Southern Edge

End of the world

2011-05-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

With prophesies of rapture capturing the attention of many this weekend, I've resurrected "End of the world" from my archives. Inspired by an article in the West Australian, "End of the world" won the 1992 Tom Collins Poetry Prize and appeared in Shorelines: three poets. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995.

End of the world

Thousands of South Koreans spent yesterday preparing for the end of the world.

The West Australian, 29 October 1992

She was going to Heaven with her suitcase.

Before the scheduled departure,

she’d been to an abortion clinic.

The foetus had to go –

it had a potential for submitting to gravity.

She’d left a cluster of cells

in a bucket by the door

for the architects of flood and famine

to collect on credit for Christ.

Before midnight, she’d cleansed her skin

curled her hair, shaved down from her legs –

paying detail to the area around her ankles

from where Mercury’s wings would sprout –

ironed her halter-neck dress so her shoulder blades

would be bared for the promised explosion of feathers.

She bled still, wondered if rapture

excluded sanitary precautions.

Waited for midnight,

the pain in her pelvis dulling over time.

She’d left food out for the cat,

fed the dog for the final time,

left the last of the supper dishes

soaking in the sink.

Her strong-box brimmed with the word of God

but she’s seen the painstaking hands of time

overtake midnight twice,

checked her diary and the stages of the moon.

She’d got that part wrong once before

but does rhythm equate with rapture,

with the riot police outside her house,

with a foetus in a galvanised pail.

Beyond the kitchen window,

with its appliquéd café curtains

and wind chimes,

the horrors of the world

have overtaken ecstasy.

In Seoul, an angel is bleeding

over the soft blossom of singing pinions

budding from her ankles.

The Chook Poems

2011-04-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

Recently, after a friend, Sarah, experienced an attack on her flock of hens by several stray dogs, I promised her I would post my chook poems here.

The chook poems were written a long time ago. Many of them appeared in my first published collection (with Michael Heald and Roland Leach) Shorelines: three poets Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995 (now out of print). Before Shorelines "Mangiare alfresco" (1992), "The Thursday Fox" (1993), and "On finding white feathers" (1994) were published in the Weekend Australian back in the days when Barry Oakley was the Literary Editor there. Barry gave me one of the nicest compliments I have ever received when he said: "I just can't resist your chook poems."

"Mangiare alfresco" recently received new life when it was selected for WritingWA's"22"

The chook poems worked their way into my life at a time when my family and I lived in the Perth hills. My writing desk was located in front of a huge window that looked out onto our backyard, a bush block, with our flock of free-range hens (and the occasional wet rooster) parading by. During that period of time we nurtured several households of chooks, loving them, and grieving for them when sickness, old-age, or fox/dog-attack decimated our flock. Valuable lessons were learned. Along with the large doses of humor that arise from sharing your life with a hoard of feathered individuals, the simple, cruel tragedies of the backyard crept into those being enacted by the larger world around us. For example, in "The Thursday Fox", the story of Bobbie Cullen, a student at Curtin University and a victim of domestic violence who died when I was pursuing studies in creative writing there, seeps into a poem about a fox attack I've never forgotten: the dark, tortured night when I, with my son, Clifton – who was only about 10 years-old at the time and very, very brave – ran blindly around in the bush trying to save our hens ahead of the fox coven committed to beheading them a step ahead of us.

Woman at Desk with Writing Space

Her writing space is in her head, sleeping,
hiding between its cotton sheets, it goes
snug in the place behind her ears and eyes.
Sometimes it’s there when she’s away: sitting
on a bench at the lake, in a clearing
in the woods, on logs in the chicken run –

once – amidst a herd of cows. Would it run?
It wouldn’t jump-start! She suspects sleeping
was on its mind. More commonly, clearing
its throat loudly, it is in her car. Goes
skidding around corners, sighing, sitting
frozen at stop signs. Blue lights in her eyes.

It fires over dirty dishes, its eyes
running with onion’s scent, but daily runs
leave it puffed in the driveway or sitting
exhausted in her chair. When she’s sleeping,
hand in hand with dreams - no spare room - it goes
about dusting cobwebs, firebreak clearing,

washing the floors for visitors, clearing
fog from the bathroom mirror. To its eyes,
her desk is a mess but it likes it. Goes
cursing to the landlord: its stockings run
catching on splinters from her page - sleeping
cat on cushion. Her writing space, sitting,

jumps when the phone rings, hides away, sitting
on the edge of the curtain rail, clearing
its line of sight to catch the deep-sleeping
trailer with its overflowing cat’s-eyes,
beer cans, bike tyres, junk, time for a dump run
with leaves. The rake that broke yesterday goes,

says her writing space. And as the sun goes
down, its rays highlight the paper sitting
on her desk with coffee rings. A dry run
to the chook yard with scraps, her mind clearing
ashtrays, dust from the keyboard. Her space eyes
the livestock’s feathers, ruffled from sleeping.

