David Kelly reviews 101 Quads

 

101 Quads (Puncher & Wattmann/Thorny Devil Press)

David Kelly kindly wrote of 101 Quads:

 

101 Quads: A book worth your money and time.

 

I imagine an event. I’m an archaeologist. I’ve just opened a tomb in – somewhere in the Middle East– and in this tomb which I am the first to enter (Yippity dooo) I find 101 clay tablets inscribed with neat geometrical patterns of letters. I take them back to the University of Euroa Ancient Languages Department and leave them with my good friend, the renowned anthropologist and linguist, Professor Kenneth Slessor. 

 

A few weeks go by. He invites me over for roast beef, a very expensive red wine and to explain that this was the poetry of a little known tribe, the Berryana. He tells me the poems were composed by a Chris Mansell and that she was one of the more prominent and well known members of the South Coast Poets school. The structured layout is called a Quad and was the invention of Mansell herself. He explains that poets of all persuasion have sought a discipline to heighten their language, their message. He throws a loose quote from Thom Gunn at me:

You keep both rule and energy in view

much power in each, most in the balanced two:

Ferocity existing in the fence

built by an exercised intelligence.

(Poem: For Ivor Winters.)

He explains how the technique of these poems forced some words together to make more powerful expressions e.g swordgore (16th tablet) or slipsimpossible (51st tablet); and how the line breaks would tease the mind and suggest multiple avenues for it to proceed along until it found the one the poet intended e.g. in the 43rd tablet: glorious that t / hought that cap / in hand that ca / pacity for thin / king that justi / and so on.

 

There was a lot to take in. We rested for a while savouring his famous roast beef and a private label red. “Drink slowly young David,” he cautioned. “Both wine and poetry, I assume.” “Got it in one mate,” he said – a little out of character I thought.

 

“But what of the red bits?” I asked. He pounced straight in. His theory was that they just added to the visual appeal, or maybe were a poem hidden in the poem but he couldn’t really figure that out: a subtext language, a tribal variation. I suggested, somewhat tremblingly, for this was Kenneth Slessor and I held him in awe, that red was the colour of blood, of life, of sunrise and set and visually its presence added extra life to the presentation like the dappled light effect when sunlight breaks through a tree shadow; thus the red sprinkles and spreads life around the words.

 

He seemed impressed with my interpretation (as was I). He suggested there were many good poems in the collection but he was particularly fond of tablet 20 when two people rescue a baby bird fallen out of a nest. He was impressed the way the description of the nestling changed from ‘an asphalt coloured thing’ to the more lovable ‘little grey’. Here the universal act of human goodness is expressed in a single act of human goodness. 

 

I wondered aloud if any of the poems could be lifted from their ‘cages’ and would work as conventionally set out free verse poems. He was wary of this, suggesting that the disruption to reading and subsequent series of ‘aha’ moments were part of their effect, and indeed their meaning: a bit like the fun you have deciphering an e e cummings poem.

 

What?, I asked, in the same way that James Cagney and Greta Garbo belong in a square black and white screen. That’s where they have their meaning, their genesis. That’s where they live forever. He nodded, conceding, but not totally happy with the analogy.

 

We could have spent a lot more time on it but the hour was late, the bottle empty and so I headed home. As I was leaving I suggested to him that it would be a great pity if someone had produced such a clever, inventive, original collection; had taken the trouble to compose so many lyrics, so many moments that sparkled but due to the plague of 73 BC had been denied a celebratory launch party and that all those speeches of praise, balloons and streamers, sparkling mead etc. never happened.

 

He suggested I write a brief note about it and urge people to buy the book of the tablets now called 101 Quads and published by Puncher and Wattman in collaboration with Thorny Devil Press. And so, at Slessor’s request and my own volition, I have. The book contains many references to peculiarly Australian things such as Ned Kelly which may escape overseas readers but it’s mainly universal. And, while the scans presented here [on Facebook] are of diminished quality, the actual book is a first class print job. Poem 20 about the baby bird; poem 52 about nursing home rockers!

 

You can buy it, with my endorsement, recommendation and encouragement here:

https://puncherandwattmann.com/books/book/101-quads/

 

Facebook, September 2020 (101 Quads will come out officially in 2021)

Exile and Place

I have been a subscriber to American Poetry Review, I'm astonished to discover, almost as long as it's been around. For some of that time, when it arrived I'd remind myself, that I only bought it for the articles. But not recently.

