reading revival: a poetry book blog

2006-06-20T07:16:00.000+10:00

for current book 'ngarla songs' go to reading revival 2. the blog you are reading now contains 3 months of commentary & discussion relating to 'duty' by geraldine mckenzie. post any comments on 'duty' or reading revival 1 here. its also fine to add comments to previous threads - theyll contribute to the archive & also go to my inbox - they will still be read & responded to.

2006-06-16T07:17:00.000+10:00

2 new poems by geraldine mckenzie: Behind the lines and babble.

Behind the lines

. What changes.

. Shut in her room.

. Every weather in a day, drops down.

. Fires through summer, some see.

. Wanting to be useful.

. Green’s grace. Misgivings.

. Too much counting. On. Upon.

. The bad bargain. The risky purchase. The sly customer.

. Grunt gravel and grope, more master more.

. What’ll the sky look like?

. Imagining, a big mistake.

. Barely beauty.

. Private drought repays election.

. All around the world.

. Come home, the stones return.

. Others’ sons.

. Rot, boss. Feed flame a vicious life.

. Dull rooms, child wane, paying.

. Empty, will empire.

. It’s never enough.

. The future chunders down the street. A decision.

. Your arm brushes mine in passing, hairs bright the new.

. In this shelter, none.

. News knots, nausea, nervous historic. More of the same.

. Fair word, be word and held to.

. Writing small, we should be saving up.

. What shape, war forming.

. Blue tile replace, blue tile.

. Songs that have settle into sorrow, old pool, seems like shared.

. My hand.

. Children. Concentrate.

. Coming too soon.

. Mixed messages. A prohibition against a view. Their bodies.

. Fire works. The loop. Howl down moon for mad upon us.

. Eyes moving, one side, other. Says Texas. What could be the right answer.

. All of a sudden everything seems so important. Who’s good at this.

. The garden, the revelation. Come again.

. Nothing new.

. They ran out of anaesthetics and had to use a local, injected every 5 minutes.

. Wanton gone. With the wind. Some cowboy courtesy.

. Over and over again.

. He said, brandishing his weapon.

. Not so newsy now.

. Appreciation for services rendered. Parades parameters of theatre. Encore, encore.

. One up.

~~~~~~~~~

babble

the motor hums

bleat tunes awry

herd at windows in the city
streets shuddering under
the weight of melancholy white folk
earnestly metaphorical
living in tyrantslation

the summer clips and strokes
broaching the surface
too far out to sea to save

destination’s moot

they return to their desks
brown heart adrift between us
statement stultifies
but stakes out, fakes outrage at the appropriate moment

belief’s a long stretch
life sentence and they’re turned away at the gates

fuckinawful fabuloso
nothing seems
quite right

our portion title place
history and repeating

unregenerate
clip and stagger
good for a shout
shoulders a world well off

mired in the clog the necessary
punishment squared and in detail

for singing
for talking back
for failing in the exercise of a realistic appraisal of one’s position

crumbling sandstone
under the overseer’s whip
a dog licks the smeary stand, ants
carrying off shreds of flesh

looking up
you can’t see past the dazzle

2006-06-13T05:34:00.000+10:00

feedback from the book group (via email):

Hi Michael,

I wanted to add a comment to your blog but so far my attempts have not been successful. So this is what I wrote:

Not long ago I discovered that I had a new, and neglected duty, to add to my maternal, domestic,pedagogical, civic and caninical obligations. According to Gilbert Ryle it seems that I have also the 'cognitive duty to perceive the world as clearly as possible'. Coincidentally I friend gave me a copy of 'Duty' which I received gratefully as who better than a poet to assist in carrying out my cognitive responsibilities. Geraldine McKenzie brought clarity to my understanding of the world in two particular ways. First, she the admirable exactness with which she used use particular words to illuminate a scene. For instance, in 'gaudy rills of white/
and blue/untrammelled/onto beach',(p 15) 'gaudy' is just such a word. It taps into the anxiety I feel in looking at paintings of beach scenes, an anxiety created by having seen a retinue of postcard reproductions of such scenes, asking myself whether there is any point in such paintings now. What could it have been like to see the shores of an only Aboriginal untrammelled Australia? This is the same, probably, as never hearing the songs the sirens sang (p 56). The aptly chosen 'rills' of 'blue and white' effectively undercut 'untrammelled' as I feel already the presence of striped and frilled umbrellas and other imprisonments of genteel society. The idea of the unreality of the 'real world' for contemporary western people is picked up later in snare the heart-footed man (p 50) as countryside (perhaps real) is transformed into landscape (representation) by even the act of observing it. Others hearts have trodden all over it long before and left footprints. Writing it is at a further remove again. While the lines 'shades of green & white/do not/submit to language' (p 11) may well describe the English reaction to the Australian landscape, they also express a certain dissatisfaction with words in themselves in the present, the sense I have in using them that they feel so used, and somehow inadequate, or lacking.I feel beset by these 'things' (p 82) and this besetness is wonderfully summed up for me in 'O throw me an orange/anyone' (p 62).

I thought space was at a premium so I squeezed up the quotations. Anyhow, I just wanted you to know I did enjoy the discussion and the reading very much.

Warm regards,and thank you,
Minnie S

2006-06-12T09:34:00.000+10:00

one aspect of the laziness of the attribution 'experimental' is that whatever challenges or experiments are being made are not looked at specifically. though rhythm, language, typography, syntax, semantics, diction may all be up for grabs - it is often a number of these things being challenged - but not all. convention takes a route through all poetry. but today im not interested in what convention gets overlooked but in the challenges. think of language poetry, for example. because of its name, the main arena of challenge is considered to be - & often is - language itself, also syntax, semantics, & poetic form get guernseys. its greatest challenge is perhaps to the cliche - & this is related to image. pound defined the image as "that which presents an intellectual & emotional complex in an instant of time" (quoted in charles hartman's 'free verse'). he evolves this def. over time into what kenner (bid) descibes as 'an imitation of an action'. ill disregard the time bit. poets like bruce andrews, lyn hejinian, susan howe, clark coolidge and charles bernstein have affected what an image is / can be. as have people like cage & maclow. ok i wont totally disregard the time factor: the disregarding of time within a poem affects how a poem is read, how images are read as being connected, related - or not - to each other. this is not peculiar to language poetry - it comes out of any poetry influenced by collage. (hejinian's 'my life' is interesting in this context because though her images do not appear to be sequential in time - & they recur throughout the book - the concept she is working through is time-based: ie the years of her life.)

consider these images from mckenzie's 'iconoclasty'p 81-3: 'It was music. It had no father.' 'This is the rock. Thwart or grounding'. 'Blood as conversation.' or '30. Slick idol, I ken your parts and pronto.' from 'After Ritsos'. langpo by way of gig ryan? from the same poem: '26. Hard slog down trodden more up ahead.': rhythmic, ambiguous, evocative - not obscure it seems to me tho lacking referent. the absence of punctuation provides music. punctuation would pin it down, but would only enforce its abstraction i think. if, by way of beckett & barthes, any thought can be an image, cant we think anything in language? whether its 'I ken your parts' or 'Hard slog down trodden more up ahead'.

obscurity .. the very word suggests imagery: an obscure phrase or line must be hiding the image it refers to..? language poetry attempts to establish language as an image in itself. i think this is its great legacy, (that & the demonstration that 'it hasnt all been written before' - that on the level of language at least- its easy to avoid cliche - not that this doesnt create more problems - cliches of tone - new cliches of word arrangement & affect -). that poets who reacted against langpo in favour of a more flexible & popular form still benefit from what langpo did for the image ..

this is not to deny the work of concrete poets who established language as an image also - but in the visual sense. what langpo does is take back ground for poetry as written & sounded .. ok im getting stuck as i always remember that concrete or visual poetry often employs the sound of words too .. but there is a distinction to be made: between visual form & poetic form. either could demonstrate pounds definition - tho of course the 'intellectual & emotional' elements are problematic, supplementary .. perhaps concrete poems could be said to be an image, however large & complex, whereas a language poem - like the mainstream of poems - is made up of images ..

im getting out now while i can

2006-06-11T08:18:00.000+10:00

a quote: 'I dedicate this book to the angels of Clinton Prison who, in my 17th year, handed me, from all the cells around me, books of illumination.' gregory corso, 'gasoline'.

2006-06-10T04:48:00.000+10:00

what do the 'illuminations' p25-29 illuminate? rimbaud? i dont think so, tho i think theres a strong resemblance in tone between rimbaud & mckenzie - but less in the 'illuminations' than in the other poems. the tone here seems milder - the content isnt: 'He saw his sergeant drown in shit' ('III' p26). Later in that stanza: 'The painter didn't make it--...his groom/ holds fast as he dies in brutal crimson'. i suppose theres an ambiguity there in the word groom: groom for his horse/ bridegroom. but how much more is the word bridegroom applicable/available to 2 men in 2006 than it was in 2001 when duty was published. 'III''s conclusion: 'I draw no conclusions--they stand /as those that are themselves, a kind of light.' illuminations of integrity? how much accent is on the word 'themselves'?

'V' p 27 begins: 'Put out the light--the green men come to dance/ their wildness in the chambers of the king' - I'm not sure whose light is being put out in this poem but the end suggests the king: 'we, baseborn, cry good riddance/ and cheer the days the bastard takes in dying'. ('VI' begins 'Tyrants can be gentle ...')

the sequence ends with poem or sonnet 'IX' -- suggesting more 'baseborn' activity, rimbaud amidst revolution:

'That there are connections, that the massed wall
can come down and fine grass issue summons
to delight -- strummed leaf, wind shiver, bird call--
that some obscure and lovely spirit runs
like ink each sparse page illuminating
treasure in the margin, that we can sing --'

illumination(s) - a poetics - and angelic cycle?

2006-06-10T04:38:00.000+10:00

more on synthesis (see may 27: a letter from kris hemensley)

'If the Image consists (as it frequently does) of a collection of objects, the "poetic fact" [pound] is not the objects themselves but the relations that bind them into a whole. Eliot describes how the poet discovers his images: "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of the cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes"'. charles hartman 'free verse' p132.

2006-06-07T16:19:00.000+10:00

a free copy of duty has gone to danielb of toronto (and editor/host) of fhole who was the first to respond.

also, diana at famouspoetsandpoems kindly let me post her email response to reading revival:

I'm Diana Collins, I'm a poetry fan.

I've visited your blog http://readingrevival.blogspot.com and I liked it very much.

I would like to thank you for your blog and for the time you spent creating it.

It's wonderful that there are such blogs, where people can learn something new and useful about poetry.
It would be great to have such blogs as many as possible!

Wish you good luck and success in your occupation!

Hats off,

Diana Collins

2006-06-04T08:08:00.000+10:00

‘after ritsos’ p18-24 (to read online try samzidat link on posting for may 29). the title, by claiming inheritance from a major greek poet, makes a move toward tradition. the poem itself is of the tradition of poems in one line sentences (occasionally varied by a line made of 2 or 3 sentences). apparently (cf book group member) this was a form used by yannis ritsos. they make careful, concise images: '25. A small fish. A silver fork. The moon.' '15. A poem using the word salamander.' '23. Evening, we listen.''11. Not far off, currawongs.' '54. I'll eat this mango slowly.' care of the sentence, the tradition of the sentence. they are paratactic, none is subordinate to another as lines; in those lines made up of more than one sentence, most sentences though often seemingly narratively linked are of equal worth, some lines however contain/suggest hypotactic sentences: '49. Cats! The place is full of them.' '31. You want a subject? I'll give you a subject.' yet a line like '17. The final snake has found its space. Let the pipes begin.' challenge a narrative reading. the poem as a whole challenges not just a narrative reading but also a reading the poem as a whole, or consecutively. we may read the poem's lines at random -- we might do this with any poem of course -- but the form of 'after ritsos' offers more encouragement than most. '83. Horde the beaten musntn't grumble polity knackered. Falls due.' challenges the sentence itself - the first sentence alerts us to the precedent of langpo. the poem continues the opening of the book started by adenfrorde/adenfrorde fragments - meanings, tones proliferate - but then we head straight - if straight is how were heading - to the sonnets: 'illuminations'.

(the last line '90. I placed that slice of melon on the wet sand.' corresponds fruitfully with the end of 'counting coup' p62: 'O throw me an orange/anyone'.)

2006-06-04T06:21:00.000+10:00

i have discovered a new place to buy duty online: booktopia. $22.46 + $6.50 postage = $28.96, meaning u pay $4.01 over retail. if you buy more though its the same postage up to 100 books - unless im misunderstanding. it seems like a good option if u live in australia but not close to a decent bookshop - or if its incovenient to go shopping for something u might have to order & go back & collect, all the while paying for yr travel etc. if anyone tries this option, feedback on timeliness wd be great.

