First poem from long ago, in memoriam Mhairi

By Tracy

These poems were not written "in memoriam" but during the course of the friendship, and were published in Hothouse (2002/2006). I never thought to be posting them so long after, and in such circumstances. I just learnt that Mhairi passed away in the UK last month. She was a gifted poet as well as pianist, a film buff, and a savvy winner at all board games.

She was also a fluent speaker and avid reader of French, and a half-dozen of the best French novels I have on my shelf here at Jam Tree Gully were gifts from her, because she loved to give presents.

The first poem takes a line from a beautiful DH Lawrence poem, which ends "in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past".

Piano

Small walls and the furniture

too large, as in a dolls’ house,

or a Dutch interior

the swollen disproportions

of a dream;

a baby grand and you playing

Bach and Satie

as my grandmother played the Polonaises

and my mother the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata

suddenly the hunger

to pick it up again, dropped stitch,

to let fingers go as they know because

it was trained into me

every morning

or because I was born to it

and let it go, wasted and taken for granted

like water; this our idiom

I’ve abstained from

out of some foolish notion

of imperfection, forgetting the pure pleasure

the insidious mastery of song

that makes the child’s heart beat faster

as I stand there

wordless but listening

with my arms around her

in the chill spring.

                                                   —Tracy Ryan

Review of Paul Kelly's 2017 album/CD Life is Fine

            by John Kinsella

Life is Fine is a great album — that is, if we agree such accolades can be applied to a creative project, then it is certainly true of this one. It’s so solid, and compacted, and yet full of easeful flow and even patience against barriers of tension and confrontation. No technical ragged edges in terms of its construction — not that there's anything wrong with ragged edges, but this album is musically tight and lyrically perfectly co-ordinated — yet it still has elements enough of rawness and ‘the occasion’ to give a fresh and tuned-in immediacy.

Four of the songs were co-written with Bill Miller, and Kelly is always in collaborative synch with the musicians he works with, sharing a vision. That’s what I respect so much about him — his open ear, open mind, and enthusiasm for sharing and discovery. And given that the title and the lyrics of the title song come from African American poet Langston Hughes, the complexity of irony and affirmation  might be lost in the cultural transfer/borrowing, but Kelly is a culturally sensitive and respectful artist who listens and connects without appropriation, his music in dialogue with the original text rather than leaning on, taking, or extracting. Kelly’s is an art of moral integrity as well as a rocking and swinging engagement with the spontaneity of music, and the moment. And he understands the drives of poetry like few other musical performers, singer-songwriters.

If there are ragged edges, they are emotional and creative and fully engaged with; they are in(side) the self battling to find the positive, to keep on top of life — never easy. Those personal ‘ragged edges’ are kept vibrant and dynamic by the superb containment field of the harmonies, of the lead lines, of the shapes of music as a whole. There’s a real literary sense of form in this.

What really makes it occasionally grungy and always tough, even in its ‘sensitive’ personal moments (we might actually believe his love songs!), is the fact that 'trouble' is always close by, that a fall is possible, that the persona knows the threat. We don't know if a crisis will be avoided, we don't know the persona won't 'embrace' it or fall to it, but we go with 'his' hope, we travel the road with him, sail the waters, keep our head above water. We're all okay, too, but only just. Or just maybe. We have to be, we have to try in the face of. And only just is enough to cling on to — the only quota of optimism we can have. Which, strangely, makes the album a celebration of life, love, and survival. In a world of oppression, Kelly offers possible ways out, but all of these are inevitably fraught, zigzagging their way through existence. Langston Hughes knew about oppression big-time, and yet he revivified the word, and in the many threads of the Harlem Renaissance we have confrontation and joy at once, a taking-on of the inequities, injustices and downright wrongs with energy, life, creativity, and optimism in the strength of black Americans in the face of segregation. Hughes could also see the fetishisation of black culture by white culture, and wrote texts that resisted marginalisation, that claimed space for themselves and African American people and culture. Listening to Kelly, one can feel assured he knows what all these mean. The implications.

