After an interesting week in Melbourne, about which more soon, Ms TN is off to the Perth Festival tomorrow. It may do me good to be locked in a hotel room for a week, with my scope for procrastination firmly curtailed. Meanwhile, I have uploaded all my translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's The Duino Elegies, as well as an essay about the poems that was published in the UK poetry magazine Agenda, at Lost Poems.

George Hunka at Superfluities Redux (whom I'm sure you all read religiously) blogs on the recurrent death of criticism, and in particular on the argument that its death sentence is signed by the new democratisation of the web. This is (sigh) an old and whiskery argument, but as George points out,"the real danger is in formalizing (the) informal process of inclusion and exclusion". It's an interesting read. As a bonus, check out some rare photos of Sarah Kane performing in Howard Barker's Victory.

Meanwhile, Katharine Brisbane delivered the Philip Parsons Memorial lecture over the weekend, giving an overview of four decades of Australian theatre. An extract is published in the Australian (free registration required). (Update: full text here.) As she says:

More people attend arts ventures than sport, according to polls. In 40 years it is a record of which we should be proud. And yet (with rare exceptions) the leaders of this industry are not influential in the way leaders of other professions are. A new play may be acclaimed but is rarely discussed as an insight into, or barometer of, our culture. Artists have become a collection of specialists for whom communication outside their art has become more difficult. The less they try to break through this barrier the more they are misunderstood. It seems that only for artists is the word elite a pejorative. In the sports world they are heroes.

Brisbane suggests this is the result of a demolition of a "culture of inclusion", which meant that theatre failed to take its audience with it. I suspect this problem might have more to do with the media than with audiences. Worth thinking about in tandem with George's post.

Lastly, for those who might be interested, I have idly started a new blog called Lost Poems. This came about because a week or so ago, in the interests of order, I plunged into the labyrinths of my computer and discovered a bunch of poems that I had completely forgotten about. What to do with them? A blog seemed like an excellent idea. From now I'll be posting one every few days, until I run out of poems.

Much has been said about The Manganiyar Seduction, a stunning theatrical presentation of Rajasthani music, and no doubt I will simply add another bunch of superlatives. Indian director Roysten Abel has created a work that had the Melbourne Festival audience standing up, cheering and stamping its feet. Like everyone else, I was seduced: by the musicianship, by the passion of the music, by the production itself.


The Manganiyars are a caste of musicians, an unknown concept in western culture. The performers in The Manganiyar Seduction are mostly Muslim, although there is one Hindu, and mostly, intriguingly, have the surname "Khan". Their work combines both classical and folk traditions, creating a music of winding complexities: driving rhythms that get under your skin and make you want to dance contrast with solo voices that seem to express all human longing, edged with raw feeling and yet astonishingly skilled in their flexibility.

At first we're presented with four tiers of booths curtained in red velvet, each surrounded by light globes. The progression of the show is through revelation: one by one, two by two, three by three, the curtains open and reveal singers and musicians, until there are 37 musicians all playing together. It was like an Advent calendar, and I found myself pleasurably looking forward to finding out what I would see next. The other simple conceit is that the globes around the booths light up when individual musicians are playing, and darken when they stop. This creates a constantly changing geometry, and permits the conductor/percussionist/dancer (Deu Khan) who performs before the set to act as a conductor of the visuals as well as the music.

The performance itself consists of three songs, which fluidly connect in a text-book example of theatrical orchestration. The primary song is a Sufi work by the poet Bulleshah, Alfat Un Bin In Bin, which explores the love of God and the Sufi journey of gnostic self revelation. Two other songs are woven into the first: Halariya, a traditional welcome for newborn children that describes the birth of Lord Krishna, and Neendarli, a comic song about a wife attempting to seduce her husband.

I wished I could understand the words: not that the music wasn't enough in itself, because it was, but because the directness of its emotional effect made me want to know what they were singing. However, I didn't need to read the program afterwards to know that all these songs were about love. That was absolutely palpable. This show made me want to cry with happiness.

*



I walked out of Rhinoceros in Love shaking my head. One of the Melbourne Festival's headline acts, it's a production from the National Theatre of China, billed as China's "most popular contemporary drama". It was first produced in 1999, and was the National Theatre's resident playwright Liao Yimei's first play. We're seeing the fourth production, directed by Meng Jinghui, who has, among other things, specialised in bringing productions of the European modernists - Dario Fo, Samuel Beckett - to the Chinese stage.

This production is a bizarre collision of Chinese and European traditions. And yet... for all its faults - and these are legion - it generates a seductive energy that I found impossible to resist. Within this work is a feeling that I think western theatre has largely lost: it manifests an expressive liberty which reminded me strongly of the modernists of the early 20th century, a sense of almost defiant arbitrariness. All the dramaturgical care, all the polish and experience that can be brought to the best western theatre, can have a constipating effect, creating a feeling of aesthetic politeness and, in the worst cases, a "by the rules" stolidity. There's something refreshing in the total lack of attention to our unwritten laws of aesthetic production here, and in its best moments it creates an electric sense of the unexpected.

