Poetry: MTC Cronin
Introduction: The poetry of MTC Cronin
by Peter Boyle
The poetry of MTC Cronin opens up a world that is simultaneously our familiar, everyday reality and an invasion of radical strangeness. These poems happen in the depths revealed when the minima of existence, non-existence, desire, and emptiness are viewed with unwavering intensity, without the distraction of pre-given narratives or ready-made emotions. There is a certain kinship with Pierre Reverdy or Wallace Stevens in the quiet attentiveness of Cronin's poetry and its avoidance of grand gestures, but, compared to Reverdy or Stevens, there is a greater emotional range and far more willingness to address the socio-political dimensions of our lives. Cronin explores, evokes, dialogues with whatever a concentrated focus on the minutiae of life and language may bring into our seeing. It is a poetry that playfully, meaningfully disrupts language and perceptions to surprise us with the possibilities of being.
This ‘possibility’, the allowance at the seat of MTC Cronin’s poetry, points to a sense of freedom in her work that in turn creates freedom in the reader. Central to this is the way emotional states are not fixed down while language takes on unexpected transformations. These conversions of everyday speech and everyday narratives don't proceed from any cerebral-academic starting point but are intuitive, heart-centred, and visceral. Frequently in Cronin's poems, opposites unite in an explosion of recognition, a frisson of the specifically poetic that carries the weight of all those experiences that seem, logically, forever beyond words and so the only experiences worth articulating. In "lorca's horse", for example, we read of "the silver dagger / buried deep like laughter" and learn how "the murderers and lovers kiss / by the stand of olive trees." For Cronin, poetry requires a risk-taking strategy that rejects the evasion of emotion as much as easy sentimentality or the overvaluation of the individual's own chance circumstances. The slippage of words into states of confusion is encouraged. The heart and its insistent cries are not silenced. Exposure to life's cruelties is not avoided but mandated as part of the truth-telling of poetry. Beauty is given space as much as ugliness, grace alongside irritability. To see night, as Cronin does, as "stopping the day / and starting a cat" is both to grasp something new about that fundamental companion to our lives, night, and to discover ourselves as outside the categories happy / sad and all other boxes of closed perceptions. Poetry becomes a way of experiencing the world without props or preconceptions, relying only on an instinctive sense of what the poem wants to say at a given moment in the chaos of our separate and shared lives.
From her first collection, Zoetrope, in 1995, Cronin has been a highly prolific poet, publishing her books with presses in the US and England as well as Australia. This international reach of Cronin's poetry is also reflected in the range of influences she has assimilated. While most Australian poetry since the 1970s has been strongly indebted to US poetry, notably the New York School and a range of more autobiographical, largely traditional poets like James Wright, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, James Dickey, or Mark Strand, Cronin's poetry is far more influenced by European and Latin American poets. Writers as diverse as Vasko Popa, Paul Celan, Ritsos, René Char, Henri Michaux, Guillevic, Ernst Meister, Adam Zagajewski, Vallejo, Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, Octavio Paz, and Lorca have helped shape Cronin's distinctive sensibility and aesthetic preferences.
Experimentation with forms and the use of constraints have also been a recurrent feature in much of Cronin's poetry. Talking to Neruda's Questions (2001), for example, systematically offers responses or ripostes to each of the questions in Neruda's Book of Questions. Cronin's 2004 book <More Or Less Than> starts with a one-line poem, then adds a line to each subsequent poem till 50 is reached, then subtracts a line to reach the concluding poem “100.” The Law Of Poetry (2015) gathers poems describing all manner of strange imaginary laws. Every second poem in God Is Waiting In The World's Yard (2019) begins with the sentence "Right at the back of the world’s yard I am sitting." The construction of this imaginary space, the world's yard, reverberates against a diversity of unconventional notions of who or what God might be.
The philosophical bent in Cronin's poetry is allied to a trust in the disruptive power of humour, a trust that humour can open up original ways of seeing deeper into how the world operates, whether this be at a sexual, social, political, or ethical level. Irreverence is a key element in Cronin's poetry, as is a certain distrust of the overly beautiful or rhetorical. Across the diversity of her work, Cronin seeks to provoke thought. In the midst of a great deal of purely descriptive, narrowly emotional, or else merely abstract and clever poetry that fills our contemporary bookshelves and cyberspace, MTC Cronin's poetry invites us, its readers, to think through who we are, to look closer at patterns, and to let the imaginative force of poetry suggest new possibilities. //
Peter Boyle is an Australian poet and translator of poetry from Spanish and French. His most recent collection of poetry is Notes towards the Dreambook of Endings from Vagabond Press.
