The Best Australian Poems 2011
Page 1
The Best Australian Poems 2011
Copyright
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood Vic 3066 Australia
email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com
http://www.blackincbooks.com
Introduction & this collection © John Tranter & Black Inc., 2011. Individual poems © retained by the authors.
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book. However, where an omission has occurred, the publisher will gladly include acknowledgement in any future edition.
eBook ISBN: 9781921870453
Print ISBN: 9781863955492
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
Contents
John Tranter
Introduction
Robert Adamson
The Sibyl’s Avenue
Ali Alizadeh
Public Mourning
Richard James Allen
Aubade
Chris Andrews
Function Centre
Jude Aquilina
An Apology
Louis Armand
Hugh Tolhurst, with Lines for a Poem
Peter Bakowski
Portrait of Edith Murtone, fiction writer
Ken Bolton
The Funnies
Ken Bolton & John Jenkins
Volatile Condensate
Neil Boyack
Others in the Town
Peter Boyle
Clarity of the word
Kevin Brophy
The Sublime
Pam Brown
In my phone
Joanne Burns
tick
Michelle Cahill
How the Dusk Portions Time
Grant Caldwell
the lights are on
John Carey
on empty
Bonny Cassidy
Magma
Julie Chevalier
ms marbig No. 26 16
Justin Clemens
We begin building that which cannot collapse because it will have to have been built as if it had already fallen
Sue Clennell
Picasso
Jennifer Compton
Four Lines by Ezra Pound
Michael Crane
Metamorphosis
Fred Curtis
Adenocarcinoma Triolet
Toby Davidson
Metropolitan Cannibal Hymn
Bruce Dawe
Mini-series
Sarah Day
Afterimage
Suzanne Edgar
Homage to Mapplethorpe
Brook Emery
‘You know the way …’
Kate Fagan
Chrome Arrow
Diane Fahey
Terns
Jeltje Fanoy
Mother’s (creative) tempat
Michael Farrell
Motherlogue
Johanna Featherstone
Warning
Liam Ferney
Gli ultimi zombi
Toby Fitch
Fluff
William Fox
Long Weekend, 2
Andrew Galan
The Suns Fall at Zero
Angela Gardner
The Sum and its Parts
Carolyn Gerrish
Absurdity Rules
Jane Gibian
Leftovers from a pirate party
Geoff Goodfellow
An Uncertain Future
Lisa Gorton
Dreams and Artefacts
Robert Gray
Flying Foxes
Kathryn Hamann
-kuing the Rex
Jennifer Harrison
Busker and Chihuahua, Chapel Street
Paul Hetherington
Through a Window, Looking Back
Sarah Holland-Batt
The Capuchin
Jodie Hollander
The Humane Society
Duncan Hose
The Truffle Hunters
D.J. Huppatz
FUTURE HAPPY BUDDHA vs Fake Kenny Rogers Head
Mark William Jackson
The Frequency of God
John Jenkins
Miracle on Blue Mouse Street, Dublin
A. Frances Johnson
Coal and Water
Evan Jones
Send in the Clowns
Jill Jones
Break on Through
Paul Kane
Triangulating the Tasman
S.K. Kelen
Rapptown
Cate Kennedy
Temporality
Richard King
Expat
Graeme Kinross-Smith
The History Idea
Andy Kissane
It Begins with Darkness
Mike Ladd
Mise en Scène
Sam Langer
into the index
Martin Langford
Sydney and the Bush
Anthony Lawrence
Quolls
Geoffrey Lehmann
Unlicensed (from Spring Forest)
W.M. Lewis
Sierra Nevada
Kate Lilley
Crush
Debbie Lim
Bodies of Pompeii
Helen Lindstrom
5.30 a.m.
