Dispatch From The Front: Day 14

A Waggaist badge

Frederick Seidel’s tattoo

Blodgett and Stevens were in a bad way. After being bound and gagged, they’d been given a long-lasting hit of LIMP (Language-Intensified Monosyllabic Poetry), a drug the Red K had invented and developed in one of the science labs at Oxford. Seidel had been given a huge supply of the drug, which he’d brought with him to The Island to keep the Waggaists in line.

Behind their gags, the two poets had been spewing forth an unintelligible, seamless stream of verse that contained no similes, metaphors or internal rhyme. It was, as Wilding would say later, “a vile sound, stripped of all emotion, like hearing a conference paper on Language Poetry through a box of sand.”

Blodgett and Stevens had managed to crab and crawl their way to a dark corner of the Main Hall, and there they had remained, speaking garbage for days. As Wilding and Wallace-Crabbe emerged from the tunnel, they’d heard the confused, gnarled voices and had gone to investigate. After cutting the ropes and removing the gags, the horror of what they were hearing only intensified. Wilding was about to replace the gags, when Wallace-Crabbe threw himself over the poets and started sobbing. He was in the final stage of his trip, and through his exhaustion and hot-wired imagination, he began counseling Blodgett and Stevens, telling them that “nothing decays, life is not tragic.” When Wallace-Crabbe had finished, Wilding helped him and the other poets to their feet. It had worked. They’d stopped the rank onslaught of words. Then, like figures awakened from a Goya painting, they walked quietly out of the hall.

Bukowski had heard and seen enough. He tore down the chicken wire cage and hurled the rolls of hexagons away. He grabbed Dorn and lifted him from the Drunken Boat. Dorn tried to hit him, but his wild swings went over Hank’s head. Rimbaud started swearing and hurled a copy of Enid Starkey’s biography. “Lies! He screamed. “Ugly lies! My life was much darker and more violent that what’s in there!” Billy, Dusty and Frank came quietly. They knew a finishing-line when they saw one. Baudelaire had already left the cage and was standing in the shadows, smoking and drinking. Bukowski saw the red glow and the faint gleam of his absinthe bottle. “Get your Symbolist ass over here now, Charles!”

When they were standing in a tight, sorry group, Hank began telling them of his plan. Then he stopped. He’d never had a plan in his life and wasn’t about to start making one now. “Ah fuck it,” he said. “Let’s just get out of here.” As they were leaving the room, Billy Gibbons came up to Bukowski and said “What about Burroughs? He’ll come in handy. We need a good road manager.” Hank cursed. He’d forgotten about Bill. This tripping bunch of madmen had demanded all his attention. He asked Billy to take the others down to the wharf, and went to get Bill.

Entering the Beluga Vault, he found Bill asleep on a huge mound of empty jars. The room, once stained and littered, was now akin to a crime scene in a caviar-processing factory. The walls were completely black. Burroughs himself was a wet, dark figure, barely discernible among the wreckage. He might have been a huge sturgeon, gasping for air on black sand by the Caspian Sea. Bukowski tried waking him. He took him by the shoulders and shook him violently. He even tried quoting a line from the Red K’s Salt in the Wound, knowing how much it irritated Bill, but he would not stir. In desperation, he took Bill’s Colt .45 from its holster and fired off four quick rounds. Bill leapt to his feet and reached for his gun. Seeing the Colt in Bukowski’s hand, he narrowed his eyes until they were slits and said “Relinquish that weapon or eat dust like an extra in Gunsmoke.” “Welcome back, Bill,” Hank said, and handed the revolver over.

John Berryman had taken Geoffrey Hill into the oldest bar in the Angler’s Rest. The decor was just as it was in the 1950’s, with formica tables, hard-backed wooden chairs, and an old-fashioned cash register that chimed with each sale. Few people used the room now. Berryman wanted Hill’s full attention.

Sitting in the corner, a small lamp casting a pool of light upon his dark coat and weaving hands, Berryman was animated and theatrical, embuing each word with loving detail. He began by commenting on the red flying fox attack at the citadel: “Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.” He then moved swiftly into new, serious territory. He read DREAM SONG 29: There Sat Down, Once, a Thing On Henry’s Heart - a poem Geoffrey Hill knew well. He had used it many times with his students at the University of Leeds.

As Berryman read, a chill went up Hill’s spine and into his neck. He was overcome with vertigo. Leaning forward, captivated and in complete disarray, it dawned on him that Berryman’s poem - indeed the entire DREAM SONG sequence - was about a live-bait called Henry. 

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

so heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry’s ears

the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

Clearly this was a reference to reincarnation - the endless life-cycle of the live-bait. The little cough of an approaching mulloway, and its sweet, predatory odour. The chime of a chemically-sharpened hook on a harbour stone...

Berryman continued:

And there is another thing he has in mind

like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,

with open eyes, he attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;

thinking.

Geoffrey felt the room bend and shake. The reference to a Waggafish was unmistakable. He was finding it hard to breathe. He couldn’t take much more. And finally this:

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

end anyone and hacks her body up

and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.

Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

Nobody is ever missing.

Geoffrey Hill’s heart was racing. His mouth was dry. Berryman was detailing the secret nature, thoughts and fears of a live-bait: a slimy mackerel or yellowtail. It was about the guilt Henry endures and subsequently conceals after witnessing the murder, by a pelagic hunter, of the bait-school.

When John Berryman had finished reading, Geoffrey Hill excused himself and went into the bathroom. He stood leaning on the basin, looking at himself in the mirror. “Brilliant,” he said to his reflection. “Brilliant and dangerous,” his reflection replied. When he went back to the bar, Berryman was gone. On the table he found a napkin with a drawing, in red ink, of a small fish. Beside the fish, Berryman had written: “Henry is a survivor. His wounds grow over. It is the endless cycle, Mr Hill.”

High in the citadel, Shelby was now into his fifth copy of The Immigrant Chronicles. He’d tried eating the poems in strips, in crunched-up balls and as neatly-folded pages. They all tasted the same: like passport-control at the border between Sentiment and Longing. Seidel was in the corner, spitting out lines of vacuous rubbish. He’d taken off his shirt, revealing the tattoo he’d had done on his chest to celebrate becoming commander of the Waggiasts: a black swan against a red background. To take his mind off the hunger and thirst, he’d injected himself with LIMP. He knew his mouth would be off and running for at least five hours, but it was better than listening to Shelby complain.

The Waggaists had thrown down their weapons and were sitting in the grass. Having collected the wheat-grass guns and thrown the mortar canon into the lake, Rodney Hall and the poets walked among the beaten crowd. Seeing them up close was both a shock and revelation. They were nothing special. Men and women in red coats, their badges declaring allegiance to the Red K.

Rodney walked up the hill and turned to address them: “The war is over. The Red K’s work on The Island has come to an end. If you choose to surrender quietly and with dignity, you will not be harmed. Good work awaits you. As I speak, W.B. Yeats is gathering a vast team to patrol the waters of Australia to bring an end to this Waggafish scourge once and for all. He needs deck-hands, cooks, publicity people, craftsmen and women, guides... If you choose to accept these conditions, you must also promise to abandon all study and interest in Red Language. It must be obvious to you now, that this heinous form of so-called poetry has done nothing but lead you astray. It has crippled your lyrical tendencies and infected your heads and hearts. It has hollowed you out and turned you into followers, not original thinkers.” A Waggaist raised his hand. “Can I keep my copy of The Silo Manifesto? The Red K signed it for me.” Rodney nodded to Richard Hugo, who walked over to the Waggaist, picked him up, carried him down to the lake and threw him in. The Waggaist waded back to shore, but was once again hurled out into the deep. There was a loud, mournful moaning as the lake’s surface trembled, bubbled, then shattered. The dissenter was taken down.

When the red water had settled, Rodney continued. “Any other requests?” he asked. A Waggaist stood up. “We’ll need to go into rehab,” she said. “We are all addicted to LIMP.” Rodney motioned for Judith Beveridge to join him on the hill. Judith smiled and walked over. “I will be taking you to Mangrove Mountain,” she said. “There we will embark on a two-week meditation course and read William Stafford, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver and Li-Young Lee. By the end of this course, LIMP will no longer be a problem.” Mary Oliver spoke up. “I’d like to thank you for suggesting my work. In Boston, people can’t find my books in the poetry section, they’ve all been shelved under Self-Help and Spiritual Growth.” Mary looked around. “Have you noticed how the bullrushes shed their velvet when we look at them, how the lakeside grass demands nothing from the wind? Why even the Waggafish are beautiful in their raw desire. This morning, as I...” “Thankyou Mary,” Rodney said loudly. “Now, I’d like the prisoners to form two orderly lines and walk slowly back to the wharf. We will be following and watching you closely.”

Bill beard had returned to the watchtower after seeing Phil Spector’s violent end. He was drinking a beer when something caught his eye. Glassing the hill, he saw two red lines coming over the crest. The Waggaists were walking slowly, heads down, hands by their sides. Their red coats and hats were gone. Behind them, the pagers and stagers were strolling along, some with mounds of red fabric in their arms, others carrying guns and sling-shots.

Bill finished his beer and climbed down from the tower. At the base he took an axe and started chopping. Each swing took a white wedge from the ancient wood. Soon he heard the tree creaking and cracking. After one more mighty blow, the tree trembled, cracked loudly, and began to fall. Bill ran back and watched. It leaned and toppled, throwing branches and clumps of leaves. The small shelter that had been his home came crashing down with the canopy and disappeared into the surrounding trees. He took a deep breath. He didn’t look back as he walked off in the direction of the wharf.

K. Slessor, at the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 13

Bill Beard’s watchtower

The University of Sydney's Robert Fowler (Dean of Genetics) awarded Geoffrey Hill his honorary degree, Doctor of Live Bait,  March 9 2010.

John Berryman

The Waggaists who’d been trying to flank Spector and Dickey had skirted the northern base of the hill and had come face to face with the kind of poetry they most feared: conviction fuelled by attention to technique and craft. They weren’t used to it. It disturbed them. Under the leadership of the Red K, they’d come to understand and develop a deep appreciation of his motto: Write, Self-Promote, Publish Everything, Repeat. Yet here, out of control and out of their comfort zone, they were slammed by the stagers and book-ended by the pagers. They were printed in limited editions by the grains of planks and distributed to all parts of the valley by Zest. Jayne Fenton Keane took out three red fools with a stream-of-consciousness rave about beer bottles. Peter Boyle translated a wayward ampule of wheatgrass juice and chili oil into a glass of Spanish wine, then drank it.

Spector and Dickey were dodging mortar shells and trying to get the Mustang clear of the mud. They’d jammed a few lance-ends and cross-bow bolts under the tyres. Phil had seen the poets coming, but concern for his battered car had taken all his attention. Death of a Lady’s Man was on the stereo. When Memories came on, Phil climbed in, cranked up the volume and kicked the big V8 into life. It growled and spat as the tyres found purchase, and slowly the Mustang emerged from the deep twin grooves in the grass. “Almost clear!” Dickey shouted.

Bill Beard had grabbed a jousting lance when he saw that the poets and Waggaists were about to met head-on. He mimed snapping shut the perforated metal visor on a helmet. He whispered into the ear of an armoured, stamping stallion. He lifted the heavy, candy-striped lance and tucked the handle under his arm. He wanted to scream something memorable as he ran down the hill into battle. He wanted to make a real impression with his arrival. But as he stumbled down the bank, his lance dug into the earth and he was levered high, kicking and flailing. He came down on the head of a Waggaist who thought that standing your ground and reciting the Red K’s poems was a good tactic in a time of war. Bill flattened him, then got to his feet to cheering and clapping. “Do that again!” said Peter Rose as he ran past, his spray-can at the ready.

“Get out of my fucking way!” Phil Spector yelled as the Mustang roared down the hill. Everyone but Richard Hugo did as they were told. As the Mustang leapt and rumbled over the grass, Hugo sidestepped at the last moment and tossed a smoke grenade through the open window. Dickey climbed out through the sun-roof and dived clear. When the grenade went off, the Mustang started swerving. Spector was losing control. Blinded by smoke and shaken by the blast, he tried wrestling the car back into line but it was useless. He went sideways with smoke pouring from the windows and sun-roof, and then he over-corrected. The Mustang went into a fatal broadside, then flipped. It went into the air and landed on its side in the lake. “Play Smoke on the Water, Phil!” Nigel Roberts shouted.

