UPDATE

What's happening...

I've been asked to launch the Southern Highlands Arts Festival October 21... Sturt Gallery, Mittagong NSW... 5pm... a new poem I've penned concerning Emily Bronte in the Southern Highlands will be displayed on a Mittagong pavement during the time of the Festival... it's part of the Raining Poetry initiative...  Mark Tredinnick is also involved... the poem is only visible when it rains... I'm beginning an essay on Judith Wright's Birds for a forthcoming publication... a colleague and I may well be collaborating on a project concerning refugees... she's painting on rice paper and I'm providing the words... the work will be displayed in Sydney's eastern suburbs in 2017... ANTIC has taken two of my poems for an issue in 2017... one poem is on Siri... the other looks at hipsters... thanks to Kirstin Corcoran... Hallowell Press in WA has accepted a poem on migratory shorebirds for their upcoming anthology Flightpath... thanks to Virginia Jealous... a poem I put together on a woman grieving for the loss of her partner is now out in the 2016 Grieve Anthology... I have an interesting new person on board for CRUX... her interview will be published in December... about to begin writing an essay on a sliver of NSW mallee for a particular comp... putting finishing touches to poems for the Peter Porter and New Shoots comps... So, a rich and rewarding time. How lucky I am. It hasn't always been like this, that's for sure!

LJ, October 12 2016.

CRUX #8 - JEAN KENT

What can I say? There are times I wish I wrote with Jean Kent's finesse. She makes things look effortless. I have several of her collections at home and each of them has lines that knock me unconscious. Her poems are lengthy, continually engaging and unpredictable - I can learn much from her sustained voice and purpose. 

In this instalment of CRUX, Jean tells us about summoning up the courage to speak to Bruce Dawe, growing up in Queensland, teaching at TAFE, judging the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013... and many other things. 

Jean Kent was born in Chinchilla, Queensland in 1951. She first published her poems in 1970. Her work has won many major prizes including the Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize and the Henry Kendall Poetry Award (on two occasions). Jean has published five books of poetry. Her latest chapbook, Paris in my pocket (Pitt Street Poetry) is an exquisite thing, featuring striking illustrations courtesy of her husband. 

What was there before poetry?

My initial response to this question is to say 'prose'... although I probably really mean 'stories'... or 'words'. Even before I could write, I was making up stories and telling them to myself. Aloud, of course. You can do this before you go to school and learn not to! I did try to write some of them on the walls of the house, and on pages in books, using my own kind of writing, but that wasn't encouraged.

Was there a time without poetry? I'm not sure there was. My mother is very fond of A.A. Milne's verses about Christopher Robin and I think she probably read and recited those a lot when I was very young. Then, at primary school, the Queensland School Reader was chock-a-block with the great classics. I remember being introduced to Wordworth's Daffodils when I was ten or eleven... I didn't particularly connect with that formal style of writing, or even the Australian bush ballads which we had quite a lot of, but I do remember loving the music of poetry. 

So, long before I reached the age of sixteen and started compulsively writing myself, I'd been hearing poetry and reading it... I never thought that I would be a 'poet'. That felt like something extraordinarily exotic and special. I wanted to write but I expected I'd write prose - novels - and my own poems would just be a private passion. The real poetry would be by other people. 

How would you best define your writing? 

This is the question I find hardest to answer and would much rather leave to others.  If pushed, I'd say it's probably lyrical, but also based on character and narrative.  My poems are responses to real experiences, life as I know it or witness it on an everyday basis. They are an attempt to say what is otherwise unsayable. But I also hope that they're accessible and a pleasure to read. I do love the words themselves, and the possibilities of playing with language, so that as well as expressing something deeply felt, I'm making something that can go out into the world with its own magic.

What did you learn from your time working as a psychologist in TAFE?

