Why Poetry Matters

>> PRESENTER Good evening, hello. Welcome to the State Library of New South Wales. I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which the Library is built, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and welcoming the participants tonight. We at the State Library are very happy this evening to be presenting ”Why Poetry Matters” which is presented by the Centre for New Writing and I would like to introduce Gabrielle Carey to say a few words. >> GABRIELLE CAREY Good evening and welcome to “Why Poetry Matters”. My name is Gabrielle Carey and I am the Acting Director for the Centre for New Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. I am very happy to bring you this event on not only a very important but also a very pleasurable topic. Tonight you will hear from three wonderful poets. Let me begin by introducing you to our guest to Australia, Tony Barnstone on the left, who is the Albert Upton Professor in English at Whittier College and comes from an illustrious family of poets. Tony is the author of 13 books and winner of the John Ciardi Prize, the Benjamin Saltman Award, the Pushcart Prize among many others. In addition, he has co-written “Tokyo Is Burning”, World War II Songs, a CD of original music available through iTunes and Amazon and on the table outside. Books forthcoming in 2014 include his selective poems “Bestia and […] ” and “[…] Poetica” and translated by Mariano […] and his anthology “Monstrous Verse” edited with Michelle Mitchell-Fast and his new book of poems “Buddha in Flames”. In conversation with Tony is our own very special and very home-grown poet, Robert Adamson. Robert has published over 20 books of poetry including the triple prize winning 1990 collection “The Clean Dark”. His works the “The Goldfinches of Baghdad” and “The Golden Bird” were also major award winner and in 2011 he was awarded the Patrick White Award and the Blake Prize for Poetry. His latest book of poetry, “The Kingfisher’s Soul”, is published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books. Robert is the inaugural CAL Chair of Poetry at the University of Technology where it has also been my great pleasure to get to know him. In the centre here we have Kate Middleton who will mediate our conversation this evening and she is the author of “Fire Season” and was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009. From September 2011 to 2012 September, she was the Inaugural Sydney City Poet which was an initiative of the Centre for New Writing at UTS. Kate holds a Master of Fine Arts and Poetry from the University of Michigan where she won “Hopwood Awards” in Poetry and Drama and where she also, by coincidence, was introduced to the work of Tony Barnstone. Her second collection of “Femoral Waters” is forthcoming later this year and she has told me that if anyone’s ‘phone goes off during our proceedings she will personally answer it. So please welcome our three poets. [Applause.] >> KATE MIDDLETON We are going to bookend our conversation today with some poems and we are just going to begin with […] book, read another couple of poems to end in an open forum for questions. Tony asked me if we are allowed to ask the audience questions as well? So be prepared. Not only may I answer your phone, but you may be interrogated by an American. I am reading the best poem, unexpectedly. I wasn’t expecting to read tonight. But thank you for being here and letting me. This is going to be from my forthcoming book. I love John Wayne, I love westerns, I love the Colorado River and it happens that the 1950 John Ford film “Rio Grande” was actually filmed on the banks of the Colorado River in Monument Valley outside Moab Utah. So that was a bit of a wake up for me to read. I thought I would start us off with that. >> POETRY READING: RIO GRANDE Ramrod, ravage and ruin Another human estrangement now forced into view The opening reel shows us horses using their black and white bodies Into the waters, muddy and green, Of, no, not the Rio Grande They’re pushing their bulk into silt laden unteemable Rio Colorado Two boys jump onto the backs of two horses to ride through the valley in old roman style, standing like south western emporers, waves on repeat, their thunderous feet, making the lap through the dust but he fails at the jump On the banks of the river there’s always a tumble Off camera the horses fly heavily all through the night and when enemies come they stand scarred in the […] streaming gulch making noises of eerie and emptier squeals from the horses who always hear gunfire More gunfire, will follow the gunfire, while dust flows and smoke drips the plan is set rolling The enemy acts, the wagons are busted, the children all vanish to the rescue see trippers breach enemy lines until everything is put back to right Til the rivers flow water, stands not […] border, stands only for water Thank you. [Applause] >> ROBERT ADAMSON I’m going to read a prose poem first. The poem itself tells the story, it actually happened, every single thing in the poem happened. It’s called “A Proper Burial”. >> POETRY READING: PROPER BURIAL Outside our house the other night an owl at night jar swooped down onto the road after an injured moth. It brought to mind an encounter last Christmas with a pair of tawny frogmouths. Driving on the Pacific Highway alongside the Hawkesbury River I noticed what seemed to be an injured bird. I pulled over and walked back to where the bird was laying and found a tawny frogmouth had been killed on the road. I picked up its limp body and Proper Burial carried the bird to the side of the highway where I discovered yet another dead frogmouth in a scattering of leaves. I looked around and there was a young Aboriginal girl standing behind me. She was wearing a white dress and seemed rather shy. I had lived here for most of my life and had never met or even seen her before so I wondered where she came from. She held out a back and said “I will take them away for a proper burial”. I asked her “what happened here?” “All the cars kept going. Some of them even hit the dead bird. You are the only one who stopped.” She went on to explain that the female frogmouth was the first to be hit then the male flew down to the side of his mate trying to help somehow. As the girl watched the second frogmouth was also run down by a car coming the other way. The girl walked out onto the highway and picked up one of the birds and placed it on a bed of gum leaves by the side of the road. Then she went to get a bag to carry them which is when I turned up. We knelt on the leaves and carefully placed both frogmouths into the used onion bag. When it was done the girl stood up with the bag in her hand and then without comment walked off heading for Mooney Point Road. I was left standing there by the paperbarks, quite shaken. It had been an uneasy thing but somehow the girl made it easier to take. I went home with the milk that I had gone out to buy in the first place. Our house was full of people, family and friends gathered for Christmas. I tried to tell my wife what happened although it felt so out of context, a scene from another dimension. I went to my