Arriving at your viewing
at Palm Grove Memorial Cemetery that late June morning
you joking, only days before,
how you’d avoid the GST
if you cacked it before the 1st of July.
The blank, tattooed receptionist
glides us to an impressive
gold-coloured plaque on a door which reads:
DAVID ROGER JOHNSON.
Roger, I didn’t know
your first name was actually David!
Pushing the door open-
bewildered
stumbling before you
amazed
& with each step
aghast
seeing your corpse for the first time
through the bright
but soulless room
from
changing perspectives
of alternating light
& meaning:
the manufactured scent
the opulent coffin
you seemingly sinking
small and insignificant within it-
the former hulking beast of your huge frame
a sham-
a remnant of your former boisterous Rogerness.
The boys reckoned you looked like a vampire
in that silent black box-
those bucked incisors they could never fix
your dark black hair smoothly caressed
in your preferred mid 70s Elvis appropriation.
I couldn’t help thinking
I could poke
my fingers
without too much effort
through your rice paper cheeks.
As I grieved beside you
I tried vainly to fathom the significance
of your death at age 48
working it all out-
the tragic
stupid inevitability of it all-
even picturing
the view of the room
the afternoon light
dancing on the western walls
& on the plastic vases of flowers
from the perspective
of your depleted
cancerous frame.
In retrospect, the poem adopts elements that Buk may have used- free verse, lower case, experiments in enjambment- but to me it was a one off- a creative exercise in attempting to capture a key moment in my life- using what limited language skills I possessed.
After writing about my friend Roger, I was on a roll for a couple of years and wrote about everything and used a variety of styles and forms. I wrote about my past in Canada & about the friends I grew up with and about my old man. I mostly wrote narrative poems in free verse using simple, unembellished language.
There are about 25 poems in the collection set in Montreal, below the tracks in NDG, which recall some of my juvenile exploits in poetic form, including, ‘At the Sanair Super Speedway’, ‘The Dope Plant’, ‘First Fist Fight’, ‘Chopper’, ‘Tabarnac!’, ‘Ten O’Clock’ & others.
Looking back, my old man was a kind of Chinaski figure- a drunken bum but without the insane creativity. Similar to Buk, he grew up in a time of depression and world war. He was a disgraceful role model & he features in several of my poems and stories, including 'Cold Turkey', 'Frankie', 'The Police Interview' and 'Switching Off the Lights' in the collection.
In 'Cold Turkey', a cringe-worthy but biographically accurate poem, I explore the dark depths the old man sank, following the death of his wife, my mother, aged 47:
One winter evening
after my mother died
of a massive heart attack
the old man pounds
on my bedroom door
& drunkenly asks, ‘You hungry?’
In the kitchen
he takes a large turkey
directly from the freezer
& whacks it into the oven-
and turns the temperature up to 450F
He has been drinking for two or three days.
As we wait for the turkey to cook
the conversation is circular
every 20 minutes or so
he glances up at me and slurs-
‘You think you’re smart?
You don’t know fuck all!’
The old man sits there in his white singlet
his eyes dissolving slowly into his head
& later like clockwork he asks
flexing his right bicep
steeled by years of foundry work:
‘You think you’re tough, don’t you? Feel this!’
It is rock hard-
I try to crush the muscle with my soft teenage hands
I can only get them half way around.
He takes another drag from his Players Export cigarettes
downs another Molson
& in mid sentence nods off.
*
I set the alarm
& wake at 4 AM.
As expected, the old man is crashed out-
under the kitchen table in pissed pants
snoring in a rhythmic but shaky rattle
his left arm his pillow.
*
Our huge mongrel cat
Thomas Reef Redback
is most content for nearly a week-
the old man in the early mornings
flinging him
half-raw portions
from the big bird’s inner core.
I've always been attracted to writers who realistically focus on characters who live on the margins of society- Orwell, London, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Kerouac. Even as a young child I loved reading the tales and adventures of the courier de bois in Canada.
In my writing I often like to explore the thin edge between order and mayhem, when ordinarily good people drop any pretence at civility and plunge into shameful, atavistic behaviour. I first developed an interest in this concept years ago when I closely studied novels, such as HG Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and The First Man on the Moon, Shelley's Frankenstein and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The poems 'Wright', 'Mad Kiwi', 'Surrey Hills on a Saturday Night', 'K.O.' and 'My First Fist Fight' are some examples from the collection which attempt to show this arbitrary descent into chaos.
In a belated answer to your question, who came first Bukowski or the egg? It's impossible to apportion the percentage of his influence. Being familiar with his writing certainly helped to shape the form and content of my work when I decided to record the stuff. Like any writer, I borrow from here and there and put a specific, individual spin on my ideas.
