Category: Essays (page 2 of 4)

Long-form rants, explorations, flights of fancy.

4 February 2020 / 4 Comments

The Self in Travel Writing and the discourse of travel

I’m happy to say that I’ve now completed a course at Linnaeus University, called The Self In Travel Writing. Linnaeus has campuses in two small cities in southern Sweden: Växjö and Kalmar. But I’ve been studying from a distance. Oh, and as a mature-age student. More on that shortly.

The course discussed travel writing from the second half of the 20th century until today. It covered the main trends in research on the genre. We analysed travel writing from contextual, stylistic and formal perspectives. But we focused on the construction of a textual Self. All in all, it was a stimulating and interesting course.

I intended this post to be a kind of aide memoire for the course. I thought I could update it every now and then. You know, add notes on the books I was reading and the essays I was writing. But of course, other things tend to happen, and to get in the way. As it turned out, I struggled to finish the third and final essay before the deadline passed last week.

But that’s done and dusted now, and I’ve passed, so there’s no need for me to worry about deadlines any longer.

This post is a reflection on my experience of studying from a distance. It’s also a chance to document the literature I read and discussed in the course. And to try and reach some kind of conclusion about the nature of travel.

The Self in Travel Writing is a course provided by Linnaeus University, which is based in two cities in southern Sweden: Växjö and Kalmar. This image shows Kalmar Slott (castle) from the water. — Kalmar Slott, Sweden. Image by Alexandru Baboş Albabos via Wikimedia Commons.

On returning to the academic study of literature

You could say I’ve been to universities that never shut down. From Sydney, to Melbourne, to Swinburne University of Technology. Doesn’t scan, I know, but whatever. The point is, despite my academic credentials, it’s been a long time since I studied literature.

So, going back to uni as a full-blown mature-age student was nerve-racking, to say the least.

Sure, I’ve read lots of books (although the onset of parenthood has lessened that impulse). And I enjoy discussing writing as much as the next ageing hipster. But applying literary theory to a specific genre (in this case, travel writing)? Coming up with interesting and relevant ways to analyse content and style? This turned out to be more of a challenge than I first expected.

To put it into context, the last time I had to write an essay on a work of literature was during my Honours year in 1993. That’s 27 years ago now.

I understand the world of literary criticism and theory may have moved on since the early 1990s. But, I mean, has it? Analysing literature still involves understanding theory and applying it to a work, right? It remains one of the great unacknowledged skills acquired through a generalist education.

That’s not to say that I myself am particularly good at applying literary theory to anything. Far from it. But at the very least, this wasn’t my first rodeo. Although the value of my own prior rodeo experience was, in hindsight, doubtful. Especially when it came to the lariat.

On returning to the non-academic subject of travelling

I was 17 years old when I started university. I didn’t have a passport. Despite living in several country towns in New South Wales in my childhood, I hadn’t seen much of the world. A trip to Tasmania by plane was the closest I had come to jet-setting. Brisbane was the first big city I ever visited. It was a simpler time. A desperate, ignorant time in my life.

Unlike ‘English’, ‘History’ or ‘Economics’, travel is not a subject you can study at university. This much is obvious. Instead, travel is a bit like life: you learn by doing it, and give thanks for the opportunities you receive.

My first overseas trip was to Thailand and Laos in 1999, at the peak of my morose late-twenties. Since then I’ve travelled a bit more in East Asia, including two stints living in Seoul. I’ve visited a few of the big cities in North America, and even spent a week in Uganda for work.

I’ve lived in Europe now for over a decade. So, most of my travelling experience comes from this continent, of which I have now ‘seen’ a fair chunk. Plus I’ve now been to every state in Australia but who cares about that.

Travel has, for a long time, been a part of the way in which I conceptualize myself, or at least my poetic self. My trip to Thailand and Laos led to my first poetry chapbook, The Happy Farang. Later trips led to further collections influenced by travel. See for example Between Empires, Abendland and Morgenland.

So, why did I enrol in The Self and Travel Writing? Why study travel writing at all? Well, it seemed a natural enough opportunity to pursue the ideas sketched out in my own writing. I am critical of the effects of Western tourism on the developing world. I have explored the ironic, self aware tourist as subject. And I can’t help but view the phenomenon of ‘travel’ as imperialistic.

But the course ended up having precious little to do with my own preoccupations. In fact, I came away from the course with a much more considered view of travel writing, and travel as a discourse. This has left me with some questions for myself as a traveller in the future.

The Self in Travel Writing forced me to reconsider the purpose and effects of my own travel. This is an image from a fjörd near Bergen in Norway, taken in 2019. — Mostraumen fjörd near Bergen in Norway. Image by the author, taken in April 2019.

Three lessons from The Self in Travel Writing

But first, here are some some quick lessons I gleaned from the course. Think of it as advice from one recent mature-age student to, well, myself. And anyone else who happens to have got this far into what is already a long post. Yes, I’m aware of that. And working on it.

Lesson 1: Read the (right) syllabus

As an undergraduate I despised people who read the books for every course. I sneered when they turned up in the first week firing on all literary cylinders. To me, that approach was more suited to high school, where you had no choice. This was university, which was all about freeeeedom, am I right?

I alone would choose the books that I would read, and the manner in which I would read them. Mkai?

Two and a half decades later, that youthful arrogance sure gets old fast. When I signed up for The Self In Travel Writing, I had no job and no other extracurricular activities. But I also had (and still have) three small children, so my time was (and remains) precious. If I was going to study travel literature, I was bloody well going to study it good.

In a fever of activity, I jumped through the necessary administrative hoops. I obtained a university email address: crucial! I registered in Ladok and Moodle (more on that shortly). Then I signed up for the course, downloaded the syllabus and started reading the first book I could get my hands on.

By the time the course started in September last year, I’d read everything. Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yawwws! Mkai?

But there was one problem. I’d downloaded the previous year’s syllabus. Which contained a bunch of books I didn’t have to read.

In other words, I’d plowed through Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954), Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2014) and Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936) for no reason at all.

Actually, to be honest, I couldn’t finish Journey Without Maps. But that’s irrelevant: I hadn’t needed to start reading it in the first place.

You could argue that reading these texts could do no harm. After all, I’d also read some other books that were on the syllabus. But there was another small problem. We would only be discussing those books in the second part of the course.

So, I spent the first half of the course trying to catch up on the readings I had not already done. And the second half trying to remember the contents of books I had read, like, six months beforehand.

Always read the syllabus, and make sure it’s the right one. The benefits of doing so will more than outweigh the feelgood factor provided by forging ahead and reading everything without thinking. Like some loser with no friends and nothing else to do.

Oh, wait.

Lesson 2: Accept that online courses are not as good as live tutorials, and then move on

Look, I know that some of us would like to live in a kind of Dead Poet’s Society meta world. Where tutorials are intimate and never-ending. Where we’re free to hold lessons outside, in caves, or wherever we like.