TAFE gave me another education. I started at Sydney Tech in 1977 and though I was principally attached to the General Studies Section, which mostly offered a second d chance for mature age people wanting to do the HSC, I also had to learn about all the trades and other training areas covered by the technical system then. Before that, I had no idea what a fitter and turner did, for instance - but as part of our training we were taken to the college workshops where we would see the reality of the machines and the heavy boots and the smell of heated metal. I loved that opportunity to be present in a world that was very different from the one I'd grown up in. In my counselling office, that sort of privileged sharing of someone else's world continued. I learned that you could never assume that people's lives were simple or that they had no secret dreams or ambitions. People were walking novels, and I'd spend my days amazed by the stories of their lives. 

Share with me a story involving other Australian poets...

Growing up in country Queensland, I didn't know any real, living poets. My first sighting of any of these mythical creatures was when I was a student at Queensland University. It was 1970. The campus was in upheaval because of the Moratorium against the war in Vietnam. As part of the protests, a poetry reading was held...

I don't remember all the participants, but Judith Wright was there, and so was Bruce Dawe. Judith Wright looked frail and her voice was warmly and eerily haunting. She was one of the editors of The Poet's Pen, the anthology of poetry I'd studied in the last two years of secondary school, so seeing her was really extraordinary, and I don't think it would have mattered how she'd read or what, I was so in awe. My memory of the event is that we were all holding candles, but I don't know whether that actually happened or whether it's just an image I've created to match the atmosphere of held breath and respect.

Bruce Dawe read his poem Homecoming, about the dead soldiers being zipped into green plastic bags and flown home: All day, day after day, they're bringing them home... He had the dry, laconic tone of voice I recognised from all the country towns I'd grown up in, as well as being so powerfully anti-war, the poem was both matter-of-fact and celebratory about the places these young men had come from. I was mesmerised. I remember the shock of silence at the end, and the feeling that a space in time - my time, at any rate - had been carved out to hold the poem for me forever.

I still get shivery remembering that four decades later. I felt extraordinarily grateful for that experience. But of course, at the time, I would never ever have contemplated speaking to the poet himself... It wasn't until many, many years later I actually did so. It was 2006. I'd been invited to read and speak at an event in Toowoomba, Bruce Dawe's hometown for a long time, and mine for several years. Bruce Dawe was the other poet invited and even though he still had this status in my mind as an elder to be looked up to, he was friendly and approachable. So, at dinner afterwards, I plucked up all my courage and told him how important that reading in 1970 had been for me. I wish I had written down exactly what he said in reply. What I remember is a gracious thank you, followed by, 'We never know when there will be an angel in the wings.'

Lake Macquarie in NSW means a lot to you. Where would you take a newcomer to that area? Why?

Lake Macquarie used to be a well-kept secret. It's tucked between the NSW Central Coast beaches, the Hunter Valley and Newcastle. I'm torn between wanting to keep it a secret and wanting to say, 'Look what is here! Beaches, suburbs full of trees, bush nearby which still has flannel flowers, native orchids and bowerbirds... and of course, the Lake...'

When Martin and I moved here from Sydney in 1983, we chanced upon a peninsula which had driveways meandering away from the main streets towards houses almost hidden behind trees beside the water. The house we live in now is on the ridge in the middle of that peninsula and it has views across Kilaben Bay to a large park. That park is where we walk most days, and it's where I'd take a newcomer. 

Why? Because walking there will take you from a wide bay which has views across to the ocean, along a path through the old Rathmines Airforce Base and on to parkland of natural bush. There are glimpses there of so much that is special to Lake Macquarie: white sails on the water; children in the playground, swinging over the marked outline of a Catalina flying boat; people fishing, walking for health or with dogs; house boats and yachts moored at the jetties and in the shelter by the casuarinas; galahs and kookaburras and eastern rosellas nesting in the eucalypts and angophora; and across the water, the suburbs of houses, clustered on peninsulas... If you're lucky, just before sunset you might even see fish leaping, turning silver in the bright light. 

What did growing up in southern Queensland give you?

I should probably write a book to answer this. But just for starters, a love of big skies, space, solitude, and a fascination with the Australian countryside in all its extraordinary variety. 