The play itself is the tale of Ma Lu's (Zhang Nianhua) hopeless passion for Mingming (Qi Xi), who is herself in love with an abusive man who won't love her back. Ma Lu is a zookeeper, and his only confidant is a lone rhinoceros, to whom he addresses his confessional monologues. This dodgy love story is punctuated by satirical clowning scenes, in which the reckless individualism represented by Ma Lu and Mingming is counterpointed by the conventions of the state or market. There is, for example, a series of "Love Tutorials", in which young people are taught the proper expressions for love through Hollywood cliches and pop songs.

Ma Lu's obsession reaches stalker territory - he declares that he will keep loving Mingming until she loves him back, no matter what she says, and that she will never be allowed to escape. There's no irony in this: he is presented as the heroic individual who persists in his beliefs against all odds. Perhaps it's not surprising that there should be a rape joke in there. Again, and this time not in a good way, it made me think of the early 20th century.

It's quite clear where the expertise lies in this production: in the performances, which are highly skilled, especially in the impeccable chorus work, and, for all its problems, in the text. I don't know enough about Chinese culture to be able to read this clearly against tradition, but even through the uncertain surtitles it seemed to me that Liao Yimei's text spirals out of a long tradition of Chinese poetry. The play's lyricism and obsession with the natural world recalls Li Po and Du Fu, who famously celebrated the romantic figure of the poet as an exile from society, and also contemporary poets such as Yang Lian, one of the figures who unites Chinese traditions with European modernist influences.

The design is probably its worst aspect. The set features suspended metal rectangles and reflective panelling at the back, and is very approximately lit: the lighting design has some good ideas, but is indifferently executed. The whole looks like a bricolage of modern effects, but doesn't appear to mean anything. Likewise, the show opens with a flourish of percussion which is never seen again, and which seems to bear absolutely no relationship to anything else. This, and a lot of the clowning, made me think of the acrobatics which were interpolated into Shakespeare's productions: these elements seem designed to catch the attention of the groundlings in the pit.

To one side of the stage is something like a billiard table that turns out to be a treadmill. This is the locus of one the production's hilariously kitsch moments: a Chinese pop song rises and the two lovers are running together, in an analogue of making love. It made me feel as if I had strayed into a bad anime. Towards the end of the play, the stage is flooded with water, forcing the cast, rather charmingly, to don green gumboots. In the climax, Zhang Nianhua ends up standing on a table being drenched with a private rainstorm, passionately declaiming his stalker ambitions. I still don't know why he had to be so wet.

Pictures: Top: The Manganiyar Seduction; bottom, Zhang Nianhua in Rhinoceros in Love.

The Manganiyar Seduction, conceived, arranged and directed by Roysten Abel, conducted by Deu Khan. Sound engineer, S Manoharan, set and lighting design by Roysten Abel. Melbourne Festival. Closed.

Rhinoceros in Love, by Liao Yimei, directed by Meng Jinghui. Design by Zhang Wu, lighting by Zhang Jian, sound design by Yan Guihe. With Zhang Nianhua, Qi Xi, Zhao Hongwei, Zhang Ziqi, Kou Zhiguo, Lui Chang, Wang Xiaoshen and Feng Qilong. National Theatre of China and the Melbourne Festival. Closed.

Those unfortunate souls who follow Ms TN on Twitter will be aware that this week she has been under the weather. "Crapulous" is the adjective that springs to mind: neither ill enough to hang up her boots by her sickbed (with attendant sympathies, flowers and Belgian chocolates) nor well enough to gird her loins and spring with a happy cry into life's melee. This is one of the most boring states on the planet, and I am well bored with myself.

Still, I've been attending theatre, even if in my bathchair, and will blog about Red Stitch's admirable production of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later and the MTC's Next to Normal as soon as I can think in paragraphs again. This week's pick is Debbie Tucker Green's Random, which is presently showing at the Lawler Studio as part of the MTC's Education Program. This production opened at the World Theatre Festival in Brisbane earlier this year and features an exemplary - nay, breath-taking - solo performance from Zahra Newman. Get thee hence, and at once: it closes at the end of next week.

In other news, US playwright Tony Kushner is in the headlines, following the last-minute withdrawal of an honorary degree from NY university CUNY. The decision follows accusations from CUNY trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld that Kushner, an outspoken critic of Israeli policy on Palestine, is an anti-Semite. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux has been tracking the scandal closely, with follow-ups here and here. The public outcry, which includes high-calibre names like Harold Bloom, has forced the trustees chair to reconvene another meeting next week to "reconsider" this decision.

Lastly, shifting to another hat: I'll be at Readings in Carlton at 6.30pm Monday night, with my poetry fascinator firmly affixed to my forehead. It's my first reading in Melbourne in two years, so I'm looking forward to it, and I'll be joined by new poets Chloe Wilson and Jessica Wilkinson. Gold coin donation. Details here.

Collected Works, under the proprietorship of Kris Hemensley, is one of the treasures of Melbourne. It is that rarest of businesses, a poetry bookshop. As The Wheeler Centre comments today, Victoria boasts over 300 book shops, but its City of Literature submission singled out Collected Works as “unlike any other shop in the country… specialising in poetry and ideas, and is the most substantial retail outlet for poetry in Australasia, giving local literature a sense of where it sits within a global sphere”.

