Domus – home, dwelling

Kate Waterhouse

http://procellaria.blogspot.com/

Description

This sequence of ten poems is an intentional remix of words and lines from the ten poems or prose poems listed in the literature section of the mix & mash site. As a start point I set the poems in alphabetical order by surname of the poet (see below). First was Pip Adam’s piece The Anzac Centenary Bridge, very near where I lived for 10 years in Sydney, with its eerie “bird at the end of the world”. Last was Ian Wedde’s Shadow Stands Up – a work in progress and a brilliant line. Taking Australian poet John Tranter's technique of making poems from the first and last words of the lines of poets he admires, I kept the pieces in this order and began reducing 2136 words to 662. The two key bird and shadow lines appear in both the first and last stanzas. I heard Tranter speak on his poetics in Melbourne in July– an early poem was his response to A. D. Hope’s poem Australia, in which Hope “got stuck into the country and its position at the end of the world: ''She is the last of lands, the emptiest/A woman beyond her change of life, a breast/Still tender but within the womb is dry.'' (The Age, Aug 27, 2011). Tranter also says since that angry response to Hope in 1963 ''I have been taking other artworks and demolishing them … rebuilding them and commenting on them and using bits of them to critique them... I had the idea to rewrite (Clepsydra by John Ashbery) as though I'd written it myself but I wanted to keep Ashbery in it so I took the first and last word of each line and kept that from his poem.'' He likens the meaning of poetry to that of a dream. “…you wake up thinking, 'That's so important' but the dream is so obscure that you have no idea what it means.'' Tranter is huge in Australian poetry and while ground breaking in many respects, his portrayals of women and society are not always so. While not the reason for making the sequence, I enjoyed applying his technique to material he probably wouldn't like to produce work he probably wouldn't like, to describe another country, also at the end of the world. This "found" poem is a dark view of the future and our world - our domus - and the lives of children in the country in which we dwell. It is a country where humanity and responsibility have been abandoned by some, leaving us with no escape from social and ecological decay. Yet it is a weirdly beautiful and compelling place of natural wonder and human failing, of light and shadow, birds and water and the things between. Some stanzas emerged easily from the source work - generally the better the source poem, the less work was required to edit an “emerged” poem out. There is resonance between several of the works which contributes to their connectedness and the dreamlike flow of the sequence’s narrative. Images pour out of this piece and if I had more time I would add photographs to it. The works used (in order of use) are: The Anzac Centenary Bridge - Pip Adam Self-portrait at fifteen - Hinemoana Baker Don’t Lean Away - Emma Barnes East of the river - Airini Beautrais Sastrugi, Antarctica - Bernadette Hall On getting away - Helen Heath She used to ask me, what is it like up there? - Lynn Jenner Crossed Cultures - Renee Liang Tincture - Helen Lehndorf Shadow Stands Up - Ian Wedde

Sources

From the mix & mash literature remix category sources on the site I have used the following: The Anzac Centenary Bridge - Pip Adam Self-portrait at fifteen - Hinemoana Baker Don’t Lean Away - Emma Barnes East of the river - Airini Beautrais Sastrugi, Antarctica - Bernadette Hall On getting away - Helen Heath She used to ask me, what is it like up there? - Lynn Jenner Crossed Cultures - Renee Liang Tincture - Helen Lehndorf Shadow Stands Up - Ian Wedde