What is our being?
Why are we here?
Do we get to take a step further?
Are we coming near?
Do we smile now
And nod our heads to agree?
Is that the way we succeed
In contemporary society?
Does having the same thoughts
And aspirations intend
To make us individuals
Of which we heartily defend?
We're all just running in circles
Not sure of our direction
Hoping to meet up with it
Under conservative protection.
13th January 1980
Kym Matthews
Friday, February 20, 2009
My Home
How you calm me
With your pounding.
How you ease me
With your strength.
How could I live without you?
Or even attempt to try.
You were my companion during youth
And also my advisor at certain times.
So much power I feel
From you.
Your music is sweetest
On silent summer nights,
Accompanied perhaps by the shrill song of cicadas
Announcing their arrival.
Your beauty is boundless.
I sit here, still at awe
By your unyielding temperament.
Let your waves lick my wounds,
For the ocean is my home.
With your pounding.
How you ease me
With your strength.
How could I live without you?
Or even attempt to try.
You were my companion during youth
And also my advisor at certain times.
So much power I feel
From you.
Your music is sweetest
On silent summer nights,
Accompanied perhaps by the shrill song of cicadas
Announcing their arrival.
Your beauty is boundless.
I sit here, still at awe
By your unyielding temperament.
Let your waves lick my wounds,
For the ocean is my home.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The Digital Age
The digital age is a marvellous thing
It promises a lot -
More quality time with significant others
Looking at a screen,
Signing up to Facebook
To see holiday snaps.
Is this the quality to which we aspire
I think not.
The digital age is a marvellous thing
Less use of paper the claim.
Opening centres in regional towns
Accessing the 'net at last.
Negotiating budgets, plans, policies and more
For the bureaucratic beavers consuming copies galore.
Unfettered appetite sees our forests feverisly felled.
When will it stop?
Shame, shame, shame.
The digital age is a marvellous thing
Do all your business online -
Myriads of numbers controlling the process,
Passwords remembered each time.
Call centre assistance available 24/7,
Web support and tech help for the masses
Structures in place that never deliver -
Unlike that age-old tradition
Of drinking very fine wine.
17th February 2008
Kym Matthews
It promises a lot -
More quality time with significant others
Looking at a screen,
Signing up to Facebook
To see holiday snaps.
Is this the quality to which we aspire
I think not.
The digital age is a marvellous thing
Less use of paper the claim.
Opening centres in regional towns
Accessing the 'net at last.
Negotiating budgets, plans, policies and more
For the bureaucratic beavers consuming copies galore.
Unfettered appetite sees our forests feverisly felled.
When will it stop?
Shame, shame, shame.
The digital age is a marvellous thing
Do all your business online -
Myriads of numbers controlling the process,
Passwords remembered each time.
Call centre assistance available 24/7,
Web support and tech help for the masses
Structures in place that never deliver -
Unlike that age-old tradition
Of drinking very fine wine.
17th February 2008
Kym Matthews
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Interview with Peter Porter
The following is an interview with the poet Peter Porter from The Australian Review, written by Darleen Bungey
I thought it was an interesting addition to the discussion about poetry.
Cathy
DREAM WORLDS
IN 1935, when he was six, Peter Porter was standing on the veranda of his weatherboard home, shaded from the Brisbane sun by an unlined galvanised roof and a canvas blind, when miraculously, "almost like the angel of the lord", he says, a word appeared.
The word was death. "It came into my mind and it's hardly been out of it ever since," says Porter, now widely considered one of the finest living poets in the English languge. "I have never had a moment without anxiety -- apprehension -- always the feeling of a possible predator over the shoulder."
He was an only child, born after his parents suffered five miscarriages, and no doubt his anxiety was forever heightened when, three years after he grasped the concept of death, it was made real by the his mother's sudden death from a burst gall bladder. In 1974, Porter's first wife committed suicide.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, an international honour roll for poets, includes three of Porter's poems: two tragic, one satiric, a good indication of the weight of Porter's oeuvre. One of the poems is Porter's intimate and moving funeral rite to his partner.