A recent rent hike threatens its existence, and so tonight, from 5.30-7pm, a bunch of literary peeps have organised a Collected Works Benefit. There's even a raffle, with donations from a range of poetry folk, including Australian Poetry, Victorian Writers’ Centre, Hunter Publishers, University of Queensland Press, John Leonard Press, and over twenty writers including Kevin Brophy, Joel Deane, David McCooey, Robyn Rowland, Alex Skovron, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and me. More details from SPUNC. At Collected Works Bookshop Nicholas Building Level 1, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

One would think that, after more than a month of thespian festivities, Melbourne theatre should have collapsed, gorged with its own dizzy art, and decided instead to enjoy the burgeoning spring in a sensible and above all relaxed manner. But lo! The laurels of Dionysus jiggeth still! All the shows that have been queuing patiently as the Fringe and Melbourne Festival hogged the spotlight are now shyly stepping forth and wiggling their wings seductively, crowding into the next few weeks before Melbourne shuts down for summer. Frankly, they're making my diary a clogged and clotted mess.

Which means that I can't attend an event I'd very much like to see, though you might be able to make it. The Wheeler Centre has organised a major reading at the Merlyn Theatre, The Poet's Voice: Lovers in Trouble. A celebration of the poems of Dorothy Porter, the much-loved poet who died almost exactly two years ago at an unjustly early age, it coincides with the release of Porter's Love Poems. Novelist Andrea Goldsmith, Opera Victoria's AD Richard Gill and actor David Trendennick are among those who will celebrate Porter's passionate art, alongside readings of other works in this rich tradition. Details and bookings on the Wheeler Centre website.

Meanwhile, I have a couple of reviews to finish and upload before the onslaught begins. Watch this space.

It's unlikely to be published anywhere: so here is the celebratory speech I wrote for last night's launch of Philip Salom's new collection of poetry, Keepers, now available from Puncher & Wattman.

I am honoured to be be asked to launch Philip’s new collection, Keepers. And as I‘ve read and reread it, I’ve been pondering how to describe it. What kind of book is this? It’s easy to praise, but far less easy to categorise. Reading it is entering another reality, a reality constructed of language that is as complex and ambiguous as those we inhabit. The conceit – a series of linked poems forming an implicit narrative about the staff and students of a School of Arts – is simple; but its execution belies this apparent simplicity. Here are some attempts at a description:

Keepers is a prodigious act of imagination and thought. It’s a work of poetic virtuosity that wickedly undoes its own virtuosity. It’s a witty, beautiful and moving series of reflection on art and artists that is itself a work of art, that enacts its own argument: “Art is a strangeness come to wake them”. It’s a work of fiction, creating in its slim 100 pages an entire world, populated by a cast of immediately memorable and recognisable characters. It’s a satire of contemporary academia and culture, sometimes stingingly funny, sometimes scathingly black, that exposes and mocks the “health and safety” culture that represses and marginalises the dangerous reaches of the imagination. It’s a memento mori, that reminds us, as the poet says in a meditation on the Japanese board game Go, that the “game of poetry is mortal / accretion”. Perhaps it is, in the end, an opera, a story of love and death.

The art school is like an aquarium, as Salom suggests at one point, or a zoo or a gallery, that becomes a burning glass for emotion: love, hatred, abjection, desire, envy, spite and, increasingly, sorrow. The Keepers of the title are, among others, the staff members in the school. “The students,” as it says in the poem "The Kept Ones", “do not feel kept, but of course they / are kept. Someone or something or some household / keeps them. The staff members keep and are paid to keep keeping.” The poems dance around all the senses of keeping and being kept – the sexual economics, as suggested in the leering lecturer, “his voice in her head like a hand on a thigh”, and the ancient sense too of artists as custodians of knowledge, keeping the flame. Both these meanings – and others – are kept continuously in motion through the book.

Perhaps inevitably, as I spend a ridiculous proportion of my waking life in the theatre, the first word that occurred to me in thinking of Keepers was “play”. Keepers offers some of the most playful language in contemporary Australian poetry: the book is a celebration of poetic forms, and each poem generates a sensually charged language of constant transformation. But it also calls up another sense. Keepers is a kind of theatre: its characters flicker across the darkened stage of the mind, melancholy, estranged, hungering, each poem a spotlight in which we uneasily enter, like voyeurs, their secret thoughts and shames. And here even props have voices: inanimate objects, like "The Printmaker’s Copper Plate", or the plastinated corpses of Gunther von Hagens, articulate their thoughts. Dead artists – Dmitri Shostakovich, Artemisia Gentileschi, Francis Webb, Eadweard Muyerbridge - rise and speak with the living. In a brilliant (and brilliantly funny) series of fantasy lectures, "Lectures They Never Had", ideas lift like acrobats from the page and perform themselves. Keepers is a theatre of hallucinatory memory, of a present haunted by the thickening past of a culture that stirs and breathes in an artificial environment.

The poet himself contains multitudes, but remains invisible, vanishing into his own language. Or does he? Underneath almost every poem is a contrapuntal footnote, ironic, vernacular, prosaic, supposedly extracted from the diary of a character called Alann Fish. Fish is the cleaner and general dogsbody at the art school, and a key character in the unfolding narrative of the poems. He works in the basement, the id of the institution, and is a keen flaneur and a obsessive player of Go. Go is a defining metaphor throughout this book, which introduces another sense of the word “play”: the game of art, the game of life, the game of language. Most of all, the game of poetry. It’s not surprising to learn that Alann Fish is himself a poet, and is planning to release a book.

