Judith Wright
May 16, 2008 | No Comments »
Brennan’s contemporary, Bernard O’Dowd, espoused the cause of nationalism, and attained a far greater reputation in his day; but unlike Brennan’s, his work has dated badly.
J.W.
A Book of Australian Verse (1968)
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The First Letter
May 15, 2008 | No Comments »
I am not going to praise your poetry to you
B. O’D.
BUT! you make the leaves & the grasses speak for themselves! great scald of demos i am yours! master bending down to meh! like a tree of man your mighty river flows through days your poems like a dripping tap & i a drum that tap must fill! restless spirits stranded somewhere in the reeds by a riverbank we will walk on my prophet after you have dunked my head & blessed meh made meh drink the brown river water’s silt the fury of our resistance to imperial drones master! none shall stand before us (none! & no danger from our gentle hands (apostles walking together our hands brush gently the grasses rushes our secret lives rising up like nations to be counted among the new & old this democracy! of our own making! bard of wisdom & of long summer days in libraries lit by a stained glass sun reading your poems arrayed in battle formations line after line of soldiers' language & orders we cannot hear for the rushing sounds of rivers finally leaping free of drought (grey father of my new religion of men & words that flow like rivers of milk from she-oak trunks river gums & swarms of pollen bee- seas & our fingers sticky with that love
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Sunbathing
May 14, 2008 | No Comments »
will only say that your your hint re sunbaths
has saved meh many a day’s illness
B. O’D.
i shall take sunbaths & eat stone fruit from the goulburn valley reading your lines again my beloved my only one my sun for you i shall compose letters lines verses song cycles people will eat oranges & know that you & i are one oh my mouth full of pips I shall spit out words & watch them there in the grass speckled & wet & the galahs will circle above us wheeling & shrieking all through the evening's long denouement pray they can hear us in our nests of wisdom squawking in our new language each breath a southerly change or a billowing tent of dust in cathedrals we shall linger together preach at coat-tails of strangers bellow at believers & those they call 'godless' in glades of deception – for ours is a new world master a world composed of people not based on colour unless it be the colour of rivers & blood stilled in veins or that of sands in glass or the wind through grass & if cancer has a colour let us eradicate it from our rainbow we shall make new sounds spoken by leaves that the people can actually read
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Words From the Master
May 13, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Master?
Revered master
Dear Walt, my beloved master, my friend,
my bard my prophet and apostle –
Dear Bernard
My dear master!
Your good, long varied and loving letter
came yesterday and has been welcome and nourishing to meh.
My dear master!
I cannot reply properly,
we have been treading air since.
Dear Bernard O’Dowd (and all the friends)
My dear master!
Dear friend Bernard O’Dowd (& dear friends all)
My dear master and (may I say?) comrade!
I sh’d like to send you a little pocketbook b’d L of G
as a present to be used by any of you & maybe handy
My dear master!
Herewith are copies of my big book “Complete Works” …
Dear friend B. O’D.
Well the New Year has come &
it is a dark foggy stormy glum day here –
As I sit her Jan : 13 rather late at night …
God bless you all – & see my words at bottom re-affirmed
Evn’g – Well how are you getting along there
10,000 miles f’m here – & “how’s all”?
(as the black people say down south)
The Last drawn pict: “at 90” is the truest –
the London Il.. News one is disagreeable,
foxy
My dear master, I have received
and heartily thank you for
the papers you have sent …
Just a word anyhow while I am waiting for my supper –
Master?
B. O’D. to W.W.
W.W. to B. O’D.
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Remembering Shelton Lea
May 12, 2008 | No Comments »
My review of Diana Georgeff’s Delinquent Angel, a biography of Melbourne poet and raconteur Shelton Lea, has been published in the latest issue of Overland (#190). Interestingly, the editors have decided to put most (if not all) of the contents of the issue online, so you can now read the review in its entirety! Here’s a brief snippet:
“What emerges is the peculiar tension provided by Shelton Lea the renegade poet: a man of the street, but also someone raised in an upper class family in Toorak. While the former made him tough and possessed of no small amount of bravado, the latter gave him his love of reading and in particular of poetry, from his obvious association with the Romantics to his engagement with Modernists such as Ezra Pound.
This tension gives the book its narrative focus and Shelton his humanity. Georgeff has written a tremendously engaging account of one poet’s life, without overly romanticising her subject, and has refrained from writing over Lea’s faults or ignoring his weaknesses.”
There’s a lot more to digest in the current issue, as is usual with Overland. If anyone has a comment or would like to discuss the points I make in my review, feel free!
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Greetings To Whitman
May 9, 2008 | No Comments »
revered master dear walt, my beloved master, my friend, my bard my prophet and apostle my dear master my dear master my dear master my dear master and (may I say?) comrade my dear master my dear master
B. O’D.
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O’Dowd Seeks Whitman
May 7, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I am 24, red hair, plain features,
and a little too backward for my own good.