2006-06-04T06:09:00.000+10:00

giveaway - the first reader to email me - readingrevival at gmail dot com - will receive a free copy of duty - courtesy of st kilda library (left over from book group) - o/s ok. i have given one to davidp also for his help in setting up this blog - thanks david. please state in yr email whether u want to be named as the recipient of the book - i will only use firstname & initial - eg michaelf.

2006-06-02T06:08:00.000+10:00

traditional/ism ... justin c, who read with mckenzie on saturday, commented to me that he liked mckenzie because she was 'traditional'. there is something of a continuing battle for ownership of this word (see for example john ashbery's 'the other tradition'.) the term traditional is often opposed to terms such as modern(ist), postmodern, avant garde, experimental - & the poets identifying with these terms regularly distance themselves from the term 'traditional'. yet often these very poets are more explicit in their use of tradition than those who think of themselves as inheritors of 'the tradition'. see for example john tranter's new 'new & selected poems' for his use of pastiche & tribute; or ron silliman's blog, to a great extent concerned with forebears. it all seems to turn on the definite article: 'the' tradition. (even ashbery concedes that his tradition is other (however ironically)). its all very genesis: 'in the beginning was the word'. - not even 'word', but 'the' word (typically its the anti-postmodernists who behave in the most postmodern fashion) . all very christian -- & despite the claim to tradition, obsessed with the notion of originality. whenever i hear a word i reach for a dictionary.

cod: 'traditional: of or based on or obtained by tradition'; 'tradition' 1. opinion or belief or custom handed down, handing down of these, from ancestors to posterity esp. orally or by practice.

2. (Theol) doctrine etc supposed to have divine authority but not committed to writing, esp (1) laws held by pharisees to have been delivered by god to moses (2) oral teaching of christ and apostles not recorded in writing by immediate disciples (3) words & deeds of muhammad not in koran &

3. artistic or literary principle(s) based on accumulated experience or continuous usage. (intriguingly derivation is given as L. traditio /f. tradere: hand on, betray. very harold bloom!?). again ashbery's title seems apt in raising the notion of there being more than one tradition as there are quite different strands in the definition, suggesting different kinds of tradition.

def. 1 'opinion or belief or custom handed down' suggests: approaches to poetry or poetics (ie anti-manifesto; anti-new); inherited forms such as the sonnet.'esp. orally' suggests the tradition of aboriginal songs - (making all non-indigenous poets of australia non-traditional/new/modern); also the transfer of poetry culture to friends/peers/mentees via conversation as opposed to criticism; or, performance poetry.

def 2. 'supposed to have divine authority'/'oral teaching': suggest the classroom, what is communicated from teacher to students (this might be extended to blogs?); indigenous storytelling; muslim culture -- & by extension other religions, or the words/deeds of myths in other communities. the word 'supposed' can be read sarcastically, hinting at pretension to an unjustified authority ..

def 3. 'artistic or literary principle(s) based on accumulated experience or continuous usage' suggests both that experience is culturally cumulative, & also, that tradition may reside in (begin with?) the practitioner: tradition as becoming, or apprenticeship.

to me this opens up the concept of 'traditional' .. it no longer seems something moribund or (narrowly) rhetorical or respectable (i mean this word (un)ironically) or conservative (ditto) but something that is alive, moving from context to context, work to work .. ie is contingent ..

one last definition: 'traditionalism': '(excessive) respect for tradition esp in religion; philosophical system referring all religious knowledge to divine revelation & tradition' . '(excessive)' suggests both pathology on those that subscribe to traditionalism & revolt/heresy by those who would term them 'excessive'. the second part suggests that definitions/ownership of tradition are not open to discussion, but merely received by gods rep.

a lot to sink in/ leave in the sink ..

more on the traditional aspects of duty anon ..

2006-06-02T05:58:00.000+10:00

for another example of a blog reviewing a poetry book (hds 'trilogy'), see rebel without a clause. posts 'hdblog 13,' 'hd blog 10,'and 'hd blog 8' are pertinent to poetry & war.

2006-06-01T06:07:00.000+10:00

this post is a continuation of my comment on the post of may 27 (kris hemensleys letter). theres something relentless about duty: a workers work is never done/ theres a war on. theres a strong sense that mckenzies/our culture is a war culture. just try 'another nature poem' p36 which begins with pebbles & ants & ends with wilfred owen & ypres: 'offering our softness to/ the sun, the guns a natural mutter..'. these are poems before september 11 & iraq, using wwi & wwii as contemporary themes. (compare jorie grahams more recent use of wwii in 'never') these are intellectual-felt protest poems not dont do it protest poems. this is the world they say. from "into the throttled wood..." p52 'blood like blood. I have found my/ life in/ such rubble... rosa luxembourg in prison was/extraordinarily happy./lived to a deep river. applecored...' & from "who dares..." p53 'who dares. names ... sorting corpses, she still can't find her son./the village chants/mountains ... in an irrelevant room in a partial city/bombs//may or may not be falling...i know birds in that rich tree...' (the design of these two (facing) poems suggest very different human figures - or urns.) 'II' of 'I-V' (p76-7) suggests ecosexuality - could this be the same irrelevant room from "who dares.."?: 'plucking apples/stumbling on/peaches this is/earth with its soft/mouth passing through/windows onto darkening/bodies the room...in a declaration of scarlet/ these fields/these fields' (the last '/' is mckenzies, not a linebreak). the earths soft mouth seems vigorously romantic until it it occurs to me to take it literally..

2006-05-30T07:07:00.000+10:00

perhaps im concentrating too much on adenfreude/adenfruede fragments - but it seems an exemplary beginning to the book (though perverse - to begin a book of verse with an etymological presentation in prose.. & yet reasonable enough too) - duty opens out from these two poems. i can imagine the book opening with the following poem 'after ritsos' which would have been more neutral, less a statement of intent.

2006-05-30T04:45:00.000+10:00

there are 12 adenfrorde-fragments p12-17 (13 if u count the pierre martory epigraph: 'inutile de s'inquiter/ impossible de de perdre/ on peut toujours se promener si on le desire/ aussi lontemps qu'on le desire...'[translation anyone?]); the number suggests a rough correspondence with the 11 versions/definitions of adenfrorde on p11. various phrases suggest a poetics: 'humans/shape a weakness' 'the wood of/ perceived connections' 'pallid gums / bind up their skins/ and raise their clumsy/roots in dance'.'pallid gums' suggests a collapse of white with indigenous; if you grant the yeatsian then roots become strands of history in the dance of poetry. [the dance isnt a figure im fond of. evokes something pervy-romantic to me.] '..dance' is followed by 'are you familiar/with this --' .. the necessary estrangement in order to write? the question of who her audience is? it leads into fragment 3: 'a green horse/prised from meticulous/ forest': encapsulates surrealist, lyric, collage & eco poetics in one phrase. 'a cold eden'(i.e. edenfreude)? (4) 'say spirit brown-breasted the/casual mountains of circumference/wend to lake/illumination by water/ vicarious dugong flaunting paps/ haunched in dreamt fluidity' this could be '[mentally] illuminated by water-as-agent/oracle,' '[physically] illuminated by water-as-site'] or 'illumination [spiritual/intellectual/corporal..] by [the side of] water'. is 'illumination' 'a state of mind rather than a location or concept'(edenfreude again)? ['illuminations' will recur only two poems later: as the title of the sonnet sequence.] fragment 5, the first part of which reads 'burnt the fathers/black in the synagogue/make it holy, for Christ's/sake--make it/holy total power/now as they take over/ the language/who writes the book/won't need to burn' puts us where? in a sarcastic edenforward? edenflawed or edenfraud? these are the christian/jewish roots which had people dancing in fires. who wrote the book.. the monks? the scribes? but 'writes' could be whoever controls the interpretation of the book. 'burnt the fathers/black in the synagogue..' im probably missing a historical reference here, but australian/eden-wise what strikes me as being burnt black are: the gums [in the church of the forest]; the kelly gang [by police at the seige of glenrowan .. & by extension ned (who wasnt in the fire but) was presented as black by nolan .. to extend even further .. if billycans can be fathers (expecting them to boil - but they famously dont, not quickly enough in 'waltzing matilda' nor in barbara baynton's 'scrammy 'and'. in the case of indigenous burning, it suggests the power of white [print] culture with its unburnable book that writes the very meaning of burning; in the kelly/matilda examples the police write the book; & in the baynton it is death... more anon...

2006-05-29T09:01:00.000+10:00

links to poems in duty in jacket 9; jacket 11and samizdat. respectively: exorcising p66 in duty, and full bore p92; using it p63; and after ritsos p18. i meant to post these a while back.

2006-05-28T05:19:00.000+10:00

yesterday we held the book group. 6 attended + me. i thought duty might prove hard to get into but i was wrong. st kilda library - thanks nick- provided technical support & provisions. id envisioned a 'bad class' where id have to extract comments from people & lead all the way .. the opposite happened - everyone had things to say - they started before i sat down - & i learnt from everyone. there was a depth of reading that i dont possess - i cant recognise allusions to yeats or hopkins - ive read them but im not familiar enough - i didnt get the king lear reference either - we were fortunate in having a native french speaker who could both read & interpret the 'adenfrorde fragments' epigraph from pierre martory. some of the group were familiar with french & irish history which also supplemented the readings of some references. mckenzies use of open field composition (in "snare the heart-footed man" & its facing poem "no.8"p50-51) & olson were mentioned. the acknowledgment of war culture - its permutations, pervasion. tho the blog was available to look at on a big screen (id thought of using it as support, or even writing live comments - but there was too much, conversationally going on) we didnt use it further. theres a possibility of writeups from one or two people. if anyone from the group wants to add anything please do so at the space for comments below.

following the meeting we went to chronicles/cafe 97 for a reading by geraldine & justin clemens (who read the opening to his book the mundiad & a couple of other poems). geraldine (i realise ive slipped into calling her by her first name) read from duty, including '5 simplicities'& 'this doesnt have a name' - & also a long & interesting new poem called 'folksinging(?)'. it was a small audience - about 12 - i think 3 copies were sold - not bad considering most of us already had copies - at least i did - i dont seem to have come home with it -

listening to geraldine & justin i thought what a difference it is hearing a rhythmic poetry - its a pleasure & the time goes quickly - not like readings where the reader has a prosaic style, & however interesting they may be yr relieved when theyve finished.

2006-05-27T05:34:00.000+10:00

a letter from kris hemensley, of collected works bookshop