“I think I am real,” says Fish early on in the story. In the circling narratives of the art school, Fish becomes the work’s emotional centre, the ironic counterpoint of silence to the institution’s voluble artifice. Of course, the more real Fish becomes, the more vertiginous his existence, the more we’re haunted by his inner emptiness. This may be, in the end, a book about loneliness: all of its characters are devastatingly alone, and none more than Fish. One of its more beautiful images is one of the final visions of Fish, unravelling in a soft riot of internal rhymes before a mistakenly kindly neighbour:

Sunlight took his hat off
for him, and doffed it, and the wind that loved
the lorikeets and dried them, blew his shocked
expression off. Only his hands lifted from him
a question that wasn’t a question and therefore
said nothing.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Keepers here, but will leave it to you to discover more of this book’s multiple pleasures for yourself. I recommend it unreservedly, and declare it launched

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of editing Cordite Poetry Magazine's Creative Commons issue. Now, for your further pleasure, the second part of the issue, Creative Commons Part II - the Remixes, is online. Also, I finally got around to writing an editorial about the whole exercise. It's been a fascinating project.

And if you're in the mood for more poems, come along tomorrow night to Carlton, where I will be launching Philip Salom's new poetry collection, Keepers, out from Puncher and Wattman Poetry. Tuesday October 5, 6pm, Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall. All invited.

Recently I guest-edited the poetry for Cordite's Creative Commons issue. Today it goes live online, and it's well worth a browse. More, after you've read the poems, you can download them, remix and resubmit. Check out too the forum on creative commons, with meditations on pressing issues of intellectual copyright from Susan Hawthorne, Patrick Jones and others, the mini-feature on the superb British poet Peter Larkin, and Louis Armand's essay on John Kinsella.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the Australian today publishes my review of the mega-musical Mary Poppins, which opened at Her Majesty's last week.

Tickets, check. Passport, check. Itinerary, check. iPhone A-Z, check. Ms TN is a traveler who likes to know where her towel is, and most particularly wants maps, even if she has a record of holding them upside down and striding optimistically in exactly the wrong direction. (I'm hoping the GPS thing on the iPhone will make this less likely.) But at last I'm feeling more or less prepared.

As some of you will know, earlier this year I won the Australian Poetry Centre's International Poetry Tour ("international" meaning England, Scotland and Ireland), which is an initiative funded by the Australia Council and launched for the first time this year. Practically every poet in Australia applied for this one, and to say I was surprised to get it is an understatement. From next week, I and my fellow winner, Sydney poet Robert Gray, will be spreading the word on Australian poetry to a variety of northern hemisphere persons; but I am looking forward most of all to a week's "writing time" in the Lake District at Dove Cottage, which was Wordsworth's house in Grasmere. (Or, to be exact, I'll be in picturesque lodgings 50 metres from Dove Cottage, as well as doing a reading and a chat about Australian poetry with its present resident, Emma Jones). A list of my appearances is on the Salt blog, and there's a poetical biography on my website for those who like some background. If any of you are anywhere nearby any of my readings, it would be brilliant to see you there.

On the down side, it means that I am missing the Melbourne Festival. So this weekend I am doing a bit of hobnobbing: last night, the festival's opening night, I saw Lally Katz's The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy at the MTC's Lawler Studio (don't miss it) and tonight I'm booked for Sascha Waltz's Medea, an opera/dance piece based on Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial. Aside from any other things I can fit in, like Peter Greenaway's multimedia piece on Leonardo's Last Supper, that will be it. I'm sorry to be missing the buzz, although I admit there's certainly a lining to the cloud.

I'll also be taking the time to do some reflecting. Over the past few months, it's become very clear to me that TN is unsustainable. I love doing this, but it eats me up; and I can't delude myself any more that it isn't at the expense of my own work. I haven't finished a single project now for more than 18 months, and that is beginning to weigh heavy. I'll be considering a number of options, but I might as well warn you that one of them is ceasing blogging (if not theatre going) altogether next year. Reading Roberto Bolaño's extraordinary 2666 recently reminded me again how much I love the form of the novel; and it pricked my conscience, yet again, about my own unfinished folly, The Gilded Man (extracted here), which has been languishing since 2001. Not to mention a number of other stalled projects, at last count four, which I dearly want to complete.

I might blog while I'm away, but I may not. I'll certainly be uploading responses to the two Melbourne Festival shows I'm able to see. In the meantime, au revoir. I'll be back in mid-November.

I've been uncertain whether to post this properly, since official announcement dates seem to have shifted backwards; it was supposed to be announced earlier this month. But what the hell, the news is out anyway. I am one of two Australian poets picked for the inaugural International Tour Circuit, a scheme that was advertised by the Australian Poetry Centre earlier this year. Supported by the Australia Council, the APC sought applications for two leading Australian poets to tour the UK and Ireland, to act as ambassadors for Australian poetry. Unsurprisingly, it attracted applications from almost every poet in the country, and I figured my chances were slim indeed. Just goes to show that it's always worth buying that ticket....

It's a good scheme - for all its myriad strengths, Australian poetry is still regarded as a minor strand in the English-speaking world, and it's a chance to spread the word. I'll be touring with the distinguished poet Robert Gray who, besides being one of the finest lyric voices around, is a lovely guy, and will be good company. The cloud to this silver is that I will miss most of the Melbourne Festival. But not all of it - the tour dates have been moved forward one week, so I'll still get to catch that first week. In particular, Sasha Waltz. Phew!

