When I was young, I wrote a book. I enjoyed the launch so much, I wrote another one. Then, another. The habit caught until I couldn't kick it. So when I wrote my twelth book, I took it around the country. It also coincided with my 70th birthday, so I stood tall and proud, especially in front of works by one of my favourite Australian artists, Brett Whiteley at the gallery that holds his name in Sydney.
Now I am back in the country town where we see out our days - Corowa, New South Wales. There are about six pubs here but no bookshop, so I know how difficult it is to go fishing for interesting books.My I boastfully claim mine to be very interesting - Take a look yourself at http://store.walleahpress.com.au It is a bargain at $20!
Here's one launch speech, by Lyn Reeves, in Hobart -
Another by Andy Jackson at Collected Works in Melbourne
Novelist and long-time friend, Nicholas Hasluck, launched ONE HOUR in Perth with these words:
REMARKS
BY NICHOLAS HASLUCK AT THE LAUNCHING OF ‘ONE
HOUR SEEDS ANOTHER’ BY ANDREW BURKE AT MATTIE FURPHY HOUSE, SATURDAY 2
AUGUST 2014
We
are here for the launch of Andrew Burke’s book of poetry One Hour Seeds Another. It might also be said that ‘one book seeds
another’, for this is Andrew’s eighth [Ed: 12th] book of poetry and, as I aim to show in
the course of my remarks, there are links between the various books which say
something about the poet’s style and the nature of his preoccupations.
I
am conscious, of course, that any attempt to review a particular poet’s output
over many years bring to mind that age-old lament so ably voiced by the poet
Wordsworth when he said: ‘We poets in our
youth begin in gladness / but thereof at the end comes despondency and madness.’
Fortunately, there are exceptions to nearly every rule. It will emerge from
what I have to say that Andrew is an exception to Wordsworth’s dire warning.
And when it comes to writing he is more than willing to break any rule that
might stand in the way of reconfiguring his life and times. As he notes at page
3 of the book: ‘In poetry, being off duty
is part of the job.’ [Bernstein]
I
first met Andrew at a poetry reading in Tom Collins House given many years ago.
A report of the occasion dated 2 December 1967 refers to the Fellowship of
Writers holding its annual ‘wind-up’. It goes on to say that ‘among members who
have had books published this year are Katherine Susannah Prichard, Henrietta
Drake-Brockman, Griffith Watkin, John Barnes, Vincent Serventy, Gerry Glaskin
and Lucy Walker.’ The poets represented at the reading included Ian Templeman,
Bill Grono, Andrew Burke, Viv Kitson, Noelene Burtenshaw, Merv Lilley, Dorothy Hewett’ and several others. So we
were in good company that night, and it pleases me to recall the occasion for
several reasons. It marked the beginning of some long-standing friendships, and
I am conscious also that Andrew has dedicated the book being launched today to
his friend and fellow writer Viv Kitson who was there that evening but unfortunately,
like some of the others, is no longer with us.
I
forget how Andrew introduced himself back then but it may well have been along
the lines of his poem Self Portrait which
was later published in Soundings, the
first book put out by the fledgling Fremantle Arts Centre Press. The poem in
question is a deeply introspective piece of soul-searching which reads as
follows: ‘mainly have always lived in
Perth / have mainly always lived in Perth / have always mainly lived in Perth /
have always lived mainly in Perth / have always lived in Perth mainly / born
Melbourne 1944.
The
photograph that accompanied this and other Burkean poems in the anthology is a
head and shoulder shot of a youngish poet with a splendid ‘Ginsbergian’ beatnik
beard. There are traces of that era in
the present book when Andrew mentions ‘riding
a Greyhound bus / I think of Kerouac and co / in this sparse / Australian
landscape on / an air-conditioned coach / reading AA recovery stories / socking
water back.’ There was certainly a
touch of Ginsberg, Snyder and some of the other ‘beats’ in Andrew’s first book Let’s Face the Music and Dance which was launched by Peter Jeffrey at the Old
Fire Station Gallery in West Leederville, shortly before the Soundings anthology came out. It’s a
great pleasure to see Peter Jeffrey here today and to recall that earlier
launch, attended by a jazz band and a clamour of general revelry.
These
early books were followed by On the Tip
of My Tongue, Mother Waits for Father Late and Pushing at Silence. By then Andrew had become well-known for
readings at venues all over the city from the Stoned Crow at Fremantle to the
Stables in Mount Street and the decrepit upstairs loft off King Street, the
exact location of which now escapes me. Wherever it was, it gave heart to poets
young and old, although we were sometimes reading mostly to ourselves. In the
midst of all this, in Andrew’s poetry, one caught the echo of the contemporary,
metropolitan experience – fragmented rhythms, fleeting allusions, quips and
parodies, a style affected by what was happening overseas, but with an
Australian tone, and with an increasing emphasis upon the ups and downs of life
on the home front, the gains and losses of domestic experience and of the
workplace. There is something of this in
the books that Andrew brought out later including Beyond City Limits and Whispering
Gallery.
Mentions
of Whispering Gallery prompts me to recognise
in passing the work done by Roland Leach of Sunline Press, a fine poet himself
and the publisher of that book. At a time when poets are finding it
increasingly difficult to get their works into print, he gave heart to many. I
note in passing also that author’s photograph on the dust-jacket of Whispering Gallery presents a scrubbed-up
and clean-shaven version of Andrew Burke, but the poetry within – fortunately -
continues to thumb its nose at the rule book and goes its own way.
And
so we come finally to Andrew’s latest work One
Hour Seeds Another. It struck me immediately, upon a first reading of the
book, that there were indeed many links to the earlier works, and echoes of
former ventures and relationships. The first poem in the book commences: ‘You open my pages. Memories fly out, / roots
still growing. Clouds / float our globe
in shapes by the elements. / Start here: we could render them meaningful …
/. The reader will find that in many of the poems there is a poignant sense of the
past revisited and the youthful foibles of other days. In ‘Under a Black Beret’, for instance, the poet is pictured ‘ … still in my school suit / ordering café
noir, s’il vous plait at El Calib / or late night at The Coffee Pot / where
they’d put on Oscar Petersen Plays / Porgy and Bess when I walked in.
El
Calib. The Coffee Pot. Poems of this kind will have a special resonance for
many readers, and it was this that prompted me to return to some of Andrew’s
earlier works and various adventures. But one has to be careful in giving too
much emphasis to the vagaries of biography. I was reminded of this while
reading a piece by the American poet and novelist John Updike. He had this to
say about the process of recording the ups and downs of a life, the jobs held,
the worries confronted, and so on: ‘The
trouble with literary biographies, perhaps, is that they mainly testify to the
long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and
disappointments pile up, and they cannot convey the unearthly human innocence
that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the
real one.’
There
is much of value in these reflections, and they proved to be of use to me in
singling out the merits of Andrew’s book. In this context Updike is using the
word ‘corruption’ not as a synonym for malevolence, but simply as another way
of describing a process of wearing down or distorting. I take him to be saying
that an inventory of the external or worldly events of a life, the mundane
matters that may be of interest to a biographer, will leave an incomplete or
false impression, for a portrait of that kind is bound to omit a number of
interior or ‘other-worldly’ facets of the life in question. For most people,
underlying what happens on the surface, is the sense of personal joy or wonder,
the moments of illumination, that influence their actions. It takes a poet to
bring this home to us by enriching the scraps and fragments of the daily round
that remind us of our ‘unearthly human innocence.’
These
reflections help me to define a singular quality in Andrew’s poetry, in this
book, and in his earlier works. In many of the poems there are autobiographical
elements, be they haikus or longer pieces, episodic or carefully structured renderings,
light or sombre, but underlying these elements there is a generally a sense of
discovery and wonder, one could almost call it gladness. In this way he refutes
the Wordsworthian rule I mentioned at the outset and underlines the wisdom of
that other rule I quoted earlier: ‘In
poetry, being off duty is part of the job.’
With
these thoughts in mind it gives me great pleasure to declare that One Hour Seeds Another is now well and
truly launched. I urge you to buy several copies, for yourself and for your
friends.
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