Who are the French

On the Rue Victor Hugo

Interesting BBC news report - What is French Identity?


I never saw anyone fly the tricolour in Uzes, but then they do provincial French things like running the bulls through town, wine festivals, fetes. People sit outside cafes drinking coffee. They have a famous street market. The boulangeries are very French. What's striking is the consistency of style, as if it has been deliberately cultivated, and that signs of radical difference are suppressed. For example, I saw no shop signs in Arabic, Chinese, or in other languages, as you do in Sydney.

I. M. Claude Levi-Strauss

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

Claude Levi-Strauss Tristes Tropiques, last paragraph

Obituary

Subjectivity in poetry

4) Michael Brennan: What is the function or place of subjectivity in your poetry?

Adam Aitken: I have always struggled with the place of ego in poetry, which is not to be confused with subjectivity. Ego refers to the sense of self-identity that is as much a part of how I think people see me. Subjectivity is less about representing my self - my image - to the world. Subjectivity is more akin to consciousness beyond the sense of identity, self-pride, and my distinctiveness in the world. For me subjectivity is phenomenological, a consciousness of what exits in the mind. I try to evacuate my own ego, but at the same time I am suspicious of poets who want to claim a universal objectivity.

Romanticism is something I studied at university and there was "new Romantic" aesthetic that Robert Adamson promoted in the 80s, probably as a reaction to John Tranter's attack on "confessional" poetry, and the hippy discourses of the 70s. My own father went to Asia for business, but found romance and an alternative to Anglo-celtic mercantilism. I've been trying to negotiate an in-between position ever since, and I am veering away from poetry as self-expression. I feel that a poem can offer a humanistic understanding of life only by digging through the layers of subjectivity which condition our thinking. I still watch BBC versions of Wuthering Heights and think yes, people still have their lives be governed by romance, jealousy etc... They aren't really interested in government economic policies. Perhaps the German poets like Rilke and Trakl encouraged me to think inwardly, and Rilke's short lyrical poems on art works and animals was especially influential. When I was very young I read Rimbaud for the first time and was struck by his great destruction of bourgeois “common sense”. My training an English language teacher and linguist has also taught me that language is a code and that we are all trapped to some extent by language and its limitations. I am very interested in bi/multi-lingual consciousness, where a state of experience can only be expressed by one language and cannot be translated into another. Hence my interest in languages.

I also don’t think poetry can address subjectivity as philosophy can. Poetry is not a discipline like philosophy. Poetry creates subjectivity in a much less propositional fashion than philosophy. To sound lyrical, subjectivity is sung into being by poetry. Philosophy tends to deconstruct what poets prefer to leave mysterious.

La source ?

I like these cast iron doors for wine tanks. Behind the doors are concrete tanks, not unusual in the traditional wineries, but more a going to stainless steel.

Oracular formulae

This Little Place in France

For Pam Brown and Jane Zemiro

'Oracular formulae too speedily deciphered at dawn'
unable to cure this malady of silence
I relied 'on my single breathe to climb'
to the top of the mountain
where you can find
Mother Mary, a more-than-life size effigy,
doubling there as a lightning rod,
a surveyor's plaque, old shotgun cartridges
and views of villages named after saints
and villas sold off to retiring Northerners.

The roadmaps never fail, except in August
when a new roundabout's complete.
All of it beautiful
but not quite out of reach
in September's mist of burning leaves
when chasseurs bring out their blunderbusses.
Rumours of accidental shootings - the drawback
of camouflage is you become
another man's pig.

This little village has no twin - no cafes
or a bookshop like Blackheath.
As far I know only one man has ever
come here to write - Professor Ratz
the archaeologist who collects old ploughs
and Gallic pottery shards, who
on the national heritage day
mounts his friendly lecture in the Mairie

when the town's significance
rises up out of old mine shafts
and the people congregate
at the old clock tower
and we believe 'that a few signs remain' -
the puff of smoke, the fading motor
of a bread van.
We are not quite lonely here and
on the Rue d'Amondier
especially on days like this,
no 'self torn to pieces and suffocating'
to be seen.
Well, not yet.

