Andrew Garrick is based in a matchbox shaped room that peeks onto a major Sydney street. Andrew shares this box with a fiery little woman who also works in the universe of mobile phones, commercials, short films, anything that moves and is imaginative and can potentially be a source of life or of income to have a life. Andrew crafts animated men with large chins, surreal park scenes of floating kites and picnics, corporate videos and now poem films.
It was my last minute Occasional decision to film Claire Potter writing her poem on the night, (photographs on their way) in the light of the dummies, in real-poet-time. Over her shoulder Andrew followed Claire’s fingertips as Bird became Bird-Card became Bird-Card For Lingis became a U-Tube Bird-Card For Lingis Flight
There was a circle of four Sunday brunchers who shouted so loudly whilst swallowing pools of scrambled eggs and milk, that I could hardly hear Pam Brown talk. A few sour glances over our latte glasses towards the loud mouths didn’t work either so Pam and I conversed with our noses almost touching, reading lips as conversation rather than hearing words. Pam is well prepared for Sunday. Her mineslec features some of her own work as a poet and many interesting references and reports on other poets and occasional poems she has unearthed whilst co-editing Jacket.
I’ll report on Pam’s mineslec after Sunday, not wanting to reveal her substance or her style before she does. However I should note I’d not met Pam before today (not including momentary glances over shoulders at poetry readings) and her physical self is a fascinating reflection of her poetry writin; her cafe language is witty, quicky, precise and gleeful; the stories she shares with me concern deaths in suburbia, daughters, filmmaking, radio; between sips and quips Pam reflects on a life lived so far and provides advice to me on how to escape being strangled by reading too much of other peoples’ poetry.
Pam’s tone in the page and in the cafe is of paint on a silk screen or colour on film. Her spoken voice is like her written – a lullaby-lyrical rhythm and volume particular to Pam’s voice welcomes the reader, lures them in and as her poem narratives, maps, journeys or reflections move from the everyday to the back of the imagination there’s never a sense you’re being left out or behind, but rather encouraged to sit next to her and continue moving along, into her world/s.
—
A few days later and the flats have been painted, props hired, windows swept and invitations circulated. It took the heart of Saturday to paint the set and if you ever need a man to turn ply wood into a costume shop, walls into doors, air into earth then I’d be suggesting beanie wearing Andy, the prop and set maestro Rita invited to assist with the set building.
More thanks to …
The generous Maritime man who has lent Red Room an entire Pier to store the dummies in. Last time I checked they were sound asleep and safe and tomorrow I’ll bring them croissants and Berocca to get them up and at their best for five days of performing without eating or moving:
Tomorrow we raise up the walls, walk in the bodies, hang the poems and stand before the Occasional installation wearing smiles and perhaps a badge.
Delivering the Occasional flyers to shops or mailing them to our supporters I am dressed as the post-woman not the poet, at the moment. As I waded through my wardrobe items (flicking off a few filthy tiny German cockhroaches) the thickening fog and job of delivering publicity guided today’s outfit.
I considered wearing a navy blue jacket which half resembles the early Australian postman’s uniform, of navy blue sleeveless coat with a short shoulder cape attached at collar. But the fog suggests rain and my jacket isn’t built with waterproof heavy duty material nor does it have the postman’s required five button holes down the center front of the coat with one button remaining “Post Master Generals Department”. I wasn’t totally dissuaded – my jacket could be tailored to the postman’s jacket by pinning a few Occasional Poetry badges on my front
But, what I truly desire to wear is a red felt hat, that worn by fashionable postwomen of the 1980s. This hat with its soft curved sides is like a slippery dip, an apricot or a bottom smooth to fantasy perfection.
Digging into my top drawers I can’t find anything felt, not even matted wool button. Out of all the wool variations felt is the most poetic, material shorn from the back of a sheep that transforms to felt when it is subjected to moisture, heat, and pressure. And from the pressure the felt fiber produces scales, which open up and snatch one another, interweaving scales into scales so they are tangled up for life. The scales then cool and compress and lock together forever. This is felt.
In addition to being called ‘felt’, itself a highly sensitive, erotic, imaginative words, felt shares characteristics with those of top quality human beings: - it doesn’t raval or fray, Does not ravel or fray, it is as hard as it is soft, its essential structure remains unchanged regardless of what is is re-modelled into, it absorbs other materials with a resilient ease and can be touched and felt countless times without ever being permanently deformed. It protects you against the cold, turns the world volume down a few notches and presses itself tightly and smoothly against you, making its presence felt by the feel of you.
In the current NYRB, Helen Vendler reviews John Ashbery’s new collection with a special aside to fashion. Ashbery “represents his life-work,” Vendler writes, “as an attempt to design and wear new clothes.” I suppose by this she means the patching and re-patching of poetic style – and “clothes of style, like all others, become out of date”. This is a strange observation of poetics, given that our aesthetic ideals are usually founded on the idea of posterity and timelessness, on a universality that breaks through history.
Perhaps Vendler and Ashbery’s idea of clothes-as-poetry is more to do with influence, “from Saint Paul to Shakespeare to Carlyle”. The poet thumbs through the rack of tradition, taking out this, trying on that – sometimes casting it onto the floor after a time, sometimes picking it back up again and rediscovering. I think the definition of poetic clothing is a bit of both, even as Vendler changes metaphors to describe the fickleness of poetic style: “Ashbery rinses the palate of style, cleansing from it, with his brisk narratives, the sickly after-taste of imitative verse.” In Ashbery’s ‘The Gallant Needful’, style is indeed something that can be thrown off, that can rot and become tired, outmoded. Echoing John Forbes’ ‘Ode / Goodbye Memory’, Ashbery creates a dreadful vision – of his own era of poetic fashion as merely a figment of memory: “Farewell nightmares, / simulacra”.