Out the window it goes, to the clearing,
hens sitting, scratching, blinking lidded eyes -–
writing space on the run: writer sleeping.

Boy
For Clifton

The boy in the paddock
down the road
has frost on his eyelashes.

His hen was paralysed, dying.
He’d placed her in the nesting box
near the morning’s eggs,
and closed her eyes
against the sunlight.
He cried on his way back through the trees –
‘Spider webs in my eyes.’

The boy is watching the henhouse –
breath, making mist, trails
through the railings of the gate.

Mangiare alfresco

He’s a featherbrain,
a feather duster. He’s been caught
feathering his own nest.

He’s a rooster stalking up
and down the chicken run.
Shut-in bird bedraggled by rain.

He’s stalking up and down
the fence. Black and white.
Not soft. Wet. Stringy.
Water bonds feathers to bone.

At the corner of the yard, he turns,
tail feathers, like bridal trains
behind him, duck and follow.

A parson’s nose. He’s a parson’s
nose in a baking dish
bubbling in his juices.
Crisp. Brown. Salty on the serving
dish. On the counter.
The parson’s nose. First to go.
Next, drumstick.

His huge legs stalking featherbed.
Feet, up and down in the mud, march.
Disappear. Appear. Turn.
His voice an angry buck, buck. No crow.
No breeze. Christmas kitchen dish.

The roast, the hot, hungry
trace of basting Buff Orpington.

He stalks, walks like a Sergeant Major,
round and round the chopping block,
around the axe.

On Finding White Feathers

In the corner of the shed,
my favourite: a small, white Silky hen -
found in a nest of wings and straw -
quite dead.

She was a good breeder.
I relied on her
to increase the flock,
now she’s decreased it - by one.
She’s the fourth this week.

I’ve lost an English Game Cock,
a Bantam and a Plymouth Rock
crossed with something else.
Some days there is a body,
sometimes none.

A hole under the fence
of the chicken yard
can mean one more in my garden,
I am making compost with feathers.

I’ve closed their door for the night,
a log, new-felled, pressed firmly against it.
I stack rocks around the wire
jamming my hand between them,
lose skin, bleed.

Loss pierces my swelling thumb –
it is sharp as the swift yellow beak
of a small, white hen hoarding eggs.

The Thursday Fox
for Bobbie Cullen

The rubbish truck’s late again. It’s Thursday.
A fox has breakfasted on the hens. Eggs
and laying pellets combined, a kind of
hybrid omelette on the floor of the coop.
And the garbage bags, Glad, on the road verge
are full of headless chickens, and I hate

the way the fence collects loose feathers, hate
hens for losing their heads on a Thursday.
Midday, and I wash dishes on the verge
of tears. Outside: cat, striped yolk-yellow egg-
white, with magpie carnivals from tree. Coop’s
so empty. Their shadows blend, a kind of

melting: the bird, the cat, the wire, and of
steam, dishwater, window rivulets. Hate
the way soapsuds dry my skin, my flesh cooped
up, this body-house. Rubbish, next Thursday,
will be dull compared to this – fertile eggs
and guillotined bodies wait on the verge,

and will I know what’s missing next Thursday?
Will I wake, alone, sense the absence of
rooster crow, my body between sheets – eggs
absent from pantry, and summon up hate
for fox? Whose hands held the axe on the verge?
Not mine, they’re dry, no evidence. The coop?

Lock up? Convert to vegetable patch? Coop
with cucumber, marigolds on the verge,
pumpkins like perfect golden suns. Thursday-
time: a battery-driven clock which speaks of
bed-making rituals, detergent, fox-hate
congealed on towels. No slow breakfast, no eggs

for cakes or child-delight. No scrambled eggs
on toast, no Sunday brunch, no walks to coop
with scraps – no clustering, dumb birds. I hate
the way soap-suds dry my skin - but verges
and cats crouch over their slack bundles of
feathers. It’s a white, black and white, Thursday.

No hens hoarding eggs. Silence verges on
the grasstrees, vacant coop. The silence of
the graveyard now, after the Thursday fox.

A Letter to my Chooks

Please don’t poop on the doormat.
When you wake at 4am –
and the moon floats
on a luminous cloud –
please don’t practise the lyrics
of your favourite songs.