Lately I've been getting emergency notices for a couple of cultural institutions close to my heart. As someone who gets around to quite a bit of theatre, it's hard to miss the importance of Victorian College of the Arts graduates for the cultural richness of Melbourne. They're everywhere, and they're a major reason our independent theatre scene is so interesting. The rumbles on the implications of the VCA's merger with the University of Melbourne have been gathering for some years now, but now it's hitting crisis point. This month, college staff have been saying straight out that the VCA is under threat, and a recent series of articles in the Age has been highlighting the alarm.

Full background, and links to more stories, are on the Save the VCA website. Read it. And then sign the petition.

Meanwhile, Salt Publishing has been sending out distress signals. Salt is my publisher, and so I have a certain personal interest; but beyond that, Salt, a press founded by Australian poet John Kinsella, has one of the broadest and most innovative lists of new writing in the English-speaking world, publishing poets, playwrights and prose writers available nowhere else. Among many other things, they have been intrumental in bringing Australian writing to a wider international readership. It would be nothing less than a tragedy for contemporary literature if it went under.


Last week Chris and Jen sent out a circular, in which they frankly asked for help.

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

So that's the message. Those of you who have unaccountably failed to purchase my book, the beautifully designed Theatre, can remedy their sins now. Or you could catch up on my previous collection, Attempts At Being. But if your library is already bursting with Croggon, there are hundreds of other very tempting options. British playwright Howard Barker's new book of poems, Sheer Detachment, and The Poems of Sidney West by Spanish poet Juan Gelman (described by Nobel prize winner José Saramago as "One of the greatest poets the world has today") immediately catch my eye. You can get the only collection of Daniel Keene plays published in English, Terminus and Other Plays. Or just browse Salt's excellent list of writers until something strikes a chord. Here's the Salt website. Go for it. Just do it now.

I woke up this morning with an old poem going round and round in my head. And then I saw that Duncan Graham - no mean playwright himself and a fine director of Harold Pinter's work - had posted a beautiful poem on TN, a valediction and homage for Pinter. Poetry seems the right way to mark the passing of the year, especially when this Christmas is marked by the deaths of too many writers - Pinter, Dorothy Porter and Adrian Mitchell - who seemed too defiantly alive to die.

The poem that nagged my dreams last night was, like Duncan's, about love, and was for another dead writer. I wrote it in 1990, at the height of the First Gulf War. And I suppose it was circling in my head because, despite everything that's changed in the past two decades, both in me and in the wider world, and perhaps even more because of what has remained the same, I still believe now what I said then.

Ode to Walt Whitman

Did you see me Walt Whitman beside my meagre river where I walk at sunset with my children
Who whinge and buffet my arms and will not be led in any direction
Marching with my sight closed to the rain and skittering seagulls while my children shouted look!
As the incandescent leaves shouted look! lying individual and numberless under the sodium light
Although I hurried on nagging and impatient:
Did you hear the haul of the empty trains into the vanishing twilight
Turning my face like a mint coin hope stamped on my mouth
To a night ambiguous with satellites
Hearing in my secret heart the radio noise of murders half a suburb away
Which all the loud news fails to report -
Walt Whitman there are evenings when love withers inside me
The beat you thrummed with your syllabled fingers those joyous rebellious prosodies:
Did you see the muscles of your teeming world
Smashing the earth unstringing the massive harp of the sky
When you sang of your body returning alert as grass
Or thrust out the spokes of your sight into the great unchanging wheels the miraculous sun and the tumultuous impersonal sea -
Walt Whitman the gods are tarnished now the cities mourn their dead no longer
Children roast in the fires of this terrible century
And no love is enough no elegy sufficient:
And yet I imagine you gentle imperfect generous man I would like to talk to you
Perhaps you sit already at my shoulder whispering that nothing changes
That sunset is enough for its brilliance decay enough for its iridescence
Old faker with your wise beard your lustful piety:
And truly what is my faith
Except a stubborn voice
Casting out its shining length to where I walk alone
Sick and afraid and unable to accept defeat
Singing as I was born to

It's gone quiet because I'm back with Beowulf and the Geats, squinting through the Anglo-Saxon and picking out another version. I'm now about halfway through. Why? It's not like the world needs a new translation. Maybe I just want some light diversion from the mayhem and slaughter of crrriticking.

Back later this week.

(Image: first page of the Beowulf codex, British Museum)

MESHWORKS - the Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance - has uploaded several videos of readings from the Soundeye Cork International Poetry Festival which, as some of you might remember, I attended earlier this year in Ireland. The whole event was something like this:



The videos on the university site don't stream well, but those interested in the readings can check out the Meshworks YouTube page, which works rather better.

I may have mentioned once or twice that I have a brutal muse. Its presence has the general effect of a large steel hammer being dropped into a blender.

There have been a couple of periods in my life when I have been really convinced that writing poetry is over for me, that the Pierian Springs have dried up and the muse has packed her bags and headed off for greener poets. Far from mourning such a departure, my response has been a surge of relief. My experience of poetry is that, all my life, I have suffered from a regularly recurring illness, a kind of psychic possession. Poetry is a bad-mannered relative who moves in without notice and locks me in the pantry while it takes over my life. Choice has absolutely nothing to do with it.

