by John Tranter
Film is a magnificent and dangerous weapon if it is wielded by a free mind. It is the finest instrument we know for expressing the world of dreams, of feeling, of instinct. The mechanism that creates cinematographic images is, by its very function, the form of human expression most closely resembling the work of the mind during sleep. Film seems to be an involuntary imitation of dream … the darkness that gradually invades the auditorium is the equivalent of closing our eyes. It is the moment when the nightly incursion into the unconscious begins on the screen and deep inside man.
I know no better way of exploring the movies I like – Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for example, or Hitchcock’s own favourite among his many movies, Shadow of a Doubt – than to read them as expensive, complicated, multi-authored, beautiful and sometimes terrifying dreams.
And what better way to interpret the oeuvre of Australia’s most interesting poet, the non-existent Ern Malley? His every poem is a melange of incomprehensible images wrenched into an unwilling cohabitation, a process that liberated the vengeful unconscious fantasies of the collaborator hoaxers, the young poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The fecundity of those violent nightmares is still producing poems, plays, movies and paintings based on Ern Malley’s invented life and writings, half a century or more after Ern’s death, mainly by creative artists who weren’t even born in his lifetime. In fact just as I was writing this Introduction a major new academic study of the Ern Malley affair landed on my desk.
To speak more calmly about the creative urge, Henry James’s enigmatic story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (1896) comes to mind. In his well-known tale, James tells how a young critic seeks to unravel the secret theme or key that the famous (fictional) author Hugh Vereker says lies at the centre of everything he has written. It’s visible, Vereker says, but hard to discern, like a subtle pattern woven into a carpet. Alas, after many plot twists and turns, no secret is found. The Bulgarian-French critic Tzvetan Todorov comes to an enlightened conclusion about this quest in his 1977 book The Poetics of Prose (translated by Richard Howard):
If Henry James’s secret, the figure in the carpet of his work, the string which unites the pearls of the separate tales, is precisely the existence of a secret, how does it come about that we can now name the secret, render absence present? Am I not thereby betraying the fundamental Jamesian precept which consists in this affirmation of absence, this impossibility of designating truth by its name? But criticism too (including mine) has always obeyed the same law: it is the search for truth, not its revelation, a treasure hunt rather than the treasure itself, for the treasure can only be absent. Once this ‘reading of James’ is over, we must then begin reading James, set out upon a quest for the meaning of his oeuvre, though we know that this meaning is nothing other than the quest itself.
As John Ashbery suggested in 1995, there’s not much point in trying to explain poems or to search for the meaning of a work of literature. But if it’s true that poems are really dreams in disguise, neither is there any stable frame of reference from which to view and judge a parade of dreams. The dreamer is the last person to ask, which is why people who have baffling dreams often go to psychiatrists to ask the meaning of what they are going through. Sometimes the psychiatrist, with her or his independent viewpoint and long experience in such matters, hits the nail on the head; sometimes not. That’s the role I seem to be stuck with, and as you can see I have been making the most of the opportunity without getting very far. Of course if you don’t agree with my line of thinking, you can always ask for a second opinion.
Meanwhile, enjoy these fragments of dream-work, as Freud called it. And when you wake up tomorrow, if you’re lucky, you’ll have some dream-work of your own to think about.
John Tranter
The Sibyl’s Avenue
Robert Adamson
The lovers strolled in a city
Park under the branches of smudged trees,
Ample sun leaked down the sky –
Autumnal oak-leaves fell
Scattering fragments of calligraphy.
All this, locked away, when a bell
Rings. Memory leaks, touching sunlight,
Though with a kind of ease
My hand draws back –
The sky isn’t blue it’s abstract.
Those who walk this modern
Avenue, do so to pay the rent in paradise.
No takers, no shared accom.
A man sells diluted methadone twice
From a garish mobile bar;
Burbling vapours from
His fuel, used cotton oil, curdle in the air;
Bent hot-dogs talk to strangers.
