Ken Bolton
SPIRITS
Ken Bolton has been a leading figure in postmodern Australian poetry since the 1970s. His many volumes include the recent books The Circus, A Whistled Bit of Bop and Sly Mongoose; his collaborative texts with John Jenkins have appeared in numerous editions and also been widely anthologised. As editor of the literary journals Magic Sam and Otis Rush, and through Sea Cruise and Little Esther Books, Bolton has made a significant contribution to small press publishing over several decades. He is also an art critic, based at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation since the early 1980s, where he runs Dark Horsey Bookshop and the Lee Marvin Readings.
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/bolton-ken
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SPIRITS
I play a little 80s Lou Reed, Legendary Hearts— sentiment & compassion — to get me serious. — It takes so little? — And drink a glass of Melentie's mastika — a kind of ouzo more or less. & I've got the mood ( ! ) but by proxy, as if it had not 'arrived' though it is available — on tap & I use it — reading some poems, attending to them, making corrections, changes & that is life you use it you can't hold on The way one translation of Apollinaire's 'Zone' has it, "Your life that you toss off as though it were a glass of spirits" A glass of spirits & bed! It is late but not too late, the air is mild. Cath reading still. In the (large, abstract) painting this poem would like to resemble lines, colours, shapes, styles or modes or manners of painting, co-habit— with space, to live or breathe, beside each other— something made up of Micky Allan, Kurt Brereton, Whisson & Fitzjames (Michael’s Optikon, say, showing much of Darlinghurst, blocks & blocks of it, rooves & streets, including the street where I almost fancy I can see the restaurant I ate in for years where they threw me out once asleep before my raznichi. I was aghast, how could they? Nick & Helen at Diethnes were never like that, tho I didn’t test them they were like parents. “Where is your girlfriend tonight?”)— lines, colours, etc tho one, one of them, must organize the rest, the others? or can large aesthetic continental shelves coexist, in detente? They can if I say so. The dripping, fluid shapes of Whisson indicate ‘Gorky’ & then ‘childhood’—the mill there was no mill in my childhood— creeks & grass & green declivities— where I pictured, I remember, my future wife— seated injun squaw-style back to me in browns beautifully cut hair feminine gentle stylish a large colour-chart across her knees— the feminine task of deciding style— & so unlike the brazen hussies I chased after— demure, modest, elegant— (pace Deborah, Lila, Lorraine)—& in fact they weren’t hussies & I ‘chased’ no one. She was a model I saw in an advertisement, paid to look that way. Look feminine! “How?” the model must have thought, “I am feminine, aren’t I?” —an ideal I bought into (& Cath, of course, does occasionally push furniture around, considers colours, considers the magazines, & is, yes, elegant ) Spirits. Photos on my wall— photocopies mostly, blu-tacked— many I notice only when they go awry & need ‘a-rightening’ & pressing hard in their corners, where the blu-tak hides, good still. Some I see regularly & notice: the pic of Julie & Richard beautiful, magical people — so the photograph testifies — photographed at night, lit strongly, the street dark — coming to a small opening of mine, Richard a gilded youth, Julie, girlish, a tinkering impish angel or witch maybe, in this photo, hiding, her head peeking round the corner — at me, or whoever was taking the photo — Beside it, the picture of her on the phone at the office All these people Pam, Laurie Richard Jules figures who have witnessed my life & understood, estimated it, more realistically than I (Laurie’s records of Coalcliff — where I have none. ‘Not looking’ at the time means I can’t look back tho nostalgic am I? ever? always?) # A burst of Nino Rota music as I look again at Richard & Julie — the final scenes of Nights Of Cabiria urchins in the woods, like bad fairies, mock the heroine # Anna & Chris observe a scenario & sequence of events from their place at the front window of a restaurant, that is totally Fellini— awful, really—but magical: Surfers Paradise. A bus shelter where two girls wait for the bus in to the city— a Saturday night, very short skirts, cheap jewellery. A boy happens by & accosts them, eagerly, do they want to come to his party tonight? His birthday? His twenty-first. Lots of alcohol provided. It will be great. His Dad, he tells them, thinks he is ‘one sick cunt’. He is eyeing one girl particularly, much to the consternation of the other girl who thinks she is the prettier. He drops his bottle of vodka which smashes on the ground. Drops & does press-ups in front of the girls, lapping at the vodka. The girls will be impressed by his muscles. His shirt is off. Another friend rocks up. Will he be coming? The girls get on the bus, one a little regretfully. Some Japanese people walk by & the boy curses them at length & loudly: get out of Australia, basically. The new friend says, No, he is going in to town, to have a good time. Wrong answer. The birthday boy curses his chum’s retreating back. Then heads off. Stage empty.
Ken Bolton has been a leading figure in postmodern Australian poetry since the 1970s. His many volumes include the recent books The Circus, A Whistled Bit of Bop and Sly Mongoose; his collaborative texts with John Jenkins have appeared in numerous editions and also been widely anthologised. As editor of the literary journals Magic Sam and Otis Rush, and through Sea Cruise and Little Esther Books, Bolton has made a significant contribution to small press publishing over several decades. He is also an art critic, based at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation since the early 1980s, where he runs Dark Horsey Bookshop and the Lee Marvin Readings.
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/bolton-ken
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