The current issue (v37 no6) has poems by Mahmoud Darwish (trs by Fady Joudah) and an article called 'The Architecture of Loneliness' by Kazim Ali which are worth a look.

Ali's thoughts on exile are framed by a meditation of the cathedral inside the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Or rather the mosque with the cathedal inside.


Speaking about Darwish: "…if a place is to be made into metaphor, the wanderer has a shot of keeping his home alive and in his pocket" he compares this with the experience of Cristina Peri Rossi, Mehmedinovic and Yannis Ritsos. And asks: What is important - the place or the exile from the place?

When in the Great Mosque:

...I haven't uttered prayers in years but neither have I ever decided I wasn’t a Muslim There in that space, where prayer is expressly forbidden, I – who am myself in a certain fashion forbidden – found myself in the most curious position: it wasn't that that I should pray, obligated by my faith, but in that place, vexed and altered, was perhaps the only place I could …That vexed place, the once-mosque now very stridently Not-a-mosque for me became the only possible mosque, and exile in a structure of loss and loneliness, [like] a Jew at the remaining wall, the site of my very faith an interrupted, displaced, transposed place.

As he says elsewhere: Exile is a condition of the heart.

And later

No one knows a country like those exiled from it, and no one knows god like those expelled from paradise. …the primary condition of a person excluded from history or paradise is loneliness. it is not loneliness for the country or god left behind, because the very fact of exile convinced you that it was never yours to begin with. Rather one realises a deeper loneliness, profound, that lives in the heart of the human and cannot be succoured.

It's funny I tell you: Watching Bitter Films: Animated Shorts by Don Hertzfeldt

The difference between what we expect and what we get is either disappointment or a definition of humour.

Genres work on expectations. If you see a romantic comedy, the bloke and the sheila better get together in the end or you'll ask for your money back. Imagine any Jane Austen novel where Darcy goes off and sulks forever and Elizabeth remains a conceited self-important, self-absorbed middle class Daddy's girl all her life. That girl with the big teeth, what's her name, Julia Roberts, would be out of a job and Colin Firth would have to kill himself. The heartbreak is not real and we know it's not real. The rejection and humiliation is for our titillation and vicarious enjoyment. We're pleased that it's not us and live in the happy, if illusory, certitude that somehow we're just like the heroine/hero, even though even our family admits we're not intelligent, good looking or about to become rich. The world, however, seems ordered and right.

Speaking of ordered and right: what does it say about a culture when most of its entertainment is about murder and law enforcement? There are whole programs about catching sexual deviants (Law and Order: SVU). Does this strike you as odd? It is possible to watch nothing but football and murder for hours and days on end and in one of them the same team wins all the time. The odd show where the crims are the heroes are a big surprise, but even then there's a moral dimension. And what about that darkly comic movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for example. The complex plot unfolds in a very satisfying 'good guys' prosper 'bad guys' fail sort of way (though 'good and bad and very relative here). What does our insistence that the blokes in the white hats win say about our anxiety about keeping things ordered and right?

Even the biggest show on the planet, The Simpsons, embodies moral rectitude. From Chaucer to Mr H.Simpson via The Honeymooners and The Flintstones, there's a message there. Think about it. Every time Homer Simpson does something which scandalously threatens the right and the true, it never works out. He's always back to where he started. Not with the ruinous consequences such behaviour would invoke in our worlds, but back to zero for him. Most episodes invoke movies of the 30s40s50s (why does he give those Rousing Speeches? Don't you watch late night black and white television? Anything made by Rank? Why the dance routines? Homer lives in a post-modern world.) Homer's biggest sin, (Sloth) gets him into more trouble than it's worth. Homer even goes to church.

We're relieved we're not him, though mostly we are: yellow with 2.5 children and a secret wish to escape our responsibilities and to lie on the sofa in our underwear.

What about the phenomenon of Mr Hertzfeldt's simple cartoons? What secret do they nod to?

For the individual, it's clarity. Our wish for things to be simple and clear and for moral complexity to be straightened out and simplified to the point where we can act truthfully. Hertzfeldt laughs at us and we laugh too. We expect the expected.

