Poem For Charlie
for Charles Buckmaster
Dispossession; inside
each season as though hollow
you grow and are a part of nothing,
everything. Apart. Especially, in extreme
times, to have nothing.
Belonging nowhere, all this
the outside of some high
philosophy. Indefinite –
having learned that
a definition is an epitaph
– you move like sunlight
inside each moment’s universe.
As though a girl had kissed you, and you’d woken
from human sleep, and found the bridge and crossed it,
and were no part of this umbrella city,
no part of what they term ‘reality’.
Michael Dransfield
(from Voyage into Solitude, 1978)
The Thoughtless Shore
for Michael Dransfield
The Thoughtless Shore 1
‘We cannot tell whether
rage or grief shakes him’ So out there now
on Flat Rock Point he has returned, and stands
in light from a full moon. He stares over
the river, over the shifting water, and emotion
turns him in the night, is turning him in
night; he stands there during the complete turn
of an incoming tide. All the sentimental
images are compiled. Blast – into air, in flame
blasted on to his flesh, in air the drift
of ashes – all, all. The moonlight again, he is
standing back, turning away. His own life
takes him to the river once more: how can it matter
now how many times his friend died, he is
dead. Thoughtlessly dead: the tides turn full
of fishes. Wild fishes and ash: easy images
flow in: the air the poem exudes is putrid air now
and the verse’s vile atmosphere is his
way out: moonlight is an easy point of view.
An excuse to be ‘tasteful’, clever
romantic’s way ‘let me give you an illusion of
not grieving’ this itself a way, away.
We escaped the city by listening to endless pop
songs, in damp nights. Terrible record
players, fish chips & Coke. Now the smell of cats’
piss will always remind me of you, and those
paperbacks gone with mould. Why weren’t you more
read I suppose – Anyway on the shore at Flat Rock
the moonlight floods in, sentiments aside,
I weaken the elegy for you – there is a moon there,
and a man watching the tides flow in.
The Thoughtless Shore 2
‘I dreamed I was amongst the ones who put him out to death’
(Bob Dylan)
What have we truly ‘known’ – there above
the city, the stations of the breath
are echoing with a thousand blasphemies.
Come back. I can’t call, cannot say, even
after this, the things you would like
to hear (Secret by the unmourning water
of the Lane Cove River) secret. Now I see
the hours spread, somehow, over tide
hours and hours we once walked through.
Those lived-in hours, how many! and words
all the millions of them, we rambled
there telling each other amazing lies –
And you would have expected an elegy or so
from me, remember our Theory of Excess!
Though now, no more, I hardly ever move
beyond ‘knowledge’ of real streets we knew
even if their existence seldom ever
touched us all that deep. So here, for
your Dreams I speak out: O perils beckon
of huge excess – Come back – suddenly
and bitter, this comes – we asked for a
rotten deal, and that’s what we got. Those
beautiful, ineffectual rebels of
an imagined sky. We searched among
the long dead for the living: Shelley –
Blake: they were the harder stuff.
That idea of ourselves as ‘poets’ was an
addiction more terminal than any opiate
the chemists could refine. We rode
out nights higher then than on any smack
or chalked-up methadone. Let fall, now let
fall the pack, all the cards were
marked anyway, and we even knew it then.
So again you’ve turned my hand down, cards so
pat, flush. And I am left here still,
my head aching, as usual, struck down in
my heady way of it all. And the irony, shit,
of writing your body another letter;
why do I prolong the mess we’ve made of it.
If I could only do this in the name of ‘art’
yes, you’d like that; whereof such
turbulence – here beneath my scalp. O
of your way – what, shall I perpetuate
the thing? Still, in old age ride out nights
with elegy and fame: these beckonings.
& Finally
In the bookshop – it’s a kind of pilgrimage
I’ve taken to making – well, not just
to stare passionately at his books, but to
just sort of gaze. And mooning there
before those dreadful shelves, though but oh,
so what? It’s an indifference that comes
on, doing me, I suppose, good. I get quite
stunned after a while until thoughts
don’t form and the poets dissolve and merge
into a spineless colour field. And finally,
who gives a damn about the particular
way I happen to respond to a friend’s death,
in a bookshop? And all my heart has fallen
to sleep, who’d blame the wretched thing now?
My ‘personal experience’ done over again
in verse. This elegy follows all its
horrible predecessors, calling out in public
and sobbing, sobbing too. What’s left,
it’s all so emotional, after the event, so
that I feel proud to be so false.
Now let’s think about the way I feel, working
myself into a state, it’s easy. Maybe
I’ll work in something for myself, a pointer
to the way I planned, was sobbing too.
Who does stay constant all the way – can see
old fate for what she is – me, I’m grown
sick of weariness, ha. I’ve worked out a new
act that’s so convincing: suicide.