study, closed the door and sat there quietly going over things. Frogmouths are closer to nightjars than owls and are related to both species. They are nocturnal hunters so usually sleep by day. However these two had been run down in the middle of the day. This episode, though that’s hardly the right word, has never left my mind. [Applause] >> TONY BARNSTONE So you guys will help me a little bit. I have to decide whether I want to read about the lion or the gambler. What would you guys like to hear? Well gamblers and gambling. >> TONY BARNSTONE Gambler! OK, so it is. The lion goes away. Well you know you are very far away from Las Vegas, but in Las Vegas one of the casinos is Caesar’s Palace where it is a roman theme with many statues and so on. So this is called, if you’ve got gambling fever, it’s called “The Hundred and Sixty Seventh Song of Elvis”. >> POETRY READING: THE HUNDRED-AND-SIXTY-SEVENTH SONG OF ELVIS Blessed are the marble *** of Venus Those ancient miracles for they are upright and milk white and they point above the heads of the crowd in the casino. Blessed are the crowds that play and whose reflections sway in the polish of her eggshell eyes for they circle like birds around the games and they are beautiful and helpless. Bless the fast glances that handle the waitress. Bless her miniskirt toga and the flame gold scotch and bless the gamblers who gaze at the stage. Remember also the dancer and remember her dance her long neck arched like a wild white goose The tassels on her nipples that shoot like sparks and bless the legs and bless the *** for they are fruit and honey and they are generous to the eyes. Have mercy on my wallet. The dollars I punch into the slots and grace the wheels […] clubs and hearts. Mercy on me too as I stumble as if in a hashish haze watching the reels spin away for I am a blown fuse and I need someone to bless me before it’s too late. Honour the chance in a million, the slot machine jolting the yellow light flashing. Honour the voice that calls “Jackpot” and the coins that crush into the brushed steel tray. For there is a time for winning and a time for losing and if you cast your bread upon the waters you will find it again after many days. Pity the crowd around the blessed winner all patting his back as if it rubs off, this juice, this force, this whatever there might save them from their own cursed luck. And pity the poor winner whose hand claws back into his bucket of coins and who cannot walk away because he would do anything for the feeling he had when the great pattern rose from the chaos of cherries and lemons and diamonds and stars and he knew from that moment he was blessed. >> KATE MIDDLETON OK, so thank you for being here and for wandering with us […] work from others. Earlier today, Bob and I both met Tony for the first time. Tony and I had lunch. We went back to UTS and Bob was in his office there, and I am always fascinated to see how that first conversation with poets goes. So, last year we had a visiting German poet and somehow when Bob and I sat down and talked to him we ended up at […] This afternoon when we all sat down together we were talking about collaborations and musicians and songs verses poetry and Bob started talking about this profile of Bruce Springsteen he had been reading in the New Yorker where the thing that struck me was, in the long run, the strangeness and the weirdness win out and I feel like that is an interesting starting place to talk about poetry because we are always talking about the individual voice of the poet. How has your oddness and weirdness won out Tony? >> TONY BARNSTONE Umm. Freud was hated in his time by the poets of his day because he claimed that the poet was the strange one, the one who was socially inept, the one who could only express himself or herself through, although in Freud’s day it would have been just himself, Freud being something of a sexist, but through the arts. And that art comes out and is inspired by an essential failure of the self. And this was something that many writers of Freud’s day hated to hear. One other thing that Freud said, that I thought was quite interesting, was that one of the interesting things although there is a strong by-path there, a strong off-shoot the poets wrote, that can lead to pathology, that the poet who achieves some sort of renown and fame and so-on, will end up coming back into the fold of society, achieving love, achieving professional success, achieving fame and in the process of doing so, poetry which was a manifestation of a mental sickness or a central failure of self, becomes the way of bringing you back into the fold. So I actually would say that for all of my detestation of many things that Freud did and said, that’s actually a pretty good explanation of me. [Laughter] I was an immensely shy young man. I could speak to a young woman without shaking all over and shivering and my voice cracking. Why didn’t that happen when you met me? [Laughter] >> TONY BARNSTONE Because poetry has saved me! I think that’s probably the best way of putting it. >> ROBERT ADAMSON As soon as she said that about Freud, of course I thought of Plato and his republic. Plato, one of the first things he banished were the poets, dangerous radicals, people who would cause confusion and generally stop the republic from working. But at the same period, no, no different period, 400 years after Christ, Saint Augustine was writing about, he was a poet actually he started off as a poet, and was writing how do I measure things, he was thinking about time and saying that he didn’t really believe in time. He didn’t think there was such a thing and it is very interesting now with the new theories, chaos etc, black holes and all the rest of it, it’s not dissimilar to Augustine’s thinking. And I have asked […] physicists and they say “yeah” and philosophers. He wasn’t too far off. He says poetry is the way you measure time by the foot, by the line, by the meter by the sort of, and I am getting back to the personal relationships. I was terrible at school, I was dyslexic and in those days they didn’t know what that was exactly. This was in the early 50s and I was good at certain things, like English, and I was terrible at mathematics and the headmaster used to think I was willful. He told my parents I was very obviously intelligent and willfully refusing to do the mathematics. And I was in tears when I went home because I wanted to impress my mother but I couldn’t remember the times tables. The simplest things I got backwards. So as time went by, and I couldn’t spell either, as time went by and I started reading, I had some help but I won’t go into that, but I read books word by word and this turned out to be very good for poetry. You read them word by word, line by line, syllable by syllable almost. But then whenever I needed to look up a word to find out how to spell, I couldn’t look up a dictionary because it is in alphabetical order and the same process would happen. But I had read certain books so deeply and carefully that I remembered that to say in certain canter, […] pound or poem by Wallace Stevens, there was a certain word. So oh yeah, it’s in that poem, and