For me, the essence of Kelly’s album, and maybe a lot of his work, is that on the edge of collapse we find beauty, we survive, and there’s hope. And we flow with the extended metaphor of water generally — ‘waving not drowning’, but also Odysseus wandering his slow and contested way home. Though this album is really something of an 'epic', it’s not an overblown one, never. It’s too minimalist for that. A paradox of richness and constraint. Here’s an artist adept at the idiom, who speaks to the world in a consciously ‘Australian language’, and is comfortable doing so. Nothing contrived about it.

We might admire the album’s shifts from swinging rhythm to foreboding — the keyboard/s really make that work so well. Luscombe's drums/percussion are constrained, but you feel they might let loose — calm before a storm, which is held back. Instead, they taste of the air after rain (and sound of it). Perfect drumming — never in excess. And the bass lines and keyboards selective and generous at once. The guitar/s live between lead and rhythm, between the strum and the pick, and speak as much as the words they are in dialogue with. Liminal stuff! A true conversation of poet and instrument/s.

Let’s admire the 'natural' feel of the recording all the more in the context of this controlled sound. There's nothing pat or formulaic about it, and even the Homeric stock epithet of 'rosy-fingered dawn' is given new life — an accomplishment. It lifts onto the screen!

Kelly is a 'master' of the lyrical segue into key, lifting the word to the music, and more vitally, the music to the word. This is the toughest balancing act — maybe only a 'lifelong' practitioner lyricist/poet/composer can achieve this 'balance'. It's exciting to listen to — the lyric in dialogue with the music, the harmonies offsetting. He achieves a contrapuntal drive with a haunting, sometimes frightening beauty (‘I Smell Trouble').

The Bull sisters are in sublime form on Life is Fine, and 'their' songs are on playback loops in my head. And 'petrichor', one of my favourite words, is given life as the word itself (Russian formalists' ostranenie at work - brilliant!), and Kelly actually gives words odour — you can smell and see the texture of the land. This sensory explosion is subtle, building, and actually exciting in an epiphanic way — that's what makes a love song something else... it’s what makes it universal poetry, yet also so personal. That's the key to this album of slippage between self and society — the individual expressed against a collective, greater world. A lyrical vocabulary of encounter in which the texture of strings is strong, forceful and yet forgiving as well. It also beautifully escapes gender-prisons in surprising ways — as we glissade from one verse to another, as we bridge to the outside world.

And yes, play it loud (as was suggested to me), which in that paradoxical way also emphasises the quiet moments, the moments of witness and encounter, the seeing of the rising moon together. Every song builds lyrically and musically and remains self-contained while reaching out to others songs on the album, like a book of interconnected stories, like a narrative poem. Something of the epic in this, but broken down, and with the delicacy (and intensity) of the seasonal haiku. A polyphonous cultural experience. A musical interlude in a time of crisis. 'Life is fine' — we don't need to jump, even if we are compelled to consider the pressures around us. Resurrection in this, but also the wonder and complexity of spiritual and pragmatic strength. A cycle of songs that respects the space in which it is created — so much rests on the decisions we make. I find it particularly interesting how the persona of the songs doesn't name or know the names of, say, species of birds and trees, but likes to hear them said by someone close. This essence of connection with place is in the vicariousness.

So, maybe it’s Paul Kelly’s masterpiece, or certainly one of them. I re-hear ‘I Smell Trouble’ and the album’s themes haunt and disturb me all over again. Song after song accumulates — and for me, that’s the essence. The album as a whole. The many Kelly moments across the years I cherish are distilled here in one way or another, and then take us elsewhere — from the vocalising spirit of The Merri Soul Sessions to the energy embodied in, say, the bluegrass reversionings and surprises of Foggy Highway (Paul Kelly & The Stormwater Boys), and all the rest of that wondrous song writing poem-making that Kelly weaves in and through his music. This is an album of embodiment. And the final song, ‘Life is Fine’, a setting of lyrics, as noted, by Langston Hughes, takes us into the depths of trauma mediated by the desire and intensity for living: ‘I could’ve died for love/ But for livin’ I was born.’ And Kelly’s setting is a reply and a dialogue with the Hughes lyric — Kelly respects and connects, and never misrepresents or makes false claims. Kelly is adept at making music around pre-existing poems — his fusions are generous, comprehending, and, as said, respectful. In loss we confront extremes and we come out of it calling for life!