By the time my parents settled in Toowoomba, just as I was about to start secondary school, I'd been to seven different schools and lived all over Queensland. We moved around a lot because my father was a bank manager, but also he was hospitalised with TB when I was six, so for over a year while he was there my mother and my brothers and I went to live with my grandparents on the Darling Downs.

All through my childhood, the landscape around me kept changing. We went from the inland plains north to Georgetown near the Gulf of Carpentaria, a town I remember as a place of mango trees, snakes, crocodiles and flood... then from all that topic greenness down to the Queensland border with its tobacco farms and dust... then to the Darling Downs, the Lockyer Valley, Toowoomba. All these places were different. And I never had time to really settle in any of them, which is possibly why I'm still haunted by the question, 'Where is home?'

Mostly, these were also small towns, with all the good and bad characteristics of closed communities. I learned very early to be happy with my own company. ABC Radio had a program for children, which included The Argonauts Club, which I loved. Every afternoon I'd rush into the house to listen to these voices from Somewhere Else, talking about Books and Art and Music and The Muddleheaded Wombat. The Club awarded certificates for stories and poems children sent in. I became Dragon's Tooth Aetna 19 and started sending things I'd written. That was the start, really, of the road to being a poet.

How was judging the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013?

It was a big job! There were about 650 entries and Dennis Haskell and I read every one of them. Fortunately, our tastes were fairly similar, so although we did a lot of emailing to discuss poems as we tried to reach a common short list, and then talked by phone at length to decide on the winners, there wasn't as much wrangling as there might have been. Judging is always exhausting though. Poetry invariably comes out of deep emotions and that makes reading so much of it in a short time disturbing. I worked out quite early in the judging that I could read a maximum of thirty in one day. To be fair to the poems, there was a lot of rereading needed as well. So it became really important to have plenty of time to spread out the process. The nice thing about the NPP is that you're also looking for poems for the anthology. In some ways, that was excruciating too because there were so many very fine ones that just missed out. This was a nice revelation, actually. Some years in the past I've entered and been very downcast when my poem hasn't made the anthology. I've naturally assumed my poem was no good! But now I realise how very competitive the prize is, and just how fine a line there can be between what makes it into the book and what just misses out. 

What should Australian poets be doing more or less of?

My plea would be for more wide, generous reading, particularly of poets who have been prominent over the last century. There are wonderful new poets emerging who are very accomplished, but based on the bulk of the entries for the 2013 NPP, I'd guess that there are more people writing poetry than reading it. 

Where to from here?

I'm a very slow writer and I always have a lot of work in progress. There are some unfinished prose works, a memoir and a garden journal style book. I just need another lifetime to finish them all. 

LAUNCH

The launch for Morton was a huge success. 80 people turned up. 55 copies of the chapbook were sold. I was humbled, overwhelmed.

Huge thanks to John and Linsay Knight (my publishers at Pitt Street Poetry) for all their support, and to John Foulcher, who said the most generous things about Morton (I had a tear in my eye at one point!). I'd also like to thank my friend Andre de Borde for having the launch at the very beautiful Gallery Ecosse in downtown Exeter.

And of course, much love and light to my family, friends and Magdalene Catholic High School colleagues. You made it such a glorious afternoon.

On another note, I'm reading at Rhizomic in Glebe tomorrow night. 7pm, Mr Falcon's. Michele Seminara and Anne Walsh are also on the bill with me. A very well-respected and well-known poet from Sydney will also be gracing us with his presence...

The next issue of CRUX will be appearing here very soon... Jean Kent is the featured poet... watch this space...

LJ, May 24 2016.

MORTON'S LAUNCH

I'm excited to announce that John Foulcher will be launching Morton on Saturday April 30.

Venue: Gallery Ecosse, Exeter, NSW.

Time: 3pm.

Sincere thanks to John for agreeing to launch my poems on Morton National Park.  

Thanks also to Andre de Borde, owner of Ecosse, for holding the event at his beautiful art-space.

I do hope you can make it! 