My aspidistra was placed outside
for sunshine – not for you.
Your menu consists of laying pellets,
kitchen scraps and wheat.

The seat, my seat, situated outside
the front door, catches the first
of the morning’s rays. I enjoy
coffee and newspaper in that chair.
Please inform the rooster, the cocky one
with the crooked spur, not to perch there –
evidence is difficult to discover in the dark.

Yours faithfully seems a token gesture
when my fine new boots, and Levi’s , are wet
and pegged on the clothes line
in the moonlight.

I’ll mail this letter in the morning –
nail it, in fact – with recipes for à la King
and cacciatore, to the handle of the blunted,
rusted axe leaning against the woodshed door.

Golden Orb

2011-04-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

Photograph by Shannon Brandt, Geraldton WA, 2010

Foreshores

2011-03-15T00:42:00.000-07:00

Last night, I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the image of the Japanese tsunami hitting the Sendai foreshore. I was at a gonging session, surrounded by mood music and lighting, gongs, drums, bowls, everything focused on relaxation and meditation, but I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing black water.

Since Friday night, when I first heard the news, I have trawled the Internet, newspapers and television for updates on how this terrible situation has affected the Japanese people. I’ve saturated my psyche with images of those terrible waves.

Coming after three months of natural disasters - the big freeze in the northern hemisphere, floods, cyclones, bushfires and the Christchurch earthquake - now there is another earthquake, tsunamis, volcanic eruption and nuclear power stations near melt-down.
We don’t just get the news, it’s repeated over and over and over again until we, too, are overwhelmed, inundated, the waves coming in on us.

2009-12-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

William Yeoman's article on Ross Bolleter and Piano Hill from The West Australian Tuesday 1 December 2009 is at:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/-/entertainment/6535495/music-springs-from-ruins/

Piano Hill

2009-11-30T04:33:00.000-08:00

I’ve known Ross Bolleter for many years and I was absolutely delighted to be invited to launch his latest collection of poems Piano Hill, released this week by Fremantle Press. The launch took place at Caffissimo in Mount Lawley last Friday 27 November. In addition to all the words present on the night, music was provided by Ross on one of his ruined accordians and the wonderful Sudanese group "Waza".

Ross is well known as a musician and composer. He is interested in many things, but summing them up briefly I’d say that his work demonstrates a preoccupation with the mysterious and with obsession.

Ross is concerned, like many poets, with the shape of words, lines, sounds, and images – and as a practitioner with a foot in both the worlds of music and poetry – his poems are evidence that language can do very different things to music.

In a recent conversation we had a delightful misunderstanding brought about by the sound of words. I have some hearing loss and the misunderstanding came about between what Ross said and what I heard. It was a lot like pressing a key on one of Ross’s ruined pianos or accordions and experiencing the difference between expectation and actuality. Ross quoted Ezra Pound to me. Pound said “Rhythm is form cut into time” but I heard “Rhythm is formed by the trapping of sound.”

When words go out into the world, who knows what the reader reads, the listener hears. It’s all part of the delicious mystery of reception and interpretation. I’m not a musician, but I am intrigued by the contrast between the concept of jazz as the ultimate in improvisation and the existence of a “jazz standard” that in essence remains unchanged. Like a jazz standard a poem in a book is no accident, no one-off rendition cum improvisation. Its patterns and structures are partly instinctual, part wrought by tradition and experience, and inscribed on our consciousness as much as they are upon the page.

The works in Piano Hill have been influenced by the traditions of haiku and its parent-form the ever-evolving form of Japanese poetry known as renga, their syllabic and line patterns varied and sometimes absorbed into larger structures. In the poems Galactic and At Cottesloe Beach, for example.

Piano Hill is populated by musical, meditative moments, and a few musical, rowdy ones as well! In music the measure is in the beat, in meditation it is the breath, and both these techniques are utilised in the structure of the poems in Piano Hill, regardless of content. In contrast to the deft manipulation of syllables, the breath - something which happens naturally, instinctually - only comes into consciousness when attention is focussed on it. The breath as a measure of line length endows these poems with a naturalness that is not easy to come by.

Ross has a gift for characterisation. From the moment I encountered the "arthritic angel" of Late Sonata - “hunched over the blue ravine”, her "hands / swallow diving into ivory" - I was hooked. Likewise, Adele the hairdresser At the Delly Barber who scavenges fresh flowers from the cemetery and lives in a haunted house.

The Bird Man whom the narrator encounters sitting in the sun opposite his run-down Northbridge house: “bricks / rubbed raw as a fresh graze, verandah posts / like split pegs, bullnose crusted with pigeons / that you fed each afternoon. Evenings, you heard / the scraping of their claws as they settled deeper / into your rusting roof.”

