Lead characters Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in The Americans each wore more than forty different disguises (including wigs) across the show's six series.
After watching the first few episodes of The Americans, it seemed to me that the show’s producers had spent more on wigs than they had on the script. But later, having watched all six seasons of the show, I changed my tune.
Across the show’s various story arcs, what starts out as a cheesy 1980s homage quickly descends into vaguely horrifying Cold-War-era gore, complete with dismemberment, assassinations, undesirable sex and, well, honky tonk. I got hooked on it, and I’m not too proud to admit that.
Anyways, about a year ago the forever-bulk-ace Alicia Sometimes and I were chatting about The Americans online, as you do, and she sent me a poem she’d written about Keri Russell (who plays a Soviet secret agent posing as an American housewife, Elizabeth Jennings, in the show).
It was, of course, a great poem. And, you know, even though I don’t write so many poems anymore, I was immediately inspired to write a kind of response, about Elizabeth’s husband Philip Jennings (another Soviet agent, played by Matthew Rhys).
Then Alicia casually let slip that she’d submitted her poem to an online literary zine called Freeze Ray, and we thought it’d be fun if I submitted my poem, too.
Well, I’ll bet you can guess what happened next. Sure enough, Alicia’s poem, ‘Keri Russell’s voice in The Americans’, was selected for publication in that esteemed journal.
For your viewing pleasure, a montage of Matthew Rhys’ wig-based disguises in The Americans.
Meanwhile, my effort, ‘Line dancing with Matthew Rhys’ was rejected by the Freeze Ray editors, via the immortal burn phrase: ‘Unfortunately, we’re going to pass this time around’.
Now, I’ve been rejected many a time before, and even had some other poems that didn’t make it into this or that literary journal, too. So I was not greatly bummed by this turn of events.
I mean, the whole world got to read Alicia’s bodacious poem, and the two of us still got to read mine.
But, you know, I got to thinking, and then to tinkering with the opening lines of my admittedly rushed effort, and after a week or two I felt like I had a new draft I was happy with.
And rather than subject myself to the whole publimication fandangle, I thought I’d just pop the thing up on my own website HQ instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bernard O'Dowd, a 1924 etching by John Shirlow (detail) held by the National Gallery of Victoria. View the catalogue entry online.
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.
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!
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’.
Ashbery Mode is an anthology of Australian poetry about John Ashbery edited by Michael Farrell. My poem ‘Ninety-Nine Rabbits’ rubs shoulders with works by 68 other poets in the anthology. Hmm, ’68. Coincidence, or …