Titled An Exequy, it begins:
In wet May, in the months of change,
In a country you wouldn't visit, strange
Dreams pursue me in my sleep,
Black creatures of the upper deep --
Though you are five months dead, I see
You in guilt's iconography
Porter's dreams, he let slip in an earlier conversation, are still apocalyptic and continue every night. By day, he hunts them back down and fashions them into intricate works. "Poetry has to be made, it doesn't lie around waiting for you to pick it up; words are its material," he says. Porter doesn't use these images from what he calls "the alternative world" directly, but tries to capture their strange atmosphere. "The waking life is constantly under control but produces all the material the sleeping life uses," he says. "Things that are only reportage in life come alive in the experience of the dream world. A poet has to have invention, like a novelist, you don't just sit there and pour a bucket of blood over the page."
Porter's invention is broad. He employs all manner of rhyme, meter and form, with a rich variety of stage and cast, from the interior of a quiet English church to a war-waging Greek god; from felines to contemporary fat cats; from a Renaissance painter to a serial killer; from the shores of the Shoalhaven River on the NSW south coast to the mouth of the Deben Estuary in Suffolk, England.
While he often uses colloquialisms, he freely quotes German and Latin and some of the most obscure words in the English language. "Poetry," he says, "is language at its most concentrated form."
For all his wry takes on life and his expositions of pain and death, the essence this poet so often distils is battle-worn hope. In An Exequy, he takes loss and loneliness and redeems it. He encourages understanding: "No one can say why hearts will break / And marriages are all opaque". He shows how aloneness -- "I have no friend, or intercessor / No psychopomp or true confessor" -- can live alongside connectedness: "But only you who know my heart / In every cramped and devious part".
Is it Porter's sense of impending doom, along with the 70 steep steps leading to his London flat that he has climbed three or four times a day for almost 50 years, that gives Australia's most eminent off-island poet his gusto, and his poetry its zest?
Last October, straight from a gall-bladder operation -- which, given his family history, must have been unnerving -- and a long-haul flight from London, he launched immediately into a speaking tour of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, never missing an opportunity to socialise with old friends and colleagues along the way.
For years on most Fridays he lunched with a group of London editors and writers, including Clive James, Martin Amis, Mark Boxer, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. The lunches are not so regular now; some of the younger men find it "too dissipating".
Not Porter. Although he's not particularly interested in food, he is a self-proclaimed "gentleman who lunches". The lure is conversation. His is always served spiced with wit, peppered with quotes and garnished with metaphors, all of which enhance but never overwhelm the main ingredient, directness.
Another longstanding friend, Porter's biographer Bruce Bennett, a leading scholar of Australian literature, when asked what he wanted as a farewell honour replied that he would like to bring Porter home to take part in a two-day discourse on "place".
Place is often the question where Porter is concerned: Why did he leave Australia? When will he return? Porter has lived in London for 57 years and is often referred to as a British poet. But open the cover of any volume of his poems and the sounds from the land of his birth come bursting forth. A breath of air, the "red wind carrying dust on to my Sunday shoes", the whisper of leaves of "eucalyptus slipping past", the creak of "old windmills with their corrugated-iron sails", and the cackle of "kooka / with its caco-creado, magpie mutts / what messages they drag across the sky!"
The conclusion of Porter's poem, National Service, suggests the cord will never be cut:
I moved on: I live in London: I've grown quite mannerly.
But death will put me on the tram to Annerley
And I'll look out for the familiar sign on the shop
Bushells' Blue Label: I'll have got to my stop.
While Porter often portrays Australia as a disappointing, sometimes fearful, encounter -- he has described Sydney Harbour as the River Styx -- he also speaks of early memories with all the recall of a man describing the first sighting of a lover. Little of those long, and long-anticipated, trips to Sydney that he made as a small boy with his mother every Christmas has been forgotten: the train travelling along the Northern Rivers district, seeing jacaranda trees at Grafton, watching the dawn break over Woy Woy, then the Town Hall clock signalling their arrival, and the street photographers on the concourse jostling to seal the moment.
Finally, Circular Quay and a clanging gangplank leading on to a ferry named after a governor-general's wife -- the Lady Denham or the Lady Chelmsford -- and the excitement of the boat trip carrying him past boat houses to the stone house built by the hands of his maternal grandfather. And there, as Porter recalls in Landscape with Orpheus, "and there is the old latch / The gate, the pepperina tree, the ferry rounding / Onions Point".
