Tag Archives: Adam Aitken

Adam Aitken’s Tonto’s Revenge

Posted on 3 Jun 2011 | 3 comments

Adam Aitken, Tonto’s Revenge (Tinfish Press 2011)

Tinfish Press is a small Hawai’ian publishing house run by Susan M Schultz, the poet who wrote Dementia Blog. It publishes poetry in the Tinfish journal, in books and in chapbooks. Even if Adam Aitken hadn’t been Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i–Mānoa in 2010,  would have been a natural fit for Tinfish. He wrote recently on his blog:

I have spent my whole career as a writer trying to critique and understand a cross-cultural poetics and [my] multicultural cultural capital.

Almost like call and response, the Tinfish website says:

We publish work from the Pacific region, concentrating on language issues, colonialism, Buddhism, place, and poetic form. Above all, we seek to create alliances between writers whose work crosses national and aesthetic borders.

Tonto’s Revenge is the second title in the Tinfish Retro Series, which will comprise 12 chapbooks, $3 USD each or $36 for the set, available from http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com. (You can read Susan Schultz’s blog entry on this book here.)

I enjoyed the book’s twelve poems very much. Most of them are responses to Hawai’i: conversations on TheBus (not a typo), an encounter with a homeless woman, an elegy for the actor who played Danno in Hawai’i Five-O, a meditation on a major shopping precinct. Five monologues by ‘The Sheriff’ are less Hawai’i specific, but they too relate to encounters with the US more broadly. For example, ‘The Sheriff as Recidivist’ which gives the book its title, plays with a particularly US flavour of political correctness, in which certain words have been declared ‘bad’:

I know I can't call him that, my dusky Injun,
but I does.
[...]
Tonto.
Now that Tumbleweed U's banned the term
now that it's banned
it's even sexier.

Here, as elsewhere, the play turns serious in a surprising way, but you’ll have to read the poem to find out how.  There’s a lot of playfulness in the book as a whole – playful puns, play with syntax, play with paradox – and a lot of affection.

Since this is a blog entry and not a review, here begin a couple of paragraphs on a very minor matter:

As is pretty inevitable these days, when we can never assume a common set of references between a poet and any given reader, there are plenty of obscurities. For example, in ‘Ala Moana’, the piece on the shopping precinct, which to my mind is the most interesting poem in the book, the narrator has been meditating on nostalgia:

So I want to write 747 poems
and not worry. Whose home is it?
Whose nostalgia?

Presumably he doesn’t mean he want to write seven hundred and forty-seven poems. Is he looking forward to the time when we will be nostalgic for 747s?  Perhaps he is stating an ambition to write big poems that will carry many people to new places. This morning, re-reading the poem while walking the dog, I stumbled on this line, and moved on – as you do. Just now, checking to see if Adam had uploaded the poem to his blog as he has some of the others, I read this: ‘I feel deeply complicit in a kind of poetic tourism, where I am always unmoored, or detached from a deep sense of belonging to a place. Susan Schultz calls this the “747” poem, a poem of shallow impressions, a sketch.’

Ahh! (And since I wrote that last sentence, I’ve googled ‘747 poems’ and found lots of references: it’s not a deliberate obscurity.)

Added later: Susan Schultz has added a clarification in the comments.

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Heat death … resurrection not ruled out *UPDATED*

Posted on 12 Feb 2011 | 7 comments

Ivor Indyk (ed.), Heat 24: That’s it, for now … (Giramondo January 2011)

After 14 years, Heat is to appear no more in book form. In this final issue Ivor Indyk, the editor and publisher, departs from his usual practice and speaks to us, explaining the reasons for his decision and sketching some possibilities for an electronic afterlife. (He spoke again to Ramona Koval on the Book Show.) The sad economic reality is that as a 240 page book, Heat is a monster to produce several times a year and then to distribute and warehouse. The community of people who are glad of its existence is much larger than the journal’s market – the people who buy it, and so contribute to its viability. As I’ve subscribed for ten years and written blog entries (I don’t really think of them as reviews), I have a twinge of smug virtue mixed with my sorrow: like, ‘It’s not my fault!’ I don’t know that I’ve ever felt part of a Heat community – too middlebrow, too whitebread, too shy – but it hasn’t been a purely economic relationship. I’ll miss this regular dose of austere high culture, and emergent/experimental/cosmopolitan writing.

