From Occam’s Aftershave

To the Faithful Reader

I am seated comfortably just where the ocean

And the river collide in a high and wide

Commotion and where a large contingent

Of bedraggled coathanger cormorants has gathered

Looking and sounding a bit like The Rolling Stones

Belting out Beggars’ Banquet. If you believe this

You’ll believe anything, and are thereby my ideal reader.

Well, did you believe I was really there

At that pounding estuary with its misting confluence,

With a helicopter flying past trailing a banner

On both sides of which was painted What’s

On the other side of this notice is false?

And with the cormorants getting into a sudden

Dispute, the noise competing with waves

And the helicopter? It’s already too complicated,

Isn’t it, to be convincing? No?

Then if you believe this you’ll believe

Anything, and are thereby God’s Gift to Fabulists.

But of course you are this – and more! And more!

Not the least being your willingness to read on.

But for some time now it cannot – surely –

Have escaped your notice that I am flirting

With the idea that poetry and jokes are alike, both skirting

The hem of things, the indrawn breath of wonder corresponding

To the hush before the punchline, the device

Of enjambment being somehow like the nudge nudge

Of double meaning. Anyway you will not, I hope,

Object if a few old jokes become the subject, nay

The text, in an exercise in exploring this claim;

(For example:) “What do you get when you cross

A sheep and a kangaroo?” You’ll know this one.

The answer is (You knew) “You get a woolly jumper.”

Now you must note the peculiar way the word jumper

Takes on something of the frisson of poetry. Hey?

And the way the whole sentence staggers

Like a cow replete in a meadow after rain. Yes?

Next, “What do you get if you cross a road

With a chicken?” “You get the answer to a question

Which has long occupied us.” This one is a bit

Devious and I beg you to consider whether or not

Your groan may resemble just a little the gasp

At the startlement of poetry? Next

A more extended excursion into charmed narrative

With its familiar Ciceronian reliance on three. A man

Is walking down the street with his girlfriend.

They pause outside a jeweller’s shop where she sees

A diamond bracelet in the window. The man

Takes a brick from his pocket, smashes

The window and gives her the diamonds.

At the next jeweller’s shop she admires

A ruby necklace. He takes a brick from his pocket,

Smashes the window and gives her the rubies.

At the next jeweller’s window she admires pearls.

He says, Do you think I’m made of bricks?

Different? Might the difference here suggest

That between simile and metaphor? Too optimistic?

Consider then, “She was only the antique-dealer’s daughter

But she wouldn’t allow much on the sofa.”

(Superior, you’ll agree, to “She was only

The farrier’s daughter but all of the horse manure.”)

Or “One thing I learnt at school was this –

That double negatives are a definite no-no.”

Or “I went out with a pair of twins last night.”

“Did you have a good time?” “Yes and no.”

Or “Judge: ‘Is this the first time you’ve been up before me?’

Defendant: ‘I don’t know. What time do you get up?’

Or “You’ve got to hand it to the Venus de Milo.”

(Note here the odd resemblance to the poetic

Where the text takes away with one hand

What it seems to be proposing with the other.)

Too much? Well, yes. And yet – and yet –

How prodigal the waves in the estuary of the present.

But after this sustained barrage, no doubt

You have been long enough delighted. And now

The cormorants are diving again. The sandwall

Has fallen into the inward tide,

Falling like one who no longer hopes or wishes

To avoid change but resigns herself

To being carried along by events,

A reader, in fact – patient and considerate – You!

Positive Incapability

I’m trying all the time

To push ahead uphill this heavy stone

Of possible ideas.

Windshadow on the river braids

Is not enough.

The tidal shoals in sandstone clefts

Are not enough

To float the stone free with the tide.

A sense of place alone is not enough

To make the stone unfold

Like paper flowers in water.

The obdurate inertia of ideas

Cannot be overcome and made to fly

By force alone.

Can Sysiphus be reading as he climbs?

What follows is a travesty: some lines

From Nabokov’s Speak Memory

Iambically traduced as emblem for

The artifice which cannot by itself

Breathe life into ideas by will alone.

Dying in St Petersburg in bed

His half-deluded grandfather,

Half-conscious, had convinced himself

He could and would survive

If he remained on Mediterranean shores.

Nabokov’s mother camouflaged his room

To simulate his favourite room in Nice.

With furniture rushed back by courier

And sheaves of flowers equally correct,

The wall outside his window painted white.