Still, the oak trees flower above us,
A canopy of lust – look over there,
The sparrows chitter just far
Enough away from a cat, who chitters back.
This, so you know who’ll still be here,
As time repeats its fact.
When you come, bring Echo and Thanatos,
finally, you might raise a cheer.
Public Mourning
Ali Alizadeh
The history of tango has been cancelled
due to the sheikh’s plunge. Mourn
for his apocryphal drowning
in a lake in Morocco. I’m joyous
at the prospect of this jacket
outliving my jumpers. Ecstatic
hookers amass savings, US$ 3,500
per job. I make nothing vaguely comparable
from whoring my mind. The history
of philosophy reduced to a memory
of a real conversation. Glider
accident. Rotund corpse floats. At least I’m warm.
Aubade
Richard James Allen
Did I once believe in the power of poetry?
Was I swaddled like a baby
in a blanket of words?
Did they whisper me awake
and lullaby me to my dreams?
Now I stand, awkward, vertical,
in static and glare.
I cannot hear the silence
or the words that linger beneath it,
echoes of some unremembered Arcady.
To those who have me by the throat
and would rather I didn’t hear
even the simple rise
and fall of my own breath,
I say, ‘You misunderstand
if you think that any poet
ever lived in a golden age.
Every one lived in this world
under house arrest. The only gold
they ever knew was the music
of their imaginations,
when, for a few brief
unfathomable moments,
they mistook the prison bars of their minds
for the harp strings of the heart.’
Function Centre
Chris Andrews
Resonant surgical anecdotes roll on:
spiral fractures from middle-aged skateboarding.
Old antipathies are instantly renewed:
‘Still writing away for X-Ray Spex, I see!’
When it comes to stories of jumping the fence
– ‘For years I had been walking insincerely’ –
many think I told you so, some feel cheated.
Vanity comes creeping out through tiny cracks
to bask in the sun: It was so cold in there!
But what’s-her-name still speaks just often enough
for her silence not to be significant.
Outside: fractured slabs of concrete glistening.
Frangipani flowers lie crushed in the round.
Departing steps have a pasty s
ibilance.
A pair of near-perfect strangers, one patting
pockets in search of a lighter, the other
returning to return a mistaken coat,
make the first moves of what could turn out to be
a long conversation begun at the end
of a reunion where late-bloomers gloated
over the popular blonde who peaked too soon.
An Apology
Jude Aquilina
I am sorry I cannot publish your poem.
The subject of a lost ant is truly original
and the dialogue between said ant
and blade of grass is certainly moving
(it moved me to write you this note).
May I suggest the repetition of ‘Mummy’
be rethought, as some reader is bound to
point out that ants do not have individual mothers,
nor are they able to weep. Of course,
poetic licence can allow such anomalies;
however, describing the ant as three
black peas with miniature Meccano legs
is rather a mixed metaphor, which fails
in the final stanza when the ant
becomes a shrunken horse.
And finally, the form of the poem,
although inventive, is quite difficult to read
as the words do not meet up around the antennae.
Hugh Tolhurst, with Lines for a Poem
Louis Armand
Scenery emerges from the picture like a train
just emerged Jolimont-way from the
tunnel system, Melbourne, 1966 – in time
for jewels and binoculars hung from the head
of a mule – all roads to Port Phillip Bay.
Young mother pegging diapers on a line –
a black crow in its pulpit yawning the day’s
sermon to conscripts ganging the platforms –
flashing backyard suburban jingoisms.
We look back through the poem and see
only the wisteria creeping under the windows,
a trellis, a flyscreen door and dead lawn
a million miles from Saigon. The train rattles on
from station to station, parsing the signals,
numbing the arses of generations to come
without ever upsetting the status quo.
Arriving one day at the end of the road
like a detail conscientiously ignored until it
punches you in the eye – imagining some
real estate genius struggling to find metaphors
that fit the marketplace: southerly prospects,
ocean views, all modcons. Grey ships ply
the dun-coloured textbook waters and turn
into History. It’s cold and you shiver a little.