Some of the culture in this final issue is incontestably high. Adrian Martin’s article, ‘Devastation’, after a wonderful anecdote about a working class man’s response to Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, goes on to discuss the films of Maurice Pialat. I’m a keen and frequent filmgoer, but I had to check with Google to be sure the article wasn’t a spoof and Pialat a comic invention – an archetypally grim French auteur whom Martin praises for daring to have sitting and standing characters in the same shot, and compares to a number of other auteurs I hadn’t heard of. It’s not a spoof: it’s the kind of article that sheds enough light on its subject to reveal the dark vastness of its reader’s ignorance. By way of  contrast, Andrew Riemer’s brilliantly erudite ‘Four Glimpses of the Zeitgeist’ takes one gently by the hand and illuminates a web of connections joining Freud, Mahler, Riemer’s ancestors, conductor Bruno Walter, His Master’s Voice records, Hitler, playwright Thomas Bernhard and others, all converging in a Viennese theatre in 2010. Jeffrey Poacher’s reflection on the poetry of Peter Porter , who died last year, is likewise kind to general readers without, I hope, boring those who know Porter’s poetry well.

Cosmopolitanism is alive and well, particularly n Andreas Campomar’s ‘Uruguay Made Me’, a discussion of Eduardo Galeano in the context of his native Uruguay that makes me want – need – to read Galeano.

There’s plenty of emerging/experimental work too, mainly in the poetry. I was happy to see two typographically adventurous poems by Patrick Jones, who commented critically on this blog a while back.

But I don’t want to get hung up on classification. There’s a terrific poem by Adam Aitken dedicated to Susan Schultz – both Adam and Susan have graced my comments section recently. Ali Alizadeh and Jennifer Maiden are in fine form. Alan Wearne does some Gilbertian editorialising on the current move to form an Australian peak industry body for poetry. Amanda Simons interviews Antigone Kefala on her writing practice: Kefala says that, for her, writing and speaking are two completely different forms, and it’s delightful to encounter the conversational Antigone here alongside two characteristically non-conversational poems (there’s that austere high culture again).

I was struck by two examples of things a book you hold in your hand can do that a boundless (the word is from Ivor Indyk’s editorial) electronic creation can’t. In Nicolas José’s ‘What Love Tells Me’ a recently widowed man and his young son attend a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony where the ‘blasting and pummelling and smashing’ music opens them up to emotional resolution and communication. The story is moving in its own right, but it gains an extra fizz from the fact that 150 pages earlier Andrew Riemer has been telling us something of what Mahler’s music (though not this precise symphony) meant at the time it was written. In my mind at least, that mental connection is made possible by the weight of the book in my hand

The other moment is a theatrical coup in Gillian Mears’ ‘Fairy Death’. This memoir begins with a title page: a right-hand page that’s blank except for the title and a brief note on the author. When you turn over, expecting the story to begin on the verso, you find instead a striking image of what seems to be a dress-shop mannequin with a crack or join around its middle, arranged on a bed and photographed from above. The figure’s face makes you realise that it’s actually a live, extraordinarily thin woman, that what looked like a join is a string tied around her waist and attached to what you now recognise as a red balloon in the photo’s foreground. The photo, taken by Vincent Lord Long, is of the author, and her mannequin-like thinness is the result of advanced multiple sclerosis. The article is in part an account of how it came to be taken. Though the memoir is astonishingly powerful, addressing (with what in another context would be Way Too Much Information) the effects of MS on the author’s sexuality, the act of turning the first page onto that image creates extraordinary poignancy – which I don’t believe could happen in an electronic form.

One perhaps minor advantage of ceasing to exist as a physical object is that proofreading and even copy editing can continue after publication. Heat 24 is far from egregious in that department – apart from a miniscule (which is a special case as the Microsoft spellchecker ignorantly allows it), I was plunged into confusion and irritation by only one editing error, which I won’t bore you with. It looks as if the presumably underpaid copy editor had enough time and/or other resource to do an excellent job on this issue, so he can go out with his head held high.

Just to be half clever, here’s the last stanza of John Shaw Neilson’s ‘The Poor Poor Country’, slightly altered:

The New Year came with Heat and thirst and the little lakes were low,
The blue cranes were my nearest friends and I mourned to see them go;
I watched their wings so long until I only saw the sky,
Down in that poor country no pauper was I.

Update 1 March 2011:

Over at Adam in (), Adam Aitken was kind enough to link to this page, and he asked me a question. I tried three times to respond in his comments section but for some reason my comments wouldn’t stick, so I’ll have go here.

Adam:

Jonathan, I don’t know why you see yourself as “whitebread”. Are HEAT writers “brownbread”? I won’t miss the so-called austerity of HEAT, as I feel on the contrary that HEAT would sometimes verge on the too rich, too dense side of things (by virtue of each issue being such a fat book).

Well, Adam, I’m not sure where I picked up the term ‘whitebread’, but my (now former) suburb, Annandale, got described that way by some of my more hip friends. They meant that the people of the suburb were the kind who ate only white, preferably sliced and packaged bread, remaining ignorant of or uninterested in the existence of pumpernickel, sourdough, ciabatta and challah, let alone pita, roti and naan. So my implication was Heat writers (and anyone else who belongs to its community) can come from anywhere in that vast world of different breads (quite a few of which are actually white, come to think of it).  I have never read an issue of Heat without having my horizons extended, and I was amusing myself by saying that in a self-deprecatory way.