On Gordon Shepherdson
Darkness comes out of the light.
The unrecognizable which we think we recognize.
All our eyes frantic universes of blindness and sight.
Perfectly unproportioned.
Pre-fear Fear Post-fear
We see it but we don’t know what it looks like.
Smaller and larger.
Pain and also what lessens pain.
Light falls backwards from what it also falls forwards into.
The dark is never half-open.
All our ‘parts’ are there, in the dark.
So you know, everything ‘has to do with’.
Your body grubbing into your body.
Their bodies out of their bodies.
(Trying to find.)
Transformation is to the self.
Like dogs barking at the end of the road.
Like the silence in life.
Feels like the dying of your voice.
Would you say it’s alive?
The big question is about the meaning of touching.
Reach for the bird in the back of the tree…
Moving my wings hides the middle of the world in a shadow that follows me like a forced freedom, a furious expiation.
Nothing to be ready for.
Everything is coming.
Each blue demanding. (The unseen. The seen blue unsees.)
Not trace.
Not to look at.
Not distance nor the internal horizon.
Not paintings but Gordon mingling.
I met Gordon Shepherdson once — a decade and a half ago — at a literary awards dinner with his son Nathan (who had just won the major poetry prize of which I was the judge). He looked like someone who worked hard. I remember thinking that he looked like a worker, the kind of people I grew up with. Thus I ‘knew’ something. I didn’t know at the time that he was a painter, though found out later that night. We had drinks. I think he had beer. Perhaps a hat? He drank the beer. He didn’t eat the hat. He talked nowhere near as much as I did. A nice silence. And so, over at the other pole, through hearing Nathan’s words — having them touch me — I found Gordon’s ‘work’ which fell straight into my mitochondria — mitochondria whirring along in the dark infrasonic passageway from light to light.
Life after life. Grateful this rawed beast.
I am delighted and ruined.
— MTC Cronin
Gordon Shepherdson photographed in his studio in Brisbane. Art Monthly Australasia No. 320.
Extracts from THE GLASS BEAR
WE’RE GOING on a bear hunt.
We’re going to catch a big bear.
I’m not scared.
No I’m not.
The bear is made of glass.
I see through its growl to no bear.
We break it.
We cut ourselves on our courage.
Girl Playing With Serpent, 1993
LAUGH the hundred laughs of ten deaths.
Fill the begging bowls with tortoises.
Why not when everything is a perfect match.
If it wasn’t quiet there would be music.
If there were three little angels, well!
Your happiness is as fresh and light as bread.
A game in which nothing counts.
Invisible stars pool in your ravished city.
Apricots display their hearts to the birds.
So laugh, laugh and go down with the laugh.
At the hour of sloe the black thorns rise.
Princess Plate, 1978
IN THE LONG YELLOW GRASS
is the sill of a window
through which the sun comes
heavenward bound.
The late golden afternoon purrs
in ancient leaves
and lion knots unravel.
Do you see the night
all unwounded and starry-eyed?
It is stopping the day
and starting a cat.
Woman with Bullock, 1998
LIKE THE SMALL BLIND WILD WORMS
we have never considered outside sleep
we mimic the immutable.
Reciting hope and vain hope
we guess again our names
and tell how they make us nameless.
We wriggle noisily in a layer of silence
as a translucent volcano erupts
at evolution’s peak.
The cosmos fills its arms
with the first million lovers
to strip naked in the sky.
Turned to the birds of absence they will fall
to rip the spirit from all creation
and with it build an empty nest.
In this unoccupied place
tightly woven from the tiny thorns of belief
shall be everything reconciled
to not existing.
Girl Holding Mask Walking Into Reality, 1993
undoing the end undoing
the end undoing
the end
In the middle of Winter in the morning
there is cold water on the face.
The ebb and flow of the face.
Two thumbs, wiping away birds
from the corners of the sky.
I decide to backtrack in a flood
of emptiness as the grey tap
huddled over the sink
plunges both hands into the future.
~•~
It seems I had not woken.
That I was on the way back to my body
when I took a wrong turn
and ended up at the register of the dead
which contains only
the names of the living.
~•~
This morning we tiptoe quietly,
putting our feet down gently
in the scrambled eggs.
Looking through the window broken
as perfectly as a heart we see peace
is in the war, everywhere.
The people out there, haunting,
exist on pain-killers and secrets
passed from ear to ear.
~•~
Chaos carried off
in the beak of a bird. Below, heather,
a cold line around the mountain.
I throw back my head and close
the skies: Unfurl my life, reality! All battles
will take place here, in your chaotic swoon
of beauty.
~•~
In the dream I was told, dreams
suffer us. Jouissance
in the scumbled light falling
into great and small rooms
where morning speaks.
‘It is a sunny day at the end of Winter.’
Starless sleep…
In this darkness
you cease to say my name.
~•~
In the darkness, without hope,
we cannot be separated.
You must be one of the powerful.
I must be one of the powerful.
Look! There is the future!
What death cannot fill.
~•~
There are no flags but several hens
still alive and a fine spider-
thread of news which we break
with our hands flicking the water
from the leaves.
An overtired sniper worships roof-
top after roof-top in some city
a long way from where we cannot be.
Our fingertips, remembering child-
hood drawings, press the ash
that falls.
~•~
On a morning when history does not
wake the past still comes along
like a second flesh and offers
its emptiness to the inescapable
world.
Some talk of chimeras.
Some, of a block of earth, reclaiming
the beauty that it owns.
~•~
There are four chambers.
Women holding men in an existing night.
A bird building a nest
in a nest. Grief,
which is the only sign
of immortality and courage
which is the only way to rest.
~•~
When I get up I can no longer hear
the men killing each other.
The torrents and the emptiness
of their incomparable deaths
have slipped down between the cushions
of the old couch that is slowly
recognizing the sovereignty
of the kitchen and the savage freedom
of the front door.
It is, it seems, time to go out.
It seems there is also this sun
that won’t fit in the sky
and deep in my heart is a playground.
Swimmer in Ocean of Eyes, 1991
Family Triptych — Man, 1991
Family Triptych — Woman, 1991
THE HARVEST ANGEL:
A mute siren…
a bird that never closes its mouth,
the bites she takes of us,
automatic.
For that is it, surely,
she eats slowly while planning the atrocity
of how we can serve her
(her purpose).
In the golden darkness, the air rehearses
her flight.
The trembling is immovable.
Her wings, day-lined, the flotillas of noon,
as for our whiteness,
catastrophe comes.
Running Winged Figure, 2011
lorca’s horse lorca’s
horse lorca’s
horse
Took one hundred years
to canter out of the olive grove.
Its name is Gordon
and its bones have been screwed together
by a dragonfly.
See how it turns its back on the moon!
See it place two front hooves
on an earthquake.
Icy ears crack its eyes open.
The night is out!
Where are you, tremendous human
with your forelegs astride
the fault lines in ideas?
~•~
Plodding on in the fullness of blood
and finding beneath the ground
all the general names of life.
The birds’ feet, those marks.
The paranoid snow.
Traces of posture.
An echo hare disappearing into premonition.
See it come blowing down the road.
Death-wedding winds
dragging the earth-bound man.
Marched out in a hail of dumbfire.
Where are you two-legged rider
of the rifle?
~•~
Where eyes passed by
there is blood underfoot.
A volcanic rock stopping a vent
or the death-portent
of the earth’s tongue licking stone
and turning it to a flickering
in the dust.
Each death finds the hiding place
where the yes and no is mixed.
Every grave is a hiding place.
Every grave is hidden.
You don’t need to be stabbed in the eye
to be blind!
~•~
That little tilt of the head
says quizzical.
What are you thinking Gordon?
Creepy white horse
who dug itself out of the nowhere
it was led to.
Starving, thirsting image
or rather unstarvable and without thirst.
Boiling eyes reading the ransom note:
A shadow for a shadow.
The shades exchanged.
~•~
The ghost was made of humans.
The moon was playing earth.
Pretending.
Each bone of the dream rattled.
Light was quiet inside the darkness.
Where are you horse?
Haemorrhaging from the nostrils
in this cranny of the universe.
The night wants your night!
Between one flower plucked
and the other given – the inexpressible
nothing.
~•~
Along the past it comes.
Fate.
You can see it!
Terrifyingly it lives.
Is a she-beast forming her shapeless young
and tossing them petal
by leaf, blossom by bloody cell
into the hole that cannot be opened
or closed.
See them! Sycophants, sober
or half-drunk and clawing in the soil.
