One of the first things I do whenever I move to a new place (trust me, I’ve lived in enough cities, towns and villages to know what I’m talking about here) is to visit — and join — the local library. There’s something comforting and consistent about libraries the world over that grounds me.
Growing up in Australia, the town library was always free to join. The same applied in Sweden, where I lived for 11 years. Sure, you might need to pay a token amount for a late book but if you were interacting with a good librarian — and let’s face it, they’re all good — they’d usually waive it.
Yesterday I woke to the mildly interesting news that Indian pace bowler Mohammed Siraj struck an Australian batter, David Warner, on the helmet during a test match in Delhi. Under the game’s like-for-like concussion laws, another left-handed batter, Matt Renshaw, replaced Warner in the team.
As followers of Australian cricket know, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. A few years ago, star batter and disgraced Test captain Steve Smith copped a blow to the head, too, during a test match against England, bringing Marnus Labuschagne into the team.
These two personnel changes had more or less dramatic effects: Labuschange has since gone on to become one of Australia’s most successful batters; while Warner’s absence from the team playing India in Delhi allowed Travis Head, the so-called Bogan Bradman, to open the batting with a modicum of success.
Today I woke up to the no-less-interesting but slightly depressing news that the Australian team had, despite yesterday’s final-session heroics by Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne, capitulated and lost the test match against India, with two days still left to play.
Stéphane Mallarmé is dead. Long may his absence linger. Long may the horrifying abyss of the white (and black) pages confound we poets, prattlers and plagiarists. And long may we question the substance of our languages, the correspondences between organic, systemic lifeforms and the unstoppable progress of symbols: numbers, letters, marks, voids . . .
One hundred years have passed since the death of one of France’s most enigmatic and curious poets. And yet for one hundred chaotic and turbulent years editors and publishers all over the world have surveyed poems, articles, essays and stories stamped with Mallarmé’s indelible influence, brushed with his unmistakable reverie.
In the same way, his paradoxical presence could be felt at the Mallarmé Writers’ Event, a small-scale but intense seminar held at the Alliance Française de Melbourne on 8–9 October 1998. The event was a celebration as much of Australian writings and writers as of Mallarmé himself.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the strange but perhaps obvious beauties of the new social media confabulation is that platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be used by people across different time zones and locations in order to get together and share their thoughts on a particular issue. The quality of the competition during Eurovision 2015, for example.
In my case, I’ve occasionally dabbled in the weird world of the Facebook comment party, in which friends comment on a particular status update in order to produce a kind of rolling-thunder live-comment stream on a specific event.
One of my personal highlights was a live comment party I hosted during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, which received an astonishing 880 comments over the sheer agony of its two- (or was it four-) hour length.
Loreen and her backing dancer Ausben Jordan kicking ass in Melo 2012.
Another highlight over the past four years (oddly, coinciding with my sojourn in Stockholm, Sweden) has been cranking up the FB in order to share expert commentary on the spectacle that is the Eurovision Song Contest final and, closer to home, on Sweden’s Melodifestival, from which the Swedish representative in Eurovision is chosen.
I could write a whole book on Melodifestivalen, with its seemingly rotating cast of performers—Danny Saucedo, Eric Saade, Sanne Nielsen, Loreen—singing songs by the same group of Swedish songwriters each year.
In fact, can I just make a little diversion here with a few videos of entrants from the past two years who did not make it through to the final but whose performances I love, mostly due to the exceptional work of the backing dancers?
Anton Ewald’s drop-dead hilarious ‘Begging’ (2013). Skip to 1:19, when the real backing-dancer action starts.
Mary N’Diaye’s ‘Gosa’ (which failed to make it past the first heat in 2013 but I don’t care).
Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, this year, for some strange reason, my partner sought to ban me from opening up a comment thread on the Eurovision 2015 finals in Vienna, Austria.
To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in this year’s event, and didn’t even make the effort to watch the semi-finals (in which the real gems compete, most of them never to be seen again . . . ).
But, after some prodding from a couple of friends, I realized that there’s a world of people out there who need to comment on Eurovision, and so I posted a status update informing all and sundry of the ban, but inviting friends to post their own comments anyway.
While I did not end up garnering as many comments as I usually would have liked, as soon as my partner went to bed (conveniently, just as the voting marathon began), I posted a few observations on other peoples’ threads, and received a few responses on my own.
Having watched this year’s final in its entirety, I would agree with the general observation that the entrants this time around were mostly lacking in the somewhat indescribable pizazz that in my opinion is compulsory if you want to win Eurovision.
Sure, there was no shortage of wind machines, key changes, big hair and Eastern European cleavage in Eurovision 2015. But by the same token there were no Russian babushkas (‘Party for everybody’, anyone?), very few songs in the national language and an excruciating number of meaningless slow-tempo power ballads.
Honestly, give me Cezar any day over that kind of toejam!
Ironically enough, then, Estonia’s Elina Born and Stig Rästa rocked my boat with their glacial ‘Goodbye to Yesterday’ (although not as much as their compatriots Winny Puuh did in 2013, when they sadly failed to qualify).
I am willing to overlook, for now, the fact that Born and Rästa’s entry was a direct rip-off (conceptually) of ‘Calm After the Storm’ by the Netherlands’ ridiculously named The Common Linnets, a melancholy country–pop song that came second in 2014.
Also, musically, let’s face it: Gotye and Kimba already did this to death in 2011. And no, I am not going to provide you with the name of, or a link to, that fricking song.
But how great was Elina Born’s manufactured tear? Not many performers can pull that off.
Stig Rästa and Elina Borg (teardrop not pictured).
The Baltic is certainly a hotbed of Eurovision talent these days, and in this respect Sweden (the true Eurovision powerhouse) is no exception.
But let me be perfectly honest: I can’t stand Måns Zelmerlöw. His song, um, ‘Heroes’, should have been used in a Saab commercial (and probably will be, eventually) and would have been nothing without the animation effects.
Furthermore, given the controversy over Zelmerlöw’s apparently homophobic comments in 2014, his ‘we are all heroes’ line to host and 2014 winner Conchita Wurst was pretty lame, really.
How apt, then, that Wurst was so graceful, despite Måns’ idiocy and seeming lack of self-awareness as he clutched his phallic Eurovision 2015 winning trophy.
Eurovision 2015 winner Måns Zelmerlöw holding his … trophy.
However, looking forward, I am thrilled that the majority of my Swedish TV licence fee will, once again, go towards staging the finals in 2016.