The Bird Man, who for decades – according to rumour - has papered the rooms of his house with Real Estate agents’ offers, finally sells, is suddenly well-off, if not wealthy, only to be taken … suddenly! “You never knew what felled you, yet you barely fell - / just tilted stiffly forward still almost upright / amongst the startled pigeons.”

One mustn’t overlook the smiles in Piano Hill, and there are many, such as the gentle parody on imagery a’la William Carlos Williams in Spectacle “one white cereal bowl / on a green striped mat a red and white Saxa saltshaker / the margarine’s olive tub”.

Like imagery, sound works its way through all Ross’s poems, whether it is in their patterns, their structure or content. Cockatoos confabulate, “tattered palm fronds clatter” (At Cottesloe Beach), bees thump on windows, accordions leak, beds creak, girls shout, and always there are the pianos: “the chirrup of loosened strings” (Requitement), “the tiniest bing-plinking starlit note” (During the flood), thunder (Drought piano) the “clink clinank” of “jangling mysteries” (Morning rolls them in the foam). Equal emphasis is placed on silence “to make a spine of love” (At Cottesloe Beach) and “the raw plink of the stars” (Tonk).

The “old Zen teacher” of Those who only wait says “There’s no such thing as waiting – only a stretching of the heart towards / an embrace that’s not yet”.

In contrast to Piano Hill's focus on ruined pianos - instruments brought undone by age and exposure to the elements, and the spontaneous compositions wrought from their battered keyboards and strings - there is nothing improvised or ruined about Ross Bolleter’s poems. They are fine-tuned, highly crafted, demonstrating a refined, yet organic style.

Piano Hill is a new and exciting chapter in the life of a man dedicated to music and words. May it travel far.

Check out http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/books/newreleases/1122 for more information about Ross Bolleter and Piano Hill.

2009-07-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

We've had a wonderful time lately with Shannon and baby K, Clifton and Tara, visiting for my birthday weekend. The "Mercedes in the Garage" fantasy materialised transformed as a lovely blue bicycle with 21 gears ... for all the hills between here and elsewhere. The house will be very quiet tomorrow when our precious toddler and her mother head south. (Couldn't get this pic oriented right... sorry)

The Feast (Stanza Thirteen)

2009-05-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

They throw me back -

to the feast,

my fisherman,

foam.

The Feast (Stanza Twelve)

2009-05-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

The captain shakes his head.

"This siren," he says,

"is undersize."

The Feast (Stanza Eleven)

2009-05-08T05:30:00.000-07:00

I am fetched up in the net

of the trawler returning home.

The Feast (Stanza Ten)

2009-05-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

He is snagged by the arms of the sea.

The Feast (Stanza Nine)

2009-05-01T07:04:00.000-07:00

The road to sunrise is paved

with mermaid purses,

sand,

lost sinkers,

stranded shells.

The Feast (Stanza Eight)

2009-04-30T04:12:00.000-07:00

Gulls squabble in the distance.

The Feast (Stanza Seven)

2009-04-28T04:28:00.001-07:00

We drift in shallows still warm from day,

sing the whole night long.

The Feast (Stanza Six)

2009-04-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

I take the line,

his hands,

introduce him to my lips.

The Feast (Stanza Five)

2009-04-25T03:52:00.000-07:00

There is nothing on the fisherman's hook,

not even bait.

The Feast (Stanza Four)

2009-04-24T05:14:00.000-07:00

Trawler, dinghy dancing in its wake,

cruises toward the fishing grounds:

crew working on the nets,

captain at the helm.

The Feast (Stanza Three)

2009-04-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

Whitebait, small waves, berley

brushing along the channel rocks,

fanning out into the harbour.

The Feast (Stanza Two)

2009-04-23T07:32:00.000-07:00

I find him

fishing from the end of the groyne.

The Feast (Stanza One)

2009-04-23T06:50:00.000-07:00

I leave the feast,

go to the beach

to watch constellations

shift in the vault of Heaven.

2009-04-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

Coming soon to this space:

The Feast: a poem

as soon as I figure out how to get it up here :)

Dream about Josie

2009-04-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

From my journal: 2 July 2002 Dream Text: Josie gives me a copy of a book/story she has written. It is A5 size, folded, stapled spine, has a green cover, is illustrated like a comic book, black and white line drawings in frames/boxes, medieval in style, based on the Arthurian legends. I'm living in an open-plan house of many levels. I misplace the book and and spend the whole dream looking for it.