Astrid Lorange
Lovetypes
Roberta Lowing
In the Laneway
Anthony Lynch
Sonnet
David McCooey
(Weldon Kees)
David McGuigan
Grandfather
Rhyll McMaster
Late Night Shopping
Jennifer Maiden
A Great Education
John Miles
Snake Lady
Peter Minter
Claustrophilic Lavallière
Les Murray
Going to the City, Karachi 2010
David Musgrave
Reading Laurie Duggan in the Shanghai New Zhen Jiang Restaurant
Nguyen Tien Hoang
Thursday April 21. Canberra
Jal Nicholl
Values Meeting
Mark O’Flynn
Our Lady of Coogee
Ella O’Keefe
Four Thirteen
Paul O’Loughlin
Reconfigured
Ouyang Yu
I love
Louise Oxley
The Red Gurnard
Geoff Page
A Manual of Style
Eddie Paterson
‘This is the Only Place...’
Janette Pieloor
Ripples under the Skin
Felicity Plunkett
Cyclone Plotting
Cla
ire Potter
Misreading
David Prater
Cute
Aden Rolfe
How we tell stories about ourselves
Peter Rose
Cicerone
Penni Russon
Quote
Gig Ryan
Daphnis and Chloe
Philip Salom
The Faces of the Unpunished
Andrew Sant
Mr Habitat Delivers a Speech to the Lapidarists
Michael Sariban
The Place in Darkness
Jaya Savige
January
Mick Searles
On the Up & Up
Thomas Shapcott
Georges Perec in Brisbane
Michael Sharkey
Heroes of Australia
Craig Sherborne
Trophy Getters
Alex Skovron
Humility
Melinda Smith
Murder at the Poetry Conference
Pete Spence
Where’s my Rattan Overcoat?
Peter Steele
The Knowledge
Amanda Stewart
Bondi rock pool. 1963.
Adrian Stirling
Christmas Poem
Maria Takolander
The Ashes
Andrew Taylor
After
Tim Thorne
Cave d’Aristide
Helen Thurloe
Ambulance thinking
Ann Vickery
Adventure at Sadies
Corey Wakeling
View
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
The Piano Inkpot
John Watson
Missing Miss Moore
Meredith Wattison
Happiness
Alan Wearne
Freely and with the appropriate sense of space
Ron Wilkins
Poolside Reflections
Warrick Wynne
The Stations of the Stairs
Mark Young
A Line from Paracelsus
Publication Details
Notes on Contributors
The Best Australian Poems 2011
Edited by John Tranter
Introduction
Each year (since 2003) Black Inc. has asked Australian poets to submit a selection of their work for this anthology. This year it was my turn to read through the two or three thousand poems that were sent in and choose the best.
I’m not sure that we can trust the word ‘best’ when we’re talking about poetry – there are so many different kinds of poetry, from Homer to rock and roll, and then there are millions of readers with their individual tastes and prejudices – but in any case I chose a little over a hundred of what I felt were the most vigorous, varied and interesting poems for this book.
And any honest anthologist should offer a further disclaimer: though I have tried to be widely representative, of course I have my own blind spots and may have failed to recognise wonderful work; some poets may have missed the deadline for any of a dozen reasons, some may have chosen not to offer poems to an anthology claiming to showcase ‘the best’ (this has happened), some of our best poets may have had no ‘best’ poems this year but may have next year, and so forth. As different editors publish their choices from year to year, any personal bias or imbalances should be cancelled out.