Dear Michael, This is from a draft of a letter I wrote to Geraldine McKenzie dated 23/9/98. I've searched in my journals & notebooks for commentary on her book launching (DUTY) in 2001 at the Shop but can't find very much at all. The book was launched by Gig Ryan and there was some discussion later commented upon by people including John Leonard. Small gathering but in this case quality compensating for quantity was correct verdict! Retta H. recalls universal surprise and wonder at Geraldine's ability to recite her poems from memory. A contemporary oral poetry : I believe she forms the poems in her mind before writing them. Anyway, for its worth and as a contribution to the blog discussion :

"Dear Geraldine, On storm-threatening Melbourne spring day, riding the trams from one end of town to the other, I reread your sonnets and say again what a pleasure it is to hear you. Please excuse me for not answering sooner. The usual schedule of days at work, more or less with it, then evenings in which I gradually yield to fatigue. Some poems along the way (....)
Monday, I should tell you, young woman came to the Shop asking if I had your address since you'd been recommended by Mike Shuttleworth, of the Victorian Writers Centre, as a poet to be invited to read at every opportunity. The young woman was arranging a poetry reading in support of literacy project --something like that. I confirmed Mike's opinion of you but said it might be difficult to get you down from NSW for a gig. She hadnt realized you werent local --
local to me though --maybe it is the Shakespeare then? --tho' I can tell you're steeped in it whereas I've merely been a kind of sneak in & around the edges-- But you remind me so much of English poets I associated with in the 70s --tho' the sex is something they rarely treated but which you do sort of mockingly or in a self-implicating mockery which yet works sexually --
The layering or fretwork --neo-classical, arts/muses/fates --is dense & suggestive as Peter Greenaway's bucolic deconstruction (Drowning by Numbers I'm thinking of)--
And then the spanner-in-the-works of III & IV --well, certainly III -- If III bore a reference to Wilfred Owen at your reading then I'm allowed to think of WW1 --if not, then I confess WW1 is a lot on my mind these days, mixed in with Georgians and despite DH Lawrence & Pound, the Bloomsburys (as pre-Raphaelitism's other side?)-- But maybe it's WW2, --"reading the S.S. paper" throws me -- But, whatever the case may be, your music plays on --and has me all ears, sighs, some tears.
Thank you for sending to me,
How can I reciprocate, --apart from telling you how relieved I was to have done a good job launching (phantom) BOXKITE [at the Melbourne Writers Festival] and to have as chorus Hibberd, Hart, Ryan, Elizov, and you, minstrel? too!
Actually I could send you a copy of one of my "mirror sonnet" narratives, -- a book about love & friendship --autobiographical by way of history, art & literature -- the first sequence written a few years ago (& the book's got a couple more narratives to write)--. Awkward, I think, compared to yours, but how I'd hope it stood "as those who are themselves, a kind of light." [McKenzie]
With all best wishes,
Kris Hemensley

2006-05-25T06:30:00.000+10:00

reminder: book group at 2pm saturday may 27 at st kilda library (carlisle st) & mckenzie reading at chronicles bookshop 91 fitzroy st, st kilda 4.30pm same day. all welcome/free. books available at both library & bookshop.

2006-05-25T05:21:00.000+10:00

its my impression prose poems had something of a heyday in the 80s - particularly in womens/feminist/lesbian writing - ania walwicz, anna couani, joanne burns are some of the names .. theres been a quiet resurgence in the last few years but i havent seen anything written about it - if anyone else has let me know - theres noone i think known as a or the prose poet in australia but many have included prose in their poetic repertoire eg kate fagan, laurie duggan, john tranter, robert gray, jill jones, cassie lewis, judith bishop, martin harrison, chris wallace-crabbe, kevin hart: quite a various list in terms of poetics.

mckenzie uses prose in a number of poems (eg after ritsos p18-24, iconoclasty p81-83, "text/book/work..." p72-5,this doesnt have a name p84-5 & "it could be a forest..." p49). in writing about prose poetry the convention is to talk about the prose poem as a form somewhere between a poem & a story. whats more interesting to me is the ground between the poem & the prose poem.

"text/book/work", which has a subtitle(?) of Using the Rules is structured as a series of 8 headings (surtitles?) in prose (descriptions of praying mantis coupling). beneath each heading is a list of fragments/phrases which relate more or less to the heading - if only because theyre there. theres a sense of a larger (?) story in the fragments. but this is mere reading. the headings control what could be read as anguish in the phrases. "t/b/w" could be an agonised poetics, the mating of the mantis as allegory for the muse & poet. the death radio (to bring in spicer). "t/b/w" functions similarly to the 2 parts of adenfrorde - the prose section (p11) of varying derivations, & afenfrorde - fragments (p12-17) - portraits of rational vs poetic mind (tho adenfrorde the prose could be seen as parodying the etymological).

after ritsos could be a 'text/book/work' itself: ie mckenzie could be writing with ritsos in hand. the 90 lines of images in one, two or three sentences function paratactically, are not subordinate to one another. they are not building towards anything - anti-rhetorical - there is no fantasy of time progressing but the poem is 'ever-renewed' (fredman). the lines rely on the title & their allusive value to cohere. each sentence relates back to the title (the images are mainly one sentence, those with more than one do relate to each other - but not the preceding or following image). after ritsos: the poem as a list of responses, they could be stimulated by mckenzies memories or sense of ritsos, or more closely - textually - linked to actual poems or lines in ritsos. or not; after ritsos could be an analogy; it could be read literally in a different way; this poem this way of writing poetry is possible, possibly necessary after ritsos.

for more on parataxis see 'poets prose: the crisis in american verse' stephen fredman, its around secondhand & probably in some uni libraries. it is a thorough account of the american prose poem in the 20th century from stein through williams, ashbery, creeley to antin, bromige, silliman and others. also see ron silliman's essay 'the new sentence' in his book 'the new sentence' and steins lecture 'poetry & grammar' in 'look at me now & here i am', & her 'how to write'.

2006-05-24T08:50:00.000+10:00

more on the sonnet: the sonnet continues both in conventional & experimental versions - at least here in australia. its derivation suggests a reason for this, why it wont die (wc williams dismissed it & then recanted in favour of merrill moore- & that was pre-berrigan) - tho i have thought it had to do with song, & was a convenient measure for a song-poem, cod gives a derivation from the italian sonetto - sonetto being a diminutive of suono, or sound, which suggests - to me - new possibilities for the sonnet - (& theres something of the sonnet - it seems to me - in clark coolidge)

2006-05-24T08:48:00.000+10:00

a model of a review blog is offered by galatea resurrects

2006-05-23T06:02:00.000+10:00

the first poem 'adenfrorde' offers a postcolonial critique of australia. the definitions of adenfrorde are apt even if ironically applied ('a paradise of the intellect'). australia - aka australia felix - was repeatedly described by poets & colonial marketing people as a new eden. mckenzie uses the history, derivations, definitions, applications of the word adenfrorde to create a prose poem that has a strong cohesiveness, but is still very flexible, & describes colonial folly in terms of language itself. language processes become a metonym for those of colonisation. 'the extreme unlikeliness of a given situation to produce any form of satisfaction'; 'one experiences sensations of joyousness and epiphany in the naive belief that the natural world is beautiful and that one is a part of it'; 'Eden forward!' 'dispute whether Eden is flawed or Eden is the flaw'; 'an individual who is perceived to be somewhat foolish but harmless'- all have (post)colonial resonance.

2006-05-19T05:59:00.000+10:00

the convenience of labelling - a book or a poet - as experimental often means that theyre not seen as innovative at all. as if theyre operating in the morass of non-poetry. as if innovation is really only metrical tricks or daring to write in prose. the little risks that a more mor poet takes are much commented on. its a question of being within the pale. critics love forms that have names. o/wise its like walking into a signless zoo. that an experimental poet may be trying to achieve all sorts of different things is subsumed in some vague idea that they just get their computer to do it, or its just some version of free verse. it would be meaningless to describe duty as free verse.

2006-05-17T08:33:00.000+10:00

blogs i think we need 1:

background to my thinking but arriving at the point eventually: its considered a foolish thing to do to reply to a negative review - even to correct facts - if the writers reply is published they look resentful, petty, oversensitive etc. if not published they probably get even more so. everyone thinks this (?) tho they make exceptions for themselves when they do it .. but i think theres a problem here aside from issues of critical value(s), poets psyche: & its this: that regardless of the tone & the un/favourable character of the review - it is a pronouncement: a judgment. there is no intention of creating dialogue - so when a poet replies they cant look anything rather than powerless, pathetic, uncool .. does it have to be this way? what about a review culture where those reviewed were encouraged to reply - & the reviewers to respond to the reply etc? so we dont have to 'sit in silence ... live in fear' etc. this wd be easier, more dynamic in a blog - assuming the age isnt going to adopt something like this. how much more interesting reviews would be then.. i like to read them, but theyre usually dissatisfying. in this scenario the reviewed poet wd be less defensive, able to ask questions of the reviewer - or perhaps better - reviewers - yes im 'talkin bout a conversation' .. ive been thinking about a blog that only publishes reviews for a while.. & blogstyle ud normally expect comments - but perhaps the reviews & reviewed/reviewer responses cd both be posted by the blogmaster, with comments reserved for the readers .. (reviewer & reviewed cd respond to these as well). would they do it? reviews themselves wd change, wd be less judgmental - & inconclusiveness/ambiguity wd no longer seem a weakness, but an opening for dialogue ..

2006-05-16T07:50:00.000+10:00

nonsense ... the line singled out in the geoff page review below: 'flap dang bamm boozled right rort write' (from 'next dance--' pp 88-9) raises questions about nonsense .. something kids are brought up on in nursery rhymes & some folk songs .. nonsense is integral to lear, hamlet and macbeth (tragedies more than comedies??) both as practice & theme .. & it comes out in rock 'n roll eg tutti frutti which this line reminds me of .. its in stein & joyce .. cummings ginsberg et al (pull my daisy) & lisa jarnot .. nonsense relies on puns .. shakespeare liked puns .. stein & joyce are the big modernist punters in my head .. the nme (new musical express) is exemplary in its use of puns in article & review headlines .. but is the pun like metaphor a conservative form? that elides difference? where does langpo sit with this? is klupzy a pun or only to me? the shakespeare, joyce, stein revel in punning; ashbery, bruce andrews, coolidge seem to me to be more .. post-pun: the pun suppressed. hejinian tho steinian is more austere i think. i expect some poets use puns as a structural device & then strip the poem of evidence. less adventurous poets only use puns very obviously & badly: this is known as academic humour.

2006-05-16T07:45:00.000+10:00

mckenzies book is clearly a musical text - this element of experimental poetry generally ignored by mainstream reviewers - music is a notion privileged in poetry crit - yet the closer language gets to music the more its derided by the mainstream - esp if it cant be put in a sound poetry box - which box can be put on the doorstep or left somewhere -

2006-05-14T08:38:00.000+10:00