2009-04-05T07:03:00.000-07:00

Josie Stone

Left this world Wednesday 25th March 2009. R.I.P. dear friend.

The world is a much better place because you were here.

Remember
by Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

On Barbara Temperton’s Southern Edge by John Kinsella

2009-03-19T04:23:00.000-07:00

Barbara Temperton is interested in where folklore and folktales intersect with fact and reportage. She has taken tales that come out of specific locations — especially around Albany and the surrounding coastline — and merged the figurative and the narrative. She tells tales in verse, but that is not all she does — she shifts the stories, language, and locations of these tales to make them much more than the sum of their parts. In Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook, F, D. L. Ashliman looks at why ‘we tell stories’ under the following headings: ‘fantasy wish fulfilment’, ‘expression of fears and taboos’, ‘explanation’, and ‘education’. One might add more than this to the list, certainly in the case of Barbara Temperton’s reinvigoration of the form, but in essence these aspects are all present in the three stories told in Southern Edge.

Before progressing, it should be noted that ‘Southern Edge’ refers literally to the coastline that looks down on Antarctica, though we read that land and sea, indeed body and sea (and nature in general) are interconnected and fluid. Each of the characters in the three narratives that make up the book flow in and out of the seascape and landscape to varying degrees. The narrative voices also flow in and out of the stories. In the second story, ‘The Gap’, which refers to probably the best-known coastal feature in the south-west, the male narrator charts his relationship of addiction in terms of love, obsession, admiration, and drug addiction with Julz, a junkie who is also, in essence, a free spirit. It’s a perverse freedom, though, as her talismanic and shamanistic exchange with the natural world comes at a great cost — to her, and to the young male narrator. Woven through the story are reportages of loss extracted from local newspapers, signs, and other sources, that set the tale against a background of fact. In a dreamlike montage of events and moods, the stories of Everyperson are reflected through the love story of Julz and the narrator.

This technique is also at work in the other two narratives, each of which relies on the other in their telling. Julz, whose living and isolation spread across the folkloric space, is a form of natural bridge in one sense, but also the froth and foam of the never-ending crush of the water within the Gap. I don’t say this lightly — in Temperton’s book the oneness of the elements and characters is absolute. And those who are outside this merging are ciphers. Julz is archetypal female renegade free spirit who even affirms the feminine in the male farmer-fisherboy narrator figure. This figure is an unreliable narrator, as we shift outside and around his viewpoint at times, in an eclogic way.

Moving back from the centre to the beginning, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife’, we also find a shamanistic figure in the lighthouse keeper, mostly absent from the narrative but omnipresent in the mood of the piece. Reversing the vulnerability of such positions, this is the God-like figure who controls the elements, including his wife. She, in her loneliness of kerosene tins and domestic duties in isolation, reaches out for others. Her need for love is ultimately defined by the sea, though, and indeed, by extension, her husband. Her escapes are illusory.

In fact, each of the tales is tragic in this way — the characters are not able to find the liberation they seek, trapped by their own emotions and by the natural world of which they are part. The lighthouse keeper is the magician who controls the sea but not his wife on one level, but ultimately neither escapes from the ‘roles’ that the sea has forced on them. Even one of the wife’s lovers, Knute, who loves and leaves her, will come back to her in the context of an elemental death: he will remember her as his life flashes past him in the pocket of air in an overturned boat far away. What the lighthouse keeper’s wife searches for is unfindable but paradoxically archetypically present.

The final tale in the book takes us to the Kimberley, but ultimately back to the southern edge as we follow the ‘traveller’ in his escape from himself and the forces of ‘nature’ embodied in the bird woman. A psycho-sexual drama of denial, it confronts us with the uncertainty of responsibility for a crime which the traveller might or might not have committed. The tale is montaged through a variety of prosodies and narrative techniques. We are intimately inside the seeing and experiencing of the (male) traveller, his observations of the bird woman, his sexual confusion and frustration and inevitable ‘consummation’, shifting to witness statement, through to fragments of narrative and imagery driven by journeying south — from the scene of the crime — that implicate elements of the earlier stories, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife’ and ‘The Gap’. The merging of fluids — sexual fluids, blood, the ocean (the body of the bird woman literally melts into the ocean only held together by a cloak — she is like a bird killed by an environmental disaster — she has been polluted) — blurs the boundaries between cause and effect, between land and sea, between crime and folklore.

We are able to accept even the most horrendous crime as symbol and tale when it recedes into the past and is told and retold through symbol, allusion, and archetypes. That’s how community absorbs the distressing and the disturbing. These tales are about women, about the isolation, the vulnerabilities and strengths, the archetypal feminine, and the mythologies of the female body and its oneness with the earth, water, and air. Temperton is not interested only in critiquing or verifying such mythologies, but in investigating how and why stories like this are told. The work is very sensitive and highly attuned. Its presentations of gender are complex in that male and female are defined so clearly, are counterpointed, and yet they blur in terms of time and the elements.

Barbara Temperton has managed that rare thing, finding a methodology to present stories in verse that are also mosaics of impression and intimate observation of specific places. She has a pinpointing eye for local detail, and can actually make her characters seem real although mythological. She manages to finely balance sexual menace and sexual joy — the undercurrent of sexual threat as cautionary tale is at the basis of so many folk stories. Our sense of time is altered and the stories themselves become timeless. And yet the details are so specific to time and place. That’s a skill. It might be Bald Head near Albany, or ‘an old Morris mounted on blocks’ or a detail as clinically specific (for the witness statement) as the ‘Northern/Southern Hemispheres Bird Migration Study’). Great care has been paid to lineation — the lines vary from pared-back imagistic glimpses to longer prose-poem-like flowings in which the story is told at a steady pace.

To conclude, I’d like to say the overwhelming feeling this book left me with was that loss is a trauma we tell stories to overcome. The bird woman was about to leave the traveller as she’d finished her project, and the reader is shocked by what ensues. Either way, the traveller’s loss is given focus, not as excuse but as a vehicle for the way stories might be told. In ‘The Gap’, the narrator is left stranded between his ideal of Julz and the brute reality of the situation, and the lighthouse keeper’s wife tragically never escapes her isolation but her longings remain so intense that she wishes to destroy her singing, her voice, to, in essence, stop ‘telling’ the tale:

Kerosene smudges everything

with its hazy-blue skin,

is the lighthouse’s other tenant,

always present, never seen,

a bitter layer on the lips

after she kissed her husband’s hand.

Remembering the children’s dog

barking until its voice was gone,

she wonders how long she could scream

before she would not make another sound.

The irony is that each of these tales needs to be told — needs to account for all the tales of pain that could not be told by those who experienced them. This is how story and poetry can become universal.

(Posted by permission of John Kinsella, presented at the Geraldton launch of Southern Edge, 13 February 2009, Geraldton-Greenough Regional Library)

Creative Writing/Poetry exercises for primary students

2009-03-07T18:30:00.002-08:00

Janet, Here's a couple of creative writing exercises that I've used for primary school children (suit grades 5-7). They are variations on adult ones. I thank Glen Phillips for introducing me to poster poems way back around 1990. 1. Writing through the senses (Can be individual poems, but a lot of fun writing as a group - use a whiteboard/blackboard) Describe an object, one or two lines each for Sight Sound Taste Smell Touch (can add others, e.g. balance) plus, Intuition (what one knows about the object) 2. Poster Poems Need newspapers they can cut up, glue sticks, scissors, and a A3 sheet of card, if available (photocopy paper will do if nothing else is available) Introduce the class to simple poetic patterning techniques, e.g. alliteration, sibilance, consonance, assonance, rhyme. Look at the newspaper headlines, find examples of poetic patterning techniques in the headlines (can look for simile and metaphor as well if you think the class is up to it, but don’t introduce too many concepts in one go). Some examples of headlines: LAPTOPS FOCUS OF FLIGHT PROBE, ICONIC IMAGE OF WA WORTH ITS SALT, ALARM AT LEVEL OF FEMALE SILENT SUFFERING, FIT HADLEY HUNGRY TO BOOST THE BLUES (The West Australian and The Sunday Times are good source) Have the students cut out the headlines, or parts of headlines to make a poem. Get them to lay the pieces out, shuffle them around, make the poem before they stick it onto their paper. Once finished they can decorate the rest of the page by cutting out pictures or drawing on it. Then: Have an exhibition of the works! You can take this a stage further, if there’s time. Have the participants write the poem out or type it up and then start refining it further by rearranging words and phrases, adding their own words and deleting those that don’t serve the poem well.

2009-02-25T02:56:00.000-08:00

Where Rocks are Other Things: anthropocentrism and landscape

an·thro·po·cen·tric (nthr-p-sntrk) adj. 1. Regarding humans as the central element of the universe. 2. Interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/anthropocentrism 25/02/2009)

A practical demonstration of anthropocentrism is to be found in the naming of prominent features of the landscape. For example: “The Sleeping Lady”, being a local name for the eastern slope of Mount Watkins in the Hamersley Ranges, describing the profile seen when approaching from the west, or “Cathedral Pool” being the name given to a rock pool in Wittenoom Gorge that lies cupped to the underbelly of an cliff, the eroded face of which evokes the ceiling vaults of a cathedral.

