BLUEPEPPER

The Striped World of Emma Jones

2009-07-01T17:27:00.005+10:00

After my recent experience of those who would call me "colleague", I will keep this short and sweet. In "Zoos for the Dead", the longest poem in this all-too-brief collection, young Sydney poet Emma Jones has given us a classic in the same class as Slessor's "Five Bells", but with the ear of Heaney and the precision of a Derek Walcott. Anyone anywhere who professes to love poetry needs to own this book. My prediction is it will be one of the most smudged and dog-eared collections in many years out of this country. Just click on the post heading to follow the links to my favourite publisher, Faber & Faber.

Not another casualty

2009-06-28T20:38:00.004+10:00

It may seem wicked to some, considering the scale of suffering the US mid-west defaults have caused across the globe, but I feel I must make a call-out to anyone interested in the music and culture of this wonderful harbour city. In the six short years fbi radio has been gracing the airwaves of Sydney, it has served unstintingly to foster and promote local artists, writers and musicians who too often have the seat out of their pants in a city very much obsessed with the top end of town. Now the GFC has seen half their advertising revenue wiped away since February, and if people don't sign up to support them, they are going to go under. Just AUD$12 a month will make you a passionate supporter. Click on the post heading if you aren't already familiar with this wonderful, volunteer-run institution.

Size Does Matter

2009-06-24T12:08:00.008+10:00

The chances are probably pretty slim that any Australian reading this blog will also have tickets to the upcoming Ashes cricket series beginning in Cardiff in two weeks' time (bearing in mind they sold out about eighteen months ago, and the Australian aversion to long-term planning), but on the off chance that there is one lucky bastard out there, I have a banner for you. Just add child-like scrawl of the islands in question, and I guarantee that at some stage you'll attract the TV cameras, and thus by extension the eyes of a billion people.

MY ISLAND IS BIGGER THAN YOUR ISLAND

New Writing and Art from Wayne H. W Wolfson

2009-06-22T08:15:00.005+10:00

Kaiser Mélange

I know of the Cheetah who lives on the limbs of the tree behind the building. Your kisses can trap him. The eyes are the secret, a vertical truth. Stars, the spots on its coat. Always, you must set him free at first light.

There is a bleary eye, the color of a cigarette tip. The record player light. Hours before, the needle had stuck and I listened to the same Strauss aria over and over, until finally admitting a dawn defeat, I got up, humming, and put a stop to it. As to not appear completely beaten, I did leave the machine on though.

Dawn won’t quit, her last resistance, the small spear of light laid to rest at the bottom of the door.

Last night she had called me to have drinks in the hotel bar when there were no tourists to hunt.

There were always things she felt that she had to tell me, although none of it was true. She always thought I would cherry pick her incidents of heart ache for my stories.

Why pretend to care one way or another? How often had I sat in the café across from the hotel which still had a piano of Wagner’s in the lobby, two Kaiser Mélange, waiting for all her work to be done? She knew, she knew and could have used this to win, but never did.

It is now so late that it is early. I lay there with my eyes still closed. Below a car loudly idles, a dog barks. Through two slits, I now watch her. She briefly looks at me, trying to decide if I am truly asleep, quickly she aims her nose at her shoulder and inhales, then she pockets the money which earlier she had assured me that “she could not possibly take”.

Quietly, she closes the door behind her.

Ah, baby there is a cat in the anisette, a lie in your heart, the piano is broken. It is all us, it is all fading night and tired eyes, the spotted coat of a cheetah.

"Rue du Temple" (pastel&paper)

Black Swans and Stars

After all these years, there is still a sort of defeat in winning. I had to go into exile, I kept bumping my head on the roof of the city. Everyone else preferred to stay small and could not understand my complaining.

Exile, I won and now I was spending time with her. My punishment? Or maybe I just thought too highly of myself. I did not want to repeat the same old patterns and so kept my circle of friends small.

Enza was always around and sort of fell into my orbit by default. She had two small black swans tattooed on the back of her neck, heads bent as if supporting hers.

At first I thought she had been pulling my leg about never reading. She often had no idea what I was talking about but liked listening to the sound of my voice.

We fucked but usually as an almost after thought to the night. We found plenty of other things to argue about.

I had just met my deadline, editor happy, I now had the illusion of freedom.

Enza had a new scarf which she was anxious to dirty up. We went out.

The drinks were the prize, winners, losers; the only difference was who had gotten caught.

She tells me about her day, none of that matters.

I am talking to me again through her, a two drink chorus. Now she is just letting me talk. No matter how clear my thoughts, I can not get the stars to reflect off of my fingers.

She has to run off for a moment, probably to score. The waiter with sleepy eyes which people mistake for wisdom watches her go.

Under the awning the heater is snapped on, Votives are lit. I have won and now have nowhere to go. It is not for Enza, I sit at my table and wait. It is for yesterday but a specific one, a far older one than that which carried me empty handed, into today.

