What do you think?
Rate this book
Salute
A work that shifts from high to low, philosophical, to ethical, to comic, in Bolton's well known, and highly praised, flexible style. A new collection from a prolific poet. Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping thru the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem's jib, there the poise & rancour of another. For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some moment of last judgement & wave at the gate keeper, a tall and bearded dude, surely a hipster - avant la lettre but also after it - outside of time in fact , where final judgements are, and truth and poetry. You wave it at him. It's a talisman, dude , you sau. 'An earnest,' says the figure, 'of your capacity for cool and rigour?' He nods and you smile. You both smile - and he waves you in. Praise for Ken Bolton:
"... bitchy, dreamy, acute ... a deeply serious - & witth * clmost self-canceling - consciousness at work" - Lynn McCredden, Heat "Easy to appreciate, lightheartedness is not a natural or easy gift, and Bolton's - brilliantly articulate - shimmers with a sense of being "amusing & sort of/crooked in relation to things." - Nicholas Birns, Transnational Literature About the author:
A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide and edits Little Esther books.
"... bitchy, dreamy, acute ... a deeply serious - & witth * clmost self-canceling - consciousness at work" - Lynn McCredden, Heat "Easy to appreciate, lightheartedness is not a natural or easy gift, and Bolton's - brilliantly articulate - shimmers with a sense of being "amusing & sort of/crooked in relation to things." - Nicholas Birns, Transnational Literature About the author:
A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide and edits Little Esther books.
144 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Read
May 10, 2021"In John's Room" (44-46): such a poem!
Some initial (somewhat cumbersome) thoughts about the poem.
Opens with a reference to Philip Guston's painting, Smoking I (1973). Poem’s focus is on details of how the painting comes to us in reproduced forms, the media that carry the original to the viewer / poem’s speaker. The painting appears as torn from a newspaper clipping — “whatever article it once was, yellowing” — tacked up in the poet's study. Then appears in a photograph taken in the painter's studio with the painter next to the painting. These aren't professional reproductions intended for some ideal viewer or some consumer who can afford an artist catalogue. The focus on mediation allows for how perceptual adjustments by the viewer (e.g., finding it reproduced in a newspaper, or handling a photograph) become part of the experience of the painting. Only with the photograph of the artist beside his painting does the enormity of the original canvas become perceptually apparent to the speaker-poet, for instance.
This embodiment of reproductive mediation connects with uses of repetition in the poem. “Philip Guston / always makes me feel like a cigarette. / Every time.” The poem expresses repetition as an unavoidable condition of work, whether inducing discomfort (habits), or pleasure (habits). Must read “over old notes, the notes / of last week, of last year" in order to write new poems, while "the same record / or tape is on [. . . .] a tape I have rocked back and forth to / for ages.”
Shaping the rest of the poem are three allegories of what it means to write poetry. In each, repetition prevails as integral. I’m going to crudely and broadly interpret these three models chronologically, the first as an instance of the modern, the second of the 20C postmodern, the third of the contemporary moment.
In the first and primary allegory, poetic practice is considered akin to “test-flying." Credo: "The poet—test-flying / the new emotions, the new subjectivity." We are in the heroic moment of machines, the airplane our example, Futurism the modernist metonym. We are asked to imagine “those movies of test-pilots [. . . .] little struggling head, scarf blowing.” But "movies" suggests supersonic test-flights, in silver jets, too (the 50s)?
After mid-century, a second model appears to consolidate poetic practice for Bolton; the poem presents this in a small anecdote as “A Sailor’s Life” “confined to ship—/ for the storm to blow over,” with nothing purposeful to occupy hands. “Where’s Frank? Frank, what are you doing? Nuthin’, says Frank.” This second model (which imagines language as, in effect, a closed sign system), poetry at its best performs the “ideology [critique] of semiotic representation,” to borrow Herman Rapaport’s phrasing, or performs, in other words, perhaps the sort of social text one finds articulated from Barthes’s Mythologies through to Blonsky’s On SIgns anthology.
Enter the third and final allegorical model of poetic practice, which is for poetry under rightwing neoliberalism. Poetry and its institutional apparatuses together now resemble a “horrible (cheerful, / ugly) bearded garden gnome” dressed in rugby team colours, “look[ing] arrogant / and comically aggressive—as though just awarded / a penalty [....] pink face and fat pink legs / little bright eyes. Its smile is matter-of-fact, certainly.” And so the poet-speaker asks: “Is / this the new subjectivism (if not ‘subjectivity’)?”
Do these two sides to the poem come together, or do they fall apart—on the one side, the Guston reference and poem’s focus on how an original gets mediated, reproduced, perspectivally constructed by viewers' perceptions, and on the other side, the three allegories of poetic practice, wherein the poet’s privileged modernist moment of “test-flying” new experience gets swallowed up by a culture industry of asocial, homogenous groupthink?