The Waggaists and poets had stopped fighting. Philip Levine stood with his plank raised, open-mouthed and breathing heavily. J.S. Harry released her grip on the red collar of the Waggaist she’d felled with a talking rabbit. David McCooey gave his beaten adversary a shove, and the weeping Waggaist went down.

Phil Spector climbed from the smoking wreck. The muted, bubbling strains of Romance in Durango drifted up from the dying stereo. As he waded to the bank, a pair of black swans went for him, honking and thrusting their long necks, their red beaks tearing at his clothes and hands. Phil was fending them off, waist-deep in the muddy water, when a loud, low moaning sound filled the air. The swans retreated, flying off towards the river. Phil looked around. The water began to ripple and swirl, then erupted. A Waggafish in excess of eighty kilos came crashing through the surface and took hold of Spector’s head. It clamped its terrible jaws together, buckled sideways, and dragged Phil down. As it went deep, Spector’s black shoes cut a ragged V in the surface. The water had turned a deep, turbulent red. 

When the lake was calm and the music had stopped, no-one spoke or moved. It was Rodney Hall that broke the silence. “Now, where were we?” he asked, and looked around, a faint smile playing over his lips.

I’d had enough violence for one day. I needed a pink gin, and wanted nothing more than to drop anchor in Jerusalem Bay for the night, sit out on the deck, drink gin and listen to mullet slapping the surface. I climbed aboard Wallace-Crabbe’s Halvorsen cruiser and headed to Brooklyn for supplies.

As I was about to walk into the general store, Geoffrey Hill walked down the stairs of the Angler’s Rest. He said he wanted breakfast, and was about to ask Griffo where the best place would be. The Rest’s cook didn’t clock-on until lunch. Before Hill could find the publican he ran into a man sitting on the stairs. This fellow had a long beard and was stooped over, muttering “Life friends is boring but we must not say so,” along with phrases of disjointed syntax that nevertheless impressed Hill with haunting implications. The man was John Berryman. He had been with the poets on The Island, but found the war, like life, to be boring. He was drinking straight from a bottle of vodka. “Are you a swoffer or a live bait man?” he asked Hill. “Neither. When I fish I always use a spinner-bait. I learnt to fish for sea-bass in Dublin when I was running a poetry workshop with  Seamus Heaney ” Berryman ignored this. “But do you think the live bait feels pain as it swims against the tide with a chemically sharpened hook pierced through its shoulder?” he asked. “Of course it feels pain,” said Hill. “Not only does it feel pain, it prays to the Lord of Fishes.” “Remarkable,” said Berryman. “That’s a loaded sidewinder of a sentence. So the fish is capable of thought, then?” “I didn’t say that at all,” Hill insisted. “Yet I do believe the live-bait is a survivor. These fish are sacrificed and are reincarnated as live-bait again. They may go down the throat of a blue-nosed whiting as a blood worm, only to return as a poddy mullet, to be swallowed in turn by a huge dusky flathead, & so on.” “Well, my new friend, that’s a damn bad thought.” Berryman was becoming agitated: “Bait-fish: survivors of the food chain. Perhaps God ought to be curbed. God sounds like a slob, playful, rough-hewn. The oceans are one vast Martini without an olive or a twist of zest. And besides you’re playing around with words again.” At this Hill growled and spluttered. “Look here. It’s the moral copula, it takes the accidentality from history, the fatalism from science. The moral copula’s not just grammatical, it’s attuned to the minute particulars of grammar and etymology.” “Well, my friend, that sounds like something to do with old Sam Coleridge,” replied Berryman, plucking broken strands from his long greying beard. “And as I said before you started me on all this stuff of despair: “Life friends is boring.”

Hill shook his head like a prize fighter, he wasn’t going to let Berryman fob him off with that stale old line. He gathered his thoughts, but Geoffrey Hill  was so agitated he forgot his high moral stance and let go with one below the belt: “Is life also boring to a live-bait—for instance: does a live-bait know that it is a live-bait?” “Oh yes, yes, yes’ Berryman shuddered, coughed in a hacking spasm and went red, he’d been caught out. “Yes, yes, I have been a live-bait man since my time in Florida, I learned how to live-bait from Wallace Stevens. He used to fish with me when he came over on his holidays. Wally was a gun bone-fish man, when the others were swoffing Wally was using blood-worms, when the others were casting their artificial crab-flies for permit Wally was using live-manna crabs.  He taught me everything I know, he blooded me on the sandflats of Florida Keys. We were silent killers, live-baiting by sight, polaroiding in the early mornings and late sunsets.” Hill’s eyes were opening wider as Berryman raved about live-bait: “And how do you feel about it now?” Berryman shook his head sadly. “That’s where I get this heaviness of soul: the pleasure and the guilt.”

The hunt with its twin-kill, the live-bait eaten by the catch, the catch eaten by the hunter. Wally taught me that too, if we have to exist in a goddamn food chain, then it’s best to exist at the top. “The imagination, the one reality in this imagined world” is how he put it, to imagine the bone-fish hovering like a blonde shadow over the blonde sand. The live crab descending through the water column, its legs sending the vibrations out to the receptors along the side of the bonefish; then the crushing jaws, the death strike.” Hill was shaking with anticipation. “So you want to know if the live bait knows it is in fact a live-bait?” Hill nodded gravely, “ Totally, they have souls like gentle honey-eaters. They hover in the tide with a great red hook through their shoulder, they see the shadow of the bone-fish, the mulloway, the stingray or the shark. They are super aware, they have the sensitivity of an ancient job fish, they know their fate and they never accept it until the jaws of a predator close around their heads.” “My God,” said, Hill “You are a monster, a cold-hearted remorseless killer.”  Berryman, opened his arms and wiped the air with his right hand “O ho alas when will indifference come, I moan and rave, and I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn.” But Geoffrey Hill was a harder man,  he caught Berryman’s attention, fixed him with a raptor’s eye and slowly said: “A beast is slain, a beast thrives. Fat blood squeaks on the sand. A blinded god believes that he is not blind.”