My fingertips read the table as of brail. Eyes now wander down, the surface, stars, lattice holes which allow me to see my shoes, their hunger, starving.

I could have another drink. I do not wait, for anything. That first kiss, music of our youth, twirling her on the dance floor, red dress blossoming out with the undulating current of her motion, that first kiss with her, ours.

Believe me, it isn’t coming around anymore. I have forsaken or forgotten it all anyways. How could I not, knowing it would be I who broke that fragile shroud of memory.

Enza comes back smelling of smoke. Her pupils are two large, black pools which when seen from certain angles reflect the stars.

- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2009

One of Bluepepper's most beloved contributors, Wayne H.W Wolfson is an American artist and poet who has just returned from his annual sabbatical in Paris.

Intelligent Design and Bilious Blogging

2009-06-02T19:13:00.012+10:00

I have decided to delete this entry as it was about as fair-minded as it was lucid. However, I will leave the post in place so that people can read Emily Ballou's comment and my apology. As such may it serve as a reminder to all and sundry of my many shortcomings.

The smug and the jaded

2009-04-11T14:09:00.004+10:00

These days my life is largely the story of two mountain towns. The older, higher, larger and somewhat poorer of the two is the administrative and retail hub, a Keillor-esque hodge-podge of 5-star resorts and welfare mothers, cafe lattes and amphetamine factories. Its younger, smaller, far more settled and urbane little sister a train stop down seems to thrive on little more than a sense of its own well-being. Stories in the former are myriad, in the latter rarely more than snippets washed down from higher up. The yin and the yang: not so much the dark and the light as the prickly and effete. Yours truly in a nutshell.

Both have thriving cafe cultures fed as much by the tourist dollar as by a bevy of sanguine locals with a little more disposable income than their mortgage-stressed cousins on the plain. One such establishment is a tiny hole-in-the-wall frequented by those who like to eavesdrop on each other's tidy lives and be seen doing so. In other words writers of a certain age and stamp, actors and actresses, and even the occasional film critic. Its proprietor bears a startling resemblance (at least to this blogger) to a late mountain poet, but as far as I can ascertain there is no actual familial connection. In fact, I have detected a strain of sub-literacy running through the place, ironic for a favourite haunt of writers, and a definite strain of sub-numeracy as witnessed by a recent lock-down of the place for unpaid bills and rent, and the broad and persistent rumours that staff had not been paid for six weeks. Trade, I should add here, has otherwise not missed a beat through all the vagaries of the GFC, and its equally-sudden re-opening only adds to my suspicion that this was someone over-playing their hand, not fighting with their backs to the wall. But amongst the alpine "foodies" and ageing literati it would seem smart cars are more important than doing the right thing by employees, all of whom are young and energetic and far too easily exploited and quickly jaded by the smug and venal in our midst.

Those who frequent this establishment do so now in the full knowledge that they are subsidising a life of greed and irresponsibility, a microcosm, perhaps, of the world they have so blithely passed on to their children (the ones frothing up their lattes) with bumper stickers to match.

The Bloody Great Game

2009-03-08T21:06:00.007+11:00

To the long-suffering everywhere I apologise. To the lovers of good blogging and good poetry everywhere I apologise, but this is entirely another order of business (as Petain whispered about Verdun). Either I am getting old or I was previously too young, but with each infraction of common human decency I find myself first of all breathless at the fact that I could be so rendered, and secondly that there was any decency left to infract.

A common bind, I'm sure, even if you don't love cricket quite as hopelessly, as unconditionally, as tragically as I do.

Not that all the 1.5 billion residents of the subcontinent love cricket quite my way. Indeed, many village elders in MS Dhoni's own home state seem to regard cricket much as we Aussies regard internet porn in its deleterious effects upon their young. But, well, show me someone who hates the game, by which I mean the spirit of the game, and I'll be avoiding the gaze of a sociopath.

Hundreds of millions of people in the most unlikely corners of the world lavish as much devotion on the noble game as once was lavished on Gothic cathedrals. The ladders this time are purely spiritual, and yet all of a sudden it seems pitifully vain and naive that our sport would be regarded as somehow immune from the wall-eyed and caulked of spirit in our midst. As though the noble old game (unarguably old and noble though it is) could possibly be any more oft-regarded or noble than the ancient Olympian sports so preyed on at Munich 37 long years ago.

There are some surface commonalities between the attacks on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games and last week's attack on a Sri Lankan cricket team on what amounted to a good-will two-Test tour (that's the kind of guys the Sri Lankan Test players are and always have been), however commentators who draw any parallels between the two events are either desperate for a bite or straining at the Fox's leash.