I agree with you on the richness and density of Heat. It’s been admirably austere in the sense that it would never have given us a review of the latest Oprah recommendation or blockbuster movie, and in a different way I’ve thought of Ivor Indyk’s editorial silence as austere. In this final issue he speaks to us, but presents it as asking our indulgence. I for one would have happily indulged him in this way many times over.

End of update

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Sonnets according to ‘m’

Posted on 23 May 2010 | 2 comments

Jordie Albiston,  The sonnet according to ‘m’ (John Leonard Press 2009)

The M in these poems is not from Fritz Lang (‘When out of grace in Peter Lorre’s eyes’?) or the James Bond franchise (‘If gin and vermouth stirred not shaken are’?), but is, as the back cover blurb tells us in a manner ominously reminiscent of the  labels in contemporary art exhibitions, ’emblematic of recurrence and precipitousness’. It’s a commonplace that poets nowadays don’t generally have a huge audience. The most recent variation I’ve heard was from David Brooks, at a Sydney Writers Festival workshop: the world is desperate for poetry but poets aren’t writing the poetry that the world wants. It’s almost as if, he said (but blame me if this is crudely expressed, I took skimpy notes), you have to choose between writing for poets or writing for the public. As a reader, I definitely identify as part of the public, and Jordie Albiston’s clever play with the sonnet form in this book tends to intimidate and alienate me rather more than it delights. Yet, there is delight here, and a little sharpening of attention brought rewards.

There are at least three Ms: ‘me’, Marsi  and em. Marsi, the acknowledgements page informs us,  was the poet’s maternal grandmother, whose diary, kept for a month in 1959, provides the basis for 12 of the book’s 54 sonnets.  Em is Emily Skinner, Jordie’s paternal great-great-grandmother, whose memoir lies behind another four of them. I found the use of these sources fascinating. At the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Adam Aitken read a poem based on his father’s letters, so perhaps this kind of familial translation is a common practice. It’s certainly an interesting one, and here the Marsi sonnets in particular provide a kind of rootedness. They tend to observe metrical and rhyming conventions, not strictly, but more so than the ‘me’ poems, and the quiet intelligence they bring to the concerns of a 50s housewife  demonstrate Albiston’s range marvellously:

well we have waited twelve months to see
what the nuns would do with the old wood
house 00 a noise at last from the sainthood:
the roof is coming off! 00 now of course we

are curious to know What Next!

and so on. Compare this to the ebullient play with form in ‘mandatory’ (all but the ’em’ poems have titles beginning with  m):

well you gotta be good 00 but
you gotta be bad 00 you gotta
be both glad & sad 00 yep you
gotta be human it says in the
book but look! 00 there’s that
creature inside! 00 you gotta be
nothing you gotta be all 00 you
gotta be both great and small

Would you have picked that as the octet of a sonnet? There’s a huge variety here. There’s quite a bit that seems to be just for fun (as in ‘methinx (i)’, ‘2moro 2moro & 2moro / goes slo frm day 2 day’). Katherine Mansfield scores a sonnet. There are a number entitled ‘mural’ that celebrate and mourn the passing of verbal graffiti. Some seem to embody a very contemporary feeling of derangement. And so on.

I ended up being completely won over.

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A full day at the SWF

Posted on 21 May 2010 | 2 comments

My yesterday was entirely devoted to the Sydney Writers Festival, and I had a great time, starting out at Walsh Bay, where my choices seemed to keep me away from the monster queues.

10 : 00 Poetry on the Harbour: Adam Aitken, Judith Beveridge and Kim Cheng Boey, with Ivor (‘I know they’re good poets because I published them’) Indyk in the chair.

In general I prefer to hear poets read their own work over having actors deliver sonorous, deeply felt renditions, because actors’ performances tend to narrow the range of possible readings. I also prefer poets’ readings that avoid the incantatory (though I’m delighted by the over the top bits of Yeats and Tennyson I’ve heard). All the same, all three of these poets read their work with such modesty and introspection that I longed for just a touch of the rock star, just a hint that they might be able to hold us in the palm of their hands and wring our withers.

It was an excellent reading nonetheless. Adam Aitken read his ‘Pol Pot in Paris’, and a poem taken from his father’s letters (introduced with, ‘I love my father, but he had colonial attitudes’) got actual laughs. Judith Beveridge began with an anecdote from Robert Creeley: at a school reading a child asked him, ‘Mr Creeley, was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?’ Among the poems that JB had made up herself was a lovely piece about a man washing himself at the railway station tap just outside Delhi. Of the extraordinarily cosmopolitan Kim Cheng Boey’s poems, I particularly liked ‘Stamps’, in which the poet converses with his little daughter.