That Riviera white… Perhaps convinced,

While Russian birches soughed just out of sight,

He died enswathed in artifice.

This is an emblem for forced lines which seek

But lack at last that transformative grace

With which they might take flight

– Or flow uphill.

And incidentally that painted wall

Suggests O’Henry’s tale,

The Last Leaf. There a similar device

Allows a convalescent at the pane

To cling to one last clinging, painted leaf.

The light is water-skiing at first glance,

Then suddenly the river is deserted.

And here again is proof

That Place alone, while willing us

To think it all-embracing,

Cannot soar and cannot even move.

Some birds fly in to fill the void

But cannot bring with them sufficient narrative.

Let us carefully expose

The text which pushes on by artifice

Until at last it has no reader left…

How is this

Unlike the tree fall unheard in the forest?

Or Sysiphus asleep

In equilibrium against the stone?

In An Old Magazine

In an old magazine bought with others

At a bookfair dominated by first edition hunters

Descending with whoops and hollas on the heaped-up tables,

By chance a poem opens which, despite being translated,

Is beautiful, sad, and still packs a punch like a canister

Of some heavy element ticking and still half present.

It is a poem regretting the loss of old Lithuania

And of course the loss or absent-minded misplacement somewhere

Of childhood. It is by Czeslaw Milosz whose two z’s

Go before him like pilgrims’ or legionnaires’ pair of flags,

One in the forefront, one bringing up the rear

As, fluttering, they descend a mountain enfilade. It recalls

The sorrows of that Europe like a woman in headscarf,

The sadness of early photographs of wooden churches,

Loggia, cart, sleigh and loom, of men and women

In traditional costume holding distaff or accordion,

Pictured in a sepia silence as palpable

As the silence of probability before an avalanche.

The poet has returned after fifty years. All is changed.

“I remembered where to turn but did not recognise the river.”

The granary and orchards and linden alley have gone

And with them the dowry chest, the carved looking-glass

And the grove of ancient pines. But he remembers

The scent of rosemary, the shower from a spray of lilac

And he remembers too a small lake, its shores now

Without its rushes “through which we struggled forward, swimming

To dry ourselves afterwards, I and Miss X, with one towel, dancing.”

It is this Miss X whom I see repeatedly stepping ad libitum

From the birch shallows and pausing for the towel

While along a white forearm and sternum droplets gather;

It is Miss X whom I would like to see again –

Even more than to revisit the alders long ago felled

Or the former granary cellars with their winter apples,

Or the villages which have become empty fields,

She with a mud-streaked ankle, with a small bruise

On one shin, with the slight disfigurement

Of a smallpox inoculation on one arm,

She who while holding the towel with one hand

Points with her free hand towards the past.

And just as Milosz is bemused at this lost Lithuania

Might we not equally regret the loss

Of an Australia lost without ever having been properly found,

An Australia in which I may have swum –

At Tidal Palms or Thousand Mile Beach – with someone

Resembling Miss X without ever knowing it,

An Australia never found then lost again – all in fifty years,

The slate erased or muddied of all that was zestful,

Redolent or vital, by the new Conservatism?

For it is that whole faint apparatus of accretion –

Relics of Byzantine carved timbers, the traces in lanes

Of a millennium of incense, orchards reverting to thistle –

Which, even in their loss or decline or translation,

Milosz finds still lingering as memory’s ozone.

This is entirely lacking here, and in its place

Is a subversion and perverse redeployment of the past,

The constant cutting back to the ground of burgeoning

Tendrils and roots, the young eucalyptus regrowth

Lopped as if it were tall poppies. Accordingly

In the absence of all such traces, the tradition being clinker,

Dense mallee, emptiness and searing blue,

I feel not as one returning to ruins, painted façades,

Enigmatic remains, excavations, fading embroideries,

But rather am suspended in an abstraction of air

Removed from such histories, as if all along the coast

The waves resounded in the minor key only

As sweetly as Schubert’s returning to that mode,

And I were looking in this vast beach tabula rasa

For something to legitimise a cadence like Milosz’s conclusion:

“Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.”

Pleasantly Teetering

Perhaps it is too much to hope

That I might share with you my pleasure

At dividing odd bits of prose into lines,

That is, somewhat more pretentiously, the pleasure

Of making enjambments. You the reader

Tend to see these divisions as given

And concentrate over-much on the content,

Asking at every step, Is this sufficiently

Concentrated? Or cogent? Or original? And Is this

Lyrical enough? Whereas I am content

With that modest enjoyment, the aesthetic

Of the sausage maker – and deciding when to twist the casing

And start a new sausage. Thus

For instance I might find myself browsing

Amongst, say, harmless solecisms or oddities

Garnered from newspapers, with a view

To breaking them into amusingly disjoint units,

And choose, say, this riff on the pronoun:

“A few moments after Her Majesty

Had broken the traditional bottle of champagne

On the bows of the noble ship

She slid slowly and gracefully down the slipway

Entering the water with barely a splash.”

Or the following zinger, based this time on idiom,

From The News of the World: “He told Mrs X

He had a record of the complete works

Of The Messiah and she arranged to visit

His house the next day to hear it.

‘I was playing The Messiah for about 10 minutes

When she said this was not the right occasion

For it, and she started to make overtures to me.’ ”

Many might disparage the pursuit of such trivia

As an abrogation of the stronger stuff

Poetry is supposed to get itself involved in

And scorn one who potters about at the high tide mark

Picking up bits of odd shaped wood or glass

When the true practitioner is diving amongst corals

And with almost bursting lungs finds and records the dark

Submerged hull or krill or fall of filtered sun

Or pall of pale lilac or linen light

And so on. But I continue to hope

That some readers may find connections

Between the odd frisson accompanying puns

Or similar unintentional ambiguities or slippage

And the deliberate pleasure of suspension

Occasioned by enjambment, that brief weightlessness

As at the high point on a swing before return,

A pleasure which can be almost – well, almost

Independent of the content or visionary intensity

Of those underwater bubbles and baubles and babble.

Therefore I would still press for a place

For the flimsy or ephemeral as in, say,

Shaky newspaper headlines, e.g. Women Lay

Observers at Council or Women Who Smoke

Have Lighter Children or Sun-suit Schoolgirl

Suspended by Head or even Sibelius Dies –

After Hearing Sargent Conducting 5th Symphony,

The point being to see language on holiday

Or misbehaving or out on its leash sniffing

The occasional tree trunk or leaping about

Blithely on its trampoline or treading water while noting

The most audacious changes in the cloudline,

Or wading through breakers while someone loudly

Above them does prodigious imitations of birdcalls

Including kookaburras, magpies and other old favourites.

In short, I would hope that the reader

Might enjoy language performing like circus tumblers

Balancing on each other’s shoulders in a pyramid

While perilously teetering on a ball or bicycle,

Or suggesting even the charm of errors

In the first Macquarie Dictionary, including

Kurrawong: see currawong and Currawong: see kurrawong.

Wattle-Bird Song

Wattle birds lake flame trees

The trees the flame the lake the birds

Alighting clucking chuckling clacking

Already about to expound to cackle to chortle

Expatiating giving us the full picture

Filling us in sparing us no detail

Wattle birds think of next? Lake look

Spill trills pell-mell willy-nilly

Nearly still downlake pelicans can't talk

In the illimitably shimmering

Down below la-di-da galahs

Get off the grass

Persiflage banter ranter clatter badinage

Squawk talk hawk gawk

Top of tree broadcast

Here is the news

Beck and call gobbledegook

What? What? What?

Beak up I can't weir you

Trill two birds with the one tone

Swallow that

Get out

What, me? Glib? Never

Glib? Bilge

Garden garbler

Where? There

Dissociate ourselves from the scabrous

Scandalous gossipings on of cormorants underwater

They never tell you when and where

They're coming up for glabrous air

Great lair

Connectives what are

Every good

Every good bird

Every good bird deserves fruit

Here is the news

Few gulls like lake

Every bird deserves good fruit

Bird catches fruit on wing

Kookaburra cry empties lake

Pecking order decision re central tree

Recently handed down

Tree roost roster ratified

Kookaplover hover over hung-over

So you sling slang?

Clang bang prang gang-gang

Parrot warfare ding-dong

Malarky lark nark

Ark park lake

Snow flake? Never heard of it

We take a break

Gulargambone galah galoot

Here is the news

Bird heard to sip drop

Boat glance into under-view

Plop berry into prow now

Ripple settle

Now back to the news

I'm the most voluble virtuoso

Warbler and burbler

In this particular mode

But in that particular mode

How about this can you better this?

Barter with wing beater can you

Top this trilling trope?

In this neck of the woods

Fine feathered

Cap this

Thrilling tripping but what about this trailing

Throat thrall? Oh very pretty gutteral clutter

For collateral cop this top C

High seas for me too you

Gargling gargoyle

Tropical measures for babbling wobblers

On coral see-saw treeReporter says he saw

What? That?

Can't Des descant? Who can't?

What call gang of us drunk on wood?

Peck of pickled peckers

Decant descant

Discourse discourse dis course

Ain't big enough for both of us

Gurgling gigolo

Calm uplake heard

Alarm clock bird

There's another cluster

Lustre of coral flower

On convenient get at it

Upside down possibly

Cling to sweet liqueur

Tree

Four

Not so sweet as it was before

Vocal noisy semaphore

When a door not a door?

When it a jar night jar

What a plover? A lover with a P

Pea hen then he

Jostle with a thrush? Hush with a trill

Hustle throotle

Oh sweet very sweet very very sweet

Oh I say

One good tern deserves fruit

Larking about Kingfishers catch

Shrike shriek

Speak spoke spook

Look lake lark

Quake quirk quack

Speck speckle speak

Do you read me? Over

Under? Through

Through leaves sip

Sill Sit Willow Trill Sill Silt Syllable Table

News? All the fuss about? What all the news

O you liquid relaters

Kraken waken in laken

Corncrake rake lake

Crow about

Hang about while I hang on

Upside to sip down

Now

Now begin

Now begin again.

Blackbirds

Unlike the parrots who shout a lot

And when musical seem to turn on and tune in

To singsongs of the same old evergreens,

The blackbirds are without a doubt

Enjoying lengthy conversations with pauses

For thought, reconsideration, modifications,

Qualifications, shifts, repetitions, hesitant exaggerations,

Instances of “I agree with the first

Speaker” or “Are you sure?” or

“Of course but wouldn’t you just know?”

Or “No! Did she?” or “But it is generally acknowledged”

Or “I’ll tell you one thing, though”,

All uttered with trills and extended arias

And exquisitely considered opinions conceded

With grace notes and melismas and glissandi

Suggesting discourse of a literary refinement

And lofty tone such as graces the last pages

Of At Swim-Two-Birds of Flann O’Brien

Or perhaps even – when dusk scatters talc

Between the cicada-loud trees and the sun –

And discussion, becoming increasingly lyrical,

Reveals unmistakably ardent interest shared

Between all parties – might we not posit

Something approaching a truly Mozartian discussion?

Four Ways to Approach the Numinous

By the Mystery of Presence

Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters, both naked

Are standing in what might be a bath. Lining its sides

Are milk coffee cloths, gathered and pleated by water.

Upstage in the gloom a fully clothed woman is sewing.

On each side a red satin curtain is tied back

Allowing the viewer a clear frontal view of the two sisters,

Who seem expressionless or, to be perhaps more precise,

Are giving nothing away because the pressure of decorum

Requires them to restrain, contain but nevertheless be aware

Of a considerable cargo of physical and metaphysical truths.

Above the woman sewing is the lower half of a painting

Of male legs suggesting a depleted Mars in disarray.

But the sister’s reticence and a mysterious and pervasive air,

As if they breathed pure nitrogen, makes instances of symbolism

Difficult to identify. One sister holds a pale nipple of the other

Between thumb and index finger in a circle, the hand highly

Stylised like a Balinese dancer’s. The other holds a ring,

Her own hand forming a second, almost identical circle.

Their four forearms make a separate formal geometry,

As if this tableau of arms in itself represented something

Like an epigram the viewer should be able to read but cannot.

Their breasts, which lie in a single horizontal line,

Are small, conical and, as it were, undemonstrative,

Like four mounds in a raked Zen garden.

It is as if time had stopped several minutes earlier – perhaps

At the moment the one reached out her right hand

To the other’s breast. It appears, although this may seem fanciful,

That she is adjusting the vertical hold in some16th Century

Equivalent of a screen bombarded from behind by electrons

So as to achieve an unstable, shuddering stillness

In which nothing else other than this gesture is happening

And the viewer watches some unchanging studio test-pattern.

Two pearl drop-earrings are visible, one obscured on each sister

By their centralising gaze. An unsatisfactory permanence

Seems to exclude the possibility of any future action

Such as stepping from the bath or drying or smiling.

By Embracing Multiplicity

Seven roads diverge in a wood

And at their point of departure

An acolyte meets a Master and asks him, “Master!

How should I decide which path to take?

