poetry

I COME IN PEACE

Robert Adamson

John Kinsella (ed)
Salt, Volume 10
FACP/Folio $16.95pb, 313pp
1 86368 400 X

 WHEN A POET REVIEWS a poetry magazine it can be like walking out over a virtual mine-field. I have a few more books to write before they take me out, so let me say straight away, I come in peace. These are cynical times so maybe nobody will be taken in by this tone. After all, Salt is published and edited by John Kinsella, a highly successful poet who has established himself in record time. Let's face it, this is poetry as strategy. As Hilary McPhee pointed out the literary community in this country can be particularly vicious, and if anyone tries to hose that down they are having themselves on -- the response McPhee got in relation to what she actually said proves the point really. It doesn't have to be bland and polite though. There has been a lot of talk about the careerist approach to poetry lately. Ramona Koval noted at the first National Poetry Festival in Melbourne recently that some American poets have taken on this 'professionalisation' of poetry even down to their 'Brooks Brothers suits and leather satchels' -- Fay Zwicky replied,`I think careerism in poetry is contrary to how a poem comes into existence in the first place.'

This is surface stuff but the darker currents run on down deep. A couple of poets told me what they thought about this new issue of Salt before they had even read it. When Ivor Indyk gave Kinsella's Poems 1980-1994 an unfavourable review in July's ABR, faxes went flying around the world, phones were abuzz and Kinsella e-mailed a form letter to friends and foes saying he was 'withdrawing from the literary community completely'. My first response was 'what literary community?' One cannot complain about the standard of the literary debate if you don't contribute to it. What could be a vital and stimulating exchange of ideas has been poisoned by the fact that the Australia Council's fellowships have created a couple of generations of poets who are savagely competitive.There is not enough money and too many 'professional poets'. This brings to mind the wisdom of the Chinese tradition where artists were not taken seriously unless they were amateurs. Calligraphic painters did not create works for sale (even the word work in this context reveals the inadequacy of English to deal with the concept). Chinese artists dealt with spiritual matters, the work was contemplative and ritualistic, but with the climate prevailing in this country, poetry coming from such inner resources would be seen as pure whimsy.

The new issue of Salt is worthy of a reading that occurs in the context of the recent history of literary magazines in this country. The first issue appeared in 1990 and ambitiously identified itself as Salt, Volume I, Number 1. Kinsella was canny in not publishing an editorial nor promising regularity in Salt's appearance. With little backing, Kinsella has pulled it along by will power and his belief in what he is doing. Along the way six substantial, well produced books have been published. These volumes constitute ten issues of the journal, the last two co-published with Fremantle Arts Centre Press who have courageously joined forces with Folio. The new issue is simply called Salt Volume 10. It looks good, over 300 pages on quality paper, the typography has been redesigned and now the whole thing feels better than ever.There is a photograph by Simon Cowling on the cover in full colour and celloglazed. The bookshops will love it.

This venture is a back to front version of what happened with the magazines Kinsella modelled his publication on, New Poetry and Scripsi. When Hale & Iremonger and Oxford University Press respectively came to their rescue, like bodies rejecting heart transplants, New Poetry and Scripsi slowly died. Fremantle Arts Centre Press with its publishing resources has relieved Salt of the sheer grind of putting a magazine through the press and left its editor free to actually edit. The result shows in this issue. The improvement, however, creates a higher expectation in the reader for something less tangible than a shiny look. Aside from the wealth of high quality contributions from some of the best poets writing anywhere, there is something about the editorial flow that seems a bit jerky.

There's an almost indefinable quality in every great literary magazine, running through the pages like a watermark. It's a combination of book-design, editorial policy, proof-reading style, overall shape. Editorial policies have fluctuating qualities, a good one is tidal, it has governing principles that can vary according to the phases of the moon, the literary climate. The other quality every successful journal needs before it can navigate the oceans of its subscribers' imaginations is even more mysterious, editorial philosophy.

I think you could say this venture is in the spirit of small press publishing in poetry that goes back to Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound. In this country there was Grace Perry who published a whole issue of previously unpublished work by Pound. Her Poetry Australia also published issues devoted to translations. In the seventies New Poetry, the magazine I edited and published, started printing American and English poets and critics. By the time our subscription list hit the two thousand mark the Lit. Board started complaining about the balance of Australian poets. New Poetry's 'internationalist' editorial policy came under a lot of criticism from everyone except our subscribers.

