Tag Archives: Ken Bolton

Ken Bolton, A Whistled Bit of Bop (Vagabond Press )

I recently heard a British podcaster describe Louis MacNeice as ‘a highbrow ordinary bloke.’ The implied combination of approachability and erudition struck me as a spot-on description of Ken Bolton in these poems.

As the book’s biographical note tells us, Bolton is a prolific art critic and journal editor as well as a poet. As if to emphasise his intimidating high-browness, the back cover blurb speaks of poetic abstraction and lists members of a ‘pantheon’ who appear in the poems: a timid reader who wasn’t sure who Ashbery or Berrigan are (note the use of second names only – the highbrow equivalent of Cruise and Nicholson), or had never heard of F T Prince or Peter Schjeldahl, might quail.

It’s true that the poems fairly bristle with erudite references. But when one turns to the endnotes for help, here’s part of what they say the second poem in the book, ‘Europe’:

As with many of these poems there are references to art – to Winckelmann, Mengs, Jacques-Louis David – but as the joke is that they are so little thought of now it would be perverse to explain them here.

I stopped worrying about my ignorance, and started getting the joke.

In these poems, an ordinary bloke hangs out in cafes people-watching, or stays up late writing to his adult son on the other side of the planet, broods about friends alive and dead, meditates on art and poetry, and (so it generally feels) somehow lets the flow of his mind find its way onto the page. It’s a lively, questioning, self-conscious and sometimes self-mocking mind. You really don’t need to know who Winkelmann is to have fun reading ‘Europe’. Probably it’s more fun for better educated readers, but that’s not a reason to be intimidated.

I loved the whole book, but I’ll keep to page 77*. It’s the right-hand side of the spread containing ‘(Pigeon Song) We Meet Again, Traveller’ which, by sheer good blogging fortune, is the shortest poem in the book. Click to enlarge this image:

Not strictly part of the poem, there’s an endnote:

Pigeon Song: a white pigeon with reddish brown flecks on it & around one eye. Strangely the bird had no accent, & spoke in English.

It’s a quietly comic poem in which an Italian pigeon questions an Australian poet about his life choices, after which both pigeon and poet do what they would have done if the conversation hadn’t happened. I hope I won’t make it any less enjoyable by doing a little ‘slow-reading’. With a lovely light touch, it airs some serious issues.

First the title. Its complexity is explained by yet another endnote: the words in brackets, ‘Pigeon Poem’, were a working title, and ‘We Meet Again, Traveller’ is the title finally settled on. Showing his working in this and other ways is one of the things I love about Bolton’s poetry: he lets the reader in on his process. Apart from the title, there’s not a lot of that in ‘We Meet Again, Traveller’. The comic endnote makes up for that absence a little: it implies that the fantasy is based in a real-life moment, and suggests that Bolton may have considered having the pigeon speaking in Italian or with an accent, but – happily – rejected both options.

The action of the poem takes place, typically, in an intellectual ambience. Bolton is sitting at a cafe table in Trastevere, a cool part of Rome that’s home to four or five academic institutions, where sitting at a table reading a literary journal wouldn’t stand out. (As even middlebrow ordinary blokes know, the TLS is the Times Literary Supplement.)

But there’s nothing rarefied or highbrow about the pigeon. Who among us, sitting alone at an outdoor table, hasn’t felt judged by a beady-eyed pigeon (or ibis if you live in Sydney)? This particular judgmental pigeon voices something of the complex unease of being a settler Australian poet, deeply meshed in European culture with an unresolved relationship to the actual land where one lives:

I see you are reading the TLS,
thinking about 19th Century

Parisian authors –
sitting here in Rome, an Australian.

Go home!

London, Paris, Rome, Australia, past and present: it’s complex. I’m reminded irresistibly of a music hall ditty I loved as a child (and which, as a complete irrelevance, I once heard the late Dorothy Hewett sing):

Why does a red cow give white milk
when it always eats green grass?
That's the burning question.
Let's have your suggestion.
You don't know, I don't know, don't you feel an ass?
Why does a red cow give white milk
when it always eats green grass?

The pigeon then asks a key question with characteristic Boltonian (Boltonic?) lightness of touch.:

Though where is home for you?

If you are so immersed in European culture, is your home in a physical location or in a less tangible ‘place’? As in the music hall song, the burning question goes unanswered.

The pigeon knows where its home is, though it too has travelled. Then:

and Arezzo. Some years ago
I spoke to you there.

This may be referring to an earlier Bolton pigeon-poem that I haven’t read, or to a time when he visited Perugia in real life, perhaps to study at the Università per Stranieri. (Decades before Duolingo, Perugia was often mentioned among Australians of a certain age and education as a place to go to learn Italian.) The content of that earlier conversation, whether the subject of an earlier poem or not, was evidently the Bolton’s poetic aspirations:

Where has it got you, poetry?
I despair of you, frankly

But then, having dipped by pigeon-proxy into the well of settler-anxiety, self-doubt and possible despair, the poem returns to lightness. (I’ll just note in passing that I don’t understand the word ‘suit’, or why it’s in inverted commas – any help welcomed in the comments.) The pigeon, dropping its role as cultural challenger, asks the question that’s actually on any judgemental-looking pigeon’s mind. And both pigeon and poet fly away, as they were both going to anyway.

The poem consists of eighteen stanzas, most of them couplets. I can’t say much more than that about the form, except it’s good to notice the use of rhyme in the last third of the poem: stay, away, sotto voce, away, day. Reading those lines aloud, the rhyme creates a sense of relief that the awkward conversation is over: things flow easily. The pigeon’s sotto voce couplet about the nut and the final line both depart from the rhyming flow, suggesting that bird and poet both now exit the staged conversation.

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I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live, as a settler Australian who tries to remain aware of unceded Indigenous sovereignty. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

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* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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.