In the mid 1930s, The Albany Advertiser published the articles “Strange Rock Formations” (1935, 49-50) and “Where Rocks are Other Things” (1936) in which local rock formations were described as “freaks” and in anthropocentric terms. On their list were: Dog Rock, Shark or Eagle Rock, Pulpit Rock, Helmet Rock, Devil’s Gap, Natural Bridge, Boat Rock, Wagon Rock, Koala Rock, one described as looking like a chimpanzee, another like a snarling dog’s head. The name of a particular feature of the landscape may be anthropocentric, but - when it comes to particular speaking positions, in terms of discourse - they can be even more specifically so. The prominence at the eastern edge of the Gap is referred to by the National Park Ranger as “Gorilla Head Rock”, whereas rock climbers call it “Sea Wolf”. The discourse of rock climbers, a vocabulary specific to their activities, in which every rock face and every variation of climbing it has an individual name, also offers possibilities for poetic transformation. Rock faces are walls, wave-ledges are platforms, boulders can be blocks, protrusions, flakes. In South Coast Rock: Guide to Rock Climbing on WA’s South Coast, author Shane Richardson describes Climb 15 on the Natural Bridge’s “Orca Wall“: Climb the slightly overhanging, left trending lay back crack (the stomach of the ‘diving killer whale’) to finish up the thin crack above. (23) The naming of aspects of landscape in familiar terms renders the unknowable known, the unfamiliar familiar. Likewise, story attempts - by filling in the gaps (no pun intended) - to make the unknowable known. The local narrative describing underwater caves at the Gap (used in my poem “The Gap” in Southern Edge) arose from an attempt to explain how a woman could vanish completely. An alternative angle is that some local narratives are actually cautionary tales, arising not from historical events but because the contemplation of a feature of the landscape incites the viewer to imagine potentiality, the possibility for harm. Another perspective offers the possibility of redemption, she is not dead but alive in the caves from which there is the likelihood, like other women vanished into the underworld (such as Persephone and Eurydice, for example) that with some kind of upper-worldly intervention she might emerge alive. There are many areas on the Australian coastline called the Gap. Sydney’s is notorious. In fact, most sites bearing the name, and similar names, are notorious. Dare we entertain the notion that reputation (and story, in this case) is semantic, that it could be linked more to a name than it is to a place? Fact or folklore? It is almost impossible to say. These days, suicides on this area of the South Coast do not receive media coverage, and therefore most information, true or false, is related through the gossip-network, where after much repetition and elaboration stories of suicides are more legend than “truth”. In view of the mobility of urban legend, it isn’t inconceivable that these “local” legends, restricted to a degree by the requirement for certain features of the landscape to be present, might move from place to place, attaching to certain features of landscape rather than specific places. The Gap at Albany hasn’t always been the focus of white people’s local lore. In fact, until the construction of an adequate access road for vehicles in the 1930s – built to encourage tourism in the Albany area – the Gap was barely accessible except by a rough walk trail. In documentation from that period, the zawn is christened “Devil’s Gap”. Compare the semantics of the name “Devil’s Gap” with that of its neighbour “Natural Bridge”. The contradictions are ironic indeed. The name “Devil’s Gap”, metaphorically loaded with Christian foreboding, is attached to the place which appears to be the most dangerous - all froth and noise, unpredictable winds, waves thundering into the crevasse. Yet, statistics appear to show that most people who die in that particular area are washed to their deaths by surges sweeping under the seemingly benign “Natural” Bridge. From: The lighthouse keeper's wife, and other stories ; and, Ceremony for ground : narrative, landscape, myth

Ian Nichols reviews Southern Edge

2009-02-21T01:49:00.000-08:00

Ian Nichols reviews Southern Edge in West Weekend Magazine (The West Australian), Saturday 21 February 2009: "The three narrative poems in this book explore reactions to loss, death and disappearance. They paint the situations and responses with a delicacy that is reminiscent of watercolour paintings; nothing harsh, softly edged, but nevertheless effective. The wife of a lighthouse keeper shares the death of her children in imagery that wavers as the light on the sea. A troubled couple explore their relationship against a mirror of the Southern Ocean, and one of them vanishes. A jetty becomes a palimpsest of traveller's tales. All this is written with a truly remarkable lyricism which has earned Barbara Temperton recognition and many awards."

2009-02-07T05:13:00.000-08:00

She’d looked back at Bald Head slipping south behind them, the peninsula a whale plunging into the Southern Ocean, saw its eye-shadow cast on fractured granite — the beast looking back at her. (from "The Lighthouse Keepers Wife", Southern Edge, Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Press, 2009.)