But this is 21st-century Sweden. I’m a mature-age student and father of three with no time for flim-flam, so online courses are my only real option.

Having said that, online educational software lacks something in the interaction department. The simple fact is that online interaction is still not as immersive as we’d like to think it is. This suggests that Fredric Jameson was right—that cyberspace is a load of old cobblers. And will remain so for the foreseeable future. But I digress.

And yet. Imagine, even for a millisecond, that I entered the Moodle for The Self In Travel Writing. That I thereby jacked in to some kind of edumacational matrix. And that the thoughts of my fellow students appeared as a 3D strand of DNA I could experience on my own eyeballs.

Would that be too much to ask? Or am I doing a disservice to the makers of a half-arsed piece of software like Moodle? Not to mention the not-entirely-impossible and totally-okay-with-me coupling of DNA and eyeballs?

Well, there comes a point when you have to admit something to yourself. Interacting in Moodle still trumps admiring the brilliance of your own ideas. You know, the ones you communicate to yourself, alone, late at night.

There were only six participants in our course. But that only meant a response took a while to arrive. Sometimes I didn’t get any responses to my posts at all.

In the end, the posts I wrote during the course, and my replies to replies to others’ posts, ended up helping me a lot. For example, when it came to writing the three essays I needed to complete to pass the course.

Which I guess was the whole point.

Make use of the tools available to generate your ideas in writing. Get over yourself. You’re no more special than a bunch of strangers typing away in silence at various other places in the world. You can’t see or hear them. Which makes it impossible to make judgements about anyone in the first place.

Lesson 3: Read the theory first, and the rest as late as you can

The last time I engaged with literary theory in an academic setting was in the early 1990s. Sure, Pierre Bourdieu’s work might have formed a cornerstone of my PhD thesis. But I came away from that one not sure whether I’d written something relevant or a steaming pile of jitches.

So let’s cut to the chase and say I’ve never been good at theory.

To some extent, this is a product of my own high school education. My teachers taught me the value of analysing texts using an array of literary devices. I later learnt that this was a version of the Leavisite approach to textual analysis.

We read and discussed Shakespeare’s plays line by line. I memorized sections of Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’. I recorded myself reading Emily Dickinson’s poems. And then fell asleep each night with her words blaring out of my Walkman.

I didn’t have time to ponder the death of the author. Or the question of whether Othello forms a discourse. But, again, I digress.

I realized something, one minute into The Self In Travel Writing. I would have been much better off diving into some good old theory before attacking the syllabus. Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ may well be a difficult text. But it’s kind of fundamental, isn’t it?

On another level, Masters-level courses assume knowledge of Foucault, Said and Kristeva. To give three not-so-random examples. I’d forgotten about them all. So the supplementary materials were thus rather impenetrable to me.

I should have worked that out a little earlier. And then delayed the act of reading each book until the week before we discussed it in Moodle. Simples.

The Self in Travel Writing syllabus included E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. This image shows a still from David Lean's 1984 film adaptation of the book. — A still from David Lean’s 1984 film adaptation of *A Passage to India*. Via the Internet Archive.

Eight quick takeaways from The Self in Travel Writing

Well, this has been a lot of words, even for me. I came away from The Self in Travel Writing with a more considered view of travel as a discourse. Here are some quick takeaways. Followed by a slow-baked conclusion that may still need some more time in the oven.

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) is a work within a work. It’s partly concerned with the discourse of women’s travel. In fact, Forster is merciless when it comes to Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested. But it’s also about the real ‘friendship’ between two men, Aziz and Fielding. The fact that the book is silent on their relationship both surprised and shamed me. But David Lean’s 1984 film is more explicit, and well worth watching.
I now understand why I failed to finish Ernest Hemingway’s turgid Green Hills of Africa (1935). It’s because Hemingway equals He-Man and the wildlife of Africa represent Skeletor. Whether Hemingway’s wife, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, is She-Ra (Princess of Power) is moot.
I read Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977) with a sense of relief. I’d endured the stifled colonial atmosphere of A Passage to India. I’d rolled my eyes at the He-Man narrator of Green Hills of Africa. Sissy’s account of her travels as a Ghanaian in Europe was a real palate-cleanser. Plus, Our Sister Killjoy is a very short book. This is important.
Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) generated a lot of discussion on Moodle. It struck me as a strange book to include in a course about the self and travel writing. The grand sweep of the narrative is closer to a David Mitchell novel in style. I had a lot of problems with Shamsie’s texts, none of which I’m ready to articulate here.
Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007) came in for some criticism in the course. Some students saw it as too self-absorbed but I found the book quite moving. Like Richard Wright in Black Power, Hartmann ‘passes’ for a Ghanaian but is aware of her difference. Her treatment of the idea of the ‘stranger’ is poignant, contradictory and human.
Caryl Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound (2000) was my favourite book on the syllabus. Phillips describes the travel experience with an unflinching honesty that I found refreshing. But it’s also travel writing at its most cynical. It’s a fine line to tread to skewer human failings without mercy. At the same time, the book’s subversion of traditional narrative forms is fascinating.
Noo Saro Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) was an easy read. But this does not make it simple. The tone is light and self-deprecating. The style is more like a guide book for millennials than an academic treatise on colonialism. While Saro-Wiwa discusses serious issues, she never becomes too self-absorbed. Which is a considerable achievement. After all, the Nigerian regime murdered her father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, in 1995.
By the time we got around to discussing Tom Chesshyre’s A Tourist in the Arab Spring (2013) it had been a year since I read it. But I still felt Chesshyre was protesting a little too much by constructing himself as a tourist. To paraphrase the character of Boromir in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, one does not simply walk into Tunisia. Especially when you work for The Times—an organ of British soft power worldwide. But it did seem fitting to end with another example of British (neo)colonial literature.

Conclusion: Re-evaluating the Self in Travel Writing

Speaking of neo-colonialism. Have I been guilty of travelling in the manner of a privileged Western jerk? This question bothers me a lot more than it should, given that I no longer go anywhere. But in the context of travel in a post-carbon age, it’s worth remembering that travel is a privilege.

I have obtained social and economic advantages via my freedom of movement. I’ve left behind the place and country of my birth, and started a new life on the other side of the world. Millions of people try to do the same thing each year. Most of them never make it.

The so-called European refugee crisis that began in 2015 was a small part of a global phenomenon. All over the world, people are on the move, whether by force or by personal choice. The majority of their stories never make it into travel literature. Their journeys are rarely even considered ‘travel’.

All this points to a possible conclusion. That travel forms a discourse (in the sense that Foucault might use the word). Travel writing, and discussions on travel writing, offer evidence of this discourse’s power.

In its simplest form, this power relates to who gets to travel. It also affects who gets to call a specific type of movement ‘travel’ in the first place. And who gets to be a traveller, as opposed to a tourist. Or a migrant, a refugee, an illegal, an alien.