Along the past we saw them come.
Intimidated into being
by the present.
~•~
I’m in love, pony.
I see chance with chance.
They are lovers.
Strong like this prison.
Freedom is the monster-bit in the heart.
The country beyond the compound
works its sympathetic magic.
Reminisces the future.
Galloping over the prison walls.
Opening the room to mountain air.
The stream in plurals.
Gurgling about what’s not yet done.
Itself and itself downstream.
~•~
Night earths
clearly mine
in this everlasting hour.
‘In this the hour of my death.’
I need my sleep.
I’m dying soon.
Does the horse cry tears
that are labyrinths of rind?
Is that look quizzical Gordon?
Can I exist despite the slight curve
of time?
Can I saddle you up, survival?
And ride another man to infinity.
~•~
Riding your eye, the silver dagger
buried deep like laughter.
Sitting when I am dead
in the steel nail’s soul.
Souls have their own business
— with infinite infinite luck.
— with newborn death.
Don’t cry pony, I haven’t written you yet.
Run faster!
Throw me down!
Three night crawl to where there’s no blood.
Just the ground. Ridden.
Just the ground.
~•~
I rise like heartbreak.
When you’re dead it stays the same time.
Black from my eyes
and the vestibule of foliage green.
The marks of your hooves
are on my forehead
plodding the path of memory.
The cell wasn’t square.
It was shaped exactly like the shape
into which my body could not move.
I stepped into the hole they dug
with my pockets out of my hands.
~•~
Don’t believe it’s the hand
that leaves the grave first.
Crawling out it’s my nose that peeps.
Sniffs.
Gordon, you’re not a horse!
I smell paint.
The canvas is nailed to your knees
drawing blood.
Your brushes, reminders of privacy.
I understand your mystery.
I see life come toward me –
half-red half-green. All blue!
~•~
The murderers and the lovers kiss
by the stand of olive trees.
Lorca’s Horse, 2005
THE WINDOW begins in the sky.
The blossoms of eyes float down
in a soft wedding.
Wind-mottled clouds oversee
two feathers in a race to earth.
Standing alone in a field
a river marvels at the closed stones
listening to the waves returning
from a lifetime beneath the sea.
I have been your litany
says the sun turning itself over
to replace the truth.
In a bowl sit pomegranates
on a table beside a chair with no cat.
The rose taps at the window
trying to wake them.
Dark Ocean of Dark Eyes Squall, 2008
THE DUST remembers the rooster that turned white
and receives it as an excoriated miracle.
Its crow blooms inwards
and opens the black cavern where the stones wait.
The wind doesn’t talk
but holds its breath in the trees.
Look at Summer!
Then destroy your eyes.
Scratch them out with the distance
measured by dry sticks.
In their excavated void
the colourless cock pecks at the last of the sun.
Frightened, 2001
THE CORRECT WAY to drink from a broken cup.
To welcome both dark and light into your house.
To imagine tomorrow.
To pick verbena and red clover.
On the path where nothing will grow.
The correct way to tend the frozen.
To take their sweet throats and swim down into their livers.
To disembowel without touching.
To do what is at stake.
To move from cage to cage.
The correct way to say only some things worth saying.
To recognize the world’s mark.
(The shape of conception.)
To feed an apple.
To bruise.
The correct way to close your lips.
To keep a promise.
To remember.
And then, to die in a room.
Or out in the open.
Bullock and Still Life in Dark Landscape, 2008
THE MAN who is thinking of death
grabs the shovel by the blade.
He has no tomb.
He has a job.
Bullock Hanging in Dark Landscape, 2004
HE WALKS on the bread.
An extraordinary arrival.
With or without a hatchet
he stops everyone from speaking.
They wait in a simple side-road
by the slippery universe.
Watching the same thing.
The event of the rock
and an animal in the shape of fire.
Nailed to the flame.
Her pretty thighs are what we choke on.
The beast is worst.
Woman with Serpent, 1992
your first words your
first words your
first words
Spoken
through brown eyes,
‘How do we live?’
as the hand spoons ash
into the face of your skull.
~•~
How do I cure your madness.
You are involved
with the sun, in touch
with the stars, growing
on dung.
~•~
The sky is dirt.
And because yours
is no longer a name
you climb a black rope
to get back to us.
~•~
Earth-through —
Right to the terror
at its centre.
The black shirt today
and the black hat.
~•~
When asked, you simply
sign with an x.