And finally, fashionable.
Robert Adamson
(from Southerly, 1/1974)
The Poetry of Michael Dransfield and Charles Buckmaster
Allen Afterman
(from Meanjin, 4/1973)
Michael Dransfield and Charles Buckmaster were two of the most highly regarded of the younger poets, and died within two years of one another. This article is not intended as a eulogy; it is an attempt to evaluate their poetry on the basis of what I consider the highest standards.
In Streets of the Long Voyage (1970), The Inspector of Tides (1972), and Drug Poems (1972), Michael Dransfield’s concerns range from the personal and introspective to such ‘public’ themes as pollution and political oppression. Although the countryside and the natural forest are prominent, the city is the dominant internal landscape. This is especially true of Drug Poems which centres on, or grows out of, the ‘hard drug’ experience and the city drug culture.
Dransfield’s talent and fluency were apparent in his earliest wor
k and set him apart from all but the very best of his contemporaries. It is probably true to say that, at least three years ago, he was the most accomplished of the poets under twenty-five; and this probably accounts for the exaggerated praise he subsequently received. There is no question that his work is attractive; it has an immediate impact and is rich in language and imagery. Dransfield was at his best in ‘Mazurka’, parts of ‘Endsight’ and his ‘Streetpoems’. On the other hand, many poems lack genuine depth; they slip away like rain pelting against a window. Too often the pattern emerges as a series of engaging images or descriptive lines (often a catalogue) with ‘endings’ which seem contrived, or at worst, smart. ‘That Which We Call a Rose’ is an example. His work lacks the resonance and maturity of today’s best poetry, either because he wrote too many poems too quickly, or because of his age, or both. By ‘best poetry’ I mean that which is grounded in a personal and significant vision or consciousness, which demands to be expressed in a poetic form. Dransfield’s work cannot be considered coherent in this sense. What is presented is the writer’s impressions and experiences, but without a spirit or even a particular atmosphere potent enough to engage or envelop the reader: a collection of vignettes, impressions, and mood pieces, a common enough failing of young writers.
In addition to this central problem of Voice, Dransfield’s work was held back, I feel, by the difficulty which he diagnosed in ‘Sub Judice’, ‘… images are too easy’. I often had the impression that as soon as an image or idea came to his mind, a poem immediately resulted. Perhaps he was too eager to produce. Rodney Hall wrote recently: ‘I’m inclined to think success, the way it came, was one of the most damaging things that happened to Michael Dransfield in the last three years of his life because it made such demands on him, and on the image he had created for himself.’
I mention this because I found Drug Poems almost entirely unconvincing. This collection purports to be founded upon ‘hard drug’ experiences and consciousness, and not the occasional ‘hit’. If he had been able to work deeply within this milieu, it would have been of interest in its own right. Dope ‘culture’ is developing rapidly in Australian cities, particularly in Sydney. It is already possible to see its broad manifestation in such cities as New York and Chicago. Although dope consciousness tends to be egocentric, deeply cynical, manipulative, and even self-righteous, it can be devastatingly incisive and intelligent in its criticism. In certain respects it constitutes an extension of the most objectionable characteristics implied by the imprecation ‘bourgeois’. The drug ‘scene’ is itself basically commercial – heroin being the perfect product, the junkie the perfect consumer. Dope conversation is most often shop talk: who’s got dope, how good, how much, and how to connect. Being a drug addict involves a deliberate choice and commitment; and I expect it will become a political position in the future.
Whatever the potential interest of the theme or condition, Dransfield produced a collection of mere episodes of dope. The nihilism in many of the poems seems mere mood, often conveyed by stock expressions. He shows very little genuine engagement with Dope; the hustling to keep up, or the sweetness. His poems are impersonal and written around the edges … cool, detached, but not the Detachment within Dope. Here I am comparing Drug Poems with Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, for example, and with some of the American ‘beat’ poets. ‘Bum’s Rush’, one of the better pieces, is typical in that the Hole seems poetically contrived:
… In the early winter mornings
sometimes you will hear the snow winds blowing in on you
soon then you will become impatient as lost souls do
you will think you hear someone calling
when it comes to that all you need do is
take a look at the effigy collection
say farewell to friends you may have made among the graven images
then walk as a human lemming would
out across the bay to where the ice is thinnest and let yourself vanish.
His three publications contain the makings of one good first book. Michael Dransfield had talent, strength, and compulsion. I have no doubt that in time he would have gained in depth and insight, and he was gifted enough to have developed into a fine poet.