This phenomenon is why poets get all vague and mystic when they speak of the process of writing poems. If you try to describe what actually happens, you just sound crazy. Some poets have more polite visitations, and some find their muses fatal. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam coined the term Pre-Lyrical Anxiety (PLA to you and me) to describe the complex of symptoms - lassitude, depression, irritability, intellectual dysfunction - that accompany the writing of a new poem. The problem is that this state can go on for weeks, only to result in a few lousy lines. And human consciousness being what it is, full of charming self-blindness, I only recognise the symptoms after the fact.

This might explain why the idea of writing prose - a relatively sane, measurable, sober activity - holds such attractions for me. And also why I've found myself barely capable of holding a conversation or writing a sentence for the past few weeks. After an absence of nearly 18 months, the muse turned up without notice, hoovered out my brain, mashed it into a pulp and, finally, turned it into about 20 lines of poetry. Is it really worth it? I ask the muse. Who cares? says the muse. And before I can answer, vanishes as completely as if she were never there.

So now I seem to be free again, I'm contemplating the mess she's left behind and hoping that it's at least a month before she visits again. I'm a couple of reviews behind on the Fringe, and my desk looks like a bombsite and, frankly, I'm a little tired.

Moreover, later this week Ms TN (she thinks she's Ms TN) begins her annual high-octane coverage of the Melbourne Festival. The big news - in this family anyway - is that I'm in conversation with Patti Smith and documentary maker Steve Sebring at Readings on Friday, hopefully to discuss Rimbaud, Bulgakov, Wilde and other mutual passions. I only say this to share my fangirl enthusiasm, as the event is booked out. And I'm hoping the muse keeps a polite distance, so I can function. Hello everybody, and nice to be back.

Yes, it's me, back from an all-too-short wallow in the ponds of idleness. I bought 6kg of books, read some of them, looked at lots of visual art, ate a wide variety of interesting food and didn't go near a theatre. Which can't be said about my time since my return, which has been rather theatre-rich. Yes, I've been going to the FRINGE. Of which more in ensuing days. My brain is still lounging by the virtual swimming pool, but I'm sending urgent telegrams and am hoping for some contact soon.

Some stop-gap notices while I await anxiously the return of consciousness, because there's no shortage of excellent online reading. First, I have uploaded a new issue of my literary ezine, Masthead, which is a special issue featuring an anthology of poems by poets from Poetryetc, a listserv founded by John Kinsella in 1997, and which I ran for many years. If I say so myself, it's pretty damn fine.

And over the past month or so, the blogs have been waking up - there's some excellent and thought-provoking reading around the traps, and what follows is a very partial list of what's been interesting me in the blogosphere lately, and which I suggest to you as great places to land your cursor. Those perennial faves of mine, George Hunka at Superfluities Redux and Chris Goode at Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, have been pounding the keyboards with all manner of interesting posts. Andrew Haydon at Postcards from the Gods has been uploading reviews like a maniac, as well as noting Andy Field's new blog, meaning Andy, one of the interesting British bloggers and up-and-coming young theatre artists, hasn't deserted us yet.

Closer to home, there's a promising new blog called Long Sentence No Suggestions, which features this startling and brave post from Martin confronting some of the demons we all have to face in this game. Which brings me, by demonic association, to the Fringe, well-summarised by Richard Watts, where the bloggers have it covered. Michael Magnusson is blogging heroically at On Stage and Walls in Melbourne, with extensive coverage of opera and music as well as theatre, and is currently heading, flags bravely flying, into the turbulent Fringey whirlpool. Watch too for the reviews on Jana's blog mono no aware. Some - ie me - are heading less bravely than others, but even so my schedule next week is as packed as I can manage. But I am a frail flower, especially when I look around and see what others are doing. No one, however, is showing such devotion to the Cause as Born Dancin'. As the man himself puts it:

So I made a calendar of 83 shows I thought I could get to at this year’s Melbourne Fringe (launched yesterday). I mentioned this to a friend and he said “Hey, it’s like Around the Fringe in 80 Shows”. Oh, I think you dropped something. WAIT, IS THAT A GAUNTLET? I accept the challenge. I’ll try to write up 80 capsule reviews here in the next three weeks.

THRILL! at the SIZZLING NEW ART I encounter!!!
MARVEL! at the pointless AMBITION of my task!!!
GASP! as my writing becomes increasingly erratic and HYSTERICAL!!!!
SKIM! the reviews for the BEST BITS!!!

83 shows? What manner of madness is this? I suggest volunteers ought to be at the ready in three weeks' time to pick up the bits. And I dips me lid.

As you all know by now, it got through: this week it was announced that Melbourne is now, after Edinburgh, the second UNESCO City of Literature. Let's hope we can live up to it, although there's no way we can claim the kind of literary heritage Edinburgh has. And there have been unkind comments in the Australian about the Melbourne Writers Festival. Well, whatever you think of the festival, you can't claim that the 2008 program isn't big.

If you're going cross-eyed trying to work out what to see, never fear: Ms TN has filleted out those sessions of interest to the thespian-minded among us, which is why both of my pupils are now riveted to my nose. Observations about there being a lot of nose to look at will hereby be treated with the hurt disdain they deserve.

This Sunday, there are a couple of sessions for which it should be well worth making the trek to Federation Square. Barrie Kosky, fresh from wowing the Scottish with The Tell-Tale Heart at the Edinburgh Festival, will be in conversation with theatre historian/director Julian Meyrick about his Melbourne University Press book (I'd call it a booklet, if it were not not quite right) On Ecstasy at 10am at ACMI 1.

Barrie will be talking later the same day with the distinguished director Jim Sharman - whose memoir Blood and Tinsel (a weighty tome, rather than a booklet) is also just out from MUP - about changes in theatre over the past couple of decades. I'm sure that will be worth hearing - I'd be surprised if there weren't provocation in bucketloads. That's at 5.30 at the BMW Edge, and will be mediated by broadcaster Julie Copeland.

I'm chairing a session next Friday, August 29, in which theatre historians Julian Meyrick and Gabrielle Wolf - who have respectively written histories of the Nimrod Theatre and the APG, the leading theatres of the 1970s New Wave - will be discussing their history and impact on present day theatre. That's at 2.30pm at ACMI 1.

It's not all directors and historians. Joanna Murray-Smith will be holding up the playwright end in a session on Monday, August 25,that explores "issues of identity and belonging" with Waleed Aly and Diana Sandars. 6.30pm at ACMI 2.

Going beyond talk sessions, comedian/librarian Josh Earl will be doing his stand up act at the Festival Club from tomorrow night. Meanwhile, if you have a spare $130 a head, you can eat a meal and be entertained by "dramatic readings" by some of our best actors, including David Tredinnick, Jane Clifton and Paul English, at the Bottego Restaurant for Beyond Cuisine.

As for me: my other dates are all poetry. Tomorrow at 12 noon at the Festival Club I'll be reading at the launch of Over There, an anthology of Singaporean and Australian poetry published by Ethos Books, along with Edwin Thumboo, Alvin Pang , Madeline Lee, Aaron Lee, Angeline Yap and Isa Kamari. This one is unticketed, so come along for free wine and free poems.

At 5.30pm on Thursday, August 28, at ACMI 2, I'll be talking about contemporary Australian poetry with Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Justin Clemens and Robert Gray. We're supposed to predict the next big thing, but who knows? I certainly don't, so I'll talk about something else.

And finally, a session I'm really looking forward to - on Friday August 29, I get to discuss Anna Akhmatova, one of the great lyric poets of the 20th century, with the eminent Russian historian Orlando Figes in a session chaired by Ellen Koshland. It's a chance to read some of Akhmatova's work out loud, which will be a pleasure. 4pm at the BMW Edge.

And then it's September, when I can hang up my Author hat and go back to being an obscure and private writer. I hope.

Or, How Little Alison Learned to Love the Bomb Again

Onstage, I am a real person, not a "persona." The people for whom I play are just that: individuals, not a faceless or generic "audience." We bring to our experience together preferences, histories, and expectations, and this is a volatile combination. This kind of immediate, intimate encounter is as far as one gets from an abstract cultural construct. And personal encounters, as everyone knows, are the riskiest kind.

Pianist Marilyn Nonken, from an interview in Superfluities

Language, so the wisdom runs, is what separates us from beasts. Unlike the average amoeba or domestic cat, we possess a glittering consciousness that is a microcosm of the galaxy itself, and of which the most noble excresence is the ability to communicate in abstractions. This raises us above other living things, and – like our expulsion from Eden, which was an expulsion into consciousness and the primordial moment of our alienation from other living things - justifies our exploitation of the planet, which is given to us, God’s chosen higher beings, to do with as we will.

This has been the basic contract of human authority since around the Renaissance, though it started long before. Our humanity is measured against the non-humanity of animals, and if we wish to deprive others of their humanity, we merely need to categorise them as less than human, as animals themselves. George W Bush is only the most crass example of what happens when such linguistic manifest destiny is put into practice.

At the other end of language are writers who are concerned with at once smashing and exploiting the hidden legislations of language, worrying the loosening tendons of syntax and grammar into the animalities of sound and redelivering language to the body, bewildered and unknown to itself. They make a various and implosive language, corrupted and broken and enlivened by post capitalist consumerism, conscious and angry, shamanistic, ecstatic, beautiful, polluted, impure: but most of all, it’s language that articulates consciously, through soft tissue palate and breath and skin and bone, the impossible abstractions of thought. It’s language that traces the oscillations between the tangible and the intangible, here and there, the said and the thought, the mediations of technology and self. Poetry.

If language is so deeply embedded in our idea of our humanity, then tinkering with its DNA, as poetry does, is a deeply political and significant activity. At the same time, it’s an activity which has to negotiate its own lack of significance, its continuing marginalisation, which it does with varying degrees of defensiveness or belligerence or grace. At its best and most bracing, it’s an art about which, even more than most, it’s impossible to generalise: it is stubbornly particular in the multiplicities of its insistences on now, here, this. Poets have to be spoken about one by one. And a week ago in Cork at the SoundEye Festival of the Arts of the Word, about 30 poets proceeded to prove that truism.

