Letter to Ken Bolton
Dear Ken, tonight
there was a power blackout
at our place,
during which Maria and I watched
Fiona Shaw perform
The Waste Land in an app
on our iPad (which
was luckily fully charged).
Her performance
was electrifying (har har),
changing voices
like a dial sweeping across a radio.
Unlike Eliot’s
adenoidal readings of the poem, Shaw
treated the poem
as theatre. I’d never thought about
how Madame
Sosostris would sound with a cold.
So there Maria and
I were, with our electronic device
and three candles
in a darkened house, like some
eighteenth-century
tableau, a fact we both noted
more or less
simultaneously, commenting on
the disjunction
between the technologies.
‘The domestic
postmodern’ one of us called it
(the quote marks
inevitably hanging in the air).
Meanwhile, Shaw’s
presentation of Eliot’s poem
brought out new
shades previously unnoticed:
how ‘Falling
towers’ reads post-9/11; how those
‘hooded hordes’
evoke Hollywood Islamophobia; and
how camp (‘queer’
even) the poem could be
(and not just
because of the bit about Mr Eugenides).
Shaw made The Waste Land strangely sexy; the
Cockneys in ‘A
Game of Chess’ funny and tragic.
Actually, the
blackout was a brownout, according
to the man from
the power company who I called
on our out-dated
Nokia mobile phone. (Students go
into raptures of
nostalgia when I look at the phone
in class). But
‘brownout’ doesn’t sound quite
so lyrical, does
it? It has an embarrassingly
scatological sound
to it (or let’s just say ‘shittiness’,
which is more
James Joyce than T.S. Eliot). Or else
it evokes the War,
meaning the Second World War,
my parents’ war,
my father turning eighteen
years of age in
nineteen forty-six. But in the forties
I don’t suppose
they had clothes dryers to turn off
during a brownout
so as not to burn out the motors.
And our brownout
didn’t last long, just enough
to make the night
seem strange—reading to my son
by torchlight,
boiling water for tea on the stove-top,
peering through
the blinds at our darkened street,
the street lights
looking uncertain. But by eight-thirty
‘service had
returned to normal’. I was answering work
emails, and
thinking about writing this letter
(this ‘verse
epistle’) to you, who I don’t know well
but whose voices
(those that occupy your books)
have kept me
amused and aglow, like a boy with
his ear against a
radio in the war, valves warm
in the night, the
room filled with interesting
and recondite
thoughts. P.S. By coincidence,
I have a copy of
Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives
on my bedside
table, a novel which features in
one of your verse
letters. All of your writing shows
that such
coincidences are the stuff of art (where are
those quote
marks?), every thought and every action
jostling together
like bumper cars or comedians or
paratroopers,
drifting down from the sky like beautiful
mushrooms and
being fired upon by grim-faced Nazis below,
their automatic
weapons ripping through the delicate night,
all a diversion for the Resistance to blow up the power station.
What a marvellously interesting poem this is, by Geelong poet, David McCooey. I know Ken Bolton's work quite well, and can really relish the synchronicities that David plays with. But I don't think, I hope, that you need to know KB (or Fiona Shaw or even T.S.) to 'get it'. I find it holds, I opine it holds on to the reader tenaciously. David's most recent book of poetry is Outside by Salt Publishing, which I haven't read yet, but which I will be reading soon.
http://www.mwf.com.au/2012/?name=Writer-McCooey-David
The
Weekend Australian 25-26 August 2012, Review p. 20
The
Best Australian Poems 2012, ed. John Tranter, Black
Inc., Melbourne, 2012, pp. 80-82.