Q: Following up on my Bukowski question: the first of Sir Charles' I read, like you, was BURNING IN WATER DROWNING IN FLAME. It blew my mind in that it gave me the idea that my life--no matter how boring or dull, or full of shit I thought it--could be used as poetic material. The sense of meaningless I often felt, about myself and life in general could be given meaning through artistic creation. Who I was, what I was, had relevance. Did you feel anything similar after reading Buk? How about some other writer?
Anderson: Yeah, I totally agree. I remember attending a Poet's Union seminar about 20 years ago and all the academics talked about for about 2 hours was the evolving aesthetic concept of the vase in literature over the last 10,000 years or so. Although I still consider John Keats's poem 'Ode On a Grecian Urn' (1819) as one of my favourite poems of all time- I was bored shitless on the day!
For Bukowski any topic is permissible, however trivial or controversial. I was first attracted to his poetry for his humour, his interesting choice of subject matter, and as I've said, how he put the boots into the establishment. I liked his cynical tone, how he incorporated dialogue into many of his poems, and especially, the improvisational feel of his writing.
I wrote the poem ‘One Clear Winged Morning’ in tribute to Buk and how he challenged cultural norms and raised a stiff finger to the elites:
One Clear Winged Morning
For years, I understood poetry
to be the work of flabby grey men
in pompous suits & ties
pouring over obscure lines
in heavily annotated books
mocking each other’s poetics.
But then one clear winged morning
I discovered that it can be found anywhere:
in the shell of a burnt out car
in the automated voice of a train guard
on the side of trucks or bathroom doors
belted out in pubs or on factory floors.
(first published in The Legendary, 2009)
The poem, was also a direct reference to some of my own material, including to 'burn out'- a 2003 broadside- which was written after a friend's car was brazenly stolen outside my house in Doonside during a party & later set alight in a nearby reserve:
Bukowski's estate also left him a massive target by allowing so much of his less capable work to be published posthumously through ECCO. He obviously never allowed this material to be published during his lifetime. I gently mock this overkill:
Horses that Shit in the Woods Eat Sushi at Dawn
the skid row poet
cum multi-millionaire
another used condom of
his poems recently released
the fourteenth since his death
the proverbial scrapping of the barrel:
cigar butts, Ludwig, pussy, beer.
(first published in The Legendary, 2010)
Q: I view your work as that of a "descriptive" poet rather than an "introspective" one. (Not to say I find NO introspection in the work.) An "action" poet, if you will; concerned with telling a story, a narrative, rather than, or in addition to, relating feelings involved, of narrator or character/subject of the poem. Would you agree with this assessment?
Sure, I agree! In The Rough End of the Pineapple I deliberately included some of my more accessible portrait poems which use simple language and personal anecdotes to create a visual image in the head of the reader. They usually tell an external story rather than explore the inner eye.
Over the years, I have experimented in many forms and styles- for the sake of continuity- in this book I have adopted an observational tone and a consistant authorial voice. I tend to view "introspective" poems with suspicion and often find myself gagging on revelatory verse which often provide the reader with a self-absorbed or sentimental illumination.
Q: Do you feel (ha! I am putting you on the spot), that writing criticism, as in your BOLD MONKEY columns, takes away from your own work or does it feed it? Is your approach to writing criticism like that to a disliked job--something to get through? An irritant maybe? A pain in the you know what? If not, what are your feelings toward writing criticism? What does the act of doing so consist of for you? The results?
I started writing criticism on Bold Monkey in 2007 to help me strengthen my ability to teach my students how to write the stuff. I also used the platform to help support the small alternative press by providing reviews of poetry books which academics usually avoided.
Early on, I got a lot of positive feedback from Wolfgang Carstens (Epic Rites Press) and RD Armstrong (Lummox Press) and many individual writers. I also tried my hand at reviewing classic texts, such as Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Brautigan’s Watermelon Sugar and Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. I saw each new book as an intricate puzzle that I had to unravel and had a lot of fun constructing my analysis.
Later on, John D. Robinson of Holy & Intoxicated Publications (UK) and Hank Stanton of Uncollected Press (USA) were key contributors in getting me to shift my focus from critical to imaginative writing.
In the last couple of years, I am finding it more difficult to find the time to stay on task to complete all reviews. I usually read a book at least 5-6 times, compile notes and interview the writer to gain a greater understanding of what they are trying to achieve. I hate taking shortcuts and as other projects intercede, some reviews have had to be abandoned or have been substantially delayed.
I never try to kiss the ass of the writers I review. I generally will only review books I can get into, and as you can appreciate, some books are well beyond the scope of Bold Monkey and my comprehension of poetry. Sometimes in my reviews I feel I am writing parody or hyperbole, but at its heart my thoughts are non-bullshit, genuine.
Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions.
No worries.