Planting the dead
on the white line
of catastrophe.
~•~
Now there is no present.
Your feet have hidden you
in the river.
See your wet shoelaces
tangled in the new city.
~•~
Walking its missing street
your lamp eyes are on
tonight.
Your words bleed
in the public gardens.
Family Triptych — Adolescent, 1991
Two Thousand Year Old Apple Tree
the way ash the
way ash the
way ash
The head, it is still nothing.
After the mouths
the non-battle of bones.
The book shakes its head.
A thousand daggers.
~•~
The (our) dead children
lie undigested in my stomach.
The news of their death
is devoured far and wide.
As the sun dirties the stream.
~•~
A dog lies face down
in the whistle.
The dead cats lie side-by-side
in the clay.
A black hat and a hazel branch
on the church-house
bench.
~•~
There were only two thieves.
One looked at reality through a microscope.
The other stole what he saw.
~•~
Even when we add the past
back on, nothing.
The stone won’t show you its feet.
Ungrasp the meaning.
The world is on the other side
of us.
~•~
Skinner of memory,
resolving the skull,
atrocity stretching the field
until we are all
in all our pain.
~•~
He guts the fish.
Forgets the fish.
He has two hands
but it is so long since he has counted them.
~•~
What catches in the cinders?
Ribs of a thousand years
of sun.
~•~
Night stumbles on itself.
The images of night.
Eyes shut on the pleasure
to keep it safe.
Death trembles in the house.
Confused by the trappings.
The flat walls and floors.
In the fireplace
the door closes.
~•~
It is only possible to quietly think
the way ash is quiet.
There is no smell of burning
and no sign of smoke.
It’s not up to you to be wary.
Wader Carrying Images, 2002
The Second Plate (The Bull Plate), 1977
by my absence by
my absence by
my absence
The cemetery on my lips.
~•~
The available site, my life.
~•~
And what will be found in the dead?
The dust in a truce with the day.
~•~
And you standing there in dull time,
altered by your shadow.
~•~
Inside dawn the night is naked.
Luminous.
~•~
I am going to be saved
by my absence.
He never leaves to return.
~•~
The heart flattens its beat.
The heart’s round beats argue.
~•~
Were they your words,
the ones I said?
~•~
Friction.
Desperate to leave the triangle.
~•~
Dice landing all sides up.
~•~
Conceive a tomb.
Rehearsal of dwelling.
~•~
I am nothing.
A favour.
~•~
The grave glides through,
just this dark bird,
all sky and earth.
Nothing allows us us.
We turn to it. We are the turn.
The headstones have left.
Hawk in Flight
Reclining Figure, 1993
Girl on Steps with Four Masks, 1991
DEDICATIONS
LORCA’S HORSE is for Gordon Shepherdson
YOUR FIRST WORDS (unspoken ‘AUGENTROST’) is for Paul Celan
NOTES
In Lorca’s play Blood Wedding’, a horse is led to water but will not drink. It is pierced through the eyes with a silver dagger and bleeds into the flowing stream. “In 1935 a journalist asked [Federico Garcia Lorca] which of his plays he liked best. ‘Among the works I’ve already produced I don’t have any favorites,’ Lorca answered. ‘I’m in love with the ones I haven’t written yet.’”In 1936 Lorca was shot and buried, some believe, beside a stand of olive trees. His grave has never been found.(Quote taken from Leslie Stainton, Lorca, A Dream of Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, pg. 461.)
Gordon Shepherdson (1934–2019) is a highly regarded Australian painter who lived in Brisbane. He worked for 23 years in an abattoir. This had a profound impact on his work. Critic Louise Martin-Chew described him as "a man of few words, who had little to say about his artistic practice. His paintings speak for themselves, evoking not words but feelings about his being in the world." Over five decades he honed a highly personal philosophy addressing nature, time, and silence splintered by his oft remarked "astral" second. His works are reproduced here, courtesy of Nicholas Thompson Gallery, QUAGOMA, and Philip Bacon Galleries.
A SKÁLD’S GALLERY:
MTC Cronin
1. Whinger.
This is my soul. (I’m a young soul!)
2. Mid ’66, Noosa; I’m not a photo person but this is one of my favourites ever.
From left to right: sister Jennie (Jeanette – actor & playwright); me; brother Tim (architect & designer). I always think that looking closely – or maybe faraway-y – it’s a parallel universe version of the three monkeys.