At Munich there were hostages, dialogue, something hard and fast to barter with (ie Palestianian "hostages", thousands of them, rotting in Israeli prisons, the sheer numbers suggesting perhaps they should have been treated as prisoners of war). Since the attack on the USS Cole, 9/11, etc there have been a few isolated cases of hostage-taking (with mostly horrific outcomes for the hapless), but none owned by any major terrorist group. They regard such tactics as passe, a waste of breath. Their war is global and their message universal (or so they believe), and a grudge older than Messina. Cricket and the billions who love her waft and wane, her humanity and theatre, is, much like the insect that bears her name, either a beautiful song or a maddening din depending on whether or not you are or ever have been truly in love.

No points for guessing who wore the balaclavas and pointed the guns in that Munich Olympic village. They hailed from dense urban environments where identity was not so easily concealed. They jeered their captors as only those who share a common heritage can. They were educated and tactically alert (as opposed to their German besiegers who displayed an ineptitude almost Wagnerian in the existential mud it brought to the surface). The gunmen who blasted away at the Sri Lankan cricket team this week also wore balaclavas, but as far as I can tell they had every opportunity to board the two buses but preferred to keep their distance and keep blasting. That they killed eight people is hardly surprising considering they blasted away for 25 minutes. No army in the world would pass such marksmanship, which is perhaps why they felt the need to form their own.

According to the Australian coach of the Sri Lankan team, Trevor Bayliss, the team proved their mettle as the bullets ripped their mini bus to shreds and all armed assistance seemed to melt away. It did not read either as one of those laconic quips Aussies tend to pass in moments of crisis, nor a needle thrust at the cold eye of global terror, rather a simple statement of fact.

For we who love the game know that it stands for dignity, poise, courage and respect. That, like life, it is not a game of two speeds, and that those who brand it, like life, boring are not so far from those terrorists who brand their own and our terrestrial stays the lesser of some undefined duality.

Smoke

2009-02-11T17:34:00.005+11:00

Australians are as durable and thus as prone to cliche as any people on earth, but suddenly it feels like we are set adrift in the old wry latitudes. Perhaps our entire colourful lexicon will seem a little blanched after the white heat of this summer. Nothing seems to fit anymore. Even here in my cosy mountain hideaway shrouded in mist everything seems rent with an awful light. This too is fire territory, and in the rumble of the passing coal trains I can hear a pale echo of the fury of those Victorian fires. "Like every jumbo on the planet was revving up its engines" was how one firefighter put it.

The fronts are staggeringly wide - the Churchill front alone extends 125kms, only 20kms of which is under any sort of control. As we all know by now, hundreds of Victorians have lost their lives. The body count will continue to rise inexorably, pathologically as the ruins are sifted and the remains discerned that had been fused together by the colossal heat - husbands from wives, mothers from children. Spare a thought, won't you, wherever you are, for us rendered helpless down here.

Fox News did, and in their own inimitable way, managed to link this tragedy to al-Qaeda. Wilson "Iron Bar" Tuckey MP (so-called because as a publican he once took to a recalcitrant patron with said implement) stated in parliament that the fires were the fault of the Greens and their cohorts for "trapping" so much of the country in nature reserves.

That scientists have been warning all and sundry about such extreme events as a consequence of climate change for some years now has not, of course, escaped the attention of either "Iron Bar" Tuckey or Fox News. But even in such dark times the practised tentacles of the neo-cons are feeling their way.

February 7th 2009, needless to say, will be a day forever etched in this island's memory. Perhaps all right-thinking citizens of the world should also mark it down in their calendars.

holland1945 call out

2009-01-30T06:20:00.001+11:00

holland1945 is a downloadable journal publishing contemporary and non-mainstream poetry in a variety of disciplines, essays and interviews, photographs, video stills, cartoons, comics (excerpts, strips, panels), and illustrations.

Issue Two is now open for submissions.

For full submission details, please visit: www.holland1945.net.au

Enquiries via e-mail to editors@holland1945.net.au

Les Wicks Book Launch

2009-01-14T09:03:00.002+11:00

Being a poet, sometimes the odds seem long on our struggling wee art form surviving. Magazines are folding everywhere & book publishing is an endangered species. Island Press, however, has not sunk beneath the rising waters.

It would great if you could come. If you can’t make it, copies can be ordered using the form below.

Note that nibblies will be provided & drinks can be purchased from the bar. A free copy of a previous title is yours with every book purchased at the launch. Minors are more than welcome to attend so long as they are under direct supervision of adults. Feel free to pass this on.

IS THIS… THE END?

Island Press is pleased to announce publication of Les Wicks' 8th book of poetry…

The Ambrosiacs

This solid book (128pp) concerns “endings”- an elegy - from ecology under stress to the loss of close friends. We explore a sequence of endpoints: spiritual exploration, suburbia, rural escapes and travel...all with Wicks’ typical raw honesty, humour and rage. A startling, and ultimately affirming picture of generations and lives.

A small selection of comments about previous titles:

...he is chameleon, restless, full of questions, refusing to be pinned down. Happily moving here & there, amused, bemused, shaking his head in disbelief, belief, in love with it all. - Brook Emery

varied, nimble, humane, wry & well timed - Jennifer Maiden

wit & sparkle, the clever playfulness....warmth & compassion - Tim Thorne

...full of humour and dignity in the face of sheer survival. - jeltje

We are having a launch for the book at:

the Friend in Hand Hotel
58 Cowper St, Glebe
upstairs bar
Launched by joanne burns

Sunday 15th February 2.30pm

CAN YOU COME?

For details ring 9580 4542

New Art and Story by Wayne H. W Wolfson

2008-12-20T07:37:00.002+11:00

Magic Hat

Youkali said she would trade me a new hat for one of my drawings. Her cousin owned a shop near a bar I liked so we had some drinks before going to get one.

I usually wore a snap brim to mute the sparks I occasionally gave off when things were going well. Knowing that I was getting one tonight, I had not worn a hat. I was only half recognized, the way one would a familiar song as heard from a distance.

Blue-gray fur and of Russian lineage, it sat, a stranger among the Pork Pies and Fedoras. I had always been superstitious and knew this outcast would bring me luck.

I tried it on as Youkali gossiped with her cousin. Two faces flushed, one with drink, one with lust.

“It’s more than I wanted to spend but no one else would ever take it which may be why it costs so much.”

Initially I was going to just offer her a piece from my portfolio. Although it had nothing to do with my choice, I had seen the price tag as I moved it out of the way while trying the hat on. I had to do something a little more special, not out of guilt but because I felt to do otherwise would cheapen my art.

We did a quick shot of Grappa out of paper cups with her cousin and then were off.

Walking down the street she took my hand. It was warm and fluttered, a bird which could not come completely to rest. She drove me home. We sat in her car for a minute.

“I will do a portrait of you.”

I was debating whether to ask her up now. Nerves won out over desire for her.

“You can do it from a picture I will give you.”

I put on some Don Byas and fell asleep.

Early in the morning I heard a noise. Only half awake I thought it was the paper-boy or the sun taking the stage.

Hours later it was time to get up. I found an envelope had been slipped under my door. Over coffee I opened it up to find an instamatic photo.

She had used the mirror on the armoire. A reversed image Youkali sitting up in bed, naked but visible only from the waist up. She knew the trick I could do, so her eyes were shut and with the look on her face it was not clear if she were coming or crying.

We met for dinner, the bar being our starting point. With the picture done we would be even, so it was unclear who would pay.

Again, a mad chorus of drinks, empty glasses lined up before us casting their shadow over tattooed cocktail napkins. It all took longer than we had realized. She could make good eggs and I had half a loaf of bread with a little life left in it.

We walked back to my place. I stopped her under a street light I was fond of. She had noticed the large envelope all night long but in a show of extreme will power had pretended not to.

She carefully pulled the picture out. She liked it as was evidenced by the care with which she handled it. I had also put the photo in the envelope which she now held in her hands.

Again she closed her eyes and kissed it. Within the beat of a heart it was floating skyward, the plastic of its surface reflecting the moon as now motionless, it took its spot hanging in heaven, a celluloid star among other abstract dreams.

- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2008

Submissions in the spirit of summer

2008-12-18T08:47:00.000+11:00

After that fairytale end to the test in Chennai between England and India, when the Mumbai hero Sachin Tendulkar knocked up a century and the historic winning runs in a single languid sweep behind square, when the soothing balm of cricket was laid over a pained nation......

I could go on until your ears began to bleed.

I have decided, in the full knowledge that Dave Prater at Cordite will be whispering "hey, that bastard stole my idea!", to put out calls for submissions with the noble game of cricket in mind. Don't be too specific. In Australia cricket evokes long languid summers slurping on mangoes and falling asleep on the beach under the latest soon-to-be-pulped-staff-pick with the occasional bark from a radio as another wicket falls. In every corner of the world there will be different associations. I would like to sample as many as possible.

So just for the time being, submit with cricket in mind.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

2008-12-15T14:08:00.000+11:00

lapse into

gabrielle is weeping –
they’re smoking his hems now.

a spoon tangos spaghetti

and brown shirts gather
in the wardrobe

lens click and you pirouette,
unleash the elephants.

a robin lands in the fruit bowl

somewhere in the desert
a tomb
and in that, your smile

i start to cover things up.

- Ashley Capes 2008

Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006. He is currently studying Arts and Education at Monash, while co-editing www.holland1945.net.au and singing for his band. His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm (2008) was published with the assistance of Small Change Press.

New Writing by Jen Craig

2008-12-10T16:09:00.002+11:00

The inheritance

My colleague took great delight in hearing that one of the students we
taught together, a student who appalled her by continual racist slurs on her
fellow students and, last month, on Barack Obama¹s biological legitimacy,
had recently inherited an aged, diseased cat. Having spent years looking
after an irascible and childless neighbour, I had heard, looking after in
the sense of occasionally ringing the elderly neighbour¹s doorbell and
bringing her soup or the local paper, our student had been furious to learn,
after the neighbour¹s death, that the stately but disintegrating terrace
house in Stanmore she had coveted had been left to the church instead of to
her.

The delight of my colleague would have been complete if I had been able to
tell her about months of exorbitant vet bills and feline dyspepsia, but this
student, always canny and now grown righteous in her anger, told me that she
had left the cat at the church in a laundry basket. The church would
understand, was all she had said.

Calling all poets

2008-12-09T09:23:00.002+11:00

I will be away down in Sydney for a couple of days reveling with my good friend "Geordie", but will put out this call now for submissions in the expectation that we can sail under the radar of the law as we perhaps haven't done so successfully in the past.....

The usual conditions: a handful of poems in the body of the email. ATTACHMENTS WILL NOT BE OPENED. Any style any subject, but as with my drinking partners, I am always looking for something with a bit of flair and sense of adventure. Comments, too, are always welcome, although I loath the encroachment of Messrs Anonymous into the Public Domain. Times such as ours demand that every man and woman bear their stamp proudly.

Bazstralia

2008-12-01T20:16:00.006+11:00

Recently, at the gentle behest of my most staunch and dew-eyed drinking partner, Jeff "Geordie" Graham, I began work on a collection of poems whose titles would all bear the august names of bands or singers who (and by extension...)I figured had cast some sort of spell over times and places since the turntables started turning.

It seemed a noble idea between beers and the froth that follows.

We both misted up and scrawled a whole lot of crap in the most frightening Gen-X ransom-writing that I gazed at next morning in mute horror. And yet I went ahead, pasting snippets of my life to the names of great people with heartfelt and brainless abandon until one day I fell back a little dizzy with the effort and realised all I had was a fistfull of poetry-lite and heavy lawsuits.

The poetry-lite was the problem, not the names I had attached to the waffle, as dawn bled over me. Because the names became an anchor. No-one, other than Gore Vidal, would divorce their name from even a middling work of art; assuming, of course, they were merely the subject and not the hapless author.

Speech writers have their own private hell.

Names are the very stuff of us. It will be the prevailing matter, trust me, when Jeff and I meet for lunch next Thursday. That and the bill.

The names I keep calling these things, mate. "Morrissey", "The Pixies", do you really think they'll mind?

Jeff works high up-middling in one of the big corporations, dances at Christmas parties with a witch-hat on his head. Sings through a "no" as though he had a deeper sense of its polarity but didn't want to break the party up to warn us. A man I have always considered born out of his time, such as Bowie or Frank Black or that lazy-eyed genius Thom Yorke. Loves his ex-wife as the mother of his daughter. Has never once pitied we "childless", knows he is simply along for the ride, witch-hat or no. He is a story on his own, Jeff, which is probably why I decided to dedicate the book to him.

The one with all the names inside of it.

Proper names, like proper nouns. Those ones we all own and have a right to scratch our heads at when we meet them in out-of-the-way places.

Which brings me to AUSTRALIA.

I have learnt a thing or two about naming things with this book.

One: that if there is any borrowed splendour from your creation it will not come from the name.

Two: names are important, not imported, mate. You cannot assume with names. Especially names as redolent and (apparently) unsung.

You had a good thought, you should have stopped at the second line.

As a pimply boy from Castlecrag with a hump on his back and just as much love for this strange and wonderful place (although with a little less money to spend), I set my sights on writing the Aussie version of Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov". My twenties were wild and wired and roaming, but never ever in all my time before or since would I have ever assumed such an audience existed for a poem named after a country.

Change

2008-11-10T23:39:00.002+11:00

There have been a fair few changes to the world since I last posted. Peace tables (laid out in all their Amin-ostentation) in The Congo, workable closing times in Westchester, Parramatta, Kawaguchi. Roads and highways deserted but for the few shift workers and idle dreamers the world can still afford. Australian cricket ordinary. Our enemies machine-gunned to death. May we never have to stoop so low again or cross paths so tired and out of breath.

And then, of course, there is Obama. Who inherits all this. Who stands there like a Christmas tree, all crow-faced-coddled-foundling, (my own constituency), smiling the world into tomorrow. The gift of a truly great orator, I suppose. To alert you to the steaming pile of shit you're standing in, and to its ripe (but not always cogent), potential. And still be holding the adapter, grinning, waiting for the angel to light up while you all argue over the last dram.