In his early 20s, believing Brisbane a blight, Porter fled to Britain. He talks of London as an office, a place of work: he likens his knowledge of it to negotiating a supermarket.
His accent, even after such an immense absence, is still Australian but his charm and self-deprecation are English. He claims that his name is so "silly", no one could take him seriously as a tragic poet. He also says he has always thought of himself as "someone you wouldn't particularly want to know". He is chronically diffident, especially when he returns to Australia. "I left, there's no excuse for that," he says.
But there is a caveat. "If I were 21 in 2008, I wouldn't go to Britain. I'd wait until I had achieved what I wanted in Australia. There are opportunities here now, people are interested now." If he has any criticism it is that there is "too much navel gazing; for where Australia stands in the world and what people think of us".
Does Porter feel at home anywhere? His poems would suggest not. He is probably most at home in the middle of a good lunch, anywhere. Or perhaps contained within the borders of his large, white slip-covered chair, the centrepiece of a room devoted to books and manuscripts. By day the chair is lit by the northern sun washing off the white walls of the neighbouring Victorian building in the Paddington Square; at night it is illuminated by a small blue china lamp perched on the mantel above his head, wire dangling down past the back of the chair. It is here he reads.
Porter memorably once said, "The best way to learn anything is like a dog: to roll in it." He doesn't believe in courses or creative writing classes. The aspiring writer should "just read, read, read". In London, a job as an advertising copywriter, which supplied material for his sardonic, often quoted A Consumer's Report, kept him fed but unhappy. He quit when his work as a freelance critic became frequent enough to make it possible. He has contributed thousands of reviews for journals and newspapers and is a constant voice on the BBC. In the early years, radio was a saviour. "A lot of keeping myself alive was turning up at the studios and talking," he says. Penury, Porter claims, is the penalty for being a poet. If he were ever to contemplate returning to Australia -- packing up his many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry -- he would have no real residence. "I don't have a house, any money. I haven't accumulated any possessions apart from books and records."
There has been no alternative to this life of glittering prizes but little financial reward: "If you don't write poems and you're a poet, you feel sick," he says.
When his friends gather in London next month to salute him on his 80th birthday, he will be signing his 22nd volume of poetry, Better Than God. He is still exploring, still looking to expose himself through his poetry and, he says, if that means "getting into trouble so much the better".
He says he would like his epitaph to be "last to leave". His readers will be hoping that, in his ninth decade, he will continue getting himself into all the trouble in the world.
I thought it was an interesting addition to the discussion about poetry.
Cathy
DREAM WORLDS
IN 1935, when he was six, Peter Porter was standing on the veranda of his weatherboard home, shaded from the Brisbane sun by an unlined galvanised roof and a canvas blind, when miraculously, "almost like the angel of the lord", he says, a word appeared.
The word was death. "It came into my mind and it's hardly been out of it ever since," says Porter, now widely considered one of the finest living poets in the English languge. "I have never had a moment without anxiety -- apprehension -- always the feeling of a possible predator over the shoulder."
He was an only child, born after his parents suffered five miscarriages, and no doubt his anxiety was forever heightened when, three years after he grasped the concept of death, it was made real by the his mother's sudden death from a burst gall bladder. In 1974, Porter's first wife committed suicide.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, an international honour roll for poets, includes three of Porter's poems: two tragic, one satiric, a good indication of the weight of Porter's oeuvre. One of the poems is Porter's intimate and moving funeral rite to his partner.
Titled An Exequy, it begins:
In wet May, in the months of change,
In a country you wouldn't visit, strange
Dreams pursue me in my sleep,
Black creatures of the upper deep --
Though you are five months dead, I see
You in guilt's iconography
Porter's dreams, he let slip in an earlier conversation, are still apocalyptic and continue every night. By day, he hunts them back down and fashions them into intricate works. "Poetry has to be made, it doesn't lie around waiting for you to pick it up; words are its material," he says. Porter doesn't use these images from what he calls "the alternative world" directly, but tries to capture their strange atmosphere. "The waking life is constantly under control but produces all the material the sleeping life uses," he says. "Things that are only reportage in life come alive in the experience of the dream world. A poet has to have invention, like a novelist, you don't just sit there and pour a bucket of blood over the page."
