Category: Criticism

Though known by his business cards as a famous poet, π.O. is foremost an anarchist landscape artist working against the sanitised tradition of the state-sanctioned pastoral (an institution that makes colonial settlement possible). At least, that is, in his magnum opus, Heide, published by Giramondo in 2019. Elsewhere, in Fitzroy, published by Collective Effort Press in 2015, π.O. is a biographer, autobiographer and fictocritic all at once, giving a gruesome yet delightful account of the inner-north suburb from convict settlement to modern gentrification. But π.O. is impossible to pin down. Just when we were nearly through with the 1300-odd pages of these two master volumes, the famous poet returned for a victory lap with The Tour, published by Giramondo in 2023. Here, π.O. carries the reader with him like a diary as he and a delegation of Australian poets tour 1980s America, the West’s newest imperial motherland.

Fitzroy

As he notes on the back cover of Fitzroy, π.O. writes a poetry of place ‘from the perspective of one who grew up there’. This appeal to authority is necessary when mainstream histories of Melbourne are either laid out neatly in the language of government or guided by the flows of capital (or both). There is an unnervingly insistent historical consciousness in Australian writing that obscures the reality of the colony, maybe because our governments are the largest investors in Australian history, or because 96% of us are essentially migrants (i.e. not Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples). In the last census, a third of the population identified as having English ancestry, which may be thanks to British parliamentary control over Australian immigration policy in the 1800s. Being of English heritage myself, I would argue that the British, who have attempted to colonise most of the Antipodes, are the most deranged of all the Western Europeans. In Fitzroy, π.O. does not let us forget this, with the first half of the book dedicated to the pugnacious exploits of several British-Australian murderers, thieves and delinquents.

Highlighting the latent violence of mathematics, the first poem in Fitzroy concerns the London-born surveyor and artist Robert Hoddle (1794–1881): ‘A mathematical bent / draws a square’.[1] Hoddle is the surveyor responsible for the Hoddle Grid, which forms Melbourne’s central business district, as well as the Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond grids. Perhaps π.O., a draughtsman and artist himself, sees his own task as opposed to Hoddle’s: to recount Melbourne’s messy history in spite of the tidy lines of the Englishman’s sterile grid. Language is not innocent in this equation either. Rather, π.O. works against what might be considered ‘proper’ in Western literary or academic terms by producing multiplicitous accounts of history, where several contrary things may (or may not) be true at the same time. In the third poem of Fitzroy, he quotes the diaries of Hoddle, who wrote of the Wurundjeri people: ‘They are friendly / by light / wishing me goodnight, but my faithful / dog tells me otherwise … They would gladly knock my / brains out, and feast on my ribs.’[2] Did Hoddle write this? We can believe it. Here the British imagination turns on itself, taking the form of a paranoid and carnivorous psychosis via gentrification, colonisation and class anxiety over the next 700 bloody pages.

The first half of Fitzroy covers roughly the Victorian period in Melbourne, when people of all classes were behaving very badly indeed. One of these was the well-known chocolate magnate Macpherson Robertson KBE, the founder of MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works, where Freddo Frogs were invented. The tone of mainstream history appears to reflect his philanthropy (Robertson funded a 1929 Antarctic expedition as well as numerous public works projects). π.O. writes, ‘Charity is / a coin in the / slot, and a paper-flower in the lapel.’[3] But charity can also be an easy way to launder both money and reputation in one clean sweep: ‘everything about him, had to be absolutely “spot- / less” i.e. spotlessly White or cream—including / Him, his buildings, his factories, his horses, / the colour of the walls, his worker’s uniforms, his suits…’.[4] On Friday, 25 August 1905, at the intersection of Nicholson and Gertrude (though π.O. records Nicholson and Kerr), opposite the Exhibition Building, Macpherson Robertson was one of first drivers in Victoria involved in a fatality.[5] The decorated chocolate mogul ‘was travelling / towards, a cable tram, when he hit and ran over / something, solid’.[6] The ‘something’ was Tom Hall, an iron foundry worker and ‘recent widower (with / 4 kids)’, who died from his injuries at the scene.[7]