I know that at the end of one is a voluptuous tavern;

Another contains a cinema of dreams; a third

Offers cyber-space access to the past;

Another has a coin-in-the-slot peep-show

Of selected future events which, it is said,

Is fully interactive; another leads to the sea

With hire-boats and a favourable breeze waiting;

Another leads to a pavilion in which there are

Extensive and documented views of this very place of departure;

Another leads through a wilderness which is constantly changing

So that none can predict for a moment

The experience which might be gained there – ”

The Master replies. “I know you too well. You ask me this

Expecting me to answer in an enigma or reversal

Of all your expectations of an answer, or propose

Staying very still here at this point of indecision

So that all seven roads flow gently back to you,

Or give you a method of visiting all at once,

Even perhaps pointing you (in the Borgesian use

Of the term) to an Aleph where All is One

And where the angels put on a large dance-fest

In a ballroom on the head of a pin – and you’re invited.

Perhaps you half expect me to announce steps

Leading underground which circumvent all seven paths,

Or conversely ease you into the gondola of a balloon

In which you might rise serenely into the air

To let the winds take you everywhere and anywhere –

But you have become too dependent on such contractions.

You have relied too long on everything approaching you

In labelled clusters or packets or quanta.

You have become accustomed to assuming the atoms

Of events may be combined into the molecules

Of experience, and this is not necessarily so.

You view everything as problem and seek a solution.

You expect that from every diverging path

There will be bridges to others, and this also

Is not necessarily so. I could continue, pointing out

Other radical simplifications you have unwittingly – Ah!”

The Master observes that his words are having

The desired effect: the acolyte’s head is nodding

With weariness at so many words of reply; he leans

Against the broken and loosely turning signpost.

And soon the Master notes with satisfaction

(To a degree not incompatible with his humility as Master)

That the acolyte has fallen into a peaceful sleep.

By a Devotion to Objects

Morandi crossed the borders of Italy into the wide world

Twice only, and one of these occasions was to see

Paintings on the shores of a Swiss-Italian lake.

Otherwise he was frequently in his room allowing

His thoughts to gather dust and eliminate glare.

It is pleasing to imagine oneself actually standing

In that room (a bedroom) in front of a table

On which the votive objects stand. And to see oneself

Seeing them, like tourists in Rome for the Tiber spring flood,

Or viewing the Eiffel Tower with some degree of dispassion.

The objects are a group of bottles or canisters

Or ointment jars standing on a shelf

Crowding together like cows in a field, lowing,

Lowering their gaze, looking up, chewing cud,

Staring curiously behind a simple wire fence.

The still lifes made from this array are as familiar

As a coat hanging in a hall, and one need remark merely

On the propensity for that frieze of containers

To discourage, deny, descry any implication

That they contain anything at all, or that

They were assembled to assert in any way

Anything symbolic, allusive, shamanistic, allegorical,

Even nostalgic or tinged with sadness. Rather

It would appear they have arrived, jostled slightly

Then settled to attempt to profess essence merely.

Similarly one might consider one of several

Outdoor scenes. For instance here is something close

To a square representing the side of a house

Bordered by a dissemblance of trees like hair

And what looks like a trapezoid of ploughed ground,

That wall windowless, a churned-ricotta-white

With the tree backing off lest its shadow

Assume greater moment than its canopied branch.

Some claw marks partly distinguish the wall

From a rhombus of brown-purple (a field).

So reticent are these shaded areas with shadows

Posited in the gestures of eucalypt or conifer

One might well be in the afternoon lace cloth interior

Of the room in its Bolognese cool with the footfalls

Of three sisters elsewhere in the echoing house.

One would like to press further into this sub-tropical, leafy

Interior, this haven of shadows, and ask the reader

Stationed as he is at the apex of a triangle

Whose other vertices are these meditations and Morandi’s tableau,

To allow these two to overlap and coalesce further,

As the eyes focussing after a reverie recombine

Two adjacencies into a single and singular éclat,

With the clarity of the gaze from a window

At the unflinching presence of umbrella pines like clouds

On an autumn afternoon in a rising breeze.