K. Slessor, the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 12

The interior of Phil Spector’s customised Shelby Mustang

Propaganda is the use of magic by those who no longer believe in it against those who still do. W.H. Auden

The poets were bored. Bukowski and Dorn were off on a rescue mission, Spector and Dickey didn’t want company, Blodgett and Stevens were missing, Bill Burroughs was deep into a three-day Beluga binge, Creeley had taken a boat-load of fishing-mad writers upriver, and Shelby and Seidel had vanished. The Island had lost its edge.

Jamie Grant was still in his cage. They’d had to relocate him as he wouldn’t stop talking about how Auden’s reputation was based solely on a flamboyant lifestyle and not the quality of his work. “Overblown and over-written!” he’d screamed. “Formal formaldehyde!” Auden had gone into the cage a number of times, first with a headful of expletives, then with a plank. Finally he’d ripped off Grant’s wire-mesh mouthguard and replaced it with one he’d fashioned from old fountain pen nibs and paper clips. “Lookin’ good, stationery mouth,” Faye Zwicky said as she walked past the cage. Auden left a cassette player with a rare recording of a J.H. Prynne poetry reading just outside the cage. “Thith will thort you out, you theptic huthy.” “Blesiloquent wanker,” Grant had muttered.

With the dull drone of the Prynne reading and Grant’s cries for mercy in the background, the poets tried to entertain themselves. The stagers played beach cricket using a microphone-head for a ball. The pagers knuckled down to workshop everything they’d heard and seen over the last couple of weeks. It was a circus.

Dorn had long since disarmed and removed the last of the mines. Despite Bukowski’s warnings, he’d accepted the tab of acid Billy Gibbons had offered him, and was now in Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, trolling for metaphors up and down the length of the pool. Baudelaire was coming down. He was on the bank of the East River, looking through a wall of hexagons that had mysteriously appeared before him. Frank and Dusty, too, were out of the chemical line-of-fire, and were sleeping. Wilding had left the cage as soon as Dorn had cut his way through, taking Wallace-Crabbe with him. “Is end-word a good battologist?” he asked, from the frayed, knotted rope of his distress.

The Waggaists had regrouped and had managed to form some kind of red counter-attack. Some were using their sling-shots, though most of the ampules of wheatgrass juice and chili oil were falling well short of the hill’s crest. One had hit Spector in the face as he jived and shouted abuse down into the valley. “What was that! he’d yelled, wiping his face. “A fucking mosquito?” He turned to James Dickey. “Get in the car, Jim. We’re going to finish this redness once and for all!”

The poets had listened to the distant blasts of music long enough. The sport and workshops had been a frail distraction. All the while they’d been looking in the direction of the valley. They were full of restless, wild energy, and they needed to use it.

Charles Simic took Rodney Hall aside. “This is ridiculous. I didn’t come all the way from New Hampshire to hold poetry workshops on a wharf. There’s a war going on and we need to be there.” Rodney looked over at the poets. “I know,” he said. “But Spector is unpredictable. He could turn on us if we went against him.” “Screw Phil Spector,” Richard Hugo said. He’d walked over to eavesdrop. “Charles, I bombed the Danube when you were a boy. I was fighting a war I didn’t believe in. But this is different. I’m seeing red. Let’s get go get some Waggaists.” Rodney studied his hands. “You’re right,” he said. He turned away and shouted to the poets. “Meeting on the wharf, now!” “Fuck off, Rodney!” Vincent Buckley said as he ran in to bowl. “Yeah, we’ve had enough meetings,” shouted Gwen Harwood, her pen poised over an Island memoir.

Rodney walked over, picked up the microphone-head that Philip Hodgins had cover-driven onto the sand, and tossed it into the river. He addressed the poets: “You were brilliant when it came to storming the citadel and the Red Bunker. You showed great courage and determination. Because of you, Shelby and Seidel have fled The Island.” The poets were listening intently. Then Robert Frost got to his feet. “But what did it achieve?” he asked. “Many of us have come out of retirement to be here. We have sacrificed much: leaving our families, travelling many thousands of miles, and what was supposed to be a war has turned out to be a minor scrap with a bunch of damn pansies.” Rodney nodded. “Well for that I’m sorry,” he said. “But now we need to regroup. Phil Spector has no right to outrank or intimidate us. I say we go to join them now. The time has come to show him that poets are as tough as any Wall of Sound. What do you say?” Judith Beveridge put down her new fishing poem and stood up. “Alright,” she said, “as long as the prisoners agree to a three hundred day meditation retreat up at Mangrove Mountain.” Maria Takolander joined her. “But this is the last time. I’m due at the Iowa Writers workshop in five days.” The poets erupted. They ran to get their planks and spray-cans. The air was alive with excitement. Richard Hugo turned to Rodney Hall and Charles Simic: “I’ve got that maniac Spector in my cross-hairs and the bomb-bay is full.”

Phil and Jim were in the car. The Door’s LA Woman was thundering out in all directions. Phil had his foot to the floor but the Mustang was shuddering and lurching, going nowhere. Phil slammed the steering wheel and climbed out. The rear wheels were buried to the rims in soft black earth. “Oh that’s just fucking great!” he screamed. “Get your ass out here Dickey and start digging. You too Bill. Get on your knees.” Bill hesitated. He wasn’t sure what Spector was asking him to do.

The Waggaists, aware of that something had happened on the hill, seized on the moment and set up their mortar launcher. A handful of others ran around the side of the lake, keeping low behind a screen of bullrushes. 

Bill saw the incoming mortar shell and shouted for Phil and Jim to take cover, but the music killed his warning. The shell hit the Mustang’s bonnet and burst, sending wheatgrass juice and thick black chili oil in a wide arc. The oil burned into Bill’s neck and face and he fell to the ground, writhing in agony. Phil Spector wiped his face and swore. When he saw a great dent in his Mustang, he went into a complete rage. He tore at his hair. He ripped off his jacket. “A man touches me at his own peril,” he spat. “He touches my car, he dies!” “Settle down, Phil” Dickey said. He’d been digging a tyre out and had avoided the blast. “Settle down?” Phil screamed. “Eat my disc!” he screamed and grabbed a jousting lance. 

As L.A. Woman finished, Bill Beard heard a commotion. Through burning eyes, he looked in the direction of the beach and saw a huge crowd running towards the hill. He lifted his binoculars. The glass was filled with frenzied expressions, raised planks, flying hair. Rodney Hall, Charles Simic and Richard Hugo were leading the charge.