geraldine mckenzie will read at chronicles (91 fitzroy st, st kilda) on may 27 at 4.30 pm - with justin clemens. a rare opportunity for melbournites. the reading follows immediately the book group meeting at 2pm at st kilda library, carlisle st. all are welcome to both; both are free - but if attending book group be ready to talk/listen (ie have read at least some of the book).

2006-05-12T07:46:00.000+10:00

Reading Duty in Rwanda, by Jeff S

I bought Geraldine McKenzie’s ‘Duty’ from Kris at Collected Works and didn’t begin to read the poems until I was in Rwanda. There was initially a parallel sensation of being out of place there and the apparent out-of-placeness of thinking of reading this text in this place. Both perceptions altered as I gradually explored my room, the building I was in, the streets surrounding the building and the long walk into Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) that took about an hour. I traveled to sites (I was in Rwanda to witness memorial sites to the 1994 genocide) in the east, west and south of the country, covering many kilometers. What I noticed first from Duty was the dedication:

to write without betrayal,
to write what will inevitably be partial
but with as great a fullness as possible

There was an accord between this sentiment and what I hoped would be possible in the journal and subsequent writing that I would be doing in Rwanda. There was also a resonance with being in Rwanda and how I also wished to be able to conduct myself in this place. This introduction ‘permitted’ me to continue reading in a spirit that now seemed linked to my room and the surrounding country, however tenuously. I made a note on three poems, Illuminations, Another Nature Poem and Beloved: A Miscellany because I could hug them to my own tenuous being here. These three poems seemed to speak of the place most obviously, literally.

Illuminations: The brush and typewriter become the knives of the gentle tyrant’s kisses. The tit-bits for the dog while I am siting back here in Australia become body parts; not while in Rwanda however. There it was the gentle kiss and the grand children, the duplicity, the humanness of touch that can also supply a militia, the Interahamwe, with machetes to hack their neighbours to death.

Suffering’s an easy slide, typewriter
riddling the neat ranks of obedient
men, paint brush sticky with slaughter,
cameras knives carving pale faces, decent
overcoats, trains ebbing out of life, meant
cruelties – the screws, knout, lash, rack – it’s all
at my fingertips – sober rumours sent
of death – or life, in truth, after the fall

My reading searched out associations, perhaps to embed me deeper in place, to make clearer what I was witnessing. My ‘typewriter’ or brush could easily have been complicit in this genocide. At one site, Murambi where hundreds of the actual bodies of victims are displayed in the technical school in which 50,000 people were killed, I recognized myself in both victim and ‘genocidaire’. “No one escapes…not even the newly-born babies…the victims are pursued to their very last refuge and killed there.” Committee on Human Rights. The closeness to this death, the witnessing of the people who were killed, their smell of decay and lime covered bodies sucks you into the act of killing. There is no escaping. There is a bodily sensation of falling into the racks of dead, of recognizing that you too are this person, you too are the one who killed. The experience of alterity, that complete and unmistakable absolute separateness of the other, who you face as Levinas has said, exposes with a shock of recognition ones responsibility. The red steel door to the small room is unlocked, as are the next ten along the length of two of the many buildings making up the Murambi technical school. Inside there are bodies of adults, adolescents, children. Some still wear clothing, a blue dress on an adult woman or a faded red top with a yellow border around the neck and sleeves on an infant probably two years old. Gradually each body separates from the many that first confront you. They are individual people, who have been killed, and this is what is repeated, and this is who has been exhumed, and this is who are repeated underground 45,000 time. So 50,000 is not abstract, it is lived here in this place, it is smelt and witnessed. Each person is here, as am I and the guide relating how he managed to hide in the bush while all his family members, fourteen people, were massacred here. Beside one of the bodies is a recently laid rose. It is the month of April, the month the genocide began and the time of remembrance across Rwanda.

another nature poem: because of the First World War, that red rose and my return to Australia on Anzac Day. It does not take much to read the names engraved on the cenotaph in my hometown as victims.
B. S. Johnson in See The Old Lady Decently his last novel, the first of a projected three, whose combined titles would have read, See The Old lady Decently Buried Although Amongst Those Left Are You, writes:

“…then years after he had had to give up killing others, Lord (as he had been gratefully prompted) Haig himself succumbed. He was a mere sixty-six, and his funeral procession more than a mile long. Marshal Foch led most of the other Field Marshals available…Unnumbered must have been the dead men’s maledictions following that blind little man’s last putrefying, rotting corpse, so many had he sent to their deaths. And for what? So many dead there could never be an exact count. And was there any sign he had ever felt his conscience troubling him?
It was far more than the men he killed, than the widows and orphans down to him…
During the whole five months of the Passchendaele campaign Haig never once visted the battlefield, never ever saw the conditions under which his men were fighting for him.

Foch off.

Haig. Should his name be remembered? Try this for another mnemonic:
HOMICIDE ASSASSIN INFAMOUS GUILTY

Somme, Fricourt, Delville Wood, Thiepval, Mametz: these and hundreds of other names stink in our nostrils because of the saprophytic criminal Haig.
And especially Ypres.
What scum! His name should never be mentioned but with execrations, with infinitudes of contempt, vials of loathing.
What kind of patriotism could it possibly be for him to thrust deep mourning onto a quarter of his people?
They should have massed to shit onto his grave that year.”

another nature poem:
……every ant
and pebble, every rustle flaring
into moments of distinction

The vortex that was initially the first room I entered at Murambi focussed quickly, in flashes, onto tufts of hair still attached to skulls, those personal items of clothing, crushed skulls and a small child. Each detail still present. Unlike Johnson however those Rwandans I met, I know these are only those that I met, but every one spoke of forgiveness and the possibility of reconciliation. This of course implies confession, which is being made possible through the Gacaca courts, grassroots trials at a community level as part of a national system of trials for those who partook in the genocide. A talking and listening between two.

And in Beloved: A Miscellany McKenzie writes ‘I’ll give what’s my gift”. What else can one offer?

[received via email from the author]

2006-05-11T04:51:00.000+10:00

when i say something about poetry to strangers - inevitable if they want to know 'what i do' - & i might mention teaching ('how can u teach poetry?!') - a view recurs: isnt it all about taste? ie isnt what my child writes as good as shakespeare? what does 'good' mean here? the judgment, valid enough at first glance, is based on the fact that my childs writing gives me more pleasure than shakespeare's. this i think is based on a different notion to reading than mine. you read something in the way you might scratch something or clean something. i am thinking rather of reading as a practice, that doesnt have distinct temporal boundaries (well god knows cleaning exists forever) - it doesnt stop really - i am always reading - i dont mean i have the words ive read that day present in my mind, but the books are present to me - can my childs writing sustain my interest on a daily lifelong basis? maybe it can. again it comes back to conversation, what i read expands in different directions, circulates .. something my childs & other great writing have in common is the element of surprise - if we are ready to admit it - if we love the writer, think we know them - but then they write something unexpected - even if its an unexpected word.

the taste attitude: it assumes were all educated cultured beings already, that theres no skill required in reading - & by extension writing - its the democratic experience - someone who never reads poetry (has in fact no taste for poetry) - reads some doggerel somewhere & likes it - isnt their experience as valid as the parents/ reader of shakespeare / duty? but what were talking about isnt experience as sensation - the verb version - but experience as knowledge & skill - the noun version - there are two versions of this attitude - the postmodern & the reactionary
- perhaps both think my childs take on a text is as valid as derridas/baudrillards/barthes' - its the word valid that bothers me - its like a licence, that has nothing to do with the real experience of reading - am i sounding very oldfashioned? or merely traditional? opinions arent conversation any more than remarks are literature. if anyone has another take on my child vs shakespeare im interested.

2006-05-11T04:19:00.000+10:00

the question of how we write about poetry is related to how we talk about poetry. do we talk about poetry as such? many times ive met poets whose work interests me, & realised later that we didnt talk of poetry at all - but the poetry world. critical articles seem to generate more discussion than poems. its not the age of criticism any longer, but its still easier to talk about criticism. randall jarrell goes into this in some detail. i think this is partly because i mostly read critical pieces in journals, & though i read poems in journals too, i dont appreciate them there as much as i do in books (i think?) in a book i am taking time - if not with a particular poem, with a poet & its rare to find someone reading the same books of poetry at the same time as me .. i am reading duty now with all of you! .. & yet theres a tendency (on this blog) for me to write more about the criticism of duty than duty itself. i havent really learned how to talk about poetry. when offered the opportunity by someone who can, i falter, i have no memory, i dont have depth, i have perhaps a perfunctory judgment to make. i am fascinated by the poetry world but i do read poetry all the time. i mean several times a day. at the moment im actively reading about 15 different books, & maybe i should stick to duty a bit more. wouldnt critical writing be so much easier if it came out of our conversation? another factor is that i talk obsessively about aspects of poetry with poets because it seems difficult to do so with others - people who are happy to talk about many other different arts - were back at jarrells cocktail parties here - blogs of course create a conversation - & people are interested in blogs as a conversation topic - well some people - i guess im more the obsessive rather than objective cultural type - which is dying out faster? - the blog generation - in at least 2 senses of 'generation' is an effect of a lack - but could be a parallel action - im interested to read about others experiences of & thoughts on talking about poetry (with non-tax people).

2006-05-10T07:43:00.000+10:00

3 copies of duty now ready to use at st kilda library. also: new comments below.

2006-05-09T07:41:00.000+10:00

duty is the title of duty. there are various duties approached - fulfilled - here. there is the duty of writing about what you see / hear / know to be true. the duty to language - to respect it - by not using it complacently (& thereby being used by it). the duty - the tax - on us as human beings - on mckenzie as a writer, a poet, a western citizen & the implications & responsibilities that brings up - a tax on the gift of poetry - a tax on the priveleged - a tax on the war mongers .. (a tax enacted by mckenzie as well as paid). duty as anachronism. duty (the book) as an elegy to duty (the concept, the ethical practice) - or blueprint for a future duty.

2006-05-06T06:25:00.000+10:00