But Fitzroy is much more than a mere sullying of the whitewashed names of Victoria’s enshrined bourgeoisie. π.O. also takes an interest in reporting on the wider cultural landscape, which ‘belongs / to the people, not just to the traffic’.[8] In ‘Greek History’, we learn that in 1939, ‘Australians still didn’t know “which Dago / was which”… they all went on / a rampage, smashing Dagoes windows, thinking them / all Mussolini’s’.[9] After World War II broke out, anyone born in Italy, Germany or Japan was considered an ‘enemy alien’ under the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations of 1939. Italian studies and linguistics scholar Gaetano Rando documents that those considered ‘highest risk’ were conscripted to the Civil Aliens Corps, which was ‘a national labour force, or, following a precedent established during the First World War for German Australians, imprisonment in one of the purpose-built internment camps’.[10]

As π.O. records, the racist policies of the white Menzies government also contributed towards attacks on Greek families: ‘A number, of fruit and a fish’n’chip shops, had / their windows broken. In Johnston St, one of the shops / owned by a Greek (& his family) had a brick thrown / thru the window… Greek shops, taped up signs / on their windows: “We are not Italians”, but Australians / were no good at writing or spelling, either.’[11] This is classic π.O., recapitulating violence and stupidity with a twinkle in the eye, in stark juxtaposition with anything recorded in the passive tongue of government records. The second half of Fitzroy brings the reader up to speed on the scandalous history of the suburb from the 1950s onward with an autobiographical focus. If you want to know what happened in the 1960s at Collingwood Yards (then Collingwood Tech), or in 1972 when Allen Ginsberg came to read at the Melbourne Town Hall, you’ll have to buy your own copy of Fitzroy from Collective Effort Press for $55, which you can do by writing a letter to the anarchists at PO Box 2430 GPO, Melbourne VIC 3001.

Heide

π.O.’s more recent epic, Heide, is published by Giramondo. The form of the ‘everything poem’ is developed cohesively in this volume, where he ventriloquises further histories from a present perspective as the modern dissipates into yet another dusk. Heide was my first encounter with π.O.’s work. Having recently moved to Melbourne,  Iwas recommended the book by scholar, writer and trans pioneer Vivian Blaxell. Blaxell was nominated for the 2021 Writer’s Prize while π.O. was up for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Reading π.O. and Blaxell introduced me to art, literature and culture in this colony, and both incorporate shifting viewpoints in style. Blaxell advances a unique sort of ‘everything’ essay in a similarly irreverent tone (see: ‘Nuclear Cats’). In π.O.’s work, the ‘everything poem’ collates facts from old encyclopedias and Guinness World Records alongside local narratives to form a murky stage-set of implications rather than a cold hard representation of Truth. It’s impossible to hold on to anything concrete in the everything poem because the background scenery is always changing. The effect is that each poem has a life of its own. Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno writes that ‘the decisions of a bureaucracy are frequently reduced to Yes or No answers … But the responsibility of philosophical thought in its essential situations is not to play this game.’[12] R.I.P. Adorno, you would have loved π.O.

The poems in Heide present surplus galore, each an overflowing Zarathustran cup challenging the authority of ‘fact’ by pointing towards the simultaneous truth and untruth of all language. Heide may well be one of the germinal texts of an emergent Australian fictocriticism that leverages the questionable modal realism of imperial archives (modal realism being the view that all possible worlds are actual worlds). Anything we might say or write could refer to a real possibility. Take, for example, the recent Overland article ‘Whitefella Mischief: a tour of the museum of the magicians of reason’ by writers and scholars Max Brierty and Stephen Muecke. They take a collaborative fictocritical approach to represent a museum tour on Kullilli country (‘where Max’s people come from’) in the year 2060. Like π.O., Brierty and Muecke consider artworks and historical artefacts to fabulate a possible future constructed from a very real past.[13] Fictocriticism reclaims possibility, drawing attention through negation to the untruth of a single narrative and the impossibility of truth, particularly in the digital age. In recollecting multiple histories via the ‘everything poem’, π.O. summons alternative futures through his historical observations of shifting Australian landscapes.