Porter's invention is broad. He employs all manner of rhyme, meter and form, with a rich variety of stage and cast, from the interior of a quiet English church to a war-waging Greek god; from felines to contemporary fat cats; from a Renaissance painter to a serial killer; from the shores of the Shoalhaven River on the NSW south coast to the mouth of the Deben Estuary in Suffolk, England.
While he often uses colloquialisms, he freely quotes German and Latin and some of the most obscure words in the English language. "Poetry," he says, "is language at its most concentrated form."
For all his wry takes on life and his expositions of pain and death, the essence this poet so often distils is battle-worn hope. In An Exequy, he takes loss and loneliness and redeems it. He encourages understanding: "No one can say why hearts will break / And marriages are all opaque". He shows how aloneness -- "I have no friend, or intercessor / No psychopomp or true confessor" -- can live alongside connectedness: "But only you who know my heart / In every cramped and devious part".
Is it Porter's sense of impending doom, along with the 70 steep steps leading to his London flat that he has climbed three or four times a day for almost 50 years, that gives Australia's most eminent off-island poet his gusto, and his poetry its zest?
Last October, straight from a gall-bladder operation -- which, given his family history, must have been unnerving -- and a long-haul flight from London, he launched immediately into a speaking tour of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, never missing an opportunity to socialise with old friends and colleagues along the way.
For years on most Fridays he lunched with a group of London editors and writers, including Clive James, Martin Amis, Mark Boxer, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. The lunches are not so regular now; some of the younger men find it "too dissipating".
Not Porter. Although he's not particularly interested in food, he is a self-proclaimed "gentleman who lunches". The lure is conversation. His is always served spiced with wit, peppered with quotes and garnished with metaphors, all of which enhance but never overwhelm the main ingredient, directness.
Another longstanding friend, Porter's biographer Bruce Bennett, a leading scholar of Australian literature, when asked what he wanted as a farewell honour replied that he would like to bring Porter home to take part in a two-day discourse on "place".
Place is often the question where Porter is concerned: Why did he leave Australia? When will he return? Porter has lived in London for 57 years and is often referred to as a British poet. But open the cover of any volume of his poems and the sounds from the land of his birth come bursting forth. A breath of air, the "red wind carrying dust on to my Sunday shoes", the whisper of leaves of "eucalyptus slipping past", the creak of "old windmills with their corrugated-iron sails", and the cackle of "kooka / with its caco-creado, magpie mutts / what messages they drag across the sky!"
The conclusion of Porter's poem, National Service, suggests the cord will never be cut:
I moved on: I live in London: I've grown quite mannerly.
But death will put me on the tram to Annerley
And I'll look out for the familiar sign on the shop
Bushells' Blue Label: I'll have got to my stop.
While Porter often portrays Australia as a disappointing, sometimes fearful, encounter -- he has described Sydney Harbour as the River Styx -- he also speaks of early memories with all the recall of a man describing the first sighting of a lover. Little of those long, and long-anticipated, trips to Sydney that he made as a small boy with his mother every Christmas has been forgotten: the train travelling along the Northern Rivers district, seeing jacaranda trees at Grafton, watching the dawn break over Woy Woy, then the Town Hall clock signalling their arrival, and the street photographers on the concourse jostling to seal the moment.
Finally, Circular Quay and a clanging gangplank leading on to a ferry named after a governor-general's wife -- the Lady Denham or the Lady Chelmsford -- and the excitement of the boat trip carrying him past boat houses to the stone house built by the hands of his maternal grandfather. And there, as Porter recalls in Landscape with Orpheus, "and there is the old latch / The gate, the pepperina tree, the ferry rounding / Onions Point".
In his early 20s, believing Brisbane a blight, Porter fled to Britain. He talks of London as an office, a place of work: he likens his knowledge of it to negotiating a supermarket.