3. The Big Pineapple.
The Big Pineapple is an attraction on the Sunshine Coast and yes, it is a big pineapple. This is the Big Pineapple mini-train and that is my very groovy mum and us fashionistas. I don’t think anything needs to be said except ‘Do you remember the parfaits?’
4. Hey Charger!
In the ‘70’s my dad came home with this brand new car and we all looked out the window and went ‘ugghhh’! Apparently though it was at the time the coolest car on the market, double fuel tanks to boot. He took us around Australia in it – with people everywhere yelling ‘Hey Charger’ at us. That was the ad on the TV at the time. He drove us across the middle of the country, 4000 miles or so through desert where we got to meet the true owners of this land (which we now like to call a nation) while we continue largely to treat them like shit. Everything comes back to bite you on the bum and Australian ‘culture’, if that’s what you want to call it, has bite marks all over its ugly arse. Just waiting for someone to take a nice big chunk so we can’t sit down at all!
5. Who doesn’t like a wetsuit?
Maybe 15 or 16. Me and my best friend Roz (Rosalind Brydon). My parents got a speed boat and we all learnt to water-ski. And by ‘all’ I mean a lot of people in town – all of us kids were down there. Broke a few ribs!! (Mine.)
6. The Beginning of Something...
1984. I’m 20, he’s 24. I was visiting my sister in Sydney from Brisbane, a city 1500 miles away (where I was living with a guy). I’d known Richard, in the photo, since I was 8 as he’d moved to my hometown, Caloundra, when he was 12. We’d never attended school together because of the age difference and in high school I’d gone away to a convent for a few years. However, when I went to university in Brisbane after school he was already there and showed me around. He ended up going out for a number of years with a girl I lived with in my first share- house. Back to the photo: On my last night in Sydney a bunch of ex-Caloundra- ites who all happened to be in Sydney went on a pub crawl and Richard and I were the last two left standing. He drove me to my sister’s flat on his motorbike the next morning (and no, we hadn’t slept together) only to find out that she’d accidentally deadlocked her apartment from the inside and I couldn’t get in. I missed my ride home to Brisbane with two girls who were driving out that day. I never went back. We’ve barely spent a few nights apart in the last almost-forty years.
7. Good Times!
House-sharing in Sydney in the ‘80’s. Me and Casey (maybe she spelt it KC?) on the footpath with our spoils. The two of us shared not just a house but a bit of supernatural, altered states, general grottiness. We lost touch though did run into each other once years later in a park. She’s a writer now, successful and well known.
8. Archetypes/Fantasies.
When I was little I wanted to be one or more of three things: insane AND in an asylum, a nun in an enclosed religious order, or dying/dead. All of these desires were accompanied by inordinate degrees of fear, anticipation and dread. I was in a constant state of fight-or-flight or perhaps, for me, it would more accurately have been fright-and-flight. I was also convinced that everyone around me whom I loved was probably going to die that very day or at least sometime soon. This photo – I think maybe taken in Spain – kind of looks nunnish. In fact the little heart-shaped pale blue leather pouch I’m holding originally held rosary beads but I kept a silver cigarette lighter (given to my by an adolescent boyfriend) in it.
9. Pooty.
The little silver cat on the green glass sphere over to the right of the photo is Pooty (aka Üte). She slept with me, she had showers with me, she accepted unwarranted attention from me. She got run over very young and I didn’t get out of bed for ten days and I cried for three months. Richard tried to drag me from the house and I refused to get dressed so ended up getting dragged to Bondi Beach in Sydney in my pyjamas. I started writing poetry though so Pooty is up there with Dirk Meure. I wrote a novel in poetry, Hate of the Dead, my first book, and showed it to some people and things started taking off a bit. A big poet was impressed, a big novelist was impressed, a big literary agent was impressed, a big publisher was impressed. The publisher had a heart attack; the literary agent asked if I had a novel instead and so I went and wrote one and then she said it was great but too literary; the poet and the novelist introduced me to people. All in all 44 publishers took a geek at Hate of the Dead and many of them loved it but they said hey, it’s a novel in poetry, what’s that?, hey, you’re a nobody, hey, we’ve just lost our funding.... Hate of the Dead remains unpublished. Pooty remains in my heart. What a great little person she was – the only one of her litter to survive beyond kittenhood. PS. Hate of the Dead’s protagonist is not a cat!