Out beyond the big picture the refinery lights
are coming on – the tide heaves towards its
Bethlehem. A hundred years and nothing
remotely imaginable, thinking why here and
not some other place, far away under monsoon –
Agent Orange sunsets making hell a scenery.
But the poem is only a way to dream without
having to suffer – and it dreams us too,
on the other side where time is forever
advancing like a threat. Night stabs a thorn
into the mind’s eye – we end where we began,
riding the line until the words stop. The
silent machines take us back out of the picture.
A train’s windows flash past like cinema:
Something groans. Something else gets born.
Portrait of Edith Murtone, fiction writer
Peter Bakowski
Scarlet nail polish and lipstick.
Plastic surgery on her once-prominent nose.
Edith summers in Cornwall,
winters in Athens.
Her latest novel is selling well.
The cook, the gardener,
will receive a Christmas bonus,
compensation for enduring
Edith’s moods and temper
when she finds living
harder than writing.
Characters like Clarissa and Harold
appear to her
as she drives,
as she walks along the river.
Clarissa,
eldest of two daughters,
an amateur botanist and watercolourist,
infatuated with her piano tutor.
Harold,
a neighbour’s only son,
asthmatic, excused from sport.
Interested in astronomy
and the treasure underneath Clarissa’s skirt.
Desire,
the primary emotion that moves plot and pen,
stirs the serpents in the garden,
coiled in the shade of the family tree.
Images crafted into words,
words crafted into images.
Truth and fiction,
lying down in the same bed,
entwined,
no longer strangers
to each other.
The white heat of writing –
thoughts, visions
becoming words,
lifting the writer and the reader
beyond the page,
to where the self is seen,
an ant
struggling with crumbs,
one day to be crushed
beneath a wind-blown twig.
On a good day, five thousand words.
On a bad day, the snapping in half of pencils –
the study mirror reflecting
Edith asleep on the sofa,
one shoe missing,
an empty brandy bottle
in her lap.
Edith waking
with hangover –
legs of straw on which
to inch and tilt
towards the horizon
of the kitchen sink,
a much-needed glass of water.
Edith
straightening cushions on the sofa,
lighting the day’s first cigarette,
asking the walls
what post-war England could be
if Nigel’s plane hadn’t been
shot down over Berlin.
The roulette wheel spins,
the white ball
comes to rest on zero.
Not every player
will risk as much again.
Edith alone
with her characters.
Maybe in the next book,
Harold, through his telescope
will view the flare and fall of a comet,
an arc of light that once scarred the heavens,
now reduced to a photo, data in a journal.
Clarissa will disturb his ordered world
by becoming pregnant.
The characters’ world changed by
a birth,
a wavering allegiance,
an affair revealed,
leaving a known path.
All that threatens and excites,
asks us to consider again
human nature
as it slithers away
from definition,
Edith will examine
in her next book.
Already she knows its title,
writes it out neatly
&
nbsp; on a fresh sheet of paper.
Tomorrow will be a good writing day,
if tonight she’s able
to sleep.
The Funnies
Ken Bolton
The comics were best kept simple –
The Little King, Boofhead, Brenda Starr.
The King never spoke
& others spoke ‘but briefly’
in his presence – announcing
something – this or that –
& the King would leap,
scowl or shrug,
exclamation mark
above his head.
I understood him
from an early age.
The cartoonist’s
ineptitude
was essential: Boofhead’s
Egyptian style
of ambulation,
his Egyptian surprise.
‘The true archaic simplicity’
as someone might have said.
Arms akimbo, one leg lifted,
mouth open, his eyes – did I
ever see him sleep? – pools
of black.
The amateurish, confident
styling of Brenda Starr.
Where is that world now?
I wanna go there & roll
cigarettes, roll my own
smokes, as Dan Hicks
had it – later, in a more
sophisticated age –
an age that
looks back –
at the King affronted,