the Donkey, a small quarterly poetry journal published by above/ground press, publishers of one of these chapbooks. In that interview, he describes his approach:
I begin writing a poem (or prose poem) without knowing what I am going to say after the first few words that I thought of to begin with. Sometimes … I begin with a friend in mind and want to write something for the friend although I usually haven’t figured out anything beyond wanting to write something to that friend.
It’s poetry impro.
No doubt these poems have been polished and revised, but they retain the feeling of immediacy, of the poet’s mind chasing associations like a distractable child in a toy shop, and then they resolve themselves as if by magic.
I’ll stick to ‘Levy’sAccordion Straps’ on page 77–78*. I apologise for the quality of these images:
You could call this a rabbit-hole poem. It doesn’t start in exactly the way Levy describes in the interview above, but it’s in the same paddock. It’s a comic version of close reading: he takes a single word from Gregory O’Brien’s poem ‘A Genealogy’ (of which we know nothing else), and sees where it takes him. Maybe it’s the obsessive copy editor in me, but I love it that the poem starts from what turns out to be a misspelling. We tend to think of USA-ers as culturally arrogant, but Levy here has the humility to check the ‘variant’, and then stays open to the possibility that they do things differently in New Zealand. (There’s an Easter egg in line 24: Levy slips in a typo of his own, adding a space in Angelo Dipippo’s surname.)
As the poem progresses in an apparently random manner, it turns out that it features quite a bit of English as spoken/written by people not from the USA. There’s quiet humour, but not, I think, mockery. The last line made me laugh out loud. Instead of seeing the ‘detour’ as taking him away for a moment from O’Brien’s poem, he sees it as having changed the kind of attention he brings to it.
And now, because it’s November, here’s an hommage (with an advance note – Mruphy’s [sic] Law decrees, ‘If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written’):
Verse 10: Dear John
YouTube. Angelo Di Pippo plays, you said, 'La vie en rose'. I can’t find him (you’ve got a typo in his surname, Mruphy knows). I do find other Piaf splendours – Galliano working wonders. Music takes me in its arms, an infant whose late night alarms are soothed by father’s tender crooning. Jean, who says she’s ninety-one, comments that life then was fun. I googled “Levy’s straps” this morning, found them, surfed around some more, found fancy watch straps made by Shaw.
I finished this blog post on Awabakal country, near what is now one of the biggest coal ports in the world. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.
* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.
In July this year, Pope Francis issued a letter on ‘the role of literature in formation’ (you can read the whole letter here). He recommends that people in general, and especially people training to be priests, read poetry and novels. I love it that he has written things like this:
Reading, as an act of ‘discernment’, directly involves the reader as both the ‘subject’ who reads and as the ‘object’ of what is being read. In reading a novel or a work of poetry, the reader actually experiences ‘being read’ by the words that he or she is reading.
I found an opening line for a November stanza in paragraph 27 where he quotes St Ignatius’ description of ‘desolation’, a condition Francis says can be induced by some literature. The quote from Ignatius goes like this, with my chosen iambic tetrameter in purple):
I call desolation darkness of the soul, turmoil of spirit, inclination to what is low and earthly, restlessness rising from many disturbances and temptations which lead to want of faith, want of hope, want of love. The soul is wholly slothful, tepid, sad, and separated, as it were, from its Creator and Lord
Here goes, with what turned out to be a not-quite-autobiographical reflection on ageing:
Verse 9: The soul is wholly slothful, tepid The soul is wholly slothful, tepid, not quite lost in darkest night but stuck at dusk. All seems insipid, flavourless, not worth the fight. You’d rather watch some ancient Vera, cheer for Marvel’s latest hero, play sudoku, crossword, scroll – a dreary arvo of the soul. Where’s the rise, the roll, the carol, the dance, the dive, the tumbling glee that once enlivened you and me? Let's find again the thrill of peril, take a stand and make a fuss – let's talk to strangers on the bus.
Last week I went to a meeting where two members of Standing Together spoke. Standing Together is a grassroots movement of Jews and Palestinians in Israel working for peace, equality, and social and climate justice (website here).
At the meeting, organised by the recently formed Sydney Friends of Standing together, Shahd Bishara and Nadav Shofet gave personal accounts of their involvement in the movement. Shahd Bishara, a Palestinian Israeli medical practitioner, said, among other things:
The liberation of Palestine is inextricably intertwined with the security of Israelis. Two peoples both live in the land that both call our homeland. We need to fight for freedom of Palestinians and the safety of the Israeli Jews.
Nadav Shofet, an Israeli Jew, spoke of the absence of an alternative narrative to the genocidal one of perpetual war put forward by the Israeli right. Standing Together aims to fill that vacuum with a narrative that includes hope.
There’s much more to say. Standing Together has been attacked from the right in the USA and Europe, and from the left in Australia. My comments section isn’t open for that debate. The ABC covered the visit here.
Without wanting to in any way trivialise the struggle that was the subject of the meeting, I kept my ears open for an iambic tetrameter that could kick off an Onegin stanza. I got one. Nadav was referring to the narrative vacuum when he used the phrase, ‘In this environment of silence’. I have taken it somewhere else.
(The Emerging Artist says I should give links to W. B. Yeats, ‘Long-Legged Fly’ and Hopkins, ‘The Habit of Perfection’. Sadly I don’t remember the name of the Italian poet who inspired my last line.)
Verse 8: In this environment of silence
In this environment of silence minds can move like Yeats’s fly upon the stream, or can with violence leave democracy to die. Silence sings if it’s elected. Silenced hearts by fear inflected can’t or will not have their say – stony, look the other way. Silence thrives when life's unruly – words as weapons, words as toys, words as endless streaming noise leave no room for words that truly come from hearts that seek to heal whose uvulas are made of steel.
My Book Group met this week to discuss Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck’s novelset in East Berlin in the lead up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I blogged about the book when I read it for my Book Club – link here – so I won’t repeat myself.
It was a terrific evening. Once we’d eaten we had a slide show of one chap’s recent trip to Germany. This led to a shared moment of reflection about what it must have meant for East Germans to be taken over by the West in ‘Unification’.
Having edged up on the book in that way, we then encountered what someone later on WhatsApp called a hurricane. The book has inspired one of us to unmitigated rage. It was an insult to older men, he said, hackneyed, mean spirited and at key moments completely implausible.
No one disagreed with his substantive points, though no one quite shared his rage. Some had been unable to finish the book. Some, me included, found the account of East–West relations in 1980s Germany interestingly nuanced, though oddly unrelated to the central story of a toxic sexual relationship.
Then we had birthday cake for the youngest man present.
It was, as someone said in WhatsApp later, a classic book club conversation. Which gave me my first line.
Verse 7: A classic book club conversation A classic book club conversation – classic chat, not classic book. We're not averse to Tolstoy, Austen. Nobel winners get a look, but we choose trash as well as treasures, low as well as highbrow pleasures. We've read comics, Sci-Fi, crime, and don't pick winners every time. It’s our collaborative readings makes the conversation soar. A dozen lenses brought to bear light up a text, set fire to endings. We disagree but seldom fight, and when there's heat there’s always light.
Esther Anatolitis (ediitor), Meanjin Vol 83 Nº 2 (Winter 2024) (links are to the Meanjin website: some but not all of them are available to non-subscribers)
This Meanjin is incredibly rich and varied. I’ve carried it in my backpack for weeks, mostly reading a single article or story at a time when on public transport, in waiting rooms or queues, or occasionally – as in the days before podcasts – while walking. I have learned about:
Click on any link in that list, and you may find something instructive, challenging, entertaining or all three.
As the child of a farmer in North Queensland, where Mamu land has never been ceded and sugarcane monoculture has not been kind to the land, I was particularly moved by Katherine Wilson’s brief memoir about regenerative farming and collaboration with traditional owners, ‘Our Bog Paddock’s Understory‘.
I also want to mention ‘We, small heroes‘ by Micaela Sahhar, a short reflection on what it means in the current era that Palestinian culture has hospitality as a core value.
Of the four excellent pieces of fiction, Katerina Gibson’s ‘Something Dormant‘ stands out as a complex story of young, unrequited love remembered, with an environmental twist.
One of the joys of this Meanjin is the way its nine poems are spread throughout, so each one comes as a pleasant surprise among the prose. Having just this morning read an editorial on ‘eco-poetry’ in the Guardian (poetry ‘cannot ignore global heating’), I’ll single out Caitlin Maling’s ‘Ordinary Disaster‘, a chillingly affectless account of a mass dying of fish among coral in Western Australia.