Spector was swearing and getting ready to storm the valley with his lance. “Phil,” Bill Beard said. “The poets are coming.”

K. Slessor, the Front.

Dispatch From The Front: Day 11

James Dickey in his cabin on the shores of Lake Marie.

He is writing a letter to Phil Spector, detailing directions to The Island.

The KonaHead Live-Bait lure, designed by W.B. Yeats.

Phil Spector’s badge.

Sign on the wall of the Angler’s Rest hotel.

Bill Beard reached the top of the hill and looked down into the valley. The lake was a compact mirror dusted with changing light. The surrounding trees and low shrubs were a watercolour bleed on textured, beige paper. Bill glassed the scene. The Waggaists had gathered at the lake’s far edge, and were standing in the water, reaching into bullrushes and retrieving what seemed to be small red packets, which they then placed into backpacks and shoulder bags. They looked like a mass baptismal congregation, their reflection a red algal bloom. Many had the new, heavy-duty, rapid-fire guns slung over their shoulders. On the bank was a wheat-grass mortar canon. He’d heard of this. It could fling a one kilo cartridge of wheatgrass juice and black chili oil almost a kilometer, and was extremely accurate.

Having taken what they needed from the rushes, they stood in a tight, animated and agitated group. The wind changed direction, and Bill heard a few words and phrases: “Shelby and Seidel” “Forsaken” “Ruthless” “Intentions” “Final stand” “the Red K wanted.” Bill spoke into the two-way. “Bill to Rodney, over.” Nothing. “Bill Beard to Rodney Hall, come in, over.” Bill stood up and considered his options. It was an hour’s walk to the wharf, and quite frankly he couldn’t be bothered. Rodney Hall rarely contacted him, and the other poets couldn’t give a flying fox. Up until now he hadn’t worried about his isolation. He’d had much to reflect upon, and was filling notebooks with poems. But now he’d had enough. He glassed the citadel. The needle-tower and Waggafish gargoyles; the high, fortified windows and ornate carved panels on the sandstone walls. What did it mean? Poetry had always been a simple affair. You read it, wrote it, talked about it and, if it was good enough it, you published it. There’d always been a bit of in-flighting. It went with the territory. But this was insane. Who was the Red K? He thought he knew, yet now it seemed this figure might well be mythical, a name invented by charismatic leaders who had conned a large group into following their Language-driven scheme. And what the fuck was the scheme? His head was reeling.

Looking down to the lake, he saw that the Waggaists were on the move. They were coming around the left side of the lake. The mortar canon was being wheeled on its carriage. He lay down on his stomach in the grass and watched them. He tried calling Rodney again. He was about to retreat down the hill and return to the watchtower, when he heard a great thundering roar. He lifted the binoculars and scanned the beach and plain leading up to the hill. In the far distance, a Shelby Mustang was fish-tailing and ripping up grass and throwing clods of mud in its wake. As it got nearer, The Stone’s Gimme Shelter was blasting from the car. He’d never heard anything like it. He might have been standing close to the stage at an open-air Stones concert, except this was even louder. Birds had taken flight. The black swans on the lake were rising and flapping their wings in terror. The combination of the growling V8 and stereo was overwhelming. At the wheel, Phil Spector was a study in manic concentration. He was hunched forward, his black hair combed perfectly into place, his mirror shades shining. Standing up, his upper body through the sun roof and dressed in jungle fatigues, James Dickey was holding a jousting lance. His hair was blown back and he was smiling broadly, a flare gun clamped in his teeth.

Back at Brooklyn, in the Angler’s Rest, the atmosphere was a mix of the fumes from roll-yr-owns and drafts of passionate intensity. On the wall was a series of photos, trophy fish: huge mulloway, great broad-backed flathead with heads like shovels, huge blue-nosed bream and even a massive hammerhead. There was a vintage photo of the wharf at Mooney - along the side of a boat-shed, the heads of flathead were nailed up, forty or so, then right at the end, like an intimation of things to come, a very strange and freaky head indeed.  The jaws of this creature were similar to a the jaws of a rabbit-trap, its teeth were still firmly implanted, the plated skull bones were like the ghost of static electricity, translucent and almost red in colour, even though it was a sepia photograph. This room had been the meeting place of the Mooney Mooney Fishing Club. Members met here to talk of their catches and also to organize the seasonal fishing competitions, and after the meetings, a floating poker-game moved in.

Willie Yeats was winding up his lecture. His voice was an incantation, and he moved his hands to conduct his pace, which was measured and slow. He explained the new Wagga-rod, embellishing the finer points. By the time he was finished, quiet a crowd gathered in the small room. Even the sons of old Zebedee were standing at the door, smoking, pretending not to listen. Jim and Jack were now standing with their old mate from way up the river, Simon the Hook. Yeats was about to make a point, when he was interrupted by a chain of coughing spasms. The pungent fumes of White Ox were heavy in the air, and even as Simon coughed his lungs up, Jack was lighting another smoke. From the jukebox in the main bar the strains of The Streets Of Baltimore could be heard;  there were more oystermen moving towards the back room, not certain if they should heckle or listen in to W. B. Yeats’ hypnotic voice mingling with the delicate country music of Gram Parsons.

Willie seized the opportunity the moment created. He stood there completely silent for a few minutes until the sounds in the room gradually fell away. He then opened a long velvet box. His timing was perfect. Inside was the new Konahead experimental Waggafish live-bait lure. “This magnificent artificial was designed for one thing,” he said, holding the sleek lure by its skirts above his head. “A projectile to carry live bait through the air in a long cast. The head of the livie is threaded through the skirt of the lure and two chemically sharpened hooks are threaded through the bait. This new Waggafish Konahead can be used for beach fishing as well as trolling.”