His work begins, as mine has, by opening a decent Atlas (believe me!) and flipping through the pages. As I followed this time-honoured protocol, I couldn't help noticing how many great cities of the world had their railway hubs sign-posted THUS, and how many of their cultural hubs signposted thus, or in even smaller font. No wonder Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent and not a country. She couldn't read the font.

I spent six months of my priviliged childhood in a very white and priviliged Africa. That is not my point. Africa is not my point. Africa is a continent with too much of the wrong attention paid to it. Like the library of a dying town. Only journeymen have taken Africa's wars beyond. Otherwise war has been an import.

Tomorrow marks the 90th anniversary of the moment the guns were supposed to fall silent all across the planet. So it begins, so it ends; a very Hegelian little war.13 million dead. Someone declares dark, the other light, and so you count down the hand. Tomorrow is Africa's birthday. No more please.

Executive Decisions

2008-11-03T09:06:00.001+11:00

It appears some genius at a certain US publisher has decided to tinker with their on-line shipping costs, so that anyone trying to purchase my titles through the on-line bookstore incur a whopping US$169 shipping fee! I therefore advise anyone interested in purchasing the twin verse-novels, "Magellenica" and "The Great Big Show", or the 2006 collection "Glass Poems" to go through Amazon, Barnes and Noble or any of the myriad places they seem to be for sale across the globe. Meanwhile I will join the ranks of writers and booksellers staring down the digitalised version of middle management trying to baffle us with their weasel words while they pocket their Christmas bonus.

The Standard

2008-10-27T20:14:00.004+11:00

In the early 1970's, following the lead of that moral avatar Richard Nixon, most of the developed economies of the "free" world decided to quit pegging their issued notes to the gold standard. The Communist bloc regarded all this with wry apprehension. This decision happened to coincide with the blushing vaseline-lensed dawn of easy credit. All of a sudden the bills you held in your hand were not actually worth what was printed on them (ie what your government held in its reserves) but what complete and mostly unnacountable strangers haggled between themselves in the smoky confines of the bourse. I am old enough to remember the OPEC crisis of 1973 when the Arab nations took the only other way out after the humiliations of the Yom Kippur war, but even their Soviet-inspired perfidy pales in comparison with the utter stupidity and greed of western markets who have held governments to account for their spending on the one hand (at the expense, of course, of the most vulnerable), while leveraging themselves into a very tight seat indeed in what may become the greatest roller coaster ride since that honey of 1914-45.

The venality and greed of the post-war generation is, of course, pretty much a given on this site. That is not my point. My point goes back to the gold standard, to what beet-faced poets like myself skirt around like sharks around a rusty anchor. That guarantee there was a mother ship in these waters and there will be again. That underwriter of all parliaments and all royal houses, the guarantee that we will rise tomorrow and not all be speaking different tongues. Guarantor of Shelley's great fear when he woke up that fateful post-war morning all carpet-mouthed in the dungeon of his liberty.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to millstones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them. 1

You see, without more than paper promises that those in a position to make a difference will do so in the common interest, we will remain a market place and not a culture. A civilisation requires some sort of underpinning. Debts are all very well as long as they don't outlive their usefulness.

Which brings me back to the gold standard.

In the mid-1960's, when the world's economies were still dubiously pinned to gold, the English marched with their feet away from cricket and toward football as the national sporting obsession. Within a year or two, Britain had decimalised its currency, joined the European common market, dropped the gold standard, and introduced a truncated version of first-class cricket that could produce a result within a day. The doomsayers doomsayed and the kiddies...well, some grew up and some grew into those bull-necked wizards in the corporate boxes holding up every passage of play in every Test cricket arena in the country.

And some, of course, have always loved football the way I love cricket, can eulogise for hours on the deft touch, the lyrical dance of someone long dead just like I can. But then football was bought like everything else, once the "gold standard" of local representation was steadily vetted.

I am not English, but I lived there through the end of the Thatcher years when Millwall supporters could have governed the country (if they had not been so indebted to their bookies and the crown), and when test cricket stadiums stood empty as though the very word cricket meant "bomb".

I despaired of the future of the game then, because I had left behind an equally desultory island with a barely beating cricketing heart.

But within a matter of three or four years something miraculous happened in world sport - cricket began to pack stadiums like it hadn't since carpet became vogue. In Australia, England, Jamaica, Johannesburg, people were queueing up again to see this strange game, and nor were they disappointed. Since 1993/4 crowds all over the planet have been graced by some of the most exhilarating, tightly-contested international sport ever played.

I am here talking of Test cricket, that eternal drone some overseas visitors have commented on when gracing our summer shores. Because there are now in fact three formats of the game played at international level - the five day Test format played between 2 squads of 11 players selected by their respective country's board of control, a one day game consisting of 50 6-ball overs per side in which the highest scorer of runs always wins, and the newest version of 20-20 cricket where the uninitiated can more than half the previous formula.