Charles Buckmaster published The Lost Forest (1971) and Deep Blue and Green (1970). His poetry has a highly personal ring; there is less of the abundance I found throughout Dransfield’s work; rather a sparseness – as if the poems were carved. They reflect a genuine quest for meaning and position in the world. His best writing runs the edge between affirmation and repulsion. He was a country boy seeking a place in the city (Melbourne) and was unable to find it. He saw the countryside built up and the natural bush being destroyed behind him, and ahead only the oppressive and sterile city. His most moving work is rooted in a countryside in transition; one which he believed would not be spared – despite an earlier optimism expressed in ‘A History of the Father’. In that poem he speaks of the possibility of ‘change’, but no direction is indicated; in ‘An End to Myth’, the possibility of ‘rebirth’ is abandoned. His work is considerably less effective when it extends beyond his personal experience; as for example, when he writes of the plight of the Aboriginals in ‘Wilpena Pound’. He hinted in ‘Vanzetti’ of a purpose in life: ‘Yet that purpose survives – and is love’, but that seems more a grasping at straws than evidence of a significant vision or direction. He is at his best in such poems as ‘Willochra’:
What can I say? I now acknowledge
yet cannot understand
the nature
of this fear
The grey pastures –
Willochra –
have faded, taken
to the air –
Ah, I
see that plain
of ice, brooding above me
poised
prepared to descend
at any moment.
Now, knowing
all the dark hints
were not, as I had expected,
a part of this game –
unreal, contrived
purposely veiled …
The kind of countryside of which Buckmaster wrote – Gruyere, Lilydale, Wilpena Pound, the country town in ‘Main Street Dust Song’ – continues to exist in the immediate Australian consciousness. I say this despite the fact that we live in the most urbanised nation in the world, and in the face of scoffing we hear about the Great Australian Myth. It is still possible to speak, for example, of the small farm as a ‘way of life’; whereas in America the possibility is so far out of reach that it becomes the subject of the nostalgic ‘country ’n’ western’ revival. In this sense, it may be proper to speak of Buckmaster as an ‘Australian’ poet, while Dransfield’s poems could have been written in Chicago or London.
Charles Buckmaster’s work does not show the invention or variety of technique or styles of Dransfield’s. Many times he seems to break his lines arbitrarily, to overdo the Olsonian ‘projective field’ structure. Nevertheless he was capable of skilled use of line, as in the beginning of ‘Pieces in the Change’:
o the
flowers of the
earth
and the
eagles through
the day
(circling
circling
circles
round sheep)
and a day of great change …
Buckmaster’s output consists of perhaps forty-five poems. He destroyed his unpublished scripts before his suicide. Within his collection are a few really fine poems in which a personal and genuine voice can be heard. Although Dransfield was the stronger and perhaps the more gifted of the two, Buckmaster’s work stands as the better. But he succumbed to what may be a special hazard for poets, that of ‘not lasting’. I feel fairly hard about it in this one sense: his life work is small and largely unrealised because that was all he was willing to do and endure. He chose death.
Burnie
John Laurence Rodd
(from a stor
y from Tabloid Story Pocket Book, 1978)
… He went home and packed his haversack with warm jockeys and a large plastic garbage sack full of muesli and a sleeping bag and hatchet and started off, The Aquarian Gospel, The Psychology of Jung and a copy of Where Do They Come From stuffed in the pockets of his pack … There was only one place now for Burnie to go and that was a small cabin on the coast where lived a polite Hell’s Angel tapester called Polecat who lived on the earnings of his marijuana plantation and the occasional sale of a tapestry. And his chick who was a women’s liberationist rose up from her Aztec coverlet and said, ‘Well, fuck me, if it isn’t that young goofy Burnie,’ as he walked down the paperbark track with his blue haversack, albatross dog, and his seagull style of striding. Burnie sat in a canoe chair and drank ginger wine …
Donald Horne on James McAuley
(abridged extract, from The Education of Young Donald, 1967)
… my hero among the Hermes poets was ‘J.Mc’. I read his verse so often that, without meaning to, I soon had some of it by heart. ‘J.Mc’ seemed to convey the sad emptiness of metropolitan youth, lost between beliefs. A howling desolation feeds that pride at whose dead centre sits a child that weeps, lost and disconsolate, and never sleeps. In ‘J.Mc’s’ verse the late sky cleared and wet pavements shone with hard blue light; the night was fearful and empty; dawn burnt low and pale upon its wick. Morning for both of us would shine like insult in the eyes. Walls crumbled, faces blurred as one passed to the black abyss, contemplating, with fearful eyes and a scarred and weary heart, dusty passion and dissolution. Lips were cold and shadowed, smiling with a sad, slow smile, or in an agony of contemplation. The fizzy drink that love provides changes quickly and goes flat, so quickly, sour and flat. Close to mad lust was death, sunken skin, wrinkled breasts. Oh! thou dead come not in dreams, your cold mouth to my mouth.