Tabloid Story No. 9 appeared in the Secondary Teacher in Victoria; No. 10 appeared in Semper Floreat (University of Queensland), Lot’s Wife and Arena (Macquarie University). No. 11 appeared in New Journalist and in Fifth Assembling. An annual publication from Brooklyn, New York, Assembling is an assemblage of avant-garde writing produced by the writers themselves without the mediation of editor or publisher; each writer produced 1000 copies of his or her piece (roneoed, printed, rubber-stamped, handwritten) and Assembling collates, binds and distributes. Assembling’s assemblers (Richard Kostelanetz, Henry Korn and Michael Metz) were worried about Tabloid Story having editors, so we decided the issue for them should be of the editors’ own self-selected writing rather than any edited collection of other people’s work, to accord with the Assembling policy, though we stressed that other issues of Tabloid Story welcomed contributions from writers everywhere. Assembling was our first issue out of Australia – a stage in Tabloid Story’s policy of reaching new, wider readerships, and yet a further extension of Tabloid Story’s packaging experiments. The Assembling model was later followed in Australia with A Package Deal, put together by Dave Morrissey, Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts and Tim Burns, just as the Tabloid Story packaged insert concept was followed by Nigel Roberts and Richard Tipping with the regular poetry supplement to the Living Daylights, News & Weather. No. 12 appeared in On Dit (Adelaide University), and No. 13 and No. 14 in the Union Recorder (Sydney University). No. 15 appeared in the Bulletin.
Brian Kiernan recalls:
… the summer of 1974–75 was grim. In the early days we’d been hosted by journals with circulations of over 50 000, which if nothing else had brought in a flood of manuscripts. As acting editor, while the others roved, I became slowly entombed by the mounting walls of paper – fresh manuscripts, manuscripts to be returned, letters from writers whose stories had been accepted but not yet published. Feelers put out to possible new hosts encountered nothing. Even apparently firm agreements appeared to be jinxed. Then at the lowest moment, the editor of the Bulletin rang and asked if the editors would be interested in placing an issue and would like to discuss it over lunch at their office. The Bulletin and a free lunch! The Bulletin had been the vehicle for a generation of writers immediately before and after federation who had wanted to make it new in terms of their experience to break through the prevailing conventions – Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Edward Dyson, Steele Rudd … For myself, as acting editor this was an historically symbolic opportunity to present the new fiction of the 1970s in the magazine that had carried the new fiction of the 1890s. We ran Murray Bail’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ as the lead story. My accompanying note that the Bulletin had published Lawson’s story of the same title in 1892 was subbed out; the press missed covering our ‘meeting with history’.
We began our search to find an entirely new group of editors in April 1975. We wanted to ensure the magazine’s continuation and we also had to maintain continuity in the magazine’s current appearance while we were arranging a change-over. No.16 appeared in Jenny Sheehan’s experiment in a raised-consciousness suburban throw-away, the Warringah Woman’s Times; No. 17 appeared in the first issue of the New Literature Review (itself incorporating Arna which had had an interesting literary history over the years). No. 18 appeared in Newswit again, and No. 19 in Tharunka.
Then in November 1975 we handed over to a Melbourne-based group of editors, involving at various times Lucy Frost, Meredith Michie, Anne Timlin, John Timlin, Laurie Clancy and Judy Slingsby.
The Poet and the Motor Car
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 12.6.71)
We expected to find some of the signs of the times when we accepted Don Anderson’s invitation to go to the Australian and New Zealand Society for American Studies seminar at Sydney University. But, my god, we didn’t expect to find them all.
Don, a lecturer in English literature at Sydney University and a friend, was ostensibly talking on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman (they became linguistically tangled during the lecture into ‘Whitberg’) but in fact he delivered a sub-lecture titled the ‘Motor Car and the Poet’ – a footnote to his lecture which subsumed the whole lecture and occupied the discussion – along with a scarcely polite exchange among Don, a women’s movement activist and a gay liberationist.
The sub-lecture was tantalisingly sketched in by Don who began with a quote from Ginsberg’s ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ – a car ride poem:
I am the universe tonite
riding in all my Power riding
chauffeured thru my self by a long haired saint with eyeglasses
He moved on then to William Stafford’s ‘Travelling through the dark’, Louis Simpson’s great line ‘The Open Road goes to the used-car lot’ to Robert Bly’s poem ‘Driving towards the Lac Qui Parle River’ and Robert Creeley’s poem ‘I know a Man’ (which Don, something of a motorist and something of a poet, has on his office wall):
Why not, buy a goddam big car
drive, he sd for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
The oblique stroke and the abbreviations ‘yr’ and ‘sd’ had come to contemporary poetry.
