In Memory

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are informed that the following text contains the name of a person who has passed away.

It's almost a year since Charmaine passed, and I want to mark this with a poem that was written at the same time as the sequence I posted for 'CPG' in October last year, after Tracy and I had gone on to Charmaine's birth Country and paid our respects to her spirit and to those of her ancestors. We send Charmaine's family and her people our best and wish to honour her memory, always.

Fringed Lily at Eradu

 

Defies the drift

of clearance

 

and establishes

a zone of intense

 

expression, fringes

vibrating with vocalisations

 

of story and curiosity,

of insect visitation.

 

Afterimages burn

deep to remind us

 

when seasons are forced

to work with the blanked

 

sandplain, to reach

far back into seedbanks,

 

to remember

the flourishing.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

 

Poem in Memory of Poet Andrew Burke

 Belated Elegy

You and I were never close, and likely

thought we knew each other better 

than we could. But we were

familiar with each other, and earlier

spent time in company.

You attended our wedding dinner.

We visited you. In the later

days of my addiction, you were

‘on call’ on two or three or four

occasions. You stayed with AA forever. 

Once an addict... remember.

We published your local poetry

collection, Pushing at Silence. And after

we escaped to Cambridge, there

was an exchange of emails about poetry

and form, about where prosody

might make meaning. 

                                             We can barely

have drifted apart when we were

never really alongside each other.

I felt you weren’t there when I was publicly

under pressure — a bet either

way, rather than ‘all in’, but really

I was searching for something

you were in no position to deliver.

Mea culpa. The lateral drift continuing.

But there was much in common.

And there were moments of wry

humour. I valued your poems celebrating

the everyday, jazz, poetry, the earth... and simply

being. I’ve said little since your passing, 

and now this demi-hymn...

to a friendship of sorts, but of a very

particular sort, wouldn’t you say?

Or would you respond in some jazzy meter: 

read slower... read slower... read slower.

John Kinsella

and see Tracy's elegy for Andrew here.

A farewell memory for poet Andrew Burke

 By Tracy Ryan

Andrew Burke (left) in 2008, with Tracy & John

Nineteen-ninety

in memory of Andrew Burke

 

 

Frank: you were always that.

 

I’ll even admit things treasured but

never shared: the way my late ex-

husband nicknamed you Balzac

and it stuck till I almost said it

to your face, not because

you were prolific, though you were,

but for the half-walrus moustache

you had back then, & the nineteenth-

century boho longhair look,

though it was poetry, not prose, for you.

 

Now: the day I think we first really met:

Three teetotal poets out on a fortnight’s

well-paid country tour of schools, dodging

teacher happy-hours, though you’d

always sit over lemonade in a pub,

letting the dark side down,

trashing the writerly reputation.

 

Collecting me at Midland station, you

laughingly noted your then-wife had

asked around about us beforehand

(me & E.)

& been reassured I was pregnant

& E. was over sixty —

let’s not even gloss it.

 

But it was never like that.

 

On the wild drive through the Mid-West you played

track after track from your full set of The Poet Speaks,

E. upset & sullen in the back seat saying turn it down,

Plath is just not poetry; me, not long turned twenty-six,

wanting those poems blaring on repeat. Yee-ha.

 

You telling me off for over-and-over loud

Sinéad O’Connor on the hotel jukebox,

rooms damp and the tea-kettle full of ants,

asking nonetheless to read the MS

of my first book, and I let you, frail self

you slashed through with that rhythmic biro

till I heard jazz not mine, & arrogant, took on none of it.

 

But what I did learn from you: it mattered —

the way you wrote all detail, each day of the journey,

into your poetry, reprocessed every minute,

poems a mode of living,

regenerating.

Memories of Bill Grono (1934-2022)

Tracy Ryan: Bill was a great encourager of other writers, while shy of admitting that he himself could turn a very fine poem when he chose to. I owe more than one of my first publications, and my first job as an editor back in my 20s, to Bill. Even before that, like others of my age, I learned in school English classes from anthologies he had edited. His influence on readers and writers has been immense. I loved how when the pandemic began he started a kind of email circle for sharing favourite poems, with his usual tongue-in-cheek tone. I think of Bill as always warm, wryly laughing, always ready to share a witty story or an irony, but also as a serious storehouse of information about Western Australian literature and its history. Our family will miss him very much.

John Kinsella: I first met Bill in a non-literary setting, though he wouldn’t have remembered that. But from the time I started publishing, I ran into Bill constantly. Not so much in recent years after he moved to Margaret River, though I did see him at a couple of events down there. Bill was a generous but blunt critic. If he thought something was good, he said so; if not, well he said so as well, but always with a laugh attached that made you feel as if everything was okay really. And it usually was — he would never abandon a poet. He and I had many conversations about Dorothy Hewett and Mick (Randolph) Stow, two brilliant stars in his firmament of friends. He cared deeply about them both, and about their work, and gave much of himself to affirm their work.

 

I dedicated the online anthology of Western Australian writing I did for UWA library to him, and Tracy and I owed him a great debt of thanks for his ground-breaking anthology work when we came to edit the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry a few years ago. I remember a day seventeen years ago, Bill dropped off a sea-chest (no less) full of copies of old Swan River Colony newspaper poetry at York for me to use in any way that suited. He went out of his way to help if he could.

