Poetics
I
As some on this list may have already noticed, I'm interested in the lyric. I'm the guy that posts poems with subjects like “the next lyric” and “lyric with a twist” and the “lyric that came before the other one”. I like to believe that poetry has a lyrical heart and that there are two things that can seriously impair this hearts functioning: ideology and theory. I see both of these as restraints, systems of containment, professional endeavours. I like what B. Shaw said about the professions, that they're a conspiracy against the public. The late great John Forbes copped a bit of stick when he referred to poetry as a vocation, but I think he was right. It is something that calls you and you respond to the best of your ability. But it's not really poetry that calls, it's a need to have our exeperience verified and our developing selves set up in relief against paradox, mystery and imagination.
II
If culture is human nature then art is a kind of frottage that happens at the interface. This arouses the poet in us. We are at once animal and god, erect in our dignity and grovelling in the filth of our desires, riding our humanity like a surfboard, free and infinite in precise moments of correspondence.
III
I love and crave the moment when the poem comes together. Inspiration is like being taken by the shape of a new Jaguar on a car lot. The next thing you know, your drooling over the leather seats and the lumbar control. But when you buy it, it comes in kit form and has to be assembled. In the end, it may turn out to look like a stagecoach with lunar landing capability. But sometimes it turns out strangely familiar, and not at all bad looking. It's odd, it's like hearing your voice on tape for the first time, I don't sound like that do I!? But you do and it's a good thing too.
Here is a list of my publications
BOOK
* A Student's Guide to Cat's Eye, Wizard Books, Ballarat, 2000
POETRY
* Born from an idea and 'We are many', Poems of the Rochester Castle, Melbourne, 1989
* The Red Leopard, Going Down Swinging, 15, Currency Productions, Melbourne, 1995
* A filleting knife for Michael and Recovery unit flap 2021
Meanjin, Volume 55, #3, Spring, 1996. University of Melbourne
* John Herouvim, Going Down Swinging, 16, Currency Productions
Melbourne, 1996
* Sweet Pea, Island, number 70 autumn, Sandy Bay Tasmania, 1997
* Her cat, Cimarron Review, number 120, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, USA, July 1997
* Death of this day and Against entropy, Westerly, no. 1, autumn 1998
REVIEW
* Kenzo, by Ross Davy, Australian Book Review, number 79, April 1986
ESSAY
* The Bad Seed from the Bad Seed Bed: a cultural perspective on the work of Nick Cave, Overland, December 1997
OTHER
Inside Story on The Player, published by VATE, November 2000
And a couple of poems (that treat science and the soul)
Passage of the head
The wind is a crazy cult this morning,
cramming blows against the sun's coming to.
I surge then slop in the troughs that hoist
some surfacing burden trying to make a point.
Or is it a quest? And if it is, then what's
it supposed to cancel? Since losing my head
over her there's been nothing but this drone.
I suppose what I want is the music again.
The magic that moves rocks to dance; willows
to sigh as the words tighten like a skirt, and
the breath that carried them urge a slow waltz
in her hair, thick with the scent of horses.
The only problem lately has been this vast
lack of solidity. The solution is all
round me, yet I am suspended by its charm,
while dangling in its idiom.
If taken with the moment I will sing
or spit. She knows which is which.
This body of tears may be a melody
of white noise, but see how her ear is shaped
like a shell: a spiral path to call me in. I am
her image of myself. (Out here ideas roll
in a kind of bitter convection, but once the heart
is packed with salt, the soul begins its dream.)
Irritating as I have become, some
tendencies cannot be denied. One gesture
leads to another and soon the skin crawls
with the diligence of sea lice. The moon
is full of promise. The world is my oyster.
To pearl divers craving an angle and
busting a gut, I'm a beacon of avoidance.
Even so it's not possible to rot in peace.
So I bend my ear to the glint, the shimmer
that goads the horizon, deepening as the twilight
undoes itself from her matinee. And listen for this:
a lapping skull, sinking solid into memory.
Against entropy
I
One more outburst like that
and she'll have an orgasm.
Don't look at the curtains and count,
call up the big bang and see
the snake suck in its tail.
Scales balanced in silver bubbles.
She recommends bulimia, but
your savagery is already crystalline.
We've farmed her centuries now so
from my flattery some order flows.
While she swirls this design in a mirror,
I'm hot at it - perched at the drawing board.
II
Leaning in that shop front alcove
there are three of you.
A tarnished nickel window frame,
a flattened fag butt and a short black skid.
What has your lipstick to do
with the life of a cigarette ?
Is it time's synthetic;
a gesture from the eternal forest ?
And which one of you should I address ?
The one swelling with hope,
the one dying for sublimation,
or the one that loves lists ?
The universe has found a new centre
I said. A baby. Holy smoke.
III
Desiring hope has me winning out
and the day is priapic on a teaspoon.
Now there's three of us I may as well
Wear my jeans rolled up too.
Orions belt wrapped round my head.
And no-one can blame me for this !?
I've still got bits of Carousel stuck
to my face and smiling makes it worse.
Still, you've known this all along.
Give the child your quiet mind, my arena.
IV
What is finished must have a sheen.
You speak to me from hollows
and I relate my passion for hinges.
When we meet again we'll be one
vase or two faces. Move me
and I'll give you flowers: grow on me
and I'll polish the windows. Is that our
baby or the wardrobe door squeaking ?
V
What stylus plays these fingerprints
or am I imagining this melody ?
Snow flakes, water drops, steam.
A stem of events on a pin head of time.
Still, it's mine as much as I signifies
the space containing this dream.
I will, if I'm able, not collapse tonight.
It's too magnificently serious.
Like our baby, reading my face. She sees
beyond me and hears my memory playing.
VI
Today, mending the house, I felt all my hopes
hanging on one nail: baby, I'm a romantic!
Then such a heavy buzz. A cicada
kazooing clumsily on frail wings.
And I didn't know what to think.
Forgiving green, it went off in search
of a cue. Behind was me, feeling that
if the said universe is to disappear
up its own arsehole, I want cicadas
crimping the scene.
Russell Forster
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