Bohemian Bestiary

Poetry & Ideas: Text and Images
edited and drawn by Raffaella Torresan
Devil Dog Publishing, 2015, 166 pages, $29.90

Poetry & Ideas is a beautiful, hard-covered, A4-sized, strongly bound book, with nice thick paper eager for turning. The cover outlines the nine major themes explored, with collaged poster-like images of animals and trees sailing through the steam of nuclear power stations.

Raffaella Torresan has organised an art event over a period of years, in which she has invited poets and artists to explore nine themes in what she calls her “Conscience Shows”. The nine themes were: Keep it in the Ground—Anti-Uranium Mining (2007), For Love of Whales (2008), TreesTreesTrees—for Love of Trees (2009), More More More is Never Enough—Greed Show (2010), Beauty (2011), LoveAnimals (2012), Strange (2012), Freedom (2013), Leave the Animals Alone (2014).

Each theme attracted an exhibition of paintings by between ten and twenty painters and a small hand-stapled booklet of poems of between ten and twenty poets. Each exhibition had an opening and a poetry reading which usually raged on into the nights of Collingwood, spilling out of the Collingwood Gallery onto the footpath—as much as the passing bohemian life of Smith Street was sucked into the exhibition. Each event was packed with buyers and painters and art and poetry lovers from across the spectrums of society, mixing the Melbourne literati with a wide variety of painters and their bohemian entourage.

It is this mixing of the poets and the painters, teachers and students, known and unknown, left and right, bohemia and liberal, young and old, where Torresan has really made a hit. She has managed to create a forum for the meeting of minds which transcends the current cultural or political divide, by focusing the work on particular themes. Poetry & Ideas is a selection of the poems which were submitted for the above exhibitions over the nine years, illustrated by Torresan using pastel, pencil, etching, collage, pen and ink and printmaking, particularly linocuts.

Art historian Richard Haese, famous for his 1981 book exploring the revolutionary years of Australian art, Rebels and Precursors, has written a glowing and inspiring foreword to Poetry & Ideas which outlines the development of Torresan’s work through three previous publications which in many ways have also been collaborations with poets. Haese notes:

the seemingly endless enigma of the relationship between poetry and painting … I’ve long been absorbed by the ways in which some of Australia’s finest modernist painters—notably Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Olsen (obsessive readers all)—were fixated on the poetic word. Many of their key works correspondingly have their roots in the great imaginative struggles of Rimbaud, Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas—and not the least our own inimitable Ern Malley.

Torresan has chosen an eclectic and yet magnificent group of Australian contemporary poets of which Ern Malley (or James McAuley, his father) would have been proud. Jennifer Compton (winner of the 2014 Newcastle Poetry Prize), Jordie Albiston, Jennifer Harrison, Judith Rodriguez and Anna Fern all feature beautiful, well-crafted and profound poetry—perhaps to some extent freed to focus on a single subject. For example, Jordie Albiston finds a mood through the whale theme in her poem “Whale Song”:

I sway, broken mast, mad harpoon, stuck

like a limpet on the hoary back of pain.

But do your worst cetacean shadow

I have flukes of my own, and when you

sound I can hold breath for a lifetime.

Les Murray seems relaxed and playful in this short poem, and Torresan’s simple drawing, diving down beside it, translates “bubba dog down”:

Vertically diving,

thick roof tail

spilling salt rain

off onto wallowing

upthrust all around,

bubba dog down.

Eric Beach’s famous performance poem “I’m the Man who talks to trees”, which he does in a crazed loony manner, is printed here, above a swirling lino­cut of windy circles surrounding two hands waving into the sky. It’s a magnificent poem and one you can read to teenagers sceptical of poetry. Anybody who reads this poem out loud immediately becomes a genius.

Poetry & Ideas is overflowing with, well, poetry and ideas. Domenic de Clario attempts a certain syntax outside his usual performance space, in his poem “once more” which is accompanied by a beautiful simple Torresan linocut with a blue moon. Colin Talbot talks about an adventure with the famous romantic iconoclast poet Shelton Lea, and John Flaus asks “Who Remembers Emily Davison?” The book is a constant and seemingly endless treasure trove of urban myths, consistently good poems and humour, with lines which take the mind through some of the most profound questions that humanity has to ask of itself in our times.

The poets probably represent Melbourne-based poetry across all the tribes from the university creative-writing-based work of Kevin Brophy, to the war cries of the Dan O’Connell and the bars and dens of the Melbourne performance poetry circuit. The remnants of the old bohemian Melbourne push and the Pram Factory appear in several excellent poems from the recently deceased Phil Motherwell. His poem “One fucked unit” is a testament to his genius for finding beauty under difficult circumstances.

A white pig-dog, a bad bad boy

Back-handed and teased

In bikie bush camps

Bloodied for the hunt

The homeless in the honking city

Took up residence in my yard.

His face was at every window

Pressed against the glass

Heart-breaking loneliness writ large

Wormed his way inside

Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

Then, as the list of victims lengthened

The green needle of execution

Was as close as the next triple 0 call

As this Jekyll & Hyde of dogs

Bastardized beyond repair

Walked his giddy tightrope.

Hard wired to hate people of color

Ripped the pale face off a gentle Japanese

Savaged children trying to pat him

Even bit me once wildly tearing

As I pulled him from a fight

Man’s best friend?

Well so they say

While I had him

Everyone stayed away.

Outriding intellectuals, such as Alex Skovron, Marietta Elliott-Kleerkoper and the late Leon Shann are there in all their glory, accompanied by Bruce Dawe, Gary Foley and Jack Charles. Komninos, the multicultural poet on the VCE syllabus, adds gravitas.

This is a book of Australian poetry and art you could read with your children or send to your relatives in Europe—which would reflect something which is not only Australian, but also tells you something about the state of Australian art and poetry. It is a book which celebrates art for art’s sake and poetry for the poem’s sake. It is an illustrated art book of Australian poets discussing the human condition through their love of animals. The artist has created the borders and imagined the poems in line and form.

Patrick McCauley lives in central Victoria. He is one of the fifty-seven poets whose work appears in Poetry & Ideas