By Approaching the River

Towards the general wellspring of recollection itself

An instinctive resistance to being drawn surfaced, as if,

Once on display there, all original impulses must fail;

Or perhaps there was a desire to prevent the fall,

Into the general wellspring of recollection itself,

Of the floating world which so innocently, so vulnerably,

Was passing, intact and entire and magisterial:

The river surface, for instance, like a titanium mirror

Undisturbed, impossibly large, where siftings of rain already fell,

And a pelican single and solitary was indecisive about

Arrival and take-off with a little track of wake

Attesting to the intermittence of its resolve — O

How the general wellspring of recollection itself

Wants to take such epiphanies from the bystander

But does so peremptorily, is careless in taking

The choicest fruit from the centre of the pyramid,

So that the edifice pauses before collapsing suddenly

And spills out over the surrounding lawns,

Out of the general wellspring of recollection itself

And into the increasing disorder of Lost Property

Where float worlds of simulacra and dockets and motes.

But to the river! whose two divulged items, bird and rain,

Were tiny portions of an indivisible and larger whole:

These now threaten to overturn their floundering vessel,

For being singled out inevitably ties weights to the rest

And throws them overboard in a tangle of floating and sinking.

The boat rocks dangerously. And yet of course

There was no boat to be seen on the original river, nothing

So graspable or large. For some minutes before the first

Drops of rain the Gesualdo madrigals veered and tangled

Of crows somewhere invisible amongst trees on the opposite bank;

The wrens’ tiny flit and flight amongst aniseed trees,

A heron flying overhead just when items of similar degrees

Of granulation seemed to have been skimmed cleanly

From the surface of the eventful world; shimmers where

A fish may or may not have leapt, circles fading

Like the general wellspring of recollection itself,

And reflections — most ambiguously falling between

Incident and steady state — reflections of hinterland

Lowered in competing layers and of the blue torn openings

Between clouds, a stronger blue as reflections than above them.

And sounds! On the one hand the sound of grass

Being twisted then torn by a cow’s tongue

Just behind the matted fence, and, on the other,

The sound like an improvisation for pins and pincushions

Of the rain falling lightly across the whole water sheet.

With the thought that exhaustive description may render appearances

Less susceptible to being made metaphor, the river divulges

Incident after incident: the stained grey tarpaulin looses

Tiny spiralling orbits, leaves moving in a slow convoy, aggregates

Of pollen; and the river announces a momentous event:

It is quasi-noon. The slow drift of tidal water

Hesitates, about to change direction, as if to reverse

The general wellspring of recollection itself.

The Four Stages of Poetry as Proposed by Jimenez

First poetry wore the tunic of innocence

Then she dressed up like a queen

Before divesting herself of futile ornament

And finally removing even the innocent tunic.

First poetry came down the stairs wearing

The dress copied from the dress Rebecca had worn

To the same ball, completely innocent

Of the fact that this might inflame passions.

Then poetry, dressed up like Queen Salote

On her way to the Coronation of Elizabeth II

And subject of a humorous remark by Noel Coward,

Showed plenty of white satin and diamonds.

Later after the fireworks and streamers and taxi home,

Poetry herself took off her fine regalia

And sat in serious mood over a cocoa

Reading yesterday’s literary pages

Until finally she took off even her slip

And, with the blinds up, pranced about

Quite naked knowing James Stewart – or someone –

Was watching with a telescope from flats opposite.

Grand Tour of the Prevailing Tropes

On Thirty years of the Newcastle Poetry Prize

Mandelbrot Sets under the Hexham bridge

Happily celebrate the complexities

Attending 30 years of the NPP.

A simile is forming off the coast

When, in the Hunter estuary scriptorium,

A tremor shakes the page

And for all these years the trembling has been sustained.

Every year amidst signs and portents

A halo of text messages appears over Hunter vineyards;

A metaphor is stranded on Nobby’s Head

And in the associated north-easterly

A tanker is lying sideways in the swell.

On the suspension bridge spanning

The railway valley near the University,

Where the air settles a fine sediment of ideas,

A vast community of poets

Gathers to honour the Thirty Years Peace

And exfoliation of hybrid strains.

Someone somewhere is devising a complex figure,

Part oxymoron, part dangerous zeugma,

Against the submissions day which is not long.

The Newcastle Poetry Prize, a brief history:

1981 sees the infamous underarm delivery;

A morally ennobling counterpoise is needed

To restore national pride. NPP proposed.

30 years of turbulent change ensues.

From Scandal to Kindle. Australia moves forward.

All this has been the initiative of the dedicated

Stockton Recollection In Tranquillity Committee

And comes to fruition with the implementation of

A Draft Plan For The Utilisation

Of Emotion, Recall and Rumination

In The Hunter Region Wetlands.