My sense is that the one intends to counter the other, that the identification with Guston, with gestural embodiments of the making arts, ultimately win out over the proliferation of gnome-like presences dotting the poetry garden. The poem takes the long view, ends on that hopeful note, as we exit on these lines: “Nancy Wilson sings This Bitter Earth. / Kind of thing I love.”
Note the word is "thing," not "song." Thing as "enigma" in Guston's sense as opposed to fantasy (he goes into it in conversation with Clark Coolidge, 1972 [Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations]). This Bitter Earth's lyrics emphasize: response (long overdue), recognition (long overdue), and reaffirms, against alienated loneliness, the importance of mutual co-presence of the other, and love.
As if in confirmation, there is an enigma to the garden gnome's function, as in the poem it circulates in a conventional kinship structure as "an early Xmas gift" that "sits on John's studio desk" [poet John Jenkins] intended and intended for an in-law.
Some initial (somewhat cumbersome) thoughts about the poem.
Opens with a reference to Philip Guston's painting, Smoking I (1973). Poem’s focus is on details of how the painting comes to us in reproduced forms, the media that carry the original to the viewer / poem’s speaker. The painting appears as torn from a newspaper clipping — “whatever article it once was, yellowing” — tacked up in the poet's study. Then appears in a photograph taken in the painter's studio with the painter next to the painting. These aren't professional reproductions intended for some ideal viewer or some consumer who can afford an artist catalogue. The focus on mediation allows for how perceptual adjustments by the viewer (e.g., finding it reproduced in a newspaper, or handling a photograph) become part of the experience of the painting. Only with the photograph of the artist beside his painting does the enormity of the original canvas become perceptually apparent to the speaker-poet, for instance.
This embodiment of reproductive mediation connects with uses of repetition in the poem. “Philip Guston / always makes me feel like a cigarette. / Every time.” The poem expresses repetition as an unavoidable condition of work, whether inducing discomfort (habits), or pleasure (habits). Must read “over old notes, the notes / of last week, of last year" in order to write new poems, while "the same record / or tape is on [. . . .] a tape I have rocked back and forth to / for ages.”
Shaping the rest of the poem are three allegories of what it means to write poetry. In each, repetition prevails as integral. I’m going to crudely and broadly interpret these three models chronologically, the first as an instance of the modern, the second of the 20C postmodern, the third of the contemporary moment.
In the first and primary allegory, poetic practice is considered akin to “test-flying." Credo: "The poet—test-flying / the new emotions, the new subjectivity." We are in the heroic moment of machines, the airplane our example, Futurism the modernist metonym. We are asked to imagine “those movies of test-pilots [. . . .] little struggling head, scarf blowing.” But "movies" suggests supersonic test-flights, in silver jets, too (the 50s)?
After mid-century, a second model appears to consolidate poetic practice for Bolton; the poem presents this in a small anecdote as “A Sailor’s Life” “confined to ship—/ for the storm to blow over,” with nothing purposeful to occupy hands. “Where’s Frank? Frank, what are you doing? Nuthin’, says Frank.” This second model (which imagines language as, in effect, a closed sign system), poetry at its best performs the “ideology [critique] of semiotic representation,” to borrow Herman Rapaport’s phrasing, or performs, in other words, perhaps the sort of social text one finds articulated from Barthes’s Mythologies through to Blonsky’s On SIgns anthology.
Enter the third and final allegorical model of poetic practice, which is for poetry under rightwing neoliberalism. Poetry and its institutional apparatuses together now resemble a “horrible (cheerful, / ugly) bearded garden gnome” dressed in rugby team colours, “look[ing] arrogant / and comically aggressive—as though just awarded / a penalty [....] pink face and fat pink legs / little bright eyes. Its smile is matter-of-fact, certainly.” And so the poet-speaker asks: “Is / this the new subjectivism (if not ‘subjectivity’)?”
Do these two sides to the poem come together, or do they fall apart—on the one side, the Guston reference and poem’s focus on how an original gets mediated, reproduced, perspectivally constructed by viewers' perceptions, and on the other side, the three allegories of poetic practice, wherein the poet’s privileged modernist moment of “test-flying” new experience gets swallowed up by a culture industry of asocial, homogenous groupthink?
My sense is that the one intends to counter the other, that the identification with Guston, with gestural embodiments of the making arts, ultimately win out over the proliferation of gnome-like presences dotting the poetry garden. The poem takes the long view, ends on that hopeful note, as we exit on these lines: “Nancy Wilson sings This Bitter Earth. / Kind of thing I love.”
Note the word is "thing," not "song." Thing as "enigma" in Guston's sense as opposed to fantasy (he goes into it in conversation with Clark Coolidge, 1972 [Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations]). This Bitter Earth's lyrics emphasize: response (long overdue), recognition (long overdue), and reaffirms, against alienated loneliness, the importance of mutual co-presence of the other, and love.
As if in confirmation, there is an enigma to the garden gnome's function, as in the poem it circulates in a conventional kinship structure as "an early Xmas gift" that "sits on John's studio desk" [poet John Jenkins] intended and intended for an in-law.
Displaying 1 of 1 review