degraded echo
(de Chirico?)
a white sun, nudging a post
heavy sun: velleities
hairy sun: shaking itself dry
barely an impingement, a diluted sun,
a dilated sun, egg
broken into a large bowl of soup sun
hot sea, in a clear glass: a sun like a creek that someone, right now,
is carrying a bike across
art-like sun: an installation; the sun I just went outside to see (it wasn’t there)
a sun groaning, sick in bed, complaining […]
from ‘Suns’ by Tim Wright (in Suns, Puncher & Wattmann 2018)
This year I’ve read, and I’m not joking when I say this, tens of thousands of poems, due to various freelance commissions and long-term editing projects coming to a head. I did my usual reading as poetry editor for Overland and as a teacher of creative writing at the University of Sydney. I judged three prizes (the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, the Anne Elder Award for a first book of poems, and the Newcastle Poetry Prize) and I took on two anthology projects: Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2007–2020, a historical anthology of the 40 poets who have won or placed in the competition (including their winning poems and selected other poems that show the poets’ development since featuring in the prize), and Best of Australian Poems 2021 (co-edited with Ellen van Neerven), a new annual anthology series; both of which will be published before the end of this year.*
Across the last few months I would read in print, on my phone and laptop, in bed, in front of the TV, on the grass, at the table, on the beach, in the car, waiting for coffee, at meals, during Zoom meetings, in the rain, in the sun. The experience of such broad but atomised reading is like sifting through a wheat silo, or being hit by thick waves. It can be fun, surfing, digging, diving, plodding, sifting, wading, swimming, exposing one’s self to all the bright words, but it can also overwhelm the body, the brain, the eyes.
‘Suns’, the beginning half page of which is extracted above, is an exemplary long (6-page) list poem. It is a kaleidoscope of suns—from ordinary suns to sublime suns—that D. Perez-McVie describes, in Australian Poetry Journal 10.2 (APJ), as ‘singular-plural. The eponymous Suns taking place under the one big Sun.’ What I love about this poem is how, when reading it, one is taken on an improvisatory journey through the poet’s world under the sun, how anything he sees, reads, thinks about, could be of the sun, could be a sun or suns, how everything is because of the sun—each mundane thing becomes alive with demotic possibility. The poem could be taking place over one sitting in one big sunspot-like brainstorm, or it could be taking place over many weeks or months of accumulating observations and collaging them together. The poem explores a form of language creation (and thinking) that is contingent on mobility, relationality, process and transformation. The act of composition becomes the experience and the experience becomes the writing process, or rather, that dialectic is blurred, creating a pleasurably blinding reading effect/affect.
Another way of reading the construction of this poem might be through Astrid Lorange’s quoting (in her book How Reading is Written) of Alfred North Whitehead as a way to describe Gertrude Stein’s use of repetition: ‘Experience involves a becoming, that becoming means that something becomes, and what becomes involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy’ (p. 216). Remembering Stein’s directive that repetition is rather insistence, Wright’s repetitive poem, to me, is all about novel immediacy.
I first read ‘Suns’ almost exactly a decade ago in the first issue of Rabbit (Winter 2011), the quarterly poetry journal edited by Jessica Wilkinson now up to its 34th edition, and the poem continues to light me up as though I were, as with any other reader, one if its satellites. I rediscovered it when finalising Groundswell. It became an essential late replacement/addition to the selection of Tim Wright’s poems in the anthology. Its republication in APJ brought it back to my shore the way our ecology of literary journals, through interrelated projects and publications, often allows, reminding me like a tide.
This year, I’ve hardly written any poetry of my own. Yep, I published a book of poems in July through Giramondo, Sydney Spleen (shameless plug), but those poems were finalised at the end of 2020. For me, reading has always been such an integral part of the writing process. The iterative, immersive repetition of reading can be generative, and the more I read, while teaching and editing, the more kaleidoscopic my poetry can become, I like to think. But this year, the volume of reading, perhaps more like a king tide than blinding suns, has entirely flooded my writing routines, which had worked in osmotic ways but are now sodden and sunken, somewhere among the coal ships off the Awabakal (Newcastle) coast where I currently live, because the reading jobs on dry land have had to be done properly.
This is an unsustainable practice, too. And so I’m treating this year as a very large time of reading flow while hoping, now, that a big ebb will take me back to a more balanced kind of reading and writing. Likewise, I hope you’ll forgive me for not using this writing commission to focus on a nuanced reading of a book or writer dear to me, and rather on sliding back into the waves of my writing practice to show how reading generates writing, how writing is a reading practice, how reading and writing are tidal processes, proliferative within constraints, constructed yet always at the whims of larger forces (place, history, politics, work, life, death, the planets, etc.). The following poem was written in dribs and drabs over the last few weeks while I was finalising the edits on the aforementioned anthologies, while in lockdown, while my partner and I were homeschooling and with family in Albury (on Wiradjuri country) assisting in palliative care for my partner’s mother (grandma to our daughters). The poem may be imbued with some details from my daily/nightly experiences during this time but it is also indebted and a homage to Tim Wright’s poem, which mine both repeats and inverts, as you’ll see. I turned (in)to the moon.