As I am spelling all this out, I feel like Frasier Crane explaining Radiohead to a young girl in a lift. Cricket is not that foreign anymore. Just ask Allen Stanford, the Texas millionaire behind the 20-20 Stanford Cup in the Carribean. The game was a religion down there until about 10 years ago. Suddenly the lure of Basketball and more nefarious activities robbed cricket of one of the world's most enduring and successful sporting federations. Allen Stanford saw something worth reviving and has gone about it with all the verve and aplomb of a man who has discovered the old world at his doorstep. In other words, like a wealthy, warm-hearted American of the old school. The type who picked up Bradman's tab in the midst of the last Depression.

I am getting somewhere, my American cousins.....

In a small administrative Punjabi capital last week, by the name of Mohali, the Australian test cricket team suffered one of its greatest defeats since the 1920's. There were celebrations all over India, the financial home of cricket these days, as Australia and India have been standing toe-to-toe for the best part of a decade now. And yet for all five days of this beguiling Test match the stadium was at most half-full. The previous Test match in Bangalore was better attended, but not much better. Which isn't to downplay the quality of those attending, another matter entirely, especially at an event as strangely intimate as Test cricket. But perhaps it is no coincidence Fleet street lies under the shadow of the bells, because journalists are always listening out for some bell tolling for someone. This month it happens to be the global monetary system and Test cricket. Both have been assailed by greed, self-interest, naked ambition, and nationalism, all the usual symptoms of decline (or revival), it all depends on the editor.

In Test cricket, like in no other international sporting event I can think of, you have the lone figure (the batsman) pitted against eleven of his opposing country's most talented representatives. He has a batting partner at the other end of the pitch, but that pitch is 22 English yards long, and that's a long long way when you have just walked in with, say four chatty Indian fielders crouched in a ring just far enough away they don't cast a shadow across the pitch.

If you are interested and uninitiated, I refer you to the YouTube footage of the famous Kolkata 2001 test match to the immediate right of you right about now.

It can quickly become an incendiary clatter of tumbling Australian/Indian wickets (the nearest thing our two nations have ever come to war), or a strangely intimate affair, almost as though millions of people were peering in to a slowly unraveling family reunion. That is the beauty of test cricket, and the germ of its own demise. It really needs no apologists (and I hope I have not come across as that), and I doubt it will ever see any serious attempt at a re-packaging of its "product". Because there is often none (other than the copious tv revenue and the sheer exhilaration of the best pitted against the best), even after five days of grueling competition. That is test cricket's enduring, lyrical statement in the face of the sneers of radical-chic, punk, yobbo, yuppie. Sometimes you must search for a result, yes, even in a sporting fixture.

Five days is a long time, granted. But there are few things that can equal the rush of following the first two days of a test match as you deliver pizzas, paint a house, hold the hand of your dying mother, then stroll bug-eyed into the stadium twenty minutes after the start of play on day three, the long, silent march of that lonely figure toward his destiny before you can stop someone cheering long enough to tell you who just passed by.

1. IV and V from "The Mask of Anarchy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

New Poetry and Pastel by Wayne H. W Wolfson

2008-10-20T08:24:00.003+11:00

Summer’s Funeral (for Lady Ahna)

We were in October but now is the time. Keep glasses in the ice box as the rain maker won’t come.

All day the sun had been out, so much so that I felt it licking my scalp as I took my walk. I could keep the windows in my studio open allowing bugs to get in so that the cat could hunt.

At night the heat refused to flee with the light. The black dress with its pattern of red flowers laying across the back of the one chair without a trick leg, I wash my hands, still wet, I flick them at the sink three times.

The air is still warm, as if she has just left, her breath on my neck late at night after every vow has been met and broken.

I shut all the lights, let the stars spell out her name.

I want music, something blue. There should be music for summer’s funeral.

- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2008

New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

2008-10-17T17:07:00.000+11:00

For Derrick Hussey

In memoriam: H. P. Lovecraft

Though time, like ice, is slow,
the moments pass, accumulate
with the weightiness of glaciers
between now and the now that saw
Howard, plunging into deadly
breathlessness, pouring the will
to fight to fightlessness, and the final
rattle of lungs, and thence silence.

And, as (I imagine) his hand
faltered, dropped the pen a span
of space, onto the bedspread,
his beloved aunt surviving
him a second's worth then more,
tears falling along her cheeks
in mournfulness, I expect there may
have been a tuneful bird that day.

I can imagine the single, solitary song
honing in through a semi-open
window, with the white, washed curtains
breathing inwards. And the song
itself is catching in the throat
of Howard's closed ears, and some spark
of life is thinking, even as it fades,
"How beautiful is life!"

How truly beautiful is life,
when there could have been a man
as moving to us as him preceding,
and living still in our memories
and our actions even now? I don't
know if there was that bird,
but I can imagine it this easily,
and it is with this that I am comforted.