Buster Keaton's cunning simpleton evades disaster, unlikely odds, winning out and winning the girl, evoking our sympathy and sometimes anxious dismay until the end when the baddies are defeated and he comes out all right. When he's caught in a cyclone and the walls fall, he's the one left standing in the open doorway as the wall falls flat around him, He's blithely unharmed. The audience laughs as one. It's all too much, any normal person would have been killed. When there's a coiled rope on the deck of a boat he walks over it several times, and the joke becomes that he hasn't tripped up on it.

When Hertzfeldt's baby falls down the stairs, tripping over the small pun of the title ('First Steps') it's funny because it's appalling (poor baby!) and not real. When there is an impossibly huge set of steps, the like of which humanity has never seen in brick or stone, the joke becomes a meta-joke: we get it that he's sending up the trick he's just this moment pulled on us. When there is blood in excess, it is much less than any night of any week of television or the horrible realities of thousands of the real bloodied collateral damage perpetrated in our names just over the horizon. All the red scribble of Don Hertzfeldt doesn't come within spitting distance of this. But he makes us laugh. Why was that? Because 1. he steps over a loine and breaks a taboo (that anus talk) 2. he shows improbable gushing of blood 3. then he takes the improbably gushing illogically far too far (see the too many steps, above).

When, in L'Armour, the girls rejects our simple though confident hero, he remains unaccountably uncowed (think Keaton, think Chaplin, Marx Bros, Three Stooges, Dumb and Dumber) and optimistic in just the way we we hope we could be and tell our children to be. It's stupid. He should give up. He's had his heart ripped out and been beaten around the head with it. That, surely, was hint enough that he should give up. Or if not then, perhaps when he was cut in two, lengthways, with a chainsaw. But no, he reappears, whole, optimistic and even judgemental (he bypasses the overweight girl. We'd expected that he would approach her and she would be all right because…oops, in expecting the expected a vile little prejudice is revealed.) Only after several lifetimes of unlikely and excessive damage, does he finally work out what you are supposed to do to win the girl. He could have written a paper about it (others have) but by eschewing earnestness Hertzfeldt has been succinctly eloquent about gender relationships and got a laugh out of it. It's the men who laughed in recognition – while the women quietly exempted themselves from such sins. We do not lie around on the sofa in our underwear and we do not chop blokes up with chainsaws, tempting though that is.

When there is overweening inanity (My spoon is too big), the four million episodes of Sesame Street come rushing back, the comfortable wholesomeness exposed as slight. We laugh this time with embarrassed recognition that we accepted them as worthy and that we had suppressed our suspicion that they were actually silly. The innocent earnestness of the child character's face, the unlikely stupidity of the enterprise, even the awkward entry of the straight-talking and irrelevant banana, the pause for the punch line that doesn't come, make us laugh because we expected a development and it wasn't there.

When Bugs Bunny picks up the black circle that represents a hole and puts it under his arm and runs away with it, puts it down again and disappears down the hole, we laugh because we're operating in two contradictory states at once: one where we have accepted the fake as real (black circle equals hole) and one where we understand completely that it's a drawing and false. When the cartoonist's hand comes in and picks up the Hertzfeldt's rabbit by the ears in Genre and the ears are ripped off, and bleed, three conventions are being violated: the real hand is seen directly manipulating the creation (rabbit) and the rabbit's (non-existent) weight has internally consistent (though excessive) consequences (a reality is enforced though it was just revealed as illusory, and then immediately violated again). The blood is the third violation. We expect the expected: vile and excessive assaults in cartoons are neither lethal nor bloody.

Our first jokes are just like this. The terror of the parent disappearing behind the blanket in Peek a Boo only to magically reappear again from nowhere instantly is a wonder. Perception (what we see/don't see) gives way to anxiety which is replaced with relief. Something strange, worrying and improbable in the disappearance of the parent, is resolved. There has been a Trick. Do it again! When Uncle Jimmy pretends to take off his thumb, the joke is not the fear of mutilation which momentarily arises but the realisation that this is a Good Trick. We laugh because we know we've been duped, and everything is really, all right. We like it. Because we're in on the joke the gap between apparent reality and what subsequently seems true is not a disappointment after all.