This doesn’t feel like a conclusion at all. More like the beginning of another post, the post I may have been trying to write when I started drafting this one.

I’m not sure where this line of thought will lead me, but I need to leave it here for now, in the hope that I will return. As ever, comments are more than welcome.

What do you think about the discourse of travel? Is it a question of privilege? Or has the whole act of travel become mundane? What is the distance from which you experience the world? What would your version of The Self in Travel Writing look like?

Are you a traveller, or a tourist, in your own life?

A gardener sweeping leaves at Kenrokuen garden, Kanazawa

15 January 2020 / 6 Comments

Zen writing: the art of the clean, meditative paragraph

What is Zen?

Zen is both a word and a practice. It’s the Japanese version of ‘Chan’, which is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word for ‘meditation’. To use the term ‘Zen meditation’ in English implies a redundancy: meditation meditation. Zen writing also implies a double meaning: meditations in a mediated form (writing).

I first meditated at a pretty early age. I have a memory of my dad making us lie down on the lounge room floor and listen to Tubular Bells (it was the late 1970s). But meditation was also a background constant in my Catholic upbringing. We meditated on school retreats, or else at school.

This was the lying-down, deep-breathing variety of meditation. I guess it’s closer to Hatha yoga in form.

It might be hard to believe, I know, but my year 10 maths teacher once made us meditate in class. At the conclusion he said, ‘You are now going to have a great day’. This lesson struck me as both epic and banal. But he was actually right.

Since then I’ve dabbled in self-guided meditation and relaxation. I’ve also explored meditative writing practices such as haiku and renga. My written explorations of Buddhism have veered between irreverence and transcendence.

But I guess that’s Buddha.

My own private (Swedish) Zen failure

It wasn’t until recently that I attempted Zen, at a meditation centre on Södermalm, in central Stockholm.

At the time I was looking for a change of scene, as they say. I’d been curious about the rigour and emptiness of Zen since moving to Sweden in 2011. It had to do with Swedish pine forests in winter, and the way they resemble Japanese or Korean scenery.

Or was it the bleak Swedish winter that drove me to pay 400 SEK to stare at a wall? Did I mention that someone slapped me on the back with a giant stick?

Whatever the reason, I got through one Zen session (not sesshin, that’s for the professionals). I never went back, despite dreams of a life of silence and vegetable tending at the Zengården retreat centre.

My major difficulty was that, despite my Catholic upbringing, I couldn’t kneel for longer than five minutes at a time. Which is, after all, the longest you’ll ever need to kneel during a standard Catholic mass.

By the end of the first part of the session I couldn’t feel my legs at all. Then came a break in proceedings, which involved walking in a circle around the room. I gave the leader a pre-arranged signal and he brought me a chair.

So, I spent the second half of the session sitting there and staring at the wall. Which is what it’s like to be stuck on public transport in Stockholm in the middle of winter.

Anyway, that was a fail for me.

Looking for a Zen writing location? Look no further than Daitoku-ji zen temple complex, Kyoto. — I visited Japan for the third time in October 2013, on my honeymoon. The Daitoku-ji temple was a real find: a sprawling complex right behind the apartment where we were staying in Kyoto! While we could not take any pictures inside the awesome Zen garden (complete with nightingale floor), the whole place is stunning, with bamboo forests, beautiful walls and gateways and some true tranquility right in the middle of the city. View the full gallery from our trip.

Returning to Zen writing practice

Yet the practice of Zen—in this case, counting to 10 over and over again—is something that exists within me.

I’ve always counted my steps on stairs. It’s a habit that buying a wearable exercise tracker has diluted somewhat. But I keep track of my breathing while swimming. And I measure my cadence to avoid boredom while cycling.

Sitting, swimming, walking, cycling, writing.

Breathing.

The simplicity of Zen practice is both beguiling and deceptive. The notion of returning to practice, again and again. Returning to the human breath as the basic measure of time. It’s so simple that, for me anyway, my instinct has often been disbelief: Is that it? Breathing?

Does this disbelief provide a business model for meditation and mindfulness apps? I’m thinking Headspace, and real-world ventures like Zengården. That’s not a criticism either—rather, an acknowledgement that it’s possible to over-egg the simple.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, Zen writing.

But first, some more biographical details

One year ago I quit my job. I’d been working as a Publications Manager for an international organization in Stockholm. My resignation brought to an end a long decade as a ‘professional’ editor.

At the time I intended to spend 12 months working on my own Zen writing. I had the feeling that editing other people’s writing had killed off my creativity.

While I wasn’t wrong, the process of rediscovering my own words has been quite complicated. I’ve realized that working through a decade’s worth of unfinished projects is impossible. There will always be a new idea to explore, a new novel to conceptualize.

Instead, I’ve learnt that zooming in on the micro level—the word, the phrase, the sentence—is more important. Living in the sentence, the written version of the breath, both grounds and frees me.

That might sound daft but at least it’s my daft.

I’ve also re-learnt that the best way to re-energize my skills as a Zen writer is to spend a lot more time reading. When it comes to meditative practices, reading is right up there. But, as with eating, it all depends on what you’re ingesting.

Zen writing example, from a gallery of images taken in Kanazawa, Japan. — During our travels in Japan we spent some time in Kanazawa. Lovely place, took some beautiful photos there, it was hard to take a bad shot. Anyway, my image gallery from the trip started attracting some interesting comments. One image in particular – a set of footprints painted on a road – seemed to have been singled out for some pretty complimentary responses. Anyway, take a look at what I created as a result! Zen writing, jaaaa!

How to write a book on Zen writing that people will actually borrow from the library

My local public library is small. I’m often forced to travel to the bigger inner-city libraries to find decent books. One library in particular has a great collection of recent books. I go there to borrow biographies (I love a good rock-music bio), non-fiction and books about writing.

I also love to rock up and borrow the first thing I see on the shelf. This is how I discovered Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s a book that raised many questions for me (and others), including old chestnuts such as ‘what is a memoir?’ and ‘is this autobiographical?’.

But the book got my brain working. When I returned it to the library, I noticed another book on the shelf reserved for books about writing. It was Alexander Chee’s How to Write An Autobiographical Novel. I picked it up, and noticed a testimonial from Ocean Vuong on the cover:

This book makes me feel possible.
Ocean Vuong on Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)

Well, I borrowed that book immediately. Over several weeks, I read each of the essays with a growing sense of excitement. This was the kind of book I needed to be reading. Equal parts craft, memoir and meditation. On several occasions, having read an electrifying essay, I lay awake in bed, amazed, for hours.

Reading. Breathing. Thinking.