Inescapably Don had to quote Marshall McLuhan – a piece from his book Understanding Media in which McLuhan says, ‘As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbours became strangers … the car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell of urban and suburban man.’
Don’s thesis was that the motor car had altered our relation to the environment and our sensibilities, that we now see the world through the shape of a car window at 75 kilometres an hour – and that this is reflected in the texture of contemporary poetry.
(We pondered whether poets of the eighteenth century saw the world from the back of a horse; did the pen become a rein?)
A Melbourne woman queried whether ‘poetry hated the car’ and whether the car isolated the senses from the environment. Don replied that he thought the relation of the poet to the motor car was ambivalent but that the poet often saw the speed of the car as a ‘mode of freedom’.
As discussion continued, Don was asked whether in Ginsberg’s poetry he could locate the ‘essential voice of freedom’ as distinct from the motion of a motor car. How could the poet free himself from the confinement of the car and the dictation of its motion? Don said, at the risk of being crudely simple, the poet could always look out of the window of the car.
[The bicycle people had not yet arrived in the cities when this lecture was given (wherever the bicycle people have come from). Nor had the oil crisis.]
But the analysis of the poet and the automobile mingled with a quite separate discussion launched by Dennis Altman from the department of government at the University of Sydney, author of Homosexual – Oppression and Liberation and Coming Out in the Seventies. Don had mentioned the homosexuality of Ginsberg and Whitman but told the seminar (somewhat oafishly, he admitted) that he would put aside ‘the question of Ginsberg screwing little boys’.
Dennis Altman said he found the expression ‘screws little boys’ personally offensive. It reinforced stereotype misconceptions about the homosexual. He also commented on what he saw as the embarrassed failure of literature critics to come to terms with the homosexuality in Ginsberg’s poetry. Don, he said, would not have used the expression ‘Screws little girls’ in reference, say, to Mailer.
Don replied that he probably would have and no doubt someone would find that offensive too.
They did. Kate Jennings, active in the women’s movement, sprawled with the rest of us on the seminar room floor, said loudly, and emphatically, ‘Yes, they would.’
Thus Don was crunched in a language vice and became the first person in our experience to be publicly attacked by both the women’s movement and gay liberation.
Don said that he found Dennis’s overreaction to his statement intellectually offensive.
Despite the discomfort of the chairperson, James Tulip, the exchange
between Don and Dennis continued intermittently through the discussion, with the fraternal use of first names and the dry controlled heating of the rare-book room, where the seminar was being held, barely keeping the discussion academically calm.
To complete the array of contemporary styles, a student behind me smoked a joint. He didn’t contribute to the discussion but maybe he tuned in to Don at some other level.
All in all, we told Don, he was lucky not to have been attacked also by the National Roads and Motorists Association.
The Death of Three Young Writers
Michael Dransfield, a young poet on heroin, died from hepatitis, tetanus and other complications caused by injecting the drug.
Charles Buckmaster, also a poet, shot himself with a shotgun after being released from a psychiatric hospital.
John Rodd, son of Kylie Tennant, died at twenty-six. He had published a few short stories in Tabloid Story and some verse. His mother writes:
He was murdered by some drunken Aborigines in Kings Cross. He had been to Bali twice and India twice, and Nepal once – all quite safely. He had wandered over Australia and at the time of his death was a student at Macquarie University. The circumstances of his death are still mysterious but he was robbed of nearly a thousand dollars. One man was given a life sentence, which John would have deplored as he was no more a believer in vengeance than I am. The other two escaped for lack of evidence … He was a gentle, humorous, and concerned young man. An astrologer once refused to put his horoscope on paper because he had never seen anything so disastrous. He loved India and regarded the Australian way of life as puerile.
Rodney Hall on the Death of a Cult-Hero
(from the Introduction, Voyage into Solitude, 1978)
Michael Dransfield died on Good Friday 1973. He was twenty-four years old. At the time he had published three books of poems and was already something of a cult-hero among young people who shared his anger against the callous commercialism of our society and his experience as a drug addict. He spoke for many who had never had a voice before. There is no doubt they loved him for it – and still do. I think it would be true to say that he and the Aboriginal poet Kath Walker are the only Australian poets of recent times with a genuine popular following, a following among people who do not otherwise read poetry.
And yet his poems never talk down to people nor assume the modesty of prose. In most respects his mode is High Romantic, his vocabulary of images at times positively gothic. But, unlikely as it may appear, these very characteristics contribute to his popular appeal: the desire for vivid, colourful, and fantastic notions being so much part of the world of the ‘alternative society’. His use of archaic spellings, the abundance of viols and lutes, tapestries, princes and sundry enchantments is understood in terms of fancydress because of the brutal, despairing context from which so much of his poetry speaks: it is what the poet actually says that raises both the quaintness and the squalor to the level of moving (even rhapsodic) poetry.