This was my third visit to SoundEye, a 12-year-old poetry festival run by Irish poet Trevor Joyce with cohorts Fergal Gaynor, Matthew Geden and Jimmy Cummins. It is one of the more nourishing poetry events I know of. It’s hard to describe the mixture of chaos and organisation that seems peculiar to SoundEye: at one moment it seems impossible that anything might occur, and then, without any sense of real transition, you are suddenly watching something extraordinary. And it’s even harder, even impossible, to describe the electric clash of poetries that in Soundeye 2008 made it such an energised and vital event. But I’ll give it a go.

The programming was marked most deeply by diversity: from the anti-aesthetic noise poetics of Justin Katko and the multiple unselvings of Jow Lindsay, to the shamanistic disarticulations of language and exquisite visual poems of Maggie O’Sullivan; from the “uncreative” media collages of Ubu Web founder Kenny Goldsmith, to the bone-tough lyrical constructions of Trevor Joyce, or the splintered urban demolitions of London poet Sean Bonney, or the baroquely observed minutae of poet Peter Manson (whose forthcoming translations of Mallarmé will be a significant event). There was even an epic romance, of sorts, from Cathy Wagner.

However, all the poets present – hailing from Ireland, England, Scotland, the US and Australia – were, in one way or another, heirs of modernism, in all its diversity of definitions. A hint of this provenance – and of its historic depth – was given during the cabaret night, which opened with a violin de gamba trio under Marja Tuhkanen playing Renaissance and baroque music, which was punctuated by readings from Sir Philip Sidney by Keston Sutherland and Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt by Fergal Gaynor, and from there plunged into successive anarchies.

SoundEye reflects the fact that contemporary innovative poetry is a bewildering variety of poetics, an uncountable collection of micro-communities scattered throughout the world, tracking their own aesthetic traditions and rebellions and deeply involved in each other’s work. These splintered communities are often deeply at odds with each other, or at least peer sniffily over each other’s fences to throw snails. What’s called, with varying degrees of impatience, the “poetry scene” can be a disheartening place, one I often find myself contemplating with depression or irritation. I suppose the general tendency of the world in general to despise poets internalises itself in a propensity for poets to despise each other, and the divisions that can ensue, as the so-called Australian “poetry wars” during the 70s and 80s demonstrated, can generate a lot of heat and shadow.

Which is to say that for some time the idea of poetry, outside an idiosyncratic network of relationships and my own private practice, has not much interested me. For me, poetry has always been driven by an inarticulate internal necessity; it is a mysterious if dominant force in my life which seems to imperiously demand certain questions, certain explorations, certain attentions. And it has not always been clear to me – it isn’t clear to me even now – how what I do fits into any particular poetic community. I am, for better or worse, a lyric poet, and “lyric poet” is in certain vocabularies a synonym for “twat”. But the truth is that most poets, whatever their provenance and chosen traditions, feel unhomed and isolated.

Poets assume, quite rightly for the most part, that their primary audience will be their peers. Within a multitude of tiny economies flourishes an infinity of small presses publishing beautifully made chapbooks and collections and online journals and blogs, holding readings and conferences, attracting those with the specialised literacies such work demands. Thus it ever was - Milton and Wordsworth published in much the same way - but there are times when one tires of the resultant inwardness. It's seldom that you will hear poets thinking with such depth or complexity about a relationship to a general audience as you will see in UK poet Chris Goode's latest (especially mammoth) post on Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire. (That's because Chris also works in the theatre). There are good things about this as well as less good things: but sometimes, in the hurlyburly, it's hard to remember them.

Well, I seem to have wandered off the point. Or maybe the point is that I didn’t think any of these thoughts at SoundEye, even though I was elbow to elbow with so many and so different poets. For five days I was intrigued, fascinated, excited and stimulated. Sometimes I was bored, but the longueurs were relatively rare. And instead of a bunch of defensive egos, I was for the most part among that rare collective noun, a generosity of poets. I remembered how poetry works at the edges, inventing new languages out of what lies prosaically around us in the contemporary world or imagining vivid alternative realities. It is all life – hatred, snails, love, curiosity, passion, sex, jokes, cities, arcane intellectual obsessions, insects, war, television, home. It is paying attention.

And what I carry away mostly is how the many readings I saw confirmed poetry in the body and in the present. Keston Sutherland’s reading of a poem in which his body was at war with itself, a fleshy dismembered microcosm of wider political violence, was among the more startling of these assertions, but no less memorable than Maurice Scully’s quiet, seated reading of his wickedly turned articulations. There was poetry made for that day only and poems that will be read in books for decades to come, and it was all alive and dynamic and grabbed your ears and showed you how many ways there are to listen. Listening is a choice not often given in our cultures of endless consumerist distraction: the open ear is a necessary balance to the incipient fascism of the eye. The parties were great too. I am glad I was there.

Note: The poems and readings linked to here were not performed at SoundEye 2008. However, the event was recorded on video and readings will (eventually) be uploaded to Meshworks and, it is threatened, YouTube.

My publisher tells me that my new collection of poems, Theatre, is at last in book form (it took a little longer than expected, and I just missed getting my hot little hands on it in England - apologies too to those who tried to buy it and found it wasn't printed yet). Those who missed the full TN advertisement, complete with flattering endorsements, can contemplate it here, and then, flushed with enthusiasm, order it directly from Salt Publishing. Or you can just wander down to Readings in a few weeks and buy it there, as copies are winging south as we speak.