10. Like the icecreams, I just like this photo.
On a beach in Caloundra with Richard’s mum and dad, Irene and Sean (both dead now), and my daughter, Maya. It’s a good pic to show the atmosphere over here.
11. I did read poetry in public.
I think this is probably me reading in Tasmania.
12. A true radical.
This is Dirk Meure having a very special celebration in his honour at the University of New South Wales. This is Dirk who is responsible for wonderful things for I am sure so many people. Why? He has his own mind. Not only that but he wants other people to have one of their own as well. In the late ‘80’s I had gone back to law school after a four year break in which I worked in bars and travelled. In fact I never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place but in the first place just ended up in university. I come from a working class family and it was hoped that I wouldn’t end up in one. Anyhow, second time around I had stuck out a couple of years and then gone to the Dean to say I was dropping out. I hadn’t studied for my coming exams or done any of my assignments. I poked my head into Dirk’s office to let him know – he was cool and out there and kind of scary – and I had a paper due in to him the next day that was worth 80% of the assessment (the other 20% was participation in tutorials in which I hadn’t said a word all year). He said, why don’t you just write me your life story tonight and hand that in for your law paper. So I went home, got drunk and kinda did just that in some sort of weird stylized way. When I got the paper back all he had written on it was something along the lines of: ‘Thickets of Summer grass are all that remains of the dreams and ambitions of ancient warriors’ (broken into lines). I was to find out that it was a haiku, perhaps Basho, I can’t remember. All I know is I read it and went, ‘That’s fucking it – whatever the fuck that is!!’ Poetry here I come. Conversations in books with people I can really talk to here I come. I was a mess at this time in life (always a bit messy I am), Dirk saved my life. This photo is many years later but still a long time ago now. Dirk went on from being a singular Professor and criminologist to become a wonderful winemaker. If I believed in owing people I would owe Dirk much though I’m sure he doesn’t believe you can owe anyone either. I went on to finish my law degree (after requesting and received special permission to write fiction for five of my law subjects and not to sit exams), do two masters degrees, be admitted as a lawyer to the Supreme Court and hand in a PhD that was never awarded because I caused a ruckus (that’s a whole other story!). I worked in legal research and editing for over a decade but mostly I read poetry – came in late but better late than later.
13. My time in Texas.
My second or third book (had two close together so not sure) was published by a lovely guy and lawyer from Temple, Texas, Mark Klemens. I had just been awarded a traveling Scholarship by the Marten Bequest in Australia so set about purposefully getting pregnant in order to get paid maternity leave from my job so that we might get together enough money to fly to the States and do a book launch. Sperm came to the egg party and Vivi appeared. We left Oz when she was around 10 weeks old and Maya was a little over three years. We spent six months overseas altogether and this is Maya at my launch of Everything Holy at Barnes & Noble in Austin. The whole time we were away she pulled that pink tutu over everything she wore.
14. 10 years of book launches and breastfeeding.
The caption says it all. (And seriously, none of the girls would give it – them – up.) My first book and first baby came in 1995 when I was 32; then they started popping out all over the place. This is my second baby, Vivi, always a watcher.
15. A gentleman & a darling.
Me with the poet Peter Porter. What can I say – such a lovely man and generous and real.
16. Didn’t know him well but met him well.
I met Les Murray, big Oz poet, a couple of times. I asked him to help with the Woolworths supermarket arseholes and he readily obliged (writing aftermentioned platypus poem – see pic #22). He rang my house once (only once!) and got the answering machine on which was a message from Richard, me and all three girls and he left a message saying ‘It sounds like a giggle-fest.’ I asked him to write a back cover blurb once for one of my books and he refused saying the writing was ‘too cool’. I didn’t ask him what he meant. Good call I reckon. We’re both smiling☺☺
17. Somewhere in the middle of four decades...
18. A great theatre moment.
Debbie (sister-in-law) and best friend of Jennie (sister) and me in a restaurant in Sydney. Deb had come down with my brother Tim and the two little cousins to visit and we all went out to a Greek restaurant for dinner. Part way through the night I mentioned that I wondered why I hadn’t got my period. We were all drunk so I went across the road to a 24-hour pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test and went into the restaurant toilet to find it was positive. Jen and Deb thought this was hilarious and probably, theatrically, somewhat unfortunate! Why not. I look pretty happy though. If I wasn’t already pushing 40 here I might have had another three or four babies but I insisted for most of my life till thirty that I never wanted children. When I got pregnant with our first baby after a night out on grass (I hate marijuana as it doesn’t agree with me so obviously slightly more than once was enough to fuck me up, literally) Richard insisted he’d look after it I if kept it (he did by the way – changed a lot of those nappies – and still does (look after the girls that is, not change their nappies!))...