Answering Mike Brennan's survey of Australian poetry (Part 1)

Comments and feedback invited.

1) When did you start writing and what motivated you?

I started around age 15. My parents had recently divorced and a friend of my mother offered her the use of his flat. He is a writer and his flat was stocked with books, including early issues of New Poetry and Poets Choice. I read a few anthologies of European and Australian poetry and felt I could contribute to the art. My mother also shared a love of recital and we shared many evening reading poetry aloud. The fact that my mother’s friend was a successful poet and good friend motivated me. I bought myself a typewriter.

2) Who are the writers that first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?

David Malouf was my first inspiration as far as Australian literature was concerned. After reading Michael Hamburger’s anthology of German Poetry, I found a kind of voice that was serious, surreal, but precise, even though I didn’t read German. Robert Adamson and the poets he published in New Poetry were also important to me in the late 70s. Michael Dransfield was also influential, though I was too young to enjoy his drug poetry. In the early 80s my English course at Sydney University introduced me to American poetry, and the lectures of James Tulip and Don Anderson were wonderful inspirations. I began to attend informal poetry workshops which had been hosted by Dennis Haskell, a lecturer at Sydney Uni. there I was probably closest to Dipti Saravanamuttu and Susan Hampton. I was also encouraged by the wonderful poet and editor of a magazine called Compass, Chris Mansell. In my final year I met John Forbes. Gig Ryan, Pam Brown, Phillip Hammial and John Tranter, and I felt they kind of “adopted” me in some way. Judith Beveridge was also an early acquaintance and as a peer she was unstinting in her encouragement. Although I had joined “the wrong club”, I was on good terms with Judith’s friend Robert Gray, who was very encouraging. I read all these writers now.

3) How important is 'everyday life' to your work?

Not very. That's said I am interested in 'everyday language', you know whatever's on the radio, in the news, the local paper, shopping lists etc. I have a very ordinary everyday life and don’t write about it much. I seem to write more after I have traveled or lived outside of Australia. Everyday life is after all different wherever you live. Perhaps I could say that other people’s everyday lives offer much more interest than my own. Perhaps I should also say that “everyday language” is important, insofar as it reveals as much about life as it obscures. To recycle a cliché, poetry is a means to uncover the mysteries behind everyday life, but the mysteries can’t exist without the everyday.

Beverley Martyn's Primrose Hill

Thanks To Jill Jones for sending me the lyrics for Beverley Martyn's song 'Primrose Hill. (BTW, PH can boast Frederick Engels as one of its previous residents).


Primrose Hill

Went to see the sun go down on Primrose Hill
The Sunday evening sun go down on Primrose Hill
Never could be anything else
Never should be anything else
Cos I like that kind of life
I like that kind of life.

Never thinking too far ahead
Hanging high, I fall to bed
That's the only kind of life I've led
Just the pictures in your room
Smell the rose's sweet perfume
While you're around, you've got to hear this tune
And all those groovy guys
And all those groovy guys.

We went to see the sun go down on Primrose Hill
The Sunday evening sun go down on Primrose Hill
Never could be anything else
Never should be anything else
Cos I like that kind of life
I like that kind of life
Do you like that kind of life?
Do you like that kind of life?
Do you like that kind of life?

The New Jerusalem

Primrose Hill is referred to in a Beverly Martyn songs, but also by William Blake:
"...The fields from Islington to Marylebone/To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood/Were builded over with pillars of gold/And there Jerusalem's pillars stood..." According to Wiki

It was upon Primrose Hill which the poet-illustrator supposedly climbed and had conversations with the Spirit of the Sun. He also believed that this area would eventually be the foundation for one of the pillars of the biblical New Jerusalem.

Primrose Hill, old Piano Factory

This is the view from Sally Crossfield's flat in Primrose Hill. Sally is descended from the Cadburies and the Crossfields, both Quaker families. Sally likes Quaker furniture and collecting hand carved wooden objects.

Primrose Hill

A park bench with dedication plaque, Primrose Hill, North London.