Snake City

2009-02-07T04:56:00.000-08:00

It was late winter, several years ago, the early wildflowers were putting on a pretty spectacular display. I planned a walk on the Bibbulman track, from Shelley Beach across West Cape Howe to Bornholm Beach Road and back. None of my regular walking partners wanted to come, so I decided to go alone. I thought walking alone would be a great opportunity for thinking through an issue which had been troubling me. I’d recently become aware that I had become quite distracted and unproductive, obsessed with a matter which was consuming all my energy and going nowhere.

I parked my car at Shelley’s Lookout and headed bush. I was about a kilometre and a half into the walk, all uphill, stopped to rest at the top of a hill and realised with a shock that I’d left my hat in the car. I had a choice of going back to get it or going on without it - it was a warm, sunny day. I thought it wiser to turn around. Setting out for the second time I climbed the hill again. Now completely warmed up, I set off down the dirt track at a pretty fast pace. I rounded a corner and met a snake coming down the track in my direction! The snake went left into a cluster of rocks, I went right. A little further along another snake crossed the track in front of me. Then a few moments later, going downhill on steps formed with logs, I step onto a log and disturbed a snake on the other side. I tried not to be distracted by the acres of bush in flower around me or by the insidious way my walking rhythm lulled me into the world of my thoughts, several more times I was jolted back to reality by rustles from the bush alongside the track, snakes retreating into the scrub or travelling downhill ahead of me. After some time spent crossing around the back of West Cape Howe, I reached the coast. The Cape to my left, the wild Southern Ocean in front, and Bornholm Beach curving away to my right. I stood absolutely spellbound. Yes, I thought, God was here, recently. I don’t know why I looked down, but there on the track right beside me was a snake, sunbaking. I went North, the snake went South. I kept going. The walk was proving tougher than I’d imagined it would be. A lot of it was uphill, and one of those hills was a real challenge. I laboured up it, one man-made step after the other, and half way up disturbed another snake! I was breathless for more than one reason. After that, it was a cruisey walk downhill and along a winding but flat track to Bornholm Beach Road, a sandy four-wheel drive track. I sat on a log at the side of the track, rested and ate my lunch. It seemed to me I’d been receiving warnings via the snakes all morning, as though something was saying: Pay attention. Barbara, pay attention! I turned around, resolving to make as much noise as I could, to sing, to shout, to recite poems, to walk loud, to make sure those snakes were long gone by the time I got anywhere near them. I had a good time, composed some awful song lyrics, sang until I was hoarse, walked myself into a strong, comfortable rhythm. But, without realising, I’d stopped the noise making. My thoughts busied themselves with my current obsession and I slipped into that rhythm that walking long distances gets you into, where you cover the ground without really being present. The pace is steady and fast. Too quiet. The tiger snake was standing on its tail in the middle of the track and striking when I saw it! I don’t know how, but despite the speed of my forward momentum I flew backwards! I stopped. Terrified. My heart felt as though it would thump its way out of my chest. Stand still! Don’t run! Stand still! The snake half-dropped to the ground, head swaying slightly. I thought it might charge at me. It looked like it was going to charge me … then it wavered and veered off into the scrub at the side of the path. God! Oh, God! Fear cemented my feet to the ground. I don’t know how long I stood there before I began to think rationally. Move! And I launched myself from that spot, ran full pelt past the place where the snake had left the path and I ran until I couldn’t run any more and then I walked and I never took my eyes off the track not even for a for a milli-second and I jumped at every lizard, every bee, every dragonfly, screamed when a feral cat shot out of the heath and into a cluster of peppermints. About an hour later, approaching the crest of the last hill before the descent to the Lookout car park, I hesitated. The track was bordered by heavily eroded limestone rocks, it was late afternoon and the shadows were lengthening. That first snake? I drove down to the beach and sat in the car shaking, watching the waves come in. I just watched the waves come in.

Last Night

2009-01-27T03:04:00.000-08:00

Last night, as I was leaving the house to take the dogs for their evening walk, I glanced up at the sky and caught, through the lenses of my very dark glasses and several layers of pre-cyclonic cloud, a perfect image of the partial eclipse of the sun. I rushed back inside and grabbed my digital camera, and it malfunctioned. I took only one photograph before I was greeted by a "disk full" message. Usually, there is space for around 400 photographs on the disk, but the response to the stunning sight of the moon taking a bite out of the sun was "disk full"... and the photo... well, it didn't work... all the detail was drowned out by the glare of the sun.