The vast community of entrants swells in number;

The nation proudly salutes its rhetors;

The streets echo to their murmurations,

Applauding their flashing eyes and floating hair.

And, during these thirty years of innovation

Their notebooks give way to Notebooks.

The community of poets slaving in the galleys,

Bravely pulling their weight and towing anchor,

Rows towards the Newcastle beacon.

In this thirty years’ long generation

A trillion lattés were pushed aside,

Half-full or half-empty, to make space

On the open-air pavement table

For the industrious notebook

And the pressing task – construction

Of a 200-line tanker

Soon to enter and find secure

Lodgement on Newcastle Beach.

Haste – even at times desperation –

Was likely to accompany the transition

From notebook draft to notable typescript

Against the submissions day which was not long.

The vast community of poet-pilgrims

To the Compostela of Nobby’s Beach

Brought flags, pennants, flambeaux,

Banners laden with text.

Many seized the moment to shine lanterns

Or hold mirrors to the light

Depending on whether they saw themselves

As star or planet; many

Delighted in playing tennis

With the net down; many

Said there was a place for iambics

“But not at our place”;

Many carried undiagnosed memories

Of Larkin’s cricketer running up to bowl

As the Whitsun train passed on its embankment;

Many were obsessed with breath

When, like an otter shedding crystal,

They surfaced to floodlights

And strapped on the Olson respirator;

Many, still shaken by aftershocks

Years after the quake, discovered

Fragmentation as their unavoidable strategy;

Many were unaware that Pound, long before,

Pounding the typewriter with furious urgency,

Would carelessly hurl back the carriage

Only partially and not to the margin

And thereby indent with an irregularity

Mistakenly seen as deliberate and therefore doctrinal;

Many during the poetry wars

Were in hiding and did not hear

News of the armistice until years later

When advance parties penetrated the jungle;

Many were full of passionate intensity;

Many, fired by Pound’s rallying cry,

“To break the pentameter – that was

The first heave,” lent a shoulder;

Many had overdosed on Dr Williams’

Patent medicine, often failing to read

The fine print on the bottle;

Many sent the flintstones flying

But kept their feet; many were joyful

Seeing the pod of whales travelling north

As strophes or stress pattern markers

Or idea fonts or enactments of narrative,

And, to celebrate The Joy of Signifying,

Followed them up the coast to the Hunter estuary.

In the bouquet of 30 years

were many flowers and among them

numerous species and subspecies

with a surprising admixture of exotics.

An approximate inventory of devices

might prove instructive.

Actuaries have certified the following,

while stressing that numbers have been rounded:

400 similes of the form

‘as x as y’

(such as, for instance,

‘as warm as snow’);

1000 (give or take) similes introduced by ‘like’;

20 Homeric similes, several in retrospect

appearing to be over-extended. Approximately

1500 metaphors ranging over

the full gamut of the traditional

and the daring, the fashionable and bizarre;

60% (a guesstimate) of line-breaks

designed with pzazz in mind;

400-plus strategic deployments

of the Look-at-me or situational mode,

many beginning with a participle

(such as, say, ‘Stirring my latté I look up

startled to see zebrine shadows

entering the shearing shed bunker’);

550 views of childhood,

some through the wrong end of the telescope,

some preferring the microscope slide,

a not inconsiderable number conducted

from the analyst’s couch;

700 instances (many coinciding

with the 550 already mentioned)

of personal experience asserted as unique,

or masquerading as symbolism

(as, say, ‘My mother regretted the loss

of perfume from hybridised roses’

or ‘I remember the gulf country when

the waterspout crossed the verandah’);

Derrida mentioned 17 times

(‘I was travelling by trail-bike

with Derrida in the Kimberley

in search of anthropophagi’);

Delight, curiosity and anger – at a rough count –

represented in equal measure;

But enough! If exceptions prove rules

instances may falsify generalities,

and it’s the thought that counts.

Every year at this time

The Newcastle offices are strained to capacity.

The hazards of exposure to metaphor

Must be countered by appropriate measures.

Hunter Street glistens in expectation;

Novocastrians carry the joyful burden;

Waves offshore shift under rainbow segments

Like fleeting Rothko panels.

The light is unusually didactic.

Other instances of the Sympathetic Fallacy

Light up the city during submissions

And persist until the awards and accolades.

Hokusai’s fractal wave hovering off Nobby’s Beach

Happily celebrates the complexities

Attending 30 years of the NPP.