- Phillip A. Ellis 2008

Tori Amos in the Morning

Listening, Tori Amos in the morning and YouTube
underneath the palimpsest of a poem,
and, like a shadow of cigarette smoke, the globe
made of tin, of the moon, lost now to time,

a free verse poem, but with slant rhyme, a growling
stomach that complains almost, all against the song
the way that a cat rubs up against the shins
and ankles, or the winter sunset wanly shines.

- Phillip A. Ellis 2009

Phillip A. Ellis is an external student studying English Honours at the University of New England. One collection of his poetry has been published by Gothic Press, and another will be published by Hippocampus Press; his concordance to the poetry of Donald Wandrei has also been published by Hippocampus Press. He is the editor of AustralianReader.com (http://australianreader.com/index.php), and Similax (http://similax-poetry.blogspot.com/). Click on the post heading for Phillip's web page.

New Poetry by David Lumsden

2008-10-15T23:53:00.005+11:00

Hercules Goes Bananas

On rugs by the temple
vendors offer bright
prayer flags, short
in-curved knives,
pirate DVDs, despite
half here subsist without
electricity or water.

The heir to absolute power
liked Schwarzenegger movies,
and in a shooting frenzy
slaughtered his family.

Internet cafés are empty.
Large ads for mobile phones
overlook now touristless streets.

Over murky tea in glasses sticky to the touch,
we gaze out at The White Mountains
as though this high valley were a prison.

Beyond the city
gunfire descants
the sacred river,
chirping birds,
and people still
singing in the fields.

- David Lumsden 2008

David makes a living with software. His poems have appeared in lots of magazines in Australia, U.K. and U.S.A. but there's no book yet. Ages ago he edited a litmag called Nocturnal Submissions. His blog of poetry commentary is called Sparks From Stones. Click on the post heading to take you there.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

2008-10-15T23:46:00.001+11:00

no tyrant could match

the sixth letter was ‘e’

and it was wrong
and I wanted to correct her

but between husband and wife
history rattles

a faint breeze carries the scent of frangipanis
over three carpeted steps to the bookcase,
where novels are little train-wreck victims,
lumped together in a mountain of bodies
no tyrant could match, their spines twisted
and pages torn like bloodless arteries

- Ashley Capes 2008

Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006. He is currently studying Arts and Education at Monash University, Australia, while editing www.holland1945.net.au (issue one up now!) and http://kipplepoetry.blogspot.com/ His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008.

CALLING ALL POETS

2008-10-15T16:27:00.000+11:00

I am fresh out of rants. The times are too tight, too close. Everyone knows who the bogeymen are, and nothing has come across my desk of late that inspires me enough one way or the other to review. So, once again I am CALLING ALL POETS.

Just click on the "Bluepepper" tag in the top right hand corner and submit anything up to five poems, a 1000 word comment or review in the body of the email. NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE. I have a very good turnover time, and that applies to most things I do. Just as my bevy of exes.... The worse you will get is silence, as I won't comment on subs unless I can see some way of working with the author to make them more suitable for posting under the Bluepepper. There are no payments and thus no guidelines.

Turn(bull)

2008-09-29T23:48:00.004+10:00

North or south of the line, beggar's east or golden west, mumma's boy or beer-tap dancer, third man or fly slip, I have always been true to my kind. Spoilt, white, male, bullet-dodger, all the echoes that would see me chased from any self-respecting chamber. Studio 54, Hacienda, the Macquarie Street public gallergy, open mic night at the old Sandringham Hotel...

But as summer comes, I am suddenly reminded of all the scratches I lay pellets for in the chill season. Small, hapless creatures disposing of my waste and keeping Buster (pictured)busy. Rats, as though the busy need names.

By the way, don't stare, he bites.

If there will ever be days of a truly republican, Cato-esque, Cicero-free, democratic Australia, they are probably brewing a little further west than the Mamre Road exit. No Jacobite massacres, just the usual grumbles in the usual 40-ton tread. Kiwis, probably, drawing our western riches from the ground. Scots and Maori A-sharp churl lending the customary Aussie D-minor drone that little bit of piquance. A bookish bunch, the Kiwis, and we have already taken over their air defence. Perhaps in time they will teach us how to take a position and hold it.Otherwise, just the usual rattle of chains.....

This nation (I mean the third assumption of those we know), was brought into being by a motion of hands some doubtless bristling day in the great breezy Georgian complex of Westminster just as the last great Queen's grieving head was finally coming to rest. And so white nations are settled.

That was one hundred seven scratchy years ago.

The usual strangers suckling our young, enticing their wolves to our throaty syllables.

...and still this profound place, this envy of the slack-jawed and the square-jawed and the millions in between....thriving despite a surfeit of roses and a talent for cricket.

But why did they pick you....how could they ever mistake you?

(Bob Dylan, 1967)