Lorne

REVERBERATIONS - ARIANE BEESTON

Welcome to the first instalment of Reverberations, where Australian poetry aficionados respond to the Australian poetry that most moves and inspires them. 

In this edition we meet Sydney-based freelance writer Ariane Beeston. When I first hooked into the twittersphere in 2014, Ariane was one of the first people to follow me. I was constantly impressed by her tweets quoting Australian poetry and her enthusiastic engagement with other Australian poets. Knowing she was passionate about this country's lyricism, I approached her about opening Reverberations. In many ways, Ariane inspired me to begin this new phase of The Ultraviolet Range. 

I love what Ariane says here. I wholeheartedly thank her for her honesty.

* 

In my last year of high school I studied the poetry of Gwen Harwood. She was the first Australian poet I fell madly in love with. As a seventeen year old, although I couldn't relate to a lot of her writings on motherhood, death and grief, I knew I was reading something special. And while I still have my clumsily annotated high school edition of her selected poems, the meaning I've found in her words, the colour and beauty, has only increased with time.

and when I am seized at last
and rolled in one grinding race
of dreams, pain, memories, love and grief,
from which no hand will save me,
the peace of this day will shine
like light on the face of the waters
that bear me away forever.

- At Mornington 

It was motherhood that drew me back to Australian poetry for the first time since high school. I suffered a severe psychotic depression after my son was born and for a little while was completely unable to read. One of my doctors suggested I try reading poetry- perhaps smaller chunks of text would be easier for my brain to decipher.

Via twitter I discovered Felicity Plunkett and her book Vanishing Point (UQP). It was one of those wonderful times in life where the right book finds you at exactly the right moment. Her poems spoke to the increasingly painful feelings of identity, loss and transformation I'd been wrestling with for months while I was so unwell. They were like little lifeboats helping anchor me to motherhood and all the changes it brought.

I plaited my fingers around her throat
and released a song she would drown in.
I called her into my fresh fecundity
wanting to remember girlish breasts with pink nipples.
At the edge of the room, out of the world's line of sight
we would smoulder quietly under the cover of maternity...

Later she would whisper to me of everything your birth
would silence,
her pristine days and wild nights...

- Delivery

Earlier this year at the Queensland Poetry Festival, I discovered the lovely Melinda Smith. She read from her 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award-winning collection Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call (Pitt Street Poetry) and her poem Given had me gasping. I could have written the exact same words.

Then: eight months of the black dog.
I crawl back from cold hell
that no one understands
out of quietest, loneliest lands.
Now you seem newly-made,
or is it me, new-born?

With poems entitled bitterweet, Don't worry e-happy and song of the anti-depressant, Melinda's collection is also hysterically funny and witty.

I've lost count of the number of copies of Kathryn Lomer's Night Writing (UQP) I've given to friends and family. There's an exquisite lightness to it that makes it easy to read, even for those who don't normally read poetry. It's hopeful, insightful and multi-layered - full of poems about love, madness, parenting and grief.

The biggest stars, or the closest, ripple
silver lines across the bay.
One falls, brief and burning, like a love affair, a life.

- Night

David Stavanger's The Special (UQP) has been another favourite. It's dark, weird and gritty, but playful at times, too. There's an edginess to his poetry that's unlike anything I've read.

It's hard to let people in.
How do they get back out?

At the moment, it's David Brooks' work that I'm devouring - his beautifully erotic, dry and intelligent poems from Open House and The Balcony. And there are still so many of his earlier collections left to enjoy.

She is
writing a message
with her tongue on my neck
in a language I don't understand.