π.O. has achieved something momentous with Heide—not only by presenting a less sympathetic account but also by collating such a readable history with his ecstatic tone and impressive eye for salacious detail. If π.O. presents this history incredulously, it’s because the antics of the bourgeoisie and their artists are utterly ridiculous. In ‘The Artist & the Patron’, he writes:

            A lot of money, can produce
a lot of money, or a lot of //// paintings.
But either the Artist snubs the Snob, or the Snob
snubs the Artist—Thank God, for hypocrisy!—
The Patron, is the one, who supports and approves
and the Wretch, is the one who responds
with insolence. ‘Business, my dear boy, Business!’[14]

The poem examines the motives of John Reed and Sunday Reed (née Baillieu), an old-money settler couple who in 1934 purchased a former dairy farm in Bulleen. The old farmhouse became known as Heide, comparable to Garsington Manor in Oxford, England, which hosted members of the Bloomsbury group. Heide is now, of course, a museum of modern art, but from the 1930s to the 1950s, the Reeds patronised artists there, including Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker. π.O. writes ‘Sunday knew that the business of landscape (in / Australian Art) was not finished’, and this unfinished business is the central concern of Heide.[15] Here, π.O. offers a critique, demonstrating how Australian landscape art and bourgeois ideals have made the ongoing colonial project possible. The success of colonial settlement in Australia is fuelled by collective delusions of white supremacy, nativity and belonging. The mythology of Australia has relied upon naturalised representations of the settler as transplanted into the landscape from imperial Europe. Sunday Reed encouraged Sidney Nolan to paint the landscape, and during World War II, she secured Nolan a Parkville hideout from which to work: ‘Landscape art was like treason; a return to / an authentic view of Nationhood; the gumleaf & / koala school of Impressionism. The fastest amputation (in / history) was done by one of Napoleon’s surgeons.’[16] Nolan received the Order of Merit for his service to art in 1983.

Read the full piece here.

Footnotes:

[1] π.O. (2015). Fitzroy (p.11). Collective Effort Press. Melbourne.
[2] Fitzroy (p.17).
[3] Fitzroy (p.82).
[4] Fitzroy (p.82).
[5] https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/78638184-F1C1-11E9-AE98-2342D5DCF76F
[6] Fitzroy (p.83).
[7] Fitzroy (p.83).
[8] Fitzroy (p.403).
[9] Fitzroy (p.419).
[10] Rando, G (2005). Italo-Australians during the Second World War: Some perceptions of internment 2005. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/120. [Accessed 23/10/2023].
[11] Fitzroy (p.420).
[12] Adorno, TW (1990). Negative Dialectics (p.32), trans. Ashton, EB. Routledge. England.
[13] Brierty, M and Muecke, S (7 July 2023). Whitefella Mischief: a tour of the museum of the magicians of reason. Overland. https://overland.org.au/2023/07/whitefella-mischief-a-tour-of-the-museum-of-the-magicians-of-reason/. [Accessed 23/10/2023].
[14] π.O. (2019). Heide (p.342). Giramondo. Penrith.
[15] Heide (p.344).
[16] Heide (p.368)

Amelia Zhou on Antigone Kefala

Little by little, names no longer fit things.
Yannis Ritsos, ‘Seconds’ (tr. Antigone Kefala)

I. The photograph

In the photograph, the woman’s head tilts right. Her face registers a slight smile, but it’s hard to make out the expression behind her eyes, though I’m leaning into the page to look closer. What am I looking for? To put into language what the photograph purports to capture, some quality of the real beyond its paper, this fiction. Here’s my descriptive attempt. She is alone, not if you count the pigeons milling about her sandaled feet, or the tourists idling in the background. I think it’s summer or spring. Her sandals give it away. The woman is standing in Piazza San Marco. I’m guessing this from the caption beneath the photograph which reads: in Venice.