Chee’s book, in turn, led me to seek out one of his writing teachers, Annie Dillard, to whom he devotes a whole essay. I tracked down and read one of her non-fiction collections, For the Time Being, published in 1999. And in it I found the following quote:

Work, work! … Work! … Don’t waste a moment … Calm yourself, quiet yourself, master your senses. Work, work! Just dress in old clothes, eat simple food … feign ignorance, appear inarticulate. This is most economical with energy, yet effective.
Chan Buddhist monk Daman Hongren (601–674), quoted in Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (1999)

Zen writing for beginners (like me)

Work, work! For the past 12 months, I’ve needed someone to say this to me. Get on with it! If time passes, and things remain unwritten, that’s no way to live. The fact that this advice comes from a seventh-century Chan monk is neither here nor there. If it makes sense, do it. Work!

The trick, I’ve found, is to not even think of Zen writing as working. To not even think of Zen writing at all but instead count the letters, syllables, words. Even the spaces between words. To gather them in a line, a sentence, a paragraph. And then to repeat until the writing’s done.

Of course, the words and sentences still need to make sense. For me, at least. I can well imagine comprehension being of little interest to some writers. I used to think that way about writing poetry.

But my obtuseness got me into trouble with people I cared about. And I ended up losing interest in one of the very few things that has given me pleasure and meaning in my life.

Work! Zen! Writing!

Now I start with the line and let it take me where it will take me. I hope this makes sense to someone reading this post. Failing that, I hope it makes sense to me the next time I come here to write it.

30 December 2019 / 0 Comments

Letters to Live Poets at fifty: sound as ever

Letters to Live Poets, Bruce Beaver’s fourth book of poetry, appeared in 1969. Fifty years on, the poems in this remarkable collection still burn with a righteous fury.

I’m lucky enough to be in possession of a first edition of Letters to Live Poets. It was loaned to me by Professor James Tulip (1934–2018) while I was writing my Honours thesis on Bruce Beaver’s poetry in 1993.

I’m ashamed to say that I never returned it but, in my defence, Professor Tulip did have another copy in his office.

I’m also embarrassed to admit that my thesis really wasn’t all that good, and that I was lucky to scrape through with a second-class Honours degree in Australian Literature when I graduated from the University of Sydney in 1994.

I should stress that the low quality of my thesis—which ostensibly explored the influence of Rainer Maria Rilke on Beaver’s poetry—was not a result of poor supervision. In fact, my thesis supervisor, David Brooks, was extremely supportive.

Bruce Beaver published Letters to Live Poets in 1969, via South Head Press, a Sydney-based poetry publisher. — Bruce Beaver published *Letters to Live Poets* in 1969. This is a scan of the dust jacket of the first edition, published by the Sydney-based South Head Press.

Meeting Bruce Beaver

It was David Brooks who encouraged me to write about Bruce Beaver, and who introduced me to him at a book launch at Gleebooks in 1993.

And it was David who later drove me from the University of Sydney campus in Chippendale to Manly, on Sydney’s north shore, to meet with Bruce during one of his many stints in hospital (I think on account of his kidneys, for which he required dialysis).

To say that I was starstruck that afternoon as David and I sat beside Bruce’s bed (joined by his partner, Brenda, at one point) would be to miss the point. I did not have the nerve to utter a single word the entire time.

It was only when someone (probably David) mentioned Bruce’s poem, ‘The Cranes of Auckland’, that I managed to croak that it was my favourite poem of his. Like, um, thanks for that contribution, right? I dimly remember Bruce smiling and telling me it was Brenda’s favourite, too.

Personal preferences aside, however, it’s probably fair to say that Letters to Live Poets is the book for which Bruce will be best remembered.

Dead (poet) letter office

Letters to Live Poets contains 34 poems. The collection itself is dedicated to Grace Perry, the book’s publisher.

The first poem, simply titled ‘I’, is perhaps the most famous: addressed to US poet Frank O’Hara—who died in a bizarre accident in 1966—it’s an excoriating glimpse into the geopolitical moment that was the late-1960s.

God knows what was done to you.
I may never find out fully.
The truth reaches us slowly here,
is delayed in the mail continually
or censored in the tabloids. The war
now into its third year
remains undeclared.
The number of infants, among others, blistered
and skinned alive by napalm
has been exaggerated
by both sides we are told,
and the gas does not seriously harm;
does not kill but is merely
unbearably nauseating.
Apparently none of this
is happening to us.
—Bruce Beaver, Letters to Live Poets, ‘I’ (to Frank O’Hara)

I mean, as far as opening statements go, this one’s pretty tight. In the following stanzas, Beaver returns, three times, to O’Hara’s death.

. . .
Even afterwards —
after I heard (unbelievingly)
you had been run down on a beach
by a machine
apparently while sunning yourself;
that things were terminal again —
even then I might have written.

. . .

But to be trampled by the machine
beyond protest. . .

. . .

Crushed though. Crushed on the littered sands.
—Bruce Beaver, Letters to Live Poets, ‘I’ (to Frank O’Hara)

It turns out, of course, that Beaver was only partly right about the manner in which O’Hara died. But writing in the 1960s, he could not possibly have known the full story. O’Hara was indeed struck by a vehicle on a beach at Fire Island, although it was at night, and it took him a further two days to die.

Image: ‘Surfer waits for his wave‘ [Manly] by Kim (TheGirlsNY)/Flickr
Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

As Frank O’Hara lay dying

In City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, first published in 1993, Brad Gooch writes about O’Hara’s death and burial:

O’Hara got his wish to be buried in Green River Cemetery, but not his wish that no one come. By 3:00 p.m. almost two hundred mourners had converged on the cemetery. The coffin was a reminder of the almost unbelievable facts. Frank O’Hara was dead at forty. He had been killed in a freak accident by a twenty-three-year-old summer worker taking a joyride with a young woman in a jeep on the Fire Island Pines beach at three in the morning.
Brad Gooch, ‘Prologue’, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)

Gooch relates how one of O’Hara’s numerous lovers, Larry Rivers, delivered a eulogy at the funeral. To the horror of those attending, Rivers “began describing O’Hara as he had looked when he had visited him a few days earlier at Bayview General Hospital in Mastic Beach, Long Island, where O’Hara had survived for almost two days after his accident.”

He was purple wherever his skin showed through the white hospital gown. He was a quarter larger than usual. Every few inches there was some sewing composed of dark blue thread. Some stitching was straight and three or four inches long, others were longer and semi-circular. The lids of both eyes were bluish black. It was hard to see his beautiful blue eyes which receded a little into his head. He breathed with quick gasps. His whole body quivered. There was a tube in one of his nostrils down to his stomach. On paper, he was improving. In the crib he looked like a shaped wound, an innocent victim of someone else’s war. His leg bone was broken and splintered and pierced the skin. Every rib was cracked. A third of his liver was wiped out by the impact.
Larry Rivers, quoted in Brad Gooch, ‘Prologue’, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)

It would be an understatement to say that this information is crucial to any reading of O’Hara’s life and works, and to any elegaic poem about O’Hara.

While Bruce Beaver, writing in 1968 or 1969, could not realistically have known this detail (after all, ‘truth reaches us slowly here,/ is delayed in the mail continually/ or censored in the tabloids’), I can’t make the same excuse. City Poet was published in 1993, the year I was writing my thesis.

If I’d done just a little more research, I might have uncovered this quote from Larry Rivers. The phrase “he looked like a shaped wound, an innocent victim of someone else’s war” provides a vital link to Beaver’s poem, which in turn links O’Hara’s death to the ongoing war in Vietnam.

But my research for my Honours thesis consisted of leavisite close reading, and a brief trip to Canberra. There, I visited the National Library of Australia, which was the only place I could access a number of the journals published in the 1970s and 1980s that featured interviews with Beaver. In these interviews, he talked a lot about Rilke (my main interest) but almost never mentioned O’Hara.

“No notes are given as I can’t remember all of the sources.”

Letters to Live Poets, in the first edition at least, bears a dust jacket text, written by the author, which also references O’Hara:

The letters began as an elegaic address to an American poet, the late Frank O’Hara, who lives on in his own quirkily communicative verses.

It continued as a series of journal letters to actual and imaginary friends, each poem a kind of intimate one-way dialogue between myself and a not-impossible creative reader, a live poet in his or her own sense.

The poems are full of quotes, italicized, from other poets and writer-thinkers.

No notes are given as I can’t remember all of the sources.
—Bruce Beaver, Letters to Live Poets, dust-jacket text.

I really love this last line, which has all the bravado of the spirit in which the Beastie Boys’ sample-heavy masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique, was recorded and released.

Unlike that album, however, Letters to Live Poets is long out of print, and no-one, to my knowledge, has ever undertaken the task of identifying and annotating the ‘samples’ in each of the poems.

The University of Sydney Press has made a print-on-demand version of Letters to Live Poets available for sale. Personally, I feel lucky to instead have a copy of the first edition published by South Head Press.

Coincidentally, or not, in 1999 I sent an email to John Tranter at Jacket, asking if he’d be interested in publishing a poem I’d written for Bruce. To mark the twentieth anniversary of its publication, therefore, I’m posting ‘Cars’ here on my website.

Bruce Beaver died in 2004. Tranter’s obituary is as good a place as any to start for an overview of Bruce’s life. Another good entry point is Dorothy Porter’s introduction to (and selection of) Beaver’s work on the Poetry International website.

Following Bruce’s death, the Red Room Company commissioned me to write a poem in celebration of his life and works. To mark the fifteenth anniversary of its first online publication, therefore, I’m posting ‘(On the Tomb of) Victor Bruce’ here on my website, too.

Letters to Live Poets at 50

What, then, of the other thirty-three poems in the collection at 50 years’ remove from their initial appearance? Interestingly, and perhaps due to the University of Sydney Press edition, none of the poems from Letters to Live Poets is available on the Australian Poetry Library website.

When I began writing this post, several months ago, I had the intention of going through the poems one by one, and analysing or perhaps rewriting them. Like all spur-of-the-moment ideas, however, I chucked that one in the bin.

I mean, I had my chance to write about Letters to Live Poets 25 years ago. What little I could hope to add to the body of knowledge about Beaver’s work would hardly be worth the effort.

But this post, at least, might well serve as the beginning of an effort to take the poetics of Letters to Live Poets more seriously than I did the first time around.

After all, it’s not every year that a book turns 50. In the case of Letters to Live Poets, this post is a chance to celebrate a book whose influence on my own poetics may take me another 50 years to work out, should I live that long.

22 October 2019 / 0 Comments

Göteborg Book Fair 2019: Hanguk style

In late September I travelled to the city of Gothenburg (spelt Göteborg in Swedish) to attend Göteborg Book Fair 2019. It’s a three-hour trip to Göteborg by fast train from Stockholm. It seemed as if everyone on the train was heading to the Book Fair. On each seat: a copy of the Swedish Publisher’s Association magazine. The almost toxic smell of printed brochures cloyed our carriage.

I didn’t have any special interest in the Book Fair itself. After all, I’d been to the London and Frankfurt book fairs on several occasions. I’d had my fill of trade-shows and business cards there. I’d also met with printers, editors and developers. Slept in hotel rooms the size of closets. Spent whole days wandering between gigantic pavilions, gripping my lanyard like a talisman.

The Göteborg Book Fair has this trade format in spades. But unlike London and Frankfurt, it also includes a program of seminars and events. In this respect, it’s more like a low-key writers festival. This year’s iteration featured a special guest: the Republic of Korea (South Korea). And it was the Koreans whom I had travelled to Gothenburg to see, hear and read.

My neverending love affair with Korea

I first travelled to South Korea in 2005 as an Asialink resident. It’s no understatement to say that trip changed my life.

Since then, I’ve returned to Korea several times. In 2009 I undertook a second residency hosted by the Language Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). In 2011, I was part of a delegation of Australian poets who travelled to the country. And in 2013 I spent the first few days of my honeymoon in Seoul.

I’ve written a book of poems about life in Korea. In 2005 I spent many hours in PC Bangs composing prose poems about imaginary cities. Then, in 2011, I published an anthology of Korean and Australian poets in Hangul and English. I’ve also been working, for too many years, on a novel set partly in Korea.

So you could say I have a special interest in South Korea. It verges on the obsessional. If not Orientalist. I can see that now.

Go! Go! Amazing Park, an image of a PC Bang in Seoul, Republic of Korea, which has nothing at all to do with Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — Go! Go! Amazing Park is the name of a PC Bang I photographed while living in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 2005, and which has absolutely nothing to do with Göteborg Book Fair 2019.

Göteborg Book Fair 2019 Guest of Honour: South Korea

Anyway, enough about me. The point is that I was in Gothenburg for a specific reason. And so were many Korean writers, illustrators, critics, academics and publishers.

It seems that the Göteborg Book Fair invites a special guest of honour each year. Recent guests include Lithuania (2005), Spain (2009) and Brazil (2014). In years without a special guest, the Book Fair responds to a specific theme. This year, we got both.

South Korea was this year’s guest of honour and theme country, with a focus on the theme of ‘Human and Humanity’. There were six key Korean sub-themes: ‘Socio-historical Trauma’, ‘State Violence’, ‘Refugees and Humanism’, ‘Technology and the Posthuman’, ‘Gender and Labor’ and ‘Community of Time’.

The Book Fair’s other general themes for 2019 included Gender Equality and Media and Information Literacy.

Göteborg Book Fair: the logistics

My train arrived at Göteborg Centralstation at around 10.30 am. I walked from the station to the Bökmassan (Gothia Towers, to be exact). Although I could have jumped on a tram, I preferred to stroll down Avenyn through the crisp autumn air.