What happens if the funny is not funny? Fart jokes, racist jokes. Why aren't they funny? Racist jokes are not funny because we can't suspend any disbelief there. We know the consequences: the very meanness that kills people. We've got to be careful. They've Gone Too Far. Jokes that could have serious consequences cease to be funny. Fart jokes, however, are funny to some people. The same way that bums and bottoms are hilarious to nine year old boys but less so when you are older: by the time we're 49 we've got used to having bums and bottoms and it seems a bit normal and unremarkable.

Have you ever tried to explain an elephant joke to anyone? I have. Me: Why do elephants paint their toenails many different colours? Them: I don't know, why? Me: So they can hide in Smarties boxes. Them: Elephants are too big to fit into Smarties boxes. Me: I know. Them: So how's that funny? Me: That's the joke, that they're too big, so painting their nails would be futile and no help at all disguising them. Them: So why say they should hide in Smarties boxes? Me: Look! Over there! {Exits, stage right. Sound of rapid footsteps, off}. There comes a point where you have to admit that if it isn't funny to them, it isn't funny to them.

Even so, I've got to tell you, Don Hertzfeldt is funny. What about when the people with the silly hats beat up the guy with the normal hat! Hilarious.

Galatea Resurrects #8 (A Poetry Engagement): MOONSHINE by MML BLISS

Galatea Resurrects #8 (A Poetry Engagement): MOONSHINE by MML BLISS a review by Ivy Alvarez. Have a look at the rest of Galatea Resurrections (it's issue 8) while you're there.

Reading the room | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books

Some thoughts on readings from The Guardian: Reading the room

An interview with Billy Collins

Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More - A Brisk Walk: Billy Collins in Conversation

Frida Kahlo's last secret finally revealed | World | The Observer

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). Photograph: Mario Guzman/EPA

The artist's confessions to her doctor were locked up for 50 years. Now the details of her misery at not being able to bear children have been exposed

She was always one of the most painfully personal of artists, producing a series of autobiographical canvases that dealt with everything from the consequences of the terrible injuries she suffered in a tram crash to her abortion. But finally the one part of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's life that has remained secret - at the orders of her former husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera - has been revealed in a new book published in Mexico...

The ObserverFrida Kahlo's last secret finally revealed | World | The Observer

Review of Love Poems

Go to Stylus to see Patricia Prime's review of Love Poems offers some considerable insight into the book. I'd disagree with some of the analysis of rhythmical structures, but it's a good review (ie intelligent). Have a look.

New in Famous Reporter

It's good to see a book you know and like very much gets a decent review. Ralph Wessman has reviews Margaret Bradstock's Coast in the latest Famous Reporter saying:

There's no doubting the tough-minded emphasis of Margaret Bradstock's writing. But it's also a poetry of balance; she doesn't lose sight of the humanity she shares with her political opponents. Her brief, on the whole, is more concerned with addressing issues than it is with cornering ideological adversaries...

Go to the review in Famous Reporter number 33.

Tim Thorne's review of Mortifications & Lies in Famous Reporter

Go to Tim Thorne's incisively intelligent review of Mortifications & Lies. It's interesting that those who have seen the works performed and then read them (see also Paul Cliff's review below) understand best how the poems in this book go. Many thanks to Ralph Wessman and his Famous Reporter.

Interview with Anne Kellas in Famous Reporter

Ralph Wessman has been putting up back issues of Famous Reporter on line ... including this ancient interview by Tasmanian poet Anne Kellas.

Thank you Paul Cliff

I recently had the pleasure of reading Paul Cliff's intelligent reaction to my latest book (Mortifications & Lies (Kardoorair). He has allowed me to put up on my site. While there are things that I'd argue with, it is rare to have such a considered and wide ranging response to a book. Thank you Paul, for allowing me to publish it.


(See Paul Cliff's response at:
www.chrismansell.com)

Bradstock reviews Mortifications & Lies

"Mortifications & Lies is an important book, both stylistically and thematically a ground-breaking book. One emerges from the experience of reading it disturbed and challenged. Its haunting rhythms do not easily let go. It reinforces insights many of us already possess, but reminds us of the need to reject complacency, to become involved.

Many of Mansell's books are already recorded on CD. It is to be hoped Mortifications & Lies will soon follow suit."

Margaret Bradstock, Five Bells, Volume 12, no 2, Autumn 2005, p48