Umm, The Slip Inn is anything but suburban - if I remember correctly,
which I may not for all the usual obvious reasons.
Cheers,
J
________________________ Jill Jones www.jilljones.com.au
----- Original Message -----
From: "Poetryetc: poetry and poetics"
To:
Cc:
Sent:Fri, 14 Sep 2012 13:40:00 +0800
Subject:Re: Oddities of poetryetc
Ah, the old marriage, the old hiding place(s) - many of us live so
long now
that we shouldn't ever marry 'for life'. It's an outdated concept.
Maybe a
renewable five or ten year contract. The history of the Cedar Tavern
has
even reached these far distant shores, distorted by time and envy for
creative talent. I had my own version of the Tavern at The Royal
George
Hotel in Sydney, home before I got there in the early Sixties to the
Sydney
push - and burired under the anonymous shadows of a expressway
overpass by
the Eighties.
*From Wiki*: "The *Sydney Push* was a predominantly
left-wingintellectual
subculture in
Sydneyfrom the late 1940s to the
early '70s. Well known associates of the Push
include Jim Baker , John
Flaus,
Harry Hooton , Margaret
Fink,
Sasha Soldatow,[1]
Lex
Banning , Eva
Cox,
Richard Appleton , Paddy
McGuinness , David
Makinson,
Germaine Greer , Clive
James,
Robert Hughes , Frank
Moorhouse and Lillian
Roxon.
From 1961 to 1962, poet Les
Murrayresided in Brian
Jenkins's Push household
[2]at
Glen Street, Milsons
Point , which
became a mecca for associates visiting Sydney from
Melbourneand other cities."
I saw a photo on the Wiki site which told me it is now called the
Slip Inn,
for all of you in Sydney. Looks quietly suburban from the pic.
Andrew
On 14 September 2012 09:07, Kenneth Wolman wrote:
> Thank YOU Kasper. I don't know what happened with the multiple
postings.
> One of them came through with gobbledegook as the receiving
address. Which
> makes me wonder if the account weren't hijacked. Why would someone
try to
> snatch a poetry list??
>
> Ken
>
>
> On Sep 13, 2012, at 8:30 PM, Kasper Salonen wrote:
>
> > Ken, that was a privilege and a treat to read. Very clear on a
subject
> that
> > many opt to leave untouched or -analyzed, very nonchalant while
being
> > intensely heartfelt. The details empower this with authenticity
too.
> Thank
> > you.
> >
> > KS
> >
> > On 14 September 2012 02:51, Kenneth Wolman
> wrote:
> >
> >> I tried to post this and nothing happened.
> >>
> >> AT THE CEDAR TAVERN, FEBRUARY 1997
> >>
> >> After the Saturday winter readings
> >> we'd cross West 3rd Street through the Square
> >> and quick-march to the Cedar Tavern,
> >> then drink some more, eat the tolerable food,
> >> and usually four conversations
> >> at once produced laughter
> >> even if no one knew quite why.
> >>
> >> That winter of 1997 my marriage was in ruins,
> >> but I still dwelt in that airless Between
> >> where my sole action was waiting for
> >> a tenant to abandon an apartment
> >> into which I'd move; so I crept
> >> below (I hoped) the radar
> >> through the end-days in the house
> >> that was now a house of strangers.
> >> Marital ghosts roamed the rooms and halls,
> >> fangs dripping like the Queen Alien,
> >> while we pretended we were civilized
> >> that hatred was too far buried for us to touch.
> >>
> >> The proof? my wife still cooked for herself and our son,
> >> but since I'd paid for the food, even then for me,
> >> and I wondered Why back then and still I wonder Why,
> >> for dinnertime was a silent torment I could face
> >> only if I got plastered first. So
> >> I tried not to go to whatever I called home,
> >> performed elaborate psychological contortions
> >> to keep myself out as late as possible, and laughed
> >> or tried that I'd call the place Home at all
> >> --my local habitation with a name that was lost.
> >>
> >> There were ghosts in the Cedar too, adrift
> >> on Saturday nights, but they were not my ghosts,
> >> nothing to take to heart or care about,
> >> because in those moments the dream of beauty
> >> stank like shit, and poetry had died in me.
> >> It clanged around in the steel ventricles
> >> of a Tin Man clone: something detached, heartless,
> >> anchored only to the fear that it
> >> might never reattach, that words were dead,
> >> and I'd be left only to read the crap I'd written years before.
> >> Nobody would know or really care.
> >> deception did not end at home,
> >> it was everywhere and I wrapped myself in it.
> >>
> >> I did not know the Cedar Tavern's history.
> >> Nobody told me that this was the House of Fame,
> >> the artist's paradise between the used bookstores
> >> and dry cleaners on University Place,
> >> a home for the blessed spirits even if they
> >> were only the blessed-in-training, in other words
> >> just a pack of chain-smoking drunks
> >> swinging like bipolar pendulums in a clock shop--
> >> manic-sad, sad-manic, graced at least
> >> with communal misery.
> >>
> >> Ghosts of the blessed spirits, benign
> >> and without anything like evil intent,
> >> and I would come to love them.
> >>
> >> Frank O'Hara bought me a drink but
> >> did not sit on my lap.
> >>
> >> Rothko sat in clear stolid pain
> >> but did not open his veins,
> >>
> >> LeRoi Jones was not glaring
> >> while awaiting a name change.
> >>
> >> Dylan came through and Dylan was gone,
> >> the Joker and the Thief together.
> >>
> >> Contrary to mystical beliefs,
> >> I did not absorb some secret charm from
> >> the seats and benches, only
> >> was what I came in with: sadness
> >> that the subway ran uptown
> >> to the Port Authority bus station,
> >> and that sooner I would have to go
> >> and later, too, I would have to go,
> >> even beyond the darkness of the inner cold,
> >> beyond even where those cold nights drove me
> >>
> >> I would never see the Cedar again.
> >> The last I heard it's gone, out of business,
> >> presumably taking its ghosts along for the ride.
> >> The ghosts in any case were displaced by mine:
> >> not famous or gifted, but weighted
> >> with a tragic raging presence
> >> that drove even the gifted from the room.
> >>
> >> KTW/1-25-09
> >>
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
'Undercover of Lightness'
http://walleahpress.com.au/recent-publications.html
'Shikibu Shuffle'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/new-from-aboveground-press-shikibu.html
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