Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Poetry First


For reasons known only to themselves, the editors of Melbourne's Cordite Magazine decided to open a comment stream left happily dormant for the best part of six years, a mangy hydra to which yours truly contributed his set of gnashing yellow teeth. I was not at my best in the early years of this decade, and no doubt suffering one of my Swiftian "episodes", replete with tiny feet in the night, hog-tied mornings and perfumed winds always blowing the wrong way. Paul Hardacre and I, well.....there is a good deal to be said for silence in this game, the space between words. And Richard King was more than happy, I'm sure, to leave me where he found me, under that rock I will always call home.

In the midst of all this petulant wank, however, sprang a gentle and very pertinent question: where does poetry spring from? I had steamed off by then in search of a mirror that would tell me what I wanted to hear, so for me the question sank like a stone. Only the truly great question the origins of their craft, leaving the rest of us to needle over our "profession", last refuge of the vagrant.

At the risk of a lawsuit I will paste the original dialogue here..if I can....JUST WRESTLE.....this f@@cking LAWYER!!.....off....my...arm....


THERE!!!........


Monday, November 17th

Who invented poetry?

Can anybody help?

While not being able to answer ‘who, we may be able to find out ‘why. A certain ms. hummburger has this to say: poetry sucks crap. it was invented so that people had something to talk about.......


November 26th

I think it was a mail order firm in Michigan. [apologies to Douglas Adams]

And so trail off the usual stale breadcrumbs into that toy forest of Australian academia....the glib response of the vagrant, the true professional [apologies to Jean Genet]. I am history for I am now. Like Uncle Leo with his painted eyebrows, both aghast and eloquent in all the languages of mankind as the interlocutor in us all backs away......








this did not help me at all ill make sure i never come here again you guys should get more serious i have research paper due and no answers to my questions yet you guys should Fuck off






Well, fuck off, poetry at this blog at least is a linguistic fossil, but all the more immediate for that. I hope that cools your ardour a little. An appendix of the soul, if you like, the medium through which we trained our tongue to our clumsy ear all those crazy parties ago. Language and song and story all live here, my little fuck off friend. Cricket came later, but completed the puzzle to this blogger's satisfaction.

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