- The Balcony

Ariane's writing has appeared in many publications including Daily Life, Essential Baby, Essential Kids, The Motherish and Role/Reboot. She is not to be left unsupervised in a secondhand bookstore. You can find her on twitter - @ArianeBeeston 

THE SOUTHERN HIGHLAND PLACES I LOVE

Bonnie View area (Morton National Park, Bundanoon), Erith Coal Mine (Morton National Park, Bundanoon), Badgerys Lookout area (Morton National Park, Tallong), various paddocks between Wingello and Tallong, the dam near stock processing centre in Moss Vale, Gallery Ecosse (Exeter), Jumping Rock Cafe (Bundanoon), 2 Park Road The Corner Store (Bowral), Dirty Jane's Emporium (Bowral), Red Cow Farm (Sutton Forest), Burrawang Pub, Empire Cinemas (Bowral), Sturt Gallery (Mittagong), the top of Mt Gibraltar (Bowral), Cecil Hoskins Nature Reserve (between Moss Vale and Burradoo), The Bowral Bookstore, Stingray Swamp (Penrose), Wingecarribee Reservoir, rainforest between Fitzroy Falls and Barrengarry, Kangaloon Rd (between East Bowral and Robertson), Robertson Nature Reserve, Budderoo Plateau (at very edge of Highlands between Robertson and Jamberoo), Berkelouw's Book Barn (Berrima), Harper's Mansion (Berrima), Stones Patisserie (Berrima), Coffee Culture (Bowral), Seymour Park (Moss Vale), Fitzroy Falls, Carrington Falls, Belmore Falls, Banana Leaf (Bowral), the country behind Sutton Forest Inn, Golden Vale Road (Sutton Forest). LJ, November 2015. 

CRUX #7 - PETER SKRZYNECKI

I have studied Peter Skrzynecki's poetry on numerous occasions throughout my career as an English teacher in Catholic secondary schools in NSW. I never tire of teaching his honest, ambiguous and almost mysterious work. My students (those who take English in their stride and strugglers) find his work rich and engaging. Much thought-provoking discussion follows a reading of one of Peter's poems; I've had students write their own poems in response to some of his. 

Peter has many fans. The launch of his weighty collection Old/New World, in 2007, at Gleebooks' store in Glebe, Sydney, was one of the most well-attended poetry bashes I've  been to. I remember Peter finished his reading with a line about breathing in and breathing out. Is there any greater poem? 

Peter has published twenty books of poetry and prose. He has won several literary prizes including the Captain Cook Bicentenary Award, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize and the Henry Lawson Short Story Award. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the Polish government, and in 2002 he received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his contribution to multicultural literature. IMMIGRANT CHRONICLE, a book of poetry, was a set text for study on the New South Wales HSC syllabus for many years. His memoir THE SPARROW GARDEN was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. OLD/NEW WORLD: New & Selected Poems was published by UQP in 2007. He is an adjunct associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. A new memoir, APPOINTMENT NORTHWEST,  of life in a one-teacher school on the New England Tablelands in the 1960s  was published by Five Senses in 2014. A book of children’s poetry, THE RAINBOW BIRDS, will be published by Five Senses in 2015.

What was there before poetry? 

Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Who really knows? I prefer not to speculate. 

Tell me about your childhood/teenage years.

They were  happy years; I had no brothers or sisters but that never mattered. I had plenty of friends living in Mary Street, Regents Park, and environs. The suburb was all bushland, paperbarks, gum trees and prickly scrub. Our house overlooked a reserve and Duck Creek flowed through  it. Birdlife abounded. Lizards. Snakes.

Best of all I was with my parents. When we came to Australia my father worked in Sydney for the Water Board for two years as a pick-and-shovel man while the cost of transportation from Europe was repaid as a deduction from his paypacket.  My mother and I lived in the migrant hostel in Parkes (1949-51). That was the deal with the government. After two years you had to leave. Buy a house somewhere or buy land and build. There was the knowledge, though barely understood by me, that we had done well by coming to Australia.  We were fortunate. My parents were happy and if they were happy, so was I.  They worked very  hard and had the house paid off in four years.

Share with me a story or two from Europe.  

The first memory is of snow. In my memoir THE SPARROW GARDEN (UQP,  2004), there is a chapter called “Snow is Falling”.  My mother was a single mother and after the war she was sent to a Displaced Persons camp in Lebenstedt where she met Feliks Skrzynecki a farmer from Poland who had been in forced labor for five years. They married and he  became my adopting father. You could not have asked for a better father.

I am kneeling on a chair and looking out at  drifting snow. It is falling gently, softly, so fine and powdery it is like a mist. Directly beneath the window is a wire enclosure with a low wooden structure , like a dog’s kennel, subdivided and lined with straw. This is where my father keeps rabbits. They are not being kept as pets. I am not allowed to play with them. These rabbits are kept for their meat. They are bred, fattened and killed. Food queues in the camp are long. People resort to other means to supplement their diet. We can also sell the meat or trade it. I watch the rabbits . The snow keeps falling, drifting.

The second memory involves walking between railways carriages on the journey from Germany to Italy.  We sailed to Australia from Naples. At one point, walking from one carriage to another I saw the broken fuselage of a plane lying in a forest. The trees were filled with dappled light and the broken plane, painted in camouflage colours, resembled a butterfly. The light remains magical, unearthly, as if it appeared on purpose, just to illuminate one small part of the tragedy of war.

Why have you lived in Sydney for so long?

Sydney is home.  In FLAWS IN THE GLASS Patrick White says that for better or worse Sydney is in  his blood.  I feel like that; it is an ambivalent feeling, with all the highrise  building that’s going on. The traffic, the congestion. I sometimes wish I had settled in New England, perhaps Armidale. My first small school was at Jeogla, 50 km east of Armidale. The central west draws me also – probably because  our first home in Australia was in Parkes, in the migrant hostel on its outskirts. Now I have a home in Sydney, my wife is here, my children and grandchildren. Having reached my three score years and ten, and with   health issues arising in recent times, I have no desire to live elsewhere. I feel I belong here.

What are your feelings toward the much-loved and much-studied Immigrant Chronicle after all these years? 

I am still very fond  of IMMIGRANT CHRONICLE and proud of what it achieved. Originally it had a different title and Angus & Robertson turned it down.  About that time UQP was starting its second Paperback Poets series (the coloured covers). Roger McDonald was publisher and Tom Shapcott was the poetry editor. I sent the ms to them. From memory, Tom  and Roger did the selection. Roger and I came up with the title. Roger said the word “immigrant” should be in the title. I liked the word” chronicle”.  I flew up to Brisbane for the meeting. In retrospect, it all came together naturally, without any angst. Since 1975 it has never been out of print and has gone into twenty-two reprints.

Which period of your work are you most proud of?

Fair to say that I am proud of all periods of my work – but maybe a little more of the early years which  were the hardest when it came to meeting publishers and getting manuscripts accepted; but the need to write and express myself was always there, urgent and unavoidable.  Roland Robinson’s press, Lyrebird Writers published my first two books.  Various other publishers followed. UQP published four of my books and keeps them in print. THE SPARROW GARDEN is coming out as an E-book.

Describe your relationship with the natural world of NSW.

My relationship with the natural world is one of respect and honour. Do it proud, as they say, in what I create out of what it offers. Be it land, sea or sky.

Looking back, the natural world of NSW made me a poet. My eyes were opened up to what  beauty NSW/ Australia holds when we lived in Parkes for those first two years. I quote from THE SPARROW GARDEN...”After a sea voyage of four weeks, Parkes meant open spaces, paddocks, sheep, cattle, gum trees, magpies stalking the ground on frosty mornings and throwing back their heads to sing, Parkes meant hot, dry weather, a bushland that I loved walking through, picking at branches of scrub wattle or encountering the scent of eucalypts for the first time....”  

Last year I published APPOINTMENT NORTHWEST (Five Senses) a memoir of my days at Jeogla. A very different landscape from  the central west but just as inspirational. As I was writing,  it became apparent that this was not only a narrative of my days in a small school but also a tribute to the high country of New England with its mountains, rivers, waterfalls and wildlife.  The people, also.

What does the future hold? 

The future ? What  indeed ? Many years of good health and creativity, I hope. I have a book of children’s poetry due before the end of the year, THE RAINBOW BIRDS (Five Senses) that my son has illustrated . I  also have three more manuscripts in my head and perhaps a last collection of poetry to round it all off.