B. O’D.
24yo dawn-red hair western districts oz poet seeks 80ish NS/SD amerikan dusky-grey hair ex-civil war nurse poet for inter-continental correspondences & hero worship – must heart ozpo philo/sci-fi &/or long walks on beach FYI both parents RC father policeman lonely child etc. must possess GSOH & look good in footy shorts LOL should be child & wife friendly (without seeking same must be cool with I can haz my own space can haz OK genuine mature aged gentleman preferred pets OK & must be familiar with works of H.K., A.L.G. & A.(B).P. curvy grey-blonde fit uncut or straight-acting free verse poet preferred prose writer also OK must also be DTE NO BUSH POETS 1880s music OK slam poets OK kisses & cuddles on winter nights watching DVDs OK seeking fr’ship &/or possible loveship (optional) please looking forward to each of your genuinely crafted replies however due to stalker SNAFU send to mailbox B.O.D. enclose 2 recent portraits + drum taps & leaves of grass
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Waning Gibbous: “Upper Left Hand Corner of the Moon”
April 29, 2008 | 2 Comments »
DNRC089 | LP | 2018 | DELETED
Strange retro-fitted space capsule band Waning Gibbous checked out of the collective sub-conscious some time in 2019, making this their last and, in some respects, worst album. In others, it resembles nothing so much as the scene of an aircrash investigation - a random smash-wreckage ensemble of rivets, torn metal and smoking ash. Still, on opening track “Houston” we see the band exhibiting its trademark wit in a barely-concealed tribute to Whitney Houston, the first of the 1980s pop stars to go into space. Elsewhere, “Fountain Pen”, “This Monkey’s Gone To Houston” and “Whitney” trade on the same riff, interspersing plaintive wails with snippets of Houston’s own songs. It is on Waning Gibbous’ attempt at a cover version however - not surprisingly, a rabblehouse rendition of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know (If He Really Loves Me?)” - that the first of this moon patrol buggy of an album’s many and various wheels begins to fall off. Literally. You can hear the penny dropping on surprisingly spacey interlude “Sound Of The Penny Drop” and what follows, over the course of seventy eight more minutes of excruciating pule, is a harrowing document of a band falling out of orbit, gradually losing contact with Houston, drinking each others’ urine as the supplies dwindle, penning one or two final words in closing, before the radio goes dead, and the spacecraft, unlike everything else in the universe, stops. It is at this point that the listener, thinking their ordeal is finally over, removes headphones, calls up the music playlist on their air GUI, identifies offending ’songs’, strips them of all classifying data and then deposits them, with a quick swish of a wii-trained hand, into the virtual dustbin that, no matter how technologically-savvy we get, will always be marked “deleted”. But we all know it’s not as simple as that, is it? Because this album hasn’t even been released yet, and won’t be for another ten years.
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Gowayz ob LOL: “O Kitteh! Meh Kitteh!”
April 25, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Similarly, poetry (e.g. the Psalms) can be written
in such a way that it looks like a cat wrote it.
LOLCat Bible Translation Project
“O Kitteh! Meh Kitteh! Mai feeful trip iz dun, k?
Teh hoomun haz weferd evareh rack, teh googie wii want iz wawn,
Teh nom nom iz near, teh bels Iz heer, teh ppl iz exultez,
Wyl folo Iz teh stedeh keel, teh vesel grim an dareh …”
But O srsly!
O teh bleedin drobs ob red,
Wear awn teh dek meh Kitteh lys,
Falen cold an ded.
K.
O Kitteh! Mai Kitteh! Ryz up an heer teh bels;
Riyz up -- for yu teh flag iz flun -- for yu teh b00gil trls,
For yu b00kays an ribawn reefs--for yu teh shawz a-crowdeh,
For yu dey cal, teh swayin mas, feir eegr fases an him sez:
“Hare Kitteh! Deer fafar!
Dis rm benefe yor hed!
It iz some Zzzzzz dat awn teh deck,
Yu've falen cold an ded?
Kfx.”
Meh Kitteh do not want anser, him lips r payl an stil,
Meh fafar do not want feel meh rm, him haz do not want!
Puls do not want! Teh ship iz ankud sayf an sownd, its voyej
closed an dun, Fwom feeful trip teh hoomun cums in wif wawn objetc;
Exolt O shaws, an rign O bels!
But Iz wif mownful foots,
Walk teh dek meh Kitteh lies,
Falen cold an ded. Srly.
Kfxbai.
Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!”, Leaves of Grass (10th edition)
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Fantasy I
April 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
oh yea! let us go then you & me to a tavern & drink meade there mumble through a manuscript of runes & pull on heavy chain mail sharpen our swords (let the orcs come now for we are ready here in our makeshift campsite cloaks compulsory tales of yore yea of bravery (other words that sound like meade did ye drink the dregs of it already (fool! meet me on a barren hilltop for my daggers will want a word with you (an elvish word that may well be meade oh yea huddle closer to the pathetic little fire ye little people tried to make from peat & strange rubber (how that got here is anyone's guess my silhouette stalking the compulsory full moon & mist yea the usual atmospherics (beards see previous comment or shave with sword we'll tear chunks of mutton &/or venison we'll leave grease marks on platters & make strangely powerful masticating sounds with our rotting teeth oh ye pixie lights of fate shine down upon us here in a vengeful glade! & our boot buckles jingling as we stamp our feet eh frostbite takes another of our mounts we'll walk on blistered soles & recite bawdy hymns to battle & to our beards except yours oh little ones whose bum fluff insults the gods yea now prepare to face your final armour (geddon! yo lords of the ringtone! compulsory burning torches & the faint nauseous strains of mandolin music (we shall meet de burgh & live to tell others of his brilliance! now form a circle let's defend our little patch of slime & what is left of the meade & last night's feast but as for these pages of poetry well let's just skip them shall we? nothing more boring than poorly written verse (except bad meade drunken wizards treading on little people in the dark & elves whose airs of superiority make me wretch
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