“All this comprises the Waggafish specific gear - the rod, the reel, the special Irish 200lb braid. There is only one hard and fast rule: live bait must be used at all times.” Simon the Hook cheered. Devin Johnston looked nervously at Creeley who was smiling broadly. “Just listen to Willie’s cadences: the line breaks, enjambments, breath... listen to his beautiful chanting accent. You’d think he was back at the Lake Isle of Innisfree about to cast for a silver trout.” Creeley poured another Jim Beam for himself and Devin. “This is useful gear,” he said, raising his glass. “We’ll take a couple of rods and when the show on the Island is over, we’ll go to town and fish for Waggas under the Harbour Bridge at midnight. We’ll fish the Opera House at dawn. The city Waggas wont be expecting anything like this. They might remember Dickey’s cross-bow, and there’s bound to be a few with his arrows dangling from their sides - that might turn out to be Dickey’s method of tagging!” 

Creeley stopped talking as Frank Webb walked into the back room and caught sight of the sons of Zebedee. Frank went into a rage and started clearing the room. “All out!” he shouted. “Move it now, you useless red bastards!” Frank though it was a meeting of communists. He couldn’t bear the thought of the Sons of Zebedee setting eyes upon this meeting of red agents against Christ the Lord. Devin rushed over to Frank and handed him a copy of Robert Duncan’s book Letters, and quoted a few lines. It calmed Webb down straight away. Devin said “Come on, Frank, let’s go out and look for Basil and Ezra, they'll  know what to do.” Then Vickie Viidikas burst into the Angler’s. “No dancing on the dance floor! What kind of shitty dump is this? I thought there’d be poetry workshops, dancing words and spirits dancing with ice and fire. I thought it would be all condition red: passion and eloquence. And what have we got? Retarded killjoys, Symbolists lecturing Symbolists. Where’s the reality? Get a grip.  Forget the hunt, killing, the live-bait. Where’s the perfect line, the zest for life, the passion?” “Zest for life,” repeated Creeley. “What an unfortunate choice of words.” 

Just then I became aware of a glowering presence somewhere in the room. One could feel the atmosphere being squeezed into a glad-bag - some silence vacuum cleaner sucking the essence out of the crowd. People starting stubbing out their butts, fishermen shuffled and looked about uneasily. Even Yeats looked unsettled - this new, harsh atmosphere reminded him of a seance, of the transmigration of a soul, something eerie.  

Griffo, always the publican with a weather-eye for trouble, came into the room and turned on the big flood lights. Over in the far corner, crouched in a chair with his back to the wall, was a gnarled and conservatively dressed figure. Even in the full blaze of Griffo's floodlight, this figure was actually glowing, his face radiating an intense haze of inner light. The hunched figure muttered a few tightly rhymed words that were incomprehensible to the men and women of the Angler's Rest. “Who the fuck is that clown?” asked Bill Wisely. “I'm afraid to say,” Creeley replied, “that it's Geoffrey Hill!” “Barry fucking Hill? I've sold him squid,” said Ian, the squid man.  “The Red Hill,” said Peter Minter. “The curse of Castlemaine.” “No, not Barry Hill,” Creeley said, taking up the bottle of Jim Beam and having a decent slug. I said, “Geoffrey Hill. That man sitting there like the shadow of doubt, is Geoffrey Hill."    

At this stage, for some reason only known only to them, the sons of old Zebedee unleashed a box of big mud crabs that went scuttling across the floor, their great mottled claws snapping the air. “If I were a pair of ragged claws,” Webb started to quote, but before he could finish the line Bill Wisely had whipped the muddies into his airline bags and rushed off towards the Fisherman's Co Op. 

“This meeting was over before it began,” said Basil Bunting on his late arrival at the door. “What the heck does that mean?” asked Jack Zeb?” “It means,” said Basil, that “the spuggies are fledged.”

Out in the Angler’s Rest beer-garden, people had stopped talking and were staring off into the distance, their faces upturned. A series of red flares had gone up, followed by a ragged, loud music arriving on a warm tide of wind. Creeley walked outside. He saw the flares, heard the music. “The  Island is about to blow,” he said “Spector is hunting.”

Having heard the music, the Waggaists started running over the field next to the lake. They were trying to reach a small stand of swamp gums about five hundred yards away. When the Shelby Mustang reached the crest of the hill, Spector threw it into a sideways swerve and the gleaming, thundering machine came to a standstill. Bill Beard had to dig in to the earth and lean forward to keep from being blown off the hill. He had his hands clapped to his ears. Spector was shouting and waving his arms. Dickey was grinning. Bill staggered to keep his balance and pointed down to the lake. Phil got out, grabbed Bill’s binoculars and glassed the valley. Then he turned to Dickey and made a series of angular sweeps with his arms. Dickey nodded, threw down the lance, ran to the side of the car and unclipped a massive cross-bow bolt. It’s explosive zest-head was the size of a grapefruit. He put the bolt into the groove of the mounted cross-bow. Spector turned down the volume and yelled at Dickey. “Make this count,” he yelled and positioned the Mustang. Dickey looked through the cross-bow sights and raised the weapon slightly. “Okay!” he shouted. Spector put the car into neutral and slammed his foot on the accelerator. There was a loud crack and the bolt flew high and fast. In their panic, the Waggaists began running into each other. The bolt hit one of them in he chest and exploded. A great shower of zest went flying in all directions. They were screaming and falling to the ground, covering their faces. “Another!” Spector yelled. Dickey reloaded and positioned the cross-bow, the car engine roared, and another bolt went out into the field. Three Waggaists who’d had a rush of blood to the head and who were running towards the hill, were obliterated. The explosion ripped off their red coats and blinded them instantly. 

Bill was in shock. He was torn between running for cover himself, and sprinting back to the watchtower, where he could witness the slaughter in safety. “Where are the rest of the poets?” he shouted. Dickey was reloading the cross-bow. “They wanted to come, but I told them to forget it. They’d only get in the way and besides,” he said, positioning the weapon, “we want the glory, don’t we Phil!” Spector was laughing insanely. “We want the glory and the money, Jim. I told them I don’t play well with others, and I fucking mean it. Dickey’s the exception.” Phil cranked the stereo up again, and Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper shredded the air.

K. Slessor, the Front

Dispatch From The Front: Day 10

Call of the Sons of Zebedee ~ Marco Basiti, 1426-1516

The Sons of Zebedee discus W.B. Yeats’ new fishing rod before heading out on a Waggafish expedition. Christ is demonstrating the correct way to use the rod’s launching mechanism. The citadel, moat, and road leading down to the wharf can be seen in the background.

