d r i n k s t e r: A POEM FOR TONY ABBOTT

“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)

15 October 2013

A POEM FOR TONY ABBOTT

near Emu Bay Kangaroo island photo Philip White

ejection

all the things are being sucked from the air
do not blame the plants the birds or the bugs
for clawing at the holes our poison left
it's a queue now they've gone too

even the fishscaler's sunset

sucks sideways cross the desk
pulling eyes ears nose touch skin
straight through the windows into the out

rise through prehistory with the dragonfly

tinkerbell dance with canopy shards
once the incoming fire when the incoming went
the button is pushed leaving every lost in sky

in case I land badly I'm warning you

this mess on the ground could fly too

philip white

this photo by Alex Ellinghausen from whom I hereby steal it in exchange for lunches coming

some other poems
having watched my father die - read
a thought about form - read
my no good kids - read
on account of my mouth being blind - read
you came and stood by my table - read
rosemary dobson - read
i had a soul - read
for elias canetti - read
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1 comment:

tom said...: i want to fly
fly a phantom; October 15, 2013 at 11:07 PM

CONFESSIONS

"After enough years newspapermen begin to pall on other newspapermen; they begin to take their good qualities for granted and wince at their shortcomings, of which the most common are a vanity that sometimes borders on the thespian and a sort of perpetual mental adolescence that I think stems from starting a fresh story every day or every week or month and never having time to get to the bottom of anything. They forget that newspapermen as a class have a yearning for truth as involuntary as a hophead’s addiction to junk. The question of whether the junkie really loves hop is academic; he can’t get along without it. A newspaperman may write a lie to hold his job, but he won’t believe it, and the necessity outrages him so that he craves truth all the more thereafter. A few newspapermen lie to get on in the world, but it outrages them, too, and I have never known a dishonest journalist who wasn’t patently an unhappy bastard."

A.J. Liebling,

war correspondent,

New Yorker,

Algiers,

January 1942.

“Ale, especially that made from barley, clogs the sinews, causes headache and congestion of the head, yet it overstimulates the action of the kidneys, and, when drunk to excess, lowers the temperature. That, however, which is brewed from wheat, and is flavoured with mint and parsley, is judged better for everybody. Still, in the case of persons exposed to the sun’s heat, in feverish conditions and sultry weather, its use is inadvisable.”

From The Science Of Dining – A Medieval Treatise on the Hygiene of the Table and the Laws of Health, translated from the Latin by Arthur S. Way D. Lit, MacMillan, 1936. Previous translation The Schoolmaster, 1583. Original text from Mohammed ibn Zakariya al Razi, Arabic medical writer (865-925AD).

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15 October 2013

A POEM FOR TONY ABBOTT

1 comment:

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