I arrived to find the whole place abuzz. Quite large crowds streamed in and out. One or two demonstrations wound around Korsvägen, where several tram lines intersect. Activists held out anti-NATO petitions. Police officers wandered about, while less identifiable ‘security’ guards hovered, stuttering menace.

I entered Gothia Towers. A Göteborg Book Fair 2019 attendant directed me upstairs, where I bought a student Gold Pass for a mere 800 SEK. I say ‘mere’ because this is Sweden, where everything is expensive. A day pass for a student cost 450 SEK alone. So, over two days, I was already ahead. And given that the regular Gold Pass cost 3,600 SEK, I felt pretty pleased with myself.

The Gold Pass is also good value because it provides entry to a lounge where you can get free tea and coffee. While Swedish brygkaffe is hardly anything to write home about, I wasn’t complaining. It wasn’t until the next day I realized my pass also entitled me to a choice tote bag.

With my Gold Pass attached to the inevitable lanyard, I entered the melee of the fair. Most of the events in the South Korean program took place at a special stand in one of the large halls at Gothia Towers. A series of seminars—which were the real highlight of the ‘festival’—were held in a smaller room upstairs.

Human and humanity, Hanguk style

I attended three seminars, four author talks and one movie screening over two days at the Göteborg Book Fair. That might not seem like a lot. In truth, I also spent a lot of time walking around. I drank a lot of free coffee, ate a haloumi burger and sat down whenever I could. Then I bought books from the English Bookshop stand (one of the only ones selling English books). At all times, I found it hard to handle the masses of people flowing in and out of the halls. It was pretty tiring.

One thing made the Korean festival-within-a-book-fair untold. The organizers produced three books on Korean literature and distributed them for free. They must have invested some serious won in designing and printing these beauties.

The first, the Human and Humanity program book, contained speaker bios and a running sheet. It also included some fascinating essays on the Korean program sub-themes. Written by Korean academics, they focused on the works of the presenting authors. But they also provided some pretty crucial political and cultural context. I like to think I know quite a bit about Korean politics and history. These essays proved me wrong, time and time again.

The cover image from a 245-page anthology of Korean fiction and poetry produced for Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — The Literature Translation Institute of Korea produced a 245-page anthology of Korean fiction and poetry on the occasion of Göteborg Book Fair 2019. The cover illustration was created by the mysteriously named 0.1. It features an androgynous red-head (possibly Pippi Longstocking), lying on a floor in front of a stack of books propped up by a Hangul letter, while draping their arm over a Dalarna horse.

The second book was Korean Literature: Stories and Poems. It was a 245-page sampler of the works of the Korean writers appearing at the Book Fair, publushed by LTI Korea. In my experience it’s hard to find translations of lesser known Korean poets and writers. In that respect, this neat collection alone was worth the price of admission.

The third book was a catalogue, containing images from Korean children’s books. Having visited Paju Book City, I know that children’s literature is big business in Korea. It’s a huge export market. In fact, I managed to catch a Q&A with one Korean children’s book artist at the Book Fair, Suzy Lee, who is a total superstar.

So, with my books in tow, I set off on my miniature journey through Korean literature today.

All three of the seminar sessions I attended at Göteborg Book Fair 2019 related to Korea. These were a real highlight of the Book Fair for me. The organizers provided simultaneous translations in English, Swedish and Korean). This made the events intimate and intelligent. We could listen in as Korean panellists spoke. We could watch them as they listened to translations of moderators’ questions.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it at a book fair.

The design theme of the Korea Stand

Attending a book fair can be pretty wearing on the feet and legs. What was also pretty tiring was the way in which the Korean stand was set up. According to the rather neat Human and Humanity program book, the stand even had its own designer.

Enter Seong-ho Ham, architect and poet. According to him, “Sadness is the human condition.”

Well, okay, but—

“Each of us has our own slope. Humanity begins in recognizing that discomfort and sympathizing with the other.”

Fine.

So, the stand was a raised platform “that slopes upward by 1 percent with chairs facing this incline.” The audience members sat on 66 chairs placed on this incline. In ergonomics terms, this meant actual physical pain for anyone who sat there for more than a few minutes.

How this idea managed to get past the Göteborg Book Fair OHS committee (if there was one) is beyond me. It also strikes me as being in tune with the hard-edged theme and sub-themes of the stand itself. I can assure you, my hips were aching for days afterwards. But whether that is of significance to anyone else remains, of course, moot.

The Korean stand at Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — The Korean stand at Göteborg Book Fair 2019 was designed by Seong-ho Ham, an architect and poet.

The Human Condition in Korean Society

The first session on my agenda was ‘The Human Condition in Korean Society’. The program stated that it would be about the tensions between the old and new in Korea. The unintended consequences of the country’s swift development.

The session featured two Korean panellists. Cheon Gwan-yul is a political journalist. He writes for SisiaIn, an independent online news magazine. Lee Sang-heon is a writer and academic. He’s also the Director of the International Labour Organization’s Employment Policy Department. The panel also included Sweden’s former ambassador to South Korea, Lars Vargo.

The moderator, Patrik Lundberg, asked each panellist some pretty searing questions. It may come as no surprise that Vargo painted a predictable and moderate portrait of Korea. I found it annoying that he mentioned ‘karaoke’ rather than ‘noraebang’, though. Lee was more nuanced. He reflected on how Korea has copied other systems in the past but now faces a new existential crisis. He also spoke about the concept of ‘han’ and about inequality in Korean society.

Cheon was the most radical panellist. He’s written a lot about government corruption in Korea. I hoped that he might say a little about this. But he seemed to face the most difficult questions, and at times I found this frustrating on his behalf.

This came to a head towards the end of the session. Lundberg stated that the overseas adoption of Korean orphans has been a big issue for Korea. He added that he himself was an adoptee. He then invited the panellists to comment on this issue. For me to say that this is a sensitive issue for many Koreans would be presumptuous. But I could sense Cheon’s discomfort. Such a tough question to answer.

The discussion then moved on to the issue of refugees in Korean society. This was not something I knew much about, to be honest. For example, I was unaware that 500 Yemenis seeking refugee status arrived on Jeju-do in 2018. I guess even I’m still stuck in a ‘one-blood’ conception of Korea.

In Human Time

The second session I attended on Thursday had the title ‘In Human Time’. As the name suggests, it focused on how we understand time. Or ‘towers of time’ as the program described it. A tad bombastic but okay. Time was a suitable topic for two Korean poets regarded as ‘futurists’.

Both Haengsook Kim and Yong-mok Shin had appeared at the Korean stand (on that infamous inclining stage) to read some of their work. A screen projected their answers to some generic questions about their preoccupations. Simple, yet effective.

But in this session, Yukiko Duke, a Swedish writer and journalist, acted as moderator. She’s translated Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood into Swedish. Which made me realize how little I know about how Swedes regard (or read) Asian literature.

Anyway, it was nice to see two poets talking about their work. Especially as they are both around the same age as me. Kim’s comment on the descriptor ‘futurist’ also struck me as familiar.

She noted that some critics had used the term to describe her style. But this may have reflected the alien-ness of that style, she said. In that it was a style that people could not yet understand. I suspect many other poets from ‘post-2000’ generations would have received similar comments.

When Kim added that she was ‘trying to write about questions that have no answers’, it almost broke my heart.

She went on to describe an experience she had in a hotel on Jeju-do in 2014. In fact, she wrote about it in the sampler made available to Book Fair attendees. But she was there to chair a session at the Seoul Writers Festival. Three times, while addressing the audience, she said ‘1914’ instead of ‘2014’.

Later, in a hotel corridor, she felt surrounded by spirits from a different era. This led Kim to meditate on the quality of time. In fact, she admitted that ‘within my body there are two modes of time’. I can kind of relate to that!

Yukiko Duke is a sympathetic interviewer. She managed to draw out each poet on the themes in their work. But I found her reference to Indigenous Australian concepts of time a bit strange.

Duke also introduced each poet’s work by inviting them to read. I also found this a little odd, given the short time available in the session. Anyone interested in their poetry could read it in the program anthology. Or attend the separate readings.

But then I heard both Duke and Yong-mok Shin read his poem ‘Community’ and something clicked into place:

May I use the dead person’s name? Since he’s dead,
may I take his name? Since I gained one more name today
the number of my names keeps increasing …
—Yong-mok Shin, ‘Community’ (translated by An Sonjae)

Shin also weighed in on the ‘my generation’ debate. He pointed out that political and aesthetic progress in the 1990s did not coincide. In other words, younger Korean poets have needed to do a lot of experimenting. Or at least that was my hot take.

Interview with Yong-mok Shin courtesy of LTI Korea.

Then he spoke of a student friend who had self-immolated. The reference was almost casual, but I’ve heard Koreans stating similar things. This tragic event had provided a motivation for Sin to write.

Shin concluded by emphasizing how mystical it is that we live in different times in our bodies. Experiencing the same thing at the same time. In the end, “reading poetry in this place is proof that we exist in the same place”.

And with that we all picked our jaws up off the floor and moved out of the auditorium.

That evening, after checking into my Air BnB stuga, I took a stroll through the Botanic Gardens. I then grabbed some dinner at a Japanese restaurant in the Haga precinct in downtown Göteborg, before catching a tram back to home base.

And thence, dear reader, to Bedfordshire.

Social-historical Public Trauma at the Göteborg Book Fair

The third session I attended, on the Friday afternoon, was the one that everyone wanted to attend. Han Kang was on the panel.

It’s safe to say that Han Kang is a literary superstar, almost a household name by now. That’s what happens when you win the Man Booker prize. Or write a book that no one alive today will get to read. She could have filled an auditorium appearing all by herself. Which made it strange and intriguing that the organizers sttuck her on a panel. In a room with capacity for around 100 people.

Needless to say, I fought my way into that auditorium with vigour. By that time, deep into my second day of the Göteborg Book Fair, I was an old hand. Swedish queues are the stuff of myth. There are rules and regulations governing how to queue for a bus. How to stand in line at a health centre. How to navigate a kölapp (paper ticket) system. This one was no exception.

I’d seen the queue for previous sessions stretching in to the distance. So I made sure I got there early. To each person inquiring whether this was the queue for Han Kang, I answered in the affirmative. I gave nothing else away. Not even an inch. As the queue snaked forward I remained in my place, a neutral expression on my face. In the end, I was one of the last people let in. It seemed like at least one hundred people behind me missed out.

Anyway, it wasn’t all about Han Kang. This session also included Eun Young Jin and Athena Farrokhzad. All three writers discussed the issue of social-historical public trauma from interesting perspectives. Mats Almegard, the moderator, did well to keep the conversation on track.

A reading by Eun Young Jin courtesy of LTI Korea.

Jin discussed the Sewol ferry tragedy, and her own response to it as a poet and writer. She described how she wrote a poem for a girl named Ye-eun, one of the 250 school students who drowned on 16 April 2014. “I had to write that poem,” she explained. Farrokhzad also discussed the tragedy of the 1998 discotheque fire in Göteborg. The fire, lit by a group of boys, killed 63 young people. Grim but moving stuff.

Kang discussed The White Book and Human Acts, two of her most well-known books. The latter deals with the 1980 Gwangju massacre. Again, hardly cheerful stuff. But it was fascinating to watch the way she answered the moderator’s questions. Sitting so still as she listened to the translator. Narrowing her eyes in an enigmatic way. Was I projecting? It’s possible.

The cover of Han Kang's Human Acts, which the author discussed at Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — The cover of Han Kang’s *Human Acts*, which the author discussed at Göteborg Book Fair 2019.

Kang spoke at some length about the process of writing Human Acts. It got to the point, she said, where the book was writing her. Sure, it’s a phrase one often hears but in this case it seemed compelling. She described how difficult it was to find the voices of the victims of the massacre. The polyphonic nature of the narrative, in the end, provided a way to work through the events of 1980.

The session ended too soon for everyone’s liking. As we filed out, a new queue formed in the foyer. Fans stood in line, waiting for Han Kang’s autograph. An assistant performed triage, asking what they wanted inscribed in their copies. I left them to it.

The staff at the Korean stand had told me there were no copies of any of the Korean writers’ books available. But I took the stairs down to the main hall of the Book Fair and came to the English Bookshop’s stall. I noticed they had copies of Human Acts, as well as some other books. I purchased a copy and raced up the stairs. But it was too late.

Han Kang had left the building.

Epilogue: station to station

As for me, it was also time to head home. But I still had several hours to kill before my train departed. I left the Bökmassan and headed over to Göteborg’s cultural precinct. There, in the cute-as retro Bio Roy, I caught a screening of a Korean film.

Seoul Station (2013), directed by Yoon-ho Bae, unlike the zombie film of the same name, is a documentary. It chronicles the experiences of labourers renovating the Old Seoul station building. Built in 1925, the building is a relic of Japanese imperialism—a topic discussed at length in the film.

In 2011, the renovations completed, the station was ‘reborn’ as Cultural Station 284. The 284 refers to the station’s previous designation as a Historic Site.

A still from Seoul Station (2013), directed by Yoon-ho Bae, and screened at Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — A still from *Seoul Station* (2013), directed by Yoon-ho Bae, and screened at Göteborg Book Fair 2019.

The film has no narrator. It features interviews with workers, including migrant workers from China and Viet Nam. It was a sobering experience to see the looks on their faces at the Cultural Station 284 opening. As if to say, ‘We slaved away in substandard conditions for this?’

I’d like to say the film was a fitting finale to my two days of Korean culture but I’d be kidding myself. Like the entire program, it posed uncomfortable questions about labour and culture. It attempted to show a non-glossy side of Korea that I found refreshing and honest. It made me ponder my own privilege as I trudged down Avenyn towards Göteborgs Centralstation.

I regretted not staying for the entire duration of the Book Fair, as I missed the chance to see a number of other Korean writers. But after two days, I was ready for a sit down. Which was just as well. My return trip to Stockholm ended up taking more than five hours. I did not arrive home until 2am the next morning.

As with my outward journey, I suspect most of my fellow passengers were also returning from the Göteborg Book Fair. Only this time, the carriage no longer smelt like coated printer’s paper. Was it my imagination, or did the whole train smell like bibimbap?

Bernard O'Dowd, a 1924 etching by John Shirlow (detail) held by the National Gallery of Victoria. View the catalogue entry online.

17 September 2019 / 0 Comments

Bernard O’Dowd: rewriting the colonial wizard of Oz

Earlier this year the State Library of Victoria published a blog post about the correspondence between Bernard O’Dowd and Walt Whitman. While the letters themselves have been stored away, they were transcribed and published in Overland in the 1960s. It was this version of the correspondence which inspired my poetry collection Leaves of Glass.

Bernard O’Dowd: [bad] poet?

Like a lot of literature published at the turn of the 20th century, Bernard O’Dowd’s work comes across as a little archaic today. Indeed, as Judith Wright observed:

[Christopher] Brennan’s contemporary, Bernard O’Dowd, espoused the cause of nationalism, and attained a far greater reputation in his day; but unlike Brennan’s, his work has dated badly.
—Judith Wright, A Book of Australian Verse (1968)

Pretty harsh call, but I tend to agree. This is O’Dowd’s most famous poem, ‘Australia’, first published in The Bulletin in 1900.

Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-god’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?

The cenotaphs of species dead elsewhere
That in your limits leap and swim and fly,
Or trail uncanny harp-strings from your trees,
Mix omens with the auguries that dare
To plant the Cross upon your forehead sky,
A virgin helpmate Ocean at your knees.
—Bernard O’Dowd, ‘Australia’ (1900)

Now, there are some pretty cool phrases here: ‘dredged by sailor Time’ and ‘cenotaphs of dead species’ are choice examples. Plus it’s a sonnet, and they’re cool. Rhyming gets a pass—this was 1900, after all.

At the same time, not only is the diction of the poem archaic (‘demense’, anyone?) but it also features a number of classical and religious allusions that scream ‘proper poetry’. Importantly, the poem manages to defy common sense, and elude meaning.

Is this really a poem that deserves to be held up as an expression of ‘Australia’? Gawd knows there have been numerous attempts to write the definitive statement regarding ‘Oz’ but let’s be honest: this one’s even more baffling than the national anthem.

Bernard O'Dowd, in a 1924 etching by John Shirlow (detail) held by the National Gallery of Victoria. View the catalogue entry online. — Bernard O’Dowd, in a 1924 etching by John Shirlow (detail) held by the National Gallery of Victoria. View the catalogue entry online.

Rewriting O’Dowd for kicks

While writing the poems that would eventually form Leaves of Glass, it struck me that much of O’Dowd’s work, although ‘dated’, could easily be resurrected for a modern-day audience by means of a good old-fashioned rewrite.

The rewriting (or reprising) of literary texts is extremely common and has, of course, spawned its own field of critical study. Examples include James Joyce’s Ulysses (a rewrite of Homer’s Odysseus), Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote (a takedown of Cervantes’ novel of the same name) and, more recently, Margaret Atwood’s Hag Seed (a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest) but there are thousands more.

When it came to rewriting O’Dowd’s poems, I was simply having a bit of fun: trying to crack the code of his archaic diction for kicks. I ended up ‘translating’ several poems, including ‘Australia’ and ‘Dawnward’. In doing so, I was seeking to render the poems intelligible for a modern reader. However, I am not sure that I really succeeded in this!

I also translated a couple of Whitman’s poems—including ‘Oh Captain, My Captain’ and ‘To A Common Prostitute’—into LOLCats. Again, just for fun. But that’s the subject of another post.

Bernard O’Dowd’s ‘Australia’: a private act of translation?

I wrote the drafts of the majority of the poems in Leaves of Glass between March and June 2008 while living in Den Haag, the Netherlands.

I don’t remember the exact date on which I wrote ‘Oz’ but let’s just say the whole process didn’t take very long. At the risk of repeating myself, I was doing it for fun. Basically, I took each word in Bernard O’Dowd’s ‘Australia’ and replaced it with another word. For example:

Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
—Bernard O’Dowd, ‘Australia’ (1900)

became:

final oceanic junk channel-deepened
by temporal bo’sun of the universe
David Prater, ‘Oz’ (2008)

Similarly:

Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-god’s race?
—Bernard O’Dowd, ‘Australia’ (1900)

became:

are you some castaway floating sea
kelp island where dawning abendland
in elysian fields of restfulness recon-
structs her deadly breeding grounds?

or are you one of the gods sun ra
maybe following the comet kohoutek?
David Prater, ‘Oz’ (2008)

You can read the rest of ‘Oz’ for yourself. One thing you might notice is that, while ‘Australia’ is pretty opaque for a modern-day reader, ‘Oz’ is hardly any more accessible.

It’s certainly a more violent poem that ends with a creepy image of a continent eating flies. I’m pretty sure O’Dowd would have objected to that.

It also contains cross-references to a number of my own poems and chapbooks (e.g. Abendland, a chapbook from which a number of other poems in Leaves of Glass were taken). In this sense, ‘Oz’ was a private act of translation that ended up serving an obscured public purpose in Leaves of Glass.

Was it worth it?

‘Oz’, along with two other O’Dowd translations, ended up being published online in Jacket (2010) as part of a ‘Rewriting Australia’ feature edited by Pam Brown. It was also anthologised in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP 2011).

While I’m very pleased that ‘Oz’ made it into Leaves of Glass, and that the book received a number of positive reviews, I’m also aware of the limitations of the exercise in terms of rewriting both O’Dowd and Whitman.

As noted in one of the reviews, while O’Dowd’s work certainly has dated, the same could end up being true of some of the ‘translations’ published in Leaves of Glass.

That’s inevitable, I suppose, but I’ve now come to a point in my own writing ‘career’ where I value directness and ease of reading more than literary obtuseness.

No doubt that’s due to the fact that I spent the majority of the past 10 years editing other people’s work rather than writing and evaluating my own.

But now that I’ve ‘arrived’ at this odd place of calm, I can definitely say it was all worth it. Now, to (mis)quote another poem in Leaves of Glass, it’s time to rewrite some obscure colonial texts ‘that people can actually read’.