His accent, even after such an immense absence, is still Australian but his charm and self-deprecation are English. He claims that his name is so "silly", no one could take him seriously as a tragic poet. He also says he has always thought of himself as "someone you wouldn't particularly want to know". He is chronically diffident, especially when he returns to Australia. "I left, there's no excuse for that," he says.
But there is a caveat. "If I were 21 in 2008, I wouldn't go to Britain. I'd wait until I had achieved what I wanted in Australia. There are opportunities here now, people are interested now." If he has any criticism it is that there is "too much navel gazing; for where Australia stands in the world and what people think of us".
Does Porter feel at home anywhere? His poems would suggest not. He is probably most at home in the middle of a good lunch, anywhere. Or perhaps contained within the borders of his large, white slip-covered chair, the centrepiece of a room devoted to books and manuscripts. By day the chair is lit by the northern sun washing off the white walls of the neighbouring Victorian building in the Paddington Square; at night it is illuminated by a small blue china lamp perched on the mantel above his head, wire dangling down past the back of the chair. It is here he reads.
Porter memorably once said, "The best way to learn anything is like a dog: to roll in it." He doesn't believe in courses or creative writing classes. The aspiring writer should "just read, read, read". In London, a job as an advertising copywriter, which supplied material for his sardonic, often quoted A Consumer's Report, kept him fed but unhappy. He quit when his work as a freelance critic became frequent enough to make it possible. He has contributed thousands of reviews for journals and newspapers and is a constant voice on the BBC. In the early years, radio was a saviour. "A lot of keeping myself alive was turning up at the studios and talking," he says. Penury, Porter claims, is the penalty for being a poet. If he were ever to contemplate returning to Australia -- packing up his many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry -- he would have no real residence. "I don't have a house, any money. I haven't accumulated any possessions apart from books and records."
There has been no alternative to this life of glittering prizes but little financial reward: "If you don't write poems and you're a poet, you feel sick," he says.
When his friends gather in London next month to salute him on his 80th birthday, he will be signing his 22nd volume of poetry, Better Than God. He is still exploring, still looking to expose himself through his poetry and, he says, if that means "getting into trouble so much the better".
He says he would like his epitaph to be "last to leave". His readers will be hoping that, in his ninth decade, he will continue getting himself into all the trouble in the world.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
THE ANT RACE
Busy, busy little ants
racing round my patio,
missing poles and dodging plants
as though controlled by radio.
But these mighty insect midgets,
while boosting their ecology
spurn all those magic widgets
created by technology.
Like birds on their migratory wings,
they navigate by wondrous instinct,
keeping formation, avoiding pings
however narrow is their precinct.
Their traffic flow across my yard,
dense in scale as any freeway,
is orderly and never marred
by prangs requiring towaway.
There they scurry in single files,
marching with regimental zeal,
criss-crossing pavings, skirting tiles,
heading home for the evening meal.
- Bill Guy, Adelaide, January 2009
Seven consecutive days of 40C-plus heat in Adelaide last week were not conducive to the writing of serious poetry (although South Australia would have made the ideal setting for Dante's Inferno). I, therefore, indulged myself in the above little frolic as my contribution to the latest session of the Aldinga group on the theme of Insects. Warmest (!) wishes to all my highly creative ExStanza colleagues.
Busy, busy little ants
racing round my patio,
missing poles and dodging plants
as though controlled by radio.
But these mighty insect midgets,
while boosting their ecology
spurn all those magic widgets
created by technology.
Like birds on their migratory wings,
they navigate by wondrous instinct,
keeping formation, avoiding pings
however narrow is their precinct.
Their traffic flow across my yard,
dense in scale as any freeway,
is orderly and never marred
by prangs requiring towaway.
There they scurry in single files,
marching with regimental zeal,
criss-crossing pavings, skirting tiles,
heading home for the evening meal.
- Bill Guy, Adelaide, January 2009
Seven consecutive days of 40C-plus heat in Adelaide last week were not conducive to the writing of serious poetry (although South Australia would have made the ideal setting for Dante's Inferno). I, therefore, indulged myself in the above little frolic as my contribution to the latest session of the Aldinga group on the theme of Insects. Warmest (!) wishes to all my highly creative ExStanza colleagues.
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