19. Up the duff again and up on stage.
With Anthony Lawrence and Sue Abbey. Back in the early years before I disappeared off the Australian poetry stage. (And yes, this little stage could literally be the ‘Australian Poetry Stage’!)
20. Oestrogen Overload.
I must be a bit over 40 here as my youngest, Agnès, who I’m holding, was born in 2002. Left to right we have my daughter Maya, cousin Rosie, my little Vivi, and over to the extreme right other cousin Maggie. In the background is my dad, Tony, who has just died this January. He absolutely adored these five girls and they adored him. Around his deathbed the whole lot of them were weeping and holding his hand and stroking his head and whispering to him. They’re all 18-25 now and it was like a coven of witches crooning him into the afterlife. Lucky guy!
21. TR2.
Dad custom built many cars (he and both my grandfathers were motor mechanics). This is the TR2 he modified from a racing car. That’s him looking cool.
22. I Won’t Shop There!
And I never have. Me in said badge behind microphone looking kind of arrogant I guess. My local town, Maleny, fought a valiant battle for several years against Woolworths’ (corporation) proposal to build an ugly fucking supermarket on the banks of the beautiful Obi Obi Creek that runs through the village’s centre. Of course we lost and not only that but a bunch of the townspeople turned on me and I ended up in mediation – for getting too much attention would you believe. (I organized Australia’s most famous poet, Les Murray, to write a platypus poem that got on the front page of the country’s biggest paper, yes, Murdoch press, ick, but major publicity and I ended up being roped in to do all the national radio and TV interviews). Shortly after the fiasco was over my cat Hoople, named after Mot the Hoople, died of a tick bite and I had a nervous breakdown. Ended up 40 kilos and on anti-anxiety medication that turned me into a kleptomaniac nymphomaniac. Next to me is Robyn Nugent whose daughter Sophia Nugent- Segal was a budding historian, writer and poet – Sophia has since died in her early twenties and Robyn has set up a poetic memorial to her where every year a poet is chosen to write a piece in Sophie’s honour. Behind me is Paul Alister who received government compensation for being wrongfully jailed in relation to the murder of a neo-Nazi leader in the wake of the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing. You won’t find any of us shopping at Woolies.
23. Maria Maria!!
Around a decade or more ago I received an email from Maria Zajkowski with a few of her poems included (she had read an interview I’d done with someone somewhere). One thing I reckon I’m good at is genius-spotting – found one! And what can I say about Maria!!! All three of my daughters are in love with her. I’m in love with her. Poet, librettist, deadpannist, soul that sees through souls. We have gotten (very) pissed together and the next day gone to the bottle-shop to buy hair-of-the-dog beers in our jarmies after which we cooked up a couple of steaks. We’ve written a book together and are working on another one. We are both spirits. We both like spirits.
24. Illustrious poet, translator & collaborator.
That’s Peter Boyle. This is us Christmas 2019 at my parents’ apartment, Sunshine Coast, Queensland. Behind us is King’s Beach, most fitting backdrop for a man who is truly regal in a manner that monarchs (unless they are butterflies) could never be. We write books together, we drink over the phone together (well I drink a lot and he drinks a little), we say ‘I love you’ every time we say goodbye.
25. Yeah, well, this is my publisher –
And one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met in my fucking life. Meet David Musgrave... Publisher, poet, novelist, raconteur...Can’t leave him out even though we can’t find a single photo of us together... We’ve drank a fair bit together; maybe why there are no photographs! Either that or we don’t have time to get the camera out between cracking jokes!!!
26. Getting squishy-faced.
Richie and I in 2020. We went with the girls to a Spanish restaurant in the city (which we supply from our farm) for Agnès’ 18th birthday. Up to 37 years together and looking all soft focus. Never married. That’s just info☺
27. Rub-a-dub-dub, three girls in a tub.
Why are my three daughters in a bathtub? Because they’re in a rock band. Maya (lead guitar), Vivi (bass) and Agnès (drums) are MARY VALLEY, squished here into our tiny farmyard bathtub. Nice good clean fun! Check ‘em out at @maryvalleymusic.
28. Rare soft.
My sister Jen took this. I wish I could feel like this.