But don’t think for a moment that this album doesn’t have moments of levity — it does. As any journey across land or water requires — shifts in tone, the light and the heavy, the aware and the surprised. It’s a work that lives outside its packaging, even its form — it reaches into lives via experiences of life. It lives, it rocks, it sings, it critiques, it respects, it surprises, it survives.

Rilke on Music and Breath

By Tracy


John likes to have music playing in the background when he writes; I can't. I have to have silence.

We've both often written poems inspired by or about music, as have many other poets.

Rilke wrote several poems about music: here is a translation of one of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

To Music

Music: breath of statues. Perhaps:

stillness of pictures. You language where languages

end. You time,

who stand perpendicular to the way passing hearts go.

Feelings of whom? O you the changing

of feelings into what? —: into audible landscape.

You foreigner: music. You heartspace that’s

outgrown us. Our innermost

that, exceeding us, expels us —

holy farewell:

while the inside surrounds us

as the most skilful distance, as the other

side of air:

pure,

colossal,

no longer habitable.

         trans. Tracy Ryan

One of the most basic challenges of translating is the simple yet heavily polysemous words that can tilt a poem one way or the other. 

In the poem above, I chose "stillness of pictures" for Rilke's "Stille der Bilder". Stille in German means both stillness (lack of motion) and silence — the translator might go with either. 

Likewise, Bilder could refer either to literal pictures or to mental images. So the reader of German gets both (all) resonances; the translation's reader gets a narrowed interpretation. 

In this case I went for "stillness of pictures" because of the preceding literal reference to statues, and because of the assonance; however, the English-language reader thereby loses the idea of silence pertaining to music, and of the mental image (though pictures might suggest them).

It's not a matter of the choices here being right or wrong; all translations are in a sense provisional and incomplete insofar as they convey any "original". 

Of course it's also not a case of there being only one or two polysemous words — all language has this lovely problem — but often a poem is built around the charge of a particularly ambiguous word or two.

There's a similar apparently "simple" hinge-word in the following poem. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus Part 2

1.

Breath, you invisible poem!

Outer space always purely

exchanged for our being. Equilibrium

in which I happen rhythmically.

Single wave, whose

gradual sea I am;

you thriftiest of all possible seas, —

gaining of room.

How many of these points in space were already

inside me. Many a current of air is like

a son to me.

Do you recognise me, air, you full of my past places?

You, once smooth bark,

curve and leaf of my words.

         trans. Tracy Ryan

The hinge-word I'm thinking of here is Blatt in German, both leaf and sheet (as in a sheet for writing on). The German text has clearly set up the plant associations with bark, curve, leaf, but though the English "leaf" can also refer to the page of a book, it doesn't sound quite as strongly for both senses in English. That is, when the reader sees it in English, it doesn't seem to stand quite as clearly as both tree-leaf and leaf written upon.

Working on translations (and especially revisiting them) is a great way to hone one's consciousness of this "problem" -- it's a problem that's really a gift.

Trying something new

By Tracy

Last week I heard novelist and musician Willy Vlautin talking on the radio from the Sydney Writers' Festival, and decided to try one of his books.

I wanted to partly because I get tired of novels limited to privileged or middle-class characters, and he's more interested in what reviewers keep calling "the dispossessed".

He's published three novels -- Planet Books only had two of them. I wasn't that interested in the new one, Lean on Pete, because of the horse-racing motif, so instead I chose his second, Northline (Faber and Faber, 2008).

It's a fast read. At first I found it quite annoying -- too much dialogue, phrasing too staccato for me, and the sense that the so-called "low-life" aspect is self-consciously on display for the reader. I couldn't tell if it was simply over-edited, stylistically, or if it was running on the assumption that people can only read very, very pared-back flat language. Some great writers of course have used a simple approach to style, but here it's frequently clunky, stilted.