Taking pictures is one way to engage in and record our experiences as they are happening. But most things don’t appear in photographs, they escape. Therein presents the difficulty of translating a photographic image into words. Still we keep photographs as a tangible token of remembrance—a souvenir—an object that preserves a trace of an instant caught in time. ① Another way we might score time is to write in a journal. A private souvenir of one’s lived time. The photograph of the woman I’m looking at is pressed in the centrefold of the journal I’m reading. Antigone Kefala is the writer of this not-so-private journal; she’s also the woman in the photograph I’m trying to describe. It’s one photograph amongst several in Kefala’s Sydney Journals (2008). There she is with her friends Jolanta and Jurgis, on a road trip passing through Tibooburra. There she is walking arm and arm with her brother Homer, in Athens. Or she’s not in the photographs at all. In a refugee camp in Lavrion, her father and Homer play the strings. A two-storey house in Annandale, Sydney—where Kefala lived from 1960 until her passing—shadowed by a towering gum. Here is a small sampling of moments and places that shape a life, these photographs suggest. To accurately tell the story of a life, instant to instant, is after all, an impossible task. 

Chasing time, grasping at its impossibility, arranging the gathered ephemera on the page—(from the Greek ephemeros, meaning ‘daily, for the day’)—time is both the journal’s constant constraint and foremost preoccupation. It is ‘the element that we cannot keep still, that we cannot recapture, the image of this passing forever chilling,’Kefala notes in Sydney Journals.Together with Late Journals (2022), the two volumes span half a century of her life—from 1970, predating her first poetry chapbook The Alien (1973), and ending in 2020, after the publication of Fragments (2016), her last collection.                                                                                                                      

And what is the ephemera Kefala gathers, records, and keeps? It’s past midnight, and the moon hangs ‘like half a slice of orange, sharply cut’ (Late Journals). Or it’s time to go to the grocers, where, Kefala writes, ‘they kept telling me that the WAR had started.’ (Late Journals) And despite the stark observation of a friend’s recent death, still, she insists, ‘On Monday […] we will go back to the everyday.’ (Sydney Journals) These textual ephemera accrue, in Kefala’s case, not to a self-evidential portrait of how one spends the ordained hours of the day as such, as the monthly entries of her journals might first indicate. If any kind of portrait of Kefala arises, it’s of a self in intimate witness to the real, actively attenuating to one’s scalar relationship to history and landscape. ‘Events always surpass our imagination,’ she writes (Late Journals). For Kefala, events that exceed the imagination include those events that are otherwise unremarked on and looked over, because of their ordinary beauty, or perhaps their unexceptional violence. Kefala’s acts of witnessing, then, is a call to be them directly, to attest to how such events meet with her quotidian. What exceeds imagination can be more surmountable when expressing it with the language of most direct and plainest means, of taking it on through the measure and scale of our everyday.

To write this everyday is as much a practice of duration, of staying in a temporality of perpetual waiting: ‘Waiting for this living to happen to discover inwardly one’s writing’ (Late Journals). Yes, life is always beginning and its living is well underway. Yet the delay between life and writing can be a long distance, and the transformation of one to the other a ‘slow development,’ Kefala notes, ‘coloured by events, experiences.’ (Late Journals). To wait as Kefala does suggests a waiting for memory to catch up to the present, the writing of events and experiences always mediated by one’s memory of them. Or rather, are we waiting for the present to recede into memory?

Time, as if no longer continuous, as if it had totally stopped…
[…]
Suddenly realising that one can feel outside time…

(Late Journals)

Perhaps, in waiting, Kefala points towards a general feeling of being ‘outside time’ altogether. Waiting, time stopped, time no longer continuous, yet one must go on living in the present, even if that present is set against a ‘shrinking of the future’ (Sydney Journals) and a background of ‘material unease’ (Late Journals). Such examples demonstrate the ambivalent temporal drift underlining Kefala’s journals: to be both outside time—an affective, imaginative space—and in its actual flow. ‘Time had passed over our faces leaving a fine print’ (Late Journals) she writes. And while the body always outwardly bears the trace of time passing, what remains relentlessly outside time, resistant to its encroachment, Kefala implies, are the objects in which time—as it is lived—is recorded and kept. Objects akin to the journal, the family album, letters, papers; these make their own ‘periphery of existence’, which, ‘when we go […] will remain in the house, still here, unaware of our passing.’ (Sydney Journals).