i was just looking at rimbauds 'les illuminations' - thinking there was a correspondence with 'this doesnt have a name': the energy, the sarcasm, the matter-of-factness too. the energy of duty is unlike the 4 poets mckenzie mentioned: celan, bernstein, niedecker, oppen. mckenzies 'illuminations' are sonnets; still a popular form in these post-metrical (& post-berrigan) days: dorothy porter, jill jones, peter minter, brett dionysius have all been writing sonnets lately. the range of 'ear' of a writer & reader .. i think i probably incline to reading in one way - certainly within one book .. i have to consciously listen for the metrics of illuminations - i just wasnt brought up with iambs .. some readers were .. can they read postmetrical verse..? im avoiding the term free, because many poets use constraints other than metre to give their poems form/tension/control.. we hear music differently i think post-cage - post-hiphop & electronica - post-collage .. concrete poetry is interesting here: sometimes it seems purely visual, without sound, but other times its insistently rhythmic - rock'n roll - basic beats -

2006-05-06T06:21:00.000+10:00

from an email correspondent: i've now read quite a bit of duty. i find it is a bit like visual art - something that is not about understanding or recognition but rather about immersion in words. i'm still further down the poetry reading evolutionary
scale and wanting more immediate meaning! but still find myself going back
to pick it up again to float in the word pool...

2006-05-06T06:10:00.000+10:00

'this doesnt have a name' seems a key point/poem in the book. weve had argument & elegant statement - but now mckenzies letting it all out: a rant - in a sense - but a complexly managed one - 'before the wall came down how pleasant on the beaches' - this is the wall coming down & the voices pouring over/out. the poem offers an alternative to speaking for suffering multitudes by giving a range of tones & perspectives & changing tack/rhythm. 'la plus ca change the more it fucking doesnt'- more anger than suffering - but the anger is relieved (or accentuated?) by the breaks into other kinds of phrasing - its like the news .. an unpappified news ..

2006-05-05T08:43:00.000+10:00

please ignore the $30 in post below - the price of duty is $24.95 AUS

2006-05-04T18:40:00.000+10:00

Duty. By Geraldine McKenzie. Paper Bark Press. 100pp. $30.00

Reviewed by Geoff Page

Duty is very much a first book, not through any lack of sophistication but from its sense of the different directions its author might take from here. It is a book marked by wit, ingenuity (conceptual and verbal), humour, pathos, technical assurance and self-conscious experimentalism.

In the more experimental poems, which make up a substantial proportion, McKenzie bends her syntax to the point where, probably under the influence of the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, she makes it disappear altogether. In ‘next dance’, for instance, the last line reads ‘flap dang bamm boozled right rort write’. I’m not sure that even Noam Chomsky could parse that. There’s a noun and a verb in there somewhere but just what the signifiers are signifying is none too clear. Words, as James Joyce found, are marvellous, resonant things, full of textures and associations but to throw away the syntax that normally holds them together is a risk rarely worth taking. ‘A poem should at least be as well-written as prose,’ said Ezra Pound, referring, I think, to excessive syntactical liberties being taken way back in 1910.

That being said, however, it’s important to note that Duty does contain some poems that are outstanding by any criterion – including that of the ‘well-made poem’. McKenzie’s sequence of nine sonnets, ‘Illuminations’, is very assured technically and full of verbal élan. The final couplet of #II is typical: ‘as we undress, lie down and slowly visit / love, he preens before his new exhibit.’ There are echoes of Wallace Stevens’ imagery throughout (‘no pianissimo distracts / those minor lovers counterpointing sighs …’) as well as a tone that goes right back to sixteenth century love poetry.

But McKenzie is not all verbal highjinks. Her ‘another nature poem’ does a strange, almost surreal justice to the trench grotesqueries of World War 1.Her image of ‘a pair of rats …/ too busy fretting as they / nurse a nibbled hand over / gravelled slopes …’ is just one arresting detail. The last stanza, by contrast, has a different, rather languid mood: ‘leaning back, one offers me a cigarette -- / we smoke and chase its random issue / into blue, offering our softness to / the sun, the guns a natural mutter / as a small plane flits above us’.

The poem, ‘Testament’, set in World War 2, is similarly convincing. So too is the erotic ‘Scenes from an imaginary romance’ and the successfully experimental ‘text/book/work’ about the well-known mating habits of the praying mantis.

In the face of such unarguable successes it seems a pity that so much of Duty is taken up with a sort of youthful experimentalism where the author seems to be glancing over her shoulder for the approval of her American mentors or her European antecedents -- and perhaps their local disciples. In this first book the highly talented McKenzie is at a kind of crossroads. I hope she takes the right one from here.

2006-05-04T18:37:00.000+10:00

any readers in the st kilda area? st kilda library are buying 3 extra copies of duty to be used in the library to ensure the reading group (may 27, 2pm at the library) is accessible to all. (there is one borrowable copy.)

2006-05-04T08:04:00.000+10:00

brunswick st bookstore have 1 copy as of 4 may.

2006-05-02T07:38:00.000+10:00

buying online is a new fish. theres a different pleasure to it - & it has its oldfashioned aspect: parcels in the mail. it expands your options in terms of what books are available. it saves time. & can save money. its cheaper to get duty in a shop in australia, but if yr in the outback or another country online's a reasonable option. future reading revival books might be easier to get online. best to keep our options open. we can all be nervous about what we're spending. reading revival books are easily budgetable: 4 per year, all under $30 (australian dollars).

2006-05-02T06:44:00.000+10:00

buying poetry; a thorny topic. (a rosy topic). though my intention is not too get too general about poetry, poetry criticism, but to keep focus on the book (duty, at present) - the question of book sales is one that brought reading revival into existence. the common complaint is lots of poets - why arent there more book sales? i am encouraging book sales through the site, &, i know that ive succeeded in selling a small number of copies. what are the factors involved? i buy poetry books quite often, but i didnt when i first started writing. money. poets are often poor. when i started writing poetry seriously i was on the dole. i didnt have much money of course, but i bought cds & went to movies. i bought interesting secondhand books. this wasnt purely about pleasure, but about meaning. the australian poetry scene was relatively invisible to me. its not that different from being gay if you dont know where the clubs are & dont have any gay friends.

it was a very gradual process. somehow i found out about & went to open readings. i slowly made occasional connections with someone i saw reading & their poems in an anthology. i learned about the existence of the melbourne writers festival (i came from country nsw via canberra). i went to book launches. i still wasnt buying new books. though i spent quite a bit on secondhand ones and was reading more poetry from the library. i read early to midcentury american poets: plath, lowell, ginsberg, berryman, cummings. i read their bios. in a sense these were metaphors or movies of the real thing. which did exist right here. but i couldnt get into it. i hadnt studied poetry since high school - the only modern was eliot; noone contemporary. i read frank o'hara & ashbery - but did anyone else have their humour & warmth? i was interested in lowell, but it was a bit of a duty; ditto williams - but easier. wallace stevens was a new adventure in pleasure, emily dickinson. (ok im getting off the path of buying factors here perhaps into a fairly generic sounding reading trajectory - i wont go on about how i went down the path of stein -- langpo -- ). i published a few poems, i read the other poems in the journals. i read a few anthologies. i am slow to learn most things. plaths collected is probably one of the first new poetry books i bought. i got to know some poets. generally they didnt have books. i read john forbes library copies. gig ryan. secondhand pam brown. (one factor is i didnt see the poets i was becoming interested in 2nd hand).

i am trying to remember what got me buying new poetry. finding collected works bookshop. cant remember how. part of the pleasure of a bookshop is buying; i did/do feel guilty if i go in too often without buying anything. i bought books as presents: wallace stevens, robert adamson. a vague constellation of aust. po. was forming in my head. i submitted mss to publishers. i was included in an anthology. i got a job (this was earlier); my pay went up; i went part-time: it went down. i got a grant. i was attracted to more avantgarde books: surrealist books, novels etc. things that werent in the library. books with inviting covers (oh dear). i started to know the people whose launches i went to. there was an element of obligation in buying - if i had the cash - tho i still felt guilty if i didnt. poetry gradually meant more to me than other forms or writing. i was becoming interested in new australian poetry (i still knew little about colonial or pre-1960s poetry). i felt desire when a new book by someone i knew came out (poetry publishing is so slow - or has been since the 90s - that it can seem static - books were always already published). i began to think about reviewing. i bought chapbooks (cheaper). i think part of it was there was little publishing by poets in their twenties - the way there had been in the 70s - so it was harder to get a handle on the poets' culture(s). even now i find the culture of many poets a million miles from mine - but im more interested, able to find meaning in their language use, their tone, how they keep it all together.

what im trying to do is to find the block that i had about buying poetry to see if it will help others with their blocks... its hard to break habits - even negative ones: like the habit of not buying things we arent already familiar with .. i used to buy cds based on nme reviews - a rating of 7+ out of ten was enough. john peel said when asked what his favourite music was said he was always more excited by the records in the boot of his car (that he hadnt listened to). im trying to make a habit out of not behaving habitually. does duty seem strange? are the writers mckenzie mentioned: niedecker, berstein, oppen, celan, strange? the whole world was strange when we were born. do we feel locked out of the culture? it sounds like a capitalist cliche to say we become part of the culture by consuming it .. but poetrys not coke. do you want poetry to continue: 'always' like coke? this is not a moral question, nor a rhetorical one. are u ambitious or unambitious for your own poetry? (if you dont write poetry & have read this far -- i salute you!). readers are the vital element of poetry culture (obviously) - give yourself credit as a reader. read strange things. why be comforted all the time? you can always sell them secondhand if you hate them. what books do you buy? are they the kind easily accessible in libraries? you can lend your new poetry books to friends: more value for money. you can buy them as presents now youve read them & can be confident theyre good. you know whats going on right now - this is the other side of going to readings or reading magazines - those poems can be fresher than those in books - but heres an art to poetry in books thats separate .. if you dont read individual volumes you wont get to learn this pleasure. the entering a world, the breathing in of a poets work. it opens to you - in your space - in a way no other form of poetry does: in the book, the new book.

tell me your own stories relating to mine ...

2006-04-30T07:32:00.000+10:00

wrought is an interesting word to apply (see ryan review: 'wrought language'). the concise oxford says see 'work' - as in 'work on'.. make efforts, be a craftsman [sic], bring about an effect or influence eg work wonders, be in motion or agitated, hammer into shape, excite by degrees, advance gradually to climax .. it evokes the effort, the effect of reading, the sexuality of duty.

2006-04-30T07:30:00.000+10:00

all comments go to my inbox - so its never too late to respond to a post or discussion - i will read it & respond

2006-04-30T07:27:00.000+10:00

influence - it can mean several things. it can give a writer a new style - even a new vocabulary - or it can allow the writer to follow their own style more insistently, with more integrity after someone else's strong example.

2006-04-30T07:18:00.000+10:00

i asked meckenzie to name some poets whose work might be preparation for her own. she didnt answer this exactly but named 4 poets who were important to her:

"poets - it's so long ago but i'm thinking now just of poets who matter one way or another to me - just a few - Paul Celan, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen. Charles Bernstein too."

celan & bernstein have been mentioned already.. but what does such a list mean? they make the territory seem a little more familiar (knowing - to an extent - the four writers named). the names - as metonyms for their work - become metaphors for mckenzies poetry. it's like coming to a new country & calling it new bernstein. & tho this may make us feel more comfortable, there are obvious problems with such a naming. whether the writer herself inhabits new bernstein is one question; another is how the poetry or land itself feels about its new name.

2006-04-28T07:56:00.000+10:00

cant afford the book? or just feeling proactive? maybe your local library would get it in for you (and others)?

2006-04-28T07:55:00.000+10:00

this issue of reading revival will continue till mid-late june, so theres still plenty of time to jump on the boat (with your book).

2006-04-28T07:53:00.000+10:00

'O throw me an orange/ anyone' ('counting coup') is one of my favourite poem endings ever (p 62).

2006-04-28T07:51:00.000+10:00

it may seem i havent been posting the last couple of days - but ive been adding comments to the ryan review. stay glued for geoff page's canberra times review - coming soon.

2006-04-27T07:19:00.000+10:00

melbourne reader alert: four copies now on the shelf at collected works, level 1, 37 swanston st. retta - shop co-owner - said she was 'amazed' the book was selling because of the blog - she said she'd been skeptical at first ..

2006-04-25T05:18:00.000+10:00

gig ryan has sent me her review of duty from the age.[the references to hill are to barry hill's the inland sea, reviewed at the same time.]

Duty, Geraldine McKenzie
review by Gig Ryan (The Age, 30.3.02)

Duty is Geraldine McKenzie’s anticipated first book. At 100 pages McKenzie shows little hesitancy for a ‘new’ poet and this is energetic experimental work, occasionally with some similarities to the late Robert Harris’s award-winning Jane, Interlinear. Sometimes though McKenzie’s excursions are both private and repetitive, boiling in a sort of romanticism of disorder, where inventive language seems a tic, a short cut. This paroxysm seems to leap out a little past midway through Duty. Like the various scopes used in medicine now, one gets a colourful view of an interior body part meaningless to any but a specialist in that part. As with Hill’s book, Duty also traces a love affair. Where Hill is often confessional and corrective, a little like Ted Hughes’s in Birthday Letters, McKenzie is less bound to actual matter than to intellectual analysis and reflection. She welcomes ambiguity while remaining sceptical of the result - “I don’t think poetry / can save us”. Her sonnets display a control of rhyming schemes and voices, many with an Elizabethan formality and playfulness. Although it is common now for poets to quote, or sample, their influences and predecessors, this can also be a way of evading imagination. McKenzie’s love of wrought language is at times unguided but more often it is her strength - “and the cut / as fresh as ever throttle clutch and / brake for no one as progress / its maw and might have been / silky persuasion in the manifest / and wished down river withered / in a word it was just love / unravelled retrospective rape”.

2006-04-25T05:06:00.000+10:00

a library week presentation

reading revival
a blog devoted to the discussion of recent australian poetry

http://readingrevival.blogspot.com

interested in contemporary australian poetry but not sure where to start?

started, but have no one to share your thoughts with?

writing poetry but not sure what's going on in local poetry publishing?

As part of library week blog founder & local superpoet [sic] Michael Farrell will be leading a reading discussion group at the St Kilda Library, focussing on Geraldine McKenzie’s Duty.

2pm May 27
Free

…but you need to read the book and bring a copy with you!

Ask at the library

Or order through a bookshop. It retails at $24.95 and you would need to allow 10 days for them to get it in

Book a place now

St Kilda Library 150 Carlisle St St Kilda 92096650

2006-04-23T04:53:00.000+10:00

sometimes the meat of a blog is in the comments .. there are 4 new comments ..

2006-04-22T08:05:00.000+10:00

new poetry blog link added today: derek motion - it was his comment i responded to - see comments (3 - circa now) 'another thing this blog..' on 12/4

2006-04-22T08:03:00.000+10:00

i spoke to geraldine mckenzie in sydney (the city that needs no hyperlink) & theres a chance she may come to melbourne for a reading - stay glued .. (ok i left my copy of duty behind & access aside felt finger-tied)

2006-04-22T07:49:00.000+10:00

bookshops welcome to post details of stock of duty here - or anywhere..

2006-04-22T07:46:00.000+10:00

this post isnt to say anything - i said it all in my comments - responding to a comment - see 'another thing this blog is leading ' on 12/4 - i think im handling my material klutzily - ? - that word always reminds me of charles bernsteins poem 'the klupzy girl'.

2006-04-13T06:02:00.000+10:00

dates confirmed for 2 perth reading groups

poetry book group 1: wednesday september 6 at the bakery, northbridge, geraldine mckenzie's duty 2 pm

poetry book group 2: friday september 8 at the bakery, northbridge, book to be advised, 2 pm

the second group will discuss the next reading revival choice, to be announced in late june

to register email reading revival at gmail dot com

2006-04-12T17:11:00.000+10:00

visitor stats set at 0 from 12.4.06. no visitors from before then recorded. (my cousin says im being 'too catholic today'.)

2006-04-12T17:09:00.000+10:00

another thing this blog is leading people to is a practice of ordering books in shops or online .. because if you rely on shelves for poetry you wont see a lot of great stuff

2006-04-09T09:04:00.000+10:00

interested in mckenzies own critical style? see this example from the excellent
how2

2006-04-09T08:19:00.000+10:00

for those who read duty when it came out, note any second impressions here

2006-04-08T07:37:00.000+10:00

more about influence ... mckenzie reminds me of truffaut (ive been watching the last metro) in her dramatic intensity and unpulled punches. but i dont want to suggest mckenzie is just a tissue - not even a strong tissue - of influences. words may not be orginal - may suggest the fold, where theyve been before.. - but what we bring to writing those words - the force is its own thing: mckenzie is herself; duty is itself.

2006-04-07T06:11:00.000+10:00

a poetry more concerned with the word as material is perhaps apt for the contest with the material(ist) world.

2006-04-07T05:54:00.000+10:00

language poetry - its attention to the word - seems to be a natural movement in an age becoming digital. and now post-digitality is affecting analogue forms of art (painting s by vija celmins (see 21:art the sbs doco) or ross bleckner (see the excellent 'modern art in the common culture' by thomas crow). but their work reminds me as much of the supposedly highlanguage poets susan howe (cited by leves) and lyn hejinian as that of a younger generation (sounds like i know a whole generation ... i know bits. their work could be read as already postlanguage (i mean post language poetry not a poetry that is post language) - but what am i implying? im not implying so much as withholding an unexamined assumption that the postlanguage poem would be a return to a more humanist poetic (and perhaps celmins and bleckner are just postmodern - yet i think theres some analogy to be drawn). howe/hejinian may shudder at such a description - they may not - but there is a stronger sense of the personal political in their work (howe's use of historical material is a personalising one) than their male counterparts (bernstein, perelman, andrews). this could be said of poetry as a whole - though im sure thered be also sorts of complications and exceptions - there always are - but im not sure that this generalisation is true of the surrealists. the male surrealists seem more sentimental than the female.. mckenzie isnt sentimental - nor particularly surrealist - though perhaps theres something of aragon in the un/forced digital erotics of 'Using it'/'excorcising'/'More'(pp 63-69).

2006-04-07T05:31:00.000+10:00

the influence of language poetry begins leves' review - presumably from overland - of duty. he veers from this into european culture/history. the presence of charles bernstein - influential language writer (poetry and essays) - on the back cover - his blurb is on the homepage too - clues us in before we start. but clues us in to what? there's a tradition of criticising Australian poets in taking from (contributing to) northern hemisphere literary movements - as if we're all meant to read the same things (leves doesnt do this by the way). surrealism gave something to many poets writing now. they're not usually taken to be surrealists, dont take themselves as surrealists. the fact of the incredible variety and progress in the work of just the most well-known language writers is one for another time, and probably place (im not being controlling here - comment if u want - just bringing it back to duty...). duty could be described as a post-language work, as could much of the work of poets of her generation in the u.s. - of a certain stripe, or openness - as it could of those here. are there any language poets in australia? im sure ive read the implication there shouldnt be. does a poem make a poet or vice versa?

2006-04-06T08:20:00.000+10:00

be the first to review duty for amazon.com: scroll down to customer reviews.

2006-04-05T10:16:00.000+10:00

first reading revival reading group has been scheduled for saturday may 27 at 2pm at st kilda library, carlisle st, st kilda. it is part of a library activities week. free to attend but please read duty before meeting. also please let me know via email readingrevival@gmail.com if you wish to attend, so i can have an idea of numbers.

2006-04-03T06:44:00.000+10:00

write your experience of ordering or buying duty here: how long it took, problems, bookshop response ..

2006-04-03T06:43:00.000+10:00

add comments re your first impression of duty here

2006-03-31T08:07:00.000+11:00

geraldine mckenzie has agreed to answer questions u might have about duty. email queries to readingrevival@gmail.com and i'll pass them on to her.

2006-03-31T08:03:00.000+11:00

spoke to brunswick st books about reading revival. they were positive and are ordering a copy of duty, and thinking of making poetry separate from fiction on their web catalogue.

2006-03-28T08:08:00.000+11:00

comment on one poem of your choice from duty

2006-03-28T07:55:00.000+11:00

my flatmate said keats 'negative capability' in a reading context is like coleridge's 'suspension of disbelief': i think coleridge was referring to poems like 'the ancient mariner'- thinking his readers might find it unbelievable - the two concepts i think were probably closer in their coiners time .. (now we'll believe anything). what im interested in is that keats theory has conservative critical respect, yet the same critic can dismiss poetries that negative capability could most readily apply to from a reading perspective.. all of this is just to say you can open yourself to 'duty' (to poetry) - just read - youll find your mind will appreciate the poetry as long as theres not a constant chatter in yr head of 'whats this mean' 'i dont get it' etc. those comments are like people talking during a reading ..

2006-03-27T09:27:00.000+11:00

duty received at least two excellent reviews: the kerry leves and peter rose. do 'the discontinuities pall' (rose)? and if so, where? perhaps 'using it'pp 63-5 ?

2006-03-26T21:00:00.000+11:00

reading being a kind of writing: you write the poem in your mind as you read -- negative capability seems like a useful tool for reading as well. no irritable casting about for meaning just going with the flow (& the rocks).

2006-03-26T19:53:00.000+11:00

live reading groups melbourne & perth. interested? email readingrevival@gmail.com & i'll let u know details. probably may sometime for melbourne, september for perth - i'll b there for the spring poetry fest & will lead groups on both 'duty' and the next as yet undecided book (at least thats the plan). if you'd like to lead/start your own anywhere, email me also & i'll post details for others to contact you.

here is an edit of the blurb i did for perth:

blurb

Poetry Book Group 1: Geraldine McKenzie's 'Duty'

Interested in contemporary poetry but not sure where to start? Or just looking for opportunities to share your interest? Melbourne poet Michael Farrell will lead a poetry book group on Geraldine McKenzie's 'Duty'. 'Duty' is the first book to be discussed by Michael's blog: http://readingrevival.com. To take part in a live discussion all you need to do is read the book. (You don't need to know anything about blogs.) Bring notes, comments, questions, or just come and listen. But the more involved you get with the book the better the meeting. Michael suggests getting to know just one poem really well. Get the book early to give yourself plenty of time. Allow a couple of weeks for ordering if your local book shop doesn't have it in stock. You can also check out reviews and online discussion at the blog address above or look at Paper Bark's 'Duty' page http://www.paperbarkpress.com/reviews/Duty.htm.

2006-03-25T06:40:00.000+11:00

what i like about 'testament' p 38 is that it lists gemstones 'amethyst etc..' without making a fetish of them. to me this is a tedious aspect of the portrait of dorian gray, as much as i like other things of wilde. mckenzie writes of politics, sex, fathers, nazism with a cool eye, not wallowing like many before and after.

2006-03-24T20:53:00.000+11:00

two copies available collected works bookshop and one at the city library. sorry to be melbourne-centric. if anyone notices copies elsewhere let me know and ill post it.

2006-03-21T07:40:00.000+11:00

anyone interested in mail order can contact collected works on 03-96548873 or email collectedworks@mailcity.com

2006-03-21T07:34:00.000+11:00

the word i most strongly associate with mckenzies poetry is integrity. i tried to think of an american equivalent (i dont mean one that has integrity, but one that gives me that feeling) and i came up with creeley; otherwheres theres celan; an email correspondent had the same thought, hopefully more from him soon ... also id like to say that i dont intend this discussion to be among just those who already write criticism, review books -- or even have published or write poetry -- anyone who reads poetry is welcome -- your thoughts are not merely interesting to me, but vital to the discussion ...

2006-03-20T17:08:00.000+11:00

here's my review of 'duty' as it appeared in famous reporter. this is one of my early attempts at trying to write a review, getting past my even earlier attempts of responses. reading it now, im surprised by the energy of it; my thoughts now are different (not that i disagree with what i said before). the reason for the title 'Mrs Robinson & A ??' is that it appeared following my poem 'mrs robinson and a mango' (ode ode p 42). It gave me a starting point.

Mrs Robinson & A ?? (Duty, Geraldine McKenzie, Paper Bark Press, 2001)

What do the question marks represent? A hand grenade? A light bulb? What does the culture want from women? – from poets? Two seconds of Peter Costello yelling in parliament and I’m ready for matriarchy. I don’t want to give the wrong impression: Duty’s not a tract – merely a brilliant piece of work.

It’s easy for poets – and other agnostics – to feel unnecessary: that is the impression I want to give – that of necessity: not hectoring or refutation – though a negation – but art.

The sculptor Lawrence Weiner says the role of art is to present reality so that – rather than be metaphorical itself – the reader of art can make their own metaphors of the relationship between themselves and life. He quotes a child saying the word ‘apple’ is written inside an apple. He tells a group of teenagers interested in graffiti that it’s not enough to say ‘Me Jose’: say rather ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘my children are hungry’.

‘I

historical:

these are strangers
with their awkward gaze claiming
kinship like an egg
teetering in rough
hands

you signal
–-no

V

liturgical

item: one pr. womens shoes
item: one pr. workboots
item: one pr. mens shoes
item: one pr. womens shoes (evening)
item: one pr. childrens shoes

VI

biographical:

I don’t think poetry
can save us

(‘the honey pit’)

I’m hungry for the avant garde, and for forms which are assured but don’t rest. Mrs Robinson had two outlets: an affair with a graduate, and the repression of her family. Geraldine McKenzie’s putting her money on poetry, and relatively speaking, it’s a good bet.

It’s no joke. I’m reader enough to notice ‘??’ parody the female form. And parody questioning itself. Hell, I want freedom too, and if I can raise the subjects of misogyny – or sexism if you prefer – and Order, then I will.

I don’t remember getting excited over ‘Adenfrorde – fragments’ when it appeared in Calyx 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (Paper Bark Press, 2000). Was I brain dead? Maybe just not ready...

‘2.

here’s where the forest
lays down its arms & sings
for bread

...

are you familiar
with this—

3.

a green horse
prised from meticulous
forest its slow canter
into cloud traces of this morning’s milk
star breathy over
the ridges
...’
(‘Adenfrorde – fragments’)

What colour is your sky?

‘3. The lighthouse is no longer orange.
...
35. A sentence with teeth and a digestive system.
A sentence with all organs intact. Go on.
54. I’ll eat this mango slowly.’
(‘After Ritsos’)

‘O throw me an orange anyone’ (‘counting coup’)

McKenzie eats fruit like anyone, and won’t be reduced.

‘a sentence like a threshing machine
a sentence like the cigarette smoked absent-mindedly
over the body’ (‘a bit of fun’)

Like any reader of Gertrude Stein, avant garde heroine and world war veteran, McKenzie cares about sentences. If not ourselves, for poems are that, they are closely related.

‘4. We observed the insects carefully and one was aware of
the ferocity of their existence.

...
5. After I saw the shocking cannibalism that always
terminated the relationship of male and female insects,
one never knew whether to be awed or simply
indifferent.
...
8. He bows his neck and raised his thorax.

Toddesprung

death jump
...
oh jesus’ (“text/book/work...”)

It’s the cunning ending – and she achieves this over and over – that performs the feat of balance: not resolution or neutralisation, but ayurvedic satisfaction: salt, sour, sweet, bitter, astringent.

‘~~~~~

begin with hazel gathering to itself a clean landscape

the birds will sing us out’ (‘The Five Simplicities’)

It’s not possible to convey the range of forms packed into Duty, though the titles might give some indication: ‘ ”listen that is hear...” ‘, ‘the next dance—,’ ‘The Beloved: A Miscellany,’ ‘I-V,’ ‘Iconoclasty,’ ‘ “No.8” ‘; ‘this doesn’t have a name’:

‘lived experience. someone knows what this means.... THESE FIGURES HAVE BEEN RACIALLY ADJUSTED.’;

‘Full bore’:

‘Absence of daffodils. Colour as what we believe.’

Feel better? The world hasn’t changed, but maybe yours has.

2006-03-19T16:47:00.000+11:00

just heard from devin at flood that he can't take orders - so its amazon for interested u.s. readers.

2006-03-19T16:22:00.000+11:00

this is a blog promoting australian poetry books & criticism; first off the shelf
is geraldine mckenzies duty. why duty? it was an unconscious choice, the purpose of the blog is partly to discover why. despite favourable reviews, what is the context -- if any -- that such a book -- any poetry book -- finds itself in in australia on publication? what reading culture does it enter? can a reading culture exist without a supportive critical culture? the complaints are familiar: not enough reviews, not enough critical reviews. there is little in the way of general poetry criticism, or criticism that goes beyond the cramped review. many books get 1, 2 or no reviews. what is the meaning of prizes in such a culture? this blog can't attempt to fill the gap, but it can offer a forum to discuss such matters, as well as take a considered look at recent australian poetry.

2006-03-19T08:25:00.000+11:00

four email addresses put down for live reading group, perhaps a st kilda library event? if interested & in melbourne please email me at readingrevival@gmail.com. read the book before the meeting ... outside melbourne? anyone can start a group. if yr interested in starting one somewhere else, advertise yr email in a comment, or, email me & ill advertise for you.

2006-03-19T08:17:00.000+11:00

blog announced yesterday at john leonard's lecture on reading poetry: perfect chance, tho i was a bit rushed, and again i realise the power of one-to-one, talking to people afterwards. one copy sold i think. shop was officially closed so that's no failure. monday morning rush for what's left im sure! copies take about 10 days if u order them. over the next few weeks ill post new material: other reviews etc. please feel free to comment at any time dont feel yr comment has to relate to the post. 'duty' is the sun around which all comments/posts revolve. make a comment on a poem if that is easier than taking on the whole book at once - or just because u want to.

2006-03-18T06:54:00.000+11:00

from explorer to mozilla and back again: they are not my friend. buyingonline: amazon.com seems the best of the three -- abebooks is dearer,co.uk takes longer to ship. but paper bark has dev@floodeditions.com as a contact for the u.s. - emailed devin and will confirm when i hear - but suspect books may be cheaper thru him.(spd are out of stock). for non-outback australians book shops make more sense. i havent seen any copies anywhere - if u see a copy of duty in ashop that u dont need to buy yrself - let us know. i'll find out today if collected works' order has arrived yet.

2006-03-17T08:40:00.000+11:00

five years down the track & im still impressed with geraldine mckenzies duty. this may be a melbourne impression, but i think this book's been overlooked. as youve probably gathered, this book is my choice to inaugurate readingrevivial. if you have it already, nows the time to pick it up again. any thoughts? share them please. if you havent youve got three months to read it and take part in the discussion, but why not get in early, those copies wont last forever. you can order from good book shops (shops that stock good books) such as collected works (melbourne) or gleebooks (sydney) or the lane (perth) or new editions (fremantle); or online at the links on the right (or at the bottom, having some formatting issues). im available to lead poetry book groups email me: readingrevival@gmail.com. im announcing the blog on saturday at john leonard's lecture (early) (earlier than id planned). any problems getting a book (don't forget libraries, and inter-library loans. maybe you could persuade your library to get a copy -- this might be a lengthy process ...) email me for help.

2006-03-07T16:42:00.000+11:00

reading revival ... poetry and criticism ... with this blog i'm aiming to stimulate discussion and sales of australian poetry. there'll be a new book every quarter. three months to order, read and discuss books online .. or in a book group (start one). the books chosen will be ones that i think deserve more attention, and that i think are great. they won't be brand new, but will have appeared since 2000. i'll give links for online bookshops and info on the book. to make sure anyone can obtain a book, an option is to send me a cheque, and i'll send you a copy: allow four weeks approx in australia, say six weeks outside. the books will generally be in print, so you can order from your local bookshop in australia. the blog will be launched soon, with an email announcement, and possibly a live one ...