The idea was to see our poetry in context with international traditions and developments. Instead of sending our poets overseas, we invited poets from other countries to publish in New Poetry. There were no travelling fellowships or studios in Italy or France for Australian poets and it was good value even when New Poetry sponsored Robert Duncan's Australian tour. Scripsi continued publishing internationally known poets into the nineties and now we have the excellent HEAT publishing our poets alongside the best from the rest of the world. Salt will do well if it continues on as a poetry magazine. After all we haven't had one since New Poetry.

There are small magazines that publish poetry ( a couple publish only poetry), but without book reviews and critical essays they are simply small anthologies. This is where this new issue of Salt is weakest: there are no book reviews. Poets thrive on the stimulation created by good book reviews. As Charles Olson says, 'the feed-back proves/feed-back's the law'. Otherwise Salt Volume 10 holds up well -- internationalist, with a strong component of linguistically innovative poetry along with some traditional work. There is imaginative prose, a conversation between Edgar Allan Poe's wife Virginia and family friend Marie Louise Shew, written by Brenda Walker; a piece called '[Mayapanthe]: a Poetics of the Link, Poetics of the World-Wide Webb from the perspective of the Electronic Poetry Centre wings at Buffalo University'; an essay byVeronica Brady on Judith Wright's poetic and political 'translations'; prose by Hélène Cixous in French with a translation by Tracy Ryan; three fine poems by Gunnar Harding with translations from the Swedish by Anselm Hollo, alongside five poems by Pierre Alferi published in their original language (this bilingual publication indicates Kinsella's editorial generosity). There is also an interesting interview that will delight readers who enjoy the poetry of Kevin Hart.

Some of the best poems are by John Tranter, Jennifer Maiden, Adam Aitken, Peter Minter, Paul Hoover, Zan Ross and Frances Rouse. There is an extract from a long poem by Alan Wearne, 'Stubbsy', that reads well. Craig Stubbs is a failed entrepreneur holed up in one of his former empire's few remaining properties, Crazy Horse, a bar in a large South East Asian city. It is like a post modern version of Francis Webb's 'A Drum For Ben Boyd'. The prose foreword with a quote from Christopher Skase makes interesting reading alongside Webb's foreword about Boyd.

There are some excellent language-based poets in this issue. Lyn Hejinian has an excerpt from 'A Border Comedy' --a short quote should give some indication of her powerful voice:

Their hostility is genuine
The battle will be real and I am a man
I am the 'hero'
The heroine is on my side and she parades along the old wall ˇˇˇˇwearing a mask
An enemy warrior from the other side of the wall meets her and ˇˇˇˇremoves his shirt
He is thin, tall, and aroused
The enemy plans to rape the heroine
I must seek mystical aid among the ferns
It makes me think of Gig Ryan's new work with its agile use of irony and controlled poetic tone with a mix of colloquial language and high art. To read poets like Hejinian alongside Ryan and Jennifer Maiden gives us a perspective, and it is stimulating and reassuring to see our poets holding their own in an international context. Here's a quote from Maiden's brilliantly sustained 'Look, I'm Standing On No-Floor' where her prose syntax juxtaposes the tone of despair carried in the voice's calm utterance:
hell, when you're standing on no-floor, you skate
or fall or just stay-put, appreciate
the elevation... and how women...
had gone out to pay/a photographer to give them back their bodies.
One works better in all areas, I think, with
a confidence in one's geography, and if
there's a vaginal velvet emptiness at centre
studded with that vaginal/diamond mine of nerves,
no-floor is not a life-defining problem.
There is a long poem by Charles Bernstein, 'Log Rhythms', that is clever and very funny. It shows how the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are easing their doctrinaire approach. It almost verges on something like an abstract narrative, making it much more readable than a lot of Bernstein's work from the eighties.

Incomplete:

Robert Adamson is a poet whose most recent work is The Language of Oysters , with photographs by Juno Gemes.

Return to September 1997 / AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW