The Waggafish Letters

Dispatch From The Front: Day 43

2010-04-24T22:32:00.000-07:00

Bikers at the park in Parsley Bay, standing around in amazement after Blodgett throttled half the gang.

Geoffrey Hill in the special room he had built off to the side of Yeats’ oyster shed. He is shown here preparing for his reading of King Log during the festival.

The ‘Woman washing her hair’ tree outside Geraldton in Dennis Hopper’s vision.

As Blodgett reached the road he saw a group of bikers at a smoking hotplate in the park. On the crest of a hill, kites dipped and soared as if the trees had released them. A cockatoo wheeled over. Blodgett stopped to watch it tumble and angle away into the blood-letting of a huge angophora. He could hear the bikers. They were talking about how The Little River Band should have been invited to the festival. “And Max Merritt and the Meteors,” said one. “Fucken oath,” said another, “and don’t forget Bill Thorpe and the Aztecs.” Blodgett had been a fan of country music since he was a teenager. He also considered himself an expert Australia’s contemporary music, and he knew that these bikers were out of their depth. Their vision was so narrow and obvious, it made Blodgett laugh. As he passed their picnic area, he said “So, you love your country music then?” The bikers stopped eating and drinking and stared at him. “Can’t see how you’d call Max Merritt country,” Blodgett scoffed. Two of the bigger bikers edged around the picnic table and took a few steps towards him. “I mean, The Little River Band might just get one vote for their pseudo country airs and faces, but c’mon fellas, the bands you mentioned are rock and pop and,” he stopped to make a huge theatrical show of wiping his brow, “they’re gone! The time of Sherbet and John Paul Young and all those other saccharine pansies has passed uneasily into history. It’s time to move on.” The other bikers had abandoned the barbecue. Blodgett knew he was in trouble, and he welcomed it. “So tell me,” he said loudly and slowly. “What’s a bunch of filthy, leather-bound, pop-loving, out-of-time-and-mind fools like you doing in a dump like this” The bikers came at Blodgett like the remnants of a heathen tribe on the edge of madness and starvation. They wanted blood and meat and they were going to feast. Blodgett side-stepped and hammered the first two into the ground with his fists. The others came on blindly, swinging and cursing and throwing saliva. Blodgett grabbed them, lifted them off the ground and bashed them together. He crouched and turned, kicking them away as they came again. “For a bunch of flowers in a strange land, you’re feisty,” he laughed as he belted a biker into the river. “Who are you?” a biker said from the grass. “My name is Blodgett,” said Blodgett,” and walked off over the grass to the track that led around to the main harbour.

Dennis Hopper stared from the rear window of Andrew Burke’s Monaro. “Can’t say I’m going to miss Geraldton,” he said. “But it does have a certain... red allure.” Burke adjusted the rear-view mirror and looked at Hopper. “Is it true you’re an explosives expert?” Dennis removed his sunglasses and spoke to Andrew’s eyes in the mirror. “Expert is a bit extreme, but I know my way around a detonator, a fuse and the sweat-stains on a stick of dynamite.” Michael Dransfield turned and leaned over the seat. “We might need your help,” he said. “But first we’re going to where the ghost of Randolph Stowe still blows through the dunes and trees near Greenough,” he said. “But Stowe isn’t dead,” Andrew said, a hint of alarm in his voice. “Is he?” “Michael is using the word ‘ghost’ parenthetically,” Dennis Hopper said, his breath blooming on the window glass.

They drove in silence until Dennis started whistling Ghost Riders in the Sky. When he finished, he said “I still don’t know what you two have planned, but I’m sensing there’s magic and intrigue afoot, and I’m up for it.” Michael Dransfield smiled. Andrew Burke looked through the remaining legs and wings and shells of grasshoppers on the windscreen. He saw how the road out of town was empty and coated with red dust. He re-adjusted the mirror and looked at himself. We wasn’t smiling.

Terry Hack and Moose had been following the Waggaists around town. Whenever the group stopped, the men pretended to be deep in discussion. When they reached the oyster shed, Alison Croggan stepped away from the group and confronted Hack. “Why are you following us?” she said. “We’re not followers, we’re leaders,” Moose said. “I’m not talking to you, budgie-features,” Alison said without looking at him. “We’re not followers, we’re trackers,” Terry said. “Well track yourselves back to whatever oyster lease you were spawned in and leave us alone,” Alison said. Moose looked her up and down. When he saw a lyre-bird feather trailing down outside her jeans, he said “Bit of an ornithologist, are ya?” “What?” Alison said impatiently. Moose pointed to the feather. “Bit of a collector of local imitators, are ya?” Alison tucked the feather into her jeans. “Listen,” she said quietly. “I have no issue with you, so leave us alone.” Terry Hack spoke into his two-way: “Terry to Bill. Come in, over.” “Bill here, Terry. What’s happening, over?” “Get yourself to Yeats’ oyster shed immediately. And bring some planks. Over and out.”

When Lynyrd Skynyrd walked out on stage the crowd erupted. Ronnie van Zandt was beaming. As was his style, he was wearing a t-shirt, jeans and bare feet. As guitarist Steve Gaines picked the opening chords of Simple Man, Ronnie spoke to the crowd. “We’ve come a long way to be here, but it’s not about distance. Brooklyn is a backwater, and that’s the kind of country we know and love. Give me the swamp over the city. Give me the dirt road over the highway. C’mon, let’s kick the loose gravel home!”

Blodgett had to knock out three security guards at the rear festival gate to gain access. He had no tickets, no money, no clothes. Since the Island War, he’d been living on his nerve and cunning. Using a bagful of palm-fibre snares he’d stolen from Amanda Joy, he’d been trapping rabbits and birds and collecting water from the toilet block in Parsley Bay. When young, growing up in the wilds in the far north of Canada, he’d had a reputation as a brawler, but had long since let that part of his life slide by. Now the brawler was back. He was going to sort the Waggaists out once and for all, and anyone else who got in his way would be dealt with swiftly.

W.B. Yeats, Devin Johnston, Wallace Stevens and Earnest Hemmingway were in the back bar of the Angler’s Rest. John Berryman was beside himself with nerves. Yeats had taken him aside. “Nerves are a fine thing, John. They restore our faith in feeling the dark and the light. Square your shoulders and step into the fray.” “I’d give anything to sing with Lynyrd Skynyrd,” Wallace Stevens said. “Damn right,” Papa Hemmingway said. “Great band, great venue, just get your ass out there and give ‘em hell.” John Berryman finished his pint of Guinness and walked to the door. He saw Geoffrey Hill over in the corner of the main bar talking to Robert Duncan and a few of the golden codgers he’d brought with him from Budgewoi. Duncan raised his cup of tea: “Have fun, John,” he said. David Gilbey and Elizabeth Campbell stopped playing pool and wished him luck. Chris Wallace-Crabbe was still upset at not being offered the job as leader of the Poets, even though there seemed to be no core group to lead and nothing much to do. “Are you coming to hear me sing, Chris?” Berryman said across the crowded room. “No. I think I’ll just stay here and read,” Wallace-Crabbe said. As Berryman walked down the steps towards the marina, Emmylou Harris came running towards him, waving her arms madly. “Where have you been?” she shouted. “You are supposed to be in the green room, waiting to go on.” Berryman shrugged. “Ok,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

Andrew Burke stopped the car outside Greenough. He pointed at a huge tree, its branches lying along the ground where the prevailing winds had prevented it from growing normally. “Randolph Stowe called it the ‘woman washing her hair’ tree,” Andrew said. Dennis Hopper got out of the car and walked to the side of the road. He could see the image clearly, but he also saw death, and sadness, and memorial. He saw a sarcophagus. He saw beauty and decay. The scene overwhelmed him, and he wept. He walked over to the tree and ran his hands along a branch. “Darling,” he said. When Dransfield and Burke joined him, he said “I must read this Stowe fellow. I feel he has much to tell me.”

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 42

2010-04-24T01:22:00.000-07:00

Bob Russo at Hawkesbury River Station.

Blodgett emerging from his cave above Parsley Bay.

M.C. Escher adjusted a large screen and then stepped back as it came to life: a flickering, luminous scene involving hundreds of boats, seagulls and sparkling water. “We will not be able to negotiate a safe passage down this crowded river,” he said. Ted Hughes thought for a moment, then said “I suppose we could swim ashore. We’re not far from land.” Dorothy Hewett laughed bitterly: “Not far from land, but much too close to those fucking Waggafish. Forget it, Ted.” Lucinda Williams was pacing up and down. “I don’t care how we get to Brooklyn, but we’ve got to make it there soon. I’m expected on stage. I can’t let Emmylou down.” T.S. Eliot rubbed his chin: “To live is to fly,” he said. The others turned to look at him. Escher smiled: “Mr Eliot is right. I wasn’t going to suggest this because it might seem too odd.” “Too odd?” Dorothy said. “Are you kidding? This whole thing has been beyond odd. It’s beyond surreal. What’s on your mind, admiral?” Escher strode to a large red box against the far wall. He lifted the lid, reached in and withdrew what looked like a deflated rubber bladder with cords trailing from its riveted edges. He held it in front of him. “What’s that? An octopus head?” asked Ted Hughes. “A box jellyfish?” asked Lucinda. “It’s a balloon,” Escher said. “I have been experimenting for years with personal balloons - small, intimate versions of your standard hot air balloon, except my balloons don’t have a basket, obviously, and they are controlled by drawstrings.” Ted Hughes knew something about aerodynamics. He understood the basics behind maneuvering parachutes to earth accurately. “Ridiculous,” he said. “Can’t be done. Too dangerous. We’ll die. Fall to earth. No thanks.” M.C. Escher lowered the balloon. “May I at least give a demonstration?”

Alison Croggan was taking in the scene. She was standing back from the stage as preparations for Lynyrd Skynyrd and John Berryman were finalised. At the back of the stage was a huge photo of Ronnie van Zandt on a palomino horse, and beside him, on a John Deere tractor, John Berryman, staring out from under a large straw hat. “This is a bloody circus,” Alison said.

Bill Wisely had been watching Alison. There was something not quite right about her. It wasn’t just that she had been leading a group of badly-dressed people around Brooklyn; it wasn’t just that they didn’t seem to be that interested in the town, the people, the buskers, or the general atmosphere; it was a dark feeling that had been growing inside him, and now he wanted to find out what was going on. He watched as Alison stood before the stage, her arms folded. He tucked his plank into his trousers, buttoned his coat, and moved to stand beside her. “Lovely evening,” he said. Alison jumped. She looked at Bill through her hair, then returned her gaze to the stage. “Are you a Skynyrd fan?” he asked. Alison did not speak or move. Bill looked around at her followers. “Are your friends fans of country music?” he asked. Alison Croggan turned to him. “Please do not speak to me again,” she said. Bill smiled and touched the handle of his plank through the fabric of his coat. “Sorry,” he said. “Just trying to be friendly. It’s just that you look like a country-loving woman, and I thought you might like a chat.” Alison’s face was going red. “You see,” Bill continued, “I live here, and I’m also head of security for this festival, and I like to know that everything’s on the level, if you know what I mean.” He leaned in and put his mouth to Alison’s ear. “And you look a bit off centre,” he whispered. Alison’s face was now the colour of beetroot juice. “Fuck off,” she said, and turned away. The Waggaists followed her. Bill watched them walk off through the crowd. He spoke into his two-way radio. “You there, Terry? Over.” Terry Hack’s voice came through: “Hearing you loud and clear, Bill. Over.” “There’s a group of people heading your way led by a woman with a red face. Can you let me know where they go and what they’re doing? Over.” “Will do. Wilco. Roger. Over.” “Shut the fuck up and just get onto it Terry. Over.”

Dr Greene had finally arrived by train and was standing at the base of the railway station stairs. Bob Russo was beside him, the tail of his fox-skin cap whipping around in the wind. Dr Greene was looking at the festival program. “I don’t want to miss Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Charlie Daniels Band,” he said. “And The Jayhawks,” Bob Russo said. Dr Greene looked down at the red, humming container at his feet. “Are you ready for the country, Bob?” “Ready,” Bob said, and grinned like a hillbilly.

Blodgett woke from a fitful sleep and stretched. He was in a cave high in the bush overlooking Parsley Bay. He had a pounding headache and his feet ached. He’d been more reclusive these past few weeks than at any time in his life. He knew the other poets would be worried about him, but he’d had to do what he sensed was right. He’d been drinking heavily, but now it was time to get back to community. His isolation had given him the charge he needed. Things were in sharp relief. The situation was clear. He was missing Canada, but he had to tie up loose ends. He emerged slowly from the cave and looked down at the bay. From the other side of the hill he could hear a guitar coming and going on the wind. The evening was perfect. The time was right. He stepped down into the scrub and set off for the marina.

It took a lot of convincing before the poets and Lucinda Williams accepted the balloons Admiral Escher had offered them. Dorothy Hewett was first to take one into her hands. She looked down at the large collapsed balloon with its trailing cords. “If I end up in the fucking river, I’m going to put a curse on you that will turn your drawings to mush,” she said, then she smiled. “Imagine. Coming down outside The Rest. Old Bill Wisely will shit planks.” Admiral Escher opened the roof of the Red Oblong and began filling the balloons from a cylinder of helium gas. When all the balloons were bobbing and straining at the ends of their leads, everyone stepped into their harnesses and got ready to fly. T.S. Eliot stepped up the velvet-covered ladder and stood on a small panel below the lip of the roof of the Oblong. Admiral Escher waited for the breeze to swing around to the West, then called out for T.S. to jump. He jumped, and sailed away, slowly and steadily towards Brooklyn. As the others watched him go, an air of excitement filled the Oblong. Lucinda Williams stepped up, took a deep breath, and jumped away. Ted Hughes and Dorothy followed her. As Ted lifted away, he looked down and saw that Escher was standing inside the Oblong holding a balloon in his hands. “Admiral, come on!” Ted shouted. Escher waved and smiled. “My place is here,” he said, “Buon viaggio, Edward!”

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 41

2010-04-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

Frederick Seidel impersonating John Denver with a Waggaist at the festival in Brooklyn.

Shelby as Gram Parsons at the Angler’s Rest.

Merle Haggard looking like Bukowski and Leonard Cohen.

Led Zeppelin’s air ship outside the oyster sheds.

Michael Dransfield, Andrew Burke and Dennis Hopper were sitting out on the end of the Geraldton break wall. Dransfield was flicking lures around, prospecting for tailor. Andrew Burke was listening to Hopper talk about film. “Life is a B-Grade masterpiece. Every script is flawed and everyone knows the story. Dialogue is what happens when the lights and camera turn you on. It’s all bullshit. Sometimes I wish the continuity people would fuck off and let it all unravel. Brando might be a dickhead, but he understands the need to step away from the script. He’s ad-libbed his way through some monster scenes and you wouldn’t fucking know it. A true genius. Directors go white and tear at their hair, but in the end he brings it all on home. You can trust him to ride the edge on he backstreet, then return to the well-lit highway. He taught me how to trust my fear. Pete Fonda, now there’s another story. In a publicity shot, he used a black and white photo of Richard Tipping, and everyone was taken in. ‘Great photo, Pete,’ they said, and Fonda just smiled and said nothin’. I love that guy. Should have made more of his talent. Same with lots of guys. Sean Penn, now there’s brilliance in a blood basket. Fuck he can act. Do anything, be anyone. Studies his character with a surgeon’s precision, then roughs up the edges, so what you get is the human and the fiction in bed. I love watching that guy work. He can step out of his trailer with a hangover, rub his face, take a hit of coffee, then walk on set and into frame and be fucking spellbinding. Not many have that.” Hopper lit a cigarette and looked over at Dransfield, who was into a nice tailor, working the fish around to the shallows. “I used to fish,” he said. “James Dickey took me out on the Coosawatee River in Georgia. That’s the river in Deliverance. I had my old fiberglass pole and a bashed-up reel and a tin full of rusted hooks. Dickey had his hunting bow and arrows with blade-heads. The guy is a maniac. He shot fish. Fuck he was good. Just stood up in the boat, pulled back the string, took a deep breath, waited, then fired. His arrows had fishing line attached to the ends of the flights, and he just reeled the thrashing trout back to the boat. Dickey fishes the way he writes poetry - with his whole body. A visceral specimen.” Dennis Hopper stood up and stretched. “I want to go home,” he said. “But there are things to do.” He looked down at Burke and removed his Ray-bans. “Isn’t that right, Andrew?”
The Ambulance drove slowly through the crowded streets of Brooklyn. Alison Croggan was staring straight ahead, focussed and silent. She saw Emmylou Harris in the crowd and noticed how Emmylou was talking quickly and lightly, using her hands and giving directions. She hated her smile. She loathed the woman’s effortless way with people. Then she saw Charlie Daniels. He was leaning back on a railing at the wharf, his fiddle under his chin, chipping away at a tune. She eased the ambulance to the side of the road outside Tom’s fish and chip shop. “Stay together,” she told the Waggaists. “Don’t speak to anyone. If we need to engage with these fuckwits, let me do the talking.” The doors opened and the Waggaists stepped out into a warm day. A light breeze was coming off the river. There was music everywhere. The huge stage was ready. As they walked along the waterfront, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama began thumping through the P.A.
A water taxi pulled into the marina and idled at the wharf as three men stepped out with their bags. Security approached them and asked them for their tickets, but when they saw who the men were, they greeted them warmly and let them through. John Denver, Gram Parsons and Merle Haggard stood and looked around from under their hats. “This is going to be good,” said Frederick Seidel. “You look even more like Denver than Denver,” said Shelby, who was wearing a country shirt with red poppies and cactus embroidered into it. “And you are Gram Parsons personified,” said Haggard. Seidel and Shelby didn’t bother addressing Haggard’s persona, despite the fact that he was looking more and more like Bukowski morphed into Leonard Cohen. Merle was was in a filthy mood. “Let’s go find Emmylou Harris,” he snarled.
As the afternoon wore on and the crowd got drunk and the sky darkened at the edges, talk began spreading about a curious shape that had appeared at the mouth of the river. The words “Red Oblong” went through the festival until they reached the ears of W.B Yeats and Devin Johnston, who were up at the Angler’s Rest, drinking Guinness with John Berryman, Ronnie van Zandt and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats stood up and drained his glass. “Let’s welcome them,” he said. Berryman declined, saying he needed to finalise things with van Zandt, as they were due on stage in a few hours. Geoffrey Hill was too pissed to move. He waved Yeats away. “Screw ‘em,” he slurred. “Let ‘em swim ashore.” Yeats frowned and nodded to Devin, “Then we will do the right thing,” he said. “While courtesy does not demand sobriety, it requires our full attention. Come, Devin.”

As Yeats and Johnston walked through the crowd, a slow shadow passed over them. People began talking loudly, then everyone was shouting and pointing into the sky. Yeats looked up and saw a huge airship. It was moving slowly, about a hundred feet up. The crowd watched as the airship came to a stop above the oyster shed at the end of the wharf. Devin was smiling. “Come on, W.B., let me introduce you to something truly amazing. The Red Oblong can wait.”
When they reached he oyster shed, the airship had descended and a rope had been tied to an old wharf pylon. A set of stairs had been lowered, and men with long hair and wearing colourful clothes were stepping down onto the road. “Led Zeppelin!” someone shouted. The crowd began pushing forward, but Bill Wisely, Terry Hack, Moose and the Sons of Zebedee stepped out in front of them and started waving their planks. “Hello Brooklyn!” Robert Plant shouted, and the crowd went wild. “It’s good to be back in Australia, Jimmy Page said as he moved along the front of the crowd, signing autographs. John Paul Jones said bugger-all, and moved to stand to one side, fiddling with his hair and looking uncomfortable. “Where are those fucking Waggas?” growled John Bonham, holding his fishing rod and tackle box. Bill Wisely glared at him and tightened his grip on the plank. Now was not the time to start swinging, but he sensed that he and Bonham would soon have things to discuss. Emmylou Harris emerged through the side door of the oyster shed. She was smiling, but her eyes were troubled. Led Zeppelin were one of the world’s greatest rock bands. Their presence was going to steal the thunder of the other performers. Now that word had got out, things were surely going to fall apart quickly. She called out to Robert Plant, who came over and shook her hand. She told him of her fears, and Plant just laughed. “Don’t worry darlin,’ he beamed. We love country music. We don’t have any plans to play, unless of course we’re asked. You can rely on us to help in any way we can.” Emmylou was relieved. She invited the band into the oyster shed, where she arranged to have a special corner made up for them but Plant declined. “We’ll sleep in the air ship.” Bill Wisely watched them go into the shed. “Fucken hippies,” he said.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 40

2010-04-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

A Waggaist hiding in the trees outside Brooklyn.

An empty street in Geraldton.

Dennis Hopper on the beach at Geraldton.

As Michael Dransfield and Andrew Burke drove into Geraldton, a light rain began falling. The place was all but empty. The windy streets were lined with paper bags and other blown refuse. As they rolled down the main street, Michael noticed that many of the offices and businesses had boards and tin-sheets nailed over their windows. He asked if Andrew knew what had happened. Andrew shrugged and pulled over outside an empty bakery. They got out into a cold wind. The rain was heavier now and it angled onto the footpath. “This is very odd,” Andrew said as they sought refuge under an awning. “Last time I was here the place was humming.” As they stood trying to keep dry and wondering what to do, an old woman came around the corner with a red heeler on a leash. The heeler jumped when it saw the poets, then ran to stand beside the old woman where it curled its lip and sat down uneasily. “Excuse me,” Andrew said to her, “but why is Geraldton so quiet? Where is everyone?” The old woman spoke to her dog: “It’s because the show that never came has finally come,” she said. “What show?” Andrew asked. The old woman spoke to her dog again. “The one we said was over before it began,” she said, and nodded. The heeler was looking up at her expectantly. “Could you be a bit more cryptic?” Michael Dransfield said. The old woman looked away from the dog and fixed him with a glare. “Sarcasm is the last refuge of fools and thieves. Come along Red, these men are uneven and dangerous.” The poets watched as she turned the corner, the heeler giving them a lingering look as it went.
The Waggaists emerged from the bush. They were very cold and their bodies had been scratched and torn. Alison Croggan adjusted her lyre-bird skirt and scanned the scene. She saw how the main entrance to town had been fenced where it led down to the Angler’s Rest. A couple of bikers were standing at the main gate, arms folded. An ambulance was parked beside the gate, facing up the road, and Bill Wisley was talking to one of the paramedics. “We need to get through,” Alison said. “But not like this.” She turned and looked around. There were houses close by, and in their backyards she could see Hills hoists and pole-and-twine washing lines with clothes flapping on them. “I need two volunteers to go and steal those clothes,” she said. The Waggaists found sudden interest in the sky and earth. “You, you, and you” she said. The Waggaists cursed, but didn’t argue. They set off in a crouching run, keeping low among the shrubs and tall grass. They entered the yards and unpegged the clothes, then returned with their arms overspilling with fabric. There was barely enough clothing to go around, but they managed to cover most of their bodies. The men had to make do with shorts and jeans, some put t-shirts on, some had to go bare-chested. The women covered themselves with dresses, shorts, jeans, t-shirts, overalls, an ill-fitting assortment of casual and formal wear. The Waggaists stood among the trees and shrubs looking ridiculous and self-aware. “They’ll think we’ve run away from the nuthouse,” someone said. “Well we have,” said another. Alison Croggan stared down the road. Bill Wisely had left the ambulance and had gone back into town. The bikers were still standing at either side of the gate, their sunglasses gleaming. “We need a distraction,” Alison said. She looked around the group. “Now I need someone to get the attention of those paramedics. Who can do a convincing fainting spell?” A man put up his hand. “I can do them for real,” he said. “So what needs to happen before you faint?” Alison asked. “Mostly it’s the sight of my own blood,” he said, “but sometimes all it takes is to remember a time when I was bleeding.” Alison looked back at the ambulance. “Off you go then,” she said. “Get out into the middle of the road and remember away.” The man began stuttering and protesting. “But I might fall down on the road,” he said. Alison Croggan took him aside. “Shut the fuck up and get your blood-fearing arse out onto that road now. When you’ve got their attention, get as close to the side of the road as you can, then do your thing with blood and memory.” He looked around at the others. The others looked away. His lips trembled. “But,” he said, then he saw how Alison’s eyes were clouding over. “Okay,” he said, and walked out gingerly onto the road. He walked a few paces towards the main gate, then stopped and stood with his head bowed. The Waggaists watched and waited. He started swaying. He lifted a hand to his face. The hand fell away and hung by his side. Then he started staggering. The ambulance engine roared into life. He made it to the side of the road and went over. He dropped like a bag of rags and hit the road. The ambulance pulled away from the gate and came roaring up the road. “I want you all to hide. When I get their attention and bring them over, jump them and make sure they don’t get up again.” When the ambulance reached the fallen Waggaist, the paramedics leapt out and knelt down beside him. Then Alison stepped forward. “Aggghhhhh,” she screamed. The paramedics looked over. They saw a woman standing with her face in her hands. Then the woman fell down. One of the paramedics ran over and knelt beside her. Alison was holding her breath. “Better grab the defibrillator,” Jack, I think we’ve got a cardiac arrest.” Jack left the fallen Waggaist, who had come around and was sitting up in the gravel. When he reached his partner he unzipped the red defibrillator bag and knelt down. The Waggaists came out of hiding and fell upon the paramedics. They knocked them out and dragged them away into the trees. They stripped their clothes, then Alison and a young man put the uniforms on. Using vines and the belts, they tied the unconscious men to the base of a tree and gagged them. Alison climbed into the driver’s seat. The other Waggaist joined her up front. The others climbed into the back and closed the door. They only just managed to fit. In a tangle of arms and legs and stolen clothes, they started arguing and shoving as the ambulance pulled away. “Silence!” Alison shouted. “We’re going in.”
Dransfield and Burke were amazed at how quiet Geraldton was. Everywhere they looked the streets were empty. The rain had stopped and a clear sky had given the buildings and houses a startling glow. When they reached the harbour, they got out and stood on the sand. The breakwall’s broken spine went out into deep water. On the far side of the bay, a stand of pines looked like a watercolour bleed. As they looked around, they saw someone at the far end of the beach. They took off their shoes and started walking towards this lone figure. As they got closer they could see it was a man. He was holding a large black book in his hands. When the man saw the poets he raised the book in welcome. “Hello friends,” the man said in an American accent. He was dressed in black jeans, a black shirt, black boots and was wearing Ray-bans. Michael Dransfield stopped walking and stared at the man. “It’s Dennis Hopper,” he said. “Bullshit,” Andrew Burke said, then looked closer at the man. “Bloody hell, it is Dennis Hopper.” Dennis walked up to the poets and extended his hand. “It’s good to see you,” he said, smiling broadly.
Dennis told the poets he’d been on his way to an island north of Sydney with Marlon Brando more than a month ago. Their friend the poet Philip Levine had told them about the Poetry War, and they were keen to come and lend a hand. Brando had insisted they fly to Perth first as he’d heard there was a restaurant in Fremantle that served the world’s best seafood gumbo. Dennis said he’d soon tired of Brando’s endless demands and moods, and had gone off to a club where he’d scored some speed. Then he’d returned to the restaurant, completely wired and full of talk. Brando was in to his third dish of gumbo, and all but ignored him. “To get his attention, I went into my James Cagney routine, but that just pissed him off,” Dennis said. Then I started reciting his own lines from Apocalypse Now. ‘The horror, the horror,’” Dennis said, and doubled over, laughing. “You should have seen his face. He went pale then red, then he stood up and turned the table over. Shrimp and fish and sauce went flying. Oh Lord, what a carnival!” Andrew Burke was feeling ill. He knew that it was indeed Dennis Hopper there on the sand before him, but nothing he’d ever read, seen or heard approached the madness he felt descending upon him in. “I think we’d better go,” he said to Dransfield, but Michael had gone head-and-heart-first into Hopper’s story. “So what happened then?” he asked. Dennis opened the big black book - a dictionary - and started reading. “Convolvulus,” he said. “A trailing or twining plant with funnel-shaped flowers.” He looked over the black edge of the dictionary. “Isn’t that a beautiful thing?” He opened the book again. “Denouement,” he savoured the word. “The unraveling or clarification of a plot.” He shivered. “Mellifluous words. They steal your breath,” he said. Michael agreed, then said “But why are you in Geraldton?” Dennis Hopper closed the dictionary and looked out over the harbour. “I left Brando to sort things out in the restaurant and went back to the club. I fell in with a very bad crowd. Speed, heroin, the best hash I’ve ever smoked. Whisky. I went under that swift current and stayed there. When I woke up I was in the back of a camper van, just up there near the marina. I’d been driven to Geraldton.” He smiled and removed his Ray-bans. “Isn’t life grand,” he said quietly. Andrew Burke had wandered off and was sitting up on the grass above the beach. He was talking loudly to himself: “Edward Hopper. Grasshoppers. Dennis Hopper,” he said. “Is your friend alright?” Dennis asked. Michael looked up at Andrew. “He’ll be fine,” he said. “He’s just doing it hard with the living and the dead.” “Aren’t we all,” Dennis said. “And who would have it any other way?”

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 39

2010-04-12T01:35:00.000-07:00

A Superb Lyre-Bird mimicking the call of the Waggafish.

The red wheel barrow out back of Ian the Squid Man’s shop.

The free-styling Waggaists were in a tight, thrashing group. As they reached the centre of the river, a loud moaning filled the air. The sound seemed to be coming from the depths of both the water and the pit of despair of itself. Then the sound became like a raw, broken symphony - a chorus-line, where anger, sadness, futility and pain were dividing and reforming. NARAAAGH, the sound was getting louder. And then it became flesh, that of rising, hungry fish, and that of the stricken Waggaists. Two of the weakest swimmers at the back suddenly fell further behind and went under, as if they’d been pulled away by a swift current. The water around them turned red, and then their arms and legs came flying out of the turbulence and floated away. “Keep swimming!” Alison Croggan urged them on. Then the man beside her was torn asunder. A huge school of Waggafish had surrounded the swimmers. Like killer whales working to isolate whale calves, they came at the Waggaists in quick, violent raids, crashing into their bodies then ripping them away and down, where they were torn apart. A wide, red stain was covering the river. By the time they’d reached the far shore, there were only twenty Waggaists left. The limbs and torsos of the others were being ferried away out to sea. Alison Croggan spoke through her tears. “Away,” she said, and walked off into the scrub. The others followed, numb with cold and grief.
They climbed into the escarpment. It was tough going. Branches scratched at their faces and hands. The hard afternoon light gave their bodies an amber, ethereal glow. They climbed and did not speak. Past the blackened trunks of gums, through scribbles of vine and trembling, dusty ferns. They stumbled and fell. When they reached a high sandstone cave, lit as if from within, they sat together and stared back down over the river. The walls of the cave were honeycombed and crumbling. They huddled together, shivering and holding their arms. Alison spoke through her hair: “Whatever happens, we need to be strong. We should reach Brooklyn in a few hours. Keep together. Try not to think about what just happened.” She was about to say something else, when a loud, piercing sound came through the scrub above them. NARAAAGH, NARAAAGH. The Waggaists started shouting and leapt to their feet. They looked around wildly. Waggas in the bush? This was now completely fucked up. Alison stepped from the cave and peered up through the trees. The sound came again. Her first thought was that the poets had come looking for them, and were taunting them from high in the scrub. “Let’s go,” she said. “If they want a fight, then I’m up for it.”
They climbed higher, moving slowly and keeping low in the undergrowth. As they reached the top of the ridge, Alison Croggan parted a screen of sawgrass and raised her hand. “Don’t move,” she whispered. Carefully, she eased her face and shoulders through the sharp serrations of waving green grass. In a clearing, its tail fan spread wide, a lyre-bird was parading and strutting. NARAAAGH, it called. The perfect mimic, it had picked up the cry of the Waggafish and was giving it back to the late afternoon sky. Alison cursed. “Fuck this,” she said. She waited until the lyre-bird had turned away to face the other side of the clearing, then she got to her feet and sprinted after it. She was fast. The lyre bird never had a chance. She grabbed it by the tail-fan and swung it around over her head. The Waggaists watched in amazement as she turned and danced. The lyre bird was calling out in panic. It was repeating a rapid-fire arrangement of sounds from the bush: whip-birds, kookaburras, even chain-saws and the motor-driven shutter from a camera. As it went around and around over Alison’s head, a car alarm went off in the lyre-bird’s mouth. Soon it fell silent, and it closed its eyes. Alison put the bird down onto the earth it had scraped clear. She stood over it, breathing hard. Then she knelt down and began removing its tail feathers. When she had plucked them all, she took a length of vine and began attaching the feathers. When she stood up, she wrapped the tan and white tasseled skirt around her waist and looked at the other Waggaists who had emerged from the saw grass. “What are we going to wear?” asked one. Alison adjusted her skirt. “Go find your own lyre bird,” she said.
Shelby woke with a start and looked around. He was at the back of a bus in the dark, the aisle strip-lighting like an aircraft runway at night. Seidel was beside him, breathing loudly, his head on the window glass. They were heading back to Sydney, where they were going to meet with Merle Haggard then catch a water-taxi to Brooklyn. Merle and Seidel were old friends. Seidel had helped resurrect Merle’s flagging career by injecting large amounts of cash and time into promoting his work. As a gesture of thanks and goodwill, Merle had written a new song for Frederick: The Sod-Buster’s Dream, which he’d sung to Seidel over the phone. Frederick told Merle he thought the song was a masterpiece, where in all honesty he thought it was a piece of shit. A few weeks later, when Haggard found out that Emmylou Harris had not invited him to the festival in Brooklyn, he flew into a violent rage. He called Seidel and said he was going to come anyway, and he was bringing trouble. Seidel didn’t doubt it. When Merle was angry, storm clouds gathered, animals and birds went for cover. When Seidel told Merle how he’d been treated by the poets, Merle completely flipped. Seidel heard stomping, breaking glass, a door slam and then slam again. A bird shrieked and fell silent. A dog yelped. A cat started yowling then made a sound like an electronic blip. When Merle picked up the phone again, he said “You tell those freaks in Brooklyn that Merle Haggard has poets and poetry in his sights, and that his magazine is loaded.”
The Sons of Zebedee dragged the giant Waggafish from the bow of the boat and loaded it into a wheelbarrow, then they went off to Ian the Squid Man’s live-bait shop. Ian had the best filleting knives in town, but he also had a secret sideline in Waggafish blood. He sold small bottles of it out back of the shop. It was so intense in texture and scent, that only a few drops were needed when fishing. The blood infiltrated the water column, attracting fish from miles around. The old locals used it in their burley, and some were said to have developed an addiction to it. You could see them walking around with a red smear on their lips, their eyes glazed over.
Ezra Pound hopped and skipped along behind the wheelbarrow, stroking his beard nervously and whistling like a wattlebird. “Where are you taking that Wagga? I am very fond of the meat in the pouch below the gill-rakers, though I’m also quite partial to the liver. Can you spare an old man a small fillet of delirium?” The Sons just laughed and wheeled the Wagga away into the crowd.
When they got to Ian’s Live-Bait shop, Ian wasn’t there. The Sons went around the side and climbed in through a back window. Ezra remained out front of the shop, cupping his hands at the glass and moving from foot to foot. “Please!” he cried out. “Just a taste!”. Bill Wisely was crossing the street, heading down to the festival stage with an arm-load of planks when he saw Pound outside the shop. “What are you doing you old codger?” Bill shouted. Ezra tried to run away, but Bill went after him and hauled him up by the collar of his coat. “What are you up to, Pound?” Ezra pointed back to the live-bait shop. “They have a Wagga, and they won’t give me any meat.” Bill’s eyes narrowed. “Who has a Wagga?” “The Sons of Zebedee,” Ezra said. “They have a red wheelbarrow glazed with Wagga blood beside the white fridges.” “Stay here,” Bill said, and strode off towards the bait shop. He went to the window and looked in. When he saw what was happening, he took his plank and smashed the lock on the door, then went in swinging. The Sons had removed the Wagga from the wheelbarrow and were just about to start cutting it up when they were floored with a plank. As they tried to get up they were planked again. “This,” Bill panted, “is,” he swung the plank again, “what,” he shouted, “you,” he took aim at a retreating arse, “get,” he gave the arse a whack, “for,” he planked the shield of a hand, “bringing,” the plank came back over his shoulder, “Waggas,” the plank fell, “into,” a Son screamed for mercy, “town!” The Sons of Zebedee had ben laid-out cold on the floor of the bait-shop. Bill Wisely looked down at his handiwork, then put flakes and broken bits of plank into the wheelbarrow. He went to the Wagga, took a filleting knife and cut a sliver of meat from its side. He wrapped it in a square of carpet, then took it out to Ezra Pound.
Led Zeppelin were now passing over the many islands surrounding Fiji. They were flying low, speared along by a potent tail-wind, and were making good time. They were going to be in Brooklyn by mid afternoon on the first day of the festival.
Jimmy Page was looking down, watching the ocean’s surface glitter pour through and over the long rollers of a velvet swell when he noticed a disturbance. Many sea birds had gathered and were diving into and around what appeared to be a dark blue shadow. It was a cloudless day. Then he saw how large fish were patrolling the edge of the shadow. He called to John Bonham. “Are you seeing this?” “Yes,” Bonham replied. “It’s a huge bait-ball.” They watched as the birds and fish swept into and over the dark mass. They had to move down the airship, looking through each window as the airship passed over this foam-flecked, travelling feast. From the last window, they saw a new disturbance - a red cloud was circling the dark blue one like an ocean-borne corona. “Waggas!” Bonham cried. He ran up and down the aisle of the airship, rubbing his hands together and laughing. “Waggas!” he said again. “Fuck the festival, I’m going fishing.”

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 38

2010-04-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

A swarm of red grasshoppers north of Perth.

Robert Duncan with his own edition of the Zohar.

Eurydice in the form of a stone curlew.

Driving north out of Perth into an overcast afternoon, Michael saw how the sides of the highway were blowing with sand, how the bottlebrushes were lighting the air. Despite having company, he inhaled a draught of solitude and turned back to look at the road.
Michael was telling Andrew Burke about the Edward Hopper exhibition when Andrew pointed. “Looks like a storm ahead.” Over the highway, a large red cloud was swirling and pulsing. “Wind up your window, quick!” Andrew yelled. As the Monaro entered the cloud, huge grasshoppers began smashing into the car and exploding on the windscreen. It was a relentless onslaught of wings and armour-plated bodies, all reduced to a red paste on the windscreen glass. The wipers only made it worse. They pulled over as the swarm raged against the car. When the grasshopper cloud had moved on, they got out and watched it go, breaking and reforming on its way south. The mustard-yellow Monaro had a new paint-job, and some of it was still moving.
When they reached Guilderton, they pulled over beside the Moore River and stretched their legs. Michael took his telescopic rod and a small net from his backpack. He screwed on a small Spinfisher reel spooled with 2 kilo braid and attached a 20 gram lure. He stood on the bank, casting the silver lure out into the river, and winding it back fast. On his third cast, the line went tight and he lifted the rod tip, which then slammed down as the fish took off. Andrew Burke watched as Michael Dransfield went to work on a nice tailor. The fish leapt and shook his head, trying to throw the hooks. Burke was impressed. He didn’t know Dransfield was into fishing, and he marveled at Michael’s rod-work as he brought the fish towards the bank. Michael netted the tailor, lifted it from the net and held it up. Its pale green sides flashed in the late afternoon sunlight. He removed the hooks and lowered the fish into the river, where it disappeared with a flick of its tail. “Why did you let it go?” Andrew asked. “We could have had that for dinner.” Dransfield stood up, removed the reel and collapsed his rod. “Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you have to,” he said. Andrew Burke was disappointed. He’d been hoping for a more eloquent, lyrical explanation. He was looking at the spot where Michael had palmed the tailor back into the river. When he turned around to say something, Michael was sitting in the car, his legs up on the dash, the lowered sun visor concealing his face.
Dr Greene and Bob Russo pulled off the road at Gerringong and drove down a narrow dirt road that led to the beach. The Cocteau Twins’ Sugar Hiccup was on the stereo. Bob Russo tapped the dash. “What’s this fucken shit?” Dr Greene spoke to the windscreen: “It’s called sublime music, Bob. I have no Bay City Rollers, Kim Carnes or Barry Manilow with which to soothe and inspire the beast that resides within that Godly frame you call a body.” Bob Russo picked up the CD cover and stared at it. “Oh,” he said. Sarcasm had not eluded Bob all his life, the ability to recognise it had been erased from his brain at birth.
The Waggaists were holding an emergency meeting. I loved that they had convened to meet when every day and every aspect of their lives had been one long, drawn-out emergency.
I’d gone out to Lion Island in Bill Wisely’s tinny to check on their situation. I was anchored out front of the island in a gentle swell when I heard a woman’s voice. I grabbed the binoculars and scanned the scrub. The Waggaists had gathered at the only place on Lion Island where the red fairy penguins couldn’t reach them: in a tree. On top of the Lion’s head was a huge Moreton Bay fig, its branches sprawling and twisting. The Waggaists had covered every part of the main branches - they were like huge red flying foxes standing upright in their torn and stained coats. The woman’s voice cut through the sound of the swell breaking open on the rocks below. Her clear, urgent syllables came through the wind. When I first heard her speak, the voice was vaguely familiar. The more she spoke, a shock of recognition went through me. I glassed the tree slowly, checking every face. Then I saw her. She’d let her hair out. The red hood of her cloak was flapping out in the wind. She was leaning against the skin of a huge branch, one hand gripping it high for balance, the other waving in time with her words. It was Alison Croggan. Was she really a Waggaist, or had she been, like Dorothy Hewett, working under cover the whole time - and if so, what was her agenda? Surely she’d already had the chance to come out and renounce Red Language. “This doesn’t have to end here,” Alison said. “We might have lost The War, but we haven’t lost our fire. The poets think it’s over. They’re down there at Brooklyn getting drunk and sleeping in warm beds while we get cold and wet and starve.” The Waggaists were listening with their heads bowed. Croggan continued. “I have a plan. Their will be pain, physical and emotional. Remember: what doesn’t kill you makes you a darker shade of red.” With those words, she sounded more than convincing. She sounded like a natural-born Red leader. The Waggaists were now muttering and looking around. “But what if we’re wrong?” a man said. “What if the poets are right, and the Red K is indeed nothing more than a manipulative, self-styled, self-promoting mouthpiece for empty rhetoric, badly-edited poems and confused ideologies?” Croggan stared at him. “Then you, my friend, are penguin food. I say we make a swim for the other side. If we form a tight group and swim fast, it won’t take us long.” “What about the Waggafish?” someone said. “Yeah, and the bull sharks!” shouted another. “Baitfish form tight, rolling balls,” Croggan replied. “It confuses predators. There’s safety in numbers.” There was a long, awkward silence. “So, are you with me? If so, we need to leave now, not tomorrow or the day after.” Alison Croggan began climbing down through the branches. Others followed her. Soon many Waggaists were climbing down. As they neared the base of the tree, the red fairy penguins were jumping up and down, snapping and growing. “We need to hit the ground running,” Croggan shouted. “Once we reach the beach, we need to strip off and start swimming. Our cloaks and coats will drag us down. Are you ready?” There was a half-hearted response from the others. “Alright then. One, two, three!” Croggan said, and jumped from the tree. The red fairy penguins went for her but she kicked them away and ran down through the scrub. Most of the other Waggaists followed her, kicking penguins out of the way and removing their clothes. By the time they reached the shore, Alison Croggan was already ten metres out, treading water and urging them on. They dived in a swam out to join her. Up in the scrub, those that had descended the tree but had stalled at its base were being torn to shreds. The screaming was terrible. Those still in the tree were howling and slapping the branches. I pulled the anchor and motored away quickly. Looking back, I could see the water being thrashed to white foam as a desperate group of Waggaists swam for the far shore.
THE FINAL TRANSMIGRATION
Lenka was no longer the passive recipient of his dance. She was burning in blue fire as Shiva smiled at her with his alarming pointed teeth. She was the gold centre, the essence of truth at last, all her savagery gone, reaching further and further into the flashing blades and limbs, blue and red, white and black, she was dissolving, melting, through the gate of fire.

Vicki Viidikas, Kali and the Dung Beetle
Robert Duncan had been performing complex ceremonies. He concentrated on getting each ritual right, pulling together all his knowledge about the transmigration, weaving this into his effort of calling up Eurydice from Hades. She’d already died twice because Orpheus had doubted her love, the second time as they were about to pass through the gates of hell. Duncan wasn’t going to be responsible for a third failure. Eurydice had died twice for love, this was enough even for a myth. Duncan had started his ritual at 3am and now it was almost dawn, he decided to freshen up before his final session. A shower and a cup of herbal tea, a short period of meditation, refer to some books.
After his shower Duncan carefully shaved, dried his hair and toweled himself. He used a towel with the blue crest of the Masonic Temple embossed on the bottom. He made a pot of lemon-grass tea and decided on a change of clothes. His favorite black velvet suit with its waistcoat, cream silk shirt and a black raw-silk tie. He then consulted the Zohar (on loan to him from Christopher Brennan) an edition he wasn’t familiar with, taking up more time than he had to spare. Duncan used the Zohar as a guide in attaining knowledge about the origin of his soul. Just to know how far he was along the path to this, always gave him strength.
Duncan considered the meaning of Eurydice’s time in hell. How long could she remain physically separated from Orpheus before her love would begin to fade? Complex considerations, all factors in the truth and life of myth, things that were unfathomable. Eurydice was another mortal who had been caught up in the whims of Gods, but why had she remained silent - she was like a reflection caught between the silver on the back of a mirror and the surface of its glass, a space of silence. While Orpheus babbled over, water falling, or a skylark embroidering an endless song.
Duncan resumed his secret incantations, his rituals of reclamation. Breathing rebellious fire into the restless soul of Eurydice in Hades. Duncan’s mind and soul were dancing on the border of time and eternity - he felt an affinity with Vicki Viidikas and her lines about being in the ‘gold centre, the essence of truth at last, all her savagery gone, reaching further and further into the flashing blades and limbs, blue and red, white and black, she was dissolving, melting, through the gate of fire’. Duncan could see how the different cultures and myths blended into one vast universe of truth. Figures with glowing heads flew across the heavens, he felt the beginning of Eurydice’s soul’s transmigration. It fluttered and danced and Duncan worked himself into a visionary state. He could tell Eurydice was circling Budgewoi - a migrating bird from the other side of the world looking for a safe waterway to come to rest. Duncan thought of Tennessee William’s Orpheus Descending where he has that image of a tiny legless bird that lives its whole life on the wing ‘they sleep on the wind and never light on this earth but one time when they die!’ Eurydice was free and her soul would return to the paradise of Budgewoi and she would become mortal and never have to live again as a ghost in the underworld.
W.B. Yeats and Devin Johnston came into the library, they were smiling and Duncan knew by this that he had succeeded. These two weren’t false poets like the imitations of Raworth and Baudelaire that came earlier trying to disrupt the proceedings - Red phantoms from the sick imagination of Dr Greene. These two were Duncan’s friends and even their likenesses could not be corrupted. Yeats was an Immortal and Devin Johnston had been studying the alchemical mysteries of the transmigration for years.
“Eurydice’s soul has been released,” Duncan said to Devin. “She will be here any time now.” Yeats padded across the old Persian carpet on the library floor to where Duncan stood and embraced him. “You’ve done it Robert—her soul has risen from the rocks and bird-less trees of Hades.
Devin Johnston was smiling broadly but his intelligent eyes were full of questions.
Duncan was exhausted, he sat down on a lounge chair and sighed, he looked out through the window and watched the cold fire of morning. Bower birds swooped through the ancient grape vines growing over the back fence of the Masonic Hall. The wooden grapes were finished and the leaves were yellow. Zebra finches bounced like tiny balls of red-flecked fluff across the grass. In the primrose silver-eyes darted about like green dashes of electricity, the circles of their eyes streaks of white flake.
Feargal Sharkey was huddled in his hide on the edge of the Budgewoi Sports Ground, he’d been there all night waiting for the first sign of the return of Eurydice. Earlier, at dawn he thought he saw a shape in the rolling mist, the figure of a woman appeared and then turned in the parting mist and dissolved in the morning air. Feargal thought why the hell he was doing this, his clothes were damp, his legs were aching and his neck was stiff. He was about to give up when he noticed a bird walking across the oval. An extraordinary creature with long spindly legs, sepia and fawn cryptic plumage, its head large for its body with huge brown eyes. It was a stone curlew and it came walking across the oval towards Feargal in his hide. The stone curlew was only a few feet away and Feargal felt an overwhelming wave of emotion. A feeling so intense he didn’t know how to respond to the situation. He was balancing on one leg which suddenly filled with a hundred cramps, Feargal toppled over and knocked the structure of the hide over. The curlew panicked and jumped three feet into the air before flying off. Feargal finally eased the pain in his leg and managed to get up. He timidly started walking towards the scrub where the stone curlew had vanished, his feet touching on the heavenly grass as he passed by the goal posts.
WB Yeats and Devin were having a coffee in a beach side café. They were talking about Duncan and wondering when they would find out the fate of Eurydice. “How does it work?” Devin said to Yeats. “How can her soul settle into the body of another living soul?” Yeats thought about this for a while before replying “It’s a great mystery.” When the stone curlew walked under the outside tables of the café, the two poets looked at each other knowingly. The soul of Eurydice had taken up in the body of the stone curlew. Feargal Sharkey came in next, his eyes wild and his silky hair falling over his shoulders. “He saw the poets and said “I’m in love!”
G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 37

2010-04-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

Charles Baudelaire.

Val Kilmer in his role as Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil.

Val Kilmer in his Shelby Mustang driving through Budgewoi.

Dr Greene emerged from his laboratory carrying a large red container. Attached to its side was an aquarium aerator. He put the container down carefully and stretched. He was wearing a leather coat, moleskin trousers and a blue shirt. He adjusted his Akubra to a gunslinging angle and squinted into the hard Ulladulla sun. He was waiting for Bob Russo to close the tackle shop. He looked down the hill and out to the harbour. “It’s time you had a holiday,” he said to himself. When Bob Russo walked out of the tackle shop, the tail of his fox-skin cap swinging like a furred plait over his shoulder, he tossed a set of keys to Dr Greene. “I see you’ve got the new items,” he said. They walked over to the car park. “That fuckwit Berryman has no idea what the words live-bait mean,” Greene said, patting the side of the red, humming container. “It’s time he understood. Let’s go fishing, Bob.” He opened a door and climbed into Lucinda William’s Chevy Silverado.
Seidel and Shelby had been gone for days on a LIMP2 binge. Dr Greene had offered them as much as they wanted, and they had feasted. They’d been in Seidel’s room at The Wheelhouse, talking like a pair of cockatiels and laughing uncontrollably. Seidel had seen the Red Oblong sail away to the north, and had doubled over, clutching his sides and crying with delight. “Look Shelby,” he howled, “they’re escaping in the Red Rectangle.” Shelby was on the floor, counting carpet fibres, quoting lines from The Immigrant Chronicles, and doing T.S. Eliot impersonations.
Now that they were focussed again, they spread a map of New South Wales on the kitchenette table and began making plans.
Michael Dransfield was waiting outside the Perth art gallery. He’d just been to see the Edward Hopper retrospective. Hopper’s painting Nighthawks had always been a favourite. He loved Hopper’s portrayal of the lonely, after-hours lives of the Red Language poets: the Red K in drag and beside him, Ron Silliman impersonating William S. Burroughs. On the other side of the bar, his back turned, Charles Bernstein writing a poem on a napkin. The diner’s proprietor is reaching for a canister of Zest, as things are getting tense. To his right, the water containers are silo-shaped.
Michael was deep in thought, going over the details of Hopper’s painting when he heard a deep, loud rumbling. He looked up and saw a mustard-yellow Monaro with twin black GT stripes over the roof and bonnet. Behind the wheel, wearing mirror shades, was Andrew Burke. “Come on then!” Andrew called through the passenger window. “It’s a great day for a drive.”
Emmylou Harris looked down the river. She was worried about Lucinda Williams. With one day to go before the festival, she was concerned about Lucinda’s wellbeing, but also she couldn’t stand the thought of her missing out on what was sure to be a memorable time. The atmosphere was unbelievable. There were buskers everywhere, and poets reading on the street. This was not like Tamworth: predictable songs sung by Australians busting their guts to sound like they’d just coughed up a handful of Nashville dust. The Nashville scene was no better, which is why Emmylou and Lucinda had invited an eclectic, mostly alt-country line-up. They left the ragged edges on their music and brought a world of styles to their playing.
Bill Wisely had been on the look-out for Australian country music stars trying to get into the festival. He’d put posters of John Williamson, Lee Kernaghan, Slim Dusty, Anne Kirkpatrick, Casey Chambers. Keith Urban and Troy Cassar-Daley on the train station walls, at the Angler’s Rest, and at the main entrance gate just down from Ian the Squid-Man’s live-bait shop. He knew that some of them would try to get past security, and he was determined to keep them out.
“So what was your point?” Dorothy Hewett asked Admiral Escher as the Red Oblong made its way north. Escher didn’t respond. He was staring straight ahead as though he were looking through a high window of a bridge on some ocean liner. “I mean, great, we got to see a red asterisk at a place called the Red Abyss, and then the head of Dante comes out of the water like some fucking humanoid atoll spewing red water, and starts raving. And it didn’t even sound like Dante. This is fucked. Look, you’re a great graphic artist. One of the best. I love Night and Day and Hand With Reflecting Sphere. And Three Worlds got me through some tough times. You put things into perspective, and you do our heads in with your dreamscapes and tricked realities, but to be honest, I don’t care anymore. You can take your clever visions and put someone else inside them. I didn’t ask to be included in all this horror. I didn’t just wake up one morning and say ‘Bloody hell, I hope M.C. Escher takes me in a Red Oblong out to sea for a front-row seat at the Dante-and-Asterisk Show.” T.S. Eliot spoke from the top of a staircase. “But you did enter the Oblong, Dorothy.” “Oh fuck off, T.S.,” she said. “I only scrambled into this jumped-up bit of geometry because I was worried about you and Ted and Lucinda. If that’s how you feel, you can all get stuffed.” M.C. Escher was nodding. Then it became apparent that he was crying. His shoulders were rising and falling slowly. Great globes of tears were sliding down his cheeks, each with highly-stylised images of birds and insects inside them. Lucinda went to him and put her hand on his arm. “It’s alright, Cornelis, we’re all a bit stressed here.” Ted Hughes joined Lucinda. “Come on old man, chin up.” The badger farted. Dorothy sat down at the base of a staircase. “All this redness,” she said. “Can we please have a change of colour?” Lucinda Williams took a deep breath. “How long will it take us to get to Brooklyn?” she asked. “About twenty hours,” Admiral Escher said between sobs. “Perfect,” Lucinda said. “We just might make the opening of the festival after all.”
The Transmigration
‘I had known from the beginning and told those about me that we were in the Last Days, in the Glory then. The Doctor came into the picture then. I told him about the fall of the giant orders of the world. “How can the unreal have as much effect as the real?’ I asked the Doctor. The falling of the astral worlds may be, then, the falling of the sky, where giant stars and dwarves, monstrous constellations and regents of the planets stream down in the collapse of time. Here the Doctor and I must restore the Milky Way, the spring of stars that is our universe. The Doctor had the key to the old science of the spring. I had to find the lock, but now it seems that I draw the water forth by the physical magnetism of a shaman, witching, pulling invisible reins of the stream with my hands. ‘You who are nearest to me’, I said to the Doctor, ‘are unreal’. I could see through his form.’
Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book

After the local Goths had upset the first transmigration ceremony, Robert Duncan decided to hold the final phase in private. He waited until after midnight and was about to set up his candles for the ritual. There was a knock on the door. It was Tom Raworth and Charles Baudelaire. They looked tired and were soaking wet and their legs were covered in mud. “We came up the river in a Bass-Boat we borrowed from Dr Greene. We didn’t see a sunken tree as we came into Budgewoi and it hit the boat with a great force,” said Raworth. “With the force of Darkness,” said Baudelaire. “What a lot of shit,” said Raworth. You could tell they had been arguing for days. It seemed they were on some kind of mission. Duncan became very suspicious. Why were they using Dr Greene’s boat? Had Greene lent the boat or had they stolen it? Duncan knew Greene never lent his bass-boat - it was the boat he used in Bass-Fishing Competitions; he’d been trying to beat Steve Starling with the best bass for years and he had to have the boat ready. Duncan had been briefed by Rodney Hall about Dr Greene and his obsessions. “So you have been with the Doctor?” Duncan eyed them with his straight eye. “You have been dicing with death.” This seemed to cheer Baudelaire up. He looked about the Masonic Hall and took off his wet coat. “Is there a bathroom here? I would like to refresh myself, and to wash this mud from my legs and feet.” Duncan directed him to the bathroom.
Tom Raworth wanted a drink, he wanted “vodka with limes, and a double to start with.” Duncan told him that Feargal Sharkey had drunk everything in the Masonic Hall except for a bottle of pink gin the Lodge got in when they thought that Kenneth Slessor was coming up to report on the transmigration. Duncan opened the gin and offered a bottle of tonic water. Raworth wanted to know when the transmigration would occur. He said wanted to write a report for ‘Pepper’ an electronic literary journal. Duncan knew this was edited by the Red K, or at least started by the K before he lost the Poetry War. Duncan also knew the funds were drawn from the poetry mafia’s bank in America, run by the poetry academic, (this was her cover) Helen Vendler. “Where’s the money?” says the investigator from Internal Revenue. “The money? What a joke, there’s no money in poetry.” Vendler had relentlessly omitted Robert Duncan from every anthology she edited and generally made it clear she did not even consider his work. Just thinking of Vendler made Duncan furious.
“She rings up Dr Greene to check out the flathead fishing in Queensland,” said Tom Raworth with a smile. Duncan felt betrayed. He knew Raworth was double dealing somehow, and when Raworth had finished half a bottle of gin he slipped up. He took out his thin silver camera from his coat pocket an envelope fell onto the floor, it was addressed, in Raworth’s handwriting to Val Kilmer! “What the hell is going on here?” Duncan said. Baudelaire had finished his bath and came back into the library drying his hair with a towel. “Yes, Val Kilmer!” said Tom Raworth. “He is going to play the main role in Flowers of Evil - a big Hollywood movie based on the life and times of Charles Baudelaire.” “He will play me in my heyday!” said Baudelaire. “Yes, it’s all happening,” said Tom. “Charlie loves the idea of Val Kilmer, in fact he suggested it.”
“Tom, did you just say that Helen Vendler phoned the Doctor in Queensland to ask about flathead fishing?” Duncan, shaking his head. “Yes, Vendler is fascinated by flathead. She wants to come to Australia and give a lecture on Gwen Harwood at the University of Queensland so she can go flathead fishing with Doctor Greene.” Duncan let go with a stream of references and quotations from the 17^th Century to the present day but right at the end he slipped in a sly question to Raworth. “Tell me Tom, what do you make of the poetry of the Red K?” Raworth was well known for his quickness, though now he stumbled and waited two seconds too long. Duncan knew these two desperados were either poetry gangsters or agents working for either Greene, Shelby or the Red K himself.
Feargal Sharkey came in with the crew of golden codgers, armed with their gaff-hooks and blackfish knives. They had been fishing all day and were going to cook up a feed for Duncan to bring him strength for his transmigration ceremony. Duncan said to Feargal “Throw them out, these two are frauds, they aren’t who they claim to be, throw them back into the river where they came in from.” At this Feargal tore off his clothes and mounted the old oak table in the library, he started flapping his arms and imitating the call of a male kookaburra. He danced around on the table and became a kookaburra shaman, his voice transforming from a human imitating a kookaburra into pure bird song. As he did this the golden codgers with their gaffs held in threatening positions ushered the two false poets out of the Budgewoi Masonic Hall.
It was 3am when Robert Duncan began to call on the soul of Eurydice. Outside the Milky Way looked like a great horn of fog flecked with stars and flares of starlight and cold fire. The constellations were spinning their light and drawing themselves onto the imagination of whoever looked up that night. The heavens were bright with darkness. Feargal Sharkey had recovered from his kookaburra shape-changing dance and was now settled into his special Eurydice hide on the edge of the Budgewoi Sports Ground. The golden codgers were in their beds and Duncan was chanting and calling up the dead from the library of the Masonic Hall.
How would Eurydice’s soul manifest itself? Would she return as a Goth and finally get to speak in the local version of English? She had never spoken in all the myths, not one word, in Greek or any other language. She was a silent figure for the wife of the first singer, the inventor of the lyre and the poet who charmed the King of Hell. What was behind this silence? Maybe Feargal Sharkey would be the first moral to hear Eurydice’s side of the myth, the first person to hear Eurydice’s own story.
Feargal peered through the slot in his special hide and saw the mist rolling in over the cricket pitch, over the turf and around the goal posts.

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 36

2010-04-06T22:21:00.000-07:00

Lyle Lovett’s sound-check.

Michael Dransfield stepped off the plane in Perth and inhaled the air. It reeked of solitude and vast distances. The light was sharp and clean. He walked into a hot, dry wind, more focussed than he could remember.

J.S. Harry and Kerry Leves had gone to Brooklyn. They weren’t country music fans, but the festival seemed a far better option than travelling into the wild West on a mission that was bound to end in tears.

Michael caught a cab into the city, then walked down through Kings park and the botanical gardens to the Swan River. He found the jetty where kids were doing bombies in the opening pages of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. He sat on the end of the jetty, looking out over the sliding dark blue river, going through the details of his plan. He had much to do and see before he went to the wheat belt. First he needed to visit Fay Zwicky. Fay had sent him a text, saying she had a special gift, one that would be ‘a talisman against redness...’ After visiting Fay, Michael was going to call in on Andrew Burke. He’d liked the poems of Andrew’s he’d read in New Poetry and sensed he could rely on him in a tight fix. He was going to ask if he’d accompany him to Geraldton. Michael had always wanted to see first-hand the harbour and surrounding countryside of Randolph Stowe’s Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, and Andrew Burke knew the place well. He remembered a line from the novel, and said it aloud: “The merry-go-round had a centre post of cast iron, reddened a little by the salt air...” He understood that line now. The redness was not rust. It was Stowe’s metaphor for a fast-approaching time of linguistic decay and unprecedented ego in Australian literature. The merry-go-round’s centre post was the eye of the storm, the hub, and at its perimeter was the centrifugal force that would throw all but the most discerning and determined readers and lovers of poetry into chaos.

Fay had morning tea ready when Michael arrived. She poured tea and talked about The Island War. She spoke calmly about how the Waggaists were representative of all that’s wrong with poetry when theory becomes its overarching focus and driving force. “Most of them are running scared on the meniscus of an ill-perceived notion of what it takes to write good verse,” she said, spooning blackberry jam into a bowl. “They feel that if you dive deep, and go on your nerve and trust your instincts rather than the poetics of the current fashion of the time, you’re seen as being too vulnerable, or sentimental. The Waggaist’s poetry is largely without passion and emotion. They view anything that engages with matters of the spirit as being pathetic. It’s why the Deep Imagists were ridiculed by the Academy when they started publishing their poems. When James Wright wrote “...when I stand upright in the wind, my bones turn to dark emeralds,” or “...if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom,” the hard-arsed spin-doctors of cynicism and theory couldn’t handle it. For them, opening your chest and saying ‘Look at my heart, it’s in shreds’ was a fuck-up.” Fay was leaning on her elbows, using a scone to highlight each point. “By following the Red K’s lead, the Waggaists were writing too much, too quickly. Technique and craft might seem to be interchangeable, but when careful editing is exposed on a hillside in septic weather, the poem breaks down.” Fay took a sip of tea and looked carefully at Dransfield. “Can you remember one line of a Red K poem?” Michael had to think, but not for too long. “No,” he said. Fay smiled and stood up. “My point exactly,” she said. She went to a large mahogany cabinet and opened a drawer. When she turned around she was holding a pendant on a plaited black leather string. She came to stand behind Michael and looped the pendant around his neck. It settled against his shirt with a cool, comforting weight. He lifted it and saw a photo of an osprey behind a globe of glass. Michael was overcome with emotion. The osprey was his favourite raptor. Fay took his hand. “The long voyage does indeed involve many streets,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead. “Now get to work.”

Emmy-Lou Harris was running around with a clip-board under her arm, organising the many singers and bands. There were only two days to go before the festival, and things were tight. The stage has been erected - it ran along beside the water at the marina, and had a huge scallop shell behind it, lit with green and blue. At night it looked incredible. During Lyle Lovett’s sound-check, Lyle had insisted the crowd be allowed to come to the stage. The atmosphere was electric.

Heading the bill at the music festival was supposed to have been Lucinda Williams and Hex, but no one had seen Lucinda for days. In her place, she’d put Lynyrd Skynyrd (with special guest John Berryman). Ronnie van Zandt and Berryman had been holed up in the back bar of the Angler’s Rest, putting music to some of the Dream Songs. Berryman loved that “Life, Friends, Is Boring...” now had a driving Southern swamp-boogie sound. Following Skynyrd were:

Johnny Cash

The Charlie Daniels Band

John Prine and Iris Dement

Patty Loveless (performing songs from her forthcoming album inspired by the poems of Mary Oliver)

Gram Parsons and Emmy Lou Harris

Drag the River (with Lucky Oceans replacing their late friend on pedal-steel)

Sun Kil Moon

Diesel Doug and the Long Haul Truckers

Dolly Parton, Lynn Anderson, Linda Rondstadt

Blue Rodeo

The Jayhawks

Kris Kristofferson and the Oyster Band

Gillian Welch

Drive-By Truckers

The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash

The Amazing Rhythm Aces

Lyle Lovett

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (with Doc Watson and Vassar Clements)

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils

The freak banjo-player from Deliverance (with James Dickey responding on guitar)

Waylon and Shooter Jennings

Steve Earle and the Copperheads

Townes van Zandt

Wrinkle Neck Mules

Robert Earle Keen

Frog Holler

Chris Knight

James McMurtry

I See Hawks in L.A.

Bill Wisely was Head of Security. He and Terry Hack and Moose had set up a perimeter fence around the venue, and out back of Yeats’ oyster shed, in case they were needed, they’d erected a few chicken wire cages. Bill had also enlisted the help of the Sons of Zebedee, who had finally been won over by Berryman and Hill’s eloquence and passion. Bill was handing out planks and giving orders.

Traffic out of Sydney and on the freeway south was already a nightmare. The Old Pacific Highway was banked up from Asquith and cars jammed the freeway from the Gosford turn-off. Many had abandoned their vehicles and were walking in. A local outlaw motorcycle club had already arrived in Brooklyn, and were a serious presence as they walked around with Bill’s planks, keeping things in order. Dolly Parton had taken the members aside and given them a stern lecture about how crowd-control can get out of hand. She reminded them of what had happened in ’69 when the Stones played Altamont. The bikers were impressed by Dolly’s cautionary speech, and promised to keep order without resorting to violence.

Brooklyn was packed. You couldn’t get near the bar of The Rest. Thousands of craft were anchored out on the river - from Brooklyn to Flint and Steel and up to Spencer there was no room for anymore. The river was a tight patchworking of motor boats and sails. In town most people had gone up to the oval above the marina. There was a constant blue fog of spliff smoke on the breeze. Barbecues were spitting and smoking. The local cops were barely visible. They assumed because it was a country music festival that things would not get out of hand. This would prove a fatal mistake.

In their stone cottage, Bron yr Aur, in the Snowdonia National Park in Wales, Led Zeppelin were getting ready to leave. Robert Plant had received an email from his old friend Gram Parsons. Gram had told him how much he was looking forward to the festival in Brooklyn. Plant had contacted the other members, saying how much he wanted to go, and were they up for it. They hadn’t been semi-acoustic since Led Zeppelin 111, and they thought they’d surprise Gram by turning up in Brooklyn. They were all keen. John Bonham was excited. He was a keen fisherman, and news of massive Waggafish in the Lakes District had been in the London Times. He’d already packed his live-baiting gear. The band’s air-ship was waiting, hovering over a field outside the cottage.

G. Lehmann

Dispatch From The Front: Day 34

2010-04-04T16:06:00.000-07:00

The Red Asterisk.

Above and below: Monarch butterflies and the souls of wildebeests, summoned by Robert Duncan.

Feargal Sharkey’s specially-built ‘Eurydice Hide’.

The jetty where the Golden Codgers fish for blackfish.

PART ONE

Charlie Daniels was not used to being upstaged. He was a big man with a big presence. So when Michael Stipe started singing in the Angler’s Rest, Charlie flew into a rage. He couldn’t pull the plug on this self-promoting upstart because Stipe was singing unaccompanied and without amplification. He was standing at the bar, hands together, eyes closed, his face painted with red smears. The worst thing was, Stipe was good. He was into the second verse of The Wichita Lineman when Charlie chinned his fiddle and went into The Devil Went Down to Georgia. Stipe’s eyes flew open. The packed bar started cheering. Stipe took a sip of water and smiled. Inside he was in a red fury. He watched Charlie turn and swoop, tapping his boot. Michael Stipe felt like a shag on a wharf pylon. He slipped quietly from the bar and went down to the marina.
The Red Oblong had reached The Red Abyss. Admiral Escher woke his crew and announced that soon they’d be disembarking. “You mean claw through the wall,” Dorothy Hewett said. Ted Hughes and T.S. Eliot stood up and waited for directions. Hughes couldn’t find the badger. He called it and looked around. Then he saw it. It had climbed one of the staircases and was sitting outside a closed door, three flights up. One of the faceless figures was beside it, stroking its head with slow, over-exaggerated sweeps of its white hand. “Here boy, come on, come down here,” Hughes said. The badger just stared at him. Escher went to the foot of the stairs. “X, leave that animal alone.” X stopped patting the badger and stood up. “You’re a benign representation of humanity. You do not engage with living things, do you hear me?” X nodded. “Good, now get back into the lithograph and don’t let me see you cross that border again.” Lucinda Williams loved M.C. Escher’s work. She had his books and posters. He’d been part of her deep imagining as a teenager. Now she didn’t like him. You don’t speak to someone like that, even if they don’t exist, she thought, and then she felt very strange. What the hell does that make me?

On Lion Island, things were totally out of control. The red fairy penguins had taken out fifteen Waggaists and were feeding on their remains. The other Waggaists had sought refuge in the sandstone caves above the shoreline. They’d been eating insects and the curious blue fruit that hung from vines high in the scrub. Some said they’d been better off in the chicken wire cage on The Island. Some said they were going to try and swim to Brooklyn, despite having to run the penguin gauntlet and then negotiate the treacherous passage thick with bull sharks and Waggas.

The Waggaists had never had a natural leader. The Red K had always been more theory than physical presence, and he’d lost whatever power he held when he’d refused to travel during The War. His wool-classing brother had left The Island on the second day, hightailing back to the wheat belt after ZZ Top had told him they were going to tour with his head on a pike. The Red K was now seen as a joke. Whenever the Waggaists went to festivals where the Red K had been invited to read or talk on a panel, he’d cancel at the last minute. And now he was in his bunker in the wheat belt, getting others to type his flawed, tired philosophies.

The Waggaists had been a desperate crowd of fools under the breaking hold of Red Language. Now they were a desperate crowd of fools on another island, being killed by red penguins and starving to death.

“Stand clear,” Admiral Escher said. He pushed a large button on the wall and the front of the Red Oblong made a sound like steam escaping under pressure. Then the wall dissolved. They were still at sea. The sky was clear and dark blue. Before them lay the Red Abyss. It was indeed an asterisk, huge and crafted from wooden beams. “You’ve got to be fucking joking,” Dorothy Hewett said. Escher strode to the wide open space and looked down. The others joined him. The asterisk was massive. It floated on the ocean without any form of anchorage. It rose and fell with the gentle swell. “So what does it actually do?” Ted Hughes asked. “Why nothing at all,” Escher replied. “It is what we do that matters.” “Please explain,” said T.S. Eliot. “And don’t take the scenic route,” Lucinda Williams said. “There’s a festival on at Brooklyn, and I’m not going to miss it because you wanted to show us a wooden asterisk somewhere on the goddam ocean!”

Escher took a deep breath, stroked his goatee beard, and began. “It’s very simple,” he said. “The Red Abyss is a Red Asterisk in a Red Time, and we have come to seek counsel at its sacred design. “Oh fuck off,” Dorothy said and stepped down onto one of the Red Asterisk’s beams. “I suggest you return to the Oblong immediately,” Escher said. “Why? What’s it going to do? Turn me into an exclamation mark?” Dorothy laughed and started jumping up and down on he cross-beam. “Please, don’t do that,” Escher was wringing his hands and going pale. Dorothy continued jumping and stomping on the beam. Lucinda Williams, Ted Hughes and T.S. Eliot held their breath. The badger was running in circles at Hughes’ feet, whimpering. Suddenly the water around the base of the Red Asterisk turned blood red and trembled. “Oh no,” Escher said. Dorothy stopped jumping and held onto the beam. It began raining heavily. A driving wall of silver water fell upon the Red Asterisk and covered a large area of ocean surrounding it. As everyone watched, looking down into the water, a gigantic shape loomed from the depths. Then it broke through the surface: a huge nose, prominent eyebrows, high cheekbones, all streaming red water. The poets were used to all kinds of visions, but this was beyond the surreal. Lucinda Williams thought back to the time she saw the face of Woody Guthrie in a dark swirl of Mississippi water; how Guthrie beckoned for her to join him - that had been a kind of dark comfort, but now she was afraid. Dorothy was yelling: “It’s about time you showed up!” The face was now clear of the ocean. There were no hydraulic poles, no attendant machinery, just the face - massive, gleaming - and a voice deep as the Mindanao Trench was emerging from the mouth, haltingly at first, and then with a booming confidence that ruffled everyone’s hair and clothes. Dorothy was staring down the throat of Dante Alighieri.

Ocean rain on the torn pelt of our lives
and we surrender all knowledge
of the underside of this world and the next
for assessment and charity.
Gone are the vendors of goodwill and hope.
Gone are the taxidermists of lust.
Whosoever bleeds out
before they are wounded will find comfort
in the selfless itineraries of the heart.
Take this Red design into your breast
and make of it what you will.
A brief encounter can astound
and the overlong engagement disenfranchise
and betray.
This destination is a mark on the hide
of belief and fortitude.
What appears can be trusted
if the eye and hand travel lightly.
Burden the mind with alternative scenes
and slaughter will find you.
The Red Abyss is not home.
The past and present are not home.
Home does not exist.
The shearwater’s touring black cloud understands
but will not say the name
impermanence.
Go now. Return to what returning means
when all else continues to confound
and terrify.
Remember the sound of indifference
when you falter at the changing-yards
of time and experience.
Go and be yourselves
where others afix the masks of strangers
with blood and hair
and the spittle of abandonment.
The great mouth closed and the head of Dante sank slowly back into the depths. Lucinda Williams was on her knees, weeping. T.S. Eliot was nodding silently, his monocle clouding over. Ted Hughes was trying to tame his heartbeat with a breathing exercise. M.C. Escher was scribbling furiously on a whiteboard. Dorothy Hewett climbed back into the Oblong. She picked up the badger and gave it a cuddle. “Okay, now we’re in trouble,” she said.
PART TWO
‘To immerse yourself in Robert Duncan’s poetry is to dive into a deep sea. The surface is all dazzle of sun, but light fades the deeper you go, the compression intensifies, the sea creatures are as strange and hallucinatory as they are real. And there’s the solitude of the diving suit, its heaviness and foreignness, with it’s huge brass helmet pressurized against massive liquid nighttime. After the depths are reached comes a long drifting up to the choppy surface of the water. Back into the violent weather of the world. No one enters these depths lightly, just as no one dives there alone. Help is needed at every turn, in every further immersion.’
Peter O’Leary
It’s a daunting task to try to describe Robert Duncan in action. However, I’ll give it my full attention: by ‘in action’ I mean Duncan writing, teaching, lecturing or even talking. And it’s another thing again to have to describe him in the midst of a ritual that involves incantations and rituals that are intended to summons a soul from Hades back into the land of the living. Robert Duncan’s speech has been described as possessing a ‘torrential polymathic fluency’. He had been preparing himself for three weeks for this ritual and was now in top form, he was going to open the proceedings. Devin Johnston and W.B. Yeats were at his side, they were prepared for anything, and they needed to be.
I was in attendance during the transmigration - it’s very difficult to remember who else was there last night because I was completely swept up into the vortex of Robert Duncan’s charisma - and forgot to take notes. I can remember Jack Spicer up the back sitting on the floor, swigging a bottle of Russian vodka. Feargal Sharkey was off to the side of the stage, now and then he was caught by the edge of a spotlight, shaking and moving his limbs like some apparition performing the danse macabre. (Which reminds me I also spotted Malcolm Lowry earlier in the night, walking in with a couple of bottles wrapped in brown paper.) The event was meant to be a discrete and exclusive ritual, but the Masonic lodge had scrimped on security, and many gate-crashers had slipped through the back doors. There were at least fifty people all told, including the poets, the Golden Codgers, and a couple of hippy ferals who wanted to hear Feargal Sharkey’s hit song. There were some local Goths who thought the ceremony might be a good creepy show. Poets had traveled from all over, there were some from overseas, others from Brooklyn and the Island. By this stage all the Golden Codgers had given up fishing for blackfish. They had arrived at the Hall straight from their night session of fishing the Budgewoi for pike eels with bullock hearts.
It was least 1.30 am before Duncan started the proceedings. He started by reading some lines by H.D. (who was in the audience) and then he spoke at great length of Hermes and the Gnostics. He told us about the great troves discovered during the 1940s in the caves along the Dead Sea at Qumran and at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, and also in the Jabal al-Tarif, a mountain filled with caves. The Dead Sea Scrolls were a central text in Duncan’s teachings. He asked us if we had thought about just whose soul would be transmigrating? Where this soul might come to rest once it made the journey from Hades to Budgewoi? What vessel would the soul take up in? At this there was a disturbed murmuring in the Hall. I noticed Jack Spicer shudder at the thought of the possibility. Malcolm Lowry opened a brown paper wrapped bottle of whisky. Peter O’Leary had made the journey from Chicago, and he was looking more worried as the night unfolded. We heard a loud disturbance, looking around I could see who was creating the ruckus. It was Hart Crane. Wearing his white crinkled linen suit and his Panama hat, it looked like he’d just arrived on an ocean liner. He was talking to Lowry and I could tell they were going to be trouble as the night wore on.
Duncan was declaiming verses, he was speaking in some ancient sounding language. When he completed the poem he turned around and picked up a golden grail and started pouring what looked like a fine oil over Devin Johnston’s head. W.B. Yeats took out his red Bic lighter and started lighting the candles. Devin unfurled a stunning looking tapestry on the back wall, depicting a unicorn, a peregrine falcon and a flight of whooping cranes. Then the lights in the Hall went out and we sat there in the dark for four or five minutes or so as Duncan chanted more ancient sounding poetry. Then there was relative silence, we listened to the sound of Crane and Lowry swigging from their bottles. Then I heard Jack Spicer raise his voice and ask somebody if they had a transistor radio so he could listen to the cricket! There was a buzzing sound and we thought the lights were about the come back on again - it wasn’t the lights however, there was a glow across the Hall but it wasn’t coming from lighting. Hundreds, thousands of monarch butterflies filled the air in the Masonic Hall, they were a great zone of glowing colour, moving from the floor to the ceiling, a great and illuminated atmosphere of flight. Eventually, they gathered around one of the small windows along the top of the wall, the windowpane fell open and the butterflies poured out the opening in a seemingly endless stream of delicate wings.
This miraculous event hushed the audience again. The drunks even stopped drinking for a minute or so, the Golden Codgers burst out into spontaneous applause. Then Duncan was introducing W.B.Yeats and his recitation of ‘The Second Coming’. WB chanted the poem and was spell-binding, the words flowed over the audience and we were transported into various levels of trace-like states. Then Yeats sat down and a strange sound started up. It turned into an incredible noise that thundered through the Hall. The call of a massive herd of wildebeests. It was the sound they made as they charged and hurled themselves wildly into some turbulent river in Africa. It was as if they were actually charging through the Masonic Hall right there in Budgewoi. People were dodging phantom beasts and throwing themselves under their chairs. It wasn’t surprising because they were in fact being charged by wild animals, they were being charged by the souls of a herd of wildebeests. Robert Duncan was calling up the souls of these charging creatures. Gradually the sound of the wildebeests faded away and we were left in a relative silence again.
Duncan told us that next he was going to call up the soul of Eurydice. He said she had been in Hades so long she had almost forgotten paradise. Duncan wanted to get her back out of hell so that she could enjoy the paradise of Budgewoi. The Golden Codgers loved this and made noises of encouragement, however the Goths didn’t like this idea at all, and started to boo and jeer. At this outrage Robert Duncan called a halt to the proceedings and ordered everyone to leave. We filed out through the front door and were amazed to see that it was already dawn. The sun was shining and there was a clear blue sky with some light mist hanging in the trees. We looked about and saw that the butterflies were still in the air. There were hundreds of monarchs fluttering around the Masonic Hall and filling the sky.
Feargal Sharkey came bounding out from the Hall. He had decided to build himself a special ‘hide’ so that he would be able to observe Eurydice when she appeared in the early morning mist tomorrow. Duncan mentioned she would be materializing in some form at dawn at the opening of a field. So Feargal built his hide in the pine trees that ran along behind the goal posts of the Budgewoi Sports Ground. Feargal said this way, he wouldn’t miss a thing. The old Golden Codgers had been so shaken by the night’s events that they had decided to take up fishing for blackfish again. They reached the jetty where they fished with their red and white pencil floats by the river. It was a magnificent morning, not a wind in the world. They watched the mullet rising and listened to the now reassuring calls of the curlews. There was a low blanket of translucent mist floating just above the surface of the tide.

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 33

2010-04-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

Admiral Escher waited until the excitement over Dorothy Hewett’s arrival had subsided. He looked at the poets with a craftsman’s cold eye, his vision softened by understanding and compassion. He recognised obsession in the intensity of their gaze. “So, we are gathered,” he sighed loudly. “While I will not say that your being here has been pre-ordained, I do know there was always a good chance it would happen.” “Why us?” Lucinda Williams asked. M.C. Escher went to a whiteboard at the base of one of his staircases. He waited until the faceless, featureless figure ascending it had moved on to another level, then he took a marker and started drawing. “We are here,” he said, pointing to a Red Oblong. “And this is where we’re headed. The Red Abyss.” He had sketched a beautiful, perfect large asterisk. “The Red Abyss is an asterisk?” T.S. Eliot asked. “How will we enter it and what happens once we’re inside?” M.C. Escher smiled. The faceless, featureless figures stopped moving and peered down from their staircases and balconies. “The Red Abyss is the Heartland of the Chamber of Sorrow at the end of the Vanishing Point this sea-road has made from faith and determination. “Fucking hell” said Dorothy. “Stick to the graphics, old son, your philosophy is awful.” Ted Hughes stroked the badger’s head and said “When do we arrive?” Escher tapped the side of his leather boot with the board-pointer. “We should be there by morning,” he said. T.S. Eliot was leaning forward, concentrating and squinting. He looked like Kenneth Graham in Carry On Up The Front. “My dear Cornelis,” he said softly, “I have encountered many an abyss in my time, and have burned my various selves away within the bonfires of regret and exhilaration. Not once did the fuse of my desire sputter out.” M.C. Escher stared at Eliot for a long time before tearing his eyes away. The he leaned on the beacon and said “Do the names Jethro Tull and Blue Oyster Cult mean anything to you folk?” Lucinda Williams pushed back the brim of her hat and said “Yes, why?” “Oh nothing,” Escher said. “I just love their music.”

Dransfield, Harry and Leves climbed down from the truck and thanked the driver. It was raining heavily. They stood in the main street of Bermagui, dripping and shivering. “So what’s the plan?” a crested tern said as it wheeled over. “Pull your head in,” Dransfield said, then turned to address the others: “Can someone remind me why we’ve come to Bermagui?” J.S. Harry and Kerry Leves scratched their heads and rattled their loose change. Michael held his hands to stop them making fools of themselves and said “Let’s get out of this rain.”

Standing on the footpath outside a travel agent, they discussed possible plans. The names Seidel and Shelby were mentioned. Blodgett was offered as a reason for their travelling. Dransfield turned and looked at the travel agent window. There were posters showing coral reefs, mountain temples, Cambodian villages and Times Square at night. There was a also a poster of Shark Bay, Western Australia, showing two people in swim-wear kissing on a deserted beach. Below this photo were the words: REMOTE CONTROL. Michael Dransfield’s hands were doing a fandango in the air in front of his face. “It’s time for a change of scenery,” he said. “We’re going to W.A.”

Robert Duncan snapped. “Right. I’m going back into the Masonic Hall, if you people want to waste your imagination and life watching this flight of Feargals pretending to be peculiar it’s your own business, I have to write.” Duncan turned on his heels and stomped back into the kitchen off the Hall. He meticulously cleared the table and set down his fountain pen and his Bic; he opened a legal pad and tore out some yellow pages and set about writing a poem. He wrote furiously, and as he finished each page he placed it on top of the one before it, soon he had a thick stack of drafts and redrafts. He kept writing into the night.

W.B. Yeats burst into the kitchen. It was 4am and he was flushed with the victory of his latest catch: a job-fish, a pike and a banjo-ray. He had cleaned and filleted them and was about to tell Duncan the details of the catch. Duncan said “What’s happening to you William? This fishing has become some kind of obsession. I remember the first days, when you fished with the old Golden Codgers for blackfish with green weed and floats - their was some elegance, some delicacy and even art involved in that. I could see what you were drawn in by—This rough fishing for pike eels with bullock hearts, well that was bad, but now you are fishing for just about any bottom feeder that comes along. What are you doing to yourself, it’s like some form of twisted self-abuse. Why are you doing this to yourself William, you are a great poet and yet you don’t even write fishing articles for Fishing World, you don’t write fishing poems, you simply fish for the scum of the river and seem happy to continue to do so, what gives?” W.B. Yeats looked at Duncan and replied “Well Robert, what happened to the promised transmigration of the soul ceremony? Where is the old magic, have you finally run out of tricks?” The look in Duncan’s eye was beyond murderous. It was as cold as the eye of a dead job fish. Yeats said to Robert Duncan: “This is Easter. This is anniversary of the day Peter saw a blood-red moon come up and the dimness descend, the Lord was betrayed by his friend, pieces of silver, a kiss, all the old tricks. We don’t need new tricks, the old ones and the old enemies are still with us, they will stab you where you stand, walk away and wont even bother to gut you.”

Spicer walked into the kitchen drinking a beer and reading the latest issue of The Monthy. “Take a look at this. Clive James. He’s quite an article. He’s reviewing Les Murray’s new book, well, he’s talking about it in print: Clive is imagining a bat cave where the bats have a bat library and they take out Les’ book Translations from the Natural World and read his poem about bats. And the bats all say: ‘hey man, this poet really understands bats, he’s a cool dude.’ What the fuck does that say about Clive James? He thinks bats can read poetry, that they can read Les Murray’s poetry about bats. This is better than my theory about the Marians beaming me serial poems or Blake transcribing what the angels say to him, this is really weird. Humanism again, the same old hurdy-gurdy, man at the centre of the universe. Mr James imagining a bat reading Les Murray’s bat poem and getting it?

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 32

2010-03-31T22:56:00.000-07:00

Charlie Daniels at the Mooney Mooney Worker’s Club.

Patty Loveless looking for Mary Oliver.

Ronnie van Zandt singing to Amanda Joy in Greenville, South Carolina.

Feargal Sharkey trying on a black, full-body lycra suit.

Dorothy Hewett had been waiting for Dransfield and the others long enough. She’d just read the local Bermagui paper again, and was looking out to sea from the verandah of the only cafe in town with decent coffee when she saw the Red Oblong. At first she thought it was a mirage, then the red bloom of a spinnaker heading for land. When she recognised the Oblong, she opened the paper, found an ad for water-taxis, and dialed the number.

Out on the Princess Highway, Michael Dransfield, Kerry Leves and J.S. Harry were in the back of an old Bedford truck, bouncing along towards Bermagui. They’d been hitch-hiking for hours, weathering the abuse of drivers and trying to keep warm. The truck driver had only pulled over because he’d recognised Dransfield from his photo on the front of Drug Poems. He was a bush-verse man, but he prided himself in being widely-read. The truck’s cabin was filled with fruit and vegetables, so the poets had to ride in the back. Kerry Leves was hypnotising himself by watching the telegraph wires loop and switch and cross over each other, playing cat’s cradle and making wind-music. J.S. Harry was scanning the underside roadgrowth for rabbits. Dransfield was twitching and speaking too slowly. He needed a hit of LIMP2.

The country musicians had arrived. The makeshift accommodation off to the side of the oyster shed was full, so many had to find their own places to sleep. The oval above the marina as bright with tents.

John Berryman, Amanda Joy, Geoffrey Hill, Bronwyn Lea, Myron Wearne, Mary Oliver and Ed Dorn had formed an unlikely yet solid alliance. They were walking around town like the Magnificent Seven, wearing straw five-gallon hats and talking in Country Code - a language Geoffrey Hill had invented and passed on to the others. It was a language that involved the exclusive use of lines from country songs, and because they were all big fans, it was second-nature. Amanda Joy had attended the final Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Greenville, South Carolina, the day before the band’s Convair 240 ran out of fuel and fell out of the sky into a Mississippi swamp. She was beside herself, having heard that Ronnie van Zandt was going to make a special appearance at the festival. John Berryman was good friends with Charlie Daniels, and had been with the road crew back when Charlie had played fiddle with Leonard Cohen’s band The Army. Bronwyn Lea was a walking, talking fan-base for Townes van Zandt. Townes had been staying with her in Brisbane, where they’d been writing songs and singing them at night on Bronwyn’s balcony overlooking the Brisbane River. Mary Oliver was in love with Patty Loveless, who was now fifty miles away on a Mississippi whiskey barge. Myron Wearne was pissed of because no Australian country musicians had been invited to the festival. Whenever he mentioned their names, the others laughed and made jokes about sentimental, obvious songs filled with tractors, snakes, billabongs, wheat and love-gone-wrong. He had to pretend that he liked The Wrinkle Neck Mules and Chris Knight, and when he spoke their lyrics he felt the bile rising into his throat. Ed Dorn loved it all. He didn’t give a fuck as long as there was a good driving country beat. He quoted indiscriminately from a wide range of country and country-rock artists, and he did it with such theatrical aplomb that it sounded amazing. The others knew he was a scattergun and didn’t seem to mind at all.

The Red Oblong was a distant red smear when Dorothy Hewett stepped aboard the water taxi. “Follow that Red Oblong,” she told the driver. He nodded and pulled away as if chasing ocean-going geometry were a common occurrence.

As they approached the Oblong it slowed, then stopped, displacing troughs and mounds of dark red water. “Can you get any closer?” Dorothy asked the driver as she climbed out onto the side of the taxi. The driver eased the boat alongside the Oblong. Dorothy knocked hard, and her hand disappeared. She looked through the windscreen and the driver was lighting a smoke and smiling at her. She pulled back her right foot and kicked out. “Good work,” the driver yelled as her foot disappeared. Dorothy prodded and kicked and punched and fought her way into the Oblong. When she’d vanished, the driver looked up at a gannet that had stalled above the Oblong as though it were preparing to dive. “Ya gotta love an adventure!” he shouted at the bird, then pulled away and rooster-tailed it back to Bermagui.

W.B. Yeats sat under a native willow tree by the Budgewoi River with a plastic bucket at his feet that contained three fresh bullock hearts. Feargal Sharkey had bought WB the bucket at K-Mart and Devin Johnston had managed to con the hearts from the local butcher at Woy Woy. Devin had joined Yeats as his Australian advisor because of his vast experience fishing the Hawkesbury with Bob Adamson and Anthony Lawrence. It was just after midnight and W.B. had already caught a pike eel without much trouble, except it broke him off when he pulled it up onto the bank. So he decided to change the breaking strain of his line from 100lb to 300lb. He wasn’t going to take chances.

Now Yeats was onto another fish, this one hit him like a train, it swallowed the heart and then took off at great speed, bucking and shaking its head violently. It was heading for a nasty snag on the other side of the river. It wasn’t a pike eel because no eel that could make such lively swerving moves It just kept going and showed no sign of slowing down. Yeats was yelping with joy and shouting to Devin “Get the net, for the sake of god, get the gaff."

There was by now a some silver codgers gathering to watch the fight. Yeats wasn’t using a rod, his was fishing for pike in the traditional Irish manner with a hand-line, His hands were being cut into as the nylon slid through his fingers but he wasn’t worried because he was so excited. Finally he managed to bring the fish over to the bank where Devin was shining a spotlight. There was a huge boil of water and finally they saw colour. The trouble was, they saw the colour red - a massive waggafish thrashed around on the surface at Yeats’ feet, opening and closing its hideous mouth, making a gurgling sound each time it broke water, then it rolled and made a final dive for freedom, every fishy tricky in the book. Then something else happened - the line went slack and there was an even larger boil of water, and now something massive was on the end of Yeats’ line. A great fin cut across the tide. A bull shark had come up behind the Wagga and had swallowed it whole. The hooks set again, this time in the shark’s jaw, the wire trace held and Yeats found himself hooked up to a huge bull shark. Devin took up the line behind W.B. and helped with the hauling, the line slipping through their fingers on blood from deep cuts. Then for some reason only known to the shark, it changed direction and started coming straight at them. This gave Devin and WB a chance to get most of the line in and when the shark was almost against the bank, one of the old silver codgers managed to get a gaff shot in. The shark exploded when it felt the cold steel in its shoulder and the men pulling it in were drenched with water and blood. Then Devin, Yeats and the silver codgers managed to drag the old bull shark up the bank of the river until finally it lay there in the wild grasses, defeated with the tail of the waggafish still protruding from between its jagged teeth.

Back at the Masonic Hall there was great excitement as a truck from Sydney had arrived and was unloading many boxes. Duncan thought it was the delivery he’d been waiting for from California, the equipment he’d be needing for his spiritual experiments. There was confusion as well because Kate Jennings had arrived in the truck along with the cargo. She was supervising the unloading. Jack Spicer who was to help Duncan with the transmigration of the soul, was too impatient to wait, he grabbed a box and tore it open - he was hoping there might be a drink involved some how. When he saw what the box contained his face went totally blank. There was nothing but copies of Frederick Seidel’s book, Ooga Booga - there were endless boxes full of them, all containing the same edition. Jennings started ordering the old silver codgers to help unload the books and carry them into the Masonic Hall. Robert Duncan was furious, it was only a matter of time before he blew a fuse.

Then Devin and Yeats came walking down the main street carrying plates of shark fillets they were going to cook for dinner that night. Devin looked at Kate Jennings and said: “So the unloading has begun,” then he walked on through into the kitchen.

Jack Spicer and Duncan were baffled when they saw a group of men in the main street who had formed a tight circle. They were dressed in black lycra full-body suits and seemed to be doing some kind of folk dance. Then they started to pull the hoods back from their heads. This was a confusing moment to Duncan and Spicer because the dancing men all seemed to have the same head. They were in fact, all of them, Feargal Sharkeys. He’d been reproducing himself, as if he’d worked out a way to photocopy three dimensional copies of himself. There were at least twenty of them now, smiling. “Fuck this” said Spicer “If they start to dance now I’m going back to San Francisco.” Robert Duncan glared at the gathering of Feargals. “This has got something to do with Ron Silliman” he said in a cold fury.
G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 31

2010-03-31T03:59:00.000-07:00

The interior of the the Red Oblong.

Admiral M.C. Escher.

Jennifer Maiden with some gifts for Robert Duncan in Budgewoi.

When Ted Hughes, Lucinda Williams and T.S. Eliot reached the Red Oblong, the humming was so loud the water at its base was vibrating and its interior was glowing furiously. It was much bigger than they’d imagined - at least three storeys high. Ted rowed around it, looking for a way to get aboard or inside. Its exterior was smooth. There were no footholds, no chains or ropes, no windows, deck or wheelhouse. “It’s just an oblong,” Lucinda said, with Nashville in her mouth. As Ted rowed around it a second time, the current pushed the dinghy against the side of the Oblong, and he put out his hands to steady the small craft. He withdrew his hands quickly. “The surface is hot,” he said. Lucinda reached out and touched the wall. “Yes, but it doesn’t feel oppressive,” she said. Together they placed their hands, palms down, on the side of the Oblong. They felt the wall give slightly. “More pressure,” Ted said, and they leaned hard into it. Ted saw Lucinda’s and Eliot’s hands enter the red surface, then his own hands were gone to the wrists. The badger was making low, grunting sounds that Ted took to be distress, and he went to remove his hands. They wouldn’t budge. “Come on,” Lucinda shouted. “This is how we get in!” They all stood and leaned hard into the wall. Their arms went into the glowing red wall. When they were up to their shoulders, they put their feet to the wall and eased them in. Then they did the same with the other foot. Then they eased their faces inside. They were entering and parting the Oblong’s molecular structure. Like figures in a Magritte painting, they were becoming the details where reality married nightmare. Lucinda was first to enter fully into the Oblong’s interior. T.S. Eliot followed her, losing his glasses as he went. Ted Hughes pushed forward and slipped on through. The badger was turning in circles in the dinghy, which was starting to drift away from the Oblong. It stared at the place where Ted Hughes had gone through, and then it leapt. Its head went into the wall and it clawed and wriggled, gaining purchase until it too had gone through to the other side.

Brooklyn was buzzing. As when the poets first arrived on The Island, this small river community was alive with hundreds of different kinds of craft. The marina was full. The boardwalks and narrow roads around the harbour were crowded with musicians wearing hats and carrying guitar cases. Some were busking outside the various cafes. Others were fishing from the end of the wharf. They had been arriving by boat, water-taxi, sea-plane and train. Emmylou Harris, Bill Wisely, Terry Hack and a large crew of locals had been busy erecting temporary accommodation off to the side of Yeats’ oyster shed. The Angler’s Rest was full.

John Prine and Kris Kristofferson stepped of the train at Brooklyn station and looked around. “My head’s shouting out to my heart Better watch out below,” Prine said. Kristofferson laughed and rubbed his chin. “Oh Lord,” he said. “It’s a loser’s paradise.”

In the Angler’s Rest, Johnny Cash was playing pool with Waylon Jennings. Everyone wanted to play The Man in Black, and coins were stacked the length of the table’s edge. Over in a corner, Dolly Parton and Robert Frost were deep in conversation, heads together. “You know, Robert,” Dolly said, just under her breath, “I used to read The Road Not Taken to my cousin Jim, whom I secretly coveted, in golden winter light in the feed shed at home.” Frost smiled and put the doomed flower of his mouth to Dolly’s ear: “And I used to listen to the long preparations for your arrival and place in the world through the needled headwind of gramophone static as the Watson family gospelled their way into my heart.”

Inside the Red Oblong, Ted, Lucinda and T.S. looked around and could not speak. The entire interior was a three-dimensional model of M.C. Escher’s Relativity, with staircases leading into impossible, yet correct dimensions and endings. The complexity and weirdness of the scene gave them intense vertigo, and they fell over. Lying on the soft red floor, as they tried to regain their balance, they saw that the source of the Oblong’s intense red light was a huge beacon. At its centre was a contained, raging fire. Standing over the beacon was Maritus Cornelis Escher himself. He was dressed in a navy Admiral’s uniform, with red flying fish on the lapels of his immaculate jacket and the word PALINDROME on the front of his cap. Slowly he turned around and said “Welcome. Please allow me to put things into perspective.”

W.B. Yeats was sitting by the Budgewoi, the full moon flooding across the in coming tide, the surface of the river black glass. He could hear green tree frogs croaking their high triple notes, then the weird chuckling calls from owlet nightjars waiting for a frog to put one foot wrong. The mullet were flopping and popping across the surface as they jumped and skipped against the tide. W.B. Yeats had given up fishing for blackfish, he’d met an old silver codger in the pub earlier in the night who had told him about the pike eels - huge olive-backed, silver-bodied fish that grew over a meter long and weighed up to 40lbs. Their teeth ran down the roof of their mouths, except for six fang-like cutting teeth in their bottom jaw. They were powerful eels and you had to fish with a wire trace or they would bite you off. Yeats remembered the pike in Ireland and how he had once fished for them with one of Lady Gregory’s relatives, Blackie O’Carrol - it had been an unforgettable experience and Yeats wanted to try again in the Budgewoi for a similar fish. The man in the pub told Yeats to use a bullock’s heart for bait and a length of 100 lb breaking strain line with a wire trace. Yeats was lost in the world of black water and moonlight, pike eels and the eerie calls of the night birds.

W.B. Yeats didn’t hear Feargal Sharkey yodeling for help. He’d been to the hospital to visit Huncke and when he walked into Herbert’s ward he could see there was already a visitor. This man was taking down Huncke’s drip and filling it with a brown substance. He was about to say something when the figure at the bed turned around to face him. Feargal was in the bed, and yet the man changing the drip looked exactly like Huncke, it took a minute for Feargal to realize he was confronting Huncke’s doppelganger as it emptied the saline from the drip and refilled the plastic bag with a full bottle of Black Drops. The two Hunckes rose up and tore the ward apart, there was chaos and strife, orderlies running around and nurses calling out for help. Eventually the police arrived but it was too late, the Huncke twins were running amok in Woy Woy. The real Huncke was being pursued through the lake-side streets by his insane doppelganger. Feargal wondered which Huncke he should fear the most. Were they independent of each other or did they work together in their quest for totally anarchy and mayhem?

Back at the Masonic Hall in Budgewoi, Robert Duncan was setting out the teacups for refreshments. He had a guest coming on the next train and was looking forward to talking to Jennifer Maiden about The Problem of Evil. Duncan was looking elegant in his black velvet jacket and silk shirt with his tailored charcoal grey superfine wool trousers. He had baked some teacakes in the Masonic oven and was warming the tea-pot. Jennifer turned up with her daughter Katharine, who looked like a young version of Jennifer and was as keen to meet Duncan as her Mother. When they started talking, Jennifer asked Duncan if he was sure he should be experimenting with the ritual for the transmigration of souls, and shouldn’t he be careful of chaos breaking out when he summoned the god Set? Duncan turned the question back on Jenny and asked her if she believed in direct action in the same way as Denise Levertov? Jennifer replied “I’ve always found poetry a useful tool for tactical and ethical problem-solving. I see it as a three-dimensional philosophy, like you have a human being in the form of the physical nature of language, incarnate as an idea that you set forth and explore, it lives out the problem as the poem tests it.” Duncan loved this and agreed with her. They were about to explore the idea and the myth of the transmigration of a soul when there was a knocking on the door. When Jennifer answered the door, Feargal was standing there as white as the side of a pike eel, “What do you know about doppelgangers?” he asked in a shaky voice.

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 30

2010-03-30T02:53:00.000-07:00

A selection of hand-carved planks.

James Dickey’s plank.

Bill Wisely coaching his son in the art of planking.

The Witchdoctor, todays most successful game-fish teaser. The shape of Bill Wisely's original 'plank' can be seen under the smoke and mirrors.

A Short History of the Plank
The plank first came to my attention when I witnessed its use during The Island War. This particular version was a crude affair, consisting mainly of the kinds of planks one sees on backyard fences, though with a handle shaped for a better grip. James Dickey’s plank was another thing altogether: based on the clubs used in the trenches in WW1, Dickey wielded his plank with an artist’s flourish, skittling Waggaists and sometimes other poets as he went in chanting and smiling.
Bill Wisely was the first to use a plank. Fishing from West Fort late one afternoon, he caught a Waggafish using one of Ian the Squid-man’s famous live-baits. When the Wagga came up thrashing and snarling, Bill lifted it into the belly of his boat and took to it with the plank he’d ripped rom the Brooklyn jetty a few days earlier. The Wagga was bucking and throwing red slime. Bill’s hand was a blur as he turned the huge Wagga to red slime.
Soon Bill had a huge collection of planks. His room at the Angler’s Rest was bristling with planks of various lengths and widths. He had planks for dealing with Waggas, planks for sorting out fights at the pub, and planks he used as teasers - these were towed behind his boat while trolling for Waggas and yellowfin tuna. They were painted red, green and blue, and had fragments of mirror glued onto them to attract fish from the deep.
Bill’s plank collection soon became an obsession. The plank he’d used to kill the Wagga was framed and hung on the wall behind the bar at the Angler’s Rest. Bill’s talk became so plank-based, that hardly anyone understood him. The word ‘plank’ appeared so many times in each sentence, the word itself became stripped of all meaning. “Plank you,” he’d say, when giving thanks. “Quite plankly, I don’t give a flying fuck,” was another of his favourite expressions.
News of the plank soon spread, especially within Australia’s tight-lipped and highly secretive fishing community. Steve Starling, our finest fishing journalist, came to Brooklyn to interview Bill about his planks and quickly became a devotee. In Modern Fishing, Starling wrote “...if ten percent of anglers catch ninety percent of the fish, then Bill Wisely is owed one hundred percent credit for introducing Australia to this extraordinary wooden item.” Starling’s article appeared in the February 2005 issue, and within weeks Brooklyn was alive with those wanting to seek Bill’s counsel. He responded by barricading himself in his room, and abusing the plank-disciples from his second-story window.
It soon became clear that the plank, when in the right hands, was not simply a weapon or Wagga-pacifier - it had fish-attracting properties. Steve Starling found this out first-hand while fishing with his mate Bushy out at Rowley Shoals. The fishing had been slow, so Starlo brought his plank and lowered the polished blade into the water. He waved it back and forth, slowly. Soon a school of massive dog-tooth tuna swept in from the around the other side of the atoll and went berserk around the boat, tail-swamping Starling and Bushy with seawater like Flipper, and eyeing the plank as they ripped past, snapping and glowing. That afternoon they caught green job fish, huge barracuda, coral trout and wahoo. The prize was a 250 kilo Waggafish, which Starling attracted and then subdued with his favourite plank.
In England, planks are now used while coarse fishing. Many a pike has known the allure and bite of a deftly-wielded plank. In South Africa, planks are used in the long-distance beach fishing championships: 15’-long, curved and hollowed planks are used to fling a 150gram lead sinker the length of a football field. On the Bellinger River, planks are being used for yabbying and for smashing European carp. Even in the wheat-belt, WA, planks are now the mainstay for farmers wanting to catch the marron that migrate from dam to dam. Despite the Red K’s petition and a flurry of activity on his homepage, thousands of these huge, tasty crustaceans have been planked, cooked and devoured.
I myself have a plank. I fought the urge for weeks, but having seen Bill Wisely at work on the upper reaches of the river, his various planks singing and flying in his hands, I relented and placed my order. Bill is a master plank-craftsman. My plank is made from jarrah, has a handle in the shape of a dragon-fly tail, and one of the landscapes in my book Ross’ Poems has been lovingly carved into the blade.
“There is a teaser lure called the Witchdoctor, it is Peter Pakula’s first invention. Initially designed for use while trolling live baits, the Witchdoctor is accepted as the best fish exciter for all game fishing trolling applications. At trolling speeds the Witchdoctor stays deep below the prop-wash, sending out irresistible vibrations, flashing reflected shafts of fluorescent blue and purple light in all directions, and unlike any other teaser, it never comes to the surface to interfere and tangle with trolling lines.”
The above paragraph is a typical description by a fishing writer promoting the most famous ‘plank’ in game fishing. It claims Peter Pakula invented the Witchdoctor game-fish teaser. It’s true that Pakula came up with many classic lures - the Konahead is one that comes to mind - however, it is not completely true that Pakula invented the Witchdoctor. Here is an account of how the witchdoctor was ‘invented’ and how it was manufactured and marketed by Peter Pakula.
Some years ago when Pakula was in Sydney, he wanted to catch a black marlin, so he hired a game-boat called The Sheriff and set out with its skipper and crew to fish Brown’s Mountain. It happened that Bill Wisely was one of the crew of and on this trip Bill was the live-bait and gaff-man. After a great session of tagging three black marlin and a Mako shark, Pakula had a strike and was hooked up with something big. It was swimming hard and deep and not acting like anything the crew could indentify by its behavior. After about a half an hour Bill called it for a black kingfish, a huge cobia. When they finally saw colour and had the fish on the surface they couldn’t believe their eyes.
What the hell was this incredibly ugly looking fish? Because Bill was handling the trace and gaff he decided to pull the fish aboard to get a better look. When it hit the deck the fish started to ‘growl’ and lurched at the nearest crew member and threw off a foul smelling red slime. This fish turned out to be the first recorded Waggafish caught by a game fishing boat in Sydney waters. When Pakula grabbed the gaff and poked the fish, the Wagga turned its head and snapped at the gaff, breaking it in two. The angry red fish was about to go for Pakula’s leg, but Bill Wisely grabbed his plank and started in on the fish. Something inside Bill snapped out there on the sea that day above Brown’s Mountain. Wisley went into a frenzy of planking the waggafish and within five minutes had turned it into a pulp of dark red jelly on the deck.
This action of Bill’s frightened the shit out of everyone on board. The skipper decided to call it a day. As they cruised back in towards the coast, Bill was trying to wash his plank in the live bait tank. The gunk, slime and red speckled scales embedded in the wood just wouldn’t budge. Bill decided the plank needed to be rinsed by sea-water, so he tied a trace around it and threw it over the stern into the wake. After The Sheriff had towed the plank for awhile, it started to dive and ‘swim’ in a peculiar manner. Bill pulled it closer to the back of the boat and saw that the red scales embedded in the grain of the plank were sparkling. A couple of the crew members came to have a look, they were astonished to see three black marlin were following the plank as Bill wound it back in. Peter Pakula started taking photographs and making notes. He then questioned Bill exhaustively about his old ‘plank’. Six months later, the first batch of ‘Witchdoctors’ appeared in the tackle shops, and these were not much more than versions of Bill’s plank painted red with mirrors glued to both sides.

G. Lehmann

Dispatch From The Front: Day 29

2010-03-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

Robert Duncan and the Initiates of the Cult of Seth.

Seth the God of Chaos.

John Tranter impersonating Ern Malley.

Feargal Sharkey as a Tawny Frogmouth on the cover of his first album.

Devin Johnston was twenty four hours late. He’d been held up at Central Station waiting for the train to Budgewoi as there was track-work in progress. Devin got to know a fellow traveler in the crowd by the name of Feargal Sharkey, a singer from Dublin. Devin told him he was going up to the central coast to help W.B.Yeats who was stranded with a group of poets in a Masonic Hall. Feargal was having a break from his tour so decided to go along with Devin so he could meet up with the great poet.

W.B. Yeats had been on the phone to Devin early that morning, he told Devin about the Black Drop outbreak, that everyone who was staying at the Masonic Hall had sampled the Drops and were now too intoxicated to help Robert Duncan proceed with the ritual he needed to perform. Everyone was completely out of control except for Duncan himself and Richard Tipping. Richard was there on a fellowship from the Returned Mystics Association to film the transmigration of the soul ceremony and generally document the event for the future. He had already set up his hi-tech lighting system and had cameras focused on the stage and other strategic positions. He was pacing around looking for unusual angles. Richard followed Duncan everywhere asking questions. Duncan told Tipping how he loved one of Richard’s conceptual sculptures - a red brick that had the words ‘trick-brick’ stamped on the top and bottom. The Budgewoi Masons wanted to commission Tipping to make a huge quantity of these bricks, enough for them to build a project, a shrine to the ancient god Seth or ‘Set’ as the Egyptians called him. Set was the god of Chaos and was often depicted in a human form but with an animal head. Some say this is the head of an aardvark - Seth has a curved snout, erect square ears, and a long forked tail.

The ancient Greek myths contained versions of Set but called their god of Chaos Seth - the Greeks’ idea of the transmigration is similar to reincarnation and yet different in some aspects. If, for example, the transmigration occurs after death, the person’s shade has to dwell in Hades and drink from the river Lethe until he looses all memory of his or her previous life. When all memory has drained away, the soul moves out from the underworld into another human form, and is then reborn.

Duncan explained to Tipping that this is very simplified version of the process, but it would do for the moment because he would soon be a witness to the real thing.

There were stories of transmigrations gone wrong. If even a tiny trace of a previous memory is retained, when the soul is reborn it becomes a troubled soul forever. There were other stories of souls that had transmigrated into the bodies of non human creatures, sometimes into birds, and at other times even fish.

Duncan set the date. The ceremony would be in two days. This would give them time to clean up the mess left behind in the wake of the Black Drop binge. It would also be enough time for the effects to wear off and for the poets to sober up.

Devin Johnston and Feargal Sharkey arrived with John Tranter who they had met on the train. Tranter had his whippets with him, Jet and Blondie, as he was aiming on doing some rabbiting while he was staying in the country. Tranter was impersonating Ern Malley but none of us were fooled, although we went along with his charade out of kindness.

Devin took charge of things at the Masonic Hall. Before long he had Herbert Huncke booked into a detox program in the Woy Woy Hospital. Herbert was too far gone to even know what was happening. This was a good thing because he didn’t believe in a life without narcotics, and Devin had to think of the welfare of the whole group. There was no alternative. When Huncke came to, he was going to be a handful, however this was a district with a high rate of addicts and the crew at the hospital would have seen all types and would know what to do. Devin also arranged a de-briefing session for Bob Adamson who was still convinced Anthony Lawrence should be living on green weed to boost the iron in his blood.

Johnston went down to the river and he soon took up with the old golden codgers who pledged their help with the preparations. A few weird things kept happening for a while - probably the oddest thing was when Philip Salom turned up on the dark of the moon and claimed that he was the Red K himself. He was dressed in a bright red silk jumpsuit and carried a big basket of vegetables he said were harvested in accordance with Rudolf Steiner’s gardening philosophy. Salom made some wonderful jokes

about Herbert Huncke and had everyone in stitches for hours. This totally blew his cover because, as everyone knows, the Red K has absolutely no sense of humour. We were never convinced by Salom’s mimicry but we were now in the habit of going along with the identity crises the poets were all going through.

W.B. Yeats had been laying low, he had been keeping to his room practicing a recitation of The Second Coming for Duncan’s ceremony. He decided to jump back into the eye of the action, he wanted to go out into the night and look at the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere. He loved seeing the Southern Cross and watching the shooting stars and the tails of the space junk as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and burned up. He walked along the banks of the Budgewoi and noticed the mullet were jumping, he watched the night herons preparing for the night’s hunting forays.

He was dressed in his finest grey Connemara cloth and wearing his new R.M. Williams boots. He ran into Ginsberg by the river who was trying to sober up by singing Dorothy Hewett’s song On An Island In a River accompanying himself on his trusty old harmonium. Ginsberg looked across to Yeats and said: “Ah Willy, this is a sweet life, and this is a place where peace comes dropping slow, just remember this now because in two days when Duncan gets to work on raising up that old red beast of a god, we’re going to need peace. Call him Seth or Set, whatever the name, he is the God of Chaos!”

There is one more very strange occurrence to report. When W.B. Yeats was strolling back from his walk in the night sky by the river, he heard the tinkling of little bells, then a flapping sound and then a chuckling male voice. Yeats walked out onto the main road under a street light, and there was Feargal Sharkey, swinging on the telegraph wires. He would swing and then move forward by passing his hands along the wire and moving an arm-span at a time. He was totally nude but his body was intricately painted with the full plumage of a tawny frogmouth owl and he was uttering the chuckling call of a male. He swung along for about ten metres, and then slid down a telegraph pole and landed on the footpath. He walked out into the middle of the street and, looking like a huge nocturnal predator, shivered in his feathery skin then started reciting Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poem A Wintery Manifesto. W.B. Yeats listened in amazement and then shook his head, thinking ‘The Black Drops’.

G. Lehmann.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 28

2010-03-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

Lion Island, seen from the top of the Citadel.

Dr Greene’s genetically-engineered fairy penguins.

The Black Drops.

The transmigration of the soul goes bad and Huncke shoots up to ease the pain. Note the prison-tat of a wagga-fish on his arm.

W.H. Auden and the poets were there to meet Drag the River as their barge pulled into the wharf. “Welcome to The Island,” Auden said. “Thankth for coming.” He then led the band away to see the Waggaist enclosure.

Everyone had packed. Their bags were piled on the wharf. The poets were fed up and pissed off. The adventure had long since lost its edge, and they wanted to go home. Where once they would have had something to say about any new arrival, they were now quiet and numb with resignation. It was a terrible sight. Impersonation had become endemic. Partly it was about passing the time, though for some it had become habitual. The poets were viewing each other with suspicion each time they interacted, unsure of who it was they were really talking to.
Tim Winton stared down from the crow’s nest. He only came down to relieve himself and collect more copies of The Immigrant Chronicles, which he’d taken to eating. Rodney Hall had become a total recluse and had moved into the citadel. Each morning at sunrise he emerged onto a small balcony under the needle tower and shouted lines from Blake and Whitman. He was like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.
T.S. Eliot was taking his morning stroll along the harbour. Seidel had given him a signed copy of Ooga-Booga, and he had been reading it constantly. Even now, as he walked, he held the book before him, reading the lines out loud, his walking cane swinging from where he’d hooked it over his wrist. He was dismayed by Seidel’s frequent references to female genitalia and motorbikes, which often occurred simultaneously. Yet there there was something in the work that touched him deeply, and he’d memorised complete poems. As he turned onto the boardwalk that led down to the main wharf, he saw that the Red Oblong was pulsing violently. Its curious interior light was deep red, and he thought he heard it humming.
Lucinda Williams jumped when she heard the door-knock. She held her breath as she went to the spy-hole. It was Ted Hughes. She ripped open the door and threw her arms around him. “We have to go, right now,” he said. She threw her things into her bag and they left the hotel.
As the Waggaists filed from their cage, Drag the River were filled with pity and sorrow. The prisoners were beaten and weathered and they stank in their torn robes. The bass player went to help a woman who had stumbled, but Eric Beach held him back. “Come on salamander, give her the Red side of the verandah,” he said. The poets pressed in, forming a wall of bodies as one by one the Waggaists stepped aboard the barge. The poets then began attending to the vast amounts of luggage on the wharf, taking their belongings to the various craft scattered about on the river.
When Rodney Hall came down the hill from the citadel, no-one acknowledged him. He went up to Nigel Roberts and asked if he could give him a hand. Nigel looked at him and just shook his head. Rodney approached Emily Dickinson and offered to carry her suitcase onto the tall-ship. She glared at him and turned away. Then Ivor Indyk walked up to him, clapped him hard on the back, and said “I really enjoyed your reading the other night, though I must say your style has taken a very interesting path.” Rodney walked to the end of the wharf. He was upset and confused. He looked down over the edge at his refection, mirrored perfectly on the top of the tide. He fought back tears. He choked and swallowed. The face floating on the water was Myron Wearne’s.
Ted Hughes and Lucinda Williams ran out onto the wharf. They’d been looking for T.S. Eliot, Michael Dransfield, J.S. Harry, Kerry Leves and Vicki Viidikas. Dransfield’s room was open and empty. On the wall above the wash-stand they saw a note scrawled in red ink: We have gone with Dorothy Hewett to Bermagui. Greene details. Later, M. When they saw T.S. leaning on a rail, reading, they went to him and took his arm and led him down to the end of the wharf. Hughes untied a row-boat from the back of a cruiser. When they were all aboard, he started rowing. The badger put its front legs onto the bow and stared out at the harbour. The Red Oblong was pulsing faster and faster, and it was indeed humming.
The poets watched as the huge barge left the wharf with it’s ragged human cargo. Auden, Bill Wisely, Terry Hack and Drag the River were standing up front. When the barge had become a dark stain in the distance, they farewelled each other and made ready to set sail. This was not the end to The War they’d been anticipating. They’d heard talk of a music festival, of dancing, of overseas publishing contracts with Alfred Knopf - hardcover 1st editions, signed and numbered, with initial print-runs of 100,000 copies. Now they were sunburned, dehydrated, broke, and their identities were up for grabs.
Tim Winton stripped off and did a swan-dive from the crow’s nest. When he surfaced, spouting a fine line of water, he free-styled it out into the river, and was last seen heading for Pearl beach. He knew that Robert Drew had a weekender there, and thought he’d break in and have a well-deserved rest.
Jayne Fenton Keane looked to all points of the compass. She looked inward and questioned what she most wanted. She looked around and saw everyone being downcast and not wanting to be the first to make a move. She climbed onto the roof of the paddle-steamer. “Fuck this,” she shouted. “Over there at Brooklyn they are drinking, listening to live music, playing pool, relaxing for God’s sake. Mostly we’ve been sitting around waiting for something to happen. I want some fun. I want to dance. I want to listen to music and forget about this fucking island. Does anyone want to join me?” The poets looked around. Randolph Stow removed his Charles Simic mask and said “I’m in.” Felicity Plunkett looked down the vanishing point to where the river met the sea. “Dancing,” she said. “Oh, yes!” Michael Farrell looked up from the book he was reading: Look Who’s Morphing, and simply nodded his head. Soon most of the poets were animated and talking loudly. They aimed their boats in the direction of Brooklyn and took off. But not Myron Wearne. He was composing a verse novel - half haiku, half vernacular narrative, and he needed solitude. He’d go to Brooklyn, but he didn’t want to socialise. He knew of a cave high in the bush between Parsley and Dead Horse Bay. He’d live there until the book was finished.
“Where are you taking us?” a Waggaist called rom the back of the barge. W.H. Auden ignored her. He stared straight ahead. Lion Island was looming out of the morning haze, its sandstone base throwing light. Drag the River were just following Auden’s orders. The Waggaists had been tied together with the rest of Amanda Joy’s palm fibre snares. The manacles were biting into their wrists. When someone pulled too hard, others suffered. As they drew nearer, they could see a small beach between two large outcrops of boulders. The barge eased into the shallows and the Waggaists were ordered to disembark. Many refused. Bill Wisely and Terry Hack went to work with their planks until the dissension had ended. Drag the River watched the spectacle with horror. When the last Waggaist had stepped off into the water, Auden said “We will return with fresh water. You will find variouth fruitth on the island. Native bush ratth are quite tathety, I’ve heard. Good luck.” As the barge backed out into deep water, a loud scream came from the beach: a large flock of red fairy penguins were attacking the Waggaists. Despite being flightless, they had launched themselves into the air and were tearing at clothing, ripping out clumps of hair and lacerating faces and hands. It was a shocking scene.
Over the years, Dr Greene had been experimenting with all kinds of creatures. Live-bait was his latest passion. Every island within one hundred miles of Sydney had been used as testing grounds for Greene’s genetic-modification. The fairy penguins had been given injections of LIMP2 as chicks. This had led to a savage disposition and a territorial obsession. The penguins had wiped out every other living thing on Lion Island.
The screams increased, rising to fever pitch as the barge headed away upriver.
Robert Duncan was up early. He sipped his Irish tea and spread blood-orange marmalade onto his spelt-grain toast. Then he opened today’s copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. He read Andrew Riemer’s review of Les Murray’s new book. How did Les’ collection stack up against his others?
‘Too soon to tell, poetry needs to mature in the reader’s mind and imagination.’ This was published in a major newspaper - how wise and unlikely a comment in such a context. Duncan was assured that Budgewoi was the right place to perform the ritual that might bring about a transmigration of a soul. If Sydney could support a critic and newspaper of this quality, then at least some culture may be available to readers in the outer suburbs. He always tested the waters of the culture of a place by reading the poetry reviews (if any) in the city’s main newspaper. And even if the review was a cruder affair than this one, it would tell a certain story about the place, a sample of taste or of critical awareness. Duncan’s eyes were sandy this morning, his head still fuzzy from a sleepless night. He’d been up all night staring at the page of manuscript written in the hand of the Red K. This was an authenticated sample of the K’s work and therefore it demanded an assessment - being the work of the man who had caused so much grief and quiet terror.
This writing resembled, if anything, a version of the famous hoax poems by Ern Malley. However this verse was so clotted and the rhetoric so stunted it barely passed muster even as a piece of verbiage,
and there was a certain tone that troubled the reader’s sensibility because it was utterly without a soul of its own. There was no spirit here either, only some kind of a demented energy, like the madness of a confused wagtail charging its own image in a rearview mirror, and charging again and again until the creature wounded its tiny head.
Robert Duncan had been studying the animists and was thinking again of the understanding that all things had souls, all animals, birds and fish, even inanimate things like rocks. Staring at this dismal artifact, this so called poetry by the Red K, Duncan’s understanding darkened and
his enlightened mind was repulsed. This piece of gibberish had no soul. He scrunched the page in his hand, rolled it into a tiny grey ball and then dropped it into his pot of Irish tea. May it drown in the bitter tannin stained warm brew and hopefully eventually disintegrate there.
While Duncan showered and tried to clean the seven chambers of his heart and soul of corruption, there was more trouble brewing down in the basement of the Budgewoi Masonic Hall. Herbert Huncke had managed to smuggle a case of the Black Drops into town and was down there handing out little bottles of Sam Coleridge’s favorite tipple. Bob Adamson was already off his brain and had gone back down to the river and brought back two of the old codgers along with their bait, the green weed they used for the blackfish. Somehow Adamson believed in his stoned mind that the green weed would be good for Anthony Lawrence, that Anthony needed iron in his blood for the coming day when he would come across the Red K in the field. Ginsberg was drinking bottles of Black Drops and was trying to recite Howl from memory, it was coming out wrong and sounded like Dorothy Auchterlonie Green’s love letters to James McAuley. I was going to find Huncke and tell him that Duncan would fly into a rage if he found out, and that we should stop handing out Black Drops until after the transmigration of the soul ceremony.
However as I turned into a back room in the cellar, Huncke was in there hunched in a corner. It was a bleak scene, he was actually injecting the Black Drops into a vein in his arm. His face was blue and his eyes were white, he was repeating a single letter over in a quite and calm voice. “K. K. K. K. K’. Then, as he crossed over the darkest of all rivers, he stood up and danced around inside that dank room. He was doing an infinity elegant kind of Irish Jig.

G. Lehmann, at the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 27

2010-03-26T02:44:00.000-07:00

Herbert Huncke having a smoke in bed in his room at the Budgewoi Masonic Hall.

Huncke, Ginsberg and a fishing inspector looking at W.B. Yeats fishing for blackfish in the Budgewoi River.

Budgewoi Masonic Hall.

Ted Hughes hated his room at The Wheelhouse. It was worse than any of the places he used to stay in when travelling around England, and some of those had been septic - spectred but never inspected. They stank of monarchy and fortified wine. They came apart while you looked at them. The Wheelhouse itself was quite pleasant. Whitewashed walls and a simple garden, a fine restaurant, polite and helpful staff. But on the inside, things were very different. His room was claustrophobic. The ceiling was too low, the walls too thin, the paintings were wrong, the carpet threadbare, the window too small, the wash-stand leaning, the plaster flaking, the lampshade dented. Hughes sat on his bed, which was much too hard, and took out a notepad and pencil.
Lucinda Williams dreamed of the knock on her door before she heard it. In her dream she got up and looked through the spy-hole. The hallway was empty. In her dream she was not afraid. When the knocking came again, she woke and turned the bedside lamp on. She put on her dressing gown and went to the door. She looked through the spy-hole. A man wearing a fox-skin cap was standing back, grinning in a faint blue light. “What do you want?” she asked. She went to the phone and called reception. There was no answer. The bedside lamp went off, the full moon emerged from behind a cloud and threw a molotov cocktail into the room. When it started again, the knocking was constant and loud. Lucinda Williams was afraid.
Ted Hughes looked out the window and saw how sunset was lighting the Red Oblong. Over the last few days he’d watched as the water police and then the navy had come to try and tow it away. Each attempt had been met with frustration and much on-and-offshore deliberation. He’d heard them cursing. “Fucking weird geometry,” someone shouted when their tow-rope had snapped like a rifle-shot. There had been talk of scuttling it where it was. An artificial reef. A snapper breeding ground. A Wagga Coney Island, thought Hughes, then returned his attention to the notepad. He’d been working on an escape plan. He felt the time was fast approaching when he’d be able to leave. Seidel’s power and influence were diminishing. Shelby was a joke.
Drag the River pulled into the marina at Brooklyn. Bill Wisely was there to meet them. Bill was a huge fan. He saw that the pedal steel player was missing, and started asking questions. When the singer told Bill that a massive red fish had eaten him in Newcastle harbour, Bill went into a complete rage. He started smashing things with his plank. He belted a Pacific gull out into the river. He was swinging the plank and yelling when Emmylou Harris walked onto the jetty. “Bill,” she said. Bill stopped swinging and shouting. “Would you help these gentlemen with their luggage?” Bill calmed down immediately and stepped onto the barge and started gathering bags. She turned to the band: “We are so happy you have come. We have heard about your friend and we’re so very sorry for your loss. However, I need to ask you a huge favour. The new leader of the Poets, W.H. Auden, has phoned asking if we have any barges here in Brooklyn. We do, but they’re nowhere near big enough. I know it’s a huge imposition, but would you mind going with Bill Wisely and Terry Hack to The Island? There are some prisoners needing transport.”
When Adamson’s Customline pulled up at the Masonic Hall in Budgewoi, W.B. Yeats was excited and twitching with nerves. His hair was ruffled by his right hand that had been constantly running through it, his fingers like five avocets raking the kelp for glass eels with their curved beaks. Anthony Lawrence was re-telling the story of the day he saw me in my Kombi van in a traffic-jam on Roseville bridge. As he drove by in another lane, he recognised me and recited a whole stanza from one of my Nero poems— at the time I didn’t know him, and I was puzzled for days about who would do such a thing. Little did I know that it was an intimation of things to come, maybe an omen? Speaking of omens, W.B. Yeats was now speaking to Robert Duncan on his mobile phone. When we got out of the Customline he was still talking. We watched Robert Duncan and W.B. Yeats walk towards each other still speaking into their phones until they met and threw their arms around each other. I looked around, the Budgewoi Masonic Hall was quite an imposing building compared to the rest of the town: mostly fibro cottages, weatherboard fishermen’s shacks and the redbrick monsters built by the Sate Housing Commission in the 1950s.
The Budgewoi River ran straight through the town, through backyards and caravan parks—at a boat-launching ramp, there were several men fishing on its banks for blackfish. I noticed their brightly coloured floats moving swiftly on the surface of the river, pulled along by a strong ebb tide. These were the old golden codgers of the town, the same kind of men Yeats had written about in his poem New for The Delphic Oracle: ‘There all the golden codgers lay, / There the silver dew, /And the great water sighed for love,/ And the wind sighed too.’ Except today there was no silver dew. It was 11 am and the sun was high and hot in the sky, there was a hint of a Southerly in the humid breeze but it was not strong enough to blow away the sticky humidity. Yeats told us to be prepared for weirdness - evidently Herbert Huncke was also staying in the Masonic Hall with Robert Duncan: W.B. said he was an unsavory type and to be wary of him.
As soon as we met Huncke he surprised us with the news that Allen Ginsberg was also staying with Hammer Whitefeather. Yeats loved this information, and went looking for Ginsberg straight away, Huncke told W.B. he would be in the pool hall with the local boys who’d be playing Ginsberg for drinking money.
Anthony Lawrence and Bob Adamson started unloading the things that Duncan needed to perform his transmigration of the soul ceremony. They were in a black mood, having watched Frank O’Hara escape in his dune buggy. Each time they positioned something, a candelabra for instance, Huncke made some disturbing noise and shook his head in a way to indicate the idiocy of their participation. Lawrence was ready to plank him, but Adamson held him back, saying that there would be dire consequences if Huncke was harmed. He was a slippery looking character. He wore a creased silk shirt soaked in sweat and black tie even in the heat, he had greasy hair and his face was a sign depicting his vocation: the crumpled but dangerous Apostle of Junk, the man who introduced William S Burroughs to his first hit of morphine. Huncke was friends with Aleister Crowley and evidently Crowley was also in town, he was down at the riverbank fishing for blackfish with the old golden codgers. Things were getting complicated and Bob and Anthony were nervous. They had told me at different times that there was a sense of menace and dread in the atmosphere. They said the whole Masonic thing was a cover for the real sect that controlled this temple: the society who worshipped the ancient Egyptian God, Seth. This sect had, over the millennia, altered human genetics in order to create a race of people with blond hair, blue eyes and red intelligence: these followers would do the bidding of the ancient order, merciless bigots, who would stop at nothing to protect their belief in the purity of Redness.
Two weeks ago Crowley had sent Robert Duncan a parcel that contained a red brick, a scale from a very large waggafish, a full set of teeth extracted from the jawbone of a hairtail caught at Jerusalem Bay and a jar of red liquid labeled ‘Blood of The Lamb’. Under these objects there was a page from a manuscript of incomprehensible poetry. Duncan submitted the manuscript to an analytic chemist and a handwriting expert. The results had come back to Budgewoi and the secret was out: the combined report specified that the manuscript had been written with the quill of a night parrot from Western Australia dipped in waggafish blood, the earliest sample of the fish’s blood on record. The graphologist reported that the handwriting was without a doubt, the handiwork of the Red K.
G. Lehmann, at the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 26

2010-03-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

James Joyce’s Martello Tower at Sandy Cove.

Patrick Kavanagh making his way to Sandy Cove to meet Yeats.

The sky over Sandy Cove as Yeats returns to Woy Woy.

Robert Adamson in front of Frank O’Hara’s Live Bait shop, Long Jetty.

W.B. Yeats felt himself lifted violently into a roaring wind. Something like fine hail was pelting his face. He tried to open his eyes but the pressure had sewn them shut. He dreamed of gold coins lying heavy on his eyelids, of Saint Beckett blessing him with a bog-wood plank. He heard a choir of celtic thousands singing “Dirty Red Town”. He was lost in a vision of The Salmon of Knowledge when the wind and ice stopped and he felt himself falling. As he tumbled, his clothes were being torn away. He plummeted through a thunderhead, its blue and purple ridges and swollen seams giving way as he went through it. Then he saw a harbour, the roofs of houses shouldering each other down a narrow street. Then a sandstone tower loomed up at him. He closed his eyes and held his breath. And then everything was quiet and still.

Yeats opened his eyes. He was in a high-backed darkwood chair in front of a raging fire. The air was thick with peat and aromatic tobacco smoke. He looked around. The vast room was empty, its sandstone walls flickering with shadows and golden light. In the distance a bell tolled. Then the room’s huge wooden door opened slowly. A massive, hulking figure stepped into the room. It was Cuchculain. The great warrior had to bend low to get under the door frame. When he stood up inside the room, Yeats estimated his height to be at least 10’. He was dressed in boar-leather and the tanned skins of red fish. A large silver shield with fish and birds embossed into it was hanging from his belt. In one hand he held two spears, their shafts as thick as an average man’s arm. In the other he held a live Waggafish by its tail. The fish must have weighed at least twenty kilos, and was looking around wildly and moaning. Cuchculain held the Wagga aloft, then brought it close to his face. The Wagga went insane, thrashing and snapping its jaws. Cuchculain smiled at Yeats, then bit the Wagga’s head clean off. He spat the still-snapping head into the fireplace. With two steps he was beside Yeats, towering over him. He looked down and said. “I am happy you summoned me. I was expecting your call.” He looked at the headless fish in his fist. “I have slain over ten thousand of these Red creatures and still they come. They are murdering the heart of our rivers. They are in the streams. I have seen them flipping and snarling as they rise on the blades of the mill-wheels. Our fishermen are kneeling in impotent fury under their terrible influence. I have brought you here to meet with those who share your desire to see this Redness banished forever.”

With those words, Cuchculain stepped aside, and through the door came a silent line of poets, all wearing large War on Wagga badges. First to enter was James Joyce, his monocle flashing with firelight. Then came Patrick Kavanagh, his torn coat stained with Wagga blood. C.S. Lewis was next, his hands clasped together, his head bowed. Oscar Wilde stepped into the room, flicking his fringe and smiling broadly. Then Jonathan Swift swept into the room, a quill from an eagle feather bristling from a pocket of his large black coat. Spike Milligan tripped on the step and stumbled into the room, followed by Paul Muldoon, who looked for all the world as though he’d just been spirited away from drinking with friends in the snug at the Bleeding Horse, or the Bleeding Heart hotel in Ennis.

The poets sat down in a half-circle facing Yeats. Joyce was first to speak. “Red times have befallen us. We are gathered here to free Ireland of this pestilence, this cloud of impending doom.” “What Joyce is trying to say,” said Oscar Wilde, “is that whenever three or four things gather in the name of Redness, that’s three or four too many as far as I’m concerned.” Spike Milligan was staring at Yeats. “The first ‘Woy’ means deep, the second ‘Woy’ water,” he said. Muldoon looked at Milligan. “What the hell are you talking about?” C.S. Lewis packed the bowl of his yew-wood pipe, tamped the tobacco down with his thumb, struck a match on the sole of his boot, put fire to the bowl, took a sip of smoke, and said bugger all.

Yeats was still in shock at finding himself in such illustrious company. He’d only recently been reading Muldoon’s Moy Sand and Gravel, and had been amazed and infuriated by the man’s facility with language and his ability to rhyme rock with Donegal. He took a deep breath and addressed the poets: “My dealings with occultism have been inspirational, but no encounter has led me into such astonishing company. “It only gets better,” Wilde said. “Yes indeed, Patrick Kavanagh said. “Just wait until we bring out the soda bread, porter, and blood pudding.” Yeats removed his glasses and polished the lenses on his waistcoat. “Like Caesar in his war-tent, I feel compelled to study the emotional lie of the land before me, and then consider,” he said quietly. He looked over at Cuchulain, who was jabbing a huge finger into the side of the still-shaking Waggafish. “So please, friends, what would you have me do?” “Are they still live-baiting for jewies among the pylons of the old Woy Woy road bridge?” asked Spike Milligan. James Joyce raised his hand. He made a sweeping gesture that took in the entire room. “My tower at Sandy Bay will be home to our small group until we have harnessed our collective thoughts on how to rid Ireland of the Red ones. We will remain here until such time as we are ready to take action.” Joyce leaned forward in his chair and fixed Yeats with a look so intense, W.B.’s ears started ringing. “Are the red Wagga-rods with their lure-launching device ready to be used in this War?” he asked. Yeats got to his feet and went into a heated description of the complex workings of the rod and lure-launcher. Oscar Wilde went to him and took Yeats by the shoulders. “Settle down man,” he said. “You’re a great poet not a feckin’ epileptic.” Yeats took his seat. “Very well,” Joyce said, “Now, if that’s everything, I suggest...” “This Red K fellow,” Muldoon said. “I was on the bill with him during a festival a couple of years ago. Jaysus it was dreadful. I couldn’t understand a word the man was saying. It was like he was talking through a mouthful of wheat.” Yeats was going to say something about the age-old story of self-promotion rarely achieving the talent it parades, when the air in the room turned cold and he felt a terrible pressure in his neck and down his spine.

Once again he felt himself rising and tumbling. His mouth filled with rain, and his eyes were sealed with miles of cold wind. One moment he was travelling at a frightening speed, deep inside a dream about Patrick Kavanagh taking a plank to Wendy Cope, and the next he was slumped over the seance table inside the Woy Woy Trades Hall, fighting for breath and trying to still his racing heart. Wallace Stevens prodded him with his walking cane. “Welcome back, W.B.” he said. “There are more than thirteen ways of looking at a miracle.” The other poets started talking at once, asking questions and pointing at the ceiling, which was still smoking. “You were only gone a couple of minutes,” said H.D. Basil Bunting looked at Yeats through eyes grown weary with visions and reading in bad light. “Pity,” he said. “I was hoping for a little insight into the details of The Other Side.” “Well, friends,” Yeats said, “if I told you, you would believe me.”

There was a silence in the hall thick as winter mist on the Budgewoi River. Then one of the Evangelicals let go with a seagull-toned gale of gibberish, which encouraged the rest of the flock to bust out again into a mumbling version of their speaking in tongues. When this subsided they gradually began filing out of the Trades Hall. After the last of the Evangelicals had moved on, the group of poets started climbing down from the stage. Above them the hole in the roof was shaped like W.B. Yeats’ body. When they reached the street they decided to spilt up into two groups. Bunting had hired a car earlier in the day. He wanted to show the poets in his group the wonders of the lagoons of the central coast. The other group was myself, W.B. Yeats, Bob Adamson and Anthony Lawrence.

We were in Adamson’s Customline again and heading back to the Pacific Highway. As we drove through the streets of Woy Woy, W.B. Yeats told us he had arranged another meeting to do with spiritual matters. This time it was to be held in the Masonic Lodge Hall at Budgewoi, the oldest Masonic Lodge in the Southern Hemisphere. W.B. knew about this because he’d been corresponding with Robert Duncan. It turned out that Duncan had arrived in Sydney a good month before the poetry war, but instead of going directly to The Island had traveled north to Budgewoi. Duncan was the guest of Hammer Whitefeather, the high chief of the Masons of the mid-north coast. These two had been corresponding for three years and plans for Duncan’s performance of a transmigration of the soul had been followed to the letter.

Before we looped back through Budgewoi, W.B. decided we should go and check out O’Hara’s fishing tackle store. We cruised into the Entrance and before long we saw a corner shop with a huge live-bait sign painted in red on the window. We parked and walked over to the store.

Frank O’Hara was there to welcome us, so was his brother and Oboe. The first thought that came to mind was relief that Wallace Stevens had gone off with Bunting’s group to see the lagoons. Whenever anybody saw Oboe, Hemingway was not far away. Frank wanted to take us on a tour of his live-bait tanks but W.B. was over in a corner studying the hard-bodied lures. “Could one rig-up a live bait on one of these beauties?” W.B. asked Frank, but O’Hara had never heard anything like this before. “Well I guess, but it’s against the philosophy of the artificial lure”. W.B. Yeats looked Frank straight in the eye and said “Well, isn’t that a shame. However, I don’t think any kind of philosophy is going to help us with the struggle against the Waggas - in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t some idiot’s ‘philosophy’ that brought this wretched red pestilence upon us in the first place.” Frank O’Hara felt a trickle of sweat run down his side. If the poets discovered his Waggafish-fillet dealings, he’d be sunk.

Lawrence and Adamson were watching O'Hara closely. I could sense trouble brewing.

Some movement in a tank near W.B. caught his eye. He peered in through the thick glass and could hardly believe what he saw. In the tank there were hundreds of wagga-fingerlings and above them was a sign in red lettering: PODDY WAGGAS $1.50 each! “What in the name of the Holy Ghost?” W.B. said to Anthony. “Are these what they appear to be?” “What do they look like?” said O’Hara’s brother, who held one of the fingerlings above his mouth for a few seconds before dropping it into his throat and swallowing. “Waggas, fucking baby waggas!” Said Adamson, “This is a total outrage.” Frank’s brother interjected: “Not at all, no not really, it’s well known they are the most cannibalistic fish in the drink. Poddy waggas make the perfect livie - they are so tough they can stay alive for hours with a hook in their shoulder. Also they attract a savage bite from the massive waggas because of the vigorous vibrations they make as they struggle. And best of all, if you don’t get any bites, you can eat the bait!” There was a crash from behind the counter - it was Hemingway and Oboe, they were stocking up on poddy-waggas. One of their live-bait buckets had fallen off the counter and spilled across the floor. “This joint is a mess, I just tripped over a goddamn bottle of Sam’s Black Drops.” Oboe was mopping up the water and carefully picking up the fingerlings. “These are fine, they can survive anything, he said.” Then Papa Hemingway stooped over and delicately picked one up from the floor, he turned it over in the palm of his hand and studied it closely: “What a Goddamn beautiful bait!”

As Hemmingway and Oboe were filling containers with Waggafish fingerlings, Lawrence took O'Hara aside. Adamson closed the doors to the shop and hung the CLOSED sign in the window. Seeing this, O’'Hara backed into a corner behind the counter. “You look a little nervous, Frank,” Lawrence said. “Yes Frank, would you like some zest?” Adamson said. Frank opened his till. “Take it all,” he stuttered. W.B Yeats adjusted his monocle. “Frank, we are decent folk. We simply demand you return the same decency and answer our questions honestly.” Adamson came close: “We don’t want your money, Frank, we want the truth. Tell us about the Waggafish fillet trade.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I sell live-bait, that’s all.” Lawrence looked towards the back of the shop. “What’s out there Frank?” “Nothing. The lunch room. Containers. Live-bait tanks.” Bob Adamson went over and pulled back a heavy stainless steel door and stepped through it. O’Hara and Lawrence waited, looking at each other. Finally Adamson came back. He was smiling. “Lunch room, eh? Containers? I’d say you’re doing a roaring trade, O’Hara.”

Hemmingway loooked over and saw the tense situation behind the counter. “Keep filling these bags,” he said to Oboe, and walked over to see what was happening. “It seems Mr O’Hara has been very busy,” Adamson said. “Come and check this out, Papa.” “You might like to bring your plank,” said Yeats.

Out the back of O’Hara’s Live-Bait shop, there was a huge cold-room complex. At the jetty on the canal was a long-lining boat. Hemmingway threw open the doors of the cold room. Inside they saw shelves stacked to the ceiling with trays of huge Waggafish fillets. The place reeked of betrayal and death. Hemmingway was passing his plank from hand to hand. “You mongrel,” he said. O’Hara was freaking out. “Look, it’s nothing. I mean, you people seem to think it’s alright to buy Waggafish fingerlings and use them for live-bait. You think it’s alright to enter into some kind of Red contract with these creatures, but it’s not okay for me to sell them. “It’s different,” Yeats said. “We have adventures while tracking them down, and we get to write about it.”It’s not different” O’Hara said, gaining in confidence. After being given a swift demonstration of Hemmingway’s plank, he settled down. “Your Waggafish enterprise is over,” Adamson said.

As Hemmingway went down to the jetty to take command of the long-liner and Adamson and Lawrence inspected the cold-room, Yeats took O’Hara aside and tried to reason with him. Frank listened, then made a run for it. He bolted from the cold room and sprinted down a narrow laneway beside the shop. A motor coughed and roared into life, and Frank O’Hara sped away in his dune buggy.

G. Lehmman, at the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 25

2010-03-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

The Cottage Point Inn.

Frank O’Hara and his brother sampling Waggafish fingerlings at Long Jetty.

Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Basil Bunting and H.D. look on in horror as W.B. Yeats is dragged through the ceiling after he’d summoned the spectre of the great Irish warrior Cuchulain.

Poets were stealing each other’s identities. They’d always done this, in verse, but to discover that many were brilliant impersonators came as a shock. It was disturbing. Petra White turned out to be Emma Lew, undercover and writing furiously. It was a relief to know that despite the rumours, Emma hadn’t abandoned poetry. Gwen Harwood’s cover was blown when James K. Baxter was seen getting changed on the beach behind the citadel. All the cross-dressing, the subterfuge, the brazen identity-theft was killing me, so it came as a huge relief when I got a text from Angus Young, telling me to come to the Cottage Point Inn.

Angus Young and Bon Scott were waiting on the jetty when I arrived. They’d been jamming with Radio Birdman in the studio of AC/DC's Church Point mansion. They told me that when their lunch arrived by water-taxi from they Cottage Point Inn, it was clear that their meal was not what they’d ordered. Rob Younger, Birdman’s singer, took one look at the large red fillets and went into a rage. Rob was a keen fisherman, and he knew a Waggafish fillet when he saw one. “This is fucked, man. Waggafish? The Red Death!” He picked up the large cardboard box full of fillets and lemon wedges and threw it over the verandah. He then demanded they all go to the Inn and throttle the owner. Angus and Rob had calmed him down and said they’d go and sort it out. They knew of what had been happening on The Island, and wanted me to report on this new development.

When we went into the restaurant, the owner/chef took one look at us and bolted. He ripped off his chef’s hat and apron and ran out through the back of the kitchen. Bon took off after him, and we followed. The chef was in his runabout, pulling furiously on the outboard rope when Bon leapt into the boat, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him out onto the wharf. The chef was then frog-marched back into the restaurant. He wanted us to talk to him in private, but Angus and Bon made him sit at a table in front of all the diners. Bon stood over him. “What fish did you send us?” The chef looked around. “Snapper,” he said. Angus went over to a large aquarium where bream and squire were swimming around. “I don’t see any snapper in here,” he said. He then went over to a table where an elderly couple were eating lunch. On their plates were large red fillets. “Excuse me folks, but what did you order?” “Red snapper,” the woman said. “It does taste a little odd. It’s more like a freshwater species, but with a strange aftertaste.” “My mouth is going numb,” said the man. Bon made the chef stand up. “I’m going to ask you one more time. What fish are you serving?” The chef broke down. He sobbed uncontrollably, his face in his hands. “Stop your red blubbering you fuckwit, and answer the question.” The diners had stopped eating and were staring at the chef. “Answer him,” a man shouted. The chef stopped crying and said that he’d been taking large deliveries of Waggafish from a man by the name of Frank O’Hara. Frank had a live-bait business at Long Jetty, and his brother was running a long-liner out to the Continental Shelf, catching huge Waggafish. There were so many of them, he had decided to supply many seafood restaurants. The owners didn’t ask questions as the fillets were cheap and their profit margins exceptional.

Angus and Bon then told the chef that if he continued selling Wagga fillets, they would return to trash the restaurant and burn it top the ground. The diners stood and applauded. I decided to go right to the source of all this deception and madness, and call in on Bob Adamson.

Arriving at Adamson’s, I saw Anthony Lawrence’s Moto Guzzi California Vintage motorbike in the driveway. Its saddlebags had sewn-on badges of red fish with black lines through them.

The poets were down on the jetty. They’d spread a large oceanographic map on the boards, weighting it with downrigger leads at the edges. They were in animated discussion. Lawrence was talking loudly. I heard “Lion Island,” and “Greene’s genetically-modified fairy penguins.” Adamson responded with “Oboe’s brutal loyalty,” and “a flood-tide of anguish awaits them.” They stood up when I came down the sandstone steps and moved to stand in front of the map. I told them about what had happened at the Cottage Point Inn. They were incensed. I suggested we take a drive to Long Jetty, to speak with Frank O’Hara. As we made ready to leave, an oyster farmer approached in his punt. He slowed as he went past the jetty. Then he stood up and shouted: One day in a gallery I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES. Adamson and Lawrence laughed softly, and smiled, and something about those words put a chill through the back of my head.

We jumped into Adamson’s Customline and headed up the old Pacific Highway. We passed the lilly pilli ferns, great red lilies at least two metres tall, growing along the high ridge at Mount White - crimson rosellas looped through the native willows in the valley at Moonie where Henry Kendall used to listen to the bell birds. Bob was saying to Anthony that they’d have to ring Creeley to make sure the poets from Bunting’s picnic knew we were going up that way. Anthony agreed we could all meet up, and then see what Yeats was up to and if he had any new plans. The picnic party had left early that morning from Central Station and were headed up to the Central Coast. Bunting wanted the visitors to see the lagoons up that way.

Bunting, Elizabeth Bishop, H.D. ,Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats had decided to get out of town before Hemingway turned up at the fish shop trying to sell his catch. If he happened to see Stevens, who was staying for a couple of days, there’d be trouble. Stevens and Hemingway were always getting involved in fist fights - the one at Florida Keys over the Bone Fish Tournament was no joke. Wally had broken several small bones in his fist, and Papa had to have a six stitches in his arm when he fell through a tackle shop window. They were still at each other’s throats every time they got together. Bunting wanted to show the poets the lagoons that had been locked off to the sea for five or more years. Sand-bars had formed at the mouths of the lakes and the all the marine life inside had grown to enormous sizes. The prawns were larger than king prawns and the flathead had heads like big sand-shovels.

Finally Anthony reached Yeats on his mobile. W.B. told him they should all meet at the Woy Woy Trades Hall because he was going to make contact with the Other Side. There’d be a séance and they’d be getting some advice from Cuchulain about the Waggafish problem. This was Yeats’ first séance in Australia, and he was going to make contact - it would bring great power to them all if it all worked out as well as he hoped.

As Adamson swung his Customline into the main street of Ettalong, he asked Anthony: “Should we show Geoff the shop Frank O’Hara’s set up?” “Yes, he can write about it - it’s time people knew the truth.”Anthony was getting more excited as we approached Long Jetty. “First we have to go to Woy Woy and talk to W.B.Yeats and his séance picnic.” Bob said with a wicked tone in his voice.

The sea-side suburbs were passing by as we drove through the little towns and their Churches of many a stripe - Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Baptists and the Quakers and Shakers. A lot of these Churches were red brick barns with no windows at all, while others were elaborate weatherboard Cathedrals with stained glass windows depicting Christ riding in on a surfboard, or John The Baptist blessing the Squid Boats in Gosford Harbour.

The beach-side streets were bristling with muscle cars doing demos, and the local hoons beeped their horns or waved as they caught an eyeful of the black Customline. Finally we pulled up at the Trades Hall. “Hey Geoff, you know what Spike Milligan said about Woy Woy?” “No, what?” Bob was almost laughing already. “He said it’s an Aboriginal word for ‘deep water’: the trouble was that Spike didn’t know which ‘Woy’ was ‘deep’ and which ‘Woy’ was ‘water.’ We all laughed and then fell into an uneasy silence before climbing out of the car.

We walked up the pavement to the Trades Hall. W. B. Yeats came to the door and said “You’re just in time.” We were ushered into the hall and on the stage there was a plain cedar table and the poets were sitting there, sweating in the heat and holding strange objects in their hands. Wallace Stevens was reciting The Idea of Order at Key West; Elizabeth Bishop was looking depressed and highly suspicious; H.D. looked like she was already having a vision, and Basil Bunting kept repeating aloud “The spuggies are fledged” over and over. W. B. Yeats looked around, we were sitting in the audience, a crowd of Evangelicals, who were speaking in tongues. Yeats saw Anthony and Bob and started to recite The Lake Isle. “I shall arise and go now....” Then sunlight flared in the windows and great bolts of lightening came crashing through the ceiling, forming long electrical arms that were reaching for Yeats. Adamson turned to Lawrence and quoted Bob Dylan: The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of your face... W. B. screamed out that it was a manifestation of Cuchulain’s mighty power. Then the jagged electrical arms seized Yeats and pulled him up, quite literally, through the roof.

G. Lehmann, off to the Side.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 24

2010-03-22T03:18:00.000-07:00

Robert Creeley.

Basil Bunting’s fish & chip shop at Central Station.

Bunting disguised as Rodney Hall.

W.B. Yeats’ was about to go aboard Le Pilar when his Mobile phone rang. It was Robert Creeley. He wanted to know if Yeats had heard that Basil Bunting had opened up a fish shop at Central Station in Sydney. “Is that a fact,” said Yeats. Creeley went on to tell him that Basil Bunting was a Waggafish addict and had set up the fish shop after visiting Ian the squid man’s Hawkesbury Secrets bait shop in Brooklyn. I told Judith Beveridge, who was taking photos of Le Pilar, that Yeats was talking to Creeley on the phone. “Have you actually met Bunting?” asked Judith. “He’s an old friend of Burroughs from his days in the Far East, where they were involved in some kind of espionage in Morocco - they even went on to Hippo and helped Augustine in his efforts to become a Saint.” Judith knew about these kind of things - she had studied comparative religion and history for years. She was also an expert on zest, saffron and poppies. “What do you mean, espionage?” Said Elisabeth Webby, who was with Judith. “It’s a form of disambiguation,” replied Judith, but the conversation at this point was drowned out. Webb was on board the Le Pilar and making a hell of a racket. He was hammering nails into the heads of Hemingway’s catch of Waggafish, pinning them stolidly in a line along the front of the bow.

Randolph Stow turned up wearing Ivor Indyk’s clothes. “Basil Bunting has been around some places you just wouldn’t want to know about. He is the man who turned Creeley onto Wagga-meat. They are total addicts, they write poetry in several styles and send it to HEAT and other journals under the names of many Australian poets. They need the cash. They make Harold Stewart’s and James McAuley’s Ern Malley look like a ragged joke. Creeley and Bunting are brilliant but it’s all in the service of Wagga-meat.” Stow was sounding more like Ivor Indyk than the great Western Australian novelist. Yeats’ phone rang again. It was Creeley. He wanted Judith Beveridge to bring a set of Griffo’s filleting knives to the fish shop at Central Station. She had to catch the next train, and Creeley would meet her at the coffee shop in the railway station. He’d be wearing a red-eye patch.

Judith stepped off the train at Central Station an hour later. She walked over to the coffee shop. Creeley was pacing up and down outside, she couldn’t miss him: his red-eye patch, his overcoat buttoned up to the neck, his stylish hat and his black goatee. When Judith got up close she noticed his hands were shaking. His eye was bloodshot, the pupil dilated, all of which amounted to a testimony to the ravishes of Wagga-meat. Creeley took the box of knives eagerly but he wanted Judith to follow him, he wanted to show her what went on behind his shop. They went through the front door and it appeared to be a ordinary fish-shop at first glance except for the red lighting in the display fridges, and there was a pungent odour in the air. Aside from these details the place was very clean and neat.

Creeley showed Beveridge through the back door which opened onto an alleyway. Out the back of the shop was a morbid scene, there were great clouds of cigarette smoke, men and women were hunched in the shadows, some leaning against the walls, others sitting cross-legged on the dirt. There was chicken wire everywhere, it hung from the windows and was wrapped around the telephone pole. The whole alley was a huge but loosely wired cage for Wagga-meat addicts, however up the back there were some gapping holes the size of a man: addicts had torn the wire and barged through like huge mulloway hitting one of Terry Hack’s mesh-nets. There were Wagga-junkies holding out plates and others holding out their filthy hands. As soon as a man dressed in red rubber overalls came to the back door and threw Wagga off-cuts into the yard there was a wild scrabble for them, anyone who happened to grab some fish didn’t hang around, they clasped it to their body or stuffed it into an airline bag and ran, straight through the great holes in the chicken wire. The garbage bins were completely empty and the outside toilet was malfunctioning.

Judith went back inside with Creeley. “Where’s Bunting?” Creeley told her Basil was up-stairs but he’d be down soon. He told her that Bunting was repulsed by any food except raw Wagga-meat and that he had to have a fix every hour, if he didn’t he would start to hallucinate, and then start withdrawing. “How did this happen?” Judith was disturbed and worried, she loved Buntings poetry and was looking forward to meeting him, but after this bleak experience she wasn’t so sure. Then Bunting came down the stairs. He looked at Beveridge and then Creeley “It’s okay Basil, she is a friend, an Australian poet who writes brilliantly about religious matters and fishing.” “Excellent,” said Bunting, putting up a magnificent front. “Excellent”.

Then an elegant gentleman looked out from the Chinese-screen behind the counter. The screen had a painting of several huge goldfish swimming upstream a beautiful river somewhere in ancient China. The man who stepped out from behind the screen was Vincent Buckley, he had his black velvet jacket on with a red scarf tucked in a cream silk shirt. He nodded to the gold fish and said “They were ancestors.” Judith Beveridge was immediately relieved. Buckley motioned her to one side and whispered: “This is not what it appears to be at all - Creeley is not addicted to Wagga-meat, nor is Basil Bunting, they are undercover. This whole deal is a front. This is the centre for their espionage operation. They are going to bring down the whole illegal Wagga-meat industry.” Judith Beveridge let go a huge sigh of relief, then she was puzzled again. What did Vincent Buckley have to do with this operation, that’s if it really was a front. Buckley answered this by handing her an invitation - it was to a reading of Wallace-Crabbe’s poem A Wintery Manifesto to be read by the poet himself on the stage at W.B.Yeats’ oyster shed. “Ah, right” Judith said, “the Irish connection.”

W.H. Auden went into his cabin and unzipped his calfskin suitcase. He chose a lilac-coloured cravat. He removed a pair of gold cufflinks from their case. Then he took down his suit and shirt from their hangers. He was a long time getting dressed. He patted his face with Guerlinade, took a deep breath, and stepped out onto the wharf.

The poets were keen to hear Auden’s speech. They’d been on the verge of leaving The Island. They were restless and bored, and no-one had been writing poetry. Someone had suggested a poetry-reading, but they’d been shouted down. But now they had something to focus on. Auden had been an influence on most of them, at some stage. Even the vaguest spark of interest in the great man’s work had planted the seeds of difference in their own poetry.

Auden stepped onto the stack of Immigrant Chronicles, which had been much-depleted over the course of The War. He adjusted his cravat. He patted the pockets of his coat, which he always did when feeling ill-at ease. He felt the pack of cigarettes, which comforted him. Then he started speaking.

“I want to thank Rodney Hall for endorthing my role ath new leader. It ith a great honour. It theemth I have been waiting all my life for thutch a thing to befall me. I will do whatever it taketh to thupport you all in any and every way you dethire.” Jamie Grant started shouting behind the new mouth-guard Amanda Joy had made from oystercatcher feathers and palm fibre. Auden nodded at Bukowski, who picked up his plank and strode off to Grant’s cage. Auden continued. “The crucial thing we need to conthider ith what to do with the Waggaithth. They are in poor health and need medical attention. Billy Gibbon’s, who was off to one side picking softly on a Gibson Hummingbird, called out “Let ‘em suffer.” The poets echoed Billy’s thoughts, and started shouting at Auden. He raised his arms. “We need to leave The Island, but we need to make sure we leave it rethponthibly. I have phoned W.B. Yeatth in Brooklyn. He ith currently putting together a plan for the dethtruction of Waggafish, and we are working with Hemmingway to make it happen. He needth a large crew.” “What about us?” Jayne Fenton Keane said. “We need work too. Most of us have lost our jobs and put our relationships on the line to be here. Personally, there’s no way I’m going to spend the next few years chasing those red fucks around the ocean. I hate fishing. Most of us do. We wanted to end the Red Line, we wanted to see Red Language put to the sword. We...” “Excuthe me, Jayne,” Auden said, hands on his hips. “Would you like to come up here and take my plathe? Right. Now, are we all agreed? The Red foolth have already withdrawn from LIMP. They won’t be needing a retreat at Mangrove Mountain. We will take them henthforth to Brooklyn to join the crew.”

There was much muted discussion, then the poets fell silent. Rodney Hall stepped forward. “Thankyou, W.H. Auden. I think we should start packing and getting ready for our passage to Brooklyn.” He looked over at the Waggaists’ cage. Then he saw Bukowski still swinging a plank. When he looked back, the poets had scattered and Auden was still standing on the stack of Chronicles. “Well done,” Rodney said. Auden stepped down. He patted his coat pocket, then lifted out a pack of cigarettes. He struck a match, drew on the smoke and inhaled. “I loathe thpeaking in public,” he said. “I want thith nonthence to end, and then I want go home.”

G. Lehmann, at the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 23

2010-03-21T03:56:00.000-07:00

Hemmingway’s boat, Le Pilar.

Earnest with his plank.

With a shipment of Red Rods for W.B. Yeats.

Hemmingway and Oboe.

The beauty of heavy industry is not lost on the alternative-country music band Drag the River, who have pulled into Newcastle harbour to fish in raining sodium light under the yellow booms of coal-loading cranes. Either they don’t care or know that hand-lining for sharks with dead bonito under party balloons is not recommended. The singer got the idea after reading a poem by Daniel Halpern about fishing at night from the Santa Monica pier.

They’d made good time on the passage south from Port Macquarie, after visiting the singer’s brother. The huge dredging barge cut through the low swell as they sat with their legs hanging over the edge, drinking beer and talking about the adventure that lay before them.

The singer is a punk who found Blaze Foley like a joker in a stacked deck of Townes van Zandt LP’s. If it didn’t change his life, it changed his voice, and he went country. The pedal steel player sits at the prow, hunched over as if he were playing at a narrow, wired table under blue serifs of smoke like an old-time compositor. The bass player’s hands are constantly moving. When he talks, his fingers seem to be spider-walking up and down the neck of a guitar. He squints and nods under a straw five gallon, growling harmonies. The guitarist is a thrashing machine with his fists and words, and is in a leaden mood.

Out from the barge there’s a huge water-swirl. A balloon breaks free, and the singer is on. A plastic hand-line reel spins at his feet. Two hundred pound monofilament line spits through his fingers. The others shout encouragement. On the pier, a nightwatchman’s flashlight finds them standing and intense as extras in a David Lynch dream sequence. It gets worse. The pedal steel player strips and goes overboard. He is treading water about ten feet out from the barge when a red light comes on in the depths. The singer’s hand-line goes slack and he winds it in. The nightwatchman is telling the man to get out of the water. The cranes lean over the barge like the necks and heads of massive mechanical birds in silouhette. The red light goes out and the water boils. The man is turning in circles. He doesn’t go under. He is removed entirely from the scene by a massive fish with a head like something even Bruegel couldn’t imagine. The guitarist lets fly with a seamless volley of homegrown swear-words and snapper sinkers until the harbour’s surface is calm.

Rodney Hall had given up on finding a new leader. He couldn’t leave until someone had been appointed, and this was making him edgy and cranky. And he was spending more and more time alone. He could be heard muttering to himself as he walked up and down the beach. He hadn’t written a poem for weeks.

Wallace-Crabbe approached Rodney and apologised for not volunteering. “It’s that acid I took in the citadel,” he said. “It really took the wail out of my sins.” Others had voiced their inability to take on such a responsibility, but not Bukowski. Every time he saw Rodney he’d shake his head and say “Fuck that,” or “Leaders are pain-magnets.” Amanda Joy had used the rest of her snares to catch oystercatchers on the tidal flat. When Felicity Plunkett asked if she liked eating them, she said “No, I don’t eat waders. I’m taking photos of their eyes.” Felicity made a note to herself to avoid Amanda in future, at all costs. Ivor Indyk, who’d been on The Island the whole time disguised as Randolph Stow, said that while he desperately wanted to see the Red K and his entire crew keel-hauled and publicly humiliated while having zest rubbed into their wounds, he couldn’t possibly accept the role as leader as it involved far too many inconsistencies, gratuitous in-jokes, had no health-and-safety guidelines, no pay whatsoever, and The Island wasn’t even on the map. Also, he said, just being on The Island had made him use long, awkward, rambling sentences.

Rodney climbed the rigging of the tall-ship and jumped into the crow’s nest. “Move over,” he said to Tim Winton, who barely looked up as he turned another page of The Immigrant Chronicles.

In Ulladulla, Ted Hughes was biding his time. He was convinced he’d bluffed Seidel and Shelby into thinking he’d turned Red. He’d been going along with their every suggestion and whim. He knew that Seidel loved attention, so when they were out and about, he’d stop people in the street and introduce them to Frederick, handing them copies of Ooga-Booga, and calling him “The great American-Australian poet.” Seidel lapped it up. He’d been invited to the Shoalhaven Mayor’s house for dinner. He’s been asked to read poetry at a Lion’s Club meeting. He was constantly being propositioned. Women fancied him as well. He’d been taken game fishing by the local charter boys. Ted Hughes was waiting. He knew his time would come soon.

Drag the River had taken the barge into the coal-loading dock. The nightwatchman had called the police, but the they didn’t want to wait around. They ran out through the coal-blackened buildings until they hit a road, then started walking. Out on the harbour, where the pedal-steel player had been taken, huge flocks of gulls and terns were competing for what was left.

W.B. Yeats was pacing up and down the wharf at Brooklyn. He was talking on his mobile phone. Richard Tipping set up an account for him and had shown him how to use it. Yeats loved the mobile, now he was ringing everyone. At the moment he was talking to Hemingway, who was steaming past Lion Island as they spoke, heading up the river in his boat, Le Pilar. “It’ a grand day,” W.B. told Bill Wisely, Hemingway will sort out the Americans in RAW, he’ll know how to deal with them.”

Emmylou Harris had come back to book her band into the Angler’s Rest but every room was booked. She went down to Tom’s Lifeboat fish and chip shop to see if she could find some other place to stay. Geoffrey Hill was there sitting at one of Tom’s wooden tables with a sun umbrella in the middle, feasting on a huge fillet of Waggafish. Tom had fried it in beer batter especially for him, and Hill was completely engrossed in his meal. When he heard Emmylou’s Southern accent he winced, but looked up wearily. He didn’t need to talk, and by the time he’d focussed on Emmylou and caught her gaze, his eyes were growling.

There was a great cheer from the wharf as Le Pilar pulled up. Hemingway was up on the bow. He threw the rope around a pylon, tied up and jumped down onto the wharf. All he had on was an old pair of old shorts, his hair was wild and he was almost dark-skinned from the sun. Hemingway walked straight up to Yeats and threw his arms around him. “Where’s the fight?” Yeats turned around to look at the reaction from the others with a big smile on his face. Emmylou had heard this commotion and was there, right in Papa’s face. “You’re a dreadful man, cruel and heartless, mean and selfish.” Hemingway looked at Emmylou and smiled. “And why’s that, what have I done now?” Emmylou had a print-out from PETA. A list of animal rights, she waved it at Papa. “Hold on woman, what particular poor beast have I abused lately?” Emmylou wasn’t taken in by this ironic machismo, and she wasn’t going to be patronised. She pulled out a Cuban newspaper about a month old. “Fighting Cocks!” “It’s Inhuman behaviour. You set them against each other with cruel stainless steel claws strapped onto their feet, they slash each other to pieces and die from exhaustion or loss of blood.” Hemingway didn’t blink an eye. “Well what do you expect? In Finca Vigia, we bet on the fighting cock! Where else can you train cocks and fight them and bet those you believe in and be legal? Some people put the arm on fighting cocks as cruel. But what the hell else does a fighting cock like to do?”

“That logic is as straight as a gaff-hook.” The voice came from behind the others crowded on the wharf. Everyone looked around. It was Frank Webb, clapping two books together instead of his hands. He was highly agitated and fumbled one of the books, which fell and went skidding across the wharf and landed at the feet of W.B. Yeats. W.B. picked up the book and read the title aloud “The Ghost of The Cock.” Hemingway walked across to Frank and shook his hand. “You’re a good man and a man with the spine of a marlin.” ‘Have a drink with me?” Papa whipped out a bottle of scotch and offered Frank a dram straight from the bottle. “We’re signing you up. You’re going to be my gaff-man.” Papa turned and introduced his first mate to Frank. “This is another Australian. I found him adrift in the Gulf Steam in a Haines Hunter with a Mercury motor that had thrown a piston, his name is Oboe.” Oboe just nodded, and smiled faintly for the sake of Papa, but he’d seen it all before. They’d picked up a dozen so called 'gaff-men’ since they rounded the the Horn. Hemingway had worn them out in a few days before they either lost their minds or jumped over board. Frank seemed pleased though, he said “Just let me bring my friend Randolph Stow, though he might be someone else today.” “Someone else, well, he’s a nut-case then, that’s fine with me! He might make a good live-bait man, can he sew a live-bait bridle on a yellowfin tuna?”

W.B. Yeats had Emmylou over in the corner reading her Leda and The Swan. She was listening intently, swaying back and forth with her eyes closed. When Yeats finished intoning the poem she said although it might be great poetry the subject was quite appalling. It went further than Leonard Cohen, like when he was working with Phil Spector on Death of a Ladies Man with the references to cruel and unusual practices -and while Leonard was ironic, Yeats’ metaphor was an excuse for attitudes condoning sadomasochism and then underlining it with authoritarian ideology. A gruff voice divided the air: “Well, I don’t know much about the the sex life of a black swan but I do know about Arctic Jaegers.” It was Geoffrey Hill. He was standing on the roof of the Hawkesbury River Fisherman’s Co Op with a huge Waggafish in one hand. Then he held his free hand to his mouth and cupped it there like a sad megaphone and started yelling “I am Offa, The King of The World.!”

On The Island, W.H. Auden looked over at the cage where the Waggaists were lying around, withdrawing from LIMP and eating insects and the scraps the poets had thrown them. He looked at the cage where he’d been spending a lot of time with a plank, silencing Grant. He looked up at the crow’s nest on the tall ship, where the heads of Rodney Hall and Tim Winton could be seen from time to time. He looked at the vast fleet at anchored off the wharf. Finally he looked at himself in the tin-foil mirror Ken Slessor had given to him. “You can do thith,” he said, then went off to find Rodney Hall.

G. Lehmann, at the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 22

2010-03-20T04:41:00.000-07:00

Steve Earle and Townes van Zandt.

Drag the River.

W.B. Yeats.

Arctic Skua.

Because the Austin Sheerline ambulance had been abandoned, the police were called. Customs and quarantine officers soon joined them. The ambulance was traced back to Hull, to an address on the River Humber. The paper-trail ended there. In the glove box they’d found a hardcover copy of The Collected Poems of David Gascoyne, E.W. Elwood’s Badger Husbandry, and a single crow feather. Eventually the ambulance was towed away to the Water Police compound.

When W.B. Yeats and Geoffrey Hill entered the Angler’s Rest, the Sons of Zebedee stood against the wall, watching Hill closely. Geoffrey delighted in reaching into the inside pocket of his coat. On seeing this, the Sons bolted for the door. Yeats turned to Geoffrey: “I respect a man who can scatter fools with even the slightest suggestion of impending doom,” he said.

John Berryman was pissed and in no mood for poets or poetry. “I am taking the waters from the wellspring of a black-and-white-collared heart,” he said, too slowly, when W.B. and Hill walked into the room. “Spoken like a true gentleman,” Yeats said. “Now, finish your pint. We have serious work to do.” “And what that might be?” asked Berryman. Geoffrey Hill took the pint from Berryman’s hand. “You know as well as I do that no-one has any idea until it happens,” he said. “Isn’t that right, W.B.” he said, but Yeats had left the room.

Lucinda Williams was on her mobile. Reception at The Afterglow was patchy, so she’d gone down to the wharf. She’d called her manager in Nashville, and he was telling her that Emmylou Harris, Rawlings and Gillian Welch had gone to Australia on a mission to save a red fish. He then said that other musicians had joined them. Some were on their way to support the Release All Waggas cause, and others were going to try and kill as many as they could. The list of singers, songwriters and bands was straight out of the country music Hall of Fame: The alternative country-punk band Drag the River had left on a huge dredging barge; Townes van Zandt, Guy Clark and Steve Earle were flying down in Townes’ Nord Noratlas; John Prine was coming with Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women; Steve Forbert was bringing his saltwater swoffing gear; Waylon jennings was on his way with Blaze Foley; Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline were meeting up with Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson in L.A., then flying down. It was going to be very busy time.

Lucinda Williams folded her phone and looked out at the Red Oblong. “What a circus,” she said. A parasitic jaeger looked down at her from its lookout on a wharf-lamp. It sharpened its beak on the lamp cover. It looked sideways into the harbour. “Blood,” it said, and went knifing off into the sun.

Back at the Angler’s Rest W.B. Yeats was recruiting men to help him unload a great container of Wagga-rods and reels that had arrived on the train from Sydney. They’d been shipped all the way from Sweden. Being a Nobel Prize winner, W.B. arranged to get the best Swedish rods made up specifically for Waggafish live baiting, and he also got an amazing deal on the purchase. The Sons had come back into the bar and this time Yeats talked them into helping him unpack the rods. He told them that seeing they were mentioned in the Bible as fishermen they should have the first of the red ‘armbreaker’ rods. Yeats walked over to the post office and sent a message to James Joyce by email. He told Joyce to leave Paris immediately and to bring Ernest Hemingway as well. Yeats knew Hemingway was the perfect man for the job, he’d help organise this rabble at the Angler’s Rest and bring some steel into the hunt. He didn’t quite know what use Joyce would be but at least he’d get Hemingway to come. W.B. couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of Hemingway before this.

Things were happening, and although W.B. spoke ironically of the American singers he thought the publicity they might create could be put to use. He was starting to hatch a plan, it would take all his wile to swing but once certain things fell into place the Waggafish would be a dying species. He would set up a fleet of boats, they’d confiscate all the trawlers in the surrounding towns from Woy Woy to Brooklyn for a start, and they’d have boats trawling for squid, they’d have mesh-nets catching slimy mackerel. He wasn’t counting on Shelby and Greene to come up with a re-usable live bait: and besides he still couldn’t tell who they were working for. Was Seidel behind them? Were they just lunatics or did the presence of the Red Oblong indicate that there was something more substantial going on?

There was a racket going on down at the Brooklyn Fishermen’s Co Op. Bill was abusing Auden and a group of ex-Waggaists had gathered around, yelling “Fight. Fight. Fight.” Auden had no idea how he’d got to Brooklyn. One minute he was on The Island, in the cage with Jamie Grant, dishing out a hiding with a plank, and the next he was shaping up against Bill Wisely. Life, friends, was not boring. And now a bird was coming straight at his head. It was an arctic jaeger, flying at an incredible speed. Auden’s sight was failing and he didn’t see it approaching. Suddenly, Bill swung around and grabbed a plank he had sitting beside his old Qantas bag. It happened fast. Bill held the plank as if it were cricket bat, took a savage swing and collected with the jaeger. The sound made people turn away. Bill’s eyes were wild, he glared at the crowd fiercely and said “Yeah, well, who wants a fucking fight now?” There were blood stained feathers everywhere and Auden kicked the mangled bird aside. It was truly a tragic spectacle. W.B. Yeats saw the whole thing, he didn’t raise a hand, but during this frightening episode he was making notes with a pencil and notebook.

G. Lehmann, the Front

Dispatch From The Front: Day 21

2010-03-19T04:11:00.000-07:00

Emmylou Harris, David Rawlings and Gillian Welch arriving at W.B. Yeats' Oyster Shed at Brooklyn.

W.B. Yeats’ oyster shed.

After climbing in through my window, Lucinda told me a terrible story that not only mirrored what Michael Dransfield had seen in Greene’s lab, but added a few darker details. She was in a real state, sliding her bracelets up and down her arm and tapping the toe of a snakeskin boot on the floor. “I sought refuge in the arms of a man who throws dice with the devil,” she said. “I have known true disgrace.” She then told me her bleak tale of comfort and betrayal.

While Greene had slept, she’d gone to investigate the low, constant hum she’d heard the day she arrived at the apartment. Behind a red curtain in the laundry she’d found a door leading into the dark. She went down the stairs and found his laboratory. As well as the pink nippers and beakers of LIMP2, there were beach worms as thick as her wrist, their black holding-fangs like those on a funnelweb spider. On a stainless steel bench she found the head of a huge yellowtail, its mouth still opening and closing, its gills bright red with oxygenated blood. In a glass tank, the headless bodies of yellowtail and frigate mackerel were swimming around as if they could see where they were going. Their wounds had sealed over.

“It was hellish down there,” she said. “I’ve heard of the breeding tanks under the Red Bunker, of how Seidel and Shelby are loose cannons, but this is beyond the red and the pale.” Lucinda stood up and turned to face me. “We need to do something, Geoff. We need to take action now.”

As the sun came up over the harbour, Lucinda Williams fell asleep on the couch. I sat in the frame of the big bay window and watched light come in like a flood-tide. Out beyond the tuna boats and recreational craft, the Red Oblong glittered and swayed at its mooring. Like the re-usable and headless live-bait in Dr Greene’s lab, this huge shape needed no crew, sail or propellor to drive it forward. I heard Dorothy cursing on the wharf: “The Red Oblong,” and “we’re all fucked.” It was time to find out what I could about this disturbing, influential symbol.

In Brooklyn, things were getting out of hand. The Sons of Zebedee were tired of being kept out of the loop, and had taken matters into their own hands. They went to the Angler’s Rest where they knew John Berryman and Geoffrey Hill would be in the old back bar. Sure enough, the Sons found the two poets deep in discussion and drinking stanzas of Guinness. Berryman put his bottle down when they walked through the door and stood up. “Ah, the sons of the sons of the sons of Trouble,” he said through the grey wires of his beard. Jack grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him up. Jimmy did his best Gene Wilder impression, speaking into the side of Berryman’s head: “Where is Henry when you need him?” Jack chimed in: “What are you two planning? We need to know. We don’t like blow-ins, especially poets who think they can fish.”

Geoffrey Hill put his bottle of Guinness down on the table as if he were lowering a lure into an ice-hole. As the Sons pushed and shoved Berryman, he reached into the special pocket he’d sewn into the inside of his overcoat and pulled out a plank made from a length of crepe myrtle. Then he walked over and started swinging. The Sons went down and strayed there. John Berryman shook Geoffrey’s hand. “I knew when I first read King Log that you’d be a handy man to have in a fix.” Bill Wisely had witnessed Hill’s finesse with the plank from just outside the door. “I like you,” he said, and walked off. Geoffrey Hill picked up his bottle of Guinness and took a long hit. He swallowed and exhaled loudly. “Let’s go find Yeats,” he said.

W.B. Yeats had taken over one of Dutch’s oyster sheds, a barn of a place built from corrugated iron and iron bark - a huge cavern with an elevated floor at one end that Dutch had used for sorting and shucking oysters. Yeats thought this might make a good stage for poetry readings and for giving lectures on the fine points of live-baiting for Waggas. This was a shed that could accommodate at least five hundred people if necessary.

Bill came back from the Angler’s Rest and told W.B. that Geoffrey Hill and Berryman were looking for him. “Oh that’s a fine thing then because I’ll need them before long.” W.B. seemed a bit distracted but he was nevertheless pleased to hear Bill’s news. He was sitting at a makeshift desk writing with the quill of a pelican, setting down the basic rules for the eradication of all Waggafish. He figured there’d be ten Commandments, to make things sound Biblical, and therefore have more rhetorical sway.

Outside there was the sound of a car pulling up in the yard. W.B. looked out the open window and saw a sleek black limo slide into the space where Dutch’s tar-vats used to stand. Bill said “Well fuck me, who the fuck is this, some idiot looking for a dozen oysters?” The back door of the limo opened and out stepped Emmylou Harris, David Rawlings and Gillian Welch. They were dressed in stylish country clothes and Emmylou and Gillian wore their best cream coloured cowboy hats. W. B. Yeats walked out into the yard to introduce himself and welcome them to his shed. They weren’t looking for oysters at all, they were looking for a venue.

Emmylou had heard about the ‘needless slaughter of Waggafish’ and wanted to do a concert to raise funds for a new organization called RAW (Release All Waggas). The look on Yeats’ face was a study of deep symbolic confusion and anger. Bill told them to fuck off because this was Waggafish Central and its job was to bring about the total extinction of waggas throughout the world. “We have been delivered directly into the black heart of the Beast” said Emmylou to Gillian. “This is going to be a very interesting day. I think we should go back to Brooklyn and collect T Bone Burnett, he’s trying to book us into the Angler’s Rest. I think we’re going to need his sage advice.” Before anyone could reply, Bill had grabbed a couple of planks and was coming towards the little group of country singers. They managed to jump back into the limo and tell the driver to get out of there fast, but Bill landed a couple of blows on the bonnet as the limo spun its wheels and fishtailed out of Yeats’ property. As they reached Brooklyn Road they saw T Bone walking along with Geoffrey Hill. They pulled up and told them to get in. “What’s happening man?” asked T Bone. “We’ve been attacked by a madman and have just met W.B. Yeats, who turns out to be one of the main people involved in the slaughter of Waggafish.” Said Emmylou. “W.B. Yeats, the poet? Is he still alive?” “Yes to both questions!” replied David Rawlings. “Well, then far out” replied T Bone.

Geoffrey Hill glared at the country singers. “And what’s the true problem may I ask?” Emmylou looked hard at Hill: “The real question is that we have come to stop the slaughter of Waggafish. We are giving a concert to raise money for RAW, as we find this brutal murder of fish an appalling insult to all living things.” Hill’s eyes narrowed and then opened wide. He glared fiercely at the singers for a few moments before he started laughing, a terrible black laughter, bitter, twisted and with a sound that sent the fear of God into the hearts of the Americans. “Stop this wretched vehicle. I cant abide people with brains the size of pickled walnuts, let me out of this vacuum chamber right now!”

G. Lehmann, at the Front and Back.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 20

2010-03-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

The bionic mosquito: an early experiment of Dr Greene’s.

A youthful Dr Greene at work in his lab creating re-usable live-bait.

Shelby pumping pink nippers for Dr Greene's experiments.

A prototype of re-usable live-bait.

Shelby and Seidel didn’t care that their every move was being observed, and Ted Hughes and T.S. Eliot seemed oblivious to the fact that they were, for all intents and purposes, hostages and in the company of dangerous men. They went to the maritime museum together. They went to the park for picnics. They walked up and down the main street, looking into shops and talking with the locals. The badger had become a real hit, and a photo of this odd beast appeared in the Ulladulla Times.

I was staying at The Afterglow, a lovely cottage-like pub on the outskirts of town. At my suggestion, Dorothy, Merv and the poets who’d arrived on the oblong checked in as well.

Dorothy Hewett was in a rage. “Shelby and that maniac Seidel are running around with Hughes and Eliot and no-one’s doing anything about it! It’s fucked. You disappoint me, Geoff. You write a great, fearless book about Nero, and yet you can’t even get off your arse and go and sort those idiots out!” I looked over at Dransfield, J.S. Harry, Vicki Viidikas and Kerry Leves. They were listening to the new Jackson Browne album on the pub’s old battered stereo. Dorothy was pacing. “I went to that island to do something. I spent three bloody weeks preparing things for you lot, and now look what’s happening! You can’t even stand up to old Ooga-Booga, and that Shelby is a fuckwit.” I watched as she put on her coat. “Where are you going, darl?” Merv asked. “I’ll bloody well sort this out myself,” Dorothy said, and went out the door. “It’s that fucking oblong,” Merv said, and went after her.

Lucinda Williams looked out the window of her room at The Wheelhouse. The harbour looked incredible: ink-like flourishes of decklights on the water, the silver fizz of insects in the light of the wharf lamps. When she looked down at the road she saw a man wearing a fox-skin cap looking up at her. She turned out the light. When she looked again the man had gone.

I could’t sleep. Behind my eyes, a colour-saturated, badly-edited movie of the last few weeks was on repeat. Scenes rushed past and into each other. I saw Phil Spector riding a giant red bat up to the watch tower, where he leapt off into a Wall of Sound and opened a bottle of Ronnette, which he shared with Frederick Seidel. I saw Sharon Olds get pash-rash from kissing Billy Gibbons with Coral Hull’s mouth. I saw a badger wearing a black swan mask walk up to a Waggaist and give it a mouthful of “Go and get fucked.”

Outside on the street, a nightwatchman was painting the doors and shutters of houses and sheds with the beam of his flashlight. Or so I thought, until a yellow beam came wandering over the walls of my room, followed by a tangle of arms and legs coming through the window. I leapt out of bed and turned on the light. Lucinda Williams killed her flashlight and started raving.

Back on The Island, having found the ongoing weight of responsibility too much to bear, Rodney Hall was looking for a new leader. He was hoping to find a replacement before leaving and returning home to the South coast. Yet when he called a meeting, and asked for a volunteer, no-one put up their hand. The poets looked away or down and shuffled their feet nervously. “What about you, Philip?” Rodney asked. Philip Hodgins thanked him and declined his offer, saying he’d rather tongue-kiss a tiger snake than have to deal with another Waggaist. “And you, Bronwyn?” Bronwyn Lea knelt down and started going through the odds and sods inside her big cane basket. “Is there no-one who will take responsibility for the group and take over?” he asked, his voice trembling. “I’ll do it! I’ll be the leader!” Jamie Grant called from where he was standing at the wire of his cage. He’d managed to remove the fountain pen nib and paper clip mouth guard. “I’ll take charge!” he shouted.

While W.H. Auden went off with a plank to sort things out, I pondered the one special gift that being a war correspondent had afforded me; the one thing that eclipsed all others and left them smoldering in its wake: being omnipresent was a total fucking hoot.

I had another rough night thinking about who was going to be the new leader. Rodney was the perfect man for the job, but we needed someone who could fill his shoes. Around midnight in my room in The Afterglow I was still seeing coloured lights, though this time because a migraine had taken over my head. I looked through my medical supplies and found a couple of broken Black Drop tablets that Coleridge had given me. I swallowed these with a shot of malt whiskey and then started worrying about Sam Coleridge - what on earth had happened to him? I hadn’t seen him since the first few days on the Island. He’d been thinking of setting off with Wordsworth on a squid boat, of going to Tasmania to collect a Devil from Tim Thorne. But these thoughts fell apart as sleep came falling like a cast net. I felt trapped as a black tide of powerful opiate started flooding through my veins. My fever and headache lifted, but these were replaced by dreams, or nightmares concerning rhomboids, obelisks, pyramids and dodecahedrons, then a truncated tetrahedron filled the dark cave of my head; though behind these shapes, always the haunting shadow of the Red Oblong.

I woke and almost cheered when I saw the sunlight in my window. After a shower I walked down the hallway and found myself in the breakfast room. Sunlight poured through the bay window and reassured me the nightmares were gone. Two people were finishing their breakfast. I noticed one of them was Mandy Beaumont so went up and said hello. “Sit down, have a coffee with us,” she said. Mandy seemed nervous and I felt she wanted to tell me something. “What happened last night?” She replied by relating an incredible story. Mandy spoke without pauses and I found myself believing every word she spoke. Her tone rang true. This what she told me:

“Last night we went to the Ulladulla Yacht Club. The had a show. Hex were playing and Lucinda Williams and Gig Ryan rocked out. It was great. Around 1am things slowed down and we were drinking on the terrace. We watched a man row up the bay and tie up at the wharf. He walked up to the club and came in looking dazed. It was Michael Dransfield. He’d just escaped from Dr Greene’s lab under the fishing shop. Vicki, Kerry Leves and J.S. Harry were still there, loaded up on LIMP. Greene had been hitting them up, mainlining the stuff. Though by the time reached Dransfield, the drug had worn off and Michael decided he’d had enough. Greene had trouble finding a vein, and when he was stooped over, probing for one, Michael reached for something on the bench behind Greene and smashed a bunsen burner onto his head. Greene crashed across the table, smashing beakers of red liquid, sending live-bait flying and flapping as jars hit the floor. Michael took off. He ran down the hallway and jumped through a window. There was a pontoon at the back and he leapt into Greene’s net-boat and rowed up the bay to the Yacht Club.

When Michael arrived, he took up the story. He was so articulate, remembering every detail of his kidnapping and he tied these fragments into a description of the experiments he witnessed. Greene was even more a monster than any of us thought. In the secret lab he was in the process of genetically engineering pink nippers. Creating nippers as big as crayfish that were virtually indestructible. He wanted to market ‘re-usable’ live bait! Beautiful-looking pink creatures hovered in the glass vats and changed colours in the manner of squid. They waved their marbled claws, and whenever one broke the surface, it would snap shut, creating a sound like a rifle shot. There were other half-finished projects going on in there, but Michael was visibly shaken when he tried to recall the details.

The crew of the Red Oblong were totally drugged with a new version of LIMP. Greene had refined the formula. Anyone under the influence of LIMP2 could be mesmerised by the sound of the voice they happened to be listening to as the drug hit home. Dransfield couldn’t work out the mysteries of the Red Oblong either. However it’s red pulsations were a fascination to him. He’d even written several odes to the oblong. When they were at sea and the LIMP was wearing off, Michael would reach for his pen and scrawl some more verses.

As Dransfield reached the end of his tale, I felt so moved that I put my arm around his shoulders. I felt his body tremble like a fawn, without words, his voice, his poetry. When it all fell away, he was a frail creature.

It was clear Mandy was falling in love with Dransfield, and I wondered where this would end: what could I do to shelter these young lovers from the Redness about to spread through this unsuspecting fishing town?

The Club closed and as we all walked back to hotel, we could see the pulsating red glow down at the docks. On the top of a street light Mandy pointed out an unusual bird. It was an Arctic Jaeger. The others went to their rooms but I went through my case and found my field guide. It’s correct name was the parasitic jaeger. I read the following lines aloud: “Like other skuas, it will fly at the head of a human or fox approaching its nest. It can inflict serious damage, an attack by a jaeger is a frightening and painful experience.”

G. Lehmann, at the Front

Dispatch From The Front: Day 19

2010-03-17T14:12:00.000-07:00

The tackle shop in Ulladulla above Dr Greene’s secret laboratory.

David Malouf aboard Slessor’s Halvorsen cruiser, reacting to the story of Phil Spector being taken down in the lake.

Ulladulla harbour at dusk, just before the arrival of The Red Oblong.

When David Malouf introduced John Milton to the poets, some called Milton for an escaped Waggaist - his red cape confused them, and his intense stare was similar to that of someone coming down from LIMP. “Put him back in the cage, David!” Roger McDonald shouted. Roger had abandoned fiction and returned to poetry, and even though he was too late for The War, he was loving the company of friends he hadn’t seen for more than forty years. “Yeah, what the fuck are you doing? Is this some kind of fashion parade?” Kevin Brophy yelled. Others join in. Milton was used to being heckled, and simply stood his ground until the abuse had subsided. Finally he turned to Malouf and said: “A great, pervasive spirit resides at the heart of this gathering. May it remain so. Now, if it be your will, guide me through the aftermath of this unholy war, this wreckage of mad design and cruelty.” Malouf looked long and hard at Milton. Even the worst parody of the great man’s speech would have been preferable to what he’d just heard. Still, it was better than not having him there at all, and so off they went on a tour of The Island.

Lucinda Williams slipped her bracelets on and ran a brush through her hair. She looked at herself in the mirror, then looked beyond her face to where Dr Greene was lying on the bed. The last thing she’d wanted was to have an affair, especially with someone whose life seemed so at odds with her own. At first she’d fallen into a drunken embrace. Two days later, after countless embraces, she was still in Greene’s apartment in Ulladulla under the shop he used as a front for his experiments. Now it was time to go. She turned to face him. “You look ravishing,” he said. “I have to go,” she said, and started to gather up her things. Greene got out of bed and went to her. He put a hand on her waist. “Don’t,” she said. “Please.” Greene watched her pack clothes into a bag. Her perfume was like sandalwood and driftwood smoke. “I was hoping we’d be able to start a new life down here,” he said. “I was never a fan of country music until I met you.” Lucinda stopped packing and half-turned towards him. “Then I suggest you return to what you were listening to before you met me,” she said through her hair. “Are you always so cold and aloof at the end of an affair?” he asked. “Only when end is another word for shipwreck,” she said, then picked up her bag and left the room.

A crowd of tuna men and local jetty rats had gathered to watch the ambulance pull into the wharf at Ulladulla. It was a crazy spectacle. A 1950s Austin Sheerline, its roof and bonnet festooned with seaweed, a dead gull hanging by a string from the aerial, and the face of a badger peering out from the passenger window. When Seidel and Ted Hughes stepped out of the ambulance, one of the tuna men said “Looks like youse are the only sick fucks needing treatment around here.” Seidel opened the rear doors, and Shelby emerged backwards, helping T.S, Eliot up the little ladder on the side the wharf. Eliot stood blinking and leaning on his cane. “Land’s End,” he said. “Good job, driver.”

Milton was exhausted. Rodney Hall and David Malouf had taken him in Kenneth Slessor’s Halvorsen cruiser on a water-based tour of The Island. Rodney had pointed out the various places where most of the action had taken place. He’d done his best to explain why the poets had fought the Waggaists, and had been animated in his description of the day Phil Spector had come to grief in the lake. Malouf was wide-eyed and had demanded intimate details. As they returned to the wharf, Milton stood on the bow of the cruiser, his red cape fluttering out behind him. “Figure this out, figurehead!” a poet had shouted as one of the confiscated Waggaist ampules hit Milton’s shoulder and exploded. “Zest!” he exclaimed. “The essence of what the mind can achieve, under pressure!”

Dr Greene watched as Lucinda Williams got into her Chevy Silverado and pulled away. He’d put on his white lab coat and had gone out the secret side entrance to the apartment. He wanted to see her again, though didn’t know where she was going, or if she knew anyone in the area. He would find out.

Greene’s fishing tackle shop was above his lab, and was doing a fine trade in bait and lures. It was the perfect facade for his serious work. Only one person knew of what lay below the tackle shop, and they were behind the counter, selling lures to the tourists who had just begun to arrive in earnest on the South coast. The man’s name was Bobby Russo. He was a well-known fishing identity, famous for wearing a fox-skin cap and budgie-smugglers, and head-butting yellowfin tuna and bronze-whaler sharks into submission on the rocks. His book The Day the Bottom Moved - the story of how he caught a 300kg Waggafish alone, at night, from The Tubes at Jervis Bay - had been a best-seller. Dr Greene called him from the lab: “Bob, put out the word on a Chevy Silverado. I want to know where it finds a berth for the night.”

I’d taken a water-taxi from The Island to Brooklyn, then driven down to Bermagui to reach Ulladulla by night. Before I left, Dorothy Hewett had taken me aside, saying “Just get yourself to Ulladulla and I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.” She told me that Merv Lilly was coming to pick her up in his pole-barge, and they were then going drive down in the white Merc.

I looked out over Ulladulla: an orange moon was floating up the sky from the black water. To my side, a crested pigeon exploded from the grassbank, the jingle-bells in the sound of its flight described an arc across the cyptic twilight. Then I saw something moving on the water, at first it appeared to be another tall ship—but soon realised it was a thing I didn’t really want to see. A shape from the murky past, some old repression, was now making its presence felt in this beautiful setting. It was The Red Oblong. A glassy looking vessel made from some unknown material - it must have been at least twenty metres long - and best way to describe its shape is to call it for what it was: a large oblong that was illumintaed from within. It created a pulsating light that could travel across long distances. I grabbed my old field glasses and had a good look: on deck there were four figures, moving about in postures of unease. Two were kneeling and the other two were laying themselves onto the deck and then standing again. It looked like they were moving to some kind of religious choreography. Ater watching for some time I realised they were praying. The Oblong pushed its blunt way through the harbour and made a messy wake that chopped up the black glass into lumps of crazed redness. This evil geometric vessel was powered by either a big V8 or some old navy diesel plant— I could hear the pistons firing like the throaty purr of some fabulous big cat.

As I watched the Red Oblong being pushed into its archorage by a tugboat, I wondered if Dorothy had been tipped off about this craft of extreme redness. A row-boat had delivered the crew who had been praying on deck of the Oblong. As they walked up the steps of the wharf and into the light I recognised them all: Michael Dransfield, Vicki Viidikas, J.S. Harry and Kerry Leves. The whole crew were dressed in black and humming some turgid mantra, their eyes were glazed and they couldn’t seem to focus. I went up to Vicki and asked her what the hell was going on, she just looked straight through me and seemed unable to respond. The others in turn did the same, they appeared to be members of some kind of red cult, all spaced out and without wills of their own. Was this a manifestation of some Waggaist hex? Who was behind it? Shelby, Dr Greene? These people were all fine poets and head-strong individuals, and it would have been extremely difficult to have brain-washed them. What was the allure of the Red Oblong? They formed a single file and walked straight by me, heading into the town. I waited until Dorothy and Merv arrived in the Merc. Dorothy walked to the end of the wharf to see what was moored there. Throwing back her hair, she moaned: “The Red Oblong, we’re all fucked.”

Ted Hughes, Frederick Seidel, Shelby and T.S. Eliot made a bizarre sight as they walked up the main street of Ulladulla. Shelby had long-since put the LIMP needle away. Hughes wasn’t going anywhere.

They checked into The Wheelhouse, a bed-and-breakfast near the harbour. Later that evening they were sitting outside a cafe drinking and talking. A woman with golden hair, wearing a blue denim jacket and with a guitar slung over her shoulder, approached and asked if the men knew of a decent place to stay. T.S. Eliot stood up. “The Wheelhouse is splendid,” he said. As Eliot was pointing and giving the woman diections, Frederick Seidel narrowed his eyes. “Country rock meets the Wasteland. This will be interesting,” he said.

I had been given a second chance at reporting from the Front, and I was loving the challenge. Ken had basically lost heart with the whole scene and had gone back to Kings Cross. We didn’t know if he’d be back. The night before he left we threw a party for him on the tall ship. The pink gin was flowing. Ken was in fine form, making speeches and flirting with Mandy Beaumont, who kept reading from tiny hand-made books of poems and giving the eye to Bukowski. Tim Winton, who’d been told about The War by Dennis Haskell, had come over from the West on his Triumph Speedmaster, low-flying in the minor key the length of the Nullabor Plain. He thought there might be a novel in a crowd of poets tearing each other’s words out. When he arrived by tinny and saw a lot of people laughing and deep in conversation, he climbed the tall ship’s rigging and spent the night in the crow’s nest, reading old issues of Tracks magazine. I went to bed and drifted off to sleep to a Lauren Williams love song.

Geoffrey Lehmann, the Front

Dispatch From The Front: Day 18

2010-03-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Lehmann, poet and War Correspondent.

Interior of the Austin Sheerline ambulance.

Since accepting the brief role as war correspondent, Geoffrey Lehmann had been up each day at dawn. Despite being told by all and sundry that he was no longer needed, he continued to walk around taking photos and scribbling furiously into his own little notebook. You could hear him as he passed by: “Very interesting. Yes, indeed. That’s good. I wonder. Perhaps there are...” When he cornered Bukowski on the wharf and started asking him questions about the various movie depictions of his life, Charles picked Geoff up and threw him into the river. “Ben Gazzara or Mickey Rourke?” Geoff had demanded, streaming water and ribbons of weed. “And who are you? Are you Charles? Chuck? Hank? Henry? Tell me! The world needs details! You can’t just write about battered lampshades, horses, bourbon, cigars, women, fighting, poetry, fucking, vomiting, L.A., bars, Mozart and bed bugs without giving us at least a splinter of the truth!” Bukowski had gone into the river to silence Lehmann, but Geoff outswam him. His freestyle was excellent. Charles came back to the wharf, pulled up a deck chair, opened a beer, and sat there patiently, waiting for Lehmann to come ashore.

Fifty kilometers away, the ambulance was punching through a stiff norther-easterly chop. It was heavy going. Shelby had to strap T.S. Eliot into the stretcher as he kept flying out of his seat and rolling around on the floor. Up front, visibility was patchy. The wipers were slapping across the glass and small waves were breaking over the roof. Seidel and Hughes sat in silence. For awhile they’d listened to old country and western songs on the cassette player Ted had brought along, but now Seidel was in no mood for music. They were travelling about a kilometer offshore. Occasionally they caught glimpses of a headland or beach through the spray. The sight made Hughes think of Cornwall, of the times he and Sylvia had stayed at the stone cottage by the beach and spent evenings wandering around Tintagel Castle, the birthplace of King Arthur. He was remembering how Sylvia would turn her face into the wind, her hair flying around her face, when Seidel shouted “Look out!” Hughes came back and through the chop he saw a yacht bearing down on them, some fifty yards away. At the last minute the yacht tacked away, its crew hanging over the sides. Seidel wound down his window: “You fucking morons we’re in an ambulance are you blind or just plain stupid!” The badger had leapt under the dash when Seidel started shouting, and was now looking up at Ted through loops of trailing wires. T.S. Eliot was demanding to know what was going on. Shelby was close to tears. He got seasick drinking water.

Geoffrey Lehmann had avoided a nasty incident with Bukowski by promising he’d speak to his good friend in Melbourne - the Australian importer for Lagavulin single malt Scotch. Feeling cocky, he was now standing outside the Waggaist cage, asking questions and taking photos. The Waggaists couldn’t speak because they were wearing wire-mesh mouth guards, but that didn’t stop Geoffrey. He wanted to know everything: what Waggaists ate, if polygamy was their thing, had they ever met the Red K, their tastes in music, if they were allowed to read lyrical poetry, what they thought of poets who called themselves post-modernists... The huge red crowd were making muffled, angry noises and kicking at the sandy soil. Geoffrey’s questions continued unabated. He didn’t miss a beat, scrawling answers to his own questions and nodding wildly. In the end, Rodney Hall had to take him by the arm and lead him away. Even in his cabin, he could be heard asking questions, answering them, and practising his best correspondent’s voice.

K. Slessor, the Front

Dispatch From The Front: Day 17

2010-03-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

The Fortune of War hotel, Circular Quay.

A small Waggafish, around the same size as the one caught and killed by Bill Wisely seven years ago.

I looked at the departing ambulance and realised this was the time to have a lengthy break. I wanted to know more about the background to The War, who actually started it, what factors from history or social problems contributed to it? I knew it had its roots deep in the creation of the Waggafish - the CSIRO experiment gone wrong - but how did Dr Greene really become involved? Where did Shelby come from? He wasn’t even a poet. The list went on. There were so many implications, so many innocent bystanders, victims, camp-followers and red-raggers. Deep at the heart of this whole episode in history was a dark mystery. What had really started the Poetry War and divided so many diverse people and set them at each other’s throats? Were the fishermen involved simply because a fish - admittedly a fish like no other - was involved?

I was asleep in the Halvorsen when I heard a knock on the window. I parted the curtain and saw Michael Wilding looking in, his nose pressed to the glass. “Can I have a word, Ken?” he asked. I looked at my watch. It was 6 am. Normally I would have told him to go away, but there was something about his expression and voice that concerned me. I hadn’t seen him for awhile, and had noticed his absence. I got up, put on my dressing gown and let him in.

“It’s poetry,” he said. “Poetry and poets.” Michael ran his fingers through his hair and sighed loudly. “I’ve just about had enough.”

I knew that Wilding wasn’t poetry’s greatest fan, yet he had made the effort to come to The Island. His support for a couple of old friends was soon extended, without fanfare, to all the poets during the war. He had become a popular figure: quiet, observant, and with a dark sense of humour.

“Poets. You can’t live with them, and without them your life is less complicated and less likely to unravel spontaneously. Even the most well-adjusted poets are fucked-up. They are territorial and competitive. Secretly, they loathe each other and can’t stand the success of their peers. In private they study literary theory and test the waters of radical reform with regards to style and syntax. In public they feign indifference to poetics and theory, preferring to hit the piss. At festivals they read, yet never attend the readings of other poets on the program. They always get small audiences, and complain bitterly about this fact. They fear the arrival of a new, young talent. Poets are paranoid, bleak individuals who live their lives in a permanent state somewhere between melancholia, acute anxiety and depression. When they laugh, it is usually a nervous reaction to the onset of mania. Bank managers, Writers Festival Directors and most literary journal editors despise them. There is no Prime Minister’s Award for poetry. This is not an accident or oversight. The Prime Minister does not understand poets or poetry, nor do his advisors. They see it as subversive, divisive, and totally unintelligible. All poetry since Banjo Patterson is regarded with cynicism and contempt. No one buys it, hardly anyone reads it, teachers are tyrannised by it and students are afraid of it. Poetry is a threat. When I was at the University of Sydney, whenever I saw a poet coming up the stairs or into the cafeteria, I would hide. Their conversation is stilted. They take minimalism to a new level. Mostly they talk about themselves, and their essays are full of symbolist jargon. Romantic crap. Poets aren’t happy with just writing the stuff, they need to be known as poets. Leonard Cohen once said that poetry isn’t a career, it’s a verdict. Cohen was right. The Poetry War has been brewing for many years. It was only a matter of time. An ego time-bomb.”

When Wilding stopped talking, he stood up and adjusted his tie. “Thanks for listening, Ken,” he said, then he walked out of the cabin and onto the wharf. I watched as he walked off down the beach, kicking at driftwood.

This was the last straw. I really had to get off The Island. I knew I couldn't leave for good until everything had been resolved. I had to get to Sydney for one more interview. All the travel was wearing me down. I asked Frank Webb if he’d take over as correspondent for a couple of days, but he swore at me and opened his bible. I asked Geoff Page and Wallace-Crabbe, but they pretended they hadn’t heard. When I asked Geoffrey Lehmann, he ripped the notebook and pen from my hand and said “When do I start?”

I took the Halvorsen to Church Point, picked up my car and drove to Sydney, knowing reports from The Island were going to be in good hands.

I felt like a late breakfast and a drink. I decided to go to The Fortune of War Hotel at Circular Quay. It was the only early opener I trusted for a decent feed. I had a pink gin and ordered bacon and eggs. I happened to read a coaster on the bar: “The Fortune has a colourful reputation, which includes being the first and last port of call for generations of Australian soldiers involved in theatres of conflict.” Oh just perfect, I thought as someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Shelton Lea. “So where have you been hiding Shelly?” “I’ve been here for three months, reading poetry at dawn every day for drinks. They gave me a room and now I’m the poet in residence.” I filled Shelton in on The Island war, but he was right up on it. Evidently Jordie Albiston had been commissioned to write an opera based on the goings on at The Island. Shelton said: “I asked her who had commissioned it. She told me she’d been contacted by Kate Jennings, who is working for this patron who loves poetry and music.” And who was this patron? Did he happen to be an American? “Oh yes, I think he is from the U.S. The opera company has a weird name: “Ooga-Booga-Inc.” I mentioned the name Frederick Seidel. “Yeah, that’s it! Ooga-Booga Seidel!” Shelton said with a diabolical spasm of laughter. After a few more beers I asked him how he thought the war had started. He told me this story.

“I actually remember the first blow in the war. Yes, that's right. I happened to be there. I was up at Brooklyn when this bloke came by in an old beaten up tinny and asked if I wanted to go fishing with him. Said his name was Bill. Well, we went way up the river and Bill started cutting up pillies and throwing them over the side for burley. We were using squid for bait. Bill said he had a frozen supply in the pub freezer. It was nearly black but he reckoned it was okay. It must’ve been, because within a half hour Bill pulled in a beautiful mulloway of about twenty pounds. Then he got another one, but half way in Bill thought he’d lost him. When he pulled his line up there was just the jewie's head left on the hook. Fucking Noah’s ark, said Bill. So he throws out another squid and he’s on again, this time he pulled in this incredibly ugly looking fish.

It had a huge head full of teeth, a red coloured body with spikes all over it, and yet it was pretty sleek looking, a real predator. Bill pulled it in, luckily it was a small one. It stared at us with pure hate in its eyes. After a minute or so the fish started flapping around in the belly of the boat. Bill asked me to pass him an old plank he kept under the seats. I handed it to him and he went to work on that little red horror. He smashed it to a pulp and growled and carried on something terrible. After it was over, I asked him what kind of fish it was. He said “I didn’t think I’d ever see one in the Hawkesbury, fucking red swine of a thing. Fucking dog of a fish. It’s a Wagga. A fucking Wagga-Fish!” “So that’s how it started,” Shelly said. The next day Bill had a fresh supply of planks in the boat. “The red tide has turned,” Bill Wisley said, and glared at me. “You fucking idiot.” “And that's the story of the first blow in the poetry war, Ken. Like I said, it’s a mystery.”

Debriefing to me about poets and poetry seemed to have done Michael Wilding the world of good. When I saw him on my return from Sydney, he was looking much happier. Never had I met a man for whom poetry had become such a burden. He mentioned that he thought the war would go on indefinitely, but I told him the Waggaists were a spent force. There'd be no more torture or bats, no more spear guns or darts - and more to the point - no more chicken wire mouth guards. We were safe as long as we didn’t dangle our feet over the wharf. At first Wilding didn’t seem at all convinced by any of this, but as I spoke he seemed to warm to my enthusiasm and positive approach. Just then Geoffrey Lehmann walked up with his tape recorder and notebook. He had a pencil behind his ear, and he was wearing a fedora with a press card stuck in the band. Wilding took one look at him and said “Another poet who thinks verse is in bed with the media, this is just fucking great!”

Late that afternoon, while waiting for Wilding to meet me on the wharf, I noticed a red beam of light coming across the water. When I saw it, I was relieved when Wilding appeared. He was carrying two deck chairs, staring down at the planks in the jetty, so he didn’t notice the red beam until he sat down alongside me. We both watched as the light grew brighter. “Oh, but of course,” Michael said with a cutting resignation, ‘It’s heading in towards the Island. What next? A Captain Cook River Cruise with poetry? A tour of The Island to see poets living out Lord of the Flies? A delegation from the Australia Council come to see that their Poetry War Grant is being used properly?”

The light was way out to sea and I knew it would take at least a half an hour to arrive. Michael said: “It’s a contemporary abomination of the light from the West Egg, a moving light coming straight at us, and a red light just in case we miss the point. West Egg has merged with East Egg and they have turned into the Bad Egg.” Eventually it became clear that a small craft was navigating its way in through the reefs at Flint and Steel, hitting the throttle and roaring towards Wilding’s head.

As we watched the red light approaching, Wilding broke the silence. “What’s that?” he asked.

A fish had washed up on the shore next to the wharf and had been left high and dry on a seaweed-covered rock. It had most likely been stung to death by man-o-war jellyfish in a trawler’s pocket. “It’s a large black sole,” I told him. “Ah, that’s me, a Black Soul.” Michael smiled at his own ironic metaphor. On closer inspection, this fish was an evil-looking creature, with fangs and hollow eye-sockets. It was astonishing. Geoffrey Lehmann wanted to take it and nail it to the wharf, but Wilding told him to leave it where it was. “It’s the Poetry Fish,” he said. “It will devour itself soon enough.”

It was Wilding who first started living on the Island, long before the citadel had been built. At first he’d rented a house, then after years of living there peacefully (except for the times Rudi Krausman swam to shore from his yacht, found his house and climbed in through the window), he’d built his own bungalow. This had been sold and torn down when Seidel offered him twenty times the market price. Back then he was like Gatsby, renting a house in “one of the strangest communities in the country, the long slender riotous island which extends itself due east...”

Wilding looked up almost expecting to see the two enormous eggs that had haunted Gatsby. I mentioned Gatsby to Wilding, and he shook his head sadly. “No, oh nothing like that. Gatsby’s light reading, a relief really, no, nothing like Gatsby.” He smiled at the thought of “something lighter” as we sat back on our deck chairs, watching the red beam coming towards us bringing god only knows what. I asked him what was really on his mind. “What's on my mind, Kenneth? It’s always the same thing, really, in one form or another. Paradise Lost. It keeps repeating itself, along with Paradise Regained, it’s the story of our lives.”

We were blinded as the Haines Hunter pulled into the wharf. There were civilized accents, a shuffling and bumping, then a man with a rope. As our eyes adjusted to the redness and the bright light, we both recognised the noble dome of David Malouf’s head. “Is that you David?” “It certainly is. And it’s a surprise and a delight to see you here, Ken.” “He thinks you’ve been dead for years Ken, that’s why he seems surprised,” said Wilding. “And Michael Wilding! This is a wonderful reception!” “Okay, don’t get too carried way,” said Wilding. “And who’s the wonder in the cape hiding in the cabin?” “He’s not hiding,” Malouf said. “He’s preparing for his lecture.” Michael looked crestfallen. “What lecture would that be?” “The Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture, honouring the poet Henry Kendall.” “Oh right, good god. What the hell next?” said Wilding in an anguished tone. “Okay, then, who is this fellow?”

A hunched figure wearing a crumpled red cape emerged from the cabin of the Haines Hunter. “Don’t you recognise him?” asked Malouf. “It’s John Milton.”

At the mention Milton’s name a pelican, coming home late, misjudged its landing perch, overflew the pylon, and crashed into the water. A swirl, a wake of phosphorescent plankton, and a shower of whitebait escaping in terror. A Wagga had taken the pelican down by one leg at first. What followed was a horrible scene. Feathers flecked with red light and blood, moans of anguish from Wilding, cries of distressed alarm from Malouf, and finally the undisturbed, mirror of the tide again. Then the red cloaked figure of Milton, one hand shading his eyes, gazing knowingly at the black water.

K. Slessor, the Front