Meet the Writers Festival 2017 – Robert Wood on John Kinsella’s Graphology – New books by John Kinsella & Jorie Graham

June’s been a busy month poetry-wise. This week (Thursday, 22 June) I was a guest writer at the Meet the Writers Festival, an event that’s been run by the South Australian English Teachers’ Association (SAETA) for the last two and a half decades. Next year’s event will be SAETA’s twenty-fifth.

The festival is a great gift from our English teachers to the students of South Australia (2,000 of whom attend each year), giving them a chance to hear from and speak to writers from here and interstate. This year my fellow guests were: Andy Griffith, Isobelle Carmody, Phil Cummings, Rosanne Hawke, Stephanie McCarthy, Kristin Weidenbach, James Phelan, Tony Shillitoe, Ruth Starke, Allayne Webster, and Dan McGuiness.

I finished the day full of optimism and enthusiasm for the young people I spoke to. I was reminded of my own gratitude for those who taught me English in middle- and high-school, who went further than they knew in shaping my future. I was also reminded of the importance of developing young readers’ interest in and confidence around poetry, if we want to ensure an enduring readership.

In other news, my recent review of John Kinsella’s Graphology, for Plumwood Mountain, was discussed by poet and editor Robert Wood in his essay, The Boys in Cambridge: Clive James’ Injury Time and John Kinsella’s Graphology. It’s a worthwhile read for an alternate and well-considered view of Kinsella’s important three-volume work.

In terms of reading, I’ve enjoyed catching up with a few recent books of Australian poetry, including Shari Kocher’s The Non-Sequitur of Snow (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), Jillian Pattinson’s Babel Fish (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014), and Dan Disney’s form-bending Either, Orpheus (UWA Publishing, 2016).

I’ve also enjoyed a preliminary read of the new collections of poems by John Kinsella and Jorie Graham, both of whom have been important touchstones for me. Kinsella’s On the Outskirts (University of Queensland Press, 2017) consolidates and extends the form and concerns of his earlier work, Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography (University of Queensland Press, 2007), while Graham’s Fast (Ecco, 2017) breaks new ground for her oeuvre.

In the next month or two, I’ll post a link to a review that’s currently under construction.

Franz Wright – Diane Fahey’s A House by the River – James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line

Today is the two-year anniversary of the death of American poet Franz Wright. He and his father, James, remain the only parent-child pair to have won a Pulitzer Prize in the same category. The Washington Post, in its obituary, described Wright’s poetry as ‘frank, confessional verse [that] reflected a search for self-discovery and spiritual yearning amid struggles with mental illness and substance abuse.’ Critic William Logan called his poems ‘the Hallmark cards of the damned’: they are minimal, exact, melancholic and unflinching. The poem that began my exploration of Wright’s poetry was ‘Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse’:

[…] the Canadian wind // coming in off Lake Erie / rattling the windows, horizontal snow // appearing out of nowhere / across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.

For further reading from Wright’s work, there’s ‘Woman Falling’ and ‘Home for Christmas’ from Kindertotenwald (Knopf, 2011), a collection of prose poems, and ‘Another Working Dawn’ and ‘Night Flight Turbulence’, readings from Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009) with musical settings by Michael Rozon and Daniel Ahearn.

I spent the week reading Diane Fahey’s most recent collection of poems, A House by the River (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016), and James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf, 2008). Fahey’s is a likable collection of restrained and self-contained 14-line poems, primarily about nature and grief:

Rain falls in the middle of the night – / a statement, an unanswerable question. / Lightning flares for a sustained moment / in the rooms of the dreaming. (‘Summer Rain’)

I’d hoped for a marsh harrier, keeping / its place in the wind – a bookmark between / airy pages […] / […] My gaze hovers, sweeps over / that crack in the sea: a fault-line of foam / jagged as a gull’s flight through storm. (‘At the Cliffs’)

I’m still under way with Longenbach’s book, but among other things, he offers a fair argument for preferring the term ‘line end’ over ‘line break’:

Some lines end with a full stop – a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point. Others end with a comma, a semicolon or a colon that joins together two clauses or phrases within a sentence. And others end with no punctuation at all: the syntax continues on the next line. We might be tempted to say that the line “breaks” at such a moment, but the line merely ends – it doesn’t break […] it’s more helpful to think about “line endings”: the syntax may or may not break at the point where the line ends. (page 8)

The second feature of my productive week, poetry-wise, was the publication of my review of John Kinsella’s Graphology Poems: 1995-2015 (Five Islands Press, 2016) in Plumwood Mountain: an Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics.

In Plumwood Mountain Volume 4, Number 1 you’ll also find a number of excellent poems, articles by Bonny Cassidy and Stuart Cooke, reviews of recent books of poems by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, and more. All good reasons to read on.