bluebag of a day
one quick dunking
final rinse the sky
then hung brighter
flower the very bee
Image by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash. Today was one of those cloudless perfect days that a friend described as a ‘bluebag’. This referenced Reckitt & Coleman’s laundry product, a history of laundry and the (incomplete and wildly speculative) wikipedia entry for bluing (fabric): bee sting remedies, hoodoo spells and blue hands.
Unrelated, for music this morning here’s Cecilia Bartoli with cellist Sol Gabetta with some sweet duets (youtube)
blown sand blocks our street
duneland has returned
like the past
finds us oddly
unready its tidings
Image: Dunes south of Port Kembla, c. 1940s c/- Wollongong Library. A tanka inspired by the brief closure of a local road after a few days of strong southerlies. This area was subject to some ‘dune shaping’ recently by the local council which involved removal of foredune vegetation which (in my view) helped stabilise the sand. That said, the past is implacable.
Music this morning, here’s British vocal ensemble Voces8 with a reworking of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song (Youtube).
Wollongong poet, publisher and Australian poetry legend Ron Pretty has published a collection of his work over 50 years of writing.
Poetry shifts so quickly it can be hard to keep up. Sometimes I imagine it as a wave, its front rising up full of new exciting voices; voices that have been ignored or silenced; sassy angry voices talking back to the blandness of popular culture and late stage capitalism; urgent voices insisting we act on environmental destruction now.
“Jackson’s book is an extraordinary poetic exploration of his own disability – Marfan’s syndrome, which is disfiguring and distorts the shape of his face and body. His poems are blistering in their power, wonderfully subtle, objective and with no self-pity. “
Similarly, this year I listened to readings from a new anthology Admissions from Red Room Poetry, poems written from the lived experience of mental illness. My warmest memory of that night is as one of the poets came to the critical point in the poem he was struck dumb, overcome with emotion. And we, a room of 80 fans and friends, held our breath as the poet found his composure and courage to keep reading. Powerful words indeed.
So what to make of a collection of someone who’s been writing poetry for over 50 years, has published eight full collections and six chapbooks of poetry? To continue the surf metaphor, this poetry is from the green water out beyond the breakers, it’s deep and cool and collected and exhilarating in its own way. Yes, there are experiments in form, in voice and subject but it also points to the evolution of a writer over time.
Recently, I voiced Ron’s words for a program on Radio 3CR in which two of his poetry colleagues — Kevin Brophy and Alex Skovron — read from 101 poems. It’s a terrific program put together by Tina Ginannoukos from the Spoken Word team at 3CR and gives you an introduction to Ron Pretty’s work (a longer extended version is also available).
After listening to this, you’re going to want to immediately order a copy from Ron’s publisher Pitt Street Poetry.
3CR spoken-word program: The work of Ron Pretty, December 22, 2022.
And for music this afternoon (where it’s raining on newly mown summer grass) here’s American composer Caroline Shaw with the Attacca quartet playing Orange (Youtube)
It’s been a month since the contractors poisoned the weed that
was choking our suburban lagoon. Still water, mats of black collapse
the shore is quiet. Usually by October the reed warblers would be
full-throated at their young: this our morning song, this an alarm trill this is how to hang a nest on two bent rushes just right. Next year
— maybe. The pelicans mooch about before departing.
An egret wades in the shallows, brilliant
like a tear in a curtain on a summer day.
Yellow eye, yellow blade strikes, catches nothing.
I want to make this bird into something —
in its leanness and pallor, a township starved then razed
or our kids trampling helter skelter through the garden.
Unmoved, the bird stabs again, brings up a string of muck.
It won’t mate this season; it’ll starve if it stays.
I’m thinking how hard it is to say anything cleanly, truly.
Then the real bird lifts, a slow loping climb
over lawns and picnic tables with a loud croaking call
that I couldn’t help but hear as disgust.
Image: An eastern great egret (ardea modesta) c/- David Clode at Unsplash, similar to the one so disappointed at our local lagoon.
And for music today, here’s Grown Ocean… “a large ensemble project by Sydney-based musician Novak Manojlovic”. with Memory Gardens (Youtube), which features songs inspired by the Illawarra NSW – where this poem was written. Maybe start with Rail Line, What Runs thru Coast & Colliery tho it’s all good.
beyond the glass, rain
intensifies in sheets wild
by light poles and
car yards, stammer of traffic
as we huddle the dinner’s remnants
and restless chandeliers.
one eye on the conditions
we’re counting umbrellas (1)
considering desserts (4)
sticky, drunk, deep fried, pronged with sparklers
and how poetry elevates everyday language
the crackle of electrics and lit. things.
weather app shows mint and mango zones
rolling over our coast
shows renewed river rises
floods flood floods
water down the water glass.
we shrug into cardigans
and summer throw-overs
tarry at the entrance
the waiter in silk pyjamas
bows, hands together — sawadti kha diners
Buddha says appearances are an illusion —
yet here we are beguiled
the puddled carpark
the servo, native grasses
tall as the tanami in spring
a way through to
the cemetery roses
heavy heads before the rain.
Image: Photo by Jolly Yau on Unsplash. Sawadti(pronounced with long last syllable) – is a Thai greeting, farewell and generic blessing; the Tanami is a desert in north west central Australia; and Jasmine Rice is a Thai restaurant in Wollongong, ‘almost an institution in this town’ some say: not that you need all this explanation.
For music this morning, here’s the Australian Chamber Orchestra with Johnny Greenwood’s composition ‘Water‘ (Youtube).
In this still blue bright out of nowhere
they appear, five, six, nine, just hanging
I notice them peripherally, a flock much
larger than the usual circle of seabirds
a tenth is still falling, a stone tied to a ribbon
then the shute flowers finally and she brakes.
I hear them distantly woo-hooing each other
legs a-dangle, bodies hung from a string.
Maybe they’ll bring us news from that upper realm:
‘the air is cold and thin’, ‘clouds wispy like pillows’
or say how we appear in our gardens
unexalted, climbing ladders, walking toddlers
or, having snatched themselves out of the great mouth
tell us the particular word death said when denied.
Image: Royal Australian Air Force parachuter, c. 1939, c/- State Library of NSW on Flickr.
And for music this morning, here’s an early album by Max Richter, The Blue Notebooks (youtube) – (maybe start with the familiar ‘On the Nature of Daylight) which he described as a meditation on (and against) violence. Featuring Tilda Swinton reading from Franz Kafka and poet Czesław Miłosz‘s Hymn of the Pearl and Unattainable Earth. Originally released in 2003, here we are nearly 20 years on…
This poem was written with thanks on unceded Wodi-Wodi land
Here I am grateful to be up early
while the house is still asleep and
the sky is the colour of blood plums.
To slip into the kitchen, take the last orange
from the china bowl, quarter it
bleeding juice and cells, and give thanks.
Thanks for the orchard near Griffith
6 hours west of here where it’s still night
the whoosh of frost fans, the fruit like lanterns
hung in the bladed leaves. And for
the Italian diaspora, out of poverty
and crumbling fields to new south wales — grazie, milli grazie.
And ever for the Wiradjuri Nation on whose land
this fruit grew. For quartz knives and scrapers
singing trade routes thru the alluvium.
For the mottled cod on a rock face and
a deep well of water hidden by a flat stone
— say mandaang guwu (that’s Wiradjuri for thank you).
To the picker from Kiribati grateful
for our wages (less board, less diesel, less this ‘n that).
In three months, he’ll see his family
they’ll buy a Chinese solar battery
so their daughter can do her homework at night
sitting up out of the tide — and they’ll give thanks.
Such abundance, such good juice. 3 aussie dollars
buys a netful from my grocers. There’s Damascus pop
on the radio and in season you get the best broad beans.
They pile nets of glorious navels in bins by the doorway
and help mothers in hijabs and elders in duffle coats
load their trollies high — and say shukran.
Wait. Time for one final thanks:
for this morning’s morning chorus, the honeyeater’s tchlik
the blackbird in the casuarina — another settler
another feral import, useless but to assuage
an Englishman’s nostalgia at breakfast and
to bless us in our loud, complicated song.
Image: Postcard, the Parent Navel Orange Tree, Riverside, California, c. 1930, Boston Public Library c/- Wikimedia Commons. This is the image of the ur-navel orange, the mutation that occurred in oranges around 200 years ago that produced the navel. All other navels are clones of this one blessed tree.
I’m sorry for not posting for a while but here’s a new poem which I hope you’ll enjoy.
And for music today, (I know I’ve linked this before) to celebrate seasonal change wherever you find yourself, here’s Max Richter’s Four Seasons (Youtube).
girl in the Honda
smoking as she shift lanes
she's listening to Drake
driving like she doesn't care
she’s thinking YOLO
Image: Dodgem cars, Luna Park, November 1952 _ photographed by Ivan Ives, c/- State Library of NSW on Flickr. Drake, is a Canadian rapper musician, who is currently the most streamed artist of all-time on Spotify, with his songs having been played over 46 billion times, as of April 2022.) He also popularised the saying YOLO (abbr. you only live once). A tanka after Drake Equation by British-Nigerian poet Gboyega Odubanjo
as sun leaves the wall
spider gets busy
sowing sails and vacancies
scaled to her prey
in hopper legs and fly husks
how like this, this is—
line on line and beauty
bent round purpose
like a bonsai cypress
framed by chicken wire
and how wrapt we are
beguiled by gravity
stuck, barely able
to remember the door
Image: A favourite wall in Wollongong, rear of the Bridgestone Tyres outlet, McCabe Park. A bit of play with forms today (apols to any tanka purists, the syllable count doesn’t work either).
And for music this morning, here’s another piece from favourite US soul guitarist Shuggie Otis, Live in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) from 2014 (Youtube).
Peter Frankis writes 