I would look up that word and find out how to spell it. It was easier. So you’re doing all that, then the poetry is becoming more ingrained and more ingrained. I was always good at memorising poems. I could memorise long ballads by Tennyson. The things that I couldn’t do, I went the long way around to learn and in doing that, learnt more and more deeply I think. And the thing about Springsteen, Springsteen started off with a band, a cover band, all the bands around New Jersey were he was, were doing this. He said the thing was to be as close to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones as you could be and this wonderful profile, it’s a long essay actually in the New Yorker, the guy who wrote it went back to his early band members and said what was the thing that Bruce had said he couldn’t do it. He was terrible at it. But that’s why in the long run, he found ways around it, that sounded different, that sounded weird. We used to try to cover it up for him but in the long run, 20 years later, he is the one they want to listen to, not the people who are good at copying. I always tell my students try to write a poem like Yeats or T.S. Elliot or […] or whatever, and they say that’s kind of copying. I say, no, you will never be able to do it but in the process you will learn how to do it. Your instinct, your own individuality comes through […] If you’re consciously doing it, there is no worry of plagiarism, especially when you get good poems. >> TONY BARNSTONE One of the things we were talking about before in your office, I think it actually bears here, is that the neurosis, the deep obsessive need at the core of the creative self is what’s necessary to create not just work but a life work. And to discover your multiple voices, I don’t think we have just one voice, and to not just have your single breakthrough but have a lifetime of breaking through your previous level of accomplishments or your previous level of competence. And keep on challenging yourself. If you’re not driven like a mad man, truly like a mad man, as B[…] the great Indian novelist (?)Bharati Mukherjee, says at the heart of all writing is obsession. I truly believe this. >> ROBERT ADAMSON Emily Dickinson says “in all my doubt are my virtues”. Springsteen was was saying he had a very tough life in terms of a family. His father basically wouldn’t speak to him. Well of course all he ever wanted to do was impress his father. His father refused to be impressed. Later on when he became very very famous he has written a couple of really heavy songs about his father. Very critical songs about his father. You’ll know them. And someone, the one that wrote the essay said, asked the father “do you like Bruce’s songs?” He said “yeah, I like the ones he wrote about me”. >> KATE MIDDLETON Well something about that I think that is interesting is when you went to read your poem before, this is all true. Again it takes me back partially to, there are a few different parts to this, because Tony you’ve written a narrative book that is effectively a first novel. So a book like that is ostensibly fiction but you were always trying to get at something true, but you’ve also felt a book added oral testimonies and history and research of World War II that is also a sequence that is using formal materials. And then Bob you were talking earlier saying when Robert Creeley visited you, he picked up what you were writing and threw it across the room, saying, you know “what’s this, Robert Duncan ripoff, stop doing that.. Last night you told me all these wonderful stories. Write those.” So I’m thinking - >> ROBERT ADAMSON I was just telling him anecdotes and wild stories about my teenage years and I had had a few bourbons. And the next day he said “that was poetry”. And I had never been able to think about it as poetry. My poetry was something hardline and […] and referred to many other poems and traditions. This is what I learned from him. As they say, that gave me permission to write about my own life or my own experiences in a particular way. But instead of trying to imitate Robert Duncan and the Black Mountain School poets, I wrote in my own, or an inner voice that was Australian or had Australian accents through it. In that way I understood American, I didn’t understand American poetry, certain American poetry like Ted Berrigan for example. I said to Creeley “oh, I have a lot of trouble with Berrigan, I’m not sure about him, a lot of my friends think he’s the best poet in the world” like John Forbes and others. And he said sit down and I’ll read it to you. When I heard it read by Creeley with all the inflections or the ironies and the American accent, […] became this field of wondrous comment on politics, war, love, everything. It was hearing it. I think you were talking about this […] the difference between writing and reading it out. >> TONY BARNSTONE Look, what Frost says is he doesn’t read his poems, Robert Frost, he doesn’t read his poems. He says them. One of the fascinating things is that so much formal poetry, poetry written in metrical verse, metrics, is poetry that somehow goes away from the vernacular, goes away from the Ted Berrigan or the Robert Creeley. It doesn’t have to. In the American tradition of Frost for example, what Frost brought to it was Vermont accents. How the farmers, his farmer neighbours spoke, and if you read his poems metrically, then the meter will tell you how to speak with the Vermont accent. If you speak with a Vermont accent, you will pronounce his poems correctly and so in other words, it’s not artificial. It’s not mechanical. It’s absolutely organic to the voice. >> ROBERT ADAMSON When you hear actors reading them, they completely destroy those poems, Robert Frost poems, you know, […] poems. I think actors — I would rather hear a poet that couldn’t read very well any day compared to an actor hamming it up or reading it. >> TONY BARNSTONE And yet actors do a very good job with Shakespeare because they are trying to believe the words of Shakespeare. But with poetry they have this other idea, that somehow or other can’t be spoken with belief as something, if I’m speaking to you, I might slip into my Indian accent or might not, but I will speak to you as a human being and that’s how the poem can be spoken, there are many modes. >> ROBERT ADAMSON I have two quotes here from Dickinson, Emily Dickinson says “my wordiness is all my doubt” and the next one is “what I say not, I better say”. She is such a deep thinker. >> TONY BARNSTONE I love that “what I say not, I better say”. In other words I should say but I also say better by not saying it. That’s really great. >> KATE MIDDLETON […] again, and I think those Dickinson quotes - >> ROBERT ADAMSON We had a poet here, Randolph Stow, his most important book of poetry “A Counterfeit Silence”. What a great title. >> KATE MIDDLETON I think though, Dickinson quotes also, sort of harking back to our conversation where we go back to that idea of ripping off what comes out of this oddness and weirdness and the working at length at something. Tony mentioned that it wasn’t until the end of his twenties that he felt that he had some poems that were really poems and at 37 when his first book came out, one you hooked onto poetry as your thing, you were very much there but at the same time you feel like we shouldn’t be rushing our poems because the poems are going to last and wait for the book to be right. One of the thing that you said was facility can be your own worst enemy. So I always think about that in terms of one of the principal pleasures of poetry can be its difficulty and people aren’t very happy to hear that all the time. But I think certainly in the writing of it, in one of the principal pleasures, Tony you were describing your process of how you get to sonnets and villanelles, would you be able to tell the audience? >> TONY BARNSTONE Sure. But before we go, I’ll talk a little bit about the kind of extensive processes I go through which are actually very modernist and experimental to get to something that looks very formal and staid perhaps at the end. But one of the things about difficulty, I feel, is that it can be one of the pleasures. It is a very modernist pleasure, the pleasure of difficulty. I think it’s now a pleasure of itself. In other words, the title of this panel is “composary matter”. If the poem matters then the difficulty is part of the unveiling of the pleasure of what matters. >> ROBERT ADAMSON […] good liner and if poetry should escape the intelligence almost successive. >> TONY BARNSTONE Almost successive. >> KATE MIDDLETON Yeah, we’re not talking about difficulties, not just sort of the modernist […] but the difficulty of the John Donne poem or a Gerard Manley Hopkins or Christopher Smart. There is a lot of challenges there that keep coming up, even just like pure emotion or the simplest statement is a difficulty in its way because it’s deceptive. But, sorry, continue. >> TONY BARNSTONE It’s like a little bit of one of the […] from a sequence of poems in this book, “The Golem of Los Angeles”. I started out with using the technique of Picasso and Marcel Ducham, a ready made technique. What I would call “the assisted ready made”. So the idea is essentially like as Ducham would take a urinal and turn it on its side and write on it “R Mutt 1917” and send it off to the 1917 New York Society of Indepenent Artists as a sculpture in the same way as a photographer might take a picture, he says “why can’t we do the same with sculpture?” “I take something from the world and find it a beautiful form and call it a sculpture.” So that technique, and of course Picasso did the same thing. He created a bull’s head and the bull’s head was made out of the head, the snout itself was a bicycle seat and the antlers were the bicycle handlebars. He put them together and made a sculpture out of that. So my idea is how can you do this with poetry? So I took Nietzche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, took a highlighter, highlighted what I thought were the most interesting phrases and words, typed them into my computer, rearranged them, collated them, added in my own snippets of often-failed poems and put them together and put them altogether into a sequence and then I set it aside for about five years. So one day I’ll deal with this whole Nietzche sequence. And then when I was putting this book together, I wanted to renovate that sequence and so I went into rhyming, no not rhyming, I went into vernacular dictionaries and found the vernacular and the slang of the 1930s gangsters and of current rap artists and began to weave that language into the poems and then finally I turned them into sonnets and villanelles. So you start from Ducham and you end up with Frost and Shakespeare. At the end I have the finished poem. You would never imagine looking at the surface of the poem that it all came from Nietzsche but the origin was kind of processed from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. So that’s a lot of difficult I put myself through. >> KATE MIDDLETON And it’s a long time that process as well. >> TONY BARNSTONE About 10 years. >> KATE MIDDLETON So just thinking about that, in terms of the difficulty of writing a poem if not something that you want to transmit to the reader, so what is the, there are the other difficulties that you can hand over to the reader but you want to take your price tags off so to speak, so that they are like “I had to go through Nietzsche, Ducham and James Cagney etc and Little Wayne to get her” and that Little Wayne was out there running it. >> TONY BARNSTONE Probably not. Well no. What I want the reader to take away is pleasure and my idea is that you want to go through various processes, this is the process for one sequence I wrote, different process for every other sequence I do. Many of my poems are documentary or forms of translation where I’m working from pretext such as the log of Christopher Columbus or oral histories from World War II in the Pacific or my own interviews with veterans and their families or so on. But my ideas that these things are pretext that are under the surface like a ground water that might build up, to dig a well down and drop a bucket into or fish into, as the case may be. So underneath the surface there should be treasures buried, to mix my metaphors, and so the poem itself becomes a thing with pith and depth that nonetheless reads easily on the surface. So you get instant pleasure but reward from re-readings and re-readings and re-readings. So the poem has difficulty but under the surface. On the surface it’s easy and it brings you and it’s humorous, it’s sexy, it’s fun. >> ROBERT ADAMSON It’s like “[…]” and “The Wasteland”, a similar process. And seemingly accessible, they are accessible straight away. >> TONY BARNSTONE “Oh, oh, oh, that Shakespearian rag, it’s so elegant and so intelligent”. People think of Eliot as a dour poet. He was actually hilarious. >> KATE MIDDLETON There is something funny about raps, raps are very funny. I like them a lot. Well I was thinking then your poems are very different. I think a lot of the later work has such a clarity and often simplicity, it brings her a lot of favours, so in […] you had your lozenges to draw on, wondering and […] has been a very big influence on you but I also think of these very almost, in my head they are always “skinny”poems, because I think that even when there is a longer line there is some sort of clarity that punches through. What is the preface for you […]? >> ROBERT ADAMSON It is interesting. You learn a lot about discipline from reading Velichkovsky which is very extreme and severe. But I want my poems to be lucid not only in language in music but in meaning. I came across that at […], we were talking about who was writing poems in the first world war. A bit before that. He was a chemist who had no medicine at all, not even bandages, and he was in charge of […] for wounded men. It was unbearable suffering that he had to deal with and wrote poems out of that. But the poems aren’t heavy. They’re light poems. They are burningly lucid. They are about that subject but sometimes you wouldn’t know that. I have another poet, W S  Merwin who writes about how we are spared. This is to do with, […] poetry matter. This is three lines and it’s very Chinese in a way but it’s very American too. >> POETRY READING How we are spared Admit summer before dawn, and orange light returns to the mountains like a great weight And a small bird’s cry out and bear it up. >> ROBERT ADAMSON It is a mystery. It is very simple clear words. That is very profound and mysterious. Whenever he bows […] he says I don’t know. These poems just come. They’re mysterious and that’s it. There is a bit of that with my new work but I’m just striving for that lucidity that cuts through the darkness of my thoughts. I mean I’m always thinking pretty dark pessimistic thoughts but and I used to be quite nihilistic when I was younger. But after reading a lot of, oh well after reading […] I tried to work out what a soul is let along how to save it. So it is all to do with clarity, understanding, […] but it’s such a complex and profound subject that it doesn’t come out that simple. But the surface must be. >> TONY BARNSTONE Well I was going to say that for me the path, t[…] is very important as well. T[…] I discovered through the great American poet James Wright who worked with Robert  Bly, as part of a movement called “The Deep Image Movement” and their desire was to create something like the “American Imagist Movement”, “R[…] International Movement” where you strove for clarity, absolute precision, like a scientific observation or clarity of the image. But to add to that clarity a surreal archetypal diving inwards, not just the precision of focus outward, but the diving inward to the place of myth and dream where all the images blended together and they had a kind of profundity, an emotional profundity that just a clear image on the outside did not have. So for me the deep desire is to find a way into the Underworld, to kind of go down there. >> ROBERT ADAMSON We didn’t have this planned, but honestly, I had this poem as an example of the subject. I’ll just read it. It’s James Wright. It’s a perfect example of what you have said. It’s a marvelous poem. It’s called “Hook”. >> POETRY READING: HOOK I was only a young man in those days. On that evening The cold was so God damned Bitter there was nothing. Nothing. I was in trouble With a woman, and there was nothing There but me and dead snow. I stood on the street corner In Minneapolis, lashed This way and that, Wind rose from some pit, Hunting me. Another bus to Saint Paul Would arrive in three hours, If I was lucky. Then the young Sioux Loomed beside me, his scars Were just my age. Ain’t got no bus here A long time, he said. You got enough money To get home on? What did they do To your hand? I answered. He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight And slashed the wind. Oh, that? He said. I had a bad time with a woman. Here, You take this. Did you ever feel a man hold Sixty-five cents in a hook, And place it gently In your freezing hand? I took it. It wasn’t the money I needed. But I took it. >> TONY BARNSTONE Great poem. >> ROBERT ADAMSON I think there are lots of things in come with T[…] in there. He doesn’t do the narrative thing but that goes so, as you said, deep into many regions. It could be Orpheus in Hades you know, looking for […] >> TONY BARNSTONE One of the interesting things about — are we talking too much? >> KATE MIDDLETON No, No. >> TONY BARNSTONE One of the interesting things about Wright for me, I love teaching Wright to my students, but what you do as a professor teaching poetry to students is in part, you bring out your Batman decoder ring and you crack the code. So I will crack the code. I will tell all my students exactly what he means when he says, you know “that I stood up in the wind and my bones turned to dark emeralds”. I crack the code because he has a kind of wonderful symbol system that runs from poem to poem to poem to poem. For him the native Americans refer to one thing, the cold seems to another, diamonds to another, the rivers to another, horses to another. So I can give my students the key to Wright. But the problem is, in the process of doing so, I destroy Wright because then what you’ve done is brought the unconscious to the surface, you’ve turned it into the rational and it no longer moves you in an emotional way. “Deep image” is about not understanding it rationally but going deep, deep, deep down into the emotion where poetry matters. So I try to tell my students, “I’m going to tell you how to understand Wright, now go forget it and enjoy him, read him for pleasure”. >> ROBERT ADAMSON That’s wonderful. >> KATE MIDDLETON Well, I really like that and I wanted to talk about it in terms of why poetry matters rather than question why poetry for both of you, in the sense that you have always written a memoir, so the stories that you tell about your own life — >> ROBERT ADAMSON How poetry saved my life! >> KATE MIDDLETON Yes, how poetry saved your life. But you’ve got all these stories that you have chosen to tell in […] form and you’ve chosen to write narratives and also historical material in poetic form. The narrative of World War II is one that we will be familiar with from the films from the history channels, from books. We might not have heard all of your stories, your raconteurship unless you had chosen poetry. What is it that makes you want to tell these stories in verse? And why is poetry the important form or important supplement to what else there is available to tell? Our own stories and the stories that […] in history? >> TONY BARNSTONE Well my answer to that has to do with my feeling, maybe a strange feeling in the world, that poetry is my chosen art and for me I live and breathe it. It’s all I’ve done for most of my life. It’s all I will do until I die, outside of falling in love and being good to my family and being a good friend and so on. But basically poetry is my core. I feel that we as poets have accepted a status of jesters and singers around the edge of culture who might be played like a little MP3 in your Ipad and then ignored. Whereas the true powerful narratives have been given over to the fiction writers, the TV writers and the film makers. This certainly would not have been how the beowulf poet thought of his or her role, of how Dante or Shakespeare or the guild image poets etc, Milton. We’ve given up the idea that poetry is epic, storytelling narrative, important and there is no reason for it except that it is much more difficult to do it in poetry than it is in fiction. Much more difficult to do in poetry than it is in film. And so a lot of my desire in various books, especially for example in “Tongue of War” which is my book of World War II poems that goes basically from Pearl Harbour to Nagasaki, is to try to do something very difficult, which is to say tell the story of World War II in the Pacific, as a film might tell it, from multiple points of view, in dramatic monologue, in sonnet form largely, based on historical research, 15 years of interviews with veterans and their families and oral histories. To take it as seriously as a documentary film maker might or as a historical novelist might and as a way of reclaiming narrative and really for this very key question - “how do you make poetry matter?” Well tell the stories that matter. And also make the stories larger than the lyric poem. The lyric poem is great for what it does but it’s not the only engine of poetry. >> ROBERT ADAMSON That’s interesting. I was talking to my wife this morning about this question and she reminded me that her mother who is now 96, she lived in Budapest in Hungary and she saw war and horror. She heard when she went to Vienna, she heard, you know Hitler, she was only 20 yards away from Hitler speaking from the balcony. I said “what was that like”? She said “it was horrible, I couldn’t look at it” and she kept walking on. But now, she did poetry all her life and in Hungary, poetry is like a Bruce Springsteen concert, everyone goes. I could never get my head around that, that poets could be that popular, the same in Russia. But now she’s 96, she’s got slight dementia and she’s in hospital, she’s on morphine, she reads my poetry and it gives her, because its a distillation of the stories, some of them I’ve done after Hungarian poets, a relative of the family, Janet’s family, Miklos Radnoti, he’s their uncle. I’ve met Radnoti’s wife who is 99. >> TONY BARNSTONE Miklos Radnoti, the great Hungarian poet, whose poems survived the war on his corpse after he had been killed on a forced march and buried in a mass grave. When they unearthed the mass grave they found in his overcoat his last poems written on the march. An extraordinary story. >> ROBERT ADAMSON I have seen a facsimile of that last manuscript. Well we took her to the local shopping centre and I was considering her age, she was 96 or something, Fifi her name is. And I thought oh I’ll just duck in there, it was a parking spot for disabled people. I said “I’ll just duck in there” and she said “look at that disabled, only a criminal would park there”. For other people! She reads the poems because as you said they are distilled, they’re small, they’re powerful, they’re stories, not just mine but others that I have translated. Other friends of mine, one wonderful great Australian artist said as he was dying of cancer, the only consolation he had was reading my poetry and he would send two lines of writing, my own work, in an email and said “this got me through the day”. Poetry matters! Like that was one of the greatest compliments I have every received in a way. It has got to hold people. It’s got to mean something to them that they can’t find in any other medium, painting or music. It is an essence isn’t it. It’s an essence that you need so that you can continue a life that is rich. >> KATE MIDDLETON I mean from that, poetry is an essence that isn’t in other art forms but we were also talking to  […] collaborated in various ways, artists with musicians, you’ve both translated works, I’ve only translated from Latin and there is no new Latin poetry coming out basically, so I can’t […] with that. But that idea that poetry is like on the page with that individual reader has that life when it’s spoken by the right person, like reading Berrigan, and you really get it but it also has that like, in combination with other voices whether they are other poets that you are trying to render in the English language or other art forms, that might make them more accessible to a wider audience who know how to engage with […] . and just needs that little door opened to get through to the poem or knows how to engage with art and just wants that little, that they can look between and say “I can see that connection”. Umm, I was just wondering if you could both talk a little bit about your […], I know Tony is also going to read apparently a sexy poem translated from the Chinese for us. But maybe it’s time for a sexy poem. >> TONY BARNSTONE Sexy poem and then collaboration. OK. >> ROBERT ADAMSON I’ll just say, while you find it, it’s a tradition that was not discovered until later in America and Australia, the European tradition of collaboration with painting and poetry. In America it came back into full force in the Black Mountain College days and continued on ever since. It was around before that but that’s really where it had an epiphany there. >> TONY BARNSTONE And if you start looking around in the modernist painters and poets, so many of them work together. And symbolism, B[…] translating poet having it illustrated by Monet, incredible. >> KATE MIDDLETON Well the most famous example locally, Christopher Brennan and his correspondence with [?]Stephan Mallarme — letters to each other that still exist. >> TONY BARNSTONE So Gabrielle asked if I would read a sexy poem — I blame her. This is from a book called “Chinese *** Poems”. It is 3000 years of Chinese writing about sex and this is called “Secret of the Inner Chamber”. The thing to understand about a lot of Chinese writing about sex is that a lot of it’s symbolic so a “turtle head” is a *** head, a “flower” is a *** and the various honeys and dews are all the *** juices and so on. So, not to do into all that detail, I think you will be able to decipher what is going on here. This is called “Secret of the Inner Chamber” and it’s by Li Shangyin, a late Tang Dynasty poet. >> POETRY READING: SECRET OF THE INNER CHAMBER My flower holds both red dew and white honey Attracting yellow wasps and purple butterflies Different types. By the spring window I sleep in dreams of ***. Next to me in the quilt my husband knows nothing. [Laughter] >> TONY BARNSTONE Now we can talk about artists. >> ROBERT ADAMSON That last line, it reminds me of the last line of that James Wright poem “and I have wasted my life”. >> TONY BARNSTONE Yeah, beautiful. Well certainly James Wright got that technique from the Chinese — he says as much. Yeah. His great influences are T[…], B[…] and the Chinese. >> ROBERT ADAMSON Wonderful translations of T[…]. With collaborations, I worked with my wife June, I’ve lived on and off at the Hawkesbury River all my life, I was a fisherman there and we went to live there over 20 years ago. When we first got there June had started taking photographs of the fishermen and the oyster farmers and all the remnants of the aboriginal civilisation, like rock carvings and all the rest of it. She would bring me photographs in to me, and print up black and white prints in the old way, with silver gelatin and magical chemicals and bring them in and put them on my desk and I would like at these things. My grandfather, who again was 98 at the time, she took his portrait on his trawler. I was looking at these as if I had never seen them before. Things that I grew up with and were part of my life. Seeing the photographs I wrote poems about the photographs, not to go with them especially. I could see these things that I couldn’t take in in real life. In profile it was made into art. It wasn’t the rawness of life itself drawn through Juno’s imagination with life onto the page. So I started writing columns that were inspired by the photographs and we did this book together, it was under Thames and Hudsons and a wonderful publisher called Crossman House, and it was a really popular book. Now the photos are quite old, over 20 years old, they’ve become like historic as well as art. I mean they are art above all, but they are an historic documentation as well. But they are poems I wouldn’t have written from life. I couldn’t have written them without seeing the framework of the photograph, the picture drawn with light. >> TONY BARNSTONE How has been the audience reaction to having the poems and the photographs — does it change? >> ROBERT ADAMSON Yes, very much. People who couldn’t accept the rawness of my early poetry, the ones that I wrote after Robert Creeley incited me to write more raw poetry, the photos were a way in. The photos, talk about lucid and crisp and clear, they would look at the photo and look at the poem and then “oh right”. I think that collaborative spirit of the two people joining gives it more power. I remember talking to Creeley about it and I said “how do you work with artists, it’s very difficult”. He said “yeah I heard Motherwell series of poems we did is […]” and 12 months later he was going “oh your poems are so good, they are so hard to draw things and I’m not up to it”. And Creeley went to visit his studio and walked in and said, there were all things pinned to the wall, etchings, drawings, crayon and charcoal and Creeley said, “that one, that one, that one and that one — put them in”. They just randomly folded them in and it all co-cohered. He said “that’s the way to do it, you don’t have to illustrate it”. Don’t illustrate it. The more you try to illustrate it the more banal it becomes. And that’s to do with abstraction […]  About the edge of abstraction onto traditionally narrative forces that are slightly lyrical. Something […] >> KATE MIDDLETON A space I like to think of is that the “extra-rational” so we always talk about rationality and irrationality that so much of art and poetry especially comes from this intuitive place where rationality doesn’t even apply. So I think about that, that extra rational — you’re not illustrating the poem exactly but there is some essence that comes between those two works that when placed together there is a rightness that is lovely. >> ROBERT ADAMSON I keep coming back to this, it’s what we were saying earlier. You were saying about the students and the James Wright, if you explain it away, it disappears. >> TONY BARNSTONE It’s in comic book theory, I also teach the graphic novel, in comic book theory we talk about it as the “gutter” which is the space between the images and the gutter is the space of the imagination because basically a comic book or a graphic novel is a slowed down film. >> KATE MIDDLETON Or the sonnet sequence. >> TONY BARNSTONE Sonnet sequence is exactly the same. >> KATE MIDDLETON The gutter between you know, Shakespeare’s sonnets. >> TONY BARNSTONE Exactly. So sonnet sequence is a slowed down film as well depending on the sequence and so the idea is that you get the sense if they go by fast enough that seamless motion but if you have the older films which were was it 24 frames per second, then you see the flicker and that flicker is the gutter, the flicker is the place of the imagination that tells you these are images seen in sequence that your brain translates into motion. So the place between the photograph and the poem. >> KATE MIDDLETON Before we read again and hear from you, Tony, can you just tell us a little about the collaboration, how your poems from time of war became music. >> TONY BARNSTONE Sure, happy to. I am working with a number of different artists and doing the three different visual artists and a number of musicians. The music project came from the World War II sequence I was telling you about before. A book called “Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbour to Nagasaki” which was this oral history project. So I worked from a process of translation from the pre-text to the text of the poem and then worked with two musicians. I would give them versions of the poems that had been changed so that all the rhymes which in my book are hidden, they’re enjammed, they’re understated, they’re on and off beat or they’re slant rhymes so that you can see on the page it’s a sonnet but out-loud it is very hard to hear that it’s a sonnet. So it’s essentially approaching the sonnet from a free-verse aesthetic to make it more spoken and more authentic-sounding, more documentary. But in the process of moving to song you have to find the hard rhythms, you have to find the hard rhymes and you have to rearrange it. You have to also find the point in the poem which you are not going to put as the first line or the last line as you would typically do in a lyrical poem. You will find those powerful moments and that will become the chorus. That will become the repeated moment, the emotional core that you keep coming back to. So that’s the short end of it. >> KATE MIDDLETON Well, so I want to thank you both for talking so well and so eloquently and we talked about the importance of the poet’s voice, so we are going to read a couple more poems each and then open the floor for any questions which please do, phrase your questions as questions. But first of all we will hear from each of us again and Tony also has a song from the sequence to play us. So watch this space. >> TONY BARNSTONE And did he move the computer to film? >> KATE MIDDLETON So this is another poem from the Colorado River book which is called the Femoral Waters. It also mentions John Wayne even though they are the only two poems or sections that do. I couldn’t resist writing about Monument Valley that for me being the backdrops seen in so many westerns, probably the most iconically in “The Searchers”. So, >> POETRY READING: MONUMENT VALLEY This labyrinth of emptiness seems […] time Here Wayne strides beneath the breakneck heat At night retreats to lodge. The trading posts are border-manned By partisans of commerce While the land beyond the distance […] yields more barren vistas Upholds and oath of studying light But the emptiness is just a trick A mirage that bites each buzzing mind that longs only to cross it. >> KATE MIDDLETON This I think is entirely trying to explore that intuitive space. I don’t know if it makes sense, but domestic fable after the writer […] >> POETRY READING Think of the troubadours Think of Gatsby Think of the small pink man and his pink box of hands in a gooseberry bush and orange lying in the refrigerator box which has become a home. To think like this is to master a dimming past. Dig and you shall find your own body alive in its shallow arc acting the part of a solemn mourner. Witness the chattering play by play the ball changes hands or a note with the words “[…]” […], the beaded orange heart of an open daisy. It’s not clock time necessarily when it appears and finally comes home. You can’t pay your electric bill, you’re stuck. It is bitter to hear birds dull and interchangeable as postcards. The guillotine hangs over your perfect marble house. [Applause] >> ROBERT ADAMSON I like that one. A black sonnet. Dark humour. Poetry reading in stereo. I wrote this poem in memory of a young poet, Charles Buckmaster. It came back into my mind when I was in Boulder Colorado — it’s in the poem — with couple of other poets. In America they call bird watching “birding”. >> POETRY READING: THE GREAT HAWK POEM, FOR CHARLES BUCKMASTER Birding with Meryl in Boulder The Rockies behind us We all find […] ponds and listen for warblers and talk about great hawks. Evidently they once lived throughout the North Atlantic from Norway to Greenland, Iceland right down to the Gulf of St Lawrence. There were rumours of great hawk in Ireland in our conversation they came pouring out of Jack Collins, the great hawk poem, into the air around our heads Even though long extinct and unable to fly. I mentioned that many years ago there was a poetry journal called the Great Hawk published for a season or two in Melbourne edited by a young poet named Charles Buckmaster. Once it travelled to Sydney and charmed the bookshop people who offered it a sanctuary for a while, Charles spoke of hawk bones discovered in Florida fragments put back together by the archaeologist that mourning the kingfisher of poets. Charles wrote for the lost forest and opened new pages as he walked the streets of Melbourne. Writing back the great hawks. Speaking of branches to sing from. As the growth rings thickened our lives he stretched himself imagining great shoals of pilchards turning oceans silver with hawk food, hawks returning in poems, swimming from the heads of poets into the tides of our words. >> ROBERT ADAMSON They’re like a giant penguin sort of thing and this is a poem that I wrote for Juno, my wife, called the Kingfisher’s Soul.  One of her photographs is on the cover. I said to my publisher in England, I said “is that title OK?”  He said, “yeah, they’ll look into the bookshop window and see “The Kingfisher’s Soul, what’s that? I’ve got to get that, I’ve got to find out what that is”. He was really optimistic this publisher. It’s a love poem. >> POETRY READING: THE KINGFISHER’S SOUL A wave hits the shoreline of broken boulders Explodes, sands into fine spray A fluid wing Then drops back onto the tide The spume of arterial blood Our eyes can be gulled by what the brain takes in Our spirit takes flight each time we hatch sight out Feathers of smoke dissolve in air as we glide towards clarity In the old days I used to think art that was purely imagined could fly higher than anything really Now I feel a small flurrying bird in my own […] A connection to sky Back then a part of me was only half alive Your breath blew a thicket of smoke from my eyes and brought that half to life There’s no evidence, nothing tangible and no philosopher of blood considering the possibilities, weighing up feathers or souls. One day some evidence could spring from shadows and as my body did in rejecting the delicious poisons the lure of dark song. You came with a wind in your gaze flinging away troubles […] laughing at the King of Hell’s command. Don’t look back. You created birthdays and the cheek bones of family I was off gliding through life and my fabrications bought soft cradle. I scoured memories tricks from my own memory It’s shots and scorecards, those ambiguous lyrics. Clear birdsong was not human song. Hearing became nests and chattery vibrations. The purring air full of whispers and lies. I felt blank pages indentations created by images Getting by with the shapes I made from crafted habit. You taught me how to weigh the h[…] of light. There was a bright innocence in your spelling. I learned to read again through wounded eyes, wispy spiders of withdrawal sparked with static electricity across skin, tiny veins, a tracery coppery wired conducting pain to nerve patterns. All lightweights to your blood’s iron. You brought along new light to live in as well as to read with. Before you came whenever I caught a glimpse of my own blood it seemed a waterfall of bright cells as it bled away. Clouds of […] created by its loss became holes in thinking Pretend as safe hatches. You are now a rush, wings through the channels of my coronary artery. We slept together when you conjured a bed in your Paddington tree house,  barbless hours. Peace appeared and said “soon, the future awaits you”. I stepped into the day by following your gaze. [Applause] >> TONY BARNSTONE So I will read a poem from a book called “Sad Jazz”. It is just a novel and verse about a couple who fall in love and get together and get married and fall apart and get together and get divorced and then go through the twelve steps of recovery. So how wild are you? Should I read my prepared poem or will you help me choose one? OK, give me a number from 4 to 104. Twenty seven? OK. This is called the “Audit”. >> POETRY READING: AUDIT The time has come, he never thought would come when he sees her see in him just defects. As if his love is what has kept her down, what once she thought was perfect she rejects. She takes an audit of his qualities, subtracts affection, multiplies distress, and so, in sum, she takes his sun and sees the countless reasons she should need him less. She knows him better than he knows himself so if she finds his love to be oppression, and reads these years of joy as years of lies, then he must turn his mind against himself and see, laid out in infinite regression, his net and gross failure in her eyes. [Laughter] >> TONY BARNSTONE Thank you. I had the original idea that I was going to read a poem from the “World War II” book and then play the song that was adapted from it but actually this is really a book of ying and yang. It is the male and female voices from the war. But I thought I would read a poem from the male point of view and then do a song from the female point of view so that you could kind of get that. This is from the point of view of a US soldier in the 194th Armoured Regiment who suffered what was called “the Bataan Death March” which was when the US Army and the Philippine Army were captured by the Japanese and marched for miles and days to prison camps and along the way they were casually killed in thousands by the Japanese because the Japanese were trained to think that if you actually surrendered you were deserving only of death. That was their military training. And so they were beheaded, they were shot, they were run over by […], they were starved, they died of disease. It was one of the great horrors of the war. This is someone who has survived that process. It is called “At the Retirement Home”. >> POETRY READING: AT THE RETIREMENT HOME I’ve had both knees replaced. I’ve got a steel pin in my hip. I don’t hear you so good, but I’m not stupid, son. How would you feel, surviving the Bataan Death March, no food for days, no water, and the ones who fell behind were bayoneted where they lay, and now you’re marching off to death? Real hell is not old age, though. No, taking away the rights we died for, saying torture’s right, that’s hell. Hand me the iron and those shirts, would you? Thanks, son. As long as I have fight in me I’ll love this country till it hurts. And it does. This is worse than what I saw overseas. Torture. In America. >> TONY BARNSTONE Now I’ll play you a song. [Applause] The song is from the point of view of a US Army nurse who served in the Philippines and she’s talking about the various horrors of war that she saw and how she dealt with it. It’s called “No Time to Cry”, the singer is Ariana Holm. [Song played] [Applause] Thank you. [Audio ceases]