 

I have numerous personal stories of drinking with Bill back in my bad old days, but maybe I would retell them differently in my sober life. They weren’t just snappy stories full of literary-referenced self-irony; they were often empathetic and sometimes deeply personal. One very kind thing... one day, when I was at the bottom of my addiction barrel and living on my own in a flat near UWA in the early 90s, Bill turned up (having heard rumours I was in a bad way) and spent the day with me (drinking, but that was the way it was back then) just to see I got through... and an act made a difference to survival. I am sure I was one of many. Bill and Janet came around to celebrate after Tracy and I got married, bringing a couple of bottles of wine, only to discover I was trying to stay on the wagon, and with the skill of one in tune with the ups and downs of life, Bill said something like, Well, I’ll take care of them!

 

I spent decades trying to get Bill to write more poems, but he said he’d done with that. I believed Bill about everything else, but not that. Even if he wasn’t writing them down, I am sure he was thinking them. Poetry was part of him and he was part of Western Australian poetry’s essence.

 

Remembering the great Russian-language poet Regina Derieva, 1949-2013

Epistle to Regina Derieva

In Memoriam


I’m looking at your favourite icon, Regina,
an icon painted by your husband, Alexander,
an image of ‘The Virgin Eleousa’, made for
Discalced Carmelites, that closed and solitary
order, that retreat to awareness and love
where the self dissolves into complexities
of community, devotion and scripture.
Child born with an old head on young
shoulders, travelling the hard miles
from Kazakhstan to Jerusalem, mapping
houses and families, mapping the godless
and the god-filled, baggage heavy with conversion
but carried over borders, declared at every
crossing: a slippage, a parsing, God loud
in-absentia, those ‘distance measures’,
that tinnitus you don’t want to get rid of.
The stars can be so glib in their night skies,
and yet they keep company, work the light.
In translation your words read our words,
words I am as familiar with as my ‘outdoors’,
the birds and animals and plants I see
and note down — remade to grow a familiarity,
to fly in the lines of an icon, a wry liturgy
of making the days count. You still complete
the space we listen for, that telegraphic
whispering across vastness, so much part
of exile, that much-leavened ‘annihilation
of distance’. I can only say ‘God’ in colours:
the vivid reds, illuminating yellows, defining
blues taking comfort in wrapping the world
as we might know it. But it’s the hands that wrap
around a grave, the hollow we fill with lives;
all our flesh, all our people. My wife was once
a Carmelite postulant across the hottest months,
when fire spread within the walls, rare
bush conserved, or a garden spade was thrust
through a boot, a doctor called from the outside,
laughter at the painful absurdity. You’d
get the irony, the grimness, the art —
beyond a photograph, deep in the icon
where your words came from.


John Kinsella

Demythologising "Diggers"

By Tracy

Further to John’s comments on Anzac Day... I’ve been reading a memoir by the late A. D. Hope (b. 1907), in which he recounts the following story:

“One day I was sitting on a bench in Machattie Park in Bathurst when a man sat down beside me and got into conversation mainly about the war in the desert. His unit was moving north towards Damascus in the final stages of the campaign, he said, and had camped in the sand not far from a small village where there was water. In the morning it was found that a very popular officer had been robbed in the night and was lying in his tent with his throat cut. Sentries had been posted but had not noticed the intruder whose trail in the sand clearly led from the tent and back towards the village. ‘When the body was brought out,’ he said, ‘we all stopped work. Nobody said a word but we all armed ourselves and went in a body to the village, surrounded it, set fire to the houses and shot everybody who came out of the flames.’ ‘Women and children too?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘Weren’t you punished for it?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘That was the kind of war it was. Anyway a few days later we joined the main army and not long after we were in Damascus.’ ‘I can hardly believe that Australian soldiers would do such a thing,’ I said. ‘Well it happened,’ he said...”

The sad thing is that people think any side, on any war, is any different. That’s what war is.

(Quote is taken from A. D. Hope, Chance Encounters, Melbourne University Press, 1992, pp. 38-39.

Introduction

Welcome, all. This is a dual blog by poets John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan. We intend to talk here about many diverse issues from poetry through to politics and anything else that takes our interest from day to day.

We are both committed, long-term vegans and pacifists, and John has called himself an anarchist since his teenage years. He is a strong believer in community living, decentralisation and living without the intrusion of the State. He has developed a term or a theory he calls "umbrella anarchism", which he uses to denote coexistence with the State while not condoning the activities of the State, with a view that eventually the State will dissolve through its own inadequacies, injustices and oppressions. He feels that consensus is the basis of any just community.

Further to this, he considers himself an international regionalist (his term), which in essence means he proposes international conversations between places, while respecting regional integrity. He is a deeply committed environmentalist and activist who aims to decrease human intrusion into the "natural world".

He believes strongly in indigenous land rights around the world.

Tracy writes fiction as well as poetry, and shares John's environmental and political concerns. She has a background in language studies and is keenly interested in all things related to language-learning, translation and linguistics in general. Consciously feminist since reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in her twenties, she continues to be interested (though often with disillusionment and frustration) in feminist writings and ideas. As a mother of two, she is also preoccupied with how we might equip children to survive in an increasingly damaged and disordered world. She has a passion for vegan cooking, especially baking, and for understanding vegan nutrition.