The Spring Reading Series began on Wednesday 22nd January with three poets from the recent anthology Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land.
So, what was radical about it?
Michael Farrell; David Herd introducing
Michael Farrell set an offbeat tone with his first poem, a continuous rendering of the line ‘baa baa black sheep’. Eyes on the page, he actually appeared to be reading. How many times had he said it? 30? 50? The audience stiffened, the air drew tight. A mischievous glint appeared in the poet’s eye; he looked up for a second. Listeners gave a titter of relief. Then the line again, over and over, beyond discomfort and into hypnosis. 100 times? 400? As the glaze set in there was a sudden shift, a prompt line, and voices in the audience called out answering stanzas.
Suddenly we knew where we were. Sort of.
The sounds of a jazz band tuning up hovered in the room above. Farrell and the readers who followed embraced the challenge; foot-stamping glee club choruses were answered with sonorous lines and heightened voices. Farrell gave us phrases in backwards Latin, Spanish and Italian. The devil emerged on horseback in urban Sydney ‘like Voss’ from the desert. ‘You can’t drink paranoia’, we were assured. The Earth said: ‘let’s get a coffee in that little Italian café we know… the Sistine Chapel.’ Ears caught fire. The glee club showaddywaddied approval.
Next up was Claire Potter, whose organic poems wreathed their way through the room.
Claire Potter
Potter’s stunning lines showed how assonance and alliteration can woo the ears of an audience, and the distant stride piano evaporated. Phrases such as ‘a ribbon of tea coils into my cup’ and ‘a simmering of sound’ hung in the air long after the reading was over. There was flora and fauna, a blending of ‘plant into night, night into plant’. ‘So yes’, Potter declared, in lines from her poem ‘Misreading’: ‘I pushed her flat into the dirt of this difficult country; and it is true that I write as I read – mistaking wreaths for wraiths, spires for spines, girls for orchids.’
Laurie Duggan took the stage next. Now based in Kent, Duggan is a familiar face on the UK poetry circuit. He began with a section of a long poem in the anthology, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’. (Droll eye-roll to Gershwin fans and singing ceiling.) Written in his thirties, reading the poem was, Duggan said, like reading out his teenage diaries. Undaunted, he delivered a litany of interior details: crazed paintings, the green glaze of an overflowing ashtray, frozen figures in old
Laurie Duggan
photographs, broken typewriters. This was a very different landscape, and Duggan gave us every inch of it, a flâneur collating threads of worn upholstery and old magazines. ‘I would like to write poems like Edward Hopper paintings’ he read, ‘but the eye doesn’t work like that’. Duggan followed with a couple of newer poems not in the anthology, one of which name-checked John James at last year’s Veg Box reading.
So, what was radical about it? Australians in the audience had plenty to say. The poets seemed less concerned with radicality, although Farrell pointed out that ‘radical’ is a problematic term. ‘Putting the land first is a difficult thing in a nation that is all about using the land,’ he claimed. And with a timely cymbal crash, the show was over.
Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land is published by Black Rider Press.
Next in the series, Kent’s own Frank O’Hara: Simon Smith reads from his new poetry collection 11781 W. Sunset Boulevard, published this month by Shearsman. Wednesday 29th January, 6pm, Eliot SCR.
See you there.
Sonia
Michael Farrell’s books include Open Sesame, published by Giramondo in 2013. He won the prestigious Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2010. Farrell is currently Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Modern Poetry at the University of Kent.
Claire Potter’s collection Swallow was published by Five Islands Press in October 2010.
Laurie Duggan’s latest book of poetry is The Pursuit of Happiness, published by Shearsman in 2012.