Do producers, executives, chiefs and directors tick or throw the multiple wonders poetry and moving images can offer?
Manhattan Plaza or McDonald’s
Poems or Garden Gnomes
Risk or Reduction
literary TV or ABC
I am happy to announce the publication of my first book, Mortal, published by Red Morning Press. Yay! Thanks for letting me share my news here and for checking it out.
From high above and all around we crawled through the inner west to collect the lap top – my car and I were being watched by something natural we couldn’t see. Grave purple skies knifed by lightning and tough winds send a human silence across the streets.
As rains rage in Sydney, there are bush fires in Tasmania.
Driving I was nervous the sharp silver spike on the bonnet or my silver hoop earrings would invite down the lightning so, to un worry I tuned the pocket radio 2 2CH easy listening. Suave baritones missed New York but New York didn’t miss them and there was no more worrying.
Ready for show my plastic polka dot umbrella, purchased for $3.00 popped open and protected from car-apartment-car-home.
Now, safely indoors it seems the drive has cleansed my head. This sleepless sort of rain that is tonight’s type mixes up moods so the melancholic becomes pleasantly soft and, with the right music in the background, a style of writing assumes itself.
I trust the rain more than anything.
Ironing pleats into a black linen A-line skirt whilst relishing the metallic fumes from cheap blush coloured nail polish is my meditative way to begin Saturday and domesticate away the recent week.
Last week was a waiting week: at the email for graphics in horrendously large sizes and deleting the army of Spam. There was an increase in sightings of tired eyed adults sneakering into shops looking increasingly disturbed about buying Christmas gifts for their children who will grow up and out of them by New Years.
Then – in the middle of a morning, whilst jingling a tea bag in boiling water and leaning back into the leather chair I spoke with the program manager of the Ian Potter Foundation
[hold yourbreath. The next sentence spells good news]
The Ian Potter Foundation have injected funds into Red Room towards the implementation of our education program, planned for ’07. All the hours of dedicated trimming wish lists to one page submission, night after day after day is worth it when our company succeeds in being funded.
Some of my fellow professionals and friends will respond in words that are a variation on the theme of: Red Room is always getting grants and you are grant queen.
These infantile comments are untrue, annoying and ill informed. Red Room has a ratio of of 1:5 in terms of grant successes. Each grant takes a month to write and a few more months preceding the writing to light bulb alive a surprising idea that noone else can do or would do. We rarely get the entire amount we request and are therefore forced to create projects on revised budgets, that, once the poets are paid we are left with miscellaneous cash, enough to purchase a pre packaged cheddar cheese and salad sandwich, minus the Branston pickle.
Time is editing itself, the seperation each day should have from the next ceases to exist. My ankles are tied to the tips of a speeding wind and it’s a fascinating challenge to stay slow and remain steady in judgement – for example:
The editor on this current film project is Tamie Meem.
With luscious blueberry black lashes unfolding over her eyes and leagues of deep blue eye that draw you in she and I played around with the title sequence for the film late into Monday night. It wasn’t until Tuesday when I presented the sequenceto The Boss that I saw the titles didn’t work.
Tamie and I had chopped and joined ourselves into a delirium of cliches, in the enclosed space of the editing frame and our two brains we’d misjudged the work. This week the titles will need to be remade, in a workhouse on the outskirts of Byron Bay, our title designer carves out letters, shapes and style that we can re work into a new sequence
Then, next Tuesday I’ll return to edit in a small room in an apartment block where, on last visit, an eighty plus woman waited outside an anonymous door for a gentleman to return home. This lost old lady has been waiting every afternoon for the last few years, for her gentleman to return.
Today the colour of poetry will be altered and enhanced digitally. In The Lab, a maestro of shadow manipulation will restore the natural tones of rivers, scrub and wicker, subtelties that are swallowed and dulled by the digital video camera.
Readers of this blog familiar with The Wordshed and The Poetry Picture Show, will know we didn’t grade the images in these projects. Therefore some shots and thus some moods are conveyed incorrectly. But, with the current moving image project Red Room is working on (with The University of Western Sydney) we have the opportunity to visually treat the image.
Treat in two ways (i) To subject to a process, action, or change, especially to a chemical or physical process or application and (ii) To give (someone or oneself) something pleasurable.
Treating the visual poem performance (by Jennifer Maiden) means treating the textual poem.
The word ‘teal’ recurs in the interview dialogue as do ducks in the interview background. The colour teal gets its name from the wings of the common teal, a member of the duck family. With this information or visual clue we could enter today’s ‘grade’ and request the entire film be graded in duck teal. This treatment would enforce a new meaning on Jennifer’s poem, make her rhythm quack rather than crack open. Mock the imagery rather than bring humour to the story.
Although a poem can be multi-interpreted and multi-channelled it can be read in less i.e. incorrectly. A visual change or grade (to teal) would mean I (or the filmmaker) was deleting the poet, their intention and context in which the poem was written. To colour the poet teal would morph her from woman to duck.
Excessive inteference with the poem indicates the reader, or in this case filmmaker or director, is a slave to their own ego rather than to the poem they should be working with. I think a poem can be mistranslated and be interesting but, mistranslation can become a misplacement of roles – if you don’t listen to the poem at all you might aswell have written the poem yourself and the poet or poem that first inspired you has been killed in your process of your colour grading.