Now the time of the scene has changed: Kefala’s journals are laid in front of me on my desk, and it is not Kefala’s experience of writing, but my encounter with the object of her writing that is made bare. Just as Kefala realises one can feel ‘outside time,’ this same feeling is also mapped onto my own encounter with her journals, enlarged by the knowledge of their capture of moments already passed. In this way, to read a journal is not unlike looking at a photograph: in reading one or looking at the other, there is a similar kind of dissonance and temporal arrhythmia through the confrontation with stilled life, with that which has been. A person’s emanation of ‘vitality […] an explosiveness of silent energy […] can only be hinted at in a photo,’ Kefala says (Late Journals). Reading her journals, I cannot help but fall into a similar reverie.

Any kind of translation from experience to textual or visual language alike mediates absence, a loss in its process. ‘Writing – constantly trying to recapture the living element at the beginning of the experience, an elusive element’ (Sydney Journals). Kefala reminds us that it is with, and in spite of, the undergird of loss that we turn to language, for—to paraphrase her invocation of Paul Celan—it is the one thing that remains reachable, close, and secure amidst all that escapes. In my own looking at Kefala’s photographs and my reading of her journals, I recognise a mourning for the fantasy of ‘vitality’, the temptation to hunt for what cannot be translated, a language in bind to an aperture of loss. Kefala fathoms the crossings from one moment in time in relation to another, the disjunctures that occur in language between those moments and their recaptures, all the while bridging those jumps and bringing us with her. The evergreen secret of what has been transformed and lost in those crossings of language and time—(she’s hinting; I’m hunting)—this is what I contemplate on the page as it lands on my particular side.

II. The quote unquoted

I’ll hint on my own jump now into the middle—as in, what is meddling in the space between the quote and the unquote? What spills over? The self is contained and spilling over. The quote likes to spill over its punctuation too. I watch Agnès Varda’sdocumentary The Gleaners and I one evening, because Kefala watches it on page eight of Late Journals, and I want to see what she’s seeing. (‘To glean is to gather after the harvest. A gleaner is one who gleans. In times past only women gleaned.’ These lines open the film.) Watching it, one discovers that gleaning is not only what is documented on screen but what Varda also performs as a filmmaker, stitching together a moving tapestry of images, ideas, and words from painting, cinema, and her life, mirroring the gleaner’s picking up of, say, oranges or potatoes. Gleaning animates Kefala’s journals too. What is gleaned are tiny accidents chanced upon in the ‘everyday miraculous’ (Sydney Journals) as much as they are deliberate exercises of gathering and accumulation. We encounter voices of writers, artists, composers, friends; words from films, documentaries, interviews, books; things heard on the radio; once, a scribble on a bus seat (‘I love Irfan’); among numerous other things. If the page, like memory, starts as an empty theatre, these things fill its seats, indicative of the real and imagined company Kefala keeps. In parsing our eye down the journal’s page, we are invited to meander through her social milieu, as if overhearing snippets of someone speaking, until another juts in. The page, by this logic, becomes a dramaturgical space organised by travel and connection. What is at work is a sense of relational call-and-response, insofar as such voices, when interspersed with fragments of Kefala’s observations and commentaries, can be prismatic in what they relay. We are solicited to follow the relays between various voices not only within the page at hand but their outwards oscillations beyond the text, to the glimpsed traces of Kefala’s social world. What Kefala ultimately puts on the page then veers from any sense of arrival at closure, preferencing the possibilities of ambiguous relation, giving much work for us, as readers, to follow such possibilities.

Read the full piece here.

Works cited

✷ 1. I take the idea of the ‘souvenir’ from Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, 1993).
✷ 2. Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 45.
✷ 3. Philippe Lejeune, ‘How Do Diaries End?’, trans. by Victoria A. Lodewick, Biography, 24.1 (2001), 99–112 (p. 100).