Moons
reverberating ear
(van Gogh?)
a pewter moon, poking a tree
light moon: restrain yourself
balding moon: wriggle into a hat
hardly an infringement, a good but placid moon
a plate of a moon, golden
and cracked on the garbage-bag firmament
warm milk, in a steamed glass: moon like an eye that someone, tomorrow, won’t be able to see through
artless moon: benched; the moon I like to think is outside (but is not)
a moon moaning, viral, cancelled
a moon with covid on it. a moon with cornflakes on it. a moon
cancelling all its appointments because of a migraine,
it’s got the shits, is vomiting
I swore at a moon and that moon threw a wave at me
a moon that resembles fire, half moon that resembles algal bloom. a
moon resembling fear. one superb moon.
a moon being sucked down by an ocean. a moon of big data
the flowers of a moon (they don’t exist). moon in a jam. in the corner of my fridge, a moon
mooning me from someone’s backpack—a full one; walking down the street, windowshopping
fingerprint: a moon
icy moon: pinch it and it slips
through the air: in Mooney Mooney
or was it Moonee Beach, dappled fragments, birds
Catholic guilt, ‘not unmoonly’, St Vinnies, ‘not undressed’
birthday, Thoth measuring time: grains of moon
Indigenous art, lightning, country
Doubt: moon
There you are with a moon on the Thames, here we are with another moon on the Mississippi
On the Zambezi: jade lion. Hippo submerging itself.
One pair of blue baboon balls at Victoria Falls, swaying.
Moon on an iPad, a flat one
Moon on an Opal card, moon on Malaysia
Moon on a pool of ogres, on scales
shadows, a laneway, and bank robbers
On an email, the pale hands clicking away at it
on an urn, funereal
on shampoo, orange juice and vaseline. Moon on the absence of a person
on the cracked glass of an imploded oven
a rainbow of moons, a train locomotive dragging a small moon
moon on coffee: inhale the night
on marble: a chip
moon on a catheter, leaking drops of moon, calling out for help ——
‘relieved’; biohazard moon-brain, signing in with a QR code at the shops
ID: moon
mood: moon
a moon—screaming in its sleep
tiny light-grey circular Lego (plastic moon)
moon on lagoons, moon on logs, moon on a police car
death, taxes, extortion
rice bubble, paper, long-nosed potoroo moon
moon on the London riots, moon as my forearm, sickle-shaped and awake
moon on the Black Sea, moon on the University of Sydney’s executive management and its ‘synergistic’ change proposal
moon on Keanu Reaves and on Julia Roberts, driving into the moon
on Scooby Doo! and on James Bond, raking
moon on a chiropractor, treating (the moon)
moon around infinite pools, moon around a prodigy child
who already understands everything you tell her
moon on Frank O’Hara on Fire Island beach
before the dune buggy
moon on an earthworm, moon on a baker’s son
moon on a trickle of piss on a Saturday evening in Albury,
moon-shaped frown upon saying this
moon on a desert, moon as a sea cucumber
moon around a keyhole, moon on catcalls. Moon on workers handling rare earth elements yttrium and europium
moon on mud and on rocks (small moons I throw into the Murray)
a whisk, a mass protest, a school test—a kids’ tent made from 100% polyester moons
moon on Franz Kafka, as bucketrider; moon on Leonora Carrington
from under the windings of the sea
where the unicorn evils run you through
sprouting stars
moon on a smiling Chris Edwards in Bondi, 2021, reading The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
poesy moon
moon around disaster capitalism
wheelie bins, rollerblades, hail
consider the gods and goddesses of moons on Wikipedia, the various reasons they’ve been invoked over the centuries, and then leave them out of the poem, except for Thoth
soft techno throbbing through walls: moon beats
representation: moon
evil eyes: the depravity and complicity of every living moon
colonial heart: an ongoing moon in full daylight
moon on urban sprawl
Lucian’s moon: Vera Historia, the first sci-fi novel
Bloch’s fossilized piece of moon, i.e. the unearthing of fascism again
moon on race, sex, and porn
moon on your thought processes
moon on job interviews, retirement; moon on an illuminating 1984 essay on the moon
moon in a lake
green Staminade in a whiskey glass
Witches’ Sabbath moon
a lunar eclipse, ruining relationships; moon on toast
Two Men Contemplating the Moon, moon on ‘how long have you been smoking’
moon of tattoos, chemicals, electrons pinging
moon on the dusty surfaces of secondhand Gleebooks, back when it existed
moon on paramedics, moon on stalkers
a moon like a baby onion
moon of baggage, moon of duty, moon of puddles driven through by the nightrider bus—‘splosh splosh’
every moon is less than the sum of its parts, invisible, gone dark
———
moon on committees
the moon has no symbolism in the Bible: IRL moons
whirlwind moon, blasted light of the moon crumbing like cheese beneath my feet as I trespass: black swan
a moon hooting like an owl, calm in the moonlight
a complaining moon, an exploding moon
a moon being bombarded with heat and obligation
moon of chalk
dogs lying with their paws on moons, with moon craters in their fur
the sound of a moon with subtitles
break under the moon till the moon breaks down
merging with a streetlamp, dusky blue
summoned by the tides
indissoluble
moons
Note: The phrases ‘under the windings of the sea’, ‘the unicorn evils run [you] through’ and ‘break [under] the [moon] till the [moon] breaks down’ are derived from ‘And death shall have no dominion’ by Dylan Thomas.
*I won’t go into the details of the kinds of reading involved in prize-judging and anthology curation here but if you’re interested you can click on the links in the blog above to access judges’ notes or buy the anthologies, which feature introductory essays. And if you would rather listen than read, here is a podcast with Lisa Gorton for the Brisbane Writers Festival 2021 in which we discuss our roles as editors, our reading practices and the nature of the decisions editors make.
Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland, and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. His most recent books of poetry include Sydney Spleen (Giramondo Publishing 2021) and Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond Press 2019).