~

For he was astonished, and all that were with him, at the draught of the fishes that they had taken: And so was also James, and John, the sons of Zebedee, which were partners with Simon. And Jesus said unto Simon, Fear not; from henceforth, thou shalt catch men. Luke (ch. V, v. 9-10)

It's no sure rule to fish with a cross-bow. George Herbert.

Bill Beard had been up the watch-tower for nine days, and apart from when Wallace-Crabbe had been taken hostage, there'd been nothing to report. On that occasion, he’d tried calling Rodney on the two-way but there was no response.

The view was spectacular: headlands stacked in blue relief down the coast, The Island lake printed with clouds, the river-mouth feeding the ocean its current lines... Even the citadel could be beautiful, especially first thing in the morning and at dusk: the tower needle gleaming, the Waggafish gargoyles compounding light and eating shadows.

He’d made the watch tower from local timber and old sheet iron. Once he’d had the main floor in place (old wharf planks hammered into a three-way fork in the top of a massive turpentine), the rest of the materials had been lowered by David W. Foster in his helicopter. It was a basic structure, but it was home for now. In the pre-dawn dark, Vivian Smith would bring food and water, which Bill hauled up in a basket.

He’d started writing poetry again. After breakfast, he’d open his notebook and get to work. He’d even written a poem about the optical wonders of his Celestron binoculars. With their Dark Sky Nebula Filters, they were not perfect for diurnal use, but they gave whatever he saw an unusual, detailed glow. At night, the sky came close and he went into it for hours, returning with star-plans and new names for spirals of purple dust.

Bill was scanning the southern end of the beach when he saw a huge crowd of Waggaists running and stumbling along the sand. He could see they were in a bad way. Some were helping others to walk. Some fell and lay with their faces pressed into the sand.

“Bill Beard to Rodney, over.” Bill looked again and saw that the Waggaists were making their way back over the hill that led down to the lake. “Bill, Rodney here. Over.” “There’s a huge red crowd heading for the lake, over.” “Yes, Bill, we know, over.” “Then what the hell am I doing up here if you guys already know what’s happening on the ground?” A long silence ensued. “Bill, you’re supposed to say ‘over’ at the end. If you can't you use the designated protocol for this kind of communication, I'll have to get someone else to live in the watchtower.” “Oh fuck off Rodney. What’s happening? Over and over and over!” “Just sit tight Bill. Over and under and out.”

Phil Spector and James Dickey had been hard at work during the night, rigging Phil’s Mustang for the hunt. Dickey had fashioned a giant crossbow which he’d set up on a tripod welded to the bumper. The trigger mechanism was attached to the accelerator cable: once a Waggaist was in sight, Phil could release the bolt with its explosive zest-head by putting his foot to the floor.

They’d amassed a fearsome arsenal. Phil had re-fashioned his snub-nosed Colt revolver into a zest-gun. He’d packed 500 hollow-point bullets with Valencia Zest, the world’s most potent form, and was wearing a bandolier across his chest. Dickey had cut the hunting blades from his arrows and replaced them with stun-heads: large globes of compressed zest. There were medieval-style lances sticking out of the rear window, each capped with huge wads of red material they’d salvaged from beside the moat. They were going to joust their way through the fleeing ranks. The most impressive weapon was the gatling gun that Charles Bronson had made for him in L.A. It was a hand-cranked unit, each turn of the handle setting the circular, barrel-lined chamber spinning and spitting zest in a wide, deadly arc. It wasn’t accurate and it didn’t have to be. Anyone within fifty yards would be taken down.

Robert Gray approached the Mustang and walked around it slowly. He inspected each weapon. After running his fingers over the metal eye-holes of the gatling gun, he turned to look at Spector and Dickey. “Incredible, isn’t it!” Dickey grinned. “You guys are animals,” Robert Gray said, and walked off.

Shelby and Seidel were hungry and thirsty. Seidel picked up Immigrant Chronicles. He’d taken it from the Red Cell, back when they were shredding copies to feed Wilding. Tearing out a page, he screwed it into a ball, tossed it into his mouth and started chewing. “What’s it like?” Shelby asked. Seidel swallowed. “Like eating a boarding pass. Like a wafer on the tongue of a non-believer.” Shelby studied the book. He picked it up and flicked through it’s battered pages. Then he tore out a handful of chronicles and feasted.

Ed Dorn was on his hands and knees. He’d disarmed four mines and was about half way to the cage. Billy Gibbons was reclining in a chair beside his heart-shaped pool, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and drinking Red Needles - a cocktail Leonard Cohen had made for him, back when he’d stayed with Lennie on Hydra, in ’78. He pointed to the mines and said “Could you leave those lilly pads there. I went to great expense importing them from under Monet’s bridge.” Rimbaud looked up from his model of the Drunken Boat. “Red Excess!” he cried out, then lowered the frames of his glasses. Wallace-Crabbe had abandoned the sonnet and was now working on a sestina. “Is cataclysmic a good end-word," he asked Wilding, who growled at him through a hexagon. Baudelaire was hanging by a vision from a girder high on Hart Crane’s Bridge. Frank Beard and Dusty Hill were in the studio with Mary Gauthier, recording a rhythm-and-blues version of I Drink.

Bill Beard climbed down from the tower. He stood at the base of the giant turpentine and looked over at the hill. The last of the Waggaists were limping over its crest. “Time for some action,” he said, and started running.

The wall of CCT screens in the citadel stronghold flickered and went black. Shelby and Seidel had been watching Dorn disarm another mine, and Shelby was raving. “Dorn is rooted! I’m going to shove his head up the arse of a gargoyle.” “Yeah?” Seidel asked, looking forlorn. “You and whose army?”

Philip Levine, Elizabeth Campbell and Ted Kooser had been on patrol with their sling-shots. Using the ball-bearings Levine had stolen from a Chevrolet plant in Detroit, they were knocking out the cameras mounted on walls and in trees around the citadel.

Shelby stood up, a shred of paper hanging from his lip. “What do you suggest?” he asked. “We have no Red Brigade, no televised coverage of what’s happening, no food or water, and some have taken up with the poets!” Seidel swiveled back and forth in his chair. “Suicide by chronicle?” he asked. He leaned over the desk and gave Shelby his best Ooga-Booga look. “We surrender,” he said. “Otherwise we will die in here.” Shelby started screaming and frothing at the mouth: “I will not surrender to Hall and his bunch of free-verse-loving, stage-hogging poets!” Seidel spoke quietly. “Look, surrender doesn’t have to mean complete compliance. We just bide our time, wait for an opportunity. It will come soon enough.”

Dorn had one more mine to disarm. Bukowski, tired of watching the meticulous operation, had slumped into a corner near the door and was onto his second bottle of Southern Comfort. Inside the cage, Billy Gibbons was floating on his back in the pool. He’d taken up smoking again, and his huge Cuban cigar was leaking a pale blue line that swirled into the shape of a Gibson guitar above his head. Wilding was coming down from the acid. He stood with his fingers entwined in the mesh, staring at Bukowski and Dorn. “Whenever I get involved with poets it always ends in tears,” he said. Baudelaire had taken another trip. While swinging on the metal girder high above the East River, he’d been rewriting his poem The Albatross. He cleared his throat, looked down past the bridge-workers to the boats, and began:

Often, for fun, Waggaists will train

an albatross, that greater-glider of the low

pressure system and driving rain.

They paint it red. They defile it and bestow

Language upon its hard, captive stare.

It flounders in sickness, pecking

chronicles from a cage. Pinioned, the law 

of Arctic water dies, and it sings

of distant islands, Great Southern breaks

of swell and long-line killers. The Waggaists

put a pipe-stem into its clapping beak

and laugh. They ruin everything. The list

is long and red. The wandering albatross

watches storm clouds mass above

the citadel. It smokes and weeps for lost

horizons, for freedom and for love.

Having stopped his breathless work to listen, Dorn placed his tools carefully on the floor and got to his feet. “Did you write that?” he asked. Rimbaud laughed. “Does Raggedy Anne have cotton tits?” Wilding put his mouth to a hexagon. “No more poetry, please.” Bukowski drank and wiped his mouth. “Sentimental crap,” he said. Dorn ignored them. “I’ve never paid your work much attention,” he said. “But that’s changed. Thankyou, Charles.” “Is parenthetical a good end-word?” Wallace-Crabbe called out from the lonely, far-flung parish of his sestina.

Bob Creeley didn’t slow down in the no-wake-zone, and as the Boston Whaler roared into Brooklyn, a group of men came out from the Fisherman’s Co-Op and started abusing him. When they recognised Terry Hack, there was an air of bafflement as the Whaler pulled up at the end of the wharf. Who were these weird blokes with Terry? Devin jumped out with the mooring rope and tied up to the pontoon. W. B. Yeats, dressed in a velvet suit and a red cravat walked out onto the wharf, twirling a blank rod like a cane. Creeley turned off the motors and looked the part: he was dressed in jeans and a denim jacket and was wearing his black eye-patch. As Bill Wisely came down to meet them, he said to Terry Hack, “You’re being too fucking generous to these Americans!” “They’re not all Americans,” Terry said. “Willy comes from Ireland. He often fishes for sea-bass at Balbriggan Beach in Dublin.” “Dressed like a cocky?” Bill asked, looking over at Yeats. “How long since you caught a decent fish?” Yeats looked him up and down and adjusted his monocle, “Maybe twelvemonth since I wore the grey Connemara cloth, walked the beach and with a downturn of my wrist, dropped a flie upon the tide.” “Well fuck me dead” said Bill “There’ll be none of that shit here.”

Yeats’ eyes narrowed and he spun the blank in his hand, “I have come to teach you how to use a new rod, a red ugly-stick. It’s qualities are as cold and passionate as the dawn.” At this Terry Hack stepped between Bill and Yeats. “I think we should all move on and have our meeting at the Angler’s Rest.”

This motley crew walked through the bar and all eyes were on them. It was only 10 am and Dutch was already drinking whisky. Charles Olson was there handing out oysters and boasting about how many Waggaists he was going to use as crab-bait. He had Philip Levine in a corner and was plying him with projectivist theory and Tasmanian beer.

The usual gang of Brooklynites were gathered around the pool table completely oblivious that the poetry war had been raging for over a week. The prawners were playing darts and Griffo was looking for Ian. He was after live squid.  Bob Creeley yelled “There’s Olson!” “Ulladulla, you old beast! Where’s the Jim Beam?” shouted Olson. Yeats gave a nod to Devin who walked over to Griffo, the publican, and asked if they could use the back room for a meeting. Griffo scanned the crew of poets and agreed.  “Take them out of here before there’s a fight,” he said. “Why would there be a fight?” asked Devin. Griffo nodded towards what looked like a family of real river rats - prawners for generations - they looked mean and very unpoetic. “Who are they?” Devin was perplexed. “They are Jimmy and Jack Zee, the sons of old Zebedee. “They work with Simon the Hook,” Griffo said.

Yeats stood in front of a mixed crew, which now included Olson and Creeley. Devin was standing next to Hack at the door, both of them keeping a weather eye on the sons of old Zebedee. “Makes you want to laugh in a way” said Devin, “Well don’t,” said Terry Hack who was dressing some squid, cutting them into pale strips, then handing them on to Ian the Squid Man. Yeats was speaking: “This piece of magic was developed in the labs of Jack Erskine in Darwin,” he said, turning the rod over in his hands. “Erskine created the blank and Ian ‘Barra’ Miller did the bindings. See how the guides glow with a pink light in the dark. It’s an extract from the otoliths, the ‘jewels’ of Waggas. This rod has a core of titanium surrounded by a sleeve of iron bark wood, which in turn resides inside a blank made from carbon-fibre - the same glass they use on Ugly Sticks. This rod is bullet-proof, it wont bend and is equipped with a high-powered launching device invented by Blaise Pascall, an outcome of his experiments into the pure vacuum, basically the cylindrical abyss. I call it the Red Wagga-Wand, mark IIV. The rod is coupled with a special red reel manufactured by ABU in Sweden. This reel has no drag whatsoever. You must feel the Wagga, then whack into it with all your might - hook-up and skull-drag them in as if you were using a Ned-Kelly rig. Except you are using tough braid of 300 lb breaking strain so there’s no excuses. It’s either you or the fish.”

K. Slessor, at the Front