11 : 30 First Nation Stories: Richard Van Camp and Boori Monty Pryor herded ‘like cats’ by Anita Heiss.

In introducing his poets, Ivor Indyk mentioned university positions and awards. In this session, Anita Heiss talked about which Indigenous Nations/mobs people came from, including herself. Both Richard and Boori perform and tell stories in schools. Richard gave us what I took to be one of his school performances; Boori talked about his. Both men were very funny, and Boori gets the Me Fail I Fly nomination for the most charming man on the planet. Yet with all the humour and charm he managed to put some hard truths. ‘This is the only country in the world,’ he said, ‘that mines a culture and sells it off to the world but doesn’t want to know about the people who produce it.’ He told of a group of preschool teachers who asked him for advice on how to tell Aboriginal stories to their charges. ‘Do you know about the 1967 Referendum? The Gurindji campaign? The reserves?’ he asked (though he probably named different specifics). ‘You won’t be able to tell the stories until you know about the fight to keep them alive.’

13 : 00 The Politics of Storytelling: Mike Daisey and William Yang, chaired by Annette Shum Wah.

I’m told Mike Daisy’s story was shattering, but I went to sleep during the loud, bombastic opening section of his monologue, which I guess was meant to be the warm-up (a baby cried, presumably at the sheer loudness, and was incorporated into the rant, to the delight of the fans in front of me but adding to my need to absent myself). William Yang showed a number of slides, and it was reassuring to see that his style worked just as well when taken out of the tightly controlled environment of his shows. The discussion was interesting – Annette asked about their provocativeness (William’s photos can be a bit rude, and Mike uses four-letter words, hardly confronting in Sydney I would have thought, but he did mention a show where a big bloc of the audience stood up and walked out – it’s on YouTube and his response is wonderful). William said that when he first did his shows he was part of an angry community. Now he might put in an occasional naughty photo out of impishness. These were such different men, yet their mutual appreciation was lovely to behold.

16 : 00 David Wessel, Meet Paul Keating with George Megalogenis

Note to anyone doing this kind of gig: it really really helps if you read up on the person you’re appearing with and can refer approvingly to his work. Both these men did that and it was a great leavening to what could have been a dry conversation about economics. David Wessell (economic editor of the Wall Street Journal, was able to drop a number of Keating’s famous phrases into his presentation (‘The recession we had to have’, ‘A shiver looking for a spine to run up’, etc). Wessell explained the causes of the GFC memorably as resulting from two false assumptions in the US: that house prices would never fall, and that extraordinary financial innovations spread risk in such a way as to diminish it to the point of negligibility. Keating, equally memorably described Chinese reserves as a great cloud full of water and electricity floating over the world, and Alan Greenspan building a copper pipe up into the sky to draw down the water. He also talked about Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece as having a big one-off party made possible by converting to the Euro and suddenly enjoying German interest rates. Right now we’re seeing the morning-after crash. Questions were probably intelligent, but were well above my head.

18 : 00 Have We All Been Conned?: An Emergency Town Meeting: Bill McKibben, Ross Garnaut and Clive Hamilton, with Tim Flannery as participating Chair, discussing the politics and science of climate change.

A case of false labelling. Of course, we all knew it was a Writers’ Festival event and not a political rally, so it was no surprise that it was, as my son described them, four bald men in glasses talking to an appreciative audience about the current state of affairs. No one was really concerned to plug his own book – it was, as Tim Flannery, said, a bit of a dream team.

Was Copenhagen a success or failure? Too soon to tell, but it has meant that developing countries are now taking on climate change rather than waiting for the developing countries to do their bit first.

How come Australia is the biggest laggard in climate change action, yet it has the most to lose? Ross Garnaut spoke with transparent obliqueness of lack of political leadership. Bill McKibben, I think it was, first mentioned Kevin Rudd by name. Clive Hamilton sunk the boot: Kevin Rudd thinks science is a lobby group, and he’s a manager not a leader.

What about the Greens’ rejection of the CPRS? A lamentable strategic error, seemed to be the consensus, rather than a grievous failure of principle as we have seen from federal Labor. Bill McKibben said wise words here. Coming from afar, he said, he had the luxury of responding without knowing or needing to know the details, but what we have to remember is that any victory, however small, is to be celebrated, and any victory, however large, is only a step forward. This is a struggle that will continue for our lifetimes and beyond.

Perhaps the grimmest note of the evening was the statement from, I think, Bill McKibben, that our challenge now is no longer to prevent climate change but to take action to deal with the new world we now live in.

In question time we reaped the consequences of the false advertising. Person after person took the microphone to tell us what they thought about the subject. One woman, from an outfit called A Hundred Percent Renewable, had even brought a banner, which she trailed after her disconsolately as she left the microphone, having failed to get a taker to hold up its other end.

And I’m off to another full day today.

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