It’s my blogging custom to focus on page 77. In November, I try to include a verse stanza in each blog post. Page 77 in this issue is part of a fascinating interview with architecture critic Naomi Stead (link here). The phrase that gives me my opening line comes from this paragraph:
I don’t want to be the schoolmarm, but if people understand more about the built environment – how it’s procured, how it comes into being, how it’s not an accident, how there’s almost nothing in our cities that is not deliberately designed – then they can begin to see the role that they themselves could play. I mean we should expect more, we should demand more of our cities and buildings and built environment, but we can only do that with a degree of knowledge and education about how this came to be, and what could be.
Rather than enlarge on Professor Stead’s point, my little verse follows where the phrase takes it. That and the plane that flew over our flat as I typed the first full stop.
November verse 6: We should demand more of our cities We should demand more of our cities. Not more aircraft overhead. No more oh-dears, what-a-pities – Packer's Pecker, Jeff's Shed. Perhaps less civil inattention, less of what's too gross to mention, neighbours partying till four, Mormons knocking on the door.
Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney, Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney, give me silence, show me stars, let me breathe air free from tars. So many things I'd have you give me. Make your waters clear again, and some day soon please change your name
I wrote this blog post on Gade / Wane, not far from Warrane, which some people want to give its name to the whole of Sydney. I acknowledge the Gadigal and Wangal Elders past present and emerging, and gratrefully acknowldge their care for this land for millennia.
David Malouf once said that the most interesting thing in the world is a three-year-old child. Today’s opening line is from any one of a hundred monologues performed recently by my four-year-old grandson.
Verse 5: BYD and all electric 'BYD and all electric, blue triangle, no exhaust.' This boy can read, he's not dyslectic, logos now, words in due course. Lexus, Mitsubishi, Honda, Volvo, Kia, Tesla, Skoda, Ford, Mercedes: through each sign the world yields meaning to his mind. For some, the first code's saints and angels: Anthony for lost and found, Christopher when outward bound. Others fret at kinship tangles: who is in, who's out, and why. Above us all, the deep, clear sky.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) – part way through Book 2, essay 40, ‘On the resemblance of children to their fathers’ to part way through Book 3, essay 5, ‘On Some lines from Virgil’
Montaigne’s essays become even more interesting as he ages. By Book 3, he writes about his chronic pain from ‘the stone’ and, especially in the innocuously titled ‘On some lines from Virgil’, he does some spectacular writing about sexual politics.
I expect that whole books have been written about Montaigne and sex. I won’t try to untangle any of it here. I’ll just quote the paragraph from today’s reading that has given my poem its opening line. (For those who came in late, this November I’m writing at least 14 fourteen line poems, the first line of each coming from something I’ve heard or read that day.) The paragraph will give you just a glimpse of the complexity of Montaigne’s thought:
We do not weigh the vices fairly in our estimation. Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But we make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages it in consequences which are worse than their cause.
I think he’s saying that making sexual behaviour a major criterion for a woman’s reputation is wrong; men make the rules that condemn women’s ‘immorality’; and the punishments are much worse than the so-called crimes. Further on in the essay he says that social expectations on women to be chaste are an intolerable burden.
I don’t know if he is putting a proto-feminist case, or arguing deviously that women should be more sexually available to men. Or both. Either way, it’s fascinating to have a voice from a very different epoch wrestling with questions that aren’t exactly resolved today.
But before I leave Montaigne for my own versification, I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph from Book 2, which follows some strong opinions about the medical profession, and rings out like a beacon of rationality for our times:
I do not loathe ideas which go against my own. I am so far from shying away when others’ judgements clash with mine … that, on the contrary, just as the most general style followed by Nature is variety – even more in minds than in bodies, since minds are of a more malleable substance capable of accepting more forms – I find it much rarer to see our humours and purposes coincide. In the whole world there has never been two identical opinions, any more than two identical hairs or seeds. Their most universal characteristic is diversity.
Yay Montaigne!
But on with my verse, which takes the phrase somewhere else altogether – and you can probably see the point when news from the USA knocked the poem off its tracks:
November verse 4: We do not weigh the vices fairly We do not weigh the vices fairly, thumb the scales to suit our whim: I exaggerate, quite rarely – you tell fibs – but look at him! His lies destroy the trust that binds us, lead us where no truth can find us. Crowds have wisdom, mobs can rule, electorates can play the fool. He's murderous and self-regarding, incoherent, vile, inane. He once could boast a showman's brain, but principles are for discarding. Lord of Misrule, theatre's Vice: How could you choose him once, then twice?
This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where the tiny lizards are enjoying the beginning of hot weather, and jacarandas are the land’s most spectacular guests. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation.
Me fail? I fly! 