Reviewers and critics have already paid some attention to Courland Penders, that ramshackle abandoned family homestead, parts of which are described in all his books. There has been some earnest rooting around for evidence as to whether it was ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’. Surely this is not the point. He needed Courland Penders for his imaginative balance, it was a tool for the survival of his imagination. It was his ideal. And if justice were to be done to his sense of history, his tastes, his passions, a Courland Penders would have been his. Even its dilapidation is important to the romantic aura of the place:
twenty rooms four thousand acres
emptiness and desolation
as he writes of it in an unpublished poem ‘Courland Penders: Reminiscences’.
Fancydress implies playing a part; of course he played a part. And most of all he enjoyed exploring the public image of a Poet – still, astonishingly enough the Keats/Shelley model. This suited him for he shared with the nineteenth-century romantics a belief that history is created by individuals, that our history was made by Caesar and Elizabeth I, Dante and Marx, James Cook, St Augustine and Napoleon, not the faceless people, much less those abstractions class and capital – nothing so impersonal as the collective need for food or greed for wealth; but the passion and energy of the gifted individual.
He survived experiences that might well have killed off a good many of his detractors. He earned his fanciful words and his wishful thinking in terms of the poetry he made of them. It was one of his hobbies to toy with the idea of remote nobility among his ancestors on both his mother’s and his father’s side (Pender and Dransfield). The furnishing of an old family house, physical embodiment of his cultural inheritance was one of the ways he managed to survive. In 1969 he commented, ‘I’m the ghost haunting an old house, my poems are posthumous.’
There are few enough of these baronial pieces, all said and done; for the most part the poetry is essentially a diary. A glance through this book will show how many of the poems begin with the day, the morning, the evening, the night, his room, names of friends and lovers – commentaries on how his time was spent and with whom, what they did and thought, what they saw and the reactions of those who watched them. He is perfectly open about this:
preserving his identity through friends,
‘the poet as the letter X’, resisting
all but the past because that never ends.
He seemed to build a labyrinth consisting
of everything he loved, that distance rends
and passion clouds with fateful nearness …
(from ‘Death as triumph’)
Some poems, like ‘Peter’ give explicatory autobiographical details which help clarify the threads running throughout the fabric of Michael Dransfield’s poetry. The diary poems are devastatingly frank. He may wear motley dress, but never a mask. He says things about himself which must have taken immense courage to say. Small wonder that the ‘real’ world could seem so unbearable and hallucinations so alluring. Just how he judged this aspect of life was clearly put in ‘That which we call a rose’, first published in the Australian in 1969, mourning the death of two young friends, Rick and George:
One dead of hunger the other of overdose their
ideals precluded them
from the Great Society
It might be pointed out here that one of the distinguishing features of Michael Dransfield’s poems about the experience of taking drugs is that they are not content to be just drug poems: more often they are an attempt to place the individual in society, or else a means of relating the past to the present through dreamlike elisions. There can be no doubt that he felt a fellowship with the victims of our system whether these were individual criminals or an entire outmoded social order. Also in the Australian he published a letter of appreciation for the series Poems from Prison, in which he had this to say:
… Yes. The victims of our society, the outcast, the imprisoned, are articulate. That is the history of art. The view through a cell window has a perfect and terrible inevitability. Always the guilty go free. It’s their game, they own the wars …
(17 July 1972)
Just so his beloved aristocracy fell victim to capital having been dealt its fatal blow by the very same Industrial Revolution which gave birth to the machine age, mechanarchy and computerdom, which lie at the heart of the social impotence and aimlessness suffered so generally by youth today. Michael was among those who felt this social impotence and longed to escape it into dreams and poetry. But he also nursed a fiery conviction that dreams and poems could be used as a weapon of defiance. He saw himself as having a mission to undermine mechanarchy by spreading his ideas about beauty and love and art. So in this respect too he resisted every demand that he be a stable respectable member of this Great Society. He made himself an outsider and stayed that way, constantly on the move, renting a flat here, buying an old house there, but always moving, selling, hitch-hiking, riding his motorbike, staying with friends and relatives, moving on. The theme of leaving is r
eiterated throughout this collection. And though it carries with it the overtones of loss and alienation, what he really feared was the closing of exits. This idea is superbly put in ‘Partita’ with its window becoming a mirror and therefore rejecting him by rejecting his projection of vision, giving him back not the world outside, the world of leaving, but only himself, dissatisfaction, the limiting and rigid confines of the room. The voyage to solitude has much to do with this transformation of the window into the mirror: the outward-looker becoming the inward-looker …
Days of Wine and Rage Page 17