Yet I kept reading, and it grew on me a little: there's a strong sense of compassion in the novel, and although it veers into being too sentimental (the Paul Newman fantasy-sequences, for one), it does leave you with a distinct feeling of atmosphere and some memorable characters.

Not the protagonist, however -- Allison -- who seems, perhaps intentionally, little more than an outline. It's the people who befriend her on her desperate downer -- like Penny, who trains her in phone sales, and Dan, a trauma survivor -- that seem vivid and durable creations.

The story is set in Las Vegas and Reno, among the drinkers, gamblers and workers of those places (Vlautin comes from Reno, according to the radio interview, though he now lives in Oregon).

He's singer-songwriter with the band Richmond-Fontaine, and there's a soundtrack for the book too.

All in all a bit disappointing -- certainly not the new Steinbeck or Carver that publicity led me to expect -- but still not a bad read.

Bad, Botched Brel (but still...)

By Tracy

Smitten as ever with le grand Jacques, but rarely getting time to listen these days, I finally succumbed and borrowed the DVD of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris from Planet Video in Mount Lawley last week.

Can’t say I wasn’t warned – apart from a few fanatics who must be tone-deaf or very tolerant, almost every online review I read had stressed how awful the film was.

It’s not Brel singing – though he does make a brief appearance to sing Ne me quitte pas at one point in the film. It’s the filmed version of a stage show built around translations – sometimes complete makeovers – of a clutch of Brel’s songs into (American) English.

We saw the Perth version of this stage show, minus some of the numbers, two years ago, with much better singers and far greater dynamism – a production to mark the 30^th anniversary of Brel’s death. It did, however, downplay the politics and was more about pure entertainment. The original play dates from 1968 and even in the later film you can see many of the political and social concerns of that time being alluded to or openly referenced in the way the set of songs has been stitched together.

Some of the translations are quite good, or at least quite in keeping with the spirit of the Brelien universe. Some are weak.

The film dates from 1975 and feels at least as dated as that, or more. It’s as if the filmmaker was trying to cross Godspell with Hair  and Rocky Horror, and run it through the sieve of a chaotic Andy Warhol production.

That on its own wouldn’t bother me – chaos being okay to some degree, and representative of what they were trying to say about the world.

But the voices of the singers in this film version were unbearable to me. And I don’t think it’s just the inevitable mental comparison with Brel himself – Elly Stone is simply too shrill for my liking, and the others watery and wobbly. (I did find Stone's rendition of Marieke quite moving, but I suspect it was the translation and the melody itself. Here is Brel's.) Voice styles change, go in and out of fashion – some seem to transcend that, as Brel's does, but not these. I tried just watching the versions of my own favourite songs, but it was painful.

Still, I put myself through it. And survived to tell the tale. One for desperate fans only (if then). 

 

 

What I'm reading...

By Tracy

Not much else is happening, because poor Tim is still sick, and we're a bit housebound. We'd hoped to take him to the Model Railway Show over this long weekend, as we've been twice in past years, but even without the tonsillitis, Perth's weather would be a bit daunting: around 40mm of rain in a day -- we spent most of the day on edge checking the radar to be prepared if it hit up here in the wheatbelt, but nothing doing. (Not that I'm complaining -- I am no fan of storms.)

So we still have light to read by (apparently 20,000 homes across Perth lost power today, though most had it restored), and this is what I've been dipping into:

The new (very new, just launched on Thursday night) anthology from the Fellowship of Australian Writers' WA branch, Lines in the sand: new writing from Western Australia, edited by Glen Phillips and Julienne Van Loon. There are too many highlights to list here, but they start from the very first piece, Liz Byrski's unforgettable "The Man Who Wasn't There", about those who returned facially disfigured from WWII and the way in which they were treated -- in all senses, medically, socially and emotionally -- in the town of East Grinstead, Sussex, which was also the town of Liz Byrski's childhood, so there is a personal angle to this reportage.

I also appreciated Carol Millner's short, deft prose-piece, "Say World", understated and yet so telling, about a mother's migrant experience re-examined by her grown daughter. Apparently this story had previously won the Joyce Parkes Writers' Prize, sponsored by the Australian Irish Heritage Association, and "aimed at promoting and encouraging women as writers in Australia", with Joyce Parkes herself as patron.

And a real coup for the anthologists is the brief but warm memoir of the late Dorothy Hewett (here's an interview with Dorothy from Jacket magazine) by her sister Lesley Dougan.

Other reading: The Australian Book Review -- the February 2008 issue which I picked up in Canberra because I had somehow missed it, and because it contained a prize-winning essay by Rachel Robertson whose talk at the Canberra conference I had also missed. (Rachel Robertson also has a short story in the FAWWA anthology, and I'm glad to have come across her both in person and in print. I look forward to reading more of her work.)

And last but not least, an unexpected (came in the mail) and beautifully produced short work by Lee Ranaldo (musician, poet, artist, member and co-founder of Sonic Youth) and multimedia artist Leah Singer, Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt. I picked it up to browse last night, and couldn't stop reading till I'd finished it. It's about time spent in 1995 with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, who it seems were the first "world music" group, and who'd been visited and apparently used to make a record by Brian Jones in the 1960s, as well as by Mick Jagger a couple of decades later (I didn't know about any of this because, unlike John, I'm not familiar with this strand of modern music history, so came to the book with no particular expectations. John has been saturating himself lately with Sonic Youth rarities, and intends to blog them further down the track.).

This little work is a detailed and sensitive account of an intercultural meeting-through-music (or meeting-in-music), complete with photographs, with a wonderful sense of sharing and open-hearted exchange on the part of the locals and the visitors.

Fairly obsessive #2 ?

By Tracy

Tim (5) has been off school with tonsillitis this week, but it hasn't stopped him singing around the house (hoarsely at times) all day long (and pretty well into the evening until bedtime too).

He's more Brel-addicted than I am now, and the acquisition of a Brassens CD was not so much a question of passion as of trying to "diversify" -- not to wean him off Brel exactly, but to get some relief from repetition... he has been in the habit of doing full-on Brel tribute performances (complete with gestures and facial expressions) for months now, and we need a little variety.

He did this with Syd Barrett for a long time too -- Syd is his earliest hero. While still a baby who couldn't talk sentences, Tim would chime in with the end-words of every line of every Barrett song. All of us in the family love Syd Barrett -- but you can have too much of a good thing...

Anyway, he likes the Brassens -- especially "Chanson Pour L'Auvergnat" and "Je Me Suis Fait Tout Petit" -- and is quite smitten with a short DVD of old Edith Piaf performances too, even to the point of incorporating one or two of her numbers into "his" routine.

But he still maintains (and I have to agree) that Brel is superior to both.

Already with Brel I have to watch some of the lyrics (for a 5-year-old!) as he can be quite risqué -- but Brassens goes even further, to the point of satirical obscenity (in order to condemn other kinds of obscenity, for example in "Le Gorille", which was banned in France for some time). They are, nonetheless, very clever.

We've also spent time making little books which I stitch together, Tim illustrates, and I fill with the words he tells me to put in. (He can write, but only slowly, so that's expedient.) He is very smitten with this process and told me yesterday, "I am a real illustrator" as he went to put his book alongside all the "real" books in his room.

Speaking of the written word, I've been enjoying -- insofar as you can enjoy anything when your child is sick -- the new issue of Meanjin, especially some of the prose, which includes a striking story by Robert Drewe, a bizarre piece of memoir from Pip Proud (disappointingly disparaging and brief in its mention of Dransfield) and an article on matters Austenesque by Laura Carroll.

There's also a snappy piece of memoir -- "Full Immersion" by Vanessa Russell ("on growing up with the Christadelphians"), which particularly drew my attention because my own novel about evangelical Christians, not Christadelphians but Baptists (Sweet), has gone off to the printers and is due out in September -- to be launched at the Big Sky Festival in Geraldton. So my thoughts have been "immersed" in that sort of material for a while now.