But what a rich, strange and diverse lot these poems turned out to be. Look at this list below, a gathering of some of the brightest images, transformations and unbelievable events that litter this collection. I suspect that these baroque and potent imaginings can only have come into existence as fragments of dreams or nightmares:
Bent hot-dogs talk to strangers. Still, the oak trees flower above us, a canopy of lust; an academic scholar talks about whoring his mind, a poetry editor apologises for not accepting a sentimental poem about a lost ant, a well-known fiction writer snoozes on the sofa, an empty brandy bottle in her lap, Boofhead’s Egyptian style of ambulation and a vast mural of Fred and Wilma are discussed, mothers wonder how tiger snakes got into the linen cupboards, an unknown baby skeleton, a word in Arabic that means a tree that befriends doomed travellers, the irony of green rain, the devil on holiday in Tasmania, Picasso’s one red eye, Ezra Pound’s brilliant rottenness, the Master of Stomachs, a skyscraper as a babel of crockery, dawn as the clock-face of the heavens, the feedback loop of amazing grace and dead birds, phantoms on the home stretch, a woman who’s doing the accounts with one hand and killing a snake with another while she gets an armful of wood, Rupert Bunny’s women waiting for a take-away pizza, two shopping bags full of stuffed bears etc, a shop where dresses were hanging like marked-down lungs, an apoplectic monkey and a monkey who practises sermons too green to transcribe, gods crawling through trumpets to get here, a miracle on Blue Mouse Street (in Dublin, of course), a wolf sack filled with of courses, perhapses, and maybe, the boots of Nazis misunderstanding stairs, God smoking a pipe, love like police presence, History with its morphine headache, a new neighbour swathed in her pet python, a man who looks forward to looking back on this moment, a mincing lion and an indignant unicorn and a dragon wind, a convention of lapidarists, a gluey saraband, murder at the poetry conference, a man with echidna gloves, a love that is an inscrutable monster, tickets to the monster trucks, a beer-drinking pig, a holidaying tycoon who has popped an artery on a sodden golf course, human beings as the tennis-balls of the stars, the memorable vanilla windows of Miss Moore, a Jungian bus trip and an absinthe sea.
The American poet John Ashbery is one of the most widely read and intelligent people in the world of writing. He has thought deeply about what it means to create poems, and in an address to the Poetry Society of America in 1995, he said:
Every poet who reads his or her poetry before an audience is accustomed to the question and answer period that follows, which often ends with the question, ‘Are there any questions that haven’t been asked that you feel you would like to answer?’ The underlying thrust of all these questions is something like: ‘Please explain your poetry to me.’ Now it may be true that composers and painters and cineastes are also asked to explain their work, but if so their task is lightened somewhat by the fact that there is something there to explain. With a poem there is nothing, or there should be nothing if the poet has done his job successfully, and that is because the act of writing the poem was an explanation of something that had occurred to the poet, and demanded to be put into words which in turn formed a poem. To explain an explanation is a much more difficult, and in the end perhaps a hopeless task because it’s doomed to redundancy. Yet I’m fully aware that I’ll have to go on making repeated stabs at it for as long as I’ll be asked to speak in public, and that this impossible feat is also a necessary one if only because people expect it, and it is normal and proper to give people what they expect.
As he suggests, there’s not much point in trying to explain how poems work or what they ‘mean’. But as with public talks, so with anthologies of poetry: readers expect an Introduction that will explain each of the poems, or if not that, then explain why they should bother reading all this stuff, which means ‘Please explain why poetry matters.’ If you’re reading this page, you have the anthology in your hands, so you already have some suspicion as to why poetry might matter – matter to you, at any rate. So thank you.
But what kind of meaning do I think poems have? After all, I’ve written more than a thousand of them over the last half-century: I should have some idea.
Well, to be frank, I don’t really know, but I have made some guesses, and I should like to share them with you.
Let’s go back a while. A book I wrote twenty years ago – The Floor of Heaven (199
2) – consisted of four long narrative poems, and was based partly on a story device employed in Luis Buñuel’s funny and clever movie The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), which features a sequence of dreams one within the other. It occurred to me many years ago that the meaning of a poem is like the meaning of a dream: intense, important, difficult to unravel and full of the energies of the unconscious mind.
And – though I have generally avoided the Juggernaut of Academia – I recently weakened (I needed the money) and completed a Doctor of Creative Arts degree at the University of Wollongong. Writing the doctoral thesis allowed me to explore this idea further. I won’t drag you through all the details – the exegesis part of my thesis (where I reveal everything) is thirty thousand words long – but in brief, building on the work I did for my 1971 BA degree in Psychology, I followed Freud and Lacan through their various mirror-mazes and theories about dreams. Movies came next, and there the trail led from Slavoj Žižek to Alfred Hitchcock and back to Buñuel. In 1953, nearly twenty years before he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, he said: